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“Regardless of his unpleasant and unsavory dealings,” Ttomalss said.
“Yes. Regardless of them.” Ttomalss noted that the Tosevite female did not deny them. She wanted the ginger smuggler forgiven in spite of them. He sighed. Kinship, not friendship, he thought. That showed historical continuity among the Big Uglies, sure enough. He sighed. He could wish-he did wish-it didn’t.
Monique Dutourd wished she hadn’t come to Tours with fall heading toward winter. The city did not show itself to her at best advantage. She was a child of the warm Mediterranean; winter in Marseille was almost always mild, with snow a rarity. Not here. Sure enough, the Atlantic drove Tours’ climate, and frost came to the city early and often. After Caesar’s conquest of Gaul, Roman colonists in ancient Caesarodunum would have been as appalled at the weather as she was now.
The climate at the university was also a good deal less than warm. Monique knew she wouldn’t have gained a position had Felless not pulled wires for her. By all the signs, every colleague in the history department knew as much, too. Her welcome ranged from unenthusiastic to downright hostile.
“Let me teach,” she told her department chairman, a white-haired fellow named Michel Casson who’d been at the university since recovering from a wound he’d received defending Verdun in 1916. “Let me publish. I’ll show you that I belong in this place.”
“You will have the opportunity,” Casson replied, peering at her through reading glasses that magnified his eyes tremendously. “We cannot prevent you from having the opportunity. It is to be hoped that you will not damage the reputation of the university too badly by what you do with it.”
Ears burning, Monique left his office in a hurry. That she might prove an asset to the university had plainly never entered his mind. Her nails bit into her palms. I’ll show you, by God, she thought. Having lost all her notes for the paper on the cult of Isis in Gallia Narbonensis that had occupied her before Marseille went up in nuclear fire, she was doing her best to reconstruct it despite a research library that wasn’t nearly so good as the snooty professors and librarians believed.
Back in Marseille, having to deal with her brother and the unwelcome attentions of Dieter Kuhn had made her neglect the monograph. Here in Tours, Kuhn was gone from her life, for which she heartily thanked the Lord, the Virgin, and all the saints. Instead, though, she had to deal with the Lizard named Ttomalss. He wanted nothing from her in bed. He even paid. But guiding him through Roman history stole time from the paper, no less than submitting to the German’s less intellectual pursuits had done.
And she still had to deal with Pierre. Technically, she supposed he was a paroled prisoner. She tried not to have anything to do with him when he wasn’t translating for Ttomalss. She sometimes wished she hadn’t got him out of the Race’s prison to interpret for her. Her life would have been simpler if she’d left him there to rot.
But he is my brother. Blood was thicker than water. She wondered if Pierre would go to a tenth the trouble for her that she’d gone through for him. She had her doubts. Pierre was for Pierre, first, last, and always.
One day, after they’d got off the telephone with Ttomalss, he said, “It’s a pity that Lizard is such a straight arrow. If he weren’t, I could have a fine new ginger network going already.”
“Do you mean you don’t have one?” Monique asked with what she hoped was withering sarcasm.
Predictably, her brother refused to wither. “Of course I do,” he said. “I meant a new one, one that reached right up into his starship. That would be worth arranging, if only I could.”
“Don’t you ever think of anything but ginger and Lizards?” she demanded.
“Ginger is what I do for a living,” Pierre said imperturbably. “The Lizards are my customers. Don’t you ever think of anything else but those old Romans who’ve been dead forever?”
“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 forbidd
ing, 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.
