Second Contact (8 page)

Flame splashed off the concrete of the landing area, then winked out as the computer cut off the rocket motor. The monitor showed people wheeling a landing ramp out toward the shuttlecraft so she could descend. No, they weren’t people; they were Tosevites. They looked like the videos she’d studied: too erect, too large, draped in cloths to conserve body heat even at what was evidently the warmer season of the year. Some of them had hair—it put her in mind of fungus—all over their blunt, round faces, others just on the top of the head. Next to the male of the Race trotting along beside them, they put her in mind of poorly articulated toys for hatchlings.

With a small clank, the top end of the ramp brushed the side of the shuttlecraft. Nesseref opened the outer door, then hissed as chilly air poured in. She hissed again when the air struck the scent receptors on her tongue; it stank of smoke and carried all sorts of other odors she’d never smelled before.

She skittered down the ramp. “I greet you, superior female,” the male waiting at the bottom said. With an emphatic cough, he added, “Strange to see a new face in these parts instead of the same gang of males.”

“Yes, I suppose it must be,” Nesseref said. Her eye turrets swiveled this way and that as she tried to take in as much of this part of this new world as she could. “But then, all of Tosev 3 is strange, isn’t it?”

“That it is.” The male used another emphatic cough. “A Big Ugly, now, a Big Ugly would have said, ‘Good to see a new face.’ By the Emperor”—he cast down his eyes—“they really think that way.”

Nesseref’s shiver had only a little to do with the unpleasant weather. “Aliens,” she said. “How can you bear to live among them?”

“It is not easy,” the male replied. “Some of us have even started thinking more the way they do than anybody straight from Home would be able to imagine, I expect. We have had to. A lot of the ones who could not are dead. But Tosev 3 does have its compensations. There is ginger, for instance.”

“What is ginger?” Nesseref asked. It hadn’t been in the briefing.

“Good stuff,” the male said. “I will give you a vial. You can take it back up with you when you fetch this intelligence data up into orbit. We do not want to transmit it, even encrypted, for fear the Big Uglies will break the encryption. They have done it before, and hurt us doing it.”

“Are they really that bad?” Nesseref asked.

“No,” the male told her. “Really, they are worse.”

David Goldfarb minded being stationed in Belfast less than a lot of people might have. From what he’d seen, even men brought over from England soon tended to divide along religious lines, Protestants going up against Catholics in long-running arguments that sometimes turned into brawls. Being a Jew, he was immune to that sort of pressure.

All things considered, Jews got on pretty well in Belfast. Each faction here despised the other so thoroughly, it had little energy to waste on any other hatreds. Neither Catholics nor Protestants gave Naomi and the kids a hard time when they left the married officers’ quarters to shop.

Goldfarb’s swivel chair creaked when he leaned back in it. “First shuttlecraft from the colonization fleet we’ve tracked,” he remarked.

“That’s right, Flight Lieutenant,” Sergeant Jack McDowell answered. If the Scot disliked serving under a Jew who singularly lacked a cultured accent, he was veteran enough to conceal the fact. “Won’t be the last, though.”

“No.” Goldfarb was a veteran himself, having spent his entire adult life in the RAF. “Not the world we thought it would be, is it?”

“Not half it’s not,” McDowell agreed sorrowfully. He pulled a packet of Chesterfields from his breast pocket, stuck one in his mouth, and lit it. Holding the packet out to Goldfarb, he asked, “Care for a fag, sir?”

“Thanks.” Goldfarb leaned forward to light the smoke from the one McDowell already had going. He took a drag, then blew a ragged smoke ring. After another drag, he sighed. “Doesn’t taste like much, does it?”

“Too right it don’t,” McDowell said, even more sorrowfully than before. He too sighed. “Not a Yank brand going that tastes like much. When you lit up a Players, by God, you knew you had a cigarette in your face.”

“That’s the truth.” Goldfarb coughed in fond reminiscence. “It’s the end of Empire, that’s what it is.” The phrase had taken on a mournful currency in Britain after the Lizards occupied most of what once was the largest empire on the face of the Earth. Cut off from much of the tobacco they’d used, British cigarette manufacturers had gone under one after another.

McDowell’s long, lean, ruddy face got even more sour than usual. “The end of Empire it is. And do you know what’s the worst of it?” He waited for Goldfarb to shake his head, then went on, “The worst of it, sir, is that the youngsters who’ve grown up since the bloody Lizards came, they don’t care. Doesn’t matter to them that we’re shoved back onto a couple of little islands. All they want to do is lay about and drink beer, you ask me.”

“They don’t know any better,” Goldfarb answered. “This is what they’re used to. They don’t remember how things were. They don’t remember how we kept the Nazis from invading us and how we beat the Lizards when they did.”

Savagely, McDowell stubbed out his bland American cigarette and said, “And now we’re on the dole from the Yanks and the Nazis both. Damned if I don’t half wish the Lizards had beaten us after all. Better to go down swinging than to slip into the muck an inch at a bloody time.”

“Something to that,” said Goldfarb, who despised the dependence on the Greater German
Reich
into which a Britain shorn of her colonies had been forced. “I warned that shuttlecraft pilot about the Nazis. Haven’t heard any squawks since, so I suppose he got down safe in Poland.”

McDowell leered. “That was a shuttlecraft from the colonization fleet. How do you know a lady Lizard wasn’t flying it?”

“I don’t,” Goldfarb admitted, blinking. “It never even occurred to me.” He shrugged. “Doesn’t matter much, not to me and not to the Lizards, either. If their females aren’t in season, the males don’t care about chasing skirt, poor buggers.”

“I’d pay five quid to see a lady Lizard in a skirt,” McDowell said.

“Come to think of it, so would I,” Goldfarb answered with a chuckle. He got to his feet and stretched. “Thanks for the smoke.”

“Any time, Flight Lieutenant,” McDowell said. “I’ve cadged more from you than you ever have from me.”

Goldfarb shrugged again. A Jew who got a reputation for stinginess found himself in even more hot water these days than he would have a generation before. Britain didn’t go in for the madnesses of the
Reich
over on the Continent, but some of the Nazis’ attitudes had rubbed off, especially down in England. That was another reason Goldfarb hadn’t minded being posted to Northern Ireland.

He walked out into watery sunshine. Belfast seldom got any other sort. Parabolic radar dishes scanned every direction. They were ever so much smaller and ever so much more powerful than the sets he’d served during the Battle of Britain and during the Lizards’ arrival—till the aliens knocked out those sets. Some of the improvement would surely have come over the course of time regardless of whether the Lizards landed on Earth. But captured equipment and training disks playable by what they called
skelkwank
light had kicked human technology far ahead of where it would have been otherwise.

A couple of RAF officers strode past Goldfarb. He stiffened to attention and saluted; they both outranked him. One of them was saying, “—ce they’re all down, we’ll pay back a lot of—”

After returning Goldfarb’s salute, the other spoke in an elegant Oxonian accent: “Now, now, old man, don’t you know?” His gaze flicked across Goldfarb as if the flight lieutenant were a speck of lint on his lapel.

Both officers fell silent till Goldfarb was out of earshot. He went on his way, quietly steaming. Far too many officers these days gave him the glove because he was Jewish. He couldn’t do anything about it, either—or rather, he could, but anything he did was likely to make matters worse. Anti-Semitism kept wafting across the Channel like a bad smell. That Heinrich Himmler seemed so calm and rational about it, rather than ranting as Hitler had done, only made it more appealing to the aristocratic Englishman of the stiff-upper-lip school.

“What do they think?” Goldfarb muttered. “I should get down on my knees and thank them for the privilege of saving their bacon”—an American phrase, to the point if not kosher—“from the Lizards? Not bloody likely!”

Trouble was, too many of them did think exactly that. He knew his chances of making squadron leader were about as good as Britain’s chances of retaking India from the Lizards. If he hadn’t had a record far better than those of his competitors—and if he hadn’t had some blokes on his side back in the days when being on a Jew’s side didn’t take extraordinary moral courage—he never would have become an officer at all.

He had become one, though. If those snooty brass hats didn’t like it, too bad for them. He wondered what sort of conversation they’d judged unsuitable for his tender ears. He’d never know. He also wouldn’t lose any sleep over it. Had he lost sleep over every slight, he’d have lain awake every night.

People on the streets of Belfast kept an eye on him as he headed for his home. He didn’t look like an Englishman or an Irishman or even a Scot; his hair was too curly, and the wrong shade of brown to boot, while his face bore a distinctly Judaic nose. Said nose itched. He scratched it. An itchy nose was supposed to be a sign he’d kiss a fool.

When he got home, he planted a big smack on Naomi. Maybe she’d been a fool for marrying him, all those years ago. Her family had got out of Germany while some Jews still could; his had fled Polish pogroms before World War I. But she hadn’t looked down her own charming nose at him, and they remained as happy as two people could reasonably expect in this uncertain world.

“What’s new?” she asked, her English still faintly accented though she’d been in Britain since her teens.

He told her about the shuttlecraft from the colonization fleet, and about the warning he’d been able to pass on. Then he sighed. “It won’t do any good. The Lizards in the colonization fleet don’t know Nazis from necklaces.”

“You did what you could,” Naomi said, and added an emphatic cough.

Goldfarb laughed. “You caught that from our children,” he said severely, “and they caught it from the wireless and the telly.”

“And the wireless and the telly caught it from the Lizards—maybe we are becoming a part of their Empire, one bit at a time,” his wife answered. “And speaking of such things, you have a letter from your cousin in Palestine.”

“From Moishe?” Goldfarb said in glad surprise. “Haven’t heard from him in a couple of months. What has he got to say?”

“I don’t know—I haven’t opened it,” Naomi said. That was standard practice in the Goldfarb household: no one ever opened mail addressed to someone else. “Here, I’ll get it for you.” He watched her go over to the sideboard—watched appreciatively, as skirts were short this year—and pluck the letter from a cut-glass dish there. She carried it back to him.

It bore no stamp, but an adhesive label covered with Lizard squiggles. Moishe Russie had written Goldfarb’s name and address in the Roman alphabet, but the letter inside the envelope was in Yiddish.
Dear Cousin David,
he wrote,
I hope this finds you well, as all are here in Jerusalem. Reuven has just finished exams for this term of medical school. How much more he knows of how the body works than I did at his age! He would have known more if the Lizards had not come, of course, but he knows even more than he would have otherwise because they did. They understand life at a molecular level we were generations away from reaching.

So Naomi would understand, Goldfarb read the letter aloud. She had no trouble following spoken Yiddish, but could not fight her way through the Hebraic script in which it was written. “Good that your cousin’s son will be a doctor,” she said.

“Yes,” Goldfarb answered, thinking that the Lizards had given medicine the same sort of lift they had electronics. He read on: “ ‘The fleetlord, you know, sometimes uses me as a channel between the Race and people. This is one of those times. Something strange is going on in connection with the arrival of the colonization fleet. I do not know what it is. I do not know if he knows what it is. Whatever it is, it worries him.’ ”

Goldfarb and his wife stared at each other. Anything that worried the fleetlord was liable to mean trouble for the whole human race—and, incidentally, for the Lizards. Why hadn’t Moishe been more explicit? Because he didn’t know much more himself, evidently. “Finish,” Naomi said.

“ ‘Atvar likes back-channel contacts more than he did some years ago,’ ” Goldfarb read. “ ‘If you can put a flea in the ear of some of your officer friends, it might do some good. Your cousin, Moishe.’ ”

“What will you do?” Naomi asked.

“God knows,” Goldfarb answered. “I haven’t got that many officer friends any more, not with things like they are here. And I’m hardly the bloke to play at world politics.” Naomi looked at him. He let out a long sigh. He had no real choice, and knew it. “I’ll do what I can, of course.”

Straha spent a lot of time touching up his body paint. He kept the complex patterns as neat as they had been back in the days when he commanded the
206th Emperor Yower
. He’d been the third-ranking male in the conquest fleet, behind only Atvar and Kirel. He’d come within the breadth of a fingerclaw of toppling Atvar from fleetlord’s rank. If he’d done it, if he’d taken charge of things in place of that boring plodder . . .

He hissed softly. “Had the fleet been mine, Tosev 3 would belong to the Race in its entirety,” he said. He believed that; from snout to tailstump he believed it. It didn’t matter. What might have been never mattered, save in the Big Uglies’ overactive imaginations. A good male of the Race, Straha kept his eye turrets aimed firmly at what had been and what was.

Exile,
he thought. When he failed to overthrow Atvar, the fleetlord’s revenge had been as inevitable, as inexorable, as gravity. It had also been slow—
typical of Atvar,
Straha thought with a sneer. Instead of waiting for it, Straha had taken the
206th Emperor Yower
’s shuttlecraft and fled to the Big Uglies.