Homeward Bound Page 8

“Ah?” Ttomalss said again. “To which speculations do you refer?”

  “I have viewed magnified images from the video footage, superior sir, and one of the wild Big Uglies appears to be Sam Yeager.”

  “Really? Are you certain?” Ttomalss asked.

  “I am.” To show how certain she was, Kassquit used an emphatic cough.

  “Well, well.” Ttomalss had to believe her. Like any male or female of the Race, he had a hard time telling Big Uglies apart, especially when facial features were all he had to go on. He hadn’t evolved to detect subtle difference between one of those alien faces and another. Kassquit had. She did it without thinking, and she was usually right.

  It worked both ways, of course. She’d once told him she recognized members of the Race more by their body paint than by differences in the way they looked. And wild Big Uglies even had trouble telling males and females apart from one another. To Ttomalss, differences in scale patterns, eye-turret size, snout shape, and so on were glaringly obvious. He and his kind had evolved to notice those, not whatever different cues Big Uglies used.

  Kassquit said, “I wonder whether Sam Yeager’s hatchling is also aboard the Tosevite starship.”

  “Time will tell,” Ttomalss answered.

  “So it will.” Kassquit sounded eager, hopeful, enthusiastic. Years before, Jonathan Yeager had introduced her to Tosevite mating practices. Ttomalss was aware he understood those, and the emotional drives that went with them, only intellectually. Kassquit sounded not the least bit intellectual.

  “Perhaps I should remind you that, as of the time when I went into cold sleep, Jonathan Yeager remained in an exclusive mating contract with a Tosevite female,” Ttomalss said. “In fact, they both appear to have entered cold sleep not long before I did, though I do not know for what purpose. This being so, if he is aboard the starship, his mate is likely to be aboard as well.”

  “Truth.” Now Kassquit might have hated him.

  Ttomalss silently sighed. He had once more underestimated the power of mating urges to shape Tosevite behavior. Those and the bonds existing between parents and hatchlings were the strongest forces that drove Big Uglies. Even Kassquit, with the finest civilized upbringing possible on Tosev 3, was not immune to them.

  The other thing Ttomalss had to remember was that, if he underestimated those forces despite his extensive experience, other alleged experts on the Big Uglies, “experts” who had never been within light-years of Tosev 3, would do far worse. It was, no doubt, fortunate that he’d been recalled to Home. However important it was that he continue his work on Tosev 3, this took priority.

  “May I ask you something, superior sir?” Kassquit spoke with cold formality.

  “You may always ask,” Ttomalss replied. “If the answer is one that I possess, you shall have it.”

  “Very well. Was it at your instruction that I was left in cold sleep for so long after reaching Home? I do not appreciate being used as nothing more than a tool against the Big Uglies. I have the same rights and privileges as any other citizen of the Empire.”

  “Of course you do,” Ttomalss said soothingly. “But how could I have done such a thing? You left Tosev 3 for Home years before I did.”

  Silence followed—but not for long. Angrily, Kassquit said, “How could you have done such a thing, superior sir? Nothing simpler. As soon as I went into cold sleep, you could have arranged to have the order sent by radio from Tosev 3 to here. Radio waves travel twice as fast as our ships. The order not to revive me at once could easily have been waiting when I arrived. The question I am asking is, did you send such an order?”

  In many ways, she was indeed a citizen of the Empire. She could figure out the implications of interstellar travel and communication as readily as any member of the Race. Somehow, in spite of everything, Ttomalss had not expected that.

  When he did not answer right away, Kassquit said, “I might have known. And yet I am supposed to work with you. By the spirits of Emperors past, superior sir, why should I?”

  For that, Ttomalss did have an answer ready: “For the sake of the Race. For the sake of the Empire.”

  “What about my sake?” Kassquit demanded. Despite her upbringing, parts of her were Tosevite through and through. By the standards of the Race, she was a pronounced individualist, putting her own needs above those of the community.

  “In the larger scheme of things, which carries the greater weight?” Ttomalss asked.

  “If the larger scheme of things is built on lies, what difference does it make?” Kassquit retorted.

  That charge had fangs—or it would have, had it held truth. “I never told you I would not send such a request to Home,” Ttomalss said. “While you may put your own interests first, I am obliged to give precedence to the Race as a whole. So are the males and females here who concurred in my judgment.”

  Now Kassquit was the one who needed some time to think about how she would reply. At last, she said, “Had you asked if I would accept the delay in revival, I probably would have said yes. I recognize the needs of the Empire, too, superior sir, regardless of what you may think. But it was presumptuous of you to believe you could decide this matter for me without consulting me. That is what gets under my scales.”

  She had no scales, of course, but that was the Race’s idiom. She did have a point . . . of sorts. Remembering that he would have to try to work with her, Ttomalss yielded to the degree he could: “I apologize for my presumption. I should have asked you, as you say. I will not make such an error again. I will also try to keep any other member of the Race from doing so.”

  Another pause from Kassquit. At the end of it, she said, “Thank you, superior sir. That is better than nothing. It is also better than anything I expected to hear you say.”

  Ttomalss sighed. “You are not fully happy among us.”

  “That is a truth, superior sir.” Kassquit used another emphatic cough.

  “Do you believe you would be happier among the wild Big Uglies?” he asked. “That can in large measure be arranged if you so desire, now that they have come to Home.”

  But Kassquit said, “No,” with yet another emphatic cough. “I am betwixt and between, one thing biologically, something very different culturally. This is your doing. There have been times when I was grateful to you. There have been times when I loathed you beyond all measure. There have been times when I felt both those things at once, which was very confusing.”

  “I believe you,” Ttomalss said. “What do you feel now?”

  “Are you still working on your research, superior sir?” Kassquit gibed.

  “Of course I am. I always will be, till my dying day,” the male answered. He said nothing about Kassquit’s dying day, which was liable to occur first. “But I also want to know for my own sake—and for yours. Your welfare matters to me. It matters very much.” Now he let out an emphatic cough of his own.

  Maybe his sentiment helped disarm Kassquit. Maybe that emphatic cough convinced her he was sincere. Slowly, she said, “These days, what I feel is that what I feel does not matter so much. You did what you did. Neither of us can change it these days. Far too much time has passed for that to be possible. I have to make the best of things as they are.”

  “That strikes me as a sensible attitude,” Ttomalss said.

  “It strikes me as a sensible attitude, too,” Kassquit said. “That is why I strive to hold on to it, but holding on to it is not always easy.”

  Just before he asked why not, Ttomalss checked himself. Males and females of the Race were full of irrational behavior. The Big Uglies, from all he’d seen, were even fuller. Their hormonal drives operated all the time, not only during mating season. He sighed again. At bottom, the Race and the Big Uglies were both evolved animals. That they behaved like animals was no wonder. That they sometimes didn’t behave like animals might have been.

  And now the Big Uglies were here. Ttomalss looked up into the night sky again. No, he couldn’t tell which moving star was in fact their spaceship. W
hich it was didn’t matter, anyhow. That they were here at all meant one thing and one thing only: trouble. And when had dealing with Tosevites ever meant anything else?

  “Hey, son. Do you hear me?”

  Jonathan Yeager heard the words, sure enough, the words and the familiar voice. At first, in the confusion of returning consciousness, the voice mattered for more. A slow smile stretched across his face, though his eyes hadn’t opened yet. “Dad,” he whispered. “Hi, Dad.”

  “You made it, Jonathan,” his father said. “We made it. We’re in orbit around Home. When you wake up a little more, you can look out and see the Lizards’ planet.”

  With an effort, Jonathan opened his eyes. There was his father, floating at an improbable angle. A woman in a white smock floated nearby, at an even more improbable one. “Made it,” Jonathan echoed. Then, as his wits slowly and creakily began to work, he smiled again. “Haven’t seen you in a hell of a long time, Dad.”

  “Only seems like a little while to me,” his father answered. “You drove me downtown, and I woke up here.”

  “Yeah,” Jonathan said, his voice still dreamy. “But I had to drive the goddamn car back, too.” He looked around. His neck worked, anyhow. “Where’s Karen?”

  The woman spoke up: “She’s next on the revival schedule, Mr. Yeager. All the signs on the diagnostic monitors look optimal.”

  “Good.” Jonathan discovered he could nod as well as crane his neck. “That’s good.” Tears stung his eyes. He nodded again.

  “Here, have some of this.” The woman held a drinking bulb to his mouth. He sucked like a baby. It wasn’t milk, though. It was . . . Before he could find what that taste was, she told him: “Chicken broth goes down easy.”

  It didn’t go down that easily. Swallowing took effort. Everything took effort. Of course, he’d been on ice for . . . how long? He didn’t need to ask, Where am I?—they’d told him that. But, “What year is this?” seemed a perfectly reasonable question, and so he asked it.

  “It’s 2031,” his father answered. “If you look at it one way, you’re going to be eighty-eight toward the end of the year. Of course, if you look at it that way, I’m older than the hills, so I’d rather not.”

  His father had seemed pretty old to Jonathan when he went into cold sleep. From thirty-three, which Jonathan had been then, seventy would do that. From fifty, where Jonathan was now, seventy still seemed a good age, but it wasn’t as one with the Pyramids of Egypt. I’ve done a lot of catching up with him, he realized. That’s pretty strange.

  “Can I get up and have that look around?” he asked.

  “If you can, you may,” the woman in the white smock answered, as precise with her grammar as Jonathan’s mother had always been.

  “It’s a test,” his father added. “If you’re coordinated enough to get off the table, you’re coordinated enough to move around.”

  It proved harder than Jonathan thought it would. What was that line from the Bible? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning—that was it. Both his right hand and his left seemed to have forgotten their cunning. Hell, they seemed to have forgotten what they were for.

  Finally, he did manage to escape. “Whew!” he said. He hadn’t imagined a few buckles and straps could be so tough. The woman in white gave him shorts and a T-shirt to match what his father had on. He hadn’t noticed he was naked till then.

  “Come on,” Sam Yeager said. “Control room is up through that hatchway.” He pushed off toward the hatchway with the accuracy of someone who’d been in space before. Come to that, Jonathan had, too. His own push wasn’t so good, but he could blame that on muscles that still didn’t want to do what they were supposed to. He not only could, he did.

  Jonathan pulled himself up the handholds and into the control room. Along with his father, two officers were already in there. The leaner one eyed Jonathan, turned to the rounder one, and said, “Looks like his old man, doesn’t he?”

  “Poor devil,” the rounder man . . . agreed?

  “These refugees from a bad comedy show are Glen Johnson and Mickey Flynn,” Sam Yeager said, pointing to show who was who. “They’re the glorified bus drivers who got us here.”

  “Two of the glorified bus drivers,” Flynn corrected. “Our most glorified driver is presently asleep. He does that every once in a while, whether he needs to or not.”

  “Stone’d be happier if he didn’t,” Johnson said. “He’d be happier if nobody did.”

  He and Flynn did sound like a team. Jonathan Yeager would have been more inclined to sass them about it if he hadn’t started staring at Home. He’d seen it in videos from the Race, of course, but the difference between a video on a screen and a real world out there seeming close enough to touch was about the same as the difference between a picture of a kiss and the kiss itself.

  “Wow,” Jonathan said softly.

  “You took the words out of my mouth, son,” his father said.

  “We’re really here,” Jonathan whispered. Hearing about it in the room where he’d revived was one thing. Seeing a living planet that wasn’t Earth, seeing it in person and up close . . . “Wow,” he said again.

  “Yes, we’re really here,” Flynn said. “And so the Lizards have laid out the red carpet for us, because they’re so thrilled to see us at their front door.”

  “Excuse me,” Johnson said, and looked down at his wrist, as if at a watch. “I think my irony detector just went off.”

  “Can’t imagine why.” Flynn cocked a hand behind one ear. “Don’t you hear the brass band? I’m just glad the Race never thought of cheerleaders.”

  How long had the two of them been sniping at each other? They might almost have been married. A light went on in Jonathan’s head. “You two are off the Lewis and Clark, aren’t you?”

  “Who, us?” Flynn said. “I resemble that remark.”

  Johnson said, “It’s the stench of Healey, that’s what it is. It clings to us wherever we go.”

  “Healey?” Jonathan wondered how hard his leg was being pulled.

  “Our commandant,” Mickey Flynn replied. “Renowned throughout the Solar System—and now here, too—for the sweetness of his song and the beauty of his plumage.”

  “Plumage, my ass,” Johnson muttered. “We thought we’d gone light-years to get away from him—worth it, too. But turns out he came along in cold sleep, so now he’s running this ship, dammit.”

  “Healey’s a martinet—one of those people who give military discipline a bad name. There are more of them than there ought to be, I’m afraid,” Sam Yeager said.

  Johnson looked as if he wanted to say even more than he had, but held back. That struck Jonathan as sensible. If this Healey was as nasty as all that, he made little lists and checked them a lot more than twice. “I wonder who’s president these days,” he remarked.

  “As of last radio signal, it was a woman named Joyce Peterman,” Johnson replied, with a shrug that meant the news surprised him, too. “Of course, last radio signal left more than two terms ago, so it’s somebody else by now—or if it’s not, things have really gone to hell back there.”

  “As long as the radio signals keep coming, I’m happy,” Jonathan’s father said. “They could elect Mortimer Snerd, and I wouldn’t care.”

  Jonathan, who’d grown up as television ousted radio, barely knew who Mortimer Snerd was. He understood what his father was talking about just the same. Radio signals from Earth to Tau Ceti meant the Lizards and the Americans—or the Russians, or the Japanese, or (since the last Nazi-Lizard war was almost seventy years past by now) even the Germans—hadn’t thrown enough missiles at one another to blast the home planet back to the Stone Age.

  My kids are as old as I am now, Jonathan thought, and then he shook his head. That was wrong. If it was 2031, his kids were older than he was. In any sane universe, that should have been impossible. But then, nobody had ever shown this was a sane universe.

  He looked up—or was it down?—at Home. The universe mi
ght not be sane, but it was beautiful.

  “Radio signals are useful things,” Flynn said. “We let the Lizards know we were coming, so they could bake us a cake. And we let them know that if the signals from the Admiral Peary stopped coming while she was in the Tau Ceti system, we’d bake them a planet.” He paused for a precisely timed beat, and then finished, “I love subtle hints.”

  “Subtle. Right.” But Jonathan knew the Lizards would be pitching a fit down there. This had been their imperial center for tens of thousands of years, the place from which they’d set out on their conquests. Now they had uninvited guests. No wonder they were jumpy.

  “We’ve got one ship here,” Glen Johnson said. “One ship, against everything the Race has in space. They came at us with their goddamn conquest fleet when we were flying prop jobs. I don’t waste a lot of grief on them.”

  “They didn’t even expect us to have those,” Jonathan’s father said. “They were looking for knights in shining armor. Hell, if you’ve ever seen that photo their probe took, they were looking for knights in rusty armor. If they’d found them, they might not have lost a male.”

  The Race always took a long time to get ready before doing anything. That had saved mankind once. Jonathan dared hope it would work for the Admiral Peary, too. But the Lizards back home had seen they couldn’t sit around and dawdle when dealing with Big Uglies. Did the ones here also realize that? We’ll find out, he thought.

  Something else occurred to him. As casually as he could, he asked his father, “Have we heard from Kassquit? Did she make it through cold sleep all right?”

  “Well, yes, as a matter of fact,” Sam Yeager answered with a rather sheepish grin. “Difference is, you know she went into cold sleep. I didn’t, because she went in after me. I got a jolt when I heard what had to be a human speaking the Lizards’ language and asking for Regeya.”

  Jonathan laughed. The two American pilots looked blank. “Regeya?” Flynn said plaintively, while Johnson asked, “Just who is this Kassquit person, anyway? A traitor? You never did exactly explain that, Sam.”