“Remember that Ussmak?” said a male named Gorppet, who wore a stripe of body paint on his left arm that showed he’d served in the SSSR. “I always figured it was the cold that drove him to mutiny, by the Emperor.”
After casting his eyes down in the ritual gesture of respect, Fotsev swiveled his eye turrets every which way to make sure nobody else had heard Gorppet. The other male was doing the same thing, aware he might have said too much even to a friend.
“I never knew much about the mutiny,” Fotsev said. Virtuously, he added, “I never wanted to know much about it, either.”
“I cannot blame you for that,” Gorppet said. Both infantrymales shuddered, as if from the chill of the SSSR, though the local weather was perfectly respectable even by the standards of Home. Mutiny-rebellion against superiors-was vanishingly rare among the Race; males interested in such things had had to look for examples in ancientest history, long before the Empire unified Home.
Belying his earlier words (there was a horrid fascination to the subject, after all), Fotsev said, “I wonder what happened to Ussmak after he yielded himself up to the Russkis. He is probably living as comfortably as anyone could in a not-empire full of Big Uglies, like that shiplord over on the lesser continental mass.”
But Gorppet made a negative hand gesture. “No-oh my, no,” he said, and added an emphatic cough. “I heard this from a male the Russkis ended up freeing from one of their captives’ camps-and he was nothing but scales and skeleton after that, too, let me tell you. He told me Ussmak died in one of those camps along with spirits of Emperors past only know how many other males. If we ever fight the Tosevites again, you do not want to let the Russkis or the Deutsche capture you-or the Nipponese, either, though we have knocked them down a good deal.”
Fotsev shuddered again. “I do not want any Big Uglies capturing me,” he said with an emphatic cough of his own. “They build factories to kill off their own-no wonder they kill us off, too, when they catch us.”
His eye turrets kept swiveling as he spoke. He and Gorppet were patrolling the market square of Basra. In the early days of the occupation, males had disappeared not far from here. The Race’s vengeance had been brutal enough to make that stop happening, but neither of the males wanted to give it a chance to start up again through lack of alertness.
In the square-an open area in a town of mud-brick buildings, most dun-colored, the fancier ones whitewashed-Big Uglies sold and bartered an enormous variety of goods, most of which Fotsev found distinctly unappetizing. Tosevite males wore robes and headpieces of cloth to shield themselves from the sun the males of the Race found so friendly, while the females swaddled themselves even more thoroughly. The Argentine Big Uglies, who lived in a harsher climate, wrapped fewer cloths around themselves. Fotsev had trouble understanding the reasons behind the difference.
When he remarked on that, Gorppet answered, “Religion,” and kept on walking, as if he’d said something wise.
Fotsev didn’t think he had. Religion and Emperor-worship were the same word in the language of the Race. They weren’t the same here on Tosev 3. The Big Uglies, not having had the benefit of tens of thousands of years of imperial rule, foolishly imagined powerful beings made in their own image, and then further imagined that those powerful beings had created them in their image rather than the other way around.
It would have been laughable, had the Big Uglies not taken it so seriously. As far as Fotsev was concerned, it remained laughable, but he did not laugh. As experience had taught the local Tosevites not to kidnap males of the Race, experience had also taught the Race not to try to alter the beliefs the local Tosevites held, no matter how absurd they were. If they thought they had to bow down five times a day to revere the Big Ugly they had writ large in the sky, easier to let them than to try to talk them out of it. Fotsev had come to Basra to reinforce the garrison here after riots from that very source.
Gorppet must have been thinking along related lines, for he said, “If they are going to have these absurd notions, why do they not all have the same ones, instead of arguing about who is right and who is wrong?”
“I do not think you can expect any two Big Uglies to have the same notion about anything,” Fotsev said. “They do not even have the same words for the same things. I had finally started learning some of the Espanol they speak in Argentina, and not a Big Ugly around these parts knows a word of it. Hardly seems fair.”
“Truth,” Gorppet said. “And some of the Tosevites here speak Arabic, some speak Farsi. Untidy, that is what this whole world is.”
“Having them all mixed together like this, you mean?” Fotsev said. “It certainly is. We ought to do something about it.”
“Like what?” Gorppet sounded interested.
“I do not know,” Fotsev said in some exasperation. “I am just an infantrymale, same as you. I know what the Big Uglies would do: kill all the ones who spoke the language they did not want. Then they would not have to worry about them any more. Nice and neat and clean, isn’t it?”
“Very neat and clean-if you do not look at the blood,” Gorppet said.
Fotsev’s shrug wasn’t that different from the gesture a Tosevite would have used. The Big Uglies weren’t in the habit of looking at blood once they’d spilled it. Off to one side of the square, a crowd was gathering, mostly Tosevite males with a sprinkling of females. Fotsev pointed toward it. “Think we ought to have a look at that?”
“What? By ourselves, do you mean?” Gorppet made the gesture of negation again. “No, thank you. If that does turn into trouble, it will turn into more trouble than the two of us can handle.”
“Why should it turn into-?” Fotsev paused. A male Tosevite was clambering up onto some kind of platform. Fotsev was no better than most other males of the Race at telling one Big Ugly from another, but he did know the males were the ones who grew tufts of ugly hair on their faces. This one had long, gray tufts, which meant he was no longer young.
“I have always thought these Big Uglies look foolish with rags wrapped around their heads,” Gorppet said.
“Down in Argentina, the females wore lots funnier things than rags on their heads. Some of them looked like walking gardens.” Fotsev kept one eye turret on the old male Tosevite, who had begun haranguing the crowd. “What is he saying? That is Farsi, is it not? I cannot tell snout from tailstump in Farsi.”
“He is talking about the Race,” Gorppet said; he knew some of the language. “Whenever these males who preach start talking about the Race, it is usually trouble. And I think this is the one called Khomeini. He hates us worse than any of the other three put together. His egg was soaked in vinegar and brine before he hatched from it.”
“But what is he saying?” Fotsev persisted.
“It is trouble, may the purple itch get under his scales.” His friend cocked his head to listen. “He is saying the spirit these superstitious fools think created them did not create us. He is saying the other spirit they believe in, the evil one, created us. And-uh-oh-he is saying that if they get rid of all of us on Tosev 3 now, the males and females from the colonization fleet will not be able to land. He thinks they are evil spirits, too.”
Fotsev made sure he had a round in the chamber of his personal weapon, a full clip attached, and more magazines where he could grab them in a hurry. Even with Gorppet by his side, he suddenly felt very much alone. “I think we had better back away,” he said, swiveling his eyes so no Big Ugly could sneak up on him with a knife or a bomb.
“I think you are right.” Gorppet came with him. “I think we had better call for help, too-help and heavier weapons.” He spoke urgently into his radio.