Kassquit wanted certainty. She’d learned that from the Race. She couldn’t have it. Every time Tosevites touched her life, certainty exploded. Every time the wild Big Uglies touched the Race, its certainties from millennia past exploded.

She looked down at Julia Yendys, who’d exploded the certainty that she would never breed. She still didn’t know what to think about that. Raising a Tosevite hatchling was an astonishing amount of work. She began to understand why family groupings loomed so large among the wild Big Uglies. Without them, hatchlings-babies — would die. It was as simple as that.

“Wait until the baby begins to smile, ” Frank Coffey said. “It will not be too much longer. That is a day to remember.”

“Maybe. But I cannot return the smile. I never learned how.” Kassquit imagined herself as a hatchling, trying again and again to bond with Ttomalss through facial expressions. But Ttomalss wasn’t biologically programmed to respond, and so her own ability to form those expressions had atrophied. She didn’t want that to happen to Julia Yendys. Her own baby should be a citizen of the Empire, yes, but should also be a complete and perfect Tosevite.

“Do not worry too much,” Coffey said. “I promise I will smile lots and lots for my daughter.” After an emphatic cough, he pulled back his lips and showed his teeth in a big grin. “And there will be plenty of other wild Big Uglies to show her how to make funny faces.” He made a very funny one, crossing his eyes and sticking out his tongue.

It startled Kassquit into a laugh. “That is good,” she said. “I was just thinking the baby should have more of its Tosevite heritage than I do.”

That made the American Big Ugly serious again. “Well, you were raised to be as much like a member of the Race as possible. I would not want that for Julia Yendys, and I am glad you do not, either.”

“What I want for her is the chance to grow up and live out her life in peace and happiness. How likely do you think that is?”

Frank Coffey sighed and shrugged. “Kassquit, I already told you-I have no better way to judge that than you do. I just do not know. All we can do is go on and hope and do all we can to make that happen, even if we know it may not. If we do not try-if the United States and the Race do not try-then we are much too likely to fail.”

“What would you do if there were a war?” Kassquit asked.

“Probably die,” he answered. She gave back an exasperated hiss, one that might have sprung from the throat of either a Tosevite or a member of the Race. He shrugged again. “I do not know what else to say. It would depend on what happened, on where I was, on a thousand other things. I cannot know ahead of time.”

That was reasonable. Kassquit had hoped for a ringing declaration that he would never fight no matter what, but a little thought told her that was too much to expect. He served the United States with as much dedication as she served the Empire, and he was a military male. If his not-empire required him to fight, fight he would.

He said, “You should have the baby immunized against as many of our diseases as you can. She will meet many more wild Tosevites at an earlier age than you did.”

“I have already talked about this with the new doctor,” Kassquit said. “He agrees with you that this would be good. I will follow his advice. He also urges me to get more immunizations, for the reason you mentioned. Faster-than-light travel will mean more Tosevites coming to Home, which will mean more chances for disease to spread.”

“Good. Not good that disease may spread-good that you and the doctor have thought about it,” Coffey said. “He does seem to know what he is doing. Call me old-fashioned-I cannot help it, considering when I was hatched-but a lot of the moderns get under my scales and make me itch.” He had no scales to get under, but used the Race’s phrase all the same.

Kassquit made the affirmative gesture. “This doctor knows much more than Melanie Blanchard did. I am sure of that. But I liked her, while when I see him it is all business.”

“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.