Aftershocks

by Harry Turtledove

  “Okay. Okay.” Jonathan hadn’t expected a speech. Maybe his dad hadn’t expected to make one, either, because he looked a little surprised at himself. Jonathan went on, “I understand what you’re saying, honest. Things do seem different to me, though. I can’t pretend they don’t.”

  “I know they do.” His father’s laugh was rueful. “You take the Race and spaceships and explosive-metal bombs and computing machines for granted. They’re part of the landscape to you. You’re not an old fogy who remembers the days before they got here.”

  “No, not me.” Jonathan shook his head. The old days, like Dad said, he thought, and then, The bad old days. People didn’t know much back then.

  Now his father was the one who said, “Okay. You can’t help being young, any more than I can help being . . . not so damn young.” He ran a hand through his hair, which really was getting thin on top. But even if he wasn’t so young, even if he was going bald, his eyes could still get a wicked twinkle in them. “Of course, if it weren’t for the Lizards, you wouldn’t be here at all, because I never would have met your mother if they hadn’t come.”

  “I know. You’ve told me that before. I don’t like thinking about it.” Jonathan didn’t like thinking about that at all. Imagining his own existence as depending on a quirk of fate was uncomfortable. Uncomfortable? Hell, it was downright terrifying. As far as he could tell, he’d always been here and always would be here. Anything that shook such foundations was not to be trusted.

  “What do you like thinking about?” his father asked slyly. “Your wedding, maybe? Or your wedding night?”

  “Dad!” Reproach rang in Jonathan’s voice. His father was an old man. He had no business thinking about stuff like that.

  “Just wait till you have kids,” his father warned him. “You’ll tell them about what it might have taken to make sure they weren’t born, and they won’t want to listen to you, either.”

  “I hope I don’t go and do stuff like that,” Jonathan said. “Maybe I’ll remember how much I hated it when you did it to me.”

  His dad laughed at him, which only annoyed him more than ever. Sam Yeager said, “Maybe. But don’t bet anything much on it, or you’ll be sorry. I didn’t like it when my father did it to me, but that’s not stopping me. Once you get to a certain age and see your kid acting a certain way, well, you just naturally start acting a certain way yourself.”

  “Do you?” Jonathan said darkly. He wanted to think he’d be different when he turned into an old man, but would he? How could he tell now? A lot of years lay between him and his father’s age, and he was in no hurry to pass through them.

  “Yeah, you do,” his father said, “however much you think you won’t till you get there.” He grinned at Jonathan again, this time less pleasantly. Jonathan scowled. His father could outguess him better than the other way round. That struck Jonathan as most unfair, too. Once upon a time, his dad had been young, and he still—sometimes, sort of—remembered what it was like. But Jonathan hadn’t got old yet, so how was he supposed to think along with his father?

  He gave ground now: “If you say so.”

  “I damn well do,” his dad said. “How are you coming along with figuring out how to tie a bow tie?”

  Jonathan threw his hands in the air in almost theatrical despair. “I don’t think I’ll ever get it so it looks right with a fancy tux.”

  That made his father laugh. “It wasn’t anything I had to worry about when I married your mother. I was in uniform and she was wearing blue jeans. That great metropolis of—”

  “Chugwater, Wyoming,” Jonathan chorused along with his father. If he’d heard about the tobacco-chewing justice of the peace who’d married his folks once, he’d heard about him a hundred times. The fellow had been post-master and sheriff, too. Not having to worry about a tux did give the story a slightly different slant, but only slightly.

  His father’s eyes went far away. “Things haven’t worked so bad for Barbara and me, though,” he said, more than half to himself. “No, not so bad at all.” For a couple of seconds, he neither looked nor sounded like an old man, not even to Jonathan. He might have been looking forward to a wedding himself, not back on the one he’d had a long time ago.

  “Chugwater, Wyoming.” This time, Jonathan spoke the ridiculous name in a different tone of voice. “It must be pretty hot, to be able to remember getting married in a funny place like that. I mean, a church is probably prettier and all, but everybody gets married in a church.”

  “It was one of those crazy wartime things,” his father answered. “Nobody knew whether the Lizards could take Chicago, so they pulled all the physicists and the typists—your mom was one—and the Lizard POWs and the interpreter—me—and sent everybody to Denver, where it was supposed to be safer. We almost got killed just when we were setting out. A Lizard killercraft shot up our ship. That was the first time—” He broke off.

  “The first time what?” Jonathan asked.

  “Never mind. Nothing.” His dad turned red. Jonathan scratched his head, wondering what that was all about. If he didn’t know better, he would have sworn . . . He shook his head. Nobody was ever comfortable thinking about his father and mother doing that, especially before they got married. Sam Yeager went on, “Isn’t there something useful you could be doing instead of standing around here jawing with me?” By his tone, he didn’t want Jonathan thinking about that, either.

  “Like what?” Jonathan didn’t feel like doing anything useful, either. “Mickey and Donald are all taken care of.” That was the chore he most often had to worry about. Not that he didn’t enjoy dealing with the two little Lizards—though not so little now. He did. But he didn’t want to get herded off to take care of them. That made him feel as if he were still little himself.

  “I don’t know,” his father said. “Shall I think of something?”

  “Never mind.” Jonathan decamped from the kitchen, pausing only to grab a Coke from the refrigerator. He gambled that his dad wouldn’t have time to come up with anything particularly nasty—yardwork qualified, in his opinion—before he did that, and he won his gamble.

  Back in the safety of his own room, he took a big swig at the soda and started studying his assignment in the history of the Race: he had exams coming. One more semester after this one, and then I can start making a living with the Lizards, just like Karen, he thought. And, thanks to his dad, he had some of the best connections in the whole world. Friendship counted for an awful lot with the Race, and his father had more friends among the Lizards than any human being this side of Kassquit.

  Poor Kassquit, he thought. Much as the Race fascinated him, he wouldn’t have wanted to get to know it the way she had. Thinking about her made him sad and horny, both at once: he couldn’t help remembering what they’d spent so much time doing up on the starship. Thinking about doing that with Kassquit made him think about doing it with Karen, and their wedding, and their wedding night. What with all that, he got very little real studying done, but he had a good time anyhow.

  Rance Auerbach stared out the hotel window at the waters of the Mediterranean. Even now, with fall sliding toward winter, they remained improbably warm and improbably blue. Oh, the Gulf of Mexico pulled the same trick, but Marseille was at the same latitude as Boston, more or less. It seemed like cheating.

  “We ought to get a blizzard,” he said.

  Penny Summers shook her head. “No, thanks. I saw too goddamn many blizzards when I was growing up. I don’t want any more.”

  “Well, I don’t, either,” Rance admitted. “But weather this good this late in the year just doesn’t feel right.” He coughed, then wheezed out a curse under his breath. Coughing hurt. It always had, ever since he got shot up. It always would, up till the day they buried him. That, or something close to it, was on his mind these days. “Maybe I’m just antsy. Damned if I know.”

  “What’s to be antsy about?” Penny asked. “We’re doing great—a lot better now that they dropped on good old Pierre. Plenty
of business, plenty of customers . . .”

  “Yeah.” Auerbach lit a cigarette. That would probably make him cough some more, but he didn’t care. No, that wasn’t right. He did care, but not enough to make him quit. “Maybe it’s just that things are going too good. I keep waiting for the knock on the door at three in the morning.”

  Penny shook her head. “Not this time. If they didn’t grab us when they got Pierre the Turd, they aren’t gonna do it. You and me, sweetie, we’re home free.”

  Now Rance eyed her with more than a little alarm. “Whenever you start thinking like that, you get careless. Remember what happened when we took that little trip down into Mexico? I don’t want anything like that happening again. They owe us for a lot more now than they did back then.”

  “You worry too much,” Penny said. “Everything’s gonna be fine, you wait and see.”

  “You don’t worry enough,” Rance returned. “You go around acting like the Lizards and the Frenchmen can’t see us, you’re going to find out you’re wrong. Then you’ll be sorry, and so will I.”

  “I’m not the one who’s been taking chances lately,” Penny said. “You’re the fellow who blackmailed that Lizard into finding good old Pierre’s sister a job. Of course, that was just out of the goodness of your heart. Yeah, sure it was.”

  “Lay off me on account of that, will you please?” Auerbach said wearily. “I never messed around with her, and you can’t say I did no matter how much you want to pin it on me.”

  “If I could, I’d be gone,” Penny answered. “I don’t stay where I’m not wanted, believe you me I don’t.” She glared at him. “But even if you didn’t do anything, I could tell you wanted to.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake.” Rance rolled his eyes. He knew that was overacting, but he needed to overact a little, because Penny wasn’t wrong. Picking his words with care and hoping that care didn’t show, he said, “She’s not ugly, but she’s not anything special. I don’t know what you’re all up in arms about.”

  “Cut the crap, Rance,” Penny said crisply. “I’m not blind, and I’m not stupid, either. I said you didn’t do anything, but I know how a man looks at a woman, and I know how a man acts around a woman he’s sweet on, too. You’re not the sort of guy who charges out and does big favors for just anybody.”

  That held enough truth to hurt if Rance looked at it closely. He limped over to an ashtray and stubbed out the cigarette. Returning the glare Penny’d given him, he answered, “Yeah, that’s why I threw you out on your can when you called me up out of a clear blue sky.”

  “You know how I paid you back, buster.” She tugged at her skirt, as if about to pull it off. “Some other gal could do it the same way.”

  “After what Monique Dutourd went through with that damn Nazi, I don’t think she pays in that coin,” Auerbach said, though he would have been interested in finding out whether he was wrong. “And we’ve been round this barn before, babe. Like I said, I sicced the Germans on that goddamn Roundbush because I wanted a piece of David Goldfarb’s ass.”

  When he’d used that line before, he’d made Penny laugh. Not this time. She said, “You sicced the Nazis on Roundbush because he pissed you off. That’s the long and short of it.”

  That also held some truth, but only some. Stubbornly, he said, “I did it because I don’t like to see anybody getting a raw deal. That goes for Goldfarb, and it goes for the French gal, too.”

  “Yeah, a knight in shining armor,” Penny snarled.

  “I already told you once, I didn’t throw you out when you called me on the phone,” Auerbach rasped. “I’ll tell you something else, too—I’m getting goddamn sick of you ragging on me all the time. You don’t like it, leave me half the cash and get your own room and run your own business and leave me the hell alone.”

  “I ought to,” she said.

  “Go ahead,” Rance told her. “Go right ahead. We split up once before. Did you think we were going to last forever this time?” He was spoiling for a fight. He could feel it.

  “That’ll give you the excuse you need to hop on the next train for Tours and your little professor, won’t it?”Penny blazed.

  Rance laughed in her face. “I knew you were gonna say that. God damn it to hell, I knew you would. But there’s something you don’t get, sweetheart. If I’m by myself, I don’t go to Tours. If I’m by myself, I go to the airport and hop on the first plane I can catch that’s heading for the States.”

  Penny laughed, too, every bit as nastily as he had. “And you last about three days before the guys whose hired goons you plugged find out you’re back and fill you full of holes for payback.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t think so. Once I’m home, I can fade into the woodwork again. I did it for years before you barged in and livened things up. I figure I can do it again without much trouble.”

  “Go back to Fort Worth and finish drinking yourself to death? Quarter-limit poker with the boys at the American Legion hall?” Penny didn’t hide her scorn. “You reckon you can stand the excitement?”

  “It wasn’t so bad,” he answered.

  Before Penny could say something else nasty, the telephone on the nightstand rang. She was standing a lot closer to it than Rance was, so she picked it up. “Allô?” That tried to be French, but ended up sounding a lot more like Kansas. She listened for a minute or so, then said, “Un moment, s’il vous plaît,” and held the phone out to Auerbach. “Talk to this guy, will you? I can’t make out more than about every other word.”

  What that meant was, she had no idea what the Frenchman was saying. She spoke some French, but she’d always had a devil of a time understanding it when spoken. Rance limped over and took the phone from her. “Allô?” His own accent wasn’t great, but he managed.

  “Hello, Auerbach,” said the frog on the other end of the line. “The shipment is early, for a wonder. You want to pick it up tonight instead of Friday?”

  Now Rance said, “Un moment.” He held his hand over the mouthpiece and spoke to Penny in English: “Want to get the stuff tonight?”

  “Sure,” she said at once. “Are we still in business?”

  “You need me, or somebody who can really talk some, anyway,” Auerbach answered. She made a face at him. He went back to French: “C’est bon.”

  “All right,” the ginger dealer said. “Usual time. Usual place. But tonight.” The line went dead.

  Auerbach hung up the phone and folded his arms across his chest. “Like I said, you want to walk out on me, go right ahead. We’ll see which one of us lasts longer as a solo act.”

  “Oh, screw you,” she said, and then, half laughing and half still angry, she proceeded to do exactly that. She clawed him and bit his shoulder hard enough to draw blood. As he bucked above her, he was trying to hurt her at least as much as he was trying to please her. Afterwards, panting and sweaty, she asked him, “Where you gonna get a lay like that from your professor?”

  “She’s not my professor, dammit,” he said. “If you listened as well as you screw, you’d know that.”

  “I don’t want to listen,” Penny said. “The more you listen, the more lies you hear. I’ve already heard too many.” But after that she did stop putting him through the wringer about Monique Dutourd, for which he was more than duly grateful.

  They got dressed and went downstairs to grab a taxi. “We want to go to 7 Rue des Flots-Bleu, in the Anse de la Fausse Monnaie,” Rance said in French to the driver of the battered VW. In English, he remarked, “Just like Marseille to have a district named for counterfeit money.” Then he had to squeeze into the cab’s cramped back seat. “One more reason to hate the goddamn Nazis,” he muttered as his leg complained.

  The Anse de la Fausse Monnaie lay on the southern side of the headland whose northern side helped shape Marseille’s Vieux Port. Being well to the west of the center of the city, it hadn’t suffered badly from the explosive-metal bomb. The locals hardly thought of themselves as citizens of Marseille at all. They hadn’t been till t
he Germans built roads connecting their little settlement to the main part of the city.

  As soon as Auerbach paid off the cabby, the fellow drove away faster than a Volkswagen had any business going. Rance didn’t care for that. “He doesn’t much want to be around here, does he?” he said. “Next question is, what does he know that we don’t?” The hotel couldn’t have been more than a mile and a half away, but was effectively in a different world—and, with Rance’s bad leg, a far distant one.

  Penny, as usual, refused to worry. “We’ve been here before. We’ll do fine this time, too,” she said, and headed off toward the tavern that was their target. Sighing, wishing he were carrying a submachine gun, Auerbach followed.

  Inside, fishermen and hookers looked up from their booze. The barkeep had seen the two new arrivals before, though. When he jerked a thumb at the staircase and said, “Room eight,” everybody relaxed—even if the newcomers didn’t look as if they belonged, they were known, expected, and therefore not immediately dangerous.

  Rance’s leg complained about the stairs, too, but he couldn’t do anything about that. By the moans and low thumpings coming from behind the thin doors upstairs, most of those rooms weren’t being used for ginger deals, but for a much older kind of transaction.

  Rance knocked on the door with the tarnished brass 8. “Auerbach?” asked the Frenchman who’d telephoned.

  “Who else?” he said in English. He didn’t think the frog knew any, but that didn’t matter. His ruined voice identified him as surely as a passport photo.

  The door opened. A blinding light shone in his face. Another one speared Penny. The room was full of Lizards. They all pointed automatic rifles at the Americans. Rance’s imagined submachine gun wouldn’t have done him a damn bit of good. “You are under arrest for trafficking in ginger!” one of the Lizards shouted in his own language. “We shall lock you up and eat the key!”