Homeward Bound

by Harry Turtledove

  “Nothing is certain any more,” Atvar said sadly. “Nothing.”

  Ttomalss understood how he felt. The Empire was built on certainty and stability. It had been, for as long as it existed. Now all of that was likely to fly away like a swarm of startled evening sevod. “We should never have sent the conquest fleet to Tosev 3,” the psychologist said.

  “This same thought has occurred to me,” Atvar answered. “But who knows whether things would have turned out better or worse? If we had waited longer, the Big Uglies might have come upon us and caught us unawares. That would have been even worse than this. I will tell you what we should have done.”

  “What is that?” Ttomalss asked. “As far as I can see, all of our choices were bad.”

  “What we should have done, when our probe showed Tosev 3 to be inhabited, was send the conquest fleet at once. The Big Uglies really were primitives and savages then. We could have easily subdued them, and we would not have had to worry about any of this.”

  “Unless they rebelled after becoming part of the Empire and acquiring our technology,” said Ttomalss, who no longer had any faith in the Race’s ability to deal with the Tosevites.

  Atvar only shrugged. “Yes, I have already heard this possibility mentioned. But I still believe doing that would have given us our best chance. Instead, we delayed—and the results of that are as we now see.”

  “So they are,” Ttomalss replied. “Until we develop this technology for ourselves, we are at their mercy.”

  “Exactly.” The fleetlord made the affirmative gesture. “I wonder if our best course might not be to fight the war anyway.”

  “But they would intercept our order. They would know about it years before our colony on Tosev 3 learned of it. Would that not be a disaster?”

  Atvar sighed. “Probably. But what do we have now? A disaster of a different sort. We might have to sacrifice the colony.”

  “We would sacrifice the Rabotevs and the Hallessi, too. And who knows what the Big Uglies could do to Home itself?” Ttomalss said.

  The fleetlord sighed again. “I suppose you are right. A war would have a certain finality to it, though. This way, we shall have to live with a difficult, dangerous, ambiguous future, with no guarantee that war, worse war, does not lie ahead.”

  “Anyone who has been to Tosev 3 knows that life is different, dangerous, and ambiguous more often than not,” Ttomalss said, and Atvar made the affirmative gesture again.

  Major Nicole Nichols was about the cutest little thing Sam Yeager had ever seen. She was just past thirty, which struck him as young for a major, but the Commodore Perry was bound to be full of hotshots. She was a light-skinned black woman with a bright smile, flashing eyes, and a shape he would have expected to see on a professional dancer, not a U.S. Air and Space Force officer.

  She’d come down to Sitneff in the Commodore Perry’s own shuttlecraft. The Lizards were too rattled to refuse permission for that. They’d contented themselves with surrounding the shuttlecraft port with police and guards. If that shuttle was packed with ginger, smugglers would have a devil of a time getting to it unless some of the guards proved venal, which wasn’t impossible.

  Major Nichols was also all business. She heard Yeager’s summary of what had gone on since the Admiral Peary reached Home, then nodded briskly. “We tried to get our ship built in time to get here before you, but it didn’t quite happen,” she said, and shrugged as if to say it couldn’t be helped.

  “That would have been awful!” Sam exclaimed. “We’d have revived and found out we were nothing but an afterthought.”

  “Yes, but we would have been in reasonably close touch with Earth, which you weren’t,” the major answered. That plainly counted for more with her. She eyed him as if he were a museum exhibit. To her, he probably was. And he wasn’t even the right museum exhibit, for she went on, “Meaning no offense, but you do understand we’d expected to be dealing with the Doctor?”

  “Oh, sure.” He nodded. “And I’m not offended. I expected the same thing. But when he didn’t wake up”—Sam shrugged—“the Lizards knew I was along, and they asked for me to represent the United States. I’ve done the best job I know how to do.”

  “No one has said anything different,” Major Nichols assured him. For a moment, he took that as a compliment. Then he realized it meant the people from the Commodore Perry had been checking up on him. He supposed they would have checked on the Doctor, too, but probably not quite in the same way.

  He said, “You’re going to replace me, aren’t you?”

  “That was the plan,” Major Nichols answered. “Someone who knows how things are now back on Earth has an advantage over you. I’m sure you’ve kept up with our broadcasts as best you could, but that still leaves you more than ten years behind the times.” She spoke oddly. Her rhythm was different from what Sam was used to, and she used far more words and constructions from the Race’s language as if they were English. By the way she used them, they were English to her.

  “I know. As you say, it can’t be helped.” Sam smiled. “I’m looking forward to finding out what the United States is like these days.”

  Something changed in the major’s face. “That . . . may be a little more complicated than you’d think, sir.”

  Yeager raised an eyebrow. “Oh?” Major Nichols nodded. Sam said, “Well, maybe you’d better tell me about it, then.” If she were a man, he would have said, Kiss me, ’cause I think you’re gonna screw me. Being of the female persuasion, though, she might not have taken that the right way.

  “This is more complicated than we thought it would be,” she repeated. “You have to understand, our instructions about you assumed you would be acting as the Doctor’s assistant and adviser, not that you would be ambassador yourself.”

  “Okay. I understand that. It’s simple enough,” Sam said. “So what were these instructions that were based on that assumption?”

  “That you were to stay here and continue to act as assistant and adviser to the Doctor’s successor,” Major Nichols answered.

  “I . . . see,” Sam said slowly. “And if I didn’t want to do that? I wasn’t born yesterday, you know, even if you don’t count cold sleep. I was thinking I would enjoy retirement. I’m still thinking that, as a matter of fact.”

  The major looked unhappy. “Sir, there’s no polite, friendly way to tell you this. You are to be . . . discouraged from coming back to Earth.”

  “Am I?” Sam said tonelessly. “Well, I don’t have to be an Einstein to figure out why, do I?” His voice went harsh and flat.

  “You probably don’t,” she agreed. “You’re . . . not remembered kindly in certain circles in the U.S. government.”

  “People who tell the truth often aren’t,” Sam said. “That’s what I did, Major. That’s what my crime was, back before you were born. I told the truth.”

  “They’ve rebuilt Indianapolis,” Major Nichols said. She went on, “I have cousins there. I’ve been to Earl Warren Park. The memorial to the people who died is very touching.” President Warren himself had died, by his own hand, when word of his role in the attack came out.

  Sam made the affirmative gesture. He spoke in the language of the Race: “Where is the monument to those our not-empire wantonly destroyed? Do they not deserve some commemoration?”

  She went right on speaking English: “It’s because you say this kind of thing that some people thought you might be more comfortable staying here than coming back to the United States.”

  “‘Some people.’ ” Sam echoed that with an odd, sour relish. “I know what kind of people, too—the kind who think anybody who doesn’t believe all the same things they do isn’t a real American. Well, I happen to think I am, whether they like it or not.”

  Major Nichols didn’t answer that right away. She studied Yeager instead. He had no idea what was going on behind her eyes. Whatever she thought, she kept to herself. He wouldn’t have wanted to play poker against her; she would have taken the shirt off his back
. At last, she said, “You’re not what my briefings made me think you were going to be.”

  “No horns,” he said. “No tail. No fangs, that’s for sure—I’ve only got four of my own choppers. Lost the rest more than a hundred years ago, if you add cold sleep into it.”

  “They can do something about that now. They have what they call dental implants,” she told him. “They go into your jawbone, and they’re just about as good as real teeth.”

  “To tell you the truth, I hardly remember what real teeth are like,” Sam said. “I’ve gone without ’em since I was a kid.” Human teeth amazed and horrified the Lizards. They couldn’t imagine why evolution made people go through life with only two sets. Like small-l lizards on earth, they replaced theirs continuously throughout their lives. And then Sam smiled sourly at the major from the Commodore Perry. “Besides, what difference does it make? You just said you’re not going to let me go back to Earth anyway, didn’t you?”

  She flushed. Her skin wasn’t dark enough to hide it. In a small voice, she said, “Me and my big mouth.”

  “You and your big mouth,” he agreed. “Look, tell me something I want to know for a change, will you? How are my grandchildren? Do I have great-grandchildren yet? Great-great? And how are Mickey and Donald getting along?”

  “One of your grandsons—Richard—is at Stanford University, heading the Interspecies Studies Department there,” Major Nichols said. “The other—Bruce—runs a company that arranges cultural exchanges with the Lizards. They’re both well, or they were when we left. You have five great-grandchildren—three boys and two girls—all told, and two great-great-granddaughters. Bruce is divorced. Richard had a brief failed marriage, then remarried and has stayed that way for almost thirty years.”

  “Lord!” Sam said softly. Jonathan’s boys had been kids when he went into cold sleep. They’d been in college when Jonathan and Karen went on ice. It sounded as if they’d done pretty well for themselves since. By the way their bodies felt, they’d be older than their parents. If that wasn’t bizarre, Sam didn’t know what would be. “And what about Mickey and Donald?”

  “Mickey is working with your grandson, Bruce,” the major said. “He recently published his autobiography. He called it Between Two Worlds. He wrote it in English. It did well in the United States, and even better in translation with the Lizards. The translation is probably on its way here now at speed-of-light. There’s talk of movie versions from Hollywood and from the Race.”

  “Wow!” Sam said. “That’s not half bad—better than I expected, to tell you the truth, since he had two strikes against him the minute he hatched. What about Donald? You didn’t say anything about him. Is he all right? If it’s bad news, for God’s sake spit it out. Don’t try to sugarcoat it.”

  “Donald . . .” Nicole Nichols hesitated again. Again, Sam had trouble reading her face. Was that amusement sparking somewhere deep in her eyes? He thought so, but he couldn’t be sure. She said, “The past five years, Donald has hosted something called You’d Better Believe It. It’s the highest-rated game show in the USA and Canada. I wouldn’t want to say whether it’s the best—my tastes don’t really run in that direction—but it has to be the most spectacular. And Donald, without a doubt, is the most spectacular thing in it.”

  Sam stared. Then he started to laugh. Then he started to howl. Donald had always been the more outgoing little Lizard. Now he wasn’t a little Lizard any more. And he was evidently more outgoing than Sam had ever imagined.

  “I’ll be a son of a gun,” he said; he still felt funny about swearing in front of a woman, even if she was a major, too. “Should I want to shake his hand or horsewhip him?”

  “That’s not for me to say,” Major Nichols answered. “We ought to have a disk with some of the shows on it aboard the ship. They knew you and your son and daughter-in-law would want to see it.”

  “Well, good,” Sam said. “That’s something, anyhow. Once I see the shows, I wouldn’t mind going back and telling him what I think of them. My grandsons and Mickey probably have a lot to teach me, too.”

  Major Nichols’ face froze back into a perfect, unreadable mask. She’d acted amazingly lifelike there for a little while, when she was talking about Sam’s family by blood and adoption. No more. She said, “As I told you, sir, that isn’t in our present plans. I’m sorry.”

  I’ll bet, Sam thought. “Once upon a time, I read a story called ‘The Man without a Country,’ ” he said. “Darn good story. Seems as if I’m in that boat now, except the fellow in the story didn’t want his country but it looks like my country doesn’t want me.”

  “I’m sorry,” Nicole Nichols said again: a polite, meaningless phrase. “In fact, the United States is grateful for everything you and the rest of the crew of the Admiral Peary have done here on Home.”

  “Just not grateful enough to want me back.” Sam didn’t bother trying to hide his bitterness.

  “Circumstances are not just what we thought they’d be when we got our orders,” she said. “Maybe the commandant will see that as justification for changing them. I must tell you, though, I doubt it. And I certainly don’t have the authority to do so. If you will excuse me, sir . . .” She left his room before he could say whether he excused her or not. He stared around the place. Live here, or somewhere much like here, for the rest of his life? Live here while other humans zipped back and forth between the stars? Had any man ever had a crueler prison?

  Karen Yeager slid the skelkwank disk into the player. Disk and player had been manufactured more than ten light-years apart by two different species, but the one fit perfectly into the other. Humans had borrowed the Lizards’ standards along with their technology. A lot of what they made was interchangeable with what they’d taken from the Race.

  “This ought to be fun,” Jonathan said.

  “This ought to be terrible,” Sam Yeager said. “A game-show host? My God, why didn’t Donald just go out and start robbing banks?”

  “I’ll tell you what I want to see,” Karen said. “I want to see what the clothes and the hairstyles look like. We’ve been out of touch for a long time.”

  “We’ll be a bunch of frumps when we do get home,” Melanie Blanchard said. Then she shrugged. “We would have been even worse frumps if we’d gone back in cold sleep.”

  All the Americans from the Admiral Peary crowded into Karen and Jonathan’s room to watch the disk of You’d Better Believe It. The ice cubes Karen was so proud of were chilling a lot of Lizard-style vodka. Frank Coffey said, “At least we got here, by God. We were awake and doing our jobs when the Commodore Perry came in. There are bound to be ships behind us full of people in cold sleep. What they’ll think when they wake up . . .” He shook his head.

  “Little bit of a surprise,” Sam Yeager said. He seemed subdued. He was drinking more than Karen would have expected, too. Or am I just imagining things? she wondered. She didn’t want to ask if anything was wrong, not there in front of everybody. Her father-in-law had almost as strong a sense of privacy as a cat.

  Instead, Karen said, “Shall I fire it up?”

  “Yeah, do it.” Tom de la Rosa raised his glass in salute. “Let’s see what we came all these light-years to escape.” Everybody laughed.

  “Play,” Karen said in the Race’s language. That was one difference between local machines and those back on Earth: these didn’t understand English. They didn’t always understand a human accent, either. This time, though, the disk started spinning.

  Music swelled. It sounded raucous and tinny to Karen, but what she listened to would have sounded the same to her grandparents. The computer graphics for the opening credits were at least as smooth and at least as fancy as anything the Lizards used. Sam Yeager looked impressed. That hadn’t happened when he went into cold sleep in 1977. By the time Karen did, seventeen years later, people had pretty much caught up.

  “And now,” the announcer said in the slightly greasy tones of announcers everywhere and everywhen, “here are the lovely Rita and
Donald and . . . You’d Better Believe It!”

  The audience applauded frantically. The lovely Rita strutted out onto the stage. She was lovely: a statuesque brunette with a profile to die for. Karen, though, didn’t think her husband or any of the other American males in the audience was paying attention to Rita’s profile. The sparkling gown she wore trailed behind her on the floor . . . but was cut Minoan-style on top.

  “Holy Jesus!” Tom said. “How‘d you like to put makeup there?”

  “I’d like it fine,” Frank Coffey said. The guys bayed goatish laughter. Karen wanted to kick Jonathan. He hadn’t said a word, but he was paying close attention to the screen.

  When the camera went to the studio audience for a moment, Karen saw about half the younger women were topless. Some of them wore Lizard-style body paint, some didn’t. That had been coming in Karen’s time, but it hadn’t got there yet. Plainly, it had now.

  Back to Rita. She flashed a million-watt smile. “Now, folks,” she said, “heeeeere’s . . . Donald!”

  He bounded out to center stage. The audience went nuts. All the Americans in the room in Sitneff started howling with glee. Donald was wearing a tuxedo—a painted-on tuxedo, perfect right down to the red-carnation boutonniere. Even his hands had been painted to make them seem a Caucasian‘s—though not a whole lot of Caucasians had fingerclaws.

  “Hello, people!” he said. Energy came off him in waves. “Welcome to another session of—”

  “You’d Better Believe It!” the audience shouted. They applauded themselves.

  “That’s right.” Donald couldn’t grin—his mouth wasn’t made for it. But he gave the impression that he was grinning. He was a performer right down to the tip of his tailstump. “Now we’re going to find out how much tonight’s contestants don’t know—and how much they’ll pay for it.” It was a throwaway line. The studio audience broke up anyway. Karen felt herself smiling, too. She couldn’t help it. Donald pulled a smile out of her the way a magician pulled a rabbit out of a hat.