Upsetting the Balance

by Harry Turtledove

  The slipstream that came over the windscreen threatened to freeze her cheeks and mouth, the only flesh she bared to it She went into a wide turn and flew over the airstrip on her way south. Georg Schultz was already out of sight. Probably on his way to Tatiana ‘s bed, Ludmila thought scornfully. But he was right: she really had no business complaining. She didn’t want him, and was just as glad to have him out of her hair once and for all.

  She buzzed over the defense lines south of Pskov, built with such unflagging and dreadful civilian effort the summer before. Soldiers in the trenches waved at her. And, as happened fairly often, a couple of fools shot at her, not believing anything built by human beings could be in the air. She saw muzzle flashes, heard a couple of bullets crack past.

  “Who do you think I am, the devil’s grandmother?” she shouted. That helped relieve her own feelings, but the men on the ground couldn’t hear her. Sometimes, when bullets came closer than they had today, she thought longingly about machine-gunning the trenches of her own side.

  Then she was over the Lizards’ lines. She gunned the U-2 for all it was worth, but that, as she knew only too well, was a matter of kopecks, not rubles. A couple of Lizards shot at her, too. They didn’t come any closer than the Russians had. That wasn’t what worried her. They’d use their radios to let their side know she was out and flying, and the Lizards had antiaircraft weapons far more deadly than automatic rifles.

  Once she was past the Lizards’ main line, she swung the Kukuruznik’s nose west, then south, then west again, then north for a little ways, and then east for an even shorter time. The less predictable she made her path, the less likely they were to blow her out of the sky.

  Some kilometers south of the Lizards’ forward positions, she spotted a convoy of tanks and soft-skinned vehicles slogging along a dirt road. Now that snow had replaced the fall rains, roads were passable again: what had been mud was frozen solid.

  That wasn’t what drew her notice to the convoy, though. The tanks and lorries weren’t moving up to help the Lizards advance on Pskov. Instead, they were heading south themselves, away from the city. They had artillery with them, too, some self-propelled and some towed weapons captured from the Red Army and the Germans.

  She didn’t get too close to the convoy. A lot of those vehicles mounted machine guns for defense against low-flying aircraft, and her best hope for surviving such a barrage was not drawing it in the first place. As soon as she was sure they really were southbound, she flew away as fast as the U-2 would take her.

  “What are they doing?” she wondered aloud. Had she not been wearing thick gloves and a leather flying helmet, she would have scratched her head. She’d never seen such a large-scale withdrawal by the Lizards before.

  She skimmed along a few meters above the treetops, drawing occasional potshots from the woods below, but was gone before the Lizards could do her any damage. She was thinking hard. The evasive maneuvers she’d performed south of the Lizards’ lines had left her a trifle disoriented, but if she was where she thought she was, she ought to strike another road if she flew southeast for a couple of minutes.

  And there it was! Like most roads between Soviet cities, it was dirt-surfaced. But it also had Lizard armor on it, and lorries with the tanks and fighting vehicles. This was a bigger column than the one she’d seen before, and also heading south—southwest, actually, given the direction of the highway, which ran toward Daugavpils in what had been Latvia till the Soviet Union reclaimed it a couple of years before.

  “What are they doing?” she repeated, but that seemed pretty obvious. They were pulling back from Pskov, or at least pulling back the forces with which they could advance farther rather than merely holding in place.

  She found another question: “Why are they doing it?” She didn’t think it was because they’d despaired of conquering Pskov. They had to want the armor somewhere else. Where, she had no idea, and it wasn’t her job to worry about such things anyhow. But she needed to get the information to someone whose job was worrying about them.

  Not for the first time, she wished the Kukuruznik had a radio. She sighed; a lot of Soviet aircraft and tanks went without radios. That saved the expense of building and installing them, and the trouble of training personnel who were liable to be illiterate peasants just off the farm. Whether such economies were worth the disadvantage of being without good communications was another question entirely.

  When she bounced in for a landing outside Pskov, no Soviet groundcrew men waited for her. The possibility that she might come back early had never entered their minds. She taxied as far from the concealed airplanes as she could, leaving her own at the very edge of the trees. With luck, the Lizards would be so intent on their retreat that they wouldn’t notice the Kukuruznik.

  Without luck . . . “Nichevo,” Ludmila said: “It can’t be helped.”

  She hurried into Pskov. By the time she got to the Krom, she was sweating; if anything would keep you warm, flight gear would. She almost ran into George Bagnall as he was coming out “What’s going on?” he asked in his bad Russian.

  She poured out the story, first in Russian and then, when she realized she was going too fast for him to follow, in German instead.

  “And so I must see Generalleutnant Chill and the Soviet brigadiers sofort—immediately,” she finished. German was a good language in which to sound urgent. If you didn’t get your way, it seemed to warn, something terrible would happen.

  But Bagnall only nodded. “Da, they all need to know that,” he said, and, setting a hand on her shoulder to show she was with him, he marched her through layers of sentries and subordinates to the commandments of Pskov.

  She told them the story in the same mix of languages she’d used with Bagnall. Aleksandr German translated from the Russian for Kurt Chill and from the German for Nikolai Vasiliev. The leaders were as excited as Ludmila had been. Vasiliev slammed a fist down on the tabletop. “We can drive them far from our city!” he shouted.

  “They’re already going,” Chill said. “Where are they going—and why? We must have more intelligence reports. I shall order up additional flights.” He reached for a field telephone.

  Until they got more data, the commanders weren’t about to order anything irrevocable, which struck Ludmila as sensible. She and Bagnall both withdrew. He said, “You did well to come back so soon. You showed a lot of—” He had trouble with the word, both in Russian and in German. Finally, after some fumbling, Ludmila decided he was trying to say initiative.

  She shrugged. “It needed doing, so I did it.” Only after the words were out of her mouth did she realize that was unusual, at least among the Soviets. You did what you were told, and nothing else. That way, you never got in trouble. From what she’d seen, the Germans were looser, more demanding of imagination from their lower ranks. She didn’t know how the English did things.

  “Das ist gut,” he said, and then repeated himself, this time in Russian: “Khorosho.” Ludmila supposed that meant he thought initiative was a good thing, too. Like a lot of Soviet citizens, she mistrusted the concept How could social equality survive if some people shoved themselves ahead of the rest?

  Coming out of the gloomy confines of the Krom took such ideological concerns from her mind. The sun had escaped the clouds while she was passing her news on to the local commanders. It gilttered off the snow on the ground and made the whole world dazzlingly white. The day wasn’t warm—they wouldn’t see a warm day for months—but it was beautiful.

  Bagnall must have felt it, too. He said, “Shall we walk along the river?”

  Ludmila looked at him out of the corner of her eye. Yes, he definitely believed in initiative. After a moment, she smiled. “Well, why not?” she said. Maybe she had a weakness for foreign men, something that struck her as vaguely—well, not so vaguely—subversive. Then she shook her head. Georg Schultz was foreign, but she’d never had the slightest yen for him. Maybe she had a weakness for kulturny men. In the Soviet Union, she sometimes thought, the
y were almost as hard to come by as foreigners.

  The Pskova River was frozen over, ice stretching from bank to bank. Here and there, men had cut holes in it and were fishing. A couple had plump pike and bream out on the ice to show their time wasn’t going to waste.

  “Fish here keep fresh all winter long,” Bagnall said.

  “Well, of course,” Ludmila answered. Then she paused. England was supposed to have warmer winters than the Soviet Union. Maybe it wasn’t an of course for him.

  After a while, he stopped and looked across the river. “Which church is that?” he asked, pointing.

  “I think that is the one they call the church of Sts. Cosmas and Damian on Gremyachaya Hill,” Ludmila answered. “But I ought to be asking you these things, not the other way round. You have been in Pskov much longer than I have.”

  “That’s true,” he said, and laughed in some embarrassment “But it’s your country, after all, so I think you should know these things. Easy to forget you could drop England anywhere in the Soviet Union and it would disappear.”

  Ludmila nodded. “After the Lizards came, I flew once into Sweden and Denmark and Germany.” She did not say she’d taken Molotov to Berchtesgaden. “Everything seemed so small and so . . . so—used. Here we have more land than we know what to do with. I have seen it is not like that all over the world.”

  “No, hardly,” Bagnall said. “With us, the trouble is finding the land to do all the things we want to do with it.” He hesitated, then laughed. He had a good laugh; even when he was laughing at himself, he sounded genuinely amused. He went on, “Here I am with a pretty girl, and I’m talking about churches and land. I must be getting old.”

  Ludmila looked up at him. He was a few years older than she, but—“I do not think you are ready for the dustbin yet,” she said. She didn’t know how to say dustbin in German, and getting it across in Russian took almost as much work as his trying to make initiative comprehensible.

  When he finally understood, he laughed again and said, “Then it must be my young, fiery blood that makes me do this.” He slipped an arm around her shoulder.

  When Georg Schultz tried putting his hands on her, she’d always got the feeling she had to shake him off right away, that if she didn’t, he would tear off whatever she happened to be wearing and drag her to the ground. Bagnall didn’t give the same impression. If she said no, she thought he’d listen. Yes, I do like kulturny men.

  Because she thought she could say no any time she wanted to, she didn’t say it right away. That emboldened Bagnall to bend down and try to kiss her. She let his lips meet hers but, after a moment’s hesitation, she didn’t kiss back.

  Schultz wouldn’t have noticed, or cared if by some chance he had noticed. Bagnall did. He said, “What’s wrong?” When Ludmila didn’t answer right away, his brow furrowed in thought. Then he smote his forehead with the heel of his hand, a gesture she’d seen him use before. “I’m an idiot!” he exclaimed. “You have someone else.”

  “Da,” she said, and in an odd sort of way it was true, though all she and Heinrich Jäger had together was time best measured in hours and a couple of letters. Then, to her amazement and dismay, she burst into tears.

  When Bagnall patted her shoulder this time, it was in pure animal comfort. No, perhaps not quite pure; anyone who finds someone else attractive will always have mixed motives in touching that person. But he was doing the best he could. “What’s wrong?” he asked again. “You don’t know if he’s all right?”

  “No, I don’t know that,” she said. “I don’t know very much at all.” She looked up at his long face, set now in lines of concern. She would never have told her story to a countryman. Speaking to a foreigner somehow felt safer. And so, in a torrent where Russian soon swamped her German, she poured out what she’d hidden from everyone for so long. By the time she was done, she felt as if she’d been flattened by a train.

  Bagnall rubbed his chin. Bristles rasped under his fingers; both razors and hot water for shaving were in short supply in Pskov. The RAF man uttered something in English. That meant nothing to Ludmila. Seeing as much, Bagnall dropped back into his mix of German and Russian: “You don’t do anything the easy way, do you?”

  “Nyet.” She scanned his face, trying to figure out what he was thinking. It wasn’t easy. What they said about Englishmen was true: whatever went on inside their heads, they kept it to themselves. At least he hadn’t called her a traitor and a whore for ending up in the German’s bed when they found each other in Berchtesgaden. That was something.

  Slowly, Bagnall said, “You must know something of what the fair Tatiana”—die schöne Tatiana, he called her; which made Ludmila smile in spite of herself—“feels because she is carrying on with Georg Schultz.”

  “Yes, perhaps so, though I don’t think she’d give me much sympathy.” Ludmila didn’t think Tatiana gave anyone much sympathy. She looked Bagnall in the eye. “Now you know why I cannot, do not want to—how did you say it?—carry on with you. And so?” What are you thinking? Your face is as quiet as Molotov’s.

  “Yes, I see that,” Bagnall answered. He didn’t sound happy about it, either. Ludmila felt obscurely good about that, even though she’d just told him she didn’t want to have an affair with him. Picking his words with care, he went on, “Your German had best be a good man, if he is to be good enough to deserve you.”

  Your German. Ludmila’s guilt came flooding back. Even after a year and a half of uneasy alliance with the Nazis against the Lizards, the memory of the war against Hitler’s invading minions would not go away. But the rest of it—Ludmila stood on tiptoe and kissed Bagnall’s whiskery cheek. “Thank you,” she whispered.

  He chuckled, a little uncomfortably. “If you do that sort of thing, you will make me forget my good intentions.”

  “With you, I will take the chance.” There was a notion believers had, one Ludmila, a thoroughgoing atheist, had always scorned. Now, though, for the first time in her life, she understood the idea of absolution. No matter that an Englishman rather than a priest had given it to her. Given her own secular beliefs, that only made it better.

  The fellow who made his living exhibiting dung beetles was talking so fast and so excitedly, Nieh Ho-T’ing could hardly follow him. “They loved it, loved it, I tell you,” he exclaimed, gulping down one glass after another of samshu, the potent, triple-distilled brew made from kaoliang—millet beer. “They paid me three times as much as I expected, and they want me to come back again as soon as I can.” He stared at Nieh in sodden gratitude. “Thank you so much for arranging my performance before them.”

  “Hou Yi, it was my pleasure,” Nieh Ho-T’ing said expansively. “Anything I can do to make the lives of the little scaly devils more pleasant, that I shall do.” He smiled. “Then they pay me, which makes my life more pleasant.”

  Hou Yi laughed a loud, sozzled laugh. He poured the last few drops from the jar of samshu into his cup, then lifted a finger to show he wanted another. After a while, a girl brought it to him. He was drunk enough to pat her on the backside by way of showing thanks. She made a face as she hurried away. She might well have been available, but making a show of that demeaned her.

  Nieh let Hou freshen his cup of samshu, too. The tavern—it was called the Ta Chiu Kang: the Big Wine Vat—was only a couple of blocks from his rooming house, but he assumed an altogether different persona here. Instead of being the scaly devils’ staunchest foe, he acted the part of a medium-important tout for them, someone who was always looking for new ways to keep them entertained. Thanks to the connections the People’s Liberation Army had with men and women in the little devils’ employ, he had no trouble living up to the role.

  The Ta Chiu Kang was different from his usual haunts in other ways besides the part he played here. MO T’AN KUO SHIH, a sign announced: do not talk politics. Every time he looked at it, Nieh snickered. In a revolutionary situation, all speech was political speech. As if to underline that, a smaller banner below the sign read, PLE
ASE KEEP YOUR HONORABLE MOUTH SHUT. In less inherently futile fashion, other signs declared CASH ONLY and NO CREDIT.

  Hou Yi said, “The little devils want me back. Oh, I told you that, didn’t I? Well, they do. One of them told me as much, as I was capturing my bugs and getting ready to go. Can you arrange it for me?”

  “Arrange it for you? My friend, I can do better than that,” Nieh answered. “Do you know what I’ve learned? The little scaly devils want to make films of some animal-show performances—of your beetle show—so they can show them far away from here, in countries where the foreign devils have no such shows. Before you go to them next time, you will visit me, and I will fix a special camera from the scaly devils inside your case. It will take just the pictures they need, by some magic I am too ignorant to understand.”

  Hou Yi goggled at him, then bowed his head—and almost banged it on the top of the table. “You are much too generous to me. I am unworthy of such an honor.”

  Nieh knew that was politely insincere. “Nonsense,” he said. “The little scaly devils demanded it of me—they insisted, I tell you. Could I say ‘no’ to my masters, especially when I know what enjoyment you give them?”

  “This is wonderful, wonderful,” Hou Yi babbled. “I am your slave for life.” He looked close to the maudlin tears of drunkenness.

  “Just remember,” Nieh said, no idle warning in view of the show man’s condition, “before your next performance in front of the little scaly devils, you come to me with your case of insects, and I will mount the camera inside. Do not act as if you know it is there; the little devils want you to put on your show exactly as you would otherwise.”

  “I shall obey you as a dutiful son obeys his father.” Hou Yi giggled, belched, set his head down on the table where he and Nieh Ho T’ing were drinking, and went to sleep.