Atvar started to answer, then stopped short. “How do you know about the imperial laver and the imperial limner? Have you been researching imperial audiences on the computer network?”
Sam made the negative gesture. “No. As a matter of fact, I have been reading Gone with the Wind. Have you ever read it?”
Atvar’s mouth dropped open in a startled laugh. “That old kwaffa berry? By the spirits of Emperors past, I had to go through it in a college literature course. I have hardly thought about it from that day to this, either. How did you ever get your fingerclaws on it?”
“I found it in a secondhand bookstore,” Yeager answered. “I do not suppose imperial ceremonial would have changed much from that time to this.” There was one area where humanity and the Race differed widely.
“No, probably not,” Atvar agreed. He took endless millennia of unchanging ceremonial for granted. “Gone with the Wind?” He laughed again. “And how do you like it?”
“Quite a bit, actually,” Sam answered. “What did you think of it?” They spent the next hour happily picking the novel to pieces.
The Race’s cooks were willing to scramble eggs for the Americans, though they didn’t eat eggs themselves. Karen Yeager worked hard not to remind herself that the creatures these eggs came from would have scared the hell out of a chicken. The flavor was about three-quarters of what it should have been. Put enough salt on them and they weren’t bad. Speaking of salt, she also had a couple of slices of aasson on her plate. Aasson was smoked and salt-cured zisuili meat. It came closer to bacon than the eggs did to hen’s eggs, but it was salty as the devil.
Nothing on Home took the place of coffee. Instant came down from the Admiral Peary. The Lizards thought the stuff was nasty, but they-mostly-stayed polite about it. Karen and Jonathan wouldn’t have been polite if they couldn’t have it. They both drank it without cream: Jonathan plain, Karen with sugar. The Race used sugar, though less than people did. Tom and Linda de la Rosa liked their coffee light. That they couldn’t have. Except for the Americans’ lab rats, they were the only mammals on the planet. To the Lizards, the very idea of milk was revolting.
“Nasty,” Tom said, not for the first time. “But I’d be even nastier without my caffeine fix. Might as well be ginger for me.” He sipped from his mug, made a horrible face, and then sipped again.
Trir came into the hotel refectory. “I greet you, Tosevites,” she said cheerfully. “Today we are going to go for a bus ride out into the country. Does that not sound pleasant?” She couldn’t smile and simper the way human tour guides did; her face wasn’t made for it. But she did the best with what she had.
In English, Jonathan murmured, “Has she forgotten how snotty she acted when mating season was just getting started?”
“She probably has,” Karen answered. “I don’t think she had any control over that.”
Her husband made the sort of face Tom de la Rosa had. “I didn’t have much control over the urge to kick her in the teeth,” he muttered.
“What is that you are saying?” Trir asked. She didn’t sound angry or contemptuous, the way she had before when she heard English. She just seemed curious.
The humans in the refectory all looked at one another. Karen knew what everybody else had to be thinking: how do we tell her what a monster she was, and do we tell her anything at all? The best diplomacy might have been just to keep quiet. Try as she would, though, Karen couldn’t stomach that. She said, “We could not help but notice how much friendlier you are now than you were when your mating season began.”
“Oh, that.” Trir fluttered her fingers in what couldn’t have been anything but embarrassment. “Take no notice of it. Mating season is a time when ordinary rules and ordinary behavior go running out the door.” A human would have said they flew out the window. It came down to the same thing. The guide went on, “If I did or said anything to offend, please accept my apologies.” She bent into the posture of respect.
If she’d done or said anything to offend? For a little while there, she hadn’t done or said anything that didn’t offend. But she didn’t seem to remember how nasty she’d been, and she did seem sorry for it.
“Let it go, then,” Karen said. Jonathan and Linda de la Rosa made the affirmative gesture. What else could you do, short of kicking the guide in the teeth as Jonathan had wanted?
“I thank you,” Trir said. “Now, as I was telling you, we are going to go out into the country this morning, out to a zisuili ranch. Zisuili are domestic animals valuable for their meat and hides, and they-”
“We know something about zisuili,” Linda de la Rosa broke in. “The colonization fleet brought them to Tosev 3.”
“Ah, yes, of course-it would have,” Trir agreed brightly. “They are some of our most important meat animals.” She pointed to Karen’s aasson. “As you see.”
“They have also caused some of the most important environmental damage on our planet,” said Tom de la Rosa, who’d made a career out of the environmental effects Home’s imported plants and animals were having on Earth. “They eat everything, and they eat it right down to the ground.”
“They are efficient feeders,” Trir agreed, which meant the same thing but sounded a lot better.
“I want to go see the zisuili,” Jonathan said in English. “I’ve seen Lizards with wigs, by God. Now I want to see them riding around on whatever they use for horses. I want to see them with ten-gallon hats on their heads and with six-shooters in their holsters. I want to hear them hissing, ‘Yippee!’ and playing zisuiliboy music around their campfires.”
That produced a pretty good stunned silence. After half a minute or so, Karen broke it: “I want to see you committed to an asylum for the terminally silly.” Jonathan didn’t come out with quite so many absurd remarks as his father did, but the ones he turned loose were doozies.
“What is a zisuiliboy?” Trir asked. She must have recognized the word-or, here, part of a word-from her language in the midst of the English.
“Believe me, you do not want to know,” Karen told her. Trir plainly believed nothing of the sort. Karen sighed and went on, “It is nothing but a joke-and a foolish joke at that.” She sent Jonathan a severe look. He seemed notably deficient in anything resembling a sense of shame.
About forty-five minutes later, all the Americans rode with Trir toward the zisuili ranch. Kassquit came along, too. She hadn’t seen much more of Home than the Americans had, and she was bound to be at least as curious.
The bus had windows that were easy to see out of but hard to see into. That kept members of the Race from gawking, and possibly from causing accidents. The ride out to the ranch took a little more than an hour. The border between city and country was not abrupt. Buildings gradually got farther and father apart. The countryside looked not too different from the way it did in the rural areas outside of Los Angeles. It was scrubland and chaparral, with bushes giving way here and there to patches of what Home used for trees.
And then Karen almost fell off her seat. She pointed out the window. Sure as hell, there was a Lizard mounted on something that looked like a cross between a zebra and a duckbilled dinosaur. The creature was striped in a pattern of gold and dark brown that probably helped it fade into the background at any distance. To her vast relief, the Lizard on its back sported neither cowboy hat nor Colt revolver, nor even a wig. Even so, when she glanced over to Jonathan she saw him looking almost unbearably smug.
“What is the name of that riding beast?” she asked Trir. If she sounded slightly strangled, well, who could blame her?
“That is an eppori,” the guide answered. “Epporyu still have their uses, even after all these years of mechanical civilization. They require no fuel, and they can go places where wheeled vehicles would have difficulties. And some males and females enjoy riding them, though the attraction has always been beyond me.”
“We have animals like that back on Tosev 3,” Sam Yeager said. “When I was a hatchling, I lived on a farm. Back then, many more animals were in use than powered vehicles. I learned to ride-I had to.”
“Would you care to ride an eppori?” Trir asked.
“Maybe briefly,” he answered. “I was never one who enjoyed riding animals much. Vehicles are much more comfortable.”
“This is also my attitude,” Trir said. Her eye turrets swiveled over the other humans. “Perhaps some of your colleagues-or even you, Kassquit-would be interested in trying this.”
Kassquit promptly made the negative gesture. “I thank you, but no. I am happy enough with mechanical civilization. I do not have any of these atavistic impulses you mentioned.”
“I will try, unless my odor frightens the epporyu,” Tom de la Rosa said. “I have ridden back on Tosev 3, for most of the reasons you mentioned. Riding animals find their own fuel, and they can travel almost anywhere-certainly anywhere the larger animals from Home that I study are likely to go.”
One by one, the rest of the Americans agreed to make the effort. Karen was anything but enthusiastic. She hadn’t been on a horse for at least twenty years before going into cold sleep. Jonathan also looked dubious. The things we’ll do to keep from letting our friends down, Karen thought.
The zisuili were not a problem. They looked like ankylosaurs with turreted eyes. All the Americans had seen them in person before, and knew they paid no particular attention to people. What the epporyu would do when they met humans might be a different story. People weren’t just going to look at them. They were going to try to get on their backs-if the animals would put up with it.
Sam tried to be the first human on an eppori. Everybody had been willing to let him set foot on Home first. And everyone was just as unanimous in telling him he couldn’t ride first now. “You’re the one we can’t afford to lose,” Frank Coffey said in English, and added an emphatic cough. “Let ’em run away with one of us or trample him, but not you.” The other Americans nodded.
“I’m outvoted,” Karen’s father-in-law said.
“You bet you are, Dad,” Jonathan told him.
Tom de la Rosa tried to claim first ride by saying he was the best horseman among them. The others-including Linda-pointedly observed that being able to ride a horse might not have thing one to do with riding an eppori. They settled who would ride first by a method that fascinated Trir-stone, paper, scissors. And when Karen’s stone smashed Frank Coffey’s scissors, she won the prize.