Colonization_ Down To Earth Part 3

After lecture, laboratory. After laboratory, more lecture. After that, more lab work, now concentrating on enzyme synthesis and suppression rather than genetic a.n.a.lysis. By the end of the day, Reuven felt as if his brain were a sponge soaked to the saturation point. By tomorrow morning, he would have to be ready to soak up just as much again.

Wringing his hand as he stuck his pen back in its case, he asked Jane, "Would you like to come to my house for supper tonight?"

She c.o.c.ked her head to one side as she considered. "It's bound to be better than the food in the dormitories-though your mother's cooking deserves something nicer than that said about it," she answered. "Your father is always interesting, and your sisters are cute..."

Reuven thought of the twins as unmitigated-well, occasionally mitigated-nuisances. "What about me?" he asked plaintively-she'd mentioned everyone else in the Russie household.

"Oh. You." Her blue eyes twinkled. "I suppose I'll come anyway." She laughed at the look on his face, then went on, "If the riots start up again, I can always sleep on your sofa."

"You could always sleep in my bed," he suggested.

She shook her head. "You didn't sleep in mine when you spent that night in the dormitory while the fighting in the city was so bad." She wasn't offended; she reached out and took his hand. "Come on. Let's go. I'm getting hungry standing here talking."

Several students gave Reuven jealous looks as he and Jane left the campus hand in hand. They made him feel three meters tall. In fact, he was a thoroughly ordinary one meter seventy-three centimeters-in absent moments, he thought of it as five feet eight-so when he and Jane looked into each other's eyes, they did so on a level. Three or four Arab men whooped when they saw Jane. They approved of big blondes. She took no notice of them, which worked better than telling them where to go and how to get there. That only encouraged them.

"I've brought Jane home for supper," Reuven called in Yiddish as he came inside.

"That's fine, his mother answered from the kitchen in the same language. "There will be plenty." Rivka Russie, Reuven was convinced, could feed an invading army as long as it gave her fifteen minutes' notice.

His sisters came out and greeted Jane in halting English and in the language of the Race, which they were studying at school. Judith and Esther had just entered their teens; next to Jane's ripe curves, they definitely seemed works in progress. She answered them in the bits and pieces of Hebrew she'd picked up since coming to Jerusalem. Reuven smiled to himself. Like most native English speakers, she couldn't come out with a proper guttural to save her life.

Judith-he was pretty sure it was Judith, though the twins were identical and wore their hair the same way, not least for the sake of the confusion it caused-turned to him and said, "Cousin David's having more troubles. Father's doing what he can to fix things, but..." She shrugged.

"What now?" Reuven asked. "It's not the n.a.z.is again, is it?"

"No, but the English don't want to let him leave," his sister answered, "and things are getting scary for Jews over there."

"Gevalt," he said, and then translated for Jane. he said, and then translated for Jane.

She nodded understanding. "It's like being a human in Australia. The Lizards wish none of us were left. After what they did to our cities, it's a wonder any of us are." For her, dealing with oppression from outside had begun when she was a little girl. For Reuven, it had begun two thousand years before he was born. He didn't make the comparison, not out loud.

His father came home a few minutes later. Moishe Russie looked like an older version of Reuven: he'd gone bald on top, and the hair he had left was iron gray. Reuven asked, "What's this I hear about Cousin David?"

Moishe grimaced. "That could be a problem. The fleetlord doesn't seem very interested in helping him out. It's not as if he's in jail or about to be executed. He's just having a hard time. Atvar thinks plenty of Tosevites are having worse times, so he won't do anything about it."

He and Reuven had both spoken Hebrew, which Jane could follow after a fas.h.i.+on. In English, she said, "That's terrible! What will he do if he can't get out of England?"

English was Moishe Russie's fourth language, after Yiddish, Polish, and Hebrew. He stuck to the latter: "He'll have to do the best he can. Right now, I don't know how I can give him a hand."

From the kitchen, Rivka Russie called, "Supper's ready. Everyone come to the table." Reuven headed for the dining room, but discovered he'd lost some of his appet.i.te.

The flat-they didn't call them apartments down here-in which the Lizards had set up Rance Auerbach and Penny Summers was barely half the size of the one Rance had lived in by himself in Fort Worth, and that one had been none too large.

He limped to the refrigerator, which was also about half the size of the one he'd had up in the States. Even though the flat was tiny, he was panting by the time he got there. He'd never win a footrace, not after the Lizards had shot him in the leg and in the chest during the fighting in Colorado. He supposed he was lucky n.o.body'd amputated that leg. He would have been a lot more certain had keeping it not meant living in pain every day of his life since.

One way or another, he did what he could to ease that pain. He took a Lion Lager out of the icebox and popped off the lid with a churchkey. At the hiss, Penny called, "Bring me one of those, too, will you?"

"Okay," he answered. His Texas drawl contrasted with her harsh, flat Kansas tone. Here in South Africa, they both sounded funny. He opened another beer and carried it out to Penny, who was sitting on a sofa that had seen better days.

She took it with a murmur of thanks, then lifted it in salute. "Mud in your eye," she said, and drank. She was a bra.s.sy blonde of about forty, a few years younger than Rance. Sometimes, she still looked like the farm girl he'd first met during the fighting. More often, though, a lot more often, she seemed hard as nails.

With a sardonic glint in her blue eyes, she raised the beer bottle again. "And here's to South Africa, G.o.ddammit."

"Oh, shut up," Auerbach said wearily. It was hot in the flat; late February was summer down here. Not too humid, though-the climate was more like Los Angeles' than Fort Worth's.

Auerbach sank down on the sofa beside her. He grunted; his leg didn't like going from standing to sitting. It liked going from sitting to standing even less. He took a pull at his Lion, then smacked his lips. "They do make pretty good beer here. I'll give 'em that."

"Hot d.a.m.n," Penny said, even more sarcastically than before. She waved her bottle around. "Aren't you glad we came?"

"Well, that depends." Thanks to the bullet he'd taken in the shoulder and lung, Rance's voice was a rasping croak. He lit a cigarette. Every doctor he'd ever seen told him he was crazy for smoking, but n.o.body told him how to quit. After another sip, he went on, "It beats spending the rest of my life in a Lizard hoosegow-or a German one, for that matter. It beats going back to the USA, too, on account of your ginger-smuggling buddies want you dead for stiffing 'em and me for plugging the first two b.a.s.t.a.r.ds they sent after you."

He had to pause and pant a little. He couldn't give speeches, not these days-he didn't have the wind for it. While he was reinflating, Penny said, "You still think it beats Australia?"

If she hadn't burst back into his life, on the run from the dealers she'd cheated, he would still be back in Fort Worth... doing what? He knew what: getting drunk, collecting pension checks, and playing nickel-ante poker with the other ruined men down at the American Legion hall. He coughed a couple of times, which also hurt. "Yeah, it still beats Australia," he answered at last. "The Lizards wouldn't have been happy s.h.i.+pping us there-as far as they're concerned, it's theirs. theirs. And even if they did do it, they'd have their eye turrets on us every second of the day and night." And even if they did do it, they'd have their eye turrets on us every second of the day and night."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know, I know, I know." Penny plucked the pack of cigarettes out of his s.h.i.+rt pocket and lit one herself. She smoked it in short, savage puffs, and then, when it was hardly more than a b.u.t.t, aimed the glowing coal at him like the business end of a pistol. "But when you asked 'em to send us here, Mr. Smart Guy, you didn't know it was gonna be n.i.g.g.e.r heaven, did you?"

"No, I didn't know that," Auerbach answered querulously. "How the h.e.l.l was I supposed to know that? White men ran things here before the fighting. I knew that much. Tell me you heard a whole h.e.l.l of a lot about South Africa in the news since the Lizards took it over. Go on. I dare you."

Penny didn't say anything. She stubbed out the cigarette and lit another one.

Rance used that pause to take a swig from the Lion Lager and to draw a couple of breaths. He went on, "I guess it makes sense, the way they did what they did. They don't give a d.a.m.n about white men and black men. And there are more blacks than whites here, and the whites are the ones who fought 'em hardest, and so-"

"So it's n.i.g.g.e.r heaven." Penny rolled her eyes. "You know what? Till the Lizards came, I never even saw a n.i.g.g.e.r-not for real, I mean, only in the movies. Weren't any where I grew up. I didn't figure it'd be like this when we came here."

"Neither did I," Auerbach admitted. "How could I have? You wanted to go to a place where people speak English as much as I did. That didn't leave us a whole lot of choice, not to anywhere the Lizards were willing to send us."

"Some people speak English-a lot fewer than I thought." Penny aimed that second cigarette at Rance, too. "And a lot fewer than you thought, too, and you can't tell me any different about that, either. At least in the United States, the colored people can talk with you. And they mostly know their place, too." She got up from the sofa and walked quickly to the window of the third-floor flat. The stairs were h.e.l.l on Rance's bad leg, but he couldn't do anything about that. Staring out onto Hanover Street, the main drag of Cape Town's disreputable District Six, Penny gestured to him. "Come over here." people speak English-a lot fewer than I thought." Penny aimed that second cigarette at Rance, too. "And a lot fewer than you thought, too, and you can't tell me any different about that, either. At least in the United States, the colored people can talk with you. And they mostly know their place, too." She got up from the sofa and walked quickly to the window of the third-floor flat. The stairs were h.e.l.l on Rance's bad leg, but he couldn't do anything about that. Staring out onto Hanover Street, the main drag of Cape Town's disreputable District Six, Penny gestured to him. "Come over here."

Though his leg felt as if he'd jabbed a hot iron into it, Rance rose and limped to the window. He looked down and saw a trim figure in a khaki uniform and a cap like the ones British officers wore. The man had a bayoneted rifle slung on his back. "What did you get me up for?" he asked. "I've seen Potlako on his beat plenty of times before."

"He's a cop," Penny said. "He's black as the ace of spades, and he's a cop. Almost all the cops in Cape Town are black as the ace of spades."

"He's a pretty good cop, too, by what I've seen," Rance said, which made Penny give him a furious look. Ignoring it, he went on, "The Lizards aren't stupid. They tried playing blacks against whites in the USA, too, but it didn't work out so well there. A lot more smokes than white men here, and I guess the South Africans treated 'em worse than we did our colored fellows. So they're happy as you please, working for the Lizards."

"Sure they are. You just bet they are," Penny snarled. "And now they treat us like we was n.i.g.g.e.rs, and I tell you something, Rance Auerbach: I don't like it for h.e.l.l."

Auerbach limped into the kitchen, opened another beer, and went back to the couch. "I don't like it, either, but I don't know what I can do about it. If you can't stand it any more, I bet the Lizards would fly you back to the States after all. By now, they've probably figured out you'd last about twenty minutes after you got off the plane. That'd suit 'em fine, I bet."

She put her hands on her hips, looking, for a moment, like a furious schoolgirl. She sounded like one, too, when she wailed, "Look what you got me into!"

He was sipping from the Lion Lager. He started to laugh, and choked, and sprayed beer out his nose, and generally came closer to drowning than he ever had in his life. When he could talk again-which took a little while-he said, "Who called me out of the blue after more than fifteen years? Whose fault was it that I shot those two nasty b.a.s.t.a.r.ds? Whose fault was it that I ended up in a Lizard jail for running ginger down into Mexico, or in a n.a.z.i jail for trying to get Pierre the d.a.m.n t.u.r.d to quit running it out of Ma.r.s.eille? You know anybody who fills that bill?"

By the time he got through, he was speaking in a rasping whisper, that being as much air as he could force out of his ravaged lungs. He waited to see how Penny would take a little plain home truth thrown in her face. Sometimes she went off like a rocket. Sometimes...

He thought she was going to ignite here. She started to: he saw that. Then, all at once, she laughed instead. She laughed as hard as she would have raged if she'd stayed furious. "Oh, you got me, G.o.d d.a.m.n you," she said, wiping her eyes on the sleeve of her checked cotton blouse. "You got me good there. Okay, I had a little something to do with getting you into things, too."

"Just a little something, yeah," Rance agreed.

Penny got herself a fresh beer, too, then came over and sat down beside him, so close they rubbed together. She swigged, set down the bottle, and leaned over to look into his face from a distance of about four inches. "Haven't I done my best to make it up to you?" she asked, and ran her tongue over her lips.

"I don't know what the h.e.l.l you're talking about," Rance said evenly.

For a second, he thought he'd blown it and made her angry. But, to his relief, she decided to laugh again. "Well, then, I'll just have to show you, won't I?" she said, and brought her mouth down onto his. She tasted of beer and cigarette smoke, but he did, too, so that was all right.

The kiss went on and on. Auerbach brought up his hand and tangled his fingers in her yellow hair so she couldn't pull back. Finally, he was the one who had to break away. It was either that or quit breathing altogether. She let his hand slide down to the back of her neck, where he started undoing the b.u.t.tons on the blouse.

"Aren't you a sneak?" she said, as if she'd never expected he would do any such thing. She took matters into her own hands, yanking the blouse off over her head. He undid her bra and grabbed for her b.r.e.a.s.t.s; she still had a h.e.l.l of a nice pair. When she laughed this time, it was down deep in her throat.

She unzipped his fly, pulled him out, and bent down over him. His gasp had very little to do with bad lungs. She had a h.e.l.l of a mouth, too.

If she'd felt like going on that way till he exploded, he wouldn't have minded a bit-which was putting it mildly. But, after a little while, she pulled down his chinos, took off her skirt and her girdle, and swung astride him as if she intended to ride him to victory in the Kentucky Derby.

His mouth closed on her nipple. Now she grabbed his head and pressed him to her. He slipped a hand between her legs and rubbed gently. Her breath came almost as short as his, and she'd never taken a bullet in the lungs. When she gasped and shuddered and arched her back, she squeezed him inside her almost as if she had a hand of her own down there. He groaned and came and had to work very hard to remember not to bite.

"G.o.d d.a.m.n," he said sincerely. "It's worth fighting with you, just on account of the way we make up."

"Who says we've made up?" Penny demanded. But, whether she wanted it to or not, her voice held a purr that hadn't been there before.

She slid off him-and dribbled on his thigh. "G.o.d d.a.m.n," he said again, this time in mock anger. "I put that stuff where it was supposed to go. I'm not supposed to be wearing it."

"I don't want it staying where you put it, either," she retorted. "That'd be the last thing I need-getting knocked up at my age." She shook her head in what was either real horror or a pretty good imitation. Then, gathering up her clothes, she hurried off to the bathroom.

Auerbach sat there in just his s.h.i.+rt, waiting for her to come out. He wanted another cigarette. All of him except his lungs wanted one, anyhow. What with all the trouble he'd had breathing while Penny straddled him, he let them win the argument for once. Instead of the smoke, he finished the rest of the Lion Lager sitting on the table. It felt like what it was, a consolation prize, but life didn't hand out so many prizes of any sort that he could turn one down.

When Penny did come out, she smiled to see him still mostly naked. He picked up his pants and used the arm of the sofa to help lever himself to his feet. That took some of the strain off his bad leg, but made his ruined shoulder groan. "Can't win," he muttered as he limped past her toward the john. "Christ, you can't break even, either." If being in Cape Town didn't prove that, he was d.a.m.ned if he knew what would.

Gorppet rattled along in a mechanized combat vehicle, heading northwest toward the Tosevite city of Baghdad. Basra, where he'd been stationed, was calm these days-or so his leaders kept saying. Gorppet had seen a lot of nasty fighting after the Race landed on Tosev 3. Basra didn't feel calm to him, nor anything close. But no one had asked his opinion. He was there to do what his officers told him to do. If that turned out to be stupid, as it sometimes did, he had to make the best of it.

"Too bad about Fotsev," said Betvoss, one of the males in his squad.

"Truth-too bad," agreed Gorppet, who didn't much care for Betvoss. "He was a good male, and a good squad leader. Now you are stuck with me instead." He swung an eye turret toward Betvoss to see what the other male would make of that.

"I curse the Big Uglies," Betvoss said. "The spirits of Emperors past will surely turn their backs on them." His voice went shrill with complaint, as it did too often to suit Gorppet: "I curse them all the more for forcing ginger on the females of ours they had kidnapped, and for using the females' pheromones to lure us into that ambush."

"They are sneaky," Gorppet said. "If you forget how sneaky they are, you will regret it-if you live to regret it." He put his own worries into words: "I hope they are not quieting down in Basra to persuade us to lessen the garrison there so they can rise up again after we have weakened ourselves."

"They are not clever enough to think of something like that. I am sure of it," Betvoss said. Another reason Gorppet was less than fond of him was that he thought he knew more than he did. He went on, "Besides, if we can stamp out the rebellion in this Baghdad place, it will also fade in Basra."

That might even have been true. Baghdad was a bigger, more important Tosevite center than Basra. Even so, Gorppet didn't care to admit Betvoss could be right about anything. The squad leader said, "Until we hunt down that maniac of an agitator called Khomeini, this whole subregion will go on bubbling and boiling like a pot over too high a fire."

He wondered if Betvoss would argue about that. Since Betvoss was ready to argue about almost everything, it wouldn't have surprised him. But the other male only made the affirmative hand gesture and said, "Truth. One of the things we will have to do to carry this world fully into the Empire is to bring the Big Uglies' superst.i.tions under our control."

"We ought to do that anyhow, for the sake of truth," Betvoss said. "Imagine believing some sort of oversized Big Ugly up above the sky manufactured the whole universe. Can you think of anything more preposterous?"

"No. But then, I am not a Tosevite," Gorppet said, speaking the last phrase with considerable relief. In an effort to be charitable, he added, "Of course, up till now, they have not known of the Emperors, and so have been forming their beliefs in ignorance rather than in truth."

"But they cling to their false notions with such persistence-we would not be going from one city to another like this if they did not," Betvoss said. "And if I never hear 'Allahu akbar!' 'Allahu akbar!' again, I shall not be sorry for it." again, I shall not be sorry for it."

"Truth!" Every male in the rear compartment of the mechanized combat vehicle said that. Several of them added emphatic coughs, to show how strongly they felt about it.

"Truth indeed," Gorppet said. "Any male who has served where they say such things knows what a truth it is. Because it is a truth, we must stay especially alert. Remember, too many of the local Tosevites will give up their own lives if they can take us with them. They believe this will a.s.sure them of a happy afterlife."

"As you said, they know not the Emperors." Betvoss' voice dripped scorn.

Gorppet scorned the Big Uglies for their foolish beliefs, too. That didn't mean he failed to respect them as fighters, and especially as guerrilla fighters. He pressed an eye turret to the viewing prism above a firing port and looked out of the combat vehicle.

He sat on the left side of the vehicle, the one that faced away from the river, so he could see not only the farmland-worked by Big Uglies in long, flowing robes-but also the drier country where irrigation stopped. The landscape, in fact, put him in mind of Home. It was no wonder the colonists were running up so many new towns in the interior of this region, towns watered with pipes from desalination plants by the edge of the nearest sea.

Even the weather in this part of Tosev 3 was decent. The mechanized combat vehicle didn't have its heater going full blast, as it would have on most of the planet. Gorppet had fought through one winter in the SSSR. He'd told some stories about that when he went into one of the new towns. None of the newly revived colonists believed him. He'd stopped telling those stories. For that matter, he'd stopped going into the new towns. He disliked the colonists almost as much as he disliked the Big Uglies. He disliked everyone except his comrades from the conquest fleet, and, with Betvoss beside him, he was forcibly reminded he didn't much care for some of them, either.

Before it should have, the vehicle came to a halt, tracks rattling. "Oh, by the Emperor, what now?" Gorppet demanded. None of his fellow infantrymales knew, of course-they were as cooped up as he. He picked up the intercom and put the question to the driver. If he he didn't know, everybody was in trouble. didn't know, everybody was in trouble.

He had an answer, all right, but not one Gorppet cared to hear: "The accursed Tosevites managed to sabotage the bridge we are supposed to pa.s.s over."

"What do you mean, sabotage?" Gorppet asked irritably. "I am in this metal box back here, remember? I cannot see straight ahead. If I do not look out a viewing prism, I cannot see out at all."

"They bombed the span. It fell into the river. Is that plain enough for you, Exalted Squadlord?" The driver also sounded irritable.

"How did they manage to bomb it?" Gorppet exclaimed, which made the males in his squad exclaim, too. He went on, "Whoever let that happen ought to have green bands painted on him"-the mark of someone undergoing punishment-"and spend about the next ten years-the next ten Tosevite years, mind you-cleaning out the Big Uglies' stinking latrines with his tongue."

His squadmates laughed. He was too furious to find it funny. The driver said, "I agree with you, but I cannot do anything about it."

"How is this column of vehicles to proceed on to Baghdad, then, if we cannot use the bridge?" Gorppet asked.

"We shall have to go on to As Samawan and cross the river there," the driver replied. "While it is not the route originally planned, it should not delay us too much."

"That is good," Gorppet said. Then he paused in sudden sharp suspicion. "Why would the Big Uglies blow up a bridge if doing so causes us no great harm?"

"Who knows why Tosevites act as they do?" the driver said.

"I know this: they act as they do to cause us the greatest possible harm," Gorppet said with great conviction. "Either they have an ambush waiting for us on the road to this As Samawan place or they are going to-"

The founder of the superst.i.tion in which the local Big Uglies believed so pa.s.sionately, a certain Muhammad, was said to be a prophet, a male who could see the future. The notion, like so many on Tosev 3, was alien to the way the Race thought. But Gorppet, though not pausing even for a moment, proved a prophet in his own right. He hadn't finished his sentence before bullets started slamming into the mechanized combat vehicle.

A lot of bullets were slamming into the vehicle. "They must have a machine gun out there, may the purple itch get under their scales!" he exclaimed, grabbing for his own automatic weapon.

As he spoke, the light cannon mounted atop the combat vehicle barked into life. He peered out through the vision prism. He couldn't see much. Because they were close by the river-the Tosevite name for it was the Tigris-plant life grew exuberantly, providing excellent cover for the Big Ugly raiders. Someone should have thought to trim the vegetation farther back from the roadway, but no one had. He didn't like that. How many Big Uglies were sneaking through the rank, noxiously green foliage toward the column?

There was the muzzle flash of the Tosevites' machine gun. That being the only sure target he had, Gorppet started shooting at it. If the machine gun fell silent, he would know he was doing some good. The rest of the males in his squad were also blazing away. He didn't know what the males on the far side of the combat vehicle were shooting at, but they seemed to have found something.