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“Yes, superior sir. I understand it very well,” Kassquit said.
She did her best to keep her voice impassive, but her best wasn’t good enough. Ttomalss, after all, had known her since she was a hatchling. He asked, “Do you not only understand but agree to it?”
“Yes, superior sir,” she said again. She knew she sounded sulky, but she couldn’t help it.
“This is important, Kassquit.” Ttomalss used a soft emphatic cough.
“I said I understood and agreed,” Kassquit answered. “If you do not believe me, remove me from the diplomatic team.”
Challenged, Ttomalss retreated. “I do not wish to do that. Nor does Fleetlord Atvar. Your insights will be invaluable-provided you do not let emotional involvement color them.”
“I would have thought my insights would be valuable precisely because I am capable of emotional as well as intellectual involvement with Big Uglies,” Kassquit said.
Ttomalss waved that away, which could only mean he had no good answer for it. Fleetlord Atvar was saying, “We will convey you Tosevites to a residence that has been set aside for you. We have made efforts to ensure that it is as comfortable as possible for your species.”
“I thank you,” Sam Yeager replied. “Will our rooms have air coolers? It must be around forty hundredths here, and we prefer a temperature closer to twenty-five.”
“I am not familiar with all the details,” Atvar said. “Believe me, though-I know Tosev 3 is a cooler world than Home.”
“Yes, Fleetlord, I am sure you do,” the white-haired American Big Ugly said. “But does the same also hold true for the males and females here who have never visited our world?”
Kassquit was sure that was a good question. The Race had been traveling between the stars for thousands upon thousands of years. In some ways, though, it was more parochial than Big Uglies were. They’d had to deal with differences much more than it had. She sighed. She was a difference, and the Race had trouble dealing with her.
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 tha
t.”
“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.
