Harry Turtledove: Second Contact

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 mighty 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 came 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.”