Frederik Pohl: Jem

“I’ve only been there since February. I’m vice-secretary for new projects. Job didn’t exist till the first of the year, and I wangled it. Before then I was teaching the stuff at my alma mater… among other subjects; we didn’t have much of an extrasolar department. It’s a small school, and it fell on hard times even while I was still an undergraduate. Well? What about it?”

“About what?”

“Were you creaming? Or do you want a grant for a manned trip to Kung’s Star?”

“I do! Christ, yes, I do, I do.”

She took his hand in one of hers, patted it with the other. “You may regard it as settled. Hello, what’s this?”

“But—”

“I said settled.” She was no longer looking at him; something had caught her attention. They had come to a large park, and off to their right was a mall leading up to a monument. Flanking the entrance to the mall were two heroic groups of bronze statuary.

Dalehouse followed her toward them, feeling dazed as well as hung over; it had not sunk in yet. “I suppose I ought to submit a proposal,” he said tentatively.

“You bet. Send me a draft first before you put it through channels.” She was examining the bronzes. “Will you look at this stuff!”

Dalehouse inspected them without interest. “It’s a war memorial,” he said. “Soldiers and peasants.”

“Sure, but it isn’t that old. That’s a tommy gun that soldier is holding… and there’s one on a motorbike. And look — some of the soldiers are women.”

She bent down and inspected the Cyrillic lettering. “Damn. Don’t know what it says. But it’s the workers and peasants welcoming liberators, right? It has to be the last of the Big Ones — World War Two. Let’s see, this is Bulgaria, so that must be the Red Army chasing the Germans out and all the Bulgarians bringing them flowers and hearty fraternal-solidarity handshakes and glasses of clear spring water. Wow! Jesus, Danny, both my grandfathers fought in this war, and one grandmother — two on one side, one on the other.”

Dalehouse looked at her with amusement and fondness, if not full comprehension; it was strange to find anyone who took such an interest in actual foot-slogging fighting these days, when everyone knew that war was simply priced out of the market for any nation that wanted to survive. “What about your other grandmother? Some kind of slacker?”

She looked up at him for a moment. “She died in the bombings,” she said. “Hey, this is fun.”

The bronzes were certainly military enough for any war fan. Every figure was expressing courage, joy, and resolution in maximal socialist-realist style. They had been sculptured to fit in foursquare oblong blocks, with all the figures fitted into each other to conform; they looked a lot like a box of frozen sardines writhing around each other. Margie’s interest in the sculpture was itself attracting interest, Dalehouse saw; the gendarmes had reached the end of their beat and were passing nearby on the return, watching benignly.

“What’s so much fun about soldiers?” he asked.

“They’re my trade, dear Dan. Didn’t you know? Marjorie Maude Menninger, Captain, USA, late of West Point, or late of the practically late West Point, as I sometimes say. You should see me in uniform.” She lighted another cigarette, and when she passed it to him for a drag he realized she had not been smoking tobacco.

She held the smoke, then exhaled it in a long plume. “Ah, those were the days,” she said dreamily, gazing at the bronzes. “Look at that prunt holding the baby up in the air. Know what he’s saying to the other soldier? ‘Go ahead, Ivan. I’ll hold the kid while you rape her mommy; then you hold the kid and it’s my turn.’ ”

Dalehouse laughed. Encouraged, Margie went on. “And that young boy is saying, ‘Hey, glorious Red Army soldier, you like my sister? Chocolate? Russki cigaretti?’ And the WAC that’s taking the flowers from the woman, she’s saying, ‘So, comrade! Stealing agricultural produce from the people’s parks! Make no mistake about it, it’s a long time in the camps for you!’ Course, by the time the Soviets got here the Germans were finished anyhow, but—”

“Margie,” he said.

“—still, it must have been pretty exciting—”

“Hey, Margie! Let’s move on,” he said uneasily. He had suddenly realized that the gendarmes were no longer smiling, and remembered, a little late, that all the municipal police had been given language lessons for the conference.

WHAT ONE COULD SAY about Ana Dimitrova was hardly necessary to spell out, because it was apparent on first meeting: she was a sweet, cheerful girl with a capacity for love. Sometimes she had the grinding tension headaches that were typical of the people whose corpora callosa had been cut through, and then she was disoriented, irritable, sometimes almost sick with pain. But she excused herself and bore them in private whenever she could.

She woke up early, as she had planned, and stole into the kitchen to make tea with her own hands. No powdered trash for Ahmed! When she brought it in to him he opened those heartbreaking long lashes and smiled at her, crinkling the dark brown eyes. “You are too good to me, Nan,” he said in Urdu. She set the cup down beside him and bent to touch his cheek with hers. Ahmed did not believe in kissing, except under circumstances which, while she enjoyed them, were not included in her present plans.

“Let’s get dressed quickly,” she proposed. “I want to show you my good monster.”

“Monster?”

“You’ll see.” She escaped his grasp and retreated to the shower, where she let the hot water beat on her temples for a long time. The solid-state helmet often brought on the headaches, and she did not want one today.

Later, while she was drying her long brown hair, Ahmed came in silently and ran his fingers along the narrow scar in her scalp. “Dear Nan,” he said, “so much trouble to go to to learn Urdu. I learned it for nothing.”

She leaned against him for a moment, then wrapped the towel around herself and scolded gently. “There is no time for this if we are going to see my monster in the dawn light. Also, it was not to learn languages that I had my brain split. It was only to be able to translate them better.”

“We would not do such a thing in Pakistan,” he said, but she knew he was only being dear.

Outside the bathroom door, listening to him squawk and grumble as the cold water hit him, Nan thought seriously about Ahmed. She was a practical person. She was quite willing to sacrifice a material good for a principle or a feeling, but she preferred to know clearly what the stakes were. For her love game with Ahmed, the stakes were pretty high. Bulgaria, like the Soviet Union, was among the most People-tolerant of the food-exporting nations, but the lines of international politics were still clear. They would be able to see each other only seldom and with difficulty unless one or the other of them renounced citizenship. She knew that one would not be Ahmed.

How deeply did she want to be involved with this dear Pakistani? Could she share a life in the crowded, slow cities of the People Bloc? She had seen them. They were charming enough. But a diet of mostly grain, a nearly total lack of personal machines, the inward-turning of the People Bloc minds — were they what she wanted? Congenial to visit, pleasant and quaint for a day or a month… but the rest of her life?

She dressed quickly without deciding the issue. One part of her mind was on what she was doing, the other on rehearsing her plans for that day’s work at the conference; nothing was left for Ahmed. She made the bed while he was dressing, put away the washed dishes and glasses, and almost tugged him out the door.