Upsetting the Balance

by Harry Turtledove

She almost did not answer him, not directly. A proper Chinese woman was quiet, submissive, and, if she ever thought about desire between woman and man, did not openly say so. But Liu Han had been through too much to care about propriety—and, in any case, the Communists talked a great deal about equality of all sorts, including that between the sexes. Let’s see if they mean what they say, she thought.

  “I’m talking about you—and about me,” she answered. “Or didn’t you come up here now to see if you could get down on the mattress with me?”

  Nieh Ho-T’ing stared at her. She laughed again. For all he preached, for all the Communists preached, down deep he was still a man and a Chinese. She’d expected nothing different, and so was not disappointed.

  But, unlike most Chinese men, he did have some idea that his prejudices were just prejudices, not laws of nature. The struggle on his face was a visible working out of—what did he call it?—the dialectic, that’s what the word was. The thesis was his old, traditional, not truly questioned belief, the antithesis his Communist ideology, and the synthesis—she watched to see what the synthesis would be.

  “What if I did?” he said at last, sounding much less stern than he had moments before.

  What if he did? Now she had to think about that. She hadn’t lain with anyone since Bobby Fiore—and Nieh, in a way, had been responsible for Bobby Fiore’s death. But it wasn’t as if he’d murdered him, only that he’d put him in harm’s way, as an officer had a right to do with a soldier he commanded. On the scales, that balanced.

  What about the rest? If she let him bed her, she might gain influence over him that way. But if they quarreled afterwards, she would lose not only that influence but also what she’d gained through her own good sense. She’d won solid respect for that; the project for which she was writing her endless slips had been her own idea, after all. There, too, the scales balanced.

  Which left her one very basic question: did she want him? He was not a bad-looking man; he had strength and self-confidence aplenty. What did that add up to? Not enough she decided with more than a twinge of regret.

  “If I let a man take me to the mattress now,” she said, “it will be because I want him, not because he wants me. That is not enough. Never again will that be enough for me to lie with anyone.” She shuddered, remembering the time with Yi Min, the village apothecary, after the little scaly devils captured them both—and even worse times with men whose names she never knew, up in the little devils’ airplane that never came down. Bobby Fiore had won her heart there simply by being something less than brutal. She never wanted to sink so low again.

  She hadn’t directly refused Nieh, not quite. She waited, more than a little anxious, to see if he’d understood what she’d told him. He smiled crookedly. “I will not trouble you any more about this, then,” he said.

  “Having a man interested in me is not a trouble,” Liu Han said. She recalled how worried she’d been when her husband—before the Japanese came, before the scaly devils came and turned the world upside down—had wanted nothing to do with her while she was carrying their child. That had been a bleak and lonely time. Even so—“When a man does not listen when you say you do not want him, that is trouble.”

  “What you say makes good sense,” Nieh answered. “We can still further the revolution together, even if not in congress.”

  She liked him very much then, almost enough to change her mind. She’d never known—truth to tell, she’d never imagined—a man who could joke after she’d turned him down. “Yes, we are still comrades,” she said earnestly. “I want that.” I need that, she did not add, not for him to hear. Aloud she went on, “Now you know the difference between yourself and Hsia Shou-Tao.”

  “I knew that difference a long time ago,” he said. “Hsia, too, is still a revolutionary, though. Do not think otherwise. No one is perfect, or even good, in all ways.”

  “That is so.” Liu Han clapped her hands. “I have an idea. Listen to me: we should arrange to have our beast-show men give a couple of exhibitions for the little scaly devils where nothing goes wrong—they simply give their shows and leave. That will tell us how well the little devils search their cages and equipment and will also make the scaly devils feel safer about letting beast shows into the buildings they use.”

  “I have had pieces of this thought myself,” Nieh Ho-T’ing said slowly, “but you give reasons for doing it more clearly than I had thought of them. I will discuss it with Hsia. You may talk with him about it, too, of course. It may even interest him enough to keep his mind off wanting to see your body.”

  His smile said he was joking again, but not altogether. Liu Han nodded; as he’d said, Hsia was a dedicated revolutionary, and a good enough idea for hurting the scaly devils would draw his attention away from fleshly matters . . . for a while.

  Liu Han said, “If he likes the notion well enough, it will only make him want me more, because he will think someone who comes up with a good idea is desirable just on account of that.”

  She laughed. After a moment, so did Nieh Ho-T’ing. He found an excuse to leave very soon after that. Liu Han wondered if he was angry at her in spite of what he’d said. Had he done what she’d said Hsia would do: decided he wanted her not so much because of the woman she was as in admiration of her ideas for the struggle against the little scaly devils?

  Once the idea occurred to her, it would not go away. It fit in too well with what she’d seen of how Nieh Ho-T’ing’s mind worked. She went back to writing her demand on strip after strip of paper. All the while, she wondered whether she should consider Nieh’s ideologically oriented advances a compliment or an insult.

  Even after she set aside pen and paper and scissors, she couldn’t make up her mind.

  Behind the glass partition, the engineer pointed to Moishe Russie: you’re on! Russie looked down at his script and began to read: “Good day, ladies and gentlemen, this is Moishe Russie speaking to you from London, still the capital of the British Empire and still free of Lizards. Some of you have no idea how glad I am to be able to say that. Others have the misfortune of suffering under the Lizards’ tyranny and know for themselves whereof I speak.”

  He glanced over at Nathan Jacobi, who nodded encouragement for him to go on. It was good to be working with Jacobi again; it felt like better days, the days before the invasion. Moishe took a deep breath and continued: “The Lizards sought to bring Great Britain under their direct control. I can tell you now that they have failed, and failed decisively. No Lizards in arms remain on British soil; all are either fled, captured, or dead. The last Lizard airstrip on the island, that at Tangmere in the south, has fallen.”

  He hadn’t seen that with his own eyes. When it became clear the Lizards were abandoning their British toehold, he’d been recalled to London to resume broadcasting. He checked his script to see where he’d resume. It was Yiddish, of course, for broadcast to Jews and others in eastern Europe. All the same, it sounded very much like what a BBC newsreader would have used for an English version. That pleased him; he was getting a handle on the BBC style.

  “We have now proved decisively what others began to demonstrate last year: the Lizards are not invulnerable. They can be defeated and driven back. Moreover, just as their weapons have on occasion discomfited us, we too have devised means of fighting for which they have as yet developed no countermeasures. This bodes well for future campaigns against them.”

  How it boded for the soul of mankind was another question, one he felt less confident about answering. Everyone was using gas against the Lizards now, and praising it to the skies because it killed them in carload lots. But if they vanished off the face of the earth tomorrow, how long till earthly nations remembered their old quarrels and started using gas on one another? How long till the Germans started using it on the Jews they still ruled? For that matter, how did he know they weren’t using it on the Jews they still ruled? Nothing came out of Germany but what little Hitler and Göbbels wanted known.

  Even as he thought abo
ut what mankind would do after the Lizards were vanquished, he realized beating them came first. And so he read on: “Wherever you who hear my voice may be, you, too, can join the fight against the alien invaders. You need not even take up a gun. You can also contribute to the war against them by sabotaging goods you produce if you work in a factory, by not paying, paying late, or underpaying the exactions they seek to impose on you, by obstructing them in any way possible, and by informing their foes of what they are about to do. With your help, we can make Earth so unpleasant for them that they will be glad to pack up and leave.”

  He finished the last line of the script just as the engineer drew a finger across his throat to show time was up. In the soundproof control room, the engineer clapped his hands, then pointed to Nathan Jacobi, who began reading the English version of Russie’s talk.

  Jacobi was a consummate professional; the engineer took for granted his finishing spot on. What struck Moishe about his colleague’s reading was how much of it he understood. When he’d first begun broadcasting for the BBC, he’d had next to no English. Now he could follow it pretty well, and speak enough to get by. He felt less alien in London than he sometimes had in purely Polish sections of Warsaw.

  “There, that’s done it,” Jacobi said when they were off the air. He clapped Moishe on the back. “Jolly good to be working with you again. For a while there, I doubted we should ever have the chance.”

  “So did I,” Moishe said. “I have to remind myself that this is warfare, too. I’ve seen altogether too much of the real thing lately.”

  “Oh, yes.” Jacobi got up and stretched. “The real thing is a great deal worse to go through, but you and I may be able to do more damage to the Lizards here than we could on campaign. I tell myself as much, at any rate.”

  “So do I,” Moishe said as he too rose. “Is Eric Blair broadcasting after us, as he often does?”

  “I believe so,” Jacobi answered. “You’ve taken a liking to him, haven’t you?”

  “He’s an honest man,” Russie said simply.

  Sure enough, Blair stood outside the studio door, talking animatedly with a handsome, dark-skinned woman who wore a plum-colored robe of filmy cotton—from India, Moishe guessed, though his knowledge of people and places Oriental had almost all been acquired since he came to England. Blair broke off to nod to the two Jewish broadcasters. “Hope you chaps have been giving the Lizards a proper hiding over the air,” he said.

  “I hope we did, too,” Jacobi answered, his voice grave.

  “The princess and I shall endeavor to do the same,” Blair said, dipping his head to the woman from India. His chuckle had a wheeze in it that Russie did not like. “I think that’s what they call an alliance of convenience: a princess and a socialist joining together to defeat the common foe.”

  “You wanted dominion status for India no less than I did,” the woman said. Her accent, so different from Moishe’s, made her hard to understand for him. He reminded himself to tell Rivka and Reuven he’d met a princess: not something a Jew was likely to do in Warsaw—or, from what he’d seen, in London, either.

  “India has more than dominion status these days, de facto if not de jure,” Eric Blair said. “It’s the rare and lucky ship that goes from London to Bombay, and even luckier the one that comes home again.”

  “How are things there?” Moishe asked. One thing he’d learned since coming to England was how narrow his perspective on the world had been. He wanted to learn as much as he could about places that had been just names, if that, to him.

  Blair said, “You will not be surprised to learn that Mr. Gandhi has made himself as unpleasant to the Lizards as he ever was to the British raj.”

  “The aliens do not know how to deal with masses of people who will not fight them but also refuse to labor for them,” the princess said. “Massacre has only made the Mahatma’s followers more eager to continue their nonviolent campaign against oppression and unjust rule—from anyone.”

  “That last bit would have brought out the censor’s razor blades and red ink had you tried to say it before the Lizards came,” Blair said. He looked at his watch. “We’d best get in there, or we shall be late. Good to see you, Russie, Jacobi.” He and the Indian woman hurried into the studio, closing the door behind them.

  The sun of early November was a cool, pale, fickle thing, scurrying through the sky low in the south and scuttling behind every cloud and bit of mist that passed. Even so, Moishe faced the weather with equanimity. In Warsaw, snow would have started falling a month earlier.

  He said his good-byes to Nathan Jacobi and hurried home to his Soho flat. Having been separated from his family when the Lizards invaded England made him appreciate them all the more. But when he got up to the flat, before he could even tell his wife he’d met a princess, she said, “Moishe, someone came round here looking for you today—a man with a uniform.” She sounded worried.

  Moishe didn’t blame her. That news was enough to worry anyone. When he first heard it, ice prickled up his spine. He needed a moment to remember where he was. “This is England,” he reminded Rivka—and himself. “No Gestapo here, no ‘Juden heraus!’ Did he say what he wanted of me?”

  She shook her head. “He did not say, and I did not ask. Hearing the knock on the door, opening it to find the man with those clothes there . . .” She shivered. “And then he spoke to me in German when he saw I did not understand enough English to know what he needed.”

  “That would frighten anyone,” Moishe said sympathetically, and took her in his arms. He wished he could forget about the Nazis and Lizards both. He wished the whole world could forget about them both. The next wish that produced the desired effect would be the first.

  Someone knocked on the door. Moishe and Rivka flew apart. It was a brisk, authoritative knock, as if the fellow who made it had a better right to make it, had a better right to come into the flat, than the people who lived there. “It’s him again,” Rivka whispered.

  “We’d better find out what he’s after,” Moishe said, and opened the door. He had all he could do not to recoil in alarm after that: except for the different uniform, the man who stood there might have come straight off an SS recruiting poster. He was tall and slim and muscular and blond and had the dangerous look in his eye that was calculated to turn your blood to water if you ended up on the receiving end of it.

  But instead of shouting something like, You stinking sack of shit of a Jew, he politely nodded and in soft tones asked, “You are Mr. Moishe Russie?”

  “Yes,” Moishe said cautiously. “Who are you?”

  “Captain Donald Mather, sir, of the Special Air Service,” the blond young soldier answered. To Russie’s surprise, he saluted.

  “C-Come in,” Moishe said, his voice a little shaky. No SS man would ever have saluted a Jew, not under any circumstances. “You have met my wife, I think.”

  “Yes, sir,” Mather said, stepping past him. He nodded to Rivka. “Ma’am.” Social amenities apparently complete, he turned back to Moishe. “Sir, His Majesty’s government needs your help.”

  Alarm sirens began going off in Moishe’s mind. He slipped from English back into Yiddish: “What does His Majesty’s government think I can do for it? And why me in particular and not somebody else?”

  Captain Mather answered the second question first: “You in particular, sir, because of your experience in Poland.” He left English, too, for German. Moishe’s hackles did not rise so much as they might have: Mather made an effort, and not a bad one, to pronounce it with a Yiddish intonation. He was plainly a capable man, and in some not-so-obvious ways.

  “I had lots of experience in Poland,” Moishe said. “Most of it, I didn’t like at all, not even a little bit. Why does anyone think I would want to do something that draws on it?”

  “You’re already doing something that draws on it, sir, in your BBC broadcasts,” Mather replied. Moishe grimaced; that was true. The Englishman continued, making his German sound more Yiddish with every sentence: �
��I will admit, though, we have rather more in mind for you than sitting in front of a microphone and reading from a prepared script.”

  “What do you have in mind?” Moishe said. “You still haven’t answered what I asked you.”

  “I was coming round to it, sir; by easy stages,” Donald Mather said. “One thing you learned in Poland was that cooperating with the Lizards isn’t always the best of notions, if you’ll forgive your understatement.”

  “No, not always, but if I hadn’t cooperated with them at first, I wouldn’t be here arguing with you now,” Moishe said.

  “Saving yourself and your family—” Mather began.

  “—And my people,” Russie put in “Without the Lizards, the Nazis would have slaughtered us all.”

  “And your people,” Captain Mather conceded. “No one will say you didn’t do what you had to do when you joined the Lizards against the Nazis. But afterwards, you saw that mankind as a whole was your people, too, and you turned against the Lizards.”

  “Yes to all of this,” Moishe said, beginning to grow impatient. “But what does it have to do with whatever you want from me?”

  “I am coming to that,” Mather answered calmly. No matter how well he spoke, that external calm would have marked him as an Englishman; in his place, a Jew or a Pole would have been shouting and gesticulating. He went on, “Would you agree that in His Majesty’s mandate of Palestine, no effort to exterminate the Jews is now under way, but rather the reverse?”

  “In Palestine?” Moishe echoed. The mention of the name was enough to make Rivka sharply catch her breath. Moishe shook his head. “No, you aren’t doing anything like that. Nu?” Here, the multifarious Yiddish word meant come to the point.

  He would have explained that to Mather, but the captain understood it on his own. Mather said, “The nub of it is, Mr. Russie, that there are Jews in Palestine who are not content with British administration there and have been intriguing with the Lizards in Egypt to aid any advance they might make into the Holy Land. His Majesty’s government would like to send you to Palestine to talk to the Jewish fighting leaders and convince them to stay loyal to the crown, to show them that, unlike yours, their situation is not so bad as to require intervention by the aliens to liberate them from it.”