Homeward Bound (52 page)

“Do you think you are responsible for that?” Kassquit asked.

“Maybe a little—a very little,” Coffey answered. “I would like to think that I have made a difference in my not-empire, even if the difference is only a small one.” He pointed to her. “You, now, you have made a difference in the Empire.”

“Oh, yes, a great difference.” Kassquit wished she weren’t being ironic, but she was. “The Race has had to figure out what to do with one Big Ugly who does not know what to do with herself.”

“Considering how you were raised, you have done very well.” The American Tosevite added an emphatic cough.

“I thank you,” Kassquit said. “I tell myself this. I have told myself this a great many times. I wish I could persuade myself it is a truth.”

“Well, it is, if my opinion is worth anything,” Coffey said. “You are highly educated and highly capable.”

“I am highly abnormal, in a great many ways.” Kassquit tacked on an emphatic cough of her own. “I know this. You will not offend me by agreeing with it. Truth is truth, with me as with anyone else.”

“Have you ever wondered what you would have been like if Ttomalss had not got you from your mother?” Coffey asked.

“Only ten thousand times!” she exclaimed. “I could have been an average Big Ugly!” Part of her, a large part, irresistibly yearned for that. Just to be someone like everyone else around her . . . What would that be like? It seemed wonderful, at least to one who had never known the feeling.

“You could have been an average female Chinese Big Ugly not long after the conquest fleet came,” Frank Coffey said. “This is a less delightful prospect than you may believe. You would have had only about a fifty percent chance of living past the age of five—Tosevite years, of course. You probably would not have learned to read, let alone anything more. You would have worked hard all your life, and likely would have been mated to a male who did as he pleased but would not give you the same privilege. Sex differences in social roles are much larger among us than they are in the Race.”

He spoke truths—Kassquit knew as much. Even so, she said, “I would have been myself, the self I was meant to be. Here, now, the way I am, what am I? Nothing! I cannot even speak a Tosevite language.”

“No matter what language you speak, you make yourself understood,” Coffey said. “Not only that, but you have something worth saying. What else matters?”

“I thank you again,” Kassquit said. “Whenever we speak, you make me feel good. This is a pleasure worth setting alongside the pleasure you give me when we lie together.”

The wild Big Ugly mimed the beginnings of the posture of respect, just the way a member of the Race might have done. “I thank
you,
” he said. “It is mutual, you know, as such things should be. It is not just that you do not dislike me or look down on me because I have dark skin. I do not think the other Americans here do that. But it has never occurred to you that disliking or looking down on me because of my skin is even a possibility. That is not and cannot be true of them, not with society in the United States being as it was when we all went into cold sleep.”

“Do you suppose it can be true of society in your not-empire as it is now?” Kassquit asked.

“I do not think so,” Coffey answered. “More change still will have come, I suppose, by the time I get back to Tosev 3. Maybe then . . . and maybe not, too.”

Kassquit didn’t want to think about his leaving. She remembered how unhappy she’d been after Jonathan Yeager went back down to the surface of Tosev 3. She was happier now than she had been with him. Would she be unhappier without Frank Coffey in proportion to the degree she was happier with him? Probably. That seemed logical, even if logic didn’t always play a large role in emotional dealings.

I am happy now. By the spirits of Emperors past, I will enjoy being happy now. I will savor it. And if I am unhappy later, I suppose I will end up savoring that, too.

As if reading her thoughts, Coffey said, “I am not going anywhere for a while.”

“Good,” Kassquit said, and used one more emphatic cough.

By now, a fair number of shopkeepers in Sitneff were used to having Big Uglies drop in on them. Karen Yeager ignored her husband’s teasing about having no clothes to shop for here. She knew Jonathan wouldn’t have minded watching her or any other reasonably good-looking woman who wore body paint and nothing else.

Because she couldn’t shop for clothes (like any good teasing, Jonathan’s held a grain of truth), she had to improvise. Bookstores fascinated her, as they fascinated her father-in-law. Very often, one of her guards would pull out a transaction card and buy something for her. Sooner or later, his superiors would pay him back. Since none of the guards grumbled about how much money Karen cost, she guessed the repayment arrangements were more efficient than they would have been in the USA.

The Race’s printed lines ran from top to bottom of the page and from right to left across it. Lizards opened books at what would have been the back by American standards and worked their way forward. Other than that, their volumes were surprisingly similar to the ones humans used. They stored a lot of data electronically, but they hadn’t abandoned words on paper.

“Why should we?” a bookstore clerk responded when she remarked on that. “Books are convenient. They are cheap. They require no electronic support. Why make things more complicated than necessary?”

Back on Earth, the answer would have been,
Because we can.
Sometimes the Race was wise enough not to do what it had the technical ability to do. Not so many humans had that kind of wisdom.

One of her guards said, “If a beffel chews up a book, that is an annoyance. If a beffel chews up an electronic reader, that is a larger annoyance and a larger expense.”

“Befflem
are
nuisances,” another guard said. “I often wonder why we put up with them. They run wild and get into everything.”

He swung his eye turrets toward Karen, then looked away again a moment later. She knew what that meant. Lizards often compared humans to befflem. She didn’t think of it as an insult, though the Race often meant it that way. She liked the small, feisty creatures the Lizards kept as pets. She would have liked them even better if they hadn’t gone feral and made nuisances of themselves over such a broad part of Earth.

“Are you finished here, superior Tosevite?” the first guard asked her.

She made the affirmative gesture. “I am,” she said. “Since we have been speaking of befflem, would you be kind enough to take me to a pet store?”

“It shall be done, superior Tosevite.” Did the guard sound amused or resigned? Karen couldn’t quite tell. She would have bet on the latter, though.

She didn’t care. She enjoyed the Race’s pet shops at least as much as bookstores. The bookstores did smell better. Pet shops on Earth were often full of earthy odors. Pet shops on Home were full of unearthly odors, sharper and more ammoniacal than their equivalents back in the USA. Karen didn’t mind all that much. The odors weren’t dreadful, and after a few minutes she always got used to them.

Befflem in cages scurried around and squabbled with one another and beeped at anyone who went by and stuck out their tongues to help odors reach their scent receptors. They also beeped at the larger, more dignified tsiongyu, the Race’s other favorite pets. The tsiongyu usually ignored the befflem. Every once in a while, though, they lost their air of lordly disdain and tried to hurl themselves through the wire mesh of their cages at the low-slung, scaly beasts that annoyed them. When they did, the befflem only got more annoying. A beffel’s chief purpose in life often seemed to be getting someone or something angry at it.

Karen fascinated the befflem. Just as the odors in the pet store were alien to her, her smell was nothing they’d ever met before. They crowded to the front of their cages. Their tongues flicked in and out, in and out, tasting the strange odors of Earth. Their beeps took on a plaintive note. The befflem might almost have been asking,
What are you? What are you doing here?

The tsiongyu, by contrast, pretended Karen wasn’t there. They were long-legged, elegant, and snooty.
Too smart for their own good
was how she thought of them. They ignored the members of the Race in the pet shop, too. They could be affectionate, once they got to know somebody. With strangers, though, it was as if they were society matrons who hadn’t been introduced.

There were also cages with evening sevod and other flying creatures in them. They stared at Karen out of turreted eyes. It wasn’t evening, so the sevod weren’t singing. The other flying animals squawked and hissed and buzzed. Karen wouldn’t have wanted anything that made noises like that in her house. By the prices on the cages, the Lizards didn’t mind the racket at all.

Farther back in the store were aquariums filled with Home’s equivalent of fish. They looked much less different from fish on Earth than land creatures here did from land creatures on Karen’s home planet. Water imposed more design constraints on evolution than air did. But the turreted, swiveling eyes went back a long, long way in the history of life on Home, for the fishy things used them, too.

One silver variety swam along just below the surface of the water. It had unusually long eye turrets. They stuck up into the air, as if they were twin periscopes on a submarine. A guard said, “When the shooter sees a ffissach or some other prey on a leaf over its stream, it spits water at it, knocks it down, and eats it.”

“Truth?” Karen said. The male made the affirmative gesture. Karen came closer and looked at the little watery creatures with new interest—till one of them, literally, spat in her eye. She jumped back in a hurry, dabbing at her face with the sleeve of her T-shirt.

The guards all laughed. They thought that was the funniest thing they’d ever seen. Once Karen had dried off, she did, too. “You see, superior Tosevite?” said the guard who’d told her about shooters.

“I do see,” Karen said. “But why did the shooter spit water at me? I was not sitting on a leaf.” The guards thought that was pretty funny, too.

As they left the pet shop, the manager called, “Would you not like a beffel of your own, superior Tosevite? Life with a beffel is never dull.” Karen believed that. She didn’t rise to the sales pitch, though.

Out on the sidewalk, a Lizard came up to her and said, “Excuse me, but are you not one of the creatures called Big Uglies?”

“Yes, that is what I am,” Karen agreed. Most of the time, members of the Race used the name without even thinking it might be insulting. She wondered how often whites had said
nigger
the same way around Frank Coffey.

Then, suddenly, she had other things to worry about. The Lizard opened his mouth wide and bit her in the arm.

She screamed. She pounded the Lizard on the snout. She kicked him. She grabbed his arm when he tried to claw her, too. After a heartbeat of stunned surprise, the guards jumped on the Lizard and pulled him off her.

“Big Uglies killed both my best friends on Tosev 3!” he shouted. “I want revenge! I have to have revenge!”

“You are as addled as an unhatched egg abandoned in the sun,” a guard said.

Karen paid next to no attention. Lizards’ teeth were sharp and pointed. She bled from at least a dozen punctures and tears. On Earth, improvising a bandage would have been easy, for cloth was everywhere. Not so here. She pulled her T-shirt off over her head and wrapped it around her arm. Seeing her in a bra and shorts wouldn’t scandalize the Lizards. They thought she was peculiar any which way.

Two guards dragged off the Lizard who’d bitten her. The third one bent into the posture of respect, saying, “I apologize, superior Tosevite. From the depths of my liver, I apologize. That male must be deranged.”

Karen’s arm hurt too much for her to care about the Lizard’s psychiatric condition. Through clenched teeth, she said, “Take me back to the hotel. I want to have our physician look at these wounds and clean them.”

“It shall be done, superior Tosevite,” the guard said, and done it was.

Back at the hotel, both Lizards and humans exclaimed when they saw her with a bloody shirt wrapped around her arm. They exclaimed again when she told them how she’d got hurt. “Please get out of the way,” she said several times. “I need to see Dr. Blanchard.”

“Well, this is a lovely mess,” the physician said when she got a good look at Karen’s injuries. She cleaned them, which hurt. Then she disinfected them, which hurt worse. “A couple of those are going to need stitches, I’m afraid.”

“Will they get infected?” Karen asked.

“Good question,” Dr. Blanchard said. She didn’t answer right away, reaching for the novocaine instead. That hurt going in, but numbed things afterwards. Before she started suturing, though, she went on, “We haven’t seen much in the way of germs here on Home that bother us. But I’ll tell you, I wish you hadn’t picked this particular way to try the experiment.”

“So do I,” Karen said feelingly. “The Lizard must have been storing up resentment since the days of the conquest fleet—well, since the days when word from the conquest fleet got back from Home. And the first Big Ugly he saw, he just went
chomp!
Good thing he didn’t have a gun.”

“Probably a very good thing,” Melanie Blanchard agreed. “Um, you may not want to watch this.”

“You’re right. I may not.” Looking was making Karen woozy. “Do you think a tetanus shot would help?”

“I doubt it. They won’t have tetanus here. They’ll have something else instead,” the doctor answered, which made an unfortunate amount of sense. “I will give you a bunch of our antibiotics, though. I hope they’ll do some good, but I can’t promise you anything.”

“Why not give me some of the ones the Lizards use, too?” Karen asked.

“I would, except I think they’re more likely to poison you than help you,” Dr. Blanchard answered. “I don’t know of any that have been tested on us. I don’t think anyone ever saw the need before.”

“Oh, joy,” Karen said. “If I start breaking out in green and purple blotches—”

“If you do, all bets are off,” Melanie Blanchard said. “But I don’t want to try anything like that before I have to, because it
is
dangerous for you. I think I’d better consult with some of the Race’s doctors, to find out which drugs I ought to use just in case.”