Harry Turtledove - Down to Earth

Atvar, the fleetlord of the Race’s conquest fleet, and Reffet, the fleetlord of the colonization fleet, were having a disagreement. They had agreed on very little since Reffet brought the colonization fleet to Tosev 3. Atvar was convinced Reffet still had no real understanding of the way things worked on this miserable planet. He didn’t know what Reffet was convinced of-probably that things on Tosev 3 were in fact the way the Race had fondly imagined them to be before sending out the conquest fleet.

“I do not know what you wish me to do, Reffet,” he said. They were equals; neither of them was Exalted Fleetlord to the other. They could be, and often were, equally impolite to each other. “No matter what you may believe, I cannot work miracles?” He swiveled his eye turrets this way and that to show exasperation.

Reffet swiveled his eye turrets, too, and hissed for good measure. “I do not see that it is so difficult. The ship the Big Uglies have launched is under very low acceleration. You have plenty of time to send a reconnaissance probe after it and keep it under close, secret observation?”

“And you brought starships across the light-years between Home and here!” Atvar exclaimed. “You must have had good officers and good computers, for you surely were not up to the job unaided.” He paced across his office, which had been a suite in Shepheard’s Hotel before the Race occupied Cairo. It gave him plenty of room to pace; Tosevites were larger than males and females of the Race, and, naturally, built in proportion to their own size.

“Leave off your insults,” Reffet replied with another hiss, an angry one. His tailstump switched back and forth, back and forth. “I repeat, I do not see that what I have asked is so very difficult. As I said, that ship, that Clewis and Lark, is under acceleration of no more than a hundredth of the force of gravity.”

“Lewis and Clark.” Atvar took no small relish in correcting his colleague and rival over even minute details that shouldn’t have mattered to anyone save a Big Ugly. “That it is under tiny acceleration does not matter. That it is under continuous acceleration does. If we are to observe it closely and continually, our reconnaissance must be under acceleration, too. And how, I ask, do you propose to keep that secret? A spacecraft with a working engine is by the nature of things anything but secret.”

“By the Emperor!” Reffet burst out. He lowered his eyes to the floor when naming his sovereign. So did Atvar, on hearing the title. From training since hatchlinghood, any member of the Race would have done the same. Still furious, Reffet went on, “These accursed Tosevites have no business flying in space?” He used an emphatic cough to underline his words. “They have no business having instruments that let them detect what we do when we fly in space, either.”

Atvar let his mouth fall open in amusement. “Come here, Reffet,” he said, walking over to the window. “Come here-it is safe enough. I intend no tricks, and the riots seem to have quieted down again, so no Big Ugly is likely to be aiming a sniper’s rifle in this direction at the moment. I want to show you something.”

Suspicion manifest in every line of his forward-sloping body, Reffet came. “What is it?” The suspicion filled his voice, too.

“There.” Atvar pointed west across the great river that flowed past Cairo. “Do you see those three stone pyramids, there in the sand?”

Reffet deigned to turn one eye turret in that direction. “I see them. What of it? They look massive, but weathered and primitive.”

“They are primitive-that is my point,” Atvar said. “They are as old as any monuments on this world. They were built as memorials to local rulers eight thousand years ago, more or less: eight thousand of our years-half that many for the years of Tosev 3. Eight thousand years ago, we had already had a planetwide Empire for more than ninety thousand years. We had already conquered the Rabotevs. We had already conquered the Hallessi. We were beginning to wonder if the star Tosev-this world’s star-had any interesting planets. Here, civilization was just hatching from its egg.”

“And it should have taken much longer to hatch, too,” Reffet said irritably. “The Big Uglies should still be building monuments much like these, as we were not long after we started gathering in cities?”

“Truth?” Atvar’s voice was sad. “They should have. In fact, we thought they had. You will have seen this picture of a Tosevite warrior in full battle regalia before you set out from Home, of course?”

He walked over to the hologram projector and called up an image. He had seen it countless times himself, both before reaching Tosev 3 and since. It showed a hairy Big Ugly in rusty chainmail, armed with sword and spear and iron-faced wooden shield and riding a four-legged beast with a long head, an unkempt mane, and a shaggy tail.

“Yes, of course I have seen that image,” Reffet said. “It is one of those our probe took sixteen hundred years ago. From it, we assumed the conquest would be easy.”

“So we did,” Atvar agreed. “But the point is, in those intervening sixteen hundred years-eight hundred of this planet’s revolutions-the Tosevites somehow developed industrial civilization. However much you and I and every other member of the Race may wish they had remained primitive, the sorry fact is that they did not. We have to deal with that fact now.”

“It was not planned thus.” Reffet made that an accusation. The Race moved by plans, by tiny incremental steps. Anything different came hard.

Atvar had been dealing with the Big Uglies for more then forty of his years. By painful necessity, he’d begun to adapt to the hectic pace of Tosev 3. “Whether it was planned or not, it is so. You cannot crawl back into your eggshell and deny it.”

Reffet wanted to deny it. Again, every line of his body showed as much. So did the big breath of air he sucked deep into his lung. “I think I would rather deal with the Tosevites than with you,” he snarled. “I know they are aliens. With you, I cannot tell whether you have become half alien or are simply addled like an egg gone bad.”

That did it. Atvar drew in a deep, angry breath of his own. It brought the stinks of Cairo-the stinks of Big Uglies and of their food and their wastes, as well as the stinks from the hydrocarbon-burning engines they had developed themselves-across the scent receptors in his tongue. “Go away,” he told Reffet, and added an emphatic cough of his own. “I have not the time to deal with your stupidity. Whatever the Big Uglies in that spacecraft do, they will not do it soon. I am facing a serious uprising in the subregion of the main continental mass called China. I have to deal with that now. I will deal with the American spacecraft as I find the chance, or when it becomes urgent. Meanwhile, good day.”

“You have turned into a Big Ugly,” Reffet said furiously. “All you care about is the immediate. Anything that requires forethought is beyond you.”

“Tosev 3 will do that to a male-unless it kills him first,” Atvar answered. Then he paused. Both his eye turrets swung thoughtfully toward Reffet. “Have you any notion how many casualties the Big Uglies’ continual revolts have cost us?”

“No, I do not?” Reffet sounded peevish. As far as Atvar was concerned, Reffet sounded peevish far too often. The fleetlord of the colonization fleet went on, “Had you done a proper job of conquering this planet, I would not have to concern myself with such things-and neither would you.”

I will not bite him, Atvar thought. I will not tear his belly open with my fingerclaws. But he hadn’t known such temptation to pure, cleansing violence since a ginger-induced mating frenzy in Australia. Fortunately, he had no ginger coursing through him now, nor could he smell any females’ pheromones. That let him stay his usual rational self. “Deal with things here as they are, Reffet,” he said, “not as you wish they would be. Our casualties have been heavy, far heavier than anyone could possibly have anticipated before we left Home. Like it or not, that is a truth.”