Aftershocks (9 page)

One of the males in the unit, a trooper named Yarssev, summed up his feelings when he asked, “How did the Big Uglies stay in the war so long when we did this to them? Why were they so stupid?”

“I cannot answer that,” Gorppet said. “All I know is, they fought hard up till the moment they surrendered.”

“Truth, superior sir,” Yarssev agreed. “And now their countryside will glow in the dark for years because of their foolish courage.”

He was exaggerating, but not by any tremendous amount. Every male moving into the
Reich
wore a radiation-exposure badge on a chain around his neck. Orders were to check the badges twice a day, and the troops followed those orders. Nowhere on four worlds had so many explosive-metal bombs fallen on so small an area in so short a time.

But not every area of the
Reich
had had a bomb fall on it. In between the zones where nothing was left alive, the Deutsche who had survived the war struggled to get on with their lives, to raise their crops and domestic animals, to care for refugees and demobilized soldiers, to rebuild damage from conventional weapons.

As the occupying males of the Race moved into the
Reich,
the local Tosevites would pause in what they were doing to stare at them. Some of those Tosevites would have fought against the Race in earlier conflicts. Others, though, females and young, were surely civilians. The quality of the stares was the same in either case, though.

“Nasty creatures, aren’t they, superior sir?” Yarssev said.

“No doubt about it,” Gorppet agreed. “I have seen stares from Big Uglies who hated us before—I have served in Basra and Baghdad. But I have never seen such hate as these Deutsche display.”

“Better they should hate their own not-emperor, who was foolish enough to think he could beat us,” Yarssev said.

“They never hate their own. No one ever hates his own. This is a law through all the Empire, as sure as I hatched out of my eggshell.”

The detachment came to the sea not much later, came to the sea and headed west. Gorppet had seen Tosevite seas before. The one south of Basra was quite tolerably warm. The one off Cape Town was cooler, but of an interesting shade of blue. This one . . . This one was cold and gray and ugly. It splashed lethargically up onto the mud of the coastline, then rolled back.

“Why would anyone want to live in a country like this?” a male asked. “Chilly and flat and horrible . . . ”

“Sometimes you live where you have to live, not where you want to live,” Gorppet answered. “Maybe some other Big Uglies chased the Deutsche into this part of the world and would not let them live anywhere better.”

“Maybe, superior sir,” the other male said. “And maybe having to live here is what makes them so mean and tough.”

“That could be,” Gorppet agreed. “Something certainly has.”

He wished he had a taste of ginger. He had plenty—more than plenty—stashed away in South Africa, but it might as well have been on Home for all the good it did him. He’d been very moderate all through the fighting. Males who tasted ginger thought they were stronger and faster and brighter than they really were. If they went into action against coldly pragmatic Big Uglies with the herb coursing through them, they were all too likely to do something foolish and end up dead before they could make amends.

When we stop for the evening,
he thought.
I’ll taste when we stop for the evening.

They came to the vicinity of Peenemünde as light was failing. They would have gone no farther had it been early morning. Teams of the Race’s engineers had already taken possession of the principal spaceport the Deutsche used. They had also set up warning lines to keep other males from venturing too far into the radioactivity without proper protection. No site in the
Reich,
Nuremberg probably included, had taken as many bombs as Peenemünde.

“Nothing will grow here for a hundred years,” Yarssev predicted. “And I mean a hundred Tosevite years, twice as long as ours.”

“I suppose not,” Gorppet said. “And yet . . . wasn’t it here that the Big Ugly who calls himself the Deutsch not-emperor these days was holed up during the fighting?”

“I think so,” Yarssev replied. “Too bad the miserable creature came out alive, if you want to know how I feel.”

“Truth,” Gorppet said, for he agreed with all his liver. But if any Tosevite could emerge alive from the slagging the Race had given Peenemünde, that bespoke some truly formidable engineering prowess. He let out a wry hiss. The Race had seen as much in the fighting in Poland. The weapons the Deutsche used there were alarmingly close to being as good as the ones the Race owned—and the Big Uglies had had a lot more of them. If the Race hadn’t pounded their not-empire too flat to let them keep supporting their army, things might have gone even worse than they had.

As usual, field rations tasted like the mud that lined the southern shore of the local sea. Gorppet fueled himself as he would have put hydrogen into a mechanized combat vehicle. Having fueled himself, he did taste ginger. He was sure he wasn’t the only male in the small group who used the Tosevite herb. Penalties against it had grown harsher since females came to Tosev 3, but that hadn’t stopped many males. Except for making sure his troopers didn’t do anything that would get themselves and their comrades killed in combat, Gorppet didn’t try to keep them from tasting. That would hardly have been fair, not when he had the ginger habit himself.

He poured some of the herb into the palm of his hand. Even before he raised palm to mouth, the heady scent of the ginger was tickling his scent receptors. He never tired of it; it always seemed fresh and new. His tongue shot out almost of its own accord.

“Ahhh,” he murmured as bliss flowed through him. He felt bigger than a Big Ugly, faster than a starship, with more computing power between his hearing diaphragms than all the Race’s electronic network put together. Some small part of him knew the feeling was an illusion, but he didn’t care. This side of mating—maybe not even this side of mating—it was as good a feeling as a male of the Race could have.

While it lasted. Like the pleasure of mating, it didn’t last long enough. And when it faded, the crushing depression that followed was as bad as it had been good. One solution was to have another taste, and then another, and . . . Gorppet chose the harder road, waiting till the depression faded, too. Over the years, he’d come to take it as part of the experience connected to the herb.

When they set out again the next morning, the road along which they were traveling west came together with another, on which were about their number of Deutsch soldiers coming home from Poland. No one had disarmed the Deutsche: they still carried all their hand weapons, and several of them wore bandoliers of bullets crisscrossed on their chests.

The males in Gorppet’s unit nervously eyed the Big Uglies. The Deutsche did not have the look of defeated troops. On the contrary; they looked as if they were ready to start up the war again then and there.

They might win if they did, too, at least in this small engagement. Gorppet was uneasily aware of it. Before either side could start spraying bullets around, he stepped away from the males he commanded and strode toward the Deutsche. “I do not speak your language,” he called. “Does anyone among you speak the language of the Race?” If none of them did, he was liable to be in a lot of trouble.

But, as he’d hoped, a Deutsch male came out from among the Big Uglies and said, “I speak your language. What do you want?”

“I want my small group and your small group to pass by in peace,” Gorppet answered. “The war is over. Let it stay over.”

“You can say that,” the Tosevite replied. His face was grimy. His wrappings were filthy. He smelled powerfully of the rank odor Big Uglies soon acquired when they did not bathe. He went on, “Yes, winners can say, ‘The war is over.’ For losers, the war is never over. Winners can forget. Losers remember. We have much for which to remember the Race.”

“I have nothing to say to that,” Gorppet said. “I am not a politician. I am not a diplomat. I am only a soldier. As a soldier, I tell you this: if you attack us now, you will be sorry and your not-empire will be sorry.”

With a bark of Tosevite laughter, the Deutsch soldier said, “How can you make us sorrier, after what the Race has done to the
Reich?
How can you make this not-empire sorrier, after all you have done to it?”

“If you attack us, you cannot kill us all before we radio the situation to our superiors,” Gorppet replied, trying to hold his voice steady. “Helicopter gunships will punish you for fighting, and the Race will take further vengeance on the
Reich
for violating the surrender. Is this a truth, or is it not?”

“It is a truth,” the Big Ugly admitted. “It is a truth about which few of my males care right now. Many of them have lost their mates and hatchlings. Do you understand what this means? It means they do not greatly care if they live or die.”

“I do understand, yes,” Gorppet said, though he knew he did so only in theory. Tosevite kinship ties, and Tosevites willing to kill without thought for their own lives once those ties were broken, had complicated life for the Race since the conquest fleet landed. Gorppet tried the only real direction in which he thought he could go: “What they want to do now, they may regret later. Is this a truth, or is it not? Do you command them?”

“Yes, I command them,” the Deutsch soldier replied. “You make good sense. I almost wish you did not, for I am as ready as any of my males to seek revenge against the Race. But I will tell the soldiers what you have said. After that . . . we shall have to see. With the war over and lost, my hold over them is weaker than it was.”

“We shall stay alert,” Gorppet said. “We shall not attack you—the war is over. But if we are attacked, we shall fight back with all our strength.”

“I understand.” The Big Ugly walked back toward his own males, calling out in their guttural language. Some of the Deutsche shouted at him. They did not sound happy, nor anything close to it.

“Be ready for anything,” Gorppet warned the males he led. “Do not open fire on them unless they fire on us, but be ready.”

He was willing to let the Deutsche use the crossroads first, and held up his males so they could. The Tosevite officer led his Big Uglies forward. They towered over the males of the Race. Some of them shouted things. Some shook their fists. But, to Gorppet’s vast relief, they didn’t start shooting.

“Forward,” he called after the Deutsche had passed. Forward his own small group went. He kept one eye turret on the terrain, the other on the map he’d been given. Unlike the maps he’d had in the SSSR, this one seemed to know what it was talking about. When, toward evening, his males reached a town, he stopped a local and asked, “Greifswald?”

He made himself understood. The local nodded a Big Ugly affirmative and said, “Greifswald,
ja
.”

Gorppet turned back to his males. “We have reached our assigned station. Dismal-looking dump, isn’t it?”

 
3

With a curse half in Yiddish, half in Polish, Mordechai Anielewicz used the hand brake on his bicycle. “How am I supposed to get anywhere if the roads are all
kaputt?
” the Jewish fighting leader muttered.

Burnt-out trucks made the asphalt impassable. These particular vehicles were of human manufacture, but he had to look closely to see which side had used them. The Lizards had pressed plenty of human-made models into service in Poland, and most of them had been imported from Germany.

He got off the bicycle and walked it around the jam. He’d been doing that every kilometer or two on the journey down to Widawa. He’d got his family out of Lodz before the fighting started, and sent them southwest to this little town. That had kept them safe—or safer, anyhow—when the Germans hit the city with an explosive-metal bomb. But the
Wehrmacht
had overrun Widawa—and Bertha and Miriam and David and Heinrich were every bit as Jewish as he was, of course.

Even after he passed the wrecks, he couldn’t get back on the road right away. Someone’s airplanes had cratered it with bomblets. Anielewicz’s legs ached as he brought the bicycle forward. They’d been doing that since the last round of fighting, when he’d breathed German nerve gas. Without the antidote, he would have died then. As things were, he’d got off lucky. Of the others who’d breathed the gas, Heinrich Jäger, after whom his younger son was named, had died at an early age. Ludmila Gorbunova had suffered far more from the lingering effects of the stuff than he had. Ludmila had been in Lodz. Odds were all too good—or all too bad—she wasn’t suffering at all any more.

Over the years, Mordechai had come to take his aches and pains for granted. He couldn’t do that now. The Nazis had used poison gas again in this new round of fighting. How much of it had he breathed? How much harm was it doing? Just how much residual damage did he have? Those were all fascinating questions, and he lacked answers to any of them.

And, in a most important sense, none of them mattered much, not when measured against the one question, the overriding question.
What happened to my family?
No, there wasn’t one question only. Another lay underneath it, one he would sooner not have contemplated.
Have I still got a family?

After half a kilometer, the road stopped being too battered for a bicycle. He got back up on the bike and rode hard. The harder he worked, the worse his legs felt—till, after a while, they stopped hurting so much. He let out a sigh of relief. That had happened before. If he put in enough exercise, he could work right through the cramps. Sometimes.

No road signs warned him he was coming into Widawa. For one thing, Polish roads had never been well marked. For another, Widawa wasn’t a town important enough to require much in the way of marking. And, for a third, the war had been here before him. If there had been signs, they weren’t upright any more. A lot of trees in the forest just north of Widawa weren’t upright any more.

When the road curved around the forest and gave him his first glimpse of the town, he saw that a lot of the houses in it weren’t upright any more, either. His mouth tightened. He’d seen a lot of ruins in the first round of fighting and now in this one. Another set wouldn’t have been so much out of the ordinary—except that these might hold the bodies of his wife and children.

A burnt-out German panzer and an equally burnt-out Lizard landcruiser sprawled in death a few meters apart, just outside of town. Had they killed each other, or had some different fate befallen them? Mordechai knew he would never know. He pedaled past them into Widawa.

People on the street hardly bothered to look up at him. What was one more middle-aged bicycle rider with a rifle slung on his back? They’d surely seen a surfeit of those already. He put a foot down and used a boot heel for a brake. Nodding to an old woman with a head scarf who wore a long black dress, he asked, “Granny, who knows about the refugees who came in from Lodz?”

She eyed him. He spoke Polish notable only for a Warsaw accent. He looked like a Pole, being fair-skinned and light-eyed. But the old woman said, “Well, Jew, you’d best ask Father Wladyslaw about that. I don’t know anything. I don’t want to know anything.” She went on her way as if he didn’t exist.

Anielewicz sighed. Some people had a radar better than anything electronic in the Lizards’ arsenal. He’d seen that before. “Thanks,” he called after her, but she might as well not have heard.

A couple of shells had hit the church. Workmen were busy repairing it. Mordechai shrugged at that, but didn’t sigh. Jews would have fixed up a synagogue before they worried about their houses, too. “Is the priest in?” Mordechai asked a carpenter hammering nails into a board.

The man nodded and shifted his cigarette to the corner of his mouth so he could talk more readily. “Yeah, he’s there. What do you want to talk to him about?”

“I’m looking for my wife and children,” Anielewicz answered. “They came here out of Lodz not long before the Germans invaded.”

“Ah.” The cigarette twitched. “You a Jew?”

At least he asked, instead of showing he could tell. “Yes,” Mordechai said. The other fellow had a hammer. He had a rifle. “Don’t you like that?”

“Don’t care one way or the other,” the carpenter answered. “But you’re right—you’d better talk to the father.” He gestured with the hammer toward the doorway. As Mordechai walked over to it, the Pole started driving nails again.

Inside the church, Father Wladyslaw was pounding away with a hammer, too, repairing the front row of pews. He was a young man, and startlingly handsome in a tall, blond way. If his politics had fit, the Nazis would have scooped him into the SS without a second thought. With all the noise, he didn’t notice Mordechai for a bit. When he did, his smile was friendly enough. “Oh, hello,” he said, getting to his feet and brushing sawdust off his cassock. “What can I do for you today?”

“I’m looking for my wife and children,” Mordechai said again, and gave his name.

Father Wladyslaw’s eyebrows flew upward. “The famous fighting leader!” he exclaimed. “Your kin would have been some who came out of Lodz.”

“That’s right,” Mordechai said. “People in town tell me you’d know about them if anybody does. Are they alive?” There. The question was out.

But he got no sure answer for it, for the priest replied, “I’m sorry, but I
don’t
know. The Germans overran us twice, and kidnapped people each time they retreated. Some were Jews. Some were Poles who’d lived here for generations uncounted. I’m not even sure why, but who can tell with Germans?”

“They’ve run out of Jews in Germany,” Anielewicz said bitterly. “They need some fresh people to keep the gas chambers and the ovens busy.”

“You may well be right,” Father Wladyslaw said. “I wish I could give you more definite news of your loved ones, but I fear I can’t. You’ll have to go inquire among the refugees who are still here. I pray your family is among them.”

“Thank you, Father,” Mordechai said; the priest seemed a decent fellow. Then he added several choice comments about the Nazis. He was ashamed of himself as soon as they were out of his mouth, which was, of course, much too late. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” Father Wladyslaw told him. “If you think I haven’t called them worse than that, you’re wrong.”

“They’re supposed to have published a list of the people they took. They’re supposed to have already released those people,” Anielewicz said. “And they have published it, and they have turned a few people loose. But nobody believes that list is everybody, or even close to everybody.”

“Your family is not on it?” the priest asked.

“If they were, I wouldn’t be here,” Mordechai answered. “Thanks for your help, Father. I won’t take up any more of your time. The refugee tents are on the south edge of town?”

“That’s right,” Father Wladyslaw said. “I wish you luck there, either in finding them or in learning of them.” Nodding, Anielewicz walked out of the church. The priest started hammering again even before he’d left.

The tents and huts in which the refugees were staying looked even shabbier than the town of Widawa. The fighting had smashed them up, too, and they’d been less prepossessing to begin with. A sharp stink assailed Mordechai’s nose. He wouldn’t have let his fighting men pay sanitation so little heed.

Poles and Jews spilled out into the spaces between tents to see who the newcomer was. Anielewicz got the notion the people of Widawa would just as soon they all disappeared. But with Lodz radioactive rubble, a lot of them had nowhere to go. He stared this way and that. He didn’t see his family. He did spot someone he knew. “Rabinowicz! Are Bertha and the children here?”

“Were they ever here?” the other Jew answered. “News to me if they were. But I’ve only been here a couple days myself.”

“Wonderful,” Mordechai muttered. He looked around again. He’d thought a good many Jews had come from Lodz to Widawa, but Rabinowicz’s was the only face he recognized. What had happened to the Jews who were here, then? Were they dead? Were all they hauled off to the
Reich
for a fate that couldn’t possibly be good? He asked some of the Poles, and got a different answer from each of them.

“Damn Nazis took ’em away,” a woman said.

“Not everybody,” a man disagreed. “Some got taken away, yes, but some got shot right here and some ran off.”

“Nobody got shot right here,” another man insisted. “The Germans said they were gonna, but they never did.”

“Does anybody know if Bertha and Miriam and David and Heinrich Anielewicz got away safe, or if they got taken back to Germany?” Mordechai asked.

Nobody knew. Any which way, people were too busy arguing over what had happened to be very interested in giving details. The two men who’d disagreed went nose to nose with each other, both of them shouting at the tops of their lungs. Mordechai wanted to knock their heads together. That might have let in some sense. He couldn’t think of anything else that would.

He lacked the energy to treat the two loud fools as they deserved. Instead, he turned away, sick at heart. His wife and children were either carried off to Germany or dead: a bad choice or a worse one. He would have to beard the Nazis in their den to find out. He’d need help from the Lizards there, but he thought they would give him the paperwork and help he’d require. They despised the German ruling party, too.

He tried one more thing: “My son, Heinrich, had a beffel for a pet, an animal from the Lizards’ world. It would squeak when it was happy. Does anybody remember that?”

And two people did. “That damned thing,” a woman said. “Yes, the Germans nabbed the people who had it. They took them away when they got run out of here.” The other person, an old man, nodded.

“They
did
go into Germany, then,” Mordechai breathed. “Thank you both, from the bottom of my heart.” He didn’t know if he ought to be thanking them. Jews who went into Germany were not in the habit of coming out again. But his family hadn’t simply been slaughtered here. That was something . . . he hoped.

Nesseref was feeding Orbit, her tsiongi, when the telephone hissed for attention. The pet started eating while she hurried into the bedchamber, wondering who was calling. “I greet you,” the shuttlecraft pilot said, waiting to see whose image appeared on the computer monitor.

To her surprise, it was not a male or female of the Race but a Big Ugly. “I greet you, superior female,” he said in the language of the Race. “Mordechai Anielewicz here.”

“Good to see you,” Nesseref answered, glad he’d named himself. No matter how well she liked him, she had trouble telling Tosevites apart.

“I hope you are well,” the Big Ugly said.

“On the whole, yes,” Nesseref replied. “The fallout levels have been high, but my apartment building was damaged only once, and even then the filters functioned well. By now, everything has been replaced, and radioactivity levels are falling. But I hope very much that
you
are well, Mordechai Anielewicz. You have not been shielded from all the radioactivity that descended on Poland.”

“I am well enough for now,” Anielewicz told her. “Past that, I do not worry about myself. I worry about my mate and my hatchlings. They have been carried back into the
Reich
by retreating Deutsch armies, and they very well may be dead by now.”