Aftershocks (46 page)

“Of course it is,” Liu Han agreed. “I don’t suppose people can do anything about having the little scaly devils here on Earth with us—it’s too late for that. But having them think they have the right to rule us—that’s a different business. We should be free. If they can’t see that, they need reeducating.” She smiled. “Maybe we could all sit down together over tea.”

No, her daughter couldn’t smile: one more score to lay at the feet of the little devils. But Liu Mei nodded and said, “I think that would be very good.”

The little scaly devils’ machine tried to slide into a space just ahead. But a man on an oxcart squeezed in first. He had to lash the ox to make it move fast enough to get ahead of the armored vehicle. As soon as he found himself in front of it, he set down the whip and let the ox amble along at its own plodding pace. That did infuriate the scaly devils. Their machine let out a loud, horrible hiss, as if to cry,
Get out of the way!
The man on the oxcart might have been deaf, for all the good that did them.

People—Liu Han among them—laughed and cheered. The fellow on the oxcart took off his broad straw hat and waved it, acknowledging the applause. If the little scaly devils understood that, it probably made them angrier than ever. Unless they chose to get violent, they could do nothing about it.

Then more laughter rose. It started a couple of blocks up Lower Slanting Street and quickly spread toward Liu Han and Liu Mei. Liu Han stood on tip-toe, but couldn’t see over the heads of the people around her. “What is it?” she asked her daughter, who was several inches taller.

Liu Mei said, “It’s a troop of devil-boys, cutting up capers and acting like fools.” Disapproval filled her voice. The young men and—sometimes—young women who imitated the little scaly devils and adopted their ways were anathema to the Communist Party. They learned the little devils’ language; they wore tight clothes decorated with markings that looked like body paint; some of them even shaved their heads so as to look more like the alien imperialists. There were such young people in the United States, too, but the United States was still free. Perhaps people there could afford the luxury of fascination with the scaly devils and their ways. China couldn’t.

But then Liu Mei gasped in surprise. “Oh!” she said. “These are not ordinary devil-boys.”

“What are they doing?” Liu Han asked irritably. “I still can’t see.” She stood on tiptoe again. It still didn’t help.

Annoying her further, all her daughter said was, “Wait a bit. They’re coming this way. You’ll be able to see for yourself in a minute.”

Luckily for Liu Mei, she was right. And, by the time Liu Han could see, shouts and cheers from the crowd had given her some idea of what was going on. Then, peering over her daughter’s shoulder and through a gap in the crowd in front of them, she did indeed see—and, like everyone around her, she started laughing and cheering herself.

Liu Mei had also been right in saying this was no ordinary troop of devil-boys. Instead of slavishly imitating the little scaly devils, they burlesqued them. They pretended to be a mixed group of males and females, all taking ginger and all mating frenetically.

“Throw water on them!” shouted one would-be wit near Liu Han.

“No! Give them more ginger!” someone else yelled. That got a bigger laugh.

And then Liu Han started shouting, too: “Tao Sheng-Ming! You come here this instant!”

One of the devil-boys looked up in surprise at hearing his name called. Liu Han waved to him. She wondered how well he could see her. She also wondered whether he’d recognize her even if he could see her. They hadn’t met in more than three years, and she didn’t think he knew her name.

Whether he knew it or not, he hurried over when she called. And he did recognize her; she could see that in his eyes. Or maybe he just recognized Liu Mei, who, being much closer to his own age and much prettier, was likelier to have stuck in his mind. No—when he spoke, it was to Liu Han: “Hello, lady. I greet you.” The last three words were in the language of the Race.

“And I greet you,” she answered in the same tongue. Then she returned to Chinese: “I am glad to see you came through safe, after all the troubles Peking has seen since the last time we ran into each other.”

“I managed.” From his tone, he was used to managing such things. His grin was wry, amused, older than his years. “And I’m glad to see you’re all right, too, you and your pretty daughter.” Yes, he remembered Liu Mei, all right. He sent that grin her way.

She looked back as if he were something nasty she’d found on the sole of her shoe. That only made his grin wider, which annoyed Liu Mei and amused Liu Han. She asked the question that needed asking: “Did you ever go and visit Old Lin at Ma’s brocade shop?”

If Tao Sheng-Ming had visited Old Lin, he’d have been recruited into the Communist Party. If he hadn’t, it was just as well that he didn’t know Liu Han’s name. But he nodded. His eyes glowed. “Oh, yes, I did that,” he said. “I know more about comradeship now than I ever did before. Shall I tell you what”—he lowered his voice—“Mao says about the four characteristics of China’s revolutionary war?”

“Never mind,” Liu Han said. “So long as you know them.” He wouldn’t, unless he was a Communist himself.
Or unless he’s bait for a trap,
Liu Han thought. But she shook her head. Had the little scaly devils known she was coming into Peking, they would have seized her. They wouldn’t have bothered with traps.

Tao’s grin came back. “Oh, yes. I know them. I know all sorts of things I never thought I would know. I have many things to blame you for—I mean, to thank you for.”

He might be a Communist. But he was still a devil-boy, too. He enjoyed being outrageous. The foolish skit that he and his fellows had been performing proved that. “Did you have fun there, making the little devils look ridiculous to the masses?” Liu Han asked him.

He nodded. “Of course I did. That was the point of the antics. Good propaganda, don’t you think?”

“Very good,” Liu Han agreed. “I will have to do some talking with the Central Committee”—that made Tao Sheng-Ming’s eyes widen, as she’d hoped it would—“but I think you and your devil-boys may prove even more useful in the continuing revolutionary struggle.”

“How?” Tao was pantingly eager.

Liu Han smiled at Liu Mei. “Why, in the matter of the special tea that’s come up from the south, of course.” Liu Han laughed. Liu Mei didn’t, but she nodded. Tao Sheng-Ming looked most intrigued. Liu Han laughed again. Sure enough, she knew how to get devil-boy wildness to serve the Party.

“There is no justice.” Monique Dutourd spoke with great assurance and equally great bitterness.

Her brother was shaving with a straight razor, a little soap, and a handheld mirror. Pierre paused with the right side of his face scraped clean and the left still full of lather and whiskers. All he said was, “Now tell me something I did not know.”

“Oh, shut up,” she snarled. “You don’t mind working with that Nazi again, no matter what he did to me.”

Pierre Dutourd sighed and raised his chin so he could shave under it. Some small part of Monique hoped he’d cut his throat. He didn’t, of course. He guided the razor with effortless, practiced skill. He didn’t talk while shaving around his larynx. But when he started on his left cheek, he said, “Nobody in this business is a saint, little sister. The Nazi was screwing you. The Englishmen were screwing somebody else—that Jew, the American said.”

“Nobody is a saint?” Monique rolled her eyes. “Well, if I didn’t already know that, you would prove it.”

“Merci beaucoup.”
Pierre was hard to infuriate, which was one of the most infuriating things about him. He finished shaving, rinsed and dried his razor, then washed his face with the water left in the enameled basin. He toweled himself dry and examined himself in the mirror. Only after a self-satisfied nod did he continue, “You know that, if you grow too unhappy here, you are always free to go elsewhere. There are times when I would say you were welcome to go elsewhere.”

Ha!
Monique thought.
I did hit a nerve there, even if he doesn’t want to let it show.
But Pierre had hit a nerve, too, and painfully. Monique still had nowhere else to go, and she knew it. She had received a couple of more letters from universities that had survived the fighting. Nobody seemed to need a Roman historian whose university was now nothing but rubble that made a Geiger counter click.

She said, “You may be sure that, when the chance comes, I will take it.” Each word might have been chipped from ice.

“Meanwhile, though, you would be wise not to bite the hand that feeds you,” her brother went on, almost as if she hadn’t spoken. “You would also be wise to become useful to someone in some way.”

“Useful!” Monique made it a swear word. “Aren’t you glad you’re
useful
to the Lizards?”

“Of course I am,” he answered. “If I weren’t, I would have had to work much harder for most of my life. People I don’t like would have told me what to do much more than they do now. Things could have been better, yes, but they also could have been much worse.”

He was impervious. Monique stormed out of the tent. She’d been doing that more and more often these days. This time, she almost ran into a Lizard who was about to come in.
“Excusez-moi,”
he said in hissing French. Monique strode past him without a word.

She’d just got to the edge of the tent city when a double handful of Lizards hurried past her. They were all carrying weapons. She was no great expert on the many patterns of body paint the Race used, but she thought theirs—which were all similar to one another—had to do with law enforcement.

Uh-oh,
she thought. She turned and looked back. Sure enough, they too were heading for the tent she’d just left. And she couldn’t do anything about it. They were moving faster than she could. She was too far away to scream out a warning to her brother. And, after this latest blowup, she wasn’t much inclined to scream out a warning anyway.

She waited. Sure enough, the Lizards emerged with not only the one who’d gone before them but also with her brother in custody. They marched their prisoners out of the camp—marched them right past Monique, though Pierre didn’t notice her—hustled them into a waiting motorcar with flashing orange lights, and drove them away.

Well,
Monique thought,
what do I do now?
She hadn’t wanted to look for work in a shop. That would have been as much as admitting that she’d never find another academic position. As long as she could live with Pierre and Lucie, she’d been able to indulge those hopes. When you couldn’t indulge your hopes any more, what did you do? If you had any sense, you buckled down and got on with your life.

With her brother a captive of the Race, she was going to have to get on with her life if she wanted to keep eating. Shop girl, scullery maid . . . anything this side of selling herself on the street. Dieter Kuhn had made her do something all too close to that.
Never again,
she vowed to herself. Better to jump off a cliff and hope she landed on her head. Everything would be over in a hurry then.

Hitting bottom here, realizing she’d have to look for work that had nothing to do with her degree, might have felt like that. It might have, but it didn’t. Instead, it was oddly liberating. All right, she couldn’t be a professor—or, at least, she couldn’t be a professor right now. She’d be something else, then.

She started out of the camp and toward the rebuilding city of Marseille. She hadn’t gone very far before she ran into Lucie coming back from the city. Unlike her own brother, Lucie recognized her. Of course, the Lizards hadn’t just seized Lucie, either.

Monique was tempted to let her go back to the tent. Maybe the Lizards had left some sort of alarm behind so they could swoop down again when she did return. But Pierre’s mistress hadn’t given Monique a bad time. Lucie had, in fact, been easier to get along with than her own brother.

And so she said, “Be careful. The Lizards just grabbed Pierre.”

“Oh, for the love of God!” Lucie said. “Was that the car I saw going downhill toward town?”

“That’s right.” Monique nodded. “Pierre and I had another fight. I’d just gone out when a Lizard—a customer, I mean—went in. And I hadn’t gone a whole lot farther before a whole squad of Lizard
flics
came in and grabbed Pierre and the Lizard customer, too.”

Lucie said something considerably more pungent than,
Oh, for the love of God!
She went on, “Keffesh was afraid they were shadowing him. Pierre was a fool to let him come to the tent.”

“What are you going to do?” Monique asked.

Lucie grimaced. “I’ll need to find somewhere to stay. I’d be an idiot to go back there now. Then I’ll have to make some phone calls. I need to warn some people and some Lizards, and I have to ask a few questions. If I like the answers I get, I’ll set up in business for myself. I’ve been Pierre’s right hand and a couple of fingers of his left for a long time. My connections are as good as his, and I daresay I’m a lot better at being careful than he ever was.”

All that took Monique by surprise. She didn’t know why it should have. She knew Roman history. What did Lucie know? Selling ginger. Ruefully, Monique admitted to herself that the demand for ginger dealers seemed to be stronger than that for Romanists.

Her brother’s mistress might have been thinking along with her. “What about you, Monique?” she asked. “What will you do?”

“Look for work,” Monique answered. “I mean any kind of work, not a university position. I have to eat. And”—she sighed—“I suppose I’ll see what I can do about getting Pierre out of jail.” She noticed Lucie hadn’t said anything about that.

Pierre’s mistress also sighed. “Yes, I guess we will have to see about that, won’t we? But it won’t be easy. The Lizards’ officials are death on ginger. You need connections to be able to get anywhere with them. Have you got any?”

“I may,” Monique answered, which seemed to take Lucie by surprise. “And I’m sure that you do.”

“Maybe.” Yes, Lucie sounded grudging. If Pierre got out of jail, she would have more trouble going into business for herself.