Second Contact (26 page)

When he got there, Bunim addressed him in German: “I have spoken to you of the threat against the colonists I received.”

“Regional Subadministrator, I remember,” Anielewicz replied. “Many ships have landed in Poland now. Many colonists have landed in Poland now. I know of nothing bad that has happened to them, though not many have landed near Lodz.” In their shoes, he wouldn’t have wanted to land near the border with the Greater German
Reich
, either.

“Nothing bad has happened—not yet,” Bunim said. “But I am concerned. Is it the right word—concerned?” He didn’t like to make mistakes. In that, he was a typical Lizard. Mistakes showed faulty planning, and the Lizards were much enamored of planning in general.

“Concerned is the right word, yes, Regional Subadministrator,” Anielewicz said, giving him what credit he could. “You have come to speak this language well.” That was a lie, but not an outrageous one. Bunim did work hard. Having delivered the compliments, Mordechai got down to business: “Why are you concerned? Have you received another threat?”

“No, no one has threatened,” Bunim told him. “That is one reason I am concerned. When you Tosevites strut and bluster, we of the Race at least know where you stand. When you are quiet, that is the time for worry. That is the time when you are hatching plots in secret. And—” He fell silent.

Anielewicz exhaled in some exasperation. “If no one had sent you the first message, you would not be worried now, even though everything was quiet. Since everything has been quiet since, why are you still worrying?”

Bunim’s eye turrets flicked this way and that. He was an unhappy Lizard, no doubt about it. “I have reason to be concerned,” he declared, and added an emphatic cough even though he was still speaking German.

“Well, if you do, you’d better show me why,” Mordechai said, his patience wearing thin. “Otherwise, I’ll just think you’ve been wasting my time.”

“Show you why? It shall be done,” Bunim said. Even in German, the phrase sounded odd, and seemed to imply Anielewicz was the regional subadministrator’s superior.

Bunim took out one of the
skelkwank
disks the Lizards used for just about all their recording. He stuck it in a player. Out came the threat he had mentioned before to Anielewicz. Mordechai was not tremendously fluent in the language of the Race, but he followed it well enough to understand what he heard here.

“Well?” he said when the brief recording was done. “I heard it. It was what you said it was, but so what?”

“You heard it, but you heard without full understanding,” Bunim said.

“You’d better explain, then,” Mordechai said. “I must be missing something here, but I don’t know what.”

“You heard the threat?” Bunim asked. Mordechai nodded. Bunim understood the human gesture. He went on, “That threat, Anielewicz, was not spoken by a Tosevite. Without the tiniest fragment of doubt, it came from the mouth of a male of the Race.”

Anielewicz thought about that for a few seconds. Then, very softly, he said,
“Oy.”
Bunim was right. People didn’t—couldn’t—sound quite right speaking the Lizards’ language. Sure as hell, that had been a Lizard. “What do you suppose it means?” Anielewicz asked the regional subadministrator.

“One of two things.” Bunim held up a clawed middle finger. “It could be some Tosevites holding a male of the Race prisoner. This is not good.” The Lizard held up his index finger. “Or it could be a male of the Race plotting with Tosevites: a criminal, I mean to say. This also is not good.”

“You are right,” Mordechai said. “Did any male go missing not long before you got this recording?”

“No, but this does not have to mean anything,” Bunim answered. “We know both the
Reich
and the Soviet Union still have prisoners they took during the fighting. So does the USA. So do Britain and Nippon. Those not-empires are less likely to threaten Poland, though. If you were wondering, the recording was posted to me here from Pinsk. How it got to Pinsk, I do not know.” His eye turrets swung toward Anielewicz. “You were in Pinsk not so long ago,
nicht wahr
?”

“Yes, it is so,” Anielewicz said, judging a lie there more dangerous than the truth. “I was meeting an old friend”—which stretched the point about David Nussboym as far as it would go, and then another ten centimeters—“I hadn’t seen since the fighting stopped.” That last clause, at least, was true.

Bunim looked to be on the point of saying something, but closed his mouth instead. Maybe he’d expected Mordechai to lie about going to Pinsk. After a moment, he started again: “You Jews could have captives, too. Do not think we do not know about this.”

“So could the Poles, more easily than we could,” Mordechai said. “Or it could be a ginger smuggler angry at the administration here and wanting to embarrass you.”

“All these things may be true,” Bunim said. “Only one of them
is
true, or perhaps truth lies in none of them, but in a place we have not yet found. But where is that place? I have males of the Race trying to learn. I have Poles trying to learn. And now I have Jews trying to learn, too.”

“Yes, we had better find out about that, hadn’t we?” Mordechai said abstractedly. “You are right, Regional Subadministrator. This could be trouble.”

“The colonization fleet has already had too much trouble,” Bunim said. “We had better not have any more. If we have any more, Tosevites will also have trouble. They will have more trouble than they ever imagined.”

“I understand,” Anielewicz said. “I tell you this, Regional Subadministrator: no humans like you any better than the Jews of Poland. If you will not find humans on your side among us, you will not find them anywhere.”

“Then it may be that we shall not find them anywhere,” Bunim said. “I know you have had dealings with the
Reich
when you thought our eye turrets were turned the other way. I know you are not the only one to do this, too.”

Anielewicz felt a dull embarrassment, rather as if he’d been caught in bed with a woman other than Bertha. But his marriage to the Lizards was one of convenience, not of love. And he’d been unfaithful not only with the Nazis but also with the Russians, as David Nussboym could attest. He shrugged. Like any adultery, his bouts of infidelity to the Race had seemed a good idea at the time.

He said, “When the Race came to Earth, we Jews here in Poland were slaves to the
Reich
. Men are not meant to be slaves.”

“And we set you free,” Bunim said. “And see the thanks we have had for it.”

Yes, he sounded like a woman betrayed. “You set us free of the Germans,” Mordechai said.

“That is what I told you,” Bunim said.

But Anielewicz shook his head. “No, it is not. You set us free of the Germans. You did not set us free. You aimed at becoming our masters yourselves. We do not care for that any more than we cared for having the Nazis enslave us.”

“And who would rule you if we left Poland?” Bunim inquired. Twenty years on Tosev 3 had taught him sarcasm.

He had also asked a question—
the
question—for which Anielewicz had no good answer, and indeed no answer of any sort. Instead of answering, he evaded: “This is why we will help you now. For your safety, and for our own, we need to find out who is making threats against the arriving colonists.”

“So you do,” Bunim said. “Any trouble that comes down on our heads—in the end, it comes down on your heads, too.”

Anielewicz sent him a stare of undisguised loathing. “It’s taken you all this time since you came to Earth, but you’ve finally figured out what being a Jew means, haven’t you?”

“I do not know what you are talking about,” Bunim said, which might have been true or might not. The Lizard went on, “I do know that my first duty is to preserve the Race, my next is to preserve the land on which the Race will dwell, and only after that do I concern myself with the welfare of Tosevites of any sort.”

From his perspective, that made perfectly good sense. Mordechai knew he himself put Jews ahead of Poles, Poles ahead—far ahead—of Germans, and humans ahead of Lizards. But Bunim had resources he couldn’t hope to match. If the Lizards decided the Jews deserved oppressing . . . if they decided that, how were they any different from the Nazis?

He shook his head. That wasn’t fair to the Lizards. When they’d discovered Treblinka, they’d destroyed it in horror. Anielewicz did not think they would ever build an extermination camp of their own. A generation on Earth could not have corrupted the males of the conquest fleet that far, and the males and females of the colonization fleet would not be corrupt at all, not by Earthly standards.

Bunim said, “Remember, our fates—is that the word?—our fates, yes, are tied together. If the Race fails on Tosev 3, your particular group of Tosevites is also likely to fail. The rest of the Tosevites, starting with the Poles, will make sure of this. Am I right or am I wrong?”

He was all too likely to be right. Anielewicz had no intention of admitting as much. In a stony voice, he replied, “Jews got by for three thousand years before the Race came to Earth. If every male and female of the Race disappeared tomorrow, Jews would go right on getting by.”

Bunim’s mouth fell open in Lizardly amusement. “What are three thousand years?” he asked. “Where will you be in three thousand more?”

“Dead,” Anielewicz answered, “the same as you.”

“You, yes,” Bunim agreed. “I, yes. The Tosevites? Possibly. The Race? No.” He spoke with absolute confidence.

“No, eh?” Anielewicz said. “What about that male who threatened the colonists, then?” He had the somber satisfaction of seeing that he’d made Bunim loathe him as much as he loathed the Lizard.

Beside the
13th Emperor Makkakap
, the shuttlecraft seemed tiny. Beside the shuttlecraft, Nesseref seemed tiny. That surely made her seem infinitesimal alongside the enormous bulk of the starship now landed not far from the Tosevite town of Warsaw.

The logic was flawless. Nesseref, however, had other concerns besides logic. Turning to the male from the conquest fleet beside her, she asked, “Why would anybody want to live in this miserable, cold place?”

“You think it is cold now, wait another season,” the male answered. “Nobody from Home knows what cold is about. Winter here is like cold sleep without the drugs to make you unconscious.” He laughed. “Tosev 3 has different drugs, believe you me it does. Have you found out about ginger yet, superior female?”

“Yes,” Nesseref said, which was not quite the truth and not quite a lie. She still had the two vials males had given her on earlier visits to Tosev 3. That in itself was against regulations, which grew more strident on the subject with each passing day. But she hadn’t actually opened the vials and tasted the herb inside. As long as she didn’t do that, she felt no enormous guilt.

“Good stuff, isn’t it?” the male said enthusiastically. This time, Nesseref didn’t answer at all. Every male from the conquest fleet who talked about ginger talked about it enthusiastically. That was one reason she hadn’t tried it herself: she didn’t trust anything that evoked such fervent responses. Being a shuttlecraft pilot had made her rely more on her own opinion than was usual among the Race.

Her own opinion at the moment was that things looked more confused than they should have. Newly awakened males and females from the colonization fleet wandered here and there, none of them with any clear notion of where they ought to be going or what they ought to be doing. The males from the conquest fleet who moved among them were easy to pick out by eye. They strode with purpose, to some destination familiar to them. They’d had years to get used to the vagaries of life on Tosev 3. A couple of hasty briefings couldn’t possibly have the same effect.

Turning back to the male beside her, she asked, “When you do not taste ginger, how do you stand Tosev 3? How do you keep from being bored to death?”

The male laughed again. “Superior female, you can die a lot of ways on this planet, but being bored is not one of them. Of course, if you do get bored, one bunch of Big Uglies or another is liable to kill you, but I do not suppose that is what you were talking about.”

“No,” Nesseref said. Just how dangerous these natives could be hadn’t really sunk in, despite her getting shot at on the way down to Cairo. Some Tosevites were laboring in the shadow of the
13th Emperor Makkakap
. “They certainly do look funny, do they not?—wrapping themselves in cloths even when they work hard.”

“They stay warm that way,” the male from the conquest fleet said. “But even the Tosevites who live where the weather is decent wear cloths, or most of them do. They use them for display—and for concealment, too, I think.”

“Why would they conceal with cloths?” Nesseref asked, puzzled. “They are not hiding from predators, are they? No, of course not.” She answered her own question. “They could not be.”

“No, no, no—concealment from one another.” The male from the conquest fleet gave a brief, highly colored account of Tosevite courtship and mating habits.

“That is revolting,” Nesseref said when he was through. “I think you are making it up. I am new to this miserable world, so you figure I will believe anything.”

“By the spirits of Emperors past, I swear it is the truth,” the male said, and looked down at the ground. “They are worse than animals, but they have a civilization. Nobody will ever figure them out.”

“Yes, we will, sooner or later.” The shuttlecraft pilot spoke with conviction. “We just have not given it enough time yet. In a few hundred years, or maybe a few thousand years, our descendants will look back on this time and laugh at how foolish and upset we were. And the Big Uglies will be loyal subjects of the Emperor, just like everyone else.” She paused and peered over toward a couple of them. “They will still be funny-looking, though.”

“That last is truth,” the male said. “The rest . . . I tell you, superior female, you are still new-come from Home. You do not really know what things are like here. On Tosev 3, time is different, somehow. You can see things happen over years; they do not take centuries, the way they did with us. I am not sure there was a televisor on this planet when we got here. There are millions of them now.”