Aftershocks (23 page)

“What could he have learned that was so dreadful?” Straha asked, now seriously alarmed.

His driver’s mobile Tosevite face twisted into an expression Straha recognized as annoyance. “I do not know,” the Big Ugly said, adding, “I do not want to learn. It is none of my affair.” Now pride filled his voice. “I am not like Yeager—I obey my orders. If my superiors were to order me to put my hand in the fire, I would do it.” To show he meant what he said, he took out a cigarette lighter and flicked the wheel to produce a flame.

“Put that thing away,” Straha exclaimed. “I believe you. You do not need to demonstrate.” He was speaking the truth, too. Big Uglies, far more than the Race, reveled in such displays of fanaticism.

Another click closed the lighter. “You see, Shiplord? You are my superior, and I obey you, too.” The driver laughed again.

“I thank you.” Straha tried to hold irony out of his voice. Which of them was the superior varied from day to day, sometimes from moment to moment. Straha’s rank meant little here; his utility to the American government counted for more, and his driver, these days, was much more consistently useful than he was.

The Big Ugly dropped into English: “I’m going outside to fiddle with the car for a while. I can’t get the timing quite the way I like it. These hydrogen engines are a lot harder to monkey with than the ones that use gasoline.”

“I hope you enjoy yourself, Gordon,” Straha answered, also in English. Some males and females of the Race had the same fondness for tinkering with machinery. Straha had never understood it himself. Tinkering with the way males and females worked had always been more interesting to him.

He went to the computer and turned it on. Using the Race’s network to send and receive electronic messages was risky. He was only illicitly present on the network; the more he did anything but passively read, the more likely he was to draw the system’s notice and to be expelled from it. But this was the one safe way he had to communicate with Sam Yeager. Sometimes risks had to be calculated. His telephone might be monitored, and so might the Big Ugly’s. The same went for the mail.

As I have warned you before,
he wrote,
I am once more given to understand that the authorities from your not-empire are seriously concerned with your putting your snout where they wish it would not go. I trust you will do nothing so rash as to cause them to have to punish you.
He studied the message, made the affirmative gesture, and sent it. When he walked out to the front room once more, he saw his driver still bent over the engine of his motorcar.

Sam Yeager usually responded very promptly to his electronic messages. Here, though, a couple of days went by with no answer. That puzzled Straha, but he could hardly ask anyone what it meant.

When a reply did come, he knew at once that Yeager had not written it. His friend had some odd turns of phrase, but handled the language of the Race about as well as any male. This message was formal and tentative, and had a couple of errors in it that Sam Yeager wouldn’t have made.
My father has not come to home for several days now,
it read.
We have a message that new duties call him away, but we have not heared from him. We are worried. Jonathan Yeager.

Straha stared at that. He stared at it most unhappily, wondering how much trouble Sam Yeager was in and whether his Tosevite friend still remained alive to be in trouble. His driver had known what he was talking about. But if he had intended Straha to deliver another message, it came too late.

And Yeager had delivered a message to Straha. If the Big Ugly disappeared, the ex-shiplord was to read the papers with which he’d been entrusted. He’d wanted to do that ever since he got them. Now that he could, his eagerness felt oddly diminished. Some things, he discovered, were more desirable before they were attained than afterwards.

And, now that he felt free to look at those papers, he had to wait for the chance. His driver stuck annoyingly close to home for the next several days, as if he knew something was going on under his snout but couldn’t put a fingerclaw on what.

Eventually, though, the Tosevite discovered errands he had to run. When he drove off, Straha hurried to his bookshelves and pulled out a fat volume full of pictures of the Fessekk Pass region of Home, one of the most scenic spots on the whole planet. The volume was a gift from a male of the colonization fleet who’d visited Straha; he’d glanced at it once and set it aside. But its size made it perfect for concealing the papers Yeager had given him. His driver, who cared nothing for the Fessekk Pass, had walked by it hundreds of times without paying it the least attention. So, for that matter, had Straha.

He sighed as he opened the envelope. The papers inside were liable to be the only memorial his Tosevite friend would ever have. He took them out and began to read.

They were, of course, in English. Straha understood the spoken language well enough. He read it only haltingly. Its spelling drove him mad. Why did this set of Big Uglies need several different characters to symbolize the same sound, and why did they let the same character represent several different sounds?
Because they are egg-addled idiots,
Straha thought resentfully.

But, after a little while, as he realized just what Sam Yeager had given him, he stopped fretting about the vagaries of English spelling. He stopped fretting about anything at all. He read on, spellbound, to the last page.

That last page was a note from Yeager.
If you are reading this, I am dead or in deep trouble,
the Tosevite wrote in Straha’s language.
If you can get this to the Race, I expect it will be plenty for them to let you back into their territory in spite of everything you have done. I know you have often been unhappy here in the United States. Everyone deserves as much happiness as he can get. Grab with both hands.
The signature below was written twice, once in English, once in the characters of the Race.

“He is right,” Straha whispered in slow astonishment. “With this, I truly could restore my good name.” He had not the tiniest bit of doubt about it.

He’d dreamt of returning to the eggshell of the Race since very shortly after defecting to the United States. He had known it would take a miracle as long as Atvar remained fleetlord. Now, here in his hands, he held a miracle.

The next question was, did he want to use it? He had never imagined that question might arise with a miracle, but here it was. He could take this to the Race’s consulate in Los Angeles and be assured of reconciliation, forgiveness, acceptance. He could see the new towns. He could live in one of them, in the society of his own kind.

But what else would happen if he did?

After the little scaly devils’ prison camp, Liu Han didn’t mind living in a peasant village, not in the least. She’d hated the idea after living in Peking for a good many years. Nieh Ho-T’ing laughed at her when she said that out loud. He answered, “It proves everything is in the yardstick you use to measure it.”

“You’re probably right,” she answered. “What yardstick do we use to measure the little scaly devils’ imperialism?”

That got his attention, and also his thought. Slowly, he said, “In China, they are worse than the Japanese and worse than the round-eyed devils from Europe. What other yardstick is there?”

“None, I suppose,” Liu Han admitted, not much liking the thought. “And how do we measure our struggle against the little devils?”

To her surprise, Nieh brightened. He said, “There I have good news.”

“Tell me,” Liu Han said eagerly. “We could use some good news.”

“Truth,” he said in the little devils’ language. Liu Han made a face at him, almost as if they were still lovers. Laughing, Nieh Ho-T’ing returned to Chinese. “Our fraternal socialist comrades in the Soviet Union have seen fit to increase their arms shipments to the People’s Liberation Army. They have seen fit to increase them by quite a bit, in fact.”

Liu Han clapped her hands. “That
is
good news! Why, when the Russians have kept us half starved for so long?”

“Well, I don’t know for certain. I don’t think anyone knows for certain what goes through Molotov’s beady little mind,” Nieh said, which made Liu Han laugh in turn. The People’s Liberation Army officer went on, “I meant that seriously. Mao understood Stalin; he could think along with him. But Molotov?” He shook his head. “Molotov is inscrutable. I’ll tell you what I think, though.”

“Please.” Liu Han nodded.

“Remember not long ago the Soviet Union gave Finland an ultimatum? And the Finns, instead of knuckling under to the Russians, ran under the wing of the scaly devils like a duckling running to its mother?”

Finland, as far as Liu Han was concerned, was so far away, it might as well have been on the world the little scaly devils came from. She wasn’t sure she’d even heard of it till the Soviet Union pressured it. Even so . . . She nodded again. “I understand. This is the Russians’ revenge. If they cannot get what they want from Finland”—she had to pronounce the unfamiliar name with care—“they will do what they can do to make the little devils sorry elsewhere—and we happen to be the elsewhere.”

“Exactly so.” Nieh eyed her with respect. “The Party was lucky when you joined us and got an education. You see very clearly; you would have wasted your life as an oppressed peasant woman.”

But Liu Han laughed at him this time. “This has nothing to do with education. If a strong peasant loses a quarrel with a stronger one, what does he do? Not fight him again—he would lose again, and lose face doing it. No: he sows hatred against his enemy in the other people in the village, so the other man will have trouble wherever he goes.”

“Eee!”
Nieh said, a high-pitched sound of glee. “You are right. You are so very right. That’s just what the Russians are doing. So Comrade Molotov thinks like a peasant, does he? I’m sure he would be offended to hear it.”

“What kind of weapons are we getting?” Liu Han was sure that would be answered at the next Central Committee meeting, but she didn’t want to wait. She had one particular question: “Will the Russians send us anything that we can use to wreck the scaly devils’ landcruisers?” That last was a word Chinese had adapted from the language of the Race; the Japanese had had only a few of the fearsome vehicles, while those of the scaly devils roamed everywhere, deadly and all but unstoppable.

Nieh Ho-T’ing was smiling again. “Yes. For once, the Red Army truly is opening its storehouse to us. The Russians are sending us plenty of their mines with the wooden casings, the ones even the little devils have trouble detecting. Bury those on roadways and in fields, and the landcruisers will be most unhappy.”

“Good,” Liu Han said. “They deserve to be unhappy. But mines are not enough. What about rockets, so we can take the fight to the little devils instead of waiting for them to come to us?”

“You know what the Russians always say about those things,” Nieh answered. “That has not changed while we were imprisoned.”

Liu Han made another face, a sour one this time. “They say they cannot send us anything like that, because it would let the little scaly devils know where the weapons came from. But I thought you said they truly opened their storehouse to us.”

“They did.” Nieh was grinning again. “After the fighting in Europe, they somehow got hold of a lot of German antilandcruiser rockets. I don’t know how—maybe these were rockets the Germans gave them instead of surrendering them to the little devils, or maybe they got them from one of the German puppet regimes. However they got them, they have them—and they are sending them to us.”

“Ahhh.” Liu Han bowed to Nieh as if he’d been responsible for getting the rockets rather than just for giving her the news about them. “Are these weapons only promised, or are they really on the way?”

“The first caravan has already crossed the Mongolian desert,” he answered. “The weapons, or some of them, are in our hands.”

Liu Han did not have sharp teeth like a tiger’s, but her smile would have sent any tiger with a drop of sense scurrying back into the undergrowth. She’d been fighting the little scaly devils most of her adult life, fighting them with a hatred not only ideological and nationalistic but personal. If the People’s Liberation Army had the chance to strike them a heavy blow, that delighted her on every one of those levels.

Before she could say as much, a woman’s cry of anger and, a moment later, a man’s cry of pain burst from a peasant hut not far away. She whirled in surprise. So did Nieh Ho-T’ing. A heartbeat later, the man himself burst from the hut, running for all he was worth. He might have run faster had he not been yanking up his trousers with one hand.

“Ten million little devils!” Liu Han exclaimed. “Who has Hsia Shou-Tao tried to outrage now?”

No sooner had she spoken than her own daughter came out of that hut. Liu Mei was carrying a chamber pot. Her expressionless face was even more frightening than it would have been had fury filled it. She flung the pot with both hands, as a man might fling a heavy stone. The pot flew through the air and smashed against the back of Hsia’s head. He fell forward onto his face and lay motionless, as if shot. Blood poured from his scalp. So did urine and night soil; the chamber pot had been full.

Eyes blazing in her dead-calm countenance, Liu Mei said, “He tried to take what I did not want to give him. First I stamped on his foot, then I kicked him, then I did this, and now I’m going to kill him.”

“Wait!” Nieh Ho-T’ing got between Hsia Shou-Tao and Liu Mei, who plainly meant exactly what she’d said: she’d drawn a knife and was advancing on the officer and Communist Party dignitary she’d felled.

Hsia groaned and tried to roll over. Liu Han had wondered if the flying chamber pot smashed in the back of his skull. Evidently not.
Too bad,
she thought. “You know how he is with women,” she said to Nieh. “You know he’s always been that way with women. He tried to outrage me, too, you know, back in Peking not long after the little devils came. I’m not pretty enough for him any more, so now what does he do? He tries to molest my daughter. If you ask me, he deserves whatever Liu Mei gives him.”