Cars and trucks glided along the streets. From up high, they didn’t look much different from their Earthly counterparts. They burned hydrogen; their exhaust was water vapor. These days-or at least back in the 1990s-most human-made motor vehicles did the same. Karen wondered if any gasoline-burners were left in 2031. She’d grown up with Los Angeles smog, even if Gardena, her suburb, did get sea breezes. She didn’t miss air pollution a bit.

Plants halfway between trees and bushes lined some of the boulevards. They had several skinny trunks sprouting from a thicker lump of woody stuff that didn’t come very far out of the ground. Their leaves were thin and greenish gray, and put her in mind of nothing so much as the leaves of olive trees.

Something with batlike wings, a long nose, and a tail with a leaf-shaped flap of flesh on the end glided past the window, close enough to give Karen a good look at its turreted, Lizardlike eyes. “My God!” she said. “A pterodactyl just flew by!”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Jonathan said. “They don’t have birds here. You knew that.”

“Well, yes. But knowing it and seeing one are two different things,” Karen said. “If they weren’t, why would we have come here in the first place?” Jonathan had no answer for that.

Ttomalss sat across a park table and bench from Sam Yeager. The psychologist would sooner have done business inside a building. This setting struck him as unfortunately informal. For the third time, he asked, “Would you not be more comfortable indoors?”

For the third time, the Big Ugly’s thick, fleshy fingers shaped the negative gesture. “I am just fine right where I am,” Sam Yeager said. He had an accent-no Big Ugly who used the Race’s language could help having one-but his speech was almost perfectly idiomatic.

“How can you say that?” Ttomalss inquired. “It must be too warm for your comfort, and this furniture is surely too small for your fundament.”

“The weather is not bad,” the Tosevite replied. “It is early morning, so it has not got too hot to be unpleasant for me. And we are in the shade of that kesserem tree-it is a kesserem tree, is it not? I have only seen photos up till now.”

“Yes, it is,” Ttomalss said. “That is well done, to recognize it from photos alone.”

“I thank you.” Sam Yeager made as if to assume the posture of respect, then checked the motion the instant it became recognizable. A male of the Race would have done exactly the same thing. Yeager stretched out his long, long legs and continued, “Anyway, as I was saying, the shade keeps the hot glare of your sun off my head.” He laughed a noisy Tosevite laugh, no doubt on purpose. “How strange for me to say your sun and not the sun. To me, this is not the sun.”

“So it is not. When I first came to your solar system, I had the same thought about the star Tosev,” Ttomalss said. “Before long, though, it faded. A star is a star, and Tosev is not a star much different from the sun.” His mouth dropped open in the laughter of his kind. “From your sun, you would say.”

“I would now. Maybe not in a little while, though.” Sam Yeager shrugged. “And this bench is all right, since I am not trying to get my legs under it.”

“You would still find it more congenial in an office,” Ttomalss said.

But the Big Ugly used the negative gesture again. “That is not a truth, Senior Researcher. I know what the Race’s offices are like. I have seen plenty of them back on Tosev 3. I have never seen one of your parks. I spent lots of years in cold sleep to see new things, and that is what I want to do.”

“You Tosevites are incurably addicted to novelty,” Ttomalss said.

“No doubt you are right,” Sam Yeager said placidly. “But we have fun.”

A stray beffel that was ambling along suddenly stopped in its tracks when the Big Ugly’s unfamiliar odor reached its scent receptors. It stared at him. Every line of its low-slung body said nothing that smelled like that had any business existing. It let out an indignant beep and scurried away, its short legs twinkling over the sandy ground.

“Those creatures were becoming first-class nuisances back on Tosev 3 long before I went into cold sleep,” Sam Yeager said. “They were, and so were a good many other plants and animals of yours.”

Ttomalss shrugged. “This continued after you went into cold sleep, too. But you cannot expect us to settle and not bring bits of our own ecosystem with us. We want to make Tosev 3 a world where we can truly live, not just dwell.”

“When your animals and plants displace the ones that were living there, you cannot expect us to be very happy about it,” the Big Ugly said.

With another shrug, Ttomalss said, “These things happen. Past that, I do not know what to tell you. Had you come to Home, you would have brought your creatures and your food crops with you. Do you doubt it?”

He waited. How would Sam Yeager respond to that? He laughed another noisy Tosevite laugh. “No, I do not doubt it, Senior Researcher. I think it is a truth. We have spread our own beasts when we colonized new land masses-including the one where I was hatched. And there are some that could easily make themselves at home here. But you will understand that we like it less when it is done to us.”

Was that irony in his voice? Or was he simply stating a fact? With a male of the Race, Ttomalss would have had no trouble telling the difference. With the Tosevite, he wasn’t quite sure. He decided to take it as seriously meant. “No doubt,” he said. “But you will understand that any group looks to its own advantage first and to the situation of others only later.”

“I wish I could say we needed the Race to teach us that,” Sam Yeager answered. “I cannot, however, and I will not attempt it. We have quite thoroughly taught ourselves that lesson.”

He was, Ttomalss judged, fundamentally honest. Was that an advantage in diplomacy or the reverse? The psychologist had trouble being sure. Had the Big Uglies’ chief negotiator been the male known as the Doctor, Ttomalss would have known what to expect. That male was notorious for doing and saying anything to advance the cause of his not-empire. Sam Yeager probably would not go to the same extremes-which did not mean he was incompetent, only that his methods were different.

A female out walking a tsiongi suddenly noticed Yeager. Both her eye turrets swiveled toward him, as if she could not believe what she was seeing. “Spirits of Emperors past!” she exclaimed. “It is one of those horrible Big Ugly things!”

“Yes, I am a Big Ugly,” Sam Yeager agreed. “On my planet, we have nicknames for the Race, too. How are you this morning?” His interrogative cough was a small masterpiece of understatement.

“It talks!” the female said, perhaps to Ttomalss, perhaps-more probably-to the tsiongi. “No matter what they said on the news, I did not really believe those things could talk.”

Sam Yeager turned to Ttomalss. The psychologist wanted to sink down into the ground. “Are you certain there is intelligent life on this planet?” the Tosevite asked.

“What does it mean?” the female squawked. “Is it being rude and crude? Come on, you with the fancy body paint! Speak up!”

“This is the ambassador from the not-empire of the United States to the Empire,” Ttomalss told her. “He is, I will note, behaving in a much more civilized fashion than you are.”

“Well!” the female said with a noisy sniff. “Some males think they are high and mighty. If you would rather take the side of a nasty thing from who knows where than a hardworking, tax-paying citizen, I hope you come down with the purple itch. Come along, Swifty.” She twitched the leash and led the tsiongi away.

“I apologize on behalf of my entire species,” Ttomalss said.

To his astonishment, Sam Yeager was laughing again. “Do not let it worry you, Senior Researcher. We have plenty of males and females like that ourselves. It is interesting to learn that you have them, too.”

“I wish we did not,” Ttomalss said. “They contribute nothing.”

The Big Ugly used the negative gesture once more. “You cannot even say that. For all you know, she may be an excellent worker.”

“I doubt it.” Ttomalss was not inclined to feel charitable toward the female, who showed the Race at its worst. “She is bound to be incompetent at everything she does.”

“Do not worry,” Sam Yeager said again. “We were talking about ecosystems. You will know we do not seek to damage yours when we bring rats down from the Admiral Peary. ” The name of the animals, necessarily, was in English.

“I know of rats from your planet,” Ttomalss answered cautiously. “I know they are pests there. Why did you bring them here, if not with the intent of taking a sort of vengeance on us?”

“Because this is your planet and not ours, and because some of the things on it are different from those on Tosev 3,” the Big Ugly said. “We will use the rats to test foods here, so that we do not make ourselves ill by accident.”

“There are few differences between Tosevites’ biochemistry and the Race‘s,” Ttomalss said. “We did not have many problems with food and drink on your world.”

“What about ginger?” Sam Yeager returned. “We do not want to get that kind of surprise, either.”

Ginger had been a surprise, all right, and a singularly nasty one. Ttomalss made the negative gesture to himself. Ginger had been a plurally nasty surprise. It had complicated the lives of the males of the conquest fleet. But it had complicated the lives of both males and females from the colonization fleet, especially those of the females. When they tasted ginger, they not only got the pleasure the males did, they also went into their mating season regardless of whether it was the right time of year. And the pheromones females released sent males into a breeding frenzy of their own.

Big Uglies had evolved to deal with continuous sexuality. The Race hadn’t. Repercussions on Tosev 3 were still sorting themselves out. Some of the males and females there had even gone so far as to seek Big Ugly-style permanent mating alliances. The first ones had been expelled for perversion from the areas of the planet the Race controlled, to live out their days in exile in the not-empire of the United States. There, no one seemed to care what anyone else did so long as it didn’t involve mayhem or murder.

But, from what Ttomalss had gathered since his awakening on Home, the colonists had begun to relent. They’d had to. Too many males and females had sought such alliances. Losing them all to the Big Uglies would have been a disaster, especially since Tosevite technology was already advancing so alarmingly fast.