Vilcabamba
Harry Turtledove
illustration by Jason Chan
The President of the United States looked out of an Oval Office window at Grand Junction, Colorado. The Oval Office was square, but the President’s workplace kept its traditional name. Harris Moffatt III sighed and bent to his paperwork again. Even in Grand Junction, that never disappeared.
Washington, D.C., remained the de jure capital of the United States. Harris Moffatt III had never been there. Neither had his father, President Harris Moffatt II. His grandfather, President Harris Moffatt I, got out of Washington one jump ahead of the Krolp. That the USA was still any kind of going concern came from his ever-so-narrow escape.
Harris Moffatt III was also Prime Minister of Canada, or of that small and mountainous chunk of Canada the Krolp didn’t control. The two countries had amalgamated early on, the better to resist the invading aliens. That, of course, was before they realized how far out of their weight they were fighting.
When the enormous ships were first detected, between Mars’ orbit and Earth’s, every nation radioed messages of welcome and greeting. The Krolp ignored them all. The enormous ships landed. There were still videos--Harris Moffatt III had them on his computer--of human delegations greeting the aliens with bouquets and bands playing joyful music. At last! Contact with another intelligent race! Proof we weren’t alone in the universe!
“Better if we were,” the President muttered. When the Krolp came out, they came out shooting. Some of those fifty-year-old videos broke off quite abruptly. And “shooting” was the understatement of the millennium. Their weapons made ours seem like kids’ slingshots against machine guns.
Seeing how the Krolp wanted things to go, half a dozen militaries launched H-bomb-tipped missiles at the great ships. They couldn’t live through that, could they? As a matter of fact, they could. Most of the missiles got shot down. Most of the ones that did land on target didn’t go off. And the handful that did harmed the Krolpish ships not a bit and the rampaging, plundering aliens running around loose very little.
They weren’t invulnerable. Humans could kill them. Unless somebody got amazingly lucky, the usual cost was about two armored divisions and all their matériel for one Krolp. Back in the old days, the United States was the richest country in the world. All the pre-Krolp books said so. Not even it could spend men and equipment on that scale.
Back before the Krolp came, a fellow named Clarke had written, Any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic. Harris Moffatt III didn’t know about that. What the Krolp did wasn’t magic. The best scientists in the USA--the best ones left alive, anyhow--had been studying captured or stolen Krolpish gadgets for half a century now. Their conclusion was that the aliens manipulated gravity and the strong and weak forces as thoroughly as humans exploited electromagnetism.
Humans could use Krolpish devices and weapons. They could even use them against the invaders, for as long as they kept working. What humans couldn’t do was make more such devices themselves. The machines weren’t there. Neither was the theory. And neither was the engineering to turn theory into practice.
And so Harris Moffatt III ruled an attenuated state between the Rockies and the Wasatch Range. He understood too well that he ruled here not least because the Krolp hadn’t yet taken the trouble to overrun this rump USA (and Canada).
From everything he’d heard, the United States still was the richest country in the world. The richest human-ruled country, anyhow. And if that wasn’t a telling measure of mankind’s futility in the face of the aliens, Harris Moffatt III was damned if he could figure out what would be.
His appointments secretary stuck his head into the Oval Office. “Excuse me, Mr. President, but Grelch wants to see you.”
“Tell him I’ll be with him in a few minutes, Jack,” Moffatt said. “I really do need to study this appropriations bill.” Calling the economy in the independent USA rotten would have praised it too much. So would calling it hand-to-mouth. Robbing Peter to pay Paul came closest, except Paul mostly got an IOU instead.
Jack Pagliarone turned to pass the news on to Grelch--but Grelch didn’t wait to hear it. The Krolp shoved past the appointments secretary and into the office. “I see you, Moffatt,” he said--loudly--in his own language.
“I see you, Grelch,” Harris Moffatt III answered--resignedly--also in Krolpish. There was a lot of Grelch to see. He was big as a horse: bigger, because he was a tiger-striped centauroid with a head like a vampire jack-o’-lantern. He had sharp, jagged jaw edges--they weren’t exactly teeth, but they might as well have been--and enormous eyes that glowed like a cat’s. He smelled more like Limburger cheese than anything else.
“I have some things to tell you, Moffatt,” he declared. No titles of respect: the Krolp had them for one another, but rarely wasted them on humans.
“I listen,” the President said, more resignedly yet, wondering what Grelch would want this time. He was bound to want something, and he’d make trouble if he didn’t get whatever it was.
Not for the first time, Harris Moffatt III wondered what Grelch had done to be forced to flee to Grand Junction. A dozen or so alien renegades lived here. Humans had learned a lot from them, and from their predecessors. But they were deadly dangerous. They were Krolp, and had Krolpish defenses and Krolpish weapons. And they were almost all of them sons of bitches even by Krolpish standards. No alien who hadn’t done something awful to his own kind would have to stoop so low as to live with humans.
“I need snarfar, Moffatt. You’ve got to get me snarfar,” Grelch said.
“I can do that, Grelch.” The President tried to hide his relief. Some Krolp chewed snarfar. It gave them a buzz, the way nicotine or maybe cocaine did for humans. Harris Moffatt III didn’t know the details; snarfar poisoned people. He did know the aliens turned mean--well, meaner--when they couldn’t get the stuff.
But he could get it. They grew it in the flatlands of the Midwest--what had formerly been wheat and corn country. He still had connections in the lands his grandfather once governed. People and things informally slid over the border all the time. He’d arranged to bring in snarfar before. He’d known he would have to do it again, for one Krolp or another, before too long.
“You better do that, Moffatt. By the stars, you better,” Grelch snarled. He turned--which, with that four-legged carcass, needed some room--and stomped out of the Oval Office. The ripe reek that came off his hide lingered in the air.
The President sighed. “That’s always so much fun.”
“Yes, sir,” Jack Pagliarone said sympathetically. Even a renegade Krolp, an alien who’d put himself beyond the pale of his own kind, was convinced down to the bottom of whatever he used for a soul that he was better than any mere human ever born. All the evidence of fifty years of conquest and occupation said he had a point, too.
“If we didn’t need to pick their brains . . .” Harris Moffatt III sighed again. Humanity needed nothing more.
“By the stars, Mr. President, if the first big uprising had worked--” Jack sadly shook his head.
Back when Harris Moffatt III was a boy, Americans, Russians, and Chinese all rebelled against the centauroids at once. They rocked the Krolp, no doubt about it. They killed forty or fifty of them, some with stolen arms, others with poison. But close didn’t count. The Krolp crushed mankind again, more thoroughly this time.
Jack had spoken English with the President. Humans in the free USA mostly did. Even humans in Krolp-occupied America did when they talked among themselves. But the appointments secretary said By the stars anyhow.