He threw out the comparison to see if the foods dealer would rise to it. “That thing!” the male said with an indignant hiss. “A big, ugly construction from the Big Uglies.” His mouth fell open in appreciation of his own wit. He went on, “I hear they are building a separate section onto it, well removed from the main body. It will be even uglier than it is now.”
“That is difficult to imagine,” Straha said. It was also something he had not heard before. He wondered if Sam Yeager knew about it. He would have to remember to pass it on to the Tosevite. Maybe Yeager would have some better idea of what it meant than he did.
After drinking some more vodka, he went back into the kitchen to get his first taste of ginger. One of the females from the trade delegation was in there. She had an almost empty glass of vodka or rum in her hand, and was laughing a wide-mouthed, foolish laugh. Pointing to the bowl of ginger on the counter, she said, “In any proper land”-by which she meant any land the Race ruled-“I would be punished for standing even this close to that herb.”
“It is not against the law in this not-empire,” Ristin said. “If you want to taste, go ahead.” He gestured invitingly.
“It smells good.” The female laughed again, even more foolishly than before. “I think I will.” She scooped up about four tastes’ worth. Her tongue flicked in and out, in and out, till the herb was gone. “Oh.” Her voice went soft with wonder. “I did not think it would be like this.”
Remembering his own first taste of ginger, Straha empathized with her-and his hadn’t been nearly so monumental as this one. But then, a moment later, he almost stopped thinking altogether as his scent receptors caught the pheromones the ginger released in the female. Sam Yeager had offered to get him a female who’d tasted ginger. He’d turned the Big Ugly down. What an addled egg he’d been! The long scales of his crest rose.
He straightened into his mating posture as the female bent into hers. Ristin started for her, too, but Straha’s display of crest, outspread fingerclaws, and colorful body paint made the other male yield to him. He took his place behind the female. Their bodies joined. Not much later, he let out a loud, ecstatic hiss.
When he stepped back from the female, Ristin took his place. Other males crowded the kitchen, drawn by the female’s pheromones as surely as Tosevite flying pests were drawn by light. A couple of males got clawed; one got bitten badly enough to draw blood. Straha, satiated, withdrew. He knew he was supposed to tell Sam Yeager something, but for the life of him couldn’t remember what.
Felless was glad she was in the Race’s embassy in Nuremberg when the urge to lay her eggs became overwhelming. She and the Race would have been embarrassed if the urge had struck her while she was interviewing some Deutsch functionary with preposterous ideas. And she might not have-she probably would not have-found a proper place in which to lay had she been out among the Big Uglies.
Inside the embassy, though, Slomikk the science officer had prepared a chamber to which gravid females could go when their time came. It had a deep layer of sand on the floor, and plenty of rocks and dry branches the females could use to conceal their clutches. In the chamber, of course, such concealment didn’t matter. But it would have mattered very much to the Race’s primitive ancestors, and the urge to conceal remained strong.
Slomikk had also given the chamber extra shielding against local background radiation. That wouldn’t have mattered to Felless’ primitive ancestors, but she was glad of it.
When she went inside, she looked around warily to make sure she was alone-another triumph of instinct over reason. The door to the laying chamber clicked shut behind her. She was, as far as she knew, the first female to use it. Few others, here or anywhere, had tasted ginger as early as she had. Few others had mated as early as she had. And few others had become gravid as early as she had.
She scurried over to a corner of the chamber half screened from the doorway by branches and rocks. All her instincts shouted This is the place! to her. She could not have found anywhere better to lay her eggs. She was sure of it, sure in a way that transcended reason. This place felt right.
Splaying her legs apart, she bent forward and scooped a hollow in the sand. No one had ever told her how deep to make the hollow, but she knew: the knowledge was printed on her genes. Had the sand been warmer, she would have dug deeper; had it been cooler, the hole would have been shallower. Again, she knew that at a level far below the conscious.
With an effort, Felless straightened up enough to take a couple of short, spraddle-legged steps. That positioned her cloaca just above the hollow she’d dug. She bore down hard-and in absolute silence. At any other time, in any other place, she would have grunted and hissed with the effort she was making. Not here, not now. Grunts and hisses might have drawn predators to her, and to her clutch.
Her two eggs were far bigger than the waste that usually passed through her cloaca. At first, she did not think they wanted to come at all. She was sure the leading one had got stuck inside her body, and would obstruct everything behind it till she perished. Logically, she knew that was unlikely, but she wasn’t thinking logically at the moment.
Still silent, she bore down again. The pain of making that first egg move inside her threatened to tear her in two from the inside out. And the egg would not move. Maybe it really was impacted. After every mating season back on Home, a handful of females needed surgery to remove impacted eggs. Wouldn’t that be just her luck, to have a medical emergency here in the middle of the Reich? They’d have to take her away then.
I’ll try once more, she thought, and then I’ll shout for a physician. Unlike the arid plains on which the Race had evolved, the laying chamber was equipped with a telephone on the far wall. If Felless needed help, she could get it.
She took a deep, deep breath, as if filling her lung with air could somehow help force the egg out of her and into the sand. And maybe it did, for she felt the accursed thing shift inside her. That made her redouble her effort to force it out. It also redoubled her pain, but somehow she hardly noticed.
The egg came forth and dropped into the sand. With it came a sense of relief and determination that surely sprang from some hormonal source, not the reason on which she usually relied. Still straddling the hollow in the sand, she bore down again.
She had an easier time with the second egg than she’d had with the first. Maybe the first had helped stretch the way for the one that came after it. Before long, two yellowish, speckled eggs-colored to match the sand in which her ancestors laid them-rested in the hollow.
She covered them with the sand she’d scooped aside. Her motions were sure and deft; her body knew how much sand to put over them. Then, on top of the sand, she voided a little. That was as instinctive as the rest of her laying behavior.
As soon as she’d done it, she took several quick steps away from the place where her eggs rested. Any other female of the Race who sought to lay in that spot would be similarly repulsed by the pheromones in the dropping. So would the females of several species of predators back on Home. Females of the Race rarely had to worry about them these days, but evolution didn’t know that.
Felless made her way out toward the door of the laying chamber. Those first few voluntary steps told her how worn she was: her legs didn’t want to bear her weight. She felt empty inside; the eggs growing within her had compressed the rest of the innards, which now seemed to have more room than they knew what to do with.
She wanted to hurry to the refectory, but could not-she couldn’t hurry anywhere. She could only walk slowly, her legs still wide apart. Her cloaca smarted-worse than smarted-from having been stretched far more than it had to open at any other time in her life.