Homeward Bound (colonization)

by Harry Turtledove

  And then Jonathan noticed something that wasn’t a special effect. He stared at the elderly archaeologist who was trying to calm the frightened young hero and heroine-and who was bound to come to a Bad End before long. “Look at that guy,” he whispered to Karen. “I’ll be damned if that’s not Matt Damon.”

  She eyed the actor. “My God! You’re right. He used to be just a little older than our kids-and he still is.” She squeezed his hand. “We’ve been away a long time.”

  The Curse of Rhodes showed that in other ways, too. The violence was one thing. Gore and horror movies went together like pepperoni and pizza. But some of the doings between the hero, the heroine, and the resurrected, bad-tempered Colossus of Rhodes… Jonathan wouldn’t have taken a ten-year-old to see them in 1994. He wasn’t so sure he would have gone himself. The heroine was either a natural blonde or very thorough. She was also limber enough for an Olympic gymnast, though he didn’t think they gave gold medals in that.

  As the Colossus sank beneath the waves-gone for good or ready to return in a sequel, depending on how The Curse of Rhodes did-and the credits rolled, the house lights came up. “What did you think?” Karen asked.

  “I know what the curse of Rhodes is now,” Jonathan said. “The screenwriter, or maybe the director.” Karen stuck out her tongue at him. He went on, “It was really dumb and really gory and really dirty.”

  She nodded. “That’s what we came for.”

  Was it? Jonathan wasn’t so sure. He thought they’d come not least to try to forge some link between the time in which they’d lived and the one in which they found themselves. The movie hadn’t done it-not for him, anyhow. Instead, it reminded him over and over what a stranger he was here and now. With a shrug, he started for the parking lot. Maybe time would help. Maybe nothing would. He’d have to find out day by day, that was all.

  Some things didn’t change. The building in downtown Los Angeles where Sam Yeager faced a colonel who’d been born about the time he left for Tau Ceti was the one where he’d worked a generation before that, before he got saddled with the responsibility for Mickey and Donald. The office furniture hadn’t changed much, either. He wondered whether that battered metal desk could possibly date from the 1960s.

  Colonel Goldschmidt said, “No, you are not permitted to see any Lizards. You might pass intelligence from Fleetlord Atvar to them.”

  You bureaucratic idiot. Sam didn’t say it. He was ever so tempted, but he didn’t. What a good boy am I, he thought, even if he didn’t have a plum on his thumb. Clinging to shreds of patience, he said, “Colonel, you or somebody gave me permission to see Atvar. I’m sure you or somebody listened to what we said. If I’d wanted to do that, I could have gone to a pay phone the minute I got out of his hotel room.”

  “But you didn’t do that. You didn’t telephone any Lizards from your place of residence, either.” Goldschmidt had a narrow face with cold blue eyes set too close together. He wore a wedding ring, which proved somebody loved him. Sam wondered why.

  “So you’ve been monitoring me,” he said. Goldschmidt nodded. Sam asked, “If you people thought I was that big a menace, why did you let me see him in the first place?”

  “There were discussions about that,” Goldschmidt replied. He gave no details. Even though the discussions had been about Yeager, the hatchet-faced colonel’s view was that they were none of his business. “It was decided that the risk was acceptable.”

  It was decided. Maybe that meant God had sent down a choir of angels with the answer. More likely, it meant no one wanted to admit he’d done the deciding. No, some things didn’t change. Sam said, “Seems to me you people didn’t think this through as well as you might have. Now that I have seen Atvar, how are you going to keep me away from Lizards for the rest of my life? When I take an elevator down to the lobby and walk out on the street, it’s better than even money that I bump into one, or two, or three. We’re only a few blocks from the Race’s consulate, you know.”

  Colonel Goldschmidt looked as if his stomach pained him. “I have my orders, Mr. Yeager. You are not permitted to travel to any territory occupied by the Race or to contact any members of the Race.”

  “Then you can lock me up and throw away the key”-Sam was careful to use the human idiom, not the Lizards’-“because I’ve already done it.”

  “What? Where? How?” Now Goldschmidt looked horrified. Had something slipped past him and his stooges?

  “My adopted sons-Mickey and Donald,” Sam said.

  “Oh. Them.” Relief made the colonel’s voice sound amazingly human for a moment. “They don’t count. They’re U.S. citizens, and are considered reliable.”

  “What about other Lizards who are U.S. citizens? There are lots of them.” Sam took a certain malicious glee in being difficult.

  “As we have not made determinations as to their reliability, they are off-limits for you at this point in time,” Colonel Goldschmidt said.

  Yeager got to his feet. He gave Goldschmidt his sweetest smile. “No.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “It’s a technical term meaning, well, no,” Sam answered. “I suppose you can keep me from leaving the country if you don’t issue me a passport-Lord knows my old one’s expired. But if I want to see old friends, I will. Or if I bump into a Lizard on the street, I’ll talk to him. You may decide you made a mistake letting me see Atvar, but you went and did it. You can’t very well unpoach the egg.”

  “There will be repercussions from this,” Goldschmidt warned.

  “That’s what I just told you,” Sam said. “You people forgot there would be repercussions when you let me see Atvar, and now you’re trying to get around them. If you really thought I was a traitor, you shouldn’t have let me do it. If you don’t think I am, why can’t I see other Lizards? You can’t have it both ways, you know.”

  By Goldschmidt’s expression, he wanted to. He said, “I am going to have to refer this to my superiors.”

  “That’s nice,” Sam said. “Meanwhile, I’m going to do what I think is right.” He’d been doing that for a long time. Yeah, and look at the thanks I’ve got, he thought.

  He got some more now. “The last time you did what you thought was right”-Goldschmidt all but spat the words at him-“it cost us Indianapolis.”

  “Fuck you, Colonel,” Sam said evenly. “The horse you rode in on, too.” He walked out of Goldschmidt’s office. As he headed for the elevators, he wondered if the Army man would shout for MPs to head him off. He’d already been held incommunicado once in his life, and hadn’t enjoyed it much. The real irony was that he’d told Goldschmidt the exact and literal truth. Atvar hadn’t given him any message to pass on to the Lizards here on Earth, and he wouldn’t have done it if the fleetlord had. He was and always had been loyal to his country, in spite of what seemed to be his country’s best efforts to make him change his mind.

  No shouts came from behind him. He stabbed at the elevator’s DOWN button with unnecessary violence even so, and clenched his fists while waiting for a car to arrive. Part of him, the part that kept forgetting he wasn’t a kid any more, wanted a fight. The rest of him knew that was idiotic; one soldier in the prime of youth could clean his clock without breaking a sweat, let alone two or three or four. All the same, the sigh that escaped him when the elevator door opened held disappointment as well as relief.

  Sure as hell, Lizards were on the streets when Sam headed for the parking structure a couple of blocks away. They seemed as natural to him as the Hispanic men selling plastic bags of oranges and the British tourists festooned with cameras who exclaimed about how hot it was. That made him want to laugh; after Home, Los Angeles seemed exceedingly temperate to him.

  One of the Lizards almost bumped into him. “Excuse me,” the Lizard said in hissing English.

  “It is all right. You missed me,” Yeager answered in the Race’s language. He grinned fiercely; he’d taken less than a minute to violate Colonel Goldschmidt’s order, and he loved doing it.


  The Lizard’s mouth fell open in a startled laugh. “You speak well,” he said in his own language. “Please excuse me. I am very late.” Off he skittered, for all the world like a scaly White Rabbit.

  “I thank you,” Sam called after him, but he didn’t think the Lizard heard. He was tempted to yell something like, Rosebud! at the male just in case sitting in Goldschmidt’s chair had been enough to plant a listening device on him. That would give the Army conniptions, by God! In the end, though, he kept his mouth shut. He didn’t want, or didn’t suppose he wanted, to make these moderns any more paranoid than they were already.

  His car was a three-year-old Ford. It wasn’t enormously different from the ones he’d owned before he went on ice. The styling was plainer-real streamlining had taken a lot of individuality out of design. One year’s models nowadays looked like another‘s, and one company’s like another‘s, too. The engine was smoother. The radio sounded better. But making cars had been a mature technology even in 1977. The changes were refinements, not fundamentals. He had no trouble driving it.

  Traffic was worse than he remembered. The Los Angeles area had more than twice as many people as when he’d gone into cold sleep, and it didn’t have more than twice as many freeways. Too many cars were trying to use the roads at the same time. But things did thin out as he rode down to the South Bay.

  His apartment wasn’t far from the one where Karen and Jonathan were living. That was convenient for them in case he got sick. It was also convenient for him: they were two of the very few people he could talk to in any meaningful way. Where cold sleep separated him from the vast majority of mankind, it had brought him closer to his son and daughter-in-law because he’d been in it longer than they had.

  “I meant it, Colonel Goldschmidt-you and the horse both,” he said when he walked in the door. He assumed the apartment was bugged. What could he do about it? Nothing he could see.

  He sat at the computer for a while. Like Jonathan and Karen, he was working on his memoirs. He wondered if anyone would want to read his once he finished. Very few people these days remembered how things had been back in the 1960s. Instead, they knew what they’d learned in school about that time. What they’d learned in school wasn’t kind to one Sam Yeager.

  He shrugged and typed some more. If he couldn’t persuade an American publisher to print the work, he could still sell translation rights to the Race. The Lizards would want to hear what he had to say even if his own people didn’t. And faster-than-light travel might mean he could sell the rights not only on Earth but also on Home, Rabotev 2, and Halless 1-and see the money now instead of in the great by and by. That would be nice. He had no guarantee he’d be around for the great by and by. Odds were against it, in fact.

  He jumped when the telephone rang. He’d got used to phones on Home that hissed. And he was going well at the keyboard. He said something unkind as he walked over and picked it up. “Hello?”

  “Hello, Sam. This is Lacey Nagel.” Mickey’s literary agent had taken him on, and Jonathan and Karen as well. He hadn’t met her in person, but gathered she was about the apparent age of his son and daughter-in-law. She’d been, or at least seemed, more optimistic about the project than he was. Some of that, no doubt, was professional necessity; an agent who wasn’t optimistic wouldn’t stay in business. But Sam hoped some was real.

  “Hi, Lacey,” he answered now. “What’s up?”

  “We have a deal with Random House,” she said crisply. Sam’s jaw dropped. Then she told him how much it was for. His jaw dropped farther, all the way down onto his chest. “I hope that’s satisfactory,” she finished.

  “My God,” he said, and she laughed out loud. He tried to come up with something more coherent. The best he could do was, “How did you manage that?”

  “Well, I didn’t do anything to the acquiring editor that left a mark,” she said, which made him laugh in turn. She went on, “They’re excited about it, in fact. They must be, or they wouldn’t have made that offer. They said it was high time you told your own story.”

  He couldn’t very well have told it before this unless he’d done it before he went into cold sleep. That hadn’t even occurred to him back then. Now the book would feel like history to everybody who read it. “My God,” he repeated.

  “I hope that means you’re pleased,” Lacey Nagel said.

  “I’m more than pleased-I’m flabbergasted,” Sam told her.

  “Now there’s a word I haven’t heard in a while,” she said.

  “I’m not surprised,” Sam said without rancor. “I know the way I talk is old-fashioned as all get-out these days.” Saying all get-out was old-fashioned these days, too.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Lacey said. “No matter how you say it, what you have to say will be right up to the minute.”

  “I hope so.” He still felt a little-more than a little-dizzy. “I was working on it when you called.”

  “Oh-oh!” she said. “That means you want to wring my neck for interrupting you.”

  He shook his head. Lacey Nagel couldn’t see that; his phone didn’t have a video attachment, which only proved how old-fashioned he was. “Oh, no,” he said. “If you’ve got news like that, you can call me any old time. Thank you. I don’t think I said that before. Thank you!” He added an emphatic cough. When he walked back to the computer, his feet didn’t touch the carpet once.

  Karen Yeager walked softly around Jonathan. The two of them and Sam Yeager all had book deals now, but Jonathan’s dad had got his more than a month before either one of them. That didn’t bother her much. But she could see how it got under her husband’s skin. She laughed at herself. She’d almost thought of it as getting under Jonathan’s scales-proof, as if she needed proof, she’d spent too much time around the Race.

  Jonathan hadn’t said much about the way he felt, but he didn’t need to. Spells of alternating gloom and bad temper said it for him. He’d come in second to his old man again, and he didn’t like it one damn bit.

  Hearing the doorbell came as a relief. “Who’s that? What does he want?” Jonathan said, grumpy still.

  “One easy way to find out.” Karen opened the door. “Oh, hello, Mickey! Come in.”

  “Thanks,” Mickey said. Karen waved him to a chair. They’d bought a couple adapted to a Lizard’s shape. But Mickey sat down in an ordinary armchair. “I’m more used to these damn things.” He swung one eye turret toward Karen, the other toward Jonathan. “And whose fault is that?”

  “Well, we could blame the federal government,” Karen said. “It’s a handy target-and it is where Jonathan’s dad got your eggs.”

  Mickey shook his head. He did that as naturally as most Lizards shaped the negative gesture. “Too big a target. I need to blame people, not a thing.”

  “We’ve already apologized,” Jonathan said. “There’s not much else we can do about it now. And you’ll have the last laugh-even with our cold sleep, odds are you’ll outlive us by plenty.”

  “Your father already told me the same thing,” Mickey said. Most of the time, that would have been fine. Now… Now, Jonathan made a noise down deep in his throat. He didn’t want to hear that his father had got there ahead of him one more time. Mickey went on, “Yeah, I’ll live a long time. But what will I live as? A curiosity? Hell, I’m a curiosity even to myself.”

  “Would you like to be a curiosity with a drink?” Karen asked.

  “Sure. Rum and Coke,” Mickey said. As she went to the kitchen, he added, “You Yeagers, all of you, you’re my family-all the family I’ve got, except for Donald. The only problem with that is, I shouldn’t have any family, and if I did have a family, it shouldn’t be full of humans.”

  Karen brought him the drink, and scotch for her and Jonathan. “Well, we’ll try not to hold it against you,” she said.

  Both his eye turrets turned sharply toward her. Then he realized she was joking, and chuckled-a rusty imitation of the noise a human would make. “Donald would have bitten you for that,” he said, sipping
.

  “Donald may resent people, but he’s piled up a hell of a lot of money making them laugh,” Jonathan said.

  Mickey shrugged. “I’ve piled up a hell of a lot of money, too. I’ve got nothing against money-don’t get me wrong. Life’s better with it than without it. But Donald was right about what he told you the day you came down from the Commodore Perry — the fellow who said it can’t buy happiness knew what he was talking about. That makes Donald angrier than it does me. Instead of biting them, he makes them laugh-and then he laughs at them for laughing at him.”

  Jonathan caught Karen’s eye. He nodded slightly. So did she. That made more sense than she wished it did. It also went a long way towards explaining the urgency of Donald’s performance on You’d Better Believe It. Something not far from desperation surely fueled it.

  “Do you laugh at us, too?” Karen asked.

  “Sometimes. Not quite so often. I still want to be one of you more than Donald does,” Mickey answered. “Yeah, I know that’s silly, but it’s how I was raised. I speak English as well as I can with this mouth, but I have an accent when I use the Race’s language. Ain’t that a kick in the head?”

  “Kassquit speaks the Race’s language as well as she can with her mouth,” Jonathan said. “It’s the only one she knows. She never learned any of ours.”

  “That’s a damn shame.” Mickey added an emphatic cough, but a lot of human English-speakers these days would have done the same thing. “You could have done worse. I’ve never said anything different. Donald may have-but Donald doesn’t always even take himself seriously, so why should you?”

  Before either Karen or Jonathan could answer, the doorbell rang again. “Grand Central Station around here,” Karen said. When she opened the door, she found Donald out there on the walkway. “Well! What can I do for you?”

  “May I come in?” he asked. “Please?” Mockery danced in his voice.

  “Of course.” Karen stepped aside. “You’re always welcome here. We’re not angry at you. We never have been, no matter what you’ve decided to think about us.”