One piece of hardware in particular stood out. “What are the Big Uglies doing?” she asked as she floated weightless at the central docking hub of the 27th Emperor Korfass. “Are they building a starship of their own?”
“Do not be absurd,” answered the male she had come to ferry down to the surface of Tosev 3, a chemical engineer named Warraff. “They cannot hope to fly between the stars. They did not even travel beyond their own atmosphere until after the fighting stopped. That is only the space station of the not-empire called the Confederated-no, excuse me, the United-States.”
“Why is it so large?” Nesseref asked. “I am certain the Tosevites had nothing of that size in orbit when we first came to Tosev 3.”
“No one knows the answer to that,” Warraff replied. “No one of the Race, at any rate. The American Tosevites are doing something peculiar there; I would be the last to deny it. Keep an eye turret on the computer network to stay up with the latest gossip, but bear in mind it is only gossip.”
“I thought you told me it belonged to the United States,” Nesseref said. “Who are the Americans?”
Straightening out that misunderstanding took a little while. Nesseref had paid little attention to the lesser continental mass. She knew about the SSSR and the Reich because Poland lay sandwiched between them. But she’d had only radio contact with U.S. spacefliers and ground stations, and had forgotten those Big Uglies had an alternative name for themselves.
Several officials were waiting for Warraff when she brought him down to the shuttlecraft port outside the new Australian cities; he was, evidently, good at what he did. No one was waiting for Nesseref, no matter how good she was at what she did. She found transportation from the shuttlecraft port to the airfield not far away. Then she had to wait for the next flight to Poland, and then she had to endure the journey halfway round the planet.
By the time she walked into her flat, her body had no idea whether it was supposed to be day or night. Locally, it was late afternoon. She did know that felt wrong. Uncertain whether to eat breakfast or go to sleep, she chose the latter. When she woke up, it was the middle of the night, but she could not go back to sleep no matter how hard she tried.
She felt caged inside the flat. She’d spent too much time inside her shuttlecraft and inside the airplane that had brought her home. She rode the elevator down to the lobby of her building and then strode out into the street. This sort of thing had happened to her after other missions, too. Once more was an annoyance, not a catastrophe.
Few other males or females of the Race were on the street. Nesseref eyed the ones who walked or motored past with a certain amount of wariness, but only a certain amount. The Race was generally more law-abiding than the Big Uglies, and males and females chosen as colonists were generally law-abiding even by the standards of the Race. Still, every hatching ground held a few addled eggs.
Tosev 3 could do some addling of its own. A male sidled up to Nesseref, saying, “I greet you. How would you like to greet something nice for your tongue?”
“No,” Nesseref said sharply-all the more sharply because she did crave ginger. “Go away.” When the male did not move off fast enough to suit her, she added, “Very well, then, I will call the authorities,” and reached for her telephone.
That got the fellow moving at a better clip. Nesseref felt more regret and anger than satisfaction. She walked along the quiet streets. Loud metallic crashes sent her skittering forward to investigate. She found a couple of Big Uglies loading trash cans into a ramshackle truck of Tosevite design.
“We greet you, superior sir,” they said, lifting cloth caps from their heads in unison. Their accents were even worse than the foremale Casimir’s, and they couldn’t tell Nesseref was a female. But they acted as if they had every right to be where they were and do what they were doing.
“What is going on here?” Nesseref asked.
She had little experience in judging Tosevite expressions, but needed little to realize they found the question stupid. So did she, once she thought about it. One of the Tosevites said, “Taking trashes away, superior sir. Race not wanting to do. Paying us to doing instead.”
“Very well,” Nesseref said, and the Big Uglies resumed their noisy, smelly work. Indeed, it was labor no male or female of the Race would want to perform. Paying the Tosevites to do it made perfect sense.
The truck rumbled off down the street, leaving a cloud of noxious fumes in its wake. Nesseref coughed a couple of times, and did her best not to breathe till the cloud dispersed. Yes, paying Big Uglies to haul trash made sense. But Big Uglies also made trucks. If they did that more cheaply than members of the Race could, would paying them for such manufacturing also make sense? Nesseref didn’t know. She did know some of the colonists were industrial workers. If they didn’t manufacture, say, trucks, what would they do?
If the trucks they did make were better but at the same time more expensive than those of the Big Uglies, what would the Race do? What should the Race do? She was glad she didn’t have to decide things like that.
She prowled the streets of the new town, now and then looking up through the scattered clouds at the stars. She knew the constellations well; they didn’t look a great deal different from the way they would have in the northern hemisphere back on Home, though of course they rotated about a different imaginary axis.
Little by little, the eastern sky turned pale with the approach of day. Before the star Tosev came up, a mist rose on the fields and meadows around the settlement the Race had built. Tendrils flowed through the streets, leaving the air damp and clammy. Despite that and despite the unpleasant chill, Nesseref stayed out, watching in fascination. Such mists occurred in only a few places back on Home, and then but seldom; the air usually stayed too dry to support them. They seemed common enough here in Poland, but still intrigued her.
This one, like most, hugged the ground. When Nesseref looked up through it, she had no trouble seeing the tops of taller buildings. But when she turned her eye turrets down to street level, so that she peered along the layer of water droplets, the lower stories of nearby structures blurred, while those farther away-and not much farther away, at that-disappeared altogether. She might have been alone in the center of a small, clear circle, the rest of the planet (for all she could prove, the rest of the universe) shrouded in fog. Even the sounds that reached her hearing diaphragms were distant, muffled, attenuated.
When Tosev rose, the mist let her look at it without protection. That seemed even stranger to her than the fog itself. As a shuttlecraft pilot, she’d grown used to harsh, raw sunlight, unfiltered even by atmosphere, let alone by these billions of droplets. Even a glimpse of a sun should have been enough to make her automatically turn her eye turrets away. But no, not here. She could look at Tosev with impunity-and she did.
With sunrise, the town began to come to life around her. Males and females trooped out of their apartment buildings. Off they went, to whatever work they had. A couple of them turned curious eye turrets in her direction. She wasn’t going anywhere. She was only standing and watching. That made her not fit in. She kept on doing nothing but standing and watching, too, which left the curious no excuse to ask her any questions. That suited her fine.
Now she didn’t know that she felt like breakfast, but she didn’t know that she felt like any different meal, either. She did feel like something, and breakfast would do. She had to look around to see where she was; she’d walked through the night almost at random. But the new town wasn’t large enough to make getting lost easy. Before long, she found herself in an eatery she’d already visited several times.
“Ham and eggs,” she told the male behind the counter. Ham she esteemed, as did most of the Race; the only thing better she’d found on Tosev 3 was ginger, and ginger she stubbornly refused. The local eggs tasted different from those of Home-rather more sulfurous-but weren’t bad when flavored with enough salt.