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Anielewicz still lived in what had been the Lodz ghetto, not far from the fire station that had housed the ghetto’s only motorized vehicle, a fire engine. He could have lived anywhere in the city- indeed, anywhere in Poland-he chose. His flat suited him well enough, and his wife, Bertha, had lived her whole life in Lodz. He sometimes thought about moving, but without great urgency.
An old friend waved as he rolled to a stop in front of the block of flats and put his feet down on the ground. Mordechai waved back. “How are you today, Ludmila?” he asked with real concern.
Ludmila Jager slowly walked up to him. “I am… not so bad,” she replied in Russian-accented Polish. “How are you?”
“I’m pretty well,” Anielewicz answered in Yiddish. Ludmila nodded; she spoke German, and could follow the Jews’ variation on it. He went on, “How are your legs? How are your arms?”
She shrugged. The motion made pain flow across her round, ruddy face. With what looked like a deliberate effort of will, she wiped it away. “I will never move fast again,” she said. “Nichevo.” That was a Russian word, and a useful one: it meant something like, It can’t be helped. Ludmila went on, “It could have been worse.” Pain filled her face again. This time, she let it stay. “For Heinrich, it was worse.”
“I know,” Anielewicz said quietly, and kicked at the cobblestones. A Jewish partisan leader, a German panzer officer who couldn’t stomach the incineration of Lodz, and a Red Air Force pilot, as Ludmila had been then-a strange trio to thwart the Reich after the atomic bomb got smuggled into the city. They’d done it, but they’d paid the price.
Mordechai Anielewicz knew how lucky he’d been. All he had to show for his brush with Otto Skorzeny’s nerve gas were pains if he exercised too hard for too long. Ludmila, though, was nearly a cripple. And Heinrich Jager… Mordechai shook his head. Jager, a German who proved his kind could be decent, had died young, and with few healthy days before he did.
After all these years, Anielewicz still wondered why. Was it because Jager had been twenty years older than his two comrades? Or had he breathed in more of the gas? Or had the antidote not been so effective on him? No way to tell, no way at all. Whatever the reason, it was too damn bad.
Ludmila might have been reading his thoughts. She said, “He did what he thought was right. If he hadn’t done it, the fascist jackals might have caused the destruction of the entire world. We had a cease-fire with the Lizards. If it had come apart then… Heinrich said to the end of his days that keeping that from happening was the best thing he ever did.”
“I wish he were still here to say it, your fascist jackal,” Anielewicz replied.
Ludmila smiled; she still sometimes used Communist jargon without even noticing she’d done it. She said, “So do I, but… nichevo.” Yes, that was a very useful word indeed. With another nod, she made her slow, painful way down the street, never once complaining.
Anielewicz carried the bicycle upstairs to his flat. Had he been so rash as to leave it on the sidewalk, even with a stout chain, it would have walked with Jesus. Even Jews used that saying about mysterious disappearances these days.
When he opened the door, familiar chaos surrounded him. His wife, Bertha, wearing a dress that would have been stylish in London a couple of years before and was still the height of fashion in Lodz, came up to give him a kiss. As always, a smile brought beauty to her plain face without the intermediate step of prettiness.
She said something. It was probably “How are you?” or “How are things?” but Anielewicz had trouble being sure. His daughter, Miriam, was practicing the violin. His son David, a couple of years younger, was practicing Hebrew for his bar mitzvah, which was only a little more than a month away. And his other son, Heinrich, who was eight, was working his way through a school lesson in the Lizards’ language. These days, Anielewicz hardly noticed the contrast between Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the universe and It shall be done, superior sir. He did notice the racket. He would have had to be deaf, or more likely dead, not to notice.
The racket changed only languages when his children spotted him. They all tried to tell him everything about their days at the same time. What he heard were bits and pieces that surely didn’t-couldn’t-have gone together. If a boy had in fact invited Miriam to go to a film about Lizard irregular verbs, the world was even stranger than Anielewicz suspected.
When his wife could get a word in edgewise, she said, “Bunim telephoned a couple of hours ago.”
“Did he?” That brought Mordechai to full alertness; Bunim was the most powerful Lizard stationed in Lodz. “What did he want?”
“He wouldn’t tell me,” Bertha answered. “He said leaving a message would not be proper protocol.”
“Sounds like a Lizard,” Anielewicz said, and Bertha nodded. He went on, “I’d better ring him up. Can you keep the menagerie down to low roars while I’m on the telephone?”
“I can try,” his wife said, and proceeded to lay down the law in a fashion Moses might have envied. In the brief respite thus afforded-and he knew it would be brief-Mordechai went into his bedroom to use the telephone.
He had no trouble getting through to Bunim; the regional subadministrator always accepted calls from his phone code. “I have for you a warning, Anielewicz,” he said without preamble. His German was fairly fluent. Hearing the Nazis’ language in his mouth never failed to set Anielewicz’s teeth on edge.
“Go ahead,” Anielewicz answered, not showing what he felt.
“A warning, yes,” the Lizard repeated. “If you Tosevites plan any interference against the anticipated arrival of colonists in this region, it will be suppressed without mercy.”
“Regional Subadministrator, I know of no such plans inside Poland,” Anielewicz answered, on the whole truthfully. As he’d thought before, most of the human inhabitants of Poland, Jews and Poles alike, preferred their alien overlords to any of the humans who aspired to the job.
“Perhaps you should know more,” Bunim said, and added an emphatic cough. “We have received a communication threatening that if a million males and females of the Race colonize Poland, that entire million shall die.”
“First I’ve heard of it,” Anielewicz said, which was completely true. “Probably a lunatic. In what language was this… communication? That may give you a clue.”
“It gives no clue,” Bunim said flatly. “It was in the language of the Race.”
Nesseref used her maneuvering thrusters to ease the shuttlecraft away from the outer skin of the 13th Emperor Makkakap. She checked the shuttlecraft’s instrument panel with special care. Like the ship with which it had come, it had just crossed a gulf of space even light would have needed more than twenty of the Race’s years to travel. Of course the revived engineers had already been over the shuttlecraft again and again: that was how the Race did things. But Nesseref was no more inclined than any other female or male to leave anything to chance.
Everything seemed normal till she got to the radar display. With a hiss of surprise, she swung both eye turrets toward it, turning what had been a routine glance to a shocked state.
A fingerclaw activated the radio link with the ship. “Shuttlecraft to Control,” Nesseref said. “Shuttlecraft to Control. I wish to report that the radar set is showing impossible clutter.”
“Control to Shuttlecraft,” a technician aboard the 13th Emperor Makkakap replied. “Control to Shuttlecraft. That clutter is not, repeat, is not, impossible. We have a crowded neighborhood around Tosev 3 right now: the ships of the colonization fleet, the ships and satellites of the conquest fleet, and the ships and satellites of the Tosevites-the Big Uglies, the males of the conquest fleet call them. Remember your briefing, Shuttlecraft Pilot.”
“I remember,” Nesseref answered. Things hadn’t been as anticipated for the Race, disorienting in and of itself. The conquest fleet had not conquered, or not completely. The Tosevites had proved improbably far advanced. Nesseref had believed what the briefing male said-he wouldn’t have lie
d to her. But she hadn’t begun to think about what it meant. Now she was seeing that with her own eyes.
As she scanned more instruments, she discovered that radar frequencies the Race did not use were striking the shuttlecraft. Any one of them might guide a missile on its way to her. “Shuttlecraft to Control,” she said. “You can confirm that we are at peace with these Tosevites?”
“That is correct, Shuttlecraft Pilot,” the controller said. “We are at peace with them-or, at least, no great fighting is going on right now. On advice from males of the conquest fleet, we have relayed the time of your burn and your anticipated trajectory to the Tosevites and assured them we have no hostile intentions. The ones with whom I spoke used our language oddly but understandably.”
“I thank you, Control.” Nesseref did not want to speak to touchy, possibly hostile aliens, no matter how well they used the language of the Race. As far as she was concerned, they had no business using radio and radar at all. That they had such things disrupted plans the Race had made centuries before. Nesseref took it almost as a personal affront.
Moments slid past. Nesseref spent them aligning the shuttlecraft with fussy precision. When the job was done, she waited till it was time to leave orbit. Her fingerclaw hovered above the manual-override control, in case the computer didn’t begin the burn at the right time. That was most unlikely, but training held. Never take anything for granted.
