“I do not even know if this is a suitable place yet,” Nesseref said, a little taken aback at such vigor. “Are the Big Uglies west of here not supposed to be dangerous?”
“Oh, we can take care of the Deutsche, too,” the officer said with another emphatic cough. “If they give us trouble, we will give them a good kick in the snout.”
But, over the next little while, his enthusiasm and his boasts faded away. He started looking all around, as if afraid someone might be following him. “Is something wrong?” Nesseref asked.
“No,” he said in a forlorn voice, but then added, “Wait here, superior female,” and skittered around a corner. When he returned a moment later, he was strutting again, up on top of the world. “Wrong?” he demanded. “What could possibly be wrong? Everything is just as right as it could be, and this is the perfect-the perfect, I tell you-place for a shuttlecraft port, or my name isn’t Emmitto.”
Before very long, Emmitto was subdued and worried again. Nesseref wondered what was wrong with him; such wild mood swings were most unusual in the Race. Only after he excused himself once more and once more returned full of exuberance did a warning light begin to glow on the instrument panel of her mind. She had everything she could do not to let her mouth fall open in sour laughter. I should have tasted ginger, too, she thought. Then Emmitto would have had some company.
Tosev blazed down out of a sky the wrong shade of blue, but with very respectable warmth all the same. Atvar smelled unfamiliar spicy odors far removed from the stinks of Cairo. “I should come to Australia more often, regardless of where I make my capital,” he told his adjutant.
“Whatever pleases the Exalted Fleetlord,” Pshing replied. “Since so many of the Race will be settling here, surely your duty might well be construed as requiring you to make frequent visits here.”
“It might indeed,” Atvar said, “although I expect I can find my own excuses for doing what I want to do anyhow. Most males can, at any rate.”
He looked around with considerable satisfaction. Here as in few places on Tosev 3, the Race would have the land to itself. The Big Uglies had made little use of the central part of the island continent. Now the Race would show them how foolish they had been to ignore it.
“Perhaps,” he said, “just perhaps, mind you, the colonization fleet could establish its administrative center here, a center that would, in time, become the Race’s chief administrative center, replacing Cairo. That would allow us to change capitals without confessing weakness to the Tosevites. If I spent my retirement here, I might yet come to think of Tosev 3 as a pleasant world.”
“A clever notion indeed, Exalted Fleetlord,” Pshing said. “Shall I relay it to Fleetlord Reffet for his views?”
“Not yet,” Atvar answered. “Let me study it for possible drawbacks first. We are males of the Race. I need not be hasty here, as I would when dealing with the Big Uglies. Returning to old habits feels good, after so long.” He paused, then let out an exasperated hiss. “Or perhaps not so good. If I return to the habit of slowness, the Tosevites will make me regret it before long.”
“If we succeed in bringing this world into the Empire, I wonder if we shall ever be able to slow the Big Uglies down to a pace that the other races find tolerable,” Pshing said.
“I hope so, for the Tosevites’ sake and ours,” Atvar said. “I also hope we can bring this world fully into the Empire, for their sake and ours.”
Though he would not say as much to his adjutant, he feared the result if the Race failed to bring the independent not-empires into the Empire in a fairly short time. That the Big Uglies had succeeded in building a technological civilization in the relatively brief period since the Race’s probe showed they had none warned of their prowess. What they had done since the colonization fleet made the warning even more urgent. Then, while astonishingly advanced, they had been behind the Race in every area. They’d hung on with an abundance of cunning and materiel. Now…
Some males brushed aside the Tosevites’ progress by noting how much they had borrowed-stolen, many said, and truthfully-from the Race. Atvar recognized the truth in that. But he also saw how the Tosevites did not blindly borrow, how they used machines and information taken from the Race to bring their own preexisting technology up to date, how they put their own slant on everything they stole.
His experts had run projections. He’d run secret projections of his own, too. They differed in detail, depending on just what assumptions went into them. The broad outlines, though, were startlingly, dismayingly, similar: before too long, the Big Uglies’ technology would be more advanced than that of the Race.
Most of the projections said the Race would still enjoy a breathing space after that: the Big Uglies would need a while to realize what they’d achieved. Sooner or later, though, they would. They couldn’t help it.
What would happen then? There too, the projections differed. Nothing good for the Race, though, was the theme that ran through them.
And I can’t even destroy those not-empires, Atvar thought, not without destroying the whole planet, which means destroying the colonization fleet. One of the ideas haunting him was that such destruction might be worthwhile in spite of the cost: it might mean saving the Race as a whole.
Pshing pointed at something moving across the barren countryside, for which distraction Atvar was thoroughly glad. “What are those things, Exalted Fleetlord?” his adjutant asked.
“Tosevite life of some sort, I suppose,” Atvar answered. “If you have a monocular, you will be able to tell more.”
“I do, Exalted Fleetlord.” Pshing took the magnifier from a belt pouch, turned one eye turret toward the distant creatures, and raised the magnifying lenses. He let out a startled hiss. “How peculiar! Are those Big Uglies? No, they cannot be. But still…” He gave Atvar the monocular. “See for yourself, Exalted Fleetlord.”
“I will.” Atvar brought the little tube up to one of his own eyes. The creatures on the plain seemed to leap much closer. “They are funny-looking.”
“They certainly are.” Pshing added an emphatic cough. “I thought almost all Tosevite life forms except the Big Uglies themselves were quadrupeds, not bipeds.”
“I seem to recall reading that this island continent had an ecosystem long isolated from others on Tosev 3,” Atvar said. “Maybe that accounts for these peculiar things. They look almost like a cross between the Big Uglies and ourselves, don’t they? — though their tails are long.”
Just then, something must have startled the Tosevite creatures, which went bounding off at a very respectable turn of speed. “Well!” Pshing said. “I did not think they could move like that.”
“A lot of Tosevite creatures are deceptive, all the way up to the Big Uglies,” Atvar said. Suddenly, one of the animals crashed to the ground and lay kicking. The fleetlord could not see why until a Big Ugly emerged from concealment and ran over to the downed creature. “Will you look at that!” Atvar exclaimed, and passed the monocular back to his adjutant.
“Yesss.” Pshing drew the word out into a hiss of his own. “Not all Tosevites have moved forward from where the probe found them, have they?”
“By no means,” Atvar answered. The Big Ugly he’d been watching was naked, his dark brown hide filthy and daubed here and there with mud of various colors.
“He is bashing in the animal’s head with a rock,” Pshing reported. “I think his knife is metal, though. Looking at him, I do not think he could have made it for himself.”
“Perhaps he got it in trade from the more advanced Australians,” Atvar said, “the ones whose principal cities we bombed so as to take possession of this continent.”