Homeward Bound

by Harry Turtledove

  “Well, yes, I can see that,” Jonathan said. “I’m glad you seem to be healing all right.”

  “you’re glad!” Karen exclaimed. “What about me? I was joking with the doctor about breaking out in green and purple blotches—and I was hoping I was joking, if you know what I mean.”

  “Our germs don’t seem to bother the Lizards, so it’s only fair the ones on Home should leave us alone,” Jonathan said.

  “That’s what Melanie told me. That’s nice and logical,” his wife replied. “When it’s your arm, though, logic kind of goes out the window.”

  “The crazy Lizard could have raised an even bigger scandal,” Jonathan said.

  “How? By biting your father?” Karen said. “That would have done it, all right. He’s the ambassador, after all, not just an ambassador’s flunky like yours truly.”

  “Well, I’m just an ambassador’s flunky, too,” Jonathan said, a little uneasily. Comparisons with his father made him nervous. He was good enough to get here. His father was good enough to head up the American embassy. Not a lot of difference, but enough. He shook his head. That wasn’t what he wanted to think about right now. He went on, “I had something else in mind. What if the crazy Lizard had bitten Kassquit?”

  “Kassquit?” Karen thought about it, then started to giggle. “Yes, that would have been a hoot, wouldn’t it? Poor Lizard is angry at the Big Uglies because his friends got killed during the fighting, and then he would have hauled off and bitten the only Big Ugly who wishes she were a Lizard and has the citizenship to prove it? That would have been better than man bites dog.”

  The Lizard’s story was pathetic, if you looked at it from his point of view. Here he’d nursed his grief and his grudge all these years—it would have been close to eighty of the Earthly variety since he got the bad news—and what had he got for it? One snap—at a human who hadn’t been more than a baby when the fighting stopped. Oh, yes: he’d got one more thing. He’d got all the trouble the Race could give him. They’d lock him up and eat the key, which was what they did instead of throwing it away.

  Jonathan didn’t worry about going into Sitneff even after his wife’s unfortunate incident. His guards asked him about it once. He said, “Any male of the Race who bites me will probably come down with acute indigestion. And, in my opinion, he will deserve it, too.”

  That startled the guards into laughing. One of them said, “Superior Tosevite, do you taste as bad as that?”

  “Actually, I do not know,” Jonathan answered. “I have never tried to make a meal of myself.” The guards laughed again. They didn’t try to restrict his movements, and keeping them from doing that was what he’d had in mind.

  Like Karen, he prowled bookstores. He read the Race’s language even better than he spoke it. Words on a page just sat there. They could be pinned down and analyzed. In the spoken language, they were there and gone.

  Since word of the conquest fleet’s arrival on Tosev 3 got back to Home, the Lizards had spent a good deal of time and ingenuity writing about humans, their customs, and the planet on which they dwelt. Much of that writing was so bad, it was almost funny. Jonathan didn’t care. He bought lots of those books. No matter how bad they were, they said a lot about what the Lizard in the street thought of Big Uglies.

  The short answer seemed to be, not much. According to the Race’s writers, humans were addicted to killing one another, often for the most flimsy of reasons. Photographs from the Reich and the Soviet Union illustrated the point. They were also sexually depraved. Photographs illustrated that point, too, photographs that wouldn’t have been printable back on Earth. Here, the pictures were likelier to rouse laughter than lust. And humans were the ones who grew ginger.

  Ginger had spawned a literature of its own. Most of that literature seemed intended to convince the Lizards of Home that it was dreadful stuff, a drug no self-respecting member of the Race should ever try. Some of it put Jonathan in mind of Reefer Madness and other propaganda films from before the days he was born—his father would talk about them every now and again. But there were exceptions.

  One Life, One Mate was by the defiant female half of a permanently mated Lizard pair: permanently mated thanks to ginger and what it did to female pheromones. The pair was, for all practical purposes, married, except the idea hadn’t occurred to the Lizards till they got to Tosev 3. The female described all the advantages of the state and how it was superior to the ordinary friendships males and females formed. She was talking about love—but, again, that was something the Lizards hadn’t known about till they bumped into humanity.

  She went on almost endlessly about how the mixture of friendship and sexual pleasure produced a happiness unlike any she’d known at Home (the ginger might have had something to do with that, too, but she didn’t mention it). Rhetorically, she asked why such an obvious good should be reserved for Big Uglies alone. She complained about the Race’s intolerance toward couples that had chosen to create such permanent bonds with ginger. The biographical summary at the back of the book (it would have been the front in one in English) said she and her mate were living in Phoenix, Arizona. Jonathan knew not all permanently mated pairs were expelled from the Race’s territory these days. The author and her partner, though, had done as so many others had before them, and found happiness as immigrants in the USA.

  Jonathan’s guards had a low opinion of One Life, One Mate. “Bad enough to be a pervert,” one of them said. “Worse to brag about it.”

  “Meaning no offense, superior Tosevite,” another added. “This kind of mating behavior is natural for you. We of the Race thought it was peculiar at first, but now we see that is an inescapable part of what you are. But our way is as natural for us as yours is for you. Would any Tosevites want to imitate our practices?”

  Hordes of lust-crazed women not caring who joined with them, panting and eager for the first man who came along? Dryly, Jonathan said, “Some of our males might not mind so very much.”

  “Well, it would be unnatural for them,” the second guard insisted. “And your way is unnatural for us. Next thing you know, this addled female will want each pair to take care of its own eggs and hatchlings, too.” His mouth fell open and his jaw waggled back and forth in derisive laughter.

  “That is how we do things,” Jonathan said.

  “Yes, but your hatchlings are weak and helpless when they are newly out of the egg,” the guard said, proving he’d done some—but not quite all—of his homework about Big Uglies. “Ours need much less care.”

  “Truth,” the first guard said.

  Was it the truth? The Race took it as gospel, but Jonathan wasn’t so sure. His folks—and then he and Karen—had raised Mickey and Donald as much as if they were human beings as possible. The little Lizards had learned to talk and to act in a fairly civilized way much faster than hatchlings seemed to do among the Race. Maybe giving them lots of attention had its advantages.

  And maybe you don’t know what the devil you’re talking about, Jonathan thought. Mickey and Donald were no more normal Lizards than Kassquit was a normal human. With her example before them, the Americans had gone ahead anyway. Jonathan had been proud of that when the project first began. He wasn’t so proud of it any more. His family had done its best, but it couldn’t possibly have produced anything but a couple of warped Lizards.

  He had more sympathy for Ttomalss than he’d ever dreamt he would. That was something he intended never to tell Kassquit.

  “I have a question for you, superior Tosevite,” the second guard said. “Ginger is common and cheap on your world. Suppose all the males and females of the Race there fall into these perverted ways. How will we deal with them? How can we hope to deal with them, when they have such disgusting habits?”

  The question was real and important. It had occurred to humans and to other members of the Race. The answer? As far as Jonathan knew, nobody had one yet. He tried his best: “I do not believe all members of the Race on Tosev 3 will change their habits. More of them use
ginger there than here, yes, but not everyone there does—far from it. And those who keep to their old habits on Tosev 3 have learned to be more patient and respectful toward those who have changed their ways. Perhaps members of the Race here should learn to do the same. Sometimes different is only different, not better or worse.”

  All three of his guards made the negative gesture. The one who had not spoken till now asked, “How do you Tosevites treat the perverts among you? I am sure you have some. Every species we know has some.”

  “Yes, we do,” Jonathan agreed. “How do we treat them? Better than we used to, I will say that. We are more tolerant than we were. Perhaps you will find that the same thing happens to you as time goes by.”

  “Perhaps we will, but I doubt it,” that third guard said. “What is right is right and what is wrong is wrong. How can we possibly put up with what anyone sensible can tell is wrong with a single swing of the eye turret?” His companions made the affirmative gesture.

  “Your difficulty is, the Race’s society has not changed much for a very long time,” Jonathan said. “When anything different does come to your notice, you want to reject it without even thinking about it.”

  “And why should we not? By the spirits of Emperors past, we know what is right and proper,” the guard declared. Again, his comrades plainly agreed with him. Jonathan could have gone on arguing, but he didn’t see the point. He wasn’t going to change their minds. They were sure they already had the answers—had them and liked them. He’d never thought of the Lizards as Victorian, but he did now.

  The Race didn’t arrest Walter Stone after he returned their scooter to them. Glen Johnson assumed that meant whatever ginger had been aboard was removed before they got it back. Stone said, “What would you do if I told you they didn’t even search the scooter?”

  “What would I do?” Johnson echoed. “Well, the first thing I’d do is, I’d call you a liar.”

  Stone looked at him. “Are you calling me a liar?” His voice held a distinct whiff of fists behind the barn, if not of dueling pistols at dawn.

  Johnson didn’t care. “That depends,” he answered. “Are you telling me the Lizards didn’t search the scooter? If you are, you’re damn straight I’m calling you a liar. They aren’t stupid. They know where ginger comes from, and they know damn well the Easter Bunny doesn’t bring it.”

  “You’re the one who brought it the last time,” Stone observed.

  “Yeah, and you can thank our beloved commandant for that, too,” Johnson said. “I’ve already thanked him in person, I have, I have. He played me for a sucker once, and he wanted to do it again. Do you think the Lizards would have given me thirty years, or would they have just chucked me out the air lock?”

  “They didn’t find any ginger on the scooter,” Stone said, tacitly admitting they had looked after all.

  “They didn’t find it when you took it over,” Johnson said. “Suppose there hadn’t been that delay before you flew it. Suppose I’d taken it when Healey told me to. What would they have found then?”

  “I expect the same nothing they found when I got to their ship.” Stone sounded unperturbed, but then he usually did. He’d been a test pilot before he started flying in space. It wasn’t that nothing fazed him, only that he wouldn’t admit it if something did.

  Being a Marine, Johnson had a dose of the same symptoms himself. That inhuman calm was a little more than he could take right now, though. “My ass,” he said. “And it would have been my ass if I’d taken the scooter over to the Horned Akiss. You’ve got a lot of damn nerve pretending anything different, too.”

  “If you already know all the answers, why do you bother asking the questions?” Stone pushed off and glided out of the control room.

  Resisting the impulse to propel the senior pilot with a good, swift kick, Johnson stayed where he was. Home spun through the sky above, or possibly below, him. He went around the world every hour and a half, more or less. What would things have been like for the Lizards in the days when they were exploring Home? Seas here didn’t all connect; there was no world-girdling ocean, the way there was on Earth. The first Lizard to circumnavigate his globe had done it on foot. How long had it taken him? What dangers had he faced?

  The Race could probably answer all those questions as fast as he could ask them. It didn’t matter that woolly mammoths and cave bears had seemed at least as likely as people to inherit the Earth when the first Lizard went all the way around Home. The data would still be there. Johnson was as sure of that as he was of his own name. The Race had more packrat genes in it than humanity did.

  But Johnson didn’t call the Horned Akiss or one of the Race’s other orbiting spacecraft to try to find out. He didn’t want chapter and verse. He wanted his own imagination. What would that Lizard have thought when he got halfway around? The animals and plants would have been strange. So would the Lizards he was meeting. They would have spoken different languages and had odd customs.

  None of that was left here any more, not even a trace. Home was a much more homogenized place than Earth. Lizards everywhere spoke the same language. Even local accents had just about disappeared. From everything Johnson could tell, all Lizard cities except maybe the capital—which was also a shrine, and so a special case—looked pretty much alike. You could drop a female from one into another on the far side of Home and she’d have no trouble getting along.

  Is that where we’re going? Johnson wondered. Even nowadays, someone from Los Angeles wouldn’t have much trouble coping in, say, Dallas or Atlanta. But Boston and San Francisco and New York City and New Orleans were still very much their own places, and Paris and Jerusalem and Shanghai were whole separate worlds.

  Thinking of separate worlds made Johnson shake his head. You could take that imaginary female of the Race and drop her into a town on Rabotev 2 or Halless 1, and she still wouldn’t miss a beat. Oh, she’d know she wasn’t on Home any more; there’d be Rabotevs or Hallessi on the streets. But she’d still fit in. They’d all speak the same language. They’d all reverence the spirits of Emperors past. She wouldn’t feel herself a stranger, the way a woman from Los Angeles would in Bombay.

  And the Lizards didn’t seem to think they’d lost anything. To them, the advantages of uniformity outweighed the drawbacks. He shrugged. Maybe they were right. They’d certainly made their society work. People had been banging one another over the head long before the Race arrived, with no signs of a letup any time soon. If the Race had stayed away, they might have blown themselves to hell and gone by now.

  If the Lizards had come to Earth now, in the twenty-first century, humans probably would have beaten the snot out of them. If they’d come any earlier than they did, they would have wiped the floor with people. Only in a narrow range of a few years would any sort of compromise solution have been possible. And yet that was what had happened. It was pretty strange, when you got right down to it.

  Fiction has to be plausible. Reality just has to happen. Glen Johnson couldn’t remember who’d said that, but it held a lot of truth.

  Most of Home was spread out before him. As usual, there was less cloud cover here than on Earth. Deserts and mountains and meadows and seas were all plainly visible, as if displayed on a map. Johnson wondered what effect Home’s geography had had on the Race’s cartography. Back on Earth, people had developed map projections to help them navigate across uncharted seas. Hardly any seas here were wide enough to be uncharted.

  He shrugged. That was one more thing the Lizards could probably tell him about in great detail. But he didn’t want to know in great detail. Sometimes, like a cigar, idle curiosity was only idle curiosity.

  Counting cold sleep, he hadn’t smoked a cigar in close to seventy years. Every now and then, the longing for tobacco still came back. He knew the stuff was poisonous. Everybody knew that these days. People still smoked even so.

  He laughed, not that it was funny. “Might as well be ginger,” he muttered, “except you can’t have such a good time with it.”<
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  All things considered, the Indians had a lot to answer for. The Europeans had come to the New World and given them measles and smallpox, and it didn’t look as if America had sent syphilis back across the Atlantic in return. But tobacco was the Indians’ revenge. It had probably killed more people than European diseases in the Americas.

  The insidious thing about tobacco was that it killed slowly. Back in the days before doctors knew what they were doing, you were likely to die of something else before it got you. That meant people got the idea it was harmless, and the smoking habit—the smoking addiction— spread like a weed.

  But with diseases like typhoid and smallpox and TB knocked back on their heels, more and more people lived long enough for lung cancer and emphysema and smoking-caused heart attacks to do them in. And kicking the tobacco habit was no easier than it had ever been. Once the stuff got its hooks in you, hooked you were. Some people said quitting heroin was easier than quitting tobacco.

  Johnson hadn’t had any choice. He was healthier than he would have been if he’d kept on lighting up. He knew that. He missed cigars and cigarettes even so. He’d never smoked a pipe. He managed to miss those, too.

  Then something else occurred to him. Humanity and the Race were both liable to be lucky. While European diseases had devastated the natives of the Americas, Lizards and people hadn’t made each other sick. They’d shot one another, blown one another up, and blasted one another with nuclear weapons. But germ warfare didn’t seem to work out. Thank God for small favors, he thought.

  Mickey Flynn came up the access tube and into the control room. “A penny for your thoughts,” he said. “I know I’m overspending, but such is life.”

  “Thank you so much. I’m always glad to be around people who respect my abilities,” Johnson said.

  “As soon as I find them, you may rest assured I’ll respect them,” Flynn replied. “Now—are you going to earn your stipend, or not?”

  “I hate to risk bankrupting you, but I’ll try,” Johnson said. With Flynn, you had to fight dryer with dryer. Johnson expanded on his musings about tobacco and disease. When he finished, he asked, “How did I do?”