Down to Earth c-2

by Harry Turtledove

  Reffet paused before answering, from which Atvar concluded the other fleetlord hadn’t thought about that, and neither had his advisors. Maybe they hadn’t wanted to think about it, since doing so would have made them reexamine the way they looked at the colonists and at life on Tosev 3. Refusing to look at the unpleasant was a more common failing of Big Uglies than of the Race, but males and females from Home were not altogether immune.

  At last, Reffet said, “This proposal may have some merit, if you think you can shape what is liable to be unpromising material into soldiers.”

  “We can do that,” Atvar said. “We shall have to do that, since it is the material we have available. I guarantee we can. Send us the males-send us the females, too-and we shall make soldiers of them. We have been through the training of a Soldiers’ Time. We can duplicate it here.”

  “You guarantee it? On the strength of no evidence?” Reffet said. “Merely on your unsupported word, you expect me to turn over to you males and females by the thousands? You have been dealing with Big Uglies too long, Atvar; you think like one yourself.”

  Somehow, Atvar kept his temper under his command. Voice tight with the rage he was holding in, he said, “Well, if you will not turn them over, what brilliant idea for their use do you have?”

  “Your notion may perhaps have some merit.” Reffet spoke with the air of a male granting a large concession. “I propose establishing a committee to study the matter and see how-and if-that notion might be implemented. Once we examine all possible factors impacting the proposal, we can make an informed decision on whether to go forward. Such is the way of the Race.” He sounded as if he thought Atvar needed reminding.

  He was probably right about that. Atvar had got used to the headlong pace of life on Tosev 3. “Splendid, Reffet-splendid indeed,” he said, letting out the sarcasm he’d held in its eggshell till then. “And your magnificent committee will, no doubt, bring in its recommendations about the time the last male of the conquest fleet dies of old age. I am afraid that will be rather late, especially given the recent threats from the Deutsche. How long do you think our colonies can stay safe without soldiers to defend them?”

  “I will tell you what I think,” Reffet snapped. “I think you see the males of the conquest fleet dying out and hope to gain power over some part of the colonization fleet so you will not fade into obscurity with their passing.”

  “Eventually,” Atvar said, “you will review this conversation and realize what an addled cloaca you have been through the whole of it. When that time comes, I shall be glad to speak to you. Until then, however, I have no such desire.” He broke the connection, and felt like breaking the monitor, too.

  “He does not understand,” Pshing said.

  Up in Reffet’s spaceship, the other fleetlord’s adjutant was doubtless saying the same thing about Atvar. Atvar didn’t care what males or females from the colonization fleet thought. “Of course he does not. We do not fully understand the Big Uglies or the entire situation on Tosev 3, and we have been here a great deal longer than the colonists. But they know everything-and if for some reason you do not believe me, you have only to ask them.”

  “What will you do about recruiting soldiers from the colonization fleet?” Pshing asked. “I think you are correct that a committee would be impossibly slow.”

  “I know I am correct about that,” Atvar said. “What shall I do?” He thought, then began to laugh. “One thing I shall do at once is begin to accept volunteers for training. Reffet cannot possibly object, and I think there may be a fair number of colonists who would sooner do something with themselves than sit around in their apartments watching videos all day.”

  “I hope you are right, Exalted Fleetlord,” Pshing said. “I think that a reasonable calculation myself. Will you truly include females as well as males among these new soldiers?”

  “Why not?” Atvar said. “Females and males mix in almost every aspect of the Race’s life; it was only for the convenience of avoiding mating issues that the conquest fleet was made all-male. Those will arise now-and will be worse, thanks to the accursed Tosevite herb-but I think we will manage quite well. Accepting females also means we have a larger group of potential recruits. We need them, and we shall get them. It is as simple as that.” Atvar hadn’t the slightest doubt he was right.

  As day followed day, Monique Dutourd discovered she had lived her whole life in Marseille without knowing half her city, maybe more. When she told that to Pierre, her older brother laughed at her. “You kept up the family’s petit bourgeois respectability too well,” he said. “You wouldn’t have wanted to have much to do with the black market or anything of that sort.”

  “Everybody does a little,” Monique said. “One has to, to live; without the black market, especially in the days not long after the fighting, the whole city would have starved, the way the Boches stole everything in sight.”

  “Everybody does a little,” Pierre echoed, laughing still. “But you never approved, did you, little sister? And now, whether you approve or not, you’re part of it. Is it really so bad?”

  Looking at the flat in which he lived, the flat in which she occupied a spare room these days, Monique had a hard time saying no. The flat was far larger and far airier than the one from which she’d escaped. And it held every sort of electronic gadget, mostly Lizard-made, under the sun: more modern conveniences than people could even imagine. Still…

  “How do you stand living like a hunted animal all the time?” she burst out.

  Her brother looked back at her, for once without a hint of irony on his plump, pouchy features. “I’d sooner live as a hunted animal than as one in a cage, where the keeper could reach in and pet me-or do anything else he wanted-whenever he chose.”

  That held enough truth to sting. But Monique said, “I’m still in a cage, only now it’s yours and not the SS man’s.”

  “You can go back any time you please,” Pierre said easily. “If you would rather do what he wants than what I want, go right ahead.”

  “I’d sooner do what I want,” Monique said. She’d said that a good many times, to anyone who might listen. It hadn’t done her much good, and didn’t seem likely to do her much good this time, either.

  And so it didn’t. Her brother, at least, didn’t laugh at her any more. Voice serious now, he answered, “If that is what you would rather have, you need to make yourself strong enough to be able to get it. No one will give it to you. You have to take it.”

  Monique clenched her fists till her nails bit into her flesh. “You talk like you just came back from the revival of The Triumph of the Will.”

  “I saw it,” he said, which made her glare harder than ever. Since he’d come back into her life, she’d never been able to faze him. He went on, “It’s marvelous propaganda. Even the Lizards say so. They study it to see how to make people do what they want. If it’s good enough for them, why shouldn’t it be good enough for me?”

  Before Monique could answer, someone knocked on the front door. Pierre didn’t just open it. Instead, he checked a little television screen connected to an even littler camera hooked up to look out on the front hall. He nodded to himself. “Yes, those are the Lizards I’m expecting.” Turning to Monique, he said, “Why don’t you go shopping for a couple of hours? Spend as much of my money as you want. I’ve got some business to take care of here.”

  By his tone, he was as convinced he had the right to send her away as Dieter Kuhn was that he had the right to tell her to take off her clothes and lie down on the bed. One fine day, and it wouldn’t be long, she’d have something pointed to say about that. But it wouldn’t be today. She grabbed her handbag and left the flat as soon as the Lizards outside had come in.

  Except for the clothes the people wore, Porte d’Aix always made her think of Algiers as much as France. It reminded her of the unity the Mediterranean had known during Roman times and even later; Professor Pirenne’s famous thesis said the rise of first Muhammad and then Charlemagne had set the
two sides of the sea moving in different directions. Scholars of Monique’s generation worked to refute Pirenne, but she, not a medievalist herself, thought he made good points.

  A walk through this part of Marseille certainly supported his views of the way history worked. Streets here were short and winding and narrow-most too narrow for automobiles, quite a few too narrow for anyone but a madman to try on a bicycle. But plenty of madmen were loose; Monique had to flatten herself against brick or stone walls every few steps to keep from getting flattened as they whizzed past.

  Shops and taverns and eateries were tiny, and most of them did as much business out on the street as back in the buildings that supposedly housed them. A tinker sat on a chair, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, as he soldered a patch onto a cracked iron pot that might almost have dated back to Roman days. His legs stuck out into the street, so that Monique had to step over them.

  He moved the pot and patted his lap. “Here, sweetheart, you can have a seat if you care to.”

  “You can solder your fly shut, if you care to,” Monique told him, “and your mouth to go with it.” Bristling, she strode on. Behind her, the tinker laughed and, without any undue haste, went back to work.

  In the course of the three blocks that lay between Pierre’s flat and the local market square, she heard several dialects of French, German, Spanish (or was it Catalan?), Italian, English, and the language of the Race spoken by both men and Lizards. People changed tongues more readily than they changed trousers. As a scholar-as a former scholar, she reminded herself-she wished she could go back and forth from one language to another as readily as did some of these traders and tapmen and smugglers.

  As always, the market was packed. Some merchants had stalls their families had held for generations. Others guided pushcarts through the crowds, shouting abuse and lashing out to keep people from getting too many free samples of their cooked squid or lemon tarts or brass rings polished till they looked like gold but sure to start a finger turning green in a week if you were rash enough to buy one.

  Monique hung on to her purse with both hands. Plenty of thieves in the market square were a lot less subtle than the ones who sold rings. No sooner had that thought crossed her mind than a German soldier in field-gray let out a guttural bellow of fury at discovering his pocket picked. The fingersmith was sure to be long gone. Even if he hadn’t been, Monique saw no police, French or German, anywhere.

  Some of the Lizards who skittered through the largely human crowd were as much at home here as any people. Monique would have guessed they were males from the conquest fleet, veterans who understood people as well as any Lizard could and were liable to be up to something shady themselves.

  Then there were the Lizard tourists. They were as obvious and as obnoxious as any travelers from an English-speaking land. They all carried video cameras and photographed everything that moved and everything that didn’t. Monique kept her head down. She was wearing a new bouffant hairdo and makeup far more garish than she would have dared-or even wanted-to use while teaching at the university, but she didn’t care to be recognized if she showed up on some Lizard’s pictures.

  She wondered how many of the hissing tourists were spies for the Race. A moment later, she wondered how many were spies for the Nazis. Ginger, from what she’d seen, was a great corrupter. She wished her brother had never got into the trade, even if it had made him rich. If he hadn’t, she wouldn’t have needed to have anything to do with the Nazis, either.

  One of the Lizards, one with fairly fancy body paint, bumped up against her. It spoke in its own language. “I’m sorry, but I don’t understand,” Monique said in French. Along with her own tongue, she had Latin. She had Greek. She had German and English and some Italian. But very little classical scholarship was conducted in the language of the Race.

  To her surprise, the Lizard handed her a card printed in pretty good French. It read, You may already be a winner. To find out if you are, come to the consulate of the Race, 21 Rue de Trois Rois. Many valuable prizes.

  “What kind of winner?” she asked. “What kind of prizes?”

  The Lizard tapped the card with a fingerclaw and said something else in its own language. Evidently it knew no more French than she did of its language. It reached out and tapped the card again, as if certain the little rectangle held all the answers.

  “I don’t have the faintest idea what you’re trying to tell me,” Monique said with a shrug. The Lizard shrugged, too, in what seemed to her a sad way. Then it vanished into the crowd.

  Monique stared at the card. Her first impulse was to crumple it up and let it fall to the ground, to be trampled underfoot. The Lizards’ consulate was bound to be the most intently spied-upon building in Marseille. If she ever wanted to remake the acquaintance of Dieter Kuhn, that struck her as the way to go about it. All she wanted for Kuhn was a horrible death far away from her.

  But, from somewhere, that miserable Lizard had come up with magic words. You may already be a winner. Was the Race running a contest, the way rival laundry-soap makers did when business got slow? Laundry-soap makers sold soap. What were the Lizards selling? She had no idea, but the very notion of the Lizards selling anything piqued her curiosity.

  Many valuable prizes. It sounded more like something Americans would say than anything the Lizards were likely to do. What would a Lizard think a valuable prize was? Just how valuable a prize would it be? Valuable enough to let her get away from her brother as she’d got away from Dieter Kuhn? Were there any prizes that valuable?

  She didn’t know. But she wanted to find out. She wondered if she could manage it. She started to let the card drop-she knew where the consulate was-but then hesitated. Maybe she would need it. She looked at it again. By what she could see, any French printing house could have done up such cards by the tens of thousands. But she didn’t know what she couldn’t see.

  Thoughtfully, she dropped the card into her handbag. If I get the chance, maybe I will go over there. She wondered how many cards the Lizard was giving out, and how many Lizards were giving out cards. If she did go to the Rue de Trois Rois, would she find half of Marseille there ahead of her? And would the valuable prize turn out to be aluminum pans or something else every bit as banal?

  She knew she shouldn’t leave the Porte d’Aix for any reason. If she was safe anywhere in Marseille, this was the place. The Germans came in here, yes, but they came in to buy and sell, not to raid and plunder. They didn’t know a half, or even a quarter, of what went on under their noses. And the Lizard authorities didn’t know half of what went on under their snouts, either, or Pierre wouldn’t have thrown her out so he could meet with those two shady, scaly characters.

  “Lady, you going to stand there till you grow roots?” somebody demanded in loud, irritable tones.

  “I’m sorry,” Monique said, though she wasn’t, not really. She moved, and the annoyed man pushed past her. Then she sank into abstracted study once more. What were the Lizards doing? Did she dare to find out? On the other hand, did she dare not to find out?

  14

  Felless looked down from a third-story window at the crowd that had gathered in front of the Race’s consulate in Marseille. The male who stood beside her was a researcher from the conquest fleet named Kazzop. “Save that these Big Uglies have black hair, this puts me in mind of a Tosevite work of fiction called ‘The Red-headed League,’ ”he said.

  “Tosevite literary allusions leave me uninterested,” Felless said. “The question is, will this accomplish what we desire?”

  “We have certainly stimulated the Big Uglies, superior female,” Kazzop said. “I do not think the Deutsche or the Francais have the least idea how to control this swarm of Tosevites.”

  “In that case, they will start brutalizing them soon,” Felless predicted. “It is not what you had in mind for this experiment, but does seem to be the standard Tosevite procedure in case of insecurity.”

  “Truth,” Kazzop said. “Of course, the Deutsch T
osevites need little excuse for brutalizing the Francais in any case. They rule them more through forcing fear than through promoting affection.”

  “I suppose it is because they only conquered this province of their not-empire shortly before the conquest fleet arrived,” Felless said. “It strikes me as counterproductive, but a great deal the Deutsche do strikes me as counterproductive, so this would be nothing out of the ordinary there.”

  “Indeed it would not,” Kazzop said. “We had better go down there and get things under way, or else the Deutsche will disperse that crowd before we can get any use out of it.”

  “I suppose so,” Felless said unhappily. This wasn’t her project; she’d been brought here at the bidding of others, just as she’d been sent to Nuremberg. She remained inside the borders of the Greater German Reich. Here, though, she had at least a chance to escape the disgrace that had hovered over her in the capital. That should have made her more enthusiastic about cooperating.

  To a point, it did. But only to a point. She had to keep coming out of her office and working not only with Big Uglies but also with females and males of the Race. Working with Big Uglies was merely annoying, though less so than it had been in Nuremberg. Working with females of her own kind was innocuous. Working with males of her own kind she hated, because it meant she dared not taste ginger.

  She wanted a taste. How she wanted a taste! As she never had before, she understood what addiction meant. She would crave ginger even on her deathbed, regardless of whether she had another taste between now and then. She knew that. If only she could get a couple of days doing research and data correlation inside the cubicle they’d given her. Maybe that would be long enough to let her taste and to let her raging pheromones subside afterwards.

  And maybe she would taste and taste and then humiliate herself with the males who coupled with her after she emerged from the cubicle. She’d done that before. She’d done it more than once, in fact. She was all too likely to do it again.