“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.
Once she had it, she wasn’t sure she wanted it. “If it weren’t for the honor of the thing, I’d rather walk,” she said. But she walked toward the eppori that a zisuiliboy named Gatemp was holding for her.
When she started to go to the creature’s left side, Gatemp made the negative gesture. “We mount from the right,” he said.
“You would,” Karen muttered. The eppori swiveled an eye turret her way as she came up beside it. It made a snuffling noise that might have meant anything. She set a hand on its scaly hide. It felt like living, breathing crocodile leather. She asked Gatemp, “Is it all right to get up?”
“I think so,” he answered. “Why not find out?”
“Yes, why not?” Karen said grimly. She would have been awkward mounting from the left side. She was worse than awkward from the right. Gatemp’s mouth fell open in a laugh. She would have bet it would. A Lizard stirrup had only a bar on the bottom. Members of the Race could grip it with their toes. Karen couldn’t, but her foot did fit on it.