Homeward Bound (39 page)

“I would rather think of myself as the first Tosevite citizen of the Empire granted an audience with his Majesty,” Kassquit answered.

“How did you become a citizen of the Empire?” another reporter asked, while the camera crews came closer and closer.

“I was only a hatchling at the time. You would do better to ask Senior Researcher Ttomalss, who arranged it,” Kassquit said. “And now, if you will excuse me, I must proceed. I cannot be late for the audience.”

They could not have cared less whether she was late. All they wanted was a story from her. Her being late and being disgraced would make as good a story as her audience. It might make a better one, since another Big Ugly had just come before the Emperor. Sam Yeager was a wild Big Ugly, of course, not a citizen, but would the male or female in the street care? One Tosevite looked just like another, as far as the Race could tell.

She ignored the further shouted questions from the reporters, and walked into the entryway by which she’d been told to go in. An involuntary sigh of relief escaped her when the closing door shut off their queries.

“You did well there,” said a male waiting inside.

After reading his body paint, Kassquit bent into the posture of respect. “I thank you, Protocol Master.”

“You are welcome. You earned the praise,” Herrep replied. “Reporters will eat your life if you give them half a chance—even a quarter of a chance. So . . . are you ready to proceed with your audience?”

“I hope so, superior sir,” Kassquit said. “I shall do my best not to embarrass you or myself or Fleetlord Atvar, who lent me so much help.”

“I thank you,” Atvar said. “But I believe you would have done well without me, too.”

Herrep made the affirmative gesture. “I have confidence in you,” he said. “I have heard excellent reports of your preparation, and the American ambassador’s audience left nothing to be desired. Your species may differ from ours in many ways, but you seem competent. Not knowing your kind, I was hesitant before. Now, though, I see my qualms were as empty as a hatched egg.”

He did not seem like a male who said such things lightly. “I thank you, Protocol Master,” Kassquit said again.

Herrep’s only reply was, “Let the ceremony begin.”

Unlike Sam Yeager, Kassquit not only had to come before the imperial laver and limner but counted doing so a privilege. She gave them the ritual thanks. The soap the laver used to remove her everyday body paint was harsh on her soft skin. So was the brush with which the old female rubbed off the last traces. Kassquit would have endured far worse than that to come before her sovereign.

The imperial limner was even older than the laver. She poked with a fingerclaw one of the glands intended to produce nutritive fluid for a Tosevite hatchling. “How am I supposed to get the pattern right when you have these bumps here?” she complained.

That wasn’t ritual. It was just ordinary grumbling. Kassquit wondered if she dared answer it. After brief hesitation, she decided she did. “Please do the best you can. I cannot help my shape, any more than you can help yours.”

“I do not have this trouble with Rabotevs or Hallessi.” The limner heaved a sigh. “Oh, well. Might as well get used to it. I suppose more and more of you Big Ugly things will come see his Majesty.” She might have been old, but she was an artist with the brush. Despite Kassquit’s shortcomings in shape, the pattern for an imperial supplicant rapidly covered her torso.

“I thank you, gracious female,” Kassquit said when the limner finished. That
was
ritual. Getting back to it felt good. She went on, “I am not worthy.”

“That is a truth: you are not,” the limner agreed, and added an emphatic cough. “You are granted an audience not because of your worth but by grace of the Emperor. Rejoice that you have been privileged to receive that grace.”

“I do.” Kassquit used her own emphatic cough.

“Advance, then, and enter the throne room.”

“I thank you. Like his Majesty, you are more gracious, more generous, than I deserve.” Kassquit bent into the posture of respect. The limner did not.

When Kassquit and Herrep paused in a jog in the corridor before she went out into the audience chamber proper, the protocol master said, “Fear not. Your talk with the limner will be edited before it is broadcast. She has done so many of these ceremonies, they have lost their grandeur for her.”

“Really? I had not noticed,” Kassquit said. Herrep started slightly, then saw the joke and gave her a polite laugh. Kassquit asked, “May I proceed, superior sir?” Herrep made the affirmative gesture, and she stepped out into that vast, shadowed, echoing hall.

For a moment, awe almost paralyzed her. This was where the Empire became
the
Empire upon the unification of Home. This was where the Rabotevs and Hallessi acknowledged the Emperor’s sovereignty and made the Empire more than worldwide. And now, in a smaller way, she too was becoming part of imperial history. Of itself, her back straightened. Pride filled her as she walked toward the throne.

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 summoned 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.”

“No Emperor has ever been outnumbered by Tosevites before,” Risson said. Even though Sam had used the Race’s slang for humans, the Emperor was too polite to imitate him. Risson went on, “And yet, Tosevites have occupied the Race’s thoughts, and the thoughts of the Emperors, for a good many years now.”

“Well, your Majesty, we have been paying a fair amount of attention to the Race ourselves lately,” Sam said in a dry voice.

He wondered whether Risson would catch the dryness. When the Emperor’s mouth dropped open in a laugh, Sam knew he had. Matching dry for dry, Risson said, “Yes, I can see how that might possibly be so.” The Lizard leaned forward. “And now, can you tell me what you American Tosevites require from the Race, since it has drawn your notice?”