Betvoss seized the first part of that. “You say the colonists do not understand us? What of the Tosevites?” His wave encompassed the Big Ugly males in their wrappings of brown or white and the females in black with only their eyes showing and sometimes even those veiled away behind cloth.
Fotsev shrugged. “I do not expect Big Uglies to understand-they are Big Uglies. But the folk of the new town are my own kind-or they look like me, at any rate. I expected more than I got, and I was disappointed.”
“And I as well,” Gorppet agreed. “Only we who have been through it can understand what we endured. Some of the Tosevites who fought against us come closer than the males and females of the Race who did not.” He sighed. “When the males of the conquest fleet die, no one will understand.” After a couple of strides, he swung an eye turret toward Betvoss. “Some males do not understand now.”
“Truth,” Betvoss said. “And you are one of them.”
“Enough,” Fotsev said with a slow, tired, emphatic cough. “Are we Big Uglies, to brawl among ourselves?”
By the Emperor, I need a taste of ginger, he thought. However much he might need one, though, he was not so sure where he might come by it. The herb was in shorter supply than he could ever remember. Those above him had always fumed and grumbled about ginger, and every so often made examples of males caught tasting or dealing in it. But there had always been plenty-till females from the colonization fleet showed what the herb did to them. Now the authorities were serious about keeping it off everyone’s tongue.
One of Fotsev’s eye turrets slid toward Gorppet. If anyone could still get ginger, he was the male. And if he understood why Fotsev stayed away from the new towns, maybe he would be more willing to share some of what he had, if he had any.
The breeze shifted, changing the notes in the symphony of stinks that played over Fotsev’s scent receptors. One odor cut through the usual array of Tosevite stenches, though: the pheromones of a female in her season. Somebody is getting ginger, Fotsev thought. He wasn’t the only male to note that scent, of course. His whole squad suddenly seemed more alert. A couple of troopers began to take on the erect posture associated with mating. Betvoss started away from his comrades, toward that wonderful scent.
“Back!” Fotsev said sharply, relishing the chance to rebuke the male who’d thought he was addled. “She is a long way off. We just have to go on about our business and pretend she is not there.”
“I smell her. I want to mate with her,” Betvoss whined. Fotsev wanted to mate with her, too, wherever she was, but not to the point where he forgot himself and forgot his duty. Even as he kept eyeing the market square, the urge remained, an itch inside his head-and inside his cloaca-he couldn’t scratch. It made him irritable; he was ever so ready to leap down Betvoss’ throat if the other male got more unruly than he had already proved.
But Betvoss, though he stayed sulky, obeyed: obedience was nearly as ingrained in the Race as was desire when presented with the proper stimuli.
Small male Tosevites came running up to the patrol, jabbering in their own language. Gorppet gestured with his rifle. He did not want them to get too close. Fotsev didn’t blame him. The Race had learned from painful experience that stopping suicide attackers wasn’t easy.
So far, the fanatical Tosevites had not begun using hatchlings as suicide warriors. That did not mean they would not do such a thing, though. In all truth, Gorppet was right to be cautious.
Caution came hard, though, when the small Big Uglies (a notion that made Fotsev laugh, but that was true: he overtopped almost all of them) came up in spite of Gorppet’s warning. They’d learned a few words from the language of the Race. “Food!” they shouted. “Want food!” Others shouted, “Want money!”
“No money,” Gorppet said, gesturing with the rifle again. The Race’s credit would have been useless to these ragamuffins, and handing out the metal disks the Tosevites used as their medium of exchange went against orders.
Food was something else. Fotsev had never seen hunger till he came to Tosev 3. He’d thought hunger was the feeling he knew just before it was time for a meal. Maybe that was hunger, of a sort. But it was not the kind of hunger that came from having no food at all, from having to do without meals. Fotsev knew such conditions had existed back on Home in ancient history, before the Empire unified his planet. But those days were more than a hundred thousand years in the past, a very long time ago even by the standards of the Race. Seeing that kind of hunger had jolted him, and he was far from the only male it had jolted.
So now he took little cubes of pressed meat and concentrated nutrients and tossed a handful of them to the Big Ugly hatchlings. So did three or four other males from the squad. The Tosevites squalled in delight and squabbled with one another over the food. They had no trouble eating the Race’s rations, as Fotsev and his fellows had no trouble except occasional disgust with Tosevite foods. And some Tosevite food products were even more delectable to the Race than to Big Uglies… and so Fotsev’s mind, almost inevitably, came back to ginger.
The one problem with feeding some Tosevite beggars was that their success drew more, sure as carrion drew scavengers. After a while, Fotsev and his fellows ran low on ration cubes and started saying, “Enough! All gone!” The hatchlings cursed them in the language of the Race and, Fotsev was sure, even more hotly in their own tongue.
Gorppet said something in that language that made them stop cursing and bark out the laughter of their kind. After that, the patrol had less trouble getting rid of them. When Fotsev asked Gorppet what he’d said, the other veteran replied, “I wished that predators would find the eggs of all their descendants.” It seemed a fine strong curse to Fotsev till he remembered the Big Uglies did not lay eggs. Then he understood why the hatchlings laughed. But anything that avoided trouble suited him fine.
After what seemed forever, the patrol returned to barracks. Fotsev made his report, not that he had anything much to report. And then, for a little while, his time was his own. As he’d been sure he would, he hunted up Gorppet. “Come for a walk with me,” he said. Rumor had it that the barracks held listening devices. Fotsev neither knew whether rumor was true nor cared to learn.
Out in the open, he hadn’t even broached the subject before Gorppet said, “You look like a male who could use a taste-maybe even a couple of tastes.”
“Truth,” Fotsev said, with an emphatic cough. After a couple of tastes, Tosev 3 improved-and would stay improved till the ginger left his system. He asked, “How did you come by the herb? I am empty.”
“Your friend”-a common euphemism for a ginger dealer-“must be one of the males who got his from a Big Ugly west of here who’s out of business-for the time being, anyhow,” Gorppet answered. “I have lots of friends. That is why I never go dry.”
“I never thought I would,” Fotsev said ruefully, or as ruefully as he could with the herb exulting through him, “but I did.”
“The males with the fancy body paint want to get their teeth into this, all right,” Gorppet said. “They do not want females coming into season any old time.” He laughed; he’d had a couple of tastes, too. “You smelled how well it works while we were out on patrol. They can slow the trade down, but they can’t stop it.”
“I think you are right,” Fotsev said. “Hard to try to do other things, normal things, while on the edge of my own season. I understand why our superiors are fighting ginger so hard-but I still want one more taste.”
“It shall be done,” Gorppet said, and it was. He had another taste himself. They spent the rest of their free time enjoyably cutting Betvoss into little strips.
The Americans had a phrase: a slow boat to China. Liu Han and Liu Mei heard that phrase any number of times on their journey west across the Pacific, so often that they got good and sick of it. It was, if anything, an understatement for their homeward voyage aboard the Liberty Princess, a ship whose self-contradictory name never failed to amuse Liu Han.