Aftershocks (35 page)

“What measurements will we need for the case?” David asked, and answered his own question by measuring the motor. “Let me cut some sheet metal. We ought to have some sort of insulation around here, too. That’ll give us an idea of whether this’ll be practical.”

He’d got used to flanging up this, that, or the other thing in the RAF. Cutting sheet metal to size was as routine as sharpening a pencil. But when he was carrying the metal back to the motor, his hand slipped. He let out a yelp.

“What did you do?” Devereaux asked.

“Tried to cut my bloody finger off,” Goldfarb said. It was indeed bloody; he added, “I’m bleeding on the carpet,” and grabbed for his handkerchief.

Hal Walsh hurried over. “Let’s have a look at that, David,” he said in commanding tones. Goldfarb didn’t want to take off the handkerchief. The blood soaking through told its own story, though. Walsh clicked his tongue between his teeth. “You’re going to need stitches with that. There’s a new doctor’s office that’s opened up in the building next door, and a good thing right now. Come along with me.”

David didn’t argue. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been so clumsy. He didn’t want to look at his hand. Whenever he did, he felt woozy and wobbly. Blood was supposed to stay on the inside, not go leaking out all over the place.

JANE ARCHIBALD M.D.
, read the sign on the door. “A lady doctor?” Goldfarb said.

“I hear she studied under the Lizards,” Walsh answered. “She ought to be able to patch you up, wouldn’t you say?”

“What happened here?” the receptionist asked when Walsh brought David into the office. Then she said, “Never mind. Come into the examining room with me, sir. The doctor will be with you right away.”

“Thanks,” David said vaguely. Hardly noticing he’d done so, he sat down on the chair there. He was cursing softly to himself in Yiddish when the doctor hurried into the room. He stopped in embarrassment all the worse because he hadn’t expected the female physician to be so decorative. More slowly than he should have, he realized this tall, blond, obviously Anglo-Saxon woman was unlikely to have understood his pungent remarks.

But her laughter said she did, which embarrassed him all the more. A moment later, she was all business. “Let’s have a look at it,” she said, her accent lower-class British or perhaps Australian. David undid the makeshift bandage. Dr. Archibald examined the wound and nodded briskly. “Yes, that’ll take a few stitches. Hold the edges together while I give you a bit of novocaine so you won’t feel the other needle so much.”

“All right,” he said, and did. As she injected him, he asked, “Do you really know Yiddish? How did that happen?”

“Just bits and pieces, Mister—?”Dr. Archibald said, threading catgut on whatever they used for sutures these days onto a needle.

“Goldfarb.” David looked away. He didn’t care to see what would happen next. “David Goldfarb.”

She stared at him, blue eyes going wide. “Not the David Goldfarb who’s related to Moishe and Reuven Russie?” She was so astonished, she almost—but not quite—forgot to start stitching him up.

And he was so astonished, he almost—but not quite—forgot to notice it stung despite the novocaine. “My cousins,” he answered automatically. “How do you know them?”

“I was at the Russie Medical College with Reuven,” she answered. “Hold still there, please. I want to put in a couple of more stitches.” That was spoken in physician’s tones. Then she went back to talking as if to a person: “I might have married Reuven, but he wanted to stay in Palestine and I couldn’t stomach living under the Race any more, not after what they did to Australia.” Her tone changed again: “There. That’s done. Let me bandage you.”

As she wrapped the finger with gauze and adhesive tape, Goldfarb said, “I didn’t meet you when I was in Jerusalem. I would have remembered.” That was probably more than he should have said. He realized it too late. Well, Naomi didn’t need to know about it.

Dr. Archibald didn’t get angry. She’d probably heard such things from the age of fourteen up. “It’s very good to meet you now,” she said. “I heard about your troubles in France, and getting out of England. That you’d wound up here in Edmonton had slipped my mind. You’ll need to come back in about ten days to have the sutures removed. See Myrtle out front for an appointment.” She stuck her head out the door and called to the receptionist:

“No charge for this one, Myrtle. Old family friend.”

As David went back to the Widget Works, Hal Walsh turned to him and said, “I saw the doctor. Old family friend? You lucky dog.” David smiled, doing his best to look like the ladykiller he didn’t come close to being.

Felless hadn’t had a holiday in much too long. She hadn’t done much work after fleeing Marseille for the new town in the Arabian Peninsula, but life as a refugee was vastly different from life as a vacationer. Here in Australia, too, the Race had claimed the land for its own, even more emphatically than it had in Arabia. And, unlike in Arabia, here no fanatical Big Uglies willing, even eager, to die for their superstitions prowled the landscape and had to be warded against.

The landscape in the central part of the continent reminded Felless eerily of Home. The rocks and sand and soil were all but identical. The plants were similar in type though different in detail. Many of the crawling creatures reminded members of the Race of those of Home, though a rather distressing number of them were venomous.

Only the furry animals that dominated land life on Tosev 3 really told Felless she remained on an alien world. Even those were different from the large beasts on the rest of the planet; Australia, by all indications, had long been ecologically isolated. The bipedal hopping animals filling the large-herbivore ecological niche hereabouts were so preposterous, Felless’ mouth fell open in astonished laughter the first time she turned an eye turret toward one. But the creatures were very well adapted to their environment.

She saw less of that environment than she might have otherwise. Business Administrator Keffesh had been even more generous than she’d hoped after she arranged the release of the imprisoned Big Ugly, Monique Dutourd. She’d brought a lot of ginger to Australia, and she was enjoying it.

That required care. Felless would spend one day in an orgy of tasting, the next in her hostel room waiting for her pheromones to subside so she could go out in public without exciting all the males who smelled them into a mating frenzy. Getting meals sent to the room rather than eating in the refectory cost extra. Felless authorized the change without the slightest hesitation.

All the individuals who brought meals to her were females. Once she noticed the pattern, she found that very interesting. Were the males and females who ran the hostels quietly adapting to the unavoidable presence of ginger on Tosev 3? She couldn’t have proved it. She didn’t dare ask about it. But the assumption certainly looked reasonable.

On the days when she was out and about, she noticed that ginger did indeed make its presence known in these new towns. She couldn’t smell the pheromones she emitted in her season; they were for males. But she saw a couple of matings on the sidewalks, and she saw more than a few males hurrying along in unusually erect posture and with the scales of their crests upraised. That meant they smelled female pheromones and were looking for a chance to mate.

How foolish they look,
she thought. Back on Home, she wouldn’t have seen males interested in mating unless she was in her season herself. Then she would have found them attractive, not absurd. As things were, she viewed them with a cool detachment unlike anything she’d known on Home.

I wonder if this is the attitude Tosevite females have toward their males.
That struck her as an interesting notion. It might repay further research when she got back to France.
I might even ask this Monique Dutourd,
she thought.
She owes me favors, and I know she was involved in at least one sexual relationship.

The idea didn’t occur to her on a day when she’d been tasting ginger, but on one when she hadn’t, and when she was feeling the gloomy aftereffects of overindulgence in the herb. She wondered what that meant. Ginger was supposed to make a female clever. Maybe it only made a female think she was clever.

Such reflections disappeared when she got a telephone call from Ambassador Veffani. Without preamble, he said, “Senior Researcher, I strongly recommend that you return to France at once.”

“Why, superior sir?” Felless asked, doing her best to disguise dismay.

“Why? I shall tell you why.” Veffani sounded thoroughly grim. “Because there is serious danger of war between the Race and the not-empire known as the United States.”

“By the Emperor!” Felless was so upset, she barely remembered to cast down her eyes after naming her sovereign. “Have all these Tosevite not-empires gone addled at the same time?”

“It could be so,” Veffani answered. “There are threats that, if we fight the United States, the not-empire called the Soviet Union will join in on the side of their fellow Big Uglies.”

“That might almost be for the best,” Felless said. “Once we have smashed them both, Tosev 3 will be ours without possibility of dispute.”

“Truth,” the ambassador to France said. “Truth to a point, at any rate. The question remaining is, how much damage can the Big Uglies do us while we are smashing them? Estimates are that each of these not-empires could by itself hurt us at least as badly as the Deutsche did. If they fight us together, they may be able to do a good deal more than that, because we would not be able to concentrate all our military strength against either one of them.”

“Oh.” Felless stretched out the word. However much she wished it didn’t, that made good logical sense. But a new question occurred to her: “Why should I cut short my holiday to return to France? Will I not be in at least as much danger there as I am here?”

Veffani made the negative gesture. “I do not think so, Senior Researcher. Australia is part of the territory the Race rules, and so is a legitimate target for both the USA and the SSSR, as it was for the
Reich.
But France is an independent Tosevite not-empire. By the rules of war on Tosev 3, it is not a fair target for them unless it declares itself to be at war against them. The government of the Français shows no willingness to do this.”

“They are ungrateful after we regained for them the independence they had lost to the Deutsche?” Felless asked indignantly.

“They are the most cynical beings I have ever known,” Veffani replied. “They know we did not free them from the Deutsche for their benefit, but for our own. And our efforts to use Big Uglies as soldiers against other Big Uglies have been far less successful than we would have wished. Let them be independent. Let them be neutral. Let their not-empire be a safe haven. It was not during the fight against the Deutsche.”

“Well, that is a truth,” Felless said, and then, “Tell me, superior sir, what is the cause of the latest crisis with the not-empire of the United States? I thought that, except for such peculiarities as snoutcounting, it was relatively civilized.”

“I know the answer to your question, Senior Researcher, but security forbids me from telling you,” Veffani replied. “Negotiations with the USA are still in progress; there is some hope that this war may be prevented. That will be more difficult if reasons for the crisis become too widely known. Even we are not immune from being forced to actions we might otherwise not take.”

“But will the Big Uglies of the USA not bellow these reasons to the sky?” Felless asked. “That not-empire is notorious for telling everything that should stay secret.”

“Not always,” Veffani said. “The American Big Uglies concealed the launch of their spaceship to the belt of minor planets in this solar system very well. And they have more reason to conceal this—believe me, they do.” He used an emphatic cough. “They would not bellow unless they wanted a war with us in the next instant.”

“I am not sure I understand, superior sir,” Felless said—an understatement, because she was annoyed Veffani wouldn’t trust her with whatever secret he knew, “but I shall obey, and shall arrange to return to Marseille as soon as I can.”

“You are wise to do so,” Veffani told her. “Now you colonists are beginning to get some notion of the delights we of the conquest fleet faced when we first came to Tosev 3. For you, though, these delights are less a surprise.”

He broke the connection before Felless could tell him how utterly mistaken he was. Everything about Tosev 3 had been a horrible surprise to the males and females of the colonization fleet. Felless remembered waking from cold sleep weightless, in orbit around what she’d thought would be the new world of the Empire, to be informed that nothing she’d believed on setting out from Home was true.

I will go back to Marseille,
she though.
I will go back to Marseille—after I enjoy myself one more time here.
She still had more ginger in her luggage than she knew what to do with. No, that wasn’t true—she knew exactly what to do with it. She set out to taste as much as she could in one day.

Normally, a ginger-taster rode from exhilaration to depression and back again. Intent on tasting all she could, Felless didn’t wait for one taste to wear off before enjoying another. She stayed strung as tight as the herb would make her.

When a female she telephoned to arrange an early return to France pointed out a couple of difficulties in her revised schedule, Felless screamed insults. The other female said, “There is no reason to snap my snout off.”

“But—” Felless began. She seemed to have the Race’s entire aircraft schedule at the tips of her fingerclaws. But, when she tried to access the information with the thinking part of her mind, she discovered she couldn’t.

Yes, ginger makes you believe you are smart,
she reminded herself.
It does not really make you smarter, or not very much.
It also made her far more vulnerable to frustration than she would have been otherwise.

“Here.” The female proposed another schedule. “Will this do?”

Felless examined it. “Yes,” she said, and the other female, with every sign of relief, vanished from her screen. Felless took another taste. She wasn’t sure the departure time would be late enough to let her stop producing pheromones by then. With so much ginger coursing through her, she didn’t care.