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Heinrich had a key. After the younger children went to sleep, there was nothing to keep Kathe and Drucker from climbing the stairs to their own bedroom. With the air of a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat, Drucker took the second gift-wrapped package from under a spare pillow in the closet and handed it to her. She let out a small shriek of happy surprise. “Why didn’t you give this to me with everything else?” she asked.
“You’ll see,” he answered, and closed the bedroom door as she opened the package. She let out another small shriek: it held a pair of frilly garters and other bits of lace and near-transparency. He grinned. “Gift-wrapping for you.”
She looked at him sidelong. “And then, I suppose, you’ll expect to unwrap me.”
Before very long, he did just that. Some little while after she was unwrapped, they lay side by side, naked and happy. He toyed idly with her nipple. “Merry Christmas,” he said.
“I hope it was,” she told him, her voice arch.
“Jawohl!” he answered, as he might have to his commanding general. He wished he could have raised a different sort of salute, but that took longer in middle age.
She lay quiet for so long, he wondered if she’d fallen asleep. Then she said “Hans?” in tones altogether different from the ones she had been using. He made a wordless noise to show he was listening. She leaned over and whispered in his ear: “My father’s mother… I think she really was a Jew.”
He didn’t say anything right away. Whatever he said, he knew, would touch, would shape, the rest of their lives together. Silence, on the other hand, would only alarm her. He whispered back: “As long as the Gestapo doesn’t think so, who cares?” She hugged him, then burst into tears, and then, very quickly, did go to sleep. After a couple of hours, so did he.
10
“I do not understand,” Felless said. She had said that many, many times since coming to the Greater German Reich. Most of the time, as now, she did not mean she could not understand the translator who was rendering some official’s words into the language of the Race. For a Big Ugly, this translator spoke the language well enough. What he said, though, and what the official said, made no sense to her.
“I will repeat myself,” the security official said. He seemed patient enough, willing enough, to make himself clear. Because he had lost most of the hair on top of his head, he looked a little less alien to her than did a lot of Tosevites. Below a wide forehead, his face was narrow, with a pointed chin. He spoke in the guttural Deutsch language. The translator turned his words into those Felless could follow: “The Jews deserve extermination because they are an inferior race.”
“Yes, you have said that before, Gruppenfuhrer Eichmann,” Felless said. “But saying something and demonstrating it is true are not the same. Is it not so that the Jews have given the Tosevite notempire known as the United States many able scientists? Is it not true that the Jews under the rule of the Race are thriving in Poland and Palestine and… and elsewhere?” She had learned some Tosevite geography, but not much.
“These things are true, Senior Researcher, yes,” Eichmann said calmly. “In fact, they prove my point.”
Felless’ jaw muscles tensed. She wanted to bite him. The urge was atavistic, and she knew it. But maybe pain would make him come out with something she recognized as sense. “How does it prove your point?” she demanded. “Does it not seem to prove exactly the opposite?”
“By no means,” Eichmann said. “For the purpose and highest destiny of any race is to form a-” The interpreter hesitated. He said, “The term ‘volkisch’ has no exact translation in the language of the Race. What the Gruppenfuhrer means is that it is the destiny of each kind of Tosevite to form a not-empire made up of that particular kind and no other.”
A thousand questions occurred to Felless, starting with, Why? She suspected-indeed, she was certain-that one would not take her anywhere she wanted to go. She tried a different one instead: “How are the Jews in any way different from this?”
“They are incapable of forming a not-empire of their own,” Eichmann answered, still sounding unimpassioned, matter-of-fact. “Instead, they dwell within not-empires other, better races have created, as disease viruses dwell within a body. And, again like viruses, they poison and destroy the bodies in which they dwell.”
“Let us assume much of what you say is true,” Felless said. “Has this conclusion you draw from the data been proved experimentally? Has anyone given these Jews land on which to set up a not-empire? Have they tried and failed? What sort of experimental control could you devise?”
“They have not tried and failed,” Eichmann replied. “They have not tried at all, which demonstrates they are incapable.”
“Perhaps it only demonstrates they have not had an opportunity,” Felless said.
Eichmann shook his head back and forth, a Big Ugly gesture of negation. “There has been no independent Jewish not-empire for two thousand years.”
Felless laughed in his face. “First, this is an inadequate sample. Two thousand years-even two thousand of your long years-is no great time in terms of the history of a race or group, regardless of your opinion. Second, you are arguing in a circle. You say the Jews cannot form a not-empire because for this period of time they have had no opportunity to form a not-empire, and then you say they have had no opportunity because they cannot form a not-empire. You may have one fork of the tongue or the other on that argument; you may not have both.”
Gruppenfuhrer Eichmann stirred behind his desk. The translator murmured to Felless: “The Gruppenfuhrer is not used to such disrespect, even from a male of the Race.”
That made Felless laugh again. “For one thing, I am not a male of the Race. I am a female of the Race, as should be obvious to you. For another, when elementary logic is classed as disrespect, I am not sure rational discussion between the Gruppenfuhrer and me is possible.” I am not sure the Gruppenfuhrer is even an intelligent creature. But his kind controls explosive-metal weapons. One day soon, they may begin to try to build a starship. What do we do then?
“I have here a choice,” Eichmann said. “I can follow what you say, a female of an alien species who has no personal experience of Tosev 3 and its races and kinds. Or I can follow the words and teachings of Hitler in his famous book My Struggle. Hitler spent his whole life pondering these problems. I trust his solutions far more than I trust yours. If this makes me seem illogical in your eyes, I am willing to pay such a price.”
He was as impervious as landcruiser armor. From his perspective, what he said made a certain amount of sense-but only a certain amount, for his conclusions, as far as Felless could see, remained those of a lunatic. His notions-and, presumably, this Hitler’s notions-of the importance of an individual not-empire for every minutely different variety of Tosevite also struck her as absurd. Her own bias, she admitted to herself, was for the unity and simplicity of the Empire.
She tried again: “If every Tosevite faction should have its own not-empire, how do you justify the rule of the Reich over the Francais and the Belgians and the Danes and other such different groups of-of Tosevites?” Big Uglies
, she recalled just in time, sometimes took offense at being called Big Uglies to their big, ugly faces.
“That, Senior Researcher, is very simple,” Eichmann answered. “We have defeated them on the battlefield. This proves our superiority over them and demonstrates our right to rule them.”
“Is it not so that they have also defeated you on the battlefield from time to time?” Felless asked. “Are these events not random fluctuations of strength rather than tests of competitive virtue in the evolutionary sense?”
“By no means,” the Deutsch male answered through the interpreter. “Truth, at one time the Francais defeated us. But that was a hundred fifty years ago, and since that time they have mongrelized themselves, thus weakening their race to the point where we were easily able to defeat them not once but three times-though in the middle conflict we were robbed of our victory by a stab in the back.”
Felless did laugh again. She couldn’t help it. “The absurdity of imagining that evolution proceeds in such a fashion, or can have profound results in so few generations, is almost beyond description.”
“What is beyond description is the arrogance of the Race in imagining it can come to our planet and presume to understand us in so short a time,” Eichmann said.
Understand the Tosevites? Especially the Deutsch Tosevites? Felless did not think she would ever do that. She said, “Even the Tosevite authorities in the other not-empires, and also those in areas ruled by the Race, disagree with the interpretation offered by the Reich.”
“And what would you expect?” Eichmann’s shoulders moved up and down in a Tosevite gesture of indifference similar to the one the Race used. “When Jews dominate these other not-empires-and also the areas of the planet that you administer-they will naturally try to conceal scientific fact that places them in a bad light.”
