Homeward Bound (51 page)

Healey’s bulldog glower only got angrier. “Depends on what?” he demanded, hard suspicion in his voice.

“On whether you’ve loaded it up with ginger, the way you did with ours. If you have, you can find yourself another sucker, on account of the Lizards are going to land on whoever tries to pull the same stunt twice like a ton of bricks.”

“You’re the best scooter pilot we’ve got. It’s almost the only thing you’re good for. I can order you to fly that scooter,” the commandant said.

“Yes, sir, you sure can,” Johnson agreed cheerfully. “And you can fling me in the brig for disobeying orders, too, because I won’t take it out of the air lock till you tell me the truth about it.”

“I always knew you and that Lizard-loving Yeager were two of a kind,” the commandant snarled.

That answered Johnson’s question without directly answering it. “Why don’t you send Stone, sir?” he asked in turn. “He’s always happy to do anything you say.”

“He is the senior pilot,” Healey said stiffly.

“You mean you can’t afford to lose him but you can afford to lose me?” Johnson said. “Well, sir, I’ve got news for you:
I
can’t afford to lose me. So when you send that scooter over, find yourself another boy to ride herd on it.”

The commandant glowered at him. Healey had come to expect insubordination from him over the years. Outright insurrection was something else again. “Consider yourself under arrest, Colonel,” Healey said. “Report to the brig at once.”

“Happy to, sir,” Johnson answered. “Only one question: where the hell is it? I haven’t gone looking for it till now. I didn’t even think we had one.”

“We do, and you have so,” Healey said. “It’s on B deck, room 227. Enjoy yourself.”

“Sir, I won’t be talking to you, so I expect it’ll be a pleasure.”

Johnson also had the pleasure of leaving before the commandant could reply. He headed straight for the brig. It proved to be a compartment like any other on the starship. The only difference was, it had a door that wouldn’t open from the inside once he closed it after himself. That could be no fun at all in case of emergency, but Johnson refused to dwell on unpleasant possibilities. He strapped himself onto the standard-issue bunk and took a nap.

Nobody bothered him. He began to wonder if Healey’d told anyone he was jugged. Then he wondered if anybody would come by and feed him. He had visions of someone finding a starved, shriveled corpse in the brig the next time Healey decided to throw someone in there, which could be years from now.

He told himself he was being silly. Stone and Flynn would notice he wasn’t showing up for his shift. They’d ask where he was . . . wouldn’t they? Healey would have to tell them . . . wouldn’t he? It all seemed logical enough. But when logic and Lieutenant General Healey collided, all bets were off.

Three hours later, the door to the cell opened. It was Major Parker, Healey’s adjutant. Johnson looked at him and said, “I want a lawyer.”

“Funny, Colonel. Funny like a crutch,” Parker answered.

“What, you think I’m kidding?” Johnson said. “My ass, pardon my French.”

“And where are you going to find a lawyer here?” the other officer asked in what he evidently intended for reasonable tones. He looked dyspeptic. Anyone who had to listen to Healey all the time had a good reason for looking dyspeptic, as far as Johnson was concerned.

He said, “Okay, fine. Screw the lawyer. Let me talk to Ambassador Yeager. That ought to do the job. By God, that ought to do it up brown.”

Parker looked as if he’d asked for the moon. “The commandant sent me here to let you out as long as you give me your word of honor you’ll keep your mouth shut.”

“Sorry.” Johnson shook his head. “No deal. He’s the one who got into this mess, and got me into it with him. He ought to be making me promises, not asking for them. I’d just as soon stay here. How long before the whole ship starts wondering why? How long before the Lizards start wondering why, too?”

“Colonel, you are deliberately being difficult,” the adjutant said, his voice starchy with disapproval.

“You noticed!” Johnson exclaimed. Parker turned red. Johnson nodded. “You bet your left nut I’m being difficult, Major. Healey still thinks this is my problem, and he’s dead wrong. It’s his, and he’d better figure that out pretty damn quick.”

“I’ll be back.” Parker made it sound like a threat. “The commandant won’t be very happy with you.”

“Well, I’m not very happy with him, either,” Johnson said, but he didn’t think the other officer heard him.

Another two hours went by. They were not the most exciting time Glen Johnson had ever spent. He wondered if Healey knew how potent a weapon boredom could be. Leave him in here long enough and he’d start counting the rows of thread in his socks for want of anything more interesting to do. Maybe he should have agreed when Parker offered him the deal.

No, goddammit,
he thought. Healey had played him for a patsy. He wouldn’t be the commandant’s good little boy now.

The door opened again. There floated Parker, his face as screwed up as if he’d bitten into a persimmon before it was ripe. He jerked a thumb toward the corridor behind him. “Go on,” he said. “Get out.”

Johnson didn’t move. “What’s the hitch?” he asked.

“No hitch,” Parker said. “Your arrest is rescinded. Officially, it never happened. You’re restored to regular duty, effective immediately. What more do you want, egg in your beer?”

“An apology might be nice,” Johnson said. If he was going to be difficult, why not be as difficult as he could?

Healey’s adjutant laughed in his face. “You’ll wait till hell freezes over, and then twenty minutes longer. Do you want to?” He made as if to close the door once more.

“No, never mind,” Johnson said. He hadn’t actually demanded one, only suggested it. He didn’t have to back down, or not very far. He pushed off from the far wall of the brig and glided out into the corridor. “Ah! Freedom!”

“Funny,” Parker said. “Har-de-har-har. You bust me up.”

“You think I was kidding?” Johnson said. “Well, you probably would.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” the other man said. “I’m just as much an American as you are. I know what freedom’s worth.”

“You sure don’t act like it,” Johnson said. “And your boss wouldn’t know what it was if it piddled on his shoes.”

The two-word answer Healey’s adjutant gave was to the point, if less than sweet. Johnson laughed and blew him a kiss. That only seemed to make Parker angrier. Johnson wasn’t about to lose any sleep on account of it. He pushed off again and returned to the land of the free and, he hoped, the home of the brave.

He brachiated to the refectory. Walter Stone was there, eating a sandwich and drinking water out of a bulb. The senior pilot waved to Johnson, who glided over to him and grabbed a handhold. “I hear you’ve been naughty again,” Stone said.

“Not me.” Johnson shook his head. “It’s our beloved skipper. He told me to smuggle more ginger to the Lizards, and I’m afraid I turned him down. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”

“You haven’t got the right attitude,” Stone said.

“Sorry, but I’m afraid I do,” Johnson said. “Healey wants me to give the Lizards ginger? Okay, fine. He doesn’t care if they catch me and toss me in one of their clinks for the next thirty years? That’s not fine, not by me, not when the Race knows what we’re up to. And the Lizards do know. You can’t tell me any different.”

Stone looked as if he would have liked nothing better. He didn’t, though. And if he couldn’t, Johnson thought, nobody could.

Kassquit was happy. She needed a while to recognize the feeling. She hadn’t known it for a while—a long while. She’d known satisfaction of a sort, most commonly at a job well done. Sometimes that masqueraded as happiness. Now that she’d run into the genuine article again, she recognized the masquerade for what it was.

She knew sexual satisfaction was part of her happiness. So she’d told Ttomalss—and she’d taken a different kind of satisfaction at discomfiting him. But the longer the feeling lasted, the more she noticed other things that went into it.

Chief among them was being valued for her own sake. That was something she’d seldom known among the Race. By the nature of things, it wasn’t something she could easily know in the Empire. To Ttomalss and to the other males and females who dealt with her, she was about as much experimental animal as she was person. She couldn’t be a proper female of the Race, and she couldn’t be a normal Big Ugly, either.

But Frank Coffey made her feel as if she were. He talked with her. Members of the Race had talked to her. Looking back, she thought even Jonathan Yeager had talked to her. Now she discovered the difference.

But to Frank Coffey, what she said mattered at least as much as what he said. And that held true whether they were talking about something as serious as the relations between the Empire and the United States or as foolish as why her hair was straight while his curled tightly.

“There are black Tosevites in the United States whose hair is straight,” he said one day.

“Are there?” she said, and he made the affirmative gesture. “And are there also Tosevites of my type with hair like yours?”

This time, he used the negative gesture. “No, or I have never heard of any. The black Tosevites I mentioned artificially straighten theirs.”

“Why would they want to do such a foolish thing?” Kassquit asked.

“To look more like the white Tosevites who dominate in the United States.” Coffey sounded a little—or maybe more than a little—grim.

“Oh.” Kassquit felt a sudden and altogether unexpected stab of sympathy for wild Big Uglies she’d never seen. “By the spirits of Emperors past, I understand that. I used to shave all the hair on my body to try to look more like a female of the Race. I used to be sorry I had these flaps of skin—
ears
—instead of hearing diaphragms, too. I even thought of having them surgically removed.”

“I am glad you did not,” he said, and leaned over to nibble on one of them. Kassquit liked that more than she’d thought she would. After a moment, Frank Coffey went on, “You know more than I do about being a minority. That is something surprising for a black American Tosevite to have to admit. But I was never a minority of one.”

“Never till now,” Kassquit pointed out.

“Well, no,” he said. “For once, though, I feel more isolated simply because I am a Tosevite than because I am a black Tosevite. That, I admit, is an unusual feeling.”

“You are not black,” Kassquit said “You are an interesting shade of brown—a good deal darker than I am, certainly, but a long way from black.” His skin tone showed up to fine advantage against the smooth white plastic of the furniture in the refectory.

“Sometimes my shade of brown has proved more interesting than I wished it would,” he said, laughing. This time, Kassquit heard no bitterness in his voice. He added, “You and I are part of the default setting for Tosevites, after all.”

“The default setting?” Kassquit wondered if she’d heard correctly, and also if Coffey had used the Race’s language correctly.

He made the affirmative gesture. He meant what he’d said, whether it was correct or not. Then he explained: “Most Tosevites have dark brown eyes and black hair. Skin color can vary from a dark pinkish-beige like Tom de la Rosa through Tosevites like you to those a little darker than I am, but the hair and eyes stay the same. The default setting, you see? Only in the northwestern part of the main continental mass did Tosevites with very pale skins, light eyes, and yellow or reddish hair evolve. They have colonized widely—they were the ones who developed technological civilization on our planet—but they hatched in a limited area.”

“The default setting.” Kassquit said it again, thoughtfully this time. “This makes me one of the majority?”

“As far as Tosevites are concerned, it certainly does.” Coffey made the affirmative gesture. “You were hatched in China, I believe, and there are more Chinese than any other kind of Tosevite.”

“I have heard this before,” Kassquit said. “When I was all alone among the Race, it did not seem to matter much. Now that I am not alone any longer, it means more.”

Now that I am not alone any longer.
Those words meant more than she’d ever dreamt they could. Maybe that was the secret of her new happiness. No, not maybe—without a doubt. Except for the brief, bright segment of her life when Jonathan Yeager came board her starship, she hadn’t kept company with other Big Uglies throughout her life. She didn’t realize how much she missed that company till she had it again. Being among her own biological kind simply felt right.

Maybe that was because wild Big Uglies understood her in ways the Race couldn’t. For all she knew, it was just because Tosevites smelled subconsciously right to her. Pheromones didn’t play as obvious a role with Tosevites as they did with the Race, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there.

Whatever the reason, she liked it.

Quietly, Frank Coffey said, “When I set what I have gone through in my lifetime against what you have suffered, I am embarrassed that I have ever complained. Next to you, I am nothing but a beginner.”

“Most of it has not been . . . so bad,” Kassquit said. “When you are in a situation that never changes, you do your best to get used to it, whatever it is. Only when you have something to compare it against do you begin to see it might not have been everything you wished it would be.”

“Truth—not a small truth, either,” Coffey said. “That is probably why so many dark brown Tosevites accepted second-class status in the United States for so long.” He smiled. “You see? I said ‘dark brown.’ But they did not see anything else was possible, and so they complained less than they might have. When pale Tosevites’ attitudes about us began to change, we took as much advantage of it as quickly as we could.”

“And, as you have said yourself, you proved you deserve to be included in your Tosevite society by isolating yourself here on Home,” Kassquit said.

He shrugged. “Some things are worth the price. From what I have heard in the signals sent out from Tosev 3, relations between dark and pale Tosevites in the United States are smoother now than they were when I went into cold sleep.”