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.”
It turned out not to be. The only reason it turned out not to be was that the mausoleum was wonderful enough inside to take the bad taste of the reporters out of Jonathan’s mouth-and, by what he could see, from everyone else‘s, too. Tau Ceti’s buttery light poured through windows and glowed from granite and marble. Urns of Hellenic simplicity and elegance but not of a shape any human potter would have chosen held the last remains of a couple of thousand Emperors. The sequence was spotty before Home was unified; it seemed to be complete after that.
Nobody said anything for a long time. People wandered where they would, looking, admiring. Even footfalls rang monstrously loud here. Because the Americans were representatives of an independent country, they had special permission to take pictures inside the mausoleum. Permission or not, no one touched a camera. It would have profaned the place. Karen quietly squeezed Jonathan’s hand. He nodded. Not even the memorial to Washington, D.C., in Little Rock had affected him like this. Whatever the many differences between mankind and the Race, the Lizards understood majesty.
Sam Yeager paused outside the imperial palace to admire the grounds. They were landscaped with the same spare elegance that informed the gardens surrounding the imperial mausoleum. He turned to Atvar, who as his sponsor walked one neat pace behind him and to his right, and who had stopped at the same time as he had. “I hope you will not be angry if I tell you that these grounds remind me of something the Nipponese might do,” Sam said.
The fleetlord made the negative gesture. “I am not angry, for the same thing has occurred to me. I think you would do better, though, not to make this comparison to the courtiers within.”
That made Sam chuckle. “No doubt you speak truth. I suppose they would say the Race had the idea first, and that too would be a truth.”
“Indeed it would. These grounds have been more or less as they are for a very long time, even by the standards of the Race-much longer than all of Tosevite history put together,” Atvar said. “And now, shall we proceed?”
“One moment, if you please,” Sam said after glancing at his watch. “I left the hotel early so I could gawk a bit before the ceremony starts. We have time. I will not disgrace the United States by being late.” When he was playing minor-league ball-in a vanished century, in a vanished time that had not known the Lizards-he’d never once missed the train or the bus to the next town. Half of getting anywhere in life was simply showing up on time.
Atvar also wore a watch. Like every other Lizard timepiece Sam Yeager had ever seen, his was digital. Their style had started a fad among humans for the same kind of watches, and even for clocks. Yeager was old-fashioned. He went right on wearing a watch with hands (even if this one had been made for Home’s day, which was about an hour and a quarter longer than Earth‘s, and for keeping time by tenths).
But that was a small thing. The palace in front of him was anything but. Unlike most of the Race’s buildings, it had been designed when those within had to worry about their safety, and it looked the part. Sam wouldn’t have wanted to attack it with anything short of an armored division. Where the grounds looked Japanese, the palace seemed more Russian than anything else. He supposed the onion domes topping some of the gray stone towers put that thought in his mind. But the palace wasn’t really Russian, any more than the mausoleum was really a match for the Parthenon. Those were just comparisons his human mind groped for. The Race’s architecture had its own logic, and not all of it followed anything he was used to.