Homeward Bound (81 page)
“He is a better technician, but a poorer person,” Coffey said.
“Truth! That is what I was trying to say.”
“You do what you can with what you have. I do not know what else there is to do,” Coffey said. “The other choice is not doing what you can with what you have, and that is worse. If you do not make the most of what you have, why live?”
“Truth,” Kassquit said once more.
Have I made the most of what I have?
she wondered. Looking back, she didn’t see how she could have done much more. Some things she did not have, and never would. She could rail at Ttomalss for that, but what was the point? Her upbringing was what it was. She couldn’t change it now. She remained bright. Even by Tosevite standards, she remained within hissing distance of sanity. And she’d had—she’d really had—an audience with the Emperor!
She looked down at Julia Yendys once more. Now she also had a chance to make her baby’s life better than hers had been. That was a chance members of the Race didn’t get, not in the same way. She intended to make the most of it.
* * *
When the telephone rang, Sam Yeager jumped like a startled cat. He’d been deep in work—deeper than he’d thought, obviously. Well, it wasn’t going anywhere. He walked over to the phone. “Hello?”
“Hi, Dad. What are you up to?”
“Oh, hello, Jonathan. I was reading the galleys for
Safe at Home,
as a matter of fact. They’ve got a tight deadline, and I want to make sure I get ’em done on time.”
“Good for you,” his son said. “Catch any juicy mistakes?”
“I think the best one was when ‘American helmet’ came out as ‘American Hamlet.’ That would have spread confusion far and wide if it got through.”
Jonathan laughed. “You’re not kidding. Are you too busy to come over for dinner tonight? I hope not—Karen’s got some mighty nice steaks.”
“Twist my arm,” Sam said, and then, “What time?”
“About six,” Jonathan answered.
“See you then.” Sam hung up. He looked at his watch. It was a quarter past four. He worked on the galleys for a little while longer, spotting nothing more entertaining than “form” for “from.” Like the one he’d told Jonathan about, that passed muster on a computerized spelling program. Most of the errors he found were of that sort. The rest came on words and place names from the Lizards’ language: terms that weren’t in spelling programs to being with. With those, typesetters could inflict butchery as they had in years gone by.
He set down the red pen, put on a pair of slacks instead of the ratty jeans he’d been wearing, and went down to his car. On the way to Jonathan and Karen’s place, he stopped in a liquor store for a six-pack of beer. He remembered being disappointed with Budweiser ninety years ago, when it started reousting local beers after the first round of fighting between humans and Lizards ended. Things hadn’t got better up till he went into cold sleep. Bud and Miller and Schlitz and a couple of others had swept all before them. They were available, they were standardized, they were cheap . . . and they weren’t very interesting.
But while he’d been on ice, beer had had a renaissance. Oh, the national brands were still around. Even their packaging hadn’t changed much. But, to make up for it, swarms of little breweries turned out beer that cost more but made up for it by not only tasting good but by tasting good in a bunch of different ways. Who wanted to drink fizzy water with a little alcohol in it when porter and steam beer and barley wine were out there, too?
Jonathan laughed when Sam handed him the mix-and-match six-pack. “It’ll go with what I went out and bought,” he said.
“Fine. If I get smashed, you can put me on the couch tonight,” Sam said.
“If
I
get smashed, Karen’ll put me on the couch tonight,” his son said. “You can sleep on the floor.”
“If I’m smashed enough, I won’t care.” Sam sniffed. “Besides, I’ll be full of good food.” He pitched his voice to carry into the kitchen.
“You’re a nice man,” Karen called from that direction.
The steaks were as good as promised, butter-tender and rare enough to moo. “What we had on Home wasn’t bad,” Sam said after doing some serious damage to the slab of cow in front of him. “It wasn’t bad at all. We didn’t have any trouble living on it. But this tastes
right
in a way that never could.”
“I’ve heard Lizards say the same thing, but with the opposite twist,” Jonathan said. “They don’t mind what they get here, but to them the good stuff is back on Home.”
“I’m not convinced,” Karen said. “Put us in Japan and we’ll think Japanese food is weird, too. Japanese people feel the same way about what we eat. A lot of it has to do with cooking styles and spices, not with the basic meat and vegetables. A lot more has to do with whether we’re used to eating what’s in front of us. Sometimes different is just different, not better or worse or right or wrong.”
Sam thought about that. After a few seconds, he nodded. “I’ve been used to eating my words for years, so they don’t taste bad at all. You’re right. I’m sure of it.”
No matter what he’d said to Jonathan, he didn’t get drunk. Back when he was a kid, he’d thought tying one on was fun. He wondered why. Part of it, he supposed, was coming to manhood during Prohibition. He was one of the last men alive who remembered it, and wondered if they even bothered teaching about it in U.S. history these days. It would be ancient history to kids growing up now, the way the presidency of John Quincy Adams had been for him.
But he’d gone right on getting smashed after drinking became legal again. A lot of his teammates had been hard drinkers. That wasn’t enough of an excuse for him, though, and he knew it. He’d enjoyed getting loaded. He hadn’t enjoyed it so much the morning after, but that was later. He wondered why he’d enjoyed it. Because it gave him an excuse to get stupid? That didn’t seem reason enough, not looking back on it.
Jonathan and Karen also held it to a couple of beers. He knew they’d done their share of drinking before he went on ice and stopped being able to keep an eye on them. He laughed at himself. No doubt they’d missed that a lot—just the way a frog missed a saxophone. They’d done fine without him, which was, of course, the way things were supposed to work.
He drove home with no trouble at all. His head was clear enough to work on the manuscript for a while before he went to bed. When he got up the next morning, he didn’t have a headache. He didn’t have any memories of stupidity or, worse, holes where he needed to find memories.
Aren’t I smug and superior?
he thought as he sipped his morning coffee the next day. He was more sober than he had been once upon a time. So what? All over the world, people by the millions needed no excuse at all to drink as much as they could hold, or a little more than that.
He’d just come out of the shower when the phone rang. That made him smile: whoever‘d tried to catch him in there had missed. “Hello?”
“Yes. Is this Sam Yeager that I have the honor to be addressing?”
Alertness tingled through Sam. Though speaking English, that was a Lizard on the other end of the line. “Yes, this is Sam Yeager. Who’s calling, please?” Talking to members of the Race, once one of Sam’s greatest pleasures, was fraught with risk these days. They still hoped he might have a message from Home for them. The American government still feared he did. He didn’t, and wouldn’t have delivered it if he had. Nobody—not Lizards, not American officials—wanted to believe him when he said so.
“I am Tsaisanx, the Race’s consul in Los Angeles.”
Sam whistled softly. Tsaisanx should have known better. He’d been consul here for a human lifetime, and was a veteran of the conquest fleet. If he didn’t know better than to call here . . . maybe it was a mark of desperation. “I greet you, Consul,” Sam said, using the Race’s formula but sticking to English. “You do know, I hope, that anything we say will be monitored? You had better tell me very plainly what you want.”
Tsaisanx let out a hissing sigh. “I would rather talk in greater privacy. . . .”
“I wouldn’t.” Sam used an emphatic cough. “I have nothing to say that others can’t hear. Nothing—do you understand me?”
“I cannot believe that,” Tsaisanx said. “You aided us before. Why not now?”
“I helped you when I thought we were wrong,” Sam said. “I’m not going to help you when I think we’re right. So we know something the Race doesn’t? All I have to say is, good for us. We didn’t do anything we shouldn’t have to learn it. All we did was make experiments and see where they led. If you want to do the same thing, okay, fine. Go right ahead.”
“You are not showing a cooperative attitude,” the Race’s consul complained.
“Tough.” Sam used another emphatic cough. “I’m very sorry, but I don’t feel like cooperating here. Not only that, I damn well can’t. Am I plain enough, or shall I draw you a picture?” He was about to hang up on the Lizard, a bit of rudeness he couldn’t have imagined before coming back to Earth on the
Commodore Perry.
“You are painfully plain.” Tragedy trembled in Tsaisanx’s voice. “What is also plain is that my civilization—indeed, my entire species—trembles on the brink of extinction. And you—you do not feel like cooperating.”
“I’m afraid I can’t be polite about this, so I won’t bother trying,” Sam said. “When the conquest fleet came, you intended to do to us what you did to the Rabotevs and the Hallessi. You were going to turn us into imitations of the Race and rule us forever. If we didn’t like it, too bad. You were ready to kill as many of us as you needed to get the message across. I was there, too. I remember. If you think I’m going to waste a hell of a lot of sympathy on you now, you’d better think again. That’s all I’ve got to tell you.”
“Rabotev 2 and Halless 1 are both better, happier, healthier worlds than they were before they became part of the Empire,” Tsaisanx said. “Tosev 3 also would have been. We would have made sure of it.”
Take up the white man’s burden,
Sam thought. He didn’t doubt that Tsaisanx meant it; the Lizard was nothing if not sincere. All the same, he said, “The United States is a better, happier, healthier place than it was before you got here, and we did it all by ourselves.”
“How much of our technology did you steal?” Acid filled Tsaisanx’s voice.
“A good bit,” Sam admitted. “But we would have done it without that, too. If you’d never come, we’d be better and healthier and happier than we were ninety years ago. We wouldn’t be the same as we are now, but we wouldn’t be the same as we were back then, either. You think progress is something to squash. We think it’s something to build on. And we would have, with you or without you.”
“We really have nothing to say to each other, do we?” Tsaisanx said sadly. “And here all this time, I thought you understood.”
“I do—or I think I do, anyhow,” Sam replied. “I just don’t agree. There’s a difference.”
“Farewell.” Tsaisanx hung up.
“So long,” Sam said, though the Lizard couldn’t hear him. He put the handset back in the cradle. Shaking his head, he returned to the galleys of
Safe at Home.
A minute later, he stood up again. He couldn’t concentrate on the words in front of him. All these years, all these upheavals, and what did it mean? His own people thought he’d betrayed them, and now the Lizards thought he’d betrayed them, too? He wondered if he should have called the book
A Moderate’s Story.
What was a moderate but somebody both sides could shoot at?
But he still thought he’d had it right with Tsaisanx. Even if the Race hadn’t come, the United States would be a better place now than it was in 1942. The rest of the world might be better, too, in ways it had never had a chance to show with the Lizards sitting on half of it.
He shrugged and returned to the galleys. He’d already seen so much happen, more than almost any man alive. He’d gone from horse and buggy to spanning the light-years one way in cold sleep, the other in the wink of an eye.
And what would the next chapter be? He could hardly wait to find out.
BOOKS BY HARRY TURTLEDOVE
The Guns of the South
T
HE
W
ORLDWAR
S
AGA
Worldwar: In the Balance
Worldwar: Tilting the Balance
Worldwar: Upsetting the Balance
Worldwar: Striking the Balance
C
OLONIZATION
Colonization: Second Contact
Colonization: Down to Earth
Colonization: Aftershocks
Homeward Bound
T
HE
V
IDESSOS
C
YCLE
The Misplaced Legion
An Emperor for the Legion
The Legion of Videssos
Swords of the Legion
T
HE
T
ALE OF
K
RISPOS
Krispos Rising
Krispos of Videssos
Krispos the Emperor
T
HE
T
IME OF
T
ROUBLES
S
ERIES
The Stolen Throne
Hammer and Anvil
The Thousand Cities
Videssos Besieged
A World of Difference
Departures
How Few Remain
T
HE
G
REAT
W
AR
The Great War: American Front
The Great War: Walk in Hell
The Great War: Breakthroughs
A
MERICAN
E
MPIRE
American Empire: Blood and Iron
American Empire: The Center Cannot Hold
American Empire: The Victorious Opposition
S
ETTLING
A
CCOUNTS
Return Engagement
Homeward Bound
is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used ficitiously.
A Del Rey
®
Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
Copyright © 2004 by Harry Turtledove
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Del Rey, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Del Rey is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the publisher upon request.
eISBN: 978-0-345-48194-8
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