Free Second Contact by Harry Turtledove Page B

unnatural; she was used to rocks and dirt with occasional vegetation, not the other way round. Now she would see buildings, too, some the utilitarian cubes and blocks the Race favored, others absurdly ornate. Why would anyone want to build like that? she wondered. She also spied small buildings roofed not with metal or concrete or even stone, but with what looked like dry grass. How could a species that used such primitive building materials fare off the surface of its planet?
    Being without a good answer, she eyed the instruments, once more ready to use manual override if the shuttlecraft’s landing legs did not extend or if the rocket failed to ignite at the proper moment. No such emergency developed. Again, she had not expected one. But preparedness was never wasted.
    Flame splashed off the concrete of the landing area, then winked out as the computer cut off the rocket motor. The monitor showed people wheeling a landing ramp out toward the shuttlecraft so she could descend. No, they weren’t people; they were Tosevites. They looked like the videos she’d studied: too erect, too large, draped in cloths to conserve body heat even at what was evidently the warmer season of the year. Some of them had hair—it put her in mind of fungus—all over their blunt, round faces, others just on the top of the head. Next to the male of the Race trotting along beside them, they put her in mind of poorly articulated toys for hatchlings.
    With a small clank, the top end of the ramp brushed the side of the shuttlecraft. Nesseref opened the outer door, then hissed as chilly air poured in. She hissed again when the air struck the scent receptors on her tongue; it stank of smoke and carried all sorts of other odors she’d never smelled before.
    She skittered down the ramp. “I greet you, superior female,” the male waiting at the bottom said. With an emphatic cough, he added, “Strange to see a new face in these parts instead of the same gang of males.”
    “Yes, I suppose it must be,” Nesseref said. Her eye turrets swiveled this way and that as she tried to take in as much of this part of this new world as she could. “But then, all of Tosev 3 is strange, isn’t it?”
    “That it is.” The male used another emphatic cough. “A Big Ugly, now, a Big Ugly would have said, ‘Good to see a new face.’ By the Emperor”—he cast down his eyes—“they really think that way.”
    Nesseref’s shiver had only a little to do with the unpleasant weather. “Aliens,” she said. “How can you bear to live among them?”
    “It is not easy,” the male replied. “Some of us have even started thinking more the way they do than anybody straight from Home would be able to imagine, I expect. We have had to. A lot of the ones who could not are dead. But Tosev 3 does have its compensations. There is ginger, for instance.”
    “What is ginger?” Nesseref asked. It hadn’t been in the briefing.
    “Good stuff,” the male said. “I will give you a vial. You can take it back up with you when you fetch this intelligence data up into orbit. We do not want to transmit it, even encrypted, for fear the Big Uglies will break the encryption. They have done it before, and hurt us doing it.”
    “Are they really that bad?” Nesseref asked.
    “No,” the male told her. “Really, they are worse.”

    David Goldfarb minded being stationed in Belfast less than a lot of people might have. From what he’d seen, even men brought over from England soon tended to divide along religious lines, Protestants going up against Catholics in long-running arguments that sometimes turned into brawls. Being a Jew, he was immune to that sort of pressure.
    All things considered, Jews got on pretty well in Belfast. Each faction here despised the other so thoroughly, it had little energy to waste on any other hatreds. Neither Catholics nor Protestants gave Naomi and the kids a hard time when they left the married officers’ quarters to shop.
    Goldfarb’s swivel