“I… see,” Gorppet said slowly. “No, I am not in the habit of doing any such thing with females. I have mated with females who have tasted ginger, but such tasting has always been at their initiative.”

“I understand,” Hozzanet said. “Many males have done that here on Tosev 3, I among them. Whether we like it or not, the herb is changing our sexual patterns here, and will continue to do so. But that, at the moment, is a patch of scales shed from one’s back. I ask again: are you interested in serving in Intelligence?”

“I… may be, superior sir,” Gorppet said. “May I have a day to think on it?” Hozzanet made the affirmative gesture. Gorppet assumed the posture of respect and left the tent. He didn’t know what he’d expected on visiting brigade Intelligence, but he was sure he hadn’t expected an invitation to join it.

He was on his way back to his small group when a beffel trotted across the path in front of him. It turned one eye turret his way, gave him a friendly beep, and went on about its business.

“And hello to you, too, little fellow,” Gorppet said: a beffel was a welcome reminder of Home. He’d walked on for several paces before he paused to wonder what in the Emperor’s name a beffel was doing in the midst of the wreckage of the Greater German Reich.

DOWN BUT NOT OUT. Monique Dutourd had seen those signs so many times in Marseille, she was sick of them. She was, by late summer, sick of everything that had anything to do with her home town. She was sick of wreckage. She was sick of high prices everywhere she looked. She was especially sick of the tent city in which she had to live, and of being crammed into a tent with her brother and his lover.

French officials had promised things would be back to normal by now. She hadn’t believed the promises, and her skepticism was proving justified. The French hadn’t done anything but what the Germans told them to do for a solid generation. Now the Germans were gone. The French bureaucrats were on their own. With no one to tell them what to do, they didn’t do much of anything.

Monique picked her way through one of the market squares. Everybody who had peaches and apricots wanted an arm and a leg for them. She scowled. Shipping hadn’t come back the way the bureaucrats promised it would, either.

She almost ran into a Lizard. “Pardonnez-moi, monsieur,” the creature said in hissing French. Monique wanted to laugh in its pointed, scaly face, but she didn’t. In a way, dealing with someone who couldn’t tell whether she was male or female was refreshing. She wished a good many of her crude countrymen had the same problem. She wished even more that Dieter Kuhn had had it.

For once, thinking of the SS Sturmbannfuhrer made her smile. Odds were, he’d died when the Lizards detonated their explosive-metal bomb on Marseille. If he hadn’t, he’d gone back to the Reich once France regained her freedom. Any which way, he was out of her life for good.

Thinking of his being out of her life for good made her a lot more cheerful than she would have been otherwise. That, in turn, made her more inclined to spend her money-well, actually, her brother’s money-on the fruit she wanted than she would have been otherwise.

Stringbag full of apricots in a wire basket behind her, she rode a battered bicycle back to the tent city. She’d had a far better machine before the bomb fell. Now she was glad to have any bicycle at all. The chain she’d used to secure it while she shopped weighed more than it did.

Commotion rocked the tent city when she reached it. A squad of hard-faced men in uniform were trundling a man and woman into a waiting motorcar. A crowd followed, yelling and cursing and throwing things. Monique couldn’t tell if they were pelting and reviling the captives or their captors.

“What’s going on?” she asked a man who was just standing there watching. With luck, that made him something close to neutral.

“Purification squad,” he answered, and jerked a thumb toward the captives. “They say those two were in bed with the Boches.”

“Oh, are they finally down here?” Monique said, and the man nodded. Now that France was free again, everyone who’d collaborated with the Nazis in any way was all at once fair game. Since the country had been under German rule for a quarter of a century, the new government could make an example of almost anyone it chose. No one said a word in protest, though. To complain was to appear unpatriotic, un-French, and probably pro-German: and therefore a fitting target for the purification squads.

They’d been in the news for weeks, fanning out through northern France to get rid of people described as “traitors to the Republic.” But everything reached Marseille more slowly than almost anywhere else. Till now, traitors here had been allowed to go on about their business like anybody else.

One of the men from the purification squad drew his pistol and fired it into the air. That gave the angry crowd pause. It let the men get the couple they’d captured into the automobile. Some of them got into it, too. Others piled into another motorcar behind it. Both cars drove away in a hurry.

“Are they really collaborators?” Monique asked.

“Ferdinand and Marie? Not that I ever heard of, and I’ve known them for years.” With a shrug, the man went on, “It could be that I did not know everything there is to know about what they did. But it could also be that someone who does not care for them for whatever reason-or for no reason at all-wrote out a denunciation.”

He said no more. Had he said any more, he might have got into trouble himself. Twenty-five years under the Nazis had taught wariness. They’d also taught Frenchmen, once lovers of freedom, to write denunciations against their neighbors for any reason or, as the man had said, for none.

“Do the purification squads ever let people go once they seize them?” Monique asked.

She got only another shrug by way of answer. The man with whom she’d been talking had evidently decided he’d said everything he was going to say. Monique shrugged, too. She couldn’t blame him for that. Under the Germans, talking to strangers had been a good way to land in trouble. Things didn’t look to have changed too much with the coming of the new regime.

With the motorcars gone, the crowd that had followed the purification squad out to them began to break up. Monique walked her bicycle to the tent she shared with Pierre and Lucie. She brought the bicycle into the tent, too. The folk of Marseille were notoriously light-fingered even at the best of times. In times like these, a bicycle left outside for the evening was an open invitation to theft.

“Hello,” Monique said as she ducked her way through the tent flap and came inside. She wondered if her brother would be dickering with Keffesh or some other Lizard, and would have to explain her presence. What infuriated her most was that he always sounded so apologetic.

But he and Lucie were alone in the tent this evening. Lucie was cooking something that smelled good on a little aluminum stove. Pointing to it, Monique asked, “Is that Wehrmacht issue?”

“Probably,” Lucie answered. She went on, “If it is, what difference does it make?”

“I don’t know for certain that it makes any difference,” Monique said. “But I wouldn’t let the purification squads know you’ve got a German stove.”

Patiently, Pierre Dutourd said, “Monique, probably seven-eighths of the people in this camp are cooking off Wehrmacht — issue stoves. There are a lot more of them in France than there are French-made stoves these days.”

“Without doubt, you have reason,” Monique said. “But will the purification squads care even the least little bit about reason?”

“Oh.” Pierre nodded. His jowls wobbled a little. Monique was glad she was slimmer than her older brother. “I don’t think we need to worry about the purification squads. We have enough friends among the Race to make it very likely indeed that they’ll leave us alone.”

“I hope you’re right.” Monique was willing to admit he might well be. The Lizards didn’t formally occupy France, as the Germans had. But the French were still too weak, still too unused to ruling themselves, to have an easy time standing on their own two feet. If they weren’t going to lean on the Nazis, the Race was their other logical prop.

That savory odor Monique smelled turned out to come from a rabbit stew full of wild mushrooms. With a tolerable rose, with some cheese and afterwards the fruit Monique had bought, it made a good supper.

Monique and Lucie washed the dishes in a bucket of water. Then Lucie and Pierre settled down, as they usually did of evenings, to hard-fought games of backgammon. Backgammon held no interest for Monique. She wished she had her reference books. She never had finished that article on the cult of Isis in Gallia Narbonensis. Her books, like the apartment from which her brother had spirited her, were bound to be radioactive dust these days.

She sighed, wondering if she would be able to find a teaching position in the new France. She was sick of living with her brother and Lucie. But the Reichsmarks the Race had given her not so long ago were worth hardly anything at the moment. New French francs were coming into circulation, and German money was shrinking in value almost as fast as it had after the First World War. It seemed most unfair.

Her brother didn’t think so. “There!” he exclaimed in triumph after winning the game. “If we’d been playing for money, I’d own you now, Lucie.”

For all practical purposes, he did own Lucie. Monique was almost angry enough to say so, which wouldn’t have made the tent a more enjoyable place to live. Pierre and Lucie started another game. That didn’t make the tent any more enjoyable, either, not as far as Monique was concerned. Her brother and his lover, unfortunately, had other ideas, and they outnumbered her. The tyranny of democracy, she thought.

She heard footsteps outside: not the soft, skittering strides of Lizards, but the solid steps of men, and men wearing heavy shoes at that. One of them said, “Here, this is the place,” right outside the tent flap. He spoke clear, Parisian French. That should have warned Monique what would happen next, but she was taken by surprise when the men with pistols burst into the tent. The man who’d spoken outside now spoke again: “Which of you women is Monique Dutourd?”

“I am,” Monique answered automatically. “What do you want with me?”

“You were a Nazi’s whore,” the man snapped. “France needs to be cleansed of the likes of you. Come along, or you’ll be sorry.” He gestured with his pistol.