Second Contact

by Harry Turtledove

  “Yes, I know that,” Atvar said, and did his best not to let his disgust with the policy the Deutsche pursued show. “If you removed him from your not-empire by sending him here to me, you would be keeping your not-empire as free of Jews as if you killed him.”

  “He could still cause trouble for the Reich if we let him live,” the Big Ugly replied. “And the British would care very little about what happened to him: they are slowly coming round to our way of thinking.” But he did not reject the fleetlord’s request out of hand, as he might have—as Tosevites often seemed to take a perverse pleasure in doing.

  Noting that, Atvar said, “If you kill him, the Race will care, whether the British Big Uglies do or not. Do you understand me?”

  The Deutsch Big Ugly used his short, blunt, forkless tongue to lick his lips. That was a sign of cautious consideration among the Big Uglies, or so researchers had assured Atvar. After a pause, the official said, “You are taking an improperly high-handed attitude, Exalted Fleetlord.” Atvar said nothing. The Big Ugly licked his lips again. He made a fist and slammed it down onto the top of the desk behind which he sat. In any species, that would have been a sign of anger. “Very well,” he snapped. “Since you love Jews so well, you may have this one, too.”

  Time had proved it was useless to point out that the Race did not particularly love Jews, that their Tosevite neighbors treated them so badly as to make the Race seem a better alternative. Since the Deutsche seemed unable to figure that out for themselves, Atvar had no interest in enlightening them. The fleetlord contented himself with saying, “I thank you. My subordinates will arrange to retrieve this Tosevite.”

  “If he should ever enter the Reich again, he will be sorry he was ever hatched,” the Deutsch male said, which had to translate a Tosevite idiom all too literally into the language of the Race. “Farewell.” The Big Ugly’s image disappeared.

  No male or female of the Race would have been so rude to Atvar. Big Uglies, though, had already proved they could be far ruder than this. The fleetlord telephoned Moishe Russie. “It is accomplished,” he said when the connection was made. “Your relative will in due course be returned to you.”

  “I thank you, Exalted Fleetlord.” Russie added an emphatic cough.

  “You are welcome,” Atvar said. Maybe Russie did not know this Big Ugly named Goldfarb had been involved in the ginger-smuggling trade—or more likely, maybe he did not know Atvar would know. But know the fleetlord did. And he also knew he would do everything he could to learn as much about the trade as Goldfarb could or would tell him.

  “He should be here any minute now,” Dr. Moishe Russie said, peering out through one of the narrow windows that gave a view of the street.

  “Father, you’ve been saying that for the past hour,” Reuven Russie pointed out with such patience as he could muster.

  “The Nazis are punctual,” his father said. “The Lizards are also punctual. So I ought to know when he will be here.”

  “We know it, too,” Reuven said, even less patiently than before. “You don’t have to keep reminding us every five minutes.”

  “No, eh?” Moishe Russie said. “And why not?” His eyes twinkled.

  Reuven smiled, too, but it took effort. He knew his father was joking, but the jokes had turned into what Jane Archibald would have called kidding on the square. His father was too worried about his distant cousin to be anything but serious behind those twinkling eyes.

  Silent as a thought, a hydrogen-powered motorcar glided to a stop in front of the house. A door opened. A man in utterly ordinary clothes got out and walked up the short path to the door. He knocked.

  Moishe Russie let him in. “Welcome to Jerusalem, Cousin,” he said, folding David Goldfarb into an embrace. “It’s been too long.” He spoke Yiddish, not the Hebrew the Jews of Palestine used most of the time.

  “Thanks, Moishe,” Goldfarb answered in the same language. “One thing I’ll tell you—it’s good to be here. It’s good to be anywhere but a Nazi gaol.” His Yiddish was fluent enough, but had an odd accent. After a moment, Reuven realized the flavoring came from the English that was his relative’s first language. David Goldfarb turned toward him and stuck out a hand. “Hello. You’re a man now. That hardly seems possible.”

  “Time does go on.” Reuven spoke English, not Yiddish. It seemed every bit as natural to him, if not more so. He hadn’t used Yiddish much since coming to Palestine. While he had no trouble understanding it, forming anything but childish sentences didn’t come easy.

  “Too bloody right it does,” Goldfarb said, also in English. He was a few years younger than Reuven’s father. Unlike Moishe Russie, he still kept most of his hair, but it had more gray in it than the senior Russie’s. He must have seen that for himself, for he went on, “And it’s a miracle I’m not white as snow on top after the past couple of weeks. Thank God you could help, Moishe.”

  Reuven’s father shrugged. “I did not have to go into a gaol after you,” he said, sticking to Yiddish. “You did that for me. All I did was ask the Lizards to help get you out, and they did it.”

  “They must think a lot of you,” Goldfarb answered; now he returned to his odd-sounding Yiddish. If Jane spoke Yiddish, she’d speak it like that, Reuven thought. His cousin added, “They’d better think a lot of you now, after everything they put you through back then.”

  Moishe Russie shrugged again. “That was a long time ago.”

  “Too right it was,” Goldfarb muttered in English; he didn’t seem to notice going back and forth between languages. Still in English, he continued, “We’d all be better off if the buggers had never come in the first place.”

  “You might be,” Moishe Russie said. “England might be. But me? My family?” He shook his head. “No. If the Race had not come, we would all be dead. I am sure of it. You saw Lodz. You never saw Warsaw. And Warsaw would only have got worse as the war went on.”

  “Warsaw was bad, very bad,” Reuven agreed; he had no happy recollections of the city in which he’d been born. “But what the Nazis did with their killing factories is worse. If they’d stayed in Poland, I think Father is right: we would all have gone through them. Next to Hitler, Haman was nothing much.”

  Goldfarb frowned. Plainly, he wanted to argue. As plainly, he had trouble seeing how he could. Before he found anything to say, the twins came out of the kitchen. The scowl disappeared from his face. Grinning, he turned to Moishe. “All right, they’re as cute as their photos. I didn’t think they could be.”

  Reuven suppressed the strong urge to retch. The twins stretched like cats, being charming on purpose. As with cats, it struck Reuven as an act. “They’re miserable nuisances a lot of the time,” he said—in Yiddish, of which Esther and Judith had only a smattering: his father and mother often spoke it when they didn’t want the twins to know what was going on.

  “Well, I have children of my own, and every one of them thinks the others are nuisances,” Goldfarb said, also in Yiddish. He eyed Judith and Esther, then switched to slow, clear English: “Which one of you is which?”

  “I’m Esther,” Judith said.

  “I’m Judith,” Esther echoed.

  Reuven coughed. So did his father. David Goldfarb raised an eyebrow. He’d had practice with children, all right; his expression was identical to the one Moishe Russie used when he caught Reuven or Judith or Esther stretching the truth.

  “Oh, all right,” Esther said. “Maybe it is the other way around.”

  “You couldn’t prove it by me,” Goldfarb said. “But your father and your brother have their suspicions.”

  “We came out here to say that supper was ready,” Judith said. “Who says that doesn’t really matter, does it?”

  “Not if it’s true,” Reuven said. Both his sisters sniffed indignantly at the possibility that he could doubt them. Having failed to doubt them a few times when he should have been wary, he bore up under their disapproval.

  Supper was a couple of roasted chickens, with chickpeas and carrot
s and a white wine that made Goldfarb nod in what seemed surprised approval. “I don’t usually drink wine, except during Pesach,” he said. “This is good.”

  “It’s not bad, anyhow,” Moishe Russie said. “When I drink anything these days, it’s mostly wine. I haven’t got the head for whiskey or vodka any more, and the beer you can get here is a lot nastier than what they made in Poland—in England, too, for that matter.”

  “If you get used to drinking wine, you won’t want to drink beer, anyhow,” Reuven said. “Beer’s thin, sour stuff by comparison.”

  “That only goes to show you’ve been drinking bad beer,” David Goldfarb answered. “From what your father said, I don’t suppose it’s any wonder.”

  Rivka Russie brought matters back to the more immediate by softly saying, “It’s good to see you here and safe, David.”

  “Omayn,” Moishe Russie added.

  Their cousin—Reuven’s cousin once further removed—emptied his wineglass with a convulsive gulp less closely related to how much he enjoyed the vintage than to its anesthetic properties. “It’s bloody good to be here, believe me,” he said, and inclined his head to Reuven’s father. “Thanks again for pulling the wires to help get me out. You did more than the British consul in Marseille. You couldn’t very well have done less, let me tell you, because he didn’t do anything.”

  “It was my pleasure, you believe me,” Moishe Russie said, waving away the thanks. Reuven had seen many times that his father had a hard time accepting praise.

  “What was it like, there in the Nazis’ prison?” one of the twins asked.

  “It was the worst place in the world,” David Goldfarb said. Esther and Judith both gasped. Goldfarb looked at his glass, as if regretting it was empty. Moishe Russie saw that glance and proceeded to remedy the situation. After drinking, Goldfarb went on, “The cell was only a cell, with a cot and a bucket. Not much different to a British cell, I shouldn’t wonder. They fed me—I got a little hungry, but not very. They asked me questions. They didn’t knock my teeth out or hit me very often or very hard. It was still the worst place in the world.”

  “Why?” Esther asked, while Judith said, “I don’t understand.”

  “I’ll tell you why,” Goldfarb said. “Because even though they didn’t do any of those things, they could have. I knew it, and they knew it, and they knew I knew it. Knowing it did almost as good a job of breaking me as real torture would have done.”

  He’d spoken English; word by word, the twins couldn’t have had any trouble following what he said. But they didn’t understand it. Reuven could see as much. He did, or thought he did, though he was just as well pleased not to have had the experience that would have made understanding certain.

  His mother asked, “What were you doing there in the first place?”

  “Trying to help some of my British . . . friends,” Goldfarb said. “They did some of their dealings through a Frenchman who had been operating on his own, but they started losing money—or not making so much money, I’m not sure which—when the Germans got their hooks into him. So they sent me down to the south of France to see if I couldn’t persuade him to go back to being an independent operator. Why not?” His mouth twisted; he emptied the wineglass again. “I was just an expendable Jew.”

  “Ginger is as bad for the Lizards as cocaine or heroin is for us,” Reuven’s father observed, “maybe worse. I wish you’d never got caught up in that.”

  “So do I,” Goldfarb said. “Vey iz mir, so do I. But having dreadful things happen to my family would have been even worse, and so off I went.”

  Moishe Russie reached for more wine himself when he heard that, something he rarely did. Nodding heavily, he said, “When I was having trouble with the Lizards in Warsaw, I had help getting Rivka and Reuven to a place where the Race couldn’t get their hands on them, so I understand how you feel.”

  “We were in a cellar!” Reuven exclaimed, astonished at how the memory came back. “It was dark all the time, because we didn’t have many lamps or candles.”

  “That’s right,” his father said. Reuven shook his head in astonishment; he hadn’t so much as thought of that hideaway for many years. His father looked across the table at Goldfarb. “And the Lizards were trying to put Dutourd out of business while you were trying to set him up again—and the Nazis caught their people, too.”

  “If you stick your head in the lion’s mouth, you know there’s a chance he’ll bite down,” Goldfarb said with a shrug. “I gather you got the Americans out of their cells, too?”

  “Yes, I managed that,” Moishe Russie said. “Getting them was easier than getting you, in fact. The Germans worry more about offending the Race than they do about offending England.”

  “I can understand that, worse luck for me,” David Goldfarb said. “The only one who got left behind was Dutourd. He would have dealt with me, I think. I hope he doesn’t get into too much trouble for that.” He paused. “The Lizards started asking me questions the minute I got on their plane in Marseille. And do you know what? I answered every one of them. If my ‘friends’ back home don’t like it, too bloody bad.”

  “Good for you,” Reuven said.

  His father nodded and remarked, “My guess is that the Frenchman won’t. He’s useful to the Nazis—he’s not just another damned Jew.”

  Goldfarb inclined his head. “As one damned Jew to another—to a whole family full of others—I thank you.” He poured more wine into his glass, then raised it high. “L’chaim!” he said loudly.

  “To life!” Reuven echoed, and was proud to have answered a beat ahead of his father and mother and sister. He drank his wine; it went down sweet and smooth as honey.

  Felless felt like a hypocrite as she accompanied Ambassador Veffani into the Reichs Ministry of Justice in Nuremberg. She also felt even smaller than she usually did while entering a building the Big Uglies had built to suit themselves. The Ministry of Justice, like a lot of public buildings of the Reich, was deliberately designed to minimize the importance of the individual, whether that individual was a Tosevite or belonged to the Race.

  “They know not the Emperor, so they have to build like this,” Veffani said when Felless remarked on the style. “They hope false splendor will make their not-emperor and his minions seem as impressive to their subjects as generations of tradition have made the Emperor seem to us.”

  “That is . . . a very perceptive remark, superior sir,” Felless said. “I have seen similar speculations, but seldom so pithily expressed.” For a moment, interest made her forget her craving for ginger—but only for a moment. The craving never left for long—and now she and Veffani were visiting the Deutsch minister of justice to plead for harsher treatment of a captured ginger smuggler. If that was not irony, the stuff had never hatched from its shell.

  Deutsch soldiers in steel helmets stiffened as Veffani and Felless reached the top of the broad stone stairway leading to the entrance. They clicked their booted heels together, a courtesy rather like assuming the posture of respect. One of them proved to speak the language of the Race: “I greet you, Ambassador, and your colleague. How may I serve you?”

  “We have an appointment with Justice Minister Dietrich,” Veffani answered, observing protocol. “Please escort us to him.”

  “It shall be done.” The Deutsch guard’s about-turn had none of the smooth elegance a member of the Race would have given it, but possessed a stiff impressiveness of its own. Over his shoulder, the Big Ugly added, “Follow me.”

  Follow him Veffani and Felless did, down corridors that dwarfed Big Uglies, let alone the two of them. Deutsch functionaries, some in the business clothes the Tosevites favored, more in the uniform wrappings the Deutsche used to show status in place of body paint (and, Felless realized, to overawe Tosevites not similarly wrapped), bustled here and there. As with the Race, they seemed to feel that the busier they looked, the more important they actually were.

  Minister Dietrich had a doorway even larger and higher than any of the
others. A Tosevite miscreant hauled before him would surely feel he had committed some crime for which he could never atone. Felless felt the Big Ugly architect had committed a breach of taste for which he could never atone. A great deal of Deutsch monumental architecture inspired the same feeling in her.

  The guard escorting Felless and Veffani spoke back and forth with Dietrich’s secretary in the Deutsch language. Felless had picked up a few words of it, but could not follow a conversation. “It is all formality, of no great consequence,” Veffani whispered to her.

  She made the hand gesture of agreement. The secretary spoke the language of the Race about as well as a Tosevite could: “Come with me, Ambassador, Senior Researcher. Minister Dietrich will be pleased to hear whatever you may have to say, although, of course, he cannot promise to fulfill all your desires.”

  “I understand,” Veffani said. “As always, I look forward to seeing him.”

  Veffani is a hypocrite, too, Felless thought. The ambassador’s hypocrisy, luckily for him, had nothing to do with the herb. He merely had to pretend the Big Uglies with whom he dealt not only were but deserved to be his equals. Felless still found that concept outrageous. She had come to Tosev 3 assuming the world would be altogether conquered, subservient to the will of the Race. That hadn’t happened, but she remained convinced it should have.

  After more formal pleasantries, the secretary—who would also serve as translator—escorted the male and female of the Race into the presence of Justice Minister Dietrich. His gray hair and flabby face showed him to be an elderly male. “I greet you, Veffani,” he said in the language of the Race. His accent was far thicker than that of his secretary.

  “I greet you, Sepp,” Veffani replied. Sepp, he had given Felless to understand, was a nickname for Josef. The Big Uglies, already possessed of too many names from the standpoint of the Race, added to the confusion by using informal versions of them whenever they felt like it. One more piece of Tosevite inefficiency, Felless thought. Veffani went on, “I present to you Senior Researcher Felless, who is also concerned with the problem ginger poses for the Race.”