Jonathan Yeager was glad his father had talked the Race into letting him and the rest of the American delegation come along to Preffilo for the imperial audience, and not only because a dust storm filled the air in Sitneff with a brown, gritty haze. The humans had been to a lot of places on Home, but not to the imperial capital. Except for the trip to the park near the South Pole, Jonathan had been less impressed than he’d expected. If you’d seen one Lizard city, you’d damn near seen them all. They varied among themselves much less than American towns did.

Figuring out why wasn’t hard. Cities in the USA were only a few centuries old, and showed wildly different influences of geography and culture. Cities here on Home differed one from another in geography. In culture? Not at all. They’d all been part of the same culture since long before modern man took over from the Neanderthals. They’d all been improved and reworked time and again, and they all felt pretty much the same.

Preffilo wasn’t like that, anyhow. Jonathan had expected a bustling imperial capital, something on the order of London in Victoria’s day or Moscow when he went into cold sleep. But Preffilo wasn’t like that, either. Home had its bureaucrats, its males and females who ran things, and they came to the imperial capital to hear their sovereign’s wishes. They didn’t make a swarming mess out of the city, though. And the reason they didn’t was simple: the Emperor didn’t want them to.

In a way, Preffilo was like Kyoto in the days when the Emperor of Japan was a figurehead and the shogun ran things. It preserved the way things had been a long time before (here, a long, long, long time before), back when what was now only symbolic had been real.

Stretching Earthly comparisons, though, went only so far. The Emperor here was no figurehead. He’d never been a figurehead, not-so far as Jonathan knew-throughout the whole long history of the Race. Most Emperors tempered their authority with common sense. It was a strong custom that they should. The Race respected custom more than any humans, even the Japanese, did. But there were occasional exceptions scattered through the Lizards’ history, some glorious, others-rather more-horrible. If an Emperor wanted to stir things up, he could.

Along with feeling like the beating heart of a power greater than any Earth had ever known, Preffilo also felt old. Even to the Lizards, for whom everything within the scope of written human history seemed no more antique than month before last, their capital felt old. Some Englishman had earned immortality of a sort by calling vanished Petra a rose-red city half as old as time. (It was immortality only of a sort, for nobody bothered to remember the rest of the poem these days, or even the Englishman’s name.)

There were similar poems about Preffilo in the language of the Race. The differences were twofold. For one thing, Preffilo wasn’t just half as old as time. It had been a going concern for thousands of years before Home was unified. In those days, mammoths and cave bears must have seemed about as likely to inherit the Earth as skulking human beings. And, for another, Preffilo wasn’t a vanished city. It was still a going concern, and looked forward to the next hundred thousand years with only minimal changes.

Geography, again, played a role in that. The Race’s capital happened not to lie in earthquake country. Only how well a building was built said how long it would stay up. The Lizards commonly built very well. Along with the palace, a fair number of structures in Preffilo were supposed to be older than the unification of Home, going back to what the Race called ancientest history. Jonathan was hardly in any position to disagree with what the guide told him.

The humans’ guide here was a male named Jussop. Jonathan liked him better than Trir. He didn’t seem to take questions as personal affronts, the way she sometimes did. Of course, not many folk came to see Sitneff; the tour guide business there was underdeveloped. Things weren’t like that in the capital. Lizards, Rabotevs, and Hallessi all visited here. Humans? They might be out of the ordinary, but Jussop would accommodate them.

Once they were settled in their hotel, he took them to the mausoleum where urns holding the ashes of eons’ worth of past Emperors were on display. Jonathan wasn’t sorry to escape the hotel. The Race had tried to keep its guests comfortable, but it hadn’t done the best job in the world. The rooms back in Sitneff were a lot more inviting. Considering how much they left to be desired, that wasn’t good news.

Even the little bus that took them from the hotel to the mausoleum had seats that fit human backsides worse than those on the bus in Sitneff. Jonathan grumbled, but in English. His father might have been diplomacy personified. Ignoring the miserable seats, Sam Yeager asked Jussop, “How did you arrange for us to have a private viewing of the mausoleum? I hope we do not inconvenience too many males and females who want to commune with the spirits of Emperors past.”

“Well, you must understand I did not personally make these arrangements, Ambassador,” the guide replied. Sam Yeager’s title seemed natural in his mouth, though except in historical fiction it had fallen out of the Race’s language not long after the unification of Home. Jussop went on, “His Majesty’s government does wish to extend you every courtesy. You must also understand it is not, perhaps, strictly a private viewing.”

“What does that mean?” Karen asked sharply, before Jonathan could. “It was supposed to be.”

Jussop made a vaguely conciliatory gesture. “You will not be swarmed with these others who seek to commune with spirits of Emperors past. The other superior Tosevite is right about that, never fear.” He left it there, in spite of other questions from the rest of the Americans.

The bus rounded a corner and silently stopped. The questions stopped at the same time. “That’s amazing,” Jonathan whispered. The rest of the humans stared as avidly as he did. If you had set the Parthenon in the middle of an enormous Japanese garden, you might have created a similar effect. The mausoleum didn’t really look like the Parthenon, but it had that same exquisite simplicity: nothing in excess, and everything that was there perfect without being ostentatious. The landscaping, with open ground, stones of interesting color and shape, and a few plants strategically placed and intriguingly trimmed, came a good deal closer to its Earthly counterpart.

“Lovely,” Sam Yeager said to Jussop. “I have seen pictures, but pictures do not do it justice. For some things, only being there will do.”

“That is a truth, Ambassador,” the guide replied. “It is an important truth, too, and not enough folk realize it. We walk from here. As we go along the path, the view will change repeatedly. Some even say it improves. But the walk to the mausoleum is part of the experience. You are all capable of it?… Good.”

It was somewhere between a quarter mile and half a mile. The path-made very plain on the ground by the pressure of who could say how many generations of feet-wound and curved toward the entrance. Every so often, Jussop would silently raise a hand and wave to signal that they had come to a famous view. The perspective did change. Did it improve? Jonathan wasn’t sure. How did you go about measuring one magnificence against another?

And then, when they’d drawn close to the mausoleum, the Race proved it could make mistakes to match any mere humanity ever managed. A hiss from behind made Jonathan look back over his shoulder to see what was going on. A horde of reporters and cameramales and — females hurried after them on the path like a swarm of locusts. Some of the Lizards with cameras wore wigs, which seemed not just ridiculous but-here-a desecration. “Is this building not marvelous?” one of the reporters shouted.

“Is it not inspiring?” another demanded.

“Does it not make you seek to reverence the spirits of Emperors past?” a third yelled. The closer they came, the more excited and vehement they got.

A fourth reporter said, “Tell me in your own words what you think of this mausoleum.” Then, without giving any of the Americans a chance to use their own words, the Lizard went on, “Do you not feel this is the most holy, most sacred site on four worlds? Do you not agree that nowhere else is the same combination of serenity, power, and awe-inspiring beauty? Would you not say it is unmatched in splendor, unmatched in grandeur, unmatched in importance?”

“Get them out of here,” Tom de la Rosa told Jussop, “before I pick up one of these sacred rocks and bash in their heads-assuming they have any brains there, which does not seem likely.”

Before the guide could do anything, the reporters and camera crews had caught up with the humans. The reporter who wanted to put words in everyone’s mouth thrust his-or possibly her-microphone in Jonathan’s face. “I will not comment about the mausoleum, since I have not yet been inside,” Jonathan said, “but I think you are unmatched in rudeness, except possibly by your colleagues.”

“I am the ambassador,” his father said, and the archaic word seemed to have some effect even on the jaded reporters. Sam Yeager went on, “My hatchling speaks truth. We did not come to this place for publicity. We came to see what is here to see, and to pay our respects to your beliefs even if we do not share them. Will you kindly have the courtesy and decency to let us do that-undisturbed?”

“But the public needs to know!” a Lizard shouted.

“This is not a public matter. It is private, strictly private,” Jonathan’s father said. “And if you do not go away, the protest I make when I have my audience with the Emperor will be most public indeed.”

Jussop had been quietly speaking into a handheld telephone. The Race’s police were most efficient. No more than two or three minutes went by before they hurried up to escort the reporters away. “Come on, come on,” one of them said. “The Big Uglies do not want you around. This is not a traffic accident, where you can ask bloodthirsty questions of some poor male who has just lost his best friend.”

Spluttering protests, the reporters and camera crews reluctantly withdrew. Most reluctantly-some of them kept shouting inane questions even as the police pushed them away from the Americans. “I apologize for that, superior Tosevites,” Jussop said. “I apologize with all my liver. I did not think it would be so bad.”

Maybe he was telling the truth, maybe he wasn’t. Short of making a worse scene, the Americans couldn’t do much about it now. Major Frank Coffey said, “Let us just go on, then, and hope the moment is not ruined.”