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He went down the stairway. The steps weren’t quite the right size and spacing for his legs, and the handrail was too low, but he got down without a stumble. One of the guards skittered ahead of him. The other followed.
More guards stood outside Atvar’s door. They bent into the posture of respect. “We greet you, superior Tosevite,” they said.
“And I greet you,” Sam answered. “The fleetlord is expecting me.”
As if to prove him right, Atvar opened the door just then. The U.S. ambassador and the Lizard exchanged polite greetings. Atvar said, “Please come in.” Yeager did. His guards, for a wonder, didn’t follow. Even they could see no assassins were likely to lurk in Atvar’s room.
Atvar had a human-style chair in the room. He waved Sam to it. “I thank you,” Sam said. He handed the petition to the fleetlord. “Is everything as it ought to be? If it is not, I will copy it over again.” Or maybe I’ll just jump out a window, depending, he thought.
“Let me have a look at this. As you know, it must be perfect,” Atvar said. Sam made the affirmative gesture. He knew that all too well. Atvar went on, “Your handwriting is not bad. It is not particularly fluid, but it is clear. I have seen plenty of males and females with worse. They are in a hurry, and they scribble. You obviously took pains over this.”
“I should hope I did!” Sam used an emphatic cough. “When I did not take enough pains, I made mistakes and had to start over.”
“The process is not supposed to be easy,” Atvar said. “It is designed to weed out those who seek an audience for only frivolous reasons. Let me see here… I do believe, Ambassador, that everything is as it should be. I cannot see how the protocol masters could reject this petition on any stylistic grounds.”
At first, that so delighted Sam, he thought Atvar had said the petition was sure to be approved. After a moment, though, he realized Atvar hadn’t said any such thing. “What other reasons are there for rejecting it?” he asked. He’d come up with a few of his own-what would the fleetlord find?
“If the Emperor does not care to see you, there is no more to be said,” Atvar answered. “I do not believe this to be the case, but it may be. If certain courtiers do not wish you to see the Emperor, that is also a difficulty. But in that case, there may be ways around it.”
“Such as?” Sam asked. Lizard politics at this intimate level was a closed book to humans. How did members of the Race get what they wanted in the face of opposition?
“If we are able to learn who has set out to addle your egg, perhaps we can appeal to a higher-ranking opponent,” Atvar answered. “Such ploys are not guaranteed to succeed, but they are not hopeless.”
“This is very much the same sort of thing I would do in a Tosevite factional squabble,” Sam said. “In some ways, our two species are not so very different.”
“In some ways, possibly not,” the fleetlord said. “In others… In others, the difference is as large as the distance between our sun and the star Tosev.”
“It could be.” Something occurred to Sam. “I have a question,” he said. Atvar made the affirmative gesture. Sam asked, “Since I do not wear body paint, how will the imperial laver and the imperial limner deal with me?”
Atvar started to answer, then stopped short. “How do you know about the imperial laver and the imperial limner? Have you been researching imperial audiences on the computer network?”
Sam made the negative gesture. “No. As a matter of fact, I have been reading Gone with the Wind. Have you ever read it?”
Atvar’s mouth dropped open in a startled laugh. “That old kwaffa berry? By the spirits of Emperors past, I had to go through it in a college literature course. I have hardly thought about it from that day to this, either. How did you ever get your fingerclaws on it?”
“I found it in a secondhand bookstore,” Yeager answered. “I do not suppose imperial ceremonial would have changed much from that time to this.” There was one area where humanity and the Race differed widely.
“No, probably not,” Atvar agreed. He took endless millennia of unchanging ceremonial for granted. “Gone with the Wind?” He laughed again. “And how do you like it?”
“Quite a bit, actually,” Sam answered. “What did you think of it?” They spent the next hour happily picking the novel to pieces.
The Race’s cooks were willing to scramble eggs for the Americans, though they didn’t eat eggs themselves. Karen Yeager worked hard not to remind herself that the creatures these eggs came from would have scared the hell out of a chicken. The flavor was about three-quarters of what it should have been. Put enough salt on them and they weren’t bad. Speaking of salt, she also had a couple of slices of aasson on her plate. Aasson was smoked and salt-cured zisuili meat. It came closer to bacon than the eggs did to hen’s eggs, but it was salty as the devil.
Nothing on Home took the place of coffee. Instant came down from the Admiral Peary. The Lizards thought the stuff was nasty, but they-mostly-stayed polite about it. Karen and Jonathan wouldn’t have been polite if they couldn’t have it. They both drank it without cream: Jonathan plain, Karen with sugar. The Race used sugar, though less than people did. Tom and Linda de la Rosa liked their coffee light. That they couldn’t have. Except for the Americans’ lab rats, they were the only mammals on the planet. To the Lizards, the very idea of milk was revolting.
“Nasty,” Tom said, not for the first time. “But I’d be even nastier without my caffeine fix. Might as well be ginger for me.” He sipped from his mug, made a horrible face, and then sipped again.
Trir came into the hotel refectory. “I greet you, Tosevites,” she said cheerfully. “Today we are going to go for a bus ride out into the country. Does that not sound pleasant?” She couldn’t smile and simper the way human tour guides did; her face wasn’t made for it. But she did the best with what she had.
In English, Jonathan murmured, “Has she forgotten how snotty she acted when mating season was just getting started?”
“She probably has,” Karen answered. “I don’t think she had any control over that.”
Her husband made the sort of face Tom de la Rosa had. “I didn’t have much control over the urge to kick her in the teeth,” he muttered.
“What is that you are saying?” Trir asked. She didn’t sound angry or contemptuous, the way she had before when she heard English. She just seemed curious.
The humans in the refectory all looked at one another. Karen knew what everybody else had to be thinking: how do we tell her what a monster she was, and do we tell her anything at all? The best diplomacy might have been just to keep quiet. Try as she would, though, Karen couldn’t stomach that. She said, “We could not help but notice how much friendlier you are now than you were when your mating season began.”
“Oh, that.” Trir fluttered her fingers in what couldn’t have been anything but embarrassment. “Take no notice of it. Mating season is a time when ordinary rules and ordinary behavior go running out the door.” A human would have said they flew out the window. It came down to the same thing. The guide went on, “If I did or said anything to offend, please accept my apologies.” She bent into the posture of respect.
If she’d done or said anything to offend? For a little while there, she hadn’t done or said anything that didn’t offend. But she didn’t seem to remember how nasty she’d been, and she did seem sorry for it.
“Let it go, then,” Karen said. Jonathan and Linda de la Rosa made the affirmative gesture. What else could you do, short of kicking the guide in the teeth as Jonathan had wanted?
“I thank you,” Trir said. “Now, as I was telling you, we are going to go out into the country this morning, out to a zisuili ranch. Zisuili are domestic animals valuable for their meat and hides, and they-”
“We know something about zisuili,” Linda de la Rosa broke in. “The colonization fleet brought them to Tosev 3.”
“Ah, yes, of course-it would have,” Trir agreed brightly. “They are some of our most important meat animals.” She
pointed to Karen’s aasson. “As you see.”
“They have also caused some of the most important environmental damage on our planet,” said Tom de la Rosa, who’d made a career out of the environmental effects Home’s imported plants and animals were having on Earth. “They eat everything, and they eat it right down to the ground.”
“They are efficient feeders,” Trir agreed, which meant the same thing but sounded a lot better.
“I want to go see the zisuili,” Jonathan said in English. “I’ve seen Lizards with wigs, by God. Now I want to see them riding around on whatever they use for horses. I want to see them with ten-gallon hats on their heads and with six-shooters in their holsters. I want to hear them hissing, ‘Yippee!’ and playing zisuiliboy music around their campfires.”
That produced a pretty good stunned silence. After half a minute or so, Karen broke it: “I want to see you committed to an asylum for the terminally silly.” Jonathan didn’t come out with quite so many absurd remarks as his father did, but the ones he turned loose were doozies.
“What is a zisuiliboy?” Trir asked. She must have recognized the word-or, here, part of a word-from her language in the midst of the English.
