Risson stiffened. Atvar wondered if he would be sent away, never to see his sovereign again. Then, to his vast relief, the Emperor laughed. “Well, Fleetlord, you have made your point, I must say. That analogy has more teeth than I wish it did. Until we can match the Tosevites’ prowess, maybe we are in truth no better than semibarbarians.”
“For many millennia, we have believed ourselves to stand at the pinnacle of biological and social evolution,” Atvar said. “And why not? Our society was successful and stable. We easily overcame the other intelligent species we met and remolded their cultures and their worlds in the image of ours. Who could oppose us? Who could show us there were other ways of doing things?” He laughed, too, bitterly. “Well, now we know the answer to that.”
“Yes. Now we know.” Risson’s voice was heavy with worry. “But thinking we were superior to all around us helped make us that way in fact… for a long time. Now that we see we are not at the pinnacle, as you said, will we begin to view ourselves as permanently inferior to the Big Uglies? That could also become a self-fulfilling prophecy, you know.”
The fleetlord didn’t answer right away. He’d had more experience worrying about Big Uglies than perhaps any other member of the Race. What worried him more than anything else was that they needed to be worried about. When the conquest fleet first landed, the Tosevites had used numbers and appalling heroism and even more appalling deceit to make up for their technological deficit. More appalling still was how fast that deficit had shrunk. And now… Yes. And now, Atvar thought.
“As you said, your Majesty, we have to do the best we can,” he said at last. “They learned from us. For a while now, we will have to learn from them. And then, with a little luck, we can learn from each other. One thing this breakthrough will do: it will mean both the Tosevites and we can colonize much more widely than ever before. Both sides are vulnerable now because we are so concentrated. If we have colonies on hundreds of worlds rather than a handful, the situation changes.”
It was Risson’s turn to stop and think. “The Empire would not be the same. It would not, it could not, hope to hold together.”
“Probably not, your Majesty,” Atvar said. “But the Race would survive. In the end, is that not the most important thing?” Risson thought again, then used the affirmative gesture.
Now that Kassquit knew what Ttomalss had not wanted to tell her about, she also understood why her mentor and the Emperor had been so unwilling. Nothing would ever be the same again for the Empire. The Race, convinced faster-than-light travel was impossible, hadn’t seriously looked for it. For the Big Uglies, impossible seemed nothing but a word to get around. And now they’d got around it. If the Race couldn’t, it would find itself in deadly peril.
She’d wondered if she would have mixed feelings about what the American Tosevites had done. They were, after all, her own kin, far more than any members of the Race could have been. She might have shared some of the pride at their achievement. She had before, over smaller things.
But she didn’t, not because of this. This terrified her. She could see the danger it represented to the Empire. As long as the Big Uglies had this technology and the Race didn’t, the planets of the Empire lived on Tosevite sufferance.
“Do not worry, not on account of this,” Frank Coffey told her after she poured out her alarm to him in her room one afternoon. “Remember, this is the United States that has this technology. My not-empire will not do anything to touch off a war against the Race.”
“No?” Kassquit said. “I am sure the millions your not-empire killed in the attack on the colonization fleet would be ever so relieved to hear that.”
Coffey did have the grace to wince. He spread his hands, palms up. The paler skin there and on the soles of his feet, so different from the rest of his body, never failed to fascinate Kassquit. He said, “That was a long time ago. We would not do such a thing now.”
“Oh? Are you certain? If your not-emperor gave the order, would your soldiers disobey it?” Kassquit asked. “Or would they do as they were told?”
“Our not-emperor would not give such an order,” Coffey said, though he didn’t tell her how he knew such a thing. “And if he-or she-did give it, not all soldiers would obey. Remember, Sam Yeager is our ambassador to the Race. He was a soldier who disobeyed.”
“Yes, and was sent into exile because of it,” Kassquit said. “He would not be ambassador if the Doctor had lived, and he will not stay ambassador now that the new ship is here. Nor will the newcomers allow him to go back to Tosev 3. So much for the respect he won for disobeying orders.”
“You do not understand,” Frank Coffey insisted.
Kassquit made the negative gesture. “On the contrary. I fear I understand much too well.” She pointed toward the door. “I think you had better go. Otherwise, this conversation is all too likely to put an end to our friendship.” It was more than a friendship, of course, but that was the strongest word the language of the Race had.
“We might do better to talk things out,” Coffey said.
“No.” Kassquit used the negative gesture again. “What is there to say? You are loyal to your not-empire, as you should be. I am loyal to the Empire. This is also as it should be, I believe. We will not change each other’s minds. We will only quarrel, and what is the good of that?”
Coffey inclined his head. Kassquit understood that. It was what Big Uglies sometimes did instead of sketching the posture of respect. “No doubt you have found a truth. I will see you another time,” he said. He put on the few wrappings American Tosevites insisted on wearing in public even in the warmth of Home, then left her room.
Only after he was gone did Kassquit let tears start sliding down her face. She had known he was unlikely to make a permanent mating partner. She had expected him to return to Tosev 3 when the Admiral Peary left. But the Commodore Perry changed everything. Now he might leave within days, or tens of days. When she found happiness, did she always have to see it jerked out from under her feet?
She remembered the attack by the Reich when Jonathan Yeager was up in the starship orbiting Tosev 3 with her. Actually, for a little while that had worked out well on a personal level. It meant they’d stayed together longer than they would have otherwise, because he couldn’t go back down to the United States while the war lasted. But it had only made parting harder when the time finally came.
All at once, Kassquit wished she hadn’t thought about the Reich and the Deutsche. The Race would be doing everything it could to learn to travel faster than light. But so, without a doubt, would the Deutsche. They were formidably capable engineers. And, as far as she cold tell, their not-empire was governed by an equally formidable set of maniacs. What would they do if they succeeded before the Race did?
Maybe Frank Coffey had a point. Were the Commodore Perry a Deutsch starship, wouldn’t it have announced its presence by launching missiles at Home? The United States could have been better. But it also could have been much worse.
Kassquit yawned. She didn’t feel like thinking about it now. She felt like curling up and taking a nap. She lay down on the sleeping mat and did. When she woke up, she still felt more weary than she thought she should have. That had been happening more and more often lately. She wondered if something was wrong with her. Had she caught some Tosevite disease from Nicole Nichols or one of the other wild Big Uglies who’d come down from the Commodore Perry?