“What will you do about recruiting soldiers from the colonization fleet?” Pshing asked. “I think you are correct that a committee would be impossibly slow.”

“I know I am correct about that,” Atvar said. “What shall I do?” He thought, then began to laugh. “One thing I shall do at once is begin to accept volunteers for training. Reffet cannot possibly object, and I think there may be a fair number of colonists who would sooner do something with themselves than sit around in their apartments watching videos all day.”

“I hope you are right, Exalted Fleetlord,” Pshing said. “I think that a reasonable calculation myself. Will you truly include females as well as males among these new soldiers?”

“Why not?” Atvar said. “Females and males mix in almost every aspect of the Race’s life; it was only for the convenience of avoiding mating issues that the conquest fleet was made all-male. Those will arise now-and will be worse, thanks to the accursed Tosevite herb-but I think we will manage quite well. Accepting females also means we have a larger group of potential recruits. We need them, and we shall get them. It is as simple as that.” Atvar hadn’t the slightest doubt he was right.

As day followed day, Monique Dutourd discovered she had lived her whole life in Marseille without knowing half her city, maybe more. When she told that to Pierre, her older brother laughed at her. “You kept up the family’s petit bourgeois respectability too well,” he said. “You wouldn’t have wanted to have much to do with the black market or anything of that sort.”

“Everybody does a little,” Monique said. “One has to, to live; without the black market, especially in the days not long after the fighting, the whole city would have starved, the way the Boches stole everything in sight.”

“Everybody does a little,” Pierre echoed, laughing still. “But you never approved, did you, little sister? And now, whether you approve or not, you’re part of it. Is it really so bad?”

Looking at the flat in which he lived, the flat in which she occupied a spare room these days, Monique had a hard time saying no. The flat was far larger and far airier than the one from which she’d escaped. And it held every sort of electronic gadget, mostly Lizard-made, under the sun: more modern conveniences than people could even imagine. Still…

“How do you stand living like a hunted animal all the time?” she burst out.

Her brother looked back at her, for once without a hint of irony on his plump, pouchy features. “I’d sooner live as a hunted animal than as one in a cage, where the keeper could reach in and pet me-or do anything else he wanted-whenever he chose.”

That held enough truth to sting. But Monique said, “I’m still in a cage, only now it’s yours and not the SS man’s.”

“You can go back any time you please,” Pierre said easily. “If you would rather do what he wants than what I want, go right ahead.”

“I’d sooner do what I want,” Monique said. She’d said that a good many times, to anyone who might listen. It hadn’t done her much good, and didn’t seem likely to do her much good this time, either.

And so it didn’t. Her brother, at least, didn’t laugh at her any more. Voice serious now, he answered, “If that is what you would rather have, you need to make yourself strong enough to be able to get it. No one will give it to you. You have to take it.”

Monique clenched her fists till her nails bit into her flesh. “You talk like you just came back from the revival of The Triumph of the Will.”

“I saw it,” he said, which made her glare harder than ever. Since he’d come back into her life, she’d never been able to faze him. He went on, “It’s marvelous propaganda. Even the Lizards say so. They study it to see how to make people do what they want. If it’s good enough for them, why shouldn’t it be good enough for me?”

Before Monique could answer, someone knocked on the front door. Pierre didn’t just open it. Instead, he checked a little television screen connected to an even littler camera hooked up to look out on the front hall. He nodded to himself. “Yes, those are the Lizards I’m expecting.” Turning to Monique, he said, “Why don’t you go shopping for a couple of hours? Spend as much of my money as you want. I’ve got some business to take care of here.”

By his tone, he was as convinced he had the right to send her away as Dieter Kuhn was that he had the right to tell her to take off her clothes and lie down on the bed. One fine day, and it wouldn’t be long, she’d have something pointed to say about that. But it wouldn’t be today. She grabbed her handbag and left the flat as soon as the Lizards outside had come in.

Except for the clothes the people wore, Porte d’Aix always made her think of Algiers as much as France. It reminded her of the unity the Mediterranean had known during Roman times and even later; Professor Pirenne’s famous thesis said the rise of first Muhammad and then Charlemagne had set the two sides of the sea moving in different directions. Scholars of Monique’s generation worked to refute Pirenne, but she, not a medievalist herself, thought he made good points.

A walk through this part of Marseille certainly supported his views of the way history worked. Streets here were short and winding and narrow-most too narrow for automobiles, quite a few too narrow for anyone but a madman to try on a bicycle. But plenty of madmen were loose; Monique had to flatten herself against brick or stone walls every few steps to keep from getting flattened as they whizzed past.

Shops and taverns and eateries were tiny, and most of them did as much business out on the street as back in the buildings that supposedly housed them. A tinker sat on a chair, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, as he soldered a patch onto a cracked iron pot that might almost have dated back to Roman days. His legs stuck out into the street, so that Monique had to step over them.

He moved the pot and patted his lap. “Here, sweetheart, you can have a seat if you care to.”

“You can solder your fly shut, if you care to,” Monique told him, “and your mouth to go with it.” Bristling, she strode on. Behind her, the tinker laughed and, without any undue haste, went back to work.

In the course of the three blocks that lay between Pierre’s flat and the local market square, she heard several dialects of French, German, Spanish (or was it Catalan?), Italian, English, and the language of the Race spoken by both men and Lizards. People changed tongues more readily than they changed trousers. As a scholar-as a former scholar, she reminded herself-she wished she could go back and forth from one language to another as readily as did some of these traders and tapmen and smugglers.

As always, the market was packed. Some merchants had stalls their families had held for generations. Others guided pushcarts through the crowds, shouting abuse and lashing out to keep people from getting too many free samples of their cooked squid or lemon tarts or brass rings polished till they looked like gold but sure to start a finger turning green in a week if you were rash enough to buy one.

Monique hung on to her purse with both hands. Plenty of thieves in the market square were a lot less subtle than the ones who sold rings. No sooner had that thought crossed her mind than a German soldier in field-gray let out a guttural bellow of fury at discovering his pocket picked. The fingersmith was sure to be long gone. Even if he hadn’t been, Monique saw no police, French or German, anywhere.

Some of the Lizards who skittered through the largely human crowd were as much at home here as any people. Monique would have guessed they were males from the conquest fleet, veterans who understood people as well as any Lizard could and were liable to be up to something shady themselves.