Aftershocks (43 page)

Fury filled her in place of despair. What did she have to look forward to in years to come? This cubicle. Her own fingers. Memories of a brief, too brief, contact with another of her own kind. How long, how often, could she replay those memories in her mind before they started to wear out or wear thin?

“It is not fair,” she repeated, this time in an altogether different tone of voice. Anger burned in her. She added an emphatic cough.

Had she had Jonathan Yeager there before her, she would have given him a piece of her mind—a large, jagged-edged piece. He’d come up here, taken his sexual pleasure with her, and then gone down to the surface of Tosev 3 to resume his ordinary life? How dared he?

She wondered if any female Big Ugly had ever been betrayed in the way she was since the species evolved such intelligence as it had. She doubted it. Jonathan Yeager had surely devised a unique way to play on the affections of one who was, one who could not help being, naive.

She hurried to the computer to let him know exactly what she thought of him, but refrained at the last minute. For one thing, she didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of knowing he’d succeeded in wounding her. For another, she still esteemed his father. She didn’t want Sam Yeager reading a nasty message intended for his hatchling. What his hatchling did was not his fault. He surely never would have done such a thing with—or to—a female.

But what did that leave her? Nothing but sullen acceptance. Nothing but living on memories. That wasn’t good enough.

Kassquit snapped her fingers. Jonathan Yeager had taught her to do it. She ignored that for now, enjoying the small sound for its own sake. “I can have another male brought up from the surface of Tosev 3. I can have my own pleasure.”

I shall have to talk with Ttomalss about that,
she thought.
He had better not tell me no, either.

Even so, she wondered if it would be the same. Because Jonathan Yeager was the first, he was the one against whom she would measure all later comers. And she had given him her affection without reservation; she hadn’t known to do anything else. Would she do that again? Of itself, her hand shaped the negative gesture.
I would not be so foolish twice.

She kicked at the metal floor to her cubicle. If she brought a male up for sexual pleasure alone, if no affection was involved, what could he give her that her fingers could not? What except betrayal?

“I have had enough betrayal,” she said. Would other male Big Uglies prove as treacherous, as devious, as Jonathan Yeager? It wasn’t impossible.

That brought her back to where she’d begun: alone, with only her own hand for company. She hadn’t minded that—too much—before meeting Jonathan Yeager. He’d shown her something of the spectrum of Tosevite sexually related emotions . . . and now he was lavishing them on this Karen Culpepper female.

Kassquit looked in the mirror again. To her relief, the blotches and swelling were fading. Soon, they would be gone. No one would be able to note any outward signs of distress on her. But the distress was there, whether visible or not.

“What am I going to do?” she asked the metal walls. She got no more answer there than anywhere else.

I might have done better never to have met wild Big Uglies in the flesh at all,
she thought.
I certainly might have done better never to have started a sexual relationship with one of them. I could have gone on doing my best to emulate a female of the Race. I would not have known about some of the emotions accessible to Big Uglies, emotions for which the Race has no real equivalents. I had no real equivalents, only a dim awareness that I felt things Ttomalss did not. Now I understand much more, now these areas have opened up in my mind—and I cannot use them. Would it not have been better that they stayed closed?

She had no real answer for that. She could not go back into the eggshell that had held her before. But she could not use the new areas, enjoy the new areas, as long as she was alone. Even if a new Big Ugly male came up to the starship, even if he was everything Jonathan Yeager had been and more . . . sooner or later, he would go back down to Tosev 3, and she would be alone, cut off, once more.

“What am I going to do?” she repeated. Again, no answer.

“Congratulations,” Johannes Drucker told Mordechai Anielewicz. “Congratulations,” he repeated to Anielewicz’s family. A wife, two boys, a girl—achingly like his own family, though Anielewicz’s girl was the eldest, where his Claudia was sandwiched between Heinrich and Adolf.

They didn’t particularly look like Jews, or what he imagined Jews looking like. He suspected German propaganda of exaggerating noses and lips and chins. They just looked like . . . people. Bertha Anielewicz, Mordechai’s wife, was plain till she smiled. When she did, though, she turned very pretty. When she was younger, she’d probably been gorgeous when she smiled.

“I hope you find your wife and children, too,” she told him. She spoke Yiddish, not German. The gutturals were harsh and the vowel sounds strange, but he understood well enough.

“Thanks,” he said. Hearing Yiddish reminded him how strange it was to be standing outside a Red Cross shelter—another Red Cross shelter—near Greifswald talking with five Jews. Before this last war, it wouldn’t have been strange; it would have been impossible, unimaginable. A lot of things that would have been unimaginable a few months before now seemed commonplace. “What will you do?” he asked the Anielewiczes, trying his best not to be jealous of their good fortune. “Go home?”

Mordechai laughed. “Home? We haven’t got one, not with Lodz blown off the map. We’ll find something back in Poland, I expect. Right this minute, I have no idea what. Something.”

“I’m sure you will,” Drucker agreed. No, staying away from jealousy wasn’t easy. “You’ll help pick up the pieces back there. And I’ll help pick up the pieces here . . . one way or another.” He didn’t want to dwell on that. Holding on to hope came hard.

Anielewicz set a hand on his shoulder. Part of him wanted to shake it off, but he let it stay. The Jewish fighting leader said, “Don’t quit, that’s all. Never quit.”

He could afford to say that. He could quit now—he’d found his needle in a haystack. But he wasn’t wrong, either. If he hadn’t scoured this corner of Prussia, he never would have come up with his wife and sons and daughter. “I know,” Drucker said. “I’ll go on. I have to. What else can I do? Kill myself like the American president? Not likely.”

He tried to imagine Adolf Hitler killing himself if faced by some disaster.
Not likely
rang again in his mind. The first
Führer
would surely have grabbed some soldier’s Mauser and kept firing at his foes till he finally fell. Suicide was the coward’s way out.

Heinrich Anielewicz—like Drucker’s own Heinrich, named for the Heinrich Jäger they’d both admired—was holding his pet beffel. The little animal from Home swiveled one eye turret toward Drucker. It opened its mouth. “Beep!” Pancer said, almost as if it were a squeeze toy. The corners of Drucker’s mouth couldn’t help twitching up a few millimeters. That really was one of the most preposterously friendly sounds he’d ever heard.

Heinrich Anielewicz scratched the beffel between the eye turrets and under the chin. Pancer liked that, and said, “Beep!” again. The boy spoke to it in Polish. Drucker had no idea what he said; he’d never known more than a handful of words in the language, and he’d long since forgotten those. Then Heinrich Anielewicz switched to Yiddish and spoke to him: “If it hadn’t been for Pancer, you know, we might never have been found.”

“Yes, I do know that. I was with your father when he heard him,” Drucker answered. “I didn’t know what the noise was. But he did.”

“You could have knocked me over with a feather,” Mordechai Anielewicz said. “It was luck, nothing else. But sometimes, when you haven’t got anything else, you’ll take luck.”

“You don’t just take it. If you get it, you grab it with both hands,” Drucker said, the soldier in him speaking. Had Bertha and Miriam Anielewicz not been there, he might have put it more earthily.

“Listen,” Mordechai Anielewicz said. “I’ve talked to that male named Gorppet, the one who had Pancer. He knows I’m a Big Ugly”—he used the language of the Race to say that—“the Lizards want to keep happy. I’ve asked him to give you whatever help he can. He’s an intelligence officer, too, so whatever they hear, he can get his hands on it. I hope that does you some good.”

“Thanks.” Drucker nodded. “That’s—damned good of you, all things considered.”

“All things considered.” Anielewicz savored the phrase. “There’s a lot to consider, all right,
Herr Oberst.
There’s the
Reich
you fought for. But then there’s your wife and your children. And you got Jäger loose from the SS, you tell me, and if you hadn’t done that, Lodz would have gone up in 1944 instead of this spring. Bertha and I would be dead, and the first round of fighting might have gone on and ended up wrecking the whole world. So I didn’t spend a lot of sleepless nights worrying about this one.”

“Thanks,” Drucker said again. That didn’t seem to be enough. He stuck out his hand. Anielewicz shook it. Bertha Anielewicz hugged him, which took him by surprise. No woman had done that since. . . since the last time he’d seen Käthe, before the fighting started up. Too long. God, too long. Roughly, he said, “I’m going into the camp now.”

“Good luck,” they chorused behind him.

He’d seen too many refugee camps by now for this one to hold any surprises. Tents. People in shabby clothes. More shabby clothes hanging out as laundry. The smell of latrines and unwashed bodies. The dull, apathetic look of men and women who didn’t think things would or could ever get better again.

In the middle of the camp, as in the middle of all these camps, stood a tent with a Red Cross flag flying above it. The men and women—they’d be mostly women—in it would be clean. They’d have clean clothes, fresh clothes, clothes they could change. They’d mislike anyone entering their realm who didn’t give them their full due.

As he ducked through the tent flap, he heard rhythmic tapping. Someone in there had a typewriter. It wasn’t a computer, but it was still a sure-fire sign of superiority in the middle of a refugee camp. Several women—sure enough, all of them scrubbed till they gleamed—looked up from whatever important things they were doing to give him the once-over. By their expressions, he didn’t pass muster. They probably took him for one of the people they were there to help.

“Yes?” one of them said. “What is it?” By her tone, it couldn’t possibly have been as urgent as the forms she was filling out. Yes, she must have taken him for an inmate here.

“I am here to look for my family. My wife. My sons. My daughter. Drucker. Katherina—Käthe. Heinrich. Adolf. Claudia.” Drucker stayed polite and businesslike.

“Oh. One of those.” The woman nodded. Now she knew in which pigeonhole he belonged. She pulled out a form from a box on the table behind her and said, “Fill this out. Fill it out very carefully. We will search. If we find them in our records, you will be notified.”

“When will you search? When will I be notified?” Drucker asked. “Why don’t you search now? I’m here now.” By all the signs, she needed reminding of that.

A slow flush darkened her cheeks. It wasn’t embarrassment; it was anger. “We have many important duties to perform here, sir,” she said in a voice like winter on the Russian front. “When we have the opportunity, we shall search the records for you.” That might be twenty years from now. It might, on the other hand, be never. “Please fill out the form.” The form was important. The family it represented? That might matter, but more likely it wouldn’t.

Drucker had seen that attitude before. He had a weapon to combat it. He took from his wallet a telegram and passed the woman the yellow sheet. “Here. I suggest you read this.”

For a moment, he thought she’d try to crumple it instead. He would have prevented that—by force, if necessary. But she did read. And her eyes, the dull blue and white of cheap china, grew bigger and bigger as she read.

“But this is from Flensburg,” she said, and all the other Red Cross women exclaimed when she mentioned the new capital. Even the typist stopped typing. In an awed whisper, the woman went on, “This is from the
Führer,
from the
Führer
himself. We are to help this man, he says.”

They all crowded around to examine, and to exclaim over, the special telegraph form with the eagle with the swastika in its claws. After that, Johannes Drucker found things going much more smoothly. Instead of being a client and hence an obvious inferior, he was a man known to the
Führer—the
Führer
himself,
Drucker thought sourly—and hence an obvious superior.

“Helga!” the blue-eyed woman barked. “Check the records at once for the
Herr Oberstleutnant.
Drucker. Käthe. Heinrich. Adolf. Claudia. At once!” Drucker’s eyebrows rose. She’d been listening. She just hadn’t wanted to do anything about it. To him, that made things worse, not better—lazy, sour bitch.

Helga said,
“Jawohl!”
and went for the file boxes at the run—so fast that a lock of her blond hair escaped the pins with which she imprisoned it. She grabbed the right one without even looking and riffled through the forms in it. Then, on the off chance something had gone wrong, she went through the boxes to either side. Having done that, she looked up at Drucker and said, “I’m sorry, sir, but we have here no record of them.” Since he was known to the
Führer,
she actually sounded sorry, not bored as she might well have otherwise.

It wasn’t as if Drucker hadn’t heard it before, too many times. Lately, though, he’d added a new string to his bow. “See if you have anyone who was living on Pfordtenstrasse in Greifswald.” Maybe a neighbor would know something. Maybe.

“Helga!” the woman holding the telegram thundered again. While Helga went to a different set of file boxes, Drucker got the precious sheet of yellow paper back. He’d need it to overawe people somewhere else.

Sorting through those boxes took longer. After fifteen minutes or so, Helga looked up. “I have an Andreas Bauriedl, at 27 Pfordtenstrasse.”