Aftershocks c-3

by Harry Turtledove

  “Some do,” his father said. “Maybe even most do. But some don’t take anything seriously-for a while, when you were a little younger, I was afraid you might be one of those, but I think every young man makes his father worry about that.” He let out a wry chuckle, then sighed. “And some-a few-go to this temple the Lizards put up and give reverence to the spirits of Emperors past.”

  “Jane went,” Reuven said. “She had to, if she wanted to stay in the medical college. She always said it wasn’t anything bad-said the atmosphere put her in mind of a church, as a matter of fact.”

  “I never said it was bad-for the Race,” Moishe Russie replied. “Or even for people, necessarily. But it’s not a place for Jews. A church isn’t bad. A mosque isn’t bad. But they’re not ours.” He paused. “You know the word apikoros?”

  “I’ve heard it,” Reuven answered. “It’s as much Yiddish as Hebrew, isn’t it? Means somebody who doesn’t believe or doesn’t practice, doesn’t it?”

  His father nodded. “Usually a particular kind of person who doesn’t believe or practice: the kind who thinks it’s unscientific to believe in God, if you know what I mean. Comes from the name of the Greek philosopher Epicurus. Now, I happen to think Epicurus was a good man, not a bad one, though I know plenty of rabbis who’d have a stroke if they heard me say that. But he wasn’t ours, either. Back in the days of the Maccabees, ideas like his led too many people away from being Jews. These shrines to the spirits of Emperors past are another verse of the same song.”

  “I suppose so,” Reuven said after some thought. “A good education will make you an apikoros sometimes, too, won’t it?”

  “It can,” Moishe Russie agreed. “It doesn’t have to. If it did, you’d be in… where in Canada did Jane end up?”

  “Somewhere called Edmonton,” Reuven answered. She’d sent a couple of enthusiastic letters. He’d written back, but she’d been a while replying now. As she’d said she would, she was busy making a new life for herself in a land where the Lizards didn’t rule.

  “Canada,” his father said in musing tones. “I wonder how she’ll like the winters there. They aren’t like the ones in Jerusalem, or like the ones in Australia, either, I don’t think. More like Warsaw, unless I miss my guess.” He shuddered. “The weather is one more thing I don’t miss about Poland.”

  Almost all of Reuven’s childhood memories of the land where he’d been born were of hunger and fear and cold. He asked, “Is there anything you do miss about Poland?”

  His father started to shake his head, but checked himself. Quietly, he answered, “All the people the Nazi mamzrim murdered.”

  Reuven didn’t know what to say to that. In the end, he didn’t say anything directly, but asked, “Has Anielewicz had any luck finding his family?”

  “Not the last I heard,” his father answered. “And that doesn’t look good, either. The fighting’s been over for a while. Of course”-he did his best to sound optimistic-“a country’s a big place, and I doubt even the verkakte Germans could keep proper records while the Lizards were pounding them to pieces.”

  “Alevai you’re right, and alevai they’ll turn up.” Reuven walked around the last corner before their office. “And now we’ve turned up, too.”

  After the grim talk, Moishe Russie put on a smile. “Bad pennies have a way of doing that. I wonder what we have waiting for us today.”

  “Something interesting, maybe?” Reuven suggested, holding the door open for his father. “When I started practice, I didn’t think so much of it would be just… routine.”

  “That’s not always bad,” his father said. “The interesting cases are usually the hard ones, too, the ones that don’t always turn out so well.”

  “Did you become a doctor so you could sew up cut legs and give babies shots and tell people with strep throats to take penicillin?” Reuven asked. “Or did you want to see things you’d never seen before, maybe things nobody else had seen, either?”

  “I became a doctor for two reasons: to make sick people better, and to make a living,” Moishe Russie answered. “If I see a patient who’s got something I’ve never seen before, I always worry, because that means I haven’t got any knowledge to fall back on. I have to start guessing, and it’s easier to guess wrong than it is to guess right.”

  “You’d better be careful, Father,” Reuven said. “You sound like you’re in danger of turning into a conservative.”

  “Some ways maybe,” Moishe Russie said. “That’s what general practice does-it makes you glad for routine. Consider yourself warned. If you wanted to stay radical your whole life long, you should have gone in for surgery. Surgeons always think they can do anything. That’s because they get to play God in the operating room, and they have trouble remembering the difference between the One Who made bodies and the ones who try to repair them.”

  They went into the office. “Good morning, Dr. Russie,” Yetta the receptionist said, and then, “Good morning, Dr. Russie.” She smiled and laughed at her own wit. Reuven smiled, too, but it wasn’t easy. He’d heard the same joke every third morning since starting in practice with his father, and he was bloody sick of it.

  His father managed a smile that looked something like sincere. “Good morning,” he said, a good deal more heartily than Reuven could have done. “What appointments have we got today?”

  Yetta ran down the list: a woman with a skin fungus they’d been fighting for weeks, another woman bringing in her baby for a booster shot, a man with a cough, another man-a diabetic-with an abscess on his leg, a woman with belly pain, a man with belly pain… “Maybe we can do both of those at once,” Reuven suggested. “Two for the price of one.” His father snorted. Yetta looked disapproving. She liked her own jokes fine, no matter how often she repeated them. A doctor making jokes about medicine was almost as bad as a rabbi making jokes about religion.

  “All right, we’ll have enough to do today, even without the people who just drop in,” his father said. “We’ll have some of those, too, I expect; we always do.” Some people, of course, got sick unexpectedly. Others didn’t believe in appointments, any more than Reuven believed in Muhammad as a prophet.

  He got to see the woman with the stubborn skin fungus, a Mrs. Kratz. Yetta stayed in the room to make sure nothing improper occurred, as she did with all female patients. Custom aside, she could have stayed out. Reuven had no lecherous interest in Mrs. Kratz, and would have had none even without the fungus on her leg. She was plump and gray and older than his father.

  “Here,” he said, and handed her a little plastic tube. “This is a new cream. It’s a sample, about four days’ worth. Use it twice a day, then call and let us know how it’s doing. If it helps, I’ll write you a prescription for more.”

  “All right, Doctor.” She sighed. “I hope one of these creams works one of these days.”

  “This one is supposed to be very strong,” Reuven said solemnly. The active ingredient, one new to human medicine, was closely related to the chemical the Lizards used to fight what they called the purple itch. He didn’t tell that to Mrs. Kratz. He judged her more likely to take offense than to be delighted.

  After she left, the man with a cough came in. Reuven’s nose wrinkled. “How much do you smoke, Mr. Sadorowicz?” he asked; the aroma that clung to the fellow’s clothes gave him a head start on etiology here.

  “I don’t know,” Mr. Sadorowicz answered, coughing. “Whenever I feel like it. What’s that got to do with anything?”

  Reuven delivered his standard lecture on the evils of tobacco. Mr. Sadorowicz plainly didn’t believe a word of it. He didn’t want to get an X-ray when Reuven recommended one, either. He didn’t want to do anything Reuven suggested. Reuven wondered why the devil he’d bothered coming in. Mr. Sadorowicz departed, still coughing.

  Yetta came in again. “Here’s Mrs. Radofsky and her daughter, Miriam. She’s here for Miriam’s tetanus booster.”

  “All right,” Reuven answered. Then he brightened: Mrs. Radofsky was a nice
-looking brunette not far from his own age, while Miriam, who was about two, gave him a high-wattage little-girl smile. “Hello,” Reuven said to her mother. “I’m afraid I’m going to make her unhappy for a little while. Her arm may swell up and be tender for a couple of days, and she may run a bit of a fever. If it’s anything more than that, bring her back and we’ll see what we can do.” It wouldn’t be much, but he didn’t say that.

  He rubbed Miriam’s arm with an alcohol-soaked cotton swab. She giggled at the sensation of cold, then shrieked when he injected her. He sighed. He’d known she would. He taped a square of gauze over the injection site.

  Mrs. Radofsky cuddled and comforted her daughter till she forgot about the horrific indignity she’d just suffered. “Thank you, Doctor,” she said. “I appreciate that, even if Miriam doesn’t. I want to do everything I can to keep her well. She’s all I’ve got to remember her father by.”

  “Oh?” Reuven said.

  “He got… caught in the rioting last year,” Mrs. Radofsky-the widow Radofsky-said. As Reuven expressed sympathies, she asked Yetta, “And what do I owe you?” Reuven hoped the receptionist would give her a break on the bill, but she didn’t.

  The Polish Tosevite named Casimir pointed proudly to the shuttlecraft port. He bowed to Nesseref: not the Race’s posture of respect but, she’d learned, an equivalent the Big Uglies often used. “You sees, superior female?” he said, speaking the language of the Race badly but understandably. “Field is ready for usings.”

  “I see.” Nesseref tried to sound happier than she felt. Then she made the affirmative gesture. “Yes, it is ready for use. That is a truth, and I am very glad to see it.”

  During the fighting, the Deutsche had done their best to render the shuttlecraft port unusable. By what the males from the conquest fleet said, their best was far better than it had been during the earlier round of combat. They’d plastered it with bomblets from the air, just as the Race might have done. Some of the bomblets were concrete-busters; others were antipersonnel weapons, and had had to be disposed of with great care-they could blow the foot off a male or female of the Race, or, for that matter, off a Big Ugly. Despite the Race’s best efforts, a couple of them had done exactly that. They lurked in the weeds off the edges of the port’s concrete landing area. Nesseref wasn’t altogether sure every single one of them had been disposed of even yet.

  And, with resources so scarce after the fighting ended, Casimir’s construction crew had had to repair the landing field with hand tools rather than power machines. Nesseref had never imagined Big Uglies slapping hot asphalt into holes and smacking it down flat with shovels. That gave the shuttlecraft port a curiously mottled appearance, and contributed to her feelings of unease about it.

  She had other reasons for feeling uneasy, too. Pointing, she said, “Your patches are not as strong as the concrete they replace-is that not also a truth?”

  “It are, superior female,” Casimir admitted ungrammatically. “But the patchings will do well enough. One of this days, make all pretties again. Pretty not importants. Neat not importants. Working are importants.”

  “There is some truth in what you say,” Nesseref admitted.

  “Are much truthings in what I say,” Casimir answered.

  Nesseref didn’t want to admit that. The locals’ whole way of doing things struck her as slipshod. They had a habit of fixing things just well enough to get by for a while: that well and no better. As a result, they were always mending, tinkering, repairing, where the Race would have done things right the first time and saved itself a lot of trouble.

  Sometimes, work that was fast and sloppy, work that would last for a while but not too long, was good enough. Nesseref suspected that was the case here. Better repairs would come, but they could wait. For now, the shuttlecraft port was usable.

  A male of the Race waved to Nesseref from the control building, off to one side of the patched concrete. She skittered off toward him without so much as turning an eye turret back toward Casimir. She wouldn’t have been so rude to a member of the Race, but that thought didn’t cross her mind till she’d gone a long way from the Big Ugly. She shrugged as she trotted along. It wasn’t as if he were a particular friend, as Mordechai Anielewicz was.

  “Well, Shuttlecraft Pilot, are we operational?” the male asked. “Does everything meet with your approval?”

  “Senior Port Technician, I believe we are,” Nesseref answered. “The field is not all it could be, but it can be used for operations.”

  “Good,” the technician said. “This was also my opinion, but I am glad to have it confirmed by one who will actually fly a shuttlecraft.”

  “It will be good to have shuttlecraft coming in and going out again, too,” Nesseref said. “This subregion has been cut off from direct contact with our space fleet for too long now. Air transport is all very well, but we did not come to Tosev 3 in aircraft.”

  “Indeed,” the shuttlecraft technician said. “Unlimited access to space and its resources and the mobility it gives us are our principal remaining advantages over the Big Uglies.”

  “I suppose you are right, but, if you are, that is a genuinely depressing thought,” Nesseref said. The technician only shrugged. Maybe that meant he didn’t find it depressing. More likely, it meant he did, but didn’t know what the Race could do about it. Nesseref shrugged. She didn’t know what the Race could do about it, either.

  The first shuttlecraft that had come into western Poland since the fighting stopped landed the next day. It disgorged a new regional subadministrator to replace Bunim, who was now only radioactive dust. The female, whose name was Orssev, looked around in disapproval verging on horror. “What a miserable place to find oneself,” she said. “Is it always so cold here?”

  Listening to her carp, Nesseref began to understand why males from the conquest fleet complained about males and females from the colonization fleet. Nesseref was a female from the colonization fleet herself, of course, but even she could see that Orssev was not inclined to give Poland a fair chance.

  And she knew things Orssev didn’t. “Superior female,” she said, “this is the end of the period of relatively good weather in this area. We shall have most of a year of truly bad, truly freezing weather on the way-a year of Home’s, I mean.”

  “Tell me you are joking,” Orssev said. “Please tell me so. What did I do to deserve such a fate?”

  Nesseref didn’t know the answer to that question, either, and wasn’t much interested in finding out. Orssev was plainly a prominent female, or she wouldn’t have had the rank of regional subadministrator. But she might well have got her post here because she’d offended someone even more prominent; Poland’s weather was not of the sort to which administrators were drawn. And Nesseref could not tell a lie about that. “I am sorry, but I spoke the truth,” she said. “Winter in this subregion is unpleasant in the extreme.”

  “I shall protest to Fleetlord Reffet,” the new regional subadministrator said. “I am being used with undeserved cruelty.”

  “I wish you good fortune,” Nesseref said, as neutrally as she could. She didn’t want to come right out and call Orssev an idiot addled in her eggshell; offending the prominent was rarely a good idea. But, however prominent she was, Orssev wasn’t very bright. The males of the conquest fleet, not those from the colonization fleet, kept administrative appointments firmly in their fingerclaws. That made sense; they knew the Big Uglies better than the colonists did. Nesseref didn’t think the fleetlord of the colonization fleet would be able to get Orssev’s assignment changed, even if he were inclined to do so.

  Orssev went into the control building, presumably to start pulling whatever wires she could to try to leave Poland. The shuttlecraft pilot who’d brought her down also went into the control building, which meant the shuttlecraft wasn’t scheduled to fly out again right away. Nesseref hoped it also meant she would be assigned to take it wherever it did need to go next.

  Technicians swarmed over the shuttlecraft, inspecting
and adjusting. Lorries rolled out and topped up its hydrogen and oxygen tanks. No one shouted Nesseref’s name and told her to be prepared at short notice. She concluded she could go back to her apartment and get ready before she was summoned to duty once more.

  Getting ready consisted largely of making sure Orbit had enough food and water to keep him happy while she was gone. The tsiongi ran in his wheel. He’d run in it enough to give it a squeak. Nesseref thought that reprehensible; it seemed more like the slipshod manufacturing Big Uglies might do than anything she would have expected from the Race. She sprayed the hub of the exercise wheel with a lubricant. Orbit didn’t care for the odor, and hopped out and lashed his tail till it diminished.

  No sooner had Nesseref put away the container of lubricant than the telephone hissed. “I greet you,” she said.

  “And I greet you, Shuttlecraft Pilot,” a male from the shuttlecraft port replied. “Your first assignment has come in.”

  “I am prepared,” she answered-the only possible response from a pilot. “Where am I to go?”

  “This continental mass, the eastern subregion known as China,” the male said. “Burn parameters and time are already in the shuttlecraft’s computer. Anticipated launch time is-” He named the moment.

  “I shall be there,” Nesseref said. “Do I have a passenger, or will I fly this mission by myself?”

  “You have a passenger,” the male at the port answered. “She is a physician named Selana. Her specialty is skin fungi: Tosevite bacteria and viruses do not trouble us, but some of these organisms find us tasty. This problem appears to be more severe in China than elsewhere.”

  “Very well,” said Nesseref, who thanked the spirits of Emperors past that such fungi had never troubled her. She snatched up the small bag she always took on shuttlecraft flights-since she didn’t use cloth wrappings, her needs while on a journey were less than those a Big Ugly would have had in similar circumstances.

  The jolt of acceleration, the weightlessness that followed, felt like old friends that had been away too long. Once weightlessness began, she had a chance to make small talk with Selana. “Why are these skin fungi so common in China, Senior Physician?” she asked.