Drakas!

by edited by S. M. Stirling

  Behind them both in the grainy photo, I could see that so-called Hungarian, Edvard Teller. Rumor says he's talking about something called "the Super". I remember Apu seeming pale and quiet when we talked about it.

  "That would be bad," said his musical voice. "That would be . . . the end it."

  Our boss, affectless, said, "Unless we'uns get it first."

  We'd had a guest that day, a skinny, bruised, haunted-looking Russian introduced around the office by a translator because his English was so poor. When we talked about the Super, this Sakharov's eyes seemed to deepen with fear, but he kept his mouth shut.

  I wonder.

  What if Hitler hadn't hated the Jews? What if they'd given us the bomb first?

  Imagine that. Britain. Russia. America. Ours. Maybe even these Draka. Where would I be sitting now?

  Imagining myself in a garden on the Moon.

  After a while, I went to bed, lay in the darkness, listening to soft breezes and phantom night-noises, feeling my skin crawl and itch, feeling every wrinkle in my sheets as a little princess-pea driving me crazy . . .

  Something. Something I need. Can't remember though.

  Everything from the past, memory, desire. Gone.

  I got up after a while, went and peed in the bathroom, a faint splatter down the hole, far enough away I knew I wasn't missing and pissing on the floor.

  Put on my robe and zoris, went out into the back yard and stood looking up at the stars.

  Alpha Centauri was just about the brightest thing in the southern sky from here, Moon a slim crescent waxing in the southeast. I looked toward the ecliptic. Bright Jupiter over there. Which means Mars . . . yes. Red dot, right where it ought to be.

  Raumschiffahrt.

  What would we have done, had we been allowed to do it?

  Newspaper story talked about the German-language edition of Von Braun's pamphlet Das Marsprojekt, now being reprinted in English.

  I imagined the three-stage rocket, the Wohnrahd, the moonship, the Mars fleet. Alpha Centauri like a diamond in the sky, beckoning.

  But then I remembered Kristallnacht. Broken-glass-night. And the Jews went away, then Germany went away, and here I am in Africa.

  There was a smell of cooking from next door, the smell of curry, dark figures on Apu's patio, his wife and kids, being served whatever it is Anglo-Indians eat. Chutney on milquetoast? Boiled cabbage and mung beans? They were being served by a big fat black woman who lived in their house six days a week.

  Dark shape coming my way, coming over to the low trellis fence where morning glories twined, waiting to bloom.

  Soft, musical words: "Can't sleep, Hans?"

  "No, Apu."

  "A glass of warm milk and sugar, perhaps . . ."

  Well. How Brit of you, Apu. "Time. That's all it'll take."

  "I see."

  Silence. I kept looking up at the stars and, finally, whispered, "Ah, God. What foolish dreams we all have dreamed!"

  More silence, then Apu said, "You are too much alone my friend. At least . . . get yourself a manservant. Someone to cook, and press your clothes for you."

  I shrugged.

  In a little while, Apu went inside to bed. After not much longer, so did I. Morning came, and I went to work as usual, glad for the deeds that were there to do. The new motor was coming along fine, black serf machinest craftsmen every bit as meticulous as any German I could think of. And these new Russian boys . . .

  Their patience was . . . a surprise.

  I started looking forward to the day we could test fire the engine, and thinking about the . . . vehicle.

  That's it then.

  What dreams we all have dreamed.

  * * *

  At some times, in some places, when the season is right, the flat blue sky seems tarnished and tawny, golden dust mixed in with the blue, not a cloud in sight, depthless yellow-blue suspended above the world. This is the sky that says Africa to me, the Africa of the explorers' books.

  I wonder where Lowell Thomas is, right now? Somewhere safe in America, telling his tales of Count Luckner the Sea-Devil, no doubt.

  Over jungle Africa, maybe this sky would look green, but here . . . not desert Africa but . . . dry. The Veldt. The Drakensberg. Und so weiter. Hard to remember the opal sea is less than a day's drive off, waves crashing on the shore, fishermen standing with their rods, children swimming, surfers on their boards . . .

  Kommensie, Hans. Let's see you shoot the curl.

  Funny when some of the Dutch-descended Draka try to talk schoolboy German with me, those rough accents of theirs . . . same accent I faced one day near Osedom, faced over a deadly, short-barreled gun: Raus! Mit der hände hoch!

  And up went my cowardly hands: Kamerad! Kamerad! Balls shriveling away to nothing at all. And Göring's got two, but very small . . .

  Funny. I thought they'd still be speaking Afrikaans in the cities of the South. A language I'd learn quickly, be more comfortable with. Lots of Dutch words in the English, fon for von, but the rest of it's gone.

  One long, hard memory of being led away, shackled and bleeding with just a few other men, chosen men, stumbling through a haze of fear, confusion, Drak officer's machine pistol cracking, sharp and distinct, as he shot my friends, those lesser men, unnecessary men, right through the head, one by one by one . . .

  "Okay, Hansel. Lemme know when y'all see what you want."

  Billy Creech's hand on my shoulder, gesturing at the bustle of the common serf market all around. Maybe he was twenty-three years old, looking for all the world like some Antebellum American plantation overseer, with his tan hair, toothy grin . . . redneck is the word I'm thinking, learned from some novel I'd read between the wars, those Paris years . . .

  The boss's words, once he finished snickering over what I proposed to do: "Go along with him, Billy. See this baby isn't robbed blind by those crooks."

  Sometimes, you forget what the Domination is, forget where it's been, how all these people got to the here and now. Brilliant white cities, Archona, Virconium, faux-Classical architecture, gardens and boulevards and this was the noblest Roman of them all, like some Made-in-Hollywood fantasy world, as absurd in its way as Von Harbou's Germaniform Atlantida.

  And Fritz Lang, they say, is Hollywood's rising star.

  On a platform before me were a dozen tall, sleek black men, skin tone as of unfired sculptor's clay, more gray than brown, almost hairless, arms and legs thin but muscular, long, long penises dangling like dead mambas . . .

  The man beside them, white djellaba-clad, with black beard a-bristle, black eyes already calculating a bargain. Arab, I thought. Zanzibar. Henry Stanley's famous newspaper accounts of Drakische Afrika. You forget who was here before, and what was going on, layered under the Draka, in and around their dream, those older dreams, straggling on into an unknown tomorrow.

  Billy said, "Them boys're good workers, I hear, farmed up around the Suud these days. Course, they won't be cookin' anything you'd be willing t'eat."

  I looked around, bewildered by sights, sounds, smells, dust and wind and tawny blue sky. Not what I was expecting. Not at all. This . . . scene. I . . . "Where are all the Europeans? I mean . . ."

  Images of frightened, cowering Germans and French and Italians and Poles. Where are all the hundreds of millions now surrendered to the Domination? Where are my friends?

  Billy said, "Well most of 'em's still wild. It'll be a few years 'fore you see too many hereabouts. Got to tame 'em first, see, but . . ." He took a long look around. "There." Pointing.

  In the middle distance, all by himself on a platform, was a slim, handsome, dark-haired white man dressed up in diaphanous veil and thin silk kimono. Thin enough you could make out his body, slim and boyish. He was shading his face from the sun with a garish Chinese parasol, face made up with lipstick and rouge, steeply arched eyebrows neatly penciled in . . .

  Billy snickered. "There's rich ole Draka will pay powerful good money for a pretty French queer. Exotic. Too exotic fo' the likes
of us."

  Exotic. And tame.

  Billy said, "Must be something wrong with that 'un to be in a cheap market like this. Anyway, that's the sort of merchandise you always see first."

  So. Milling crowds, eying the tame merchandise.

  Arabs and Crackers, Bedwine Hindee and nasty little blond Dutchboys with their gaggles of property up for sale. Farm workers and household servants and whatever the Hell . . .

  Voice, thick Draka Southron accent cut by something else, something undefined, spoken softly: "Girl, I done tol' you before, keep your legs apart 'f'n you don' want the switch later on! I want 'em to see yo' pretty little hole . . ."

  Beyond the tall Nilotics, a little man with yellow skin and tight black peppercorn hair, dressed in bib overalls, nothing but rope sandals on his feet.

  Billy said, "Hmh. Sometimes these here Reservation Hottentott get above themselves." Disdain. "Nothin' anybody'll ever do about it though. Museum piece, they say. `Heritage of Africa.' Shee-it!" Underlined with a gob of spit in the dust.

  I felt my mouth suddenly go dry.

  The little yellow man saw me looking, and . . ."Ah, step right up, you fine Archona Gentlemen! Step right up and feast yo' eyes on a prime piece o' real estate!"

  Billy said, "Cripes. Like one o' mah grandaddy's plantation-bred preacher-boys . . ."

  The girl stood still, slim and long-waisted, tall, brown of skin, black of hair and eye, standing hipshot, with one knee drawn out to the side, foot arched up en pointe as instructed, so we could see . . .

  A little rise of bone there, right there where it counts, rising beneath the taut skin of her abdomen . . . Dry medical voice in my head, hypogastric region . . . There was a slight matching protrusion around her mouth, lips parted slightly, pushed open by a faint glint of white teeth, black eyes looking right at me, into my eyes and . . .

  Strangling, I took a breath, looking away and . . .

  Billy snorted, a single-syllable laugh, and said, "Well, I reckon she can cook and press yo' suits, Hansel ole boy. And I reckon yo' account can bear the expense . . ."

  "I . . . I . . ."

  "Just give the man yo' account number, Hans. Have him package her up fo' delivery and we'll get on back to work."

  When I looked at the girl again, there was nothing at all in her face, black eyes impenetrable bits of night sky set deep in her face. I turned to the little yellow man and said, "Wha . . . what's her name?"

  The man shrugged, hardly glancing at her. "Don't know."

  Don't know?

  Billy said, "What difference does it make? You'll think of something, Hans. Let's go. You've got a guidance design review meeting in two hours, then this afternoon we've got the all-up shot."

  Go.

  * * *

  That afternoon, the harsh sunlight over the veldt had a milky translucent quality that made the cloudless sky look almost white. We were under awnings, in the shade, but you could still feel its sting, stealthy on your skin.

  In the distance, a mile or so away, the Test Article stood smoking on its pad, gentle curls of water vapor falling groundward, a fading wisp of cloud like a ghost-snake by the LOX overpressure vent.

  Loudspeaker said, "Four minutes."

  The Test Article looked like two long, thin A-4's stuck side-by side, each eighty feet tall, booster, my baby, a featureless silo beside the missile itself, with its broad white delta wings, cannards and twin vertical stabilizers. Ten thousand imperial gallons of alcohol and liquid oxygen aboard the booster, another ten thousand gallons of carefully refined and filtered kerosene aboard the missile.

  From this angle, you couldn't really see the big pods of the twin ramjet engines, about to have their first all-up live-fire test. I felt confident, though. The Fiseler and Argus boys had done fine work, once they'd gotten properly organized under Dr. Kuznetsov. Who would've thought a Russian engineer, of all things . . .

  "Three minutes. Oxygen system isolated." The vent wisp suddenly diappeared.

  "Hans? Boss says you'll want to look at this." I turned away, unwilling. A thin, gray-faced man was holding out a folder full of papers.

  "Thanks, Sergei." Korolyov was doing good job managing the engine team, but . . . you could tell his heart was damaged by the things that'd happened to him, before, during, after . . . They say Stalin had him in the gulag. What a fool. Stalin should have given him money and workers. Then Sergei Korolyov would have given him anti-aircraft missiles and rocket planes that might have done to the Nazis and Draka what . . .

  Hell.

  Dreams. All just dreams.

  "Two minutes." Near the pad, a siren began to blow, and you could see tiny figures moving away, getting aboard their little steamers, raising clouds of dust as they drove toward us.

  Sergei was looking over my shoulder as I opened the package. "See? What do you think of your friends now?"

  The first sheet was a grainy telex photo, taken at a long slant angle across some stony gray desert country, low mountains in the background I recognized from mid-war newsreel footage. Jornada del Muerte. The Death's Journey Mountains.

  Hanging against the pale sky, gray in the photo, undoubtedly bluer than this one, here and now, was a fat white rocket, two stages separated by a gridwork truss, rising on a long, transparent flame beaded with big shock diamonds.

  "So," I said, just to myself. "So they went with the hypergolics after all." Aniline and nitric acid maybe? No. It'd have to be better than that.

  Korolyov said, "Apparently. Chelomei has turned up in America." There was something else, in Russian, words I thought I knew. He leaned close, studying the photo. "Nitrogen tetroxide and unsymmetrical dimethyl hydrazine make a lovely clear violet flame."

  I said, "Did you just say, `lucky bastard' about your friend Chelomei?"

  "One minute," said the loudspeaker.

  He shrugged. "Not quite. If you look at the stat sheet, you'll see that thing could deliver Teller's `Super' from a site in North America to anywhere on Domination territory."

  I flipped the page. The next photo was of the rocket in the sky, bending in the middle, as its interstage truss gave way. The third page was a picture of a lovely explosion. I tried to imagine it as a purple flower in the sky. "They'd better try harder then, if he's to have any luck at all."

  He said, "If the Draka don't win, the Americans will just give us jobs. Capitalists are like that."

  In what Russian I could muster, I muttered, "Tíshe. Durák!" Shut up. You fool.

  He shrugged, and . . .

  The loudspeaker began, "Ten, nine, eight . . ."

  "Ignition." The booster lit, black smoke and dull red fire fluttering around the base. After a few seconds, the dull thud and soft rumble.

  "Turbine spin up." The fire brightened, blowing away the smoke, turning yellow, then white. Another delay, then that familiar, steady waterfall sound.

  "Release."

  The Test Article lifted off the pad, climbing on a clean yellow flame, turning so the missile would be on top as she headed out over the blue waters of the Indian Ocean.

  Watching her go, shading his eyes against the afternoon sun, Sergei said, "What would it be like, if a man wanted to ride that thing, I wonder?"

  My turn to shrug. "Well, now. A man's just not as heavy as an atom bomb, is he? If they let us do it, there will be . . . a lot of new work for the team."

  Sergei smiled. "What was it you fellows used to say, Hans? Arbeit macht frei? Was that it?"

  Unwilling, I remembered.

  Before they got us sorted out, figured out who to cajole and who to kill, the Draka put us on work gangs, clearing away rubble, clearing streets, burning the sad debris of war, until, one day, I found myself with a rag tyed around my face, laboring through a fearsome stench, throwing dead Jews in a ditch, covering them with white lime and black dirt, while ritual-scarred Janissaries watched, laughing, joking with one another, uncaring, amused, relaxed black men with deadly black guns.

  I remember I bent to pick up a skinny, na
ked, dead woman.

  Skinny. I can't imagine how she got so thin, a skeleton covered with parchment skin. Everything about her sunken in but her mouth and pubis, all elbows and knees and hips.

  I bent to pick her up, looking at that lovely tuft of shiny black hair, and wonder how, disembodied, dead, it still had the power to enchant me.

  I remember how, suddenly, I wanted to . . .

  No. Think about your rocket, Hans, rising into the sky.

  Another part of me wanted to think about what was waiting for me at home.

  And yet another did not.

  As well try to turn back the tides of the sea.

  * * *

  Home, sunset staining the sky brick red, full dark rimming the eastern sky, beyond the mountains, out over the Hindoo Sea, Drakische Mare Nostrum soon enough, I went and stood by the mailbox, examining the day's worthless . . .

  Apu crossed his lawn, dressed in loose, garish shorts, some wild maroon pattern print I understood was called Madras, a white linen shirt, sandals. "I saw it, Hans! What a sight that was!" Voice musical and full of enthusiasm.

  I nooded, sorting the mail, trying not to think.

  He said, "The range safety officer detonated her just after she cleared the coast. Ten thousand kilometers an hour, at full cruise! She would have been in Australia in no time all!"

  I nodded again. What the hell are you doing outside? What are you waiting for? Hm?

  He said, "My wife says you, ah . . . received a delivery today."

  I felt my face burning, not looking up, not wanting to see whatever expression was on his face.

  "Well," he said. "I won't be expecting to see you later on then!"

  No? When I tried looking at him, his expression proved to be serious and gentle.

  "Sometimes," he said, "I envy you, Hans." Then he turned and walked away, head down, hands in pockets, toward the veranda of his house, where I saw his wife sitting drinking a tall glass of tea. She waved.

  When I opened the front door, the light was dim inside and . . . different. Something different here. As if I could smell something . . .

  Abruptly, I remembered how, sometimes, I would become, oh, call it subliminally aware of my wife. She would come into a room where I was working, would just stand there, and no matter what I was doing, no matter how focused, no matter what she was wearing, however unflattering, I would suddenly imagine her naked, imagine her hips and thighs and belly . . .