Free Homeward Bound by Harry Turtledove

clumsy and stupid. They took longer than they should have to figure out how the latches worked, but they did it. He sat up, torn between triumph and worry. “My brains
will
come back?” he asked her.
    “They’re supposed to,” she said, which struck him as imperfectly reassuring.
    The
Admiral Peary
’s acceleration produced barely enough weight to keep him on the table. When he slid off, he glided ever so slowly to the metal floor. He would have had to go off a cliff like Wile E. Coyote to do himself any serious damage. He bounced from the floor toward Flynn. “Lead on, Macduff.”
    “That’s, ‘Lay on, Macduff.’ ” Flynn looked pained. “Don’t tamper with the Bard.”
    “At this late date and this distance, I doubt he’ll complain,” Johnson said.
    “Oh, so do I,” the other pilot said. “That’s why I’m doing it for him.”
    “Helpful,” Johnson observed, and Flynn nodded blandly. Johnson went on, “Well, anyway, show me. Show me around, too. This is the first time I’ve been conscious—as conscious as I am—on the
Admiral Peary.
Would be nice to know what I’m flying.”
    “You don’t ask for much, do you?” Flynn brachiated up the hatchway. The starship’s tiny acceleration wasn’t enough to worry about, not as far as motion was concerned. Feeling like a chimpanzee himself—an elderly, arthritic, downright spavined chimpanzee—Johnson followed.
    The
Lewis and Clark
had had observation windows fronted by antireflection-coated glass. The
Admiral Peary
had an observation dome, also made from glass that might as well not have been there. Coming up into it was like getting a look at space itself. Johnson stared out. Slowly, his jaw dropped. “Jesus,” he whispered.
    Mickey Flynn nodded again, this time in perfect understanding. “You’ve noticed, have you? It does hit home.”
    “Yeah,” Johnson said, and said nothing else for the next several minutes.
    There was no sun in the sky.
    That hit home, sure as hell, like a left to the jaw. Johnson understood exactly what it meant. It wasn’t that the Sun was hiding, as it hid behind the Earth during the night. When it did that, you knew where it was, even if you couldn’t see it. Not here. Not now. There was nothing but blackness with stars scattered through it. And the closest of those stars was light-years away.
    “And I thought the asteroid belt was a long way from home,” Johnson murmured at last. “I hadn’t even gone into the next room.”
    “Does make you wonder why we thought we were the lords of creation, doesn’t it?” Flynn said. Johnson hadn’t thought of it that way, but he couldn’t help nodding. Flynn continued, “Look a little longer. Tell me what else you see, besides the big nothing.”
    “Okay,” Johnson said, and he did. He knew how the stars were supposed to look from space. Not many humans—probably not many Lizards, either—knew better. As Flynn had said he would, he needed a while to see anything else by the absence of a sun. But he did, and his jaw fell again.
    The outlines of the constellations were wrong.
    Oh, not all of them. Orion looked the same as it always had. So did the Southern Cross. He knew why, too: their main stars were a long, long way from the Sun, too far for a mere five or six light-years to change their apparent position. But both the Dogs that accompanied Orion through the skies of Earth had lost their principal stars. Sirius and Procyon were bright because they lay close to the Sun. Going halfway to Tau Ceti rudely shoved them across the sky. Johnson spotted them at last because they were conspicuous and didn’t belong where they were.
    He also spotted another bright star that didn’t belong where it was, and couldn’t for the life of him figure out from where it had been displaced. He finally gave up and pointed towards it. “What’s that one there, not far from Arcturus?”
    Flynn didn’t need to ask which one he meant, and smiled a most peculiar smile. “Interesting