“Why, I told you,” Dr. Rascher said. “In his writings, Hitler sets forth the doctrine of the Aryans in great detail.”
“Yes, you did tell me that,” Ttomalss agreed. “But what was Hitler’s evidence? Did he have any? What do Tosevite historians say about these questions? What does archaeology say about them? Why do you accept Hitler’s word and not the statements of those who disagree with him, if there are any?”
Behind corrective lenses that magnified them, Dr. Rascher’s eyes-they were of a washed-out gray, a very ugly color to Ttomalss-grew larger still, a token of astonishment. “Hitler was the Leader of the Reich,” the Deutsch physician exclaimed. “But naturally, his writings on any subject are authoritative.”
“Why?” Ttomalss asked in genuine puzzlement. “He must have known something about leading, of course, or he would not have led your not empire, but how much did he understand about these other things? How much could he have understood? He spent most of his time leading or getting ready to lead, did he not? What chance did he have to study these other issues in any sort of detail?”
“He was the Leader,” Dr. Rascher replied. “He knew the truth because he was the Leader.” He tacked on another emphatic cough.
Ttomalss and he stared at each other in perfect mutual incomprehension. After a long, long pause, Ttomalss let out another sigh. He’d had a lot of these moments with Big Uglies. Trying to get past this one, he said, “You claim this as revealed belief, then, not as scientific knowledge. You hold it as a superstitious opinion, like the ones expressed in… what is the local one here? Ah, Christianity, yes.” He was pleased he’d remembered the name.
But Rascher shook his head. “This is scientific truth. Christianity, on the other fork of the tongue, is a belief similar to your veneration of the spirits of Emperors past.”
He might know the idioms of the Race’s language, but he was an ignorant, barbarous Big Ugly, and did not cast down his eyes when mentioning the Emperors. And he mentioned them in insulting fashion, too. “You have no business speaking of that which you are too foolish to comprehend,” Ttomalss snapped. Dr. Rascher laughed a yipping Tosevite laugh, which further infuriated the researcher.
“Neither have you,” the Big Ugly retorted.
Now Ttomalss and he stared at each other in perfect mutual loathing. “Whatever the veneration of the spirits of Emperors past may be”-Ttomalss lowered his eye turrets toward the ground; he was no ignorant barbarian-“we do not shape the policy of the Empire around it.”
Even as he spoke, he realized that wasn’t completely true. After its first two planetary conquests, the Race had encouraged Emperor-veneration among the Rabotevs and Hallessi, using it as one means of binding the subject peoples to the Empire. Plans had been developed to do the same here on Tosev 3. So far, however, none of those plans had come to anything.
Dr. Rascher said, “Whether the Race lives according to its principles is of no concern to me. The Reich, I am proud to say, does.”
“These principles seem to include slaughtering anyone your famous Leader happened to dislike.” Ttomalss was too nettled to stay anywhere close to diplomatic. “How fortunate for you that his dislikes did not include doctors.”
He’d succeeded in making the Big Ugly as angry as he was. Rascher sprang to his feet and pointed toward the door. “Get out!” he shouted. “Get out, and never show your ugly snouted face outside your embassy again!” He punctuated that with another emphatic cough. “Your kind deserves extermination far more than any Tosevites.”
Ttomalss also rose, with more than a little relief: he found the Big Uglystyle chair in which he’d been sitting imperfectly comfortable. “I never thought any intelligent race or subgroup deserved extermination,” he said. “You Deutsche, though, tempt me to believe I may have been mistaken.”
Having got the last word, he returned to the Race’s embassy in something approaching triumph. He was still studying his recorded notes, trying to find anything resembling sense in the Reich ’s policies, when the telephone circuitry in his computer hissed for attention. On activating the telephone, he found himself looking into Veffani’s face. The ambassador said, “I have received a complaint of you from the Deutsche.”
“It could be, superior sir,” Ttomalss said. “I have a good many complaints against them, too.” He summarized his conversation with Dr. Rascher, including the Big Ugly’s revolting comments about the veneration of the spirits of Emperors past.
“They are revolting,” Veffani agreed. “But you have insulted them to such a degree that they insist you leave the Reich immediately. By the usages of diplomacy on Tosev 3, they are within their rights to make such a demand.”
“It shall be done.” Ttomalss did his best to sound as if he were obeying an order he didn’t care for. Inside, though, he felt like skittering for joy, mad and carefree as a hatchling.
“I want you to know one thing, Senior Researcher,” Veffani said.
“What is that, superior sir?” Ttomalss asked, as he knew he should.
“It is very simple: by the Emperor, how I envy you!”
Kassquit passed Tessrek in a corridor of the orbiting starship where she’d spent almost her entire life. Tessrek, she knew, loathed her for what she was and for what she had so nearly become. But the male was a colleague of Ttomalss, and so Kassquit bent into the best posture of respect she could and said, “I greet you, superior sir.”
“I greet you,” Tessrek replied, and went on his way without so much as turning an eye turret back in her direction. It was the minimum possible politeness, but Kassquit did not feel insulted. On the contrary: most of what she’d had from Tessrek over the years were insults. He’d given them to Ttomalss, too; he was a thoroughly bad-tempered male. After she’d insulted him in return, though, he’d become a lot more wary-she’d gone from target to possibly dangerous foe.
“That will do,” Kassquit murmured as she let herself into her own cubicle. “Let him hate me, so long as he fears me a little, too.”
Once inside, she went over to the computer terminal and sat down in front of it. Before she began to use it, she took a set of artificial fingerclaws from a drawer below the keyboard and put them on. She could not use voice commands; as she’d seen time and again, the machine stubbornly refused to understand her.
A glance at her reflection in the computer screen told her why, as if she hadn’t known. No way around it: though Ttomalss had raised her as a hatchling and then as a female of the Race, she was a Big Ugly. The computer knew-it couldn’t follow the mushy way in which she pronounced the language of the Race. It was the only language she knew, and she couldn’t speak it properly. That struck her as most unfair.
She shaved the hair on her head. Since her body matured, she’d shaved the hair under her arms and between her legs, too. Having the stuff at all disgusted her. Getting rid of it didn’t make her soft, smooth hide much like the scaly skin a female of the Race should have had. Even her color was wrong: she was golden, not a proper greenish brown.
Her eyes were too small and too narrow and did not lie in moving turrets. She had no proper snout. She had no tailstump, either, and when she stood, she stood far too erect. She’d tried leaning forward all the time like a proper member of the Race, but it made her back hurt. She’d had to give it up.
“I am not a proper member of the Race,” she said, rubbing it in. “I am very ugly. But I am civilized. I would rather be what I am-and what I almost am-than a wild Big Ugly down on Tosev 3.”
As she turned on the computer and colors filled the screen, she let out a sigh of relief. For one thing, those colors made her own reflection harder to see, which made it easier to imagine she really was a female of the Race. For another, the computer gave her access to the Race’s information and opinion network. There, she might as well have been a female of the Race. No one could tell otherwise, not by the way she wrote. Her views were worth as much as anyone else’s-sometimes more than someone else’s, if she could argue better.