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When the bus stopped in front of the hotel, some small flying things were making small, rather sweet-sounding chirps from the shrubbery in front of the building. Jonathan listened with interest. He hadn’t heard many animals with even remotely musical calls on Home. Birdsong was unknown here. Till this moment, he hadn’t realized how much he missed it.
The chirping went on. “What are those creatures making that noise?” he asked Trir.
“Those are called evening sevod,” the guide answered. “They are related to squazeffi and other such fliers. They always call about the time the sun goes down.”
“Evening sevod.” Jonathan repeated the name so he’d remember it. “I thank you. They sound very pleasant.”
“Well, so they do,” Trir said. “Several of our musical composers have used their calls as thematic models.”
“Really?” he said. “Musicians on Tosev 3 sometimes do the same thing with the sounds of our animals.”
“That is interesting,” Trir said. “Forgive me, but I had not thought you Tosevites would know anything of music.”
Jonathan laughed at himself. I’m not the only one who thinks we’re a bunch of barbarians. “We do,” he said. “If you want details, I am sure Senior Researcher Ttomalss can give them to you. I have no idea whether any of our music would please you. We have many different styles.”
“You are more diverse than we are. I have noticed that in my research on Tosev 3,” Trir said.
“Home has been unified for a long time. That means the Race has been homogenized for a long time,” Jonathan said. “Back on Tosev 3, our different cultures are still very different from one another.”
“I know from my research on your species that this is a truth. It strikes me as very strange even so,” Trir said.
“No stranger than tens of thousands of years of sameness seem to a Tosevite,” Jonathan replied. The evening sevod kept piping in the bushes. Finally, one of them flew out. He’d never imagined a robin-sized pterodactyl. If not for the light streaming out of the hotel lobby, he wouldn’t have got more than the faintest fleeting glimpse. The little creature made one more musical squeak and then disappeared.
Trir said, “But unity is natural. Unity is inevitable. Seeing what a species is like before the inevitable occurs is unusual.”
Was she right? Jonathan started to make the negative gesture, but checked himself. Even before the Lizards came, cultures based on ideas and technology from Western Europe had become the strongest ones on Earth. To stay independent, other countries had had to adopt Western European techniques. If they didn’t, they would go under, as Africa and India had done. China had struggled with Western ideas as it now struggled against the Race. Japan had succeeded in holding its own after Commodore Perry made it open up to the wider world, but it had done so by adopting Western methods-and it might have failed, too.
“Technology, I think, is more important than culture,” Jonathan’s father said-the two Yeagers had been thinking along with each other.
“But would you not agree that in large measure technology dictates culture?” Trir asked.
“In large measure, but not completely,” Sam Yeager replied. “Different cultures and different species can use the same technology in different ways. We Big Uglies, by now, have access to almost the same technology as the Race does, but I do not think we are quite the same.”
His grin meant nothing to Trir, but she did catch his ironic tone. “That is a truth,” she said, “but you and we are biologically distinct. This is not the case with various cultures belonging to the same species.”
She had a point. She could be annoying, but she wasn’t stupid. Jonathan said, “You have to understand that it has only been a little more than a thousand of your years since we first went all the way around Tosev 3. It has only been half that time since one culture on our world got ahead of the others technologically to any great degree. And, of course, it has been less than two hundred of your years since the Race came. Maybe we will grow more alike as time goes by. But not enough time has passed yet for that to happen.”
“Only a thousand years since you circumnavigated your world…” Trir let out a soft hiss full of wonder. “I had read this, mind you. In the abstract, I knew it. But to be reminded of it in that way…” She hissed again.
Kassquit said, “Is there any possibility that we could circumnavigate the refectory? I am very hungry.”
“I am not so sure about circumnavigating it,” Frank Coffey said. “We could probably sit down in it.”
“That might do,” Kassquit said.
Trir’s eye turrets went from one of them to the other. It was a shame, Jonathan thought, that Lizards didn’t play tennis. The crowds on Home could have followed the action without moving their heads back and forth. While he woolgathered, the guide said, at least half to herself, “Tosevites are very peculiar.”
Since he’d just been thinking about tennis, of all the useless things, he could hardly quarrel with her. His father didn’t even try. “Truth-we are peculiar,” Sam Yeager said. “And the Race is peculiar. And when we get to know Rabotevs and Hallessi better, I am sure we will find they are peculiar, too.”
Trir probably hadn’t been thinking about the idiosyncracies of the different intelligent species. She’d been thinking Big Uglies were bizarre. But all she said now was, “Supper does seem a good idea.”
The refectory featured krellepem from the Ssurpyk Sea. Finding out what krellepem were took some work. Jonathan finally gathered they were something like crabs or lobsters. He ordered them. So did the rest of the humans, Kassquit included.
Trir wanted nothing to do with them. “When we evolved, we left the seas and came up on land,” she said. “I am not interested in eating anything that did not bother to evolve.”
Jonathan had heard all sorts of excuses for not eating all sorts of things-quite a few of them from his sons when they were little-but never one that Darwin would have approved of. He admired Trir’s creativity.
When the krellepem came, they looked more like trilobites than anything else Jonathan had ever seen. They’d evolved even less than he’d expected. The servers brought special tools for eating them-tools that put him in mind of a hammer and chisel. Each segment of shell had its own chunk of meat inside.
“This is a savage way of feeding oneself,” Kassquit said as the pile of broken bits of krellep shell in front of her grew taller.
“Possibly,” Frank Coffey said. “But the results are worth it.”
“Truth,” Jonathan agreed. The krellepem tasted something like oysters, something like scallops. He discovered they had meat inside their skinny little legs, too, and sucked it out one leg at a time. The others started imitating him.
“How do you do that?” Trir asked, watching them. Jonathan demonstrated. Trir said, “We would have to use tools to get at that meat. Our mouthparts are not flexible enough to do what you are doing.”
She was right, though Jonathan hadn’t thought about it till that moment. Lizards didn’t have lips, not the way humans did. The edges of their mouths were hard. They couldn’t suck meat out of a tubular leg, they couldn’t kiss… They can’t make fart jokes, Jonathan thought, and realized he was even tireder than he’d suspected.
“What is funny?” Karen asked when he snorted. He told her.
“What is a fart joke?” Trir asked; the relevant phrase had been in English.
“Something that proves my mate is seriously deranged,” Karen told her.
“I thank you. I thank you very much.” Jonathan used an emphatic cough.
“You Tosevites can be most confusing,” Trir said.
All the Americans chorused, “We thank you. We thank you very much.” They all used emphatic coughs. Trir was… most confused.
8
Glen Johnson looked down on Home from his orbital path in the Admiral Peary. He shared the control room with Mickey Flynn and Dr. Melanie Blanchard. Flynn eyed him and said, “I don’t believe the Lizards are going to w
ant to let you aboard any more of their spacecraft. I told you bathing before you went would have been a good idea.”
“Funny. Ha, ha. I laugh,” Johnson said. “Hear me laugh?”
He glanced over toward the doctor. She smiled, but she wasn’t laughing. That left him relieved. She said, “They really are anxious about ginger, though, aren’t they?”
“Anxious about it and eager for it, both at the same time,” Johnson answered. “That one scaly bastard who went helmet-to-helmet with me…”
“Good thing you had the recorder going,” she said.
“If somebody wants to talk off the record, that’s usually the time when it’s a good idea to make sure he’s on,” Johnson said. “As soon as he told me to turn off my radio, I figured he had to have ginger on his miserable little mind. And as soon as I knew that, I knew he was liable to try to diddle me if I didn’t have any to give him.”
“Did the captain of the Lizard ship ever apologize for seizing you?” Dr. Blanchard asked.
“Ventris? Oh, hell, yes-pardon my French-finally, in a way, once I browbeat him into it. Then he made it sound like it was our fault his scooter pilot got trapped by the wicked herb. To hear him talk, it was like ginger came after that Lizard with a gun. He didn’t have anything to do with it, of course.”
“Why, heaven forfend,” Mickey Flynn said. “The very idea is ridiculous. That anything could possibly be a Lizard’s fault…?” He shook his head. “Next thing you know, there’ll be Big Uglies traveling between the stars.”
“Don’t hold your breath for that,” Johnson said.
Melanie Blanchard looked from one of them to the other. “I can see how both of you’d be welcome guests on the surface of Home.”
“Certainly,” Flynn said. “The Lizards wouldn’t kill me. They’d let their planet do it for them.” He mimed being squashed flat.
