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She almost gasped when the Emperor’s gray-painted guards suddenly appeared out of the shadows and blocked her path. Kassquit gestured with her left hand, declaring, “I too serve the Emperor.” The guards silently withdrew. She advanced.
In the spotlight, the Emperor and his throne blazed with gold. Kassquit averted her eyes from the radiance as she assumed the special posture of respect before her sovereign. From above her, the 37th Emperor Risson said, “Arise, Researcher Kassquit.”
Her name in the Emperor’s mouth! She held the posture, saying, “I thank your Majesty for his kindness and generosity in summoning me into his presence when I am unworthy of the honor.” Ritual steadied her, as she’d hoped it would.
“Arise, I say again,” the Emperor replied, and Kassquit did. The Emperor’s eye turrets swung up and down as he examined her. He said, “I am greatly pleased to welcome my first Tosevite citizen to Home. I have heard that you are very able, which gladdens my liver.”
“I thank you, your Majesty,” Kassquit said dazedly. No one had told her Risson would say anything like that! When he made the gesture of dismissal, she might have invented antigravity, for she did not think her feet touched the floor even once as she withdrew.
Along with the rest of the Americans, Sam Yeager watched Kassquit’s audience on television. “She goes through all the rituals of submission you talked them out of,” Tom de la Rosa said to him.
“For her, they’re all right,” Sam answered. “The Emperor’s her sovereign. But he’s not mine, and I wasn’t going to pretend he is.”
“Looks like she’s got all the moves down pat,” Frank Coffey remarked.
Sam nodded. “I’m not surprised. Jonathan and I met her years before we went into cold sleep. She’s not quite human, poor thing, but she’s plenty smart.” He dropped into the Lizards’ language for a one-word question for his son: “Truth?”
“Truth,” Jonathan agreed. He didn’t add an emphatic cough, as Sam Yeager had thought he might. But then, Karen was sitting right there next to him, and wouldn’t have appreciated any such display of enthusiasm. As far as Karen was concerned, Kassquit was entirely too human. But Sam had been talking about the way she thought, not the way she was made.
Linda de la Rosa said, “The Emperor paid her a nice compliment there.”
“That’s the point of the audience,” Sam said. “He wants to show everybody-the Lizards here on Home, and eventually Rabotevs and Hallessi and humans, too-that they’re really just one big, happy family. The Race isn’t as good at propaganda as we are, but they’ve got the right idea for that.”
“What did you think of Risson, Dad?” Jonathan asked.
“We all right?” Sam asked Major Coffey. Only after Coffey’s nod showed electronics were foiling the Race’s bugs did he go on, “He impressed me more than I figured he would. Most of what he said was stuff he had to say, but the way he said it made me sit up and take notice. He’s got brains, I think. He’s not just sitting up there because he’s descended from the last Lizard who had the job.”
“The succession is about the only place where family ties really matter to the Race, isn’t it?” Karen said.
“Looks that way to me,” Sam agreed. “The Emperor has his own-harem, I guess you’d call it-of females, and one of the eggs one of those females lays hatches out the next Emperor. And how they go about deciding which egg it is, they know and God knows, but I don’t.”
He laughed. Back before he went into cold sleep, he’d never worried about how the Lizards dealt with the imperial succession. It hadn’t seemed like anything that could matter to him. Which only went to show, you never could tell. He laughed again. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t already known that. His whole career since the day he met his first Lizard-a slightly wounded prisoner somewhere south of Chicago-had been a case of you never can tell.
The door hissed for attention. Sam didn’t know about the rest of the Americans, but he missed a good, old-fashioned doorbell. His knees ached as he got to his feet. He wondered if the Lizards were going to complain about the bug suppressor. If they did, he intended to send them away with a flea in their hearing diaphragm. Bugging ambassadors’ residences was impolite, even if it happened all the time.
But the Lizard who stood in the hallway wore the body paint of an assistant protocol master. Sam recognized it because it was similar to Herrep’s but a little less ornate. “Yes?” he said, as neutrally as he could. “What can I do for you?”
“You are the ambassador? Sam Yeager?” Lizards had as much trouble telling people apart as most people did with members of the Race. If Sam hadn’t been the only human on the planet with white hair, the assistant protocol master wouldn’t have had a chance.
I ought to dye it, he thought irreverently. But heaven only knew what the Race used for dyes. He made the affirmative gesture. “Yes, I am the ambassador.”
“Good. You will come with me immediately.”
“What? Why?” Yeager was primed to tell the assistant protocol master that he still had a thing or two-dozen-to learn about diplomacy. You didn’t order an ambassador around like a grocery boy.
But he never got the chance, for the female said, “Because you are summoned to a conference by the Emperor.”
“Oh,” Sam said. A sovereign could order an ambassador around like a grocery boy. He gave the only reply he could under the circumstances: “It shall be done.”
“What are they up to, Dad?” Jonathan asked in English.
“Beats me. This one isn’t in the rules, or not in the part they showed me, anyhow,” Sam answered in the same language. “If I’m not back in two days, call the cops.” He was joking-and then again, he wasn’t. His own government had kidnapped him. It wasn’t completely inconceivable that the Race might do the same. If the Race did, though, he was damned if he knew what the humans here could do about it-this side of starting a war, anyhow.
The assistant protocol master hissed. For a bad moment, Sam feared she understood English. Some Lizards here did-even that Rabotev shuttlecraft pilot had. But the female said only, “Please be prompt.”
She led Yeager out of the hotel and into a car with darkened windows. No one looking in could see the car held a human. No reporters waited at the curb. None waited outside the imperial palace, either. Sam was impressed again. Whatever this was, it wasn’t a publicity stunt.
“This will be a private audience?” he asked the assistant protocol master.
“Semiprivate,” the Lizard replied. “And it will be a conference, not an audience. Ceremony will be at a minimum.”
“All right. I am sure it is a great honor to be called like this.” Sam didn’t say whether it was an honor he wanted. That was part of diplomacy, too.
“You are the first ambassador so summo
ned in more than a hundred thousand years,” the assistant protocol master said. The Race hadn’t had any independent ambassadors come before it in all that time. Yeager thought about pointing that out, but forbore. Diplomacy again.
He almost laughed when he found the conference room nearly identical to those in the hotel back in Sitneff. All across the USA, such rooms looked about the same. Evidently, that also held true on Home. The walls were a green-brown not far from the color of a Lizard’s hide. The table in the middle was too low to be quite comfortable for humans.
There were a couple of chairs more or less made for people in the conference room. Yeager sat down in one of them. A few minutes later, Kassquit came in and took the other. “I greet you, Ambassador,” she said politely.
“And I greet you,” Sam replied. How many conferences back on Earth had featured a naked woman? Not many-he was sure of that. Jumping out of a cake afterwards, maybe, but not at the conference itself.
When the door opened again, the Emperor came in. His gilding marked him off from his subjects. Kassquit sprang out of her chair and assumed the special posture of respect. Sam followed suit more slowly. He did everything more slowly these days.
“Rise, both of you,” the 37th Emperor Risson said. “The reason I called you here was to see whether we could progress toward settling the differences between the Race and the American Tosevites.”
He didn’t think small. In a sovereign, that was, or could be, an admirable quality. Sam returned to the chair that wasn’t quite right for his shape. “I hope we can, your Majesty,” he said. “That would be wonderful.”
The 37th Emperor Risson turned one eye turret toward him, the other toward Kassquit. “Which of us is outnumbered, Ambassador?” he asked.
“Both of us,” Yeager replied. “Two Big Uglies, one male of the Race. Two citizens of the Empire, one American.”
