Synopsis
Book by Turtledove Harry
Extrait
Atvar, the commander of the Race's conquest fleet, poked a control with a fingerclaw. A holographic image sprang into being above the projector in the fleetlord's office. In the forty years since the conquest fleet came to Tosev 3 (half that many local years), he had grown all too intimately familiar with that particular image.
So had Kirel, shiplord of the 127th Emperor Hetto, the bannership of the conquest fleet. The body paint on his scaly, green-brown hide was more ornate than every other male's save only Atvar's. His mouth fell open in amusement, revealing a great many small, sharp teeth. A slight waggle to his lower jaw gave his laughter a sardonic twist.
"Once more we behold the might Tosevite warrior, eh, Exalted Fleetlord?" he said. He ended the sentence with an interrogative cough.
"Even so, Shiplord," Atvar answered. "Even so. He does not look as if he would cause us much trouble, does he?"
"By the Emperor, no," Kirel said. Both Atvar and he swiveled their turreted eyes so they looked down at the ground for a moment: a gesture of respect for the sovereign back on distant Home.
As Atvar had done so many times before, he walked around the hologram to view it from all sides. The Tosevite male was mounted on a hairy local quadruped. He wore a tunic of rather rusty chain armor, and over it a light cloth coat. A pointed iron helmet protected his braincase. Tufts of yellowish hair grew like dry grass on his scaleless, pinkish cheeks and jaw. For armament, he had a spear, a sword, a knife, and a shield with a cross painted in red on it.
A long, hissing sigh escaped Atvar. "If only it had been as easy as we thought it would be."
"Truth, Exalted Fleetlord," Kirel said. "Who would have thought the Big Uglies"—the nickname the Race used for its Tosevite subjects and neighbors—"could have changed so much in a mere sixteen hundred years?"
"No one," Atvar said. "No one at all." He used a different cough this time, one that emphasized the words preceding it. They deserved emphasis. The Race—and the Hallessi and Rabotevs, whose planets the Empire had ruled for thousands of years—changed only very slowly, only very cautiously. For the Race, one millennium was like another. After sending a probe to Tosev 3, everyone back on Home had blithely assumed the barbarians there would not have changed much by the time the conquest fleet arrived.
Never in its hundred thousand years of unified imperial history—and never in the chaotic times before, for that matter—had the Race got a larger and more unpleasant surprise. When the conquest fleet did reach Tosev 3, it found not sword-swinging savages but a highly industrialized world with several empires and not-empires battling one another for dominance.
"Even after all these years, there are times when I still feel rage that we did not completely conquer this planet," Atvar said. "But, on the other fork of the tongue, there are also times when I feel nothing but relief that we still maintain control over any part of its surface."
"I understand, Exalted Fleetlord," Kirel said.
"I know you do, Shiplord. I am glad you do," Atvar said. "But I do wonder if anyone back on Home truly understands. I have the dubious distinction of commanding the first interstellar conquest fleet in the history of the Race that did not conquer completely. That is not how I intended hatchlings to remember me."
"Conditions here were not as we anticipated them," Kirel said loyally. He'd had his chances to be disloyal, had them and not taken them. By now, Atvar was willing to believe he wouldn't. He went on, "Do you not agree that there is a certain amount of irony in the profit we have made off the Tosevites by selling them this image and others from the probe? Their own scholars desire those photographs because they have none of their own from what seems to them to be a distant and uncivilized time."
"Irony? Yes, that is one of the words I might apply to the situation—one of the politer words," Atvar said. He went back to his desk and prodded the control again. The Tosevite warrior vanished. He wished he could make all the Tosevites vanish that easily, but no such luck. He replaced the warrior's image with a map of the surface of Tosev 3.
By his standards, it was a chilly world, with too much water and not enough land. Of what land there was, the Race did not rule enough. Only the southern half of the lesser continental mass, the southwest and south of the main continental mass, and the island continent to the southeast of the main continental mass were reassuringly red on the map. The not-empires of the Americans, the Russkis, and the Deutsche all remained independent, and needed colors of their own. So did the island empires of Britain and Nippon, though both of them were shrunken remnants of what they had been when the conquest fleet came to Tosev 3.
Kirel also turned one eye toward the map, while keeping the other on Atvar. "Truly, Exalted Fleetlord, it could be worse."
"So it could," Atvar said with another sigh. "But it could also be a great deal better. It would be a great deal better if these areas here on the eastern part of the main continental mass, especially this one called China, acknowledged our rule as they should."
"I have long since concluded that the Big Uglies never do things as they should," Kirel said.
"I agree completely," the fleetlord replied. His little tailstump twitched in agitation. "But how are we to convince the fleetlord of the colonization fleet that this is the case?"
Now Kirel sighed. "I do not know. He lacks our experience with this world. Once he acquires it, he will, I am sure, come round to our way of thinking. But we must expect him to be rigid for a time."
Back on Home, rigid was a term of praise. It had been a term of praise when the conquest fleet come to Tosev 3, too. No more. Males of the Race who stayed too rigid stood not a chance of understanding the Big Uglies. By the standards of Home, the males of the conquest fleet—those who still survived—had grown dreadfully flighty.
Males ... Atvar said, "It will be good to have females in range of the scent receptors on my tongue once more. When they come into season and I smell their pheromones, I will have an excuse for not thinking about this accursed world for a while. I look forward to having the excuse, you understand, not to the breeding itself."
"Of course, Exalted Fleetlord," Kirel said primly. "You are no Big Ugly, to have such matters always on your mind."
"I should hope not!" Atvar exclaimed. Like any other member of the Race, he viewed Tosevite sexuality with a sort of horrified fascination. Intellectually, he grasped how the Big Uglies' year-round interest in mating colored every aspect of their behavior. But he had no feel for the subtleties, or indeed for what the Big Uglies no doubt viewed as broad strokes. Despite intensive research, few males of the Race did, any more than the Tosevites could understand the Race's dispassionate view of such matters.
Pshing, Atvar's adjutant, came into the chamber. One side of his body was painted in a pattern that matched the fleetlord's; the other showed his own, far lower, rank. He bent his forward sloping torso into the posture of respect and waited to be noticed.
"Speak," Atvar said. "Give forth."
"I thank you, Exalted Fleetlord," Pshing said. "I beg leave to report that the lead ships of the colonization fleet have passed within the orbit of Tosev 4, the planet the Big Uglies call Mars. Very soon now, those ships will seek to circle and land on this world."
"I am aware of this, yes." Atvar's voice was even drier than the desert surrounding the riverside city—Cairo, the local name for it was—where he made his headquarters. "Is my distinguished colleague in the colonization fleet aware that the Tosevites, for all their protestations of peaceful intent, may seek to harm his ships when they do reach Tosev 3?"
"Fleetlord Reffet continues to assure me that he is," Pshing replied. "He was quite taken aback to receive radio transmissions from the various Tosevite not-empires."
"He should not have been," Atvar said. "We have been warning him for some time of the Big Uglies' ever-increasing capacities."
Kirel said, "Exalted Fleetlord, he will have to learn by experience, as we also had to do. Let us hope his experience proves less painful than ours."
"Indeed." Atvar let out a worried hiss. His voice grew grim: "And let us hope all the Tosevites take seriously our warning to them that an attack on the colonization fleet by any of them will be construed as an attack by all of them, and that we shall do our utmost to punish all of them should any such attack occur."
"I wish we had not had to issue such a warning," Kirel said.
"So do I," Atvar replied. "But least four and perhaps five of their realms possess missile-firing undersea ships—who back on Home would have dreamt of such things?"
"Oh, I understand the problem," Kirel said. "But the general warning all but invites the Tosevites to combine against us and to reduce their conflicts among themselves."
"Diplomacy." Atvar made the word into a curse. Manuals on the subject, their data gleaned from the Race's ancient history and early conquests, suggested playing the locals off against one another. But, to Atvar and his colleagues, such concerns were but theory, and musty theory at that. The Big Uglies, divided among themselves, were expert practitioners of the art. After a negotiating session with them, Atvar always wanted to count his fingers and toes to make sure he hadn't inadvertently traded them away.
Pshing said, "When the colonists are revived from cold sleep, when they come down to Tosev 3, we will begin to turn this into a proper world of the Empire."
"I admire your confidence, Adjutant," Kirel said. Pshing crouched respectfully. Kirel went on, "I wonder what the colonists will make of us. We are hardly proper males of the Race ourselves any more—dealing with the Tosevites for so long has left us as addled as bad eggs."
"We have changed," Atvar agreed. Back on Home, that would have been a curse. Not here, though he had taken a long time to realize it. "Had we not changed, our war with the Big Uglies would have wrecked this planet, and what would the colonization fleet have done then?"
Not a single male on Tosev 3 had found an answer to that question. Atvar was sure Reffet would have no answer for it, either. But he was also sure the fleetlord of the colonization fleet would have questions of his own. Would he himself, would any male on Tosev 3, be able to find answers for them?
The pitcher windmilled into his delivery. The runner took off from first base. The batter hit a sharp ground ball to short. The shortstop gobbled it up and fired it over to first. The softball slapped Sam Yeager's mitt, beating the runner to the bag by a step and a half. The umpire had hustled up from behind home plate. "You're out!" he yelled, and threw his fist in the air.
"That's the ballgame," Yeager said happily. "Another win for the good guys." He tacked on an emphatic cough for good measure.
"Nice game, Major," the pitcher said. "A homer and a double—I guess we'll take that."
"Thanks, Eddie," Yeager said, chuckling. "I can still get around on a softball." He was in his mid-fifties, and in good shape for his mid-fifties, but he couldn't hit a baseball for beans any more. It irked him; he'd been in his eighteenth season of minor-league ball when the Lizards came, and he'd kept playing as much and as long as he could after going into the Army.
He rolled the softball toward the chicken-wire dugout in back of first base. He'd been an outfielder when he played for money, but he couldn't cover the ground out there any more, either, so nowadays he played first. He could still catch and he could still throw.
A couple of guys from the other team came over and shook his hand. They'd been playing just for the fun of playing. He'd had fun, too—he wouldn't have put on spikes if he didn't have fun—but he'd gone out there to win. Playing for money for all those years had ingrained that in him.
Up in the wooden bleachers behind the wire fence, Barbara clapped her hands along with the other wives and girlfriends. Sam doffed his cap and bowed. His wife made a face at him. That wasn't why he put the cap back on in a hurry, though. He was getting thin on top, and Southern California summer sunshine was no joke. He'd sunburned his scalp a couple of times, but he intended never, ever, to do it again.
"Head for Jose's!" Win or lose, that cry rang out after a game. Winning would make the tacos and beer even better. Sam and Barbara piled into their Buick and drove over to the restaurant. It was only a few blocks from the park.
The Buick ran smoothly and quietly. Like more and more cars every year, it burned hydrogen, not gasoline—technology borrowed from the Lizards. Sam coughed when he got stuck behind an old gas-burner that poured out great gray clouds of stinking exhaust. "Ought to be a law against those miserable things," he complained.
Barbara nodded. "They've outlived their usefulness, that's certain." She spoke with the precision of someone who'd done graduate work in English. Yeager minded his p's and q's more closely than he would have had he not been married to someone like her.
At Jose's, the team hashed over the game. Sam was ten years older than anybody else and the only one who'd ever played pro ball, so his opinions carried weight. His opinion in other areas carried weight, too; Eddie, the pitcher, said, "You deal with the Lizards all the time, Major. What's it going to be like when that big fleet gets here?"
"Can't know for sure till it does get here," Yeager answered. "If you want to know what I think, I think it'll be the biggest day since the conquest fleet came down. We're all doing our best to make sure it isn't the bloodiest day since the conquest fleet came down, too."
Eddie nodded, accepting that. Barbara raised an eyebrow—just a little, so only Sam noticed. She saw the logical flaw the young pitcher missed. If all of mankind wanted the colonization fleet to land peacefully, that would happen. But no one on this side of the Atlantic could guess what Molotov or Himmler might do till he did it—if he did it. And the Nazis and the Reds—and the Lizards—would be worrying about President Warren, too.
After Sam finished his glass of Burgermeister, Barbara said, "I don't want to rush you too much, but we did tell Jonathan we'd be home when he got back."
"Okay." Yeager got up, set a couple of bucks on the table to cover food and drink, and said his goodbyes. Everybody—including Jose from behind the counter—waved when he and Barbara took off.
They lived over in Gardena, one of the suburbs on the west side of L.A. that had burgeoned since the end of the fighting. When they got out of the car, Barbara remarked, as she often did, "Cooler here."
"It's the sea breeze," Sam answered, as he often did. Then he plucked at his flannel uniform top. "It may be cooler, but it's not that cool. I'm going to hop in the shower, is what I'm going to do."
"That would be a very good idea, I think," Barbara said. Yeager stuck out his tongue at her. They both laughed, comfortable with each other. Why not? Sam thought. They'd been together since late 1942, only a few months after the conquest fleet arrived. Had the Lizards not come, they never would have met. Sam didn't like thinking about that; Barbara was the best thing that had ever happened to him.
To keep from dwelling on might-have-beens, he hurried into the house. Photographs in the hallway...
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