Homeward Bound

12

Atvar heard from Ttomalss that Kassquit and the wild Big Ugly had become physically intimate. “We instructed her not to do this. What is it likely to mean, Senior Researcher?” he inquired. “Will she abandon us for the Americans?”

“I do not believe so, Exalted Fleetlord,” Ttomalss replied. “This is just another complication, not-I hope-a catastrophe.”

“Just another complication.” Atvar let out a weary, hissing sigh. “I have heard those words or words much like them too often for my peace of mind.” He laughed. “I remember when I once had peace of mind.”

“Before you went to Tosev 3?” Ttomalss asked.

“Certainly,” Atvar said. “Not afterwards, by the spirits of Emperors past!” He cast down his eye turrets. “Never afterwards.”

“I believe that, Exalted Fleetlord,” the psychologist said. “And, all things considered, you were fairly lucky. The Big Uglies never captured you.”

“That is a truth.” Atvar had forgotten about Ttomalss’ ordeal. He returned to the business before him: “Ironic that Kassquit should form this attachment so soon after her audience with the Emperor.”

“Indeed,” Ttomalss said morosely. “I asked her about this myself, in fact. She said the audience was a source of pride, but the liaison was a source of satisfaction. Tosevite sexuality is different from ours, and there is nothing much to be done about it.”

That was another truth. The Race had wasted a lot of time and energy on Tosev 3 trying to get the Big Uglies to change their customs before deciding it was wasting its time and energy. The Tosevites were not going to change what they did, any more than the Race would.

The fleetlord wished that thought hadn’t occurred to him. Ginger had made a significant part of the Race change its sexual patterns. Atvar let out a sudden, thoughtful hiss. “Do you know, Senior Researcher, I believe we may have missed a chance on Tosev 3.”

“In what way?” Ttomalss asked.

“I wonder if, through drugs, we might make the Big Uglies’ sexual patterns more like ours and those of the other species in the Empire,” Atvar said. “As far as I know, this was never investigated.”

“I believe you are right, Exalted Fleetlord,” Ttomalss said. “The work might prove worthwhile. If you send a message now, researchers there can begin experimenting before too many more years have passed.”

“I may propose that,” Atvar said. “If they find such a drug, well and good. If they fail to find it, we are no worse off.”

“Just so.” Ttomalss made the affirmative gesture. “And now, if you will excuse me… I did want to let you know about Kassquit’s situation.”

“For which I thank you.” Atvar laughed again, sourly. “Though why I should thank you for exercising my liver is beyond me. This is one of those times when politeness and truth part company, I fear.”

“I understand.” Ttomalss left the fleetlord’s room.

The psychologist could go. The problem he had posed would stay. He had to be annoyed that Kassquit would choose her biological heritage over her cultural one. As far as Atvar could tell, though, that was the extent of Ttomalss’ annoyance. He didn’t have to worry about the effect Kassquit’s possible shift of allegiance would have on negotiations with the wild Big Uglies.

Atvar thought about commanding her to stop mating with Frank Coffey. Only the suspicion-the near certainty-that she would ignore such a command held him back. She was no less headstrong than any wild Tosevite. Stubbornness, especially about sexual matters, was in their blood. He also thought about removing her from his party and sending her halfway round the world.

He could do that. He had the authority. But it would mean depriving the Race of Kassquit’s insights into the way Tosevites functioned. At the moment, she was demonstrating how they functioned. Atvar wondered if that had even occurred to her. He doubted it. Tosevites let their sexual desires dictate their behavior to a degree the Race found ridiculous and unimaginable-except during mating season, at which time males and females had their minds on other things.

“No,” he said, more to himself than to anyone else. He would keep Kassquit here in Sitneff. That might mean he would have to weigh carefully anything she said about the American Tosevites. Fair enough. Weighing data was something he was good at. He realized he would also have to weigh what he got from Ttomalss, who would not be anything close to objective about his former ward.

Sending a message to Tosev 3 was another matter. Atvar no longer had authority to do it on his own. He hadn’t since his recall. But altering the Big Uglies’ sexuality might be important. He was even willing to go through channels to make sure the idea reached the distant colony.

He was willing, yes, but he wasn’t enthusiastic. Years of handling affairs on Tosev 3 himself as the Emperor’s autonomous viceroy had left him impatient with the idea of gaining others’ permission before acting. He was convinced he knew enough to do what needed doing on his own. Anyone who thought otherwise had to be misguided.

Of course, the entire cumbersome bureaucracy here on Home had eventually decided otherwise. Atvar remained convinced those bureaucrats were fools. When he talked to them here, he did his best not to show it. Ttomalss was right-this was an important idea. It was even more important than getting even with the bunglers who’d recalled him. So he told himself, anyhow.

His Majesty’s chief scientific adviser was a female named Yendiss. She heard Atvar out and then asked, “What assurance do you have that researchers can actually discover or synthesize a drug of this sort?”

“Assurance? Why, none,” Atvar answered. “But I have one contrary assurance to offer you, superior female.”

“Oh?” Yendiss said. “And that is?”

“If researchers do not look for a drug of this sort, they are guaranteed not to find it,” Atvar said.

In the monitor, Yendiss’ eye turrets swung sharply toward him. “Are you being sarcastic, Fleetlord?” she demanded.

“Not at all.” Atvar made the negative gesture. “I thought I was stating a simple and obvious truth. If such a drug is there to be found, we ought to find it. Making the Big Uglies more like us would reduce some acute sociological strains on Tosev 3. It would make assimilating the Tosevites much easier. Is that not an important consideration?”

The scientific adviser did not answer directly. Instead, she asked, “Do you have any idea how expensive this research might be?”

“No, superior female,” Atvar answered resignedly. “But whatever it costs, I am convinced making it will be cheaper than not making it.”

“Send me a memorandum,” Yendiss said. “Make it as detailed as possible, listing costs and benefits.” By the way she said that, she plainly thought costs the more important consideration. “Once I have something in writing, I can submit it to specialists for their analysis and input.”

“It shall be done.” Atvar broke the connection. He let out a loud, frustrated hiss. The Race had done business like this for a hundred thousand years. That was fine-when the business had nothing to do with the Big Uglies. How many years would go by before the specialists made up their minds? Yendiss wouldn’t care. She would say getting the right answer was the most important thing.

Sometimes, though, the right answer seemed obvious. Getting it quickly began to matter. Anyone who’d dealt with Tosev 3 knew that. How many centuries had the Race spent preparing the conquest fleet after its probe showed that the Big Uglies were ripe for the taking? Enough so that, by the time the conquest fleet arrived, the Tosevites weren’t ripe any more.

Would this be more of the same? “Not if I have anything to do with it,” Atvar declared, and made another call.

Before long, the imperial protocol master looked out of a monitor at him. “I greet you, Fleetlord,” Herrep said. “I doubt this is strictly a social call, so what do you want of me?”

“I would like to speak with the Emperor for a little while,” Atvar replied. “This has to do with affairs on Tosev 3.”

“Are you trying to leap over some functionary who obstructs you?” Herrep asked.

“In a word, yes.”

“His Majesty rarely lets himself be used that way,” the protocol master warned.

“If he refuses, I am no worse off, though the Race may be,” Atvar said. “He does see the Big Uglies as a real problem for the Race, though, which not many here seem to do. Please forward my request to him, if you would be so kind. Let him decide. I believe it is important.”

“Very well, Fleetlord,” Herrep said. “Please note that I guarantee nothing. The decision is in the grip of his Majesty’s fingerclaws.”

“I understand, and I thank you,” Atvar answered. “Whatever he chooses, I shall accept.” Of course I shall. What choice have I got?

The protocol master broke the connection. Too late, Atvar realized Herrep hadn’t said when he would forward the request to the Emperor or how long it might be till Risson called back-if he did. A delay of a few days wouldn’t matter. A delay of a few months or even a few years wouldn’t be anything out of the ordinary for the Race. That kind of delay might be unfortunate, but who without firsthand experience of the Big Uglies would realize exactly how unfortunate it might be?

Atvar’s telephone hissed frequently. Whenever it did, he hoped it would be the Emperor returning his call. Whenever it wasn’t, he felt an unreasonable stab of disappointment. And then, four days after he’d spoken with Herrep, it was. The female on the line spoke without preamble: “Assume the posture of respect so you may hear his Majesty’s words.”

“It shall be done,” Atvar replied, and he did it. The female disappeared from the monitor. The 37th Emperor Risson’s image replaced her. Atvar said, “I greet you, your Majesty. I am honored to have the privilege of conversation with you.”

“Rise, Fleetlord. Tell me what is on your mind,” Risson replied. He sometimes stood on hardly more ceremony than the Big Uglies did. “Herrep seems to think you have come up with something interesting.”

“I hope so, your Majesty.” Atvar explained.

Risson heard him out, then asked, “What are the chances for success?”

“I would not care to guess about them, because I have no idea,” Atvar replied. “But they must be much greater than zero: our biochemists are skilled, and on Tosev 3 they will have studied the Big Uglies’ metabolism for many years. If we do not make the effort, what hope do we have of success? That I can guess: none.”

“Truth,” Risson said. “Very well. You have persuaded me. I shall issue the necessary orders to pass this idea on to our colony on Tosev 3. Let us see what the colonists do with it. If the Big Uglies were more like us, they would certainly be easier to assimilate. We should do all we can to try to bring that about.”

“I think you are right, your Majesty, and I thank you very much,” Atvar said. “You will also have seen for yourself by now how little inclined toward compromise the wild Big Uglies are. This may eventually give us a new weapon against them, one we can use when we would hesitate to bring out our bombs.”

“Let us hope so, anyhow,” the Emperor said. “Is there anything more?” When Atvar made the negative gesture, Risson broke the connection. He does take the Big Uglies seriously, Atvar thought. If only more males and females did.

Dr. Melanie Blanchard poked and prodded Sam Yeager. She looked in his ears and down his throat. She listened to his chest and lungs. She took his blood pressure. She put on a rubber glove and told him to bend over. “Are you sure we need a doctor here?” he asked.

She laughed. “I’ve never known anybody who enjoys this,” she said. “I do know it’s necessary, especially for a man your age. Or do you really want to mess around with the possibility of prostate cancer?”

With a sigh, Sam assumed the position. The examination was just as much fun as he remembered. He said, “Suppose I’ve got it. What can you do about it here?”

“X rays, certainly,” Dr. Blanchard answered. “Chemotherapy, possibly, if we can get the Race to synthesize the agents we’d need. Or maybe surgery, with Lizard physicians assisting me. I’m sure some of them would be fascinated.” She took off the glove and threw it away. “Doesn’t look like we need to worry about that, though.”

“Well, good.” Sam straightened up and did his best to restore his dignity. “How do I check out?”

“You’re pretty good,” she said. “I’d like it if your blood pressure were a little lower than 140/90, but that’s not bad for a man your age. Not ideal, but not bad. You used to be an athlete, didn’t you?”

“A ballplayer,” he answered. “Never made the big leagues, but I put in close to twenty years in the minors. You could do that before the Lizards came. I’ve tried to stay in halfway decent shape since.”

“You’ve done all right,” Dr. Blanchard told him. “I wouldn’t recommend that you go out and run a marathon, but you seem to be okay for all ordinary use.”

“I’ll take that,” Sam said. “Thanks very much for the checkup-or for most of it, anyhow.”

“You’re welcome.” She started to laugh. Sam raised an eyebrow. She explained, “I started to tell you, ‘My pleasure,’ but that isn’t right. I don’t enjoy doing that, no matter how necessary it is.”

“Well, good,” he said again, and got another laugh from her. She packed up her supplies and walked out of his room. Sam laughed, too, though he was damned if he was sure it was funny. The closest, most intimate physical contact he’d had with a woman since his wife died-and he’d been on the wrong end of a rubber glove. If that wasn’t mortifying, he didn’t know what would be.

He didn’t usually worry about such things. He didn’t usually get reminded about them quite so openly, though. He was still a man. His parts did still work. He laughed once more. They would work, anyhow, if he could find himself some company.

Major Coffey had managed. Sam shrugged. No accounting for taste. Kassquit had always fascinated him, but he’d never thought she was especially attractive. He shrugged again. Jonathan would have told him he was wrong-and Karen would have hit Jonathan for telling him that.

Someone knocked on the door. That meant an American stood in the hall. A Lizard would have pressed the button for the door hisser. Sam looked around. Had Dr. Blanchard forgotten something? he wondered hopefully. He didn’t see anything that looked medical. Too bad.

He opened the door. There stood Tom de la Rosa. Sam aimed an accusing forefinger at him. “You‘re not a beautiful woman,” he said.

De la Rosa rubbed his mustache. “With this on my upper lip, I’m not likely to be one, either.”

“Well, come on in anyhow,” Sam said. “I’ll try not to hold it against you.”

“I’m so relieved.” Tom walked past Yeager and over to the window. “You’ve got a nicer view than we do. See what you get for being ambassador?”

Sam had come to take the view for granted. Now he looked at it with fresher eyes. It was pretty impressive, in a stark, Southwestern way. “Reminds me a little of Tucson, or maybe Albuquerque.”

“Somewhere in there,” Tom de la Rosa agreed. “If we don’t get what we need here, you know, Tucson and Albuquerque are going to look a lot more like this. They look a lot more like this now than they did when we went into cold sleep.”

“I do know that,” Sam said. “Arizona and New Mexico are just about perfect country for plants and animals from Home.”

“And if they crowd ours out, I don’t know how we’re going to get rid of them,” Tom said. “The Lizards don’t show a whole lot of give on this one.”

“You’ve got that wrong,” Sam said. De la Rosa sent him a questioning look. He spelled out what he meant: “The Lizards don’t show any give at all on this one. As far as they’re concerned, they’re just making themselves at home-or at Home-on Earth.”

De la Rosa winced at the audible capital letter. When he recovered, he said, “But it’s not right, dammit. They’ve got no business imposing their ecology on us.”

“Starlings and English sparrows in the United States. And Kentucky bluegrass. And Russian thistle, which is what a lot of tumbleweeds are,” Sam said mournfully. “Rats in Hawaii. Mongooses-or is it mongeese? — too. Rabbits and cats and cane toads in Australia. I could go on. It’s not as if we haven’t done it to ourselves.”

“But we didn’t know any better. Most of the time we didn’t, anyhow,” Tom de la Rosa said. “The Race knows perfectly well what it’s doing. It knows more about ecology than we’ll learn in the next hundred years. The Lizards just don’t give a damn, and they ought to.”

“They say they haven’t introduced anything into territory we rule. They say what they do on territory they rule is their business-and if their critters happen to come over the border, they don’t mind if we get rid of them.”

“Mighty generous of them. They’d tell King Canute he was welcome to hold back the tide, too,” Tom said bitterly. “The only thing they wouldn’t tell him was how to go about it.”

“Well, Tom, here’s the question I’ve got for you,” Sam said. “If the Lizards don’t want to change their minds-and it doesn’t look like they do-is this worth going to war to stop?”

“That’s not the point. The point is getting them to stop,” de la Rosa said.

Sam shook his head. “No. They don’t want to. They don’t intend to. They’ve made that as plain as they possibly can. As far as they’re concerned, they’re moving into a new neighborhood, and they’ve brought their dogs and cats and cows and sheep and some of their flowers along with them. They’re just making themselves at home.”

“Bullshit. They understand ecological issues fine. They don’t have any trouble at all,” Tom said. “Look at the fit they pitched about the rats. Have they caught any besides the first two? It‘d serve the Race right if the damn things did get loose.”

“As far as I know, those are the only ones they’ve got their hands on,” Sam said. “But you still haven’t answered my question. Is this something we fight about? Or is it already too late for that? You can’t put things back in Pandora’s box once they’re loose, can you?”

“Probably not.” De la Rosa looked as disgusted as he sounded. “But the arid country on Earth-everywhere from Australia to the Sahara to our own Southwest-is never going to be the same. The least we can do is get an agreement out of them not to introduce any more of their species to Earth. That’s locking the barn door after the horse is long gone, though.”

“I’ve been over this with Atvar before. He’s always said no. I don’t think he’s going to change his mind.” Sam Yeager sighed. He saw Tom’s point. He’d seen with his own eyes what creatures from Home were doing in and to the Southwest-and things had only got worse since he went into cold sleep. He sighed again. “Atvar will tell me the Race is as sovereign in the parts of Earth it rules as we are in the USA. He’ll say we have no right to interfere in what the Lizards do there. He’ll say we complain about being interfered with, but now we’re meddling for all we’re worth. It’s not a bad argument. How am I supposed to answer him?”

“Throw the rats in his face,” Tom suggested. “That will get him to understand why we’re worried.”

“He already understands. He just doesn’t care. There’s a difference,” Sam said. “No matter what happens from our point of view, the Lizards get major benefits by importing their animals and plants. If we try to tell them they can’t, we’re liable to have to fight to back it up. Is this worth a war? ”

Tom de la Rosa looked as if he hated him. “You don’t make things easy, do you?”

“Atvar’s told me the same thing. From him, I take it as a compliment. I’ll try to do the same from you,” Sam said. “But you still haven’t answered my question. The Lizards are changing the planet. I agree with you-that’s what they’re doing. Do we wreck it to keep them from changing it?”

“That’s not a fair way to put things,” Tom protested.

“No? That’s what it boils down to from here,” Sam said. “We can have a damaged ecology, or we can have a planet that glows in the dark. Or else you’ll tell me it’s not worth a war. But nothing short of war is going to make the Lizards change their policy about this.”

Instead of answering, de la Rosa stormed out of the room. Yeager wasn’t particularly surprised or particularly disappointed. Tom was a hothead. You needed to be a hothead to get involved in ecological matters. Every so often, though, even hotheads bumped up against the facts of life. Sometimes the cost of stopping a change was higher than the cost of the change itself.

He looked out the window again. He imagined saguaros putting down deep roots here. He imagined owls nesting in the saguaros, and roadrunners scurrying here and there in the shade of the cactuses snapping up whatever little lizardy things they could catch. He imagined sidewinders looping along. He imagined how the Lizards would feel about all of that-especially the ones who had the misfortune to bump into sidewinders. Would they go to war to keep it from happening? They might.

But it was already happening back on Earth. Too late to stop it now. And, whatever else happened, he couldn’t imagine an American colonization fleet crossing the light-years and coming down on Home. The Race had the population to spare for that sort of thing. The USA didn’t.

He wondered how much he’d accomplished by coming here. That he’d got here alive was pretty impressive, too. He’d had the audience with the Emperor and the private meeting afterwards. But what had he gained that he couldn’t have got from Reffet and Kirel back on Earth? Anything?

If he had, he was hard pressed to see it. He understood Tom de la Rosa’s frustration. He had plenty of frustration of his own. The Lizards here on Home were less inclined to compromise than the ones back on Earth had been. They thought they were right, and any miserable Big Ugly had to be wrong.

One thing the flight of the Admiral Peary had proved: humans could fly between the stars. The Race couldn’t ignore that. The Lizards would have to be wondering what else might be on the way. Maybe the colonists back on Earth could radio ahead and let Home know other starships were coming, but maybe not, too. If humans wanted to send secret expeditions, they might be able to.

Sam grimaced. The Reich might do that. And any German expedition would come with guns not just handy but loaded. The Nazis owed the Lizards for a defeat. After all this time, would they try to pay them back?

How am I supposed to know? Sam asked himself. All he knew about what the Reich was like these days, he got from the radio bulletins beamed Homeward by America and by the Lizards themselves. It didn’t seem to have changed all that much-and there was one more thing to worry about.

Whenever Jonathan Yeager saw Kassquit, he wanted to ask her if she was happy. She certainly gave all the signs of it, or as many as she could with a face that didn’t show what she was thinking. Frank Coffey seemed pretty happy these days, too. Jonathan had no great urge to ask him if he was. That was none of his business, not unless Coffey felt like making it his business.

Jonathan wondered what the difference was. That he’d been intimate with Kassquit all those years ago? He thought there was more to it than that. He hoped so, anyhow. He had the strong feeling that Major Frank Coffey could take care of himself. He wasn’t nearly so sure about Kassquit. She couldn’t be a Lizard, however much she wanted to, but she didn’t exactly know how to be a human being, either. She was liable to get hurt, or to hurt herself.

And what can you do about it if she does? Jonathan asked himself. The answer to that was only too obvious. He couldn’t do a damn thing, and he knew it. He also knew Karen would grab the nearest blunt instrument and brain him if he tried.

He sighed. He couldn’t blame Karen for being antsy about Kassquit. To his wife, Kassquit was The Other Woman, in scarlet letters ten feet high. Kassquit wasn’t at her best around Karen, either.

It came as something of a relief when Trir said, “Would any of you Tosevites care for a sightseeing tour today?” at breakfast one morning.

“What sort of sights do you have in mind showing us?” Linda de la Rosa asked.

“Perhaps you would like to go to the Crimson Desert?” the guide said. “It has a wild grandeur unlike any other on Home.”

“I want to go,” Tom de la Rosa said. “I would like to see what you term a desert on this world, when so much of it would be a desert on Tosev 3.”

All the Americans volunteered-even Jonathan’s father, who said, “None of the negotiations going on right now will addle if we pause. Pausing may even help some of them.” Jonathan knew his dad wasn’t happy with the way things were going. He hadn’t expected him to come out and say so, though.

Then Kassquit asked, “May I also come? I too would like to see more of Home.”

“Yes, Researcher. You are welcome,” Trir said. “We will leave from in front of the hotel in half a daytenth. All of you should bring whatever you require for an overnight stay.”

“The Crimson Desert,” Karen said musingly. “I wonder what it will be like.”

“Hot,” Jonathan said. His wife gave him a sardonic nod. Had they been going to the desert on Earth, he would have warned her to take along a cream that prevented sunburn. As a redhead, she needed to worry about it more than most people did. But Tau Ceti wasn’t the sun. It put out a lot less ultraviolet radiation. Even in the warmest weather, sunburn wasn’t so much of a worry here.

They boarded the bus that had taken them out to the ranch. The driver left the hotel’s lot and pulled out into traffic. They were off. The bus’ dark windows kept Lizard drivers and passengers in other vehicles from gaping at Big Uglies. It didn’t keep the Americans from looking out. Whenever Jonathan saw a Lizard in a wig-or, every once in a while, a Lizard in a T-shirt-he had everything he could do not to howl with laughter. Then he’d run a hand over his own shaven skull and think about sauces and geese and ganders.

In the halfhearted Lizard way, the bus was air-conditioned. That meant it was hot inside, but not quite stifling. Jonathan’s father started to laugh. “What’s funny, Dad?” Jonathan asked.

“Another bus ride,” his father answered. “I used to think I’d taken the last one when I quit playing ball, but I was wrong.”

“I bet you never expected to take one on another world,” Jonathan said.

“Well, that’s a fact,” Sam Yeager agreed. “All the same, though, a bus ride is a bus ride. Some things don’t change. And I keep looking for greasy spoons by the side of the road. I don’t suppose the Race knows anything about chop-suey joints or hot-dog stands.”

“Probably a good thing they don’t,” Jonathan said.

“Yeah, I suppose,” his father said. “But it hardly seems like a road trip without ’em. I’ve been spoiled. I have this idea of how things are supposed to work, and I’m disappointed when they turn out different.”

“You probably expect flat tires, too,” Jonathan said.

His father nodded. “You bet I do. I’ve seen enough of them. Heck, I’ve helped change enough of them. I wonder what the Lizards use for a jack.”

“Let’s hope we don’t find out,” Jonathan said. To his relief, his father didn’t argue with him.

They had no trouble getting to the Crimson Desert. The bus rolled south and east out of Sitneff, into open country. By any Earthly standards, that would have been desert. By the standards of Home, it wasn’t. It was nothing but scrub. Treeish things were few and far between, but smaller plants kept the ground from being too barren. Every once in a while, Jonathan spotted some kind of animal scurrying along, though the bus usually went by too fast to let him tell what the creature was.

Mountains rose ahead. The bus climbed them. The road grew steep and narrow; Jonathan got the feeling not a whole lot of vehicles came this way. He hadn’t thought Home would have roads to nowhere, but the one they were on sure gave that feeling. Up and up it went. The bus’ engine labored a little. The driver turned off the air conditioning, but it kept getting cooler inside the bus anyhow. It might have dropped all the way down into the seventies. It was the coolest Jonathan had been anywhere on Home this side of the South Pole.

A few minutes later, they came to what was obviously the crest of the grade. Trir said, “This is the third-highest pass on all of Home.” Without checking an atlas, Jonathan had no idea whether she was right, but nothing about the place made him want to disbelieve her.

The bus seemed relieved to find a downhill slope. The driver knew her business. She never let it get going too fast, but she was never too obvious about riding the brakes, either. The change in the weather on the other side of the mountains was immediate and profound. Before long, three or four Americans and Kassquit all called for the driver to turn the air conditioning on again. With a sigh, she did. It suddenly seemed to be fighting a much more savage climate.

“There!” Trir pointed ahead, out through the windshield. “Now you can see why this place got its name.”

Jonathan craned his neck for a better look. Sure enough, the cliffsides and the ground were of a reddish color, brighter than rust. He wouldn’t have called most of it crimson, but he wouldn’t have revoked anyone else’s poetic license, either. And color names didn’t translate perfectly between the Race’s language and English to begin with.

Down went the bus, into the middle of the desert. By the noises the air conditioning made, it was working harder and harder. By the way sweat ran down Jonathan’s face, it wasn’t working hard enough. “How hot is it outside?” he asked.

“Probably about fifty-five hundredths,” Trir answered.

The Race divided the distance between water’s freezing and boiling points into hundredths-the exact equivalent of Celsius degrees. The USA still routinely used Fahrenheit. Jonathan was struggling to do the conversion in his head when Frank Coffey spoke in horrified English: “Jesus! That’s just the other side of 130!”

It could get that hot on Earth… just barely. But Trir spoke as if this was nothing out of the ordinary. What was that line about mad dogs and Englishmen? Noel Coward had never heard of Lizards when he wrote it.

Ten minutes later, the bus stopped. Air like a blast furnace rolled inside. It’s a dry heat, Jonathan thought in something not far from despair. That worked fine when the temperature was in the nineties. Over a hundred, it wore thin. At the moment, all it meant was that Jonathan would bake instead of boiling.

Trir seemed perfectly happy. “Is it not a bracing climate?” she said. “Come out, all of you, and look around.” She skittered out of the bus and down onto the ground.

Major Coffey wasn’t the only human being who said, “Jesus!” But they’d come all this way. There wasn’t-Jonathan supposed there wasn’t-much point just to staying in the bus. He got to his feet and went out into the Crimson Desert.

Jesus! didn’t begin to do it justice. Jonathan found he had to keep blinking almost as fast as he could. If he didn’t, his eyeballs started drying out. In between blinks, he looked around. The place did have a stark beauty to it. Wind and dust had carved the crimson cliffs into a cornucopia of crazy shapes. Not all the shades of red were the same. There were bands and twists of rust and scarlet and crimson and carmine and magenta. Here and there, he spotted flecks of white all the brighter for being so isolated. Tau Ceti beat down on him out of a greenish blue sky.

“Does anything actually live here?” Tom de la Rosa asked. “Can anything actually live here?” He didn’t sound as if he believed it. Jonathan had trouble believing it, too.

But Trir made the affirmative gesture. “Why, certainly. You can see the saltbushes there, and the peffelem plants.”

Jonathan couldn’t have told a saltbush from a peffelem plant if his life depended on it. Both varieties looked like nothing but dry sticks to him. “Where do they get their water?” he asked. The inside of his mouth was drying out, too.

“They have very deep root structures,” the guide replied.

All the way to China didn’t seem to apply, not here on Home. Or maybe it did. By the way the air and the ground felt, plants might have needed ten light-years’ worth of roots to draw any water to these parts.

But then, to his amazement, something moved under those sticklike caricatures of plants. “What was that?” he said, his voice rising in surprise.

“Some kind of crawling thing,” Trir answered indifferently. “There are several varieties in these parts. Most of them live nowhere else on Home.”

“They come already cooked, too, I bet,” Jonathan’s father said in English.

When he translated that into the Race’s language, Trir laughed. “It is hot, certainly, but not so hot as all that.”

“I agree,” Kassquit said.

She’d been raised to take for granted the temperatures Lizards normally lived with. This probably felt the same for her as it did for Trir. The Americans, though, were used to Earthly weather. Dr. Blanchard said, “Be careful of heatstroke. I’m glad I made sure we brought plenty of water.”

“Can we go back inside the bus, please?” Linda de la Rosa said. “I’m feeling medium rare, or maybe a little more done than that.”

“But I wanted to talk about the famous fossils not far from here,” Trir said. “These are some of the fossils that the famous savant Iffud used to help establish the theory of evolution.” She paused. “You Tosevites are familiar with the theory of evolution, are you not?”

“Why, no,” Major Coffey said, straight-faced. “Suppose you tell us what it is. It sounds as if it might be interesting.”

“Cut it out, Frank,” Jonathan said in English, and poked him with an elbow. Then he went back to the language of the Race: “He is joking, Senior Tour Guide. We have known of the theory of evolution for more than three hundred of your years.”

“We have known of it for more than 110,000 years,” Trir said starchily.

So there, Jonathan thought. But the trip to the Crimson Desert had turned out to be interesting in ways he hadn’t expected. And he told himself he would never complain about the weather in Sitneff again, no matter what.

Mickey Flynn gazed out of the Admiral Peary ’s control room at Home below. “I feel… superfluous,” he remarked. “Not a great deal for a pilot to do here. Now that I contemplate matters, there’s nothing for a pilot to do here, as a matter of fact.”

“You buzz around on a scooter, same as I do,” Glen Johnson said.

“Oh, huzzah.” Joy and rapture were not what filled Flynn’s voice. “I’m sure Mickey Mantle played catch with his little boy, too, after he retired. Do you suppose he got the same thrill as he did when he played for Kansas City?”

“Not fair,” Johnson said, but then he liked flying a scooter. The difference between him on the one hand and Flynn and Stone on the other was that he was a pilot who could fly a starship, while they were starship pilots. To them, scooters were like rowboats after the Queen Mary. Johnson went on, “With a little luck, you’ll have the chance to fly her back to Earth, too.”

“Well, yes, there is that,” Flynn agreed. “How very antiquated do you suppose we’ll be, there at the tail end of the twenty-first century? Like Civil War veterans when the Lizards came-that’s the comparison that springs to mind.”

“There were a few,” Johnson said. “Not many, but a few.”

“So there were.” Flynn nodded ponderously. “But at least they lived through the time in between. They saw the changes happen with their own eyes. When we get back, we’ll have been on ice most of the time. Everything we run into will be a surprise.”

“You’re in a cheerful mood today, aren’t you?” Johnson said, and the other pilot nodded again. Some of those worries had occurred to Johnson, too. He didn’t see how he could have avoided them. Alone in his bunk in the wee small hours, all these light-years from Earth, what did he have to do but worry? After a bit, he added, “Something else makes me wonder.”

“Speak. Give forth,” Flynn urged.

“Okay. Here it is: how come there aren’t any other American starships here? Or starships from anywhere else, come to that?”

“We started first. You may possibly have noticed this,” Flynn said. “Then again, since you were in cold sleep for so long, you may have given up noticing things for Lent.”

“Oh, yeah. We started first. I knew that-knew it once I woke up, anyway,” Johnson said. “But so what? The Admiral Peary ’s not as fast as a Lizard starship. You’d figure the state of the art back on Earth would get better. They’d build faster ships, and we’d have company. Only we don’t.”

“Who knows what’s on the way?” Flynn said.

“Well, I don’t,” Johnson admitted. “But radio’s twice as fast as a Lizard ship-I suppose that means it’s twice as fast as anything we’re likely to make, too. There’s the Molotov, but have you heard about starships besides her on the way?”

“No one has whispered anything into my pink and shell-like ear,” Flynn replied. Johnson snorted. Ignoring the noise, the other pilot continued, “This is not to say our beloved commandant and the Race don’t know more than I do.”

Johnson’s comment about their beloved commandant was worse than insubordinate. It was downright mutinous. Flynn clucked in mild reproach. Johnson cared very little. He said, “The Lizards might tell us what’s going on. You think Healey ever would?”

“Oh, ye of little faith,” Flynn said, which was and wasn’t an answer at the same time.

“That’s me,” Johnson agreed. “That’s me right down to the ground. And I ask you, where’s our next starship after the Molotov? Where’s the new American ship, or the Japanese one? Hell, the Nazis are liable to be back in space again.”

“Maybe they’re waiting for news from us to get back to Earth,” Flynn said. “Maybe they didn’t know if the cold sleep worked as well as they thought. Maybe the HERE BE DRAGONS notices printed on all the road maps made them think twice. But now they’ll have to think that if we can do it, anybody can do it.”

“Maybe,” Johnson said. “That makes more sense than anything I thought of.”

“Why am I not surprised?” Flynn asked.

“Ha. Funny.” Johnson gave him a dirty look. It bounced off his armor of irony. Muttering, Johnson continued, “If you’re right, though, things have changed back on Earth. The Germans solve problems by throwing bodies at them till they go away-or they used to, anyhow.”

“Takes a lot of bodies to stretch from Earth to Tau Ceti,” Flynn observed. “And everyone who found out about a failure would laugh at the failed party. The Nazis always did have a hard time seeing a joke when it was on them.”

“Mm. Maybe,” Johnson said again. Once more, the other pilot had an answer for him. Whether it was the answer… Well, how could he say when he was in orbit around Home and the answer, whatever it was, lay back on Earth?

He looked down at the Lizards’ world. The landscape down there was almost as familiar as Earth’s by now. With less cloud cover than was usual on Earth, he could see better, too. They were coming up on Sitneff. The dust storm that had plagued the city where the Americans were staying had subsided. “I wonder how Melanie’s doing down there,” he said.

“Pretty well, by all the reports,” Flynn said. “Why? Did you think she couldn’t live without you?”

“Actually, I thought she’d be so glad to get away from you that she’d start dancing too soon and hurt herself,” Johnson answered.

“Have I been reviled? Have I been insulted? Have I been slandered? Have I been traduced? Have I been given the glove? Have I been slammed? Have I been cut? Have I-?” Flynn went on pouring out synonyms till anyone would have thought him the second coming of the illustrious Dr. Roget.

“Enough, already!” Johnson exclaimed by the time it was much more than enough.

Mercifully, the other pilot fell silent. Johnson enjoyed the quiet for about five minutes. Then the intercom summoned him to Lieutenant General Healey’s office. He enjoyed that not at all. He would rather have gone to the dentist.

By all the signs, Healey was less than enamored of having him there. The commandant growled, “Congratulations. You’ve managed to make the Lizards love you.”

“Sir?” Johnson said woodenly. If he wasn’t baiting Healey, Healey would be baiting him. He didn’t want to give the other man a handle if he could help it.

But Healey only nodded, which made his J. Edgar Hoover jowls wobble. “That’s right. Your rescue mission with the scooter impressed the hell out of them. And so we’ve arranged a cultural exchange mission with the Race.”

“Sir?” Johnson said again, this time in surprise.

“We’re going to trade them one of our scooters for one of theirs,” Healey said. “There’s not a damn thing on one of our scooters that can help them militarily, and they must feel the same way about theirs. So we’ll swap, and look them over, and see if we learn anything.”

“Oh.” Johnson knew he still sounded startled. Had anyone but Healey told him that, he wouldn’t have been. But he’d always figured Healey would sooner swap missiles with the Lizards than information.

“I’m so glad this meets with your approval.” The commandant’s sarcasm would have stung more if Johnson hadn’t already been on the receiving end of it so often. Healey said, “The scooter is waiting at Lock Two. The sooner you fly it to the Horned Akiss, the sooner we’ll get a Lizard scooter to play with.”

“All right,” Johnson said. “Now that I know where I’m going, I expect I can get there. It does make things easier, you know.”

Healey waved that away. He waved away almost everything Johnson said, whether or not the motion showed. “Go on,” he said.

Johnson went. He enjoyed flying the scooter. Had Lieutenant General Healey known how much he enjoyed it, the commandant probably would have chosen someone else for the job. Healey never had wanted him to have any fun.

Well, too bad for the redoubtable lieutenant general. Johnson got into his spacesuit, then ran checks on the scooter. Everything came up green. He hadn’t thought Healey would want him to have an unfortunate accident, but you never could tell.

The outer airlock door opened. Johnson used the scooter’s little steering jets to ease it out into space. As soon as he did, he started to laugh. He knew exactly how the little spacecraft was supposed to respond when he goosed it. It was definitely slower than it should have been, which meant it was heavier than it should have been.

“You sandbagging son of a bitch!” he exclaimed, having first made sure his radio was off. Before sending the Lizards a scooter, Healey had made sure it didn’t perform as well as it might have. He wanted the Race to keep right on underestimating what humans could do. That struck Johnson as singularly pointless way the hell out here. If he said anything about it, though, the commandant would probably order him back and clap him in irons.

Instead, he called the Horned Akiss on one of the Race’s signaling frequencies. He found out the Lizards there were expecting him. That came as a relief. It would have been just like Healey to send him out and hope the Race would shoot him down. Evidently not-not this time, anyway.

Once Johnson got clear of the Admiral Peary, he aimed the scooter at the Horned Akiss and fired up the rear engine. Sure enough, the little rocketship was lugging an anvil; its acceleration wasn’t a patch on what it should have been. Inside his suit, he shrugged. Sooner or later, he’d get there.

And, in due course, he did. He wasn’t invited aboard the Lizards’ ship. Instead, one of their scooters waited for him. “I greet you, Tosevite,” the Lizard aboard it called. “Shall we exchange craft?”

“That seems to be the point of the exercise.” Johnson brought his scooter up alongside the bigger one and killed relative velocity. By then, he’d stopped worrying about the extra weight he was carrying; it was like flying with a couple of passengers, and he’d done that often enough.

He read the Race’s language, so the controls on the other scooter made sense to him. He had to explain his to the Lizard, who might never have heard of English or of Arabic numerals. Fortunately, the male-or was it a female? — didn’t get flustered, saying, “It all seems straightforward enough.”

“It is,” Johnson agreed. “Just take it slow and easy, and you will do fine.”

“Good advice. I had not thought a Tosevite would be so sensible,” the Lizard replied. “The same also goes for you. Slow and easy, as you say.”

“Oh, yes.” Johnson made the affirmative gesture.

He was cautious flying the Lizards’ scooter back to the Admiral Peary. He had to get used to it. It performed about the way he’d expected, though. He hoped the Lizard pilot wouldn’t be too disappointed with the logy machine the Big Uglies had sent to the Race.

And then, when Johnson was almost back to the American starship, he said something about the commandant that would have made all his earlier remarks fit for a love letter. He couldn’t prove a thing, but he had a feeling. He shook his fist in the direction of Lieutenant General Healey’s office. Healey couldn’t see him, of course, any more than the commandant could hear him. Too damn bad, he thought.

Sam Yeager was sick and tired of the conference rooms in the hotel in Sitneff. One morning, he asked Atvar, “Fleetlord, would it offend you if we moved our discussions across the way to the park for a while?”

“Would it offend me? No,” the Lizard replied. “I do not think we would be so efficient there, though. And will you not grow uncomfortable as the day warms up?”

“That’s why I said ‘for a while,’ ” Yeager told him. “But I do not think it will be too bad. Sitneff is not that much warmer than Los Angeles, the city where I settled not long after the fight with the conquest fleet ended.”

“Well, then, Ambassador, let it be as you wish,” Atvar said. “Maybe changing where we talk will also change the direction in which our talks are going.”

“I must say that also occurred to me,” Sam agreed. “I am afraid their direction could use some changing.”

The way he looked at things, the problem was that his talks with Atvar had no direction. He would propose things. The fleetlord would either reject them, talk around them, or say they needed more study before anything could be settled. To the Race, more study often meant a delay of decades if not centuries.

Sam had been reluctant to point that out, not wanting to derail things altogether. But he had concluded that things were already about as derailed as they could be. He wondered whether Atvar felt the same way, or whether the Lizard was satisfied to stall. Sam hoped not. One way or the other, it was time to find out.

Cars and trucks and buses halted when Yeager appeared at the crosswalk. Drivers and passengers all turned their eye turrets his way. “I enjoy being with you in public,” Atvar remarked as they crossed. “It is not easy for me to be anonymous, not with the body paint I put on. Next to you, though, I am invisible. Most refreshing.”

“Glad to be of service,” Sam said dryly. Atvar laughed.

When they got to the park, Sam led them to some tables and benches screened from the morning sun by the treelike shrubs behind them. “Are you sure you are comfortable, Ambassador?” Atvar asked.

“I thank you for your concern, but I am fine,” Sam said. He nodded politely to a Rabotev walking along the path. The dark-skinned alien hopped in the air in surprise. Sam Yeager turned back to Atvar. “I am fine as far as comfort goes, anyhow. I am less happy with the direction of our talks, to use your term.”

“I am sorry to hear that. It makes my liver heavy,” Atvar said.

“If it does, Fleetlord, a little more real cooperation might work wonders,” Sam said bluntly. “From my point of view, the Race seems to be doing its best to make these discussions go nowhere while appearing to make progress.”

“What an extraordinary notion,” Atvar exclaimed. “How can you possibly say that when you have conferred with the Emperor himself?” He cast his eye turrets down toward the pale, sandy soil beneath his feet.

“I can say it because it appears to me to be a truth. I am honored the Emperor said he wanted to help settle the differences between the Race and the United States. I am honored, yes, but I am not very impressed. He offered no proposals, only his good will. Good will is valuable; I do not reject it. But good will by itself does not solve problems.”

“You must not expect haste from us,” Atvar said. “Remember, we are not used to dealing with independent not-empires.” He laughed again. “We are not used to dealing with not-empires at all.”

“I understand that. I have tried to take it into account,” Sam said. “I am sorry, but it does not seem to be a good enough explanation. If you do not deal with us through diplomacy, we will end up fighting. Am I wrong?”

“Probably not,” Atvar answered. “If we do fight, the Race will win. Am I wrong?”

“You would have been right when I went into cold sleep, Fleetlord. I know that,” Sam said. “Now? Now I am not so sure any of your planets would get away untouched. You have been able to wreck Tosev 3 for a long time. Now we can also reach you. You would do well to remember that.”

“Is this diplomacy, or only a threat?” Atvar asked.

“It is diplomacy. It is also a threat,” Yeager answered. “I do not try to deny it. You did not worry about threatening us when you came to Tosev 3. You went ahead and did it, and not just with words. You invaded my not-empire. You occupied parts of it for years. You dropped nuclear weapons on Washington and Seattle and Pearl Harbor. These are truths, even if perhaps you would rather not remember them now. If we fight again, your worlds will learn what sort of truths they are.”

He waited. There was a chance that Atvar would stand up and spit in his eye. If that happened, he didn’t know what he’d do. Resign the ambassadorship, maybe, and go back up to the Admiral Peary and back into cold sleep. Someone else would have a better chance of getting a worthwhile agreement out of the Lizards.

Atvar’s tailstump lashed in agitation. Whatever he’d expected to hear, what Sam had just told him wasn’t it. At last, he answered, “Ambassador, you fought in that war. How can you speak of visiting its like on Home and the other worlds of the Empire?”

“You still do not see my point, Fleetlord, or not all of it,” Sam said. “The prospect bothers you more because now it might happen to you, too. ” He added an emphatic cough. “It did not bother you at all when it could only happen to Big Uglies. And that is what I am trying to tell you: you were wrong not to be bothered under those circumstances. We have a saying: ‘what goes around comes around.’ Do you understand that? I had to translate it literally.”

“I think I do,” Atvar said. “It is another way of saying that what we did to you, you can now do to us.”

“That is part of it, but only part of it,” Yeager said. “You did it to us, and you thought you were right to do it to us. Why should we not think we are also right to do it to you?”

He watched the fleetlord’s tailstump quiver again. He could make a pretty good guess about what Atvar was thinking: because we are the Race, and you are nothing but a pack of wild Big Uglies. But that was the sort of thinking that had sent the conquest fleet out. It might have made some sense against an opponent who couldn’t hit back. The Lizards didn’t face that kind of opponent any more. If they didn’t keep it in mind, everybody would be sorry.

When Atvar still didn’t say anything, Sam spoke again, quietly: “This too is what equality means.”

To his surprise, Atvar’s mouth fell open in a laugh, though the Lizard was anything but amused. “You know, of course, that Shiplord Straha almost cast me down from my position. His reason for doing so was that I had not prosecuted the war against the Tosevites hard enough to suit him. He felt that, if we did not do everything we could, regardless of consequences, to overcome Tosevite resistance, we would regret it one day. Enough of the assembled shiplords thought him wrong to let me keep the job. I reckoned him a maniac. Again, you know of this.”

“Oh, yes. I know of this.” Sam made the affirmative gesture. After Straha defected to the USA one jump ahead of Atvar’s vengeance, the exile and Yeager had become good friends. Sam didn’t remind Atvar of that; it would have been rude. Instead, he said, “But now I have to say I am not sure I see your point.”

“It is very simple-not complicated in the least,” Atvar answered. “My point is, Straha was right. Here we are, all these years later, and Straha was right. Irony has a bitter taste.”

This time, Sam had to think hard before deciding what to say next. He had heard Straha say the same thing. For all he knew, the shiplord was saying it right now back on Earth. “Does Straha still live?” he asked. “I was in cold sleep a long time, and have not heard.”

“I do not know if he still lives, but the signal that he has died has yet to reach Home,” Atvar replied. Sam used the affirmative gesture again. When news took years to travel from one sun to the next, still could be a nebulous notion. The fleetlord went on, “Are you not grateful for my mistaken moderation?”

“Are you sure it was mistaken?” Yeager said. “There is no guarantee you would have won a great and final victory with Straha in command. By what I recall, you were fighting pretty hard as things were.”

“We will never know, will we?” Atvar said. “Could the result have been much worse for my species than what in fact occurred?”

“I think it could have,” Sam Yeager said. “If you had not won, you would have had all the surviving Tosevite not-empires and empires mad for revenge against you. The fighting on Tosev 3 might never have stopped.”

Atvar shrugged. “And so? Even with constant fighting on Tosev 3, we probably would not have had to worry about Tosevites visiting Home.”

“Fleetlord, we really have a problem here, and you need to recognize it,” Yeager said. “If the Race cannot get used to the idea that we Big Uglies are doing things only you have been doing for thousands of years, then the two sides will collide. They cannot help but collide. And that will not be to anyone’s advantage.”

“Better to no one’s advantage than to yours alone,” Atvar said.

“I do not believe an agreement on even terms that everyone adheres to would be to anyone’s disadvantage,” Sam said. “If I am wrong, no doubt you will correct me. I think the Emperor would also want an equitable agreement. That was my impression from my meetings with him. Again, you will correct me if I am wrong.”

“You are not wrong. Where we differ, Ambassador, is in determining what goes into an equitable agreement.”

“An equitable agreement is one where both sides have the same duties and the same obligations,” Sam said.

“Why should that be so, when one side is stronger than the other?” Atvar came back. “Our superior strength should be reflected in any treaty we make.”

Sam used the negative gesture. What he felt like doing was tearing his hair, but he refrained. “First, all independent empires and not-empires have the same rights and duties,” he said. “This is true on Tosev 3, and it used to be true on Home as well. Ask the protocol master if you do not believe me. And second, as I have pointed out before, how much stronger you are is no longer obvious, the way it was when I went into cold sleep. Whether you are stronger at all is no longer obvious, in fact.”

He waited. He had to wait quite a while. At last, Atvar said, “This may not prompt a treaty, you know. This may prompt an effort to exterminate you while we still can.”

“The Race has been talking about that for a long time.” Sam did his best not to show how alarmed he was. “I do not believe exterminating us would be easy or cheap. I do believe you might end up exterminating yourselves in the process.”

“Possibly. But if we could be rid of you without destroying ourselves altogether, the price might well be worth paying.”

“Is this your opinion, the government’s opinion, or the Emperor’s opinion?” Sam asked. The answer to that might tell him where these talks were going-if they were going anywhere. He waited.

“It is my opinion,” Atvar said. “Perhaps I am mistaken. Perhaps peace will prove a benefit to all concerned, and not merely a breathing space in which you Tosevites gather yourselves for a blow against the Race. Perhaps this is a truth. But the evidence from Tosev 3 makes me doubt it.”

“Why am I here, then?” Sam asked. This time, Atvar did not answer him at all.

Atvar had begun to hope he never again saw the park across the way from the hotel in Sitneff. After his talk there with Sam Yeager, he pictured bombs bursting on Tosev 3, and on Home, and on the Empire’s other two worlds. How strong were the Americans? No way to know, not for certain. All he could know was how strong they had been when the latest signals left Tosev 3.

The Race had comfortably run the Empire at light speed for thousands of years. Delays of signals from one planet to the next had mattered little. But Tosev 3 was farther from Home than either Rabotev 2 or Halless 1, which made delays longer, and the Tosevites changed far faster than any species in the Empire, which made those delays more critical.

Maybe there was a good answer to the problem, but Atvar failed to see it.

He was worried enough to telephone the Emperor again. He didn’t get through to Risson. He hadn’t expected to, not at once-things simply didn’t work that way. He did hope the message he left would persuade Risson to call him back. His Majesty’s courtiers knew the Emperor took a keen interest in Tosevite affairs.

Half a day later, Atvar did get a call from Preffilo. That female was on the line again. Atvar assumed the special posture of respect as the Emperor’s image appeared on the monitor. As Risson had before, he said, “Rise, Fleetlord, and tell me what is on your mind.”

“It shall be done,” Atvar said once more, and summarized what he and Sam Yeager had had to say to each other. He finished, “What are we going to do, your Majesty? It strikes me that our choices are to grant the Big Uglies privileges they have not earned and do not deserve, or else to face a devastating war. Neither seems satisfactory.”

“Will the American Tosevites fight if we refuse to make these concessions?” the Emperor asked. “Are they as strong as their ambassador claims?” He didn’t sound the least bit self-conscious at using the old, old word to describe Sam Yeager’s status.

“As for your first question, your Majesty, they might,” Atvar answered. “Pride pushes them more strongly than it does us.” That he might find it harder to recognize the Race’s pride than the Big Uglies’ had never occurred to him. He went on, “As for the second question, how can we be certain where the Tosevites are these days?” He reminded the Emperor of the problem with communicating with Tosev 3.

Risson made the affirmative gesture. “Yes, I know the difficulty. It has always been next to impossible to administer Tosev 3 from Home. As you say, the lag is much more important there than with our other two worlds.”

Back when the Race first discovered the Big Uglies were much more advanced than anyone on Home had thought, the conquest fleet had dutifully radioed the news from Tosev 3 to Home. All those years later-more than twenty of Tosev 3’s turns around its star-detailed orders had started coming back from Home and the bureaucrats here. The only problem with them was, they were ridiculously unsuited to the situation as it had developed. Atvar had had the sense to ignore them. The males and females here had taken a lot longer to have the sense to stop sending them.

“What do you recommend now?” Risson persisted. “Do you believe making the concessions the American Tosevites demand is necessary to ensure peace? Do you believe it will ensure peace, or will it only encourage the Big Uglies to demand more from us later?”

“With the Big Uglies, that second possibility is never far from the surface,” Atvar said. “They have only those dull nails in place of fingerclaws, but they grab fiercely even so.”

“That has also been my impression,” the Emperor said. “If we reject their demands, would they truly fight on that account?”

“I am not certain. I wish I were. In the short run, I am inclined to doubt it. But they would surely arm themselves more powerfully. They would build more starships. We might decide on a preventive war against them. There is no certainty that war would succeed now. The longer we wait, the less our likelihood of victory. That, I would say, is certain.”

Risson hissed unhappily. “You are telling me our best choice would be to order all-out war against them now?”

Our best choice would have been to order all-out war against them as soon as the first round of fighting stopped, Atvar thought grimly. But he couldn’t have done that. It might have left Tosev 3 uninhabitable, and the colonization fleet was on the way.

After muttering Straha’s name under his breath, he said, “When it comes to dealing with the wild Big Uglies, your Majesty, there are no good choices. We have to thread our way through the bad and try to avoid the worst.”

“I see,” the Emperor said. “I always saw, but the coming of this starship has poked my snout in it more strongly than ever.” He paused. “Sam Yeager struck me as being a reasonable individual.”

“Oh, he is,” Atvar agreed. “But he has his duty, which is to represent his not-empire, and he does that quite well. When you consider that he also views the world from an alien perspective, dealing with him becomes all the more difficult.”

“An alien perspective,” Risson echoed. “We are not used to that. Sam Yeager speaks our language well. He adapted to the ceremonial of the audience as well as a citizen of the Empire could have done.”

“Truth. I was proud to be his sponsor. I do not say he is unintelligent-on the contrary,” Atvar said. “But he is different. His differences are to some degree disguised when he speaks our language. The assumptions behind his thoughts are not assumptions we would make. We believe otherwise at our peril.”

“What are we going to do? Can we annihilate the independent Big Uglies even if we want to?” Risson asked.

“I do not know,” Atvar answered. “I simply do not know. Conditions on Tosev 3 are different from the way they were when the latest signals reached us. How they are different, who can guess? But they are different. Whatever the difference is, I doubt that it redounds to our advantage.”

“This is a disaster,” the Emperor said. “A disaster, nothing less. We would have done better not to land on Tosev 3 at all, to leave the Big Uglies to their own devices. Maybe they would have destroyed themselves by now. They would not have had any external rivals then, so they might have gone on with their local wars.”

“It could be, your Majesty,” Atvar said. “Unfortunately, this is not a choice we can make now. We have to deal with the situation as it is, not as it was when the conquest fleet arrived.”

“I understand that,” the 37th Emperor Risson said. “But am I not allowed to wish it were otherwise?”

“Why not, your Majesty? We all have wishes about what might have been when it comes to the Big Uglies. How could it be otherwise? The way things really are is less than satisfactory.”

“Truth,” the Emperor said. “Now tell me this, if you would be so kind-suppose we grant every concession the American Big Uglies seek from us. If we give them everything they say they want, will that be enough to make them keep whatever agreement they may make with us?”

“They are, in their own way, honorable. They would intend to stick to the terms of a treaty, your Majesty,” Atvar said. “The trouble with them is that, unlike us, they are changeable. In twenty years, or fifty years, or at most a hundred years, they will not be what they are now. They will look at the treaty, and they will say, ‘This is not relevant, because we are not the same as we were. We are smarter. We are stronger. You need to change this, that, and the other thing to reflect these new conditions.’ And you may be sure the new terms they demand will be to their advantage, not ours.”

“We do change. But we change slowly and sensibly,” Risson said. “By all the signs, they change for the sport of changing.”

“Oh, they do, your Majesty. They admit it,” Atvar replied. “Change has become ingrained in their culture in a way it never did with us. Their motorcars look different from year to year-not because the new ones run better, though they often do, but merely so it can be seen that they are new. They change the style of their cloth wrappings in the same way, and for the same reason. It is as if we changed the style of our body paint every few years.”

“We could not do that! It would hatch chaos!” Risson exclaimed.

“I understand that. It is one of the reasons I find our young males and females with their false hair and even their wrappings so disturbing. But the Big Uglies embrace change, where we mostly endure it,” Atvar said. “Anyone who does not see that does not see the first thing about them. It drives us mad. That we are so different often drives the Big Uglies mad, I think. But their variability has proved a great source of strength for them.”

The Emperor let out another unhappy hiss. “Again, you are telling me war now may be our best hope.”

“It… may be,” Atvar said unwillingly. “But it also may not. If war comes, it will cost us more than we have paid in the whole history of the Empire. I do not believe Sam Yeager was lying or bluffing when he said the American Big Uglies would attack all our worlds in case of war. I do not believe we will be able to block all their attacks, either. They will hurt us. They will hurt us badly. Whether the other independent Tosevites will join them against us, I cannot say. If they do, that would make a bad situation worse. How much worse, I am not prepared to guess.”

“And what will happen to Tosev 3 if war breaks out between us and the independent Big Uglies?” Risson asked.

“Well, your Majesty, I am not there. In his wisdom, the previous Emperor, your illustrious predecessor, chose to recall me.” Atvar could not keep acid from his voice. He went on, “My opinion, however, for what it may be worth, is that the Big Uglies should never get another chance to start a war if they are addled enough to fight now. And if that means leaving Tosev 3 uninhabitable for us and for them, so be it. Up until this time, they were local menaces, restricted to their own solar system. That, unfortunately, is no longer the case.”

“It is too late now to send you back to Tosev 3,” the Emperor said. Atvar bent into the special posture of respect. Risson had just done what no one else had done before him: he’d admitted the Race had made a mistake in recalling the fleetlord. He gestured for Atvar to rise, then went on, “Do all you can to promote a peaceful resolution of our difficulties. If that fails… If that fails, we will do what becomes necessary, and we will do our best.”

“It shall be done, your Majesty,” Atvar said.

“I hope it shall,” Risson replied. “As I say, we shall attempt it, at any rate.”

He is not confident we can beat the Big Uglies if it comes to war, Atvar realized. The fleetlord would have been more shocked had he been more confident himself. What had the Tosevites learned in the years since the latest signals from Tosev 3 reached Home? What would they learn in the years while the order to attack was speeding from Home to Tosev 3? Whatever it was, how would they apply it to weapons? Would the Race be able to keep up, to counter them?

“If the spirits of Emperors past are with us, we will not have to do that,” Atvar said.

“Let us hope they are. Let us hope we do not have to,” Risson said. “But let us also be as ready as we can, so we will see trouble as it hatches and before it grows… too much.” Atvar wished the Emperor hadn’t added the last two words, but made the affirmative gesture anyway.