Homeward Bound Read online

  “I would have thought my insights would be valuable precisely because I am capable of emotional as well as intellectual involvement with Big Uglies,” Kassquit said.

  Ttomalss waved that away, which could only mean he had no good answer for it. Fleetlord Atvar was saying, “We will convey you Tosevites to a residence that has been set aside for you. We have made efforts to ensure that it is as comfortable as possible for your species.”

  “I thank you,” Sam Yeager replied. “Will our rooms have air coolers? It must be around forty hundredths here, and we prefer a temperature closer to twenty-five.”

  “I am not familiar with all the details,” Atvar said. “Believe me, though—I know Tosev 3 is a cooler world than Home.”

  “Yes, Fleetlord, I am sure you do,” the white-haired American Big Ugly said. “But does the same also hold true for the males and females here who have never visited our world?”

  Kassquit was sure that was a good question. The Race had been traveling between the stars for thousands upon thousands of years. In some ways, though, it was more parochial than Big Uglies were. They’d had to deal with differences much more than it had. She sighed. She was a difference, and the Race had trouble dealing with her.

  Back when the Race first came to Earth, people would have had trouble making a Lizard happy in a Hilton. Karen Yeager supposed she shouldn’t be too critical of the rooms the Race had arranged for people here in the town of Sitneff. On the other hand, she had a hard time being delighted with them, either.

  In 1942, people hadn’t known anything about Lizards. They’d had no idea the Race even existed. She’d heard her father-in-law and her own parents go on and on about how astonished everyone was when the conquest fleet went into action. Her folks had thought the Lizards were Martians when the conquest fleet arrived. The idea that the Race could have come from beyond the Solar System hadn’t crossed anyone’s mind.

  The Lizards here, by contrast, had been getting data back from Earth ever since the early 1950s. For some considerable while, they hadn’t wanted to believe what they were getting, but finally they hadn’t had any choice. So why couldn’t they have done a better job adapting rooms to fit human tastes?

  They had remembered air conditioners. Those cooled the air only to the mid-eighties, but even that was better than nothing. Sleeping mats were less comfortable than mattresses, but Karen knew she could tolerate them. The odd lumps of foam rubber that were intended for chairs were harder to put up with. So were low ceilings and doorways.

  And, when it came to plumbing arrangements, the Lizards showed they were indeed alien. Water came out of the tap at one temperature: a little warmer than lukewarm. She didn’t think much of that. The showerhead was set into the wall at a level between her chest and her navel. It had only one setting: abrasively strong. She didn’t have scales, and felt half flayed every time she came out of the stall.

  But the sanitary fixtures were the worst. Lizards excreted only solid wastes. Their plumbing was not adapted for any other sort. Cleaning up the mess that resulted from those differences was not something that endeared the Race to her.

  “Fine thing for an alleged diplomat to do,” she grumbled, using a towel for a purpose it hadn’t been intended to serve.

  “All right, leave it for the chambermaids, then, or whatever the Lizards call them,” Jonathan answered.

  Karen made a horrible face. “That’s worse. And who says they’d clean it up? They might think we do it all the time, or we like it this way.”

  “There’s a cheery idea,” her husband said. “We can always piss down the shower. Then it would be good for something, anyhow.”

  “That’s disgusting, too,” Karen said. Finally, the job was done. She washed her hands. What the Lizards used for soap was also industrial strength. It would probably wear raw places in her skin before too long.

  She laughed, though it wasn’t particularly funny: the soap didn’t seem to have done Kassquit any harm, and she’d put every square inch of skin she had on display. Karen didn’t think Kassquit had deliberately appeared naked to titillate. Kassquit did follow the Race’s customs and not mankind‘s. But what she’d intended and what she got were liable to be two different things.

  Kassquit looked to be somewhere around forty. Karen knew the Race’s counterpart to Mickey and Donald had gone into cold sleep years before she herself and Jonathan had. The Lizards’ starships were a good deal faster than the Admiral Peary, too, which meant . . . what?

  That the Lizards had kept Kassquit on ice for a long time after she got to Home. Why would they do that? Only one answer occurred to Karen: so their pet human could deal with the Americans when they arrived and still probably stay in good health. In a cold-blooded way, it made sense. If something went wrong, Karen wouldn’t have wanted to entrust herself to a Lizard doctor who’d never seen a human being in his life. It would be like going to a vet, only worse. Dogs and cats—even turtles and goldfish—were related to people. Lizards weren’t. Nothing on Home was.

  Karen almost mentioned her conclusions to her husband—almost, but not quite. She wanted him thinking of Kassquit as little as possible. She’d noticed him looking at her not quite enough out of the corner of his eye. Of course, she’d also noticed all the other men in the landing party (even her father-in-law, who should have been too old for such things) doing the same. But unlike the rest of them, Jonathan had memories.

  Memories and a naked woman were a bad combination. Karen was convinced of that.

  Jonathan was fiddling with electronics. A light on the display went from green to yellow-red. “Ha!” he said, and nodded to himself. “They are bugging this room.”

  “Are you surprised?” Karen asked.

  “Surprised? No,” he answered. “But it’s something we can give them a hard time about later on, if we have to. You’re not supposed to do that to an embassy.”

  “Those are our rules,” Karen said. “The Russians and the Germans break them all the time, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we do, too. So why shouldn’t the Lizards, when they don’t play by our rules to begin with?”

  “When it comes to diplomacy, they pretty much do play by our rules—at least on Earth they do,” Jonathan said. “They’ve been unified so long, they’ve almost forgotten the rules they used to have. How they’ll act here is anybody’s guess. Except for the ones who’ve come back from Earth, the Lizards we’ll be dealing with here haven’t had anything to do with people up till now.”

  “Yes, and you know what that means,” Karen said. “It means we’ll have to waste a lot of time convincing them they really need to talk to us.”

  “Well, we’re here, and we got here under our own power,” Jonathan said. “That puts us ahead of the Rabotevs and the Hallessi.” Wonder spread over his face. “We’ve finally met a Rabotev.”

  “We sure have,” Karen echoed, amazement in her voice as well.

  “We’ll probably meet Hallessi, too,” Jonathan said. “That will be something pretty special.” As he had a way of doing, he went back to what he’d been talking about before: “The Lizards didn’t need to remember much about diplomacy when they brought the Rabotevs and Hallessi into the Empire. They just walked over them, and that was that.”

  “And if they’d come right after they sent their probes to Earth, they would have done the same thing to us.” Karen’s shiver had nothing to do with the air in the room, which wouldn’t cool down till doomsday.

  Jonathan nodded. “That’s true. But they waited, and they paid for it.” He looked down at the bug spotter again. “Some of these are pretty easy to find. Most, in fact.”

  “Do you think you’re missing any?” Karen asked.

  “Well, I don’t know for sure, obviously,” he answered. “Judging from the ones I’m finding, though, I’d be surprised. The technology on these just isn’t that good.”

  “We wouldn’t have said that when we were kids,” Karen remarked. Her husband nodded. When the Lizards came to Earth, they’d had a
considerable lead in technology on people. Humanity had been playing catchup ever since. The Race’s technology was highly sophisticated, highly effective—and highly static. If it had changed at all since the Lizards bumped into humanity, no one merely human had been able to notice those changes.

  Human technology, on the other hand . . . Human technology had been in ferment even before the Lizards came. When Karen’s father-in-law was a little boy, the Wright brothers had just got off the ground and radio was telegraphy without wires. Nobody had ever heard of computers or jets or missiles or fission or fusion. It was only a little better than even money whether going to a doctor would make you better.

  The arrival of the Race only threw gasoline on the fire. People had had to adapt, had to learn, or go under. And learn they had, both pushing their own technology forward and begging, borrowing, and stealing everything they could from the Lizards. The result was a crazy hodgepodge of techniques that had originated at home and on Home, but some of it made the Lizards on Earth swing their eye turrets towards it in surprise.

  Jonathan said, “When the Lizards get something to the point where it does what they want it to, they standardize it and then they forget about it. We aren’t like that. We keep tinkering—and we manage to do things the Race never thought of.” He patted the bug sniffer.

  “They’ll be listening to us,” Karen said. “They’ll know we’ll know they’re listening to us.”

  “For a while,” Jonathan said, and said no more about that. Before long, the Lizards would be hearing either nothing or what people wanted them to hear.

  They would know human electronics had caught up with and even surpassed theirs. In fact, they would know more about human technology than Karen and Jonathan did. They’d been getting continuous reports that were more than twenty-five years more recent than anything the newly revived humans knew first hand.

  “They’re starting to borrow from us by now,” Karen said.

  “They sure are. Did you see the green wig on that one Lizard on the way here from the shuttlecraft port? Scary,” Jonathan said. “But you meant gadgets. Well, when they borrow from us, they’ll check things out before they use them, right? Have to make sure everything works the way it’s supposed to—and have to make sure whatever they introduce doesn’t destabilize what they’ve already got.”

  He spoke with the odd mixture of scorn, amusement, and admiration people often used when they talked about the way the Race used technology. If people had had the same attitude, the Admiral Peary wouldn’t have flown for another hundred years, or maybe another five hundred. When it did leave the Solar System, though, everything would have worked perfectly.

  As things were, the starship orbited Tau Ceti 2 now, not some unknown number of generations in the future. That was the good news. The bad news was that the Doctor and some other people who’d started the journey weren’t here to appreciate its success. People took chances. Sometimes they paid for it. Sometimes it paid off. Most often, as had proved true here, both happened at once.

  Karen went to the window and looked out. Sitneff reminded her of an overgrown version of the towns the Race had planted in the deserts of Arabia and North Africa and Australia. The streets were laid out in a sensible grid, with some diagonals to make traffic flow more smoothly. Most of the buildings were businesslike boxes. The tall ones housed Lizards. Males and females had offices in the medium-sized ones. The low, spread-out ones were where they made things.

  Cars and trucks glided along the streets. From up high, they didn’t look much different from their Earthly counterparts. They burned hydrogen; their exhaust was water vapor. These days—or at least back in the 1990s—most human-made motor vehicles did the same. Karen wondered if any gasoline-burners were left in 2031. She’d grown up with Los Angeles smog, even if Gardena, her suburb, did get sea breezes. She didn’t miss air pollution a bit.

  Plants halfway between trees and bushes lined some of the boulevards. They had several skinny trunks sprouting from a thicker lump of woody stuff that didn’t come very far out of the ground. Their leaves were thin and greenish gray, and put her in mind of nothing so much as the leaves of olive trees.

  Something with batlike wings, a long nose, and a tail with a leaf-shaped flap of flesh on the end glided past the window, close enough to give Karen a good look at its turreted, Lizardlike eyes. “My God!” she said. “A pterodactyl just flew by!”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised,” Jonathan said. “They don’t have birds here. You knew that.”

  “Well, yes. But knowing it and seeing one are two different things,” Karen said. “If they weren’t, why would we have come here in the first place?” Jonathan had no answer for that.

  Ttomalss sat across a park table and bench from Sam Yeager. The psychologist would sooner have done business inside a building. This setting struck him as unfortunately informal. For the third time, he asked, “Would you not be more comfortable indoors?”

  For the third time, the Big Ugly’s thick, fleshy fingers shaped the negative gesture. “I am just fine right where I am,” Sam Yeager said. He had an accent—no Big Ugly who used the Race’s language could help having one—but his speech was almost perfectly idiomatic.

  “How can you say that?” Ttomalss inquired. “It must be too warm for your comfort, and this furniture is surely too small for your fundament.”

  “The weather is not bad,” the Tosevite replied. “It is early morning, so it has not got too hot to be unpleasant for me. And we are in the shade of that kesserem tree—it is a kesserem tree, is it not? I have only seen photos up till now.”

  “Yes, it is,” Ttomalss said. “That is well done, to recognize it from photos alone.”

  “I thank you.” Sam Yeager made as if to assume the posture of respect, then checked the motion the instant it became recognizable. A male of the Race would have done exactly the same thing. Yeager stretched out his long, long legs and continued, “Anyway, as I was saying, the shade keeps the hot glare of your sun off my head.” He laughed a noisy Tosevite laugh, no doubt on purpose. “How strange for me to say your sun and not the sun. To me, this is not the sun.”

  “So it is not. When I first came to your solar system, I had the same thought about the star Tosev,” Ttomalss said. “Before long, though, it faded. A star is a star, and Tosev is not a star much different from the sun.” His mouth dropped open in the laughter of his kind. “From your sun, you would say.”

  “I would now. Maybe not in a little while, though.” Sam Yeager shrugged. “And this bench is all right, since I am not trying to get my legs under it.”

  “You would still find it more congenial in an office,” Ttomalss said.

  But the Big Ugly used the negative gesture again. “That is not a truth, Senior Researcher. I know what the Race’s offices are like. I have seen plenty of them back on Tosev 3. I have never seen one of your parks. I spent lots of years in cold sleep to see new things, and that is what I want to do.”

  “You Tosevites are incurably addicted to novelty,” Ttomalss said.

  “No doubt you are right,” Sam Yeager said placidly. “But we have fun.”

  A stray beffel that was ambling along suddenly stopped in its tracks when the Big Ugly’s unfamiliar odor reached its scent receptors. It stared at him. Every line of its low-slung body said nothing that smelled like that had any business existing. It let out an indignant beep and scurried away, its short legs twinkling over the sandy ground.

  “Those creatures were becoming first-class nuisances back on Tosev 3 long before I went into cold sleep,” Sam Yeager said. “They were, and so were a good many other plants and animals of yours.”

  Ttomalss shrugged. “This continued after you went into cold sleep, too. But you cannot expect us to settle and not bring bits of our own ecosystem with us. We want to make Tosev 3 a world where we can truly live, not just dwell.”

  “When your animals and plants displace the ones that were living there, you cannot expect us to be very happy about it,�
�� the Big Ugly said.

  With another shrug, Ttomalss said, “These things happen. Past that, I do not know what to tell you. Had you come to Home, you would have brought your creatures and your food crops with you. Do you doubt it?”

  He waited. How would Sam Yeager respond to that? He laughed another noisy Tosevite laugh. “No, I do not doubt it, Senior Researcher. I think it is a truth. We have spread our own beasts when we colonized new land masses—including the one where I was hatched. And there are some that could easily make themselves at home here. But you will understand that we like it less when it is done to us.”

  Was that irony in his voice? Or was he simply stating a fact? With a male of the Race, Ttomalss would have had no trouble telling the difference. With the Tosevite, he wasn’t quite sure. He decided to take it as seriously meant. “No doubt,” he said. “But you will understand that any group looks to its own advantage first and to the situation of others only later.”

  “I wish I could say we needed the Race to teach us that,” Sam Yeager answered. “I cannot, however, and I will not attempt it. We have quite thoroughly taught ourselves that lesson.”

  He was, Ttomalss judged, fundamentally honest. Was that an advantage in diplomacy or the reverse? The psychologist had trouble being sure. Had the Big Uglies’ chief negotiator been the male known as the Doctor, Ttomalss would have known what to expect. That male was notorious for doing and saying anything to advance the cause of his not-empire. Sam Yeager probably would not go to the same extremes—which did not mean he was incompetent, only that his methods were different.

  A female out walking a tsiongi suddenly noticed Yeager. Both her eye turrets swiveled toward him, as if she could not believe what she was seeing. “Spirits of Emperors past!” she exclaimed. “It is one of those horrible Big Ugly things!”

  “Yes, I am a Big Ugly,” Sam Yeager agreed. “On my planet, we have nicknames for the Race, too. How are you this morning?” His interrogative cough was a small masterpiece of understatement.