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 any 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.”

“Exalted Fleetlord, when have you ever known Big Uglies to think of the long run?” Kirel asked.

“Well, that is also a truth, and a good thing for us that it is, too,” Atvar said. “Even so, you have given me something new to worry about. After so long here, I thought I had exhausted the possibilities.”

“I am sorry, Exalted Fleetlord.” Kirel bent into the posture of respect. “Do you think warning the independent not-empires against pursuing such a course would be worthwhile?”

After brief consideration, Atvar made the negative hand gesture. “I fear it would be likelier to give them ideas that have not yet occurred to them, although I admit that ideas of a troublesome sort very readily occur to Big Uglies.”

“So they do.” Kirel used an emphatic cough. “Still, though, in spite of the difficulties the Tosevites pose, we do make progress all over this world.”

“Some. Not enough,” Atvar said. Kirel had put him in a fretful mood. “I would give a great deal-I would give almost anything I can think of-to know, for instance, which of the not-empires did in fact attack the colonization fleet. That, by the Emperor, would be a vengeance worth taking.”

“Indeed it would.” Kirel sighed. “But, knowing the enormity of the crime they were committing, those Big Uglies took pains to conceal their footprints.”

“One day, we shall know. One day, they will pay,” Atvar said. “And that will be progress, too, a step we can measure.”

“Indeed it will,” Kirel agreed. “I was, I confess, thinking of smaller steps: for instance, it is good to taste the flesh of our own domestic animals again, after so long living on solely Tosevite rations.”

“I will not say you are wrong, for I think you are right. The thought of grilled azwaca cutlets makes my mouth water.” Atvar had always been especially fond of azwaca. He walked over to the window of his suite and looked west across the great river toward the pyramidal funerary monuments that passed for ancient on Tosev 3. In the green strips between the monuments and the river, azwaca were grazing, though without magnification he could not see them.