“How splendidly devious,” Ttomalss said. What better way to get rid of superstition than to tax it out of existence?

Now he was going to have to look for males and females in positions of authority to support his scheme. He wanted to skitter with glee and excitement. He hadn’t had such a good idea since he’d decided to raise a Tosevite, hatchling among the Race.

Then he remembered what had happened to him after he took his second hatchling. He was lucky Liu Han hadn’t murdered him after his kidnapping. But surely the Big Uglies would not get so excited about taxes as they did about their own offspring.

6

Gorppet liked Baghdad no more than he’d liked Basra. If anything, he liked it less than he’d liked Basra, because it was a bigger city with more Big Uglies in it. And all of those Big Uglies were united in their hatred of the Race.

His squad always moved together. That was a standard order in Baghdad. Males could not travel these narrow, winding streets by ones and twos. They simply disappeared when they did, disappeared or were ambushed and slain. Whole squads had perished that way, too. Gorppet didn’t like to dwell on that.

“How do we tell what is a street and what is not?” Betvoss asked peevishly-he could always find something to complain about. “With so much rubble strewn everywhere, what used to be streets and what used to be houses look the same.”

“Just follow me,” Gorppet answered, and pressed on. He had trouble telling streets from houses, too, but wasn’t about to admit it. He picked what looked like the easiest route through the cratered landscape. His eye turrets tried to look every which way at once. The rubble showed that the Big Uglies had fought hard hereabouts. Enough was left standing to give their diehards lots of hiding places, too. And there were plenty of diehards.

Someone had scrawled something in the sinuous local script on a whitewashed stretch of mud-brick wall that hadn’t been knocked down. “What does that say, superior sir?” one of Gorppet’s troopers asked.

“Spirits of Emperors past turn their backs on me if I know,” he answered. “I’ve learned to speak some of this miserable language-Arabic, they call it-but I can’t read a word. Each sound has one character if it is at the beginning of a word, another one in the middle, and still another if it is at the end. More trouble than it is worth.”

“It probably just says, ‘Allahu akbar!’ anyhow,” Betvoss said. “I do not think these Tosevites know how to say anything else.”

Shouts-Tosevite shouts-came from ahead. Gorppet swung his rifle toward them. “We advance-cautiously,” he said. He envisioned all sorts of dire possibilities as he took advantage of piled rubble to climb up and see what was going on without exposing most of himself to gunfire.

“What is it, superior sir?” Even Betvoss sounded anxious. Anyone who wanted another fight with the Big Uglies was addled, or so Gorppet thought. He reckoned Betvoss addled, all right, but not so addled as that.

And then, when he could see what was going on, he laughed in relief. “Nothing but a pack of Tosevites kicking a ball around a flat stretch of ground,” he said. “We can go on.”

Kicking a ball around was the Big Uglies’ favorite sport hereabouts. It was, from what Gorppet had heard, the Big Uglies’ favorite sport in almost all the lands the Race ruled. Gorppet couldn’t see much point to it himself, but then-the Emperor be praised! — he was no Big Ugly.

The Tosevites looked up warily as he and his comrades approached. “Go on,” he said in the guttural local language. “Play. We do not trouble you if you do not trouble us.”

If the Big Uglies did feel like causing trouble… But one of them spoke in the language of the Race: “It is good.” He said the same thing in Arabic, so his fellow Tosevites would understand. They started kicking the ball again, their robes flapping as they ran after it.

Still wary, Gorppet led his males past the Big Uglies. But they were intent on their sport, and paid the squad little attention. Gorppet wondered how many of them had been fighting hereabouts till the Race brought in enough soldiers to reduce the latest uprising from boil to sizzle. Quite a few, unless he missed his guess.

As if getting by the pack of Tosevites were a good omen, the rest of the patrol also went smoothly. Gorppet brought his squad through the perimeter of razor wire and back to the barracks without any untoward incidents. “If only it were this easy all the time,” he said.

“It probably means the Big Uglies are plotting something,” Betvoss said. Gorppet wished he could quarrel with that, but he couldn’t.

As things turned out, the Race was plotting something. An officer harangued the patrol leaders: “One of our experts on the Big Uglies has come up with a way to bring them round toward reverencing the spirits of Emperors past-making them pay if they do anything else. We are ordered to collect coins outside the houses of their superstition. If they do not pay, they are not to be admitted.”

Gorppet stuck out his tongue, calling for attention. When the officer granted him leave to speak, he said, “Superior sir, do you mean to say that we are becoming tax collectors rather than soldiers?”

“We are becoming tax collectors and soldiers,” the officer replied, and Gorppet realized the fellow’s fancy body paint didn’t keep him from being very unhappy about the orders he’d received. “I do not say this will be easy, for I do not believe that for a moment. But it is what we are required to do, and so it shall be done.”

“Superior sir, have you any idea what the Big Uglies are likely to do if we try to make them pay before we let them enter the houses of their superstition?” Gorppet demanded. He had such an idea, and did not care for it at all.

“We are also going to move a landcruiser or mechanized combat vehicle up before each of the said houses by tomorrow morning,” the officer answered, which proved he did indeed have some idea. The way he ignored the nearly insubordinate tone of Gorppet’s questioning proved the same thing. He went on, “This policy, you must understand, is not regional in scope. It shall be done over all the areas of Tosev 3 under the Race’s rule. The sooner the Big Uglies begin venerating the spirits of Emperors past as we do, the sooner they will become contented citizens of the Empire.”

Gorppet supposed that made sense, at least in the long run. The Race habitually thought in terms of the long run, and had succeeded by pursuing long-term strategies… until Tosev 3. Such strategies might yet succeed here, too, but they were apt to end up unpleasant for the poor males who had to put them into motion right at the moment.

Another squad leader had to be thinking along those same lines, for he said, “I expect we can count on Khomeini and the other fanatics to exploit our policy to the greatest possible degree.”

“I think that is likely to be truth,” the officer agreed unhappily. “We shall have to see whether the results of the policy justify the difficulties it will bring with it. We are all veterans here, every single male from the conquest fleet. We know our dealings with the Tosevites are full of experiments and improvisations. Maybe this one will work. Maybe it will not. We shall have to wait and see.” He made a peremptory gesture. “You males are dismissed.”

So much for being veterans together, Gorppet thought. He went back to the barracks and told the males of his squad what the new plan was. None of them had much to say about it. Betvoss was too startled-perhaps too appalled-even to complain. An orderly came by with the locale of the house of superstition to which the squad was assigned. That confirmed Gorppet’s words and left everyone glummer than ever.

When morning came, all the males made sure they were carrying plenty of ammunition. They also made sure their body armor did the best possible job of covering their vitals. It might not hold out a high-powered bullet, but it was the best hope they had.