“It is possible that they may,” replied Atvar, who thought it was probable that they would. A starship from the SSSR was supposed to be on the way, in fact—but then, the SSSR’s rulers had killed off their emperor, something the fleetlord did not intend to tell Herrep. “If they succeed in coming here, they will have earned it, will they not? One group of independent Big Uglies, the Nipponese, have an emperor whose line of descent, they claim, runs back over five thousand of our years.”
“Still a parvenu next to the Emperor,” Herrep said. Atvar made the affirmative gesture. The protocol master sighed. “Still, I could wish they had got here first. We shall just have to endure these others.”
“They are all nuisances, whether they come from empires or not-empires,” Atvar said. With a sigh of his own that came from years of experience, much of which he would rather not have had, he went on, “It may almost be just as well that many of them have kept their independence. They are too different from us. We had little trouble assimilating the Rabotevs and Hallessi, and we thought building the Empire would always be easy. Even if we do eventually succeed with the Big Uglies, they have taught us otherwise.”
“You would know better than I,” Herrep said. “Aside from the obvious fact that snoutcounting is ridiculous, everything I have seen of these Big Uglies—the ones who have come to Home—suggests they are at least moderately civilized.”
Atvar made the affirmative gesture. “Oh, yes. I would agree with you. The American Tosevites sent the best they had. I was not worried about their lack of civilization, especially not here on Home. I was worried about how fast they progress in science and technology, and about how different from us they are sexually and socially. I do wonder if those two difficulties are related.”
“What could we do if they are?”
“As of now, nothing has occurred to me—or, so far as I know, to anyone else.”
“Then why waste time wondering?”
“You are a sensible male, Protocol Master. Of course this is what you would say,” Atvar replied. “The trouble is, the Big Uglies make me wonder about the good sense of good sense, if that makes any sense to you.” By Herrep’s negative gesture, it didn’t. Atvar wasn’t surprised. Nothing about Tosev 3 really made sense to the Race. Trouble? Oh, yes. Tosev 3 made plenty of trouble.
Dr. Melanie Blanchard and Mickey Flynn were floating in the Admiral Peary’s control room when Glen Johnson pulled himself up there. Johnson felt a small twinge of jealousy listening to them talk as he came up the access tube. He knew that was idiotic, which didn’t prevent the twinge. Yes, Dr. Blanchard was a nice-looking woman— one of the nicer-looking women for more than ten light-years in any direction—but it wasn’t as if she were his. And she would be going down to the surface of Home before long, a journey on which neither he nor Flynn could hope to follow.
“It’s too bad,” she was saying when Johnson emerged. “That is really too bad.”
“What is?” Johnson asked.
“News from Earth,” Mickey Flynn said.
Johnson waited. Flynn said no more. Johnson hadn’t really expected that he would. With such patience as the junior pilot could muster, he asked, “What news from Earth?”
“An Arab bomb in Jerusalem killed Dr. Chaim Russie,” Melanie Blanchard said. “He was the grandson of Dr. Moishe Russie, the man for whom the Lizards’ medical college for people is named.”
“Did you know this Chaim Russie?” Johnson asked.
“I met him once. He was still a boy then,” she answered. “I knew Reuven Russie, his father, a little better. He’d married a widow. She had a boy, and they’d had Chaim and another son of their own, who I think was also a doctor, and they were happy.” She shook her head. “Reuven Russie would have been up in his eighties when this happened, so he might not have lived to see it. For his sake, I hope he didn’t.”
Johnson nodded. The news was fresh here, but all those years old back on Earth. Dr. Blanchard had taken that into account. A lot of people didn’t. Johnson said, “Was the bomb meant for Lizards or for Jews?”
“Who knows?” she answered. “I don’t think the bombers were likely to be fussy. They weren’t before I went into cold sleep, anyhow.”
“No, I suppose not.” Johnson looked at Flynn. “There were advantages to being out in the asteroid belt for so long. News from Earth had to be big to mean much to us. When the Lizards fought the Nazis, that mattered—especially because they blew up the Germans’ spaceship.”
“The Hermann Göring,” Flynn said.
“Yeah.” Glen Johnson felt a certain dull surprise that the name didn’t rouse more hatred in him than it did. Back in the vanished age before the Lizards came, Hitler had been public enemy number one, and the fat Luftwaffe chief his right-hand man. Then all of a sudden the Nazis and the USA were on the same side, both battling desperately to keep from being enslaved by the Race. Göring went from zero to hero in one swell foop. If the Germans started shooting missiles at the Lizards, more power to ’em. And if they’d been building the missiles to shoot them at England or the Russians, well, that was then and this was now. Nothing like a new enemy to turn an old one into a bosom buddy.
That was then and this was now. Now was unimaginably distant for anybody old enough to remember the days before the Lizards came: the most ancient of the ancient back on Earth, and a handful of people here who’d cheated time through cold sleep. He looked out through the antireflection-coated glass. That was Home unwinding beneath him, in its gold and greens and blues: seas surrounded by lands, not continents as islands in the world ocean. The Admiral Peary was coming up toward Sitneff, where Sam Yeager and the rest of the American delegation were staying.
“Looks like a pretty good dust storm heading their way,” Johnson said. The gold-brown clouds obscured a broad swath of ground.
“That kind of weather is probably why the Lizards have nictitating membranes,” Dr. Blanchard said.
“Gesundheit,” Mickey Flynn responded gravely. “I’ve heard the term before, but I never knew quite what it meant.”
Why, you sandbagging so-and-so, Johnson thought. If that wasn’t bait to get the nice-looking doctor to show off and be pleasant, he’d never heard of such a thing. He only wished he’d thought of it himself.
Melanie Blanchard was only too happy to explain: “It’s their third eyelid. A lot of animals back on Earth have them, too. It doesn’t go up and down. It goes across the eye like a windshield wiper and sweeps away the dust and grit.”
“Oh,” Flynn said. He paused, no doubt for effect. “I always thought it had something to do with cigarettes.”
“With cigarettes?” Dr. Blanchard looked puzzled.
Johnson did, too, but only for a moment. Then he groaned. His groan made the doctor think in a different way. She groaned, too, even louder. Flynn smiled beatifically. He would have seemed the picture of innocence if he hadn’t been so obviously guilty.
“That’s one more thing these evil people did when they shanghaied me,” Johnson told Dr. Blanchard. “I used to spend more of my time on Earth than I did in space, and I used to smoke. So when they tied me up and carried me away on the Lewis and Clark, I had to quit cold turkey.”
“Take a good look at him,” Flynn told the doctor. “Can you imagine anyone who’d want to tie him up and carry him away? Anyone in his right mind, I mean?”
She ignored that and replied to Johnson: “In a way, you know, they did you a favor. Smoking tobacco is one of the dumbest things you can do if you want to live to a ripe old age. Lung cancer, heart disease, stroke, emphysema . . . All sorts of pleasant things can speed you out the door.”
“I liked it,” Johnson said. “Nothing like a cigarette after dinner, or after . . .” He sighed. It had been a very, very long time since he’d had a cigarette after sex. He tried to remember just how long, and with whom. Close to seventy years now, even if he’d managed to dodge a lot of them.
Now Mickey Flynn surveyed him with an eye that, if it wasn’t jau
ndiced, definitely had some kind of liver trouble. He knew why perfectly well. He’d managed to hint about sex in front of Dr. Blanchard. If he hinted about it, he might make her interested in it, perhaps even with him.
Or he might not. Doctors were unflappable about such matters. And Melanie Blanchard didn’t like—really didn’t like—cigarettes. “Damn things stink,” she said.
“Been so long now since I’ve had one, I’d probably say you were right,” Johnson admitted. “But I sure used to like them.”
“Lots of people did,” she answered. “Lots of people back on Earth are paying for it, too. Back when disease was likely to kill you before you got old, I don’t suppose there was anything much wrong with tobacco. Something else would get you before it did. But now that we know something about medicine, now that most people can expect to live out their full span, smoking has to be one of the stupidest things anybody can do.”
Johnson busied himself with looking out the window. He hadn’t had a cigarette in something close to fifteen years of body time. If a kindly Lizard offered him a smoke, though, he suspected he would take one. A male of the Race who hadn’t been able to enjoy a taste of ginger in a long time probably felt the same way about his chosen herb.
Johnson never got tired of the view. One of the reasons he’d become a flier was so he could look down and see the world from far above. Now he was looking down at another world from even farther above. As such things went, Home was an Earthlike planet. A lot of the same geological and biological forces were at work both places. But, while the results they’d produced were similar enough for beings evolved on one planet to live fairly comfortably on the other, they were a long way from identical. The differences were what fascinated him.
He got so involved staring at an enormous dry riverbed, he almost missed the intercom: “Colonel Johnson! Colonel Glen Johnson! Report at once to Scooter Bay One! Colonel Johnson! Colonel Glen Johnson! Report at once to—”
“ ’Bye,” he said, and launched himself down the tube he’d ascended a little while before. As long as nobody was screaming at him to report to Lieutenant General Healey’s office, he’d cheerfully go wherever he was told. He’d go to see Healey, too; he was military down to his toes. But he wouldn’t be cheerful about it.
“Good—you got here fast,” a technician said when he came gliding up.
“What’s going on?” Johnson asked.
“We got a Mayday call from the Lizards, if you can believe it,” the tech answered. “Their stuff is good, but it looks like it isn’t quite perfect. One of their scooters had its main engines go out not far from us. We’re closer than any of their ships, and they ask if we can bring the scooter crew back here till they make pickup.”
“I’ll go get ’em,” Johnson said, and started climbing into the spacesuit that hung by the inner airlock door. He paused halfway through. Laughing, he went on, “They’ll fluoroscope every inch of those poor Lizards before they let ’em into their ships. Gotta make sure they aren’t smuggling ginger, you know.”
“Well, sure,” the technician said. “They’ll probably send that Rabotev for the pickup, too. He doesn’t care anything about the stuff—though he might care about the money he can bring in for smuggling it.”
“There’s a thought.” Johnson finished getting into the spacesuit. He ran diagnostic checks on the scooter as fast as he could without scanting them. He didn’t want to get in trouble out there and need rescuing himself. When the outer airlock door opened he guided the scooter out with the steering jets. The tech gave him a bearing on the crippled Lizard scooter. His own radar identified the target. He fired a longish blast with his rear motor. The Admiral Peary shrank behind him.
He used the Lizards’ signaling frequency: “I greet you, members of the Race. Are you well? Do you need anything more than transportation? This is a scooter from the Tosevite starship, come to pick you up.” Partly by eye and partly by radar, he decided when to make the burn that would bring him to a halt near the Lizard craft in difficulties.
“We thank you, Tosevite. Except for engine failure, we are well.” The Lizard who’d answered was silent for a moment, probably pausing for a rueful laugh. “These things are not supposed to happen. They are especially not supposed to happen when you Big Uglies can make fun of us for bad engineering.”
“Yours is better than ours, and everyone knows it.” Johnson peered ahead. Yes, that was a scooter of the sort the Race built. “Nobody’s engineering is perfect, though. We already know that, too.”
“You are generous to show so much forbearance,” the Lizard replied. “Were our roles reversed, we would mock you.”
“If you like, you may think of me as laughing on the inside,” Johnson said. “Meanwhile, why not leave your scooter and come over to mine once I kill my relative velocity? I will take you back to my ship. Your friends can pick you up at their convenience.”
“It shall be done, superior sir,” the Lizard said. By the way the two members of the Race handled themselves as they pushed off from their disabled craft, they were experienced in free fall. Johnson put one of them in front of him and one behind, so as not to disturb his scooter’s center of mass too much.
As he burned for the Admiral Peary, he made the same sort of remark he had with the technician: “They will fumigate you before they let you back on any of your own ships.” His passengers were silent. They would have been silent if they were laughing, too. He looked at each of them in turn. Laughing, they weren’t.
Jonathan Yeager was glad his father had talked the Race into letting him and the rest of the American delegation come along to Preffilo for the imperial audience, and not only because a dust storm filled the air in Sitneff with a brown, gritty haze. The humans had been to a lot of places on Home, but not to the imperial capital. Except for the trip to the park near the South Pole, Jonathan had been less impressed than he’d expected. If you’d seen one Lizard city, you’d damn near seen them all. They varied among themselves much less than American towns did.
Figuring out why wasn’t hard. Cities in the USA were only a few centuries old, and showed wildly different influences of geography and culture. Cities here on Home differed one from another in geography. In culture? Not at all. They’d all been part of the same culture since long before modern man took over from the Neanderthals. They’d all been improved and reworked time and again, and they all felt pretty much the same.
Preffilo wasn’t like that, anyhow. Jonathan had expected a bustling imperial capital, something on the order of London in Victoria’s day or Moscow when he went into cold sleep. But Preffilo wasn’t like that, either. Home had its bureaucrats, its males and females who ran things, and they came to the imperial capital to hear their sovereign’s wishes. They didn’t make a swarming mess out of the city, though. And the reason they didn’t was simple: the Emperor didn’t want them to.
In a way, Preffilo was like Kyoto in the days when the Emperor of Japan was a figurehead and the shogun ran things. It preserved the way things had been a long time before (here, a long, long, long time before), back when what was now only symbolic had been real.
Stretching Earthly comparisons, though, went only so far. The Emperor here was no figurehead. He’d never been a figurehead, not—so far as Jonathan knew—throughout the whole long history of the Race. Most Emperors tempered their authority with common sense. It was a strong custom that they should. The Race respected custom more than any humans, even the Japanese, did. But there were occasional exceptions scattered through the Lizards’ history, some glorious, others—rather more—horrible. If an Emperor wanted to stir things up, he could.
Along with feeling like the beating heart of a power greater than any Earth had ever known, Preffilo also felt old. Even to the Lizards, for whom everything within the scope of written human history seemed no more antique than month before last, their capital felt old. Some Englishman had earned immortality of a sort by calling vanished Petra a rose-red city half as old as time. (It was immortal
ity only of a sort, for nobody bothered to remember the rest of the poem these days, or even the Englishman’s name.)
There were similar poems about Preffilo in the language of the Race. The differences were twofold. For one thing, Preffilo wasn’t just half as old as time. It had been a going concern for thousands of years before Home was unified. In those days, mammoths and cave bears must have seemed about as likely to inherit the Earth as skulking human beings. And, for another, Preffilo wasn’t a vanished city. It was still a going concern, and looked forward to the next hundred thousand years with only minimal changes.
Geography, again, played a role in that. The Race’s capital happened not to lie in earthquake country. Only how well a building was built said how long it would stay up. The Lizards commonly built very well. Along with the palace, a fair number of structures in Preffilo were supposed to be older than the unification of Home, going back to what the Race called ancientest history. Jonathan was hardly in any position to disagree with what the guide told him.
The humans’ guide here was a male named Jussop. Jonathan liked him better than Trir. He didn’t seem to take questions as personal affronts, the way she sometimes did. Of course, not many folk came to see Sitneff; the tour guide business there was underdeveloped. Things weren’t like that in the capital. Lizards, Rabotevs, and Hallessi all visited here. Humans? They might be out of the ordinary, but Jussop would accommodate them.
Once they were settled in their hotel, he took them to the mausoleum where urns holding the ashes of eons’ worth of past Emperors were on display. Jonathan wasn’t sorry to escape the hotel. The Race had tried to keep its guests comfortable, but it hadn’t done the best job in the world. The rooms back in Sitneff were a lot more inviting. Considering how much they left to be desired, that wasn’t good news.
Even the little bus that took them from the hotel to the mausoleum had seats that fit human backsides worse than those on the bus in Sitneff. Jonathan grumbled, but in English. His father might have been diplomacy personified. Ignoring the miserable seats, Sam Yeager asked Jussop, “How did you arrange for us to have a private viewing of the mausoleum? I hope we do not inconvenience too many males and females who want to commune with the spirits of Emperors past.”
Homeward Bound Page 33
