“Truth,” the proprietor said. “You will need a leash, a container for its wastes, and absorbent for the container, at least until you train it to use your own waste-disposal unit. Will you also require a supply of food?”
“This would come from the flesh of Tosevite animals?” Nesseref asked.
“Yes, of course,” the other female replied. “Eventually, we will use our own beasts, as we do back on Home, but that time is not yet here-like the pets, the food animals are only now coming to Tosev 3.”
“I will feed it table scraps, then,” Nesseref decided. The pet-shop proprietor’s tailstump quivered in poorly concealed annoyance: she would get less from Nesseref than she’d hoped. Nesseref wondered how much she was spending on ginger, and how badly she needed more. Well, that, fortunately, was not the shuttlecraft pilot’s worry.
She picked up the tsiongi, moving slowly and carefully so as not to take the animal by surprise. It stuck out its tongue again and studied her with its large eyes, very much like those of the Race. She took it up to the front of the shop, past the befflem. They tried to leap through the bars of their cages; they did not like tsiongyu. The tsiongi eyed them with lordly disdain, as if to say it knew it could dispose of three or four befflem without working very hard.
“Here are the other things you will require,” the shopkeeper said. “If you will let me have your card, so I can make the charge against your account… I thank you. And here is the statement of what you have purchased.”
“And I thank you.” Nesseref examined it to make sure the other female hadn’t charged her for tsiongi food or anything else she hadn’t bought. Satisfied, she tucked the bit of paper into one of the pouches she wore on her belt. Then she set the tsiongi on the floor and fastened the leash onto its long, flexible neck. It endured the indignity of being leashed with the air of a prisoner enduring interrogation from the Deutsche or some equally fierce Big Uglies. But when Nesseref started out of the shop, the tsiongi trotted along at her heels.
When she got to the door, she turned back and said to the shopkeeper, “If I had bought a couple of befflem, they would already have tangled their leashes around my legs three different times.”
“Befflem are not hatched to be led on leashes,” the other female replied. “Their free spirits are what make them enjoyable.”
“Their free spirits are what make them nuisances,” Nesseref said. “If they had any brains and weren’t so friendly, they’d be Tosevites.” The female in the pet shop drew back, obviously insulted. Nesseref left before that female found anything to say. The tsiongi stayed right with her. The wild ancestors of tsiongyu had hunted in pairs, a leader and a follower. In domesticating them, the Race had in effect turned its own males and females into pair leaders.
Nesseref proudly led her new pet through the streets of the new town. Several males and females exclaimed over it; a couple of them asked where she’d bought it. She told them about the pet shop. The tsiongi, meanwhile, accepted the attention as nothing less than its due.
Its air of restrained nobility lasted till it caught sight of a feathered Tosevite flying creature, a plump beast with a metallic green head and a grayish body, walking along looking for, tidbits. The tsiongi turned an eye turret toward Nesseref, plainly expecting her to attack this thing that could only be prey. When she didn’t, when she just kept walking, the tsiongi gave what sounded like a male or female’s hiss of irritation. Then it sprang for the flying creature itself.
The leash, which Nesseref hung on to, brought the tsiongi up short. The Tosevite creature flew away with a whir and a flutter of wings. The tsiongi stared as if it couldn’t believe its eye turrets. Maybe it couldn’t; fewer animals flew back on Home than here on Tosev 3, and tsiongyu didn’t hunt flying creatures there. It had probably thought this one couldn’t do anything but slowly walk along. The feathered creature had given it a surprise, as all manner of Tosevite creatures had given the Race unpleasant surprises.
“Come along,” Nesseref told it. “I will feed you something, even if you could not catch that animal.” Still looking as if it thought it had been cheated, the tsiongi reluctantly followed.
Half a block farther on, it saw another bird. Again, it tried to attack. Again, the bird flew away. Again, the tsiongi seemed astonished. That happened twice more before Nesseref got back to her apartment building. By then, she was laughing at the tsiongi-all the more so because the beast’s native dignity seemed so frazzled.
She had got the tsiongi almost back to the apartment building when a beffel-naturally, not on a leash-ran past. The male to whom it more or less belonged called, “Careful there, Goldenscale!” Goldenscale didn’t feel like being careful. It infuriated Nesseref’s tsiongi in a way the birds hadn’t. And the beffel wanted to fight, too. Nesseref had to drag her pet the rest of the way to the entrance.
“You had better be careful,” she called to the male with the beffel. “Your little friend there will be someone’s supper if you are not.”
“Befflem do what befflem do,” the male answered with a shrug, which had some truth to it. He raised his voice: “Come, Goldenscale! Come!” Despite his emphatic cough, the beffel went on doing what it did, which in this case involved antagonizing Nesseref’s tsiongi.
The tsiongi tried to slam through the glass entryway door to get at the obnoxious beffel. It slammed into the glass instead, and looked even more bewildered than it had when the birds flew away. Nesseref took it to the elevator. Once the tsiongi couldn’t see the beffel any more, it regained its dignity. Even so, Nesseref wondered if she would ever be able to take it out on the street for a walk.
Flight Lieutenant David Goldfarb was going through the motions, and he knew it. The Canadian consulate in Belfast had lost interest in having him as an immigrant once he proved unable to retire from the RAF. Officials at the American consulate hadn’t formally told him no yet, but they hadn’t shown any signs of saying yes, either.
And the Lizards, on whom he’d pinned such a great part of his hopes, had let him down. From what Cousin Moishe said, he’d done his best to get the fleetlord interested in the plight of an oppressed British Jew, but his best hadn’t been good enough. Goldfarb believed Moishe had indeed done his best. He just wished that best had been better.
Since it hadn’t been, he was left to keep an eye on the radar screens that watched the sky and space above Belfast. He was doing just that, and trying not to doze off inside the darkened room that housed the radar displays, when an aircraftman first class came in and said, “Telephone call for you, sir.”
“Thanks,” Goldfarb replied, and the enlisted man saluted. Goldfarb turned to Sergeant Jack McDowell, his partner on the shift. “Will you keep an eye on things, Jack? I doubt I’ll be long.”
“Aye, sir, I’ll do it,” McDowell replied in his rich burr. He didn’t look down his nose at Goldfarb for being Jewish-or if he did, he kept it to himself. He didn’t even have to do that; his place in the RAF was odds-on to be more secure than Goldfarb’s.
Not caring to dwell on such things, David tapped the aircraftman on the shoulder. “Lead on, Macduff,” he misquoted, and followed the youngster down the hall and into an office where a telephone lay with the handset off the hook. Goldfarb eyed it with the warm affection a bird gave a snake. It was, he feared, all too likely to be Basil Roundbush trying to get him into fresh trouble-as if he didn’t have enough already. With a sigh, he picked up the telephone. “Goldfarb here.”
“Hullo, old man,” said a cheerful voice on the other end of the line. Three words were plenty to tell Goldfarb the owner of that voice had gone to Oxford or Cambridge, and to one of the best public schools before that. Roundbush, his tormentor, had done all those things, but this wasn’t Roundbush’s voice. It wasn’t any voice with which David was immediately familiar. Its owner went on, “Haven’t seen you in a long time-not since we went trolling for barmaids together back in Dover, eh?”