Aftershocks (47 page)

Bleakly, Monique said, “One of the connections we both may have is Dieter Kuhn. If we decide we need to use him, you’ll have to be the one who makes the approach. I can’t do it, not even for my brother.”

“I don’t think we’ll have to worry about that,” Lucie said. “When the Lizards question Pierre, he’ll sing. He’ll sing like a nightingale. That’s about the only thing I can think of that might make them go easy on him. Don’t you think they’d be pleased if he could hand them a nice, juicy Nazi? That might let them squeeze some fresh concessions out of the Germans.”

Monique eyed her with sudden respect. Lucie wasn’t a fool. No, she wasn’t a fool at all. And ginger smuggling was a network that tied the whole world together. No wonder Pierre’s mistress was so quick to think in terms of geopolitics.

“If Pierre sings,” Monique said slowly, “he’ll sing about the Americans, too.”

“But of course,” Lucie said. “And so what? I never did see the point of dealing with them. Americans.” Her lip curled. “They deserved to have a city blown up. Up till now, they’ve had it easy. Most of them still do.”

“They’re people,” Monique said. “I don’t want to give them to the Lizards.”

“I’m sure I don’t know why not.” Lucie shrugged. “Have it your way. I’m not going to lose any sleep about them, I tell you that, or lift a finger for them, either. They wouldn’t do it for me.” However wide her world view could be, Lucie still came first in her own eyes.

Monique went on into Marseille. She didn’t dare go back to the tent even to get her bicycle. The Lizards might return for her, too. Keffesh had seen her with Pierre and Lucie, and she’d interpreted for Pierre when he talked with the Americans. In the eyes of the Race, that was probably more than enough to convict her.

When she got to the edge of the city, she found a public telephone and fed a couple of francs into it. She called the hotel where Rance Auerbach and Penny Summers were staying. The phone rang several times. She was on the point of giving up when a man answered:
“Allô?”

Auerbach’s accent was ludicrously bad. Monique chose English to make sure he wouldn’t misunderstand her: “The Lizards have Pierre. Do you know what that means?”

“You bet I do,” he answered, which she took for an affirmative. “It means I’m in a hell of a lot of trouble.
Merci.”
He hung up.

For good measure, Monique wiped the telephone clean of fingerprints with her sleeve after she hung up, too. She assumed the Lizards would be listening to Auerbach’s phone, and that they could trace the call back to this one. But let them try proving she’d been the one who made it.

And, having done one of the things she’d needed to do, she could get on with taking care of the rest. She walked into a dress shop, strode up to a man who looked like the manager, and asked, “Excuse me, but could you use another salesgirl?”

Nesseref was glad she could finally take Orbit for walks again without worrying much about residual radioactivity. The tsiongi was glad, too. He’d used the exercise wheel in her apartment, but it hadn’t been the same. Now he could go out, see new sights, smell new smells, and get frustrated all over again when Tosevite birds flew away just as he was on the point of catching them.

He still looked absurdly indignant every time the feathered creatures eluded him. He seemed to think they were cheating by fluttering off. This world had a much larger variety of flying beasts than Home did. Local predators probably took such escapes for granted. As far as Orbit was concerned, they broke the rules.

Befflem running around without leashes broke the rules, too. As on Home, there were regulations in the new towns on Tosev 3 against letting befflem run free. As on Home, those regulations weren’t worth much here. Befflem were much more inclined to do what they wanted than what the Race wanted them to do. If they’d had more brains, they might have served as models for Big Uglies.

Had Orbit been able to get his mouth and claws on a beffel, he would have made short work of it. But the befflem seemed smart enough to understand he was on a leash and they weren’t. They would squeak as infuriatingly as they could, inviting him to chase them. And he would, just as he went after birds. The leash in Nesseref’s hand brought him up short every time.

“No,” she told him for the third time on the walk. Inside the apartment, he knew what the word meant. He obeyed it most of the time. Out in the fresh air, he did his best to forget.

“Beep!” said a beffel half a block away. Once more, Orbit tried to charge after it. Once more, Nesseref wouldn’t let him. Orbit turned an eye turret toward her in what had to be reproach. The other turret he kept fixed on the beffel, which sat there scratching itself and then said, “Beep!” again.

“No!” Nesseref repeated as the tsiongi again tried to go after it. She used an emphatic cough. That meant nothing to Orbit, even if it gave her some small satisfaction.

Still beeping, the beffel trotted off long before Orbit got close enough to be dangerous. By then, Nesseref was starting to wonder whether her pet had pulled her arm out of its socket.
Who is getting the exercise here?
she thought, glaring at the tsiongi.

Shortly thereafter, neither of them got any exercise. Orbit sat down on the sidewalk and refused to move. His attitude seemed to be,
If I am not allowed to do what I want, I have no intention of doing what you want.
Tsiongyu were proud beasts. Offend their dignity and you had trouble.

But Nesseref knew tsiongyu, and knew how to coax them out of their sulks. She reached into a pouch she wore on a belt around her middle and pulled out a treat. She tossed it a little in front of Orbit. Sure enough, he forgot he was sulking. He trotted over and grabbed it. After that, he was walking again. Nesseref gave him another treat to keep him moving.

Some tsiongyu eventually figured out that staging sulks every so often would get them more than their share of treats. Orbit was still young, and hadn’t acquired such duplicity. As tsiongyu went, he was a good-tempered beast, too, and not in the habit of sitting down on the job.

He tried to catch a couple of birds on the way back to the apartment, but no more befflem appeared to torment him, for which small favor Nesseref cast down her eye turrets and muttered a few words of thanks to spirits of Emperors past. As it always did, the elevator that took her and Orbit up to the story on which her apartment stood fascinated the tsiongi. Orbit’s eye turrets went every which way before settling on Nesseref once more. She wondered what was going through his mind—perhaps that she’d just performed a particularly good conjuring trick.

Once inside the apartment, Orbit jumped into his wheel and started running as if a beffel as big as a bus were hot on his heels. “You are a very foolish beast,” Nesseref said severely. Orbit paid no attention whatever. Nesseref hadn’t expected him to, and so wasn’t disappointed.

She went into her bedchamber and checked to see if she had any electronic messages. She found none that needed answering right away, and a couple that she immediately deleted. Why males and females she’d never met thought she would shift credit to their account for services she didn’t want and they seemed unlikely to perform was beyond her. She supposed they found customers here and there on the electronic network; to her, that only proved that a hundred thousand years of civilization weren’t long enough to produce sophistication.

Into the electronic garbage heap those messages went. Nesseref had just seen them vanish when the telephone hissed. “Shuttlecraft Pilot Nesseref—I greet you,” she said crisply, wondering if it were a new assignment.

But the image that appeared on the screen was not a superior with or-dens, but a Big Ugly. “I greet you, Shuttlecraft Pilot,” he said. “I know males and females of the Race have trouble telling one Tosevite from another, so I will tell you that I am Mordechai Anielewicz.”

“And I greet you, my friend,” Nesseref replied. “I will tell you that you are the only Tosevite likely to call me at my home. How are you? Was your search for your mate and hatchlings successful?”

Too late, she wished she hadn’t said that. The answer was too likely to be no. If it were no, she would have saddened the Big Ugly. Friends had no business saddening friends.

But Anielewicz answered, “Yes!” and used an emphatic cough. He went on, “And do you know what? Pancer the beffel, my hatchling Heinrich’s pet, helped lead me to them.”

“Did he?” Nesseref exclaimed. “Tell me how—and I promise not to tell my tsiongi.” By the concise way Anielewicz gave her the story, she guessed he’d already told it several times. When he’d finished, she said, “You were very fortunate.”

“Truth,” he agreed. “I will thank God”—a word not in the language of the Race—“for the rest of my life.” He paused. “You would call this my superstition, and thank the spirits of Emperors past instead.”

“I understand.” Nesseref paused, too, then offered a cautious comment: “You Tosevites take your superstitions very seriously. When we opened shrines to the spirits of Emperors past here in Poland, hardly any Tosevites—either of your superstition or that of the Poles—entered them.” After the latest round of fighting, few of those shrines still stood. She suspected they would be rebuilt one day, but more urgent concerns preoccupied the Race.

Mordechai Anielewicz laughed loud Tosevite laughter. “How many males and females of the Race give reverence to God at Tosevite shrines?”

“Why, none, of course,” Nesseref said. A moment later, she added, “Oh. I see.” Big Uglies kept thinking of themselves as equal and equivalent to members of the Race. Such thought patterns didn’t come naturally to Nesseref. She might reckon Mordechai Anielewicz a friend, but most Big Uglies were to her nothing but barbarians—dangerous barbarians, but barbarians even so.

“Maybe you do,” Anielewicz said, laughing again. “But I did not call you to discuss superstition. I hope I am not troubling you, but I called to ask another favor, if you would be so kind.”

“Friends may ask favors of friends,” Nesseref said. “That is one of the things that defines friendship. Ask. If it is in my power, you shall have it.”

“I thank you.” Anielewicz added another emphatic cough. “Friends are all I have now. Except for my mate and hatchlings, I believe all my relations died in the bombings of Lodz and Warsaw.”

“I am sorry to hear it,” Nesseref said. “I understand that, among Tosevites, relations take the place good friends hold among the Race.” She understood that in her mind, not her liver, but she assumed Anielewicz realized as much. “As I said before, ask. If I can help you, I will.”

“Very well.” Anielewicz paused, then said, “We are, for now, staying in a refugee center. We lived in Lodz, and Lodz, of course, is no longer a city. Can you suggest some officials in Pinsk with whom we might talk to help arrange housing, real housing, for us?”

“Of course. Please wait while I check to see who would be most likely to help you quickly.” She used the computer’s keyboard to access the Race’s table of organization in Pinsk. After giving Anielewicz three or four names, she said, “If you like, wait a day or two before calling them. I will speak to them first and let them know who you are and what you need.”

“That would be wonderful,” the Tosevite told her. “Many of your administrators are also new in Poland, replacing males and females who perished in the fighting and who were more familiar with me.”

“Exactly why I made the suggestion,” Nesseref said. “Let me do that now, then.”

“Fine.” Anielewicz even understood she meant the conversation was over. A good many members of the Race would have gone right on chattering after such a hint, but he broke the connection.

The first call Nesseref made to Pinsk was to the officer in charge of liaison between the Race’s military forces and those of the Big Uglies in Poland. Nowhere else on Tosev 3 would the Race have had such a liaison officer. That it had one here still struck Nesseref as unnatural, but she made use of the male.

And he, to her relief, knew who Mordechai Anielewicz was. “Yes,” he said. “I have received reports of his search for his blood kin from a male in Security in the
Reich.
Everyone seems to be astonished that he succeeded in finding them, especially with the Deutsche so inimical to those of his superstition.”

“I certainly was, when he telephoned me just now,” Nesseref said. “I was also surprised to learn that a male who has done the Race so many important services should have to inhabit a refugee center because he is unable to find housing for himself, his mate, and his hatchlings.”

“That
is
unfortunate,” the liaison officer agreed. “I thank you for bringing it to my attention. Perhaps I should speak to someone in the housing authority.”

“I wish you would,” Nesseref said. “I intended to do the same thing myself, but they are likelier to listen to a male from the conquest fleet than to a shuttlecraft pilot without any great connections.”

“Sometimes I think the bureaucrats, especially the ones from the colonization fleet, pay no attention to anyone except themselves,” the liaison officer said. “But what I can do, I shall do: I assure you of that.”

“I thank you,” Nesseref said. “I think I will also make those phone calls myself. Perhaps I can reinforce you. I count Mordechai Anielewicz as a friend, and I am pleased to do whatever I can for him.”

“Well, of course, if he is a friend,” replied the male from the conquest fleet. “I have Tosevite friends myself, so I understand how you feel.”

“Oh, good. I am very glad to hear that,” Nesseref said. “It gives me hope that, in spite of everything, we may yet be able to live alongside the Big Uglies on a long-term basis.” She hesitated. Rather defensively, she added, “We may.” The liaison officer didn’t laugh at her. She feared that was more likely to mean he was polite, though, than that he agreed with her.

“Reuven!” Moishe Russie called from the Lizards’ computer-and-telephone unit. “Come here for a minute, would you? You may be able to give me some help. I hope you can, anyway—I could use some.”

“I’m coming, Father.” Reuven hurried into the front room. “What’s up?” he asked, and then stopped in surprise when he saw Shpaaka, one of the leading Lizard physicians at the Russie Medical College, looking out of the monitor screen at him. He shifted into the language of the Race: “I greet you, superior sir.”