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“What was that thing?” he asked their guide.
“It is called a fibyen,” the Lizard answered. “It feeds in the mud and gravel at the bottom of ponds and creeks. Those tendrils above its mouth help tell it what its prey is.”
Frank Coffey said, “It looked like something I’d see Sunday morning if I drank too much Old Overcoat Saturday night.”
He spoke in English. The guide asked him to translate. He did, as well as he could. The translation failed to produce enlightenment. After a good deal of back-and-forth, the guide said, “Alcohol does not affect us in this particular way, no matter how much of it we drink.”
“Lucky you,” Coffey said.
Before that could cause more confusion still, Sam said, “I have a question.”
“Go ahead,” the Lizard replied with some relief.
“You have sent many of your creatures from a dry climate from Home to Tosev 3, to make parts of our planet more like yours,” Yeager said. The guide made the affirmative gesture. Sam went on, “Why have you not also sent creatures like the fibyen and the plants here in Rizzaffi? Tosev 3 has many areas where they might do very well.”
“Why? I will tell you why: because you Tosevites are welcome to areas like this.” The guide’s emphatic cough said how welcome humans were to such places. “Some of us must live here in this miserable place, but we do not like it. I do not believe anyone who was not addled from hatching could like it. And that reminds me…” The Lizard’s eye turrets swiveled in all directions, though how far he could see through Rizzaffi’s swirling mist was a good question.
“Yes?” Sam asked when the guide didn’t say anything for some little while.
“Have you Big Uglies got any ginger?” the Lizard demanded. “That wonderful herb helps me forget what a miserable, damp, slimy hole this is. I would give you anything you like for a few tastes, and I am sure I am far from the only one who would.”
“Well, well,” Frank Coffey said. “Isn’t that interesting?” This time, he didn’t translate from English to the Race’s language.
“That’s one word,” Sam said, also in English. This wasn’t the first time humans had got such a request. He wondered how to answer the guide. Really, though, only one way was possible: “I am very sorry, but we are diplomats, not ginger smugglers. We have no ginger. We would not give it out if we did, because it is against your laws.” What else could he say, when he wasn’t sure if this Lizard was an addict or a provocateur?
The guide let out a disappointed hiss. “That is most unfortunate. It will make many males and females very unhappy.”
“A pity,” Sam said, meaning anything but. “Perhaps we should go back to the hotel now.”
“Yes,” the Lizard said. “Perhaps we should.”
With the air conditioning going full blast, the hotel was merely unpleasant. After hot wet weather, hot dry weather seemed a godsend. The sweat that had clung greasily to Sam’s skin evaporated. Then salt crusts formed instead, and he started to itch. For a human, showering in a stall made for Lizards was an exercise in frustration. Apart from the force of the stream, it involved bending low and banging one’s head against the ceiling over and over. Yeager wouldn’t have liked it when he was young. Now that he was far from young and far from limber, it became an ordeal. But he endured it here for the sake of getting clean.
He ate in the hotel refectory. He didn’t think it deserved to be called a restaurant. As usual, the food was salty by Earthly standards. That probably wasn’t good for his blood pressure, but he didn’t know what he could do about it. He fretted about it less today than he would have most of the time. He’d sweated out enough salt to need replenishing.
And he could get pure alcohol and dilute it to palatability with water. Nobody here knew anything about ice cubes. The Race cared nothing for cold drinks. But warm vodka was better than no vodka at all.
His son had a sly look in his eye when he asked, “Well, Dad, aren’t you glad you came along?”
“If Home needed an enema, they’d plug it in right here,” Sam replied, which made Jonathan choke on his drink. The older Yeager went on, “Even so, I am glad I came. When will I ever get the chance to see anything like this again? How many people have ever seen a fibyen?”
“I didn’t even get to see it,” Jonathan said. “But you know what else? I’m not going to lose any sleep about missing it.”
“I lose enough sleep to sleeping mats,” Sam said. “Kassquit may not have any trouble with them, but she’s been sleeping on them all her life. Me?” He shook his head and wiggled and stretched. Something in his back crunched when he did. That felt good, but he knew it wouldn’t last.
Outside, lightning flashed. Now real rain started coming down-coming down in sheets, in fact. Sam knew the Lizards did a good job of soundproofing their hotels. The thunderclap that followed hard on the heels of the lightning still rattled his false teeth.
Karen Yeager said, “This is a part of Home none of the Lizards who came to Earth ever talked much about.”
“I can see why, too,” Jonathan said. “How many people brag about coming from Mobile, Alabama? And this place makes Mobile look like paradise.”
Sam, who’d been through Mobile playing ball, needed to think about that. Mobile was pretty bad. But his son had it right. And if that wasn’t a scary thought, it would do till a really spooky one came along.
“Makes you see why the Race doesn’t care much about ships, too,” Jonathan added. “I wouldn’t want to live here, either.”
“I had the same thought,” Sam said. “But their ports can’t all be like this. Sure, Mobile is a port, but so is Los Angeles.”
“Good point,” Jonathan allowed. He suddenly grinned. “They’ve sent us to the South Pole, and now to this place. Maybe they’re trying to tell us they really don’t want us gallivanting all over the landscape.”
“Maybe they are. Too bad, in that case,” Sam said. “Even Rizzaffi is interesting, in a horrible kind of way.”
“Sure it is,” his son said. “Besides, the more the Race shows us they don’t want us to do something, the likelier we are to want to do it. Sort of reminds me of how I felt about you and Mom when I was sixteen.”
“It would,” Sam said darkly, and they both laughed. They could laugh now. Back then, Sam had often wanted to clout his one and only son over the head with a baseball bat. It had probably been mutual, too. Sure it was, Sam though. But, by God, he was the one who really had it coming. Not me. Of course not me.
6
Kassquit liked Rizzaffi no better than did the wild Big Uglies. She probably liked it less, and found it more appalling. The Tosevites who’d come to Home on the Admiral Peary were at least used to weather, to variations on a theme. They’d lived on the surface of a planet. She hadn’t. The air conditioning aboard a starship had no business changing. If it did, something was badly wrong somewhere.
Even ordinary weather on Home disconcerted her. The change in temperature from day to night seemed wrong. It felt unnatural to her, even though she knew it was anything but. But in Sitneff the change from what she was used to hadn’t been extreme. In Rizzaffi, it was.
She felt as if she were breathing soup. Whenever she left the hotel, cooling moisture clung to her skin instead of evaporating as it did in drier climates. She envied the Race, which did not sweat but panted. Ordinary males and females kept their hides dry-except for contact with the clammy outside air. She couldn’t. And if her sweat didn’t evaporate, she wasn’t cooled, or not to any great degree. She not only breathed soup; she might as well have been cooking in it.
The wild Big Uglies kept going out in the horrible weather again and again. Kassquit soon gave up. They really were wild to get a look at everything they could, and came back to the hotel talking about the strange animals and stranger plants they had seen. Their guide seemed downright smug about what an unusual place Rizzaffi was. Kassquit recognized the difference between unusual and enjoyable. The Americans didn’t seem to.
&n
bsp; When Sam Yeager talked about the fibyen, Kassquit read about the animal and saw a picture of it at the terminal in her room. Having done that, she knew more about it than he did. He’d seen one in the flesh, and she hadn’t, but so what? To her, something on a monitor was as real as something seen in person. How could it be otherwise when she’d learned almost everything she knew about the universe outside her starship from the computer network?
Almost everything. She kept looking at the way Jonathan and Karen Yeager formed a pair bond. She eyed Linda and Tom de la Rosa, too, but not so much and not in the same way. When she looked at Sam Yeager’s hatchling and his mate, she kept thinking, This could have been mine.
That it could have been hers was unlikely. She knew as much. But Jonathan Yeager had been her first sexual partner-her only sexual partner. Ttomalss had offered to bring other wild Big Ugly males up from the surface of Tosev 3, but she had always declined. She could not keep them on the starship permanently, and parting with them after forming an emotional bond hurt too much to contemplate. She’d done it once, with Jonathan, and it had been knives in her spirit. Do it again? Do it again and again? Her hand shaped the negative gesture. Better not to form the bond in the first place. So she thought, anyway.
