Yeager said, “Shiplord, that is not true. Your presence here has meant a great deal to my not-empire and to all Tosevites. Thanks in no small part to you and to what we learned from you, we were able to make and for the most part to keep our armistice with the Race.” He held up a hand. “I know this may only make you think of yourself as a tremendous traitor, but that is not so. You have helped save everyone on Tosev 3: males of the conquest fleet, males and females of the colonization fleet, and Big Uglies.” He used the Race’s nickname for his kind without self-consciousness.

“I wish I could believe everything you tell me,” Straha said slowly. “I also try to tell it to myself, but I do not believe it from my own mouth, either.”

“Well, you should,” Yeager said, like one male encouraging another to go forward in combat. “You should, for it is truth.”

Straha had never imagined he could be so preposterously grateful to a Big Ugly. He wondered if Yeager understood his own kind as well as he understood the Race. “You are a friend,” he said, and sounded surprised after the words came out: the idea of a Tosevite friend seemed very strange to him. But that he had one was also truth. “You are a friend,” he repeated, “and I will help you as one friend helps another.”

17

Kassquit pondered the computer screen in front of her. She often kept one eye turret turned toward discussions about objects in orbit around Tosev 3 (so she thought of it, though she, of course, had no eye turrets and usually had to turn her whole head to see something). This was, after all, the environment in which she’d spent her whole life. It was the environment in which she would likely spend the rest of her life. Tracking what went on here mattered to her.

After the disaster that befell the colonization fleet, Kassquit paid more attention than she had to discussions about Tosevite space objects. Before that attack, she’d wanted nothing to do with the species of which she was biologically a part. She still didn’t, not really, but she’d had to realize the wild Tosevites were dangerous to her. Their missiles could have vaporized her ship as easily as one from the colonization fleet. Only chance had put her on the opposite side of the planet from the ships that were destroyed. Chance, to a member of the Race (or even to a Tosevite trained to act like a member of the Race), did not seem protection enough.

Little by little and then more and more, the messages of a male named Regeya drew her notice. They stood out for a couple of reasons: Regeya seemed quite well informed about the doings of the not-empire called the United States, and he wrote oddly. Most males and females sounded very much alike, but he spiced his messages with peculiar turns of phrase and hardly seemed to notice he was doing it.

Those qualities finally prompted her to send him a private message. Who are you? she wrote. What is your rank? How have you become so knowledgeable about these Big Uglies? She did not ask him why he wrote strangely. She was strange herself, in ways more intimate than writing quirks. But, in writing, her strangeness didn’t show. That was another reason she cherished computer discussions: males and females who couldn’t see her assumed she was normal.

Regeya took his time about answering. Just when Kassquit began to wonder if he would answer at all-he would have been within his rights, though on the abrupt side, to ignore her-he did send a reply: I am a senior tube technician. The American Big Uglies taught me, and were so interesting, I got hooked on them. She admired the phrase for a moment before reading his last sentence: Other than that, I am an ordinary male. What about you?

“What about me?” Kassquit asked rhetorically. She wrote, I am a junior researcher in Tosevite psychology, which comes close to addling me. That was all true, and proved truth could be the best deception. She added, You have an interesting way of writing, and sent the message.

Wondering just what a senior tube technician did and what his body paint looked like, she checked a data store. The answer came back in moments: there was no such classification as senior tube technician. As usual, her face showed little expression, but she found that puzzling. She checked the computer to see how many Regeyas had come to Tosev 3 with the conquest fleet: the male showed too much knowledge of American Tosevites to belong to the colonization fleet, or so it seemed to her.

In short order, the answer came back. Unless the computer was mistaken, only one male bearing that name had belonged to the conquest fleet, and he had been killed in the early days of the invasion. Kassquit checked the records for the colonization fleet. They showed two Regeyas. One had been a bureaucrat aboard a ship destroyed in the attack on the fleet. The other, a graphic designer, was newly revived. Kassquit checked past messages in the discussion section. Regeya, whoever he was, had sent messages while the graphic designer remained in cold sleep.

“That is very strange,” Kassquit said, a considerable understatement. She wondered what to do next.

While she was wondering, a message from Regeya-from the mysterious Regeya, she thought-reached her. Tosevites are strange creatures, but not so bad once you get to know them, he wrote, and then, I write with my fingerclaws, the same as everybody else.

Kassquit would have forgiven him a good deal for his kind words about Big Uglies. He, of course, whoever he was, could have no way of knowing she’d been hatched (no, born: a thoroughly disgusting process) one herself. And she liked his strange slant on the world. But he was not who and what he pretended to be. Such deceptions, she had gathered, were common among the Tosevites, but rarely practiced by members of the Race.

What does a senior tube technician do? she wrote, hoping that in answering he would betray himself.

But his reply was altogether matter-of-fact: I tell intermediate and junior tube technicians what to do. What would you expect?

She stared at the screen. Her mouth fell open. That was laughter in the style of the Race. In the privacy of her chamber, she also laughed aloud, as Big Uglies did. Whoever this Regeya was, he had both wit and nerve.

But who was he? Why was he using a name not his own? She could find no good reason. Nothing in the discussions in which he took part could gain him any profit, only, at most, a little information. Unable to solve the problem herself, she mentioned it to Ttomalss the next time they spoke.

“I can think of two possibilities,” the senior researcher said. “One is that he is indeed a male of the Race using a false name for deceptive purposes of his own. The other is that he is a Tosevite who has partially penetrated our computer system.”

“A Tosevite!” Kassquit exclaimed. That had not occurred to her-nor would it have. “Could a Big Ugly seem like a male of the Race in discussion groups and electronic messages?”

“Why not?” Ttomalss asked. “You certainly seem like a female of the Race whenever your physiognomy is not visible.”

“But that is different,” Kassquit said. “This Regeya, by your hypothesis, would be a wild Big Ugly, not one civilized from birth, as I have been.” She heard the pride in her voice.

“We have been studying the Tosevites since our arrival here,” Ttomalss said. “Indeed, thanks to our probe, we studied them before we arrived here-although, as events proved, not well enough. And they have been studying us, too. Some of them, I suppose, will have learned a good deal about us by now.”

“Learned enough to imitate us that well?” Kassquit had trouble believing it. She’d not only taken this Regeya for a male of the Race, she’d taken him for a clever one. He had an unusual way of looking at the world, one that made her see things in a new light. But perhaps that sprang not from cleverness but from an alienness he couldn’t fully conceal. She said as much to Ttomalss.