Homegoing

Chapter 23

Although there are more than ninety thousand trackable objects in Low Earth Orbit, the space doesn’t look crowded. Low Earth Orbit, after all, includes a vast volume of space. It is a shell perhaps twenty miles thick, completely surrounding the Earth. The probability that any given orbiting object that is big enough to be detected—say, an expended nuclear pop-up laser—is within a mile of any other—say, an ascending Hakh’hli landing vessel—is very low at any given time. However, the orbital velocities are huge. The pop-up travels that mile in a quarter of a second. And the objects that are too small to be detected move just as fast . . . and there are many more of them . . . and hundreds of thousands of them are just as deadly.

Flying the Hakh’hli simulator was not at all like flying the landing vessel itself. Lysander’s inadequate piloting skills were taxed to the utmost. The only thing that saved them from disaster was that there was nothing very hard to do. Taking off was easier than landing. It was the easiest thing in the world: You didn’t have to go any place in particular, you only had to go up.

Compressed back into the huge kneeling-seat, Lysander could barely reach the Hakh’hli-designed controls. He knew what he had to do. It was just so very difficult to do it. Once they were off the ground he had to release his straps and lever himself forward against the enclosing arms of the seat—forcing every muscle to do more work than it had ever done before—in order to engage the magnetic repellers. Then he let himself drop back, panting.

Behind him Marguery gasped, “What are you doing, Sandy?”

“I am flying this Hakh’hli landing vessel,” he said proudly. “Please don’t get out of your seat.”

“As if I could!”

“Of course you cannot do that now,” he agreed, “but once we are at orbital velocity I will cut the thrust. Then you must remain where you are.”

“Or you’ll shoot me.”

“Oh, no, Marguery. It’s too late for you to keep me from taking off, isn’t it? But if you interfere you may very well crash and kill us both.”

She was silent for a moment, panting. Then she called over the distant thunder of the engines, “Would you really have shot me?” He didn’t answer. He just smiled at her over his shoulder. She tried a different tack. “What if I have to go to the bathroom?”

“There is no bathroom on a Hakh’hli landing vessel,” he told her. “In the cabinet behind you and to the right are waste sacks and sponge materials that can be used for that purpose, if absolutely necessary. But for now I think—ow,” he cried, as the lander made a sudden sidewise thrust. He rubbed a bruised shoulder. “We must’ve just dodged a big one! That means we’re getting into the garbage orbit, so hold tight!”

It took more than an hour to dodge and bounce their way through the garbage belt. They were continuously on drive, keeping both of them anchored to their seats. Because they were using the north polar sector of the sky the density of dangerous objects were markedly lower than anywhere else over the Earth. It was still hazardous enough, and definitely a bumpy ride. From time to time alarming noises made Marguery bite her lip, as some microartifact too tiny to dodge splatted against the foil shield and its instant plasma cone clanged against the hull. Some of the clangs were scarily loud . . . but none were followed by the blue-light pressure alarm on the board, or by the hiss of escaping gas.

The little ship’s evasive action threw them about mercilessly. By the time they were clear of the worst of the damage even Lysander was nursing bruises, and Marguery was grunting with pain. Lysander calculated the vectors for converting their circumpolar orbit into the equatorial one of the interstellar ship and applied corrections. “I’m reducing thrust,” he called, squinting with interest at a familiar face that was silently shouting on the pilot’s screen. “You can go relieve yourself now if you need to.”

“Thanks for nothing,” Marguery snarled. “Who’s that looking at us?”

Lysander studied the face. “It’s ChinTekki-tho. He isn’t looking at us, though. At least, he can’t see us, because I’m not transmitting yet. He looks angry, doesn’t he?”

“What a surprise!” she snapped. “What are you going to do now?”

Lysander leaned back against the kneeling-seat, rubbing his bruises. “I’ll answer him pretty soon,” he told her.

“Then what, damn it?”

He looked at her thoughtfully. “Then,” he said, “I’m going to do what I want to do. That’ll be a novelty, won’t it? I haven’t had much practice at that. First I did what the Hakh’hli wanted me to do for most of my life. Then I did what you wanted me to do. So this is a new experience, and there’s a good chance I’ll screw up. But we’re going to try it anyway.”

“Damn you, Lysander!” she began, and then, in a different tone, she said, “Please, Lysander. What are your plans?”

“Why,” he said reasonably, “the first thing I have to do is to set course for the Hakh’hli ship. That means there will be a lot of velocity changes, so I’ll have to be careful about that; we don’t have big fuel reserves. No,” he corrected himself, shaking his head, “that’s not the first thing. The first thing is to find the ship.” And, as she started to speak, he finished politely, “Dear Marguery, please shut up. I have to concentrate.”

It took a lot of concentration. It took painstaking searching of the three-hour equatorial orbit before Lysander caught his first glimpse of the interstellar ship. He fumbled with the magnification until he got the Hakh’hli ship large in the screen, then worked the course calculators.

Then he sighed and applied a gentle torque, then a small thrust. “It could be worse,” he observed. “We should be able to reach it in about six hours. Oh, look, Marguery! They’re coming along quite well with that big dish.”

“Great,” Marguery snapped.

“I’d like to ask ChinTekki-tho when they expect to be able to detect signals,” Lysander said cheerfully.

“Go ahead and do it, why don’t you? He sure looks like he wants to talk to you.”

Lysander hesitated, then reluctantly switched over to transmission mode. “Hello, ChinTekki-tho,” he said pleasantly, turning on the sound for the picture. “How are you?”

ChinTekki-tho thundered furiously in Hakh’hli.

“John William Washington, why are you doing this thing and not some proper thing? It is that twelfth-day for sleep now! You delay my rest! Your Major Seniors instruct you to cease this conduct which is improper and not as directed!”

“Speak English,” Lysander ordered. “I want Marguery to hear everything we say.”

ChinTekki-tho twitched his thumbs in furious objection. “But that is unwise and not prudent, Lysander! This Marguery Darp is not only Earth human who will hear!”

“I said, in English!”

“Oh, very well,” said ChinTekki-tho, angrily giving in. “Then tell me! Why are you doing this? Where is your gratitude to the Hakh’hli who gave you life? We saved you!”

Lysander shook his head firmly. “I don’t think I owe you anything for that. You didn’t do it for me. You did it for yourselves, and besides you lied to me about it.”

“Lysander! You are endangering serious plans of Major Seniors for all our progeny. Think of seventy-three million eggs unhatched!”

“I am thinking,” Lysander said harshly, “of seventy-three million Hakh’hli invading the continent of Africa, ChinTekki.”

He deliberately left off the “tho” of respect. The teacher winced, but only said, “What are you talking about?”

“That you are invading the Earth!”

“No, no,” ChinTekki-tho cried. “We are not ‘invading’ the Earth. Why do you use that word?”

“Then what do you call what you are going to do in Africa?”

ChinTekki-tho glanced nervously about, as though looking for some Earth-human eye turned in his direction. He licked his lips and said, “We do no harm in Africa. Africa has plenty of room. No Earth humans are using it.”

“But it’s their Earth. It’s their planet. Shouldn’t you ask them first?”

“Lysander, you speak without thought. What is the use of asking them if we can live there until we know if it is possible for us to live there? No, Lysander! It is not your place to question the decisions of the Major Seniors now! Rather you should explain why it is that you attacked four of your cohort-mates and, without authorization, stole that landing vessel.”

“Oh?” Lysander said, interested. “How did you know that, ChinTekki-tho?”

“How do you think I know it?” the teacher said bitterly. “They’ve been telling us about it for the last hour! As soon as your cohort-mates recovered from your foul attack they demanded that the Earth humans transmit for them. They are speaking to me even now, along with some of the humans. They, too, want you to go back!”

Lysander blinked in surprise; he hadn’t expected them to react so quickly. “Why don’t they talk to me direct?”

“Because you do not have any receiver for Earth transmissions, foolish Lysander!” ChinTekki-tho roared. “Do you not believe me? Here, wait. I will allow you to see for yourself.”

He leaned past the camera to give swift orders in Hakh’hli. In a moment the screen split in two horizontally. On top was the furious face of ChinTekki-tho. Below him were a whole group of people—Boyle and a couple of other humans, and with them Demetrius and Tanya, looking just as enraged. They looked different in other ways, too. Hamilton Boyle seemed to have had his hair cropped short since they saw him last; moreover, he was wearing a burn dressing on one side of his face. Demetrius was bandaged, too, and looked even more resentfully furious. He shouted accusingly: “You endangered our lives, Lysander! If this Earth human had not managed to pull me out of the exhaust before you applied full power I would have died unnecessarily early!”

“I’m sorry you both got scorched,” Lysander said politely. “I see you all survived, though.”

“No thanks to you,” Hamilton Boyle grated. “Come back at once!”

“Sorry,” Lysander said. “I don’t have the fuel. Or the desire, either.”

“Then come simply and peacefully to the ship, Lysander,” ChinTekki-tho pleaded. “We will accept you without harm!”

“The hell you will!” Boyle shouted. “You just want Lieutenant Darp for a hostage!”

“Hakh’hli do not take ‘hostages,’ ” ChinTekki-tho roared. “It is you who now have four of our people held captive! We are not war-loving, violent creatures like Earth humans!”

“We are neither war loving nor violent!” Boyle began, and Lysander took a hand in the conversation.

“Boyle,” he said, “have you told ChinTekki-tho what you peace-loving, gentle people did to Polly?”

That stopped Boyle. He hesitated, glancing at the Hakh’hli beside him, before he muttered, “She is quite all right.”

“No,” Lysander corrected him, “she isn’t. You don’t know how much harm you’ve done, Boyle.”

On the other screen ChinTekki-tho thundered, “If you Earth creatures have dared to harm a Hakh‘hli—”

“Shut up, please,” Lysander said mildly. “Hippolyta’s nowhere near all right now, but she’ll get over it. In fact, all of you shut up, while I tell you what you ought to do. The first thing—oh, hell,” he said, as the babble of raging voices just grew louder. He reached for the sound control and shut it off.

“There,” he said comfortably into the silence. “You can hear me, but I can’t hear a word from any of you, so just shut up. I’ve been thinking. You Hakh’hli can’t have any part of the Earth, because the humans don’t want you there. You humans can’t chase the Hakh’hli out of the solar system, because they can’t afford to go. So the answer is obvious. You have to compromise.”

He sat back, nodding seriously and watching the faces on the screen. At least they were all silent now, though the expressions on the human faces, and the way ChinTekki-tho was snapping his thumbs, showed that they had not stopped being enraged.

From behind him Marguery asked tentatively, “Compromise how, Lysander?”

“There’s only one way that I can see,” Lysander said. “Give the Hakh’hli a different planet. Mars.” He turned and gave Marguery a look of pleasure. “So you see how simple it is?” he finished.

Marguery got up and moved beside him, looking down. He gazed tranquilly back at her.

“Are you serious?” she asked. When he nodded, she objected, “But nobody can live on Mars!”

“Oh, but they can,” he said, speaking as much to the transmitter as to Marguery Darp. “It’s only a matter of energy. The Hakh’hli can beam microwaves down to Mars as easily as to Earth. They can park the big ship in a Martian orbit and start colonizing.”

“But—what if they decide not to do that?”

“Trust has to start somewhere, Marguery,” he said earnestly. “Besides, we can exchange observers. Hostages, if you like. Put a few hundred humans on the Hakh’hli ship, and then on Mars when they get around to it. Leave a few hundred Hakh’hli on the Earth. They can be like what you call ‘ambassadors,’ and they’ll know right away if either side starts to cheat. No,” he finished, wagging his head, “I’ve thought it all out. It’ll work. Oh, it will take a while. Fifty years, maybe, before we finish cleaning up the Earth and make Mars worth living on—but it’s all going to go the right way, don’t you see? Every year things will get a little better, instead of a lot worse.” He leaned toward her, grinning. He gave her a quick kiss and then turned back to the instruments.

“Now,” he sighed, turning the sound back on, “let’s see what our friends think about it all.”

ChinTekki-tho was the first off the mark. “John William Washington,” he shouted. “Who are you to give orders to the Major Seniors? They will never give in to force! You ask us to swallow our own spit!”

And Hamilton Boyle snarled, “That’s not a decision for someone like you to make, Lysander! Forget it! The Hakh’hli have already proved that we can’t trust them!”

“It is Earth humans who have lied!” ChinTekki-tho shouted.

“Oh, stop it,” Lysander said wearily. “That’s what the, ah, ambassadors are for. Otherwise there’s no doubt you’d both lie and cheat.” He nodded judiciously. “You are both experts in this matter, of course. You have both lied to me too many times for me to believe anything you say now.”

Boyle said earnestly from his half of the plate, “‘We haven’t lied to you, exactly—”

Lysander laughed savagely. “ ‘Exactly,’ ” he mimicked. “And that word is also a lie! Boyle, I know that you lie; I know that Earth people lie easily and well, because I have seen how quickly I myself have learned to do it.”

“But you’re not—” Boyle began, and then stopped. In the ship Marguery’s hand flew to her mouth.

Lysander looked at her, then back at the screen. “I see there are still lies untruthed,” he said grimly. “What is it, ChinTekki-tho?”

The big Hakh’hli flexed his thumbs restlessly. “Ask your Earth-female and not me,” he grumbled in Hakh’hli.

“I’m asking you! And I want it in English.”

“You do not wish it heard in English,” ChinTekki-tho said earnestly. “Believe me in this.”

“Say it in English anyway! You didn’t find my parents alive in a spaceship. I wasn’t born of an American woman. The only ones there were Russian, and they were both male!”

ChinTekki-tho said gently, “That is true, Lysander. They were also both quite dead. They had been dead for some time, and there was no air in their ship; there was not enough viable tissue left, really, to salvage.”

Lysander flinched but held his ground. To hear it said was terrible, but he had been expecting something of the sort ever since the time in the underwater chamber. “What you mean,” he grated, “is that I’m Hakh’hli. You’ve done genetic alteration on me. Isn’t that true?”

But ChinTekki-tho was waggling his jaw negatively. “No, Lysander,” he said, “you are not Hakh’hli.”

And from behind him Marguery, sitting there almost forgotten, whispered, “No, Lysander. You aren’t even Hakh’hli.”

Of all the tones Lysander had heard in Marguery Darp’s voice, he had never heard a tone like that. He turned to search her face. “Is that true? And you knew that?” he croaked.

She nodded. Sadly. Tenderly. “We knew that ever since we checked your tissue samples—first your excretions; we had your toilet plumbing diverted, Lysander. Then the sample they took in the hospital and your sperm—”

“No one ever took a sample of my sperm!”

She managed to smile. “Someone did, dear Lysander. I did.” He flushed, even in that moment. She went on, “As soon as they began studying your DNA they could see that some of it wasn’t human. Naturally we checked it against the Hakh’hli cells from Obie’s body; it wasn’t that, either, though the Hakh’hli DNA was closer. Yours wasn’t anywhere near the DNA from the hawkbees we caught—well, no one expected it would be. But there were other tissue samples—”

He said harshly, “There couldn’t have been any other tissue samples! There wasn’t anything else alive from the ship!”

She shook her head. “I didn’t say alive, Lysander. The other tissue samples were the scraps of food that Polly and the others left over. The—the meat,” she finished wretchedly.

He stared at her incredulously, then turned to the screen. “Please, ChinTekki-tho,” he begged.

And the old Hakh’hli teacher said somberly, “It is true, Lysander. We had to use other sources of DNA. It was very difficult to splice the genes, preserving as many Earth-human characteristics as we could—and then a surrogate mother was needed to bear you. We borrowed some genetic material from the hoo’hik to make you, Lysander, and it was out of the womb of a hoo’hik that you were born.”