Homeward Bound (36 page)

“I am,” Karen said.

“Well, here it is,” he said, and turned to his partner. “Come on, Fegrep. Give it a shove. As soon as we plug it in, we can go do something else.”

“Right,” Fegrep said. “Pretty crazy, a freezer in a room. And why does the Big Ugly want all those stupid cups?” He’d just heard Karen speak his language, but seemed to think she couldn’t understand it. Or maybe he just didn’t care.

Under other circumstances, Karen might have got angry. As things were, she was too glad to see the freezer to worry about anything else. The workmales wheeled it into the room, eased it down off the cart, and plugged it in. Then they left. Karen opened the freezer. It was cold in there, sure enough. She started filling the measuring cups full of water and sticking them inside the freezer. “Ice cubes!” she told Jonathan. “All we have to do is wait.”

“They’re round,” he observed. “How can they be ice cubes?”

She corrected herself: “Ice cylinders. Thank you, Mr. Webster’s Dictionary of the English Language.” Her husband might have got angry, too. Instead, he took a bow. As he must have known it would, that annoyed her even more.

After she started making ice cubes (she refused to think of them as cylinders) she kept opening the freezer every so often to see how they were doing. “You’re letting the cold air out,” Jonathan said helpfully.

“I know I am,” she answered. “I don’t care. I’ve been waiting all this time. I can wait a little longer.”

Some small stretch of time after she would have had ice cubes if she’d been patient, she had them anyhow. Coaxing them out of the measuring cups wasn’t so easy, but she managed. She put five of them in a glass of room-temperature—which is to say, lukewarm—water, then waited for them to do their stuff. After five minutes, she rested the glass against her cheek for a moment.

“Ahh!” she said. Then she drank. “Ahhhh!” she said. She’d never thought of ice water as nectar of the gods, but it would do. It would definitely do.

“Let me have some,” Jonathan said.

“Get your own glass,” Karen told him. “I earned this one.” He bent into the posture of respect and gave her an emphatic cough. Her snort turned into a laugh. Jonathan fixed himself a glass of ice water. He made the same sort of ecstatic noises as she had. She laughed again. She’d known he would.

Atvar gave only half a hearing diaphragm to Senyahh’s complaints. When the female finally paused to draw more air into her lung, he cut her off: “Hear me, Kitchen Chief. Any reasonable requests from these Tosevites are to be honored. Any—do you hear me?”

Senyahh glared at him out of the monitor. “I do not call a request for a freezer and a swarm of measuring cups reasonable, Exalted Fleet-lord.”

Members of the Race were more patient than Big Uglies. At times like this, Atvar wondered why. “Let me make myself very plain. Any request is reasonable that does not involve major expense—a yeartenth’s hotel revenues, let us say—or danger to a member of the Race. Anything within those limits, your only proper response is, ‘It shall be done, superior Tosevite.’ And then you do it.”

“That is outrageous!” Senyahh exclaimed.

“I am sorry you feel that way,” Atvar replied. “But then, your record at this hotel has been good up until now. I am sure that will help you gain a new position once you are released from this one. For you
will
be released from this one if your insubordination continues for even another instant. Do I make myself plain enough for you to understand, Kitchen Chief?”

“You do. You are not nearly so offensive as the Big Ugly I dealt with, though,” Senyahh said.

“Is that a resignation?” Atvar asked.

With obvious reluctance, the kitchen chief made the negative gesture. “No, Exalted Fleetlord. It shall be done.” She broke the connection.

Atvar hoped he had put the fear for a happy afterlife into her. He wouldn’t have bet anything he worried about losing, though. If she’d tried so hard to obstruct one Tosevite request, she was liable to do the same or worse with another. Some males and females enjoyed being difficult.
She might as well be a Big Ugly,
Atvar thought. His mouth fell open in a laugh. A moment later, he wondered why and snapped it shut. That wasn’t funny.

But the real trouble with the Big Uglies wasn’t that they reveled in making nuisances of themselves. The real trouble was that they were too good at it. He’d thought that too many times back on Tosev 3. That he had reason to think it here on Home only proved he’d been right to worry on the other world, and that the males and females who’d recalled him hadn’t known what they were doing.

It proved that to Atvar, anyhow. Several of the officials who’d ordered him back from Tosev 3 still held their posts. By all appearances, they were still satisfied they’d done the right thing. That they now had to deal with Big Uglies here on Home should have given them a hint that the problem on Tosev 3 hadn’t been Atvar. It should have, but had it? Not likely, not as far as the former fleetlord could see.

The trouble—well,
a
trouble, anyhow—with the Big Uglies was that they were too good at whatever they set their minds to. The way Kassquit and Sam Yeager were approaching their imperial audiences was a case in point. He hadn’t said so to either one of them, but few members of the Race could have matched how much they’d learned, or how quickly.

He hissed softly. That thought reminded him of something he had to do. He called the protocol master in the capital. The male’s image appeared on the screen. “This is Herrep. I greet you, Exalted Fleetlord.”

“And I greet you, Protocol Master,” Atvar replied politely. “I wonder whether your staff has yet finished researching the question I put to you not long ago. The time for the wild Big Ugly’s audience with his Majesty fast approaches.”

“I am aware of that, yes,” Herrep said. He was an old male, older even than Atvar, and had held office a long time. His scales had the dusty tone age gave them, and sagged slightly on his bones. Because of their looser hides, old males and females looked a little more like Tosevites than younger members of the Race did. Herrep went on, “I hope
you
understand this is a matter from the very ancientest days, and not one to be researched in the same way as one from more recent times.”

“Why not?” the fleetlord asked. “Research is research, is it not? So it would seem to me, at any rate.”

But the protocol master made the negative gesture. “Not necessarily. For most research, anyone with a computer connected to the network and a certain curiosity can do as well as anyone else. But much of the material we are looking through is so old, it never went into the computer network at all. We have to locate it physically, to make sure we do not destroy it by examining it, and sometimes also to interpret it: the language is so very old, it has changed a good deal between that time and this.”

Atvar let out another low hiss, this one of wonder. “I did not realize your material was as old as that. You have my apology. You might as well be dealing with the same sort of situation as the Big Uglies do when they go through their archives.”

“I do not know what sort of research the Big Uglies do, or what sort of archives they have,” Herrep said. “But I do know I have an answer for you, or the beginnings of an answer.”

“Do you?” Atvar said eagerly. “Tell me, please!”

“However little I care to admit it, your wild Big Ugly of an aspirant appears to be correct,” the protocol master replied. “The imperial laver and imperial limner are
not
involved in the ceremony when the representative from an independent empire greets the Emperor. In ancient-est days, before Home was unified, the Emperor sometimes sent out ambassadors of his own to other emperors. Their lavers and limners— for they too had such officials—were not involved, either.”

“I thank you,” Atvar said. “So independence is what matters? I do not suppose that Sam Yeager’s coming from a not-empire would affect the situation?”

“A not-empire?” Herrep said. “Please forgive me, Exalted Fleet-lord, but I am unfamiliar with the term.” As best he could, Atvar explained the American Tosevite penchant for snoutcounting. The protocol master’s eye turrets moved in a way that said the idea revolted him. It revolted Atvar, too, but the Big Uglies seemed to thrive on it. Herrep asked, “On Tosev 3, such a temporary, snoutcounted sovereign is considered the equal of any other?”

“That is a truth. You need have no doubt of it whatever.” Atvar used an emphatic cough. “Not-empires are more common than empires there. The United States is one of the oldest ones; it has used this system for more than five hundred of our years.”

Herrep hissed scornfully. “And this is supposed to be a long time?”

“By our standards, no. By the standards Big Uglies use, Protocol Master, it
is
a fairly long time,” Atvar answered.

“You realize I would have to stretch a point, and stretch it a long way, to consider the representative of such a sovereign equal to an ambassador from a true empire,” Herrep said. “There is no precedent for such a thing.”

“There may not be any precedent on Home, but there is a great deal of it on Tosev 3,” Atvar said.

The protocol master made the negative gesture. “On Tosev 3, there is precedent for fleetlords treating with such individuals. There is none for
the Emperor
to do so.”

“If you refuse—and especially if you refuse at this stage—you offer the American Big Uglies a deadly insult. This is the sort of insult that could prove deadly in the most literal sense of the word,” Atvar said. “As for stretching a point—there is all the Tosevite precedent for empires dealing with not-empires. If we recognize the United States as independent—and what choice do we have, when it
is
?—we have to recognize that precedent, too. And remember, the American Big Uglies are
here.
They are also as formidable as that implies.”

“I do not want to do what is expedient,” Herrep said. “I want to do what is right.”

Alarm coursed through Atvar. He wished he’d never uttered the word
not-empire
in the protocol master’s hearing. By the nature of his job, Herrep cared more for punctilio than for the real world. The real world hadn’t impinged on the imperial court for more than a hundred thousand years. But it was here again. One way or another, Herrep was going to have to see that.

Carefully, the fleetlord said, “If helping to ensure peace not just between two independent entities”—that took care of empires and not-empires—“is not right, what is? And if you consult with his Majesty himself, I think you will find he has a lively interest in meeting the ambassador from the United States.”

On the monitor, Herrep stirred uncomfortably. “I am aware of that. I had, for a moment, forgotten that you were as well.” Atvar almost laughed, but at the last moment kept his amusement from showing. That struck him as a particularly revealing comment. The protocol master went on, “Very well, Exalted Fleetlord. I have no good reason to accept Tosevite precedents, but you remind me I have no good reason to reject them, either. We shall go forward as if this wild Big Ugly represented a proper empire.”

“I thank you,” Atvar said. “By the spirits of Emperors past, I think you are doing that which is best for the Empire.”

“I hope so,” Herrep said dubiously. “But I wonder about the sort of precedent
I
am setting. Will other wild Big Uglies from different not-empires come to Home seeking audience with his Majesty? Should they have it if they do?”

“It is possible that they may,” replied Atvar, who thought it was probable that they would. A starship from the SSSR was supposed to be on the way, in fact—but then, the SSSR’s rulers had killed off their emperor, something the fleetlord did
not
intend to tell Herrep. “If they succeed in coming here, they will have earned it, will they not? One group of independent Big Uglies, the Nipponese, have an emperor whose line of descent, they claim, runs back over five thousand of our years.”

“Still a parvenu next to
the
Emperor,” Herrep said. Atvar made the affirmative gesture. The protocol master sighed. “Still, I could wish they had got here first. We shall just have to endure these others.”

“They are all nuisances, whether they come from empires or not-empires,” Atvar said. With a sigh of his own that came from years of experience, much of which he would rather not have had, he went on, “It may almost be just as well that many of them have kept their independence. They are too different from us. We had little trouble assimilating the Rabotevs and Hallessi, and we thought building the Empire would always be easy. Even if we do eventually succeed with the Big Uglies, they have taught us otherwise.”

“You would know better than I,” Herrep said. “Aside from the obvious fact that snoutcounting is ridiculous, everything I have seen of these Big Uglies—the ones who have come to Home—suggests they are at least moderately civilized.”

Atvar made the affirmative gesture. “Oh, yes. I would agree with you. The American Tosevites sent the best they had. I was not worried about their lack of civilization, especially not here on Home. I was worried about how fast they progress in science and technology, and about how different from us they are sexually and socially. I do wonder if those two difficulties are related.”

“What could we do if they are?”

“As of now, nothing has occurred to me—or, so far as I know, to anyone else.”

“Then why waste time wondering?”

“You are a sensible male, Protocol Master. Of course this is what you would say,” Atvar replied. “The trouble is, the Big Uglies make me wonder about the good sense of good sense, if that makes any sense to you.” By Herrep’s negative gesture, it didn’t. Atvar wasn’t surprised. Nothing about Tosev 3 really made sense to the Race. Trouble? Oh, yes. Tosev 3 made plenty of trouble.

Dr. Melanie Blanchard and Mickey Flynn were floating in the
Ad
miral Peary
’s control room when Glen Johnson pulled himself up there. Johnson felt a small twinge of jealousy listening to them talk as he came up the access tube. He knew that was idiotic, which didn’t prevent the twinge. Yes, Dr. Blanchard was a nice-looking woman— one of the nicer-looking women for more than ten light-years in any direction—but it wasn’t as if she were his. And she would be going down to the surface of Home before long, a journey on which neither he nor Flynn could hope to follow.