“Security from outside invasion,” Monique Dutourd answered. “Security from feuds with their neighbors also within Roman territory. Local self-government, as I said before. A large area unified culturally, and also unified economically.”
“I see,” Ttomalss repeated. “These are, of course, advantages you Tosevites would receive on becoming subjects of the Empire.”
“Ah, subjects,” the Tosevite historian said. “One thing the Romans did that made them unusual among our empires was to grant full citizenship to more and more groups that had formerly been subjects.”
“You could expect the same from us,” Ttomalss said. “Why, already there is one Tosevite with full citizenship in the Empire.”
“How interesting,” Monique Dutourd replied. “Why only one? Who is he?”
“She,” Ttomalss corrected. “That is a complicated story. It has to do with the unusual circumstances of her hatching.” He said not a word about the continuing dispute with Kassquit over whether he kept the right to monitor her activities if she was a full citizen of the Empire. That was also complicated, and none of Monique Dutourd’s business. Instead, Ttomalss asked, “If these Romans were such successful rulers of their empire, why did it fail?”
“Scholars have been arguing over that ever since it happened,” the Tosevite female answered. “There is no one answer. There were diseases that reduced the population. The economy suffered as a result of this. Rulers grew more harsh, and their bureaucracy grew more stifling. And there were foreign invasions, most importantly from the Deutsche, who lived to the north of the Roman Empire.”
“The Deutsche?” Ttomalss exclaimed in surprise. “The same Deutsche whom the Race knows only too well?”
“Their ancestors, rather,” Monique Dutourd said.
“Yes, of course,” Ttomalss said impatiently. “How interesting. That strikes me as an example of true historical continuity. I have not seen many on Tosev 3.”
“They are here,” Monique Dutourd said. “If you have not seen them, it is because you have not looked for them—or perhaps you have not known where to look.”
“Yes, I suppose that could be,” Ttomalss admitted. “Would you be willing to teach me more Tosevite history?”
“It could be,” the female Big Ugly said. “There would be the question of payment, of course.”
“Of course,” Ttomalss said. “I am sure we can come to some sort of equitable arrangement about that.”
“Payment might not necessarily involve money,” Monique Dutourd said, “or not money alone. I would want my kinsmale fully pardoned, now that I am cooperating with the Race.”
“Regardless of his unpleasant and unsavory dealings,” Ttomalss said.
“Yes. Regardless of them.” Ttomalss noted that the Tosevite female did not deny them. She wanted the ginger smuggler forgiven in spite of them. He sighed. Kinship, not friendship, he thought. That showed historical continuity among the Big Uglies, sure enough. He sighed. He could wish—he did wish—it didn’t.
Monique Dutourd wished she hadn’t come to Tours with fall heading toward winter. The city did not show itself to her at best advantage. She was a child of the warm Mediterranean; winter in Marseille was almost always mild, with snow a rarity. Not here. Sure enough, the Atlantic drove Tours’ climate, and frost came to the city early and often. After Caesar’s conquest of Gaul, Roman colonists in ancient Caesarodunum would have been as appalled at the weather as she was now.
The climate at the university was also a good deal less than warm. Monique knew she wouldn’t have gained a position had Felless not pulled wires for her. By all the signs, every colleague in the history department knew as much, too. Her welcome ranged from unenthusiastic to downright hostile.
“Let me teach,” she told her department chairman, a white-haired fellow named Michel Casson who’d been at the university since recovering from a wound he’d received defending Verdun in 1916. “Let me publish. I’ll show you that I belong in this place.”
“You will have the opportunity,” Casson replied, peering at her through reading glasses that magnified his eyes tremendously. “We cannot prevent you from having the opportunity. It is to be hoped that you will not damage the reputation of the university too badly by what you do with it.”
Ears burning, Monique left his office in a hurry. That she might prove an asset to the university had plainly never entered his mind. Her nails bit into her palms. I’ll show you, by God, she thought. Having lost all her notes for the paper on the cult of Isis in Gallia Narbonensis that had occupied her before Marseille went up in nuclear fire, she was doing her best to reconstruct it despite a research library that wasn’t nearly so good as the snooty professors and librarians believed.
Back in Marseille, having to deal with her brother and the unwelcome attentions of Dieter Kuhn had made her neglect the monograph. Here in Tours, Kuhn was gone from her life, for which she heartily thanked the Lord, the Virgin, and all the saints. Instead, though, she had to deal with the Lizard named Ttomalss. He wanted nothing from her in bed. He even paid. But guiding him through Roman history stole time from the paper, no less than submitting to the German’s less intellectual pursuits had done.
And she still had to deal with Pierre. Technically, she supposed he was a paroled prisoner. She tried not to have anything to do with him when he wasn’t translating for Ttomalss. She sometimes wished she hadn’t got him out of the Race’s prison to interpret for her. Her life would have been simpler if she’d left him there to rot.
But he is my brother. Blood was thicker than water. She wondered if Pierre would go to a tenth the trouble for her that she’d gone through for him. She had her doubts. Pierre was for Pierre, first, last, and always.
One day, after they’d got off the telephone with Ttomalss, he said, “It’s a pity that Lizard is such a straight arrow. If he weren’t, I could have a fine new ginger network going already.”
“Do you mean you don’t have one?” Monique asked with what she hoped was withering sarcasm.
Predictably, her brother refused to wither. “Of course I do,” he said. “I meant a new one, one that reached right up into his starship. That would be worth arranging, if only I could.”
“Don’t you ever think of anything but ginger and Lizards?” she demanded.
“Ginger is what I do for a living,” Pierre said imperturbably. “The Lizards are my customers. Don’t you ever think of anything else but those old Romans who’ve been dead forever?”
“Occasionally,” Monique answered, acid in her voice. “Every now and then, for instance, I have to think about how to get you out of prison or whatever other trouble you wind up in on account of ginger.”
Her brother didn’t even have the grace to look shamefaced. “Took you long enough this time, too,” he grumbled. “I thought I was going to rot in that damned cell forever. I got you out of the French jail faster than you sprang me.”
Had he not added that last, reminding her he had helped her now and again, she thought she would have tried to hit him over the head with an ashtray. As things were, she said, “I never would have been carted off to jail if it weren’t for Dieter Kuhn, and he wouldn’t have cared about me at all if it weren’t for you.” One way or another, she was going to pin the blame on Pierre.
He said, “Would you rather have them take me back to jail?”
“What have I got to do with that?” Monique said. “You’re selling ginger again. You don’t bother hiding it from me. You hardly bother hiding it from anybody. Of course the Lizards will notice. They’re not stupid. Do you think they’re not watching you? Sooner or later, you’ll annoy them enough that they’ll scoop you up and throw you into another cell. I probably won’t be able to get you out then, either.”
“Somebody will.” Pierre spoke with maddening confidence. “That’s what connections are for. The more people you know, the more people you’ve got to do you a good turn when you really need one.”
“And the more people you’ve go
t to betray you when they need something from the Lizards or the flics.”
Pierre stared at her in some surprise. “Where’d you learn to think like that?”
Monique laughed at him. “And people say that studying history never does anybody any good!” she exclaimed, and swept out of the room before he could come up with an answer.
Somewhere south of the city of Tours, the Franks had hurled the previously invincible Arabs back in defeat more than twelve hundred years before. Monique knew that, but she had no interest in finding the battlefield. For one thing, nobody knew exactly where it was. For another, she had no motorcar to go gallivanting over the landscape. And, for a third, that battlefield didn’t much interest her: it was several hundred years too modern. That amused her.
When she happened to mention it to Ttomalss, it amused him, too. “This is a difference in viewpoint between the Race and human beings,” he said through her brother. “To us, a difference of a few hundred years would not matter much.”
“That’s strange,” Monique said. “I would think that a chronological framework was important for your historians as well as for ours.”
“Well, yes,” Ttomalss said, “but everything that happened before the days of the Empire was a very long time ago for us. What real difference if something happened 103,472 years ago or 104,209? I pick the numbers at random, you understand.”
In an aside, Pierre added, “When Lizards talk about years, cut everything they say in half. They count two for every one of ours, more or less.”
“Thanks. I think I already knew that,” Monique answered. It was still daunting. She tried to imagine keeping more than fifty thousand years of history straight. Maybe Ttomalss had a point after all. Even here on Earth, with only a tenth as much history to worry about, people specialized. She concentrated on Roman history. The faculty at the University of Tours also boasted a historian of pre-Roman (not ancient; that wasn’t a word historians used since the Lizards came) Greece, one who studied medieval western Europe, one who specialized in the history of the Byzantine Empire (which struck even Monique as uselessly arcane), and so on.
Even so, she said, “Knowing the relative order in which things happened is important. Otherwise, you cannot speak of causation in any meaningful sense.”
“Causation?” Her brother gave her a dirty look. “How the devil am I supposed to say that in the Lizards’ language?”
“Figure it out,” Monique told him. “If Ttomalss decides you’re not doing a good job, he’ll ask for a new interpreter, and I won’t be able to do a thing about it.”
Pierre’s expression grew even more forbidding, but he must have man-aged to get the meaning across, for Ttomalss answered, “Yes, you are right about that: sequence and relative chronology must be preserved. Absolute chronology may be less important.”
Monique wouldn’t have said that, but she had less absolute chronology to keep in mind. And she found herself enjoying the give-and-take of the discussion with Ttomalss. The Lizard didn’t think like a human being—and why should he? she thought—but he was a long way from stupid. He had trouble understanding how people worked as individuals, though he tried hard at that, too. When he dealt with groups, he did better.
“I thank you,” he said one day. “I am learning a great deal from you. You are both intelligent and well organized. These traits are less common among Tosevites than I might wish.”
After Pierre translated that, he added a two-word commentary of his own: “Teacher’s pet.”
Monique stuck out her tongue at her brother. She said, “Tell Ttomalss that I thank him and I think he’s very kind.” That was flattery, but flattery with a core of truth. It was also flattery with a core of worry. What exactly was he learning from her besides Roman history? Something that would help the Lizards rule their part of Earth more effectively? Did that make her a traitor to mankind?
Don’t be silly, she said to herself. Most people don’t think Roman history matters to us these days, so how could it be important to the Lizards? She relaxed for a while after that crossed her mind. But then she thought, If the Lizards think it’s important, maybe it is.
When the telephone rang in her flat, she hurried to answer it. She’d dreaded the phone in Marseille: it was too likely to be Dieter Kuhn. Here, though, she hadn’t had any trouble. “Allô?”
“Hello, Professor.” Even if Rance Auerbach hadn’t been speaking English, she would have known his wrecked, rasping voice at once. He went on, “How are things going for you up there?”
“Things are . . . very well, thank you. Thank you very much,” Monique replied. She also used English, and was glad for the chance to practice it. Auerbach was a ginger dealer, too, but somehow that bothered her less in him than it did in her brother. She said, “Is it that I could ask you something?”
“Sure. Go ahead,” he told her, and she poured out the substance of her conversations with Ttomalss and her worries about what the Race was learning. When she’d finished, Auerbach said, “The world would be a better place if everybody’s troubles were so small.”
“Thank you,” Monique said again, this time in French: a breathy sigh of gratitude. She felt as if he were a priest who’d just given her absolution and a very light penance after a particularly sordid confession. “You have no idea how much you relieved me there. I want to be able to see myself in a mirror without flinching.”
That produced a long silence. At last, Auerbach spoke in English again:
“Yeah. Don’t we all?” Monique suddenly wondered if she were the only one whose conscience bothered her.
18
“Yes, Colonel Webster,” Jonathan Yeager’s father was saying into the telephone. “I think we’ll be all right if we keep cool. We have to stay firm out there, but we can’t get pushy about it or we’ll make them nervous. My professional opinion is, everybody’d be sorry if that happened.” He listened for a moment, then said, “Okay, sir, I’ll put it in writing for you, too,” and hung up.
“More trouble about the motors on the rocks in the asteroid belt?” Jonathan asked.
His dad nodded. “You betcha. They can’t blame me for that one, so they’re asking my advice instead.” Sam Yeager’s chuckle sounded sour to Jonathan. “Hell, son, I didn’t even know this was going on—though I’ve got to tell you, I’ve had suspicions ever since that big meteor slammed into Mars.”
“Have you?” Jonathan raised an eyebrow. “You never said anything about it to me—or to Mom, either, that I know of.”
“Nope.” His father shook his head. “Not much point to talking about suspicions when you don’t know for sure. Last time I was back in Little Rock, I did ask President Stassen about it.”
“Did you?” That his father was in a position to ask questions of the president of the United States still sometimes bemused Jonathan. “What did he tell you?”
“Not much.” His father looked grim. “I didn’t really expect him to. He was probably afraid I’d go running to the Lizards with whatever I heard. That’s nonsense, but it’s nonsense I’m going to be stuck with for the rest of my life.”
“That’s not fair!” Jonathan exclaimed with the ready outrage of youth.
“Probably not, but I’m stuck with it, as I said.” His dad shrugged. “I could go on and talk about what sort of lesson that should be for you, and that you should always keep an eye on your reputation no matter what. But if I did that, you’d probably look around for something to hit me over the head with.”
“Yeah, probably,” Jonathan agreed. “You’re not too bad as far as lectures go, but—”
“Thanks a lot,” his father broke in. “Thanks a hell of a lot.”
Jonathan grinned at him. “Any old time, Dad.” But the grin had trouble staying on his face. “What are the Lizards going to do, out there in the asteroid belt? If they try doing anything, will we fight them?”
“It’s like I told Ed Webster: if we don’t do anything to get ’em twitchy, I think we can ride out the storm,” his fat
her answered. “But I also think they have to think we’d fight if they did try anything out there. A lot of the time, you end up not having to fight if you show you’re ready to in a pinch.”
“If we did fight the Race, we’d lose, wouldn’t we?” Jonathan asked.
“Now? Sure we would, same as we would have last summer,” his father replied. “But that’s not the point, or it’s only part of the point. The other part is how bad we’d hurt ’em if we went down swinging. They don’t like what the Nazis did to them, and we’d do more and worse.” He sighed. “If that outbound probe of theirs hadn’t spotted our rocket lighting up, we could have built a much stronger position out in the asteroid belt before the Race caught on.”
A strong position in the asteroid belt was something less than important to Jonathan. “Do you think there’ll be a war, or not?” he asked. “The whole idea of fighting the Race seems like such a waste of everything worthwhile to me. . . .”
“I know it does,” his father said slowly. “It seems that way to a lot of kids in your generation. I’ll tell you something, though: when the Lizards first came to Earth, they shot up the train I was riding on, and I volunteered for the Army as soon as I made it into a town where they’d take me. So did Mutt Daniels, my manager, and he was about as old then as I am now. They took both of us, too. They didn’t even blink. That’s how things were back in those days.”
Jonathan knew that was how things had been back in those days. He tried to imagine it, tried and felt himself failing. Stumbling a little, he said, “But the Race isn’t so bad, really. You know that’s true, Dad.”
“I know it’s true now,” Sam Yeager said. “I didn’t know it then. Nobody knew it then. All we knew was that the Lizards came out of nowhere and started beating the crap out of us. And if we—and the Reds, and the Nazis, and the British, and the Japs—hadn’t fought like mad bastards, the Lizards would’ve conquered the whole world, and you and your pals wouldn’t be looking at them from the outside and thinking how hot they are. You’d be looking at ’em up from under, and no way to get out from under ’em.”
Colonization: Aftershocks Page 62
