Aftershocks c-3

by Harry Turtledove

  She sent Sam Yeager an electronic message, saying, Congratulations. Because of you, the Race was able to take the vengeance it required.

  That is a truth, he wrote back, but it is a truth with a high price. A male who was a fine leader except for his attack on the colonization fleet-which was wrong-killed himself, and a large city in my not-empire was destroyed. Look at the vengeance before you gloat over it.

  Calling up video images of the ruins of Indianapolis was easy enough. The Race had broadcast them widely, to show males from the conquest fleet and males and females from the colonization fleet that the Big Uglies’ attack had indeed been avenged. Smashed buildings were smashed buildings; motorcars half melted into the asphalt on which they’d been driving testified to the power of the explosive-metal bomb that had burst above the town.

  Those were the images the Race had shown again and again. But there were others, of Tosevites charred dead or half charred and wishing for death, that hadn’t been broadcast so much. Kassquit understood why: they were sickening, even when of another species. And, of course, for her they were not of another species. Had she been hatched-no, born-there, the same thing could have happened to her. One moment contented, the next with a new sun in the sky… It did not repay thinking about in any great detail.

  The males and females in cold sleep had not known what hit them. Many of the Big Uglies, the ones near the city center, couldn’t have known, either. But many had. That was a side of revenge the Race didn’t publicize so widely. Kassquit, observing it, could understand why.

  She needed a while before she wrote to Sam Yeager again. Did you know such a thing would happen to your not-empire? she asked.

  When I began searching for answers, I thought it would happen to another not-empire, he answered. I was convinced the Reich or the SSSR would deserve it. How, then, could I say my own not-empire did not?

  That makes perfect logical sense, Kassquit wrote. Am I correct in guessing you are not happy with it even so?

  Yes, he wrote back. A not-empire is an extension of one’s mate and hatchlings. When dreadful things happen to the members of one’s own not-empire, one is more unhappy than he would be if those dreadful things happened in a different not-empire. He used the conventional symbol for an emphatic cough.

  That made Kassquit wonder just how strong an emotion he was feeling. The not-emperor of the USA had killed himself after permitting the destruction of that city. She hoped Sam Yeager would not feel similarly obliged. Asking him about it, though, might touch off the urge, and so she refrained.

  And then Jonathan Yeager wrote to her: I have to let you know that I am going to enter into a permanent mating arrangement with the female named Karen Culpepper whom I mentioned from time to time while I was aboard the starship. I told you that this might happen. I am glad it finally has. I hope very much that you will be glad for me, too.

  Kassquit stared at that for what seemed a very long time. At last, her fingers moving more on their own than under the guidance of her will, she wrote, I congratulate you. She stared at the words, wondering how they had got up on the screen. At least they replaced the ones Jonathan Yeager had sent her. Still not thinking very much-still trying not to think very much-she sent her message.

  She had read that soldiers could be hurt in the heat of battle, sometimes badly hurt, and not notice it till later. She’d always supposed that a reaction unique to the Race, one Big Uglies didn’t share; whenever she’d been hurt, she’d always known about it. Now she began to understand. She knew she’d been wounded here, wounded to the core. Somehow, though, she felt nothing. It was as if her entire body had been dipped in refrigerant.

  No, not quite her entire body. A tear slid from each eye and rolled down her cheeks. She hadn’t known the tears were there till they fell. When those first two did, it was as if they released the floodgates. Tears streamed down her face. Mucus began flowing from her small, blunt snout; she’d always hated that.

  She stumbled to a tissue dispenser, grabbed one, and tried drying her face and wiping away the slimy mucus. The more she dabbed at herself, the more tears fell and the more mucus flowed. At last, she gave up and let her body do what it would till it finally decided it had had enough.

  That took an amazingly long time. When the spasms finally quit wracking her, she stooped a little to look at herself in the mirror. She gasped in horrified dismay. She hadn’t really known her soft, scaleless skin could become so swollen and discolored around the eyes, or that the white part of those eyes could turn so red. She’d always been ugly compared to males and females of the Race, but now she looked extraordinarily hideous.

  But Jonathan Yeager said I was not ugly, she thought. He said I was sexually attractive to wild Tosevites, and he proved it by being attracted to me.

  Thinking about Jonathan Yeager set off a new paroxysm of tears and nasal mucus. By the time she was through, she looked even uglier than she had before, and she wouldn’t have believed that possible.

  At last, the second spasm ended. Kassquit recoiled from the mirror in disgust. She used water to wash her face again and again. That did something to reduce the swelling, but not enough. She supposed her skin would eventually return to normal. But how long would it take?

  Before I have to go to the refectory again, please, she thought, directing the prayer to spirits of Emperors past. With Ttomalss down on the surface of Tosev 3, she was unlikely to have to see anyone till then. Who sought out a junior, a very junior, psychologist different from every other citizen of the Empire on or around Tosev 3?

  She wished she had someplace to hide even from herself. Even more, she wished she had someplace to hide from Jonathan Yeager’s electronic message. It wasn’t as if he told any lies in it. He didn’t. He had mentioned that he would probably enter into a permanent mating arrangement once he returned to the surface of Tosev 3. Kassquit hadn’t expected him to do it anywhere near so soon, though.

  “It is not fair,” she said aloud. Jonathan Yeager would go on to indulge a normal Tosevite sexuality. He would mate with this Karen Culpepper female whenever he wanted, for years and years to come. He would forget all about her, Kassquit, or, if he did remember her, it would be only for brief moments of pleasure.

  Fury filled her in place of despair. What did she have to look forward to in years to come? This cubicle. Her own fingers. Memories of a brief, too brief, contact with another of her own kind. How long, how often, could she replay those memories in her mind before they started to wear out or wear thin?

  “It is not fair,” she repeated, this time in an altogether different tone of voice. Anger burned in her. She added an emphatic cough.

  Had she had Jonathan Yeager there before her, she would have given him a piece of her mind-a large, jagged-edged piece. He’d come up here, taken his sexual pleasure with her, and then gone down to the surface of Tosev 3 to resume his ordinary life? How dared he?

  She wondered if any female Big Ugly had ever been betrayed in the way she was since the species evolved such intelligence as it had. She doubted it. Jonathan Yeager had surely devised a unique way to play on the affections of one who was, one who could not help being, naive.

  She hurried to the computer to let him know exactly what she thought of him, but refrained at the last minute. For one thing, she didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of knowing he’d succeeded in wounding her. For another, she still esteemed his father. She didn’t want Sam Yeager reading a nasty message intended for his hatchling. What his hatchling did was not his fault. He surely never would have done such a thing with-or to-a female.

  But what did that leave her? Nothing but sullen acceptance. Nothing but living on memories. That wasn’t good enough.

  Kassquit snapped her fingers. Jonathan Yeager had taught her to do it. She ignored that for now, enjoying the small sound for its own sake. “I can have another male brought up from the surface of Tosev 3. I can have my own pleasure.”

  I shall have to talk with Ttomalss about that, she though
t. He had better not tell me no, either.

  Even so, she wondered if it would be the same. Because Jonathan Yeager was the first, he was the one against whom she would measure all later comers. And she had given him her affection without reservation; she hadn’t known to do anything else. Would she do that again? Of itself, her hand shaped the negative gesture. I would not be so foolish twice.

  She kicked at the metal floor to her cubicle. If she brought a male up for sexual pleasure alone, if no affection was involved, what could he give her that her fingers could not? What except betrayal?

  “I have had enough betrayal,” she said. Would other male Big Uglies prove as treacherous, as devious, as Jonathan Yeager? It wasn’t impossible.

  That brought her back to where she’d begun: alone, with only her own hand for company. She hadn’t minded that-too much-before meeting Jonathan Yeager. He’d shown her something of the spectrum of Tosevite sexually related emotions… and now he was lavishing them on this Karen Culpepper female.

  Kassquit looked in the mirror again. To her relief, the blotches and swelling were fading. Soon, they would be gone. No one would be able to note any outward signs of distress on her. But the distress was there, whether visible or not.

  “What am I going to do?” she asked the metal walls. She got no more answer there than anywhere else.

  I might have done better never to have met wild Big Uglies in the flesh at all, she thought. I certainly might have done better never to have started a sexual relationship with one of them. I could have gone on doing my best to emulate a female of the Race. I would not have known about some of the emotions accessible to Big Uglies, emotions for which the Race has no real equivalents. I had no real equivalents, only a dim awareness that I felt things Ttomalss did not. Now I understand much more, now these areas have opened up in my mind-and I cannot use them. Would it not have been better that they stayed closed?

  She had no real answer for that. She could not go back into the eggshell that had held her before. But she could not use the new areas, enjoy the new areas, as long as she was alone. Even if a new Big Ugly male came up to the starship, even if he was everything Jonathan Yeager had been and more… sooner or later, he would go back down to Tosev 3, and she would be alone, cut off, once more.

  “What am I going to do?” she repeated. Again, no answer.

  “Congratulations,” Johannes Drucker told Mordechai Anielewicz. “Congratulations,” he repeated to Anielewicz’s family. A wife, two boys, a girl-achingly like his own family, though Anielewicz’s girl was the eldest, where his Claudia was sandwiched between Heinrich and Adolf.

  They didn’t particularly look like Jews, or what he imagined Jews looking like. He suspected German propaganda of exaggerating noses and lips and chins. They just looked like… people. Bertha Anielewicz, Mordechai’s wife, was plain till she smiled. When she did, though, she turned very pretty. When she was younger, she’d probably been gorgeous when she smiled.

  “I hope you find your wife and children, too,” she told him. She spoke Yiddish, not German. The gutturals were harsh and the vowel sounds strange, but he understood well enough.

  “Thanks,” he said. Hearing Yiddish reminded him how strange it was to be standing outside a Red Cross shelter-another Red Cross shelter-near Greifswald talking with five Jews. Before this last war, it wouldn’t have been strange; it would have been impossible, unimaginable. A lot of things that would have been unimaginable a few months before now seemed commonplace. “What will you do?” he asked the Anielewiczes, trying his best not to be jealous of their good fortune. “Go home?”

  Mordechai laughed. “Home? We haven’t got one, not with Lodz blown off the map. We’ll find something back in Poland, I expect. Right this minute, I have no idea what. Something.”

  “I’m sure you will,” Drucker agreed. No, staying away from jealousy wasn’t easy. “You’ll help pick up the pieces back there. And I’ll help pick up the pieces here… one way or another.” He didn’t want to dwell on that. Holding on to hope came hard.

  Anielewicz set a hand on his shoulder. Part of him wanted to shake it off, but he let it stay. The Jewish fighting leader said, “Don’t quit, that’s all. Never quit.”

  He could afford to say that. He could quit now-he’d found his needle in a haystack. But he wasn’t wrong, either. If he hadn’t scoured this corner of Prussia, he never would have come up with his wife and sons and daughter. “I know,” Drucker said. “I’ll go on. I have to. What else can I do? Kill myself like the American president? Not likely.”

  He tried to imagine Adolf Hitler killing himself if faced by some disaster. Not likely rang again in his mind. The first Fuhrer would surely have grabbed some soldier’s Mauser and kept firing at his foes till he finally fell. Suicide was the coward’s way out.

  Heinrich Anielewicz-like Drucker’s own Heinrich, named for the Heinrich Jager they’d both admired-was holding his pet beffel. The little animal from Home swiveled one eye turret toward Drucker. It opened its mouth. “Beep!” Pancer said, almost as if it were a squeeze toy. The corners of Drucker’s mouth couldn’t help twitching up a few millimeters. That really was one of the most preposterously friendly sounds he’d ever heard.

  Heinrich Anielewicz scratched the beffel between the eye turrets and under the chin. Pancer liked that, and said, “Beep!” again. The boy spoke to it in Polish. Drucker had no idea what he said; he’d never known more than a handful of words in the language, and he’d long since forgotten those. Then Heinrich Anielewicz switched to Yiddish and spoke to him: “If it hadn’t been for Pancer, you know, we might never have been found.”

  “Yes, I do know that. I was with your father when he heard him,” Drucker answered. “I didn’t know what the noise was. But he did.”

  “You could have knocked me over with a feather,” Mordechai Anielewicz said. “It was luck, nothing else. But sometimes, when you haven’t got anything else, you’ll take luck.”

  “You don’t just take it. If you get it, you grab it with both hands,” Drucker said, the soldier in him speaking. Had Bertha and Miriam Anielewicz not been there, he might have put it more earthily.

  “Listen,” Mordechai Anielewicz said. “I’ve talked to that male named Gorppet, the one who had Pancer. He knows I’m a Big Ugly”-he used the language of the Race to say that-“the Lizards want to keep happy. I’ve asked him to give you whatever help he can. He’s an intelligence officer, too, so whatever they hear, he can get his hands on it. I hope that does you some good.”

  “Thanks.” Drucker nodded. “That’s-damned good of you, all things considered.”

  “All things considered.” Anielewicz savored the phrase. “There’s a lot to consider, all right, Herr Oberst. There’s the Reich you fought for. But then there’s your wife and your children. And you got Jager loose from the SS, you tell me, and if you hadn’t done that, Lodz would have gone up in 1944 instead of this spring. Bertha and I would be dead, and the first round of fighting might have gone on and ended up wrecking the whole world. So I didn’t spend a lot of sleepless nights worrying about this one.”

  “Thanks,” Drucker said again. That didn’t seem to be enough. He stuck out his hand. Anielewicz shook it. Bertha Anielewicz hugged him, which took him by surprise. No woman had done that since… since the last time he’d seen Kathe, before the fighting started up. Too long. God, too long. Roughly, he said, “I’m going into the camp now.”

  “Good luck,” they chorused behind him.

  He’d seen too many refugee camps by now for this one to hold any surprises. Tents. People in shabby clothes. More shabby clothes hanging out as laundry. The smell of latrines and unwashed bodies. The dull, apathetic look of men and women who didn’t think things would or could ever get better again.

  In the middle of the camp, as in the middle of all these camps, stood a tent with a Red Cross flag flying above it. The men and women-they’d be mostly women-in it would be clean. They’d have clean clothes, fresh clothes, clothes they could change
. They’d mislike anyone entering their realm who didn’t give them their full due.

  As he ducked through the tent flap, he heard rhythmic tapping. Someone in there had a typewriter. It wasn’t a computer, but it was still a sure-fire sign of superiority in the middle of a refugee camp. Several women-sure enough, all of them scrubbed till they gleamed-looked up from whatever important things they were doing to give him the once-over. By their expressions, he didn’t pass muster. They probably took him for one of the people they were there to help.

  “Yes?” one of them said. “What is it?” By her tone, it couldn’t possibly have been as urgent as the forms she was filling out. Yes, she must have taken him for an inmate here.

  “I am here to look for my family. My wife. My sons. My daughter. Drucker. Katherina-Kathe. Heinrich. Adolf. Claudia.” Drucker stayed polite and businesslike.

  “Oh. One of those.” The woman nodded. Now she knew in which pigeonhole he belonged. She pulled out a form from a box on the table behind her and said, “Fill this out. Fill it out very carefully. We will search. If we find them in our records, you will be notified.”

  “When will you search? When will I be notified?” Drucker asked. “Why don’t you search now? I’m here now.” By all the signs, she needed reminding of that.

  A slow flush darkened her cheeks. It wasn’t embarrassment; it was anger. “We have many important duties to perform here, sir,” she said in a voice like winter on the Russian front. “When we have the opportunity, we shall search the records for you.” That might be twenty years from now. It might, on the other hand, be never. “Please fill out the form.” The form was important. The family it represented? That might matter, but more likely it wouldn’t.

  Drucker had seen that attitude before. He had a weapon to combat it. He took from his wallet a telegram and passed the woman the yellow sheet. “Here. I suggest you read this.”

  For a moment, he thought she’d try to crumple it instead. He would have prevented that-by force, if necessary. But she did read. And her eyes, the dull blue and white of cheap china, grew bigger and bigger as she read.