Homeward Bound (57 page)

“That is not a matter of luck. It is a matter of technology,” Kassquit pointed out.

“You are correct. I wish you were not,” Ttomalss told her. “And the technology the wild Big Uglies brought here is bound to be years out of date on Tosev 3. Just how far out of date it may be is a matter of considerable concern to us.”

“I understand that, yes,” Kassquit agreed. “Can you tell me what the Emperor and the fleetlord were talking about, or are you going to be as obscure as the wild Tosevites?” She added the last bit as artlessly as she could. With luck, it would get Ttomalss to talk where he might otherwise have kept quiet.

And it did. He said, “In fact, their conversation does relate to advancing Tosevite technology. They were discussing whether that advancing technology made a preventive war necessary.”

“Oh,” Kassquit said, and then, “Oh, dear.” She tried to gather herself. “The Race has talked about this for many years, but always abandoned the idea. Why is it back on the agenda now?”

Ttomalss hesitated. Then he shrugged. “The wild Big Uglies already know this, so there is no longer any reason why you should not. Do you remember my colleague back on Tosev 3, Senior Researcher Felless?”

“Yes,” Kassquit said. “I must tell you I did not like her much.”

“Felless is difficult for members of the Race to like, too—except when she has been tasting ginger, of course.” Ttomalss qualified that with a fine, sarcastic, eye-turret-waggling leer. But he continued, “However difficult she may be, no one doubts her ability—when she is not tasting ginger. She noticed some unusual Tosevite technological development and sent word of it here.”

“What sort of development?” Kassquit asked.

“We are not yet completely sure of that,” Ttomalss answered. “But the physicists are convinced it will have important results at some point in the future.”

“What sort of important results? How far in the future?”

“Again, we are not completely certain,” Ttomalss said.

Kassquit eyed him. “Precisely what are you certain of, superior sir?”

Ttomalss shifted uneasily in his chair. “What do you mean? Do you intend that for sarcasm?”

“Oh, no, superior sir. How could I possibly be sarcastic because you are evading my questions? What do you suppose might provoke me into doing something of that sort?”

“This is not helpful.” Ttomalss’ voice was thick with disapproval.

“No, it is not,” Kassquit agreed. “Your evasions are not helpful, either. The Tosevites evade my questions, too. I can understand that. They are not citizens of the Empire, and do not trouble their livers over its concerns. But I thought you and I were on the same side.”

“Until the experiments progress further, I cannot offer you a report on them,” Ttomalss said, which sounded like another evasion to Kassquit. Then he asked, “What questions are the Big Uglies evading?”

“The ones you would expect: the ones that have to do with dealings between the United States and the Empire. As I say, those evasions make sense. The ones you put forward strike me as absurd.”

“You do not understand the full situation,” Ttomalss said.

“That is a truth. I do not. And the reason I do not is that you will not tell me enough to let me understand it,” Kassquit said angrily.

“When I am authorized to give you all the details, you may be assured that I will,” Ttomalss said.

“Oh? And why may I be assured of that?” Kassquit snapped, even more angrily than before.

Ttomalss’ tailstump quivered, so she’d succeeded in angering him, too. “If you do not care for my choices in this matter, I suggest that you take it up with Fleetlord Atvar, or with the Emperor himself.”

“I thank you, superior sir. I thank you so very much.” The way Kassquit bent into the posture of respect had no respect whatsoever in it. The way Ttomalss’ tailstump quivered more than ever said he knew it, too. Kassquit went on, “It shall be done. Perhaps one of them has a certain minimal respect for the truth.” She straightened, turned her back, and stalked out of his chamber.

She started to go to Atvar’s room. Then she stopped in the hallway and made the negative gesture. She would do that if all else failed. The 37th Emperor Risson had granted her an audience. Perhaps he would speak to her as well. And if he did, she intended to hurl that right into Ttomalss’ snout.

Telephoning the Emperor, of course, was not so simple as putting a call in to the palace and expecting him to pick it up on the other end of the line. But it was easier for her than it might have been for a female of the Race. The sight of her Tosevite features in the monitor got her quickly transferred from a low-level functionary to a mid-level functionary to Herrep himself, for the males and females who served the Emperor remembered he had received two Big Uglies not long before.

The protocol master was made of sterner stuff. “What is the purpose of this call?” Herrep asked. His interrogative cough was the chilliest Kassquit had ever heard.

“To discuss with his Majesty relations between the Empire and the wild Big Uglies,” Kassquit answered. “You will agree, superior sir, that this matter is of relevance—I should say, of unique relevance—to me.”

Herrep could hardly deny that. She was a citizen of the Empire and a Big Ugly. No one else on Home could say both those things. She knew she wasn’t wild. She wondered if Herrep would remember. To him, wouldn’t one Big Ugly be the same as another?

“Wait,” he said. “I will see if his Majesty wishes to speak to you.” A pleasant, almost hypnotic moving pattern replaced his image on the monitor. Soft music began to play. Kassquit drummed her fingers on the desk in her room. They did not make sharp clicks, as those of a member of the Race would have done. Her fingerclaws were short and broad and blunt; she wore artificial ones to work the Race’s switches and operate its keyboards.

She was beginning to wonder how patient she ought to be when the pattern vanished and the music fell silent. A male’s face looked out at her. It wasn’t Herrep‘s; it belonged to the 37th Emperor Risson. Kassquit scrambled to assume the special posture of respect. “I greet you, your Majesty. I thank you for taking the time to speak with me.”

“You are welcome, Researcher,” Risson replied. “We need not stand on much ceremony on the telephone. Am I correct in believing you have learned discussions with the wild Tosevites have gone less well than we might have wished?”

“Yes, your Majesty,” Kassquit said. “I have learned that. It dismays me. What dismays me even more is that I have been unable to learn why these talks have taken this unfortunate turn.”

“There are two main reasons,” the Emperor told her. “The first is Tosevite arrogance over issues of sovereignty and equality. Under other circumstances, this might be solved with patience and good will on both sides. I believe such patience does exist.”

“What are these other circumstances, if I may ask?” Kassquit said.

“The wild Big Uglies are pulling ahead of us technologically,” Risson said. “They rubbed our snouts in this recently, when they showed they could monitor our voice communications and could keep us from monitoring theirs.”

“A shocking breach of privacy,” Kassquit said sympathetically.

“Shocking because they were able to do it,” Risson said. “After all, we have been trying to spy on them, too. But they succeeded and we failed. And their technology changes so much faster than ours. What do they currently have on Tosev 3? If we do not stop them now, will we be able to later?”

Kassquit knew those were all good questions. She also knew the Race had been debating them for years. “Why worry so much now?” she asked. “How has the situation changed for the worse?”

“In two ways,” the Emperor said. “First, the wild Big Uglies can now reach us on our own planets. Any war against them would be Empirewide rather than confined to the system of Tosev 3. The longer we delay, the more harm they can do us, too.” Kassquit used the affirmative gesture; that was an obvious truth. Risson went on, “The second factor has grown more important as time passes. It is the growing fear that soon they will be able to hurt us and we will not be able to hurt them, as they can tap our telephones undetected till they admit it while we cannot monitor their conversations.”

“Does this have to do with certain experiments that have been conducted on Tosev 3?”

Risson’s eye turrets both swung sharply toward Kassquit. Yes, that had been the right question to ask. “You heard of this from . . . ?” he asked.

“I heard of their existence from Senior Researcher Ttomalss, your Majesty. I heard no more than that,” Kassquit answered.

“Ah. Very well.” Risson seemed to relax, which doubtless meant Ttomalss did have orders from on high not to say much about such things to Kassquit. The Emperor went on, “Yes, important experiments have taken place on Tosev 3. Just how important they are, our physicists are now trying to determine. We do not know how far or how fast the wild Tosevites have advanced from what we know they were doing some years ago. We do know we will have to try to catch up, and that will not be easy, since the Tosevites generally run faster than we do.”

“What are the consequences if the Empire fails to catch up?” Kassquit asked.

“Bad. Very bad,” Risson said.

That wasn’t what Kassquit had expected to hear, but it told her how seriously the Emperor took the situation. She tried again: “In what way are these consequences bad, your Majesty?”

“In every way we can imagine, and probably also in ways we have yet to imagine,” Risson replied. “It is because of these experiments that we view the current situation with such concern.”

“Can you please tell me
why
you view them with such alarm?” Kassquit persisted. “The better I understand the situation, the more help I will be able to give the Empire.”

“For the time being, I am afraid that this information is secret,” Risson said. “We are still evaluating it ourselves. Also, the American Tosevites appear to be ignorant of what has taken place on their home planet. It would be to our advantage to have them remain ignorant. If they knew the full situation, their demands would become even more intolerable than they already are. And now, Researcher, if you will excuse me . . .” He broke the connection.

Kassquit stared at the monitor. Risson hadn’t told her everything she wanted to know. But he had, perhaps, told her more than he thought he had. Whatever the wild Big Uglies back on Tosev 3 had discovered, it was even more important than she’d imagined.

S
am Yeager had faced plenty of frustrations on Home. He’d been ready for most of them—he knew what the Lizards were like and what they were likely to do as well as any mere human could. That (along with the Doctor’s bad luck) was why he was the American ambassador today.

But one frustration he hadn’t expected was having the Race know more about what was happening back on Earth than he did.

Things had worked out that way, though. Physicists back on the home planet seemed to be dancing a buck-and-wing about something. (Did anybody back on Earth dance a buck-and-wing about anything any more? Sometimes the phrases that popped into Sam’s head made him feel like an antique even to himself.) The Race had a pretty good idea of what it was. None of the Americans on Home had even a clue.

His own ignorance made Sam call Lieutenant General Healey one more time. He relished that about as much as he would have a visit to the proctologist’s. Sometimes, though, he had to bend over. And sometimes he had to talk to the
Admiral Peary
’s commandant. He consoled himself by remembering Healey liked him no better than he liked Healey.

“What’s on your mind, Ambassador?” Healey growled when the connection went through. Then came the inevitable question: “And is this call secure?”

“As far as I can tell, it is,” Yeager answered after checking the electronics in his room one more time.

“All right. Go ahead.”

“Here’s what I want to know: has the ship picked up any transmissions from the Lizards on Earth about human physicists’ recent experiments, whatever they are? And have the Lizards here on Home been blabbing about that kind of thing anywhere you can monitor them? I’d like to find out what’s going on if I can.”

“I don’t remember anything like that.” By the way Healey said it, it couldn’t have happened if he didn’t remember it.

More often than not, Sam would have accepted that just to give himself an excuse to get off the phone with a man he couldn’t stand. That he didn’t now was a measure of how urgent he thought this was. “Could you please check, General? Could you please check as carefully as possible? It’s liable to be very important.”

“How important is very important?” Healey asked scornfully.

“Peace or war important. I don’t think it gets any more important than that. Do you?”

The commandant didn’t answer, not for some little while. Yeager started to wonder if he really did think something else was more important. With Healey, you never could tell. At last, though, he said, “I’ll see what I can find out.”

“Thanks,” Yeager said. Again, Healey didn’t answer. A glance at the electronics told Sam the commandant had hung up on him. He laughed. The man was consistent.
Yeah, he’s consistently a son of a bitch,
jeered the little voice inside Sam’s head.

Talks with Atvar faltered. It was as if both the fleetlord and Sam were waiting for the other shoe to drop. Sam wasn’t even sure what the other shoe was, but he had to wait—and he had to seem to know more than he did. At one point, Atvar said, “It would be better for all concerned if this turned out to be a dead end.”

“Do you truly think so?” Yeager said, wondering what
this
was. “Our belief is that knowledge is never wasted.”

“Yes, I understand that,” the fleetlord answered. “You have this notion of what you call progress, of change as improvement. We think differently. When we think of change, we think of all the things that can go wrong, all the things that will need fixing. We are more realistic than you.”

Sam made the negative gesture. “Meaning no disrespect, but I do not think so. The Race and Tosevites have different histories, that is all. You gained your technology slowly, one piece at a time, and that made you notice the disruptions it caused. We got ours over a couple of long lifetimes. It made things much better for us in spite of the disruptions.”

“Did it?” Atvar asked. “Would the Jews the Deutsche exterminated agree with you? Without your newly advanced technology—railroads, poisons, and so on—the Deutsche could not have done as they did. This is not the only example. Will you deny it?”

“I wish I could,” Sam answered. But that was not what Atvar had asked. Sam Yeager sighed. “No, I will not deny it. It is a truth. But you ignore, for example, the medical advances that allow most of us to live out our full spans without fear of the diseases that killed so many of us not long ago.”

“I do not ignore them,” Atvar said. Yeager thought he meant they also had a black side, as in the experiments Nazi doctors had undertaken while they were getting rid of Jews. But the fleetlord went down a different road: “Will your agriculture keep up with population growth? Will you regulate the number of hatchlings you are allowed to produce? Or will you simply start to starve because you do not think of difficulties until it is too late?”

Those were good questions. Sam had answers for none of them. All he could say was, “Tosevites have also predicted these disasters, but they have not happened yet. If progress continues, perhaps none of them will.”

Atvar’s mouth fell open. He knew Sam well enough to know he would not offend him by laughing at him. “There is such a thing as optimism, Ambassador, and there is such a thing as what we call drooling optimism.”

“We would say wild-eyed optimism,” Sam replied. “But you see optimism in general turning into that kind of optimism sooner than we do.”

“No doubt you have come out with another truth,” Atvar said. “As for me, I can speak only as a male of the Race. And one of the things I have to say is this: from the Race’s perspective, your optimism leads to arrogance. You think you can ask for anything you want and everything will somehow turn out all right. I must tell you that
that
is not a truth, nor will it ever be.” He added an emphatic cough.

“When you brought the conquest fleet to Tosev 3, you expected to find a bunch of sword-swinging barbarians,” Sam said.

“Truth. We did,” Atvar said. “I do not disagree. This is so.”

“Forgive me, Fleetlord, but I have not finished,” Sam said. “Instead of being sword-swinging barbarians, we were as you found us—”

“Barbarians with aircraft and landcruisers,” Atvar broke in.

That stung. It also held some truth, more than Sam Yeager really cared to acknowledge. Refusing to acknowledge it, he went on as he had intended: “We were advanced enough to fight you to a standstill. You recognized some of us as equals, but you never truly meant it, not down in your livers, not even when we began to get ahead of you technologically. As long as we could not get out of our own solar system, you had some justification for this. But since we are talking here in Sitneff . . .”

“Everything you have said is a truth. It makes you more dangerous, not less. Why should we not try to rid ourselves of you while we still have the chance? If we do not, how long will it be before you try to get rid of us?”

There was the rub. The Race had always seen humans as nuisances. Now it saw them as dangerous nuisances. “We will fight to defend ourselves,” Sam warned.

“That is not the issue,” Atvar said. “Any species will fight to defend itself. You will fight to aggrandize yourselves. You will, but you will not do it at our expense.”

“Was the conquest fleet fighting in self-defense?” Sam asked acidly.

“In the end, it certainly was,” the fleetlord said, and Sam laughed in surprise. Atvar went on, “We had—and we paid for—a mistaken notion of where you Tosevites were in terms of technology. We knew as much before we landed on your planet. But if you had been what we thought you were, would you not agree you would have been better off if we had conquered you?”

Had the Lizards brought Earth from the twelfth century to the late twentieth in a couple of generations . . . “Materially, no one could possibly say we would not have been,” Sam answered.

“There. You see?” Atvar said.

Sam held up a hand. “Excuse me, Fleetlord, but again I had not finished. The one thing you would have taken away from us forever is our freedom. Some of us would say that is too high a price to pay.”

“Then some of you are fools,” Atvar said with acid of his own. “You had freedom to murder one another, starve, and die of diseases you did not know how to cure. It is easy to speak of freedom when your belly is full and you are healthy. When you are starving and full of parasites, it is only a word, and one without much meaning.”

That held some truth—more, again, than Yeager cared to admit. But just because it held some truth did not mean it was a truth. Sam said, “The Greeks invented democracy—snoutcounting, if you like—more than fifteen hundred of our years before your probe came to Tosev 3: more than three thousand of yours. They were full of diseases. They were hungry a lot of the time. They fought among themselves. But they did it anyway. They believed—and a lot of us have always believed since—that no one has the right to tell anyone else what to do just because of who his sire was.”

“Snoutcounting.” As usual, Atvar filled the word with scorn. “My opinion remains unchanged: it is nothing to be proud of. And is this vaunted freedom of yours worth having when it is only the freedom to starve or to die or to impose your superstition on others by force?”

“Who brought reverence for the spirits of Emperors past to Tosev 3?” Yeager inquired.

“That is not superstition. That is truth,” Atvar said primly, sounding as certain as a missionary evangelizing an islander in the South Seas.

“Evidence would be nice,” Sam said.

The fleetlord winced, but he answered, “We at least have the evidence of a long and prosperous history. Your superstitions have nothing whatever—nothing but fanaticism, I should say.”

“We are a stubborn lot,” Sam admitted.

“You are indeed.” Atvar used an emphatic cough.

Sam said, “What you do not seem to understand is that we are also stubborn in the cause of freedom. Suppose you had sent the conquest fleet right after your probe and conquered us. You could have done it. No one would say anything else, not for a moment. Suppose you had, as I say. Do you not think that, once we learned about modern technology from you, we would have risen to regain our independence?”

He had often seen Atvar angry and sardonic. He had hardly ever seen him horrified. This was one of those times. The fleetlord recoiled like a well-bred woman who saw a mouse (which reminded Sam that the Lizards had yet to exterminate the escaped rats). Visibly gathering himself, Atvar said, “What a dreadful idea!” He used another emphatic cough. “You realize you may not have done your species a favor with this suggestion?”

He could only mean Sam had made humans seem more dangerous, which made a preventive war more likely. Sam wanted to scowl; that wasn’t what he’d had in mind. He held his face steady. Atvar had probably had enough experience with humans to be able to read expressions. Picking his words with care, Sam said, “Whatever happens to us is also likely to happen to you. You know this is a truth, Fleetlord.”

“I know that whatever happens now is likely to be better than what would happen in a hundred years, and much better than what would happen in two hundred.” Atvar sighed. “I am sorry, Ambassador, but that is how things look out of my eye turrets.”

“I am sorry, too.” Sam used an emphatic cough of his own.

“Will it be war?” Jonathan Yeager asked his father.

Sam Yeager shrugged. “I don’t know yet. But that’s about as much as I can tell you.” He shook his head. “No, that’s not right. I can tell you one other thing: it doesn’t look good right now.”

“Everything seemed so fine when we got here,” Jonathan said mournfully.

“I know,” his father said. “But
that
we got here . . . It’s just made the Lizards more nervous the longer they think about it. Now we can reach them. We can hit them where they live—literally. They’re starting to figure that if they don’t move to get rid of us now, they’ll never have another chance. They worry we’ll have the drop on them if they wait.”

Jonathan looked out the window of his father’s room. There was Sitneff, the town he’d come to take for granted, with the greenish-blue sky and the dry hills out beyond the boxy buildings. It had been a comfortable place for Lizards to live since the Pleistocene, since before modern humans replaced Neanderthals. A female of the Race from those days wouldn’t have much trouble fitting into the city as it was now. A Neanderthal woman dropped into Los Angeles might have rather more.

With a distinct effort of will, Jonathan pulled back to the business at hand, saying, “They may be right.”

“Yeah, I know. It doesn’t do us any good—just the opposite, in fact,” his father said. “But if they do attack us, Earth isn’t the only planet that’ll suffer. You can bet your bottom dollar on that.”

“Do you know for a fact that we’ve sent ships to Rabotev 2 and Halless 1?” As he usually did, Jonathan used the Race’s names for the stars humans called Epsilon Eridani and Epsilon Indi. “Do you know that we’ve sent more ships here?”

“Know for a fact? No.” Sam Yeager shook his head again. “The
Admiral Peary
hasn’t got news of any other launchings except the
Molotov.
If the Lizards have, they aren’t talking. But . . .” He sighed heavily, then repeated it: “But . . .” The one ominous word seemed a complete sentence. “If we did launch warships, we’d be damn fools to let the Lizards know we’d done it. If war does start, they’re liable to get some horrendous surprises. And I have no idea—none at all—what the Russians and the Japanese and even the Germans might be able to do by now. There may be a fleet behind the
Molotov.
I just don’t know.”