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“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.”
