Down to Earth

13

Jonathan Yeager sprawled across his bed, working on the chemistry notes and problems he’d missed because he’d gone into space. Karen sat in the desk chair a couple of feet away. The bedroom door remained decorously open. That was a house rule. Now that he’d finally turned twenty-one, Jonathan had proposed to his folks that they change it. They’d proposed to him that he keep his mouth shut as long as he lived under their roof.

He pointed to a stretch of Karen’s notes he had trouble following. “What was Dr. Cobb saying about stoichiometry here?”

Karen pulled the chair closer and bent over to see what he was talking about. Her red hair tickled his ear. “Oh, that,” she said, a little sheepishly. “I didn’t quite get that myself.”

He sighed. “Okay, I’ll ask after lecture tomorrow.” He made motions that would have implied tearing his hair if he’d had any hair to tear. “I don’t think I’m ever going to get all caught up, and I was only gone a week.”

“What was it like?” Karen asked. She’d been asking that ever since he got back from Kitty Hawk. He’d tried several different ways of explaining, but none of them satisfied her-or him, really.

After some thought, he took another shot at it: “You’ve read Edgar Rice Burroughs, right?” When Karen nodded, he went on, “You know how the apes raised Tarzan but he still turned out to be a man pretty much like other men?” She nodded again. Jonathan said, “Well, it was nothing like that. I mean, nothing at all. Kassquit looks like a person, but she doesn’t act like a person. She acts just like a Lizard. My dad was right.” He laughed a little; that wasn’t something he said every day. “We just play at being Lizards. She’s not playing. She wishes she had scales-you can tell.”

Karen nodded again, this time thoughtfully. “I can see that, I guess.” She paused, then found a different question, or maybe a different version of the same one: “How did it feel, talking about important things with a woman who wasn’t wearing any clothes?”

Was that what she’d been getting at all along? Jonathan answered, “For me, it felt funny at first. Kassquit didn’t even think about it, and I tried not to notice-you know what I mean?” He’d tried; he hadn’t succeeded too well. Not wanting to admit as much, he added, “I think it flustered my dad worse than it did me.”

“That’s how it works for people that old,” she agreed with careless cruelty. Jonathan felt he’d passed an obscure test. He’d been attracted to Liu Mei when she visited Los Angeles, so now Karen was nervous about every female he met. Here, he thought she was wasting worry. UCLA boasted tons of pretty girls, all of them far more accessible and far more like him than one raised by aliens who’d spent her whole life on a starship.

Interesting, now-Kassquit was certainly interesting. Fascinating, even. But attractive? He’d seen all of her, every bit; she was no more shy of herself than a Lizard was. He shook his head. No, he didn’t think so.

“What?” Karen asked.

Before Jonathan could answer, one of the Lizard hatchlings skittered down the hall. He stopped in the doorway, his eye turrets swinging from Jonathan to Karen and back again. They lingered longer on Karen, not because the hatchling found her attractive-a really preposterous notion-but because he saw her less often. Jonathan waved. “Hello, Donald,” he called.

Donald waved back. He and Mickey had got good at gestures, though the sounds they made were nothing but hissing babbles.

“I greet you,” Karen called to him in the language of the Race.

He stared at her as if he’d never heard such noises before. And, except from himself and Mickey, he hadn’t. “Don’t do that,” Jonathan told Karen. “My dad would go through the roof if he heard you. We’re supposed to raise them like people, not like Lizards. When they learn to talk, they’ll learn English.”

“Okay. I’m sorry,” Karen said. “I knew that, but I forgot. When I see a Lizard, I want to talk Lizard talk.”

“Mickey and Donald won’t be Lizards, any more than Kassquit is really a person,” Jonathan said. Then he paused. “Still and all, I think there’s a little part of her that wants to be a person, even if she doesn’t know how.”

Karen didn’t want him talking about Kassquit any more. She made a point of changing the subject. She made a literal point: pointing at Donald, she said, “He sure is getting big.”

“I know,” Jonathan said. “He and Mickey are an awful lot bigger than human one-year-olds would be.” His mother would have flayed him if he’d said Mickey and him. However he said it, it was true. The baby Lizards weren’t babies any more, not to look at they weren’t. They’d grown almost as if inflated by CO2 cartridges, and were closer in size to adult Lizards than to what they’d been when they came out of their eggs.

Liu Mei never learned to smile. Neither did Kassquit, Jonathan thought. I wonder what sorts of things Mickey and Donald will never be able to do because we’re raising them instead of Lizards. He didn’t know. He couldn’t know. And he didn’t feel like broaching the subject to Karen, not when she plainly didn’t want him thinking about Liu Mei or Kassquit.

After another wave, Donald scurried back up the hall. Karen said, “I wonder why they grow so much faster than people do.”

“Dad says it’s because they take care of themselves so much more than human babies do,” Jonathan answered. “If you’re on your own, the bigger you are, the fewer the things that can eat you and the more things you can eat.”

“That sounds like it makes pretty good sense,” Karen said. Jonathan automatically turned that like to as if in his mind. Karen was lucky enough not to have parents who got up in arms over grammar.

With a grin, he said, “Yeah, I know, but it’s liable to be true anyhow.” Karen started to nod, then noticed what he’d said and made a face. He made one back at her. With the air of somebody granting a great concession, he went on, “The things Dad says usually make pretty good sense.”

“I know,” Karen said. “You’re so lucky. At least your parents know we’re living in the twentieth century. My folks think we’re still back in horse-and-buggy days. Or if they don’t think so, they wish we were.”

Jonathan didn’t reckon himself particularly lucky in his choice of parents. Very few people his age did, but that never crossed his mind. He thought Mr. and Mrs. Culpepper were pretty nice, but he didn’t have to try to live with them. Pretty soon, he wouldn’t have to try to live with his own folks, either. Part of him eagerly looked forward to that. The rest of him wanted to stay right here, in the bedroom where he’d lived so long.

If he did stay, he couldn’t very well share the bedroom with Karen. That was the best argument he could think of for leaving the nest.

His mother looked in on them. “You kids are working hard,” she said. “Would you like some cookies and a couple of Cokes to keep you going?”

“Okay,” Jonathan said.

“Sure, Mrs. Yeager. Thanks,” Karen said.

The look Jonathan’s mother sent him said what she wouldn’t say in words: that he had no manners, but his girlfriend did. Getting away from looks like that was another good reason for striking out on his own.

Chocolate-chip cookies and sodas eased his annoyance. Were he living by himself, he’d have had to get up and fetch them himself. If I were married, I could ask my wife to bring them, he thought. He glanced over at Karen. Looking at her made him think of some of marriage’s other obvious advantages, too. That she might ask him to fetch Cokes and cookies didn’t cross his mind.

While Jonathan and Karen were eating cookies, Mickey came into the room. He watched them in fascination. Before he and Donald were allowed to go outside their room, they hadn’t seen the Yeagers eating. For all Jonathan knew, they might have thought they were the only ones who did.

They knew better now. They’d also had to learn that grabbing whatever they wanted off people’s plates was against the rules. That had produced some interesting and lively scenes. Now they were good-most of the time, anyhow.

Mickey was good more often than Donald. His eye turrets followed a cookie from the paper plate on the bed by Jonathan to Jonathan’s mouth. Watching, Karen snickered. “You ought to put sunglasses on him and give him a little tin cup,” she said.

“I’ll do better than that.” Jonathan snapped his fingers, the signal his family had worked out after trial and error to let the little Lizards know they could come up and have some of the food a human was eating. Mickey advanced, hand outstretched. Jonathan held out a cookie. Mickey took it with surprising delicacy. Then, delicacy forgotten, he stuffed it into his mouth.

Jonathan waited to see how he liked it. Lizards were more carnivorous than people, and Mickey and Donald were as emphatic as any human babies or toddlers about rejecting things they didn’t care for. But Mickey, after a couple of meditative smacks, gave a gulp, and the cookie was gone. He pointed to the paper plate, then rubbed his belly.

Karen giggled. “He’s saying he wants some more.”

“He sure is. And he’s not trying to steal it, either. Good boy, Mickey.” Jonathan held out another cookie. “You want this?”

Mickey’s head went up and down in an unmistakable nod. “He’s really learning,” Karen said. “The Lizards use a hand gesture when they mean yes.”

“He doesn’t know what the Lizards do, though,” Jonathan said. “He just knows what we do. That’s the idea.” He gave Mickey another cookie. This one disappeared without meditation. Mickey rubbed his belly again. Jonathan laughed. “You’re going to get fat. You give him one, Karen.”

“Okay,” she said. “That way you get to keep more of yours, huh? See, I’m on to you.” But she held out a cookie. “Here, Mickey. It’s all right. You can have it.”

Mickey hesitated. He was shier than Donald. And neither hatchling was as used to Karen as he was to the Yeagers. But the lure of chocolate chips seduced Mickey, as it had so many before him. He skittered forward, snatched the cookie out of Karen’s hand, and then scuttled away so she couldn’t grab him.

“You like that?” Karen said as he devoured the prize. “I bet you do. You want another one? I bet you do.” Mickey stood there, eye turrets riveted on the cookie in her hand. “Come on. You want it, don’t you?”

Mickey opened his mouth. That alarmed Jonathan. Was the hatchling going to take the cookie that way? He’d mostly outgrown such behavior-and Jonathan didn’t want him biting Karen. But, instead of going forward, Mickey stood there; he quivered a little, as if from intense mental effort. At last, he made a sound: “Esss.”

“Jesus,” Jonathan said softly. He sprang to his feet. “Give him the cookie, Karen. He just said, ‘Yes.’ ” He hurried past her. “I’m going to get my folks. If he’s started talking, they need to know about it.”

The motorcar pulled to a halt in front of a house not much different from the one in which Straha lived. By now, the ex-shiplord had grown used to stucco homes painted in bland pastels with swaths of grass in front of them. They seemed to be the local Tosevites’ ideal. He’d never been able to figure out why-taking care of grass struck him as a waste of both time and water-but it was so.

“Here we are,” his driver said. “You may have a more interesting time than you expect.”

“Why?” Straha asked. “Do you think someone will start shooting at the house, as happened on an earlier visit to Sam Yeager?”

“No, that is not what I meant,” the driver answered. “If that happens, I will do my best to see that no harm comes to you. But the surprise I had in mind is not likely to be dangerous.”

“What is it, then?” Straha demanded.

His driver smiled. “If I told you, Shiplord, it would not be a surprise any more. Go on. The Yeagers will be waiting for you. And who knows? You may not be surprised at all.”

“Who knows?” Straha said irritably. “I may one day have a driver who does not enjoy annoying me.” The driver laughed a loud, braying Tosevite laugh, which annoyed Straha more than ever. He got out of the motorcar and slammed the door. That only made the driver laugh louder.

Tailstump quivering with irritation he couldn’t hide, Straha went up onto the front porch and rang the bell. He could hear it chime inside the house. He never had liked bells; he thought hisses the proper way to gain attention. But this was not his world, not his species. If the American Big Uglies liked bells and pastel stucco and grass, he had to accommodate himself to them, not the other way round.

The door opened. There stood Barbara Yeager. She briefly bent into the posture of respect. “I greet you, Shiplord,” she said in the language of the Race. “How are you?”

“Fine, thanks,” Straha answered in English. “And you?”

“We are also well,” Sam Yeager’s mate answered. She shifted to English, too: “Sam! Straha’s here.”

“I’m coming, hon,” Yeager called. Straha listened with mingled amusement and perplexity. Despite having lived so long among the Big Uglies, he didn’t-by the nature of things, he couldn’t-fully understand the way their family relationships worked. Neither the Race, the Rabotevs, nor the Hallessi had anything similar, so that was hardly surprising. The former shiplord found endearments like the one Yeager had used particularly hard to fathom. They struck him as informal honorifics, a contradiction in terms if ever there was one. But the Big Uglies didn’t seem to find it a contradiction; they used them all the time.

Sam Yeager came into the front room. “I greet you, Shiplord,” he said, as his mate had before. “I hope things are not too bad.”

“No, not too,” Straha answered. With Sam Yeager, he stuck to his own language; more than with any other Big Ugly, even his driver, he felt as if he were talking with another male of the Race. That I hope things are not too bad proved how well Yeager understood his predicament. Any other Tosevite would have said, I hope things are good. Things weren’t good. They couldn’t be, not in exile. They could be not too bad.

“Come on into the kitchen, then,” Yeager said. “I have a new kind of salami you might want to try. I have rum and vodka-and bourbon for Barbara and me. And I have ginger, if you care for a taste.”

“I shall gladly try the salami,” Straha said. “If you pour me the glass of rum, I expect it will manage to empty itself. But I shall decline the ginger, thank you.”

“Whatever suits you,” Sam Yeager said, turning and walking through the front room and dining room toward the kitchen. His mate and Straha followed. Over his shoulder, Yeager went on, “Shiplord, you had better know by now that I do not mind if you taste ginger, any more than I mind if you drink alcohol. No Prohibition here.” The second word of the last sentence came out in English. By Yeager’s chuckle, it was a joke.

Straha didn’t get it. “Prohibition?” he echoed, confused.

“When I was young, the United States tried to prohibit the drinking of alcohol,” Yeager explained. “It did not work. Too many Tosevites like alcohol too well. I wonder if that will happen with the Race and ginger.”

Addicted to the Tosevite herb though he was, Straha said, “I hope not. I can drink a little alcohol and have my mood slightly altered, or I can drink more for greater changes. Ginger is not like that. If I taste ginger, I will enjoy the lift it gives me, and I will suffer the depression afterwards. I have far less control with it than I do with alcohol, and the same holds true for other tasters.”

“All right,” Yeager said. “That makes better sense than a lot of things I have heard.” Once in the kitchen, he got out glasses, poured rum into Straha’s, and put ice and whiskey into the ones for his mate and himself. He raised his in salute. “Mud in your eye.” That was in English, too.

The Race also used informal toasts. After drinking to Yeager’s, Straha returned one: “May your toeclaws tingle.” Yeager drank to that, then started slicing salami. Straha went on, “I never have understood why you Big Uglies do not freeze up, what with all the ice you use.”

He had been teasing the Yeagers about that for a long time. “We like it,” Barbara said. “If you are too ignorant to appreciate it, that only leaves more for us.”

“We have no reason to like ice,” Straha said. “If this planet did not have so much snow and ice, we would have had a better chance of conquering it. Of course, if I had been made fleetlord instead of failing in my effort to overthrow Atvar, we would also have had a better chance of conquering it.”

After more than twenty Tosevite years, he seldom let his bitterness show so openly. Sam Yeager said, “We Big Uglies are glad you failed, then. Here, see how you like this.” He gave Straha a plate full of salami slices.

After trying one, the ex-shiplord said, “It is certainly salty enough. Some of the Tosevite spices I enjoy, while others are harsh on my tongue.” He turned an eye turret toward the wrapper in which the salami had come. He found English spelling a masterpiece of inefficiency even by Tosevite standards, but he could read the language well enough. “Hebrew National?” he asked. “Hebrew has to do with the Big Uglies called Jews, is it not so? Is this salami brought into the United States from regions the Race rules?”

“No, we have plenty of Jews here, too,” Yeager told him. “This salami is made only with beef. Jews are not supposed to eat pork.”

“One more superstition I shall never understand,” Straha said.

Yeager shrugged. “I am not a Jew, so I cannot say I understand it, either. But they follow it.”

Back in the days before the Empire unified Home-long before the Empire unified Home-males and females of the Race had held such preposterous beliefs. They’d all been subsumed in the simple elegance of reverencing the spirits of Emperors past. Only scholars knew any details of the ancient beliefs. But here on Tosev 3, the Big Uglies had developed a formidable civilization while keeping their bizarre hodgepodge of superstitions. It was a puzzlement.

Before Straha could remark on what a puzzlement it was, he heard a loud thump from down the hall, and then another. “What was that?” he asked.

“That?” Sam Yeager said. “That was… a research project.”

“What kind of research project goes thump?” Straha asked.

“A noisy one,” the Big Ugly answered, which was no answer at all. After yet another thump, Yeager added, “A very noisy one.”

Straha was about to insist on some sort of real explanation when he got one, not from Sam Yeager but again from down the hall. Though they came only faintly, as if through a door, the hisses and squawks he heard were unmistakable. “You have other males or females of the Race here!” he exclaimed. “Are they prisoners?” He cocked his head to one side, listening intently. Try as he would, he could make out no words. Then he realized there were no words to make out. “Hatchlings! You have hatchlings!”

Sam and Barbara Yeager looked at each other. That was much more obvious among Big Uglies than in the Race, for the Tosevites had to turn their whole heads. In English, Barbara Yeager said, “I told you we should have put them out in the garage.”

“Yeah, you did,” Sam answered in the same language. “But the neighbors might have seen them when we moved them, and that would have been worse.” He swung back toward Straha. “The shiplord here, he’s a soldier. He knows how to keep secrets.”

His tone implied that Straha had better know how to keep secrets. Straha hardly noticed. He was still too astonished. “How did you get hold of hatchlings?” he asked. “Why did you get hold of hatchlings?”

Sam Yeager regathered his composure and returned to the language of the Race: “I cannot tell you how we got the eggs, for I do not know myself. You understand that, Shiplord: what I do not know, I cannot betray. Why? So we can raise them as Big Uglies, or see how close they can come to being like us.”

Just for a moment, Straha felt as if he were a shiplord of the Race once more. To have his own kind raised by these Tosevite barbarians, never to know their own heritage… “It is an outrage!” he shouted, tailstump quivering with fury.

“Maybe it is,” Yeager said, which surprised him. The Big Ugly went on, “But if it is, how is it anything different from what you have done with Kassquit?”

“But these are ours,” Straha said automatically. Even he realized that wasn’t a good enough answer. Some of the blind anger that had filled him began to seep away. He was glad he hadn’t tasted ginger. If he had, he probably would have bitten and clawed first and talked later, if at all.

“We are free. We are independent. We have as much right to do this as you do,” Sam Yeager said. Logically, he was right.

But logic still had a hard time penetrating. “You have robbed them of their heritage,” Straha burst out.

“Maybe,” Yeager said, “but maybe not, too. We have had them a little more than two of your years, and they are already starting to talk.”

“What?” Straha stared. “That is impossible.”

“It is a truth,” Sam Yeager said, and the ex-shiplord found him impossible to disbelieve.

Another realization exploded within Straha: his driver had known about this all along. He’d known, and never said a word. No, not quite never. Now some of the things he’d said that hadn’t made sense to Straha did. Straha wondered what he could do to take revenge on the Big Ugly. Nothing came to mind, not right away, but something would, something would. He was sure of that.

“This is all quite astonishing,” he said at last.

“I would sooner you had not learned,” Yeager said, “but they got too boisterous.” He ruefully spread his hands. “And you understand security, so it is not so bad.” Was he trying to convince himself? Probably.

“Yes, I understand security,” Straha agreed. But his thoughts were far away. He knew he would need something approaching a miracle to get back into Atvar’s good graces and be allowed to rejoin the Race. Reporting a couple of hatchlings kidnapped by the Big Uglies… would that be enough? He didn’t know. He couldn’t know-but it was worth thinking about.

Gorppet wasn’t so sure he’d been smart in coming to South Africa after all. It was a lot more easygoing than his longtime former posting, that was certain. Of course, that would have been true of anywhere the Race ruled. But the weather, as far as he was concerned, left a lot to be desired. In what was allegedly summer in this hemisphere, it was tolerable, he supposed, but what would winter be like? Not good-he was sure of that. He hoped it wouldn’t be as bad as the SSSR. The males stationed here said it wouldn’t, but Gorppet had learned the hard way not to trust what others said without testing it.

He sighed as he tramped through the streets of Cape Town’s District Six. However atrocious the Big Uglies in the district known as Iraq had been, he’d enjoyed the weather there. Every so often, he’d even felt hot. He didn’t think he would do that here.

Black and brown and pinkish-tan Big Uglies filled the streets around him. They chattered in several languages he didn’t understand. Learning Arabic had come in handy in Iraq, but did him no good here. Even this script was different from the one they’d used there. He hadn’t been able to read Arabic writing, but he’d got used to the way it looked. These angular characters seemed wrong somehow.

He paused at a street corner. More motorized vehicles were on the streets here than in Basra or Baghdad-many more driven by Big Uglies. More bicycles were on the road, too. They were ingenious contraptions, and made individual Tosevites into little missiles.

A male Big Ugly came up to the corner at a slow limp, leaning on a stick. “I greet you, Gorppet,” he said, speaking the language of the Race with a thick accent.

“And I greet you, Rance Auerbach,” Gorppet replied. “How are you today?”

“Bad,” Auerbach answered, as he usually did. He used an emphatic cough, and then several that showed nothing but infirmity. “Very bad. That hurts.”

“I believe it. It sounds as if it should,” Gorppet said. “A wound from the fighting, you told me?”

“That is right.” Auerbach nodded. “One of your miserable friends put a couple of bullets in me, and I have never been the same since.” He shrugged. “And some of your friends may limp on account of bullets I put in them back then. That is how things were. I only wish the male would have missed me.”

“I can understand that.” Gorppet liked Rance Auerbach, liked him better than he’d expected to like any Big Ugly. Auerbach was able to greet him and deal with him without rancor in spite of what had happened during the fighting. Gorppet thought he himself would have been able to do the same with the Soviet Tosevites he’d faced then. They’d all been doing what they’d been told to do, and doing it as best they could. How could you hate anyone who’d only been doing his best?

Auerbach said, “Come on. Let us go to the Boomslang. Penny and Frederick will be waiting for us.”

“All right,” Gorppet said. “I will listen to what all of you have to say.” He paused, then added, “I am less sure I would listen to the others if you were not with them.”

“Me?” Auerbach said, and Gorppet knew he’d startled the Big Ugly. “Why me? Penny found you. Of all of us involved in the deal, I am the least.”

Gorppet made the negative hand gesture. “No. You are mistaken. I understand you in ways I do not understand the female and the black-skinned male. We have been through many of the same things, you and I. It gives us something of a bond.”

“Maybe.’’ Auerbach didn’t sound convinced.

But Gorppet wanted to convince him. “It is a truth,” he said earnestly. “Did you never feel, back in those days, that you had more likenesses to the males you fought than to your own high officers and to the Tosevites who were not fighting?”

Rance Auerbach stopped walking so abruptly, Gorppet took a couple of paces before realizing the Big Ugly wasn’t with him any more. The male turned an eye turret back toward Auerbach. Hoarsely, the Tosevite said, “I had that feeling more times than I could count. I did not know it worked the other way.”

“Well, it did,” Gorppet said. “We were sent here, to a world about which, as it turned out, we knew less than nothing. We were told conquering it would be easy, a walk in the sand. We were told all sorts of things. Not one of them turned out to be truth. Is it any wonder that we were not always happy with those who led us and those who sent us forth?”

“No wonder at all,” Auerbach said with another emphatic cough. This time, he managed not to add any involuntary coughs of his own.

When he and Gorppet walked into the Boomslang together, the place got very quiet all at once. It was a dangerous sort of quiet. Having come from Basra and Baghdad, Gorppet knew that sort of quiet all too well. He let a finger slide toward the safety on his rifle. If anyone wanted trouble, he was ready to give plenty.

But then the black male named Frederick spoke in one of the local languages, and everybody else relaxed. “I greet you,” he called to Gorppet from the table he shared with the female with gaudy yellow hair. His accent was different from hers and Auerbach’s, more musical. “Come-have something to drink and we shall talk.”

“Good enough,” Gorppet said. The chair in which he sat was made for Tosevite posteriors, but he had survived such seats before and knew he could again. “I do not want that nasty brown stuff you two are drinking there-the alcohol straight from the fruit tastes better to me.”

“Wine!” Penny Summers called to the Big Ugly who served drinks, and Gorppet sipped from the glass with something not too far removed from enjoyment.

Rance Auerbach had some of the vile brownish liquor the Big Uglies seemed to enjoy so much. After he’d finished it and waved to the Tosevite behind the bar for a refill, he said, “Now. Down to business.”

“Down to business,” Gorppet answered. “You have ginger. I want it. If you can get it for me, I will pay you what it is worth and make it back by selling what I do not keep to taste for myself.”

As much ginger as I could ever want, he thought. He wasn’t sure there was that much ginger on all of Tosev 3, but he intended to find out. The reward he’d got for capturing Khomeini had included a credit transfer as well as a promotion. What was money for, if not for spending?

“It is not quite so simple,” Frederick said. “We have to be certain you are not a decoy for the Race.”

“In theory, I understand this,” Gorppet said, making the affirmative gesture. “In practice, it is absurd. I want the ginger for myself and my comrades and friends. If I were a decoy, the males handling me would take the herb. They would get it all, and leave me with nothing. I want more than nothing.”

“So you say,” Penny remarked. “We have to be sure we can believe you. The Race does not like Tosevites who sell ginger.”

“It does not like males of the Race, or females, either, who buy it,” Gorppet pointed out. “We all run risks here.”

Rance Auerbach spoke up in a local language. Gorppet understood not a word he was saying. He returned to the language of the Race: “I told them I think you are worth trusting-and I thought they were addled when this scheme began to take shape.”

“I thank you,” Gorppet said. “I also do not believe you are tools of the Race, aiming to entrap me.”

“I should hope not!” exclaimed the female with the yellow hair. “The Race has entrapped us before, but we would never entrap anyone for the Race.”

Gorppet wondered if she was protesting too much. What would his superiors do to him if they found out he’d spent his reward to buy ginger? Nothing pleasant-he was sure of that. But how could they do anything worse than demoting him to simple infantrymale and sending him back to Baghdad for the rest of his days? As far as he was concerned, they couldn’t. And, but for a minor difference in rank, how was that different from what he would have been doing had he not recognized the fanatic called Khomeini? Simple-it wasn’t. And so…

Gamble, he thought. Why not? If you lose, you only go back to what you were before-the Race does not have so many trained infantrymales that it can afford to imprison one for a crime that has nothing to do with combat effectiveness. And if the gamble pays off it will make what your superiors paid you look like nothing but the money you would use to buy a narration to make the time pass by.

He’d never really thought about being rich before. What infantrymale did? None that had any sense-except the few sharp fellows who’d got into the ginger trade early on. But if the chance for riches came his way, was he fool enough not to turn his eye turrets toward it?

“If we do this,” he said slowly, “how do you want to be paid? I have heard it is difficult for Tosevites to use our credit, though I know there are ways around this.”

“Oh, yes, there are ways,” the dark-skinned male called Frederick said. The other two Big Uglies made the head motion that was their equivalent of the affirmative hand gesture. Frederick went on, “But we do not want your credits. We want gold.”

He spoke the word with as much reverence as Khomeini gave to his imaginary Big Ugly beyond the sky. And, by the way Rance Auerbach and Penny Summers said, “Truth,” in a sort of crooning whine, they were as reverent as the other Tosevite.

Gorppet understood that. The Tosevite economy was far less computerized than that of the Race. Money wasn’t just an abstract concept here; it was often a real thing, traded at a standard rate of value for other real things. And gold was the principal medium of exchange here.

“I think that can be done,” Gorppet said.

“I know a male Tosevite who will take your credit and give you gold for it,” Frederick said.

“Not so fast,” Gorppet told him. “First, let us settle on a price in credit. Then let us settle on a rate of exchange between credit and gold. And then let me make my own quiet inquiries and see if I can find a dealer with a better rate than your friend.”

“This is not a good way to do business,” Frederick protested. “It shows no trust.”

“There is no trust.” Gorppet stressed that with an emphatic cough. “There is only business. Business that deals in lots of ginger and money is dangerous to begin with, in the middle and at the end. Anyone who thinks different came from his eggshell addled.”

Frederick started to say something more-probably another protest. But Rance Auerbach spoke first: “This is also truth. If we get through this dealing without trying to kill one another, we shall be ahead of the game.” He swung his head toward Frederick. In his rasping, ruined voice, he went on, “This is what we all have to think: my share of what we get here is enough. Do you understand what I am telling you? You could try for all. Penny and I could try for all. Gorppet here could try for all. Someone might win. But, more likely, everyone would lose.”

“I understand,” Frederick said in that musical accent of his. “Have I been anything but a proper partner?”

“Not yet,” Auerbach answered.

“No, not yet.” Gorppet made the affirmative gesture to show he agreed with Auerbach. “But betrayal was not in your interest before. Now… I hope it still is not. It had better not be.”

Rance Auerbach didn’t like the pistol he was carrying. After the heavy solidity of an Army.45, this cheap little.38 revolver felt like a toy. But it was what he’d been able to get his hands on, and it was a damn sight better than nothing. He nodded to Penny. “Ready, sweetheart?”

“You bet,” she said, and pulled her own.38 out of her purse to show she understood what he meant. Inside their apartment-the apartment that, with luck, they’d never see again after tonight-she said no more. They’d never been able to prove the Lizards listened to them, but they didn’t want to take any chances, either.

“Let’s see what happens, then.” Auerbach stubbed out a cigarette and immediately lit another one. His mouth would have been dry even without the harsh smoke. He felt like a man going into combat. And this might be three-sided combat-he and Penny had one interest, Gorppet another, and Frederick yet another.

His eyes slid over to Penny. It might even turn into four-sided combat, if she decided to double-cross him. Would she? He didn’t think so, but the idea that she might wouldn’t leave his mind. She’d had her eye on the main chance for a long time now. If she decided she wanted all the loot…

She might be planning to double-cross him with Frederick, too. Rance didn’t really think she was, but he didn’t ignore the possibility, either. His Army days had taught him to evaluate all the contingencies.

Out they went. Rance fought his way down the stairs. Once he got outside, the very chirps of the insects reminded him he was a long way from home. If this went through, he’d still be a long way from home, but he’d be someplace he wanted to be, not where the Lizards dumped him.

If it didn’t go through… “Shoot first, babe,” he told Penny. “Don’t wait. If you think you might be in trouble, chances are you’re already there.”

“I gotcha,” she said, sounding as if she’d come out of a gangster movie. She’d been through these deals before, he knew, and every one of them outside the law. But this one was further outside than most-and she didn’t have any hired muscle along except for him. He snorted and fought back a cough. Hired muscle that could hardly walk without a cane. If it came to rough stuff, the home team was in trouble.

They walked through the narrow, winding streets of District Six. This late at night, Rance worried less about being a white man in a largely black part of town. Hanover Street and a few of the other main drags were well lit. Away from them, though, it was too dark and gloomy for anybody to tell whether he and Penny were white, black, or green.

Music that sounded like U.S. jazz with something different, something African, mixed in blared out of a little hole-in-the-wall club. A black woman leaning against the wall stepped out and spoke to Rance in her own language. He didn’t understand a word of it. Then the woman noticed he already had a companion. She said something else. He didn’t understand that, either, but it sounded scornful. He and Penny kept walking. The woman went back and leaned against the wall again, waiting for someone else to come along.

A couple of blocks later, screams floated down from an upper floor of a rickety block of flats. Auerbach tried to make a joke of it: “Somebody teaching his wife to behave.”

“You try teaching me like that, big boy, and you’ll eat your dinner through a straw for the next year, on account of I’ll break your jaw,” Penny said, and she didn’t sound as if she were joking at all.

After about half an hour, they came to the little park where gold and ginger would change hands. Everything seemed quiet and peaceful. Rance trusted neither peace nor quiet. “Stay well back of me,” he said. “If anything goes wrong and we get separated, we try and meet on the docks, okay?”

“I know what we’re supposed to do,” Penny told him. “You hold up your end, I’ll hold up mine, and we hope everybody else holds up his.”

“Yeah, we hope,” Rance said bleakly. He glanced at his glowing watch dial. Five to one. They were early.

A hiss came out of the darkness, followed by more hisses that were words in the language of the Race: “I greet you, Rance Auerbach.”

“Gorppet?” Rance stood very still. He knew the Lizards had gadgets that let them see in the dark. Human soldiers-maybe human cops, too-also had them these days. But he didn’t, and somehow hadn’t expected the male to be using one. It felt like cheating.

“Who else would know your name?” the Lizard asked, to which he had no good answer. Gorppet went on, “I have the payment ready. Now we await the Tosevites with the herb.”

“They will be here,” Auerbach said. “The deal cannot go on without all of us.” That wasn’t strictly true, which worried him. The deal couldn’t have got started without Penny and him, but they weren’t essential any more. If the others wanted to take them out… He didn’t worry too much about Gorppet; Lizards generally played straight. But he didn’t trust Frederick any farther than he could throw him.

“I greet you, my friends.” Frederick, in Rance’s opinion, spoke the Lizards’ language with a funny accent. “I have some of what we need. You, brave male, you have the rest of what we need. Let us now make the exchange.”

He didn’t say a word about Rance and Penny having anything they needed. That bothered Auerbach. Set gold in the scales against gratitude, and figuring out which one weighed more wasn’t tough.

Now Penny walked past Auerbach. Gold didn’t take up much room, but it was heavy. With a bad shoulder and a bad leg, he couldn’t carry so much. If she got their share of the loot and ran off… What could he do about it? Not much. He didn’t like that, either. Penny ate, drank, and breathed trouble. She might try to run off, as much for the hell of it as anything else.

“I have males covering me,” Gorppet warned, so Rance wasn’t the only imperfectly trusting soul here.

“I have males covering me,” Frederick said, as if he took the idea altogether for granted.

“And I have males covering me,” Penny said. Auerbach looked around to see if he’d grown a twin-or, even better, quintuplets. No such luck, though. He knew that too damn well.

“The exchange,” Gorppet said. Rance peered through the darkness. He could hardly see a thing.

“Now,” Frederick said, and the gloating triumph in his voice made Rance realize he was going to try to hijack all the gold. Rance filled his ruined lungs to shout a warning-

And another shout came from the edge of the park, a shout in an African language. A shot followed it, and then another, and then a stuttering roar of gunfire. Screams rang out, not just from human throats but from those of the Race. “Surrender!” a Lizard called, his voice amplified. “You cannot escape!”

By then, Rance was already on the ground, rolling toward cover. Old reflexes took over, modified only by the need to hang on to his cane. Bullets snarled not far enough above his head. “Who says we cannot escape?” Frederick shouted. “We shall smash you!” He shouted again. Rifles barked. Submachine guns chattered. He had to have brought a young army with him. By the volume of fire his men were laying down, he had the Lizards outnumbered and very nearly outgunned.

He wouldn’t have brought so many if he hadn’t intended to cut Rance and Penny out of the deal, to say nothing of punching their tickets for good. And he’d probably intended to rub out Gorppet and whatever pals the Lizard had along, too. Having that patrol come into the park just when it did looked to have been good luck for everybody but the black man, and Auerbach wasted no pity on him.

What they had now was a nasty three-cornered gunfight, with Rance in the middle of it. He shouted Penny’s name, but his best shout wasn’t very loud, and noise filled the air. She didn’t hear him-or if she did, if she shouted back, he couldn’t hear her.

He crawled toward her, or toward where he thought she was. Muzzle flashes sparked here and there, putting him in mind of giant, malignant lightning bugs-or of the fight in Colorado where he’d got himself ruined. He’d never thought he would wind up in anything like that again. He wished to Jesus he hadn’t.

Somebody ran toward him-or maybe just toward the gold. Everyone human would be making a beeline for that. All the Lizards would be rushing toward the ginger, either to taste it or to grab it as evidence. Getting himself in deeper was the last thing he wanted to do, but Penny was there somewhere, and he’d been trained never to let the folks on his side down.

The running figure was about to run over him. He rose up onto his elbows and fired a round from his.38. With a soft grunt, the man toppled. His weapon clattered to the ground right in front of Rance, who grabbed it. His hands told him at once what he had: a Sten gun, about as cheap a way to kill lots of people in a hurry as humanity had ever made. He stuffed the pistol into a trouser pocket for a backup weapon; the submachine gun suited him a lot better now.

“Rance!” That was Penny, not very far away. He crawled toward her. One of his hands went into a pool of something warm and sticky. He exclaimed in disgust and jerked the hand away. “Rance!”

“I’m here,” he answered, and then, “Get down, goddammit!” What was she doing still breathing if she didn’t have the sense to hit the deck when bullets started flying? Another burst of gunfire from off to the right underscored his words. That was the direction from which Gorppet and his pals had come. They were making their getaway now, and doing a good, professional job of it. He wondered if they’d been able to nab the ginger before they started out of the fighting.

“Jesus Christ,” Penny said, this time sounding as if she was on the ground. “You still alive, hon?”

“Yeah, I think so,” Auerbach answered. “Where’s the gold? Where’s Frederick?” The African worried him more than the Lizards did. The Lizards played by their own rules. Frederick was liable to do anything to anybody.

“Fred’s dead, or I think so, anyway,” Penny said. “I sure to God shot him-I know that. Double-crossing son of a… You told him, Rance, but he didn’t want to listen. Gorppet’s worth a dozen of the likes of him.”

“Yeah.” But Auerbach remembered Penny had got herself in trouble by double-crossing her pals in a ginger deal. And… “Where’s the gold?” he repeated, more urgently this time.

“Oh. The gold?’ Penny laughed, then switched to the language of the Race: “I have it here, or some of it. How much can you carry?”

“I do not know,” Rance said in the same language-good security. “But I can find out, and that is a truth.”

“Suits me fine,” Penny said, reverting to English. “Here.”

She pushed something at Rance. It wasn’t a very big package, but it weighed as much as a child. He grinned. “Let’s see if we can slide out of here,” he said. “Without getting killed, I mean.”

“Yeah, that’s the best way.” Penny surprised him with a kiss. He wondered if they could make it. As long as Frederick’s pals and the Lizards kept a no-man’s-land between them, they had a chance. He also wondered how he would lug the gold and his cane and the Sten gun. Wishing for another pair of hands, he set off to do his best.

Atvar turned one eye turret from the computer screen toward his adjutant. “Well, this is a shame and a disgrace and a first-class botch,” he remarked.

“To what do you refer, Exalted Fleetlord?” Pshing asked. He approached the computer terminal. “Oh. The report on the unfortunate incident down at the southern end of the main continental mass.”

“Yes, the unfortunate incident.” Atvar’s emphatic cough said just how unfortunate an incident he thought it was. “When we discover a deal for ginger in progress, it is generally desirable to capture the guilty parties, the herb, and whatever was being exchanged for it. Would you not agree?”

His tone warned Pshing he had better agree. “Truth, Exalted Fleetlord,” he said.

Atvar pointed to the screen. “By this report, did we do any of those things in this incident? Did we accomplish even one of them?”

“No, Exalted Fleetlord,” Pshing said unhappily.

“No,” Atvar agreed. “No. No is the operative word indeed it is. No suspects, or none to speak of-only hired guns. No ginger. No gold-it was supposed to be gold, I gather. Two males killed, three wounded, and who can say how many Big Uglies? We have had a great many fiascoes in the fight against ginger, but this one is worse than most.”

“What can we do?” Pshing asked.

That was indeed the question. It had been the question ever since the Race discovered what ginger did to males, and had even more urgently been the question since the Race discovered what ginger did to females. No one had found an answer yet. Atvar wondered if anyone ever would. Not about to admit that to his adjutant, he said, “One thing we can do is make sure we do not disgrace ourselves in this fashion again.”

“Yes.” Pshing used the affirmative gesture. “Have you any specific orders to achieve that end, Exalted Fleetlord?”

“Specific orders?” Atvar glared at Pshing, wondering how to reply to that. He’d been giving very specific orders against ginger ever since it became a problem. It remained a problem, and was a worse problem now that the colonization fleet was here. Even in Cairo, even at this administrative center that had once been a Tosevite hotel, females sometimes tasted ginger. Atvar would get a distant whiff-or sometimes a not-so-distant whiff-of pheromones, and thoughts of mating would go through his mind, addling him and rendering him all but useless as far as work went for annoyingly long stretches of time.

He wondered if that was what Big Uglies were like all the time, forever distracted by their own sexuality. If it was, how did they ever manage to get anything done? Mating was good enough in the proper season, but thinking about it all the time was definitely more trouble than it was worth.

He also realized he hadn’t answered Pshing’s question. “Specific orders?” he repeated. “For this case, yes: every effort is to be made to track down the members of the Race and the Big Uglies responsible for this horrendous crime, and all are to be punished with maximum severity when apprehended.”

“It shall be done,” Pshing said. “It would have been done in any case, but it shall be done with all the more vigor now.”

“It had better be,” Atvar snarled. He went back to the report. After a moment, he snarled again, this time in raw fury. “The Tosevites involved in this crime, or some of them, are believed to be the ones we resettled in that area after their failure to help us as fully as they should have in Marseille? This is how they repay our forbearance? They must be punished-oh, indeed they must.”

“Their involvement is not proved,” Pshing said. “It is only that they have not been seen or overheard by monitoring devices in their apartment since the gun battle took place.”

“Where have they gone? Where could they have gone?” Atvar raged. “They are pale-skinned Big Uglies; they cannot find it easy to hide in a land where most have dark skins. That is one reason we sent them to this particular portion of the territory we control.”

His adjutant spoke consolingly: “We are bound to find them soon.”

“We had better,” Atvar said. “And our own males, involved in gun battles against each other? Disgraceful!”

“The criminals could even have been females,” Pshing said.

“Why, so they could,” Atvar said. “That had not occurred to me. But they handled weapons as if they were familiar with them, which makes it more likely they were males from the conquest fleet.”

“Were you not due to discuss with Fleetlord Reffet plans for the training of the colonists to aid the conquest fleet?” Pshing asked.

“Yes, I was.” Had Atvar been a Big Ugly, his face would have assumed some preposterous expression. He was sure of that. Fortunately, though, he didn’t have to show so much of what he thought. What he did show was bad enough; Pshing drew back a pace. But Atvar knew it needed doing, however little he relished it. “I had better take care of it,” he said, though he would sooner have faced a surgeon’s scalpel without anesthesia.

He made the call, consoled by the thought that Reffet would be as unhappy to talk with him as he was to talk with the fleetlord from the colonization fleet. In a matter of moments, Reffet’s image stared at him out of the screen. “What is it now, Atvar?” the other fleetlord demanded.

“I think you know,” Atvar replied.

“I know what you will ask for, yes,” Reffet said. “What I do not know is how I can hope to build a successful colony here on Tosev 3 if you take my males and females from their productive tasks and turn them into soldiers.”

By his tone, he had nothing but contempt for the males of them Soldiers’ Time. Atvar’s tailstump quivered with fury. “I do not know how you can hope to build a successful colony if the Big Uglies kill your males and females.”

“They should not be able to,” Reffet snapped.

“Well, they can. They can do a great many things we did not anticipate,” Atvar said. “High time you finally figured that out. In fact…” He paused, all at once much more cheerful. “Is it not a truth that we obtain many more manufactured goods from Tosevite factories than we anticipated?”

“Of course it is a truth,” Reffet said. “We did not anticipate the Big Uglies’ having any factories at all.”

“Does this not mean, then, that there are surplus workers from the colonization fleet who could be turned into soldiers without greatly disrupting the colonization effort?” Had Atvar been a beffel, he would have squeaked with joy.

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?