Down to Earth (13 page)

“I believe so, Shiplord, 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, Shiplord,” 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 competition 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 class in the language of the Race at UCLA and chores 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-shirt 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 glass 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 hell of a lot about the Lizards. Jonathan washed his glass, 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
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 shine.”

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 associated 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.

Chores 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 sophomore, 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 classes. 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 shirts and their female counterparts in clothes their mothers might have worn on the one hand
(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 fashion, wearing body paint or, with the weather cool, body-paint T shirts. 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 class 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 shirt 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-glass window in blocky, old-fashioned numbers. The oval brass doorknob, polished by countless students’ palms, was old-fashioned, too; Royce Hall dated from the 1920s.

Before the Lizards came,
Jonathan thought.
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.
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.
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, class,” he said.

“I greet you, superior sir,” Jonathan chorused along with everyone else.

By his body paint, the instructor, a male named Kechexx, had once served in the artillery. Now, like a lot of captured Lizards who’d chosen not to rejoin their own kind, he made his living by teaching humans about the Race. His eye turrets swiveled this way and that, taking in the whole class. “It was to be a quiz today. Did you think I would forget?” His mouth fell open in a laugh. “Did you perhaps hope I would forget? I have not forgotten. Take out a leaf of paper.”

“It shall be done,” Jonathan said with his classmates. He hoped he wouldn’t forget too much.

 
4

The train rattled east over the dry South African plain. Rance Auerbach and Penny Summers sat side by side, staring out the window like a couple of tourists. They
were
a couple of tourists; this was the first time they’d been out of Cape Town since the Lizards sent them into exile there.

“Looks like New Mexico, or maybe Arizona,” Rance said. “Same kind of high country, same kinds of scrubby plants. I went through there a couple of times before the fighting started.” He shifted in his seat, trying to find the least uncomfortable position for his bad leg and shoulder.

“New Mexico? Arizona?” Penny looked at him as if he’d gone out of his mind. “I never heard of antelopes out there, by God, bouncing along like they’ve got springs in their legs, or those big white plumy birds standing in the fields—”

“Egrets,” Auerbach supplied.

“Those are the ones,” Penny agreed. “And we saw a
lion
half an hour ago. You ever hear of a goddamn lion in Arizona?”

“Sure,” he said, just to watch her eyes get big. “In a zoo.” He wheezed laughter. Penny looked as if she wanted to hit him with something. He went on, “The country looks that way. I didn’t say anything about the animals.”

He might as well not have spoken. “Even the cows look funny,” Penny said; having grown up in western Kansas, she spoke of cows with authority. “Their horns are too big, and they look like those what-do-you-call-’ems—Brahmas, that’s what I want to say.”

“They look like longhorns to me,” Auerbach said. That wasn’t quite right, but it was as close as he could come; he knew horses better than cattle. With a chuckle, he added, “They used to have longhorns in New Mexico. Maybe they still do, for all I know.”

“Hot damn,” Penny said, unimpressed. She held out a peremptory hand. “Give me a cigarette.”

“Here.” He took the pack out of his shirt pocket and handed it to her. After she lit one, he found himself wanting one, too. He stuck one in his mouth and leaned toward her so she could give him a light. He sucked in smoke, coughed a couple of times—which hurt—and said, “Just like in the movies.”

“How come all the little stuff is like it is in the movies and all the big stuff really stinks?” Penny asked. “That’s what I want to know.”

“Damn good question,” Rance said. “Now all we need is a damn good answer for it.” He stared out the window at what looked like a big hawk on stilts walking across the landscape. The train swept past before he got as good a glimpse of it as he would have liked.

He and Penny weren’t the only ones smoking in the railway car; far from it. Smoke from cigarettes and cigars and a couple of pipes turned the air bluer than Penny’s language. Everybody smoked: whites, blacks, East Indians, everybody. A couple of rows ahead, a black kid who couldn’t have been more than eight was puffing on a hand-rolled cigarette about twice the size of the store-bought one Rance was smoking.

His sigh turned into another cough. Everybody rode together, too. It hadn’t been like that back in the United States. Despite everything he’d already seen in South Africa, he hadn’t expected it to be like that here, either. But the only ones who got special privileges on trains in this part of the world were the Lizards, and they didn’t ride trains very often.

The car might have been the Tower of Babel. African languages dominated—some with weird clicking noises that seemed more as if they belonged in the Lizards’ speech than in anything human, others without. But Auerbach also heard the clipped sounds of the British-style English some whites spoke here, the harsher gutturals of Afrikaans, and the purring noises the little brown men and women from India used.

Every so often, the train would stop at a tiny, sunbaked town not much different from the tiny, sunbaked towns of the American Southwest. And then, at last, the conductor shouted, “Beaufort West! All out for Beaufort West!” He repeated himself in several different languages.

In spite of all the repetition, Rance and Penny were the only ones who got off at Beaufort West. It wasn’t a tiny town; it had advanced to the more exalted status of small town, and lay on the northern edge of the Great Karoo. Auerbach shrugged. He didn’t know exactly what a karoo was, but the country still put him in mind of west Texas or New Mexico or Arizona.

“Drier than Kansas,” Penny said, shading her eyes with her hand. “Hotter, too—even if it’s not as hot as it was on the train. Looks like the middle of nowhere. No two ways about that.”

“Well, that’s what we came for, isn’t it?” Auerbach answered. “We can rent a car or get somebody to drive us around and look at lions or whatever the hell else lives around here.” He wondered if he’d see one of those tall, funny hawks close up.

“Okay.” Penny shrugged and picked up their suitcases; she carried things better than Rance did. “Now all we have to do is find the Donkin House.”

It was only a block away: logically, on Donkin Street, which looked to be Beaufort West’s main drag, such as that was. It was hardly out of the motel class, which didn’t surprise Auerbach. He registered himself and Penny as Mr. and Mrs.; South Africans were even more persnickety about that than Americans.

Beef stew at a little café across the street from the Donkin House wasn’t anything like what Rance’s mother had made, but wasn’t bad. A bottle of Lion Lager improved his outlook on the world. “We’ll take it easy tonight,” he said, “and then tomorrow morning we’ll go out and see what there is to see.”

“Miles and miles of miles and miles,” Penny predicted.

“Miles and miles of miles and miles with lions and antelopes and maybe zebras, too.” Auerbach poked her in the ribs. “Hey, you’re not in Kansas any more.”

“I know.” Penny grimaced. “I’m not wearing ruby slippers, either, in case you didn’t notice.”

As things turned out, nobody in Beaufort West had a car to rent. The locals, even the ones who spoke English, looked at Rance as if he were mad for suggesting such a thing. The only taxi in town was an elderly Volkswagen whose engine coughed worse and louder than Auerbach. The driver was a middle-aged black man named Joseph Moroka.

“You speak English funny,” he remarked as he drove Rance and Penny out of town onto the karoo.

Auerbach thought the cabby was the one with the funny accent, but Penny said, “We’re from the United States.”

“Oh.” Up there in the front seat, Moroka nodded. “Yes, that is what it is. You talk like films I have seen at the cinema.” He got friendlier after realizing they weren’t native South African whites. That no doubt said something about the way things had been here before the Lizards came.

He found his passengers lions. They were sleeping in the shade of a tree. He found plenty of gemsbok and kudu—he almost ran over a gemsbok that bounded across the road. He found a fox with ears much too big for its head. And Auerbach discovered that his hawk on stilts was called a secretary bird; it had a couple of plumes sticking up from its head that looked like pens put behind a man’s ear.

“It is a good bird,” Moroka said seriously. “It eats snakes.”

Here and there, cattle roamed the countryside, now and then pausing to graze. “Need a lot of land to support a herd here,” Auerbach said. That was true in the American Southwest, too. Joseph Moroka nodded again.

“Shall we head back toward town?” Penny said.

Rance gave her a dirty look. “If you just want to sit around in the room, we could have done that back in Cape Town,” he said.

“Well, we can go out again tomorrow, if there’s anything different to see than what we just looked at,” she answered. Had they been by themselves, she likely would have told him where to head in. But, like most people, she was less eager to quarrel where outsiders could listen.

And compromise didn’t look like the worst idea in the world to Rance, either. “All right—why not? We’re going to be here a week. No point to doing everything all at once, I guess.” He tapped the driver on the shoulder. “You can take us back to the hotel, Joe.”

For the first time, the black man got huffy. “You please to call me Mr. Moroka. Most white men here, they never bother learning blacks have names until the Lizards come. Now they have to learn, and learn right.” He spoke with quiet pride.

It had been like that in the American South, too.
Boy!
would do the job, or
Uncle!
for an old Negro. Things were changing there; things had been forcibly changed here. Auerbach rolled with the punch. “Okay, Mr. Moroka.” His great-grandfather, a Confederate cavalryman, wouldn’t have approved, but great-granddad had been dead a long time.

Moroka looked back and grinned. “Good. I thank you.” If Auerbach showed manners, he’d show them, too. Rance supposed he could live with that. The cabby turned the VW around—there wasn’t any other traffic on this stretch of narrow, poorly paved road—and started jouncing back toward Beaufort West.

He topped a low rise and had just begun the long downgrade on the other side when Rance and Penny both cried out at the same time: “Wait! Hold up! Stop the damn car!” Auerbach added the last word that needed to be said, “What the
hell
are those things?”

“Dinosaurs,” Penny said in astonishment, and then, “But dinosaurs are supposed to all be dead. Extinct.” She nodded in satisfaction at finding the right word.

“They
are
dinosaurs,” Rance said, his eyes bugging out of his head. “A whole herd of dinosaurs. What the hell else can they be?”

They were bigger than cows, though not a whole lot. Their scaly hides were a sandy yellow-brown, lighter than those of the Lizards. They went on all fours, and had big, broad heads with wide, beaky mouths. As Rance took a longer look at them, though, he noticed that their eyes were mounted in big, upstanding, chameleonlike turrets. That gave him his first clue about what they had to be.

Joseph Moroka breaking into peals of laughter gave him his second. “The Lizards call them zisuili,” he said, pronouncing the alien name with care. “They use them for meat and blood and hide, like we use cattle. These things give no milk, but I hear they lay eggs like hens. They are new here.” He laughed again. “The lions have not yet decided if they are good to eat.”

“They don’t graze like cattle.” Again, Penny spoke with expert assurance. “They graze more like sheep or goats. Look at that, Rance—they don’t hardly leave anything behind ’em. They crop everything right on down to the ground.”

“You’re right,” Auerbach said. He could see from which direction the herd of zisuili was coming by the bare, trampled dirt behind them. “Wonder how the antelopes are going to like that—and the real cows, too.”

Moroka wasn’t worrying about it. He was still laughing. “But the Lizards, they do not use their cows to buy wives, oh no. They have no wives to buy. I should be like a Lizard, eh?” He found that funny as hell.

Auerbach hadn’t thought about the Lizards’ having their own domestic animals back on their home planet. He supposed it made sense that they would. They didn’t have trouble with much Earthly food, so  . . . He tapped Joseph Moroka one more time. “Anybody tried eating these things yet?”

“We are not supposed to,” the cabby replied. Auerbach coughed impatiently. That wasn’t an answer, and he knew it. After a moment, Moroka went on, “I hear—I only hear, now; I do not know—I hear they taste like chicken.”

Atvar studied a map of the subregion of the main continental mass called China. “We make progress,” he said in some satisfaction.

“Truth, Exalted Fleetlord,” replied Kirel, the shiplord of the
127th Emperor Hetto,
the bannership of the conquest fleet. “We have taken Harbin back from the rebellious Tosevites, and this other city, this Peking, cannot hold out against us much longer.”

“I should hope not, at any rate,” Atvar said. “The Chinese have no landcruisers and no aircraft to speak of. Without them, they can still be most troublesome, but they cannot hope to defeat us in the long run.”

“Truth,” Kirel said again. He was solid and conservative and sensible; Atvar trusted him as far as he trusted any male on Tosev 3. Back during the fighting, Kirel had had his chances to overthrow the fleetlord, especially during Straha’s uprising after the Tosevites detonated their first explosive-metal bomb. He hadn’t used them. If that didn’t establish his reliability, nothing would.