Aftershocks (5 page)

“I doubt that would be possible,” Ttomalss said tartly. Johannes Drucker laughed yet again.
Ignorant Big Ugly,
Ttomalss thought. Aloud, he continued, “Anyone would think you were a Tosevite from the snoutcounting not-empire of the United States, not from the
Reich,
where your not-emperor has more power than the true Emperor.” He cast down his eye turrets at the mention of his revered sovereign.

“We still have more freedom than you do,” the Deutsch Tosevite insisted.

“Nonsense,” Ttomalss said. “Think of what your not-empire does to those of the Jewish superstition. How can you claim you are more free? We do not do anything like that to members of the Race.”

That hit home on Johannes Drucker harder than Ttomalss had expected. The Big Ugly turned a darker shade of pinkish beige and looked down at the metal floor of the compartment: not in reverence, Ttomalss judged, but in embarrassment. Still not looking at Ttomalss, Drucker mumbled, “The rest of us have more freedom.”

“How can you say that?” Ttomalss asked. “How can any be free when some are not free?”

“How can you say you are free when you tried to conquer our whole world and enslave us?” the Tosevite returned.

“It is not the same,” Ttomalss said. “After the conquest is complete, Tosevites will have the same rights as all other citizens of the Empire, regardless of species.”

“Whether we wanted to join the Empire or not? Where is the freedom in that?”

“You do not understand. You willfully refuse to understand,” Ttomalss said, and gave up on his interview with the obstreperous Big Ugly.

Sam Yeager called out to his wife: “Hey, hon, c’mere. We’ve got an electronic message from Jonathan.”

“What has he got to say for himself this time?” Barbara asked, but she was waving a hand when she hurried into the study. “No, don’t tell me—let me read it for myself.” She adjusted her bifocals on her nose so she could more readily see the screen. “He’ll be home pretty soon, will he?” She let out a long sigh of relief. “Well, thank heaven for that.”

“You said it,” Sam agreed. He’d been sighing with relief every day since the Germans surrendered. He hadn’t thought the Nazis would start their war against the Lizards. He knew the
Reich
was fighting out of its weight against the Race, and so he assumed the Nazi bigwigs knew the same thing. That hadn’t proved such a good assumption. Jonathan had been up in space when the war started. If a German missile had hit his starship . . .

Barbara said, “I don’t know how we could have gone on if anything had happened to Jonathan.”

“I didn’t think anything would,” Sam answered. If anything had happened to his only son after he’d encouraged Jonathan to go into space, he didn’t know how he’d be able to go on living with Barbara, either. For that matter, he didn’t know how he’d be able to go on living with himself. “It’s all right now, anyhow.” He said that as much to convince himself as to remind his wife.

And Barbara did something she’d never done in all the weeks since the war between the
Reich
and the Race broke out and endangered their son: she put a hand on Sam’s shoulder and said, “Yes, I guess it is.”

He leaned back in his swivel chair and reached up to set his hand on hers. If she was going to forgive him, he’d make the most of it. “I love you, hon,” he said. “Looks as if we’re together for the long haul after all.”

That
as if
was a tribute to the long haul they’d already put in. Barbara had done graduate work in Middle English before the fighting, and was as precise a grammarian as any schoolmarm ever born. And, over more than twenty years, her precision had rubbed off on Sam. He wondered if they did have as long a haul ahead as behind. He’d just turned fifty-eight. Would they still be married when he was eighty? Would he still be around when he was eighty? He had his hopes.

“So it does.” She smiled down at him as he was grinning up at her. “I like the idea,” she said.

“You’d better, by now,” he said, which made her smile broader. But his own grin slipped. “On the other hand, you know, I’m liable to softly and suddenly vanish away, because the Snark I found damn well is a Boojum.”

He spoke elliptically. Whenever he spoke of what he’d found with the help of some computer coding from a Lizard expatriate named Sorviss, he spoke elliptically. He didn’t know who might be listening. He didn’t know how much good speaking elliptically would do him, either.

Barbara said, “They wouldn’t,” but her voice lacked conviction.

Sam said, “They might. We know too well, they might. If they do, though, they’ll be sorry, because if anything happens to me the word will get out one way or another.” He chuckled. “Of course, that might be too late to do me a whole lot of good. The story of Samson in the temple never was my favorite, but it’s the best hope I have these days.”

“That we should need such things,” Barbara said, and shook her head.

“I just wish you hadn’t squeezed it out of me,” Yeager said. “Now you’re liable to be in danger, too, on account of it.”

“Think of me as one of your life-insurance policies,” Barbara said. “That’s what I am, because I’ll start shouting from the housetops if anything happens to you. That’s the best way I know of to get you out of a jam, if you should get into one. They can’t stand the light of day—or maybe I should say, the light of publicity.”

“That’s true enough,” Sam agreed. And so it was . . . to a point. If he and Barbara both softly and suddenly vanished away, she wouldn’t have the chance to start shouting from the housetops. Presumably, those who might be interested in silence could figure that out, too. Yeager didn’t mention it to his wife. Anybody could foul up; he’d seen that. A foul-up on the other side’s part could well give her the chance to play the role she’d talked about. He said, “We’re liable to be worrying over nothing. I hope we are. I’m even starting to think we are. If they’d found out where I’ve been, I’d think they would have dropped on me by now.”

“Probably.” Barbara looked poised to say something else on the same subject, but a crash from the kitchen distracted her. “Oh, God!” she exclaimed. “What have those two gone and done now?” She hurried away to find out.

“Something where we’ll need to sweep up the pieces,” Sam answered, not that that counted for much in the way of prophecy. He got up from his chair and followed Barbara.

He was in the living room, halfway between the study and the kitchen, when he heard a door slam in the back part of the house. He started to laugh. So did Barbara, though he wasn’t sure she was actually amused. “Those little scamps,” she said. “There they’ll be, pretending as hard as they can that they’re innocent.”

“They’re learning,” Yeager said. “Any kid will do that kind of thing, till his folks put a stop to it. And we’re the only folks Mickey and Donald have.”

The shattered remains of what had been a serving bowl lay all over the linoleum of the kitchen floor. Barbara clucked in dismay at the size of the mess. Then she clucked again. “That bowl was in the dish drainer,” she said. “They’re growing like weeds, but I don’t think they’re big enough to reach it, not since I shoved it back sideways against the wall there.”

Sam examined the scene of the crime. “No chair pushed up against the counter,” he said musingly. “I wonder if one of them stood on the other one’s back. That would be interesting—it would show they’re really starting to cooperate with each other.”

“Now if only they’d start cooperating to clean up the messes they make. But that would be too much to ask for, wouldn’t it?” Barbara rolled her eyes. “Sometimes it’s too much to ask for from Jonathan, or even from someone else I might mention.”

“I haven’t got the faintest idea who—whom—you’re talking about,” Sam said. Barbara rolled her eyes again, more extravagantly than before. But when she started for the broom closet, Sam shook his head. “That’ll wait for a couple of minutes, hon. We can’t let Mickey and Donald think they got away with it, or else they’ll try the same thing again tomorrow.”

“You’re right,” Barbara said. “If we read them the riot act, they may wait till day after tomorrow—if we’re lucky, they may.” Sam laughed, though he knew perfectly well she hadn’t been kidding.

Side by side, they walked to the bedroom the two Lizard hatchlings they were raising called their own. Up till a few months before, the door to that bedroom had been latched on the outside almost all the time: the baby Lizards, essentially little wild animals, would have torn up the house without even knowing what they were doing.
Now they know some of what they’re doing, and they still tear up the house,
Sam thought.
Is that an improvement?

He opened the door. Mickey and Donald stood against the far wall. If they could have disappeared altogether, they looked as if they would have done it. Even Donald, bigger and more rambunctious than his (her?) brother (sister?), seemed abashed, which didn’t happen very often.

Yeager held up a piece of the broken bowl. By the way the hatchlings cringed, he might have been showing a couple of vampires a crucifix. “No, no!” he said in a loud, ostentatiously angry voice. “Don’t play with dishes! Are you ever going to play with dishes again?”

Both baby Lizards shook their heads. They’d learned the gesture from Barbara and Jonathan and him; they didn’t know the one the Race used. Neither one of them said anything. They didn’t talk much, though they understood a startling amount. Human babies picked up language much faster. The Lizards would have been amazed that the hatchlings were talking at all. Yeager chuckled under his breath.
Barbara and I, we’re bad influences,
he thought.

Though behind in language, Mickey and Donald were miles ahead of human toddlers in every aspect of physical development. They’d hatched able to run around and catch food for themselves, and they’d grown like weeds since: evolution making sure not so many things were able to catch them. They were already well on their way toward their full adult size.

Sam remained a towering figure, though, and used his height and deep, booming voice to good advantage. “You’d better not go messing with Mommy Barbara’s china,” he roared, “or you’ll be in big, big trouble. Have you got that?” The young Lizards nodded. They had a pretty good notion of what trouble meant, or at least that it was a good thing to avoid. Yeager nodded at them. “All right, then,” he said. “You behave yourselves, you hear?”

Mickey and Donald both nodded some more. Satisfied he’d put the fear of God in them—at least till the next time—Sam let it go at that. He didn’t spank them save as a very last resort. He hadn’t spanked Jonathan much, either . . . and Jonathan hadn’t had such formidable teeth with which to defend himself.

“Maybe the Lizards have the right idea about bringing up their babies,” Barbara said as she and Sam went up the hall.

“What? Except for making sure they don’t kill themselves or one another, leaving them pretty much alone till they’re three or four years old?” Sam said. “It’d be less work, yeah, but we’ve got a big head start on civilizing them.”

“We’ve got a big head start on exhaustion, is what we’ve got,” Barbara said. “We were a lot younger when we did this with Jonathan, and there was only one of him, and he’s human.”

“Pretty much so,” Sam agreed, and his wife snorted. He went on, “The one I take off my hat to is the Lizard who raised Kassquit. He had to be mommy and daddy both, give her attention all the time, clean up her messes—for years. That’s dedication to your research.”

“It wasn’t fair to her, though,” Barbara said. “You’ve talked a lot about how strange she is.”

“Well, she is strange,” Yeager said, “and no two ways about it. But I don’t think she’s nearly as strange as she might have been, if you know what I mean. In the scheme of things, she might have been a lot squirrellier than just wishing she were a Lizard. And”—he lowered his voice; his own conscience was far from clear—“God only knows we’re going to raise a couple of squirrelly hatchlings.”

“We’ll learn from them.” Barbara had a lot of pure scholar left in her. “The Lizards have learned a lot from Kassquit,” Sam answered. “I wonder if she thanks them for it.” But he didn’t wonder. He knew she did. If Mickey and Donald ended up thanking him, maybe he’d be able to look at himself in a mirror. Maybe.

 
2

When Monique Dutourd had fled down into the bomb shelter below her brother’s flat, Marseille, like all of France, had belonged to the Greater German
Reich.
She and Pierre and his lover, Lucie, and everyone else in the shelter had had to dig their way out, too, when they ran low on food and water.

She wished they’d been able to stay longer. She might have avoided the bout of nausea and vomiting that had wracked her. But she was better now, and her hair hadn’t fallen out, as had happened to so many who’d been closer to the bomb the Lizards dropped on her city. Of course, tens of thousands who’d been closer still were no longer among the living.

But those who survived were once more citizens of the
République Francaise
. Monique had been a girl when France surrendered to Germany, and only a couple of years older than that when the Lizards drove the Nazis and their puppets in Vichy away from Marseille. But when the fighting ended, France had returned to German hands, and the Germans hadn’t bothered with ruling through puppets in the south any more.

Now Monique could walk through the outskirts of Marseille without worrying about SS men. If that wasn’t a gift from God, she didn’t know what was. She could even think about looking for a university position in Roman history again, and if she got one she would be able to say whatever she pleased about the Germanic invaders who’d helped bring down the Roman Empire.

“Hello, sweetheart!” A man waved to her from behind the table on which he’d set up his wares. “Interested in anything I’ve got?”

He looked to be selling military gear the Germans who’d survived the explosive-metal bombing of Marseille had left behind when they’d been required to make their way back to the
Reich
. By the way he tugged at his ratty trousers, that junk might not have been what he’d been trying to interest her in.

Since she wanted no more of him than she did of his junk, she stuck her nose in the air and kept walking. He laughed, not a bit abashed, and asked the next woman he saw the same not quite lewd question.

As Monique drew closer to the region the bomb had wrecked, she saw an enormous banner:
DOWN BUT NOT OUT
. She smiled, liking that. France had been down a long time—longer than ever before in her history, perhaps—but she was on her feet again now, even if shakily.

A lot of Lizards were on the streets of Marseille—the streets on the fringes of town, the streets that hadn’t been melted to slag by a temperature on the same order as those found in the sun. Returned French independence was one of the prices the Lizards had extracted from the Nazis in exchange for accepting their surrender. Monique hoped it wasn’t the only, or even the largest, price the Race had extracted from the
Reich.

Back when Marseille belonged to the Germans, a lot of the Lizards who visited the city had been furtive characters. They’d come to buy ginger and often to sell drugs humans found entertaining. Monique had no doubt a lot of them were still here for those purposes. But they didn’t have to be furtive any more. Nowadays, they were the ones who propped up French independence. What policeman would want to give them any trouble?

Even more to the point, what policeman would have the nerve to give them trouble? They didn’t occupy France, as the Germans had. They didn’t carry away everything movable, as the
doryphores
—Colorado beetles—in field-gray had. But France wasn’t strong enough to stand on her own even against the battered, enfeebled, radioactive
Reich.
So the Lizards had to prop up the new Fourth Republic. And, of course, they had to be listened to. Of course.

Monique turned a corner and found what she was looking for: a little square where farmers down from the hills around town sold their cheeses and vegetables and smoked and salted meats to the survivors of the bombing for the most bloodthirsty prices they could extort. “How much for your
haricots verts?
” she asked a peasant with a battered cloth cap on his head, stubble on his cheeks and chin, and a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth.

“Fifty Reichsmarks a kilo,” he answered, and paused to look her up and down. He grinned, not very pleasantly. “Or a blow job, if you’d rather.”

“For green beans? That’s outrageous,” Monique said.

“I have ham, too,” the farmer said. “If you want to blow me for ham, we can work something out, I expect.”

“No, your price in money,” Monique said impatiently. She didn’t have to give this bastard anything she didn’t want to; he wasn’t an SS man. “I’ll pay you thirty Reichsmarks a kilo.” German money was the only kind in circulation; new francs were promised, but had yet to appear.

“Fifty, take it or leave it.” The farmer didn’t sound put out that she’d failed to fall to her knees. But he went on, “For once in my life, I don’t have to haggle. If you won’t pay me what I want, somebody else will—and you won’t get a better price from anyone else around.”

He was almost certainly right. “When the roads and railroads get fixed, you’ll sing a different tune,” Monique said.

“All the better reason to get what I can now, “he answered. “Do you want these beans, or don’t you? Like I say, if you don’t, somebody will.”

“Give me two kilos.” Monique had the money. Her brother Pierre had more money than he knew what to do with, even at the obscene prices for which things were selling nowadays. The Lizards had bought a lot of ginger from him over the years, and Germans and Frenchmen had bought a lot of goods he’d got from the Lizards.

After Monique paid the peasant, she held out her stringbag—a universal French shopping tool—and he poured
haricots verts
into it. When he stopped, she hefted the sack and glared at him. Grudgingly, he doled out a few more beans. Getting cheated on price was one thing. Getting cheated on weight was something else. Hefting the stringbag again, Monique supposed he’d come close to giving her the proper amount.

She bought potatoes from another farmer, one who refrained from offering to take his price in venery. Of course, his wife, a woman of formidable proportions, was standing beside him, which probably had something to do with his restraint. Then Monique headed back to the vast tent city outside of town that housed the many survivors who’d come through even when their homes hadn’t.

The tent city smelled like a barnyard. She supposed that was inevitable, since it had no running water. The Romans, no doubt, would have taken such odors as an inevitable part of urban life. Monique didn’t, couldn’t. She wished her nose would go to sleep whenever she had to come back.

A boy who couldn’t have been older than eight tried to steal her vegetables. She walloped him on the bottom, hard enough to send him off yowling. If he’d asked her for some, she probably would have given them to him. But she wouldn’t put up with thieves, not even thieves in short pants.

As she’d had to share a flat with her brother and his lover, now she had to share a tent with them. When she ducked inside, she discovered they had company: a Lizard with impressively fancy body paint. He jerked in alarm when she came through the tent flap.

Lucie spoke reassuringly in the Lizards’ language. Monique didn’t speak it, but caught the tone. She wondered if it worked as well on the Lizard as it would have on a human male. Lucie wasn’t much to look at, being pudgy and plain, but she had the sexiest voice Monique had ever heard.

Pierre Dutourd was also pudgy and plain, so they made a good pair, or at least a well-matched one. He was ten years older than Monique, and the difference looked even wider than it was. “How did you do?”

She hefted the stringbag. “Everything is too expensive,” she answered, “but the
haricots verts
and the potatoes looked pretty good, so I got them.”

“Excuse me,” the Lizard said in hissing French. “Is it that these foods were grown in the local soil?”

“But of course,” Monique answered. “Why?”

“Because, in that case, they are liable to be in some measure radioactive,” the Lizard replied. “Your health would be better if you did not eat them.”

“They are the only food we can get,” Monique said, acid in her voice. “Would our health be better if we starved to death?”

“Well, no,” the Lizard admitted. “But why can you not get more healthful alimentation?”

“Why?” Monique wanted to hit him over the head with the stringbag. “Because the Race has dropped explosive-metal bombs all over France, that’s why.” She turned to Pierre. “Do you always deal with idiots?”

“Keffesh isn’t an idiot,” her brother answered, and patted the Lizard on the shoulder. “He’s just new in Marseille, and doesn’t understand the way things here are right now. He’s been buying and selling down in the South Pacific, till the war disrupted things.”

“Well, he ought to think a little before he talks,” Monique snapped.

“Who is this bad-tempered person?” the Lizard named Keffesh asked Pierre.

“My sister,” he answered. “She is bad-tempered, I agree, but she will not betray you. You may rely on that.”

By the way Keffesh’s eye turrets swung back and forth, he didn’t want to rely on anything. He stuck out his tongue at Pierre, as a human being might have pointed with an index finger. “It could be,” he said. Now that he’d started speaking French, he seemed content to stick with it. “But may I rely on you? If you cannot bring in food and have to eat supplies that are possibly contaminated, how is it that you will be able to bring in supplies of the herb my kind craves so much?”

Lucie laughed. Monique didn’t know what, if anything, that did to Keffesh; it certainly would have got any human male’s complete and undivided attention. Lucie said, “That is very simple. There is little profit in food. There is great profit in ginger. Of course ginger will move where food would not.”

“Ah,” Keffesh said. “Yes, that is sensible. Very well, then.”

Monique shook her head and set down the sack of vegetables. She had no doubt Lucie was right. What did that say about the way things worked in the world? That the coming of the Lizards hadn’t changed things much? Of all the conclusions she contemplated, that was odds-on the most depressing.

Rance Auerbach contemplated another perfect Tahitian day. It was warm, a little humid, with clouds rolling across the blue sky. He could look out the window of the apartment he shared with Penny Summers and see the even bluer South Pacific. He turned away from the lovely spectacle and lit a cigarette. Smoking made him cough, which hurt. He’d lost most of a lung and taken other damage from a Lizard bullet during the fighting. Doctors told him he was cutting years off his life by not quitting.
Too goddamn bad,
he thought, and took another drag.

He limped into the kitchen and got himself a beer. “Let me have one of those, too, will you?” Penny called from the bedroom when she heard him open it.

“Okay.” His voice was a ruined rasp. He popped the top off another beer. Walking back to give it to her hurt, too. Another bullet from the same burst of fire had left him with a shattered leg. “Here you go, babe.”

“Thanks,” she told him. She was also smoking a cigarette, in quick, nervous puffs. She grabbed the beer and raised it high. “Here’s to crime.”

He drank—he would have drunk to anything—but he laughed, too. “Didn’t know there was any such thing in Free France.”

“Ha,” she said, and brushed a lock of dyed blond hair back off her cheek. She was in her early forties, a few years younger than Rance, and could pass for younger still because of the energy she showed. “Now, the next interesting question is, how much longer will there be a Free France now that there’s a real France again?”

“You expect the froggies to sail out here with gunboats and take over?” After a long sentence, Rance had to pause and suck in air. “I don’t think that’s awful goddamn likely.”

“Gunboats? No, neither do I. But airplanes full of clerks and cops?” Penny grimaced. “I wouldn’t be half surprised. And they’re liable to kill the goose that laid the golden egg if they do.”

As far as power went, Free France was a joke. It couldn’t hold out for twenty minutes if the Empire of Japan or the USA or the Race decided to invade it. But none of them had, because a place under nobody’s thumb, where people and Lizards could make deals without anybody looking over their shoulders, was too useful to all concerned. How would that look, though, to a pack of functionaries back in Paris?