Aftershocks (3 page)

He went over to Kassquit and put a hand on her shoulder. She squeezed him. She liked being touched. He got the idea she hadn’t been touched a whole lot before he came up to the starship. Touching was a human trait, not one the Race shared to anywhere near the same degree.

“He will be going down to his not-empire before long,” Kassquit said.

“Truth,” Jonathan agreed.

“And you will be going down to your not-empire before long,” Kassquit said.

“You knew I would,” Jonathan told her. “I cannot stay up here. This is your place, but it is not mine.”

“I understand that,” Kassquit answered. She spoke the language of the Race as well as someone with a human mouth possibly could. And why not? It was the only language she knew. She went on, “Intellectually, I understand that. But you must understand, Jonathan, that I will be sorry when you go. I will be sad.”

Jonathan sighed and squeezed her, though he didn’t know whether that made things better or worse. “I am sorry,” he said. “I do not know what to do about that. I wish there were something I could do.”

“You also have a female waiting for you on the surface of Tosev 3, even if she is not a female with whom you have arranged for permanent exclusive mating,” Kassquit said.

“Yes, I do,” Jonathan admitted. “You have known that all along. I never tried to keep it a secret from you.”

He wondered if Karen Culpepper would still be his girl when he came home. They’d been dating since high school. When he’d come up to the starship, he hadn’t expected to stay, and he hadn’t thought he would have that much explaining to do once he got back. He hadn’t really believed the Nazis would be crazy enough to attack the Lizards over Poland. But they had, and he’d been here for weeks—and he’d almost died a couple of times, too. Karen would have an excellent notion of where he was and why he’d come up here. He didn’t think she’d be very happy about it.

“You will go back to her. You will mate with her. You will forget about me,” Kassquit said.

She didn’t know it, but she was reinventing the lines everyone who’d ever lost a lover used. “I will never forget you,” Jonathan said, which was the truth. But even if it was, he doubted it consoled her much. Had someone told him the same thing, it wouldn’t have consoled him, either.

“Can that really be so?” she asked. “You know many other Tosevites. To you, I am only one of many. To me, you are the most important Tosevite I have ever known.” She let her mouth fall open, mimicking the way Lizards laughed. “The size of the sample is small, I admit, but it is not likely to increase to any great degree soon. Why, if I meet the Deutsch male before he leaves the ship, it will go up from two to three.”

She wasn’t trying to make him feel sorry for her. He was sure of that. She didn’t have the guile to do any such thing. No doubt because of the way she’d been raised, she was devastatingly frank. He said, “You could make it larger if you came down to visit the United States. You would be most welcome in my . . . city.”

He’d started to say
in my house.
But Kassquit wouldn’t be welcome in his house. His father and mother—and he, too, when he was there—were raising a couple of Lizard hatchlings who were Kassquit’s exact inverses: Mickey and Donald were being brought up as much like human beings as possible. The Race wouldn’t be delighted to learn about that, and Kassquit’s first loyalty was inevitably to the Lizards.

“I may do that,” she said. “On the other fork of the tongue, I may not, too. Is it not a truth that there are Tosevite diseases for which your physicians have as yet developed no vaccines?”

“Yes, that is a truth,” Jonathan admitted.

Kassquit continued, “From the Race’s research, it appears that some of these diseases are more severe for an adult than they would be for a hatchling. I do not wish to risk my health—my life—for the sake of a visit to Tosev 3, interesting as it might otherwise be.”

“Well, I understand that.” Jonathan made the affirmative gesture. “But surely other Tosevites will be coming here to the starship.” Getting away from the personal, getting away from guilt he couldn’t help feeling at leaving someone with whom he’d been making love as often as he could, was something of a relief.

“I suppose so,” Kassquit answered. “But still, you must understand, you will be the standard of comparison. I will judge every other Tosevite I meet, every other male with whom I mate, by what I have learned from and about you.”

So he couldn’t get away from the personal after all. Stammering a little, he said, “That is a large responsibility for me.”

“I think you set a high standard,” Kassquit told him. “If I thought otherwise, I would not want to share this compartment with you and I would not want to go on mating with you, would I? And I do.”

She put her arms around him. She was as frank about what she liked as about what she didn’t. He kissed the top of her head. An American girl would have tilted her face up for a kiss. Kassquit didn’t. Kisses on the mouth, and especially French kisses, alarmed rather than exciting her.

They made love on the sleeping mat. It was harder than a bed would have been, but far softer than the metal flooring. Afterwards, Jonathan peeled off the rubber he’d worn and tossed it in the trash. He didn’t flush such things; he had no idea what latex would do to the Lizards’ plumbing, and didn’t care to find out the hard way.

Kassquit said, “I think I begin to understand something of Tosevite sexual jealousy. It must be close to what I felt when, after the colonization fleet arrived, Ttomalss began paying much less attention to me because he was paying much more attention to Felless, a researcher newly revived from cold sleep.”

“Maybe,” Jonathan said. He didn’t know what Kassquit had felt then. He supposed it was something strong, though, because Ttomalss had been—still was—as close to a mother and a father as Kassquit had.

“I think it must be,” Kassquit said earnestly, “for I know much of that same feeling when I think of you mating with that other female down on the surface of Tosev 3. I understand that this is not rational, but it does not appear to be anything I can help, either.”

Jonathan wasn’t nearly sure Karen would want to mate with him after he got back to Gardena. But if she didn’t, some other girl—some other girl who not only was but wanted to be a human being—would. He had no doubt of that. While Kassquit . . . Now she knew more of what being human was all about, and she would go back to hiving among the Lizards.

“I am sorry,” Jonathan said. “I never meant to cause you pain or jealousy. You were the one who wanted to know what Tosevite sexuality was like, and all I ever wanted to do was please you while I showed you.”

“I understand that. And you have pleased me.” Kassquit used an emphatic cough. But then she went on, “You have also shown me that there are times when the pleasure cannot come unmixed with pain and jealousy. From everything I gather about the behavior of wild Tosevites, this is not uncommon among you.”

However alien her background and viewpoint, she wasn’t a fool. She was anything but a fool. Jonathan had discovered that before, and now got his nose rubbed in it. She’d just told him something about the way love worked that he’d never quite figured out for himself. He assumed the posture of respect before her, and then had a devil of a time explaining why.

Armed guards stood outside the compartment housing the Deutsch captive. Kassquit hoped the males would never have to use their weapons; the thought of bullets tearing through walls, through electronics, through hydraulics, through spirits of Emperors past only knew what all, was genuinely terrifying.

She used an artificial fingerclaw to press the recessed button in the wall that opened the door. After it slid aside, she stepped into the cubicle. “I greet you, Johannes Drucker,” she said, pronouncing the alien name as carefully as she could.

“And I greet you, superior female.” The wild Big Ugly stood very straight and shot out his right arm. From what Jonathan Yeager had told her, that was his equivalent of the Race’s posture of respect.

The strange gesture made him seem wilder than Jonathan Yeager. He looked wilder, too. He was hairy all over, with short, thick, brown hair streaked with gray growing on his cheeks and chin as well as the top of his head. No one had given him a razor. And he spoke the Race’s language with an accent different from, and thicker than, Jonathan Yeager’s.

He seemed to be trying not to study her body, which was covered only by the body paint of a psychological researcher’s assistant. Kassquit remembered both Jonathan and Sam Yeager behaving the same way at their first meeting. Coming right out and staring was evidently impolite but difficult to avoid.

He said, “They told me I would another Tosevite visitor be having. They did not bother telling me you would a female be.”

“Tosevite sexes and sexuality are matters of amusement and alarm to the Race, but seldom matters of importance,” Kassquit answered. “And, though I am of Tosevite ancestry, I am not precisely a Tosevite myself. I am a citizen of the Empire.” Pride rang in her voice.

Johannes Drucker said, “I understand the words, but I do not think I understand the meaning behind them.”

“I have been raised in this starship by the Race from earliest hatchlinghood,” Kassquit said. “Until quite recently, I never so much as met wild Big Uglies.” She hardly ever said
Big Uglies
around Jonathan Yeager. When speaking to this much wilder Tosevite, it came out naturally.

“I . . . see,” the captive said. His mouth twisted up at the corners: the Tosevite expression of amusement. “Now that you have started us meeting, what do you think?”

Kassquit couldn’t imitate that expression, try as she would. She answered, “The ones I have met are somewhat less barbarous than I would have expected.”

With a loud, barking laugh, the Deutsch captive said,
“Danke schön
.” Seeing that Kassquit didn’t understand, he returned to the language of the Race: “That means, I thank you very much.”

“You are welcome,” Kassquit answered. Only after the words were out of her mouth did she stop and wonder whether he’d been sarcastic. To cover her confusion, she changed the subject, saying, “I am told you came close to destroying this starship.”

“Yes, that is a truth, superior female,” he agreed.

“Why?” she asked. War, whether carried on by the Race or by Big Uglies, still seemed very strange to her. “No one aboard this ship was trying to do the
Reich
any particular harm. Most males and females here are researchers, not combatants.”

She thought that a paralyzingly effective comment. The wild Big Ugly only shrugged. “Do you think all of the Tosevites in the Deutsch cities on which you dropped explosive-metal bombs were doing nothing but fighting the Race?”

Kassquit hadn’t really thought about that at all. To her, the Deutsche had been nothing but the enemy. Now that Johannes Drucker pointed it out, though, she supposed most of them had just been going on with their lives. That made her examine her own side in a way she hadn’t before. “Why?” she said again.

“Anything that the enemy serves a fair target is,” Johannes Drucker replied. “That is how we fight wars. And we have seen that the Race is not very different. No one invited the Race to come here and try to conquer Tosev 3. Do you think it is any wonder that we as hard as we could fought back?”

“I suppose not,” admitted Kassquit, who hadn’t tried to look at things from the Tosevite point of view. “Do you not think that you would be using explosive-metal bombs on one another if we had not come?”

“We?” The wild Big Ugly raised an eyebrow in what she’d come to recognize as a gesture of irony. “Superior female, you have no scales that I can see.”

“I am still a citizen of the Empire,” Kassquit replied with dignity. “I would rather be a citizen of the Empire than a Tosevite peasant, which I surely would have been had the Race not chosen me.”

“How do you know?” Johannes Drucker asked. “Are you happy here aboard this starship, living with nothing but males and females of the Race? Would you not be happier among your own kind, even as a peasant?”

Kassquit wished he hadn’t asked the question that particular way. The older and the more conscious of her alienness she’d become, the less happy she’d grown. Some of the males and females of the Race were only too willing to rub her snout in that alienness, too. She answered, “How can I know? How does one find an answer to a counterfactual question?”

“Carefully,” the wild Tosevite said. For a moment, Kassquit thought he hadn’t understood. Then she realized he was making a joke. She let her mouth drop open for a moment to show she’d got it. He went on, “Everyone’s life is full of counterfactuals. Suppose I this had done. Suppose I that had not done. What would I be now? Dealing with the things that are real is hard enough.”

That was also a truth. Kassquit made the affirmative gesture. She said, “I am told you do not know what has happened to your mate and your hatchlings. I hope they are well.”

“I thank you,” Johannes Drucker answered. “I wish I knew, one way or the other. Then I would also how to go ahead know. Now I can only at the same time hope and worry.”

“What will you do if they are dead?” Kassquit asked. Not until the question was out did she think to wonder whether she should have asked it. By then, of course, it was too late.

Though still imperfectly familiar with the facial expressions wild Big Uglies used, she was sure Johannes Drucker’s did not show delight. He said, “The only thing I can do then is try to put my life back together one piece at a time. It is not easy, but it happens all the time. It is certainly all the time in the
Reich
happening now.”

“Males and females of the Race are also having to rebuild their lives,” Kassquit pointed out. “And the Race did not start this war. The
Reich
did.”

“No matter who started it, it is over now,” the wild Big Ugly said. “The Race won. The
Reich
lost. Putting the pieces back together is always easier for the winners.”

Was that a truth or only an opinion? Since Kassquit wasn’t sure, she didn’t challenge it. She asked, “If your mate is dead, will you seek another one?”