Homeward Bound

by Harry Turtledove

  “It is called a fibyen,” the Lizard answered. “It feeds in the mud and gravel at the bottom of ponds and creeks. Those tendrils above its mouth help tell it what its prey is.”

  Frank Coffey said, “It looked like something I’d see Sunday morning if I drank too much Old Overcoat Saturday night.”

  He spoke in English. The guide asked him to translate. He did, as well as he could. The translation failed to produce enlightenment. After a good deal of back-and-forth, the guide said, “Alcohol does not affect us in this particular way, no matter how much of it we drink.”

  “Lucky you,” Coffey said.

  Before that could cause more confusion still, Sam said, “I have a question.”

  “Go ahead,” the Lizard replied with some relief.

  “You have sent many of your creatures from a dry climate from Home to Tosev 3, to make parts of our planet more like yours,” Yeager said. The guide made the affirmative gesture. Sam went on, “Why have you not also sent creatures like the fibyen and the plants here in Rizzaffi? Tosev 3 has many areas where they might do very well.”

  “Why? I will tell you why: because you Tosevites are welcome to areas like this.” The guide’s emphatic cough said how welcome humans were to such places. “Some of us must live here in this miserable place, but we do not like it. I do not believe anyone who was not addled from hatching could like it. And that reminds me. . . .” The Lizard’s eye turrets swiveled in all directions, though how far he could see through Rizzaffi’s swirling mist was a good question.

  “Yes?” Sam asked when the guide didn’t say anything for some little while.

  “Have you Big Uglies got any ginger?” the Lizard demanded. “That wonderful herb helps me forget what a miserable, damp, slimy hole this is. I would give you anything you like for a few tastes, and I am sure I am far from the only one who would.”

  “Well, well,” Frank Coffey said. “Isn’t that interesting?” This time, he didn’t translate from English to the Race’s language.

  “That’s one word,” Sam said, also in English. This wasn’t the first time humans had got such a request. He wondered how to answer the guide. Really, though, only one way was possible: “I am very sorry, but we are diplomats, not ginger smugglers. We have no ginger. We would not give it out if we did, because it is against your laws.” What else could he say, when he wasn’t sure if this Lizard was an addict or a provocateur?

  The guide let out a disappointed hiss. “That is most unfortunate. It will make many males and females very unhappy.”

  “A pity,” Sam said, meaning anything but. “Perhaps we should go back to the hotel now.”

  “Yes,” the Lizard said. “Perhaps we should.”

  With the air conditioning going full blast, the hotel was merely unpleasant. After hot wet weather, hot dry weather seemed a godsend. The sweat that had clung greasily to Sam’s skin evaporated. Then salt crusts formed instead, and he started to itch. For a human, showering in a stall made for Lizards was an exercise in frustration. Apart from the force of the stream, it involved bending low and banging one’s head against the ceiling over and over. Yeager wouldn’t have liked it when he was young. Now that he was far from young and far from limber, it became an ordeal. But he endured it here for the sake of getting clean.

  He ate in the hotel refectory. He didn’t think it deserved to be called a restaurant. As usual, the food was salty by Earthly standards. That probably wasn’t good for his blood pressure, but he didn’t know what he could do about it. He fretted about it less today than he would have most of the time. He’d sweated out enough salt to need replenishing.

  And he could get pure alcohol and dilute it to palatability with water. Nobody here knew anything about ice cubes. The Race cared nothing for cold drinks. But warm vodka was better than no vodka at all.

  His son had a sly look in his eye when he asked, “Well, Dad, aren’t you glad you came along?”

  “If Home needed an enema, they’d plug it in right here,” Sam replied, which made Jonathan choke on his drink. The older Yeager went on, “Even so, I am glad I came. When will I ever get the chance to see anything like this again? How many people have ever seen a fibyen?”

  “I didn’t even get to see it,” Jonathan said. “But you know what else? I’m not going to lose any sleep about missing it.”

  “I lose enough sleep to sleeping mats,” Sam said. “Kassquit may not have any trouble with them, but she’s been sleeping on them all her life. Me?” He shook his head and wiggled and stretched. Something in his back crunched when he did. That felt good, but he knew it wouldn’t last.

  Outside, lightning flashed. Now real rain started coming down—coming down in sheets, in fact. Sam knew the Lizards did a good job of soundproofing their hotels. The thunderclap that followed hard on the heels of the lightning still rattled his false teeth.

  Karen Yeager said, “This is a part of Home none of the Lizards who came to Earth ever talked much about.”

  “I can see why, too,” Jonathan said. “How many people brag about coming from Mobile, Alabama? And this place makes Mobile look like paradise.”

  Sam, who’d been through Mobile playing ball, needed to think about that. Mobile was pretty bad. But his son had it right. And if that wasn’t a scary thought, it would do till a really spooky one came along.

  “Makes you see why the Race doesn’t care much about ships, too,” Jonathan added. “I wouldn’t want to live here, either.”

  “I had the same thought,” Sam said. “But their ports can’t all be like this. Sure, Mobile is a port, but so is Los Angeles.”

  “Good point,” Jonathan allowed. He suddenly grinned. “They’ve sent us to the South Pole, and now to this place. Maybe they’re trying to tell us they really don’t want us gallivanting all over the landscape.”

  “Maybe they are. Too bad, in that case,” Sam said. “Even Rizzaffi is interesting, in a horrible kind of way.”

  “Sure it is,” his son said. “Besides, the more the Race shows us they don’t want us to do something, the likelier we are to want to do it. Sort of reminds me of how I felt about you and Mom when I was sixteen.”

  “It would,” Sam said darkly, and they both laughed. They could laugh now. Back then, Sam had often wanted to clout his one and only son over the head with a baseball bat. It had probably been mutual, too. Sure it was, Sam though. But, by God, he was the one who really had it coming. Not me. Of course not me.

  Kassquit liked Rizzaffi no better than did the wild Big Uglies. She probably liked it less, and found it more appalling. The Tosevites who’d come to Home on the Admiral Peary were at least used to weather, to variations on a theme. They’d lived on the surface of a planet. She hadn’t. The air conditioning aboard a starship had no business changing. If it did, something was badly wrong somewhere.

  Even ordinary weather on Home disconcerted her. The change in temperature from day to night seemed wrong. It felt unnatural to her, even though she knew it was anything but. But in Sitneff the change from what she was used to hadn’t been extreme. In Rizzaffi, it was.

  She felt as if she were breathing soup. Whenever she left the hotel, cooling moisture clung to her skin instead of evaporating as it did in drier climates. She envied the Race, which did not sweat but panted. Ordinary males and females kept their hides dry—except for contact with the clammy outside air. She couldn’t. And if her sweat didn’t evaporate, she wasn’t cooled, or not to any great degree. She not only breathed soup; she might as well have been cooking in it.

  The wild Big Uglies kept going out in the horrible weather again and again. Kassquit soon gave up. They really were wild to get a look at everything they could, and came back to the hotel talking about the strange animals and stranger plants they had seen. Their guide seemed downright smug about what an unusual place Rizzaffi was. Kassquit recognized the difference between unusual and enjoyable. The Americans didn’t seem to.

  When Sam Yeager talked about the fibyen, Kassquit read about the animal and
saw a picture of it at the terminal in her room. Having done that, she knew more about it than he did. He’d seen one in the flesh, and she hadn’t, but so what? To her, something on a monitor was as real as something seen in person. How could it be otherwise when she’d learned almost everything she knew about the universe outside her starship from the computer network?

  Almost everything. She kept looking at the way Jonathan and Karen Yeager formed a pair bond. She eyed Linda and Tom de la Rosa, too, but not so much and not in the same way. When she looked at Sam Yeager’s hatchling and his mate, she kept thinking, This could have been mine.

  That it could have been hers was unlikely. She knew as much. But Jonathan Yeager had been her first sexual partner—her only sexual partner. Ttomalss had offered to bring other wild Big Ugly males up from the surface of Tosev 3, but she had always declined. She could not keep them on the starship permanently, and parting with them after forming an emotional bond hurt too much to contemplate. She’d done it once, with Jonathan, and it had been knives in her spirit. Do it again? Do it again and again? Her hand shaped the negative gesture. Better not to form the bond in the first place. So she thought, anyway.

  She also noticed Karen Yeager watching her. She understood jealousy. Of course she understood it. It gnawed at her whenever she saw Jonathan and Karen happy and comfortable together.

  You have him. I do not. Why are you jealous? Kassquit wondered. Because she hadn’t been raised as a Big Ugly, she needed a long time to see what a wild Tosevite would have understood right away. You have him, but I had him once, for a little while. Do you wonder if he wants me back?

  She took a certain sour pleasure in noting those suspicious glances from the wild female Tosevite. She also realized—again, much more slowly than she might have—why Karen Yeager had wanted her to put on wrappings: to reduce her attractiveness. Males and females of the Race could demonstrate such foolishness during mating season, but happily did without it the rest of the year. But Big Uglies, as Kassquit knew too well, were always in season. It complicated their lives. She wondered how they’d ever managed to create any kind of civilization when they had that kind of handicap.

  A good many members of the Race remained convinced that the Big Uglies hadn’t created any kind of civilization. They were certain the Tosevites had stolen everything they knew from the Race. That would have been more convincing if the Big Uglies hadn’t fought the conquest fleet to a standstill when it first came to Tosev 3. Kassquit had occasionally pointed this out to males and females who mocked the Big Uglies—mocked her, in effect, for what was she if not a Big Ugly by hatching?

  They always seemed surprised when she did that. They hadn’t thought it through. They knew they were superior. They didn’t have to think it through.

  No one in Rizzaffi had ever seen a Big Ugly before, except in video. Wild or citizen of the Empire didn’t matter. At the hotel, the staff treated her about the same as the American Tosevites. She wasn’t convinced the staff could tell the difference. She didn’t say anything about that. She feared she would find out she was right.

  She sat glumly in the refectory, eating a supper that wasn’t anything special. The starship where she’d lived for so long had had better food than this. She didn’t stop to remember that that food had mostly Tosevite origins, though after the colonization fleet arrived some of the meat and grain came from species native to Home.

  As often happened, she was eating by herself. The American Big Uglies did not invite her to join them. To make matters worse, they chattered among themselves in their own language, so she couldn’t even eavesdrop. She told herself she didn’t want to. She knew she was lying.

  And then a surprising thing happened. One of the wild Tosevites got up and came over to her table. She had no trouble recognizing him, thanks to his brown skin. “I greet you, Researcher,” he said politely.

  “And I greet you, Major Coffey,” Kassquit answered.

  “May I sit down?” the Tosevite asked.

  “Yes. Please do,” Kassquit said. Then she asked a question of her own: “Why do you want to?”

  “To be sociable,” he replied. “That is the word, is it not?—sociable.”

  “That is the word, yes.” Kassquit made the affirmative gesture.

  Coffey sat down. The table, like most in the refectory, had been adapted—not very well—to Tosevite hindquarters and posture. The wild Big Ugly said, “What do you think of Rizzaffi?”

  “Not much,” Kassquit answered at once. That startled a laugh out of Coffey. She asked, “What is your opinion of this place?”

  “About the same as yours,” he said. “When I was a hatchling, I lived in the southeastern United States. Summers there are very warm and very humid. But this city beats any I ever saw.” He added an emphatic cough to show Rizzaffi was much worse than any other place he knew.

  He used the Race’s language in the same interesting way as Sam Yeager. He spoke fluently, but every once in a while an odd or offbeat phrase would come through. Kassquit suspected those were idioms the wild Big Uglies translated literally from their own language. Had they done it often, it would have been annoying. As things were, piquant seemed the better word.

  Kassquit said as much. Major Coffey’s face showed amusement. Kassquit wished her own features made such responses. But Ttomalss hadn’t—couldn’t have—responded to her when she tried to learn to smile as a hatchling, and the ability never developed. Coffey said, “So you find us worth a laugh, then?”

  “That is not what I meant,” Kassquit said. “Some of your ways of putting things would make fine additions to the language.”

  “I thank you,” the wild Big Ugly said. “Your language has certainly hatched many new words in English.”

  “Yes, I can see how that might be—words for things you did not have before you met the Race,” Kassquit said.

  “Many of those, certainly,” Coffey agreed. “But also others. We sometimes say credit, for instance, when we mean money.” The first word he stressed was in the Race’s language, the second in his own. He went on, “And we will often use an interrogative cough by itself when we want to say, ‘What do you mean?’ or an emphatic cough to mean something like, ‘I should say so!’ ”

  “But that is a barbarism!” Kassquit exclaimed. “The Race has never used the coughs by themselves.”

  “I know. But we are not talking about the Race’s language right now. We are talking about English. What would be a barbarism in your language is just new slang in ours. English is a language that has always borrowed and adapted a lot from other tongues it has met.”

  “How very strange,” Kassquit said. “The Race’s language is not like that.”

  “No, eh?” Frank Coffey laughed a noisy Tosevite laugh. “What about ginger?”

  “That is something the Race did not have before it came to Tosev 3,” Kassquit said, a little defensively. Even more defensively, she added, “To me, it would only be a spice. Biologically, I am as much a Tosevite as you are.”

  “Yes, of course.” Coffey laughed again, on a different note. “Back on Tosev 3, though, I would not have expected to sit down to supper with a female without wrappings; I will say that.”

  “Well, you are not on Tosev 3,” Kassquit replied with some irritation. “I follow the Empire’s customs, not yours. Karen Yeager already bothered me about this. I say your view is foolishness. You are the guests here; the Empire is your host. If anything, you should adapt to our customs, not the other way round.”

  “I was not complaining,” the wild Big Ugly said. “I was merely observing.”

  Kassquit started to accept that in the polite spirit in which it seemed to have been offered. Then she stopped with her reply unspoken. She sent Frank Coffey a sharp look. How had he meant what he’d just said? Was he making an observation, or was he observing . . . her?

  And if he was observing her, what did he have in mind? What did she think about whatever he might have in mind? Those were both interesting questions. Since
Kassquit wasn’t sure what she thought about whatever he might have in mind, she decided she didn’t need to know the answers right away.

  Without even noticing she’d done it, she made the affirmative gesture. She didn’t need to know this instant, sure enough. Frank Coffey would spend a lot of time—probably the rest of his life—on Home.

  And if he was interested, and if she was interested, they both might pass the time more pleasantly than if not. Or, on the other hand, they might quarrel. No way to know ahead of time. That helped make Tosevite social relationships even more complicated than they would have been otherwise.

  Was the experiment worth attempting, then? She knew she was getting ahead of herself, reading too much into what might have been a chance remark. But she also knew Tosevite males probably would show interest if an opportunity presented itself. And she knew she probably would, too. Compared to Tosevite males, Tosevite females might be less aggressive. Compared to the Race . . . She was a Tosevite, no doubt about it.

  * * *

  Atvar watched with a certain wry amusement as the shuttlecraft returned from Rizzaffi. Nothing could have persuaded him to go there. He knew better. You could come down with a skin fungus just by sticking your snout outdoors. The place made much of Tosev 3 seem pleasant by comparison.

  He wondered if suggesting they visit Rizzaffi had been an insult of sorts, one too subtle for them to understand. That was risky. Sam Yeager had a feeling for such things. Atvar shrugged. He’d find out.

  One after another, the Big Uglies came off the shuttlecraft. Even from the terminal, Atvar had no trouble recognizing Kassquit, because she did not wear wrappings the way the wild Tosevites did. She was a strange creature, as much like a female of the Race as a Big Ugly could be. The more Atvar got to know her, the more he wondered if she came close enough. If all the Big Uglies on Tosev 3 were like her, would they make satisfactory citizens of the Empire?

  He sighed. He really couldn’t say. She remained essentially Tosevite, essentially different, in a way the Rabotevs and Hallessi didn’t. With them, cultural similarity overwhelmed biological differences. They were variations on a theme also expressed in the Race. Big Uglies weren’t. No matter what cultural trappings were painted on them, they remained different underneath.