Upsetting the Balance

by Harry Turtledove

  Liu Han had long since resigned herself to the little devils’ ignorant and presumptuous questions. “Give me the baby, please,” she said. Just talking was an enormous effort. She remembered that crushing weariness from the son she’d borne to her husband not long before a Japanese attack killed him and the boy.

  Ho Ma handed her the child: as she’d said, a girl, her private parts swollen as newborns’ often were. Liu Han set the baby to her breast. The tiny mouth rooted, found the nipple, and began to suck. Liu Han turned to Ttomalss and said, “Have you seen everything you need? May I put my clothes on again?” She wanted to put some rags between her legs; she knew she would pass blood and other discharge there for weeks to come.

  The little scaly devil did not answer, not directly. Instead, he asked another question: “Why do you not clean off the hatchling, which is still covered with these disgusting substances from inside your body?”

  Liu Han and Ho Ma exchanged glances. How stupid scaly devils were! The midwife answered, “The baby is still too new to the world to bathe. On the third day after it is born, it will be more solid. We will wash it then.”

  Ttomalss spoke to one of his machines in his own language. The machine answered back. Liu Han had seen that too often to be amazed by it any more. The scaly devil switched to Chinese and said, “My information is that other groups of Big Uglies do not do this.”

  “Who cares what foreign devils do?” Ho Ma said scornfully. Liu Han nodded. Surely Chinese ways were best. Cradling the baby in one arm, she sat up, ever so slowly and carefully—she felt as if she’d aged about fifty years this past half-day—and reached for her tunic and trousers. When Ttomalss did not object, she set the baby down for a moment and got dressed, then picked up the child again, set it to her shoulder, and patted it on the back till it belched out the air it had sucked in with her milk.

  Ho Ma gave her some tea, a single hard-boiled egg (had she had a son, she would have got five), round sugar cakes of fermented dough, and little sponge cakes shaped like fans, pomegranates, and ingots of silver. She devoured the traditional food, for she’d eaten nothing and drunk only a glass of hot sugar water with a dried shrimp in it—she hadn’t eaten the shrimp—since her labor began. She was stuffed when she was through, but felt she could have eaten twice as much.

  One of the little scaly devils holding a camera spoke to Ttomalss in their language: “Superior sir, that was one of the most revolting processes I have ever had the misfortune to observe.”

  “I thank you for maintaining your position,” Ttomalss answered. “We may have lost valuable information when Dvench fled this hut; he failed in his duty to the Race.”

  “You are generous in your praise, superior sir,” the other scaly devil said. “Shall we now proceed with the experiment?”

  Liu Han had listened to their hisses and squeaks with half an ear; not only was she exhausted from childbirth and distracted by her newborn daughter, but she also had only a halting command of the scaly devils’ tongue. But the word “experiment” made her start paying close attention, though she tried not to show it; she’d been part of the little devils’ experiments ever since they first appeared. They had their purposes, which emphatically were not hers.

  Ttomalss said, “No, the matter is not yet urgent. Let the Chinese carry on with their ceremonies. These may conceivably produce an increased survival rate for infants: more Tosevites appear to be of this Chinese variety than any other.”

  “It shall be as you say, superior sir,” the other little devil said. “My opinion is that it’s surprising the Big Uglies retain their numbers, let alone increase them, with this system of reproduction. Passing an egg is far simpler and less dangerous and harrowing to the female involved than this gore-filled procedure.”

  “There we agree, Msseff,” Ttomalss said. “That is why we must learn to understand how and why the Tosevites do in fact increase. Perhaps the risks inherent in their reproductive processes help explain their year-round sexual activity. This is another connection we are still exploring.”

  Liu Han stopped listening. Whatever their latest experiment was, they weren’t going to tell her any more about it now. Ho Ma took up the cloth with the afterbirth and carried it away. Even Ttomalss and the other scaly devils got out of the hut, leaving Liu Han alone with the baby.

  She set the sleeping little girl in the scrapwood cradle she’d readied. As Ho Ma had said, it did look like a proper Chinese baby, for which she was glad. If she ever escaped the camp, she could raise it properly, too, with no awkward questions to answer.

  If she ever escaped the camp—Her laugh rang bitter. What chance of that, with or without the baby? Then all thought, no matter how bitter, dissolved in an enormous yawn. Liu Han lay down on top of the k’ang—the raised, heated platform in the middle of the hut—and fell deeply asleep. The baby woke her a few minutes later. She had groggy memories of her first child doing that, too.

  The next two days passed in a blur of fatigue. Ho Ma came back with food, and the little scaly devils with their cameras. Then on the third day the midwife brought incense, paper images of the gods and paper goods to sacrifice to them, and a basin to be filled with water and a spicy mixture of ground locust branch and catnip leaves.

  Ho Ma prayed to the family kitchen god, the goddess of smallpox, the goddess of playmates, the goddess of breast milk, the six minor household gods, the god of heaven and the god of earth, and the god and goddess of the bed, and burned offerings to each. She set out round cakes in a row before their images.

  Msseff said to Ttomalss, “Superior sir, if all this is necessary for survival, then I am an addled egg.” Ttomalss’ mouth fell open.

  The midwife bathed the baby, dried her, and sprinkled alum on her here and there. Then she laid the child on her back and set slices of ginger by the blackened stump of the umbilical cord. She put a little smoldering ball of catnip leaves on the ginger, and another at the baby’s head. A couple of the scaly devils let out hisses of longing for the ginger. Ttomalss took no notice of those, perhaps not recognizing what they signified.

  Other ritual objects made their appearance: the small weight that portended a big future, the padlock to ward off impropriety, the tap of the onion punningly used to impart wisdom (both were pronounced ts’ung), and the comb for the child’s hair. The onion would be tossed on the roof of the hut, to predict the sex of Liu Han’s next child by the way it landed.

  Ho Ma extinguished the burning balls of catnip and lit the paper images of the gods, who, having done their duty, were thus urged to depart the scene. The hut filled with smoke. Coughing a little, the midwife took her leave. The onion thumped up onto the roof. “The root points to the eaves,” Ho Ma called. “Your next baby will be a boy.”

  Liu Han couldn’t remember what the onion had foretold after the birth of her first child. She wondered how many fortune-tellers made a good living by counting on their bad predictions’ being forgotten. A lot of them, she suspected, but how could you tell which ones till after the fact?

  As if Ho Ma’s leaving the hut had been a signal, several little scaly devils came in. They were not carrying cameras; they were carrying guns. Alarm flared in Liu Han. She snatched up the baby and held it tight.

  Ttomalss said, “That will do you no good. We now go to the next step of the experiment—we of the Race will raise this hatchling apart from you Tosevites, to learn how well it can acquire duty and obedience.” He turned to the males and spoke in his own language: “Take the hatchling.”

  Liu Han screamed and fought with all she had in her. It did no good. Individually, the scaly devils were little, but several of them together were much stronger than she. The threat of their guns drove back the people who came out to see why she was screaming. Even the sight of a wailing infant in their arms was not enough to make men brave those terrible guns.

  Liu Han lay on the ground in the hut and moaned. Then, slowly, she rose and made her painful way through the staring, chattering people and into the marketpl
ace. Eventually, she came to the stall of the poultry seller. The little scaly devils might think they were through with her, but she was not through with them.

  Half past two in the morning. Vyacheslav Molotov wished he were home and asleep in bed. Stalin, however, had not asked his opinion, merely summoned him. Stalin was not in the habit of asking anyone’s opinion. He expected to be obeyed. If he kept late hours, everyone else would, too.

  The doorman nodded politely to Molotov, who nodded back. Normally he would have ignored such a flunky, but the doorman, along-time crony of Stalin’s, knew as many secrets as half the members of the Politburo—and he had his master’s ear. Slighting him was dangerous.

  Stalin was writing at his desk when Molotov came in. Molotov wondered if he’d become dominant simply because he needed less sleep than most men. No doubt that wasn’t the whole answer, but it must have played its part.

  “Take some tea, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich,” Stalin said, pointing to a samovar in a corner of the cramped room.

  “Thank you, Iosef Vissarionovich,” Molotov answered. When Stalin told you to take tea, you took tea, even if it was the vile mix that passed for the genuine article these days—much worse than the coarse makhorka everyone, even Stalin, had to smoke. Molotov poured a glassful, sugared it—as long as the Soviet Union had beets, it would have sugar—and drank. He had to work to keep from betraying surprise. “This is—excellent.”

  “The real leaf,” Stalin said smugly. “Brought in from India, thanks to the lull in the fighting with the Lizards after we showed we could match them bomb for bomb.” So there, his eyes added. He’d gone against Molotov’s advice and not only got away with it but prospered. Not only was that bad in itself, it meant he would pay less attention to Molotov the next time.

  The Foreign Commissar sipped his tea, savoring its warmth and its rich flavor. When he was through, he set the glass down with real regret. “What do you need, Iosef Vissarionovich?” he asked.

  “The lull is slowly dying away,” Stalin answered. “The Lizards begin to suspect we have no more bombs than that first one.” He sounded as if that were Molotov’s fault.

  “As I have noted, Comrade General Secretary, they are aware we used their metal to produce that bomb,” Molotov said cautiously; telling Stalin I told you so was as dangerous as defusing any other pyrotechnic device. Molotov tried to put the best face on it he could: “They cannot know, however, whether we have enough of that metal to use it for more bombs.”

  “We should,” Stalin said. “Sharing with the Germans was a mistake.” His mouth twisted in annoyance at the irrevocability of the past. “Nichevo.” Try as he might, Stalin could not utter it can’t be helped with the fatalism a native Russian put in the word. His throaty Georgian accent gave it a flavor of, but someone ought to be able to do something about it.

  Molotov said, “Creating the impression that we do have more bombs available will be a cornerstone of our policy against the Lizards for some time to come. They suspect our weakness now. If they become certain of it, the strategic situation reverts to what it was before we used the bomb, and that was not altogether to our advantage.”

  He stood up and got himself another glass of tea, both because he hadn’t had any real tea in a long time and because he was all too aware of how large an understatement he’d just loosed. If the Soviet Union hadn’t set off that bomb, the Lizards surely would have been in Moscow by now. If Stalin and he had escaped the fall of the city, they’d be trying to run the country from Kuibyshev, in the heart of the Urals. Would the workers and peasants—more to the point, would the soldiers—of the Soviet Union have continued to obey orders from a defeated government that had had to abandon the national capital?

  Maybe. Neither Molotov nor Stalin had been anxious to attempt the experiment.

  Stalin said, “Kurchatov and his team must accelerate their efforts.”

  “Yes, Comrade General Secretary,” Molotov said dutifully. Igor Kurchatov, Georgi Flerov, and the rest of the Soviet nuclear physicists were doing everything they could to isolate uranium 235 and to produce the equally explosive element 94. Unfortunately, before the war nuclear physics in the Soviet Union had lagged several years behind its course in the capitalist and fascist nations. The mere search for abstract knowledge had not seemed vitally urgent then. Now it did, but, with their limited expertise and limited cadre, the physicists were still years away from producing homegrown nuclear material.

  “The fascists in Germany are not idle,” Stalin said. “In spite of their setback, espionage confirms that their explosive-metal project goes forward. I believe the same is true in the United States and Britain, though communications with them both are not everything we might wish.” He slammed a fist down on the top of the desk. “And the Japanese?who knows what the Japanese are doing? I don’t trust them. I never trust them.”

  The only man Stalin had ever trusted was Hitler, and that trust almost destroyed the Soviet Union. But here Molotov agreed with him. He said, “If Zhukov hadn’t treated them roughly in Mongolia in 39, they would have joined with the Nazis two years later, and that might have been very difficult for us.”

  It would have been altogether disastrous, but Molotov didn’t have the nerve to tell that to Stalin. No one had the nerve to tell Stalin such things. The Moskva Hotel had two wings that spectacularly didn’t match. The architects had chosen to show Stalin their plans, expecting him to pick one design or the other. He’d just nodded and said, “Yes, do it that way,” and no one dared do anything else.

  The doorman tapped on the door. Stalin and Molotov looked at each other in surprise; they weren’t supposed to be interrupted. Then the doorman did something even more surprising: he stuck his head in and said, “Iosef Vissarionovich, the officer here bears an urgent message. May he deliver it?”

  After a moment, Stalin said, “Da,” with clear overtones of it had better be.

  The officer wore the three red squares of a senior lieutenant and the green backing on his collar tabs that meant he was from the NKVD. Saluting, he said, “Comrade General Secretary, Lizard propaganda broadcasts report—and Japanese radio confirms—that the Lizards have detonated an explosive-metal bomb over Tokyo. They say this was because the Japanese were engaged in nuclear research there. Casualties are said to be very heavy.”

  Molotov waited to see how Stalin would react, intending to match his own response to his leader’s. Stalin said, “The Germans were inept, and blew themselves up. The Japanese were careless, and let the Lizards get wind of what they were about. We can afford neither mistake. We already knew that, but now we are, mm, strongly reminded once more.”

  “Truth, Comrade General Secretary,” Molotov said. Stalin did have an eye for the essential. Not for nothing had he dominated the Soviet Union these past twenty years. Molotov wondered where—or if—the USSR would be in another twenty.

  5

  The engineer in the room next to the broadcast studio gave the you’re on signal through the large window the two rooms shared. Nodding, Moishe Russie began reading from his Yiddish script: “Good day. This is Moishe Russie, coming to you by way of the BBC’s Overseas Services. Another great world capital has fallen to the malice of the Lizards.”

  He sighed. The sigh was part of the script, but also heartfelt. “When the Lizards destroyed Berlin last year, I confess that I was not altogether brokenhearted. The Germans had done dreadful things to the Jews under their control. I thought the Lizards, who helped the Jews of Poland escape the Nazi yoke, were our benefactors.

  “I was wrong. The Lizards used us, too. They were willing to let us live, yes, but only as their slaves. And that holds not just for us but also for all mankind. When the Lizards destroyed Washington, they made that plain for anyone with eyes to see. When they destroyed Washington, they showed they were fighting freedom.

  “And now Tokyo. The Lizards no longer even try to pretend. They come straight out and tell us they dropped one of their hellish bombs on it because the Japanese were
seeking to build weapons there that could meet them on even terms. That some hundreds of thousands of human beings, most of them civilians, died in the bombing is to the Lizards of no consequence.

  “Mankind has employed one of these bombs, against a purely military target. The Lizards have now incinerated three historic cities, seeking to terrify humanity into surrender. London, from which I am broadcasting, has already been bombarded by both Hitler and the Lizards, yet still endures. Even if, in their madness, the Lizards treat it as they did Tokyo, the British Isles and the British Empire will continue not only to endure but also to resist. We hope and expect that all of you who are unfortunate enough to live in territory overrun by the aliens, yet can hear my voice, will continue to resist, too. In the end, we shall prevail.”

  He came to the end of the script just as the engineer drew a finger across his throat. Beaming at the good timing, Nathan Jacobi took over, in English rather than Yiddish: “I shall translate Moishe Russie’s remarks momentarily. First, though, I should like to note that no one is better qualified to judge the perfidy in the Lizards’ promises than Mr. Russie, for he watched them turn what he’d thought to be liberation into the enslavement and wholesale murder they bring to the entire world. As he said . . .”

  Moishe listened to the introduction with half an ear. He was picking up more English day by day, but remained far from fluent: by the time he figured out what most of one sentence meant, two others would go by.

  Jacobi went through an English version of Russie’s speech for Eastern European listeners who had no Yiddish. Since Moishe already knew what he’d said, he did better at following that than he had with the introduction. When the engineer signaled that they were off the air, he leaned back in his chair and let out a long sigh.

  Switching from English to Yiddish for Moishe’s benefit, the newsreader said, “I do wonder at times whether any of this does the least bit of good.”