The Heirs of Babylon

by Glen Cook

  “What’d you do yesterday?” Hans asked.

  “Just wandered around. There’s not much to do.”

  “There’s a cathouse near the landing....”

  “Hippke told me about it. Eight women. He said he was in and out before he knew he’d unbuttoned his pants. I’d rather do it myself.”

  Hans chuckled. “Cheaper, anyway. Cost me three kilos of potatoes yesterday. And the price’ll go up.”

  Kurt glanced down at the bag in Hans’s lap. “So that’s where they’re going. Kellerman said they were disappearing fast.”

  “The women won’t take Littoral money.”

  “What about the taverns?”

  “Same thing. They trade liquor for stores, and probably sell the stores back to the ships, where they’re stolen again. Somebody’s getting rich.”

  The boat pushed off and quickly crossed the five hundred meters to the landing.

  “I’ll see you later, Kurt,” said Hans as he hurried up the pier. “Yeah.” Kurt slowly walked into a waterfront street crowded with sailors’ from a dozen countries, speaking as many tongues. He felt lost and alone, more than ever before. It was a great black loneliness like he imagined that of space. There was no feeling of belonging, as aboard Jager.

  And there were so many Political Officers. Everywhere he looked, on every street corner, was a man in black and silver, watching, cold and deadly.

  Jager had suffered a plague of them after Beck had filed his report. In bands a dozen strong, they came to ask about events in Norway. Kurt feared shipboard resentment might flare into violence if the inquisitions did not stop.

  Gibraltar seemed unchanged from the previous day. Kurt suspected it never changed. He stopped a few meters from the head of the pier and considered courses, of action. The line at the brothel was a block long, so that was out — even had he been interested. He shuddered deliciously, wondering what Karen would say if she heard he had visited such a place.

  Stretching away to the right, up a steep street, was a line of small shops and taverns. The taverns, too, had lines before their doors.

  Well, what else was there? He. looked upward, at the mass of rock where High Command was hidden. It might be interesting to walk up and see the center of the spiderweb. He started up the road. He met a Political Officer on the way, near the entrance to the underground fortress. A very old man, and much more pleasant than any Political Officer he had ever encountered.

  “Can’t come in here, son,” the old man told him as he approached a gate in the fence before the entrance.

  “What? Why not?” Kurt eyed a negligently held sub-machinegun.

  “Security. Can’t have just anybody walking in and out.” The old man seemed accustomed to dealing with would-be visitors.

  “Why not? I just want to look around. We’re on the same side, aren’t we?”

  The old man smiled a warm, friendly smile, a sort rare in Political Officers. “Now I don’t know that, do I? Far as I know, you could be the Grand Marshal of the Australian Empire.”

  “Oh. Guess you’re right.” But Kurt felt that was not the true reason for his being stopped. “Hey! How come you speak German?”

  “Well, son, a man has this job, he’s got to know about every language there is.” He pointed toward the fleet with his gun barrel. “I seen you comin’ up, and I said to myself, ‘Walter, that boy looks like one of them Littoral fellows.’ Remembered the uniform, see? They don’t change much.”

  “Oh.”

  “Pretty bad down there, uh? Crowded till you can’t hardly breathe, and lonely as sin, eh?” He had struck right to the heart of it. “Same thing, every Gatherin’. Boys come ashore thinkin’ the Rock’s goin’ to be like home. And they’re disappointed when they find out she isn’t.”

  “Always the same?”

  “Yep. Boy, I seen four — no, five, if you count one when I was four — Gatherin’s. They’re always the same, except they’ve gotten smaller. Reckon there can’t be many more.”

  Kurt remembered Karen on their last morning together, speaking of future Meetings. And he had echoed the official line, fool that he was. Now he wisely asked no questions. “Tell you what, boy. There’s a friendly little place I go myself, when I’m looking for a little excitement — when my woman’s not watching.” He gave the location of a house not yet discovered by the fleet. “But you keep that under your hat, hear? Else there’ll be a line second time you go.”

  “That doesn’t really interest me. I’ve got a wife....”

  “Well, will you look here now? Just tryin’ to help, son.”

  “Sure. Thanks anyway. You know, what I’d really like is to find someone who’d teach me English.”

  “Now what would you want to do that for?”

  “I’m Leading Quartermaster on my ship. All my charts, and most of my publications, are American, Australian, or English. I can’t do my job well because I don’t know what they say.”

  “Well, let me see,” said the old man, cradling his weapon in the crook of one arm, scratching his chin. A minute passed. “Don’t know where you’d find anyone, offhand. Wait! There’s an old coot that’s got an antique shop down on the waterfront. Crippled fellow. Likes to play mental games. Might teach you, if you’ll teach him. He’s a strange one, though. Lives in the past. Been down there a few times myself, pickin’ up odds and ends to decorate the apartment. He’s got more old junk... well, you’ll see.”

  “How do I get there?” ‘“Just go back the way you came. You can’t miss the place if you’re lookin’. Windows full of junk, right next to the Ship’s Lantern.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Sure, boy, sure. Sorry I can’t show you around. Been nice chattin’. Gets lonesome here, sometimes.” They parted with smiles.

  As he descended toward the waterfront, Kurt worried questions the old man had stimulated. What did the High Command have to hide? That talk of spies seemed somehow false. And the man had seemed certain there would be more Gatherings. How did he know?

  Kurt paused, looked back up the slope. His eyes were caught by the forest of radio masts at the top of the Rock. Was that how they had summoned the ships from the Americas? It presupposed there were long-range radios in operation around the world. Could they communicate with the Australians?

  There was a booming to seaward. Kurt looked out and saw the battleship saluting two incoming corvettes of Liberian flag. He surveyed the neat ranks of ships in the anchorage. Almost fifty warships were there, and as many auxiliaries. Where did they all come from, in this battered, dying world? And where did High Command get the food and ammunition they were being loaded with?

  Well, no point bothering himself about High Command. No one would tell him anything. To the antique shop.

  As the old man had said, the place was easy to find. It was sandwiched between a roaring tavern and a cafe exuding abominable odors. Pausing outside, Kurt studied the dusty window. Just. within was a treasure trove. of the garbage of history: old books, a Roman helmet green with age, a few bronze spearheads, a lantern off a sailing ship which should have gone to the tavern next door, relics of Moorish Spain, a trio of tattered flags, Royal, Falangist, and Republican, and faded photographs of the last king, Carios, of Franco, of Charles de Gaulle, and of Adolf Hitler, though Kurt recognized only the last. And a hundred other things. European history exuded from the shop, like a barely perceptible odor. It drew Kurt. The past had always been his favorite escape. He slipped through the door, his entry jingling a bell overhead.

  At first he thought he had entered an untenanted shop. Dust lay over everything, as if the place had not been cleaned in a decade. There was silence, gloom, and countless piles of ancient treasure.

  Something moved with slow, shuffling steps in the shadows gathered at the back of the place. A little man, not quite a dwarf but bent to the size by a hunchback, came forward. He moved as if each tiny, shuffling step were an individual agony. He cocked his head to one side, looked Kurt up and down.

  Ku
rt shivered, wondering if the man were a mutant. They were rare at home now, but there had been a time when... But so what?

  The cripple’s mind seemed agile enough. After asking a question in English and getting no answer, he shuffled across the shop to a wall covered with bookshelves. With a whithered, clawlike left hand, he waved at them.

  Carefully keeping his eyes off the bent figure and deformed hand, Kurt surveyed titles, shelf after shelf. Nothing. Then a word caught his eye. He blew dust off the book’s spine.

  Deutsches-Englisches Englisches-Deutsches Wwterbuch

  “This...”

  The old man rose on tiptoes and peered at the title closely, claw hand slightly lifting his bifocals. “Ah...” He shifted his cane to his bad hand and used the good to take the book down. Painfully, he crossed the shop again, dropped the book on a small, dusty table, sat in a rickety chair, and motioned Kurt to draw up another. Kurt sat down opposite him.

  The cripple drew the book to him, riffled through, occasionally paused to stare closely at something. When finished, he looked up and said, “Mein Name... Martin Fitzhugh.”

  “Kurt Ranke,” Kurt replied. “Sie... wilnschenT’ Kurt puzzled that for nearly a minute. Then he took the book from the old man’s hands and thumbed through, trying to find English words for what he wanted to say. “I... would... speak... English.”

  The old man shrugged, obviously uncertain what Kurt meant. He tried again. “I... desire... to learn... English.”

  “Ah.” The old man nodded vigorously. Kurt saw he was delighted. Perhaps he needed company, this old one. The shop seemed incredibly lonely — yet homey. Kurt felt he could be happy in a place this rimed with history.

  Languages are living organisms, in constant change. Rate of change is a function of the speed and universality of the communications system. The faster and more wide-spread the system, the slower is change. The German and English of 2193 were the results of two centuries of the word-of-mouth and hand-carried-letter systems. Learning the languages through the dictionary rapidly proved impossible. Kurt could read his language as it had been written before the War, but could not speak it so.

  Fitzhugh tried a new tack, the ancient way. He pointed to the table. “Name, table.”

  Kurt frowned his lack of understanding. The old man pointed out English and German words in the dictionary, then smashed his good hand against the tabletop. “Diese 1st... table!” Kurt got it. Laughing, he slapped his chair and said, “Stuhll”

  “Chair,” the old man countered.

  Kurt tried to pronounce it. The old man chuckled at his mangled “ch” sound. Then, like a gleeful gnome, he slipped off his seat and hurried round the room, pointing, naming. “Book... sword... helmet... nail... floor... window... door...” And on and on and on.

  Kurt followed, naming a list of his own. “Pfeil... Buck... Schaufel... Mantel... Kanone...” Cannon? It was a toy, but a real one poking its snout from a mound of junk would have been no surprise. The old man had everything.

  The wonder of naming wore off quickly. Kurt and Fitzhugh returned to the table and laboriously worked out a systematic way of learning.

  He left at sunset, leaving a promise to return the following day. Although he was mentally exhausted, he carried the dictionary under his arm and was determined to study it that night.

  Kurt decided he liked Fitzhugh — perhaps because of their common interest in the past. He certainly looked forward to seeing the man again.

  “What’s that?” Hans asked as he climbed into the boat. “Dictionary. German-English.”

  “Why?”

  “I want to read my charts.”

  “So what’s to read? You’ve got conversion tables for feet and yards and fathoms and miles, don’t you?”

  “Come to the charthouse with me, after we eat. I’ll show you what I mean.” Then they chatted of other things while the boat approached the ship, chiefly of the bizarre entertainments Gibraltar offered. Kurt whispered the location of the house he had learned from the old Political Officer.

  After supper they went to the charthouse. Kurt selected a chart at random. “All right, tell me what this means.” His finger rested beside a purple circle containing a black dot and depending a purple diamond, beside which was R ‘6’ Occ R 3 sec. “Or this.” He indicated a purple circle over a tiny trapezoid which sprouted a vertical, asterisk-topped line. Beside it was: BRIGHTON REEF Occ 4sec 13M DIA.

  “And this would make sense in English?” Hans asked, chuckling. “Doesn’t look like sense in any language.”

  “If I could read English, I could look these things up in the books. I can barely tell what ocean we’re in now.”

  “But there’s no need to worry. Well let the flag do the navigating.”

  “Maybe. But that’s assuming we don’t get separated.” Hans shook his head slowly, said, “All right. You want to waste time learning English, go ahead. Me, I’ll keep the black market in business. Think I’ll go to the bridge.”

  “I’m going down to the mess decks to study.”

  But he did not get much studying done. Someone had traded parts from the wreck for an ancient movie projector and a dozen reels of film, from cartoons to stags. Despite the exigencies of breaking film, a trick sprocket, and a hand-powered take-up reel, the crew watched movies — for the first time in their lives.

  IX

  “HEY, Kurt,” said Erich Hippke as he took a seat across from Kurt at the breakfast table, “you hear what Damage Control’s doing this morning?”

  Kurt swallowed a mouthful of ersatz coffee. “What?”

  “They’ve got a floating drydock coming to lift us out of the water so they can mount that screw they took off the wreck. It’s behind us now. What a brute!”

  The ship shivered slightly.

  “Sounds like they’re getting started,” said Hippke. “They were bringing the dock up when I came in.”

  “I saw it this morning, but I didn’t know what it was. Finish eating. We’ll go watch.”

  Hippke ate quietly for a few minutes, then, after glancing around, whispered, “Beck bothering you any?”

  “No, why?”

  “Well, he’s been calling you down a lot. Almost every day.” This was true. Again and again, Beck summoned Kurt to his stateroom, where they often talked at length. “What do you talk about?”

  In this Kurt sensed a more than casual question. “Most anything,” he replied. “A lot about his wife. He’s a lonely man. Did you know she hasn’t come to visit him, all the time we’ve been here? Just because she doesn’t like ships? I’d call that flat cruelty. And he refuses to go to her in a wheelchair.” Beck was able to leave his bed now, but was still without the use of his legs.

  “He’s a funny man,” said Erich. “There was a machine-gunner in Freikorps Flieder a lot like him. He killed a hundred people during the Memel raid — just marched them into a trench and started shooting — and the next day didn’t remember....”.

  Kurt’s eyes narrowed just the slightest. What was Hippke after now? This beginning story was another of his lies, of which he had told many lately. Details of the Memel thing were common knowledge throughout the Littoral, and the freecorps had not become involved until afterward. The killers had been White Russian bandits, and the people massacred Lithuanian citizens of the Littoral. Memel had been the last big raid of the Russian bandit brotherhoods, for the freecorps had overtaken them as they retreated burdened with plunder.... But no matter. Hippke was the problem, Hippke was the man who knew so little recent history that he confused the sides of a noteworthy disaster. Hippke was a liar obviously from somewhere afar... from where, and why? Kurt resolved to catch him offguard sometime with questions about Telemark.

  Kurt shrugged, said, “Let’s think about something a little more pleasant.” The ship shivered again. “Finish your coffee. I want to see this drydock.”

  The floating dock was already moving in along the length of the destroyer, sides towering above Jager’s deck. Seamen ran about
checking the fenders, shouting at one another and the men on the dock, confusing everything.

  “It’s not long enough,” Kurt noted. “What’re they going to do?”

  “Just lift the stem out. The bow doesn’t matter.”

  “I guess not.”

  “Kurt?” Hans had appeared. “Beck wants you again.” Kurt could almost believe, from the stress on the final word that Hans was jealous.

  His spirits sank. Though Beck no longer frightened him, he was in no mood for a visit. Beck would spend the morning chatting his loneliness away, and Kurt wanted to get ashore to show Fitzhugh how he had managed three full chapters in the dull, complex nineteenth-century novel he had borrowed for the night. But there were no excuses.

  Beck was in a rare high good humor when Kurt arrived. “She’s finally given in. Coming out this afternoon.” With a smile on and happiness in his face, Beck was not at all the grim “snake-eye” Kurt remembered from Kiel. He was quite human, even warm. And this, though Kurt should have grown accustomed to it, was a surprise — emotionally, he had long ago decided all Political Officers were reptiles within, and, each time his preconceptions were betrayed, he was startled.

  More seriously, with the smile fading. Beck said, “Kurt, there’ll be trouble soon.”

  Kurt’s eyebrows rose questioningly.

  “No, not here. At least, I see no signs. On another ship — because political handcuffs keep us from dealing with rebels....”

  While Beck paused, Kurt examined his growing conviction that the man was of the extermination faction, and the fact that Beck saw only the logic in a political pogrom, not the inhumanity.

  “Kurt, how would you like to join High Command? You’ve got the brains. I could even get you assigned to the Political Office.”

  Kurt was taken completely aback. Emotions ran riot behind his blank face. First, he was both dismayed and mildly pleased — dismayed because there was nothing he wanted less than this, pleased because, in his own way, Beck was telling him he was well liked, was offering Kurt’s friendship what he felt was a great reward. Then Kurt felt sadness, sadness because this man was so lonely he imagined between them a greater friendship than could ever possibly exist. For all these reasons, Kurt could not refuse outright. He could not hurt the man, though he hated all that man represented.