Page 3 of Aftershocks (Colonization 3)

To keep from examining his own feelings right away, Jonathan answered, “Even if he finds you attractive, I am not sure he would want to mate with you. He is concerned with his own mate down in the Reich, and does not know her fate.”

“I see,” Kassquit said slowly.

Jonathan wondered if she really did. She hadn’t known anything about the emotional attachments men and women could form… till she started making love with me, he thought. He hadn’t wanted to explain to the German spaceman the sort of sociological research project in which he was engaged. It was really more the Lizards’ project, not his. He was just along for the ride.

He chuckled. They brought me up here and put me out to stud. He wondered how much they’d learned. He’d certainly learned a lot.

He went over to Kassquit and put a hand on her shoulder. She squeezed him. She liked being touched. He got the idea she hadn’t been touched a whole lot before he came up to the starship. Touching was a human trait, not one the Race shared to anywhere near the same degree.

“He will be going down to his not-empire before long,” Kassquit said.

“Truth,” Jonathan agreed.

“And you will be going down to your not-empire before long,” Kassquit said.

“You knew I would,” Jonathan told her. “I cannot stay up here. This is your place, but it is not mine.”

“I understand that,” Kassquit answered. She spoke the language of the Race as well as someone with a human mouth possibly could. And why not? It was the only language she knew. She went on, “Intellectually, I understand that. But you must understand, Jonathan, that I will be sorry when you go. I will be sad.”

Jonathan sighed and squeezed her, though he didn’t know whether that made things better or worse. “I am sorry,” he said. “I do not know what to do about that. I wish there were something I could do.”

“You also have a female waiting for you on the surface of Tosev 3, even if she is not a female with whom you have arranged for permanent exclusive mating,” Kassquit said.

“Yes, I do,” Jonathan admitted. “You have known that all along. I never tried to keep it a secret from you.”

He wondered if Karen Culpepper would still be his girl when he came home. They’d been dating since high school. When he’d come up to the starship, he hadn’t expected to stay, and he hadn’t thought he would have that much explaining to do once he got back. He hadn’t really believed the Nazis would be crazy enough to attack the Lizards over Poland. But they had, and he’d been here for weeks-and he’d almost died a couple of times, too. Karen would have an excellent notion of where he was and why he’d come up here. He didn’t think she’d be very happy about it.

“You will go back to her. You will mate with her. You will forget about me,” Kassquit said.

She didn’t know it, but she was reinventing the lines everyone who’d ever lost a lover used. “I will never forget you,” Jonathan said, which was the truth. But even if it was, he doubted it consoled her much. Had someone told him the same thing, it wouldn’t have consoled him, either.

“Can that really be so?” she asked. “You know many other Tosevites. To you, I am only one of many. To me, you are the most important Tosevite I have ever known.” She let her mouth fall open, mimicking the way Lizards laughed. “The size of the sample is small, I admit, but it is not likely to increase to any great degree soon. Why, if I meet the Deutsch male before he leaves the ship, it will go up from two to three.”

She wasn’t trying to make him feel sorry for her. He was sure of that. She didn’t have the guile to do any such thing. No doubt because of the way she’d been raised, she was devastatingly frank. He said, “You could make it larger if you came down to visit the United States. You would be most welcome in my… city.”

He’d started to say in my house. But Kassquit wouldn’t be welcome in his house. His father and mother-and he, too, when he was there-were raising a couple of Lizard hatchlings who were Kassquit’s exact inverses: Mickey and Donald were being brought up as much like human beings as possible. The Race wouldn’t be delighted to learn about that, and Kassquit’s first loyalty was inevitably to the Lizards.

“I may do that,” she said. “On the other fork of the tongue, I may not, too. Is it not a truth that there are Tosevite diseases for which your physicians have as yet developed no vaccines?”

“Yes, that is a truth,” Jonathan admitted.

Kassquit continued, “From the Race’s research, it appears that some of these diseases are more severe for an adult than they would be for a hatchling. I do not wish to risk my health-my life-for the sake of a visit to Tosev 3, interesting as it might otherwise be.”

“Well, I understand that.” Jonathan made the affirmative gesture. “But surely other Tosevites will be coming here to the starship.” Getting away from the personal, getting away from guilt he couldn’t help feeling at leaving someone with whom he’d been making love as often as he could, was something of a relief.

“I suppose so,” Kassquit answered. “But still, you must understand, you will be the standard of comparison. I will judge every other Tosevite I meet, every other male with whom I mate, by what I have learned from and about you.”

So he couldn’t get away from the personal after all. Stammering a little, he said, “That is a large responsibility for me.”

“I think you set a high standard,” Kassquit told him. “If I thought otherwise, I would not want to share this compartment with you and I would not want to go on mating with you, would I? And I do.”

She put her arms around him. She was as frank about what she liked as about what she didn’t. He kissed the top of her head. An American girl would have tilted her face up for a kiss. Kassquit didn’t. Kisses on the mouth, and especially French kisses, alarmed rather than exciting her.

They made love on the sleeping mat. It was harder than a bed would have been, but far softer than the metal flooring. Afterwards, Jonathan peeled off the rubber he’d worn and tossed it in the trash. He didn’t flush such things; he had no idea what latex would do to the Lizards’ plumbing, and didn’t care to find out the hard way.

Kassquit said, “I think I begin to understand something of Tosevite sexual jealousy. It must be close to what I felt when, after the colonization fleet arrived, Ttomalss began paying much less attention to me because he was paying much more attention to Felless, a researcher newly revived from cold sleep.”

“Maybe,” Jonathan said. He didn’t know what Kassquit had felt then. He supposed it was something strong, though, because Ttomalss had been-still was-as close to a mother and a father as Kassquit had.

“I think it must be,” Kassquit said earnestly, “for I know much of that same feeling when I think of you mating with that other female down on the surface of Tosev 3. I understand that this is not rational, but it does not appear to be anything I can help, either.”

Jonathan wasn’t nearly sure Karen would want to mate with him after he got back to Garde

na. But if she didn’t, some other girl-some other girl who not only was but wanted to be a human being-would. He had no doubt of that. While Kassquit… Now she knew more of what being human was all about, and she would go back to hiving among the Lizards.

“I am sorry,” Jonathan said. “I never meant to cause you pain or jealousy. You were the one who wanted to know what Tosevite sexuality was like, and all I ever wanted to do was please you while I showed you.”

“I understand that. And you have pleased me.” Kassquit used an emphatic cough. But then she went on, “You have also shown me that there are times when the pleasure cannot come unmixed with pain and jealousy. From everything I gather about the behavior of wild Tosevites, this is not uncommon among you.”

However alien her background and viewpoint, she wasn’t a fool. She was anything but a fool. Jonathan had discovered that before, and now got his nose rubbed in it. She’d just told him something about the way love worked that he’d never quite figured out for himself. He assumed the posture of respect before her, and then had a devil of a time explaining why.

Armed guards stood outside the compartment housing the Deutsch captive. Kassquit hoped the males would never have to use their weapons; the thought of bullets tearing through walls, through electronics, through hydraulics, through spirits of Emperors past only knew what all, was genuinely terrifying.

She used an artificial fingerclaw to press the recessed button in the wall that opened the door. After it slid aside, she stepped into the cubicle. “I greet you, Johannes Drucker,” she said, pronouncing the alien name as carefully as she could.

“And I greet you, superior female.” The wild Big Ugly stood very straight and shot out his right arm. From what Jonathan Yeager had told her, that was his equivalent of the Race’s posture of respect.

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