Homeward Bound (72 page)

“I am not going. I am a citizen of the Empire,” she answered. The male started to challenge her, but Atvar spoke quietly to him. He hissed in irritation. Then he shrugged, one of the few gestures the Race and Tosevites shared.

Frank Coffey stepped out of line. The security male hissed again. Coffey ignored him. He came up to Kassquit for one last embrace. “Take care of yourself,” he said. “I will be back if I possibly can.”

“I know. I believe you,” Kassquit said. In a way, she was lucky. She had no idea how many Tosevite males had made that same promise to gravid Tosevite females without the slightest intention of keeping it. Some, of course, did, but not all. She added, “I hope everything goes well for you.”

“So do I,” he said, and smiled what even she recognized as a tight little smile. Here he was—here all the American Big Uglies were—trusting to a technology that was anything but proved. The Race was more sensible, and would never have allowed anything so risky. That was one reason the Big Uglies now had faster-than-light travel, while the Race had never even looked for it very hard. The rest of the Americans and Atvar started out of the terminal building and toward the shuttlecraft. Frank Coffey let Kassquit go. “I have to leave.”

“I know,” she said again.
I will not cry in front of him.
That was her last determination. She managed to hold on to it as he let the security male wave a metal-detecting wand around him one more time. Then he hurried after the rest of the wild Big Uglies. The door to the field closed, and Kassquit dissolved in tears. The males and females of the Race in the terminal stared at her. They had no idea what to make of the display, or what to do about it.

She wished for a soft cloth to wipe her snout. It always dripped mucus when she cried; the plumbing between it and her eyes was cross-connected in some strange way. Here, the back of her forearm had to do, as it did for her eyes. When her vision finally cleared, she found Straha standing in front of her. She started to bend into the posture of respect.

Straha made the negative gesture. “No need to bother with that foolishness, not for me,” he said. “I am only a writer these days, not a shiplord. I just wanted to tell you that you have turned out better than those who took you have any right to expect.”

Kassquit did not feel better. She felt worse. She’d known she would, but knowing didn’t help. She tried to think of something that might make her less miserable. To her surprise, she did: “When you were on Tosev 3, superior sir, did you ever meet the males called, uh, Donald and Mickey?” She pronounced the strange names with care.

Now Straha used the affirmative gesture. “I did. I can see why you would want to know. They are also luckier than they might have been, but they make very strange males of the Race. Their mouthparts can form all the sounds our language uses, but they have accents anyway—they are used to speaking English. They know of you, by the way. I have heard them say they would like to meet you.”

“I would like to meet them, too,” Kassquit said. “That is why I asked.” The shuttlecraft took off, riding an almost colorless plume of hydrogen flame. Despite the soundproofing, a dull roar filled the terminal. Misery filled Kassquit’s liver. She burst into tears again.

* * *

The chamber Sam Yeager got aboard the
Commodore Perry
was cramped but comfortable. The starship accelerated out of Home’s solar system at a tenth of a g, so he didn’t have to get used to weightlessness again. “We’re heading off to where space flattens out,” one of the crew, a woman, told him casually. That was evidently supposed to mean something, but it didn’t, not to him.

He liked the little bit of weight he had. It was enough to keep his feet on the floor and liquids in glasses, though they’d slop out if he raised or lowered them too suddenly. It also made him feel light and quick, which was something he hadn’t felt for years—maybe not since that broken ankle ruined his chances of making the big leagues.

Even better than the low weight was the lower temperature. He’d spent too long in air that never got below the eighties and was often a lot warmer than that. As Southern Californians were fond of saying, it was a dry heat. That made it more tolerable than its Alabama equivalent would have been. Even so, there was a difference between tolerable and pleasant.

He rediscovered long pants and long sleeves aboard the
Commodore Perry.
He also thanked God that he wasn’t a nineteenth-century British diplomat, doomed to wear full Victorian formal finery no matter what tropical hellhole (Washington, D.C., for instance) he found himself in. Those nineteenth-century British diplomats had died like flies. He suspected the Americans on Home would have done the same if they’d gone around in tuxedo jackets and heavy wool trousers.

The most he ever said to any of the crew was, “It could be worse. If you don’t believe me, ask your colleagues on Home when you get back there.” He didn’t even add an emphatic cough.

He reveled in fried chicken and real hen’s eggs and orange juice and pineapple and ice cream and string beans and carrots and pork chops and mashed potatoes and coffee and Coca-Cola and all the other familiar things he’d done without for too long. Quite a bit of what he’d eaten on Home had been tolerable. Some of it had been pretty good. But all of it had been exotic—literally so, in that it and he had evolved separately for several billion years. Part of him knew that every time he took a bite.

Little by little, he began to realize he was almost as alien to the crew of the
Commodore Perry
as smoked zisuili ribs were to his taste buds and digestive tract. That wasn’t just because of what he’d done in the 1960s and what had happened to Indianapolis, either. Some of them thought he was an ogre for that. Others didn’t: like him, they saw Lizards, no less than human beings, as people.

But he remembered the days before the conquest fleet came to Earth. He not only remembered them, he’d been shaped by them. To the crew of the
Commodore Perry,
that made him a Neanderthal. The very language they spoke was subtly different from his. He’d started noticing that with Major Nichols. Oh, the crew understood what he said, but the way he said it often made them smile. And he mostly understood what they said, too—but only because he was also fluent in the Race’s language. A lot of it wouldn’t have been English when he went into cold sleep.

Such changes had already started before he went on ice. People had begun peppering their sentences with emphatic and interrogative coughs and using them by themselves—something the Lizards always found barbarous. But they’d gone further since. Words and phrases from the Race’s language got treated as if they were English. By all the signs, they
were
English now. Even word order occasionally shifted.

The
Commodore Perry
’s crew didn’t notice they were doing anything out of the ordinary. “We just talk,” one of them said. As far as she was concerned, the emphatic cough she added was as much a part of the language as the words that had gone before it.

Little by little, Sam realized he was the one who was out of the ordinary. Had Shakespeare read Hemingway, the Bard would have felt the same jolt. He would obviously have been reading English. He would have been able to make sense of most of it. Just as obviously, it wouldn’t have been the language he was used to using. Most of the time, people didn’t notice how language changed around them, because they got the changes one by one, piece by piece. They all fell in Sam’s lap at once; he didn’t have the time he needed to get used to them.

He wasn’t the only one from the
Admiral Peary
to feel the same way. “It’s a good thing we didn’t have to go back into cold sleep,” Dr. Blanchard said at supper one evening. “We’d be like ancient Romans trying to deal with Italian.”

Sam suspected they might be like Romans trying to deal with the modern world in other ways, too. He didn’t even try to use some of the controls in his room because he couldn’t figure out what they were supposed to do. One of Caesar’s legionaries behind the wheel of a Chevy could have been no more confused.

When he said as much, Jonathan asked, “Why haven’t you asked one of the crew about them?”

“Because I don’t want to look like a rube,” Sam answered. “Have
you
asked? What
is
that button with the gold star? What does it do? Does it change the air conditioning, or is it the emergency switch? There’s no label on it. You’re just supposed to know, and I don’t.”

His son didn’t answer him. Neither did anyone else from the
Admiral Peary.
Sam smiled to himself. Unless he was very much mistaken, none of the other Rip van Winkles knew what that button with the gold star was for, any more than he did. They hadn’t wanted to look like rubes, either.

He did eventually find out, but not from the brisk, polite, half-foreign young crewfolk of the
Commodore Perry.
Atvar happened to tell him it controlled the softness of the mattress. The Lizard hadn’t been embarrassed to ask; his countrymen hadn’t built the ship. He said, “I never have understood why so many Tosevites prefer to sleep on a raised area from which they might fall. That aside, though, the arrangement is comfortable enough.”

“I am glad you are satisfied, Fleetlord,” Sam said, hoping Atvar hadn’t figured out that he hadn’t known about the button. “Is the food to your taste?”

“Tolerable,” Atvar answered. “Of course, I ate Tosevite food before the colonization fleet brought our own domesticated animals and plants. As long as I add enough salt, it is not too bad.”

What the Race thought of as enough salt was too much by human standards. Lizards put salt on bacon. After some meals in Sitneff, Sam had felt like a piece of beef jerky. Dr. Blanchard had clucked about what all that sodium was doing not only to his blood pressure but to everybody else‘s. If the humans ate local food, though, they had no choice but to eat the salt that went with it.

“This whole starship I find fascinating,” Atvar said.

“How do you mean? Because it can go faster than light?” Sam asked.

“No—and yes,” the fleetlord replied. “The males and females here have made sure I have nothing to do with that, as is only sensible from their point of view. But our starships are all like your
Admiral Peary
—they are designed to take passengers in cold sleep. This one has passengers and crew who are all fully awake, and has to have facilities for feeding them and bathing them and keeping them entertained. Oh, by the way, I find your showers too weak and puny to do a proper job of cleaning, and what you call soap does not deserve the name.”

“Well, Fleetlord, when I was in Sitneff, I always wondered whether your showers or your soap would do a better job of flaying the hide off me,” Sam said. “It all depends, I suppose, on whether you have scales.”

“Any proper creature—” But Atvar caught himself. “No, that is not so. You Tosevites have taught us otherwise.” He aimed an accusing fingerclaw at Sam. “You Tosevites have taught us all sorts of things we had not known. Quite a few of them, we would have been just as glad not to learn, too.”

“You cannot always pick and choose about what you would learn and what you would not,” Yeager said.

“That too is a truth,” Atvar agreed. “Just how bitter a truth it is, we are still in the process of discovering.” He skittered down the corridor. His gait was even odder in low gravity than humans’ gliding leaps.

Sam was not given access to the
Commodore Perry
’s control room. Neither was anyone else from the
Admiral Peary,
so he didn’t have to take that personally. He couldn’t look out into space. Instead, he had to make do with what the monitor in his chamber showed him. The image was very fine, but it wasn’t the same. Home had rapidly faded behind the starship, lost in the skirts of its sun. Tau Ceti itself went from a sun to no more than the brightest star in the black sky. But Sam could have seen the same kind of thing from the
Admiral Peary
as it left the Solar System if he hadn’t been in cold sleep.

When he asked the crew what going faster than light felt like, he got different answers. Most said it didn’t feel like anything. One shrugged her shoulders and said, “I’d been on duty till an hour before. I slept through it.”

A few, though . . . A few said things like, “It was very strange.” When he tried to press them further, he got nowhere. Whatever the experience was, it wasn’t something they could put into words.

Two of them said the same thing: “Maybe you’ll find out.” One spoke matter-of-factly, the other with a certain somber relish. Sam wondered whether he ought to hope he was one of the majority who went through whatever it was without even noticing.

He also wondered whether Lizards might feel the transition differently from humans. When he mentioned that to Atvar, though, the fleetlord said, “Straha and Nesseref made this journey without harm. Neither told me of noting anything unusual at the transition. Had the crew not informed them of it, they would not have known it had taken place.”

“I see. I thank you,” Sam said. “Well, in that case I do not suppose you have anything to worry about.”

Atvar made the negative gesture. “There I must disagree with you, Ambassador. I have a great many things to worry about. It is only that that does not happen to be one of them.”

“You are right, of course,” Yeager said. “Please forgive me.”

“No forgiveness is necessary,” Atvar replied. “I thank you for your concern.”

“I wonder what the sky will look like when we make the switch,” Sam said.

“This has also occurred to me,” Atvar said. “I would rather see it for myself than on a monitor. There, it could all too easily prove to be nothing but a special effect. But if we suddenly find ourselves in the neighborhood of Tosev 3, then that concern will fall by the wayside.”

“Do you doubt that we will?” Sam asked.

“I cannot doubt that this ship traveled from Tosev 3 to Home in the time described,” Atvar answered. “But this is Tosevite technology, which means it is bound to be inadequately tested. Can I doubt that it will work perfectly twice in a row? Oh, yes, Ambassador. I have no trouble doubting that, none at all.”