Upsetting the Balance

by Harry Turtledove

  “You have of course told them the sickness from which they are suffering is only temporary, and that they will make a full recovery,” Diebner said.

  “Yes, I’ve told them?the first group, and then the ones who replaced them when they got too sick to work.” No one had argued with Jäger when he spoke what he knew to be a lie. The thin, weary men just stared back at him. They didn’t believe a word he said. He didn’t blame them.

  Diebner shifted uncomfortably. Like Jäger, he was a fairly decent man in a nation whose regime did horrible things as a matter of course. If you weren’t directly involved in them, you could pretend they weren’t there. Even if you were directly involved, pretending not to see was one way of preserving in your own mind your sense of personal decency. Very few Wehrmacht officers admitted to knowing what the SS had done to Jews in Poland and Russia; Jäger hadn’t admitted it to himself until a Russian Jew rubbed his nose in it.

  Diebner said, “If we do not recover the nuclear material, Colonel Jäger, we are all the more likely to lose the war against the Lizards, at which point all ethical arguments become irrelevant. Whatever we must do to get it back, we have to have it.”

  Jäger turned his back and walked several paces along the parapet. Arguments from military necessity were hard to refute, and losing the war against the Lizards would be disastrous not just for Germany but for mankind as a whole. And yet—Jäger took the physicist by the arm. “When you say these things, Professor, you should know firsthand whereof you speak. Come along with me.”

  Diebner was not a small man, nor a weak one. He hung back, protesting, “This is not my concern; it is why we had you brought here. My business is with the nuclear pile itself.”

  Though a couple of centimeters shorter than the nuclear physicist, Jäger was wider through the shoulders and better trained at wrestling. Not only that, his will burned hotter. He frog-marched the reluctant Diebner off the wall and down into the bowels of Schloss Hohentübingen.

  The castle’s cellar was a different world from the light and fresh air of the wall. It was dank and gloomy; somewhere out of sight, water dripped continuously. A startled bat dropped from the roof and flew chittering between Jäger and Diebner. The physicist jumped back with a startled oath. Jäger wasn’t dragging him along any more, but he followed nonetheless; officers learned ways to get themselves obeyed.

  In happier times, the cellar had contained a monster wine cask that held 300,000 liters of Burgundy. The cask was gone now, probably chopped into firewood. In its place were the miserable cots of the prisoners who got the uranium out of the pile at Hechingen.

  “Faugh!” Diebner said, a noise of disgust.

  Jäger wrinkled his nose, too; the cellar stank, not least because the only sanitary arrangements were some buckets off in a corner. Not everything went into the buckets, either. Jäger said, “One of the symptoms many of these people seem to have is diarrhea.”

  “Yes, I knew of this in principle,” Diebner said in a small voice that suggested he was much more used to dealing with abstract principles than this reeking reality.

  “Ah.” Jäger clicked his heels in exquisite irony. “Are you also aware—in principle, of course—of the other symptoms this work brings with it?’

  “Which ones do you mean?” the physicist asked. “The burns from actually handling the metal, the loss of hair, the bleeding gums and nausea? I am familiar with these, yes, and also with the cancer that is likely to result some years from now as a result of this exposure. I know these things, Colonel.”

  “You know of them,” Jäger said coldly. “Here—see what they do to real people who are not just abstracted principles.”

  A man with a pink triangle on the front of his striped shirt was spooning cabbage soup into the mouth of a Jew who lay on a straw pallet, too sick to get up. When the Jew retched and coughed up the soup, the homosexual held his head so he would not foul himself too badly, then got a rag and put it on the patch of vomit. Then he started trying to feed the Jew again.

  “It doesn’t have to be like this,” Jäger insisted. “Maybe we do have to use condemned people, as you call them, for this work, but we don’t have to make their lot worse by treating them like beasts of burden.”

  Diebner nodded to the several wooden platforms that had been built around the edges of the cellar—incongruously, they reminded Jäger of the lifeguards’ stands by a lakeshore or along a popular stretch of riverbank. Each held, not a lifeguard in white tank top and colorful trunks, but a uniformed, helmeted guard who cradled a submachine gun. Quietly, the physicist said, “Without coercion, this work would not be done?and it must be done. For that matter, neither the guards nor we are entirely safe.”

  Jäger looked at him sharply. “How do you mean?”

  “How do you think, Colonel?” Diebner answered. “We, too—and the guards—are exposed to these radioactive materials, at lower levels than the prisoners, yes, but certainly exposed. What the long-term consequences of this may be, I cannot say with certainty, but I doubt they will be good. We have lined the roof of this cellar with lead to keep the Lizards from detecting the radioactivity gathered here; that we are close to Hechingen will help account for a higher level than might otherwise be expected, and gives us some added security.”

  “I—see,” Jäger said. He rubbed his chin, remembering the raid in which he, along with Russians and other Germans, had stolen explosive metal from the Lizards, and remembering riding across Poland with the German share of the explosive metal stowed in lead-lined saddle bags. He wondered what he’d done to himself in the service of the Reich.

  The classically trained part of him thought of Prometheus, who’d stolen fire from the gods and brought it down to mankind. Zeus had chained Prometheus to a rock, with a vulture gnawing at his liver. The gods weren’t much in the habit of manifesting themselves these days, but Jäger wondered what might be gnawing at his own entrails.

  Despairingly, Teerts turned his eye turrets toward the heavens. Those heavens remained empty, silent if they remained so much longer, he would either starve or be recaptured—or use the one shot he was sure he could fire from his Nipponese rifle.

  He counted himself lucky not to have been recaptured already. So much of the train on which he’d been riding had gone up in flames. However savage and backwards they were, though, the Big Uglies were not stupid enough to take his demise for granted. A search would be mounted. Teerts was gloomily certain of that.

  A little stream tinkled by the stand of brush where he was holed up; at night he could come out to drink. He’d caught a couple of crawling and scurrying things and eaten them raw, but hunger gained on him regardless. He did his best to remember how used to hunger he’d got while the Nipponese were mistreating him, but it wasn’t easy.

  He hungered for ginger, too, all the way down to the depths of his spirit.

  Every once in a while, when he saw no Tosevites around, he emerged from the shrubbery during daylight, to show himself for aircraft or satellites that might be passing overhead. If they’d spotted him, they’d certainly given no sign of it.

  Now he lay curled up in a nest he’d made of branches and twigs and dry leaves. It was the sort of thing in which an animal might live, not a male of the Race. The Nipponese had done their best to make him into an animal, and failed. Now he was doing it to himself.

  A noise in the sky—Teerts’ head came up, but only for a moment. Some of the flying creatures of Tosev 3 were noisy as they made their way through the air. His hearing diaphragms stretched tight with hope, he’d mistaken their wingbeats for the thutter of a rescue helicopter again and again. He couldn’t fool himself any more.

  But this sound swelled and swelled. Teerts jumped to his feet, crying the Emperor’s name. From above, in a voice like thunder, came a call in his own language: “Male of the Race, show yourself! This is hostile airspace; we cannot stay long!” The accent was pure and clean—that of Home. Teerts had been listening to the mushy, barking way the Nipponese mangled hi
s speech for so long, he needed a moment to recognize this was how it should be spoken.

  He sprang from cover, waved his arms frantically, and did everything but turn backflips in the wild effort to make himself as visible as he could. His swiveling eyes caught sight of the helicopter—and one of the crewmales saw him, too, and the big, ungainly, ever so beautiful machine swung in his direction. Its rotor kicked up gravel and dust; nictitating membranes slid across his eyes to protect them from flying grit.

  The helicopter hovered, its landing wheels not quite touching the ground. Its side door came open; a male inside let down a chain-link ladder. Teerts was already running toward the copter. He scrambled aboard. “We’ve got him!” the male shouted to the pilot and weapons officer in their cockpit forward.

  The fellow hauled in the ladder, slammed and dogged the door. The helicopter was already gaining altitude and scurrying out toward the sea. “Thank you!” Teerts gasped. “The Emperor grant you bounty. You don’t know—”

  “Don’t thank me yet,” the crewmale answered. He hurried to a machine gun that stuck out one of the windows. “We’re a long way from safe. We’ve got a killercraft overhead, but if the Big Uglies send enough aircraft after us, they’re liable to catch up with us and shoot us down. They’re a lot faster than we are.” He turned one eye back toward Teerts. “Who are you, anyway?”

  “Teerts, killercraft pilot and flight leader,” Teerts answered. Stating his specialization and rank made him consciously aware for the first time in a very long while that he was without his body paint. That didn’t seem to bother his rescuer, who said, “Good. You know how to handle one of these things, then.” He patted the machine gun. “In case I get hit, keep shooting till we go into the water.”

  “It shall be done, superior sir,” Teerts said. Actually, he outranked the male at the gun, but he was not part of the helicopter crew—and, after so long in Nipponese captivity, he was used to attaching honorifics to anyone with whom he spoke. As the land of Nippon receded behind them, his wits began to work again. “You couldn’t have flown straight here from any land the Race controls: you must have used in-flight refueling.”

  “That’s right,” the crewmale said. “We’re on our way out for more hydrogen now, too. That should be enough to take us back to base.” He paused, listening to the microphone fastened to one hearing diaphragm. “Pilot says our killercraft cover just shot down three of the Big Uglies’ aircraft and the rest have broken off pursuit. Now I really start to think we’re going to be all right.”

  “Emperor be praised,” Teerts said, dropping his eye turrets to the grimy mats on the floor of the helicopter. When he raised them again, he asked, “How is the conquest faring? I’ve been away from our kind for what has to be more than a year.”

  “Between you, me, and this gun here, not so well,” the crewmale answered. “We were driving the Russkis hard, and then they somehow exploded an atomic bomb and made us stop there. These Big Uglies are a thousand times worse than we expected when we got to this stinking planet.”

  “You don’t know the half of it,” Teerts said feelingly. “The Nipponese told me about—gloated about—the Russkis’ atomic bomb. I was afraid they were telling the truth, but I wasn’t sure.” He suddenly sat bolt upright on the hard, uncomfortable seat. “They’re working on their own nuclear project, too. They spent endless time interrogating me about atomic energy. They got everything out of me, too. That’s how I managed to escape: they were taking me somewhere else so they could ask me about different things.”

  “We’ll send that news upstairs, by the Emperor,” the crewmale exclaimed, lowering his eyes as Teerts had. “And after that, unless I miss my guess, we’ll have a present for these Big Uglies. You can show us where this work was being done?”

  “The city was Tokyo,” Teerts answered. “Where in the city—”

  “—Likely won’t matter,” the crewmale finished for him.

  Teerts shivered. The male was probably right: the Nipponese would discover firsthand what nuclear weapons were like. They were only Big Uglies, and vicious ones to boot, but did they deserve that? Whether they did or not, he would have bet they were going to get it.

  No point in arguing about that; the decision would come from levels far higher in the hierarchy than himself or the crewmale. He said, “Do you have any food here? The Nipponese didn’t give me a lot to eat.”

  The crewmale unsnapped a pouch on the side of the helicopter wall, pulled out a couple of ration packs, and tossed them to Teerts. They were unheated and inherently unexciting: just fuel for the body to keep a male going until he had a chance to stop and rest and eat something better. Teerts thought he’d never eaten anything so wonderful in his life.

  “After so long without the tastes of home, this may be the best meal I ever had,” he said ecstatically. His tongue cleansed the hard outer surfaces of his mouth. Every crumb it encountered brought him fresh delight.

  “I’ve heard others we rescued say the same thing,” the crewmale answered. “That may be true for them, but I just can’t see it.” He let his mouth fall open to show he didn’t expect to be taken altogether seriously.

  Teerts laughed, too; he remembered the rude jokes he and the rest of his flight had made about ration packs in the days before he’d been captured. He also remembered something else, remembered it with a physical longing more intense than anything he’d ever known outside of mating season. Hesitantly, he said, “The Nipponese fed me a Tosevite herb. They made me depend on it; my body craves it still. I don’t know what I’ll do without it.”

  To his surprise, the crewmale laughed again. He rummaged in a pouch he wore on one of his belts, pulled out a tiny plastic vial, and offered it to Teerts. “Who says you have to do without it, friend? Here, have a taste on me.”

  Liu Han grunted as the labor pain washed over her. “Oh, that is a good one!” Ho Ma, the midwife, said enthusiastically. She’d been saying that for a long time now. She went on, “Soon the baby will come, and then you will be happy.” She’d been saying that for a long time, too, which only proved she didn’t know Liu Han very well.

  Several midwives had set up shop in the prison camp. Liu Han recognized the red-tasseled signs they set up outside their huts, and knew what the characters on those signs said even if she could not read them: “light cart and speedy horse” on one side and “auspicious grandmother-in-law” on the other. The midwife who’d worked in her now-wrecked village had had just the same sign.

  Ttomalss said, “Move aside, please, female Ho Ma, so the camera can see as it should.”

  The midwife grumbled under her breath but moved aside. The little scaly devils were paying her extravagantly in silver and food and even, she’d boasted to Liu Han, in tobacco they’d got from who could say where. They had to pay her extravagantly to ignore the bright lights they’d put into Liu Han’s hut, to ignore their presence and that of their cameras, and to ignore the way that, contrary to all custom and decency, they’d insisted on Liu Han’s being naked through the entire delivery so those cameras could do their work as the little scaly devils thought proper.

  To the scaly devils’ payment, Liu Han had added several dollars Mex from her own pocket to persuade Ho Ma not to gossip about the humiliations she would witness. The midwife had agreed at once—for money, a midwife would agree to almost anything. Whether she would keep her promise afterward was a different question.

  Another contraction shook Liu Han. Ho Ma peered between her legs. “I can see the top of the baby’s head,” she said. “Lots of nice black hair . . . but then, the father had proper black hair even if he was a foreign devil, didn’t he?”

  “Yes,” Liu Han said wearily. Bobby Fiore’s being the baby’s father would just add to the scandal of this already extremely irregular delivery. Liu Han feared she could never bribe Ho Ma enough to be sure of keeping her quiet.

  Then her body made its own demands, and she stopped worrying about what Ho Ma would say. The urge to push the baby out of her
became overwhelming. She held her breath and bore down with all her might. A squealing grunt told of her effort.

  “Again!” Ho Ma exclaimed when Liu Han had to stop because, like a punctured pig’s bladder, she had no more air left in her. Liu Han needed no urging. She panted for a moment, gathering her strength, took a deep breath and held it, and pushed once more. The urgency seemed unbearable, as if she were passing night soil at last after months of complete constipation.

  “Once more!” Ho Ma said, reaching down to help guide the baby out. A couple of the little scaly devils with their accursed cameras shifted so they could still see what they wanted to see. Caught up in her body’s travail, Liu Han barely noticed them.

  “Here, I have the head,” the midwife said. “A pretty baby, considering who its father was—not big-nosed at all. One more push, now, and I’ll bring the baby out of you.” Liu Han pushed. Now that the head had emerged, the rest was easy. A moment later, Ho Ma said, “A girl baby.” Liu Han knew she should have been disappointed, but she was too worn to care.

  A couple of more pushes brought out the afterbirth, looking like a great bloody chunk of raw liver. One of the little scaly devils set down his camera and ran out of the hut, slamming the door behind him.

  Ho Ma tied off the umbilical cord with two pieces of silk thread. Then she cut the cord with a pair of shears. She pinched the baby’s feet. After a moment, it began to squall like an angry kitten. The midwife thrust an iron poker into the flames of the fireplace, then touched the hot tip of it to the end of the umbilical stump.

  “Do you do that to kill the little invisible demons—not the word I want, but as close as your language has—that cause sickness?” Ttomalss asked.

  “I do that because it is custom to do that,” Ho Ma answered, rolling her eyes at the foolish questions the scaly devils asked. She wrapped the afterbirth in a cloth to take it away and bury it in some out-of-the-way place.