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“May I try one first?” Jonathan Yeager still sounded dubious. Ttomalss made the affirmative gesture. The Tosevite plucked one of the balls out of the syrup in which it came, put it in his mouth, and chewed thoughtfully. “It has sesamisidz inside,” he said.
“Is this good or bad?” Ttomalss asked.
Jonathan Yeager shrugged. “I do not think it is as good as choklit. But it is a sweet, and I thank you for it. I hope Kassquit will like it. I think she will.” He bent into the posture of respect-he did have manners, for a wild Tosevite-and took the container with the remaining sweets back to Kassquit’s chamber.
Ttomalss eyed the video that came from the chamber. He listened to Kassquit exclaim in surprise and pleasure, and watched her try the sweets. She must have liked them; she ate several, one after another.
“No one has ever cared for me as you care for me,” she told Jonathan Yeager. Before long, the two of them were mating again, though shielded from the possibility of reproduction.
Having seen that activity before, Ttomalss stopped watching the video feed. He hadn’t imagined that Kassquit’s words could hurt as much as they did. Who had fed her when she was helpless? Who had cleaned excrement from her skin? Who had taught her the language and the ways of the Race? Did a few sweets and pleasurable mating count for more than all that?
He let out a discontented hiss. He had not been the one to think of giving Kassquit an unexpected treat. Even so, it hardly seemed fair. He wondered if Tosevites ever so discounted the efforts of those of their own kind who raised them. It struck him as most unlikely. No, this case of ingratitude was surely unique.
I tried to get out, Monique Dutourd thought. I did everything I could. Is it my fault that I didn’t do it quite soon enough?
Whose fault it was didn’t matter. What mattered was that she remained stuck in Marseille. A passport, even a passport with a false name, did her no good whatever when she couldn’t go anywhere with it. She had two choices now, as she saw things: run for the hills or wait for explosive-metal fire to burst over her city, as it had over so many cities of the Greater German Reich.
To her surprise, Pierre and Lucie were sitting tight. “How can you stay?” she asked them one morning over breakfast-croissants and cafe au lait as usual, war having affected the black market very little. “The radio said the Lizards blew up Lyon yesterday. How long can they keep from blowing us up, too?”
“Quite a while, I hope,” Pierre answered placidly. “Pass the marmalade, if you would be so kind.”
Monique didn’t want to pass it; she wanted to throw it at him. “You are mad!” she cried. “We live on borrowed time, and you ask for marmalade?”
“Croissants are better with it,” he said. She shook with fury. Her brother laughed. “I do not think we are all going to explode in the next few minutes. Will you calm yourself and let me explain why?”
“You had better, before I get on my bicycle and head for the hills,” Monique said. “You were talking about doing that yourself, if you will remember?”
“I know.” Pierre nodded and paused to light a cigarette. He coughed a couple of times. “First one of the morning. Yes, I know I was talking about fleeing. You still may, if you feel you must. But I doubt it is necessary to flee from Marseille.”
“Why do you doubt it?” Monique bit off the words one by one.
“Why?” Pierre grinned at her and said no more.
“Enough teasing, Pierre.” Lucie could tell when Monique was on the ragged edge of cracking, where her own brother could not. Turning to Monique, she went on, “We have-which is to say, Marseille has-a good many friends in high places. From what we hear from them, the city is safe enough.”
“Friends where? Among the Germans?” Monique demanded. “They can’t keep any place in the whole blasted Reich safe.”
Her brother and his lover both burst out laughing. “Among the Germans?” he said. “No, not at all. By no means. I would not trust what a German told me if Christ came down from Heaven with a choir of angels to assure me it was so. But we have plenty of friends in high places among the Race, of that you may be very certain. They do not want to see such a fine place of business wiped off the face of the Earth-and so it will not be.”
Monique stared at him. “They will spare this city… for the sake of the ginger trade?” she said slowly. “I knew your connections with the Race were good. I never dreamt they were that good.” She wondered if Pierre was fooling himself.
But Lucie said, “Here we are, an obvious target close to Spain, a target close to Africa, but have they attacked us? No, not at all. Are they likely to attack us? I do not think so.”
“Well…” Monique hadn’t thought of it in those terms. Marseille was an obvious target. The Nazis knew it as well as the Lizards did; they wouldn’t have installed all those antiaircraft missiles in the hills outside the city if they hadn’t known it. But not even an enemy airplane had appeared over Marseille, let alone an enemy missile. Grudgingly, Monique said, “It could be, I suppose.”
“So far, it is,” Pierre said. “I see no reason to believe the future will be very much different from the past.”
That almost set Monique laughing, where nothing else had come close to doing the job. It was a very Roman attitude. It was, from everything she’d seen, also very much the attitude of the Race. But it wasn’t the attitude of the Reich, and it didn’t work so well for the Lizards here. That worried her.
Pierre wasn’t worried. After stubbing out the cigarette, he said, “Go on, Monique. Go shopping. Spend my money on whatever you want. After the Lizards finish the Nazis, they will still need people to buy and sell for them. We will be waiting. And if the Germans come back in another twenty years”-he shrugged-“they will need people to buy and sell for them, too. And we will still be waiting.”
That wasn’t a classical Roman attitude, but she had no doubt the inhabitants of ancient Massilia had shared it. And they would have had reason to do so. But not even Caesar’s sack of the ancient city would have wrecked it anywhere near so thoroughly as one explosive-metal bomb could. Monique wasn’t sure how well Pierre understood that.
She found another question to ask her brother: “How long can you hold out if the Lizards don’t come into Marseille to buy what you have to sell?”
He chuckled again. “Oh, twenty or thirty years, I would say. They make me extra money. I don’t deny that. But I do most of my business with people, anyhow. I can go right on doing that. Whether there is a war or not, plenty of things come into the Old Port. There aren’t enough Germans in the world to look through all the little boats that sail in from Spain and from Italy and from Greece and from Turkey.”
“Ah, Turkey,” Lucie said rapturously. “The business we do with Turkey, all by itself, could keep us afloat.”
“Poppies, I suppose,” Monique said, and her brother and his lover nodded. Monique had visions of opium dens and other sinister things. She didn’t know any details. She didn’t want to know any details. She shook her head. “Sordid.”
“It could be.” Pierre shrugged. “In fact, I suppose it is. You do not see Lucie or me using these things, do you? But there is a great deal of money to be had, from the Lizards and from the Nazis and from-” He broke off.
From the French, he’d been about to say. Monique knew it. Her brother wasn’t too proud to take his profits wherever he could find them. And she’d been living off his largesse ever since escaping Dieter Kuhn. She hadn’t thought till now about how filthy the bargain was. Maybe she hadn’t let herself think about it.
She took a deep breath, getting ready to tell him in great detail what she thought of him for doing what he did. Before she could speak, though, sirens all through Marseille started to scream. She sprang to her feet. “That is the attack warning!”
“It can’t be!” Pierre and Lucie said it together. But it was. The way they leaped up from their seats, the sudden horrid fear on their faces, said they knew it was, too.
Monique wasted no
time arguing with them. “To the shelter, and pray God we aren’t too late.” With that, she was out the door and rushing down the stairs. Her brother and Lucie didn’t argue with her, either. They followed.
