Drakas!

by edited by S. M. Stirling

  We talked about it, the thought amusing her so, really, Hans, making her blush, and it turned out these things happened most often right around her fertile time, nature subverting all our attempts to control . . .

  No sign of her in the Draka serf intake records. Sorry, Hans. Too bad, old man.

  She stood, emerging from the shadows, apparently having been sitting on the bare floor between my battered divan and the cold ashes of the fireplace, which I'd been afraid to light for fear of burning the place down in my abstraction, my evenings full of dreams and regret.

  "Massuh de Groot."

  Her voice was soft. Throaty. Full.

  "Uh." I stood there like an idiot. What does one say to a . . . serf? Nice little euphemism, that. Latin servus, meaning slave. In my family, we never even had servants.

  She crossed the room, face shadowed, eyes glinting, uncertain, looking at me. Kneeled in some kind of ritual posture, making me feel even more ridiculous.

  "Um. Your . . . name?"

  She looked up at me, curious, eyes seeking, questioning, probing. What is it a serf needs to do, then? Understand the wishes of her master. Anticipate.

  She said, "Khoikhoi called me—" something abrupt, with a couple of clicks embedded in it.

  "Um. And your real name?"

  "My Mammy say—" something musical, like Italian but obviously not. Malagasy?

  "Um."

  She stood, something odd in her face now. I felt myself strangling, unable to breathe. How am I going to manage this . . . this . . . Oh, you know.

  She said, "Massuh, you want yo' dinnah now?"

  All I could do was nod.

  "Ah'll do my bes'. Yo' kitchen . . ." A slow shake of the head, an amused look. "Bes' I lights a fire too. Chase away them shaduhs . . ." Turning away then, and I thought, Talking like some American movie Negro. Where would they learn that?

  What those movies were about, of course, was the world many of the Draka's ancestors had left behind, little Porgie helping Pocelain make the bed, nyuk-nyuk-nyuk . . .

  I sat in my chair, helpless, watching her bend in a thin linen dress, looking at the shape of her, watching her move, suddenly half-starved and . . .

  * * *

  Later, suddenly later, I was in my room, sitting on the edge of the bed, that wonderful dinner a solid lump in my middle, a dish whose name I didn't know, made from ingredients I didn't know I'd had. When I asked, stuttering, she said what I thought was the name of the fat black woman who served Apu's family. "She a nice lady. Bonded servant. Almost free."

  Whatever the Hell that means. Draka society was mostly a closed book to me, so many things, so many differences. Not at all like the Germany I'd known, Germany no more. Maybe a bit like America the Movie, but only a little bit.

  Suddenly, she was in the open doorway of my room, standing there, looking at me, face . . . unreadable.

  "Yes."

  "Where you wants me to sleep, Massuh? They's a spare room, but no . . ."

  Right. No bed. Not even a pile of rags for her to sleep on. "I . . ."

  She came into the room then, dark shadow in wan lamplight, eyes shining on mine. "Well. I sees." Then she unbuttoned the few top buttons of her shift, reached around to untie the back, pulled it off over her head and was naked.

  Nakeder than any woman I had ever imagined before.

  She stood, posed, something like a smile, a knowing smile on her face, watching me stare.

  Look at me. Mouth hanging open. Sweat beading on my brow. What next, a rope of drool from my lips?

  She reached down, hand passing slowly over her smooth belly, going between her legs, pausing there, drawing in my eyes. Then she took her hand to her face, covering her mouth and nose, drawing in a deep breath.

  And said, "This a good time fo' me, Massuh. Hopes to make it a good time fo' you, as well."

  * * *

  Some time later, we stood out in a slit trench, my comrades and I, out in the dry Namib desert under a featureless morning sky, sky the neutral color of the primer coat on a brand new steamer, just before the factory lays on that familiar enamel gloss, with all its color and glow.

  We stood, and we waited.

  Nothing. A soft, dry wind. The soft murmur of people talking, talking in whispers, as though . . . something were listening.

  Apu put his hand on my shoulder, and said, "You seem . . . vwell. Relaxed."

  Unbidden, the memory of her in the night, lying in the bed with my hands upon her, looking up at me, eyes . . . watching mine, looking into them, as if deep into my soul.

  I remembered the way her breath had quickened later on, perfectly responsive, responses in sync with mine, as if . . .

  I remember awakening from a dream, flinching out of it, running from a memory, three naked women standing by a ditch, pretty girls, Ukrainians I think, maybe Jews, maybe not.

  The Three Graces. One so tall and brave. Another, smaller, almost like a child despite the pretty breasts and lovely pubic swatch, head down on the other's bosom, eyes closed. A third by her side, looking frightened and cold, but modest even now, one arm across her breasts, the other hand covering her vulva.

  I remember the clatter of the bolt being drawn back, machine gun being cocked.

  I remember, behind the women there was a ditch, already half full.

  I can't remember why I was at Babi Yar that day, only that they invited me out to watch, as though to a picnic.

  And when I awoke from the dream, gasping, covered with cold sweat, she said, "Theah now, Massuh. Jes' a dream, tha's all. You safe now. I's heah."

  A voice with the power to make it all right again, lying under me, breath quickening, at just the right moment, clutching me close, crying out with joy.

  I felt myself flush, avoiding Apu's smile.

  Down the way, the boss said, "One minute, gentlemen. See to your goggles."

  We were ten miles away, far behind the front lines, where soldiers and experimental subjects waited. I remembered the boss saying, "This had best work, gentlemen, now that Teller . . ."

  Korolyov, in a harsh whisper, "Teller's Super is too heavy for the Atlas. We've got time yet."

  Over a loudspeaker, someone's voice began counting down. I pulled down my goggles and the world was blotted away, nothing but darkness under a brilliant African sun, the sound of my breathing, other people . . . almost as if we were holding our breaths, no more whispers now.

  "Four . . . three . . . two . . ."

  The world came back, colored gray and silver, the desert cast with stark, impossible shadows.

  Beyond, the entire horizon seemed to lift away, a flat line rising, then an impossible sunrise, ball of light bloating from the edge of the world, falling skyward like a huge bubble of steam lifting from the bottom of the sea.

  There was a brilliant corona, streamers of light, a visible shockwave, atmosphere constraining the event as best it could.

  The ground slammed my feet, making me stagger.

  Darkness closing in as the bomblight faded.

  I pulled up my goggles then, gaping at a towering malignancy, fat column of black smoke reaching already into the stratosphere, spreading there because it could go no farther, coming toward us swiftly, like the front of an onrushing storm.

  "That's bigger than yo' said, I think. Some of them boys up front . . ."

  Five megatons, I thought. We calculated five megatons. This . . . ten? Fifteen? Somewhere, we've done something wrong.

  Watching the pressure wave cross the desert toward us, raising a cloud of dust, Apu, in a voice hushed with wonder and sorrow, said, " `I am become Death . . .' "

  " `. . . the Destroyer of Worlds.' " replied Sakharov, lifting his goggles away, looking upward into face of his child, eyes like two pieces of dead, empty stone.

  Then the hot wind struck and roared overhead, while we cowered together in the bottom of our ditch.

  And, when I went home that night, dark, sweet Gretel was waiting for me just inside the door, wearing the new line
n shift I'd bought her.

  Ready and waiting, with a smile just for me.

  Then the dreamer becomes the dream, as mourning became Electra, making her oh-so-pretty indeed.

  The Last Word

  Harry Turtledove

  Harry Turtledove has been called the master of alternate history. This is annoying.

  Not because he isn't a master of that form, but because he's also a master of heroic fantasy, humorous fantasy—far more difficult to do well—space opera, idea-oriented hard science fiction, straight historical fiction, and an implausibly large range of other types of literature. For relaxation, he reads Byzantine Greek chronicles.

  Harry is an unfairly tall man of frightening intellect and reassuring warmth, who lives with his wife Laura (also a writer) and his three intimidatingly bright daughters in Southern California. It's as if the IQs slated for legions of surfer dudes and val-gals had been suctioned out and concentrated in one hilariously scholarly household in the San Fernando valley, where the art of conversation still lives.

  Harry's work includes the classic WORLDWAR series, which single-handedly resurrects the alien-invasion stories of yore and updates them, The Guns of the South, a meditation on the American Civil War with Afrikaners and AK-47s, and the grimly majestic alternate-history masterpiece which begins with How Few Remain, continues through The Great War: American Front, and most recently culminates in Walk in HelL.

  Here he shows—through a protagonist many of us may somehow recognize—how even utter defeat can be a kind of victory.

  Commodore Anson MacDonald strode into the underground refectory. "What's the latest?" he asked.

  Nobody paid any attention to him. All eyes were riveted on the big, wall-mounted televisor. The news reader, her pretty face worn and haggard, her eyes red with tears that hadn't—quite—poured down her face, spoke like a machine: "—San Francisco now definitely known to be vaporized. The government did not escape. Along with the destruction of Manhattan and Washington, this confirms—"

  Someone had a remote control. He aimed the little box at the televisor as if it were an assault rifle. And the infrared beam killed the screen, which went black. "That's that," somebody else said. "The Alliance for Democracy is washed up."

  Across the room, someone said, "For God's sake, get me a beer."

  MacDonald looked from one soldier to another. He was a lean, bald man in his mid-fifties, the graying hair he had left cropped close to the sides and back of his skull, a thin line of mustache—darker than the hair on his head—just above his upper lip. He felt very much a stranger here: he'd been rotated to the Nantahala Redoubt for a familiarization tour . . . just at the exact moment the Snakes chose to launch the Final War.

  Even his uniform was wrong. He was a thirty-year Navy man, and proud of the deep blue, the blue of the tropical ocean at night, but it didn't fit here, not with everyone else in mottled woodland camouflage.

  And the Navy-blue uniform wasn't the only thing that didn't fit in. Anson MacDonald felt as devastated as the news reader had sounded. The country he loved, the system he believed in, going down under the Domination of the Draka? What had that Englishman called the Snakes? A boot in the face of mankind forever—something like that, anyhow. He had every right to feel as if the world had just ended. For all practical purposes, it had.

  But the men in the mottled uniforms seemed grimly content with their fate, with their country's fate. One of them, a fellow with captain's bars on his collar tabs, came up to MacDonald and said, "Take it easy, Commodore. They didn't put us in the Redoubt for when things were going fine. This is what we're here for: to give the Draka as much trouble as we can for as long as we can, even though the Alliance for Democracy has lost the war."

  "Madness," MacDonald said. "I've always thought so. Defeatist madness."

  "No, sir." The captain—the name tape above the right breast pocket of his uniform said FISCHER—shook his head. "Strategy. The Draka have won the phase of the game that just ended. Now we have to make sure they get as little joy from it as possible. We have to tie them down in endless cleanup operations, make sure they'll need to worry about us ten years from now, twenty years from now, maybe fifty years from now. We've got men and women in here, you know. We can raise up a whole new generation to give the Snakes grief."

  "What's the point?" MacDonald asked bitterly. "The Afghans gave them grief after the Great War. The Finns gave them grief after the Eurasian War. The Afghans are Draka Janissaries these days; the Finns, poor bastards, are mostly dead. And those sons of bitches are going to turn the free men and women of the United States and the rest of the Alliance into serfs. Do you know what that is, Captain? It's the biggest rape in the history of the world."

  "Yes, sir." Fischer had a long, skinny face that seemed stupid till you studied it for a little while. MacDonald had known a few men like that; what made them seem not quite in the real world wasn't stupidity but intense concentration. After a few seconds, Fischer returned to the here-and-now. "Sir, like it or not, you're here for the duration. Ever play a game of chess where you threw away your queen like a damn fool?"

  Caught off guard, MacDonald let out a couple of syllables' worth of barking laughter. "Unfortunately, yes."

  "Okay." When Fischer grinned, he looked years younger, almost like a kid. "You aren't going to win after that. But if you're feeling stubborn and you've got a halfway decent defense, you can go into a shell and make the other fellow work like a son of a bitch to finish you. That's what we're all about."

  "But what's the point?" Anson MacDonald demanded. "The point was, we never should have lost our queen in the first place. Now that we have, we're still facing a lost game. We would have done better to put all this energy, all this manpower, all these resources, into first-strike capability. I always said so, to anyone who would listen. Not enough people did."

  "And maybe we would have lost all those people, all those resources, on account of the Snakes' stinking virus," Captain Fischer said. "We're still dealing with that; the drugs only help so much. But that's not the point. The point is, this isn't chess. The rules are more elastic, when there are rules. And you've forgotten something else."

  "What's that?" MacDonald barked—he didn't like getting a lecture from this whippersnapper. Captain Fischer spoke two quiet words. MacDonald stiffened to attention. "I am at your service, sir."

  * * *

  Janissary Sergeant Hans rubbed at the orange slave tattoo behind his left ear. It didn't itch, but he imagined it did. He held up a hand. The squad he led was glad to stop for a blow. They liked the look of the mountainous woods ahead no better than he did. Even if the leaves were off the trees, anything could be hiding in there. It probably was, too.

  "Where's the map say we're at, Sarge?" asked a trooper named Usama.

  Being a sergeant, Hans had been trained in such mysteries. He didn't even need to consult the map to answer, "That last little town we just went through was called Cheoah." His English was the slurred dialect of the Domination—not so very much different from what the folk here in the U.S. district of North Carolina spoke—with something guttural underneath, a reminder that both his grandfathers had fought for the Reich and the Führer against the Draka. They'd lost, and now he marched under the dragon that held chains and sword. He didn't worry about it. He just did what his officers told him, and handled the squad with a veteran's lack of fuss.

  "Nothing left of that place no more, not after the gunships gave it the once-over." Usama was tall and lean and dark, with a long scimitar of a nose and a neat black beard. He carried a scope-sighted sniper's rifle on his back.

  "No more town there, sure enough." Hans spat. He lit a cigarette. "But those bastards nailed Boris and Kemal. Shouldn't never have happened."

  Everyone nodded. "Stinking civilians," somebody said. "What're they doin' with so many rifles?"

  "It's like they're all Citizens," Hans said.

  "My ass." That was Usama again. "We can lick these Yankees hand to hand. Real
Citizens, they'd have 'em for breakfast."

  "No, not Citizens like that." A thoroughly hard man, Hans admired the Draka not least because he knew they were harder. "But they've all got the right to carry weapons. Somethin' in their constitution—the . . . fifth amendment?" He shrugged. He couldn't precisely remember the briefing. "So we got to deal with more goddamn francs-tireurs than you can shake a stick at, on top of whatever real soldiers—holdouts—they've got left."

  He scowled at the last sentence. The USA wasn't pacified. Hell, it wasn't even occupied. That was his job. It was a nasty one, too. He wondered what his chances were of getting old enough to retire and buy himself a tavern or something. He shrugged against the weight of body armor. Not so good, probably.

  "That one old bastard got Boris right between the eyes." Usama spoke with grudging professional respect. "Had to be five, six hundred meters, too. Good shot."

  Corporal Soshangane was a Zulu; his folk had been under the Draka yoke longer than almost any other. From what he'd told Hans, he was a sixth-generation Janissary, and he thought very much like his masters. "Damn fools," he said now, in accents that might almost have belonged to a von Shrakenberg. "Kill a coupla us, cost 'em that whole damn town."

  "I don't think they reckon that way," Hans said. "This here's like it was in Europe fifty years ago, only more so. They ain't gonna go down easy."

  "Long as they go down." Soshangane grinned, white teeth extra bright in his dark face. "Some o' the girls, they go down mighty nice."

  "Ja," Hans said, a word that did duty for yeah in the English spoken between the Rhine and the Oder. He ground the cigarette out under his bootheel. "Come on—into the woods." He pointed north and south. "We aren't gonna let those bastards go in all by themselves, are we?" Nobody said no. You didn't let your buddies down. The Janissaries fought by few rules, but that was one of them.