Aftershocks (68 page)

Monique Dutourd wished she hadn’t come to Tours with fall heading toward winter. The city did not show itself to her at best advantage. She was a child of the warm Mediterranean; winter in Marseille was almost always mild, with snow a rarity. Not here. Sure enough, the Atlantic drove Tours’ climate, and frost came to the city early and often. After Caesar’s conquest of Gaul, Roman colonists in ancient Caesarodunum would have been as appalled at the weather as she was now.

The climate at the university was also a good deal less than warm. Monique knew she wouldn’t have gained a position had Felless not pulled wires for her. By all the signs, every colleague in the history department knew as much, too. Her welcome ranged from unenthusiastic to downright hostile.

“Let me teach,” she told her department chairman, a white-haired fellow named Michel Casson who’d been at the university since recovering from a wound he’d received defending Verdun in 1916. “Let me publish. I’ll show you that I belong in this place.”

“You will have the opportunity,” Casson replied, peering at her through reading glasses that magnified his eyes tremendously. “We cannot prevent you from having the opportunity. It is to be hoped that you will not damage the reputation of the university too badly by what you do with it.”

Ears burning, Monique left his office in a hurry. That she might prove an asset to the university had plainly never entered his mind. Her nails bit into her palms.
I’ll show you, by God,
she thought. Having lost all her notes for the paper on the cult of Isis in Gallia Narbonensis that had occupied her before Marseille went up in nuclear fire, she was doing her best to reconstruct it despite a research library that wasn’t nearly so good as the snooty professors and librarians believed.

Back in Marseille, having to deal with her brother and the unwelcome attentions of Dieter Kuhn had made her neglect the monograph. Here in Tours, Kuhn was gone from her life, for which she heartily thanked the Lord, the Virgin, and all the saints. Instead, though, she had to deal with the Lizard named Ttomalss. He wanted nothing from her in bed. He even paid. But guiding him through Roman history stole time from the paper, no less than submitting to the German’s less intellectual pursuits had done.

And she still had to deal with Pierre. Technically, she supposed he was a paroled prisoner. She tried not to have anything to do with him when he wasn’t translating for Ttomalss. She sometimes wished she hadn’t got him out of the Race’s prison to interpret for her. Her life would have been simpler if she’d left him there to rot.

But he is my brother.
Blood was thicker than water. She wondered if Pierre would go to a tenth the trouble for her that she’d gone through for him. She had her doubts. Pierre was for Pierre, first, last, and always.

One day, after they’d got off the telephone with Ttomalss, he said, “It’s a pity that Lizard is such a straight arrow. If he weren’t, I could have a fine new ginger network going already.”

“Do you mean you don’t have one?” Monique asked with what she hoped was withering sarcasm.

Predictably, her brother refused to wither. “Of course I do,” he said. “I meant a new one, one that reached right up into his starship. That would be worth arranging, if only I could.”

“Don’t you ever think of anything but ginger and Lizards?” she demanded.

“Ginger is what I do for a living,” Pierre said imperturbably. “The Lizards are my customers. Don’t you ever think of anything else but those old Romans who’ve been dead forever?”

“Occasionally,” Monique answered, acid in her voice. “Every now and then, for instance, I have to think about how to get you out of prison or whatever other trouble you wind up in on account of ginger.”

Her brother didn’t even have the grace to look shamefaced. “Took you long enough this time, too,” he grumbled. “I thought I was going to rot in that damned cell forever. I got you out of the French jail faster than you sprang me.”

Had he not added that last, reminding her he had helped her now and again, she thought she would have tried to hit him over the head with an ashtray. As things were, she said, “I never would have been carted off to jail if it weren’t for Dieter Kuhn, and he wouldn’t have cared about me at all if it weren’t for you.” One way or another, she was going to pin the blame on Pierre.

He said, “Would you rather have them take me back to jail?”

“What have I got to do with that?” Monique said. “You’re selling ginger again. You don’t bother hiding it from me. You hardly bother hiding it from anybody. Of course the Lizards will notice. They’re not stupid. Do you think they’re not watching you? Sooner or later, you’ll annoy them enough that they’ll scoop you up and throw you into another cell. I probably won’t be able to get you out then, either.”

“Somebody will.” Pierre spoke with maddening confidence. “That’s what connections are for. The more people you know, the more people you’ve got to do you a good turn when you really need one.”

“And the more people you’ve got to betray you when they need something from the Lizards or the
flics.”

Pierre stared at her in some surprise. “Where’d you learn to think like that?”

Monique laughed at him. “And people say that studying history never does anybody any good!” she exclaimed, and swept out of the room before he could come up with an answer.

Somewhere south of the city of Tours, the Franks had hurled the previously invincible Arabs back in defeat more than twelve hundred years before. Monique knew that, but she had no interest in finding the battlefield. For one thing, nobody knew exactly where it was. For another, she had no motorcar to go gallivanting over the landscape. And, for a third, that battlefield didn’t much interest her: it was several hundred years too modern. That amused her.

When she happened to mention it to Ttomalss, it amused him, too. “This is a difference in viewpoint between the Race and human beings,” he said through her brother. “To us, a difference of a few hundred years would not matter much.”

“That’s strange,” Monique said. “I would think that a chronological framework was important for your historians as well as for ours.”

“Well, yes,” Ttomalss said, “but everything that happened before the days of the Empire was a very long time ago for us. What real difference if something happened 103,472 years ago or 104,209? I pick the numbers at random, you understand.”

In an aside, Pierre added, “When Lizards talk about years, cut everything they say in half. They count two for every one of ours, more or less.”

“Thanks. I think I already knew that,” Monique answered. It was still daunting. She tried to imagine keeping more than fifty thousand years of history straight. Maybe Ttomalss had a point after all. Even here on Earth, with only a tenth as much history to worry about, people specialized. She concentrated on Roman history. The faculty at the University of Tours also boasted a historian of pre-Roman (not ancient; that wasn’t a word historians used since the Lizards came) Greece, one who studied medieval western Europe, one who specialized in the history of the Byzantine Empire (which struck even Monique as uselessly arcane), and so on.

Even so, she said, “Knowing the relative order in which things happened is important. Otherwise, you cannot speak of causation in any meaningful sense.”

“Causation?” Her brother gave her a dirty look. “How the devil am I supposed to say that in the Lizards’ language?”

“Figure it out,” Monique told him. “If Ttomalss decides you’re not doing a good job,
he’ll
ask for a new interpreter, and I won’t be able to do a thing about it.”

Pierre’s expression grew even more forbidding, but he must have managed to get the meaning across, for Ttomalss answered, “Yes, you are right about that: sequence and relative chronology must be preserved. Absolute chronology may be less important.”

Monique wouldn’t have said that, but she had less absolute chronology to keep in mind. And she found herself enjoying the give-and-take of the discussion with Ttomalss. The Lizard didn’t think like a human being—
and why should he?
she thought—but he was a long way from stupid. He had trouble understanding how people worked as individuals, though he tried hard at that, too. When he dealt with groups, he did better.

“I thank you,” he said one day. “I am learning a great deal from you. You are both intelligent and well organized. These traits are less common among Tosevites than I might wish.”

After Pierre translated that, he added a two-word commentary of his own: “Teacher’s pet.”

Monique stuck out her tongue at her brother. She said, “Tell Ttomalss that I thank him and I think he’s very kind.” That was flattery, but flattery with a core of truth. It was also flattery with a core of worry. What exactly was he learning from her besides Roman history? Something that would help the Lizards rule their part of Earth more effectively? Did that make her a traitor to mankind?

Don’t be silly,
she said to herself.
Most people don’t think Roman history matters to us these days, so how could it be important to the Lizards?
She relaxed for a while after that crossed her mind. But then she thought,
If the Lizards think it’s important, maybe it is.

When the telephone rang in her flat, she hurried to answer it. She’d dreaded the phone in Marseille: it was too likely to be Dieter Kuhn. Here, though, she hadn’t had any trouble.
“Allô?”

“Hello, Professor.” Even if Rance Auerbach hadn’t been speaking English, she would have known his wrecked, rasping voice at once. He went on, “How are things going for you up there?”

“Things are . . . very well, thank you. Thank you very much,” Monique replied. She also used English, and was glad for the chance to practice it. Auerbach was a ginger dealer, too, but somehow that bothered her less in him than it did in her brother. She said, “Is it that I could ask you something?”

“Sure. Go ahead,” he told her, and she poured out the substance of her conversations with Ttomalss and her worries about what the Race was learning. When she’d finished, Auerbach said, “The world would be a better place if everybody’s troubles were so small.”

“Thank you,” Monique said again, this time in French: a breathy sigh of gratitude. She felt as if he were a priest who’d just given her absolution and a very light penance after a particularly sordid confession. “You have no idea how much you relieved me there. I want to be able to see myself in a mirror without flinching.”

That produced a long silence. At last, Auerbach spoke in English again:

“Yeah. Don’t we all?” Monique suddenly wondered if she were the only one whose conscience bothered her.

 18

“Yes, Colonel Webster,” Jonathan Yeager’s father was saying into the telephone. “I think we’ll be all right if we keep cool. We have to stay firm out there, but we can’t get pushy about it or we’ll make them nervous. My professional opinion is, everybody’d be sorry if that happened.” He listened for a moment, then said, “Okay, sir, I’ll put it in writing for you, too,” and hung up.

“More trouble about the motors on the rocks in the asteroid belt?” Jonathan asked.

His dad nodded. “You betcha. They can’t blame me for that one, so they’re asking my advice instead.” Sam Yeager’s chuckle sounded sour to Jonathan. “Hell, son, I didn’t even know this was going on—though I’ve got to tell you, I’ve had suspicions ever since that big meteor slammed into Mars.”

“Have you?” Jonathan raised an eyebrow. “You never said anything about it to me—or to Mom, either, that I know of.”

“Nope.” His father shook his head. “Not much point to talking about suspicions when you don’t know for sure. Last time I was back in Little Rock, I did ask President Stassen about it.”

“Did you?” That his father was in a position to ask questions of the president of the United States still sometimes bemused Jonathan. “What did he tell you?”

“Not much.” His father looked grim. “I didn’t really expect him to. He was probably afraid I’d go running to the Lizards with whatever I heard. That’s nonsense, but it’s nonsense I’m going to be stuck with for the rest of my life.”

“That’s not fair!” Jonathan exclaimed with the ready outrage of youth.

“Probably not, but I’m stuck with it, as I said.” His dad shrugged. “I could go on and talk about what sort of lesson that should be for you, and that you should always keep an eye on your reputation no matter what. But if I did that, you’d probably look around for something to hit me over the head with.”

“Yeah, probably,” Jonathan agreed. “You’re not too bad as far as lectures go, but—”

“Thanks a lot,” his father broke in. “Thanks a hell of a lot.”

Jonathan grinned at him. “Any old time, Dad.” But the grin had trouble staying on his face. “What are the Lizards going to do, out there in the asteroid belt? If they try doing anything, will we fight them?”

“It’s like I told Ed Webster: if we don’t do anything to get ’em twitchy, I think we can ride out the storm,” his father answered. “But I also think they have to think we’d fight if they did try anything out there. A lot of the time, you end up not having to fight if you show you’re ready to in a pinch.”

“If we did fight the Race, we’d lose, wouldn’t we?” Jonathan asked.

“Now? Sure we would, same as we would have last summer,” his father replied. “But that’s not the point, or it’s only part of the point. The other part is how bad we’d hurt ’em if we went down swinging. They don’t like what the Nazis did to them, and we’d do more and worse.” He sighed. “If that outbound probe of theirs hadn’t spotted our rocket lighting up, we could have built a much stronger position out in the asteroid belt before the Race caught on.”

A strong position in the asteroid belt was something less than important to Jonathan. “Do you think there’ll be a war, or not?” he asked. “The whole idea of fighting the Race seems like such a waste of everything worthwhile to me. . . .”

“I know it does,” his father said slowly. “It seems that way to a lot of kids in your generation. I’ll tell you something, though: when the Lizards first came to Earth, they shot up the train I was riding on, and I volunteered for the Army as soon as I made it into a town where they’d take me. So did Mutt Daniels, my manager, and he was about as old then as I am now. They took both of us, too. They didn’t even blink. That’s how things were back in those days.”

Jonathan knew that was how things had been back in those days. He tried to imagine it, tried and felt himself failing. Stumbling a little, he said, “But the Race isn’t so bad, really. You know that’s true, Dad.”

“I know it’s true
now,”
Sam Yeager said. “I didn’t know it then. Nobody knew it then. All we knew was that the Lizards came out of nowhere and started beating the crap out of us. And if we—and the Reds, and the Nazis, and the British, and the Japs—hadn’t fought like mad bastards, the Lizards would’ve conquered the whole world, and you and your pals wouldn’t be looking at them from the outside and thinking how hot they are. You’d be looking at ’em up from under, and no way to get out from under ’em.”

“Okay. Okay.” Jonathan hadn’t expected a speech. Maybe his dad hadn’t expected to make one, either, because he looked a little surprised at himself. Jonathan went on, “I understand what you’re saying, honest. Things do seem different to me, though. I can’t pretend they don’t.”

“I know they do.” His father’s laugh was rueful. “You take the Race and spaceships and explosive-metal bombs and computing machines for granted. They’re part of the landscape to you. You’re not an old fogy who remembers the days before they got here.”

“No, not me.” Jonathan shook his head.
The old days, like Dad said,
he thought, and then,
The bad old days. People didn’t know much back then.

Now his father was the one who said, “Okay. You can’t help being young, any more than I can help being . . . not so damn young.” He ran a hand through his hair, which really was getting thin on top. But even if he wasn’t so young, even if he was going bald, his eyes could still get a wicked twinkle in them. “Of course, if it weren’t for the Lizards, you wouldn’t be here at all, because I never would have met your mother if they hadn’t come.”

“I know. You’ve told me that before. I don’t like thinking about it.” Jonathan didn’t like thinking about that at all. Imagining his own existence as depending on a quirk of fate was uncomfortable. Uncomfortable? Hell, it was downright terrifying. As far as he could tell, he’d always been here and always would be here. Anything that shook such foundations was not to be trusted.

“What do you like thinking about?” his father asked slyly. “Your wedding, maybe? Or your wedding night?”

“Dad!” Reproach rang in Jonathan’s voice. His father
was
an old man. He had no business thinking about stuff like that.

“Just wait till you have kids,” his father warned him. “You’ll tell them about what it might have taken to make sure they weren’t born, and they won’t want to listen to you, either.”

“I hope I don’t go and do stuff like that,” Jonathan said. “Maybe I’ll remember how much I hated it when you did it to me.”

His dad laughed at him, which only annoyed him more than ever. Sam Yeager said, “Maybe. But don’t bet anything much on it, or you’ll be sorry. I didn’t like it when my father did it to me, but that’s not stopping me. Once you get to a certain age and see your kid acting a certain way, well, you just naturally start acting a certain way yourself.”

“Do
you?” Jonathan said darkly. He wanted to think he’d be different when he turned into an old man, but would he? How could he tell now? A lot of years lay between him and his father’s age, and he was in no hurry to pass through them.

“Yeah, you do,” his father said, “however much you think you won’t till you get there.” He grinned at Jonathan again, this time less pleasantly. Jonathan scowled. His father could outguess him better than the other way round. That struck Jonathan as most unfair, too. Once upon a time, his dad had been young, and he still—sometimes, sort of—remembered what it was like. But Jonathan hadn’t got old yet, so how was he supposed to think along with his father?

He gave ground now: “If you say so.”

“I damn well do,” his dad said. “How are you coming along with figuring out how to tie a bow tie?”

Jonathan threw his hands in the air in almost theatrical despair. “I don’t think I’ll ever get it so it looks right with a fancy tux.”

That made his father laugh. “It wasn’t anything I had to worry about when I married your mother. I was in uniform and she was wearing blue jeans. That great metropolis of—”

“Chugwater, Wyoming,” Jonathan chorused along with his father. If he’d heard about the tobacco-chewing justice of the peace who’d married his folks once, he’d heard about him a hundred times. The fellow had been post-master and sheriff, too. Not having to worry about a tux did give the story a slightly different slant, but only slightly.

His father’s eyes went far away. “Things haven’t worked so bad for Barbara and me, though,” he said, more than half to himself. “No, not so bad at all.” For a couple of seconds, he neither looked nor sounded like an old man, not even to Jonathan. He might have been looking forward to a wedding himself, not back on the one he’d had a long time ago.

“Chugwater, Wyoming.” This time, Jonathan spoke the ridiculous name in a different tone of voice. “It must be pretty hot, to be able to remember getting married in a funny place like that. I mean, a church is probably prettier and all, but everybody gets married in a church.”

“It was one of those crazy wartime things,” his father answered. “Nobody knew whether the Lizards could take Chicago, so they pulled all the physicists and the typists—your mom was one—and the Lizard POWs and the interpreter—me—and sent everybody to Denver, where it was supposed to be safer. We almost got killed just when we were setting out. A Lizard killercraft shot up our ship. That was the first time—” He broke off.

“The first time what?” Jonathan asked.

“Never mind. Nothing.” His dad turned red. Jonathan scratched his head, wondering what that was all about. If he didn’t know better, he would have sworn . . . He shook his head. Nobody was ever comfortable thinking about his father and mother doing
that,
especially before they got married. Sam Yeager went on, “Isn’t there something useful you could be doing instead of standing around here jawing with me?” By his tone, he didn’t want Jonathan thinking about that, either.

“Like what?” Jonathan didn’t feel like doing anything useful, either. “Mickey and Donald are all taken care of.” That was the chore he most often had to worry about. Not that he didn’t enjoy dealing with the two little Lizards—though not so little now. He did. But he didn’t want to get herded off to take care of them. That made him feel as if he were still little himself.

“I don’t know,” his father said. “Shall I think of something?”

“Never mind.” Jonathan decamped from the kitchen, pausing only to grab a Coke from the refrigerator. He gambled that his dad wouldn’t have time to come up with anything particularly nasty—yardwork qualified, in his opinion—before he did that, and he won his gamble.

Back in the safety of his own room, he took a big swig at the soda and started studying his assignment in the history of the Race: he had exams coming.
One more semester after this one, and then I can start making a living with the Lizards, just like Karen,
he thought. And, thanks to his dad, he had some of the best connections in the whole world. Friendship counted for an awful lot with the Race, and his father had more friends among the Lizards than any human being this side of Kassquit.

Poor Kassquit,
he thought. Much as the Race fascinated him, he wouldn’t have wanted to get to know it the way she had. Thinking about her made him sad and horny, both at once: he couldn’t help remembering what they’d spent so much time doing up on the starship. Thinking about doing that with Kassquit made him think about doing it with Karen, and their wedding, and their wedding night. What with all that, he got very little real studying done, but he had a good time anyhow.

Rance Auerbach stared out the hotel window at the waters of the Mediterranean. Even now, with fall sliding toward winter, they remained improbably warm and improbably blue. Oh, the Gulf of Mexico pulled the same trick, but Marseille was at the same latitude as Boston, more or less. It seemed like cheating.

“We ought to get a blizzard,” he said.

Penny Summers shook her head. “No, thanks. I saw too goddamn many blizzards when I was growing up. I don’t want any more.”

“Well, I don’t, either,” Rance admitted. “But weather this good this late in the year just doesn’t feel right.” He coughed, then wheezed out a curse under his breath. Coughing hurt. It always had, ever since he got shot up. It always would, up till the day they buried him. That, or something close to it, was on his mind these days. “Maybe I’m just antsy. Damned if I know.”