“This whole starship I find fascinating,” Atvar said.
“How do you mean? Because it can go faster than light?” Sam asked.
“No-and yes,” the fleetlord replied. “The males and females here have made sure I have nothing to do with that, as is only sensible from their point of view. But our starships are all like your Admiral Peary — they are designed to take passengers in cold sleep. This one has passengers and crew who are all fully awake, and has to have facilities for feeding them and bathing them and keeping them entertained. Oh, by the way, I find your showers too weak and puny to do a proper job of cleaning, and what you call soap does not deserve the name.”
“Well, Fleetlord, when I was in Sitneff, I always wondered whether your showers or your soap would do a better job of flaying the hide off me,” Sam said. “It all depends, I suppose, on whether you have scales.”
“Any proper creature-” But Atvar caught himself. “No, that is not so. You Tosevites have taught us otherwise.” He aimed an accusing fingerclaw at Sam. “You Tosevites have taught us all sorts of things we had not known. Quite a few of them, we would have been just as glad not to learn, too.”
“You cannot always pick and choose about what you would learn and what you would not,” Yeager said.
“That too is a truth,” Atvar agreed. “Just how bitter a truth it is, we are still in the process of discovering.” He skittered down the corridor. His gait was even odder in low gravity than humans’ gliding leaps.
Sam was not given access to the Commodore Perry ’s control room. Neither was anyone else from the Admiral Peary, so he didn’t have to take that personally. He couldn’t look out into space. Instead, he had to make do with what the monitor in his chamber showed him. The image was very fine, but it wasn’t the same. Home had rapidly faded behind the starship, lost in the skirts of its sun. Tau Ceti itself went from a sun to no more than the brightest star in the black sky. But Sam could have seen the same kind of thing from the Admiral Peary as it left the Solar System if he hadn’t been in cold sleep.
When he asked the crew what going faster than light felt like, he got different answers. Most said it didn’t feel like anything. One shrugged her shoulders and said, “I’d been on duty till an hour before. I slept through it.”
A few, though… A few said things like, “It was very strange.” When he tried to press them further, he got nowhere. Whatever the experience was, it wasn’t something they could put into words.
Two of them said the same thing: “Maybe you’ll find out.” One spoke matter-of-factly, the other with a certain somber relish. Sam wondered whether he ought to hope he was one of the majority who went through whatever it was without even noticing.
He also wondered whether Lizards might feel the transition differently from humans. When he mentioned that to Atvar, though, the fleetlord said, “Straha and Nesseref made this journey without harm. Neither told me of noting anything unusual at the transition. Had the crew not informed them of it, they would not have known it had taken place.”
“I see. I thank you,” Sam said. “Well, in that case I do not suppose you have anything to worry about.”
Atvar made the negative gesture. “There I must disagree with you, Ambassador. I have a great many things to worry about. It is only that that does not happen to be one of them.”
“You are right, of course,” Yeager said. “Please forgive me.”
“No forgiveness is necessary,” Atvar replied. “I thank you for your concern.”
“I wonder what the sky will look like when we make the switch,” Sam said.
“This has also occurred to me,” Atvar said. “I would rather see it for myself than on a monitor. There, it could all too easily prove to be nothing but a special effect. But if we suddenly find ourselves in the neighborhood of Tosev 3, then that concern will fall by the wayside.”
“Do you doubt that we will?” Sam asked.
“I cannot doubt that this ship traveled from Tosev 3 to Home in the time described,” Atvar answered. “But this is Tosevite technology, which means it is bound to be inadequately tested. Can I doubt that it will work perfectly twice in a row? Oh, yes, Ambassador. I have no trouble doubting that, none at all.”
Except for the elevated bed instead of a simple sleeping mat, Atvar found nothing to complain about in the accommodations the Big Uglies had given him. They did a better job of taking care of members of the Race than the Race did for Tosevites. Of course, they’d had more practice than the Race had, too.
How long will that be so? Atvar wondered. He could easily see swarms of Big Uglies coming to Home, either simply as tourists or armed with the get-rich-quick schemes they hatched so effortlessly. If the Race didn’t learn how to take care of them, they’d take care of themselves. They probably wouldn’t try to colonize Home, not the way the Race had colonized Tosev 3. But, with their furious energy, they might end up taking big bites out of the Race’s world anyway.
Or this ship might blow up instead of doing what it is supposed to do. Atvar hadn’t been joking when he mentioned the possibility to Sam Yeager. The Big Uglies always took big bites out of things. That was a great part of what made them what they were. Sometimes, though, they bit off more than they could swallow.
Days crawled by, one after another. Then there were only tenths of a day left-or, since this was a Tosevite ship, hours. Why the Big Uglies divided days into twenty-four parts, each of those into sixty, and each of those into sixty instead of sticking to multiples of ten had always perplexed Atvar, but then, a lot of the other things they did perplexed him much more.
He waited in his cabin for the change. He did not want company, not even Sam Yeager‘s. Whatever happened would happen. He would deal with the consequences… if he lived.
He hadn’t been afraid either time he went into cold sleep. He’d been sure he would wake up again. Cold sleep, at least for the Race, had tens of thousands of years of development behind it. Going faster than light… How many times had the Big Uglies tried it? It had worked once. That was all Atvar knew.
English came out of the intercom. Someone was announcing something. Atvar hadn’t learned much English on Tosev 3, and had forgotten most of that. The American Big Uglies from the Admiral Peary spoke the Race’s language so well, he hadn’t had to worry about English with them. But now he was on an American ship. People on the Commodore Perry spoke the Race’s tongue, too, but English was the ship’s routine language.
And then, apparently for him alone, came a sentence in the language of the Race: “Transition with come in one tenth of a daytenth, so please find somewhere comfortable to sit or lie down.”
“It shall be done,” Atvar said aloud. He assumed the Big Uglies monitored his cabin. He noted no one instructed him to strap himself in. That made sense. If something went wrong here, a safety belt around his middle would do him no good.
He waited. A tenth of a daytenth wasn’t a long time, but he’d never known what the Big Uglies would have called fifteen minutes to pass so slowly. He kept wondering whether the time had already gone by, but glances at the watch on his wrist kept telling him the answer was no. The watch wasn’t his. The Big Uglies had given it to him. They wanted to make sure he had nothing that could signal Reffet and Kirel when he got to Tosev 3.
Here-this really was the zero moment. He felt noth… No sooner had the thought started to form in his head than he knew an instant-no more than an instant-of being mentally turned upside down and inside out. He let out a startled hiss, but the moment had passed by the time the sound escaped. It was far and away the most peculiar sensation he’d ever felt. He wondered if it was real, or if he’d just imagined it. Then he wondered if, for something like this, there was any difference.
More English came out of the intercom. Then, again for his benefit, the Big Ugly at the microphone switched to the Race’s language: “Transition was successful. We are now shaping course for Tosev 3.”
The image of the Big Uglies’ home planet appeared in
the monitor, its large moon off to one side. Images in monitors proved nothing. No one knew that better than Atvar. But he also knew nothing he’d experienced before was the least bit like the moment the Tosevites called transition. He believed in his belly that the Commodore Perry had leaped across the light-years.
Someone knocked on the door to his chamber. To him, that was a Tosevite barbarism; he vastly preferred a hisser. But the Big Uglies had built this ship to please themselves, not him. When he opened the door, he found Sam Yeager standing in the corridor. “I greet you,” the white-haired American said. “Did you feel anything?”
“Yes.” Atvar made the affirmative gesture. “Not vertigo. What vertigo would feel if it felt vertigo, maybe. Yourself?”
“Something like that, I think,” Yeager answered. “You put it better than I could have. What vertigo would feel… Yes, that comes as close as anything. The funny thing is, though, I talked to several crewmales and — females as I came over here, and only one of them felt anything at all. I have no idea what that means, or whether it means anything.”
“I prefer to think it means you and I are highly superior to those insensitive louts,” Atvar said, and Sam Yeager laughed loudly. The fleetlord went on, “I do not know whether that is a truth, but I prefer to think it.”
“Fine. I will think the same thing. I do not know whether it is a truth, either, but I like it fine,” Yeager said.
“How soon will the ship go into orbit around Tosev 3?” Atvar asked.
“You are asking the wrong male, I fear,” Sam Yeager said. “I am only a passenger, and not privileged to know such things. One of the crewfolk would surely have a better idea than I do.”
“Perhaps. But I do not care to talk to them,” Atvar said.
“Well, Fleetlord, to tell you the truth, neither do I,” Sam Yeager said. “Of course, I have no doubt they feel the same way about me. They are three or four generations younger than I am, and our customs and ways of thinking have changed from my time to theirs. I do not believe all the changes are for the better, but they would disagree.”
Customs and ways of thinking had changed very little among the Race for millennia. Even something so small as the fad for a Tosevite appearance among the young had taken Atvar by surprise when he came back to Home. He knew Yeager was talking about much more important differences. He’d seen them himself.
One reason Big Uglies changed faster than members of the Race was that they didn’t live as long. That made a hundred of their years seem like a long time to them. Hardly anyone hatched at the beginning of such a span would be alive at the end of it, which was far from true among the Race. New Tosevites could quickly come to prominence, and bring new ideas with them. Atvar let free a mental sigh. Shortening the lifespan was not a solution the Empire would embrace.
“I thank you, Ambassador,” he said aloud. “I shall just have to wait and see for myself.”
Whenever he looked at it in a monitor, Tosev 3 got bigger and closer. After his long absence, he was struck again by how blue and watery the Big Uglies’ world looked. He had come to take land outweighing ocean for granted again; that was how things worked on Home and the other two worlds belonging wholly to the Empire. Not so here.
Of course, everything he was seeing could be just some clever special effect. The Race could have produced this. Atvar had no reason to doubt that the Americans could do the same. The only way he could be sure was to go down to the surface of the planet.
The crewmember he had to talk to about that was Major Nicole Nichols. He did not look forward to talking to her about anything. He wondered if she would refuse just for the fun of it. But she did not. She said, “You go right ahead, Exalted Fleetlord.” As usual, she sounded sarcastic when she used his title. “We want you to be sure you have come to Tosev 3. We do not want you to think we are trying to trick you in any way, shape, form, color, or size. Then we will send you back to Home, and you can let everyone there know that you made a round trip.”
“I thank you.” Atvar was not really feeling grateful-on the contrary. He wished the Big Uglies were trying to fool him. Then they would not have this stunning technology. But they all too plainly did.
Except for the pilot, he went down to Tosev 3 alone in the shuttlecraft. The American Tosevites from the Admiral Peary stayed behind. Going first was an honor he could have done without, especially when he saw that the shuttlecraft pilot was a Big Ugly. He told himself he’d just come light-years with a Big Ugly at the helm of the starship. Getting down from orbit to the planetary surface should be easy. Telling himself such things helped-some.
“I greet you,” the pilot told him. After that, most of what she said on the radio was in incomprehensible English. Every so often, she would use the language of the Race to talk to an orbiting ship or a ground station. The Big Uglies could have faked the responses coming back from those ships and stations-but it wouldn’t have been easy.
As the shuttlecraft came down out of orbit, deceleration pressed the fleetlord into his seat. It was made to conform to the contours of a member of the Race, and did the job… well enough. Everything seemed routine. The only difference he noted was that he would have understood more of the chatter with someone from his own species piloting. The Tosevite seemed highly capable. Tosevites were highly capable. In no small measure, that was what was wrong with them.
He watched the monitor. A large city swelled below him. There was the shuttlecraft port. Rockets fired one more time, killing the shuttlecraft’s velocity. The grounding was as smooth as any a pilot from the Race might have made. “Well, Exalted Fleetlord, here we are in Los Angeles,” the Big Ugly said.
“Yes,” Atvar said in a hollow voice. “Here we are.”
The pilot opened the hatch. Cool, moist outside air poured into the shuttlecraft. As it flowed over the scent receptors on Atvar’s tongue, he smelled odors both alien from billions of years of separate evolution and familiar because he had smelled such things before. Down deep in his liver, he knew he was on Tosev 3.
“Go on out, Exalted Fleetlord,” the pilot said.
“I thank you,” Atvar said, meaning anything but. When he poked his head out of the hatch, his eyes confirmed what logic and his scent receptors had already told him. He was on Tosev 3. The color of the sky, the shapes of the buildings and cars-this was not his world.
Big Uglies in wrappings that covered almost their entire bodies ran toward him from all directions. Some of them had guns in their hands. “Come with us, Exalted Fleetlord,” one of them called.
“Should I surrender first?” Atvar inquired.
“That will not be necessary,” the American Tosevite replied, taking him literally. “We are here for your protection.”
“I did not realize I needed so much protecting,” Atvar remarked as he came down the ladder.
Instead of answering that, the Big Ugly continued, “We are also here to make sure you do not communicate with members of the Race here before you go back to Home.”
“Do you need so many to do the job?” the fleetlord asked as his toeclaws clicked on concrete. “It seems more as if you are putting me in prison.”
“Call it whatever you please.” The Tosevite sounded altogether indifferent.
19
With the Commodore Perry gone from the sky, with Atvar and the Americans from the Admiral Peary gone on the astonishing new starship, Home suddenly seemed a backwater to Ttomalss. Even though Big Uglies from the Commodore Perry remained behind, this was no longer the place where things happened. In ancientest history, the Race had believed that the sun revolved around Home. Males and females had known better for well over a hundred thousand years.
Even though they knew better, the idea had kept a kind of metaphysical truth ever since. Not only the sun seemed to spin around Home. So did the stars Rabotev and Halless, and the worlds that spun around them. And so had the star Tosev and its worlds, most notably Tosev 3.
No more. Now events had literally left the homeworld behind.
The most important things that happened for a while wouldn’t happen on Home. They would happen on Tosev 3. Even now, not many members of the Race realized that. Most males and females went on with their lives, neither knowing nor caring that events might have passed their whole species by. Mating season was coming soon. If they worried about anything, it was getting ready for the spell of orgiastic chaos ahead.
As for Ttomalss, he did what any academic will do when faced with a stretch of time when nothing else urgently needs doing: he wrote reports and analyses of the dealings between the Race and the diplomats from the Admiral Peary. Even as he wrote, he understood that much of what he was recording was already as obsolete as one of the Race’s starships. He wrote anyhow. The record would have historical value, if nothing else.
No matter how dedicated an academic he was, he couldn’t write all the time. When he went down to the refectory for a snack one afternoon, he found Trir there ahead of him. The tour guide was in a foul temper. “Those Big Uglies!” she said.
A couple of Tosevites sat in the refectory, though some distance away. Trir made not the slightest effort to keep her voice down. “What is the trouble with them?” Ttomalss asked. He spoke quietly, hoping to lead by example.
A forlorn hope-Trir didn’t seem to notice the example he set. “What is the trouble?” she echoed at the top of her lung. “They are the most insulting creatures ever hatched!”
“They insulted you?” Ttomalss asked. “I hope you did nothing to cause it.”
“No, not me,” Trir said impatiently. “They have insulted Home.”
“How did they do that? Why did they do that?” Ttomalss asked.
“Why? Because they are barbarous Big Uglies, that is why.” Trir still did nothing to keep her voice down. “How? They had the nerve to complain about the lovely weather Sitneff enjoys, and that all the architecture here looks the same. As if it should not! We build buildings the right way, so they look the way they should.”
Homeward Bound (colonization) Page 66