Page 23 of Down to Earth (Colonization 2)

Beef stew at a little cafe across the street from the Donkin House wasn’t anything like what Rance’s mother had made, but wasn’t bad. A bottle of Lion Lager improved his outlook on the world. “We’ll take it easy tonight,” he said, “and then tomorrow morning we’ll go out and see what there is to see.”

“Miles and miles of miles and miles,” Penny predicted.

“Miles and miles of miles and miles with lions and antelopes and maybe zebras, too.” Auerbach poked her in the ribs. “Hey, you’re not in Kansas any more.”

“I know.” Penny grimaced. “I’m not wearing ruby slippers, either, in case you didn’t notice.”

As things turned out, nobody in Beaufort West had a car to rent. The locals, even the ones who spoke English, looked at Rance as if he were mad for suggesting such a thing. The only taxi in town was an elderly Volkswagen whose engine coughed worse and louder than Auerbach. The driver was a middle-aged black man named Joseph Moroka.

“You speak English funny,” he remarked as he drove Rance and Penny out of town onto the karoo.

Auerbach thought the cabby was the one with the funny accent, but Penny said, “We’re from the United States.”

“Oh.” Up there in the front seat, Moroka nodded. “Yes, that is what it is. You talk like films I have seen at the cinema.” He got friendlier after realizing they weren’t native South African whites. That no doubt said something about the way things had been here before the Lizards came.

He found his passengers lions. They were sleeping in the shade of a tree. He found plenty of gemsbok and kudu-he almost ran over a gemsbok that bounded across the road. He found a fox with ears much too big for its head. And Auerbach discovered that his hawk on stilts was called a secretary bird; it had a couple of plumes sticking up from its head that looked like pens put behind a man’s ear.

“It is a good bird,” Moroka said seriously. “It eats snakes.”

Here and there, cattle roamed the countryside, now and then pausing to graze. “Need a lot of land to support a herd here,” Auerbach said. That was true in the American Southwest, too. Joseph Moroka nodded again.

“Shall we head back toward town?” Penny said.

Rance gave her a dirty look. “If you just want to sit around in the room, we could have done that back in Cape Town,” he said.

“Well, we can go out again tomorrow, if there’s anything different to see than what we just looked at,” she answered. Had they been by themselves, she likely would have told him where to head in. But, like most people, she was less eager to quarrel where outsiders could listen.

And compromise didn’t look like the worst idea in the world to Rance, either. “All right-why not? We’re going to be here a week. No point to doing everything all at once, I guess.” He tapped the driver on the shoulder. “You can take us back to the hotel, Joe.”

For the first time, the black man got huffy. “You please to call me Mr. Moroka. Most white men here, they never bother learning blacks have names until the Lizards come. Now they have to learn, and learn right.” He spoke with quiet pride.

It had been like that in the American South, too. Boy! would do the job, or Uncle! for an old Negro. Things were changing there; things had been forcibly changed here. Auerbach rolled with the punch. “Okay, Mr. Moroka.” His great-grandfather, a Confederate cavalryman, wouldn’t have approved, but great-granddad had been dead a long time.

Moroka looked back and grinned. “Good. I thank you.” If Auerbach showed manners, he’d show them, too. Rance supposed he could live with that. The cabby turned the VW around-there wasn’t any other traffic on this stretch of narrow, poorly paved road-and started jouncing back toward Beaufort West.

He topped a low rise and had just begun the long downgrade on the other side when Rance and Penny both cried out at the same time: “Wait! Hold up! Stop the damn car!” Auerbach added the last word that needed to be said, “What the hell are those things?”

“Dinosaurs,” Penny said in astonishment, and then, “But dinosaurs are supposed to all be dead. Extinct.” She nodded in satisfaction at finding the right word.

“They are dinosaurs,” Rance said, his eyes bugging out of his head. “A whole herd of dinosaurs. What the hell else can they be?”

They were bigger than cows, though not a whole lot. Their scaly hides were a sandy yellow-brown, lighter than those of the Lizards. They went on all fours, and had big, broad heads with wide, beaky mouths. As Rance took a longer look at them, though, he noticed that their eyes were mounted in big, upstanding, chameleonlike turrets. That gave him his first clue about what they had to be.

Joseph Moroka breaking into peals of laughter gave him his second. “The Lizards call them zisuili,” he said, pronouncing the alien name with care. “They use them for meat and blood and hide, like we use cattle. These things give no milk, but I hear they lay eggs like hens. They are new here.” He laughed again. “The lions have not yet decided if they are good to eat.”

“They don’t graze like cattle.” Again, Penny spoke with expert assurance. “They graze more like sheep or goats. Look at that, Rance-they don’t hardly leave anything behind ’em. They crop everything right on down to the ground.”

“You’re right,” Auerbach said. He could see from which direction the herd of zisuili was coming by the bare, trampled dirt behind them. “Wonder how the antelopes are going to like that-and the real cows, too.”

Moroka wasn’t worrying about it. He was still laughing. “But the Lizards, they do not use their cows to buy wives, oh no. They have no wives to buy. I should be like a Lizard, eh?” He found that funny as hell.

Auerbach hadn’t thought about the Lizards’ having their own domestic animals back on their home planet. He supposed it made sense that they would. They didn’t have trouble with much Earthly food, so… He tapped Joseph Moroka one more time. “Anybody tried eating these things yet?”

“We are not supposed to,” the cabby replied. Auerbach coughed impatiently. That wasn’t an answer, and he knew it. After a moment, Moroka went on, “I hear-I only hear, now; I do not know-I hear they taste like chicken.”

Atvar studied a map of the subregion of the main continental mass called China. “We make progress,” he said in some satisfaction.

“Truth, Exalted Fleetlord,” replied Kirel, the shiplord of the 127th Emperor Hetto, the bannership of the conquest fleet. “We have taken Harbin back from the rebellious Tosevites, and this other city, this Peking, cannot hold out against us much longer.”

“I should hope not, at an

y rate,” Atvar said. “The Chinese have no landcruisers and no aircraft to speak of. Without them, they can still be most troublesome, but they cannot hope to defeat us in the long run.”

“Truth,” Kirel said again. He was solid and conservative and sensible; Atvar trusted him as far as he trusted any male on Tosev 3. Back during the fighting, Kirel had had his chances to overthrow the fleetlord, especially during Straha’s uprising after the Tosevites detonated their first explosive-metal bomb. He hadn’t used them. If that didn’t establish his reliability, nothing would.

Thinking of explosive-metal bombs in that context made the fleetlord think of them in this one as well. “These Big Uglies, the Emperor be praised, cannot lure a great part of our forces forward and then destroy them with a single blast.”

Kirel cast down his eyes. “Emperor be praised, indeed,” he said. “You speak truth again, Exalted Fleetlord: they are too primitive to create explosive-metal bombs. Some other Tosevite not-empire would have to provide them with such weapons before they could use them.”

Atvar swung both eye turrets toward the second most senior male from the conquest fleet. “Now that is a genuinely appalling thought. The Chinese must understand that, if they did such a thing, we would bomb them without mercy in retaliation. Unlike the independent not-empires, they could not hope to respond in kind.”

“Even so.” Kirel gestured in agreement. “We could destroy half their population without doing the planet as a whole severe damage.”

But the fleetlord remained worried. “I wonder how much they would mind. Along with India, which presents its own problems, China is the subregion that reminds me most urgently of how many Big Uglies there are, and how few of us. The Chinese Tosevites are liable to be willing to accept the loss of half their number in the hope that doing so would damage us more in the long run.”

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