He wondered how many American Big Uglies knew what was going on at the space station. Not many, surely, or Yeager would have been one of them. That he wasn’t anyhow puzzled Straha. He’d been entrusted with important secrets before. Straha knew of some of them. For that matter, Straha was one of the important secrets with which Yeager had been entrusted. That a secret should be so much more important than he had been during the fighting wounded his vanity.
He would have asked more questions among the humans of his acquaintance had it not been for his driver. He feared that, whatever the formidable male heard, the U.S. government would hear in short order. His driver no doubt knew a good many secrets of his own. He might even know what the Americans were doing up at the space station. Straha did not have the nerve to ask him.
At the moment, Straha was catching up on the Race’s computer discussion about the station. A female named Kassquit kept asking leading questions, good ones. She showed unusual understanding of the Big Uglies. The experience Straha had gained in twenty long Tosevite years of living among them made him able to see that.
“Psychologist’s apprentice,” he muttered, looking at the way she described herself. “She ought to be an intermediate researcher by now, heading toward senior. By the Emperor, she would if I were in charge. But those fools up there are dim themselves, so they think everyone else must be, too.”
If I were in charge. Even now, after all these years of exile, the words still leapt to his mind. Atvar had bumbled along, doing the safe, doing the cautious, occasionally doing the stupid. And the Race had got by, as it had got by on Home for a hundred thousand years. Even snout-to-snout with the Big Uglies, the Race had got by. Atvar had made his share-more than his share-of mistakes, but the Tosevites had made their share, too, and disaster hadn’t come. Quite.
“Still,” Straha said, “I would have done better.” His pride was enormous. If only a few more males had gone with him at that climactic meeting after the Soviet Union touched off its first explosive-metal bomb. He would have ousted Atvar, and Tosev 3 would have looked… different.
The telephone rang, distracting him. Tosevite telephones were simple-minded machines, without screens and with only the most limited facilities for anything but voice transmission. Straha often missed the versatile phone he’d had before he defected. So many things he’d taken for granted…
“Hello?” he said in English, and then gave his name.
“I greet you, Shiplord,” a male said. “Ristin speaking. Ullhass and I will be holding another party on Saturday night”-the name of the day was in English-“and hoped you might join us.”
Straha started to decline; he hadn’t had that good a time at Ristin’s earlier gathering. Then he thought that he might meet interesting males there-former prisoners who had thrown in their lot with the American Big Uglies, perhaps even visitors from areas of Tosev 3 the Race ruled. Who could tell what he might learn from them?
And so he said, “I thank you. I believe I will come, yes.”
“I thank you, Shiplord.” Ristin sounded surprised and pleased. “I look forward to seeing you there.”
“I will see you then,” Straha said, and hung up. He didn’t particularly look forward to it. Having committed himself, though, he would go.
His driver greeted the news with something less than rapture. “A party?” the Tosevite said when Straha told him. “I was hoping to watch television that night.”
“You Tosevites did not even have television when you were a hatchling,” Straha told him. “You cannot find it as necessary as the Race does.”
“Who said anything about necessary?” the driver returned. “I enjoy it.” Straha said nothing. He stood and waited and looked at the driver with both eye turrets. The Big Ugly sighed. “It shall be done, Shiplord.”
“Of course it shall,” Straha said smugly. The driver gave him more trouble than a male of the Race with a similar job would have done. Big Uglies-especially American Big Uglies-did not understand the first thing about subordination. But the driver, having made his complaints, would now do what was required of him.
Body paint perfect-he had spent considerable time touching it up-Straha went off to the gathering with something approaching eagerness. Ristin and Ullhass had had good ginger at their house. If nothing else came of the evening, he could always taste till he’d sated himself. He could do that here, too, but the experience was different in company.
“Have a good time,” the driver said as he halted the motorcar in front of the house Ristin and Ullhass shared. “I will keep an eye turret on things out here.” The Race’s idiom sounded grotesque in his mouth, but keep an eye on things, the English usage, would have been equally strange in Straha’s language.
As at the last gathering, Ristin met him in front of the door. The ex-infantrymale’s red-white-and-blue prisoner-of-war body paint was as carefully tended as Straha’s official coat. (Straha chose not to dwell on the fact that, having deserted, he wasn’t entitled to the fancy body paint he still wore.) “I greet you, Shiplord,” Ristin said. “Alcohol and ginger in the kitchen, as before. Help yourself to anything you fancy. Plenty of food, too. Make yourself at home; you are one of the first ones here.”
“I thank you.” Straha went into the kitchen and poured himself a small glass of vodka. Ginger could wait for the time being. He also took some thinly sliced ham, some potato chips, and some of the little, highly salted fish the Big Uglies used to spice up dishes. Like most males of the Race, Straha found them delicious by themselves. And Ullhass and Ristin had laid in another delicacy he did not see often enough: Greek olives. He let out a small, happy hiss. Regardless of what sort of company the night yielded, the food was good.
He carried his plate and glass out into the main room, where Ullhass, who’d been talking with a couple of other males, greeted him. Like Ristin, Ullhass wore American-style body paint instead of what the Race authorized. The other guests were more conventional. They also seemed astonished to see a shiplord there. Then they realized which shiplord Straha had to be, and were astonished again in a different way. Straha had seen that before. He’d heard the whispered, “There is the traitor,” before, too. He sat down and relaxed. In a while, with alcohol and ginger in them, they’d grow less shy of him.
His eye turrets scanned the shelves of books and videos along the walls of the main room. “Some of these are new, are they not?” he asked Ullhass. “New since the conquest fleet left Home, I mean?”
“Yes, Shiplord,” the male answered. “We have had visitors from the colonization fleet here before. We expect some tonight, in fact.”
“I thought you might,” Straha said. “I wonder if, some time or another, I might borrow some of these, to see what they were doing on Home after we went into cold sleep.”
“I would be pleased if you did,” Ullhass told him. That might be more polite than sincere, but Straha intended to take him up on it.
Sure enough, some males and a couple of females from the colonization fleet, in Los Angeles on a trade mission, joined the gathering. They exclaimed in pleasure at the delicacies. Seeing Straha’s body paint, they began to fawn on him till Ristin took one of them aside and spoke quietly. After that, they didn’t seem to know what to make of the self-exiled shiplord.
After a while, he did get into a conversation with one of them, a male whose body paint proclaimed him a foods dealer. “It must be strange living here,” the fellow remarked.
“It is,” Straha agreed. “At times, I feel as out of place as the American space station in orbit not far from the ships of the colonization fleet.”