The best part of Lysander Washington’s life was also the most important part, because it was watching the old recorded television programs from Earth. He had to do that. Everybody in his cohort did, because that was how they learned Earth language and Earth ways. He also loved it. The way he liked best to do it was to curl up next to Tanya or Helen or even, if she was in a good mood that day, Polly, enjoying the smells of their scales and the warmth of their bodies, at least ten degrees hotter than his own. Together they would watch documentaries and newscasts, because they were instructed to, but when they had free choice it would be “I Love Lucy” and “Friends of Mr. Peepers” and “Leave It to Beaver.” They weren’t good recordings. They had been recorded originally from up to a dozen light-years away; in fact, they were the electronic signatures, picked up by the ship’s always-scanning sensors, that had first alerted the Hakh’hli to the fact that there was intelligent, technological life on some planet of that little G-2 star their telescopes had located.
The old family-style television sitcoms were always fun, but they made Sandy a little wistful. Sometimes he wondered what his life would be like if he had grown up on Earth, with human companions instead of Hakh’hli. Would he have played “baseball”? (Out of the question on the ship. They didn’t have the room. Or the players. Or a mild enough gravity to be able to hit a ball as far as Duke Snyder and Joe Dimaggio did.) Would he have “hung” around with his “pals” at the “malt shop”? (Whatever a “malt” was. None of the TV chefs had ever made one, and the Hakh’hli experts hadn’t been able to decide even if it ought to be sweet or sour.) Would he—maybe—have had a girl?
That was the biggest question in Lysander’s mind. To have a girl! To touch one (the touch was “like fire,” “like an electric shock”—how could those things be pleasant? But it was said they were), even to kiss one (kisses sweeter than wine! Whatever wine was), even to—
Well, to do whatever it was that humans did when they were in sexual phase. Exactly what that was he wasn’t sure. He knew what the Hakh’hli did; he’d watched the other members of his cohort often enough when they were sexual. Did humans do the same? Unfortunately he couldn’t know. If there were porn channels for TV on Earth, the ship’s receivers had never picked one up. It was apparent that human males and females kissed. They did that a lot. They took off each other’s clothes. They got in bed with each other. Sometimes they got under the covers and the covers moved about quite a lot . . . but never once did they throw the covers back to show what made those busy lumps go bump.
Every night Lysander dreamed. Almost all the dreams were the same. They were populated with female humans who knew exactly what to do—and did it. (Though he never could remember, when he woke up, exactly what it was they had done.)
Sooner or later, the Seniors promised, Lysander would be back on Earth, with all its nubile female humans. He couldn’t wait.
Sandy switched off the film he had chosen—it was called Jesus Christ, Superstar, and it was too much of a puzzle to watch alone. From his private locker he took out the photograph of his mother and looked at it. She was so beautiful! Slim, fair, blue-eyed, lovely—
The only thing that troubled Sandy was that although he knew from Earth films that men often carried pictures of their mothers and displayed them in moments of great emotion, he had never in any of those films observed that one of the mothers had been photographed in the nude. That was a puzzle that none of his cohort, or even the Hakh’hli scholars who had spent their lives trying to understand the ways of Earth people like himself, had been able to help him solve. It seemed improper to him. It was more than improper, it was confusing—because when he looked at his mother’s picture, so fair, so bare, so inviting, he had exciting, unbidden thoughts that, he was nearly sure, were not at all appropriate to the situation.
He could not understand why that was.
He was not going to understand it today, either, he decided. His meal finished, he carried the crumbs back to the messy cart and returned to the carrel to get back to work on his poem.
Sandy didn’t remember drowsing off and wasn’t aware that he had until he woke with Obie standing over him. “You’re turning into a real Hakh’hli,” Obie told him, approving of the after-meal nap. “What’ve you got there?”
“It’s just a poem I wrote,” Sandy said, covering it up.
“Come on, let me see it. We always show you ours.”
“It isn’t ready,” Sandy protested, getting up just in time to see Polly lumbering toward them irritably.
“Lysander,” she accused, “you didn’t clean up after the meal. Next thing you know we’ll have bugs here, and then we’ll have to get the hawkbees in.”
Sandy was stung by the injustice. “Why are you blaming me? Why am I always the one who has to clean up?”
“Because you’re the one who doesn’t sleep. You know that.”
“Well, today I did sleep. I didn’t have time to clean up.”
“You had time to write a poem,” Obie pointed out treacherously. He turned to Polly. “He won’t show it to me, either. He says it isn’t finished, but it looked finished enough to me.”
“Let’s see the poem,” Polly commanded, pinching her thumbs together in a meaningful way. Resentfully Sandy passed it over as the rest of the cohort, yawning and stretching, straggled toward them.
Oh, my
almost forgotten
terrestrial homeland!
I dream of you each day
and think of you asleep
and wish the experience
of treading upon your
soil would come, O
Earth!
Also
it has the
pretty old
moon
“It’s an attempt to write a Hakh’hli poem in the English language,” the poet explained nervously.
“Hum,” Polly said, not committing herself.
“I think that’s pretty hard to do,” Bottom commented.
“Maybe it’s not worth doing at all,” Helen put in. “It’s not the same thing as a real poem, you know. Those wriggly little characters are just ugly.”
“Besides,” Obie, the astronomer, added, thumping the notepad with his clenched fist, “you’ve got it all wrong. The proportions are inaccurate. The Moon ought to be a lot smaller.”
“I couldn’t fit enough words in that way,” Sandy said defensively.
“Then you just should have made the Earth bigger, of course. And both of them are flattened out more than they ought to be. They look more like the one they call ‘Jupiter.’ ”
Sandy snarled, “It’s a poem. It’s not an astronomy lesson!”
“Yes,” Polly said severely, “but you ought to get it right. Also, how can the Earth be ‘forgotten’? You couldn’t forget it. You weren’t ever there to remember it, were you? We picked your parents up in space.”
“That’s poetic license,” Sandy said stubbornly.
Polly lashed her tongue at him in reproof. “Poets don’t have license to tamper with the facts,” she informed him. “Hakh’hli poets don’t, anyway, and it doesn’t make any difference if Earth poets do, does it? Now, no more of this! I vote we watch some films until MyThara comes back.”
But the films the cohort chose to watch were not a kind that Sandy liked. They were all about wars and terrorism, and all those other nasty things humans were known to have done to each other in the twentieth century. When MyThara returned the cohort was quarreling about them. She paused in the door, frowning, as Bottom told Sandy judgmatically, “I think that your Earth governments are fools.”
Sandy said sullenly, “You don’t understand, is all. They probably had their reasons for what they did.”
“What reasons, Sandy? Killing each other? Destroying farms, when neither side has enough food to live on? Spreading poisons? This is not a government of wise leaders who have been bred and trained for the purpose, like our Hakh’hli Seniors. Have you ever seen such outrageous things here on the ship? The hoo’hik tenders attacking the extravehicular workers, for instance?”
“The hoo’hik tenders would be slaughtered if they did,” Obie put in. “Those extravehiculars are tough.”
“That isn’t the point! The point is that such a thing could not happen here on the ship. Hakh’hli do not behave so wantonly.”
Sandy stuck to his defense. “It’s a lot easier to govern a few thousand people than a couple of billion.”
“Oh? Indeed?” Bottom licked out his tongue sarcastically. “And on our Hakh’hli home worlds, where there are a thousand times a billion, have you ever heard of such warfare?”
“I don’t know anything about what’s going on in the Hakh’hli home worlds,” Sandy said belligerently, “and neither do you. When was the last time this ship had any communication with them?”