Body paint perfect-he had spent considerable time touching it up-Straha went off to the gathering with something approaching eagerness. Ristin and Ullhass had had good ginger at their house. If nothing else came of the evening, he could always taste till he’d sated himself. He could do that here, too, but the experience was different in company.

“Have a good time,” the driver said as he halted the motorcar in front of the house Ristin and Ullhass shared. “I will keep an eye turret on things out here.” The Race’s idiom sounded grotesque in his mouth, but keep an eye on things, the English usage, would have been equally strange in Straha’s language.

As at the last gathering, Ristin met him in front of the door. The ex-infantrymale’s red-white-and-blue prisoner-of-war body paint was as carefully tended as Straha’s official coat. (Straha chose not to dwell on the fact that, having deserted, he wasn’t entitled to the fancy body paint he still wore.) “I greet you, Shiplord,” Ristin said. “Alcohol and ginger in the kitchen, as before. Help yourself to anything you fancy. Plenty of food, too. Make yourself at home; you are one of the first ones here.”

“I thank you.” Straha went into the kitchen and poured himself a small glass of vodka. Ginger could wait for the time being. He also took some thinly sliced ham, some potato chips, and some of the little, highly salted fish the Big Uglies used to spice up dishes. Like most males of the Race, Straha found them delicious by themselves. And Ullhass and Ristin had laid in another delicacy he did not see often enough: Greek olives. He let out a small, happy hiss. Regardless of what sort of company the night yielded, the food was good.

He carried his plate and glass out into the main room, where Ullhass, who’d been talking with a couple of other males, greeted him. Like Ristin, Ullhass wore American-style body paint instead of what the Race authorized. The other guests were more conventional. They also seemed astonished to see a shiplord there. Then they realized which shiplord Straha had to be, and were astonished again in a different way. Straha had seen that before. He’d heard the whispered, “There is the traitor,” before, too. He sat down and relaxed. In a while, with alcohol and ginger in them, they’d grow less shy of him.

His eye turrets scanned the shelves of books and videos along the walls of the main room. “Some of these are new, are they not?” he asked Ullhass. “New since the conquest fleet left Home, I mean?”

“Yes, Shiplord,” the male answered. “We have had visitors from the colonization fleet here before. We expect some tonight, in fact.”

“I thought you might,” Straha said. “I wonder if, some time or another, I might borrow some of these, to see what they were doing on Home after we went into cold sleep.”

“I would be pleased if you did,” Ullhass told him. That might be more polite than sincere, but Straha intended to take him up on it.

Sure enough, some males and a couple of females from the colonization fleet, in Los Angeles on a trade mission, joined the gathering. They exclaimed in pleasure at the delicacies. Seeing Straha’s body paint, they began to fawn on him till Ristin took one of them aside and spoke quietly. After that, they didn’t seem to know what to make of the self-exiled shiplord.

After a while, he did get into a conversation with one of them, a male whose body paint proclaimed him a foods dealer. “It must be strange living here,” the fellow remarked.

“It is,” Straha agreed. “At times, I feel as out of place as the American space station in orbit not far from the ships of the colonization fleet.”

He threw out the comparison to see if the foods dealer would rise to it. “That thing!” the male said with an indignant hiss. “A big, ugly construction from the Big Uglies.” His mouth fell open in appreciation of his own wit. He went on, “I hear they are building a separate section onto it, well removed from the main body. It will be even uglier than it is now.”

“That is difficult to imagine,” Straha said. It was also something he had not heard before. He wondered if Sam Yeager knew about it. He would have to remember to pass it on to the Tosevite. Maybe Yeager would have some better idea of what it meant than he did.

After drinking some more vodka, he went back into the kitchen to get his first taste of ginger. One of the females from the trade delegation was in there. She had an almost empty glass of vodka or rum in her hand, and was laughing a wide-mouthed, foolish laugh. Pointing to the bowl of ginger on the counter, she said, “In any proper land”-by which she meant any land the Race ruled-“I would be punished for standing even this close to that herb.”

“It is not against the law in this not-empire,” Ristin said. “If you want to taste, go ahead.” He gestured invitingly.

“It smells good.” The female laughed again, even more foolishly than before. “I think I will.” She scooped up about four tastes’ worth. Her tongue flicked in and out, in and out, till the herb was gone. “Oh.” Her voice went soft with wonder. “I did not think it would be like this.”

Remembering his own first taste of ginger, Straha empathized with her-and his hadn’t been nearly so monumental as this one. But then, a moment later, he almost stopped thinking altogether as his scent receptors caught the pheromones the ginger released in the female. Sam Yeager had offered to get him a female who’d tasted ginger. He’d turned the Big Ugly down. What an addled egg he’d been! The long scales of his crest rose.

He straightened into his mating posture as the female bent into hers. Ristin started for her, too, but Straha’s display of crest, outspread fingerclaws, and colorful body paint made the other male yield to him. He took his place behind the female. Their bodies joined. Not much later, he let out a loud, ecstatic hiss.

When he stepped back from the female, Ristin took his place. Other males crowded the kitchen, drawn by the female’s pheromones as surely as Tosevite flying pests were drawn by light. A couple of males got clawed; one got bitten badly enough to draw blood. Straha, satiated, withdrew. He knew he was supposed to tell Sam Yeager something, but for the life of him couldn’t remember what.

Felless was glad she was in the Race’s embassy in Nuremberg when the urge to lay her eggs became overwhelming. She and the Race would have been embarrassed if the urge had struck her while she was interviewing some Deutsch functionary with preposterous ideas. And she might not have-she probably would not have-found a proper place in which to lay had she been out among the Big Uglies.

Inside the embassy, though, Slomikk the science officer had prepared a chamber to which gravid females could go when their time came. It had a deep layer of sand on the floor, and plenty of rocks and dry branches the females could use to conceal their clutches. In the chamber, of course, such concealment didn’t matter. But it would have mattered very much to the Race’s primitive ancestors, and the urge to conceal remained strong.

Slomikk had also given the chamber extra shielding against local background radiation. That wouldn’t have mattered to Felless’ primitive ancestors, but she was glad of it.

When she went inside, she looked around warily to make sure she was alone-another triumph of instinct over reason. The door to the laying chamber clicked shut behind her. She was, as far as she knew, the first female to use it. Few others, here or anywhere, had tasted ginger as early as she had. Few others had mated as early as she had. And few others had become gravid as early as she had.

She scurried over to a corner of the chamber half screened from the doorway by branches and rocks. All her instincts shouted This is the place! to her. She could not have found anywhere better to lay her eggs. She was sure of it, sure in a way that transcended reason. This place felt right.