Part 7 (2/2)

”I am. I cannot deny it, and I thank you,” Straha said. ”I had heard that the colonization fleet was beginning to bring down domestic animals, but I did not know the meat was available yet. Ssefenji!” He let out a soft exclamation redolent of longing. ”I have not tasted ssefenji since before we left Home.”

”Neither had I,” Ristin answered. ”It is as good-well, very nearly as good-as I remembered, too. I have some in the freezer. I will bring it to you today or perhaps tomorrow. May you eat it with enjoyment. And may you eat it with Greek olives-they go with it very well.”

”I shall do that. I have some in the house,” Straha said.

”I thought you would,” Ristin said.

Straha made the affirmative hand gesture, though the other male couldn't see that, not over a primitive, screenless Tosevite telephone. Males-and females-of the Race found a lot of the food Big Uglies ate on the bland side. Ham, salted nuts, and Greek olives were welcome exceptions. Straha said, ”So there are herds of ssefenji roaming Tosev 3 now, eh? And azwaca and zisuili, too, I should not wonder.”

”I believe so, s.h.i.+plord, though I have not been able to get any of their flesh yet,” Ristin answered.

”Perhaps I can manage that,” Straha said. His connections within the American army and the American government ought to be able to arrange it. ”If I can do it, of course I shall make you a return gift.”

”You are gracious, s.h.i.+plord,” Ristin said, for all the world as if Straha were still his superior.

”Ssefenji,” Straha said dreamily. The ginger was wearing off now, but he didn't feel so depressed as he would have otherwise. ”Azwaca. Zisuili. Good eating.” The herb still sped his wits to some degree, for he went on, ”And not only good eating, but also a sign that we are beginning to make this planet more Homelike. High time we had our own beasts here.”

”Truth. And my tongue quivers at the thought of fried azwaca.” Ristin sounded dreamy, too.

In musing tones, Straha said, ”I wonder how our animals and the local ecology will interact with each other. That is always the question in introducing new life-forms to a world. The results of the compet.i.tion should be interesting.”

”Our beasts and plants prevailed on Rabotev 2 and Halless 1,” Ristin said. ”No doubt it will be the same here.”

”You are likely to be right.” Perhaps it was the onset of after-tasting depression that made Straha add, ”But this is Tosev 3. You never can tell.”

Jonathan Yeager's alarm clock woke him at twenty minutes before six. He sat up in bed and rubbed his eyes. He hated getting up so early, but he had an eight o'clock cla.s.s in the language of the Race at UCLA and ch.o.r.es to do before then. With a grunt, he got out of bed, turned on the ceiling light, and put on a pair of tight-fitting blue jeans and an even tighter-fitting flesh-colored T-s.h.i.+rt adorned with a fleetlord's body paint.

He'd showered just before he went to bed, so he ran a hand over his scalp and his chin. His face needed shaving; his scalp didn't. That saved him a little time in the bathroom.

He went out to the kitchen as quietly as he could. His parents-lucky them!-were still asleep. He poured himself a big gla.s.s of milk and cut a slab off the coffee cake in the refrigerator. Inhaling breakfast was a matter of moments. He ate like a shark and never gained any weight. Over the years, the things his father said about that had grown increasingly rude.

That thought made Jonathan laugh. His old man was an old man, all right, even if he did know a h.e.l.l of a lot about the Lizards. Jonathan washed his gla.s.s, his plate, and the silverware he'd used and set everything in the dish drainer by the sink. The hard time his mom would have given him if he'd left the stuff for her made that more trouble than it was worth.

Then he muttered to himself. He was going to have to get another knife dirty. He got a cooked ham out of the refrigerator, cut off a couple of thick slices, and cut them into inch-wide strips. He put those strips on a paper towel, took a pair of leather gloves from a drawer and put them on, and went down the hall to the room in which the baby Lizards lived.

Before he opened the door to that room, he shut the door at the end of the hall. Every so often, the Lizards didn't feel like eating-instead, they would run past him and try to get away. They were much easier to catch in the hall than when they got into places where they could skitter under or behind furniture.

Jonathan sighed. ”Mom and Dad never had to do this this when I was little,” he muttered as he opened the door to the Lizards' room and flipped on the light. Now, closing the door behind him, he spoke aloud: ”Come on, Mickey. Wake up, Donald. Rise and s.h.i.+ne.” when I was little,” he muttered as he opened the door to the Lizards' room and flipped on the light. Now, closing the door behind him, he spoke aloud: ”Come on, Mickey. Wake up, Donald. Rise and s.h.i.+ne.”

Both baby Lizards were holed up in a corner, behind a chair that had been ragged before they hatched and that their sharp little claws had torn up further. They often slept back there; it wasn't quite a hole in the ground or a cave, but it came pretty close.

They came out at the light and the sound of Jonathan's voice. Donald was a bit bigger and a bit more rambunctious than Mickey; he (if he was a he; the Yeagers didn't know for sure) was also a little darker. He and his brother-sister?-both made excited hissing and popping noises when they saw the ham strips Jonathan was carrying.

He squatted down. The Lizards were a good deal bigger than they had been when they hatched, but their heads didn't come anywhere close to his knee. He held out a piece of ham. Donald ran up, grabbed it out of his hand, and started gulping it down.

Mickey got the next one, Donald the one after that. Jonathan talked to them while he fed them. They were pretty much used to him and to his mother and father by now, and a.s.sociated humans with the gravy train. Feeding them, these days, was a lot like feeding a dog or a cat. Jonathan wore the gloves more because the Lizards got excited when they ate than because they were trying to nip him.

After awhile, Donald finished a piece in nothing flat and tried to get the next one even though it was Mickey's turn. ”No!” Jonathan said in English, and wouldn't let him have it. Jonathan wanted to use the language of the Race-the noises the baby Lizards made clearly showed where its sounds came from-but his father would have pitched a fit. The idea here was to make the Lizards as nearly human as possible, not that they'd be speaking any language themselves for quite a while.

Seeing Mickey get the strip of ham he'd wanted, Donald went over and bit his sibling on the tailstump. They started fighting like a couple of puppies or kittens. That was another reason Jonathan wore leather gloves: to break up squabbles without getting hurt in the process.

”No, no!” he said over and over as he separated them. Like puppies or kittens or small children, they didn't hold grudges: they wouldn't start up again after he left the room. Sooner or later, with luck, they'd learn that ”No, no!” meant they were supposed to stop what they were doing. Then he wouldn't need the gloves any more. That wasn't close to happening yet, though.

When the ham was gone, Mickey and Donald kept on looking expectantly at him. He wondered what was going on inside those long, narrow skulls. The hatchlings had no words, so it couldn't be anything too complex. But was he only room service for them, or did they like him, too, the way a puppy liked its master? He couldn't tell, and wished he could.

Before he left, he used a strainer to sift through the cat box in another corner of the Lizards' room. They'd figured that out even faster than a cat would have, and rarely made messes on the floor. Even when they did, the messes weren't too messy: their droppings were firm and dry.

Ch.o.r.es done, he shut the door on the Lizards, went back to his own room, grabbed his books, and hopped in the jalopy he drove to school: a gasoline-burning 1955 Ford, an aqua-and-white two-tone job that seemed almost as tall as he was. It got lousy mileage and drank oil, but it ran... most of the time. As he started it up, the tinny car radio blared out the electrified country music that was all the rage these days.

The Westside Freeway was new, and cut travel time from Gardena to UCLA almost in half. Now that he was a soph.o.m.ore, he'd gained an on-campus parking permit. That saved him a good part of the hike he'd had to make from Westwood every day during his freshman year.

A lot of students had early cla.s.ses. Some of them carried coffee in waxed-cardboard cups. Jonathan had never got that habit, which amused his father to no end. He often got the idea his dad thought he had life pretty soft. But he didn't have to listen to the ”When I was your age...” lecture too often, so he supposed things could have been worse.

A few students wore jackets and slacks. The rest were about evenly divided between guys who kept their hair and wore ordinary s.h.i.+rts and their female counterparts in clothes their mothers might have worn on the one hand (on the one fork of the tongue, (on the one fork of the tongue, Jonathan thought, using the Lizard idiom) and those like him on the other: fellows and coeds who made the Race their fas.h.i.+on, wearing body paint or, with the weather cool, body-paint T s.h.i.+rts. A lot of the fellows in that crowd shaved their heads, but only a few of the girls. Jonathan thought, using the Lizard idiom) and those like him on the other: fellows and coeds who made the Race their fas.h.i.+on, wearing body paint or, with the weather cool, body-paint T s.h.i.+rts. A lot of the fellows in that crowd shaved their heads, but only a few of the girls.

No girls went bare-chested on campus, either-there was a rule against it-though a good many did at the beach or even on the street. Jonathan didn't mind the lack too much; he had plenty to watch anyhow.

He trudged up the broad expanse of Janss Steps to Royce Hall, a big Romanesque red-brick building with a colonnade in front, in which he had his cla.s.s in the language of the Race. He wasn't surprised to see Karen sitting under the colonnade, her pert nose in the textbook. ”Hi,” he said in English, and then switched to the Race's tongue. ”I greet you.”

”And I greet you,” she answered in the same language before she looked up. When she saw the s.h.i.+rt he'd chosen, she smiled and added, ”Exalted Fleetlord.”

”Oh, yes, I am an important male,” he said with an emphatic cough that told just how important he imagined he was. Karen's expression said he wasn't so important as all that. Tacitly admitting as much, he went on, ”Are you ready for today's quiz?”

”I hope so,” she said, which made him chuckle. He spoke the language of the Race pretty fluently-given what his parents did, he had no excuse not to-but she understood the way the grammar worked better than he did. She also studied harder, which she had ever since high school. Closing her book, she got to her feet. ”Shall we go see how it is?”

”Sure,” Jonathan said in English, and tacked on another emphatic cough. A lot of his conversations with his friends mixed his own language and the Lizards'. That kept most of the older generation-though not, worse luck, his own mother and father-from knowing what they were talking about.

He took Karen's hand. She squeezed his, hard. They hadn't just been studying together since high school; they'd been dating since then, too. Giving him a sidelong glance, she asked, ”Have you heard anything from Liu Mei since she went back to China?”

”No,” Jonathan answered, which made Karen squeeze his hand again-in relief, probably. He'd been taken with the daughter of the Communist envoy who'd come to the USA for weapons. They'd been able to talk with each other, too, because Liu Mei knew the language of the Race. But she was gone, and Karen was still around. He did add, ”With all the fighting over there, I hope she's okay.”

Karen considered that, with some reluctance decided it was unexceptionable, and nodded. She went on, ”And how are your little friends?”

”They're fine,” he said. He didn't want to say too much more than that, not in a crowded hallway where anybody might be listening. An officer's son, he understood the need for security, even if he wasn't always perfect enough about it to delight his father. ”They're getting bigger.” He could tell her that safely enough. ”If you want, you can feed them next time you're over.”

”Okay.” Karen giggled. ”That's the funniest way to get a girl to come over to your house I ever heard of. And you know what's funnier? It'll work.”

”Good,” Jonathan said as they went upstairs together. He stopped in front of a door with 227 painted on a rippled-gla.s.s window in blocky, old-fas.h.i.+oned numbers. The oval bra.s.s doork.n.o.b, polished by countless students' palms, was old-fas.h.i.+oned, too; Royce Hall dated from the 1920s.

Before the Lizards came, Jonathan thought. Jonathan thought. A whole different world. A whole different world. He tried to imagine what it would have been like then, with people smugly convinced they were alone in the universe. He couldn't do it, even though his folks talked about those times as if they'd happened day before yesterday. He tried to imagine what it would have been like then, with people smugly convinced they were alone in the universe. He couldn't do it, even though his folks talked about those times as if they'd happened day before yesterday. It must have been boring, It must have been boring, was the first thing that always sprang to mind. No televisors, no computers, no satellite networks to bring the whole world into your living room... From what his father said, they'd barely even had radio. He shook his head. was the first thing that always sprang to mind. No televisors, no computers, no satellite networks to bring the whole world into your living room... From what his father said, they'd barely even had radio. He shook his head. I couldn't have lived like that. I couldn't have lived like that.

The chimes in the Powell Library bell tower, across the square from Royce Hall, announced eight o'clock. As soon as the last note died, the instructor rapped a pointer down on the lectern. ”I greet you, cla.s.s,” he said.

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