Homeward Bound (12 page)

Easiest way to find out might be to grab the bull by the horns. “Do you speak English, Shuttlecraft Pilot?” Johnson asked, in that language.

Raatiil froze for a moment. Surprise? Evidently, for after that freeze he made the affirmative gesture again. “I have learned it,” he answered, also in English. “Do you understand when I speak?”

“Yes. You speak well,” Johnson said. That Raatiil could be understood at all meant he spoke well, but Johnson had known plenty of Lizards who were worse. Still in an experimental mood, he told that to the Rabotev.

He got back another shrug-equivalent. “Some males and females are better than others at learning strange things,” Raatiil said.

So much for that,
Johnson thought. He’d been curious to see whether Raatiil enjoyed getting praise for doing something better than members of the Race. If he did, he didn’t show it. Maybe that meant there really wasn’t any friction among the different species in the Empire. Maybe it only meant Raatiil was too well trained to show much.

Sam Yeager caught Johnson’s eye and nodded slightly. Johnson nodded back. Sure as hell, Sam had known what he was up to. No flies on him, no indeed. Everybody on the ship had been gloomy because the Doctor didn’t make it. Johnson was sorry they couldn’t revive the Doctor, too. He didn’t think the diplomacy would suffer on that account, though. It might even go better. The Doctor was clever, but he’d always liked to show off just how clever he was. Sam Yeager was more likely to do what needed doing and not make any kind of fuss about it.

Raatiil said, “Those Tosevites going down to the surface of Home, please accompany me to the shuttlecraft. It has been fitted with pads that will accommodate your physiques.”

One by one, the humans boarded the shuttlecraft. Sam Yeager was the last. “Wish us luck,” he told Johnson.

“Break a leg,” Johnson said solemnly. Yeager grinned and pushed himself into the air lock.

Johnson closed the inner door. Yeager went through the outer door and into the shuttlecraft. Johnson pressed the button that closed the outer door. He waited by the air lock to make sure the shuttlecraft’s docking collar disengaged as smoothly as it had caught. It did. He headed back to the control room. From now on, most of the action would be down on the planet.

Deceleration pressed Jonathan Yeager into the foam pad that did duty for a seat on the Lizards’ shuttlecraft. Rationally, he knew it wasn’t that bad, but it felt as if he were at the bottom of a pileup on a football field.

He looked over his shoulder at his father, who was older and had been weightless longer. “How you doing, Dad?” he asked.

“I’ll be fine as soon as they take the locomotive off my chest,” Sam Yeager answered.

“Landing soon,” Raatiil said—in English. He’d never seen a human before in his life, but he spoke fairly well. Would he have admitted it if the pilot hadn’t asked? There was an interesting question.

The shuttlecraft touched down. The landing jets fell silent. It was already hot inside the craft. The Lizards liked it that way; they were comfortable at temperatures like those of a hot summer day in Los Angeles. They found Arabia and the Sahara delightful. They also found them temperate, an alarming thought. Jonathan asked, “What season of the year is it here?”

“Spring,” Raatiil answered. “But do not worry. It will be warmer soon.” That spoke volumes about the kind of weather Rabotevs preferred.

It also drew several involuntary groans from the humans on the shuttlecraft. Karen Yeager said, “Our world is cooler than Home. I hope you will arrange to cool our quarters.”

“I do not know anything about this,” Raatiil said. “Now that you remind me, I remember in my briefing that Tosevites prefer weather we would find unpleasantly cold. But I have no control over your quarters.”

It’s not my job.
That was what he meant, all right. Some things didn’t change across species lines. Jonathan had seen that back on Earth with the Lizards. It obviously applied here, too. Then Raatiil opened the hatchway, and Jonathan forgot about everything but that he’d momentarily be stepping out onto the ground of a planet that spun round another sun.

“You Tosevites may go down,” Raatiil said. “The descent ladder is deployed. Go with some caution, if you please. The ladder is not made for your species.”

“Many of us have flown in the Race’s shuttlecraft on Tosev 3,” Jonathan said. “We know these ladders.”

The air inside the shuttlecraft had had the same sterile feel to it as it did aboard human spacecraft. It had smelled very faintly of lubricants and other less decipherable things. Now Jonathan got a whiff of dust and spicy scents that could only have come from plants of some sort. That was a
world
out there waiting for him, not the inside of a spacecraft.

For a moment, none of the half dozen humans moved. Raatiil’s eye-stalks swung from one to the other. He plainly wondered why they held back. Then Karen reached out and touched Jonathan’s father on the shoulder. “Go ahead,” she told him. “You’ve got the right. You’ve been dealing with the Race longer than anybody.”

The other three humans—another husband-and-wife team, Tom and Linda de la Rosa, and a military man, Major Frank Coffey—were all younger than Jonathan and Karen. Nobody aboard except Sam Yeager (and maybe Raatiil: who could say how long Rabotevs lived?) had been around when the Race came to Earth.

“Yes, go ahead, Colonel Yeager,” Linda de la Rosa said. She was blond and a little plump; her husband had a beak of a nose and a fierce black mustache. He nodded. So did Major Coffey, who was the color of coffee with not too much cream.

“Thank you all,” Jonathan’s father said. “You don’t know what this means to me.” His voice was husky. He hadn’t sounded like that since Jonathan’s mother died. He awkwardly climbed over Frank Coffey, who lay closest to the hatch, and started down. Then he paused and started to laugh. “I only get half credit for this,” he observed. “Kassquit’s been here before me.”

“You do get that, though, because she’s only half human,” Karen said. She was right. If anything, Kassquit might have been less than half human. But Jonathan wished his wife wouldn’t have had that edge in her voice.

Out went Jonathan’s father. The others followed. Jonathan went after Major Coffey. He’d just stuck his head out of the hatch when his father stepped down onto the flame-scarred concrete of the shuttlecraft field. In English, Sam Yeager said, “This is for everyone who saw it coming before it happened.”

How long would people remember that? Jonathan liked it better than something on the order of,
I claim this land in the names of the King and Queen of Spain.
And it included not only all the scientists and engineers who’d built the
Admiral Peary,
but also his father’s science-fiction writers, who’d imagined travel between the stars before the Lizards came.

If it weren’t for them, I wouldn’t be here,
Jonathan thought.
Here
wasn’t just Home. As his father had said, if he hadn’t got involved with Lizard POWs, he never would have met his mom. Jonathan shied away from that thought. He didn’t like contemplating the strings of chance that held everyday life together.

Somebody swatted him on the fanny. “Don’t stay there gawking,” Karen said from behind him. “The rest of us want to come out, too.”

“Sorry,” Jonathan said. He hadn’t been gawking, only woolgathering. He didn’t think his wife would care about the difference. The descent ladder was narrow, the rungs too close together and oddly sloped for human feet. He went down slowly, then descended next to his father and Coffey.

“Looks like an airport back home,” the major remarked. “All this wide open space in the middle of a city.”

“I’d want plenty of wide open space around me, too, in case one of those shuttlecraft came down where it didn’t belong,” Sam Yeager said.

“That doesn’t happen to the Lizards very often,” Jonathan said. “They engineer better than we do. Of course, just once would ruin your whole day.”

Off in the distance, beyond the concrete, buildings rose. Most of them were utilitarian boxes. Jonathan wondered how many different styles of architecture this city held. How old were the oldest buildings? Older than the Pyramids? He wouldn’t have been surprised.

Across the concrete came a flat, open vehicle crowded with Lizards. It stopped about twenty feet away from the humans. Two of the Lizards descended from it and strode toward the shuttlecraft. “Which of you Tosevites is Sam Yeager?” asked the one with the more ornate body paint. Jonathan’s eyes widened as he recognized a fleetlord’s markings. Was that . . . ?

His father stepped forward. “I am. I greet you, Fleetlord. You are Atvar, is it not so?”

“You are to call him Exalted Fleetlord,” Raatiil said.

“Yes, I am Atvar.” The male who had commanded the conquest fleet sent the negative hand gesture toward the Rabotev shuttlecraft pilot. “The Tosevite is correct to address me as he does. As an ambassador, he outranks a fleetlord.” He turned back to Jonathan’s father. “In the name of the Emperor, superior Tosevite, I greet you.” He and the male with him bent into the posture of respect.

After moving down at the mention of the Emperor’s name, Raatiil’s eyestalks swung toward Sam Yeager. Jonathan had first met the Rabotev only a little while before, but he knew astonishment when he saw it. He was all but reading Raatiil’s mind.
They’re making this much fuss over a Big Ugly?

Atvar went on, “My associate here is Senior Researcher Ttomalss. Some of you Tosevites will have made his acquaintance on your planet.”

“Oh, yes,” Jonathan’s father said. He introduced Jonathan and Karen, Frank Coffey, and the de la Rosas.

“One of you Tosevites, at least, will be easy to discriminate from the others,” Atvar remarked, his eye turrets on the black man.

“Truth,” Coffey said. “No one on Tosev 3 ever had any trouble with that.” He owned a dangerously good deadpan. Jonathan had all he could do not to laugh out loud. Beside him, Karen let out a strangled snort.

“Indeed, I believe I have met all of you Tosevites at one time or another,” Ttomalss said. “And you Yeagers performed an experiment that is an outrage to the Race.”

“You would be in a better position to complain about it if you had not performed the same experiment with a Tosevite hatchling,” Jonathan answered. “And how is Kassquit these days?”

“She is well. She is still as stubbornly opinionated as ever,” the Lizard psychologist answered. “You will see her shortly. Since you have come to Home, we thought this first greeting would appropriately come from the Race alone.”

Jonathan wondered how Kassquit had taken that. Not well, if he had to guess. She’d never quite learned how to be a human, and she’d never quite been accepted by the Race, either.
Neither fish nor fowl,
Jonathan thought. All things considered, it was a miracle she wasn’t crazier than she was.

His father said, “Would it be possible for us to get in out of the sun?”

That plainly surprised the Lizards. For them, the weather was no doubt springlike. For Jonathan, the only place that had springtime like this was hell. Ttomalss said something in a low voice to Atvar. The fleetlord made the affirmative gesture, saying, “As we were always cold on Tosev 3, so you may find yourselves warm here. I should warn you, though, that you will not find it any cooler within.”

“We understand that,” Sam Yeager said. “At least we will be out of this bright sunlight, though.”

“I hope so,” Karen murmured in English. “Otherwise, they’ll see a red human along with a black one.” With her fair redhead’s skin, she burned with the greatest of ease.

She did on Earth, anyhow. “Tau Ceti’s redder than the sun,” Jonathan reminded her. “It puts out less ultraviolet. The Lizards can’t even see violet—it looks black to them.”

“I know, I know,” his wife answered. “But any ultraviolet at all is enough to do me in right now. I forgot to put on sunscreen before we came down.”

Atvar gestured toward the vehicle. “Join us, then, and we will take you to the terminal, where we will inspect your baggage.”

“I have already had this discussion with the Race,” Sam Yeager said. “The answer is still no.”

“You confuse me,” Atvar said. “First you want to go in, and then you do not.”

“Going in is fine,” Jonathan’s father said. “Inspecting baggage is not. We are a diplomatic party. We have the same rights as if we were back in our own not-empire. You must know this, Fleetlord.”

“And if I do?” Atvar said. “If I do not like it?”

“You can expel us,” Sam Yeager said. “You can send us back to the
Admiral Peary.
I think that would be foolish, but you can do it.”

“How do I know your cases of possessions are not full of the herb that causes so much trouble for us?” Atvar demanded.

“You do not know that. But you do know your own folk must smuggle more of the herb than a few Big Uglies could. And I tell you that we have none of it with us here. Will you trust me, or will you not?”

“You I will trust,” Atvar said heavily. “I would not trust any other Tosevite who made this assertion, not even the Doctor. Come, then, and we shall see what we have to say to one another.”

Kassquit waited inside the terminal at the shuttlecraft port, along with a small swarm of middle-ranking functionaries from the Race. When she looked out the window, she could see the shuttlecraft that had descended from the Tosevite starship. She could even see the wild Big Uglies who had come down from it.

As wild Big Uglies were in the habit of doing, these wore cloth wrappings and foot coverings. The wrappings were minimal, leaving arms and legs mostly bare, but she wondered why the Tosevites wore anything in this climate. She looked down at her own body, nude except for her body paint and the foot coverings she too used. Her soles were softer than those of the Race, and often needed protection.

Which Tosevite out there was Jonathan Yeager? She saw only one who shaved his hair, but that didn’t necessarily prove anything. He might have stopped shaving, as she had done, and some other Tosevite might follow the practice. At this distance, it was hard to be sure.