Karen judged Jonathan was right. Atvar had enough important things to quarrel and quibble about with Sam Yeager that something as monumentally trivial as ice cubes would only prove an irritation. If she were Senyahh, she wouldn’t have cared to risk the fleetlord’s wrath.
Time scurried on. Just before-just before-the deadline, the Race’s equivalent of a doorbell hissed for attention. Two Lizards with a square metal box on a wheeled cart stood outside. A cardboard carton full of plastic cups lay on top of the metal box. “You are the Tosevite who wanted a freezer?” one of the Lizards asked. He sounded as if he couldn’t have cared less one way or the other.
“I am,” Karen said.
“Well, here it is,” he said, and turned to his partner. “Come on, Fegrep. Give it a shove. As soon as we plug it in, we can go do something else.”
“Right,” Fegrep said. “Pretty crazy, a freezer in a room. And why does the Big Ugly want all those stupid cups?” He’d just heard Karen speak his language, but seemed to think she couldn’t understand it. Or maybe he just didn’t care.
Under other circumstances, Karen might have got angry. As things were, she was too glad to see the freezer to worry about anything else. The workmales wheeled it into the room, eased it down off the cart, and plugged it in. Then they left. Karen opened the freezer. It was cold in there, sure enough. She started filling the measuring cups full of water and sticking them inside the freezer. “Ice cubes!” she told Jonathan. “All we have to do is wait.”
“They’re round,” he observed. “How can they be ice cubes?”
She corrected herself: “Ice cylinders. Thank you, Mr. Webster’s Dictionary of the English Language.” Her husband might have got angry, too. Instead, he took a bow. As he must have known it would, that annoyed her even more.
After she started making ice cubes (she refused to think of them as cylinders) she kept opening the freezer every so often to see how they were doing. “You’re letting the cold air out,” Jonathan said helpfully.
“I know I am,” she answered. “I don’t care. I’ve been waiting all this time. I can wait a little longer.”
Some small stretch of time after she would have had ice cubes if she’d been patient, she had them anyhow. Coaxing them out of the measuring cups wasn’t so easy, but she managed. She put five of them in a glass of room-temperature-which is to say, lukewarm-water, then waited for them to do their stuff. After five minutes, she rested the glass against her cheek for a moment.
“Ahh!” she said. Then she drank. “Ahhhh!” she said. She’d never thought of ice water as nectar of the gods, but it would do. It would definitely do.
“Let me have some,” Jonathan said.
“Get your own glass,” Karen told him. “I earned this one.” He bent into the posture of respect and gave her an emphatic cough. Her snort turned into a laugh. Jonathan fixed himself a glass of ice water. He made the same sort of ecstatic noises as she had. She laughed again. She’d known he would.
Atvar gave only half a hearing diaphragm to Senyahh’s complaints. When the female finally paused to draw more air into her lung, he cut her off: “Hear me, Kitchen Chief. Any reasonable requests from these Tosevites are to be honored. Any-do you hear me?”
Senyahh glared at him out of the monitor. “I do not call a request for a freezer and a swarm of measuring cups reasonable, Exalted Fleetlord.”
Members of the Race were more patient than Big Uglies. At times like this, Atvar wondered why. “Let me make myself very plain. Any request is reasonable that does not involve major expense-a yeartenth’s hotel revenues, let us say-or danger to a member of the Race. Anything within those limits, your only proper response is, ‘It shall be done, superior Tosevite.’ And then you do it.”
“That is outrageous!” Senyahh exclaimed.
“I am sorry you feel that way,” Atvar replied. “But then, your record at this hotel has been good up until now. I am sure that will help you gain a new position once you are released from this one. For you will be released from this one if your insubordination continues for even another instant. Do I make myself plain enough for you to understand, Kitchen Chief?”
“You do. You are not nearly so offensive as the Big Ugly I dealt with, though,” Senyahh said.
“Is that a resignation?” Atvar asked.
With obvious reluctance, the kitchen chief made the negative gesture. “No, Exalted Fleetlord. It shall be done.” She broke the connection.
Atvar hoped he had put the fear for a happy afterlife into her. He wouldn’t have bet anything he worried about losing, though. If she’d tried so hard to obstruct one Tosevite request, she was liable to do the same or worse with another. Some males and females enjoyed being difficult. She might as well be a Big Ugly, Atvar thought. His mouth fell open in a laugh. A moment later, he wondered why and snapped it shut. That wasn’t funny.
But the real trouble with the Big Uglies wasn’t that they reveled in making nuisances of themselves. The real trouble was that they were too good at it. He’d thought that too many times back on Tosev 3. That he had reason to think it here on Home only proved he’d been right to worry on the other world, and that the males and females who’d recalled him hadn’t known what they were doing.
It proved that to Atvar, anyhow. Several of the officials who’d ordered him back from Tosev 3 still held their posts. By all appearances, they were still satisfied they’d done the right thing. That they now had to deal with Big Uglies here on Home should have given them a hint that the problem on Tosev 3 hadn’t been Atvar. It should have, but had it? Not likely, not as far as the former fleetlord could see.
The trouble-well, a trouble, anyhow-with the Big Uglies was that they were too good at whatever they set their minds to. The way Kassquit and Sam Yeager were approaching their imperial audiences was a case in point. He hadn’t said so to either one of them, but few members of the Race could have matched how much they’d learned, or how quickly.
He hissed softly. That thought reminded him of something he had to do. He called the protocol master in the capital. The male’s image appeared on the screen. “This is Herrep. I greet you, Exalted Fleetlord.”
“And I greet you, Protocol Master,” Atvar replied politely. “I wonder whether your staff has yet finished researching the question I put to you not long ago. The time for the wild Big Ugly’s audience with his Majesty fast approaches.”
“I am aware of that, yes,” Herrep said. He was an old male, older even than Atvar, and had held office a long time. His scales had the dusty tone age gave them, and sagged slightly on his bones. Because of their looser hides, old males and females looked a little more like Tosevites than younger members of the Race did. Herrep went on, “I hope you understand this is a matter from the very ancientest days, and not one to be researched in the same way as one from more recent times.”
“Why not?” the fleetlord asked. “Research is research, is it not? So it would seem to me, at any rate.”
But the protocol master made the negative gesture. “Not necessarily. For most research, anyone with a computer connected to the network and a certain curiosity can do as well as anyone else. But much of the material we are looking through is so old, it never went into the computer network at all. We have to locate it physically, to make sure we do not destroy it by examining it, and sometimes also to interpret it: the language is so very old, it has changed a good deal between that time and this.”
Atvar let out another low hiss, this one of wonder. “I did not realize your material was as old as that. You have my apology. You might as well be dealing with the same sort of situation as the Big Uglies do when they go through their archives.”