The Science Fiction Anthology. Fritz Leiber
of the natives.... Is something wrong with the coffee? And you’ve hardly touched your sandwich. Maybe you’d like another kind. I have several varieties here—ham and cheese and—”
“Oh, no,” Clarey protested. “The one I have is fine. It’s just that I’m—well, to tell you the truth,” he confessed, “I’ve grown accustomed to Damorlant food.”
“Don’t see how you could,” the colonel said. “Nauseating stuff—to my way of thinking,” he added politely. He opened a sandwich and inspected the filling.
“You’ve only eaten at public places. Even the better restaurants don’t put themselves out for Earthmen, say they have no—palates, I guess the word would be. But you ought to taste my landlady’s cooking!”
“All this is being taped, you know. They’ll have to listen to every word on Earth.”
“If only I could convey the true picture through words. Her ragouts are rhapsodies, her soufflés symphonies—I’m using rough Terrestrial equivalents, of course—”
“The cuisine comes later, please. Over-all impressions first.”
“Well,” Clarey began again, “at first I was a bit surprised that you’d stuck me in a quarter-credit place like Katund. Naturally in a village the people’d be more backward than in the cities, so you’d have a poorer idea of how they were developing. Then I realized that you couldn’t help putting me there, that you probably couldn’t write a letter good enough to get me a job in any of the big centers. Embelsira said she was surprised to find me so much more literate than she would have expected from the letter.”
The colonel sat erect huffily. “I’ve never pretended to be a philologist. And, anyway, Damorlan isn’t like Earth. Here the heartbeat of the planet is in its villages.”
“Earth hasn’t any villages, so the comparison doesn’t apply.” Clarey cleared his throat. “Don’t you have anything to drink except coffee?”
“Tea?”
“That would be better. Do you know the Katundi have a special variety of tea, or something very like it, which is—”
“Tell me what they think of Earthmen,” the colonel interrupted desperately.
“Not much. What I mean is, nobody in Katund’s actually had any contact with them, though they’ve heard of them, of course. Every now and then there’s a little article in the Dordonec Bulletin from their Barshwat correspondent, and sometimes, if there isn’t any real news, he gives a couple of inches to the Earthmen.”
“Exactly how do they regard us?” the colonel asked as he spooned tea into the pot. “Demi-gods? Superior beings? Are they in great awe of us?”
“They regard us as visitors from another planet,” Clarey said. “They don’t realize from quite how far away we hail, think it’s only a matter of a solar system or two, but they’ve got the general idea. Don’t forget, they may not be a mechanical people, but they do have some idea of astronomy. They’re not illiterate clods.”
“What do they think of our spaceships? Great silver birds, something like that?”
Sighing deeply, Clarey said, “They think our spaceships are cars that fly through the sky without tracks. And they think it’s silly, our having machines to fly in the sky and none to go on the ground. There’s an old Dordonec proverb: ‘One must run before one must fly.’ Originally applied to birds, but—”
“But what else do they think about us?”
Clarey was hurt. “That’s what I was getting to, if you’ll only give me time. After all, I’ve been speaking Vangtort for six months and it’s a little hard to go back to Terran and organize my thoughts at the same time.”
“Terribly sorry,” the colonel apologized, handing him a cup of tea. “Carry on.”
“Thank you. They say if you—if we—are so smart, why do we use hax or the chains like anybody else? They think somebody else must have given us the starships, or else we stole them. That’s mostly Piq’s idea; he’s the village lawyer and, of course, lawyers are apt to think in terms like that.”
“Um,” the colonel said. “We didn’t think it would be a good idea to introduce ground cars. Upset their traffic and cause dissatisfied yearnings.”
“They’re satisfied with their hax carts. They’re not in any hurry to get anywhere. But Katund’s a village. Attitudes may be different in the cities.”
“You stick with your village, old chap. If you feel a wild urge for city life, you can always take a weekend trip to Zrig. Stay at the Zrig Grasht; it’s the only decent inn. By the way, you spoke of a landlady. Do you mean at the inn?”
No, Clarey told him, at first he had put up at the inn, but he found the place noisy, the cooking poor, and the pallet covers dirty. Besides, Hanxi had kept importuning him to go on visits to a nearby township where he promised him a good time.
“I was wondering, though,” Clarey finished, “if it would be possible for an Earthman and a Damorlant to—er—have a good time together.”
“Been wondering myself!” the colonel said eagerly. “I didn’t dare ask on my own behalf, but it’s your job, isn’t it? I’ll check back with the X-T boys on Earth. Go on with your story.”
As a resident of the inn, Clarey told Colonel Blynn, he’d found that he was expected to join the men in the bar parlor every evening, where they’d drink and exchange appropriate stories. But he’d choked on the squfur and was insufficiently familiar with the local mores to be able to appreciate the stories, let alone tell any. He’d concentrated on smiling and agreeing with whatever anybody said, with the result that the others began to agree with Piq that he was a bit cracked. “They were, for the most part, polite enough to me, but I could sense the gulf. I was a stranger, a city man, and probably a bit of a lunatic.”
A few of the younger ones hadn’t even been polite. “They used to insult me obliquely,” Clarey went on, “and whisper things I only half-heard. I pretended I didn’t hear at all. I stood them drinks and told them what a lovely place Katund was, so much cleaner and prettier and friendlier than the city. That just seemed to confirm their impression that I was an idiot.”
He stopped, took a sip of tea, and continued, “The females were friendly enough, though. Every time they came into the library they’d always stop for a chat. And they were very hospitable—invited me to outdoor luncheons, temple gatherings, things like that. Embelsira—she’s the chief librarian—got quite annoyed because she said they made so much noise when they all gathered round my desk.”
He paused and blushed. “I have an idea that—well, the ladies don’t find me unattractive. I mean they’re not really ladies. That is, they’re perfect ladies; they’re just not women.”
“I’m not a bit surprised,” the colonel nodded sagely. “Very well-set-up young fellow for a native—only natural they should take a liking to you. And only natural the men shouldn’t.”
Clarey gave an embarrassed grin. “One evening I was sitting in the bar-parlor, talking to Kuqal and Gazmor, two of the older men. And then Mundes came in; he’s the town muscle boy. You know the type—one in every tri-di series. He was rather unpleasant. I pretended to think he was joking. I’ve learned to laugh like one of them. Listen.” He gave a creditable imitation of an agonized turshi.
The colonel shuddered. “I’m sure if anything would convince the chaps back on Earth that the Damorlanti aren’t human, that would do it. What then?”
“Finally he made a remark impugning the virility of librarians that I simply could not ignore, so I emptied my mug of squfur in his face.”
“Stout fellow!”
“I knew he’d attack me and probably beat me up, but I thought that perhaps if I put up a show of