Aftershocks (76 page)

Nieh Ho-T’ing nodded again. “I see the difference. Mao would probably agree with Liu Mei, you know.”

“Well, he’ll have his chance with this uprising,” Liu Han said.
Unless the people refuse to fight any more—unless they would sooner have peace regardless of who rules them.
She kept that to herself, too.

“Mao has been a revolutionary his whole life,” Nieh said. “A lot of us have. We will go on fighting, however long it takes. We are patient. The dialectic is on our side. We will bring the country with us.”

“Of course we will,” Liu Han declared. But then the doubts that never quite went away came out: “The only thing that worries me is, the little scaly devils are patient, too.” Nieh Ho-T’ing looked at her as if he wished she hadn’t said any such thing. She too wished she hadn’t said it. But she feared that didn’t make it any less true. More bombs rained down on Peking.

Just seeing Tosevite railroads had convinced Nesseref that she didn’t like them. Instead of being clean and quiet, they roared and puffed and chugged and belched filthy, stinking black smoke into the air. One of these days, she was told, the Race would replace the horrible engines in Poland with more modern machinery. But it didn’t look as if that would happen any time soon. There were so many more urgent things to do. No matter how filthy the locomotives the Big Uglies built, they did work after a fashion, and so they stayed in service.

And now she found herself in a passenger car behind one of those noxious locomotives. The rolling, swaying, jouncing ride was even worse than she’d expected, and left her as nervous as a wild Big Ugly would have been to fly in a shuttlecraft for the first time.

Fortunately, few Tosevites saw her discomfiture: one car on each train was reserved for males and females of the Race. In fact, Nesseref had the entire compartment to herself. A Tosevite conductor came through and spoke in her language (a relief, because she’d learned only a handful of words in either Polish or Yiddish): “Przemysl is the next stop. All out for Przemysl.”

Out she went, in some anxiety. If no one was waiting for her here at the station, she would have to brave a taxi. That would be doubly difficult: first finding a driver who understood her and then surviving a trip through terrifying Tosevite traffic. Having experienced both, she vastly preferred space travel, which had fewer things that could go wrong.

But a Big Ugly on the platform waved to her, waved and called, “Shuttlecraft Pilot! Nesseref! Superior female! Over here!”

With more than a little relief, Nesseref waved back. “I greet you, Mordechai Anielewicz. I am glad to see you.”

“And I am glad to see you,” her Tosevite friend replied. “I was even gladder to see you when I came out of that house in Kanth. Seeing any friends there was very good indeed.”

“I can understand how it would have been.” Nesseref’s eye turrets swiveled this way and that. To her, this crowded platform in Przemysl, full of shouting, exclaiming Big Uglies, was a frightening place; she would not have wanted to be here without a friend, and especially a Tosevite friend. But this was different from what Anielewicz had gone through inside the
Reich.
She was, fortunately, sensible enough to understand as much. No one wanted to kill her here—she certainly hoped not, at any rate. But Anielewicz could have died at any moment in Kanth, and he’d volunteered to go there understanding that was so.

Now he said, “Come with me. My apartment is not very far away. My mate and hatchlings look forward to meeting you. Well, Heinrich looks forward to meeting you again. And he looks forward to showing you his beffel.”

Nesseref’s mouth fell open in amusement. “Ah, yes—the famous Pancer.” She pronounced the Tosevite name as well as she could. “He may be interested in meeting me, too—I probably smell like a tsiongi, and that is an odor that will always get a beffel’s attention.”

Anielewicz spoke three words in his own language:
“Dogs and cats.”
Then he explained: “These are Tosevite domestic animals that often do not get along with each other.”

“I see,” Nesseref said. She skittered after Anielewicz so she wouldn’t lose him in the cavernous train station. Tosevites stared and pointed at her and exclaimed in their unintelligible languages. Many of them inhaled the burning herb that always struck her as noxious; its acrid smoke filled her scent receptors.

Outside, the cold smote her. Mordechai Anielewicz repeated, “It will not be far.”

“Good,” she said, shivering. “Otherwise, I do believe I would freeze before I got there. This winter weather of yours makes me see why you Tosevites deck yourselves in so many wrappings.”

“I have seen members of the Race do it, too,” Anielewicz said. “Staying warm is nothing to be ashamed of.”

“I suppose not.” Nesseref hurried down the street after him. “But wrappings are rarely necessary back on Home. We do not like to think they should be necessary anywhere we live.”

“What you like to think is not always what is true,” Anielewicz remarked, a comment with which she could hardly disagree.

She sighed with relief on entering the lobby to his block of flats, which was heated. “You must understand, you have more tolerance for cold than we do,” she said. “Here, frozen water falling from the sky is something you take for granted. Back on Home, it is a rare phenomenon at the North and South Poles and at the peaks of the highest mountains. Otherwise, for us, it is unknown.”

That made the Big Ugly let out several of the barking yips his kind used for laughter. “It is not unknown here, superior female,” he said, and tacked on another emphatic cough. “If the Race is going to live in large parts of Tosev 3, you will have to get used to cold weather.”

“So we have discovered,” Nesseref said, with an emphatic cough of her own. “The males of the conquest fleet have had more of a chance to grow accustomed to your weather than we newcomers have. I must tell you, my first winter here was a dreadful surprise. I did not want to believe what the males had told me, but it was true. And seasons here on Tosev 3 last twice as long as they do on Home, so that winter seemed doubly dreadful.”

“Without winter, we could not enjoy spring and summer so much,” Mordechai Anielewicz said.

Nesseref answered that with a shrug. Suffering to make pleasure seem sweeter struck her as more trouble than it was worth. She didn’t say so; she didn’t want to offend her friend and host. Instead, she followed him upstairs.

That the apartment building had stairs instead of an elevator said something about the level of technology the local Big Uglies took for granted. Nesseref remembered the fire that had destroyed not just Anielewicz’s apartment but his whole apartment building. Such a disaster would have been impossible in her building, with its sensors and sprinklers and generally more fireproof materials.

On the other fork of the tongue, this building was more spacious than the one in which she lived. Part of that was because Tosevites were larger than members of the Race, but only part. The rest . . . The Big Uglies didn’t seem to build as if every particle of space were at a premium. The Race did. The Race had to. Home, and especially Home’s cities, had been crowded since before the Empire unified the world. The Tosevites’ architecture said they still felt they had room to expand.

Their technology has come very far very fast,
Nesseref thought.
Their ideologies lag behind.
In a way, that was a comforting thought; it let her view the Big Uglies as primitives. In another way, though, it was frightening. The Tosevites had the means to do things they could scarcely have imagined a few generations before.

She wished she hadn’t thought about how expansive they were.

“Here we are.” Anielewicz led her down the hall and opened the door to what was, she presumed, his apartment. It did not seem so very spacious, not with so many Big Uglies inside it. They greeted her in turn: by their wrappings, she identified two females and two more males besides Mordechai Anielewicz.

And there was a beffel: a very fat, very sassy beffel who swaggered out as if he owned the apartment and the Tosevites in it were his servants. He stuck out his tongue at Nesseref, taking her scent. For a moment, it was as if he had to condescend to remember what a member of the Race smelled like. But then he caught Orbit’s odor clinging to her, and swelled up in anger and let out a sneezing, challenging hiss.

“Pancer!” Heinrich Anielewicz said sharply. He spoke to the beffel in his own language. Nesseref had no idea what he said, but it did the trick. The beffel deflated and became a well-behaved pet once more.

“You have him well trained,” Nesseref told the youngest Tosevite. “I have known many males and females of the Race who let their befflem be-come the masters in their homes. That is not so here.”

“Oh, no,” the hatchling said. “My father would not allow it.”

Mordechai Anielewicz laughed again. “Convincing Heinrich of that was easy enough. Convincing Pancer of it has been harder.”

Nesseref laughed, too. “Even among us, befflem are a law unto themselves.”

Anielewicz’s mate did not speak the language of the Race nearly so well as he did, but she spoke with great intensity: “Superior female, I thank for to help Mordechai for to find us. I thank you for to help to go to Kanth, too.”

“You are welcome, Bertha Anielewicz.” Nesseref was pleased she’d recalled the name, even if she didn’t pronounce it very well. “I am glad to be a friend to your mate. Friends help friends—is that not a truth?”

“Truth,” Anielewicz’s mate agreed, along with what was surely intended to be an emphatic cough.

Nesseref had wondered what sort of food the Tosevites would serve her; Anielewicz had made it plain that following the Jewish superstition limited what he and his kinsfolk could eat. But the shuttlecraft pilot found nothing wrong with the roasted fowl that went on the table. Big Uglies ate more vegetables and less meat than the Race was in the habit of doing, but if Nesseref enjoyed more pieces of the bird and less of the tubers and stalks that went with it than did her hosts, no one seemed to find that out of the ordinary.

“Here.” Mordechai Anielewicz set a glass half full of clear liquid in front of her. “This is distilled, unflavored alcohol. I have seen members of the Race drink it and enjoy it.”

“I thank you,” Nesseref said. “Yes, I have drunk it myself.”

“We have a custom of proposing a reason for drinking before we take the first sip,” he told her. Raising his glass, he spoke in his own tongue:
“L’chaim!”
Then, for her benefit, he translated: “To life!”

“To life!” Nesseref echoed. Imitating the Tosevites around her, she raised her glass before sipping from it. The alcohol was potent enough to make her hiss; after it slid down her throat, she had to concentrate to make her eye turrets turn in the directions she wanted. She asked, “May I also propose a reason for drinking?”

Anielewicz made the affirmative gesture. “Please do.”

Raising her glass, the shuttlecraft pilot said, “To peace!”

“To peace!” The Tosevites echoed her this time, Anielewicz again translating. They all drank. So did she. The alcohol was strong, but it was also smooth. Before Nesseref quite noticed what she was doing, she’d emptied the glass. Anielewicz poured more into it.

Seeing everyone in the apartment having a good time and no one paying any attention to him, Pancer let out a plaintive squeak. Heinrich Anielewicz patted his own lap. The beffel jumped up into it and rubbed himself against the young Big Ugly as he might have against a member of the Race.

Maybe the alcohol had something to do with the solemnity with which Nesseref spoke: “Watching something like that makes me hope our two species really will be able to live in peace for many years to come.”

“Alevai,”
Mordechai Anielewicz said in his language. As he had before, he translated for her once more: “May it be so.”

“May it be so,” Nesseref agreed, and then tried the Tosevite word:
“Alevai.”
Maybe it was the alcohol, but she had no trouble saying it at all.

 
20

Car keys clinked as Sam Yeager fished them out of his pocket. “I’ll be back in a bit,” he called to Barbara and Jonathan. “I’m going to see how the alterations for my tux look.”

“You’ll be dashing,” his wife said. Sam snorted. That wasn’t a word he’d ever thought to apply to himself. Jonathan just snickered. His tuxedo already fit fine, so he didn’t have to worry about return trips to the tailor.

Out on the street, cars slid past, their lights on. It was just a little past five-thirty, but night came early in December, even in Los Angeles. Yeager unlocked the door to his own Buick in the driveway, got inside, and fastened his seat belt. As he started the engine, he shook his head in bemusement. Back before the Lizards came, nobody’d bothered putting seat belts in cars. Nowadays, everyone took them for granted: the Race’s attitude toward minimizing risk had rubbed off on people.

He backed out of the driveway and drove south down Budlong toward Redondo Beach Boulevard, on which the formalwear place stood. Maybe he really would look dashing by the time the Japanese-American tailors were done with him. Jonathan did, sure enough. But Jonathan, of course, was a young man, and it would be
his
wedding day. Sam knew he needed more help to look sharp than his son did.

He’d gone only a couple of blocks—he hadn’t even got to Rosecrans yet—when he spied motion in the rearview mirror. He needed a heartbeat to realize it wasn’t motion behind the car. It was motion
inside
the car: somebody who’d been hiding, lying down on the back seat or maybe between the front and back seats, coming up and showing himself.

That heartbeat’s hesitation was at least half a heartbeat too long. By the time Sam took one hand off the wheel and started to go for his .45, he felt something hard and cold and metallic pressed to the back of his head. “Don’t even think about it, Yeager,” his uninvited guest told him. “Don’t even
start
to think about it. I know you’re heeled. Keep both hands where I can see ’em and pull on over to the side of the road if you want to keep breathing even a little longer.”

Numbly, Sam obeyed. He’d known this day might come. He’d known it ever since he gave Straha the information he’d uncovered. He’d known it before then, as a matter of fact. But he’d been extra careful since that day. This once, he hadn’t been careful enough.
One mistake, that’s all you get.

“Attaboy,” his passenger said when he parked the car by the curb. “Now—tell me where it’s at, so I can pull your teeth. Don’t get cute with me, either. I’d sooner ice you someplace where it’s quieter than this, but I’ll do it right here if I’ve got to.”

“Right hip,” Yeager said dully. Smooth and deft, the man in the back seat half stood, reached forward, slid his hand under the safety belt, and plucked out the pistol.
I was stupid twice,
Sam thought.
I couldn’t have got it very fast there myself.
Right now, though, that didn’t look as if it would matter.

“Okay,” said the man with the pistol—with two pistols now. “Get moving. Go down to Redondo Beach and turn right.”

I was going to do that anyhow,
Yeager thought as he pulled back into traffic. In an idiot sort of way, it was funny. Or maybe his brain was just spinning round and round without going anywhere, like a hamster’s exercise wheel.

The light at the corner of Budlong and Rosecrans turned red. Sam hit the brake. As he did, one small light went on in his head. “You’re Straha’s driver!” he blurted. Gordon, that was the fellow’s name.

“Not any more, I’m not,” Gordon answered. “That’s your fault, and you’re going to pay for it. President Warren’s dead. That’s your fault.” The light turned green. Yeager drove south, not knowing what else to do. Straha’s driver—no, his ex-driver now—continued, “Indianapolis went up in smoke.
That’s
your fault. And a hell of a lot of good men lost their posts. That’s your fault, too. If I could kill you four or five times, I would, but once’ll have to do.”

“What about all those Lizards?” Sam asked. The light at Compton Boulevard was green. He wished it were red. That would have given him a few extra seconds. “They never had a chance.”

“Fuck ’em.” Gordon’s voice was flat and cold. “And fuck you, buddy.”

“Thanks a lot,” Yeager said as he stopped for the red light at Redondo Beach Boulevard. “Fuck you, too, and the horse you rode in on.”

Straha’s driver laughed. “Yeah, you can cuss me. You’ll be just as dead either which way. Now go on down to Western. Turn left there and keep on driving till I tell you to stop.”

Sam waited till the way was clear, then turned onto Redondo Beach. He had a pretty good idea where Gordon would have him go. Western ran all the way down to the Palos Verdes peninsula, where there were plenty of wide open spaces without any houses close by. Kids drove down to P.V. to find privacy to park; he wouldn’t have been surprised if Jonathan and Karen had done that a time or two, or maybe more than a time or two. Palos Verdes offered privacy for murder, too.

Coming up was Normandie. The next big street after it was Western. Yeager swung into the left lane as he drove west on Redondo Beach. He was nearing the light at Redondo Beach and Normandie when it went from green to yellow to red. Cars on Normandie started going through the intersection.

Sam slowed as if he were going to stop at the light, then stamped on the gas for all he was worth. Gordon only had time for the beginning of a startled squawk before the Buick broadsided a Chevy station wagon.

It had been a good many years since Sam’s last traffic accident. He’d never caused—he’d never imagined causing—one on purpose. As they always did in pileups, things happened very fast and seemed to happen very slowly. Collision. Noise—incredible racket of smashing glass and crumpling metal. Yeager jerked forward. His seat belt caught him before he could spear himself on the steering wheel or go headfirst through the windshield.

Gordon wasn’t wearing a seat belt. Sam had counted on that. Straha’s driver hadn’t been sitting directly behind him. He’d been more in the middle of the back seat. At the impact, he too was hurled forward, half over the top of the front seat. The pistol flew out of his hand. Sam had counted on that, too—he’d hoped for it, anyway. With the reflexes that had let him play a pretty fair left field once upon a time, he snatched it up from the floorboard and hit Gordon in the head with it, as hard as he could. Then he got back his own .45 from Gordon’s belt.

All that happened as quickly as he could do it. He hadn’t had time to think about it. He couldn’t remember thinking anything since deciding to run the light at Normandie, any more than he’d done any thinking while chasing down a long fly ball in the alley in left-center. Thinking was for afterwards.

Afterwards, however much against the odds, seemed to have arrived. Time returned to its normal flow. Sam suddenly noticed blaring horns and squealing brakes as other drivers somehow missed adding to the accident.

The first thing that ran through his mind was,
It wasn’t an accident. I meant to do it.
The next thought made a lot more sense:
I’d better get the hell out of here before the car catches on fire.

When he tried to open the door, it wouldn’t. He twisted in his seat and kicked at it. At the same time, somebody outside yanked at it for all he was worth. It did open then, with a scream of tortured metal.

“You son of a bitch!” roared the man outside, a stocky, swarthy fellow whose ancestors had come from Mexico if he hadn’t. “You stupid motherfucking son of a bitch! You trying to get me killed? You trying to get yourself killed?”

He must have been driving the other car.
Sam was proud he’d managed such a brilliant deduction. “No, I was trying to keep from getting killed,” he answered—literal truth. He realized he sounded mushy. There on top of the dashboard, quite undamaged, sat his upper plate. He reached out with his left hand and stuffed it into his mouth.

“Man, I oughta beat the living shit outta you, and—” The man standing in the intersection suddenly noticed the pistol in Yeager’s right hand. His eyes went enormously wide. He stopped roaring and started backing away.

That let Sam get out of the car. One look at the stove-in front end told him he’d never drive the Buick again. He shrugged. He’d have the chance to drive some other car one day. Almost as an afterthought, he dragged Gordon out of the wreckage. Gordon’s head thumped on the asphalt, but Sam wasn’t about to lose any sleep over that.

A couple of other cars had stopped. Their drivers jumped out to lend a hand. But nobody seemed eager to come very close to Yeager, not with one pistol in his hand and another on his belt. “Don’t do nothin’ crazy, mister,” a tall, skinny blond guy said.

“I don’t intend to,” Yeager said—he’d already been crazy enough to last a lifetime, and to prolong one. “I’m just waiting for the cops to get here.”

He didn’t have to wait long. Siren howling, red lights flashing, a squad car raced up Normandie and stopped in the intersection, which was already a lot more crowded than it needed to be. Two of Gardena’s finest got out and looked things over. “Okay,” said one of them, a burly fellow with black hair and very blue eyes. “What the hell happened here?”

As far as Sam could see, that was pretty obvious. He sighed with relief for a different reason, though—he’d met the policeman before. “Hello, Clyde,” he said. “How are you tonight?”

The Mexican man who’d been driving the station wagon let out a wail of anguish. His car was wrecked—and it was totaled, bent into an L—and the guy who’d rammed him knew the cop by his first name?

Clyde needed a couple of seconds to pull Sam out of his mental card file, but he did. “Lieutenant Colonel Yeager!” he exclaimed. “What the hell happened here?” This time, he asked it in an altogether different tone of voice.

Briefly, as if making an oral report, Yeager told him what had happened. “Yeah, and that’s all a bunch of bullshit, too,” Gordon said from the street. Sam jumped. He hadn’t noticed Straha’s driver coming to. Gordon went on, “This guy kidnapped me, dragged me off the street. He was babbling about ransom money.”

Sam handed Clyde both pistols. “You’ll probably find both our prints on both of them. You want to know where I was going when I left home, call my wife and son. You can check with the formalwear place, too—it’s right down the street here.”

“Whaddaya think?” the other cop asked Clyde.

“Yeager here, he’s had some nasty stuff happen to him that nobody ever got a handle on—nobody this side of the FBI, anyhow,” Clyde said slowly. “You ask me, this looks like more of the same.” He bent down and put handcuffs on Gordon. “You’re under arrest. Suspicion of kidnapping.” Then he pointed at Sam. “But you’re coming down to the station, too, till we find out whose story checks out better.”

“What about me?” cried the man who’d been driving the station wagon.

Nobody paid any attention to him. “Sure, I’ll come,” Sam said. “But please do call my wife, will you, and let her know I’m okay.”

“We’ll take care of it,” the second cop said. He went back to the police car and spoke into the radio. Then he walked back toward the accident. “Tow truck’s on the way. Another car, too, so we can get both these guys to the station.”

“Okay, good,” Clyde answered. “Like I said, we’ll sort it out there.” He hauled Gordon to his feet.

“I want my lawyer,” Gordon said sullenly.

Whoever his lawyer was, he’d be good. Sam was sure of that. But, as he walked toward the squad car, he didn’t worry about it. He didn’t worry about anything. By the odds, he should have been dead, and he was still breathing. Measured against that, nothing else mattered.

Jonathan Yeager fiddled with his tie in front of the mirror in the church’s waiting room. He’d practiced tying a bow tie under a wing collar ever since he’d got the tux, but he still wasn’t real good at it. One side of the bow definitely looked bigger than the other. “I don’t think I’ll ever get it right, Dad,” he said in something close to despair.

His father clapped him on the shoulder and advised, “Don’t worry about it. Nobody’s going to care much, as long as you’re there and Karen’s there and the minister’s there. And you probably won’t have to worry about it again till you’re marrying off your own kid—and nobody’ll pay much attention to
you
then, believe me.”