Down to Earth (22 page)

Moishe Russie pointed toward a crowd of Jews gathered in front of the synagogue. That was unusual. “Hello,” he said. “I wonder what’s going on.”

Whatever it was, a lot of people were excited. Angry shouts in Yiddish and Hebrew reached Reuven’s ears. Rivka Russie pointed, too. “Look,” she said. “There’s a Lizard standing in front of the entrance. What’s he doing there?”

“Maybe he wants to convert,” Esther said. Judith giggled.

Reuven leaned toward his father and murmured, “How would we circumcise him?” Moishe Russie let out a strangled snort. He waggled a reproachful finger at Reuven, but his heart wasn’t in the gesture. It was the sort of joke any doctor or medical student might have made.

As Reuven got closer to the synagogue, the shouting began turning into intelligible words. “An outrage!” someone cried. “An imposition!” someone else exclaimed. “We won’t put up with this!” a woman warned shrilly. Reproach filled a man’s voice: “After all we’ve done for you!”

The Lizard—who was armed and wearing body armor—kept speaking hissing Hebrew: “I have my orders. I cannot go against my orders.”

“What are your orders?” Reuven asked in the language of the Race, pushing through the crowd toward the doorway.

As he’d hoped, the male responded to hearing his own tongue. “Perhaps you will explain it to these Tosevites better than I can,” he replied. “My orders are that no one may enter this house of superstition without first paying five hundred mills.”

“Half a pound?” Reuven exclaimed. “Why? What is the purpose of this order? How can I explain it if I do not understand it?”

“It is to reduce superstition,” the Lizard told him. “If you Tosevites have to pay a tax to gather together to celebrate what is not true, the hope is that you will turn toward the veneration of the spirits of Emperors past, which is true.”

A woman grabbed at Reuven’s arm. “What’s he saying?” she demanded.

Reuven translated the male’s words. They brought a fresh storm of protest. Some of the language in which the protest was couched made Esther and Judith exclaim, whether in horror or in admiration, Reuven couldn’t quite tell. “A tax on religion?” someone said. “Who ever heard of a tax on religion?”

But an old man with a white beard answered, “I came to Palestine when the Turks still ruled here. They used to tax Jews, and Christians, too. Only Muslims got off without paying.”

Understanding that, the Lizard said, “We tax Muslims, too. We tax all who do not venerate the Emperors.”

“They’re trying to convert us!” a woman said indignantly.

The Lizard understood that, too, and made the negative hand gesture. “You may follow your superstition,” he said. “If you do, though, you have to pay.”

Moishe Russie took out his wallet. “I am going to pay,” he said, and gave the male a two-pound note and another worth five hundred mills. “This is for all my family.”

“Pass on,” the Lizard said, and stood aside to let the Russies into the synagogue. Reuven discovered they were not the first to go in. He and his father sat on the right side of the aisle, his mother and sisters on the left. All the conversation, among men on the one side and women on the other, was about the tax.

“How will poor Jews pay it?” a fat man asked. “It is not a small fee.”

“Maybe we can get the Race to lower it,” Reuven’s father said. “If we can’t, the rest of the congregation will have to pay for the Jews who can’t pay for themselves. How could we spend money in a way more pleasing to God?”

The fat man didn’t look as if he wanted to spend money at all, whether it pleased God or not. Reuven set a hand on his father’s arm. “I’m proud of you,” he said.

Moishe Russie shrugged. “If we don’t help one another, who’s going to help us? The answer is, nobody. We’ve seen that too many times, over too many hundreds of years. We have to take care of our own.”

A couple of rows in front of the Russies, a scholarly looking man with a fuzzy gray beard was saying, “The Romans worshiped their Emperors, too. They didn’t try to make the Jews do it.”

“The Lizards aren’t trying to make us worship their Emperors, either,” somebody else answered. “They’re just trying to make it expensive for us if we don’t.”

“True enough.” The man who looked like a scholar nodded. “But that wasn’t quite my point. Who worships dead Roman Emperors nowadays?”

Reuven burst out laughing. He couldn’t help himself. “There we go!” he exclaimed. “We’ll convert
all
the Lizards to Judaism, and then we won’t have to worry about paying the tax any more.”

That got a laugh, even from his father. But the gray-bearded man said, “And why not? ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.’ That doesn’t say what He looks like; He doesn’t look like anything. He is as much the Lizards’ God as He is ours. Nothing holds them back from becoming Jews: we don’t talk about God having a human son.”

Reuven almost repeated the crack about circumcising Lizards, but held his tongue; it didn’t seem to fit, not inside the synagogue. Thoughtfully, his father said, “They could become Muslims as easily as Jews.” That brought on a glum silence. No one liked the idea at all.

The scholarly looking man said, “They could, but they won’t, not as long as the Muslims keep rising against them. And, pretty plainly, they want us to forget our own religions and worship their Emperors. That would make it easier for them to rule us.”

“Politics and religion,” Moishe Russie said. “Religion and politics. They shouldn’t mix. Trouble is, too often they do.” He sighed. “For a while here, we just got to worship as we pleased. I suppose it was too good to last.”

Before anyone could say anything to that, the rabbi and the cantor took their places at the front of the congregation. Singing in the welcome for the Sabbath made Reuven forget about the tax his father had paid to enter the synagogue . . . for a little while, anyhow.

But, after the service was over, after Reuven and his father rejoined his mother and twin sisters, he said, “If the Muslims have to pay half a pound five times a day, all the rioting we’ve been through so far is going to look like nothing in particular. This town will go up like a rocket.”

“We have enough groceries to last a while,” his mother said. “We’ve been through this before. We can do it again, even if the riots will be worse. Whatever the Arabs do, they can’t be worse than the Nazis were in Warsaw.”

“That’s true,” Reuven’s father agreed, and added an emphatic cough for good measure. “I thought the
Reich
would have fallen apart from its own wickedness by now, but I was wrong. Back when we were living in London, that fellow named Eric Blair who used to broadcast with me called the Nazis and the Russians a boot in the face of mankind forever. I used to think he was too gloomy, but I’m not so sure any more.”

“You mention him every now and then,” Reuven said. “Do you know what happened to him after we left England?”

“He’s dead—ten or fifteen years now,” Moishe Russie answered, which took Reuven by surprise. His father went on, “Tuberculosis. He had that particular soft cough even back when I knew him—but as far as I know, he never let it get in the way of his broadcasting.” He sighed. “It’s too bad. He would still have been a young man, and he was one of the most honest people I ever met.”

They walked on through the quiet streets back toward their house. Moths fluttered around street lamps. The day’s heat had faded; the night air made Reuven glad he had on a sweater. A mosquito landed on his hand. He slapped at it, but it buzzed away before he could squash it.

“When the muezzins call for prayer tomorrow morning . . .” he began.

“We’ll find out what happens,” his father said. “No point to borrowing trouble. We get enough of it anyhow.”

Because the next morning was Saturday, Reuven didn’t have classes. The Race thought humanity’s seven-day cycle absurd, but had given up trying to impose their own ten-day rhythm on the medical college.
Weekend
was an English word the Lizards had had to borrow. Their custom was to rotate rest days through the week, so ninety percent of them were busy at any given time. They reckoned the Muslim Friday day of rest, the Jewish Saturday, and the Christian Sunday equally inefficient.

Reuven slept through the amplified sunrise calls to prayer from mosques in the Muslim districts of Jerusalem, and no gunfire awakened him, either. He ate bread and honey for breakfast, and washed it down with a glass of milk. The relief he felt at the silence in the city was sweeter than the honey, though.

It didn’t last. He’d hoped it would, but hadn’t expected it to, not down deep. He and his family were heading toward Saturday morning services when, as the call to prayer drifted in from the Muslim districts, gunfire rang out: not just rifles but automatic weapons and, a moment later, cannon.

Moishe Russie stopped in his tracks. “We go back,” he said, and his tone brooked no contradiction. “God only knows what the streets will be like when services are done, and I don’t care to find out by experiment.”

“God will also know why we didn’t go to
shul
this morning,” Rivka Russie agreed. She set a hand on each twin’s shoulder. “Come on, girls. Back to the house.” The gunfire started up anew, this time much closer. Esther and Judith’s mother gave them a shove. “And hurry.”

By the time they got home, emergency vehicles were racing along the streets, those of human make clanging bells and those with Lizards inside hissing urgently to clear the right of way. Reuven hurried toward the telephone. Before he could pick it up, it rang. He grabbed it. “Hello?”

“Are you all right?” Jane Archibald asked.

“Yes, we’re fine here,” he answered, adding, “I was just about to call you. Is the dormitory safe?”

“So far, yes,” she answered. “No trouble here yet. This is all aimed at the Lizards, not at us. But everyone is worried about you and your family.”

That deflated Reuven; he’d hoped Jane had called only because she was worried about him. But he repeated, “We’re fine. I hope there’ll be something left of the city when all this dies down again.”

“If it ever does,” Jane said. “And I’m not half sure the Lizards hope the same thing. They may be looking for another excuse to slaughter the people who don’t like them and have the nerve to stand up to them.” Because of what the Race had done to Australia, she naturally thought the worst of them. But, as a helicopter flew low over the house and began pouring rockets into a target bare blocks away, Reuven had a hard time telling her she was bound to be wrong.

Liu Han, Liu Mei, and Nieh Ho-T’ing peered north from a four-story building the little scaly devils somehow hadn’t yet managed to knock down. Through smoke and dust, Liu Han spied the column of tanks advancing on Peking. Another column was coming up from the south. The People’s Liberation Army had done everything it could to throw back the scaly devils. In the end, everything it could do hadn’t been enough.

“What now?” Liu Han asked Nieh.

“Now?” the People’s Liberation Army officer echoed, his face grim. “Now we try to escape to the countryside and carry on the revolutionary struggle there. We cannot hold this city, and there will surely be a great bloodbath of a purge after the little devils retake it.”

“Truth,” Liu Han said in the scaly devils’ language. After their uprising succeeded, the Communists had meted out summary punishment to every collaborator they could catch. Liu Han was sure the enemy would not be so foolish as to fail to return the favor.

One of the advancing tanks started pumping rounds into the city from its big gun. Every explosion wrecked a little more of Peking—and drove home to the people left inside that they could not hope to halt the little scaly devils’ advance.

But the People’s Liberation Army kept fighting. Peking’s defenders had no real artillery with which to oppose the little devils’ tanks. They did have mortars; the tubes were hardly more than sheet metal, and artisans could make the bombs they fired. Those bombs began bursting among the tanks.

Liu Han cheered. So did Liu Mei, though she didn’t change expression. Nieh looked as sour as if he were sucking on a lemon. “That will do no good,” he said, “and it will tell the enemy where our weapons are positioned.”

Sure enough, the little scaly devils, who had been shooting more or less at random, began concentrating their fire on the places from which the mortars had opened up. One after another, the mortars fell silent. Liu Han hoped at least some of them were shamming, but she had no way to know.

Nieh Ho-T’ing said, “And if we are going to leave, we had better leave now. If we wait till the little devils are in the city, it will be too late. They will set up checkpoints, and they will have collaborators with them, people who are liable to recognize us no matter what stories we tell.”

Again, he assumed the scaly devils would follow the pattern the Party had used. Again, Liu Han found no reason to disagree with him. But Liu Mei asked, “Can we do anything more here before we have to leave?”

“No,” Nieh answered. “If we had a radio, we might direct fire—for a little while, till the scaly devils triangulated our position and flattened this building. That would not take long, and it would not help the cause. The best thing we can do is survive and escape and fight on.”

“He’s right,” Liu Han told her daughter. To prove she thought so, she started down the stairs. Nieh Ho-T’ing followed without hesitation. Liu Han looked back over her shoulder, fearful lest Liu Mei, in a fit of revolutionary fervor, stay behind to court martyrdom. But her daughter was following, though shaking her head in regret. Seeing Liu Mei made Liu Han go faster. When they got to the ground, she asked, “Which way out?”

“The scaly devils are coining from the north and south,” Nieh answered. “We would be wise to go east or west.”

“West,” Liu Mei said at once. “We’re closer to the western gates.”

“As good a reason as any, and better than most,” Nieh Ho T’ing said, while Liu Han nodded. Nieh went on, “The last thing we want is to get stuck in the city when it falls. That can be very bad.”

“Oh, yes. It can be bad in a village, too,” Liu Han said, remembering what had happened to her village at the hands of first the Japanese and then the little scaly devils. “It would be even worse in a big city, though.”