“I greet you,” one of the Lizards said… cautiously. His eye turrets swung this way and that. “What is the purpose of this, ah, gathering?”
Camouflage, Mordechai thought. Aloud, he said, “To make sure we Jews can strongly oppose anyone who tries to trouble us: Germans, Russians, Poles-or anyone else.” By that last, he could only have meant the Race.
“They are barbarians,” one of the Lizards said to the other. Anielewicz didn’t think he was supposed to hear, but he did.
“Barbarians, truth,” the other Lizard agreed, “but if these are the Jews, they are the barbarians who are useful to us.”
“Ah,” the first Lizard said. Ah, Mordechai thought. Hearing that from the Lizard was no great surprise. He knew the Race found the Jews useful. Jews found the Lizards useful, too. And so the world goes round. He waved to the males again, then started pedaling south and west, back toward Lodz. His legs hardly pained him at all, and, once he’d got out of town, he could go quite fast. And so the wheels go round. He bent his back to the work.
Nesseref felt like hissing at her Tosevite workmen in the tones of an alarm signal. “Why have you not poured the concrete, as we discussed the other day?” she demanded indignantly.
The Big Ugly foremale peered down at her from his preposterous height. He did not speak the language of the Race with any great grammatical precision, but he made himself understood: “Rain too hard,” he said, and added an emphatic cough. “Ground all muddily. Pour now, not set good. Pour now, not hardly set at all.” He placed hands on his hips. The shuttlecraft pilot had never seen the gesture before, but it had to be one of defiance.
And the Big Ugly-Casimir, his name was-had a point, or she supposed he did. She’d never seen it rain so hard back on Home as it had rained here near Glowno these past couple of days. Males from the conquest fleet, the ones who didn’t keep trying to ply her with ginger, told her such things weren’t rare on this part of Tosev 3, and were even more common elsewhere.
“Very well, Casimir,” she said, yielding ground. “How long do you think it will be before we can pour the concrete for the shuttlecraft field?”
“Don’t know.” Where the Big Ugly’s hands-on-hips gesture had been alien, his shrug could almost have come from a male of the Race. “Ground dry in four, five, six days-if no more rain before then.” He shrugged again. “Don’t know nothing about rain then now. Nobody don’t know nothing about rain then now.”
That wasn’t strictly true-the Race’s meteorologists were better at forecasting Tosev 3’s weather than they had been when the conquest fleet arrived. Then, from the reports Nesseref had read, they’d wanted nothing more than to crawl back into their eggshells and hide. Their models had not been built for this world’s extremes of climate. They had improved, but remained a long way from perfect.
Casimir said, “Taste some ginger, Shuttlecraft Pilot. You feel better then.” He used another emphatic cough.
“No,” Nesseref said with an emphatic cough of her own. “Do not suggest that to me again, or this crew will have a new foremale the next instant.”
She glared at the Big Ugly. He was taller and bulkier, but she was fiercer. He turned away, mumbling, “It shall be done, superior female.” The pat phrase, unlike most of his speech, he brought out correctly.
“It had better be done,” Nesseref snapped.
She still craved ginger, craved the way it made her feel, even craved the way it brought her into her season. The more she craved, the more strongly she resisted the craving. She was, and was determined to remain, her own person, bending her will to those of others only when she had to and to a Tosevite herb not at all, not if she could help it. No matter how good it made her feel, ginger turned her into an animal. Worse, it turned the males around her into animals, too.
When she strode off, her feet squelched in the offending mud. She hissed again, wishing someone more familiar than she with conditions on this planet had got the job of laying out the shuttlecraft port.
“At least I found some land we could use,” she muttered. It was up to Bunim or his superiors to compensate the Big Uglies who had formerly owned the land. By all the signs, the Tosevites were holding the Race for ransom, or thought they were. But the Race had more resources than these peasants thought, and paying them what they thought they deserved was a tolerable expense.
The idea of having to pay them still offended Nesseref. This wasn’t one of the independent not-empires whose existence had once astonished her; the Race really had conquered this stretch of Tosev 3. But the local administrators seemed to be doing their best to deny they’d accomplished any such thing. No matter how often Bunim explained it, it still seemed wrong.
Nesseref glanced north and west toward Glowno, then south and east in the direction of Jezow, the other nearby Tosevite town. On the map, in fact, Jezow was closer to the site she’d chosen than was Glowno. Her eye turrets kept twisting back toward the latter town, though. The Big Ugly called Anielewicz had said he had an explosive-metal bomb there. She still didn’t know whether he’d been telling the truth. She hoped she-and the shuttlecraft port that would eventually come into being here despite the delays the ghastly weather caused-would never have to find out.
She swung her eye turrets in the direction of the Big Uglies who labored for her. Anielewicz had joked-she hoped he’d joked-about moving the bomb he might or might not have so that it could destroy her shuttlecraft port. Were any of these Tosevites his spies? She could hardly come out and ask them.
Almost all the workers, she knew, were of the larger subgroup called Poles, not the smaller subgroup called Jews. By what Nesseref had learned from both Bunim and Anielewicz, the two subgroups disliked and distrusted each other. That made it less likely the Poles were spying for Anielewicz.
Whatever reassurance that thought brought her did not last long. That the Poles weren’t spying for Anielewicz didn’t mean they weren’t spying for someone. She wished she could have had males and females of the Race laboring here, but, even after the arrival of the colonization fleet, there weren’t enough to go around. There wasn’t enough heavy equipment to go around, either, not with so much of it in use building housing for the colonists.
She glared up at the gray, gloomy sky. She’d decided to use Tosevite labor because, with it, she could have had the shuttlecraft port finished before her turn came for the heavy equipment the Race had hereabouts. But the weather wasn’t cooperating. She’d been through an interminable winter here. She’d talked with veterans from the conquest fleet. Tosev 3’s weather was not in the habit of cooperating with anyone.
As if to prove the point, a drop of rain fell on her snout, and then another and another. This wasn’t going to be the sort of cloudburst that had halted the concrete pouring, but it wasn’t weather in which her laborers could do much, either. They seemed anything but unhappy about that. Some pulled cloth caps down lower over their eyes. Others stood in whatever shelter they could find and inhaled the smoke from the burning leaves of some Tosevite plant. That struck Nesseref as a nasty habit, but they enjoyed it.
After a while, Casimir came over to her and said, “Not can working in weather like these.”
“I know,” Nesseref said resignedly.
“You dismissing we?” the foremale asked. “With pay? Weather not ours fault.”
“Yes, with pay,” Nesseref said, more resignedly still. She would have done the same for workers of the Race, and her instructions were to treat the Big Uglies like workers of the Race, or at least like Rabotevs and Hallessi. She doubted these Tosevites deserved to be treated in such a fashion, but was willing-less willing than she had been, but still willing-to believe the males who’d come with the conquest fleet knew more about the situation than she did.