Homeward Bound

4

Back when the Race first came to Earth, people would have had trouble making a Lizard happy in a Hilton. Karen Yeager supposed she shouldn’t be too critical of the rooms the Race had arranged for people here in the town of Sitneff. On the other hand, she had a hard time being delighted with them, either.

In 1942, people hadn’t known anything about Lizards. They’d had no idea the Race even existed. She’d heard her father-in-law and her own parents go on and on about how astonished everyone was when the conquest fleet went into action. Her folks had thought the Lizards were Martians when the conquest fleet arrived. The idea that the Race could have come from beyond the Solar System hadn’t crossed anyone’s mind.

The Lizards here, by contrast, had been getting data back from Earth ever since the early 1950s. For some considerable while, they hadn’t wanted to believe what they were getting, but finally they hadn’t had any choice. So why couldn’t they have done a better job adapting rooms to fit human tastes?

They had remembered air conditioners. Those cooled the air only to the mid-eighties, but even that was better than nothing. Sleeping mats were less comfortable than mattresses, but Karen knew she could tolerate them. The odd lumps of foam rubber that were intended for chairs were harder to put up with. So were low ceilings and doorways.

And, when it came to plumbing arrangements, the Lizards showed they were indeed alien. Water came out of the tap at one temperature: a little warmer than lukewarm. She didn’t think much of that. The showerhead was set into the wall at a level between her chest and her navel. It had only one setting: abrasively strong. She didn’t have scales, and felt half flayed every time she came out of the stall.

But the sanitary fixtures were the worst. Lizards excreted only solid wastes. Their plumbing was not adapted for any other sort. Cleaning up the mess that resulted from those differences was not something that endeared the Race to her.

“Fine thing for an alleged diplomat to do,” she grumbled, using a towel for a purpose it hadn’t been intended to serve.

“All right, leave it for the chambermaids, then, or whatever the Lizards call them,” Jonathan answered.

Karen made a horrible face. “That’s worse. And who says they’d clean it up? They might think we do it all the time, or we like it this way.”

“There’s a cheery idea,” her husband said. “We can always piss down the shower. Then it would be good for something, anyhow.”

“That’s disgusting, too,” Karen said. Finally, the job was done. She washed her hands. What the Lizards used for soap was also industrial strength. It would probably wear raw places in her skin before too long.

She laughed, though it wasn’t particularly funny: the soap didn’t seem to have done Kassquit any harm, and she’d put every square inch of skin she had on display. Karen didn’t think Kassquit had deliberately appeared naked to titillate. Kassquit did follow the Race’s customs and not mankind‘s. But what she’d intended and what she got were liable to be two different things.

Kassquit looked to be somewhere around forty. Karen knew the Race’s counterpart to Mickey and Donald had gone into cold sleep years before she herself and Jonathan had. The Lizards’ starships were a good deal faster than the Admiral Peary, too, which meant… what?

That the Lizards had kept Kassquit on ice for a long time after she got to Home. Why would they do that? Only one answer occurred to Karen: so their pet human could deal with the Americans when they arrived and still probably stay in good health. In a cold-blooded way, it made sense. If something went wrong, Karen wouldn’t have wanted to entrust herself to a Lizard doctor who’d never seen a human being in his life. It would be like going to a vet, only worse. Dogs and cats-even turtles and goldfish-were related to people. Lizards weren’t. Nothing on Home was.

Karen almost mentioned her conclusions to her husband-almost, but not quite. She wanted him thinking of Kassquit as little as possible. She’d noticed him looking at her not quite enough out of the corner of his eye. Of course, she’d also noticed all the other men in the landing party (even her father-in-law, who should have been too old for such things) doing the same. But unlike the rest of them, Jonathan had memories.

Memories and a naked woman were a bad combination. Karen was convinced of that.

Jonathan was fiddling with electronics. A light on the display went from green to yellow-red. “Ha!” he said, and nodded to himself. “They are bugging this room.”

“Are you surprised?” Karen asked.

“Surprised? No,” he answered. “But it’s something we can give them a hard time about later on, if we have to. You’re not supposed to do that to an embassy.”

“Those are our rules,” Karen said. “The Russians and the Germans break them all the time, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we do, too. So why shouldn’t the Lizards, when they don’t play by our rules to begin with?”

“When it comes to diplomacy, they pretty much do play by our rules-at least on Earth they do,” Jonathan said. “They’ve been unified so long, they’ve almost forgotten the rules they used to have. How they’ll act here is anybody’s guess. Except for the ones who’ve come back from Earth, the Lizards we’ll be dealing with here haven’t had anything to do with people up till now.”

“Yes, and you know what that means,” Karen said. “It means we’ll have to waste a lot of time convincing them they really need to talk to us.”

“Well, we’re here, and we got here under our own power,” Jonathan said. “That puts us ahead of the Rabotevs and the Hallessi.” Wonder spread over his face. “We’ve finally met a Rabotev.”

“We sure have,” Karen echoed, amazement in her voice as well.

“We’ll probably meet Hallessi, too,” Jonathan said. “That will be something pretty special.” As he had a way of doing, he went back to what he’d been talking about before: “The Lizards didn’t need to remember much about diplomacy when they brought the Rabotevs and Hallessi into the Empire. They just walked over them, and that was that.”

“And if they’d come right after they sent their probes to Earth, they would have done the same thing to us.” Karen’s shiver had nothing to do with the air in the room, which wouldn’t cool down till doomsday.

Jonathan nodded. “That’s true. But they waited, and they paid for it.” He looked down at the bug spotter again. “Some of these are pretty easy to find. Most, in fact.”

“Do you think you’re missing any?” Karen asked.

“Well, I don’t know for sure, obviously,” he answered. “Judging from the ones I’m finding, though, I’d be surprised. The technology on these just isn’t that good.”

“We wouldn’t have said that when we were kids,” Karen remarked. Her husband nodded. When the Lizards came to Earth, they’d had a considerable lead in technology on people. Humanity had been playing catchup ever since. The Race’s technology was highly sophisticated, highly effective-and highly static. If it had changed at all since the Lizards bumped into humanity, no one merely human had been able to notice those changes.

Human technology, on the other hand… Human technology had been in ferment even before the Lizards came. When Karen’s father-in-law was a little boy, the Wright brothers had just got off the ground and radio was telegraphy without wires. Nobody had ever heard of computers or jets or missiles or fission or fusion. It was only a little better than even money whether going to a doctor would make you better.

The arrival of the Race only threw gasoline on the fire. People had had to adapt, had to learn, or go under. And learn they had, both pushing their own technology forward and begging, borrowing, and stealing everything they could from the Lizards. The result was a crazy hodgepodge of techniques that had originated at home and on Home, but some of it made the Lizards on Earth swing their eye turrets towards it in surprise.

Jonathan said, “When the Lizards get something to the point where it does what they want it to, they standardize it and then they forget about it. We aren’t like that. We keep tinkering-and we manage to do things the Race never thought of.” He patted the bug sniffer.

“They’ll be listening to us,” Karen said. “They’ll know we’ll know they’re listening to us.”

“For a while,” Jonathan said, and said no more about that. Before long, the Lizards would be hearing either nothing or what people wanted them to hear.

They would know human electronics had caught up with and even surpassed theirs. In fact, they would know more about human technology than Karen and Jonathan did. They’d been getting continuous reports that were more than twenty-five years more recent than anything the newly revived humans knew first hand.

“They’re starting to borrow from us by now,” Karen said.

“They sure are. Did you see the green wig on that one Lizard on the way here from the shuttlecraft port? Scary,” Jonathan said. “But you meant gadgets. Well, when they borrow from us, they’ll check things out before they use them, right? Have to make sure everything works the way it’s supposed to-and have to make sure whatever they introduce doesn’t destabilize what they’ve already got.”

He spoke with the odd mixture of scorn, amusement, and admiration people often used when they talked about the way the Race used technology. If people had had the same attitude, the Admiral Peary wouldn’t have flown for another hundred years, or maybe another five hundred. When it did leave the Solar System, though, everything would have worked perfectly.

As things were, the starship orbited Tau Ceti 2 now, not some unknown number of generations in the future. That was the good news. The bad news was that the Doctor and some other people who’d started the journey weren’t here to appreciate its success. People took chances. Sometimes they paid for it. Sometimes it paid off. Most often, as had proved true here, both happened at once.

Karen went to the window and looked out. Sitneff reminded her of an overgrown version of the towns the Race had planted in the deserts of Arabia and North Africa and Australia. The streets were laid out in a sensible grid, with some diagonals to make traffic flow more smoothly. Most of the buildings were businesslike boxes. The tall ones housed Lizards. Males and females had offices in the medium-sized ones. The low, spread-out ones were where they made things.

Cars and trucks glided along the streets. From up high, they didn’t look much different from their Earthly counterparts. They burned hydrogen; their exhaust was water vapor. These days-or at least back in the 1990s-most human-made motor vehicles did the same. Karen wondered if any gasoline-burners were left in 2031. She’d grown up with Los Angeles smog, even if Gardena, her suburb, did get sea breezes. She didn’t miss air pollution a bit.

Plants halfway between trees and bushes lined some of the boulevards. They had several skinny trunks sprouting from a thicker lump of woody stuff that didn’t come very far out of the ground. Their leaves were thin and greenish gray, and put her in mind of nothing so much as the leaves of olive trees.

Something with batlike wings, a long nose, and a tail with a leaf-shaped flap of flesh on the end glided past the window, close enough to give Karen a good look at its turreted, Lizardlike eyes. “My God!” she said. “A pterodactyl just flew by!”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Jonathan said. “They don’t have birds here. You knew that.”

“Well, yes. But knowing it and seeing one are two different things,” Karen said. “If they weren’t, why would we have come here in the first place?” Jonathan had no answer for that.

Ttomalss sat across a park table and bench from Sam Yeager. The psychologist would sooner have done business inside a building. This setting struck him as unfortunately informal. For the third time, he asked, “Would you not be more comfortable indoors?”

For the third time, the Big Ugly’s thick, fleshy fingers shaped the negative gesture. “I am just fine right where I am,” Sam Yeager said. He had an accent-no Big Ugly who used the Race’s language could help having one-but his speech was almost perfectly idiomatic.

“How can you say that?” Ttomalss inquired. “It must be too warm for your comfort, and this furniture is surely too small for your fundament.”

“The weather is not bad,” the Tosevite replied. “It is early morning, so it has not got too hot to be unpleasant for me. And we are in the shade of that kesserem tree-it is a kesserem tree, is it not? I have only seen photos up till now.”

“Yes, it is,” Ttomalss said. “That is well done, to recognize it from photos alone.”

“I thank you.” Sam Yeager made as if to assume the posture of respect, then checked the motion the instant it became recognizable. A male of the Race would have done exactly the same thing. Yeager stretched out his long, long legs and continued, “Anyway, as I was saying, the shade keeps the hot glare of your sun off my head.” He laughed a noisy Tosevite laugh, no doubt on purpose. “How strange for me to say your sun and not the sun. To me, this is not the sun.”

“So it is not. When I first came to your solar system, I had the same thought about the star Tosev,” Ttomalss said. “Before long, though, it faded. A star is a star, and Tosev is not a star much different from the sun.” His mouth dropped open in the laughter of his kind. “From your sun, you would say.”

“I would now. Maybe not in a little while, though.” Sam Yeager shrugged. “And this bench is all right, since I am not trying to get my legs under it.”

“You would still find it more congenial in an office,” Ttomalss said.

But the Big Ugly used the negative gesture again. “That is not a truth, Senior Researcher. I know what the Race’s offices are like. I have seen plenty of them back on Tosev 3. I have never seen one of your parks. I spent lots of years in cold sleep to see new things, and that is what I want to do.”

“You Tosevites are incurably addicted to novelty,” Ttomalss said.

“No doubt you are right,” Sam Yeager said placidly. “But we have fun.”

A stray beffel that was ambling along suddenly stopped in its tracks when the Big Ugly’s unfamiliar odor reached its scent receptors. It stared at him. Every line of its low-slung body said nothing that smelled like that had any business existing. It let out an indignant beep and scurried away, its short legs twinkling over the sandy ground.

“Those creatures were becoming first-class nuisances back on Tosev 3 long before I went into cold sleep,” Sam Yeager said. “They were, and so were a good many other plants and animals of yours.”

Ttomalss shrugged. “This continued after you went into cold sleep, too. But you cannot expect us to settle and not bring bits of our own ecosystem with us. We want to make Tosev 3 a world where we can truly live, not just dwell.”

“When your animals and plants displace the ones that were living there, you cannot expect us to be very happy about it,” the Big Ugly said.

With another shrug, Ttomalss said, “These things happen. Past that, I do not know what to tell you. Had you come to Home, you would have brought your creatures and your food crops with you. Do you doubt it?”

He waited. How would Sam Yeager respond to that? He laughed another noisy Tosevite laugh. “No, I do not doubt it, Senior Researcher. I think it is a truth. We have spread our own beasts when we colonized new land masses-including the one where I was hatched. And there are some that could easily make themselves at home here. But you will understand that we like it less when it is done to us.”

Was that irony in his voice? Or was he simply stating a fact? With a male of the Race, Ttomalss would have had no trouble telling the difference. With the Tosevite, he wasn’t quite sure. He decided to take it as seriously meant. “No doubt,” he said. “But you will understand that any group looks to its own advantage first and to the situation of others only later.”

“I wish I could say we needed the Race to teach us that,” Sam Yeager answered. “I cannot, however, and I will not attempt it. We have quite thoroughly taught ourselves that lesson.”

He was, Ttomalss judged, fundamentally honest. Was that an advantage in diplomacy or the reverse? The psychologist had trouble being sure. Had the Big Uglies’ chief negotiator been the male known as the Doctor, Ttomalss would have known what to expect. That male was notorious for doing and saying anything to advance the cause of his not-empire. Sam Yeager probably would not go to the same extremes-which did not mean he was incompetent, only that his methods were different.

A female out walking a tsiongi suddenly noticed Yeager. Both her eye turrets swiveled toward him, as if she could not believe what she was seeing. “Spirits of Emperors past!” she exclaimed. “It is one of those horrible Big Ugly things!”

“Yes, I am a Big Ugly,” Sam Yeager agreed. “On my planet, we have nicknames for the Race, too. How are you this morning?” His interrogative cough was a small masterpiece of understatement.

“It talks!” the female said, perhaps to Ttomalss, perhaps-more probably-to the tsiongi. “No matter what they said on the news, I did not really believe those things could talk.”

Sam Yeager turned to Ttomalss. The psychologist wanted to sink down into the ground. “Are you certain there is intelligent life on this planet?” the Tosevite asked.

“What does it mean?” the female squawked. “Is it being rude and crude? Come on, you with the fancy body paint! Speak up!”

“This is the ambassador from the not-empire of the United States to the Empire,” Ttomalss told her. “He is, I will note, behaving in a much more civilized fashion than you are.”

“Well!” the female said with a noisy sniff. “Some males think they are high and mighty. If you would rather take the side of a nasty thing from who knows where than a hardworking, tax-paying citizen, I hope you come down with the purple itch. Come along, Swifty.” She twitched the leash and led the tsiongi away.

“I apologize on behalf of my entire species,” Ttomalss said.

To his astonishment, Sam Yeager was laughing again. “Do not let it worry you, Senior Researcher. We have plenty of males and females like that ourselves. It is interesting to learn that you have them, too.”

“I wish we did not,” Ttomalss said. “They contribute nothing.”

The Big Ugly used the negative gesture once more. “You cannot even say that. For all you know, she may be an excellent worker.”

“I doubt it.” Ttomalss was not inclined to feel charitable toward the female, who showed the Race at its worst. “She is bound to be incompetent at everything she does.”

“Do not worry,” Sam Yeager said again. “We were talking about ecosystems. You will know we do not seek to damage yours when we bring rats down from the Admiral Peary. ” The name of the animals, necessarily, was in English.

“I know of rats from your planet,” Ttomalss answered cautiously. “I know they are pests there. Why did you bring them here, if not with the intent of taking a sort of vengeance on us?”

“Because this is your planet and not ours, and because some of the things on it are different from those on Tosev 3,” the Big Ugly said. “We will use the rats to test foods here, so that we do not make ourselves ill by accident.”

“There are few differences between Tosevites’ biochemistry and the Race‘s,” Ttomalss said. “We did not have many problems with food and drink on your world.”

“What about ginger?” Sam Yeager returned. “We do not want to get that kind of surprise, either.”

Ginger had been a surprise, all right, and a singularly nasty one. Ttomalss made the negative gesture to himself. Ginger had been a plurally nasty surprise. It had complicated the lives of the males of the conquest fleet. But it had complicated the lives of both males and females from the colonization fleet, especially those of the females. When they tasted ginger, they not only got the pleasure the males did, they also went into their mating season regardless of whether it was the right time of year. And the pheromones females released sent males into a breeding frenzy of their own.

Big Uglies had evolved to deal with continuous sexuality. The Race hadn’t. Repercussions on Tosev 3 were still sorting themselves out. Some of the males and females there had even gone so far as to seek Big Ugly-style permanent mating alliances. The first ones had been expelled for perversion from the areas of the planet the Race controlled, to live out their days in exile in the not-empire of the United States. There, no one seemed to care what anyone else did so long as it didn’t involve mayhem or murder.

But, from what Ttomalss had gathered since his awakening on Home, the colonists had begun to relent. They’d had to. Too many males and females had sought such alliances. Losing them all to the Big Uglies would have been a disaster, especially since Tosevite technology was already advancing so alarmingly fast.

“Well?” Sam Yeager scuffed his feet in the sand. Was he trying to get comfortable or just fooling around? Members of the Race liked to feel sand between their toes. But the Big Uglies covered their soft feet. How much enjoyment could you get out of playing in sand with covered feet? Yeager went on, “You do understand why we need the animals?”

Ttomalss sighed. “Yes, I suppose so. Very well. Have your way there. I will inform my superiors of the circumstances.”

“I thank you,” Sam Yeager said.

“You are welcome.” Ttomalss realized he had better clarify that: “For now, you are welcome. If these rats escape from captivity, you will be blamed. You will be severely blamed. We have no furry little animals here on Home. If they suddenly start appearing, we will know where they have come from, and we will take appropriate steps against you. Do I make myself clear enough?”

“You do indeed.” The Big Ugly’s mobile lips drew back from his teeth. One corner of his mouth turned up. The other didn’t. Ttomalss, who had made a particular study of Tosevite facial cues, thought that one showed wry amusement. He was pleased to be proved right, for Sam Yeager went on, “You do see the irony in your words, I hope? You will blame us for doing on a small scale what you are doing on a large scale on Tosev 3.”

“Irony? I suppose you could call it that,” Ttomalss said. “What I see is power. We are strong enough to ensure that what we desire is what occurs. Had it been otherwise, you would have discovered us, not the other way around.”

“You are frank,” Sam Yeager said.

“I want no misunderstanding,” Ttomalss replied. “Misunder-standings-especially now-can prove expensive to both sides.”

“Especially now, yes,” the Big Ugly agreed. “Before, you could reach us and we could not reach you. But things are different these days. How many starships are they building back on Tosev 3?” Ttomalss hadn’t liked thinking about one starship full of wild Tosevites. Several of them? Several of them were several orders of magnitude worse.

Atvar was a frustrated male. That was nothing new for him. He’d spent much of his time on Tosev 3 frustrated. But he’d dared hope such conditions would get better when he returned to Home. There, he’d proved optimistic.

The Race had known for years that a Tosevite starship was on its way. It had adapted spacecraft for use in combat, should that become necessary: the first time since Home was unified that military spacecraft operated within this solar system rather than going out to conquer others.

But no one seemed in charge of the spacecraft. The Emperor had not declared a new Soldiers’ Time. There was no formal military authority for defending Home. No one had ever imagined such a thing would be necessary. Along with the Ministry of Transportation, those of Police, Trade, and even Science claimed jurisdiction over the armed spaceships. Where everybody was in charge, nobody was in charge.

When Atvar tried to point that out, no one wanted to listen to him. That didn’t astonish him. It did irk him, though. He’d come back to Home under a cloud because he hadn’t completely conquered Tosev 3. Then they’d called him out of retirement on the grounds that he was an expert on the Big Uglies and on matters military-the greatest expert on matters military on Home, in fact. Having praised him to the skies when they decided they needed him, they then decided they didn’t need him badly enough to take his advice.

He’d petitioned for an audience with the Emperor to try to get a rescript to make the various ministers pay attention to him. When he submitted the request (written by hand, as tradition required), the subassistant junior steward who took it from him warned, “While many petitions are offered, only a handful are selected for imperial action. Do not be disappointed if yours is not heard.”

“I understand,” Atvar replied. “I am of the opinion, however, that my petition is more important than most.”

“As who is not?” the subassistant junior steward sniffed.

Atvar wanted to claw him. The only thing restraining the fleetlord was the certainty that that would get his petition rejected. Instead, he said, “The Emperor will know my name.” The subassistant junior steward plainly didn’t. He, no doubt, had been hatched long after the conquest fleet left for Tosev 3, and after the fighting stopped there as well. To him, the fleetlord was ancient history. “See that your superiors read my words,” Atvar told him. They, with luck, would have some notion of what he was talking about.

He got on better with Sam Yeager than he did with most of the males and females allegedly on his side. He and the Big Ugly had more common experience than he did with the comfortable bureaucrats who’d never gone beyond the atmosphere of Home. Even though Yeager had been in cold sleep for many years, he still understood the uneasy balance of the relationship between the Race and the Tosevites back on Tosev 3.

And Yeager had done the Race the enormous service of pointing out who had attacked the colonization fleet just after it reached his home planet. He had, not surprisingly, got into trouble for that with his own authorities. Atvar asked him, “Things being as they are, why did the not-empire of the United States send you on such an important mission?”

The two of them sat alone at a refectory table in the hotel the wild Big Uglies were using as an embassy. The other Tosevites who had come to Home were on a tour of the more distant regions of Home. This was not a formal negotiating session, only a talk. Yeager used a set of Tosevite eating utensils to cut up smoked zisuili meat. He’d eaten that on Tosev 3, and knew it was safe for his kind. After chewing and swallowing a bite, he answered, “Maybe my superiors thought I would not wake up again. Maybe they thought that, as a junior member of the expedition, I would not be in a position to decide anything important. And maybe-most likely, I think-they just wanted me as far from the United States as I could go.”

“And yet, plainly, you remain loyal to your not-empire.” If Atvar sounded wistful, that was only because he was.

“I do.” Sam Yeager used an emphatic cough. “I am.”

“What do you expect these talks to yield?” Atvar asked.

“Fleetlord, the Race has never yet treated us as equals,” the Big Ugly answered, adding another emphatic cough. “You have dealt with us. We showed you you had to. But you keep on looking down your snouts at us. And that is on Tosev 3, where you have got to know us. Here on Home, things are a lot worse. I have already seen as much. Will you tell me it is not a truth?”

“No. I would not insult your intelligence,” Atvar said.

Sam Yeager made as if to go into the posture of respect, checking himself at just the right moment. “I thank you. But it is time that the United States got its due. We have also traveled between the stars now. Do I understand correctly that the Soviet Union is also going to launch a starship?”

“So I have been told. It will be called the Molotov, after the longtime ruler of that not-empire. Having met Molotov the Tosevite, I hope the ship proves less unpleasant.” Atvar vividly recalled his first dreadful encounter with the Big Ugly, who at that time did not yet rule the SSSR. Molotov had explained-had been proud to explain-how his political faction came to power by murdering the emperor who formerly ruled their land. Back then, the mere idea that an emperor (even a Big Ugly) could be murdered was enough to shake Atvar’s mental world. He’d had no idea how many more unpleasant lessons the Tosevites would teach him.

“And the Nipponese and the Deutsche are also working on them?” Sam Yeager persisted.

Reluctantly, Atvar made the affirmative gesture. “I believe this to be the case, yes.” He let out an angry hiss. “How it could be, however, I confess I do not completely understand. We defeated the Deutsche. We smashed the Deutsche. We put strict limits on what they could do. How they could return to space even around Tosev 3, let alone contemplate an interstellar spacecraft…”

“We called the war we were fighting when the Race arrived the Second World War,” Sam Yeager said. “Until you came, we did not know what a world war really was, but we thought we did. A generation earlier, we had fought the First World War. The Deutsche were on the losing side there, too. The winners disarmed them and tried to make sure they stayed weak. It did not work.”

“You are Tosevites. You are slipshod. You forget things. You might as well be hatchlings,” Atvar said. “We are the Race.”

“So you are,” Sam Yeager replied. “And, evidently, you were slipshod. You forgot things. This puts you in a poor position to mock us.”

“I was not mocking you.” Atvar checked himself. “Well, yes, perhaps I was. But I was mocking Fleetlord Reffet and Shiplord Kirel much more. For you are correct, of course. They let the advantage we held over the Deutsche slip away. They should not have done so. That they did so is mortifying.”

“If it makes you feel any better, Fleetlord, the Deutsche have more experience getting around such restrictions than the Race has imposing them.”

“This may make me feel microscopically better,” Atvar replied. “On the other hand, it may not.” His tailstump quivered with anger. “For remember, Ambassador, I was recalled for incompetence. Those who came after me were going to do a far better job. They were sure of it. And look what they accomplished!”

“It does show your people that you were not to blame,” Sam Yeager said.

“I already knew as much,” Atvar said acidly. “That others also do is a matter of some gratification, but not much. I know I could have done better. I doubt I could have kept your not-empire from launching a starship. But the Deutsche, by the spirits of Emperors past, would not be a problem now if I still headed administration on Tosev 3.”

He cast down his eye turrets. Any citizen of the Empire, whether belonging to the Race, the Rabotevs, or the Hallessi, would have looked down at the ground at the mention of Emperors past or present. Sam Yeager did not. However well he behaved, however well he understood the Race, he was an alien and would always remain one.

Yeager said, “What we wanted with this mission, Fleetlord, was respect.”

“Well, you have that. I do not know precisely what you will do with it, but you have it,” Atvar said. “Along with it, you also have hatched a considerable amount of fear. Is that what you had in mind?”

To his surprise, Sam Yeager made the affirmative gesture. “As a matter of fact, yes,” he replied. “We have feared the Race now for ninety years-ninety of ours, twice as many of yours. Mutual fear is not the worst thing in the world. It may keep both sides from doing anything irrevocably stupid.”

Atvar’s mouth fell open in a laugh. “I see you look on the bright side of things. My guess would be that nothing is sure to keep both sides from doing anything irrevocably stupid.”

“My guess would be that you are right,” the Big Ugly replied. “I am still allowed to hope, though.”

“There I cannot disagree,” Atvar said. “If we did not hope, one side or the other would have destroyed Tosev 3 by now.”

“Truth,” Yeager said. “Now you of the Race have to remember that all the time, as we have had to do since the year we call 1942. And you have to remember it can apply to your planets, not just to the one we live on.”

That, no doubt, was part of what he meant by respect. To Atvar, it seemed perilously close to arrogance. That the Race had the same feeling never entered his mind. His mental horizon had expanded a great deal since he first came to Tosev 3, but he remained a part of his culture. For the Race to pressure other species seemed natural to him. For others to do the same to his kind did not.

He had the sense to see a change of subject might be a good idea. “Why did you not go sightseeing with the other Tosevites?” he asked.

“Please do not misunderstand me,” the Big Ugly replied. “I will be pleased to see as much of your planet as I can. If the Doctor were in charge now, I would be out with the others. But I have more responsibility than I thought I would. I need to talk with you-with your government-about how we can all get along now that things have changed and you really need to recognize our fundamental equality.”

Atvar laughed again. “You assume what you wish to prove, something I have seen a great many Tosevites do. We have sent fleets to Tosev 3. You have sent one ship here, and a slow one at that. This, to me, does not argue in favor of fundamental equality. The balance has changed. There is a new weight on your side of the scale. But the two sides do not match.”

“Maybe not.” The corners of Sam Yeager’s mouth turned up. That could be a gesture of amiability or of something else masquerading as amiability. “When we do fly a fleet here, are you sure you will want to meet us? You will know I mean no disrespect when I tell you our technology changes much faster than yours.” That said what sort of gesture the upturned mouth corners were, all right.

“You have been stealing from us since we first came to Tosev 3, you mean,” Atvar said.

“Truth,” Sam Yeager said again, surprising Atvar, but he also made the negative hand gesture. “But what we know for ourselves and what we have discovered has also grown, and we have already started doing things with what we have learned from you that you never thought of.”

He told another truth there. The fleetlord wished he hadn’t. Reports that came in at light speed kept talking about Tosevite advances in electronics, in biochemistry, and in many other areas. It was indeed worrisome. Why could you not have gone sightseeing? the fleetlord thought resentfully.

Karen Yeager found herself enjoying a winter day near the South Pole of Home. It felt like an April day in Los Angeles: a little chilly for the T-shirt and shorts she had on, but not bad. The guide, a female named Trir, seemed more interested in the Tosevites she had charge of than in the scenery around her. Her eye turrets kept going every which way, staring at the Big Uglies.

In a distracted voice, Trir said, “Conditions here today are relatively mild. On rare occasions, water has been known to freeze and fall to the ground in strange crystals that are known as snow… What is that appalling noise?”

“They are laughing,” Kassquit told her. “That is the noise they make to show amusement.”

“Why?” the female of the Race asked. “Do they not believe me?”

“We believe you. We do not laugh to offend you,” Karen said. “We laugh because our planet is cooler than Home. Snow is common on many parts of it. We are more familiar with it than members of the Race.” She said that even though she’d been a little girl the last time it snowed all over Los Angeles (though of course she didn’t know what had happened while she was in cold sleep).

“I see,” Trir said… coldly. The female acted as if she were in the company of a group of tigers that walked on their hind legs and wore business suits. Maybe the Big Uglies wouldn’t shoot her or devour her, but she wasn’t convinced of it.

“They speak the truth,” Kassquit said.

“I see,” Trir said again, no more warmth in her tone. As far as she was concerned, Kassquit must have been about as barbarous as a wild Big Ugly, even if she wore body paint instead of clothes. It was definitely chilly to be walking around in nothing but body paint and a pair of sandals. Karen Yeager had a hard time feeling much sympathy for the Race’s pet human.

Trying to be a diplomat, Frank Coffey said, “Shall we go on?”

“I thank you. Yes. That is an excellent idea,” Trir said. “Please follow me.” She walked along a well-defined trail. Every couple of hundred yards, signs at the height of Lizard eye turrets urged members of the Race to stay on the trail and not go wandering away into the wilderness. Karen had to smile when she saw them. They reminded her of those in some of the busier national parks back in the United States.

“What happens to the local plants and animals when it snows?” Jonathan Yeager asked.

“Some plants go dormant. Some animals hibernate,” the guide answered. “Most survive as best they can or simply perish under those harsh conditions.”

In broad outline, the South Polar region of Home reminded Karen of the country around Palm Springs and Indio, or perhaps more of the Great Basin desert of Nevada and Utah. Plants were scattered randomly across the landscape, with bare ground between most of them and with occasional clumps growing wherever the soil was especially rich or where there was more water than usual. The plants looked like desert vegetation, too: their leaves were small and shiny, and they didn’t get very big. A lot of them were armed with spikes and barbs to make life difficult for herbivores.

Something skittered from one clump of plants to another. Karen didn’t get the best look at it, but it reminded her of a small-l lizard. Of course, since all the land creatures on Home seemed to be scaly, they would remind her of lizards-unless they reminded her of dinosaurs instead.

She and the rest of the humans walked along in Trir’s wake, admiring the scenery. It was beautiful, in a bleak way. A few of the plants showed Home’s equivalent of flowers, which had black disks at their heart that attracted pollinators. Karen went up to one and sniffed at it. It didn’t smell like anything in particular.

“Why do you do that?” Trir asked.

“I wanted to find out if it had an odor,” she answered.

“Why would it?” The guide didn’t sound as if she believed the explanation.

“Because many plants on Tosev 3 use odors to attract flying animals that spread their sex cells,” Karen replied, realizing she had no idea how to say pollinators in the language of the Race.

“How very peculiar,” Trir said, and added an emphatic cough to show she thought it was very peculiar indeed.

Something rose from a bush and flapped away: one of the bat-winged little pterodacytloids that did duty for birds here. It was the same greenish gray as the leaves from which it had emerged. Protective coloration was alive and well on Home, then. When the flying beast landed in another bush, it became for all practical purposes invisible.

Bigger fliers glided overhead. Karen’s shadow stretched long off to one side. Tau Ceti-more and more, Karen was just thinking of it as the sun — shone not very high in the north. She wondered what happened during the long, dark winter nights when the sun didn’t rise at all.

When she asked, though, Trir stared at her with as little comprehension as if she’d used English. “What do you mean?” the Lizard asked. “There is a time when the sun does not rise above the horizon, yes, but there is always light here.”

That left Karen as confused as Trir had been. “But-how?” she asked.

Frank Coffey explained it for both of them. Speaking in the Race’s language, he said, “Tosev 3 has the ecliptic inclined to the equator at twenty-six parts per hundred.” The Lizards didn’t use degrees; they reckoned a right angle as having a hundred divisions, not ninety. “Here on Home, the inclination is only about ten parts per hundred. On our world, the far north and the far south can be altogether dark for a long time. There must always be at least twilight here during the day, because the sun does not get so far below the horizon.”

“That, at least, is a truth,” Trir said. “You… Tosevites must come from a very peculiar world indeed.”

Karen hid her amusement. The guide had almost said Big Uglies, but had remembered her manners just in time. The sky wouldn’t have fallen if she’d slipped, but she didn’t know that. Just as well she didn’t, probably. The more polite the Race and humanity were to each other, the better things were likely to go. And that was all to the good, since each side could reach the other now.

She did say, “To us, Home seems the peculiar world.”

“Oh, no. Certainly not.” Trir used the negative gesture and an emphatic cough. “Home is a normal world. Home is the world against which all others are measured. Rabotev 2 and Halless 1 come fairly close, but Tosev 3 must be much more alien.”

“Only because you come from Home is this world normal to you,” Karen said. “To us, Tosev 3 is the standard.”

“Home is the standard for everyone in the Empire,” Trir insisted.

“Except for Kassquit here, we are not citizens of the Empire,” Karen said. “We come from the United States, an independent not-empire.”

Trir must have been briefed about that, but it plainly meant nothing to her. She could not imagine intelligent beings who did not acknowledge the Emperor as their sovereign. And she would not admit that the choice of Home as a standard for how worlds should be was as arbitrary as that of Earth. Even Kassquit weighed into the argument on Karen’s side. She couldn’t convince Trir, either. And the guide did seem to find her just as alien as she found the Americans.

In English, Jonathan said, “If this is the Race’s attitude, we’re going to have a devil of a time making them see reason.”

“The higher-ups, the males and females we’ll be dealing with, have better sense,” Tom de la Rosa said, also in English.

“I hope so,” Jonathan said. “But down deep, they’re still going to feel the same way. They’re the center of the universe, and everything revolves around them. If they think that’s how it ought to be, we’re going to have a hard time persuading them they’re wrong.”

“Atvar will help there,” Karen said. “After all the time he spent on Earth, he knows what’s what.”

“What are these preposterous grunts and groans?” Trir demanded.

“Our own language,” Karen answered. “We know yours, and on our planet many males and females of the Race have learned ours.”

“How extremely peculiar.” The Lizard used another emphatic cough. “I assumed all intelligent beings would naturally speak our language. That is so throughout the Empire.”

“But we do not belong to the Empire,” Karen said. “I already told you that. When the Empire tried to conquer our not-empire, we fought it to a standstill and forced it to withdraw from the territory we rule.”

“As time goes on, you will be made into contented subjects of the Empire, as so many Tosevites already have been,” Trir replied.

She sounded perfectly confident. That was the attitude the Race had taken back on Earth, too. Were the Lizards right? They thought they had time on their side. They were very patient, far more patient than humans. They routinely thought and planned in terms of thousands of years.

Hadn’t that hurt them more than it helped, though? They’d first examined Earth in the twelfth century. If they’d sent the conquest fleet then, humanity wouldn’t have been able to do a thing about it. People really would be contented citizens of the Empire now. But the Lizards had waited. They’d got all their ducks in a row. They’d made sure nothing could go wrong.

Meanwhile, Earth had had the Industrial Revolution. By the time the Race arrived, people weren’t pushovers any more. And why? Because the Lizards had planned too well, too thoroughly.

He who hesitates is lost. If that wasn’t a proverb the Race should have taken to heart while dealing with humanity, Karen couldn’t think of one that was.

Kassquit said, “In my opinion, Senior Tour Guide, the issue you raise is as yet undetermined.”

“Well, what do you know?” Trir retorted. “You are just another one of these Big Ugly things yourself.” She could lose her temper after all.

Karen had never expected to sympathize with Kassquit, but she did here. Trir might as well have called Kassquit a nigger. In essence, she had. Kassquit said, “Senior Tour Guide, I am a citizen of the Empire. If that does not happen to please you, you are welcome to stick your head even farther up your cloaca than it is already.” She did not bother with an emphatic cough. The words carried plenty of emphasis by themselves.

Had Trir been a human, she would have turned red. As things were, her tailstump quivered with fury. “How dare you speak to me that way?” she snarled.

“I dare because I am right.” Now Kassquit did use an emphatic cough.

“Truth!” Karen said. She used another one. “Judge males and females for what they are, not for what they look like.”

“I thank you,” Kassquit said.

“You are welcome,” Karen answered. They both sounded surprised at finding themselves on the same side.

Atvar had just finished applying fresh body paint when the telephone hissed for attention. He laughed as he went to answer it. Jokes as old as the unification of Home insisted that it always hissed right when you were in the middle of the job. He felt as if he had beaten the odds.

“This is Atvar. I greet you,” he said.

“I greet you, Exalted Fleetlord. I am Protocol Master Herrep,” said the male on the other end of the line. “You recently petitioned for an imperial audience?”

“Yes?” Atvar made the affirmative gesture.

“Your petition has been granted. You are ordered to appear at the imperial court tomorrow at noon so that you may be properly prepared for the ceremony.” Herrep broke the connection. He did not ask if Atvar had any questions or problems. He assumed there would be none.

And he was right. When the Emperor commanded, his subjects-even subjects with rank as high as Atvar‘s-obeyed.

Preffilo, the imperial capital, lay halfway around the planet. That did not matter. An imperial summons took precedence over everything else. Atvar called the wild Big Uglies and canceled the session he had scheduled for the next day. Then he arranged a shuttlecraft flight to Preffilo. When he announced he was traveling to an audience with the Emperor, the usual fee was waived… after the shuttlecraft firm checked with the imperial court. Every so often, someone tried to steal a free flight to Preffilo.

Court officials awaited Atvar at the shuttlecraft port. “Have you enjoyed the privilege of an imperial audience before, Exalted Fleetlord?” one of them asked.

“I should hope I have,” Atvar answered proudly. “It was with his Majesty’s predecessor, more than two hundred years ago now, not long before I took the conquest fleet to Tosev 3.”

“I see.” The courtier’s tone was absolutely neutral. Not the faintest quiver of tailstump or motion of eye turrets showed what he was thinking. And yet, somehow, he managed to convey reproach. Atvar should have returned to Home as Atvar the Conqueror, who had added a new world to the empire. Instead, he might have been called Atvar the Ambiguous, who had added just over half a world to the Empire, and who had left the other half full of independent, dangerous wild Big Uglies.

Atvar remained convinced he’d done the best he could under the circumstances. Conditions on Tosev 3 were nothing like the ones the conquest fleet had been led to expect. Anyone with half a brain should have been able to see that. His recall and the scorn heaped on him since he’d come back only proved a lot of males and females had less than half a brain. So he believed, anyhow-and if this courtier didn’t, too bad.

“Come with us,” the courtier said. “We will refresh you on the rituals as we go.”

“I thank you,” Atvar replied. Every youngster learned the rituals of an imperial audience in school, on the off chance they might prove useful. Unlike the vast majority of males and females, Atvar actually had used what he’d learned. But, even discounting a round trip in cold sleep, that had been a long time ago. He welcomed a chance to review. Embarrassing yourself before the Emperor was as near unforgivable as made no difference.

Most of the buildings in Preffilo were the usual utilitarian boxes. Some had a little more in the way of ornament than others. None was especially out of the ordinary. The imperial palace was different. Ordinary buildings came and went. The palace went on forever. It had stood in the same spot for more than a hundred thousand years. It wasn’t quite the oldest building on Home, but it was the oldest continuously inhabited one.

It looked like a fortress. In the early days, before Home was unified, it had been a fortress. It had bastions and outwalls and guard towers, all in severe gray stone with only tiny, narrow windows. Here on peaceful Home, most of the travelers who came to see the palace thought of it only as ancient, not as military. No one on Home thought of matters military on first seeing any building. Atvar had had to worry about military architecture, both that of the Race and Tosevite, on Tosev 3. He could appreciate what the builders here had done.

And he could appreciate the gardens in which the palace was set. Almost as many males and females came to see them as came to see the palace. With multicolored sand, carefully placed rocks of different sizes, colors, and textures, and an artistic mixture of plants, they were famous on three planets. To most Big Uglies, Atvar thought, they would have been nothing special. The Tosevites had an embarrassment of water on their native world. They appreciated great swaths of greenery much more than the Race did. This spare elegance would not have appealed to them.

But there were exceptions to everything. While fleetlord, he had learned that photographs of the gardens around the imperial palace were wildly popular in the Tosevite empire-and it really was an empire-of Nippon. The Nipponese Big Uglies practiced a somewhat similar gardening art of their own… although Atvar doubted whether the gardeners or courtiers here would have appreciated the comparison.

As soon as he entered the palace, he assumed the posture of respect. He held it till one of the courtiers gave him leave to straighten. Then he went on to the cleansing chamber, where a female known as the imperial laver removed the body paint he’d applied only the day before. He felt as bereft as an unwrapped wild Big Ugly, but only for a moment. Another court figure, the imperial limner, painted on the special pattern worn only by petitioners coming before the Emperor.

“I am not worthy,” Atvar said, as ritual required.

“That is a truth: you are not,” the imperial limner agreed. An emphatic cough showed how unworthy Atvar was. She continued, “You are granted an audience not because of your worth but by grace of the Emperor. Rejoice that you have been privileged to receive that grace.”

“I do.” Atvar used an emphatic cough of his own.

“Advance, then, and enter the throne room,” the imperial limner said.

“I thank you. Like his Majesty, you are more gracious, more generous, than I deserve.” Atvar assumed the posture of respect again. The imperial limner did not return the courtesy. She represented the sovereign, and so outranked any official not connected with the court.

The throne room held banners seen nowhere else on Home. After a hundred thousand years, it held reproductions of the original banners that had once hung between the tall, thin windows. Awe made Atvar suck a deep breath into his lung. He knew what those banners stood for. They were the emblems of the empires the Empire had defeated in unifying the planet and the Race. Everywhere else on Home, they were forgotten. Here, where conquest had begun, the Emperor and those who served him remembered. There were also newer insignia from Rabotev 2 and Halless 1, and some, newer still, from Tosev 3. But other banners Atvar knew well from the Big Uglies’ world were conspicuously absent.

All the throne room was designed to make a male or female advancing to an audience feel completely insignificant. Colonnades led the eye up to the tall, distant, shadowy ceiling. The path up to the throne lay in shadow, too, while the throne itself was gorgeous with gold and brilliantly illuminated. The spotlights glowed also from the gilding that ornamented the Emperor’s chest and belly. The 37th Emperor Risson did not need ornate patterns of body paint to display his rank. He simply glowed.

In ancient days, Atvar had heard, the Emperor had been thought to represent the sun on Home. He didn’t know whether it was true or simply an explanation of why the Emperor wore solid gold body paint. It sounded as if it ought to be true, which was good enough.

Two large males in gray paint as simple as the Emperor’s suddenly stepped into the aisle, blocking Atvar’s progress. He gestured with his left hand. “I too serve his Majesty,” he declared. That sent them away; they slunk back into the shadows from which they had sprung. They represented what had once been a more rigorous test of loyalty.

At last, Atvar dropped into the posture of respect before the throne. He cast his eye turrets down to the ground. The stone floor here was highly polished. How many males and females had petitioned how many Emperors in this very spot? The numbers were large. That was as far as Atvar was willing to go.

“Arise, Fleetlord Atvar,” the 37th Emperor Risson said, from somewhere up above Atvar.

“I thank your Majesty for his kindness and generosity in summoning me into his presence when I am unworthy of the honor.” Atvar stuck to the words of the ritual. How many times had how many Emperors heard them?

“Arise, I say again,” Risson returned. Atvar obeyed. The Emperor went on, “Now-enough of that nonsense for a little while. What are we going to do about these miserable Big Uglies, anyway?”

Atvar stared. The previous Emperor had not said anything like that when the fleetlord saw him before going into cold sleep. “Your Majesty?” Atvar said, unsure whether to believe his hearing diaphragms.

“What are we going to do about the Big Uglies?” Risson repeated. “They are here, on Home. We have never had a problem like this before. If we do not make the right choices, the Empire will have itself a lot of trouble.”

“I have been saying that for a long time,” Atvar said dazedly. “I did not think anyone was listening.”

“I have been,” the Emperor said. “Some of the males and females who serve me are… used to doing things as they have been done since the Empire was unified. For the situation we now have, I do not think this is adequate.”

“But if you speak, your Majesty-” Atvar began.

“I will have a reign of a hundred years or so-a little more, if I am lucky,” Risson said. “The bureaucracy has been here for more than a hundred thousand. It will be here at least as much longer, and knows it. Emperors give orders. We even have them obeyed. It often matters much less than you would think. A great many things go on the same old way when you cannot keep both eye turrets on them-and you cannot, not all the time. Or was your experience as fleetlord on Tosev 3 different?”

“No, your Majesty,” Atvar said. “But I am only a subject, while you are the Emperor. My spirit is nothing special. Yours will help determine if your subjects have a happy afterlife. Do not the males and females who serve you remember this?”

“Some of them may,” the Emperor said. “But a lot of them have worked with me and with my predecessor, and some even with his predecessor. Much more than ordinary males and females, they take their sovereigns for granted.”

Atvar had heard more startling things in this brief audience than in all the time since awakening again on Home. (He’d heard plenty of startling things on Tosev 3, but everything startling seemed to hatch there.) “I would not think anyone could take your Majesty for granted,” he said.

“Well, that is a fine compliment, and I thank you for it, but it does not have much to do with what is truth,” Risson said. “And I tell you, Fleetlord, I want you to do everything you can to make peace with the Big Uglies. If you do not, we will have a disaster the likes of which we have never imagined. Or do you believe I am wrong?”

“I wish I did, your Majesty,” Atvar replied. “With all my liver, I wish I did.”

Kassquit had an odd feeling when she came back to Sitneff after the excursion to the park near the South Pole. Whenever she was alone with members of the Race, she always stressed that she was a citizen of the Empire, and no different from any other citizen of the Empire. She made members of the Race believe it, too, not least because she believed it herself.

But when she found herself in the company of other Tosevites, she also found herself taking their side in arguments with males and females of the Race. Part of that, there, had hatched from Trir’s outrageous rudeness. Kassquit understood as much. The rest, though? She looked like a wild Big Ugly. Her biology was that of a wild Big Ugly. In evolutionary terms, the Race’s body paint was only skin deep. Beneath it, she remained a Tosevite herself.

“This concerns me, superior sir,” she told Ttomalss in his chamber in the hotel where the American Big Uglies also dwelt. “I wonder if my advice to the Race is adequate. I wonder if it is accurate. I have the odd feeling of being torn in two.”

“Your words do not surprise me,” her mentor said. Kassquit was relieved to hear it. He understood her better than any other member of the Race. Sometimes, though, that was not saying much. He went on, “Since your cultural and biological backgrounds are so different, is it much of a surprise that they often conflict? I would think not. What is your view?”

“I believe you speak the truth here,” Kassquit said, relieved to have the discussion persist and not founder on some rock of incomprehension. “Perhaps this accounts for some of my intense curiosity whenever I find myself around wild Big Uglies.”

“Perhaps it does,” Ttomalss agreed. “Well, no harm indulging your curiosity. You are not likely to betray the Race by doing so. Nor are you likely to go back into cold sleep and return to Tosev 3. Or do you think I am mistaken?”

“No, superior sir, I do not. And I thank you for your patience and understanding,” Kassquit said. “I hope you will forgive me for saying that I still find this world strange in many ways. Living on the starship orbiting Tosev 3 prepared me for some of it, but only for some. The males and females here are different from those I knew back there.”

“Those were picked males-and, later, females,” Ttomalss said. “The ones you meet here are not. They are apt to be less intelligent and less sophisticated than the males and females chosen to travel to the Tosevite solar system. Would you judge all Big Uglies on the basis of the ones the not-empire of the United States chose to send to Home?”

“I suppose not,” Kassquit admitted. “Still, that is a far smaller sample than the one the Race sent in the conquest and colonization fleets.”

“Indeed it is,” Ttomalss replied. “The reason being that we can send two large fleets to Tosev 3, while the wild Big Uglies have just managed to send a single starship to Home.”

“Yes, superior sir,” Kassquit said dutifully. But she could not resist adding, “Of course, when the Race first came to Tosev 3, the wild Big Uglies could not fly beyond their own atmosphere, or very far up into it. In what short period has the Race shown comparable growth?”

For some reason, that seemed to upset Ttomalss, who broke off the conversation. Kassquit wondered why-so much for his patience and understanding. Only the next day did she figure out what had gone wrong. He had compared Tosevites to the Race in a way that slighted her biological relatives. And what had she done in response? She had compared her species and the Race-to the advantage of the wild Big Uglies.

Things were as she’d warned him. Altogether without intending to, she’d proved as much. She was more like the Race than wild Big Uglies-and she was more like wild Big Uglies than the Race.

Males and females of the Race stared at her whenever she ventured out in public. Some of them asked her if she was a wild Big Ugly. That was a reasonable question. She always denied it politely. The males and females who kept talking with her after that were often curious how a Tosevite could be a citizen of the Empire. That was reasonable, too.

But then there were the males and females who had no idea what she was. Video had been coming back from Tosev 3 for 160 of Home’s years, but a good many members of the Race did not seem to know what a Big Ugly looked like. She got asked if she was a Hallessi, and even if she was a Rabotev. One of the ones who did that was wearing false hair to pretend to be a Big Ugly himself. Kassquit hadn’t imagined such ignorance was possible.

And males and females who did recognize her for a Tosevite kept sidling up to her and asking her if she could sell them any ginger. They got angry when she said no, too. “But you are from there!” they would say. “You must have some of the herb. You must!” Some of them were trembling in the early stages of ginger withdrawal.

At first, she tried to reason with them. “Why would I have any ginger?” she would ask. “It does nothing for my metabolism. For me, it is a spice, not a drug. And I have never tasted it; it was forbidden on the starship where I lived.”

Reasoning with members of the Race who craved ginger quickly proved impractical. It wasn’t Kassquit’s fault. She was willing, even eager, to go on reasoning. The males and females who were desperate for the herb weren’t.

“I will do anything. Anything!” a female said. Her emphatic cough was the most unnecessary one Kassquit had ever heard. “Just let me have some of the herb!” She would not believe Kassquit had none.

After a meeting with the wild Big Uglies, Kassquit asked them, “Do the males and females of Home cause you difficulties?”

They looked from one to another without answering right away. At last, the dark-skinned male, the one named Frank Coffey, said, “It is only to be expected that they are curious about us. Except for you, they have never seen a real live Big Ugly before.”

“You do not seem upset at the Race’s name for your folk,” Kassquit said.

Coffey shook his head, then remembered to use the negative hand gesture. “I am not,” he said. “We have our own name for the Race, you know, which is no more flattering to them than ‘Big Uglies’ is to us. And besides, I have been called worse things than a Big Ugly in my time.”

“Have you?” Kassquit said. This time, Coffey remembered right away to use the Race’s affirmative gesture. She asked him, “Do you mean as an individual? Why would anyone single you out as an individual? You do not seem much different from any other wild Tosevite I have met.”

“In some ways, I am typical. In other ways, I am not.” The Big Ugly tapped his bare left forearm with the first two fingers of his right hand. “I was not so much singled out as an individual. I was singled out because of this.”

“Because of what? Your arm?” Kassquit was confused, and did not try to hide it.

Frank Coffey laughed in the loud, uproarious Tosevite style. So did the other American Big Uglies. Coffey was so uproarious, he almost fell off the foam-rubber chair on which he was sitting. Shaped chunks of foam made a tolerable substitute for the sort of furniture Big Uglies used. The Race’s stools and chairs were not only too small but also made for fundaments of fundamentally different shape.

“No, not on account of my arm,” Coffey said when at last he stopped gasping and wheezing. “Because of the color of the skin on it.”

He was a darker brown than the other wild Big Uglies on Home, who had a good deal more pale tan and pink in their complexions. Kassquit was darker than they were, too, though not to the same degree as Frank Coffey. She said, “Ah. I have heard about that, yes. But I must say it puzzles me. Why would anyone do such an irrational thing?”

“How much time do you have?” Coffey asked. “I could tell you stories that would make your hair as curly as mine.” The rest of the wild Big Uglies took their leave, one by one. Maybe they had heard his stories before, or maybe they didn’t need to.

Kassquit’s hair was straight. She had never thought about it much one way or the other. The dark brown Big Ugly’s hair, by contrast, grew in tight ringlets on his head. She had noticed that before, but, again, hadn’t attached any importance to it. Now she wondered if she should. “Why would a story make my hair curl?” she asked. Then a possible answer occurred to her: “Did you translate one of your idioms literally into this language?”

Coffey made the affirmative gesture. “I did, and I apologize. Stories that would appall you, I should have said.”

“But why?” Kassquit asked. Then she held up a hand in a gesture both the Race and the Big Uglies used. “Wait. During the fighting, the Race tried to recruit dark-skinned Big Uglies in your not-empire. I know that.”

“Truth,” Coffey said. Kassquit was not expert at reading tone among Big Uglies, but she thought he sounded grim. His next words pleased her, for they showed she hadn’t been wrong: “They were able to do that because Tosevites of that race-that subspecies, you might say-had been so badly treated by the dominant lighter group.”

“But the experiment failed, did it not?” Kassquit said. “Most of the dark Tosevites preferred to stay loyal to their own not-empire.”

“Oh, yes. They decided being Tosevite counted most of all, or the large majority of them did, and they deserted the Race when combat began,” Frank Coffey said. “But that they joined the Race at all says a lot about how desperate they were. And, although we in the United States do not like to remember it, some of them did stay on the Race’s side, and they fought against my not-empire harder than the soldiers from your species did.”

Was he praising or condemning them? Kassquit couldn’t tell. She asked, “Why did they do that?”

Coffey’s expression was-quizzical? That would have been Kassquit’s guess, again from limited experience. He said, “You have never heard the word ‘nigger,’ have you?”

“Nigger?” Kassquit pronounced the unfamiliar word as well as she could. She made the negative gesture. “No, I never have. It must be from your language. What does it mean?”

“It means a dark-skinned Tosevite,” Coffey answered. “It is an insult, a strong insult. Next to it, something like ‘Big Ugly’ seems a compliment by comparison.”

“Why is there a special insulting term for a dark-skinned Tosevite?” Kassquit asked.

“There are special insulting terms for many different kinds of Tosevites,” Frank Coffey said. “There are terms for those with different beliefs about the spirit. And there are terms based on what language we speak, and those based on how we look. The one for dark-skinned Tosevites… One way to subject a group is to convince yourself-and maybe that group, too-that they are not fully intelligent creatures, that they do not deserve to share what you have. That is what ‘nigger’ does.”

“I see.” Kassquit wondered if she did. She pointed to him. “Yet you are here, in spite of those insults.”

“So I am,” the wild Tosevite said. “We have made some progress-not enough, but some. And I am very glad to be here, too.”

“I am also glad you are here,” Kassquit said politely.