Homegoing

Chapter 9

The carbon dioxide warmup of the Earth’s air was real enough to be observed through most of the middle part of the twentieth century, but it didn’t really hit its stride until the twenty-first century began. That is when the global annual mean temperature began to register a seven-degree climb over the norm of the last ten or fifteen thousand years. Humans have done lots of other ingenious things to their air. They have scavenged its ozone layer with chlorofluorocarbons, burdened it with acid aerosols, even laced it with radionuclides, but it is the warmup that has produced the most interesting effects. The equator hasn’t changed much, temperature-wise. The poles have. Glacial melt-water pours in Nile-sized streams off Antarctica and the Greenland ice cap. Queerly, the temperate parts of the northern hemisphere haven’t done much warming. Their temperatures are either only negligibly higher—like North America—or even actually colder than before, like Europe. Europe suffers greatly from a change in ocean currents. The massive influx of fresh water, which is less dense than the rest of the sea, has stopped the long conveyor belt that brought warm surface water up from the tropics to moderate Europe’s winters. Contrariwise, the Pacific, at the other end of the world-girdling conveyor, is no longer refrigerated by the sea. It hasn’t meant a lot for the land areas of the Pacific, but in Europe it has meant a lot. Madrid and Monte Carlo, for instance, now have the climate once associated with Chicago.

Obie was the first of the cohort to appear at the lander door when stun time was over. Yawning and scratching, he waved down to Sandy. Then he turned around, presenting his stubby tail to the audience, gripped the center rail with hard thumbs and helper-fingers, and slid down, landing with a thump at the bottom. He turned to face them, laughing. “Oh, Sandy,” he cried rapturously. “Isn’t this light gravity wonderful? I feel as if I could jump a mile.”

“Don’t, please,” Sandy ordered, smiling apologetically at his new human friends. He introduced Oberon and Tanya, who had just come out, to the new human arrivals, stumbling over some of their names—Miriam Zuckerman, Dashia Ali, Hamilton Boyle. He didn’t have any trouble remembering the name of Marguery Darp, though. He watched her carefully, trying to gauge what she was thinking from the look on her face. It didn’t tell him much. She was smiling, nodding, and saying a few polite words of welcome to Earth. But he still felt a little embarrassment. The humans were taking such obvious care not to say anything, well, insulting. Of course, it was inevitable that human beings should experience some culture shock. Looking at his mates through human eyes, Sandy understood that four-foot-high, kangaroo-shaped, English-speaking aliens from a spaceship were certainly going to attract attention. Especially when, like Oberon, they were always taking great, joyous leaps in the air.

“Your friend,” Marguery Darp said to Sandy, pointing at Oberon, “is sure a great jumper, isn’t he?”

“Well, it’s a great temptation here,” Sandy told her. He was heroically resisting the temptation to show off his own 1.4-G strength.

“Nevertheless,” put in Tanya, standing back, “he should not make a spectacle of himself in that way.” She waved commandingly to Oberon and, when he leaped back to them with an inquiring look, said in a severe tone, “You are behaving foolishly, Oberon. This Earth human female is disappointed.”

Obie looked hangdog, but Marguery Darp said quickly, “Oh, no, Mr., ah, Oberon! Not at all! I think you jump splendidly. The only thing that I would suggest is—well—don’t you think you should wear a hat? The ozone layer’s still pretty threadbare, this far north.”

Obie stared at her. “Ozone layer? Hat?”

Hamilton Boyle explained smoothly. “Lieutenant Darp is concerned about the ultraviolet radiation in the sunlight, Mr. Oberon. Since the ozone layer was weakened we’ve had a good deal of trouble because of it—skin cancers, crop failures, a hell of a lot of bad sunburn cases. Are you susceptible to sunburn, do you know?”

Obie looked inquiringly at Sandy, who said, “No, he doesn’t know. None of us do. We’ve never been exposed to sunlight before.”

“Then you’ll all need hats,” Marguery Darp said decisively. “And probably some kind of pullover to cover your, ah, arms.”

“Or better still—” Boyle smiled “—we ought to get you all indoors. What about accepting our invitation to come to a city? There’s plenty of room in the V-tol.”

“Go to a city?” Obie squealed.

“I’ll have to ask Polly, of course,” Tanya said. She turned and began to climb back into the lander.

Boyle called after her, “Please say that this is an official invitation from the government of the Yukon Commonwealth, who would like to welcome you all to Earth!” And to Sandy and Oberon, he added, “You’ll like it, I promise. Dawson’s a real city, and I guarantee we can make you comfortable there.”

Marguery was nodding encouragingly. Sandy said, “Oh, I’d like that.”

And Obie said gloomily, “Polly won’t let us.”

But when Polly at last came down from the lander—more decorously than Obie—she was all shrugs and tears of good will. “Of course we accept your invitation to visit your Dawson,” she said. “Our advisor, ChinTekki-tho, asks us to thank you for inviting us. Unfortunately, we cannot all come with you.”

“But the V-tol will easily hold us all,” Marguery Darp said.

“It is not a matter of what the ship will hold. It is a matter of what is necessary. Some of us must remain with the landing ship as a precaution; if we left it alone some Earth person might enter it and do some hurt to himself. Also there is much work to do because of the damage the lander has received in coming to Earth. The micrometeoroid screens must be replaced, for instance; you can see how badly they have been damaged on the way in.”

“But surely you’re not planning to leave right away?” Boyle asked, frowning.

“It is not a matter of what we plan, either,” Polly told him. “Our directives come from the Major Seniors, so we must carry them out. However, the landing craft will not leave at once. Some of us will go with you. Of course, we will have to bring provisions with us so we will have something to eat.”

“There’s plenty to eat in Dawson,” Marguery Darp said.

Polly waggled her head. “But only of Earth food, I’m afraid. However, Lysander and I will go with you, and we will take—” She glanced around, sighed, and finished, “Oberon; I think he can be spared most easily. The others will stay with the lander.”

The flight to Dawson in Marguery Darp’s V-tol plane was almost as rough as the landing from the interstellar ship; even Obie got airsick. But when they landed in the place called Dawson, Sandy got his first look at a human city. “It’s so big!” he cried, staring at the tall buildings. Some of them were nearly a hundred feet high!

“Oh, it’s not that big,” Marguery Darp said reassuringly. “This is just Dawson. It’s the capital of the Yukon Commonwealth; I doubt that there are more than twenty-five thousand people in the whole commonwealth, and most of them aren’t in Dawson. They’re out on the farms.”

Sandy once again regretted the fact that he could ask only one question at a time. “Yukon Commonwealth?” he repeated inquiringly.

“That’s what this area is called,” she explained. “We don’t have big countries any more—things like nations, you know? We just have commonwealths. About ten thousand of them, all over the world. I guess the biggest commonwealth in North America is York, over on the east coast, and that only has about a quarter of a million people. The place where you landed is the Inuit. This is Yukon. Just south of us there’s the Athabasca Commonwealth—that’s where the really big farms are. And over to the west—”

Sandy stopped her geography lesson. “Can’t we go into the city?” he asked.

And Obie put in eagerly, “And get something to eat? Maybe even a real milk shake?”

“Of course we can,” said Marguery, smiling. “Come on. The car’s waiting for us.”

The car was actually a “van”—four wheels, boxy, with seats big enough even for the two Hakh’hli to squeeze in—and it moved rapidly toward the town. All three of the visitors stared at everything they passed, Obie chattering in excitement, Polly supercilious, and Sandy wholly goggle-eyed at the wonders of a real human city. He couldn’t help chuckling to himself, which made Marguery smile, and the two Hakh’hli were dripping saliva in excitement.

This part of the human world was no longer the way it had looked in the Hakh’hli records—not any of the many ways it had appeared. There were cars, of course. The Hakh’hli had seen plenty of Earth-human cars chasing each other endlessly around the “freeways” in the old films, and they knew what cars looked like. These were different. They came in three wheels or four, open ones and sealed ones, big and little. Few of the buildings in Dawson were skyscrapers. They had many stories—the “hotel” Marguery took them to had twenty-five—but most of them were underground. “There’s no sunlight to speak of in the winter here anyway,” she explained, “so what’s to look at? Anyway, this keeps us out of the wind.”

“The wind didn’t seem bad,” Obie offered eagerly, showing off his new connoisseurship, since they had experienced far worse winds in the storm when they landed.

“It isn’t bad today,” Marguery said. “Oh, they don’t get many hurricanes this far inland—that’s what they had in the Inuit Commonwealth when you landed, a hurricane. But they have what they call chinooks, and when one of them comes along they’ll take the hair right off your head—well, not your head, of course, Oberon. Anyway, come on, let’s get you settled.”

“Getting settled” meant “checking in” at a “hotel.” They weren’t alone as they did it. They never were. People clustered around them, goggling, and they never got away from the TV cameras, except in the privacy of their rooms.

Their individual rooms.

That fact by itself startled them all. Whoever heard of sleeping alone? Oberon and Polly decided at once to share one corner of a room floor (they were not quite ready to try a “bed”), but Sandy chose to do on Earth as the Earthies did. “But then I’ll just have Polly to sleep with,” Obie wailed. “I’ll be cold!”

Polly said irritably. “Oh, let the Earthling do what he likes. Only stay with us while I check the radio, Lysander. We have to make sure everything’s all right at the ship.”

Of course, everything was. Tanya responded to the first call and reported that all was well, except that some of the Earthies were eager to be allowed a look inside the landing craft. “Certainly not,” Polly ordered indignantly. “Or not unless ChinTekki-tho gives permission, anyway. Have you maintained contact with the ship?”

“Of course,” said Tanya. “The Major Seniors are considering that question now. Also, they wish to make a ‘broadcast’ to Earth themselves. I have spoken to ChinTekki-tho, and he is going to tell us how to set up a relay from the lander.”

Polly swallowed. “And are the Major Seniors, well, pleased?” she asked.

“They haven’t said they were not,” Tanya reported. So that was all right. Polly signed off, weeping in relief.

Then Marguery came knocking on the door. “Sandy?” she said. “I thought this would be a good time if you all would like to go shopping.”

“Oh, absolutely,” he said eagerly. “I’ve always wanted to see an Earth supermarket.”

“Well,” she said, shaking her head, “that’s fine, sure, some other time. But right now I thought we might go to a clothing store. Your Hakh’hli friends ought to get hats, anyway, and you probably will be more comfortable if you get out of those funny-looking clothes.”

Sandy’s introduction to the human world as a participant in it was wonderful. It was also scary, and sometimes a little repulsive, but it was all, well, wonderful was still the best word. It was just one wonder after another. The biggest thing about the Earth was the space. There was so much of it— and so variously filled! There were lakes and farms and buildings and people. The best, if most worrisome, thing was the smells. They took getting used to because none of them were in any way like the smells of the ship. But even the manure pile behind that first cowshed had been quaintly amusing—sort of—and the smells of the town of Dawson were far more varied. There were nasty ones, like the steamy car exhausts. There were curious ones—food cooking, human sweat—and sweet ones, like flowers and grasses. And then there were the very special smells of women. Marguery giggled, but she helped Sandy identify them when he asked. Perfume. Soap. Hair-spray. Body odors, faint but stirring—they all added up to Human Female, and they made Sandy’s belly twitch in surprising and unexpected contractions.

Human Female was never out of his thoughts, especially with this prime example by his side.

It was curious (but he had never been acculturated to think it was undesirable in any way) that he had to look up when he spoke to her. She was easily six feet tall. She was also, he learned, extraordinarily strong for a Human Female, though to Sandy she seemed willowy. She had red hair that came down her back in two, long, twisty braids; she had green eyes and a strong, almost beaked nose; and it astonished Sandy that in all his twenty-odd years he had never before realized that the ideal Human Female beauty was composed of red, braided hair, green eyes, and a nearly beaked nose.

The only thing that kept him from thinking of nothing else, in fact, was the fact that there were so many other things that were, in different ways, almost equally exciting. Shopping, for instance. When they reached the place where shopping was performed the sign over the door said:

BERNEE’S

Other signs said:

SLAX

SPORTERS

JOGGING

CASUALS

The signs were fascinating to look at for Sandy, because they lighted up in bright colors, because they moved before his eyes, and most of all because they said such tantalizingly mysterious, ineffably human things as the cryptic:

Double Coupon Credits on Thursdays!

In spite of the constant flashing of the signs, the three newcomers were the only ones in the store looking at the signs. Everyone else, store clerks and shoppers as well, was gaping at Obie and Polly.

Obie was clowning again. He had found a huge shoe—it was a window display, certainly not anything meant for any human being to wear—and was holding it against his own immense foot. The laughter embarrassed Sandy, but a cautious peek at Marguery Darp showed that she was laughing, too, and so apparently Obie was not giving any real offense.

Anyway, the process was fascinating. This wasn’t pretend shopping, as they had practiced on the ship, but really taking “money” and exchanging it with a “salesperson” for “clothes.”

“Actually,” Marguery Darp explained, “you don’t really need any money right now.”

“I don’t?”

“Oh, no. You’re our guests. InterSec will pick up your hotel bills—and travel, and all that kind of thing. But if you want to pay for personal purchases yourself—”

“I’d like that,” Sandy assured her. “Where do I get some ‘money’?” That was the easiest part. Marguery took away a couple of his gold nuggets and came back with a sheaf, as thick as her thumb, of rectangular pieces of printed paper.

“That should last for a while,” she said. “Don’t you think?”

“There’s plenty more gold where that came from,” he assured her gallantly. He had already begun fingering some of the clothes. The stuff the Hakh'hli costumers had run up for him, he discovered at once, was nothing like the Real Thing. Trousers were not slick and poreless. Trousers came in soft fabrics that somehow nevertheless held a crease, and inside they were often lined with some fabric even softer. Moreover (ah, so that was how they did it!) the trousers were equipped with “zippers” in the front, so that they could be opened when necessary. Neckties weren’t simple strips of cloths. They were sewn as tubes, and inside was something that stiffened them so they appeared flat. Shoes were not pressed out of a single kind of plastic; they had one kind of thing for the upper parts, a harder kind for the soles, and a hard but springy kind for the heels. Jackets had pockets on the inside. Belts weren’t just ornaments; they had to go through little loops on the trousers, and then they held the trousers up. Hats didn’t just keep your head warm, they protected the scalp from the sun. Socks, underwear, shirts—oh, everything was different, really. And a lot nicer!

The only problem was that none of these wonderful things seemed to fit Lysander Washington at all.

He could squeeze his massive torso into the largest sizes, all right, but then a sweater became almost a calf-length smock, sleeves hung down past his fingertips, and the legs of the trousers had to be rolled up nearly a foot. Marguery explained that those difficulties could be dealt with, though. They just required paying over a few hundred more of these “dollars,” because the store had on its premises half a dozen humans whose only work was to cut and shape the factory-made clothing items to the particular requirements of the individual human frame. “So just pick out things you like,” she said, “and we’ll see about getting them fitted.” She glanced worriedly toward the front of the store, where Obie and Polly were raucously telling the Earth humans the Hakh’hli names for “foot” and “head” and other, less public, anatomical areas. “I’d better see what’s going on,” she said. “Excuse me just a minute.”

So Sandy was allowed to wander almost by himself, marvelling. So many articles of clothing! For so many different parts of the anatomy, in so many fabrics, so many textures, so many colors—and with so very many buttons, laces, zippers, cuffs, pockets, patches, fringes, ruffs, and things of every imaginable kind, structural, ornamental or, Sandy decided, just plain silly. (What could possibly be the purpose of an undergarment without a crotch? It might, he thought, conceivably be an adaptation for the pendulant male anatomy, but why was it in a section marked “Ladies’ Lingerie”?)

He saw that a young woman was gaping at him. She had just come out of an alcove marked “Dressing Room,” and she had tried on a bikini bathing suit; it occurred to him that he should not be in this particular place. He turned hastily away and blundered into the men’s outerwear section of the huge store, which was filled with racks twenty yards long of nothing but “sports coats,” or nothing but “slacks,” or “suits,” or “formal wear.”

He wandered on, until he found himself in the section devoted to shoes. He admired the glossy, glassy finish of some of them—could almost see his own face reflected, though grossly distorted, in the polished surfaces. And the colors! Lavender inset with diamonds of pale green; peach and pale blue; rainbow scarlet, orange, yellow—why had Marguery urged him to get the dull blacks and browns? For that matter, why had the shoes she suggested for him all been flat, when here were rack after rack of perfectly beautiful ones in all colors, with heels that would easily add five inches to his height?

He smiled forgivingly to himself. No doubt she simply liked the idea of being taller than he was. No matter; he had found the shoes he liked. He marched with a pair in each hand to a desk and asked the astonished woman behind it, “Do you have these in my size, please?”

Marguery straightened that out for him. It seemed that shoes were gender-specific things, and men didn’t ordinarily wear such tall heels, but apart from that everything went very easily—not only because buying clothes was considered a quite ordinary, routine kind of thing to do, but because even the sales clerks and the tailors were thrilled to be helping the stranger from an alien spaceship. Everything else waited while the whole staff ran around to do Sandy’s orders. The other customers didn’t mind any more than the store personnel. They crowded around when he was in the open, and some of the men peered openly through the curtains while he was in the changing room. There was no hostility in them, as far as Sandy could tell. Curiosity, yes, a lot of that; but even more, he felt, they were welcoming. Welcoming.

He was home.

And the only really worrying thing was that, with all these humans around him, especially all these human females (none of them as big and glorious as Marguery Darp, but all of them definitely female, all the same), he could not help a certain arousal.

When one of the salesgirls turned her head away, flushed and smiling, as she helped measure his trouser length, and several of the onlookers giggled among themselves, he realized that the bulge of his arousal was showing through the fabric; and what did one do about that?

Among the Hakh’hli, that was an occasion for rejoicing. Any female nearby would have been glad to cooperate. But he wasn’t among the Hakh’hli.

All the films that ever Sandy had watched had not told him exactly how one went about getting it on with a human Earth female, however assiduously he studied them for clues. It wasn’t that there weren’t definite protocols. Indeed, the mating rituals were in fact the main subject of most of the films, especially the ones where the boy and the girl sang love songs to each other and then danced away to the music of an invisible orchestra. Sandy could easily have played the part of Fred Astaire as, in that first, accidental glance, he knew at once that Ginger Rogers was the only woman in the world for him—and was spurned by her with apparent loathing—and, by singing in her ear and whisking her through a waltz or tango, finally melted her frozen heart and tap-danced away with her to, presumably, a bed. But he never heard that invisible orchestra. Besides, he couldn’t dance.

Then there were the ones where the boy saves the girl from the “enemy” in a “war,” or from “gangsters” or “terrorists,” and naturally falls into bed with her; but where was the war? Then there were the more direct ones. The boy and the girl would enter separately into a “singles bar” (whatever a singles bar was), whereupon one would sit down with a drink and the other would come up to her. Then they would address coded remarks to each other. The code was easy enough to break, but hard to duplicate. The conversations all had two levels of meaning, and Sandy was not at all sure that his language skills were up to that sort of thing. Still, it was the most direct way; because as soon as they had received each other’s appropriate recognition signals it was, “Your place or mine?”

Sandy found one encouraging thing about the situation—he did have a place, a hotel room, and all his own—but where was the necessary singles bar to make the suggestion? For that matter, where was the time for such things? As soon as he had clothes to wear (the rest wouldn’t be finished until tomorrow) Marguery whisked him away.

“What about Polly and Obie?” he demanded, looking back to where they were talking with other humans.

“They have their own escorts,” she told him. “But the people of Earth are naturally specially interested in you, and we’ve arranged a television interview for you alone. It’s only a block away.”

She whisked him over to a different kind of building. This was almost unique in Dawson because it extended ten whole stories above the ground, and the place she took him to was on the very top floor. “This is the TV studio,” she informed him. She looked him up and down. “You look very handsome,” she added.

“Do I?” he asked gratefully. He caught a glimpse of himself in a mirror, admiring his new clothes—tan cotton shorts, a short-sleeved shirt open to display his chest, sandals, and knee-length white socks with a strip of red at the tops. “I suppose I do,” he agreed complacently. “Now what do we do?”

“We just go right in here,” said Marguery, conducting him to a large room with eight or ten human beings gathered around, with of course the television cameras (or some kind of cameras) pointed at him.

A man in a blue turtleneck advanced toward him, extending his hand. “I’m Wilfred Morgenstern,” he said, wincing only slightly as Sandy remembered not to squeeze too hard in a handshake. “I’m your interviewer. Why don’t you just start at the beginning and tell us your whole story?”

Sandy looked around, perplexed, but Marguery was nodding encouragingly. “Well,” Sandy said, “a long time ago, when you were having your ‘war’ here on Earth, the Hakh’hli ship came to investigate this solar system . . .”

It was a long interview, and when it was over Marguery said sympathetically, “Would you like something to eat before I take you back to the hotel? I guess it’s been a long day for you.”

Sandy agreed fervently; not only long in that so much had happened, but it was one of those twenty-four-hour Earth days that stretched so much past the normal Hakh’hli span. But he pointed at the window. “It’s still light out,” he observed.

“We have long days here in the summer,” Marguery explained. “It’s quite normal to go to bed while it’s still light.”

He wasn’t listening; he had taken a closer look out the window and he caught his breath. It was nearly sunset. The whole western sky was a mass of color, whipped-cream clouds tinted in shades of pink and mauve and orange where they were not snowy white. “It is beautiful!” he exclaimed.

“It’s just clouds. Probably they’re from the storm you saw in the Inuit Commonwealth,” Marguery said practically. Then she said curiously, “Haven’t you ever seen clouds before?”

“We don’t have them in the Hakh’hli ship, you know. There isn’t even a word for them in Hakh’hli; when the Hakh’hli talk about them they say, ‘ita’hekh na’hnotta ‘ha,’ which means, let’s see, ‘liquid-phase particles suspended in gaseous phase.’ ”

“That’s interesting,” Marguery said. “I hope you’ll teach me some other Hakh’hli words.”

“With pleasure,” he said, and then surprised himself with a yawn. He was sleepy, after all. He ventured, “Will I see you tomorrow?” he asked.

“Of course you will. I’m your personal escort, Sandy. You’ll be seeing a lot of me for a long time.”

He smiled gratefully. “Then let me go back to the hotel; I’ll have cookies and milk with Polly and Obie.”

And, he thought, there was something else he really wanted to do, for a poem was beginning to take shape in his mind.