We Install (7 page)

“Is that the one you were talking about?” the lance-corporal asked Lothar Zimmer. The little swarthy fellow nodded. He got to his feet and trudged off. Sack followed, glad to be with someone who knew where he was going.

What he found when he got to the vehicle park dismayed him. Only a fraction of the division's panzers, self-propelled guns, and mechanized infantry combat vehicles stood there. To eke them out and give the Forty-First
Panzergrenadiers
a fraction of the mobility they'd once enjoyed, a motley assortment of captured Red equipment and impressed civilian cars and trucks sprawled across the asphalt. Maintenance personnel were still slapping hasty tape crosses onto their doors and sides to identify them as German.

“Look at all this soft-skinned junk,” Sack blurted. “The Reds won't need missiles to take it out. They won't even need machine guns. An officer's pistol ought to do the job nicely.”

“They'll get some of us there, wherever ‘there' is,” Zimmer said, shrugging. “Once that happens, we're on our own, but that's the way it always works.”

To Sack's relief, a lieutenant waved him into a mechanized infantry combat vehicle. He peered out through the
Marder
's firing ports as it began to roll. At least he had a modicum of armor between himself and the unfriendly intentions of people in the wrong uniforms.

Somebody inside the
Marder
came up with a name for where it was heading: Perayaslav, about eighty kilometers south and east along the Dnieper.
An hour's drive on the Autobahn
, Sack thought. It took the rest of the day and all night. Not only did the alleged highway stop being paved not far out of Kiev—which slowed the impressed vehicles to a crawl—the enemy had it under heavy bombardment from artillery and rockets both.

An antitank missile fired at extreme range from across the Dnieper took out the lead panzer and forced everyone else to detour around its blazing hulk. That made delays even worse. Jets blazoned with red stars arrogantly screamed past overhead. They raked the column with cannon fire and more missiles. The
Luftwaffe
was nowhere to be found. The Germans expended their whole stock of surface-to-air missiles before they got halfway to Perayaslav. As far as Sack could tell, they hit nothing.

He must have dozed in spite of the racket and the rough ride, for he woke with a jerk when the
Marder
stopped. He had to piss so bad, it was a miracle he hadn't wet himself while he slept. Artillery boomed ahead. He licked his lips. The firing sounded heavy. It was almost all incoming.

Somebody banged on the combat vehicle's entry doors with a rifle butt. Lothar Zimmer was sitting closest to them. When he opened the metal clamshell, whoever was outside handed him a bucket full of stew. He took it with a word of thanks and set it down between the two facing rows of seats. Everyone dug in with his own spoon. It was vile stuff, mostly potatoes and grease by the taste, but it filled the belly.

Sack took advantage of the lull to leap out and empty his bladder. Another
Marder
had stopped in the mud a few meters away. One of its crewmen—likely the driver, judging by his fancy helmet packed full of electronics—stood by his machine doing exactly the same thing as Sack. The little the lance-corporal could see of his face looked gloomy. “We're for it now,” the fellow said.

“What do you know?” Sack asked eagerly. Nobody bothered telling infantrymen anything, but a driver couldn't help but get the word over the radio net.

The man answered, “The Reds are pushing hard. You can hear the guns, can't you?” He didn't give Sack a chance to answer. “Their field engineers have done something sneaky, too. They've built their pontoon bridges half a meter
under
the surface of the fucking Dnieper. Makes 'em harder to spot, a lot harder to knock out, but men and panzers just keep on coming across.”

“Bad,” Sack said. The driver grudged him a nod, then climbed back into his fighting vehicle through the front hatch. He slammed the hatch down after him. The
Marder
's diesel roared. Its tracks spat mud as it headed toward the fighting.

When Sack returned to his own
Marder
, he passed on the news the driver had given him. His comrade's faces said they were as delighted as he had been. The combat vehicle got moving again.

A roar from the turret announced the launch of an antitank missile. Sack clutched his assault rifle and hoped it hit. If it didn't, the Red panzer would return fire, and the
Marder
wasn't armored against the big, fast, hard-hitting shells a 150-millimeter panzer cannon threw.

The
Marder
didn't blow up in the next few seconds, so the missile must have done its job. The combat vehicle stopped about a minute later. “This is where you get out, lads,” the driver announced over the intercom. “Good luck.
Gott mit uns
.”

“
Gott mit uns
,” Sack echoed as he reluctantly left the relative safety of the
Marder
. He and his mates formed a skirmish line, each man six or eight meters from his comrades. The driver let them get a couple of hundred meters ahead, then followed, his cannon ready to deal with any threats their personal weapons could not handle.

Glancing left and right, Sack saw more men heading up into the front lines with his squad, more combat vehicles moving with them to provide covering fire. He and his comrades were pushing through the battered German trench lines when the real Red artillery bombardment began. He leaped into a hole (he had endless variety from which to choose), held his helmet on his head with one hand, and waited for the nightmare to end.

It lasted two solid hours that seemed two years long. The ground shook and jerked, as if in unending earthquake. The Reds were giving it everything they had, rockets, shells, all different calibers, every weapon firing fast as it could. They wouldn't have much ammunition left when the barrage was over, Sack thought dazedly somewhere in the middle of it, but that might not matter, either.

The pounding let up at last. When Sack raised his head, he saw the German lines, already cratered, now resembled nothing so much as a freshly plowed field. Through the rain, through the mud, through the rubble, seemingly straight for him, came the Red ground attack.

It was, in its way, a magnificent sight. The green-clad troops stormed forward almost shoulder to shoulder, assault rifles blazing, a wave of men to swamp the Germans who still survived. Panzers and armored fighting vehicles rumbled forward in their wake; jets and assault helicopters roared overhead with missiles and cannon to engage German armor.

Sack wanted to empty his magazine into the onrushing horde. But if he and his comrades opened up too soon, the Asiatics would just dive for cover before enough of them could be slaughtered. “Fire discipline,” he said out loud, reminding himself.

He and his comrades showed their training. Almost everyone started shooting at the same instant. The pieces of German artillery that hadn't been knocked out added their voices to the fire fight. The infantry in green went down like wheat cut too soon. But as the first wave fell, another took its place.

A brilliant white flash marked an enemy panzer brewing up; some infantryman's wire-guided missile had struck home. But it was like fighting the hydra; for every head cut off, two more took its place. Sack scrambled backwards to keep from being outflanked and cut off.

He looked back toward the
Marder
that had brought him into action. It was burning. How many divisions had the Reds managed to crowd into their fucking bridgehead, anyhow, and how much heavy equipment?
Too many and too much
was all he could think as he retreated past the combat vehicle's corpse.

Something moved behind the
Marder
. As if it had a life of its own, his assault rifle swung toward the motion. But before he squeezed off a burst, he saw it was Lothar Zimmer. He pointed the muzzle of his weapon at the ground. “You still alive, Zimmer?” he croaked.

“I think so,” the other German said. He looked as battered, as overwhelmed, as Sack felt. Staring at the lance-corporal as if Sack had all the answers, he asked, “What do we do now?”

“Try as best we can to get out, I guess,” Sack answered. It wasn't going to be easy; firing came not only from in front of them and from both flanks, but from the rear as well. While their little piece of the battle hadn't gone too badly, overall the Reds were forcing the breakthrough they'd sought.

The two Germans started north, back toward Kiev. Sack hoped the enemy would take no special notice of them in the rain and the confusion. For a couple of kilometers, those hopes were realized. But just when he began to think he and Zimmer really might get away free, a burst of machine-gun fire sent them diving into a ditch.

The fire let up for a moment. “Surrender or die!” a Red yelled in mangled German.

“What do we do?” Zimmer hissed.

“What
can
we do?” Sack said hopelessly. But if he stood up, even with his hands in the air, he was afraid the machine gunner would cut him in half. Then he remembered the propaganda leaflet he'd stuffed in his pocket, intending to use it for toilet paper. He dug it out, scanned it quickly.
“Tow shong!”
he shouted, as loud as he could.
“Tow shong, tow shong!”

“Tow shong?”
The Red pronounced it differently; Sack hoped he'd been understood. Then the enemy switched to German: “Surrender?”

“
Ja
, surrender.
Tow shong!
” Now Sack did stand. After a moment, Zimmer followed his lead. Their assault rifles lay in the mud at their feet, along with their dreams.

Several green-clad soldiers ran up to them. Grins on their flat, high-cheekboned faces, their almond eyes glittering with excitement, they searched the Germans, stripped off their watches, their aid kits, and everything else small and movable they had on their persons.

One of the Reds gestured with his weapon. Hands high, Sack and Zimmer stumbled toward captivity. A soldier of the Chinese People's Liberation Army followed to make sure they did not try to escape.

HOXBOMB

We've built our technology on chemistry and physics. We're just starting to get a handle on genetics and biochemistry. Most of the coming century's big advances will probably be in those areas, and chances are people alive now would have no more idea what to make of what they'll have in a hundred years than someone from 1850 swept forward a hundred years would know what to do with a television set … or an atomic bomb. And aliens who based their civilization on biotech would be just as wary of our mastery of the other stuff as we would by what they could do. This is a story of that kind of meeting.

T
hey met by twilight.

The hours when day died and those when night passed away were the only ones humans and Snarre't comfortably shared. Jack Cravath thought it was a minor miracle humans and Snarre't shared anything on Lacanth C.

You had to try to do business with them. Everybody said so. Everybody, in this case, was much too likely to be right. If the two races didn't get along, they had plenty of firepower to devastate a pretty good stretch of this galactic arm. Black-hole generators, ecobombs, Planck disruptors, tailored metaviruses … The old saying was, they'd fight the war after this one with rocks. Not this time around—there'd be nobody left to do any fighting, and the rocks would be few and far between, too.

By one of those coincidences that made you think Somebody had it in for both species, they'd found Lacanth C at the same time 150 years earlier. They'd both liked the world. What was not to like? It was a habitable planet, as yet unscrewed by intelligent life of its own. They both wanted it. They both needed it, too. In lieu of a coin flip, stone-paper-scissor, or that spiral-arm-wrecking war, they decided to settle it jointly.

Codominium, they called it. On Earth, such arrangements went back to the seventh century CE—ancient days indeed—when the Byzantines and Arabs shared Cyprus for a while. The Snarre't had precedents of their own. Jack Cravath didn't know the details about those; he just knew there were some.

And he knew codominium worked—as well as it worked, which often wasn't very—only because all the alternatives that anybody could see were worse. His own alternatives were none too good right this minute, either. By choice, he would have closed his scooter dealership when the sun set and gone home to dinner with his newly pregnant wife. But that would have shown interspecies insensitivity. You didn't do such things on Lacanth C, not if you had anywhere close to your proper complement of marbles you didn't.

He sat in his office instead, while darkness deepened around him. The ceiling lights began to glow a dull, dim orange. As far as anybody could tell, that amount and shade of illumination annoyed both races equally.

In a little more than an hour, when it was full dark outside, he could legitimately close. Then he could use his IR goggles to get out of the interspecies business district in Latimer and back to the human residential zone, where such perverse curiosities as street lights were allowed. His stomach growled. Beverly's good chicken stew tonight. He was hungry, dammit.

He could watch the street from his dealership. Humans went by on scooters or, occasionally, on Snarre'i drofs or caitnops. Far more Snarre't rode their beasts, but some of them sat on scooters. That was why—aside from law and custom—he kept the dealership open into their hours. Every so often, he did business with them. He wasn't allergic­ to fattening up his credit balance, not even a little bit.

That wasn't the only reason he was always happy when he unloaded a scooter on a Snarre'. Drofs and caitnops creeped him out. They looked like nothing so much as Baba Yaga's house, only with most of the house part gone: oversized yellow scaly legs with a platform for the rider and handholds through which he controlled his drof. Press here, and it went forward. Press
here
, and it stopped. Press here, and it turned right. Press
here
—left. Press here and
here
, and it opened its mouth so you could give it some yummy drof treats.

He shivered. The Snarre't had a technology that mostly matched and sometimes outdid humanity's. But theirs was biotech from the ground up, with mechanical gadgets as relatively recent high-tech innovations. It wasn't the way humanity had done things, but it worked.

Caitnops and drofs did what they did about as reliably as scooters did the same thing. Human programmers and engineers had loudly insisted biocomputers could never come close to electronic gadgets … till the Snarre't showed they were talking through their hats.

For their part, the Snarre't thought the idea of the Turing test was the funniest thing they'd ever heard. Of course computers were intelligent, as far as they were concerned. How not, when they were built from neurons? And the Snarre't had left in the pain response, even amplified it, to make sure their servants didn't turn into masters. Jack shivered again.

He looked at his watch. Half an hour till he could bail out. He thought about chicken stew, and about Bev, and about the baby due in 270 days or so (talking about months was pretty silly on a world without a moon—Lacanth C's year was divided into neat, tidy tenths). Beverly'd found out within hours that she'd caught. That was a Snarre'i-derived test; humanity's reagents weren't nearly so sensitive. He smiled. The baby would be their first.

The door opened. Two Snarre't walked in. Jack muttered under his breath. Bev wouldn't be happy if he came home late. But she would if he made a sale. “I greet you,” he called to them in Snarre'l.

“Hello,” they chorused in English. Using the other race's language first showed you had manners.

Returning to English himself, Jack asked, “What can I do for you today?”

Both Snarre't showed their teeth in the gesture that meant they were amused. They had more teeth, and sharper ones, than humans. Their noses were three vertical slits in their round faces, their eyes enormous and reflective, as suited nocturnal creatures. They had big ears that twitched, ears that put the legendary Alfred E. Newman to shame. They didn't wear clothes; they had gray or brown pelts. All in all, they looked more like tarsiers than any other earthly beasts … but they didn't look a hell of a lot like tarsiers, either.

“We would like to buy from you some meat,” the taller one said in—probably—her own language. The babelfish in Cravath's left ear translated the word. The wider rictus on the other Snarre's face translated the sarcasm.

Thinking of Beverly, Cravath answered, deadpan, “I can give you a good deal on chicken stew.”

He didn't know exactly how the Snarre't turned English into their tongue. Maybe a worm in their brains—and, with them, it would be a literal worm, not a gadget—did the translating. Maybe … Well, since he didn't know, what point to worrying about it?

The shorter Snarre' said, “We are interested in trying the Model 27 two-seater. If we like it, perhaps we will also get from you some chicken stew.”

They both thought that was pretty funny. Jack Cravath dutifully smiled. Were they a mated pair? Jack thought so, but he wasn't sure. Among Snarre't, females were usually taller than males, but not always. Their sex organs were neatly internal unless they were mating, and females had no boobs: despite the fur, they weren't mammals, but fed their young on regurgitated food like birds.

“A Model 27, you say?” the dealer echoed. Both Snarre't splayed their long, spindly fingers wide: their equivalent of a nod. Cravath went on, “Well, come with me, and I'll show you one. What sort of payment did you have in mind?”

There was the rub. Humans had a burgeoning economy, and the Snarre't had a burgeoning economy, and the two were about as much like each other as apples and field hockey. Each species' notion of what constituted wealth seemed strange, stranger, strangest to the other. That turned every deal into a barter—and a crapshoot.

“Knowledge, perhaps,” the taller alien said. “We have a brain that is getting old but is not yet foolish with age. This might be a good enough price, yes?”

“It might, yes.” Jack tried not to sound too excited. How much good did that do? If they got a whiff of his pheromones, they'd know he was. Snarre'i brains intrigued human scientists the same way human electronics fascinated the aliens. Different ways of doing the same thing … He was pretty sure he could get more for even an old one than a Model 27 was worth. “Step into the showroom with me, why don't you?”

“We will do that,” the taller one said, and they did.

He made his best pitch for the Model 27. He talked about its speed, its reliability, and its environment-friendly electric motor. “You don't have to clean up after it, either, the way you do with your drof.”

“We don't mind. Drofshit is for us pleasant—more than pleasant—to eat,” the shorter Snarre' said. Jack kept his face straight. You couldn't expect aliens to act like people: the oldest cliché in the book, but true. They weren't asking
him
to eat candy turds.
A good thing, too
, he thought. But they'd bred their animals to do that, which was not the sort of thing people would ever have thought of … he hoped.

“May we test drive?” the taller one asked.

“Sure,” Jack said. “Let me check the headlight to make certain it's not up too bright.” In the human part of Latimer, people needed headlights when they drove at night. The kind of light levels humans preferred would have blinded Snarre't, though. When the aliens had to go out by day, they wore sun goggles even more elaborate than the IR jobs humans needed to see at night without raising havoc among the Snarre't.

“Thank you for your courtesy,” both aliens chorused, and he could hope they meant it.

The headlight was okay. Cravath asked, “Whichever one of you is driving is allowed to use a scooter? You are of the proper age and know how?”

“Oh, yes,” the Snarre't said together. The taller one pulled what looked like a caterpillar out of its fur and breathed on the thing, which glowed a faint pink. “You see?” When a Snarre' asked if a human saw, the alien always sounded doubtful. To them, humans
didn't
see very well, and being adapted to do best in daylight didn't count.

But Jack Cravath nodded. That response on that thing meant the same as a green light on a human computer reader scanning a driver's license. He didn't know why, but he knew it did.

“Shall we try it, then?” the shorter one said. “Our drof is yours if we fail to return the scooter.”

Jack wanted a drof like a hole in the head. But what could he say? “Go ahead,” he answered. “Come back in twenty minutes.”

“Agreed,” the two Snarre't said. The taller one got on the scooter in front. The shorter one sat behind. Jack held the door open for them. Out they went. They turned the headlight on. The orange glow was just bright enough to warn humans who weren't wearing IR goggles. That was what interspecies law required, and they lived up to it … barely.

Out on the street, the drof's big eyes—much like those of the Snarre't themselves—swung to follow the scooter as it purred away. How smart
were
drofs? Humans had acquired a good many, just as the Snarre't had a fair number of scooters by now. It remained an open question, though. Some scientists maintained they were only bundles of reflexes; others insisted more was going on.

As for the Snarre't, they weren't talking. Nobody human was even sure the question meant anything to them.

Jack pulled his phone off his belt to warn Bev he'd be late. “What? You've got Furballs in the office?” she said.

“Well, they're taking a test drive now.” Jack was glad the two Snarre't were, too. If their translator picked up what his wife said, they could nail her on a racism charge—or threaten to, and screw him to the wall on the scooter deal. The two races sharing Lacanth C didn't have to love each other, but they did have to make nice where the other guys were listening. Cravath continued, “Anyway, I'll get back as soon as I can. Go ahead and eat. I'll nuke mine when I come in.”

“Okay,” Beverly said. She was so freshly pregnant, she hadn't even started morning sickness yet. Her appetite was still fine. “Don't be too long.”

“I'll try not to. It isn't just up to me. Love you, babe. 'Bye.” Jack stowed the phone.

He looked at his watch. Naturally, the Snarre't didn't use hours and minutes; they had their own time units. Translators were usually pretty good about going back and forth with those. But if this one had screwed up …

Nineteen minutes and forty-one seconds after they left, the two aliens drove back into the showroom. “It is a very different sort of conveyance,” the taller one said. “Less responsive than a drof—you cannot deny that.”

“But peppier,” the shorter one said. “Definitely peppier.”

The taller Snarre's big googly eyes swung towards its partner or friend or whatever the shorter alien was. Jack didn't know for sure, but he guessed that meant the same it would have with people.
Don't praise what we're shopping for. You'll run up the price
.

If the shorter one noticed, he—she?—didn't let on. “The price we proposed before is acceptable?” the Snarre' asked Jack. “For the scooter, our aging but still functional brain?”

The babelfish translation made that sound pretty silly, as if the aliens would open up their heads and pour out whatever was inside. But Jack Cravath spoke formally: “Yes, the price you proposed before is acceptable.”

“Draw up the contracts, then,” the taller one said.

“How old is the brain you want to trade for the scooter?”

“Six years. Six years of Lacanth C.”

“Okay.” Jack spoke into the office business system. It spat out contracts in English and in Snarre'l. Jack reviewed the English versions to make sure they had the deal straight. He signed all the copies, thumbprinted them, and added a retinal scan to each one. The aliens also signed in their angular squiggles. They pressed a special area on each contract to an olfactory gland under the base of their stumpy tails. Those chemical signatures were supposed to be even more distinctive and harder to counterfeit than retinal scans.