Homeward Bound (colonization)

by Harry Turtledove

  “They’re Lizards,” Major Nichols said. “Of course they’d be happy enough to stay on Home.”

  “Come on. We both know better than that,” Jonathan said. “Nesseref has lived on Earth for the past seventy years. Her friends are there. Friends count with Lizards the way family does with us. And Straha… Straha would complain no matter where he was staying.”

  “In some ways, his situation is a lot like your father‘s,” Nicole Nichols said. She drummed her nails on the white plastic of the tabletop. “He’s not particularly welcome no matter where he goes.”

  “Looks to me as though you’re saying being right is the worst thing you can do,” Jonathan said tightly.

  “Have it your way, Mr. Yeager.” Major Nichols folded the petition and put it in her handbag. “Besides, with the Lizards it’s academic. They aren’t going back to Earth with us, for fear they might pass on a message to the Race’s authorities back there. And the choice about your father isn’t mine any which way. I will take this document back to the Commodore Perry and let my superiors decide.”

  “Yeah. You do that,” Jonathan said. “It wouldn’t look so good if you came back to Earth with none of us aboard, would it?”

  She only shrugged. She was a cool customer. “We’d handle it,” she said. “We can handle just about anything, Mr. Yeager.” She got to her feet. “No need to show me the way out. I already know.” Away she went.

  Jonathan muttered under his breath. This younger generation struck him as a mechanical bunch. For a nickel, he would have kicked Major Nichols in the teeth. He would have tried, anyway. He suspected she could mop the floor with him, and probably with any other three people here who weren’t Frank Coffey.

  He got up, too, and slowly walked out of the refectory. He’d done everything he could do. So had everybody else on Home. He saw that Major Coffey’s John Hancock didn’t much impress Major Nichols-not that anything much did impress her. But Coffey’s signature sure impressed him. Even if Frank was going to be a daddy, he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life on Home. He’d signed anyway, to keep an injustice from being done to Jonathan’s father.

  A Lizard came skittering up to Jonathan. His body paint proclaimed him a reporter. Jonathan immediately grew wary. The Race’s reporters were much like those on Earth: too many of them were sensation-seeking fools. “How does it feel to travel faster than light?” this one demanded, shoving a microphone at Jonathan.

  “I do not know,” Jonathan answered. “I have never done it.” The Race evidently couldn’t keep secret any longer what the Commodore Perry had done.

  The reporter gave Jonathan what was obviously intended as a suspicious stare. “But you are a Big Ugly,” he said, as if challenging Jonathan to deny it. “How could you be here without having traveled faster than light?”

  “Because I am a Tosevite from the Admiral Peary, not from the Commodore Perry, ” Jonathan said resignedly. “We flew here in cold sleep slower than light, the same way your ships travel. You do remember the Admiral Peary, do you not?” He made his interrogative cough as sarcastic as he could.

  That might have been lost on the Lizard. After some thought, the reporter used the affirmative gesture. “I think perhaps I may. But the Admiral Peary is old news. I am sure of that. I want new news.” He hurried away.

  “Old news,” Jonathan said in English. He sighed. It wasn’t that the Lizard was wrong. In fact, there was the problem: the male was right. The Americans from the Admiral Peary were old news, in more ways than one. Had Major Nichols heard the reporter, she would have agreed with him.

  Jonathan found himself hoping the none-too-bright Lizard did end up running into Nicole Nichols. He would infuriate her, and she would horrify him. As far as Jonathan was concerned, they deserved each other.

  One of the elevators opened up. Tom de la Rosa came out. Jonathan waved to him. Tom came over. Jonathan said, “Beware of idiot Lizard reporters running around loose.”

  “Sounds like a good thing to beware of,” Tom agreed. “And speaking of bewares, have you talked with the gal from the Commodore Perry?”

  “I sure have-I just finished lunch with her, in fact. I gave her the petition, too.” Jonathan set a hand on Tom’s shoulder for a moment. “Thanks for signing it.”

  De la Rosa shrugged. “Hey, what else could I do? Right is right. Those yahoos have no business marooning your old man here.”

  “You know that, and I know that, but I’ll be damned if I’m sure they know that,” Jonathan said. “And you know you’re taking a chance with that thing. They’re liable to call us on it. If they do, none of us goes home from Home.”

  “Yeah, well…” Tom shrugged again. “Linda and I hashed that one out. If they’re the kind of stiff-necked bastards who won’t bend even when they ought to, I don’t think I want to go back to the USA any more. It wouldn’t be my country, you know? The company’d be better here.”

  Tears stung Jonathan’s eyes. He blinked several times; he didn’t want Tom to see that. Pride, he thought, and laughed at himself. “We can be expatriates sitting in the sleazy bars in Sitneff, and all the earnest young American tourists who come here can stare at us and wonder about all the nasty things we’ve done.”

  “There you go!” Tom laughed out loud. “The Lost Generation. Hell, we’re already the Lost Generation. If you don’t believe me, ask anybody from the Commodore Perry. Those people are convinced we’ve got no business being alive any more.”

  “You’d better believe it!” Jonathan used the catch phrase with sour glee. “Major Nichols told Dad they tried to get here before we did. Wouldn’t that have been a kick in the nuts for us?”

  “Oh, yeah. Sweet Jesus, yeah.” De la Rosa made a horrible face. “We’d’ve been like the dead atheist decked out in a suit: all dressed up with no place to go.”

  “As it is, we get into the history books whether our ungrateful grandchildren like it or not,” Jonathan said, and Tom nodded. Jonathan’s thoughts traveled the light-years far faster than the Commodore Perry could hope to. “I do wonder what things are like back on Earth.”

  “Well, from what I’ve been able to pick up, the politics are the same old yak-yak-yak,” de la Rosa said. “The ecology…” He looked revolted. “It’s about as bad as we figured it would be. Lots and lots of species from Home crowding out ours wherever it’s hot and dry. Earth isn’t the place it was when we left.”

  Jonathan sighed. “Like you say, it’s not a hot headline. I don’t know how we’re going to be able to put that genie back in the bottle again. The place I feel sorry for is Australia.” He used an emphatic cough. “It’s had its ecology turned upside down twice in two hundred years.”

  “Isn’t that the sad and sorry truth?” Tom said. “You hate to see something like that, because there’s just no way in hell to repair the damage. Too many native species have already gone extinct, and more are going all the time. When you add in rabbits and rats and cats and cane toads and cattle and azwaca and zisuili and befflem… And plants are just as bad, or maybe worse.”

  “I know. I don’t know the way you do-you’re the expert-but I’ve got the basic idea,” Jonathan said, and de la Rosa nodded. “I hope we get to see for ourselves, that’s all.”

  “Me, too.” De la Rosa looked fierce. His piratical mustache helped. “If we don’t, I’m going to blame you. And I’ll have all the time in the world to do it, too, because we’ll both be stuck here for the rest of our lives.”

  “Well, if we start throwing missiles back and forth with the Lizards, that won’t be real long,” Jonathan said. Tom looked unhappy, not because he was wrong but because he was right. He went on, “Of course, that’s liable to be just as true back on Earth as it is here.”

  “You think the Lizards can still hurt us back on Earth?” Tom asked. “People from the Commodore Perry don’t seem to.”

  “I’m not sure. I’m not sure anybody else is sure, either,” Jonathan answered. “I’ll tell you this, though, for whatever you think it’
s worth: the last time Major Nichols came out of a meeting with Atvar, she’d had some of that up-yours knocked out of her. Whatever he told her, it didn’t make her very happy. Maybe the Race has figured out how to do something, even if they’ve got to do it in slow motion.”

  “I almost wouldn’t mind-almost,” Tom emphasized. “Where one side figures it can lick the other one easy as pie, that’s where your wars come from. If both sides figure they’ll get hurt, they’re more likely to take it easy on each other.”

  Jonathan nodded. “That makes more sense than I wish it did.” He thought back to Earth again. “Before too long, maybe it won’t matter so much. We’ll have colonies all over the place. Eggs and baskets, you know what I mean?”

  “Oh, hell, yes,” Tom de la Rosa said. “We will, and one of these days maybe the Lizards will, too, if we don’t kill each other off first. And the Germans will, and the Russians, and the Japanese…”

  “Lord!” That took some more contemplating. Jonathan said, “I hope the Nazis and the Reds don’t end up with colonies on the same planet. They’d start banging away at each other, same as they were doing when the conquest fleet came.”

  “Yeah, that‘d be fun, wouldn’t it?” Tom said.

  Jonathan nodded, though fun wasn’t what either of them had in mind. He said, “The Nazis owe the Race one, too. If I were a Lizard, I’d worry about that.”

  “If you were a Lizard, you’d have other things to worry about, like not looking right,” Tom pointed out. Jonathan made a face at him. People had much more mobile features than Lizards did. The Race used hand gestures to get across a lot of things humans did with their faces and heads. De la Rosa went on, “I wonder how Kassquit feels about being pregnant now. This isn’t the best time to bring a kid into the world-any world.”

  “She’ll do okay, I think,” Jonathan said. “There’s always been more to her than meets the eye.” And even if she is knocked up, I had nothing to do with it, and Karen can’t say I did, he thought.

  Kassquit did not enjoy Dr. Melanie Blanchard’s examinations, which was putting it mildly. The wild Big Ugly had warned she would poke and prod, and she did, in Kassquit’s most intimate places. For that matter, Kassquit enjoyed next to nothing about being gravid, which was also putting it mildly. She wanted to sleep all the time. Her breasts were constantly sore. And she went on vomiting. Dr. Blanchard called that morning sickness, but it could strike her at any time of the day or night.

  Hoping to distract the doctor from her probings and pushings, Kassquit asked, “What possible evolutionary good is there in these disgusting symptoms?”

  “I do not know.” Dr. Blanchard wasn’t distracted a bit. Kassquit hadn’t really thought she would be. “I do not believe anyone else does. It is a good question, though.”

  “I thank you so very much.” Kassquit packed as much irony as she could into her voice.

  Instead of getting angry, Melanie Blanchard laughed a loud Tosevite laugh. “I am sorry not to be able to give you more help about this,” she said. “Some doctors claim that women who have morning sickness are less likely to produce a hatchling that cannot survive than those who do not, but I am not sure this has been proved.”

  “Produce a hatchling that cannot survive?” The phrase sounded awkward to Kassquit.

  “English has a term for this-miscarry. ” Dr. Blanchard spoke the word in her language. “If you miscarry, you discharge the hatchling from your body long before it would come out if everything were normal. Miscarried hatchlings usually have something wrong with them that would not let them live.”

  “I see. They are like eggs that are fertile and laid where conditions are good, but that do not hatch,” Kassquit said.

  The doctor made the affirmative gesture. “Yes, I think that is a good comparison,” she said. “I must tell you, Researcher: I do not know as much as I might about how the Race develops. Keeping track of how Tosevites work is a full-time job in itself.”

  “I believe that,” Kassquit said.

  “Good. It is a truth.” Dr. Blanchard used an emphatic cough. She peeled off the elastomere glove she’d been wearing and tossed it into a trash can. “For now, I am glad to say, you seem as healthy and normal as any female could.”

  “This is good to hear,” Kassquit said. “Do you have any idea how long the morning sickness will last?”

  “It usually ends after the first third of your gravidity-about half of one of Home’s years after your egg was fertilized,” Dr. Blanchard answered. “Bear in mind, though, that is not a promise. Each female is different. Some never have morning sickness at all. Some have it much more severely than you do, and suffer from it until the hatchling comes out. I am sorry, but you will just have to wait and see.”

  “I am sorry, too.” Kassquit felt like using an emphatic cough of her own. “Have you finished inspecting me for this time?”

  “Yes.” Dr. Blanchard nodded, then used the affirmative gesture. “As I say, you have earned the stamp of approval.” She mimed applying the stamp to Kassquit’s left buttock. Kassquit’s mouth fell open. That was funny, but not funny enough to make her laugh out loud the way the wild Big Uglies did.

  Laughter or no, she was anything but sorry to escape the doctor. Getting examined took her back to the days of her hatchlinghood. Members of the Race had constantly poked and prodded at her then. In a way, she couldn’t blame them for that. They were trying to find out as much as they could about Tosevites. In another way…

  She shrugged. No doubt she would have been addled no matter how the Race raised her. One species simply could not fill all the needs the hatchlings of another had. That was all the more true when the first was imperfectly familiar with the needs of the second.

  Part of her wished she could go back to Tosev 3 on the Commodore Perry. She would have liked to meet Mickey and Donald. If anybody on four worlds could understand her and what she’d gone through over the years, the males the Yeagers had raised were the ones. By all accounts, they had done well for themselves in the United States. But they were also surely caught between their biology and their culture. Mickey had said as much in the title of his autobiography.

  Had they learned the Race’s language, or did they speak only English? If they had learned the Race’s tongue, did they speak it with an accent? They would have the right mouthparts to speak it properly, yes. They wouldn’t have the mushy tone Tosevites couldn’t help. But they would have grown up using very different sounds: the sounds of English. How much difference would that make?

  I should have learned English, she thought. But she had a pretty good idea why the Race had never taught it to her. The males and females in charge of such things must have feared learning a Tosevite language would make her too much like a wild Big Ugly. And maybe they’d even been right. Who could say for sure?

  If she did ask to go aboard the Commodore Perry and visit Tosev 3, what would the American Tosevites say? Kassquit paused and then made the negative gesture. That was the wrong question. The right question was, how was she worse off even if they said no? If they did, she would be where she was now. If they said yes, she would be better off than she was now. As was true most of the time, asking was the right thing to do here.

  But whom could she ask? The formidable female officer named Nichols? Kassquit hadn’t seen her around the hotel lately. She hadn’t seen anyone from the Commodore Perry around the hotel lately. Maybe that meant nothing. Maybe it meant the faster-than-light ship was about to bombard Sitneff. How could you tell what wild Big Uglies would do next? Kassquit knew she couldn’t.

  She went to see Ambassador Yeager. He laughed. “You want me to get them to take you?” he said. “I cannot even get them to take me.”

  “I know that, superior sir. I am sorry for it. I think it is altogether unjust.” Kassquit added an emphatic cough.

  “Now that you mention it, so do I,” Sam Yeager said. “I hope you will not be angry, but I have to tell you that I do not think traveling on the Commodore Perry would be go
od for you, at least not in the near future.”

  “Why not?” Kassquit demanded. There were times when she thought everyone on four worlds joined together in thwarting her. She knew such thoughts were not true, but that did not always keep her from having them.

  “Well, for one thing, you would keep company with many more wild Big Uglies than you ever have before,” the American ambassador answered. “You would have a much greater risk of disease than you ever had before. Who can say how you would respond? You have never been exposed to diseases before. And remember, you are gravid. Disease could also affect the hatchling growing inside you. So could traveling faster than light. I do not know that it would. But I do not know that it would not, either. I do know that hatchlings growing inside females are often more sensitive to changes in environment than adults are. If I commanded the Commodore Perry, I would not accept you as a passenger simply because you are gravid.”

  “I… see.” Kassquit had expected Sam Yeager to argue in terms of politics and statesmanship. Instead, he’d talked about biology. That was harder to refute or get around. Kassquit wasn’t sure she should try to get around it, either. She said, “Would Dr. Blanchard confirm what you say?”

  “I think so. By all means, ask her,” the ambassador replied. “And ask a member of the Race who has studied Tosevites. I am not a physician.” He tacked on an emphatic cough to stress the not. “All I can tell you is what a reasonably well-educated wild Big Ugly thinks he knows. Experts know better than I do. Talk to them.”

  “It shall be done.” Kassquit pointed accusingly at Yeager. “You make entirely too much sense.”

  He laughed again, on the same sour note he’d used the first time. “I am glad you think so. I am glad somebody thinks so. There are a good many who think I am nothing but an old fool.”