Homeward Bound (73 page)

Except for the elevated bed instead of a simple sleeping mat, Atvar found nothing to complain about in the accommodations the Big Uglies had given him. They did a better job of taking care of members of the Race than the Race did for Tosevites. Of course, they’d had more practice than the Race had, too.

How long will that be so?
Atvar wondered. He could easily see swarms of Big Uglies coming to Home, either simply as tourists or armed with the get-rich-quick schemes they hatched so effortlessly. If the Race didn’t learn how to take care of them, they’d take care of themselves. They probably wouldn’t try to colonize Home, not the way the Race had colonized Tosev 3. But, with their furious energy, they might end up taking big bites out of the Race’s world anyway.

Or this ship might blow up instead of doing what it is supposed to do.
Atvar hadn’t been joking when he mentioned the possibility to Sam Yeager. The Big Uglies always took big bites out of things. That was a great part of what made them what they were. Sometimes, though, they bit off more than they could swallow.

Days crawled by, one after another. Then there were only tenths of a day left—or, since this was a Tosevite ship,
hours.
Why the Big Uglies divided days into twenty-four parts, each of those into sixty, and each of
those
into sixty instead of sticking to multiples of ten had always perplexed Atvar, but then, a lot of the other things they did perplexed him much more.

He waited in his cabin for the change. He did not want company, not even Sam Yeager‘s. Whatever happened would happen. He would deal with the consequences . . . if he lived.

He hadn’t been afraid either time he went into cold sleep. He’d been sure he would wake up again. Cold sleep, at least for the Race, had tens of thousands of years of development behind it. Going faster than light . . . How many times had the Big Uglies tried it? It had worked once. That was all Atvar knew.

English came out of the intercom. Someone was announcing something. Atvar hadn’t learned much English on Tosev 3, and had forgotten most of that. The American Big Uglies from the
Admiral Peary
spoke the Race’s language so well, he hadn’t had to worry about English with them. But now he was on an American ship. People on the
Commodore Perry
spoke the Race’s tongue, too, but English was the ship’s routine language.

And then, apparently for him alone, came a sentence in the language of the Race: “Transition with come in one tenth of a daytenth, so please find somewhere comfortable to sit or lie down.”

“It shall be done,” Atvar said aloud. He assumed the Big Uglies monitored his cabin. He noted no one instructed him to strap himself in. That made sense. If something went wrong here, a safety belt around his middle would do him no good.

He waited. A tenth of a daytenth wasn’t a long time, but he’d never known what the Big Uglies would have called fifteen minutes to pass so slowly. He kept wondering whether the time had already gone by, but glances at the watch on his wrist kept telling him the answer was no. The watch wasn’t his. The Big Uglies had given it to him. They wanted to make sure he had nothing that could signal Reffet and Kirel when he got to Tosev 3.

Here—this really was the zero moment. He felt noth . . . No sooner had the thought started to form in his head than he knew an instant—no more than an instant—of being mentally turned upside down and inside out. He let out a startled hiss, but the moment had passed by the time the sound escaped. It was far and away the most peculiar sensation he’d ever felt. He wondered if it was real, or if he’d just imagined it. Then he wondered if, for something like this, there was any difference.

More English came out of the intercom. Then, again for his benefit, the Big Ugly at the microphone switched to the Race’s language: “Transition was successful. We are now shaping course for Tosev 3.”

The image of the Big Uglies’ home planet appeared in the monitor, its large moon off to one side. Images in monitors proved nothing. No one knew that better than Atvar. But he also knew nothing he’d experienced before was the least bit like the moment the Tosevites called transition. He believed in his belly that the
Commodore Perry
had leaped across the light-years.

Someone knocked on the door to his chamber. To him, that was a Tosevite barbarism; he vastly preferred a hisser. But the Big Uglies had built this ship to please themselves, not him. When he opened the door, he found Sam Yeager standing in the corridor. “I greet you,” the white-haired American said. “Did you feel anything?”

“Yes.” Atvar made the affirmative gesture. “Not vertigo. What vertigo would feel if it felt vertigo, maybe. Yourself?”

“Something like that, I think,” Yeager answered. “You put it better than I could have. What vertigo would feel . . . Yes, that comes as close as anything. The funny thing is, though, I talked to several crewmales and -females as I came over here, and only one of them felt anything at all. I have no idea what that means, or whether it means anything.”

“I prefer to think it means you and I are highly superior to those insensitive louts,” Atvar said, and Sam Yeager laughed loudly. The fleetlord went on, “I do not know whether that is a truth, but I prefer to think it.”

“Fine. I will think the same thing. I do not know whether it is a truth, either, but I like it fine,” Yeager said.

“How soon will the ship go into orbit around Tosev 3?” Atvar asked.

“You are asking the wrong male, I fear,” Sam Yeager said. “I am only a passenger, and not privileged to know such things. One of the crewfolk would surely have a better idea than I do.”

“Perhaps. But I do not care to talk to them,” Atvar said.

“Well, Fleetlord, to tell you the truth, neither do I,” Sam Yeager said. “Of course, I have no doubt they feel the same way about me. They are three or four generations younger than I am, and our customs and ways of thinking have changed from my time to theirs. I do not believe all the changes are for the better, but they would disagree.”

Customs and ways of thinking had changed very little among the Race for millennia. Even something so small as the fad for a Tosevite appearance among the young had taken Atvar by surprise when he came back to Home. He knew Yeager was talking about much more important differences. He’d seen them himself.

One reason Big Uglies changed faster than members of the Race was that they didn’t live as long. That made a hundred of their years seem like a long time to them. Hardly anyone hatched at the beginning of such a span would be alive at the end of it, which was far from true among the Race. New Tosevites could quickly come to prominence, and bring new ideas with them. Atvar let free a mental sigh. Shortening the lifespan was not a solution the Empire would embrace.

“I thank you, Ambassador,” he said aloud. “I shall just have to wait and see for myself.”

Whenever he looked at it in a monitor, Tosev 3 got bigger and closer. After his long absence, he was struck again by how blue and watery the Big Uglies’ world looked. He had come to take land outweighing ocean for granted again; that was how things worked on Home and the other two worlds belonging wholly to the Empire. Not so here.

Of course, everything he was seeing could be just some clever special effect. The Race could have produced this. Atvar had no reason to doubt that the Americans could do the same. The only way he could be sure was to go down to the surface of the planet.

The crewmember he had to talk to about that was Major Nicole Nichols. He did not look forward to talking to her about anything. He wondered if she would refuse just for the fun of it. But she did not. She said, “You go right ahead, Exalted Fleetlord.” As usual, she sounded sarcastic when she used his title. “We want you to be sure you have come to Tosev 3. We do not want you to think we are trying to trick you in any way, shape, form, color, or size. Then we will send you back to Home, and you can let everyone there know that you made a round trip.”

“I thank you.” Atvar was not really feeling grateful—on the contrary. He wished the Big Uglies were trying to fool him. Then they would not have this stunning technology. But they all too plainly did.

Except for the pilot, he went down to Tosev 3 alone in the shuttlecraft. The American Tosevites from the
Admiral Peary
stayed behind. Going first was an honor he could have done without, especially when he saw that the shuttlecraft pilot was a Big Ugly. He told himself he’d just come light-years with a Big Ugly at the helm of the starship. Getting down from orbit to the planetary surface should be easy. Telling himself such things helped—some.

“I greet you,” the pilot told him. After that, most of what she said on the radio was in incomprehensible English. Every so often, she would use the language of the Race to talk to an orbiting ship or a ground station. The Big Uglies could have faked the responses coming back from those ships and stations—but it wouldn’t have been easy.

As the shuttlecraft came down out of orbit, deceleration pressed the fleetlord into his seat. It was made to conform to the contours of a member of the Race, and did the job . . . well enough. Everything seemed routine. The only difference he noted was that he would have understood more of the chatter with someone from his own species piloting. The Tosevite seemed highly capable. Tosevites
were
highly capable. In no small measure, that was what was wrong with them.

He watched the monitor. A large city swelled below him. There was the shuttlecraft port. Rockets fired one more time, killing the shuttlecraft’s velocity. The grounding was as smooth as any a pilot from the Race might have made. “Well, Exalted Fleetlord, here we are in Los Angeles,” the Big Ugly said.

“Yes,” Atvar said in a hollow voice. “Here we are.”

The pilot opened the hatch. Cool, moist outside air poured into the shuttlecraft. As it flowed over the scent receptors on Atvar’s tongue, he smelled odors both alien from billions of years of separate evolution and familiar because he had smelled such things before. Down deep in his liver, he knew he was on Tosev 3.

“Go on out, Exalted Fleetlord,” the pilot said.

“I thank you,” Atvar said, meaning anything but. When he poked his head out of the hatch, his eyes confirmed what logic and his scent receptors had already told him. He was on Tosev 3. The color of the sky, the shapes of the buildings and cars—this was not his world.

Big Uglies in wrappings that covered almost their entire bodies ran toward him from all directions. Some of them had guns in their hands. “Come with us, Exalted Fleetlord,” one of them called.

“Should I surrender first?” Atvar inquired.

“That will not be necessary,” the American Tosevite replied, taking him literally. “We are here for your protection.”

“I did not realize I needed so much protecting,” Atvar remarked as he came down the ladder.

Instead of answering that, the Big Ugly continued, “We are also here to make sure you do not communicate with members of the Race here before you go back to Home.”

“Do you need so many to do the job?” the fleetlord asked as his toeclaws clicked on concrete. “It seems more as if you are putting me in prison.”

“Call it whatever you please.” The Tosevite sounded altogether indifferent.

W
ith the
Commodore Perry
gone from the sky, with Atvar and the Americans from the
Admiral Peary
gone on the astonishing new starship, Home suddenly seemed a backwater to Ttomalss. Even though Big Uglies from the
Commodore Perry
remained behind, this was no longer the place where things happened. In ancientest history, the Race had believed that the sun revolved around Home. Males and females had known better for well over a hundred thousand years.

Even though they knew better, the idea had kept a kind of metaphysical truth ever since. Not only the sun seemed to spin around Home. So did the stars Rabotev and Halless, and the worlds that spun around
them.
And so had the star Tosev and its worlds, most notably Tosev 3.

No more. Now events had literally left the homeworld behind. The most important things that happened for a while wouldn’t happen on Home. They would happen on Tosev 3. Even now, not many members of the Race realized that. Most males and females went on with their lives, neither knowing nor caring that events might have passed their whole species by. Mating season was coming soon. If they worried about anything, it was getting ready for the spell of orgiastic chaos ahead.

As for Ttomalss, he did what any academic will do when faced with a stretch of time when nothing else urgently needs doing: he wrote reports and analyses of the dealings between the Race and the diplomats from the
Admiral Peary.
Even as he wrote, he understood that much of what he was recording was already as obsolete as one of the Race’s starships. He wrote anyhow. The record would have historical value, if nothing else.

No matter how dedicated an academic he was, he couldn’t write all the time. When he went down to the refectory for a snack one afternoon, he found Trir there ahead of him. The tour guide was in a foul temper. “Those Big Uglies!” she said.

A couple of Tosevites sat in the refectory, though some distance away. Trir made not the slightest effort to keep her voice down. “What is the trouble with them?” Ttomalss asked. He spoke quietly, hoping to lead by example.

A forlorn hope—Trir didn’t seem to notice the example he set. “What is the trouble?” she echoed at the top of her lung. “They are the most insulting creatures ever hatched!”

“They insulted you?” Ttomalss asked. “I hope you did nothing to cause it.”

“No, not me,” Trir said impatiently. “They have insulted Home.”

“How did they do that? Why did they do that?” Ttomalss asked.

“Why? Because they are barbarous Big Uglies, that is why.” Trir still did nothing to keep her voice down. “How? They had the nerve to complain about the lovely weather Sitneff enjoys, and that all the architecture here looks the same. As if it should not! We build buildings the right way, so they look the way they should.”

“I have some sympathy, at least in the abstract, for their complaints about the weather. It is warmer here than it is on Tosev 3. What is comfortable for us is less so for them,” Ttomalss said.

“I should say so!” Trir exclaimed. “The air conditioners they brought down from this new ship of theirs chill their rooms until I think I am back at the South Pole, or maybe somewhere beyond it.”

Ttomalss tried to figure out what on Home might be beyond the South Pole. He gave it up as a bad job. Trir didn’t care whether she was logical. Ttomalss said, “You see? You dislike the weather they prefer as much as they dislike ours.”

“But ours is proper and normal.” Trir was not the sort to think that several billion years of separate evolution could produce different choices. She judged everything from the simplest of perspectives: her own.

“As for architecture, they have more variety than we do,” Ttomalss said. “They enjoy change for its own sake.”

“I told you they were barbarians.” As if sure she’d made a decisive point, Trir got up and stormed out of the refectory.

Ttomalss sighed. Trir came closer to the average member of the Race in the street than any other male or female he knew. Her reaction to the Big Uglies wasn’t encouraging. How would the Race react to Tosevite tourists here on Home? Could simple dislike spark trouble where politics didn’t?

The tour guide hurried back into the refectory, as angry as when she’d left it. She pointed a clawed forefinger at Ttomalss. “And the horrible creatures had the nerve to say we were backward! Backward!” she added, and stormed out again.

“Did they?” Ttomalss said, but he was talking to Trir’s retreating tailstump.

His eye turrets swung to the Big Uglies in their specially made chairs. They’d paid no attention to Trir’s outburst. Did that mean they hadn’t understood it or hadn’t heard it? He didn’t think so, not for a moment. It meant they were being diplomatic, which was more than Trir could say. Who was the barbarian, then?

Ttomalss’ head started to ache. He hadn’t wanted that thought right now. Whether he’d wanted it or not, he’d got it.

So the Big Uglies thought Home was backward? Had the Americans from the
Admiral Peary
presumed to say such a thing, Ttomalss would have been as furious as Trir. The Tosevites from the
Commodore Perry
. . . Hadn’t they earned the right? From a Tosevite perspective, Home probably
was
a backward place. But it had proved it could prosper and stay peaceful for tens of millennia. If the Big Uglies dragged their competing not-empires and empires and the Empire into a string of ruinous wars, what price progress?

The psychologist could see what the price of progress would be: higher than anyone in his right mind wanted to pay.

But, now, he could also see what the price of backwardness was. Having moved forward technologically at such a slow pace over the millennia, the Race was vulnerable to a hard-charging species like the Big Uglies. With hindsight, that was obvious. But no one here had imagined a species like the Big Uglies could exist.
We knew ourselves, and we knew the Rabotevs and Hallessi, who are like us in most ways, and we extrapolated that all intelligent species would be similar. That was reasonable. Based on the data we had, it was logical.

And oh, how wrong it was!

He glumly finished his food and left the refectory. No histrionics from him. His swiveling eye turrets noted the Big Uglies turning their heads so their eyes could follow him out. Oh, yes, they’d heard what Trir had to say to him, all right.

Escaping the hotel was a relief, as it often was. He walked down the street toward the public telephone he’d used before. Every time he passed a male or female wearing a fuzzy wig or what the Big Uglies called a T-shirt, he wanted to shout. Members of the Race had taken to imitating Tosevites out of amusement. Would they keep on doing it now that the Tosevites were no longer amusing but powerful?

He thought the Race’s power was the main reason so many Big Uglies on Tosev 3 had shaved their heads and started wearing body paint that showed ranks to which they were not entitled. Would power attract more males and females here now that the situation was reversing? He wouldn’t have been surprised. Monitoring such things would make an interesting experiment—for someone else.

When he got to the phone, he swung his eye turrets in all directions. If that ginger-tasting female and her hoodlum friends were around, he would take himself elsewhere as fast as he could go. He did not see any of them. Feeling safe because he didn’t, he telephoned Pesskrag. Impatience and worry overwhelmed the careful logic of a few days before.

The phone hissed several times in his hearing diaphragm. He was afraid he would have to record a message. But then she answered: “This is Pesskrag. I greet you.”

“And I greet you. This is Ttomalss,” he said.

“Ah. Hello, Senior Researcher,” the physicist said. “Let me tell you right out of the eggshell, we have made no dramatic breakthroughs since the last time I talked with you.”

“All right.” Ttomalss might have been hoping for such a breakthrough, but he hadn’t counted on one. He gave himself that much credit, anyhow. Science seldom worked so conveniently. “I hope you have not gone backwards, though.”

“Well, no, or I also hope not,” Pesskrag answered. “We may even have taken one or two tiny steps forward. Once we devise some new experiments, we will have a better notion of whether we have. We have opened a door and entered a new room. So far, it is a dark room. We are trying not to trip over the furniture.”

“The Big Uglies charged all the way through to the other side,” Ttomalss said. “Why can we not do the same?”

“It is less simple than you think,” Pesskrag said. “What we have are only the early hints that appeared in the Tosevite literature. I gather the Big Uglies stopped publishing after that. We have to reconstruct what they did after they stopped giving us hints. No matter how provocative the early experiments, this is not an easy matter. We do not want to waste time going down blind alleys.”

“And so we waste time being thorough,” Ttomalss said.

The physicist let out an angry hiss. “I fear I am wasting time talking to you, Senior Researcher. Good day.” She broke the connection.

As Ttomalss was unhappily walking back to the hotel, a male wearing the body paint of a bus repairer accosted him. “Hello, friend,” the stranger said, so heartily that Ttomalss’ suspicions kindled at once. “Want to buy some ginger?”

“If you do not mind selling to an officer of the police,” Ttomalss answered. The repairmale disappeared in a hurry. Ttomalss wished he were a police officer. He would have been glad to arrest the petty criminal.

Kassquit was standing in the hotel lobby when Ttomalss came in. “I greet you, superior sir,” she said, sketching the posture of respect.

“And I greet you,” he said. “I hope you are feeling well?”

“I am as well as can be expected, anyhow,” Kassquit answered. “This new Tosevite physician says the same thing Dr. Blanchard did—my gravidity seems normal to them, however nasty it is for me.”

“How are you emotionally?” Ttomalss said. “You do seem less distressed at Frank Coffey’s departure than you did when Jonathan Yeager first returned to Tosev 3.”

“I am less distressed,” she said. “Most of the time I am, anyhow. My moods do swing. The wild Big Uglies say this has to do with hormone shifts during gravidity. But I have experience now that I did not have when Jonathan Yeager left me. And Frank Coffey may come back, where Jonathan Yeager entered into that permanent mating contract. So yes, I remain more hopeful than I was then.”

“Good. I am glad to hear it. Whatever you may think, I have done my best to raise you so that you would become a fully independent person,” Ttomalss said. “I know I have made mistakes. I think that is inevitable when raising someone of another species. I am sorry for it,” Ttomalss said.

“Your biggest mistake might have been to try to raise someone of another species at all,” Kassquit said. “I understand why you did it. The wild Big Uglies did the same thing. No doubt you and they learned a great deal. That still does not make it easy for the individuals who have to go through it.”

When she’d been angry before, she’d said worse things to him—and about him. “I am afraid it is too late to change that now,” Ttomalss said. “For what has happened to you, you have done very well.” Kassquit didn’t quarrel with that, which left him more relieved than he’d thought it would.

The shuttlecraft’s rockets roared. Deceleration shoved up at Karen Yeager. The pilot said, “Final approach now. The rockets are radar-controlled. They fire automatically, and nothing can go wrong . . . go wrong . . . go wrong . . . go wrong. . . .”

On the couch beside Karen‘s, Jonathan grunted. “Funny,” he said. “Funny like a crutch.”

Karen nodded. That took effort. After one-tenth g and weightlessness, she felt heavy as lead weighing more than she normally would. The rockets fell silent. Three soft bumps meant the shuttlecraft’s landing struts had touched the ground. Earth. One Earth gravity. Normal weight. Karen still felt heavy as lead. She said, “I could use that funny crutch right now.”

“You said it,” Sam Yeager agreed from beyond Jonathan.

“Are you all right?” she asked him. He was spry, no doubt about it, but he wasn’t a young man. What was hard on her and Jonathan had to be worse for him.

“I’ll do,” he answered. “We had to twist their arms to get them to let me come back here. I’ll be darned if I’ll give ’em the satisfaction of keeling over the minute I get home.”

“There you go, Dad!” Jonathan said.

The pilot undogged the hatch and flipped it open. The air that came into the shuttlecraft was damp and cool and smelled of the sea, the way it usually did around the Los Angeles International Air- and Spaceport. Karen smiled before she even knew she was doing it. To her, this was the feel and smell of home. She and Jonathan had grown up in the South Bay, only a few miles from L.A. International. “All ashore that’s going ashore,” the pilot said, determined to be a comedian.

“I’m not going first this time,” Sam Yeager said. “If I fall off the ladder, I want you youngsters to catch me.” Maybe he was trying to be funny, too. More likely, he was kidding on the square.

“Ladies first,” Jonathan said, so Karen took the ladder down to the tarmac. Jonathan followed a moment later. “Whew!” he said when he got to the bottom; full gravity was pressing on, and oppressing, him, too. His father descended then. Karen tensed to help Sam if he had any trouble, but he didn’t. If anything, he stood more easily than she and Jonathan did.