When she strode off, her feet squelched in the offending mud. She hissed again, wishing someone more familiar than she with conditions on this planet had got the job of laying out the shuttlecraft port.
“At least I found some land we could use,” she muttered. It was up to Bunim or his superiors to compensate the Big Uglies who had formerly owned the land. By all the signs, the Tosevites were holding the Race for ransom, or thought they were. But the Race had more resources than these peasants thought, and paying them what they thought they deserved was a tolerable expense.
The idea of having to pay them still offended Nesseref. This wasn’t one of the independent not-empires whose existence had once astonished her; the Race really had conquered this stretch of Tosev 3. But the local administrators seemed to be doing their best to deny they’d accomplished any such thing. No matter how often Bunim explained it, it still seemed wrong.
Nesseref glanced north and west toward Glowno, then south and east in the direction of Jezow, the other nearby Tosevite town. On the map, in fact, Jezow was closer to the site she’d chosen than was Glowno. Her eye turrets kept twisting back toward the latter town, though. The Big Ugly called Anielewicz had said he had an explosive-metal bomb there. She still didn’t know whether he’d been telling the truth. She hoped she-and the shuttlecraft port that would eventually come into being here despite the delays the ghastly weather caused-would never have to find out.
She swung her eye turrets in the direction of the Big Uglies who labored for her. Anielewicz had joked-she hoped he’d joked-about moving the bomb he might or might not have so that it could destroy her shuttlecraft port. Were any of these Tosevites his spies? She could hardly come out and ask them.
Almost all the workers, she knew, were of the larger subgroup called Poles, not the smaller subgroup called Jews. By what Nesseref had learned from both Bunim and Anielewicz, the two subgroups disliked and distrusted each other. That made it less likely the Poles were spying for Anielewicz.
Whatever reassurance that thought brought her did not last long. That the Poles weren’t spying for Anielewicz didn’t mean they weren’t spying for someone. She wished she could have had males and females of the Race laboring here, but, even after the arrival of the colonization fleet, there weren’t enough to go around. There wasn’t enough heavy equipment to go around, either, not with so much of it in use building housing for the colonists.
She glared up at the gray, gloomy sky. She’d decided to use Tosevite labor because, with it, she could have had the shuttlecraft port finished before her turn came for the heavy equipment the Race had hereabouts. But the weather wasn’t cooperating. She’d been through an interminable winter here. She’d talked with veterans from the conquest fleet. Tosev 3’s weather was not in the habit of cooperating with anyone.
As if to prove the point, a drop of rain fell on her snout, and then another and another. This wasn’t going to be the sort of cloudburst that had halted the concrete pouring, but it wasn’t weather in which her laborers could do much, either. They seemed anything but unhappy about that. Some pulled cloth caps down lower over their eyes. Others stood in whatever shelter they could find and inhaled the smoke from the burning leaves of some Tosevite plant. That struck Nesseref as a nasty habit, but they enjoyed it.
After a while, Casimir came over to her and said, “Not can working in weather like these.”
“I know,” Nesseref said resignedly.
“You dismissing we?” the foremale asked. “With pay? Weather not ours fault.”
“Yes, with pay,” Nesseref said, more resignedly still. She would have done the same for workers of the Race, and her instructions were to treat the Big Uglies like workers of the Race, or at least like Rabotevs and Hallessi. She doubted these Tosevites deserved to be treated in such a fashion, but was willing-less willing than she had been, but still willing-to believe the males who’d come with the conquest fleet knew more about the situation than she did.
Now Casimir took off his cap and bent from the waist in her direction. “You is good to working for, superior female.”
“I thank you,” Nesseref said. To be perfectly polite, she should have given the foremale a compliment in return, praising him for the hard work he and the other Big Uglies had done. She could not bring herself to say the words. From everything she’d seen, the Polish males worked no harder than they had to.
They did not seem to miss the reciprocal compliment. After Casimir had shouted to them in their own language, they let out the cries that meant they were happy. Some of them bowed to Nesseref, as the foreman had done. Some waved: a friendly gesture she had seen them use among themselves. And some simply headed off toward Jezow without a backwards glance. A lot of those, she knew from experience, would overindulge in alcohol during their free time and return to work in the morning a good deal the worse for wear.
A raindrop hit her in the eye. Her nictitating membrane flashed across the eyeball, flicking away the moisture. She wondered how long the rain would go on. Too long, without a doubt. She sighed. She couldn’t do anything about that. She couldn’t do anything about far too many things on Tosev 3.
She pulled a telephone from her belt pouch and punched in Bunim’s code. The regional subadministrator took longer to answer than she thought he should have. Nor was his voice particularly gleeful as he asked, “Well, Shuttlecraft Pilot, what has gone wrong now? I assume something has, or you would not be calling me.”
“Truth, superior sir-something has,” Nesseref said. “Because of this rain, the concrete pouring cannot commence as scheduled.”
She was glad the portable telephone had no vision link; though the Race’s features were less mobile than those of the Big Uglies, she did not think Bunim would look happy. But all he said, after a sigh of his own, was, “Very few things on Tosev 3 move in exact accord with prearranged schedules. This is naturally distressing to our kind, but it is a truth of its own here. Better the schedule should become somewhat addled than those trying to fulfill it.”
“I thank you, superior sir,” Nesseref said in some surprise. “That is generous of you.” It was more generous than she’d expected him to be.
“Anyone who tries to hurry things on Tosev 3 is doomed to disappointment, just as anyone with the purple itch is doomed to scratching,” Bunim replied. “I am given to understand the problem is worse elsewhere on Tosev 3 than here.”
“Emperor preserve me from those regions, then,” the shuttlecraft pilot said.
“Indeed,” Bunim said. “But you must also remember that the Big Uglies, when moving to their own purposes rather than to ours, are capable of bursts of speed we could not hope to match. Thus their acquisition of industrial technology in a mere handful of years. Thus also their extremely rapid growth in technical ability both while fighting the conquest fleet and since the fighting stopped.”
“I do remember this,” Nesseref said. “I do not understand it, but I remember it. My opinion, for whatever it may be worth to you, is that they have more technical ability than they know what to do with. If they had more social stability, they might not advance so fast, but they would be better off.”
“I agree with you,” Bunim said. “They were already working on explosive-metal weapons when the conquest fleet arrived. By now, the Deutsche and the Americans, say, might already have fought a nuclear war. Had we come in the aftermath of such a fight, we would only have had to pick up the pieces.” He sighed. “It would have been much easier.”
“For the conquest fleet, certainly,” Nesseref said. “The colonization fleet would have had a harder time dealing with a wrecked planet, though.”