Maybe the Big Ugly had expected Straha to ask such questions. Eyeing him, the Tosevite asked, “Is there anything else, Shiplord?” He returned to the language of the Race, and with it to formality.

“No, nothing else,” Straha replied, also in his own language. “How you Big Uglies conduct your affairs is of no great consequence to me.”

That made his driver relax. Males of the Race-and females, too, these days-had a reputation among the Big Uglies for being contemptuous of everything pertaining to Tosev 3. Straha was contemptuous of a great deal about the Tosevites, but not of everything, and not about all Big Uglies. But he used the reputation to his own advantage here, to conceal a genuine interest.

With a laugh, his driver said, “After all, it’s not as if Yeager were a male of the Race,”

“It certainly is not,” Straha agreed. The driver nodded and went off making the small, somewhat musical noises the Big Uglies called whistling. That was a sign he was amused and unconcerned and happy.

Or maybe he wanted Straha to think it was a sign he was amused and unconcerned and happy. Big Uglies could be devious creatures. Straha knew from experience that his driver could be a devious creature. If he were to pick up the telephone now and call Sam Yeager, he had no doubt the driver would listen to every word he said. He wouldn’t have been surprised if the Americans listened to every word he said whenever he picked up the telephone.

He waited till he was using the limited access to the Race’s computer network a fellow male in exile had illicitly obtained for him before sending an electronic message to Maargyees, the false name Sam Yeager used on the network. In case you did not know it, your own curiosity has amused curiosity in others, he wrote. Yeager was a clever male. He would have no trouble figuring out what that meant.

Having written the message, Straha erased it from his own computer. It would, of course, remain in the network’s storage system, but the Americans didn’t have access to that. He hoped with all his liver that the Americans didn’t have access to it, anyhow. They’d known next to nothing about computers when the Race first came to Tosev 3. They knew a great deal more than that these days, worse luck.

The Race had phased in computers ever so gradually in the couple of millennia following the unification of Home. Devices with such important influence on society had to be phased in gradually, to minimize disruption. That was the way the Race looked at things, anyhow. The Big Uglies had other ideas.

Straha didn’t suppose he should have been surprised. When the Tosevites found a new technology, no matter what it was, they always felt they had to do as much with it as they could as soon as they could. Even if the troubles that would hatch as a result of rapid change were obvious, they went ahead all the same. They’d done as much with computers in a generation as the Race had in centuries.

Not all American Tosevites had the education they needed to use computer systems to best advantage-or at all. That didn’t deter the Big Uglies. Those of them who could use the new technology did… and flourished. Those who didn’t might as well have stayed inside their eggshells. Their failure, their falling behind, bothered the others not at all.

And if upheaval followed because some Tosevites gained more advantages than others-they didn’t seem to care. That struck Straha as madness, but it was as much dogma to the Americans as reverencing the spirits of Emperors past was to the Race. Straha knew an American saying: look out for yourself and let the devil take the hindmost. To him, that was individualism to the point of addlement, survival of the fittest made into a law of society. To the Americans, it seemed common sense. Those who succeeded in the United States succeeded spectacularly. Those who failed-and there were, by the nature of things, many who did-failed the same way.

“And, all things considered, I am one of the ones who have succeeded,” Straha murmured. He had less than he would have had back on Home, but he had everything with which the Big Uglies could supply him.

The sliding glass door at the back of the house was open. The spring air was chillier than he found ideal, but no worse than a brisk winter’s day back on Home. He didn’t even bother bundling up before he pushed open the sliding screen that kept little flying and crawling pests out of the house and walked out into the backyard.

He looked around with a certain amount of pride. Bare ground and sand and succulents, some smooth, some spiky, put him in mind of a landscape back on Home, though details differed. Here, even more than inside — the house, he’d shaped things to suit himself. Inside, the place was built to suit Tosevites, and many of the devices he used every day-telephone, stove, refrigerator-were perforce of American manufacture, different from and usually inferior to their equivalents on his native world. They always reminded him what an alien he was.

Out here, though, he could look around and imagine himself somewhere on Home, somewhere a long way from his native city. Few Big Uglies cared for the effect, any more than he was enamored of the boring green lawns they so admired.

The dog next door started barking. It often did when he came outside; it probably disliked his odor. For that matter, he wasn’t fond of the scent of its droppings, which the breeze sometimes wafted to his scent receptors. He didn’t like the noise it made, either. Nothing on Home sounded remotely like a dog, and its yaps and growls spoiled the illusion the yard gave him.

A small bird with a bright green back and an even brighter red head buzzed among the flowers; red ones particularly attracted it. It too reminded him he wasn’t on Home any more. Flying creatures there had bare, leathery wings, and none of them came close to matching the aerial gymnastics of a hummingbird. But, even though the flying creature was alien, it didn’t irk him the way the dog did. It was small and quiet and attractive, not loud and annoying.

Suddenly the hummingbird, which had been swooping low, darted away as if something had startled it. Straha strode closer, and saw a scaly, four-legged creature a little longer than the distance between his wrist and the end of his middle fingerclaw. It was a brown not much different from the color of the dirt, with darker stripes to break up its outline. Like the succulents among which it crawled, it looked familiar without being identical to anything on Home.

It stuck out a short, dark tongue. Then, as if nervous about coming out into the open, it scuttled back under some of the plants and disappeared. Straha started to root around after it, but decided not to bother. It was living where it belonged and doing what it was supposed to do. He wished he could say the same.

Maybe he could return to the society of the Race… if he betrayed Sam Yeager. Maybe. His mouth fell open in a laugh that held little in the way of real mirth. He’d just warned his friend of danger from other Big Uglies, but he hadn’t warned of danger from himself.

Of course, Yeager understood the Race about as well as any Tosevite could. He would have to understand that Straha might be able to buy his way back into Atvar’s good graces by passing on the story of the hatchlings… wouldn’t he?

From the exile that wasn’t quite comfortable, from the garden that wasn’t quite Home, Straha made the negative gesture. “If I have to buy my way back into Atvar’s good graces, they are not worth having,” the ex-shiplord said aloud. “Spirits of Emperors past turn their backs on him.” He feared those spirits would reject him when he came before them, but he’d feared that ever since ordering his shuttlecraft pilot to take him down to the USA. Yet those spirits wouldn’t approve of him if he betrayed a friend, either, not even if that friend was a Big Ugly. Now he made the affirmative gesture. He would stay quiet, and stay here.