Frederik Pohl - Homegoing

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HOMEGOING

By Frederik Pohl

Chapter 1

At this time John William Washington, who is usually called “Sandy” by his old nursemaid and his six

friends, is biologically twenty-two years and eleven months old. He thinks of himself as roughly a

twenty-two-year-old, although timekeeping in the Hakh’hli interstellar ship does not go by Earth years.

His age doesn’t really reflect the elapsed time since his birth anyway. Time dilation has cooked the

clocks; the ship has spent much of its time traveling at relativistic speeds. Sandy is an excellent physical

specimen—not counting such minor problems as deafness (but that is easily remedied by the hearing aid

his shipmates have made for him) and a certain squatness of form. He stands only five feet five inches tall,

but he masses two hundred pounds—on Earth he would have weighed that, though in the gravity of the

Hakh’hli ship he weighs thirty percent more—and he is strong enough to support his own weight in each

hand, with his arms outstretched. But Albert Einstein had been right about that, as about many other

things. Everything was relative. Among the Hakh’hli on their huge interstellar spaceship Sandy is as frail

as a puppy, and his other nickname among his peers—the one they use when they are mad at him—is

“Wimp.”

A tiny voice in Sandy’s dreams cried, “Unclasp, unclasp, Sandy-Wimp.” It wasn’t a dream; it was the

voice of his cohort-mate Polly, filled with mixed affection and irritation. The reason it was faint was that

Sandy’s hearing aid had come loose again during the night. “We’ve got work to do this morning!” she

bawled, her sour but pleasant breath stirring his hair. He winced away from her. Polly was not the biggest

of the six Hakh’hli in Sandy Washington’s cohort, but she was sometimes the bossiest.

Sandy let go of Demmy with one arm and Helen with the other, sat up, stretched, and yawned. He

readjusted the hearing aid, gazing around. The whole cohort slept in a tangle on the matting in one corner

of their exercise room, and it was not uncommon for him to wake up with Bottom’s immense right leg

pressed across his back and, say, Titania’s two-thumbed claw in his mouth. But this time he was on top,

and he jumped off the pile before the inevitable morning rough-housing started.

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They splashed and rubbed themselves clean while one of them went for the morning meal cart—it wasn’t

anything like the great gobbets of roots and meat they would devour at the main midday meal, just the

broth and wafers they called “cookies and milk.” Being sleepy, they didn’t talk much. The morning music

was going, since the Hakh’hli disliked silence as much as any Earthly airport manager. It was playing

Earth tunes on the special program for the cohort quarter, of course. Sandy hummed along with the

Beatles in “Yesterday” as he pulled his clothes out of the locker. He leaned forward to kiss the picture of

his mother that was stuck inside the locker door. Then, because it was a work day, he hurried back to

the meal cart. They all ate quickly of the salty, steamy broth and the crunchy wafers. There was no

special ceremony about eating—on work mornings they didn’t take time for the Kitchen Game or the

Restaurant Game—and when they were through they hurried out to the portal of their quarters. A sharp

click, a shrill hiss, a deeper, louder thump as the pressure-lock door opened, and they walked through

the pressure change. Sandy swallowed. The pressure change from their quarters, maintained at an Earthly

1000 millibars, to the Hakh’hli 1200 wasn’t supposed to hurt his ears any more, but it did. His Hakh’hli

cohort, of course, didn’t even notice the difference.

Obie daringly hunched himself out into the corridor for a quick look in both directions. “ChinTekki-tho

isn’t here!” he crowed. “He’s late! Maybe we’ll get the day off!”

“Maybe your turds will fly! Get back in here,” Polly commanded, and cuffed him at the base of his

stubby tail when he did.

“But it’shot,” Obie whined, lifting himself on his springy legs to present his tail to Sandy for comforting.

It was there to be licked, and Sandy obliged. Everyone knew that Polly was right. Obie shouldn’t have

gone out of their quarters without permission. That wasn’t allowed any more. But the whole cohort

resented Polly’s bossiness, and besides Obie and Sandy were best friends.

Polly took it upon herself to lecture. “The reason the ship is hot,” she said severely, “is that the

navigators had to bring us in close to this star so that we could do the course-change maneuver. That

could not be helped, and anyway it is getting cooler now.”

“Praise the navigators,” Obie said instinctively.

Helen echoed, “Praise them a lot!” She was simply sucking up to Obie, of course. She was

pre-positioning herself for the time, obviously not far away, when Obie would come into sexual season.

Then it would be his whim that could spell the difference between rejection and a successful coupling in

amphylaxis.

But Obie wasn’t listening. He was daringly peering out into the corridor again, his spirits completely

restored, and it was he who cried, “Here comes MyThara!”

They flocked to greet her. Especially Sandy, who, grinning with the unexpected pleasure of seeing her

instead of the teacher, hurled himself on her back as soon as she was within the portal. She shook him

off, limping a little. She pretended to be angry. “Get off me, you! What ith the matter with you,

Lythander?” Sandy winced; the full name meant she was really angry. “I call that improper conduct for a

Cheth who will thoon be carrying out urgent work. ChinTekki-tho cannot come today, therefore I will

conduct you to your job. Come along, all of you!”

Weeping amused tears, the cohort followed her into the corridor and across the ship. The whole

Earth-mission cohort liked old MyThara, though it was only Sandy who looked on her as the closest

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thing he had ever had to a real mother. Her full name was Hoh’My’ik perThara-tok 3151. The “Hoh”

and the “ik” had to do with her family bloodlines. “My” referred to her status—she was a mature adult,

but not a Senior. Tharatok was her personal name; “per” referred to her age—now approaching the end

of her life, as Sandy well knew but tried not to think about; and the number distinguished her from any

other of her lineage and generation—it was something like the batch number of her particular set of

stored, fertilized eggs. Sandy sometimes dared to call her Thara-tok, but formally, to young adults like

those of the cohort, she was MyThara.

With the time before the Earth landing growing so short, even Sandy and his cohort had to take a turn at

doing shipwork. Sometimes the work was harvesting, pulling out the food plants and cleaning their tubers

of soil, separating the stalks and the leaves; before that it was picking the blossoms from the plants when

they were in their flowering phase, or collecting the round, pale globes that came when the plants had

fruited. Tuber-pulling was dirty work, but not as dirty as what they had to do when the harvest was

complete. Then they had to get ready to seed the next crop—pour in the buckets of sludge from the

recycling stations and mix them into the soil. The Hakh’hli food plants were marvels. Every part of them

was edible, and every part could be prepared and eaten in a hundred different ways. But they left nothing

in the soil. So all the nutrients had to be put back—once the remains of the food had gone through the

garbage bins or the alimentary systems of the ship’s crew and turned up as sludge in the bottom of the

recycling tanks.

Even that kind of shipwork wasn’t as bad as cleaning out the pens of the hoo’hik, the four-legged, hairy,

pale, docile, hog-fat food animals. The hoo’hik were as big as Lysander himself and affectionate. They

did smell bad. Especially their droppings did. But sometimes one of them would nuzzle up to Lysander,

even when he was loading them to the slaughterers—they would even gently pat and stroke the

slaughterer himself with their stubby paws as they waited dumbly for the blow that would end their lives.

The hoo’hik weren’t much like the dogs and cats Sandy saw on Earthly TV. But they were the closest

things to dogs and cats around. There were times when Lysander wished he could have had a young

hoo’hik as a pet. But of course that was impossible. No such things as pets were allowed on the big

Hakh’hli interstellar ship.

Unless Lysander Washington himself could be considered one.

“Hurry up, hurry up,” MyThara kept calling as the cohort dawdled, gazing wistfully into every

compartment and corridor that once had been theirs to roam and now was denied. The Hakh’hli they

passed gazed back, because the Earth-mission cohort was now more newsworthy than ever on the ship.

They would not normally have had much status. By Hakh’hli standards they were only “cheth,” which

was to say that they were adult, but not very. In the normal course of Hakh’hli life none of them would be

considered worthy of serious responsibilities for another half-twelve years at least, but the times were not

normal. The Earth-mission cohort didn’t have time to grow older and wiser, because the time when they

would need to act that way was almost upon them. Consequently, the other Hakh’hli thought of them the

way a Japanese cynic in World War II might have regarded an eighteen-year-old kamikaze volunteer.

The serious, even vital, job they were going to do entitled them to a certain amount of respect—but they

were still kids, and feather-headed ones, at that.

Their shipwork job that morning was to help rig netting in the nurseries. When the ship reached its orbit

around the planet called “Earth” it would turn off its motors. Then everything in it would immediately lose

weight. At that time the nets the cohort was putting up would be essential, so the newborn Hakh’hli

infants, happily springing about the nursery, would not bash their infant brains out against the unforgiving

walls.

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“Up top, Sandy,” Demetrius commanded when they had looked over the situation. “You’re the lightest.”

“You’ve given me the hardest part,” Sandy complained. Whoever was on the upper part of the walls

would have to hang on with one or more limbs and, with whatever limbs were left over, catch the heavy

balls of elastic fiber as they were tossed up to him.

“Serves you right,” Helen croaked malignly. “It’s about time you did some real work.” And then,

because she was the next smallest to Sandy, though the margin was wide, she was sent to clamber up the

far wall to catch his return throws.

So as not to waste the time the cohort organized one of their informal games—they just called this one

“Questions”—and tossed hard ones back and forth. It was Helen’s idea, so she got to choose the

category. “Middle names,” she decreed.

“Of American presidents?” Bottom ventured. He was always the most diffident one. He was the fattest

and shortest, too. Everyone laughed at the clumsy way he hopped about, but when he made a

suggestion, if anyone listened at all, they generally found it was a good one.

“That’s okay,” Sandy said eagerly, adjusting his hearing aid to make sure he didn’t miss anything. “Let

me start. How about Herbert Hoover?”

“Clark,” Demmy said at once. “His middle name was Clark. Herbert Clark Hoover, 1929-1933. He

was president during the stock market crash, 1929, which led to the Great Depression, apple sellers,

breadlines, unemployment, miniature golf—”

Polly hurled the ball of cord at him. “Just say the name,” she snapped. “Go again.”

Demmy giggled as he caught the cord, his eyes weeping with pleased vanity. He tossed it to Sandy, who

listened as he fastened a loop of it to the wall studs. “All right. How about Richard Nixon?”

“Milhous!” Polly cried at once, already ready with her next stumper. “Calvin Coolidge.” She licked her

little tongue in and out in satisfaction, confident she had stumped them. But Bottom fooled her.

“It was Calvin!” he said triumphantly. “Calvinwas his middle name; his first name was—was—”

“Was what?” Polly demanded. “You didn’t answer the question.”

“Yes, I did,” he bellowed.

“You didn’t!”

“You silly slabsided sapsucker,” Bottom hissed at her, vain of his Earth slang and the way he

pronounced his s’s. “I did, too!”

“Not really, no.I said his name was Calvin. You have to say what his other name was, or else you’ve

lost and I go again and—oof!”she gasped as Bottom leaped at her, butting his triangular head right into

her belly.

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That put a stop to rigging nets for a while. Helen leaped down to join the fray, but Sandy stayed where

he was on the wall. These free-for-alls weren’t particularly dangerous for his friends. The young Hakh’hli

weighed twice as much as he, and they were pretty evenly matched with each other. Sandy was a

different case. He had neither the mass nor the elephant-hide skin to take that kind of brawling lightly.

Nor did he have the muscle, for that matter. Any one of the Hakh’hli youths could have wrenched his

limbs off as easily as a lover plucking petals off a daisy; and there had been times when they were all

much younger when some had come close.

It wasn’t that Lysander Washington was a weakling. Nobody on Earth would have called him that, but

the Hakh’hli were something else. They knew it. Even when one of them was mad at him, they didn’t let

it get to the stage of physical violence. For one thing, they knew what would happen to all of them if

anything bad happened to the one human member of their cohort. For another, they were not ungrateful

to him. They were in his debt. They knew very well that if it hadn’t been for the fact that this Earth

human, Lysander Washington, had needed some kind of companions to grow up with—not human

companions, of course, because there weren’t any of those on the ship, but as close to human as a

Hakh’hli could manage—all of them would very likely still be unhatched eggs, frozen in the ship’s vast

cryogenic nursery.

While the others were roughhousing, Sandy slipped down from the wall and tucked himself into a

corner, behind a squatting bench. He was protected from the combat by the rows of empty infants’

nests—none of the baby Hakh’hli who would occupy them were out of the incubators yet. Comfortable

and glad to be off the perch on the wall, Sandy pulled a pad and stylus out of his pocket. He tucked his

head down in case of flying objects and began writing a poem.

Writing poetry was not an unusual activity among the Hakh’hli—of course, not counting the

nonintellectual oafs who were bred to perform heavy labor outside the ship, or for working in the

poisonously radioactive conditions around its motors. All the six others in Sandy’s cohort did it often. It

was a way of showing off. Sandy had already written his share of poems, but, like all the others the

members of the cohort produced, his had been in the Hakh'hli language, which was written in ideographs

rather than letters. In Hakh’hli usage the artistically designed appearance of the poem on paper meant as

much as the sense of the words. Sandy’s intention was to do something that none of the others had done:

to write a Hakh’hli-type poem, but in English.

He had roughed it out and was settling in to rearrange the individual words into their most artistic

patterns when an adult voice cried from the doorway, in Hakh’hli, “O wicked! O

persons-who-do-not-contribute-their-share! You are playing and not doing your work. Desist! Return to

order! It is commanded!”

Sandy recognized the voice. MyThara was back, belching faintly in anger as she rose to the full height of

her legs to tower over them. She switched to English to reprimand them, lisping and getting the words

wrong in her exasperation: “What ith matter you? Why you act like hoo’hik? Infantth to be born mutht

have thafety plathe!”

Snorting in embarrassment, the cohort froze where it was. They had indeed made a mess. Half the

webbing that was already in place had been torn away, and now it sagged in useless strands across the

baby nests. “Sorry, MyThara,” Demmy gasped abjectly. “Bottom started it. He jumped on—”

“Not care Bottom! Care people mine act badly and not well! Now, clear up meth and do job right in

great hurry!”

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Back in the cohort’s quarters when the three twelfth-days of shipwork were over, MyThara

commandeered Sandy for a clothes fitting. He was getting really hungry—they all were—but MyThara

was MyThara. For most of his life Sandy had thought MyThara was the wisest person in his little world,

as well as the best. He still thought so, and out of a vagrant impulse he asked her a question that had

often bothered him. “MyTharatok? Are you ever going to be a Senior?”

She was shocked. “Lythander! What an idea! I wathn’t born to be a Thenior, wath I?”

“Weren’t you?”

“No, I wathn’t. You thee, before the eggth hatch the thientithtth fiddle them a little. That’th how your

cohort can pronounth all thothe terrible eththeth and everything—”

“I know that. Who doesn’t know that?” Sandy demanded.

“Well, and I jutht wathnn’t given the traitth to be a Thenior. Withdom, and intelligenth—”

“You have plenty of wisdom and intelligence!” Sandy said loyally.

“For me I do,” she said, touched. “You’re a good boy. But I don’t have the genetic equipment to be a

Thenior, do I? And that ith the way it ought to be. I’m happy. I’m doing valuable work. That ith what

true happineth ith, Thandy, doing the work you’re meant to do and doing it ath well ath you pothibly

can.”

“What kind of valuable work?”

“What do you mean, Lythander?”

“You said you were doing valuable work. I thought you were just taking care of me.”

“Well, and ithn’t that valuable? You’re valuable, Thandy. You’re the only one like you on the whole

ship, and that makth you very thpecial. Now let uth get on with your wardrobe, all right?” She leaned

past him to put all four of her thumbs on the grips of the display control. The screen rapidly commenced

flashing shots of human males in various costumes.

Deciding what Lysander should wear on his mission to Earth wasn’t easy, because human beings

seemed to change their dress habits with time. Worse, the Earth television stations had the confusing habit

of transmitting historical films, and, even worse, some of the films were golden oldies without any

discernible clue to when they had been made. Togas, the Hakh’hli were sure, were out. So were plumed

hats and swords. Business suits seemed safe enough, but—well, what kind? Single-breasted or double?

Wide or narrow lapels? A tie? A stiff collar? Cuffs on the pants? A vest? And, if so, a vest that tamely

matched the jacket, or one in red or yellow or plaid?

Then, of course, there was the vexing problem of what the clothes were to be made of. The best of the

television pictures from Earth showed colors and sometimes even surface textures, but there were

subtleties no one on the interstellar ship understood. The wisest scholars, poring over nearly a century’s

worth of transmissions, had learned much and deduced even more by collation and comparison, but they

could not say whether a particular garment should be single thickness or double, or whether they were

lined or not, or how, exactly, they were held together. This was far more important for Sandy than for the

rest of his cohort, of course. The six Hakh’hli who were his constant companions wore Earth clothes, or

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at least something like Earth clothes—shorts, suitably modified to accommodate their huge, long, folded

legs, and short-sleeved jackets and now and then even caps. Shoes were out of the question for the long

Hakh'hli foot, but sometimes they were willing to wear something like sandals. Lysander, on the other

hand, dressed human all the time. He had even been required to practice “tying a tie” in front of a mirror,

as Earth males had been seen to do. But nothing in his previous life had prepared him for the ordeal of

selection that was now confronting him. “I can’t wear those things!” he cried. “How do I excrete?”

“The thcholarth thay it ith betht to remove the pantth,” MyThara soothed. “You’ll work it out all right,

Lythander.”

“I’ll look like a fool!”

“You will look very handthome,” MyThara promised, keying the final selections into the machine. “The

Earth femaleth will lick your tongue, I promithe.” Sandy, pretending to scowl at her on the outside, felt his

heart leap inside him at that thought, as she finished, “Now get ready for the midday meal.”

Since the food cart had not yet arrived for the midday meal, the cohort had begun a game of basketball,

both to keep themselves busy and to relieve some of the strain of their bubbling young glands.

Their notion of basketball wasn’t exactly regulation. There were only three on a side, plus one as

referee—although until Lysander was through with his wardrobe chores they wouldn’t be able to have a

referee at all. And the ball didn’t bounce exactly the way it did on broadcasts of the Knicks and the

Lakers, and they didn’t have anywhere near the room for a regulation-size court. But they did the best

they could. Sandy Washington urged the others to play as often as he could, because it was the one sport

he could, sometimes, beat them in. They were stronger by far, but he was quicker.

He persuaded Obie to drop out to become referee—easily enough, because Obie didn’t much like the

game—and plunged in. It was not as good as the games they used to have in the old days, before the

Earth-mission cohort were cut off from the dozens of others they had grown up with, when their teams

had, sometimes, a dozen players on each side. But it was a good game. The ship had been cooling down

a little, now that they were well past the close approach to Earth’s Sun that they had used to slow the

ship down. That was both good and bad for Sandy Washington. The good part was that the rest of the

cohort didn’t sweat as much. The bad part was that they didn’t tire as rapidly.

He did, though. Long before the midday meal cart arrived he dropped out. While the players were

shuffling around and Obie was getting back into position, Polly came over to him, limping and rubbing her

immense thigh where Obie had kicked her on his way in.

“Hehurt me,” she complained.

“You’re bigger than he is. Punch him out,” Sandy advised.

“Oh, no!” She sounded shocked. She didn’t say why, but she didn’t have to; by now everybody could

see that Obie was getting close to a sexual season, so her reasons for keeping on his good side were

obvious. “Why don’t you go for the food cart, as long as you aren’t playing?” she asked.

“I went yesterday. It’s Helen’s turn.”

“But that will break up the game,” she explained irritably.

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‘I don’t care,” he said, and turned away.

Then Sandy went off in a corner to watch TV on his personal monitor. It was the rule that at mealtime

the cohort could watch anything they liked, just so it was in the English language for the practice. The old

movie Sandy chose was calledThe Scarlet Pimpernel. It was certainly not the one he enjoyed most, and

he could not pretend that it contributed to his education about Earthly ways. The costumes were all

wrong, and exactly who was on whose side in that complicated drama of the French Revolution not even

the Hakh’hli scholars had been able to figure out. But Sandy watched it over and over with fascination,

because it was about a spy. And that was, after all, the task the Hakh’hli had decreed for him.

Chapter 2

There are some 22,000 living Hakh’hli aboard the vast interstellar ship but there is only one of Sandy

Washington. So sometimes he feels outnumbered. It isn’t just that he is alone. He is also—not counting

food animals—by a long way the smallest grown-up living thing on the ship. An adult Hakh’hli may mass

anywhere from 350 to 750 pounds, depending on age and the purpose it was bred for. Power plant and

outside-of-ship workers, for instance, are almost as big as the oldest Major Seniors, though for

occupational reasons they seldom live anywhere near as long. Though all Hakh’hli have the same basic

body pattern—short, supple forelimbs; long, pointed face like a collie’s; huge hindlegs as powerful as a

kangaroo’s—some of the specialized types have stronger hands or shorter tails or even no tails at all. The

Hakh’hli hand has three fingers, plus two thumbs and a stubby, hard-clawed digit called a “helper.” It

looks quite like a human hand, but with the helper emerging from what would be the heel of the hand in a

human. If the Hakh’hli on the ship are diverse, the many times as many Hakh’hli on their home worlds are

far more so—partly because they have more various purposes to meet, partly just because there are so

many more of them. In all, there are in excess of one trillion Hakh’hli on the planets of their native sun and

of the two nearby star systems they have colonized. No Hakh’hli on the ship has ever seen any of those

other trillion. Nor have any of the trillion seen that ship, not since it began its voyage, 3000 Earth years

ago.

Long beforeThe Scarlet Pimpernel came to its heart-melting conclusion (the refugees safe, Leslie

Howard triumphant, The Girl melting into his arms) the food cart arrived with their one great midday

meal.

Sandy hung back from the rush. He had never learned to eat “properly,” and all his friends in the

Earth-mission cohort had regretfully concluded that he never would. His diffidence in rushing the food

cart proved it, for a proper Hakh’hli didn’t eat. He gobbled.

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Sandy’s cohort tore into the midday meal with gusto. They made a lot of noise doing it, too. While

Sandy picked daintily at his slab of meat, his friends were snapping great chunks out of the carcass and

stuffing lumps of tuber and fists-full of the flavored wafers in after. The long, powerful jaws crunched. The

throat muscles gulped and swallowed. Sandy could see successive wads of lightly chewed dinner chasing

each other down the throats of his friends. None of the Hakh’hli actually snatched from him the morsels

he had cut away for himself, but he didn’t expose them too openly. While they chewed they sucked in

great quantities of the broth of the day, a sort of fishy consommé with lumps of wafer material floating in

it. They sounded like half a dozen sump pumps going at once.

There was no such thing as dinner-table conversation among the Hakh’hli, nothing more than “Pass the

broth bowlnow!” and, “Hey, that bit’smine!” Sandy didn’t even try to talk to them. He just sat patiently,

cautiously nibbling at his own meal while he waited for the feeding frenzy to subside. In a few minutes it

had. The great gobbets of food hit their respective stomachs. The Hakh’hli circulatory system rushed

blood toward the digestive organs to meet the need for action. The chewing faltered and stopped, and

one by one the Hakh’hli eyes went vacant, the Hakh’hli limbs went slack, and within five minutes every

one of the Hakh’hli in Sandy’s cohort was stretched out unconscious in “stun time.”

Sandy sighed and walked slowly over to the food cart. Amid the wreckage there was still a fair-sized

chunk of the hoo’hik meat, nibbled at but undevoured, and several handfuls of the flavored biscuits.

He took what he could carry and wandered over to his personal carrel to finish his meal in peace.

Having nothing better to do while his cohort was unconscious and digesting their meal he did what he

liked best to do anyway. He watched a film.

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 agirl?

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—

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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 calledJesus 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?”

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摘要：

HOMEGOING ByFrederikPohl Chapter1 AtthistimeJohnWilliamWashington,whoisusuallycalled“Sandy”byhisoldnursemaidandhissixfriends,isbiologicallytwenty-twoyearsandelevenmonthsold.Hethinksofhimselfasroughlyatwenty-two-year-old,althoughtimekeepingintheHakh’hliinterstellarshipdoesnotgobyEarthyears.Hisage...

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Frederik Pohl - Homegoing

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