“Occasionally,” Monique answered, acid in her voice. “Every now and then, for instance, I have to think about how to get you out of prison or whatever other trouble you wind up in on account of ginger.”
Her brother didn’t even have the grace to look shamefaced. “Took you long enough this time, too,” he grumbled. “I thought I was going to rot in that damned cell forever. I got you out of the French jail faster than you sprang me.”
Had he not added that last, reminding her he had helped her now and again, she thought she would have tried to hit him over the head with an ashtray. As things were, she said, “I never would have been carted off to jail if it weren’t for Dieter Kuhn, and he wouldn’t have cared about me at all if it weren’t for you.” One way or another, she was going to pin the blame on Pierre.
He said, “Would you rather have them take me back to jail?”
“What have I got to do with that?” Monique said. “You’re selling ginger again. You don’t bother hiding it from me. You hardly bother hiding it from anybody. Of course the Lizards will notice. They’re not stupid. Do you think they’re not watching you? Sooner or later, you’ll annoy them enough that they’ll scoop you up and throw you into another cell. I probably won’t be able to get you out then, either.”
“Somebody will.” Pierre spoke with maddening confidence. “That’s what connections are for. The more people you know, the more people you’ve got to do you a good turn when you really need one.”
“And the more people you’ve got to betray you when they need something from the Lizards or the flics.”
Pierre stared at her in some surprise. “Where’d you learn to think like that?”
Monique laughed at him. “And people say that studying history never does anybody any good!” she exclaimed, and swept out of the room before he could come up with an answer.
Somewhere south of the city of Tours, the Franks had hurled the previously invincible Arabs back in defeat more than twelve hundred years before. Monique knew that, but she had no interest in finding the battlefield. For one thing, nobody knew exactly where it was. For another, she had no motorcar to go gallivanting over the landscape. And, for a third, that battlefield didn’t much interest her: it was several hundred years too modern. That amused her.
When she happened to mention it to Ttomalss, it amused him, too. “This is a difference in viewpoint between the Race and human beings,” he said through her brother. “To us, a difference of a few hundred years would not matter much.”
“That’s strange,” Monique said. “I would think that a chronological framework was important for your historians as well as for ours.”
“Well, yes,” Ttomalss said, “but everything that happened before the days of the Empire was a very long time ago for us. What real difference if something happened 103,472 years ago or 104,209? I pick the numbers at random, you understand.”
In an aside, Pierre added, “When Lizards talk about years, cut everything they say in half. They count two for every one of ours, more or less.”
“Thanks. I think I already knew that,” Monique answered. It was still daunting. She tried to imagine keeping more than fifty thousand years of history straight. Maybe Ttomalss had a point after all. Even here on Earth, with only a tenth as much history to worry about, people specialized. She concentrated on Roman history. The faculty at the University of Tours also boasted a historian of pre-Roman (not ancient; that wasn’t a word historians used since the Lizards came) Greece, one who studied medieval western Europe, one who specialized in the history of the Byzantine Empire (which struck even Monique as uselessly arcane), and so on.
Even so, she said, “Knowing the relative order in which things happened is important. Otherwise, you cannot speak of causation in any meaningful sense.”
“Causation?” Her brother gave her a dirty look. “How the devil am I supposed to say that in the Lizards’ language?”
“Figure it out,” Monique told him. “If Ttomalss decides you’re not doing a good job, he’ll ask for a new interpreter, and I won’t be able to do a thing about it.”
Pierre’s expression grew even more forbidding, but he must have man-aged to get the meaning across, for Ttomalss answered, “Yes, you are right about that: sequence and relative chronology must be preserved. Absolute chronology may be less important.”
Monique wouldn’t have said that, but she had less absolute chronology to keep in mind. And she found herself enjoying the give-and-take of the discussion with Ttomalss. The Lizard didn’t think like a human being-and why should he? she thought-but he was a long way from stupid. He had trouble understanding how people worked as individuals, though he tried hard at that, too. When he dealt with groups, he did better.
“I thank you,” he said one day. “I am learning a great deal from you. You are both intelligent and well organized. These traits are less common among Tosevites than I might wish.”
After Pierre translated that, he added a two-word commentary of his own: “Teacher’s pet.”
Monique stuck out her tongue at her brother. She said, “Tell Ttomalss that I thank him and I think he’s very kind.” That was flattery, but flattery with a core of truth. It was also flattery with a core of worry. What exactly was he learning from her besides Roman history? Something that would help the Lizards rule their part of Earth more effectively? Did that make her a traitor to mankind?
Don’t be silly, she said to herself. Most people don’t think Roman history matters to us these days, so how could it be important to the Lizards? She relaxed for a while after that crossed her mind. But then she thought, If the Lizards think it’s important, maybe it is.
When the telephone rang in her flat, she hurried to answer it. She’d dreaded the phone in Marseille: it was too likely to be Dieter Kuhn. Here, though, she hadn’t had any trouble. “Allo?”
“Hello, Professor.” Even if Rance Auerbach hadn’t been speaking English, she would have known his wrecked, rasping voice at once. He went on, “How are things going for you up there?”
“Things are… very well, thank you. Thank you very much,” Monique replied. She also used English, and was glad for the chance to practice it. Auerbach was a ginger dealer, too, but somehow that bothered her less in him than it did in her brother. She said, “Is it that I could ask you something?”
“Sure. Go ahead,” he told her, and she poured out the substance of her conversations with Ttomalss and her worries about what the Race was learning. When she’d finished, Auerbach said, “The world would be a better place if everybody’s troubles were so small.”
“Thank you,” Monique said again, this time in French: a breathy sigh of gratitude. She felt as if he were a priest who’d just given her absolution and a very light penance after a particularly sordid confession. “You have no idea how much you relieved me there. I want to be able to see myself in a mirror without flinching.”
That produced a long silence. At last, Auerbach spoke in English again:
“Yeah. Don’t we all?” Monique suddenly wondered if she were the only one whose conscience bothered her.
18
“Yes, Colonel Webster,” Jonathan Yeager’s father was saying into the telephone. “I think we’ll be all right if we keep cool. We have to stay firm out there, but we can’t get pushy about it or we’ll make them nervous. My professional opinion is, everybody’d be sorry if that happened.” He listened for a moment, then said, “Okay, sir, I’ll put it in writing for you, too,” and hung up.
“More trouble about the motors on the rocks in the asteroid belt?” Jonathan asked.
His dad nodded. “You betcha. They can’t blame me for that one, so they’re asking my advice instead.” Sam Yeager’s chuckle sounded sour to Jonathan. “Hell, son, I didn’t even know this was going on-though I’ve got to tell you, I’ve had suspicions ever since that big meteor slammed into Mars.”