Second Contact Read online

  Ludmila Jäger slowly walked up to him. “I am . . . not so bad,” she replied in Russian-accented Polish. “How are you?”

  “I’m pretty well,” Anielewicz answered in Yiddish. Ludmila nodded; she spoke German, and could follow the Jews’ variation on it. He went on, “How are your legs? How are your arms?”

  She shrugged. The motion made pain flow across her round, ruddy face. With what looked like a deliberate effort of will, she wiped it away. “I will never move fast again,” she said. “Nichevo.” That was a Russian word, and a useful one: it meant something like, It can’t be helped. Ludmila went on, “It could have been worse.” Pain filled her face again. This time, she let it stay. “For Heinrich, it was worse.”

  “I know,” Anielewicz said quietly, and kicked at the cobblestones. A Jewish partisan leader, a German panzer officer who couldn’t stomach the incineration of Lodz, and a Red Air Force pilot, as Ludmila had been then—a strange trio to thwart the Reich after the atomic bomb got smuggled into the city. They’d done it, but they’d paid the price.

  Mordechai Anielewicz knew how lucky he’d been. All he had to show for his brush with Otto Skorzeny’s nerve gas were pains if he exercised too hard for too long. Ludmila, though, was nearly a cripple. And Heinrich Jäger . . . Mordechai shook his head. Jäger, a German who proved his kind could be decent, had died young, and with few healthy days before he did.

  After all these years, Anielewicz still wondered why. Was it because Jäger had been twenty years older than his two comrades? Or had he breathed in more of the gas? Or had the antidote not been so effective on him? No way to tell, no way at all. Whatever the reason, it was too damn bad.

  Ludmila might have been reading his thoughts. She said, “He did what he thought was right. If he hadn’t done it, the fascist jackals might have caused the destruction of the entire world. We had a cease-fire with the Lizards. If it had come apart then . . . Heinrich said to the end of his days that keeping that from happening was the best thing he ever did.”

  “I wish he were still here to say it, your fascist jackal,” Anielewicz replied.

  Ludmila smiled; she still sometimes used Communist jargon without even noticing she’d done it. She said, “So do I, but . . . nichevo.” Yes, that was a very useful word indeed. With another nod, she made her slow, painful way down the street, never once complaining.

  Anielewicz carried the bicycle upstairs to his flat. Had he been so rash as to leave it on the sidewalk, even with a stout chain, it would have walked with Jesus. Even Jews used that saying about mysterious disappearances these days.

  When he opened the door, familiar chaos surrounded him. His wife, Bertha, wearing a dress that would have been stylish in London a couple of years before and was still the height of fashion in Lodz, came up to give him a kiss. As always, a smile brought beauty to her plain face without the intermediate step of prettiness.

  She said something. It was probably “How are you?” or “How are things?” but Anielewicz had trouble being sure. His daughter, Miriam, was practicing the violin. His son David, a couple of years younger, was practicing Hebrew for his bar mitzvah, which was only a little more than a month away. And his other son, Heinrich, who was eight, was working his way through a school lesson in the Lizards’ language. These days, Anielewicz hardly noticed the contrast between Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the universe and It shall be done, superior sir. He did notice the racket. He would have had to be deaf, or more likely dead, not to notice.

  The racket changed only languages when his children spotted him. They all tried to tell him everything about their days at the same time. What he heard were bits and pieces that surely didn’t—couldn’t—have gone together. If a boy had in fact invited Miriam to go to a film about Lizard irregular verbs, the world was even stranger than Anielewicz suspected.

  When his wife could get a word in edgewise, she said, “Bunim telephoned a couple of hours ago.”

  “Did he?” That brought Mordechai to full alertness; Bunim was the most powerful Lizard stationed in Lodz. “What did he want?”

  “He wouldn’t tell me,” Bertha answered. “He said leaving a message would not be proper protocol.”

  “Sounds like a Lizard,” Anielewicz said, and Bertha nodded. He went on, “I’d better ring him up. Can you keep the menagerie down to low roars while I’m on the telephone?”

  “I can try,” his wife said, and proceeded to lay down the law in a fashion Moses might have envied. In the brief respite thus afforded—and he knew it would be brief—Mordechai went into his bedroom to use the telephone.

  He had no trouble getting through to Bunim; the regional subadministrator always accepted calls from his phone code. “I have for you a warning, Anielewicz,” he said without preamble. His German was fairly fluent. Hearing the Nazis’ language in his mouth never failed to set Anielewicz’s teeth on edge.

  “Go ahead,” Anielewicz answered, not showing what he felt.

  “A warning, yes,” the Lizard repeated. “If you Tosevites plan any interference against the anticipated arrival of colonists in this region, it will be suppressed without mercy.”

  “Regional Subadministrator, I know of no such plans inside Poland,” Anielewicz answered, on the whole truthfully. As he’d thought before, most of the human inhabitants of Poland, Jews and Poles alike, preferred their alien overlords to any of the humans who aspired to the job.

  “Perhaps you should know more,” Bunim said, and added an emphatic cough. “We have received a communication threatening that if a million males and females of the Race colonize Poland, that entire million shall die.”

  “First I’ve heard of it,” Anielewicz said, which was completely true. “Probably a lunatic. In what language was this . . . communication? That may give you a clue.”

  “It gives no clue,” Bunim said flatly. “It was in the language of the Race.”

  Nesseref used her maneuvering thrusters to ease the shuttlecraft away from the outer skin of the 13th Emperor Makkakap. She checked the shuttlecraft’s instrument panel with special care. Like the ship with which it had come, it had just crossed a gulf of space even light would have needed more than twenty of the Race’s years to travel. Of course the revived engineers had already been over the shuttlecraft again and again: that was how the Race did things. But Nesseref was no more inclined than any other female or male to leave anything to chance.

  Everything seemed normal till she got to the radar display. With a hiss of surprise, she swung both eye turrets toward it, turning what had been a routine glance to a shocked state.

  A fingerclaw activated the radio link with the ship. “Shuttlecraft to Control,” Nesseref said. “Shuttlecraft to Control. I wish to report that the radar set is showing impossible clutter.”

  “Control to Shuttlecraft,” a technician aboard the 13th Emperor Makkakap replied. “Control to Shuttlecraft. That clutter is not, repeat, is not, impossible. We have a crowded neighborhood around Tosev 3 right now: the ships of the colonization fleet, the ships and satellites of the conquest fleet, and the ships and satellites of the Tosevites—the Big Uglies, the males of the conquest fleet call them. Remember your briefing, Shuttlecraft Pilot.”

  “I remember,” Nesseref answered. Things hadn’t been as anticipated for the Race, disorienting in and of itself. The conquest fleet had not conquered, or not completely. The Tosevites had proved improbably far advanced. Nesseref had believed what the briefing male said—he wouldn’t have lied to her. But she hadn’t begun to think about what it meant. Now she was seeing that with her own eyes.

  As she scanned more instruments, she discovered that radar frequencies the Race did not use were striking the shuttlecraft. Any one of them might guide a missile on its way to her. “Shuttlecraft to Control,” she said. “You can confirm that we are at peace with these Tosevites?”

  “That is correct, Shuttlecraft Pilot,” the controller said. “We are at peace with them—or, at least, no great fighting is going on right now. On adv
ice from males of the conquest fleet, we have relayed the time of your burn and your anticipated trajectory to the Tosevites and assured them we have no hostile intentions. The ones with whom I spoke used our language oddly but understandably.”

  “I thank you, Control.” Nesseref did not want to speak to touchy, possibly hostile aliens, no matter how well they used the language of the Race. As far as she was concerned, they had no business using radio and radar at all. That they had such things disrupted plans the Race had made centuries before. Nesseref took it almost as a personal affront.

  Moments slid past. Nesseref spent them aligning the shuttlecraft with fussy precision. When the job was done, she waited till it was time to leave orbit. Her fingerclaw hovered above the manual-override control, in case the computer didn’t begin the burn at the right time. That was most unlikely, but training held. Never take anything for granted.

  Deceleration slammed her back into her padded couch. It seemed to hit harder than she remembered, though all the instruments showed the burn to be completely normal. As the computer had begun it in the proper instant, so the machine shut it down when it should.

  “Control to Shuttlecraft,” came the voice from the 13th Emperor Makkakap. “Your trajectory is as it should be. I am instructed to recommend that you acknowledge any radio signals the Tosevites may direct toward you while you are descending from orbit.”

  “Acknowledged,” Nesseref said. “It shall be done.” She wondered what things were coming to, when the Race had to treat with these Tosevites as if they held true power. But, if they were out in space, they did hold some true power. And obedience had been drilled into her as thoroughly as into any other male or female of the Race.

  Before long, that obedience paid off. The computer reported a signal on one of the Race’s standard communications frequencies. By its direction, it came from an island off the northwestern coast of the main continental mass. The computer indicated the Race did not control that part of Tosev 3. Nesseref tuned the receiver to the indicated frequency and listened.

  “Shuttlecraft of the Race, this is Belfast Tracking,” a voice said. The accent was strange and mushy, unlike any she’d heard before. “Shuttlecraft of the Race, this is Belfast Tracking. Please acknowledge.”

  “Acknowledging, Beffast Tracking.” Nesseref knew she’d made a hash of the Tosevite name, whatever it meant, but she couldn’t do anything about that. “Receiving you loud and clear.”

  “Thank you, Shuttlecraft,” the Tosevite down on the ground said. “Be advised your trajectory matches the flight plan your shiplord sent us. The Nazis will have nothing to complain about when you pass over their territory.”

  Nesseref neither knew nor cared what Nazis were. Whatever they were, they had a cursed lot of nerve presuming to complain about anything the Race did. The Big Ugly from this Beffast Tracking had his—she supposed it was a male—nerve, too, for talking with her as if they were equals. “Acknowledging,” she repeated, not wanting to give him anything more than that.

  Another Tosevite hailed her. He identified himself not as a Nazi but as a tracker from the Greater German Reich. Nesseref wondered if the Tosevite back at Beffast had been trying to mislead her. As that first Big Ugly had predicted, though, this one did find her course acceptable.

  “Do not deviate,” he warned, his accent still mushy but somehow different from that of the first Big Ugly with whom she’d spoken. “If you deviate, you will be destroyed without warning. Do you understand?”

  “Acknowledged,” Nesseref said tightly. She was low in the atmosphere now, dropping down toward the speed of sound. If the Tosevites could build spacecraft, they could assuredly blow her out of the sky. But they would have no need. “I shall not deviate from my course.”

  “You had better not.” This Big Ugly sounded even more arrogant than the one with whom she’d spoken before. He went on, “And you had better not pay any attention to the lies the English will try to feed you. In no way are they to be trusted.”

  “Acknowledged,” Nesseref said yet again. Why were the Tosevites warning her about one another? The too-brief briefing had spoken of their intraspecies rivalries, but she’d paid little attention to those. She hadn’t imagined they could matter to her. Maybe she’d been wrong.

  Then, to her vast relief, a familiar-sounding voice said, “Shuttlecraft of the 13th Emperor Makkakap, this is Warsaw Control. Your trajectory is as it should be. You will be on the ground here shortly.”

  “Acknowledging, Warsaw Control,” Nesseref said. The male’s assessment agreed with that of her own computer. She brought the shuttlecraft toward the fully upright position, so she could land it with its jet. As she did so, she studied the monitor’s view of the world below: she’d descended enough to get a detailed view of it for the first time. “Warsaw Control, is it always so green here?”

  “It is, Shuttlecraft Pilot,” the male on the ground answered, “except during winter, and then it is white with frozen water falling out of the sky in flakes like shed skin. You would not believe how cold it can get here.”

  Nesseref wouldn’t have believed the male at all had the briefing officer not also spoken of how beastly Tosev 3’s climate could be. She still found the landscape strange and unnatural; she was used to rocks and dirt with occasional vegetation, not the other way round. Now she would see buildings, too, some the utilitarian cubes and blocks the Race favored, others absurdly ornate. Why would anyone want to build like that? she wondered. She also spied small buildings roofed not with metal or concrete or even stone, but with what looked like dry grass. How could a species that used such primitive building materials fare off the surface of its planet?

  Being without a good answer, she eyed the instruments, once more ready to use manual override if the shuttlecraft’s landing legs did not extend or if the rocket failed to ignite at the proper moment. No such emergency developed. Again, she had not expected one. But preparedness was never wasted.

  Flame splashed off the concrete of the landing area, then winked out as the computer cut off the rocket motor. The monitor showed people wheeling a landing ramp out toward the shuttlecraft so she could descend. No, they weren’t people; they were Tosevites. They looked like the videos she’d studied: too erect, too large, draped in cloths to conserve body heat even at what was evidently the warmer season of the year. Some of them had hair—it put her in mind of fungus—all over their blunt, round faces, others just on the top of the head. Next to the male of the Race trotting along beside them, they put her in mind of poorly articulated toys for hatchlings.

  With a small clank, the top end of the ramp brushed the side of the shuttlecraft. Nesseref opened the outer door, then hissed as chilly air poured in. She hissed again when the air struck the scent receptors on her tongue; it stank of smoke and carried all sorts of other odors she’d never smelled before.

  She skittered down the ramp. “I greet you, superior female,” the male waiting at the bottom said. With an emphatic cough, he added, “Strange to see a new face in these parts instead of the same gang of males.”

  “Yes, I suppose it must be,” Nesseref said. Her eye turrets swiveled this way and that as she tried to take in as much of this part of this new world as she could. “But then, all of Tosev 3 is strange, isn’t it?”

  “That it is.” The male used another emphatic cough. “A Big Ugly, now, a Big Ugly would have said, ‘Good to see a new face.’ By the Emperor”—he cast down his eyes—“they really think that way.”

  Nesseref’s shiver had only a little to do with the unpleasant weather. “Aliens,” she said. “How can you bear to live among them?”

  “It is not easy,” the male replied. “Some of us have even started thinking more the way they do than anybody straight from Home would be able to imagine, I expect. We have had to. A lot of the ones who could not are dead. But Tosev 3 does have its compensations. There is ginger, for instance.”

  “What is ginger?” Nesseref asked. It hadn’t been in the briefing.

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p; “Good stuff,” the male said. “I will give you a vial. You can take it back up with you when you fetch this intelligence data up into orbit. We do not want to transmit it, even encrypted, for fear the Big Uglies will break the encryption. They have done it before, and hurt us doing it.”

  “Are they really that bad?” Nesseref asked.

  “No,” the male told her. “Really, they are worse.”

  David Goldfarb minded being stationed in Belfast less than a lot of people might have. From what he’d seen, even men brought over from England soon tended to divide along religious lines, Protestants going up against Catholics in long-running arguments that sometimes turned into brawls. Being a Jew, he was immune to that sort of pressure.

  All things considered, Jews got on pretty well in Belfast. Each faction here despised the other so thoroughly, it had little energy to waste on any other hatreds. Neither Catholics nor Protestants gave Naomi and the kids a hard time when they left the married officers’ quarters to shop.

  Goldfarb’s swivel chair creaked when he leaned back in it. “First shuttlecraft from the colonization fleet we’ve tracked,” he remarked.

  “That’s right, Flight Lieutenant,” Sergeant Jack McDowell answered. If the Scot disliked serving under a Jew who singularly lacked a cultured accent, he was veteran enough to conceal the fact. “Won’t be the last, though.”

  “No.” Goldfarb was a veteran himself, having spent his entire adult life in the RAF. “Not the world we thought it would be, is it?”

  “Not half it’s not,” McDowell agreed sorrowfully. He pulled a packet of Chesterfields from his breast pocket, stuck one in his mouth, and lit it. Holding the packet out to Goldfarb, he asked, “Care for a fag, sir?”

  “Thanks.” Goldfarb leaned forward to light the smoke from the one McDowell already had going. He took a drag, then blew a ragged smoke ring. After another drag, he sighed. “Doesn’t taste like much, does it?”