Homegoing

Chapter 13

If a world traveler of the twentieth century were brought back he would wonder greatly at the map of the Earth. The coastlines are all different. All the land San Francisco and Chicago had stolen from the lake and the bay the waters have won back as they rose. Libya’s Qattara Depression is a brackish lake, half rainwater and half overspill from the Mediterranean Sea. Bermuda is a memory. The polders of the Netherlands are part of the North Sea again, and a sluggish oozing of the lower Mississippi River has drowned out New Orleans—the main channel of the river has long since broken through the dams put up by the Corps of Engineers and forced its way through the Atchafalaya. Hawaii has lost the tourist traps of Waikiki, though there is plenty of the islands left—they began as volcanic mountains, after all. All along the east coast of North America the low, sandy barrier islands are only shoals now. Sharks nose hungrily through the gambling casinos of Atlantic City, and coral grows on the golf courses of Georgia’s sea islands. New York Bay is three times its former size, pocked with islands, and the Statue of Liberty stands with her feet wet up to the ankles. When the ice around the North Pole began to melt it made no difference. It was floating anyway, and so it added nothing to the oceanic water levels. The glaciers were a different matter. But even they were as nothing, nothing at all, compared to what happened when Antarctica lost the Ross Ice Shelf. So the edges of the continents are awash; and in their centers the searing, drying winds have left new dust bowls.

Aboard the blimp, Polly perched on a settee that groaned underneath her weight. She was peering out through the slanted windows at the ground and commenting acidly on what she saw. “Your Earth people,” she commented dispassionately to Sandy, “certainly are wasteful. Look at all this space down here, and hardly anyone using it.”

Sandy didn’t answer. He wasn’t thinking about the faults of Earth humans. He was thinking of his dead friend. Halfway across what had once been the province of Manitoba, he had not yet gotten used to Obie’s loss.

Yet . . . he was on a “blimp,” and the blimp was taking him to new experiences in the world of mankind.

It was certainly an interesting experience. It wasn’t in the least like any of the other forms of transportation he had already experienced. The blimp was helium filled and carried three hundred people with staterooms, music rooms, lavatories, and a dining room. One didn’t sit strapped in a seat on the blimp, one moved around. And yet it wasn’t like the interstellar vessel, either, because it moved underfoot; it throbbed with the noise of its engines and bobbled in the winds that struck it, and most of all it had windows you could look out of to see the ground.

As the blimp found an altitude without much turbulence, Sandy began to get used to the physical sensations, and his mood lightened. When Marguery Darp knocked on the door and invited him to join her for a drink, he accepted, glad enough to get away from Polly; even more glad to have Marguery for company.

They sat side by side on a light, soft settee, gazing out. The trip, Marguery said, would take a day and a half, and the dark of the first night was coming early, because they were heading toward it. Below them the darkening plains rolled past, and Marguery took Sandy’s hand.

“I’m really sorry about what happened to your friend, Oberon,” she said.

He squeezed her hand—gently, as she began to wince. “I know you are. He was my best friend, you know.”

“Yes.” She was silent for a moment, regarding him. Then she said, “Do you want to talk about him?”

“Oh, can I?” And, yes, he discovered, that was exactly what he wanted, very much. He wanted it even more than he wanted to work on the new poem he was meditating—even more than any of the other things he wanted to do with Marguery Darp. And so she listened, quietly sympathetic, while he told her about their childhood on the Hakh’hli ship, and the scrapes they’d gotten into together, and the way Oberon would be his buffer and bodyguard in the roughest of the Hakh’hli games, and how they’d share their “cookies and milk,” sometimes, just off by themselves—and about the funny scene when Oberon came into season with the Major Seniors, and how proud he was to have fertilized the Fourth Major Senior’s eggs. “And I miss him,” he said, squeezing her hand again.

She didn’t wince this time. She squeezed back. Then she said, “There’s something that surprises me. I mean, the other Hakh’hli don’t seem really broken up about it, do they?”

“Well, death isn’t a big thing with the Hakh’hli,” he explained. “See, there was my old teacher—well, maybe you’d call her a nursemaid. Her name was MyThara, and she was pretty nearly a mother to me.” And he told Marguery about the way MyThara had gone uncomplainingly to the titch’hik when the medical examination showed she was wearing out. Marguery shuddered. Sandy said quickly, “That’s the way they are. MyThara felt she was doing the right thing, you know? She was making room for another egg to hatch. Nobody ever really objects when it’s time to die, that I ever heard of. And nobody mourns.”

“But you do, Sandy,” she pointed out.

“But I’m not a Hakh’hli,” he said with pride.

The door opened and Polly stalked into the lounge toward them. “Sandy,” she complained, “it is sleeping time. I wish you would come to bed with me. I’m, what is the word, lonesome!”

“But I don’t want to come to bed with you,” Sandy said reasonably. “I want to be with Marguery.”

Polly licked her tongue out unhappily. “Will she come to bed with us?”

“Certainly not,” Sandy said, flushing. “Polly, you are on Earth now, and you must learn Earth ways. Earth people sleep alone, except during amphylaxis.”

“But I don’t like it,” she wailed. “I miss Obie, too!”

That decided him. He knew that what Polly missed, of course, was only warmth and company in the sleeping tangle. Nevertheless, there was nothing she could have said that would have melted Sandy’s heart more. “I think I should keep her company, just for a while,” he told Marguery Darp. “I’ll be back, I think. Probably.”

But the fact of the matter was that he, too, was tired. These long twenty-four-hour Earth days were taking their toll on him, too. In Polly’s stateroom, his arms around her and her arms around him, he found himself relaxing.

He really wanted to go back to Marguery Darp, too. When Polly’s gentle, hiccoughing snores told him she was asleep he tried gently disengaging himself. He didn’t succeed. Polly moaned and reached out, pulling him back . . .

And the next thing he knew he was waking up next to her, and he knew that a good many hours had passed.

As he moved, Polly snorted a huge sigh and rolled over. He detached himself and scuttled out from under just in time to avoid being crushed. Moving as quietly as he could, he stood up, looking around. The stateroom window was still black. He had no idea of the time. He thought for a moment of lying down next to Polly again, soaking in the warmth of her great, muscular torso; but there was, he thought, the possibility that Marguery Darp was still in the blimp’s lounge, waiting for him to return.

It was a silly thought, and of course it was wrong. No one moved in the narrow passageways of the blimp. The lights were all turned down. The lounge was empty.

Sandy sat down on a window seat, gazing out. The sky was dark, but filled with bright stars. The gentle motion of the blimp wasn’t worrying any more; it was almost comforting. Perhaps he was getting his “sea legs,” Sandy thought, and then leaned forward, perplexed. For a moment he thought he saw another constellation of stars, actually below him, a bright cluster of red and white and green lights.

It wasn’t stars. It could only be another blimp, sliding silently along a thousand feet below them, crossing their track from somewhere to somewhere else.

“Sir?”

He turned around guiltily. A sleepy-eyed crew member was peering at him from the doorway. “Would you care for some coffee, sir?” she asked.

“Oh, yes, please,” he said at once. “With a lot of cream and sugar.”

“Right away, sir,” she said, and hesitated. “I can turn the television on for you, if you like. Or there’s music on the ship system—there are headphones at your seat.”

“Maybe later,” he said politely. He wasn’t quite ready to watch Earthly television. He wasn’t even quite ready to talk to Marguery Darp, he decided, even if she had been available, because there was a lot that he needed to think about. The first, and worst, thing, of course, was Obie. He felt the tingle at the back of his nose that warned him that tears were nearby as he thought about Obie. He didn’t try to restrain them. He was, he realized, probably the only person in the universe who would even consider crying over Obie. Certainly no one on this planet would. Just as certainly, no one on the Hakh’hli ship would mourn, though a few members of the ship’s crew might be interested enough to check the name and lineage of HoCheth’ik ti’Koli-kak 5329 against their own, out of curiosity, to see what sort of kin they might have been.

But Obie was dead.

And Obie was not the first. One after another, the people dearest to Sandy went and died on him—his mother, before he was born; MyThara, going voluntarily to feed the titch’hik; and now Oberon, foolishly showing off and paying for his folly. But he wasn’t the only one who had paid! Sandy had to pay, too! He wasn’t merely grieving for Oberon, he realized; he was definitely angry at him.

When the coffee came, Sandy swallowed the first sweet, thick cup fast enough to make his throat burn, then poured another. The sugar relieved the nagging hunger he hadn’t realized he was feeling. It also, for some trivial reason he could not quite identify, elevated his mood—not a lot, maybe, but to a point where the tears were no longer threatening. Partly, he thought, it might have been the fact that “coffee” contained “caffeine” and “caffeine” was called a “stimulant.” Partly it was a kind of interior pride that he was adjusting so well to Earthly foods and drinks. The next time Marguery suggested a “drink,” he decided, he would be a little more adventurous than diluted wine. He had seen Hamilton Boyle drinking what was called a “Scotch on the rocks,” and if Boyle could enjoy it, Sandy could, too.

He thought, remembering what the crew member had said, that there were other Earthly pleasures for him to practice enjoying. He found the headphones for his seat, managed to get them more or less comfortably in place without squeezing his hearing aid too painfully and, after a little experimentation, found a channel of music that seemed to fit his mood. He lay back, listening. His mind began to blank out. Just by turning his head he could gaze at the bright stars above, and the infrequent lights of some small town sliding by on the ground below, while Tschaikovsky’s Pathetique Symphony lulled him back to sleep.

He woke up to the faint murmur of his own voice.

He sat up quickly, pulling away the earphones that had twisted around his neck. He saw Hamilton Boyle standing by the lounge’s big television screen, and on the screen Sandy saw that he himself was describing to an unseen interviewer the Questions Game he and his cohort had spent twenty years playing.

“Oh, sorry,” Boyle said. “Did I wake you?”

It was a silly question. The facts spoke for themselves, but Sandy said politely, “That’s all right.”

“I was just trying to get some news on the television,” Boyle apologized. “Lieutenant Darp will be coming along in a minute. We thought you’d like some breakfast.”

“Oh, yes,” Sandy said eagerly. The window beside him was bright with sunlight. Fleecy clouds were below them, and the warmth of the sun felt good on his skin. He stood up and stretched. “I think I would like to see some ‘news’ too,” he observed.

Boyle grinned. He was a handsome man, Sandy thought. It was hard to believe that he was sixty-two years old, but that was what Marguery had told him. He had thick, pale hair, close cropped, and his face was not lined. It was a little sharp featured, Sandy thought critically, and the man smiled a lot more than there seemed to be any reason for. But he appeared to be willing to be friendly. “You’re most of the news yourself today, you know,” he said. “The only other thing that’s interesting is a reentry—one of the big old satellites is about to deorbit, and there’s some chance it will come down where it can do some damage. But we won’t know about that for sure for a couple of days yet.”

“Does that happen often?” Sandy asked, interested.

“Often enough,” Boyle said shortly, snapping the set off. He didn’t seem to want to pursue the matter, so Sandy changed the subject.

“I didn’t know you had cameras in the room yesterday. When I was talking about my life on the ship, I mean.”

Boyle looked at him speculatively. “You don’t mind, do you? Everyone’s so interested in you.”

“Especially you cops,” Sandy pointed out.

Boyle took a moment to respond, but then he said, easily enough, “Yes, I’m a policeman, more or less. It’s my job to protect society.”

“Like Kojak?”

Boyle’s eyes widened. Then he grinned. “I keep forgetting how many old television shows you’ve seen. But, yes, like Kojak. Like any good cop. I need information, and the best place to get it is from someone on the inside.”

“The inside of what?” Sandy asked. Boyle shrugged. “I don’t know much about cops,” Sandy went on. “Do you still get your information by the—what is it?—the ‘third degree’?”

“I’ve never done that!” Boyle said sharply. Then he added, “I’ve never had to. I admit some cops have, sometimes, but that’s natural enough, isn’t it? Don’t the Hakh’hli ever do anything like that?”

“Never,” Sandy said positively. “I’ve never heard of anything like deliberately inflicting pain, for any reason at all.”

“Not even threatening someone?”

“With pain? No! Do you mean threatening them with death? But that wouldn’t work, either,” he explained. “Hakh’hli don’t fear death the way you do—we do.”

“Yes, that’s what you told Lieutenant Darp,” Boyle agreed. “Therefore—well, suppose one Hakh’hli went crazy. Antisocial. There wouldn’t be any good way of, say, forcing him to tell anything he didn’t want to?”

“I don’t think so. Not by threatening him or torturing him, anyway.”

Boyle seemed to lose interest in the subject. “I wonder what’s holding our breakfast up,” he said, and then smiled. “So you didn’t know we had cameras on you?”

Sandy shrugged. “For that matter,” he added, “until we landed, we didn’t really know if you had TV or not at all anymore. Years ago, the first time the Hakh’hli were in this part of the galaxy, they got all kinds of broadcasts. Radio, television, all sorts of things. This time there was hardly anything; we thought you’d stopped broadcasting for some reason.”

Boyle looked pensive. “Well, in a way we did. With all that stuff floating around, satellites aren’t too useful for communications anymore. So it’s almost all microwave or optical cable. Even local stations have directional antennae, so they don’t waste much energy transmitting to the sky.”

“It’s not because you’re being secretive?” Sandy hazarded.

Boyle looked really surprised. “Of course not! What makes you think that? We didn’t even know the Hakh'hli were out there, did we?” He shook his head. “No, it’s just that we made such a mess up there. It’s not just the physical obstruction; some of those old satellites are still radiating all kinds of stuff. The effects of the Star War will be with us for a long time—but still, I have to admit it was a beautiful light show while it lasted.”

Sandy pricked up his ears. “You saw the war?”

“Well, of course I saw it. I was twelve years old. I didn’t see much personally, I mean with my own eyes—there wasn’t much to see, from Cleveland, Ohio, especially because it was daylight. The Star War started at two o’clock in the afternoon, Cleveland time, and it was all over by sundown. But they had it all on television, and it was pretty spectacular fireworks out in space, believe me.” He hesitated, looking at Sandy. “Didn’t your parents ever tell you anything about it?”

“How could they?” Sandy asked bitterly. “They died before I knew them. I never saw them, really—except for the picture of my mother.”

“Oh? Can I see it?” Boyle studied the little rectangle Sandy pulled out of his pocket. He didn’t speak for a moment, and then chose his words with care. “She was certainly a beautiful woman,” he said. “Would you mind if I made a copy of her picture?”

“What for?” Sandy asked, surprised.

“I think the public would love to know what she looks like,” he said, putting the picture in his pocket. “Did you ever see their ship?”

“My parents’ ship? Not exactly. That is, just pictures there, too.”

Boyle nodded quickly, as though he’d just had an idea. “I’ll tell you what, Sandy. Suppose we showed you all the pictures we could find of spaceships of that time. Do you think you could pick their ship out?”

“I could try, I suppose.”

“And that’s all anyone could ask of you,” Boyle said heartily. “Ah, here’s Lieutenant Darp and our breakfast!”

One of the crew members was following Marguery into the lounge, pushing a wheeled cart. As Marguery greeted them the crew member pulled dishes covered in silver domes out of a heating compartment under the table and set places for three.

Although Sandy’s first interest was in the smells of what they were being offered, he didn’t fail to notice how Marguery looked. She looked beautiful. Her hair was gleaming in its long, scarlet braids, and she wore a completely different outfit than she had the night before—a skirt the color of her hair, that reached barely to her knees, a white, fringed leather jacket, bright blue socks that went halfway up her calf and ended in a plaid of red, blue, and white. Frowning, Sandy noticed that Boyle’s clothes, too, were not the same as the night before, and wondered if he was not making a mistake by continuing to wear the same outfit day after day.

But then it was time to eat the “breakfast,” and that took all of Sandy’s concentration. The “pancakes” were fine, especially with gobs of the thick, sweet “maple syrup.” So was the little dish of cut-up pieces of “fruit.” He nibbled at them very tentatively at first, but the contrasting flavors and textures of “oranges” and “grapefruit” and “melon” were irresistible. And then Polly showed up; and the day’s questioning began, and it wasn’t until Polly retired for her private midday meal and stun time that Sandy had a chance to take Hamilton Boyle aside and ask him if, really, there was any reason to change clothes so often.

He was still blushing as, hastily retiring to his own cabin, he stood in the tiny shower cubicle, with the hot water pouring down on him.

No one among the Hakh’hli had ever pointed out to him that he might smell bad. It was not a Hakh’hli concern. None of the Hakh’hli ever bothered to disguise their natural odors themselves, for that matter; but still, he told himself remorsefully, he should have noticed by himself that the pleasant odors that came from the human beings almost all came out of a bottle.

When he was out of the shower and dried, he experimented with the flask of men’s cologne that Boyle had loaned him. It certainly smelled pleasant enough. He filled a palm with it and began slapping it onto his body.

His yell of angry surprise woke Polly from the last of her stun time and brought her waddling in to see what was the matter. When he told her indignantly that the stuff stung, she was unsympathetic. “Perhaps you are putting it in the wrong places,” she suggested. “At any rate, it is a human foolishness and, as you are human, you might as well get used to it. Put on some clothing so we can go out and be interrogated some more.”

“They aren’t interrogating us,” he corrected. “They are simply asking us questions, because they are naturally so interested in us.”

“Not just in us,” she said darkly. “What have they been asking you?”

He shrugged, pulling on a new pair of pants and studying himself anxiously in the little mirror. “All sorts of things. Nothing in particular.”

“But in particular they have been asking me about some very serious things,” she said, her tone grim. “About the history of the ship. About whether the Hakh’hli have ever before encountered intelligent beings, and what they did about them. About the technology of our ship’s engines, which are powered by what they call ‘strange matter’—though how they know that I do not know. Especially about we Hakh’hli ourselves—why we allow ourselves to die when it is our turn, how many eggs are kept in storage, for how long, for what purpose . . . there is nothing they do not want to know.”

“And there is nothing we should not tell them,” Sandy said virtuously, combing his hair to see if he could make it look like Hamilton Boyle’s. “That is our purpose here. To exchange information.”

“To exchange, yes,” she agreed, “but what information are they giving us in return?”

“I’m sure they’ll tell us anything we want to know,” he said stoutly.

She gave him a bitter look. “You are quite a human being after all,” she announced. “Please remember to act like one next time we sleep together.”

He turned to gaze at her, surprised by her tone. “Have I offended you, Hippolyta?” he asked.

“You have behaved quite badly in your sleep,” she announced crossly. “You should swallow your own spit! Were you dreaming last night? What were you dreaming of? Twice last night you woke me and I had to push you away, for you seemed to be trying amphylaxis with me. That is foolish, as well as disgusting, Lysander! Save such things for your human female, Marguery Darp.”

“Don’t I wish,” Sandy said wistfully.

There weren’t as many questions as usual that afternoon, but Sandy found the session wearing. What Polly said had spoiled things for him, a little. He didn’t like the idea of being interrogated. He began taking careful note of the number of questions he was asked, and what they were about.

That part was easy. The answer was “everything,” from the Hakh’hli name for their sun, and for airships, and for the lander, to why ChinTekki-tho, though a Senior, was not a Major Senior. Hamilton Boyle had the same curiosity Marguery had shown about the films that had been shown to the entire ship’s company; Marguery wanted to know, all over again, how the landing craft’s magnetic repellers at least slowed down the bits of debris in orbit. Sandy sulked. Even though Marguery complimented him very kindly on how well he looked in his fresh clothes (and, when he asked, yes, on how well he smelled now, too), he was not enjoying the time spent with her and was glad when Boyle announced that they would stop the conversation for a while, because Bottom was on television, speaking from the lander site.

The lander was no longer as Lysander had left it. The Hakh’hli housekeeping crew had been busy; most of the tattered micrometeorite screen was gone, and they had already begun laying on the shiny new one that would be needed for takeoff. And a whole little town had sprung up around it—three big oblong structures on wheels (Marguery explained that they were called “trailers”) formed an arc around the little rocket. Half a dozen fabric things (“tents”) housed some of the human beings who worked in the trailers; half a dozen helicopters sat around, some of them with their rotors steadily turning. It was drizzling in the Inuit Commonwealth, and the Hakh’hli were staying inside. Sandy caught a glimpse of Demmy watching from the doorway, and then the scene switched to pick up the picture of Bottom, squatting inside one of the tents, explaining exactly what the “railgun launcher” was to be like, and where it could be built; and all Polly and Sandy had to do that afternoon was watch and explain some of the details Bottom was leaving out.

By the end of the long day Sandy was exhausted again, but he had discovered that coffee would keep him awake. “I don’t know if you should hit it that hard,” Marguery said, concerned. “It’s all new to your system, isn’t it?”

“It’ll be all right,” Sandy assured her. No risk to his system was going to keep him from spending private time with her. But he finished with a huge yawn.

Marguery looked concerned. “Haven’t you been getting enough sleep?”

“I can’t sleep as long as you do,” he said defensively.

“Well, if you’d like to pack it in for the night—”

“Oh, no! No. I like spending time just with you, Marguery.”

She gave him a kind of Earth-female smile that was totally unreadable to Sandy. “You aren’t about to produce another poem, are you?”

He shook his head, but thoughtfully. Were the poems doing what he hoped for them, after all? But he said, “It’s just that I’m more comfortable with you. Not that Hamilton Boyle isn’t all right, but—I don’t know. I don’t think he trusts me, exactly.”

“Well, he’s a cop,” Marguery said, and then, before Sandy could say it, added, “So am I, of course. But he’s been one all his life. It’s kind of instinctive with him now, I guess.”

“Would he third-degree me, Marguery?”

“Third-degree? Torture? Of course not! Or anyway,” she added unwillingly, “not unless he really had to. Why do you ask a question like that?” Sandy shrugged. “Are you keeping secrets from us?”

Sandy considered the question. “I don’t think so,” he reported. “I mean, I’ve told you everything you asked.”

She sneezed, then looked at him thoughtfully. “And is there anything we ought to know that we haven’t known enough to ask you about?”

“Not that I know of.” Then he looked harder at her. “Do you think there is?”

Marguery said slowly, “There is one thing that I’ve been wondering about, actually.”

“And what’s that? Just ask, Marguery. I’ll tell you if I know.”

She gazed at him for a moment, and then, oddly, asked, “How old are you?”

The question took him by surprise, but he answered promptly. “In Earth years, I’m about twenty-two.”

“Yes, that’s what you’ve told us. And you said you were rescued, unborn, from an Earth spaceship?”

“Yes, that’s correct,” he said, wondering what she was up to.

“But that was right after the war, and that happened fifty years ago.”

“Oh, yes,” Sandy said, grinning with pleasure. It was good to be able to explain something simple to her, when so many of the questions were harder to deal with. “That,” he lectured, “is because for so much of the time the ship was traveling at a major fraction of the speed of light, you see. This causes a time-dilation effect, as your Albert—as Albert Einstein predicted in his theory of relativity. So time passed more slowly for me, on the ship.”

“I see,” she said, nodding. “So it’s actually been about fifty years, Earth time, since you were born. And that was twenty-five years out to Alpha Centauri, and twenty-five years back, right? Only it only seemed like about ten years each way because of time dilation.”

“Exactly,” he said, beaming with gratification at her quick understanding.

She asked, very seriously, “What was it like at Alpha Centauri?”

He blinked. “I beg your pardon?”

She repeated, “What was it like at Alpha Centauri? I mean, that was only ten years ago as far as you were concerned, right? So you were about ten years old, in your own subjective terms.”

He frowned. “I don’t see your point.”

“Well, Sandy,” she said unhappily, “when I was ten years old I was pretty immature, but I wasn’t stupid. I wouldn’t have been totally oblivious to an occasion like that. I’d remember something about Alpha Centauri, even if it was only how excited the grownups were. Don’t you?”

He scowled more deeply. “I’ve seen pictures of it,” he offered.

“Yes,” she agreed. “So have we. The Hakh’hli have shown us tapes. But I wasn’t there. Were you?”

“Of course I was. I had to have been,” he said reasonably, though he was still scowling.

She sighed. “I don’t think you were,” she said. “I think they lied to you.”

He stared at her, thunderstruck and slightly offended. “Why would they do that?” he demanded. She was, after all, talking against the oldest friends he had.

“That’s what I’d like to know,” she said seriously. “What reason could they possibly have? For instance, suppose when they captured your parents—”

“They rescued them,” he snapped.

“When they took them aboard the Hakh’hli ship, then. Suppose your father wasn’t dead. Suppose your mother wasn’t even pregnant. Suppose you weren’t born until early in the return trip, and then something happened to your parents, and they brought you up—”

“Something did happen to my parents. Then the Hakh’hli did bring me up.”

“But you don’t remember anything about Alpha Centauri. So it couldn’t have happened the way they told you, Sandy,” she pointed out.

He was definitely edgy now. He snapped, “What’s your point?”

“Only that they lied to you, Sandy.”

“But that’s silly! There wasn’t any reason for them to lie, was there? Why would they do that?”

And she sighed. “I wish I knew.”