Upsetting the Balance

by Harry Turtledove

  But the can seller, though he might have been what Nieh called a running dog, was no fool. “You, woman!” he shouted at Liu Han. “Do you want to buy something, or are you spying on me?”

  “I am just resting here for a moment, sir,” Liu Han answered in a small voice. “I cannot afford your excellent canned goods, I fear.” That was true; he asked exorbitant prices. For good measure, she added, “I wish I could,” which was a crashing lie.

  She did not mollify the can seller. “Go rest somewhere else,” he said, shaking his fist. “I think you are telling lies. If I see you again, I will set the police on you.” He was a running dog, then; the Peking police, like police in any Chinese city, were the tools of those in power.

  Liu Han retreated across the little market square to the edge of a hutung. She pointed back at the man who sold cans and screeched, “See the fool with his nose up the little devils’ back passage!” as loud as she could, then vanished down the alleyway. With a little luck, she’d have created ill will between the can seller and his neighbors in the market, maybe even cost him some customers.

  She couldn’t reckon it a victory, though, because he’d driven her away before any scaly devils showed up at his stall. She bought some liang kao from a man with a basket of them—rice cakes stuffed with mashed beans and peas and served with sweet syrup—ate them, and then left the hutungs for Peking’s more prominent avenues. The scaly devils did not usually venture into the lanes and alleys of the city. If she wanted to find out what they were doing, she would have to go where they were.

  Sure enough, when she came out on the Ta Cha La, the Street of Large Gateposts, she found scaly devils aplenty. She was not surprised; the street was full of fancy silk shops and led to neighborhoods where fine eateries abounded.

  But the scaly devils bought no silks and sought no restaurants. Instead, they gathered several deep around a mountebank whose show might have enlivened a child’s birthday party. “See how fat my mules are, and how warm my carriages!” the fellow cried.

  Because the little devils were so short, Liu Han was able to see over them to the folding table the fellow had set up. His carriages were about six inches long, made of cast-off bits of cardboard, and used thin sticks for axles. The little scaly devils hissed with excitement as he pulled out a tin can from the box that held his paraphernalia. Out of the can he took one large, black dung beetle after another. He deftly fastened them to the carriages with reins of thread. They pulled those carriages—some of which resembled old-fashioned mule carts, others Peking water wagons—around and around the tabletop; every so often, he had to use a forefinger to keep his steeds from falling off the edge.

  Even in the village where Liu Han had grown up, a beetle-cart show was nothing out of the ordinary. By the way the scaly devils reacted, though, they’d never seen anything like it in their lives. Some of them let their mouths hang open in mirth, while others nudged each other and exclaimed over the spectacle. “They make even pests into beasts of burden,” one of the little devils said.

  “See, that one has upset the cart. Look at its little legs wave as it lies on its back,” another replied. He tossed a dollar Mex, and then another, to the mountebank. His comrades also showered the fellow with silver.

  The little devils paid Liu Han no attention. The only way they would have noticed her was if she’d got in their way while they were watching the antics of the beetles. But those antics had so fascinated them, they weren’t talking about anything else. After a while, Liu Han decided she wouldn’t hear anything worthwhile here. The Ta Cha La was full of scaly devils. She headed up it toward the next group she saw.

  When she got up to them, she discovered they were all staring at a monkey circus going through its paces. Like most of its kind, the circus also included a Pekinese dog and a trained sheep. Both men who ran it clanged brass gongs to draw a bigger crowd.

  Growing impatient, one of the little scaly devils said, “You show us these creatures, what they do, now.”

  The two men bowed nervously and obeyed. The monkey, dressed in a red satin jacket, capered about. It put on masks, one after another, cued by more taps on the gong.

  “See how it looks like a little Tosevite,” one of the scaly devils said in his own language, pointing to the monkey. His mouth opened in mirth.

  The little devil beside him said, “It’s even uglier than the Big Uglies, I think. All that fuzz all over it—” He shuddered in fastidious disgust.

  “I don’t know,” yet another little scaly devil said. “It has a tail, at least. I think the Big Uglies look funny without them.”

  Liu Han pretended she was watching the show without listening to the little devils. She’d known they had no proper respect for mankind—were that not so, they never would have treated her as they had. But hearing their scorn grated. Liu Han rocked slowly back and forth. You will pay, she thought. Oh, how you will pay for all you’ve done to me. But how to make them pay? Vowing revenge was easy, getting it something else again.

  The monkey went through the rest of its turns, imitating a wheelbarrow man and a rickshaw puller and then playing on a swing at the top of a bamboo pole. The little devils showered the men who ran the monkey circus with coins. After the monkey itself came the Pekinese. It jumped through hoops of different sizes that the men held at varying heights above the ground. Even in her village, Liu Han had seen dogs that could leap much higher. But the little scaly devils admired the Pekinese as much as they had the monkey.

  For the finale, the sheep came out and the monkey sprang onto its back, riding it around in circles like a jockey on a racehorse. The little scaly devils had only to look about them to see men on horseback. They caught the analogy, too, and laughed harder than ever. When at last the show was over, they gave the two men who ran it still more silver—they seemed to have an unlimited supply—and went off in search of further entertainment.

  “Eee,” one of the men said, letting Mex dollars jingle through his fingers, “I used to hate the little scaly devils like everyone else, but they are making us rich.”

  The other animal trainer did not answer. He picked up the gong and started pounding on it, trying to lure more scaly devils to the next show.

  He had competition. A little way up the street, a fellow with a horn was playing old, familiar tunes. He didn’t play very well, but skill on the trumpet was not how he made his living: it was just the traditional signal a fellow who exhibited trained mice used to draw a crowd.

  And, sure enough, a crowd gathered. It had children in it, and old people with time on their hands, but also a good many little scaly devils. Because the little devils stood and watched, so did Liu Han.

  “Hello, hello, hello!” the mouse show man boomed jovially. He was wearing a square wooden box, held on by a shoulder strap. From the box rose a wooden pole two feet high, on top of which were mounted a pagoda, a wooden fish, a little hanging bucket made of tin, and a hollow wooden peach. “Do you want to see my little friends perform?”

  “Yes!” the children shouted, loud and shrill as a flock of starlings. The little scaly devils who understood Chinese added their hissing voices to the cries.

  “All right, then,” the man said. “You don’t have any cats, do you?” He looked sly. “If you do, kindly keep them in your pockets till we’re finished.”

  He waited till the children’s giggles and the silent laughter of the scaly devils subsided, then rapped three times on the side of the box. It had a latched hole in the front. He lifted the latch. Four white mice came out and climbed a little ladder of string and sticks of bamboo. They went through their paces on the apparatus, scrambling down into the bucket and swinging in it, pulling the fish up by the string that held it, running to the top of the pagoda and jumping inside, and scrambling into the peach and peering out, whiskers quivering, little red eyes aglow.

  The mouse show man said, “How’d you like to bite down and find that inside your peach?” The children giggled once more.

  The little
scaly devils, though, did not react to that with mirth. One of them said, “The Big Uglies have filthy habits—always parasites in their food.”

  “Truth,” another said. “And they joke about it.”

  “They are disgusting,” a third chimed in, “but they also manage to be entertaining. We don’t have beast-shows back on Home to match these. Who would have thought animals—especially Tosevite animals—could learn to do so many interesting things? I spend as much free time as I can watching them.”

  “And I,” said the scaly devil who had spoken second. A couple of others sputtered agreement.

  Liu Han watched the performing mice a minute or two more. Then she tossed the man who exhibited them a few coppers and walked down the Ta Cha La, thinking hard. More little devils congregated in a vacant lot from which the wreckage of a shop had been cleared away. A trained bear was going through its run of tricks there. The scaly devils exclaimed as it wielded a heavy wooden sword with a long handle. Liu Han walked by, hardly noticing.

  Nieh Ho-T’ing was always looking for ways to get close to the little scaly devils, the better to make their lives miserable. If trained animals fascinated them so, a troupe of men with such performers might well gain access even to important males, or groups of important males. Anyone who showed Nieh a new way to do that would gain credit for it.

  Liu Han scratched her head. She was sure she had a good idea, but how could she use it to best advantage? She was no longer the naive peasant woman she’d been when the little devils carried her away from her village. Too much had happened to her since. If she could, she would take her fate back into her own hands.

  “Not to be a puppet,” she said. A man with a thin wisp of white beard turned and gave her a curious look. She didn’t care. Nieh Ho T’ing hadn’t treated her badly; he’d probably treated her better than anyone except Bobby Fiore. But one of the reasons he did treat her so was that he found her a tool to fit his hand. If she was lucky, if she was careful, maybe she could make him treat her as someone to be reckoned with.

  After the lamplit gloom of the Krom, George Bagnall had to blink and wait for his eyes to adjust to daylight. Even after the adjustment, he looked about curiously. Something about the quality of the light, the color of the sky, had changed, ever so slightly. The day was bright and warm, and yet—

  When Bagnall remarked on that, Jerome Jones nodded and said, “I noticed it, too, the other day. Somebody Up There”—the capitals were quite audible—“is telling us summer shan’t last forever.” He looked wistful. “Now that it’s beginning to go, it seems hardly to have been here at all.”

  “Weren’t you the blighter who swore to us Pskov had a mild climate by Russian standards?” Ken Embry demanded with mock fierceness. “This, as I recall, while we were flying above endless snow and a frozen lake.”

  “By Russian standards, Pskov does have a mild climate,” Jones protested. “Set alongside Moscow, it’s very pleasant. Set along Arkhangelsk, it’s like Havana or New Delhi.”

  “Set alongside Arkhangelsk, by all accounts, the bloody South Pole looks like a holiday resort,” Embry said. “I knew Russian standards in matters of weather were elastic before we got here; I simply hadn’t realized how much stretch the elastic had to it: rather like a fat man’s underclothes, I’d say.”

  “That may end up working to our advantage,” Bagnall said. “The Lizards like Russian winter even less than we do. We should be able to push them farther south of the city.”

  “A consummation devoutly to be wished.” Ken Embry leered at him. “In aid of which, when will they be posting the banns for you and that little Russian flier?”

  “Oh, give over such nonsense.” Bagnall kicked a clod of dirt down the street. “Nothing is going on between us.”

  The other two Englishmen snorted, either disbelieving or affecting disbelief. Then Jerome Jones sighed. “I wish I thought you were lying. That might make Tatiana stop throwing her fair white body in your direction. We’ve had rows about it, once or twice.” He kicked moodily at the dirt.

  “And?” Embry asked. “Leaving us in suspense that way is bad form.”

  “And nothing,” Jones answered. “Tatiana does what she bloody well pleases. If one were mad enough to try stopping her, she’d blow off his head.”

  Neither of the other Englishmen thought that was in any way figurative language. Bagnall said, “Whoever came up with ‘The female of the species is more deadly than the male’ must have had your fair Russian sniper in mind.”

  “Too true.” Jones sighed again. He glanced sidelong at Bagnall. “That’s why she’s keen on you, you know: she thinks you’re better at killing than I am—I’m just a radarman, after all. The idea makes her motor go.”

  Bagnall sent him a sympathetic look “Old chap, I don’t mean to give offense, but have you never wondered if you’d be better off without her company?”

  “Oh, many a time,” Jones said feelingly.

  “Well, then?” Bagnall asked when the radarman failed to draw the obvious conclusion.

  Now Jones looked shamefaced. “For one thing, if I give her the boot, she’s liable to give me something out of the barrel of that sniper’s rifle of hers.” He touched a forefinger to a spot just above the bridge of his nose, as if to say the bullet would go in there.

  “Something to that, I expect,” Ken Embry said. “But a ‘for one thing’ generally implies a ‘for another,’ what? Rather like a mén implying a dé, if you’ve read your Greek like a good fellow.”

  “Nai, malista,” Jones said, which made all three Englishmen laugh. Bagnall had trouble imagining anything further removed from the classical world than Pskov during wartime. They walked on for another few steps. Slowly, reluctantly, Jerome Jones continued, “Yes, there’s a ‘for another.’ The other reason I don’t send her packing is that—that—I seem to have fallen in love with her.” He waited for his companions to mock him.

  Now it was Bagnall’s turn to sigh. He set a sympathetic hand on Jones’ shoulder. The radarman quivered under his touch like a restive horse. Bagnall said, “Steady, there. If we’re being classical, let’s be downright Socratic and define our terms, shall we? Are you truly in love with her, or is it just that she pleases you in the kip?”

  Jerome Jones turned a vermilion not commonly seen this side of a sunset. How young he is, Bagnall thought from his superior altitude of three or four years. “How does one tell the difference?” the radarman asked plaintively.

  “Always a good question,” Embry said with a cynical chuckle.

  “Let’s try answering it, then,” Bagnall said, for Jones looked not only very young but very lost: he’d meant the question with every fiber of his being. Bagnall went on, “Socratics we are, having another go at the Symposium.”

  That pleased Jones. Embry chuckled again and said, “Fair young Alcibiades is right out.”

  “Fair young Tatiana is quite enough trouble all on her own,” Jones said. “She and Alcibiades, they’d deserve each other.”

  “Here’s one fast clue to your feelings, for starters,” Bagnall said: “If you only want to have anything to do with your possibly beloved when the two of you are naked between the sheets, that should tell you something about your state of mind.”

  “So it should.” The radarman looked thoughtful. “Not as simple as that, I’m afraid; I wish to heaven it were. But I like being around her, whether we’re”—he coughed—“or not. It’s rather like setting up a tent next to a tiger’s lair: you never know what will happen next, but it’s apt to be something exciting.”

  “And you’re liable to end up as the hors d’oeuvres,” Embry put in.

  Bagnall waved the pilot to silence. “How do you think she feels about you, Jones?” he asked.

  Jerome Jones’ face furrowed with thought. “I am of the opinion her fidelity leaves something to be desired,” he said, to which Bagnall could but nod. Jones went on, “She set her cap for me, not the other way round. This bloody country—I’d be afraid to chat up
a girl, because next thing you know, you’d be talking to the NKVD instead.” He shivered. “Some of my university chums, they weren’t just pink, they were red. If any of them had actually seen Russia, that wouldn’t have lasted long, and there’s the God’s truth.”

  “You’re certain to be right about that,” Bagnall said. “The same thing has occurred to me, oh, once or twice during our delightful sojourn here. But it’s not to the point now. That centers on the fair Tatiana.”

  “I know.” Jones walked on for several paces without continuing.

  Bagnall waited for him to say something, anything, that would clarify what he felt, what Tatiana felt, and might even help all of them get out of their present complications without falling into new ones that were worse. He realized that was asking a lot, but he’d never wanted Tatiana to set her sights on him.

  After a bit, the radarman said, “I chased a lot of skirt back in England; I don’t think there was a barmaid in any pub I went into whom I didn’t try to chat up. But we all know there’s a deal of difference between chasing it and catching it, don’t we?” He chuckled wryly. “And so, when we got here and I had this gorgeous creature chasing me, it made me feel about ten feet high. And, of course—” He didn’t go on, but his expression was eloquent.

  Ken Embry put that expression into words: “When you’re sleeping with a pretty woman, there is a certain natural disinclination to do anything which will result in your not sleeping with her in future.”

  “Well, yes,” Jones said, coloring a little. “In her own bloodthirsty way, I think, Tatiana is fond enough of me, too. Speaking a bit of Russian does me no harm there. But she keeps complaining I’m too soft to quite suit her, that she’d like me better if I stuck a knife between my teeth and crawled about through the bushes slitting Lizards’ throats.”

  Bagnall nodded. His own rugged masculine charm (if any) hadn’t been what drew Tatiana to him. He knew that perfectly well. Tatiana wanted him because she thought he was good at hurting the Lizards. She hadn’t made any bones about it, either.