Homeward Bound

by Harry Turtledove

  “If they don’t get it now, they will pretty soon,” Karen said.

  “They may, anyhow,” Jonathan said. “Maybe rats can’t make it here. Maybe they won’t find anything to eat. Maybe the exterminators will get ’em. Maybe something local will think they’re delicious.”

  “Maybe,” Dr. Blanchard said. “But nobody’s ever gone broke betting on rats.”

  Senyahh held a strange creature by the tail. The creature was deceased. The bandage on the kitchen chief’s other hand said it hadn’t perished without putting up a fight. “What is this horrible thing, Exalted Fleetlord?” Senyahh demanded.

  Atvar eyed it with a grim sense of recognition. The tail was long and naked and scaly, which made the animal seem a little less alien. The creature’s body, though, was soft-skinned and furry. Its head had the flaps of skin Tosevite creatures used to concentrate sound waves for their hearing diaphragms. The head was, at the moment, somewhat the worse for wear.

  “What did you hit it with?” Atvar inquired.

  “A frying pan,” Senyahh answered. “It bit me anyhow. And I almost missed it. It is as fast as a beffel, but I never saw anything like it before. What is it?”

  “I believe it is called a rat.” Atvar pronounced the unfamiliar word as well as he could. “It is one of the escaped Tosevite animals. Congratulations on killing it.”

  “Oh, one of those horrible creatures,” Senyahh said. “I thought they would be bigger and uglier and go around on their hind legs.”

  “This is quite ugly enough, in my opinion,” Atvar said. “And I meant those congratulations. We believe the housekeeping staff let eight or ten rats escape. This is the first one of which we have seen the slightest trace.”

  Senyahh swung the dead beast by the tail. “It will cause no more trouble,” she declared, a hunter’s pride in her voice.

  “This one will not, no,” Atvar agreed. “But what of the others? What if they breed? What if they flourish? On Tosev 3, they are major pests. Do they have any diseases or predators here? I have my doubts.”

  The head of the kitchens had her own concerns. She asked, “Are they good to eat?”

  “I believe so, but the Big Uglies do not commonly consume them.” Atvar pointed to the female. “You are welcome to experiment on your own, but do not, do not, serve the results of your experiment to the American Tosevites—not even to Karen Yeager, with whom you quarreled.” He used an emphatic cough. “The cleaning crew that freed the rats has been sacked. If you give the Americans rat to eat, you will envy their fate. Do you understand me? Do I make myself plain?”

  “Yes, Exalted Fleetlord. It shall be done. Or rather, it shall not be done, no matter how tempting it may be. You have my word on it,” Senyahh declared.

  “All right. Take the miserable creature away, then,” Atvar said. “I am more familiar with these animals than I ever wanted to be.”

  After the kitchen chief left his room, Atvar said several pungent things. He did not blame the female who had killed the rat. She was only doing her job. The cleaning crew . . . Had it been up to him, they would have got worse than the sack. Their foolishness had endangered all of Home. Yes, Atvar knew more about rats than he wanted to. He knew much more about rats than any male or female who’d never been to Tosev 3.

  He hadn’t wanted the animals to come down to the surface of Home in the first place. He’d wondered if the Big Uglies had brought them here to wage their own brand of ecological warfare. He’d warned. He’d fussed. And he’d been undone not by the American Tosevites but by the hotel’s housekeeping staff. They’d decided they felt like playing with the animals. Now everyone would have to pay for it.

  Then Atvar made the negative gesture. The Big Uglies wouldn’t have to pay a thing. They might have got what they wanted. He couldn’t prove that, no matter how it seemed to him. But it hadn’t been their fault. That was only too obvious.

  He tried to look on the bright side of things, an exercise with which he’d had frequent practice on Tosev 3. Species from Home were making the Big Uglies’ planet more livable, more comfortable, for the Race. The Tosevites couldn’t make that sort of arrangement here on Home. All they could do was make nuisances of themselves. That, unfortunately, was an exercise with which they’d had frequent practice on Tosev 3.

  As if to prove the point, Sam Yeager chose that moment to telephone him. “I greet you, Ambassador,” Atvar said resignedly. “What can I do for you this morning?”

  “I would like to request permission to bring down another ten rats from the Admiral Peary to replace the ones that were allowed to escape,” the ambassador replied.

  “Oh, you would?” Atvar said.

  “Yes, please,” Sam Yeager said. “They are very useful to us because they let us test foods easily and conveniently. We were sorry to lose the ones the housekeepers released.”

  He made sure that got under Atvar’s scales. Atvar couldn’t do anything about it, either, because he’d earned the right. The fleetlord tried to stall: “I cannot decide this on my own. I will have to consult with local authorities.”

  “Back on Tosev 3, Fleetlord, we call that passing the buck.” Sam Yeager used three words of English. “It means seeking to evade responsibility. That is not like you. I hope to hear an answer very soon. Good day.” He broke the connection.

  Atvar hissed angrily. Some of the anger was aimed at the Big Ugly, the rest at himself. The ambassador was right: he did seek to evade responsibility for letting more rats come down to the surface of Home. Unlike the males and females who had never left this planet, he had a pretty good notion of how damaging the Tosevite creatures could be. Letting more of them come here, even caged, was not in the Race’s best interest.

  But if it was in the Big Uglies’ best interest . . . Atvar hissed again. Sam Yeager had come right out and said it was. The only way the Race could reject the ambassador’s request would be to insult the American Tosevites and possibly to jeopardize their health. Atvar did not care to be responsible for that. He did not think any other male or female would care for it, either.

  He wondered if he ought to make some calls anyhow, on the off chance he was wrong. His hand shaped the negative gesture. That struck him as pointless—and also as passing the buck, as Sam Yeager had put it.

  Instead of telephoning members of his own species, he called the Big Ugly back. “Why, hello, Fleetlord. I greet you,” Sam Yeager said, as politely as if they hadn’t been sparring not long before.

  “And I greet you,” Atvar replied, trying—with indifferent success, he feared—to match that politeness.

  “What can I do for you now?” the American Tosevite asked, still smoothly. “Does this have to do with what we were talking about a little while ago, or is it about something else?”

  “The same topic.” Atvar respected the Big Ugly for coming to the point, and respected him even more for doing so in an inoffensive way. “You have permission to bring ten more of these rats here. They are to remain caged at all times, as their predecessors were to have done.”

  “I thank you, Fleetlord, and I do understand the restrictions,” Sam Yeager said. “We agreed to them from the beginning. We have not violated them, either. It was your own folk who freed the rats still—I suppose—in this hotel.”

  Atvar didn’t like that I suppose. He also wasn’t happy that Sam Yeager was completely correct. With luck, the housekeepers who’d got more curious than they should have would have trouble finding work anywhere for the rest of their lives. Atvar would have loved to fine or imprison them, but they hadn’t done anything criminal—so the local prosecuting attorney assured him. Whether they’d done anything damaging was a different question, worse luck.

  “Will any special Tosevite bait attract these creatures?” the fleetlord asked. “If so, we will use it in our traps.”

  “Our traditional bait is cheese,” Sam Yeager answered.

  Then he had to explain to Atvar what cheese was. The explanation left the fleetlord as much revolted as enlighte
ned. The idea of milk was disgusting enough to the Race. The idea of deliberately letting it rot before eating it was worse. Trying to suppress nausea, Atvar inquired, “Do you have any of this stuff closer than the Tosevite solar system?”

  “We have none here on the surface of Home—I know that,” the American ambassador said. “There may be some aboard the Admiral Peary. If you like, I will ask the ship to send some down with the rats if there is.”

  “I thank you,” Atvar said. “I thank you very much, in fact. That would be generous of you, and greatly appreciated.”

  Sam Yeager sounded wryly amused: “Unlike a certain species I could name, we do not deliberately seek to disrupt the ecology of another world.”

  “You have made your political point, Ambassador.” Atvar, on the other hand, sounded sour. “We have sought to make Tosev 3 more Homelike and friendly to ourselves. You have done the same on certain parts of the planet.”

  “Never so drastically as your folk are doing,” the Tosevite ambassador said. “And we know better now. You brag about the Race’s long spell of civilization, but it does not seem to have made you sensitive to ecological concerns.”

  The Race was chiefly interested in shaping ecologies to its own needs. It had done so on Rabotev 2 and Halless 1, and was still busy doing it on Tosev 3. Sam Yeager’s attitude made Atvar less proud of that than he might have been.

  He did not intend to let the wild Big Ugly see what he was thinking. Bitter experience on Tosev 3 had taught him that revealing anything to the Big Uglies was a mistake. They never took such revelations as simple confidences, but always as signs of weakness. And they exploited such signs for all they were worth. Would Sam Yeager do the same? Atvar did not doubt it for an instant.

  “We see nothing wrong in manipulating the environment for our own benefit,” the fleetlord said. “That is one of the hallmarks of an intelligent species, would you not agree?”

  “Manipulation is one thing, destruction something else altogether,” the American ambassador insisted.

  “Very often, the difference lies in the point of view,” Atvar said. “Or will you tell me I am mistaken?” He waited. Sam Yeager used the negative gesture. Atvar respected his honesty. He went on, “This being so, you accuse us of being strong enough to make ourselves comfortable on a new world. To this I must plead guilty.”

  “Who gave you the right to do that?” Sam Yeager asked.

  “We gave it to ourselves, by being strong enough to do it,” Atvar replied.

  Yeager studied him. “You say these words, Fleetlord, and you seem pleased with them. And I suppose you have reason to be pleased with them—now. But I tell you this: when I hear them, they are to me nothing to be pleased with. They are a judgment on your kind, a judgment on the whole Race. And judgments like that have a way of being fulfilled.”

  Atvar stared at him in astonishment. He sounded more like one of the mullahs who’d made life so unpleasant for the Race on Tosev 3’s main continental mass than the highly civilized being the fleetlord knew him to be. “Do you threaten me, Ambassador?” Atvar demanded.

  “No, Fleetlord,” the wild Big Ugly replied. “I do not threaten you if I say the sun will rise tomorrow, either. I simply observe.”

  “If that is the sort of observation you are going to make, you would do better to keep it to yourself,” Atvar said coldly.

  “As you wish, Fleetlord,” Sam Yeager said. “But have you not seen that the truth will come and find you regardless of whether anyone points it out to you ahead of time?”

  Yes, he did sound like a mullah. “What I have not seen, in this particular instance, is that you are speaking truth,” Atvar said. Sam Yeager only shrugged. He spread his hands, as if to say, You will find out. Atvar deliberately turned his eye turrets away from those hands. To his annoyance, the American ambassador only laughed—a loud, grating Tosevite laugh.

  At supper in the refectory that evening, Jonathan Yeager listened to his father’s account of the conversation with Atvar. Sam Yeager was speaking English: “I tell you, I felt like Daniel in the Old Testament. I was doing everything but shouting and waving my arms and yelling, ‘Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting.’ ”

  “How did he take it?” Dr. Melanie Blanchard asked.

  “He got mad,” Sam answered. “I would have got mad, too, if somebody talked to me like that. But I still don’t think I’m wrong. If you’re that arrogant, it usually comes back and bites you.”

  “As far as I’m concerned, you handled it just right,” Tom de la Rosa said. “What they’ve done to ecosystems back on Earth is a shame and a disgrace. They’d better not think we’re happy about it.”

  “But now the shoe is on the other foot,” Jonathan said. “Now they’re worried about rats here, not zisuili and azwaca and befflem and all their plants back on Earth. The shoe pinches more when it’s on their foot.”

  “Oh. The rats.” Dad snapped his fingers. “Almost forgot. We do have permission to bring down replacements.”

  “You insulted Atvar, and you still got away with that?” Frank Coffey said. “Not bad, Ambassador. Not bad at all.” He clapped his hands together.

  “I didn’t insult him till after he’d agreed.” Sam Yeager grinned. “Aren’t I sly?”

  Everybody laughed. Jonathan said, “He didn’t change his mind afterwards?”

  “Nope,” his father answered. “Or if he did, he didn’t tell me. If they shoot down the shuttlecraft with the rats in it, then we’ll know he was really angry.” That drew more laughs. Tom de la Rosa hoisted his glass of more-or-less vodka in salute. All the Americans drank.

  A couple of tables away, Kassquit sat by herself. Sometimes she joined the other humans when they ate, sometimes she didn’t. That seemed to fit her betwixt-and-between nature: stuck between what she’d been born and what she’d been raised as. Having watched Mickey and Donald grow from their eggs into . . . fair copies of human beings, Jonathan thought he understood that better than most.

  He scratched his head, which reminded him he needed to shave it again soon. Was he wrong, or had Kassquit been more standoffish than usual lately? After a moment’s thought, he nodded to himself. Unless he was wrong, she hadn’t eaten with the Americans since Dr. Blanchard came down from the Admiral Peary.

  He switched to the language of the Race, calling, “Say, Researcher, will you not come over and eat with us?”

  Karen gave him a hard look. He pretended not to notice. This had nothing to do with the fact that he and Kassquit had been lovers up on her starship in the early 1960s. He and Karen hadn’t been married yet, or even engaged. They had been going together, though, and his . . . research had almost spelled the end of that. This was just social. Jonathan really meant that. Because of what she was, Kassquit was to a certain degree isolated from everyone around her, humans and Lizards alike. Getting her to mingle wasn’t just diplomacy; it also felt like psychotherapy.

  As usual, Kassquit’s face showed nothing. She might have been joyful, furious, gloomy—you couldn’t tell by looking. She said, “I did not think you would want me there, not when you were so busy using your own language.”

  “We will speak yours if you do join us.” That wasn’t Jonathan—it was Melanie Blanchard. “We have no problem speaking the Race’s language, even if we are a little more comfortable with our own. The familiar is often welcome, especially when one is far from home.”

  “Well, I suppose that could be a truth, if one had known anything resembling a home in one’s past,” Kassquit said. “I have concluded that a cubicle in a starship makes an inadequate substitute.”

  “No doubt you are right,” Sam Yeager said, trying to smooth things over. “But if you join us, you may make a closer approach to something homelike than you would with the Race. Or, of course, you may not. But how will you know unless you try the experiment?”

  “I do not think I can have a true home either with the Race or with you wild Tosevites,” Kassquit said unhappily. “If there were
more Tosevite citizens of the Empire—not Tosevites raised as I was, necessarily, but those who live in the Empire’s culture despite their species—I might find more in common with them than I do with you or the Race.”

  “There are probably a fair number of such persons on Tosev 3 now,” Jonathan’s father said. “This, of course, does you no good at all here.”

  “Truth,” Kassquit said. “And if I were to go back into cold sleep and seek them out on Tosev 3, who knows how things would change there by the time I arrived? Variability, I think, is the key to Tosevites generally.”

  That was undoubtedly how humans seemed from the Race’s point of view—the one Kassquit naturally adopted as her own. But a lot of Lizards refused to see that changes in the way humans did things could affect them. Kassquit didn’t make that mistake, anyhow.

  Frank Coffey said, “Do come sit with us, Kassquit.”

  “You ask me this?” she said. “Are you certain you desire my company?”

  Major Coffey made the affirmative gesture. “Of course I am,” he said, and added an emphatic cough.

  Kassquit’s face still showed nothing. But she brought her plate to the table where the Americans were sitting. “Do you mind if I ask what you were talking about before?” she inquired.

  “Mostly about the rats that were released here, and about bringing more of them down from the Admiral Peary so we can go on testing food,” Jonathan answered.

  “Is that still necessary?” Kassquit asked. “Have the animals found many problems for you? I had no such aids when I woke up on Home, but I have eaten the food here and I am still well.”

  “We would rather not take chances we do not have to take,” Dr. Melanie Blanchard said. “We would also rather avoid unpleasant surprises if we can. The Race can eat almost anything we Tosevites can eat on our world, but who would have expected the trouble ginger causes them?”

  That seemed only common sense to Jonathan. He thought Kassquit would make the affirmative gesture; she was nothing if not logical. Instead, she let out an audible sniff. “How likely is this?”