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ever had sweethearts in the fireroom? Not many, I hope.”
    Spanky turned on him. “Shut the hell up, you goddamn perverted, filthy-minded ape!” he said hotly.
    “There!” Bashear said. “Now that’s more like it. Thought I’d never get a rise out of you!” His voice became serious. “She is sweet on you though, and it shows. A lot. What’re you gonna do? Turn Silva?” That was the increasingly accepted term for men suspected of having “taken up” with a Lemurian gal.
    “She ain’t ‘sweet’ on me,” Spanky protested. “Sometimes she’s downright insubordinate!”
    Bashear nodded sagely. “That’s always the first sign. ’Cats ain’t really all that different from us, you know. Once you get past the fur and ears—and, well, the tail.” They’d reached the weather deck and were passing under the amidships gun platform that served as a roof for the galley. Chief Gunner’s Mate Paul Stites was supervising a maintenance detail on the number three, four-inch-fifty. They were installing new oily leather bushings in the recoil cylinder. Below, Earl Lanier, the bloated cook, had left a heap of sandwiches on the stainless steel counter. Bashear snatched one. “Wimmen is all the same,” he continued. “Even ’Cat wimmen, I bet. They take to thinkin’ you belong to ’em and they start treatin’ you like dirt. Take advantage. I been married twice, so trust me, I know.” He looked at Spanky. “You want my advice?”
    “No.”
    “You can’t just ignore it,” Bashear advised anyway. “You treat her like a dog, pretend she ain’t there, it’ll just get worse. I don’t know what it is about ’em, but every time I try to get rid of a dame, they just try harder. You can’t chase ’em off.”
    “Well . . . supposin’ you’re right—which you ain’t—how would you make Tabby get over her fit?”
    “Easy,” Bashear said around a mouthful of sandwich. “Be nice to her. I never could keep a dame I really wanted. Nobody can. It’s the rules.”

CHAPTER 2
    East Africa
    “ G eneral of the Sea” Hisashi Kurokawa strode slowly beside the immense, deep basin, lightly slapping his left boot at every step with a short, tightly woven whip. A wisp of dust drifted away from his striped pants leg with each strike. The handle of the whip was garishly ornate and the gruesome golden sculpture capping it appealed to his sense of mockery. It looked strikingly like a flattened Grik face. Beyond the basin, a hot wind blew swirling dust devils amid a sea of Uul workers swarming over the flat, denuded landscape that bordered the wide river, and the hazy orange sun blazed fiercely down from above. The wind reeked of rot, feces, and an untold number of partially cannibalized, festering corpses. Those scents were renewed each day as the defecating, dying thousands toiled, and the stench was almost unbearable. Yet bear it he did. To show weakness of any sort under the circumstances was tantamount to suicide in the great game he played.
    Skeletal frameworks arose amid this teeming mass, erected by muscle power alone. Once again Kurokawa marveled at the discipline that could accomplish so much with such apparently mindless labor. Groups of Grik Uul performed many of the same functions as various machines in a factory. Some shaped massive timbers with a tool resembling an elongated adze—and that was all they did, while other groups were dedicated solely to moving the timbers to areas where still others set them in place. A little farther along, other “teams” did the same thing with an only subtly different timber. It was the most wondrous example of nonmechanized mass production he’d ever seen, and the scope and specialization of the endeavor surely put the construction of the Great Pyramids to shame.
    There were overseers, to be sure, that served much the same purpose here as sergeants and officers might in battle. They orchestrated the timing and direction of every task. Some led bearers to the next mighty