Harry Turtledove - Aftershocks

Since she wanted no more of him than she did of his junk, she stuck her nose in the air and kept walking. He laughed, not a bit abashed, and asked the next woman he saw the same not quite lewd question.

As Monique drew closer to the region the bomb had wrecked, she saw an enormous banner: DOWN BUT NOT OUT. She smiled, liking that. France had been down a long time-longer than ever before in her history, perhaps-but she was on her feet again now, even if shakily.

A lot of Lizards were on the streets of Marseille-the streets on the fringes of town, the streets that hadn’t been melted to slag by a temperature on the same order as those found in the sun. Returned French independence was one of the prices the Lizards had extracted from the Nazis in exchange for accepting their surrender. Monique hoped it wasn’t the only, or even the largest, price the Race had extracted from the Reich.

Back when Marseille belonged to the Germans, a lot of the Lizards who visited the city had been furtive characters. They’d come to buy ginger and often to sell drugs humans found entertaining. Monique had no doubt a lot of them were still here for those purposes. But they didn’t have to be furtive any more. Nowadays, they were the ones who propped up French independence. What policeman would want to give them any trouble?

Even more to the point, what policeman would have the nerve to give them trouble? They didn’t occupy France, as the Germans had. They didn’t carry away everything movable, as the doryphores — Colorado beetles-in field-gray had. But France wasn’t strong enough to stand on her own even against the battered, enfeebled, radioactive Reich. So the Lizards had to prop up the new Fourth Republic. And, of course, they had to be listened to. Of course.

Monique turned a corner and found what she was looking for: a little square where farmers down from the hills around town sold their cheeses and vegetables and smoked and salted meats to the survivors of the bombing for the most bloodthirsty prices they could extort. “How much for your haricots verts? ” she asked a peasant with a battered cloth cap on his head, stubble on his cheeks and chin, and a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth.

“Fifty Reichsmarks a kilo,” he answered, and paused to look her up and down. He grinned, not very pleasantly. “Or a blow job, if you’d rather.”

“For green beans? That’s outrageous,” Monique said.

“I have ham, too,” the farmer said. “If you want to blow me for ham, we can work something out, I expect.”

“No, your price in money,” Monique said impatiently. She didn’t have to give this bastard anything she didn’t want to; he wasn’t an SS man. “I’ll pay you thirty Reichsmarks a kilo.” German money was the only kind in circulation; new francs were promised, but had yet to appear.

“Fifty, take it or leave it.” The farmer didn’t sound put out that she’d failed to fall to her knees. But he went on, “For once in my life, I don’t have to haggle. If you won’t pay me what I want, somebody else will-and you won’t get a better price from anyone else around.”

He was almost certainly right. “When the roads and railroads get fixed, you’ll sing a different tune,” Monique said.

“All the better reason to get what I can now, “he answered. “Do you want these beans, or don’t you? Like I say, if you don’t, somebody will.”

“Give me two kilos.” Monique had the money. Her brother Pierre had more money than he knew what to do with, even at the obscene prices for which things were selling nowadays. The Lizards had bought a lot of ginger from him over the years, and Germans and Frenchmen had bought a lot of goods he’d got from the Lizards.

After Monique paid the peasant, she held out her stringbag-a universal French shopping tool-and he poured haricots verts into it. When he stopped, she hefted the sack and glared at him. Grudgingly, he doled out a few more beans. Getting cheated on price was one thing. Getting cheated on weight was something else. Hefting the stringbag again, Monique supposed he’d come close to giving her the proper amount.

She bought potatoes from another farmer, one who refrained from offering to take his price in venery. Of course, his wife, a woman of formidable proportions, was standing beside him, which probably had something to do with his restraint. Then Monique headed back to the vast tent city outside of town that housed the many survivors who’d come through even when their homes hadn’t.

The tent city smelled like a barnyard. She supposed that was inevitable, since it had no running water. The Romans, no doubt, would have taken such odors as an inevitable part of urban life. Monique didn’t, couldn’t. She wished her nose would go to sleep whenever she had to come back.

A boy who couldn’t have been older than eight tried to steal her vegetables. She walloped him on the bottom, hard enough to send him off yowling. If he’d asked her for some, she probably would have given them to him. But she wouldn’t put up with thieves, not even thieves in short pants.

As she’d had to share a flat with her brother and his lover, now she had to share a tent with them. When she ducked inside, she discovered they had company: a Lizard with impressively fancy body paint. He jerked in alarm when she came through the tent flap.

Lucie spoke reassuringly in the Lizards’ language. Monique didn’t speak it, but caught the tone. She wondered if it worked as well on the Lizard as it would have on a human male. Lucie wasn’t much to look at, being pudgy and plain, but she had the sexiest voice Monique had ever heard.

Pierre Dutourd was also pudgy and plain, so they made a good pair, or at least a well-matched one. He was ten years older than Monique, and the difference looked even wider than it was. “How did you do?”

She hefted the stringbag. “Everything is too expensive,” she answered, “but the haricots verts and the potatoes looked pretty good, so I got them.”

“Excuse me,” the Lizard said in hissing French. “Is it that these foods were grown in the local soil?”

“But of course,” Monique answered. “Why?”

“Because, in that case, they are liable to be in some measure radioactive,” the Lizard replied. “Your health would be better if you did not eat them.”

“They are the only food we can get,” Monique said, acid in her voice. “Would our health be better if we starved to death?”

“Well, no,” the Lizard admitted. “But why can you not get more healthful alimentation?”

“Why?” Monique wanted to hit him over the head with the stringbag. “Because the Race has dropped explosive-metal bombs all over France, that’s why.” She turned to Pierre. “Do you always deal with idiots?”

“Keffesh isn’t an idiot,” her brother answered, and patted the Lizard on the shoulder. “He’s just new in Marseille, and doesn’t understand the way things here are right now. He’s been buying and selling down in the South Pacific, till the war disrupted things.”

“Well, he ought to think a little before he talks,” Monique snapped.

“Who is this bad-tempered person?” the Lizard named Keffesh asked Pierre.

“My sister,” he answered. “She is bad-tempered, I agree, but she will not betray you. You may rely on that.”

By the way Keffesh’s eye turrets swung back and forth, he didn’t want to rely on anything. He stuck out his tongue at Pierre, as a human being might have pointed with an index finger. “It could be,” he said. Now that he’d started speaking French, he seemed content to stick with it. “But may I rely on you? If you cannot bring in food and have to eat supplies that are possibly contaminated, how is it that you will be able to bring in supplies of the herb my kind craves so much?”