Harry Turtledove: Aftershocks

So he couldn’t get away from the personal after all. Stammering a little, he said, “That is a large responsibility for me.”

“I think you set a high standard,” Kassquit told him. “If I thought otherwise, I would not want to share this compartment with you and I would not want to go on mating with you, would I? And I do.”

She put her arms around him. She was as frank about what she liked as about what she didn’t. He kissed the top of her head. An American girl would have tilted her face up for a kiss. Kassquit didn’t. Kisses on the mouth, and especially French kisses, alarmed rather than exciting her.

They made love on the sleeping mat. It was harder than a bed would have been, but far softer than the metal flooring. Afterwards, Jonathan peeled off the rubber he’d worn and tossed it in the trash. He didn’t flush such things; he had no idea what latex would do to the Lizards’ plumbing, and didn’t care to find out the hard way.

Kassquit said, “I think I begin to understand something of Tosevite sexual jealousy. It must be close to what I felt when, after the colonization fleet arrived, Ttomalss began paying much less attention to me because he was paying much more attention to Felless, a researcher newly revived from cold sleep.”

“Maybe,” Jonathan said. He didn’t know what Kassquit had felt then. He supposed it was something strong, though, because Ttomalss had been-still was-as close to a mother and a father as Kassquit had.

“I think it must be,” Kassquit said earnestly, “for I know much of that same feeling when I think of you mating with that other female down on the surface of Tosev 3. I understand that this is not rational, but it does not appear to be anything I can help, either.”

Jonathan wasn’t nearly sure Karen would want to mate with him after he got back to Gardena. But if she didn’t, some other girl-some other girl who not only was but wanted to be a human being-would. He had no doubt of that. While Kassquit… Now she knew more of what being human was all about, and she would go back to hiving among the Lizards.

“I am sorry,” Jonathan said. “I never meant to cause you pain or jealousy. You were the one who wanted to know what Tosevite sexuality was like, and all I ever wanted to do was please you while I showed you.”

“I understand that. And you have pleased me.” Kassquit used an emphatic cough. But then she went on, “You have also shown me that there are times when the pleasure cannot come unmixed with pain and jealousy. From everything I gather about the behavior of wild Tosevites, this is not uncommon among you.”

However alien her background and viewpoint, she wasn’t a fool. She was anything but a fool. Jonathan had discovered that before, and now got his nose rubbed in it. She’d just told him something about the way love worked that he’d never quite figured out for himself. He assumed the posture of respect before her, and then had a devil of a time explaining why.

Armed guards stood outside the compartment housing the Deutsch captive. Kassquit hoped the males would never have to use their weapons; the thought of bullets tearing through walls, through electronics, through hydraulics, through spirits of Emperors past only knew what all, was genuinely terrifying.

She used an artificial fingerclaw to press the recessed button in the wall that opened the door. After it slid aside, she stepped into the cubicle. “I greet you, Johannes Drucker,” she said, pronouncing the alien name as carefully as she could.

“And I greet you, superior female.” The wild Big Ugly stood very straight and shot out his right arm. From what Jonathan Yeager had told her, that was his equivalent of the Race’s posture of respect.

The strange gesture made him seem wilder than Jonathan Yeager. He looked wilder, too. He was hairy all over, with short, thick, brown hair streaked with gray growing on his cheeks and chin as well as the top of his head. No one had given him a razor. And he spoke the Race’s language with an accent different from, and thicker than, Jonathan Yeager’s.

He seemed to be trying not to study her body, which was covered only by the body paint of a psychological researcher’s assistant. Kassquit remembered both Jonathan and Sam Yeager behaving the same way at their first meeting. Coming right out and staring was evidently impolite but difficult to avoid.

He said, “They told me I would another Tosevite visitor be having. They did not bother telling me you would a female be.”

“Tosevite sexes and sexuality are matters of amusement and alarm to the Race, but seldom matters of importance,” Kassquit answered. “And, though I am of Tosevite ancestry, I am not precisely a Tosevite myself. I am a citizen of the Empire.” Pride rang in her voice.

Johannes Drucker said, “I understand the words, but I do not think I understand the meaning behind them.”

“I have been raised in this starship by the Race from earliest hatchlinghood,” Kassquit said. “Until quite recently, I never so much as met wild Big Uglies.” She hardly ever said Big Uglies around Jonathan Yeager. When speaking to this much wilder Tosevite, it came out naturally.

“I… see,” the captive said. His mouth twisted up at the corners: the Tosevite expression of amusement. “Now that you have started us meeting, what do you think?”

Kassquit couldn’t imitate that expression, try as she would. She answered, “The ones I have met are somewhat less barbarous than I would have expected.”

With a loud, barking laugh, the Deutsch captive said, “Danke schon .” Seeing that Kassquit didn’t understand, he returned to the language of the Race: “That means, I thank you very much.”

“You are welcome,” Kassquit answered. Only after the words were out of her mouth did she stop and wonder whether he’d been sarcastic. To cover her confusion, she changed the subject, saying, “I am told you came close to destroying this starship.”

“Yes, that is a truth, superior female,” he agreed.

“Why?” she asked. War, whether carried on by the Race or by Big Uglies, still seemed very strange to her. “No one aboard this ship was trying to do the Reich any particular harm. Most males and females here are researchers, not combatants.”

She thought that a paralyzingly effective comment. The wild Big Ugly only shrugged. “Do you think all of the Tosevites in the Deutsch cities on which you dropped explosive-metal bombs were doing nothing but fighting the Race?”

Kassquit hadn’t really thought about that at all. To her, the Deutsche had been nothing but the enemy. Now that Johannes Drucker pointed it out, though, she supposed most of them had just been going on with their lives. That made her examine her own side in a way she hadn’t before. “Why?” she said again.

“Anything that the enemy serves a fair target is,” Johannes Drucker replied. “That is how we fight wars. And we have seen that the Race is not very different. No one invited the Race to come here and try to conquer Tosev 3. Do you think it is any wonder that we as hard as we could fought back?”

“I suppose not,” admitted Kassquit, who hadn’t tried to look at things from the Tosevite point of view. “Do you not think that you would be using explosive-metal bombs on one another if we had not come?”

“We?” The wild Big Ugly raised an eyebrow in what she’d come to recognize as a gesture of irony. “Superior female, you have no scales that I can see.”

“I am still a citizen of the Empire,” Kassquit replied with dignity. “I would rather be a citizen of the Empire than a Tosevite peasant, which I surely would have been had the Race not chosen me.”

“How do you know?” Johannes Drucker asked. “Are you happy here aboard this starship, living with nothing but males and females of the Race? Would you not be happier among your own kind, even as a peasant?”