Homeward Bound

by Harry Turtledove

  The ride down to Palos Verdes was . . . strange. It went through parts of town Karen knew well—or had known well. Some of the buildings were still there. Others had vanished, to be replaced by some that seemed as strange as the shuttlecraft terminal. Karen noticed Sam doing even more muttering than she and Jonathan were. He’d gone into cold sleep seventeen years earlier than they had. The South Bay had to look stranger to him than it did to them.

  “It’s not even like I’ve been away since 1977,” he said after a while. “I only remember the time since I woke up in orbit around Home, and I keep thinking it couldn’t have changed that much since then. And it didn’t—but I have to keep reminding myself.”

  “So do we,” Karen said.

  Bruce’s house impressed her. To her eye, it seemed almost as big as the hotel where the Americans had stayed in Sitneff. She soon realized that was an exaggeration, but her son had done well for himself. So had the other people whose large houses loomed on nearby large lots. Palos Verdes had always been a place where people who’d made it lived.

  Both sets of bodyguards piled out of their cars. They formed a defensive perimeter—or was it two? People Karen had never seen came spilling out of the house. Having children calling her grandmother would have been strange enough. Having grownups she’d never seen before, grownups approaching middle age, calling her that felt positively surreal.

  Jonathan looked as shellshocked as she felt. “It’s a good thing they figured out how to go faster than light,” he said. “Otherwise, lots of people would have to try to get used to this, and I think they’d go nuts.”

  “It gives the Lizards trouble, and they live longer and change slower than we do—and they don’t have families the way we do, either,” Sam said. “But a lot of their males and females who travel from star to star have their own clique. They understand how strange it is, and nobody who hasn’t done it can.”

  “I know what I understand.” Karen turned to her younger son, who seemed to wear more years than she did. “I understand that I could use a drink.” She added an emphatic cough.

  “Well, that can be arranged,” Bruce said. “Come on in, everybody, and have a look around.”

  Jonathan Yeager felt besieged by relatives. His grandchildren and great-grandchildren seemed to know everything about him up till the minute he and Karen went into cold sleep. But that was almost forty years ago now, and he didn’t know anything about these people. To him, they might almost have been so many friendly strangers.

  That went even for his sons. Richard and Bruce still had the same basic personalities he remembered—Richard a little more like him, Bruce more outgoing like Karen—but they weren’t college kids finding out about the world any more. They’d had all those years to grow into themselves. They seemed to have done a good job of it, but he couldn’t say he knew them. The same went for Mickey and Donald—especially Donald.

  He walked over to his father, who was sitting with his legs crossed and a drink balanced on his right knee. “Hi, Dad,” Jonathan said. “Congratulations.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Sam Yeager looked up at him. “How come?”

  “Because of all the people here, you’re the only one who’s even more out of it than I am,” Jonathan answered.

  “Oh.” His father thought that over. Then he said, “If it weren’t for the honor of the thing, I’d rather walk. Only trouble is, it’s a darn long walk back to Home.”

  “Yeah. That occurred to me, too,” Jonathan said. “We’re here. We’ll just have to make the best of it. They won’t throw us in the poorhouse, anyhow. We’ve got a lot of back pay coming to us.”

  “Hot diggety.” His father made a sour face. “Do you suppose there’s anybody else on the face of the Earth who says ‘hot diggety’ any more? The more I listen to people nowadays, the more I’m convinced I really do belong in a museum. Me and the Neanderthals and the woolly mammoths and all the other things you wouldn’t want to see in your driveway at three in the morning.”

  Bruce’s daughter Jessica was sitting a couple of feet away. She smiled. “Don’t be silly, Great-grandfather. You can show up in my driveway any time you want.”

  “Thanks for all of that except the ‘Great-grandfather,’ ” Sam Yeager said. “It makes me feel a million years old, and I’m not—quite.”

  “What do you want me to call you?” she asked.

  “How about Sam? It’s my name.” Jonathan’s father pointed at him. “You can call this guy Gramps, though.”

  “Thanks a lot, Dad,” Jonathan said.

  “Any old time, kiddo—and I do mean old,” his father answered.

  Jessica looked from one of them to the other. Amusement danced in her eyes. She was somewhere in her thirties: a blue-eyed blonde with strong cheekbones. Jonathan tried to see either himself or Karen in her face, and didn’t have much luck. Maybe she looked like her mother, the woman Bruce hadn’t stayed married to. She said, “You’re quite a pair, aren’t you?”

  “You should see us on TV,” Jonathan said. “We’re funnier than Donald, and we don’t have to paint ourselves into tuxes.”

  “Nope—just corners,” Sam agreed. Jessica made a face at him. He got to his feet. “I need another drink.”

  “Now that you mention it, so do I.” Jonathan followed him over to the bar. His father picked up a bottle of bourbon. He poured some into a glass, then added ice cubes. “Alcohol with flavorings I like, by God. And I don’t have to get into a brawl with the Lizards to get ice.” He raised his glass. “Mud in your eye.”

  Jonathan built a drink for himself. “Same to you,” he said. They both sipped. Jonathan wasn’t so sure he liked bourbon any more. It did taste like home, though: home with a small h.

  Richard came over to the two of them. He made his own drink—something with rum and fruit juice. Jonathan wouldn’t have wanted it anywhere this side of a beachfront hotel at Waikiki. But his son was entitled to his own taste. Richard kept staring now at Jonathan, now at Sam. “This is crazy. You’re going to laugh at me,” he said, and added an emphatic cough. “You both look just the way I remember you, but it’s been a hell of a long time.”

  “You were a little kid when I went on ice,” Sam said accusingly. “How come you’re not a little kid any more?”

  Richard hadn’t been a little kid when Jonathan went into cold sleep. But he hadn’t been older than his father by body time, either. They didn’t look like father and son these days. They looked like brothers, and Richard was definitely the more weathered of the two. Jonathan knocked back a good slug of bourbon. “I’m not laughing at anything right now,” he said. “It’s just starting to hit me that the country I grew up in—the country where I lived my whole life—is almost as alien to me as Home. Everything here seems strange to me, so I don’t know why I ought to be surprised that I seem strange to you.”

  “That’s . . . fair enough, I suppose,” his son said. “I hadn’t really thought about what all this must be like from your point of view.”

  Jonathan put a hand on his father’s shoulder. “It’s got to be even weirder for Dad. He went into cold sleep quite a while before I did.”

  “That’s only half the problem,” Sam said. “The other half is, I was born quite a while before you were. All my attitudes are ancient history now. I’ve tried to outgrow some of the worst ones, but they’re still there down underneath. I felt like a geezer in 1977. I’m worse than a geezer now. Christ! It’s more than a hundred years since I tore up my ankle and turned into a minor leaguer for good. That was in Birmingham, Alabama, and nobody thought anything of it when they made colored people sit by themselves in the lousy seats.”

  “Blacks,” Jonathan said.

  “African Americans,” Richard said. Jonathan shook his head, like a man in a bridge game who’s been overtrumped.

  Three generations of Yeagers. Three men whose births spanned more than sixty years. By body time, fewer than twenty years separated them, and the one who should have been youngest was in the middle. Jonathan
shook his head again. Such things shouldn’t have been possible. Here they all were, though.

  Richard’s wife came over to them. Diane Yeager was younger than Jonathan’s son—say, about the same age he was himself. She didn’t say a whole lot, but Jonathan got the impression she was hard to faze. “Family group,” she remarked now, her eyes going from her husband to his father to his grandfather.

  “Family group,” Jonathan agreed. He suspected his voice sounded ragged. So what, though? By God, hadn’t he earned the right to sound a little ragged just now?

  “Three generations for the price of one,” she said. “You could all be brothers.”

  By body time, they could have been. Not many sets of brothers were spread as far apart as the three of them, but some were. And yet . . . “You’d have to go some to find three brothers as different as we are,” Jonathan said.

  “Can’t be helped,” Richard said. “We are what we are, that’s all, and we have to make the best of it.”

  “‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in the stars, but in ourselves,’ ” Sam quoted. “Except that’s not true, not this time. If it weren’t for Tau Ceti, everything would be normal.” He sipped from his drink. “Of course, I wouldn’t be here, so I’m not about to complain.”

  Strictly by the calendar, Jonathan would turn ninety in December, so he wasn’t about to complain, either. “Can you imagine how strange it would be if there were thousands and thousands of families trying to sort this out?” He pointed to his father. “How much fun are you going to have trying to renew your driver’s license when you tell a clerk—or more likely a computer—you were born in 1907?”

  Sam winced. “Hadn’t thought of that. Yeah, it ought to make some electronics start chasing their own tail.”

  “How do the Lizards handle it?” Diane asked, and started to laugh. “I’ve got three of the world’s best experts here to answer my question.”

  Richard Yeager looked to his father and grandfather. “I defer to the people who’ve been on the spot, which I haven’t.”

  “You know more about it than we do, son,” Jonathan said. “We were either stuck in a hotel trying to be diplomats or we were out being tourists, which isn’t exactly a scientist’s dream, either.”

  “That’s about the size of it,” his father agreed. “Besides, since your wife asked, only fair you should show off in front of her. I’m sure she’s never heard you do it before.”

  Diane Yeager snickered. Richard turned red. He said, “The two big things the Race has going for it are its longer lifespan and its different social structure. It doesn’t have families to be disrupted the way we do. We were talking about this in the car on the way down, in fact.”

  “Truth,” Jonathan said in the Race’s language. He went on, “Even so, there’s a clique of star travelers who stick together because they aren’t so connected to the present. I suppose that would have happened with us, too.”

  “Probably,” Richard said. “Better this way, though. Now we don’t have to spend some large part of our loved ones’ lifetime traveling from star to star.”

  Before Jonathan or his father could add anything to that, Donald came up to them. He aimed one eye turret at Jonathan, the other at Sam. “Did the two of you have any idea—any idea at all—what you were doing to Mickey and me when you decided to raise us as people?” he demanded.

  “No,” Jonathan and his father said at the same time. Sam went on, “Do you know of Kassquit, the girl the Race raised?”

  “We’ve heard of her,” Donald answered. “We’d like to meet her one of these days. If anybody would understand some of the things we’ve been through growing up, she’s the one.”

  “She’s said the same thing about the two of you,” Jonathan said.

  “The Race tried to raise a human as much like one of their kind as they could,” his father said. “We did the same thing with you. When we met Kassquit, we realized how unfair that was to you, but we were committed to doing it.”

  “National security,” Donald said scornfully. He stuck out his tongue. “This for national security. You ruined our lives for the sake of national security.”

  “Things could be worse,” Jonathan pointed out. “You’ve made a lot of money. People admire you. Millions of them watch you every night. And Mickey’s prosperous, too, even if he’s less public about it.”

  “Yes, we have money. You know that old saying about money and happiness? It’s true,” Donald said. “All the money in the world can’t make up for the simple truth: we’re sorry excuses for males of the Race and we’re even sorrier excuses for humans. You want to know how sorry? I really do leer at Rita, because that’s what a man would do. I can’t do anything with her. Even if I smelled pheromones from a female of the Race and got excited, I couldn’t do anything with her. But I leer anyway. There they are, hanging out, and I stare at them.”

  What could you say to something like that? Jonathan looked to his father, who didn’t seem to have any idea, either. “I’m sorry,” Jonathan said at last. “We did the best we could.”

  “I know that. I never said you didn’t,” Donald answered. “But there’s a goddamn big difference between that and good enough.” He used an emphatic cough. It didn’t sound like the one an ordinary Lizard would have made. He had most of the same accent a human English-speaker would have. All by itself, that went a long way toward proving his point.

  Jonathan wondered again if coming home had been such a good idea after all.

  Of all the things Glen Johnson had looked for while orbiting Home, boredom was the last. He didn’t know why that was so. He’d spent a lot of time on the Lewis and Clark bored. Maybe he’d thought seeing the Lizards’ home planet would make sure he stayed interested. No such luck.

  This wasn’t entirely bad. He realized as much. He and everybody else on the Admiral Peary could have had a very interesting time trying to fight off missiles from however many spaceships the Lizards threw at them. They wouldn’t have lasted long, but they wouldn’t have had a dull moment.

  Still . . . He had to fight not to go to sleep on watch. Back in the Civil War, they would have shot him for that. When he was a kid, he’d known an old man who as a boy had shaken hands with Abraham Lincoln. He wondered if anyone else still breathing a third of the way through the twenty-first century could say that.

  When he mentioned it to Mickey Flynn, the other pilot said, “Well, I can’t. I had ancestors who fought in it. People were willing to have Irishmen shot to keep the country in one piece, but not to give ’em a job once they’d managed to miss the bullets. American generosity knows no bounds.”

  “I don’t know. Sounds fair to me,” Johnson said.

  “And what could I expect from a Sassenach?” Flynn didn’t put on a brogue, but his speech pattern changed.

  “Don’t let it worry you,” Johnson told him. “As far as the Lizards are concerned, we’re all riffraff.”

  “They are a perceptive species, aren’t they?” Flynn said.

  “That’s one word,” Johnson said. “The Commodore Perry should be back on Earth by now. I wonder when it’ll come here again.”

  “Sooner than anything else is likely to,” Flynn said.

  Johnson clapped his hands. “Give the man a cigar!”

  “Not necessary,” the other pilot said modestly. “A small act of adoration will suffice.”

  “Adoration, my—” Johnson broke off with a snort. He started a new hare: “I do wonder when the Russians and the Germans and the Japanese will start flying faster than light. The Lizards are probably wondering the same thing.”

  “I would be, if I were in the shoes they don’t wear,” Flynn agreed.

  Johnson started to reply to that. Then he started trying to work through it. After a few seconds, he gave it up as a bad job. “Right,” was all he did say. Mickey Flynn’s nod announced anything else was unthinkable.

  Home spun past the reflectionless windows. The Admiral Peary was coming up on Sitneff. Clouds covered the city
, though. The Americans from the Commodore Perry were saying it might rain. That didn’t happen every day. Johnson hoped the Johnny-come-latelies got wet. It would serve them right. He had little use for the great-grandchildren of his old-time friends and neighbors. They struck him as intolerably arrogant and sure of themselves. Maybe they’d earned the right, but even so. . . .

  “No matter how much you influence people, having friends is better,” Johnson said.

  “And what inspired this burst of profundity?” Flynn’s voice was gravely curious.

  “The punks downstairs.” Johnson pointed to the clouded city where the Americans lived.

  “Oh. Them.” Mickey Flynn also spoke with noticeable distaste. “They aren’t the most charming people God ever made, are they?” He answered his own question: “Of course they aren’t. All the people like that are aboard the Admiral Peary.”

  The intercom crackled to life: “Colonel Johnson! Colonel Glen Johnson! Report to the commandant’s office immediately! Colonel Johnson! Colonel Glen Johnson! . . .”

  Over the noise, Johnson made a wry face. “And some who aren’t the most charming, too. Oh, well. See you later, alligator.” Out of the control room he went.

  As usual, Lieutenant General Healey looked as if he wanted to bite something when Johnson glided into his sanctum. “Took you long enough,” the commandant growled.

  “Reporting as ordered, sir,” Johnson replied blandly. “I would have been here sooner except for the traffic accident on Route 66. I had to wait till they towed away a station wagon and cleaned up the spilled gasoline.”

  Healey looked more baleful than ever. He probably wasn’t thrilled at being stuck in command of the most obsolete starship the United States owned. “Bullshit,” he said, and waited for Johnson to deny it. When Johnson just hung silently in midair, Healey scowled and went on, “I need you to fly a scooter to the Horned Akiss.”