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“He is a better technician, but a poorer person,” Coffey said.
“Truth! That is what I was trying to say.”
“You do what you can with what you have. I do not know what else there is to do,” Coffey said. “The other choice is not doing what you can with what you have, and that is worse. If you do not make the most of what you have, why live?”
“Truth,” Kassquit said once more.
Have I made the most of what I have? she wondered. Looking back, she didn’t see how she could have done much more. Some things she did not have, and never would. She could rail at Ttomalss for that, but what was the point? Her upbringing was what it was. She couldn’t change it now. She remained bright. Even by Tosevite standards, she remained within hissing distance of sanity. And she’d had-she’d really had-an audience with the Emperor!
She looked down at Julia Yendys once more. Now she also had a chance to make her baby’s life better than hers had been. That was a chance members of the Race didn’t get, not in the same way. She intended to make the most of it.
When the telephone rang, Sam Yeager jumped like a startled cat. He’d been deep in work-deeper than he’d thought, obviously. Well, it wasn’t going anywhere. He walked over to the phone. “Hello?”
“Hi, Dad. What are you up to?”
“Oh, hello, Jonathan. I was reading the galleys for Safe at Home, as a matter of fact. They’ve got a tight deadline, and I want to make sure I get ’em done on time.”
“Good for you,” his son said. “Catch any juicy mistakes?”
“I think the best one was when ‘American helmet’ came out as ‘American Hamlet.’ That would have spread confusion far and wide if it got through.”
Jonathan laughed. “You’re not kidding. Are you too busy to come over for dinner tonight? I hope not-Karen’s got some mighty nice steaks.”
“Twist my arm,” Sam said, and then, “What time?”
“About six,” Jonathan answered.
“See you then.” Sam hung up. He looked at his watch. It was a quarter past four. He worked on the galleys for a little while longer, spotting nothing more entertaining than “form” for “from.” Like the one he’d told Jonathan about, that passed muster on a computerized spelling program. Most of the errors he found were of that sort. The rest came on words and place names from the Lizards’ language: terms that weren’t in spelling programs to being with. With those, typesetters could inflict butchery as they had in years gone by.
He set down the red pen, put on a pair of slacks instead of the ratty jeans he’d been wearing, and went down to his car. On the way to Jonathan and Karen’s place, he stopped in a liquor store for a six-pack of beer. He remembered being disappointed with Budweiser ninety years ago, when it started reousting local beers after the first round of fighting between humans and Lizards ended. Things hadn’t got better up till he went into cold sleep. Bud and Miller and Schlitz and a couple of others had swept all before them. They were available, they were standardized, they were cheap… and they weren’t very interesting.
But while he’d been on ice, beer had had a renaissance. Oh, the national brands were still around. Even their packaging hadn’t changed much. But, to make up for it, swarms of little breweries turned out beer that cost more but made up for it by not only tasting good but by tasting good in a bunch of different ways. Who wanted to drink fizzy water with a little alcohol in it when porter and steam beer and barley wine were out there, too?
Jonathan laughed when Sam handed him the mix-and-match six-pack. “It’ll go with what I went out and bought,” he said.
“Fine. If I get smashed, you can put me on the couch tonight,” Sam said.
“If I get smashed, Karen’ll put me on the couch tonight,” his son said. “You can sleep on the floor.”
“If I’m smashed enough, I won’t care.” Sam sniffed. “Besides, I’ll be full of good food.” He pitched his voice to carry into the kitchen.
“You’re a nice man,” Karen called from that direction.
The steaks were as good as promised, butter-tender and rare enough to moo.
“What we had on Home wasn’t bad,” Sam said after doing some serious damage to the slab of cow in front of him. “It wasn’t bad at all. We didn’t have any trouble living on it. But this tastes right in a way that never could.”
“I’ve heard Lizards say the same thing, but with the opposite twist,” Jonathan said. “They don’t mind what they get here, but to them the good stuff is back on Home.”
“I’m not convinced,” Karen said. “Put us in Japan and we’ll think Japanese food is weird, too. Japanese people feel the same way about what we eat. A lot of it has to do with cooking styles and spices, not with the basic meat and vegetables. A lot more has to do with whether we’re used to eating what’s in front of us. Sometimes different is just different, not better or worse or right or wrong.”
Sam thought about that. After a few seconds, he nodded. “I’ve been used to eating my words for years, so they don’t taste bad at all. You’re right. I’m sure of it.”
No matter what he’d said to Jonathan, he didn’t get drunk. Back when he was a kid, he’d thought tying one on was fun. He wondered why. Part of it, he supposed, was coming to manhood during Prohibition. He was one of the last men alive who remembered it, and wondered if they even bothered teaching about it in U.S. history these days. It would be ancient history to kids growing up now, the way the presidency of John Quincy Adams had been for him.
But he’d gone right on getting smashed after drinking became legal again. A lot of his teammates had been hard drinkers. That wasn’t enough of an excuse for him, though, and he knew it. He’d enjoyed getting loaded. He hadn’t enjoyed it so much the morning after, but that was later. He wondered why he’d enjoyed it. Because it gave him an excuse to get stupid? That didn’t seem reason enough, not looking back on it.
Jonathan and Karen also held it to a couple of beers. He knew they’d done their share of drinking before he went on ice and stopped being able to keep an eye on them. He laughed at h
imself. No doubt they’d missed that a lot-just the way a frog missed a saxophone. They’d done fine without him, which was, of course, the way things were supposed to work.
He drove home with no trouble at all. His head was clear enough to work on the manuscript for a while before he went to bed. When he got up the next morning, he didn’t have a headache. He didn’t have any memories of stupidity or, worse, holes where he needed to find memories.
Aren’t I smug and superior? he thought as he sipped his morning coffee the next day. He was more sober than he had been once upon a time. So what? All over the world, people by the millions needed no excuse at all to drink as much as they could hold, or a little more than that.
He’d just come out of the shower when the phone rang. That made him smile: whoever‘d tried to catch him in there had missed. “Hello?”
“Yes. Is this Sam Yeager that I have the honor to be addressing?”
Alertness tingled through Sam. Though speaking English, that was a Lizard on the other end of the line.
“Yes, this is Sam Yeager. Who’s calling, please?”
Talking to members of the Race, once one of Sam’s greatest pleasures, was fraught with risk these days. They still hoped he might have a message from Home for them. The American government still feared he did. He didn’t, and wouldn’t have delivered it if he had. Nobody-not Lizards, not American officials-wanted to believe him when he said so.
“I am Tsaisanx, the Race’s consul in Los Angeles.”
Sam whistled softly. Tsaisanx should have known better. He’d been consul here for a human lifetime, and was a veteran of the conquest fleet. If he didn’t know better than to call here… maybe it was a mark of desperation. “I greet you, Consul,” Sam said, using the Race’s formula but sticking to English. “You do know, I hope, that anything we say will be monitored? You had better tell me very plainly what you want.”
Tsaisanx let out a hissing sigh. “I would rather talk in greater privacy…”
“I wouldn’t.” Sam used an emphatic cough. “I have nothing to say that others can’t hear. Nothing-do you understand me?”
