Aftershocks (25 page)

Mrs. Radofsky cuddled and comforted her daughter till she forgot about the horrific indignity she’d just suffered. “Thank you, Doctor,” she said. “I appreciate that, even if Miriam doesn’t. I want to do everything I can to keep her well. She’s all I’ve got to remember her father by.”

“Oh?” Reuven said.

“He got . . . caught in the rioting last year,” Mrs. Radofsky—the widow Radofsky—said. As Reuven expressed sympathies, she asked Yetta, “And what do I owe you?” Reuven hoped the receptionist would give her a break on the bill, but she didn’t.

The Polish Tosevite named Casimir pointed proudly to the shuttlecraft port. He bowed to Nesseref: not the Race’s posture of respect but, she’d learned, an equivalent the Big Uglies often used. “You sees, superior female?” he said, speaking the language of the Race badly but understandably. “Field is ready for usings.”

“I see.” Nesseref tried to sound happier than she felt. Then she made the affirmative gesture. “Yes, it is ready for use. That is a truth, and I am very glad to see it.”

During the fighting, the Deutsche had done their best to render the shuttlecraft port unusable. By what the males from the conquest fleet said, their best was far better than it had been during the earlier round of combat. They’d plastered it with bomblets from the air, just as the Race might have done. Some of the bomblets were concrete-busters; others were antipersonnel weapons, and had had to be disposed of with great care—they could blow the foot off a male or female of the Race, or, for that matter, off a Big Ugly. Despite the Race’s best efforts, a couple of them had done exactly that. They lurked in the weeds off the edges of the port’s concrete landing area. Nesseref wasn’t altogether sure every single one of them had been disposed of even yet.

And, with resources so scarce after the fighting ended, Casimir’s construction crew had had to repair the landing field with hand tools rather than power machines. Nesseref had never imagined Big Uglies slapping hot asphalt into holes and smacking it down flat with shovels. That gave the shuttlecraft port a curiously mottled appearance, and contributed to her feelings of unease about it.

She had other reasons for feeling uneasy, too. Pointing, she said, “Your patches are not as strong as the concrete they replace—is that not also a truth?”

“It are, superior female,” Casimir admitted ungrammatically. “But the patchings will do well enough. One of this days, make all pretties again. Pretty not importants. Neat not importants. Working are importants.”

“There is some truth in what you say,” Nesseref admitted.

“Are much truthings in what I say,” Casimir answered.

Nesseref didn’t want to admit that. The locals’ whole way of doing things struck her as slipshod. They had a habit of fixing things just well enough to get by for a while: that well and no better. As a result, they were always mending, tinkering, repairing, where the Race would have done things right the first time and saved itself a lot of trouble.

Sometimes, work that was fast and sloppy, work that would last for a while but not too long, was good enough. Nesseref suspected that was the case here. Better repairs would come, but they could wait. For now, the shuttlecraft port was usable.

A male of the Race waved to Nesseref from the control building, off to one side of the patched concrete. She skittered off toward him without so much as turning an eye turret back toward Casimir. She wouldn’t have been so rude to a member of the Race, but that thought didn’t cross her mind till she’d gone a long way from the Big Ugly. She shrugged as she trotted along. It wasn’t as if he were a particular friend, as Mordechai Anielewicz was.

“Well, Shuttlecraft Pilot, are we operational?” the male asked. “Does everything meet with your approval?”

“Senior Port Technician, I believe we are,” Nesseref answered. “The field is not all it could be, but it can be used for operations.”

“Good,” the technician said. “This was also my opinion, but I am glad to have it confirmed by one who will actually fly a shuttlecraft.”

“It will be good to have shuttlecraft coming in and going out again, too,” Nesseref said. “This subregion has been cut off from direct contact with our space fleet for too long now. Air transport is all very well, but we did not come to Tosev 3 in aircraft.”

“Indeed,” the shuttlecraft technician said. “Unlimited access to space and its resources and the mobility it gives us are our principal remaining advantages over the Big Uglies.”

“I suppose you are right, but, if you are, that is a genuinely depressing thought,” Nesseref said. The technician only shrugged. Maybe that meant he didn’t find it depressing. More likely, it meant he did, but didn’t know what the Race could do about it. Nesseref shrugged. She didn’t know what the Race could do about it, either.

The first shuttlecraft that had come into western Poland since the fighting stopped landed the next day. It disgorged a new regional subadministrator to replace Bunim, who was now only radioactive dust. The female, whose name was Orssev, looked around in disapproval verging on horror. “What a miserable place to find oneself,” she said. “Is it always so cold here?”

Listening to her carp, Nesseref began to understand why males from the conquest fleet complained about males and females from the colonization fleet. Nesseref was a female from the colonization fleet herself, of course, but even she could see that Orssev was not inclined to give Poland a fair chance.

And she knew things Orssev didn’t. “Superior female,” she said, “this is the end of the period of relatively
good
weather in this area. We shall have most of a year of truly bad, truly freezing weather on the way—a year of Home’s, I mean.”

“Tell me you are joking,” Orssev said. “Please tell me so. What did I do to deserve such a fate?”

Nesseref didn’t know the answer to that question, either, and wasn’t much interested in finding out. Orssev was plainly a prominent female, or she wouldn’t have had the rank of regional subadministrator. But she might well have got her post here because she’d offended someone even more prominent; Poland’s weather was not of the sort to which administrators were drawn. And Nesseref could not tell a lie about that. “I am sorry, but I spoke the truth,” she said. “Winter in this subregion is unpleasant in the extreme.”

“I shall protest to Fleetlord Reffet,” the new regional subadministrator said. “I am being used with undeserved cruelty.”

“I wish you good fortune,” Nesseref said, as neutrally as she could. She didn’t want to come right out and call Orssev an idiot addled in her eggshell; offending the prominent was rarely a good idea. But, however prominent she was, Orssev wasn’t very bright. The males of the conquest fleet, not those from the colonization fleet, kept administrative appointments firmly in their fingerclaws. That made sense; they knew the Big Uglies better than the colonists did. Nesseref didn’t think the fleetlord of the colonization fleet would be able to get Orssev’s assignment changed, even if he were inclined to do so.

Orssev went into the control building, presumably to start pulling whatever wires she could to try to leave Poland. The shuttlecraft pilot who’d brought her down also went into the control building, which meant the shuttlecraft wasn’t scheduled to fly out again right away. Nesseref hoped it also meant she would be assigned to take it wherever it did need to go next.

Technicians swarmed over the shuttlecraft, inspecting and adjusting. Lorries rolled out and topped up its hydrogen and oxygen tanks. No one shouted Nesseref’s name and told her to be prepared at short notice. She concluded she could go back to her apartment and get ready before she was summoned to duty once more.

Getting ready consisted largely of making sure Orbit had enough food and water to keep him happy while she was gone. The tsiongi ran in his wheel. He’d run in it enough to give it a squeak. Nesseref thought that reprehensible; it seemed more like the slipshod manufacturing Big Uglies might do than anything she would have expected from the Race. She sprayed the hub of the exercise wheel with a lubricant. Orbit didn’t care for the odor, and hopped out and lashed his tail till it diminished.

No sooner had Nesseref put away the container of lubricant than the telephone hissed. “I greet you,” she said.

“And I greet you, Shuttlecraft Pilot,” a male from the shuttlecraft port replied. “Your first assignment has come in.”

“I am prepared,” she answered—the only possible response from a pilot. “Where am I to go?”

“This continental mass, the eastern subregion known as China,” the male said. “Burn parameters and time are already in the shuttlecraft’s computer. Anticipated launch time is—” He named the moment.

“I shall be there,” Nesseref said. “Do I have a passenger, or will I fly this mission by myself?”

“You have a passenger,” the male at the port answered. “She is a physician named Selana. Her specialty is skin fungi: Tosevite bacteria and viruses do not trouble us, but some of these organisms find us tasty. This problem appears to be more severe in China than elsewhere.”

“Very well,” said Nesseref, who thanked the spirits of Emperors past that such fungi had never troubled her. She snatched up the small bag she always took on shuttlecraft flights—since she didn’t use cloth wrappings, her needs while on a journey were less than those a Big Ugly would have had in similar circumstances.

The jolt of acceleration, the weightlessness that followed, felt like old friends that had been away too long. Once weightlessness began, she had a chance to make small talk with Selana. “Why are these skin fungi so common in China, Senior Physician?” she asked.

“I believe it is the astonishing amount of excrement in everyday use there,” the other female answered. “The local Big Uglies use it for manure and fuel and sometimes, mixed with mud, as a building material as well. Facilities for disinfecting bodily waste, as you may imagine from that, are for all practical purposes nonexistent.”

“I am sorry I asked,” Nesseref said. Weightlessness did not nauseate members of the Race, as it sometimes did Tosevites, but disgust could do the job. Another thought occurred to her. “How do any Tosevites raised in such an environment survive? Their burden of disease must be far worse than ours.”

“It is, and a great many of them do not survive,” Selana said. “This takes me back to the most primitive days of the Race, at the very dawn of ancientest history. We once lived something like this, though the greater abundance of water in China creates a more unsanitary situation than we ever knew over such a wide area.”

Nesseref did not want to believe that the Race had ever lived in such close conjunction to filth. Such a thought would damage the sense of superiority she felt toward the Big Uglies. She said, “Spirits of Emperors past be praised that we do not live in such appalling conditions any more.”

“Truth,” Selana said, and added an emphatic cough. “But, here on Tosev 3, we are forced to do so because the natives do so. This creates difficulties of its own.”

“Senior Physician,” Nesseref said, “the Big Uglies do nothing but create difficulties.” Selana did not argue with her.

 
7

Having got to Greifswald, Johannes Drucker rather wished he hadn’t. The town where he and his family had lived hadn’t taken an explosive-metal bomb, but it had been heavily fought over. And nearby Peenemünde and Stralsund and Rostock had taken any number of hits from explosive-metal weapons, so the radioactivity level remained high.

Few people still dwelt among the ruins. The ones who did might have slipped back in time several hundred years. Instead of coal or gas, they burned wood from the wrecked buildings all around them. They had no running water. They stank, and so did the city.

The neighborhood where the Druckers had lived was even more ruinous than the rest of the town. No one seemed to live there these days; gangs of scavengers prowled through the wreckage, after whatever they could find. Nobody admitted to hearing of Drucker or his family.

“Try the Red Cross shelters, pal,” one heavily armed forager told him. “Maybe you’ll have some luck there.”

“Try the graveyards,” the forager’s sidekick added. “Plenty of new people staying there these days.” He laughed. So did his comrade.

Drucker wanted to kill them both. He had a pistol, too, a comforting weight on his right hip. But the ruffians looked very alert. He gave a curt nod and walked off through the rubble-strewn streets.

Checking the Red Cross shelters was actually a good idea. Drucker had done that every time he passed one on the long road up from Nuremberg. But, even having done so, he knew too well that he might have missed his family. He couldn’t go through the endless tents and huts one by one looking for Käthe and Heinrich and Claudia and Adolf. He had to rely on the records in each camp headquarters, and the records were in a most shocking state of disarray—anyone who expected the usual German efficiency, as he had, was out of luck.

It’s the war,
he thought. At last—and for the first time since Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhelm I unified Germany—the
Reich
had run into a catastrophe too large for it to cope with. Surviving from day to day took precedence over keeping the files that would have made administering the state over the long haul so much easier. Drucker understood that without liking it. It made his life too difficult for him to like it, even a little.

Checking the graveyards also wasn’t the worst idea in the world, he realized glumly. Or it wouldn’t have been, if so many bodies hadn’t been bulldozed or just flung into mass graves without headstones of any sort—and if so many others didn’t still lie under rubble, and if so many hadn’t simply been vaporized.

Someone rode past on a bicycle—the way things were now, a sign of prosperity. The man knew how valuable that bicycle was, too; he had an assault rifle slung on his back, and looked extremely ready to use it. Drucker called out to him: “Excuse me, but where is the Red Cross shelter closest to town?”

“North,” the man answered. “On the road to Stralsund, not quite halfway there, not far from the damned Lizards’ camp.” He started to pedal on, but then grudged a few more words: “I hope you find whoever you’re looking for.”

“Thanks,” Drucker said. “So do I.”

He trudged up the road. To his right, the gray, ugly Baltic rolled up the flat, muddy beach and then sullenly retreated again. He smelled salt water and stale seaweed and dead fish: the odors of home. And, when he got to the shelter in the late afternoon, he smelled ordure and unwashed humanity, the same stinks he’d known in every camp and in every town on his way up from Bavaria.

More Lizard troopers prowled around this Red Cross shelter than he’d seen at most of the others. They looked jumpier and more alert than the males he’d seen elsewhere, too. He came up to one of them and said, “I greet you,” in the language of the Race.

“And I greet you,” the Lizard answered. It wasn’t much of a greeting; the male looked ready to shoot first and ask questions later, if at all. “What do you want?” His hissing voice was hard with suspicion.

“I am looking for my mate and hatchlings, from whom I am long separated,” Drucker said. The answer, and the fluency with which he used the Race’s language, made the Lizard relax a little. He went on, “And I am also curious why you watch the refugees in this particular camp so closely.”

“Why? I will tell you why,” the male said. “Because there are many Deutsch soldiers here, males against whom we fought in Poland. We do not trust them. We have no great reason to trust them.”

“I see,” Drucker said slowly. He nodded. He’d been running into occupation troops up till now: Lizards who’d come into the
Reich
after the surrender, and who hadn’t done any fighting beforehand. But the males here had been combat soldiers. No wonder they didn’t trust anything or anybody. Drucker risked one more question: “Where is the administrative center for this camp?”

“That way, where the flag flies,” the Lizard answered, pointing with the muzzle of his weapon. “You may proceed.”

“I thank you,” Johannes Drucker said. The Lizard didn’t wish him any sort of luck finding his family. Some of that, no doubt, was because Lizards didn’t think in terms of families. And the rest? He was an enemy. Why should a male of the Race waste any sympathy on him?

He was just coming up to the large tent above which the Red Cross flag flew when a man not far from his own age rode up on a bicycle. The fellow carried an impressive collection of lethal hardware. He swung down from the bicycle, grunted and stretched, and started to walk it into the tent.

A woman standing in the entranceway exclaimed, “You can’t do that! It is forbidden!”

“Too bad,” the man answered in German flavored by Polish and something else. “I’m not going to have it stolen. If you don’t like it, that’s rough.”

“He’s right,” Drucker said. “There’s no place to chain it up out here, and it’ll disappear without a trace if he just leaves it.”

“Most irregular,” the woman sniffed. She didn’t seem to see that things were different in the
Reich
nowadays. But, after another glance at the weaponry festooning the other fellow, she stopped arguing.

“Thanks, pal,” the stranger said to Drucker. “Appreciate it. Some people have trouble getting the idea that times have changed through their thick heads.”

After a moment, Drucker placed the man’s secondary accent. He’d heard it before, thicker, in Poland and the Soviet Union before the Lizards landed. Yiddish, that was it. “You’re a Jew,” he blurted.

With an ironic bow, the other man nodded. “And you’re a German. I love you, too,” he said. “Mordechai Anielewicz, at your service. I’m trying to find my family after some of you Nazi bastards hauled them out of Poland.”

All Drucker said was, “I’m trying to find my family, too. They were in Greifswald, but they aren’t any more, and not much of the town is left.” He paused, staring at the other man. “Mordechai Anielewicz? Jesus: I know you. A million years ago”—actually, back in the first round of fighting against the Race—“I was Colonel Heinrich Jäger’s panzer driver.” He gave his own name.

“Were
you?” Anielewicz’s eyes narrowed.
“Gottenyu,
maybe you were. And if you were, maybe you’re not quite a Nazi bastard after all. Maybe. My younger son is named for Heinrich Jäger.”

“My older son is,” Drucker said. “What happened to him after that Russian pilot took him off to Poland?” He didn’t mention how he and his fellow tank crewmen had killed several SS men to make Jäger’s escape possible.

“He married her,” the Jew answered. “He’s dead now. You know the explosive-metal bomb Skorzeny tried to set off inside Lodz? We stopped that, he and Ludmila and I. We all breathed in some nerve gas doing it, too. It hit him hardest; he was never quite right afterwards, and he died twelve, thirteen years ago.”

“I’m sorry to hear it,” Drucker said, “but thanks for telling me. He was a good man—one of the best officers I ever served under—and I always wondered what happened to him once he got away.”

“He was one of the best.” Mordechai Anielewicz eyed Drucker. “You drove a panzer then. What have you been doing since?”

“I stayed in the
Wehrmacht,
” Drucker replied. “I ended up in the upper stage of an A-45. The Lizards captured me after I shot two missiles at one of their starships. If they hadn’t knocked both of them down, I don’t suppose they would have bothered taking me alive, but they did. Eventually, they set me down in Nuremberg. I had a devil of a time getting here, but I managed. Now if I could manage to find my wife and kids . . .”

Anielewicz looked at him as if he’d failed a test. “You served under Heinrich Jäger, and you stayed in the
Wehrmacht?
He had the sense to get away.”

“Don’t get high and mighty with me,” Drucker snapped. “I know something about what the
Reich
was doing to Jews. I didn’t do any of that. I had it done to me, in fact.”

“You had it done to you?” Anielewicz snarled. “You son of a bitch, you”—he cursed in Yiddish and Polish—“what do you know about it?” He looked ready to grab one of his weapons and start shooting. Drucker had thought him a dangerous man a generation before, and saw no reason to change his mind now. He slid his legs into a position from which he could better open fire, too.

But, instead of grabbing for his pistol, he answered Anielewicz in a low, urgent voice: “I’ll tell you what I know about it. The SS grabbed my wife because they got wind she had a Jewish grandmother, that’s what.” He’d never thought he would tell that to anyone, but who in the
Reich
ever imagined talking with a Jew?

And it worked. Mordechai Anielewicz relaxed, suddenly and completely. “All right, then,” he said. “You
do
know something.” He cocked his head to one side. “From what you’ve said, you got her back. How’d you manage that? I know a thing or two about the SS.”

“How?” Drucker chuckled mirthlessly. “I told you—I was an A-45 pilot. I had connections. My CO was General Dornberger—he’s
Führer
now, wherever the devil he is. I had enough pull to bring it off. Officially, Käthe got a clean pedigree.”

“If you have pull, you should use it,” Anielewicz agreed. His face clouded again. “Back in the 1940s, there were an awful lot of Jews who didn’t have any.”

Drucker didn’t know how to reply to that. All he could do was nod. He hadn’t thought much about Jews, or had much use for them, before Käthe got in trouble with the blackshirts. At last, he said, “The only thing I want to do now is find out if my family is alive, and get them back if they are.”

“Fair enough. We’re in the same boat there, no matter how we got dropped into it.” Anielewicz pointed at Drucker. “If you know the
Führer,
why aren’t you using your pull now to have him help you look for your kin?”

“Two main reasons, I suppose,” Drucker answered after a little thought. “I wanted to do it myself, and . . . I’m not sure there’s anyone to find.”

“Yes, knowing they’re dead would be pretty final, wouldn’t it?” Anielewicz’s voice was grim. “Still and all, if you’ve got a card left to play, don’t you think it’s time to play it?”

Drucker considered, then slowly nodded. He raised an eyebrow. “And if I try to find out for myself, maybe I should try to find out for you, too?”

“That thought did cross my mind,” Mordechai Anielewicz allowed.
“I’ve
got pull with the Lizards, myself. Shall we trade?” Drucker considered again, but not for long. He stuck out his hand. Anielewicz shook it.

Sam Yeager had never imagined that a jail could be so comfortable. His place of confinement didn’t look like a jail. It looked like, and was, a farmhouse somewhere in . . . nobody had told him exactly where he was, but it had to be Colorado or New Mexico. He could watch television, though no station came in real well. He could read Denver and Albuquerque papers. He could do almost anything he wanted—except go outside or write a letter or use a computer. His guards were very polite but very firm.

“Why are you keeping me here?” he demanded of them one morning, for about the five hundredth time.

“Orders,” replied the one who answered to Fred.

Yeager had heard that about five hundred times, too. “You can’t keep me forever,” he said, though he had no evidence that that was true. “What will you do with me?”