Nothing from Kendall. Nothing from Mae, either: Rance owed her a letter. But, amid the drugstore circulars and get-rich-quick ads for suckers to sell “miracle Lizard gadgets” door-to-door, he did come across an envelope with a stamp bearing the picture of Queen Elizabeth and another showing a tough-looking fellow in a high-peaked cap and the legend GROSSDEUTSCHES REICH.
“Well, well,” he said, looking from one of them to the other before starting the long, painful business of going upstairs. He smiled. His face almost hurt as it shifted into the new and unfamiliar expression. He might spend some of his time wishing he were dead. With any luck at all, the Lizards would spend more of theirs wishing they were.
Monique Dutourd sometimes-often-wondered why she had studied anything as far removed from the modern world as Roman history. The best explanation she’d ever found was that the modern world had turned upside down too many times for her ever to trust it fully. She’d been eleven when the Germans overran northern France and turned her native Marseille into an appendage of Vichy, a town previously known, if it was known at all, for its water. Two years after that, the Lizards had swept the south of France into their clawed grip. And two years after that, as fighting finally ebbed, they’d withdrawn south of the Pyrenees, handing the part of France they’d held back to the Germans as casually as one neighbor might return a borrowed roasting pan to another.
No, Monique had had enough and to spare of disasters and betrayals and disappointments in her own life. She did not want to examine them in more detail than she’d known while she was living through them. And so…
“And so,” she said, running a brush through her thick, dark hair, “I examine the disasters and betrayals and disappointments of people two thousand years dead. Ah, this is truly an improvement.”
It would have been funny, if only it were funny. Not a human university in the world taught a course called ancient history any more. The headquarters of the Lizard fleetlord in Cairo looked across the Nile at the Pyramids. They’d gone up more than four thousand years ago-about the time the Lizards, having long, long since unified their planet, having conquered two other neighboring worlds, began to look with covetous eyes toward Earth. To them, the entire span of human recorded history wasn’t ancient-it was more like looking back at the year before last.
A glance at the clock on the mantel-a silent, modern electric, not the loudly ticking model she had known in her youth-made her mouth pucker into an O of dismay. If she didn’t hurry, she’d be late to the university. Were a male instructor late for his lecture, he would be assumed to have a lover-and forgiven. Were she late for hers, she would be assumed to have a lover-and liable to get the sack.
As always, she lugged her bicycle downstairs. She took modest pride in never having lost one to thieves. Having lived in Marseille all her life, she knew her fellow townsfolk were a light-fingered lot. Marseille had specialized in unofficial commerce since the Greeks founded the place more than five hundred years before the birth of Christ.
Gulls screeched overhead as she pedaled south along Rue Breteuil toward the campus, which had gone up on a couple of blocks wrecked during the fighting between the Lizards and troops from the Vichy government. Marseille was one of the few places where Vichy troops had fought, no doubt because they were at least as afraid of what the locals would do to them if they didn’t as they were of what the Lizards would do to them if they did.
A policeman in a kepi and a blue uniform waved her on across Rue Sylvabette. “Hello, sweetheart,” he called in the Provencalflavored local dialect he, like she, took for granted. “Nice legs!”
“I bet you say that to all the girls,” Monique answered with a derisive gesture. The policeman laughed uproariously. He knew bloody well he said that to all the girls. He wasn’t bad-looking. Maybe it got him laid once a year or so.
With unconscious skill, Monique threaded her way through the stream of bicycle, car, and lorry traffic. A sunburned blond fellow in a field-gray uniform pulled up alongside her on a motorcycle. Over the rumble of its engine, he spoke in German-accented Parisian French: “Are you going anywhere special?”
She thought about pretending she didn’t understand. With a true Parisian, she might have done that. With a German, she didn’t quite dare. If Germans wanted to badly enough, they could make unfortunate things happen. And so she answered with the truth: “I’m on my way to work.”
“Ach, so,” he said, and then, remembering his French, “Quel dommage.” Monique didn’t think it was a pity; she knew nothing but relief as the motorcycle zoomed away. A generation had resigned her to the Germans as masters of France, but hadn’t left her enthusiastic.
Then she rode past the synagogue on the east side of Rue Breteuil. Its windows were shuttered, its doorway boarded up, as it had been since the Lizards left and the Germans came in. Maybe a few Jews still survived here. If they did, it was not for lack of German effort. Monique shook her head, then had to brush hair back out of her eyes. No wonder so many Jews got on so well with the Lizards.
As if thinking of the aliens were enough to conjure them up, she saw one on the sidewalk in animated conversation with a Frenchman in a gray, collarless shirt. They might have been discussing legitimate business; some of that got done in Marseille, too. Monique wouldn’t have bet anything she didn’t care to lose on it, though.
She parked her bicycle at a stand on the edge of the campus (which looked more like a series of apartment blocks than a proper university), chained it in place, and tipped the guard so he wouldn’t steal it himself and say someone else had. Grabbing her briefcase off the jump seat, she hurried along to her classroom.
She had more students every semester. The large majority were Frenchmen and — women as disenchanted with the present as she was. The rest, who paid their fees to the bursar like everyone else, were Germans stationed around Marseille. Some of them had been stationed around the city long enough to learn to speak the local dialect with a guttural German accent rather than the standard French they would have been taught back in the Vaterland.
The students, French and Germans alike, were chattering among themselves when she walked into the hall. The Germans quieted down out of respect for her as a professor. The Frenchmen quieted down because they were eyeing her legs, as the flic had done. The Frenchwomen quieted down because they were pondering her culottes, a nice compromise between modesty and display for someone who rode a bicycle.
However she got quiet, she was glad enough to take advantage of it. “Today,” she said, “we shall continue to examine the consequences of Augustus’ failure to conquer Germania as Caesar had conquered Gallia.”
Using the Latin names for the areas in question made the event seem more distant than it would have had she called them Allemagne and France. She did that on purpose; she did not want to have the ancient world drawn into the sphere of modern politics. If her French students took especially careful notes on this material, was it her fault? If her handful of German students took especially careful notes… That, unlike the other, was something to worry about.
And, try as she would, she couldn’t leave out her own thoughts. “Augustus’ failure in Germania is one of those areas of history where inevitability is difficult if not impossible to discern,” she said. “Had the Roman Emperor’s abler commanders not died at inopportune times, had revolt not broken out elsewhere in the Empire, he would not have had to appoint Quinctilius Varus to head the German legions, and Arminius”-she would not say Hermann, the German equivalent of the name-“would not have been able to slaughter those legions in the forest of Teutoberg.”