Homeward Bound

by Harry Turtledove

  More guards stood outside Atvar’s door. They bent into the posture of respect. “We greet you, superior Tosevite,” they said.

  “And I greet you,” Sam answered. “The fleetlord is expecting me.”

  As if to prove him right, Atvar opened the door just then. The U.S. ambassador and the Lizard exchanged polite greetings. Atvar said, “Please come in.” Yeager did. His guards, for a wonder, didn’t follow. Even they could see no assassins were likely to lurk in Atvar’s room.

  Atvar had a human-style chair in the room. He waved Sam to it. “I thank you,” Sam said. He handed the petition to the fleetlord. “Is everything as it ought to be? If it is not, I will copy it over again.” Or maybe I’ll just jump out a window, depending, he thought.

  “Let me have a look at this. As you know, it must be perfect,” Atvar said. Sam made the affirmative gesture. He knew that all too well. Atvar went on, “Your handwriting is not bad. It is not particularly fluid, but it is clear. I have seen plenty of males and females with worse. They are in a hurry, and they scribble. You obviously took pains over this.”

  “I should hope I did!” Sam used an emphatic cough. “When I did not take enough pains, I made mistakes and had to start over.”

  “The process is not supposed to be easy,” Atvar said. “It is designed to weed out those who seek an audience for only frivolous reasons. Let me see here. . . . I do believe, Ambassador, that everything is as it should be. I cannot see how the protocol masters could reject this petition on any stylistic grounds.”

  At first, that so delighted Sam, he thought Atvar had said the petition was sure to be approved. After a moment, though, he realized Atvar hadn’t said any such thing. “What other reasons are there for rejecting it?” he asked. He’d come up with a few of his own—what would the fleetlord find?

  “If the Emperor does not care to see you, there is no more to be said,” Atvar answered. “I do not believe this to be the case, but it may be. If certain courtiers do not wish you to see the Emperor, that is also a difficulty. But in that case, there may be ways around it.”

  “Such as?” Sam asked. Lizard politics at this intimate level was a closed book to humans. How did members of the Race get what they wanted in the face of opposition?

  “If we are able to learn who has set out to addle your egg, perhaps we can appeal to a higher-ranking opponent,” Atvar answered. “Such ploys are not guaranteed to succeed, but they are not hopeless.”

  “This is very much the same sort of thing I would do in a Tosevite factional squabble,” Sam said. “In some ways, our two species are not so very different.”

  “In some ways, possibly not,” the fleetlord said. “In others . . . In others, the difference is as large as the distance between our sun and the star Tosev.”

  “It could be.” Something occurred to Sam. “I have a question,” he said. Atvar made the affirmative gesture. Sam asked, “Since I do not wear body paint, how will the imperial laver and the imperial limner deal with me?”

  Atvar started to answer, then stopped short. “How do you know about the imperial laver and the imperial limner? Have you been researching imperial audiences on the computer network?”

  Sam made the negative gesture. “No. As a matter of fact, I have been reading Gone with the Wind. Have you ever read it?”

  Atvar’s mouth dropped open in a startled laugh. “That old kwaffa berry? By the spirits of Emperors past, I had to go through it in a college literature course. I have hardly thought about it from that day to this, either. How did you ever get your fingerclaws on it?”

  “I found it in a secondhand bookstore,” Yeager answered. “I do not suppose imperial ceremonial would have changed much from that time to this.” There was one area where humanity and the Race differed widely.

  “No, probably not,” Atvar agreed. He took endless millennia of unchanging ceremonial for granted. “Gone with the Wind?” He laughed again. “And how do you like it?”

  “Quite a bit, actually,” Sam answered. “What did you think of it?” They spent the next hour happily picking the novel to pieces.

  The Race’s cooks were willing to scramble eggs for the Americans, though they didn’t eat eggs themselves. Karen Yeager worked hard not to remind herself that the creatures these eggs came from would have scared the hell out of a chicken. The flavor was about three-quarters of what it should have been. Put enough salt on them and they weren’t bad. Speaking of salt, she also had a couple of slices of aasson on her plate. Aasson was smoked and salt-cured zisuili meat. It came closer to bacon than the eggs did to hen’s eggs, but it was salty as the devil.

  Nothing on Home took the place of coffee. Instant came down from the Admiral Peary. The Lizards thought the stuff was nasty, but they—mostly—stayed polite about it. Karen and Jonathan wouldn’t have been polite if they couldn’t have it. They both drank it without cream: Jonathan plain, Karen with sugar. The Race used sugar, though less than people did. Tom and Linda de la Rosa liked their coffee light. That they couldn’t have. Except for the Americans’ lab rats, they were the only mammals on the planet. To the Lizards, the very idea of milk was revolting.

  “Nasty,” Tom said, not for the first time. “But I’d be even nastier without my caffeine fix. Might as well be ginger for me.” He sipped from his mug, made a horrible face, and then sipped again.

  Trir came into the hotel refectory. “I greet you, Tosevites,” she said cheerfully. “Today we are going to go for a bus ride out into the country. Does that not sound pleasant?” She couldn’t smile and simper the way human tour guides did; her face wasn’t made for it. But she did the best with what she had.

  In English, Jonathan murmured, “Has she forgotten how snotty she acted when mating season was just getting started?”

  “She probably has,” Karen answered. “I don’t think she had any control over that.”

  Her husband made the sort of face Tom de la Rosa had. “I didn’t have much control over the urge to kick her in the teeth,” he muttered.

  “What is that you are saying?” Trir asked. She didn’t sound angry or contemptuous, the way she had before when she heard English. She just seemed curious.

  The humans in the refectory all looked at one another. Karen knew what everybody else had to be thinking: how do we tell her what a monster she was, and do we tell her anything at all? The best diplomacy might have been just to keep quiet. Try as she would, though, Karen couldn’t stomach that. She said, “We could not help but notice how much friendlier you are now than you were when your mating season began.”

  “Oh, that.” Trir fluttered her fingers in what couldn’t have been anything but embarrassment. “Take no notice of it. Mating season is a time when ordinary rules and ordinary behavior go running out the door.” A human would have said they flew out the window. It came down to the same thing. The guide went on, “If I did or said anything to offend, please accept my apologies.” She bent into the posture of respect.

  If she’d done or said anything to offend? For a little while there, she hadn’t done or said anything that didn’t offend. But she didn’t seem to remember how nasty she’d been, and she did seem sorry for it.

  “Let it go, then,” Karen said. Jonathan and Linda de la Rosa made the affirmative gesture. What else could you do, short of kicking the guide in the teeth as Jonathan had wanted?

  “I thank you,” Trir said. “Now, as I was telling you, we are going to go out into the country this morning, out to a zisuili ranch. Zisuili are domestic animals valuable for their meat and hides, and they—”

  “We know something about zisuili,” Linda de la Rosa broke in. “The colonization fleet brought them to Tosev 3.”

  “Ah, yes, of course—it would have,” Trir agreed brightly. “They are some of our most important meat animals.” She pointed to Karen’s aasson. “As you see.”

  “They have also caused some of the most important environmental damage on our planet,” said Tom de la Rosa, who’d made a career out of the environment
al effects Home’s imported plants and animals were having on Earth. “They eat everything, and they eat it right down to the ground.”

  “They are efficient feeders,” Trir agreed, which meant the same thing but sounded a lot better.

  “I want to go see the zisuili,” Jonathan said in English. “I’ve seen Lizards with wigs, by God. Now I want to see them riding around on whatever they use for horses. I want to see them with ten-gallon hats on their heads and with six-shooters in their holsters. I want to hear them hissing, ‘Yippee!’ and playing zisuiliboy music around their campfires.”

  That produced a pretty good stunned silence. After half a minute or so, Karen broke it: “I want to see you committed to an asylum for the terminally silly.” Jonathan didn’t come out with quite so many absurd remarks as his father did, but the ones he turned loose were doozies.

  “What is a zisuiliboy?” Trir asked. She must have recognized the word—or, here, part of a word—from her language in the midst of the English.

  “Believe me, you do not want to know,” Karen told her. Trir plainly believed nothing of the sort. Karen sighed and went on, “It is nothing but a joke—and a foolish joke at that.” She sent Jonathan a severe look. He seemed notably deficient in anything resembling a sense of shame.

  About forty-five minutes later, all the Americans rode with Trir toward the zisuili ranch. Kassquit came along, too. She hadn’t seen much more of Home than the Americans had, and she was bound to be at least as curious.

  The bus had windows that were easy to see out of but hard to see into. That kept members of the Race from gawking, and possibly from causing accidents. The ride out to the ranch took a little more than an hour. The border between city and country was not abrupt. Buildings gradually got farther and father apart. The countryside looked not too different from the way it did in the rural areas outside of Los Angeles. It was scrubland and chaparral, with bushes giving way here and there to patches of what Home used for trees.

  And then Karen almost fell off her seat. She pointed out the window. Sure as hell, there was a Lizard mounted on something that looked like a cross between a zebra and a duckbilled dinosaur. The creature was striped in a pattern of gold and dark brown that probably helped it fade into the background at any distance. To her vast relief, the Lizard on its back sported neither cowboy hat nor Colt revolver, nor even a wig. Even so, when she glanced over to Jonathan she saw him looking almost unbearably smug.

  “What is the name of that riding beast?” she asked Trir. If she sounded slightly strangled, well, who could blame her?

  “That is an eppori,” the guide answered. “Epporyu still have their uses, even after all these years of mechanical civilization. They require no fuel, and they can go places where wheeled vehicles would have difficulties. And some males and females enjoy riding them, though the attraction has always been beyond me.”

  “We have animals like that back on Tosev 3,” Sam Yeager said. “When I was a hatchling, I lived on a farm. Back then, many more animals were in use than powered vehicles. I learned to ride—I had to.”

  “Would you care to ride an eppori?” Trir asked.

  “Maybe briefly,” he answered. “I was never one who enjoyed riding animals much. Vehicles are much more comfortable.”

  “This is also my attitude,” Trir said. Her eye turrets swiveled over the other humans. “Perhaps some of your colleagues—or even you, Kassquit—would be interested in trying this.”

  Kassquit promptly made the negative gesture. “I thank you, but no. I am happy enough with mechanical civilization. I do not have any of these atavistic impulses you mentioned.”

  “I will try, unless my odor frightens the epporyu,” Tom de la Rosa said. “I have ridden back on Tosev 3, for most of the reasons you mentioned. Riding animals find their own fuel, and they can travel almost anywhere—certainly anywhere the larger animals from Home that I study are likely to go.”

  One by one, the rest of the Americans agreed to make the effort. Karen was anything but enthusiastic. She hadn’t been on a horse for at least twenty years before going into cold sleep. Jonathan also looked dubious. The things we’ll do to keep from letting our friends down, Karen thought.

  The zisuili were not a problem. They looked like ankylosaurs with turreted eyes. All the Americans had seen them in person before, and knew they paid no particular attention to people. What the epporyu would do when they met humans might be a different story. People weren’t just going to look at them. They were going to try to get on their backs—if the animals would put up with it.

  Sam tried to be the first human on an eppori. Everybody had been willing to let him set foot on Home first. And everyone was just as unanimous in telling him he couldn’t ride first now. “You’re the one we can’t afford to lose,” Frank Coffey said in English, and added an emphatic cough. “Let ’em run away with one of us or trample him, but not you.” The other Americans nodded.

  “I’m outvoted,” Karen’s father-in-law said.

  “You bet you are, Dad,” Jonathan told him.

  Tom de la Rosa tried to claim first ride by saying he was the best horseman among them. The others—including Linda—pointedly observed that being able to ride a horse might not have thing one to do with riding an eppori. They settled who would ride first by a method that fascinated Trir—stone, paper, scissors. And when Karen’s stone smashed Frank Coffey’s scissors, she won the prize.

  Once she had it, she wasn’t sure she wanted it. “If it weren’t for the honor of the thing, I’d rather walk,” she said. But she walked toward the eppori that a zisuiliboy named Gatemp was holding for her.

  When she started to go to the creature’s left side, Gatemp made the negative gesture. “We mount from the right,” he said.

  “You would,” Karen muttered. The eppori swiveled an eye turret her way as she came up beside it. It made a snuffling noise that might have meant anything. She set a hand on its scaly hide. It felt like living, breathing crocodile leather. She asked Gatemp, “Is it all right to get up?”

  “I think so,” he answered. “Why not find out?”

  “Yes, why not?” Karen said grimly. She would have been awkward mounting from the left side. She was worse than awkward from the right. Gatemp’s mouth fell open in a laugh. She would have bet it would. A Lizard stirrup had only a bar on the bottom. Members of the Race could grip it with their toes. Karen couldn’t, but her foot did fit on it.

  Fortunately, the eppori seemed good-natured. It snuffled again, but didn’t buck or jump or do anything else too very horrifying. It plodded forward for a couple of strides, then turned one eye turret back toward her as if asking, Well, what do you want me to do now?

  The saddle was uncomfortable as could be. She ignored that; she wouldn’t be on long. “How do I control it?” she asked Gatemp.

  “With the reins, and with your legs, and with your voice.” He might have been talking about a horse, sure enough. After he gave her the basic instructions, he said, “Now you try. Make the eppori walk and go to the left.”

  “It shall be done,” she said, and hoped it would. She squeezed the scaly body with her knees and twitched the reins as he’d told her. The eppori walked. Karen felt like cheering. She tugged the reins to the left. The animal turned in that direction. She hadn’t come more than ten light-years to go riding, but by God she could!

  On the bus on the way back to Sitneff, Jonathan Yeager turned to his wife and said, “You smell like an eppori.”

  “So do you,” Karen answered. “We all do.”

  “Well, no,” Jonathan said. “Tom smells more like zisuili. But then, he was the one who stepped in it.”

  “You guys are never going to let me live that down, are you?” Tom de la Rosa’s voice rose in mock anger.

  “You’ll be famous on four planets, once the word gets around,” Jonathan’s father said. They’d been speaking English. He translated for Kassquit and Trir.

  “Being around animals larger than I am makes me nervous,”
Kassquit said. “Who knows what they will do next? They are animals, after all.” By the way she spoke, that should have been obvious to anybody.

  Jonathan, who’d grown up in the city, had a certain amount of sympathy for her point of view. But Kassquit had never even seen an animal in person, not till she got to Home. No wonder she was hinky about them now. Jonathan didn’t say any of that, though. The less he said that involved agreeing with Kassquit, the less trouble he’d have with Karen.

  Frank Coffey said, “Animals—most animals, I should say; I do not mean large carnivores or anything of the sort—are not so bad once you get to know them and to know what they are likely to do. Until that happens, though, it is only natural to be wary near them.”

  “Truth,” Sam Yeager said. “As I told you, I grew up on a farm, so I ought to know. We had the meanest mule in the county. A mule is a work animal and can be a riding animal, and is often stubborn. I was very careful around him until I figured out what he would put up with and what made him angry. After that, we got along well enough.”

  “I never heard that story before,” Jonathan said.

  “No? Well, maybe it is because you are stubborn as a mule yourself, and would not listen even if I told it.”

  Karen snickered. Jonathan gave her a dirty look, which only made her snicker again. But when he turned around and glanced at his father, Sam Yeager tipped him a wink. What was that supposed to mean? It wasn’t anything either Kassquit or Trir would notice. Was his old man making up the story about the mule so Kassquit would feel better? That would have been Jonathan’s guess, but he couldn’t prove it.

  They came to the outskirts of Sitneff just in time for the evening rush hour. It was crowded on the highway, but things didn’t coagulate the way they did in Los Angeles. The roads were adequate for the number of cars that used them. Jonathan sighed. There were times when seeing how smoothly the Lizards managed things made him feel very much the barbarian.

  When the bus stopped in front of the hotel, some small flying things were making small, rather sweet-sounding chirps from the shrubbery in front of the building. Jonathan listened with interest. He hadn’t heard many animals with even remotely musical calls on Home. Birdsong was unknown here. Till this moment, he hadn’t realized how much he missed it.