Upsetting the Balance
Page 60
Nieh looked down on him, then shrugged and left coins on the table to pay for the samshu they had been drinking. He walked out of the Big Wine Vat and into the maze of Peking’s hutungs. Torches and candles and lanterns and the occasional electric light made the alleys almost as bright as day. Nieh used every trick he knew to make sure no one was following him before he made his way back to the rooming house where the Communist cause flourished.
Sitting in the dining room there was Hsia Shou-Tao. To Nieh’s relief, his aide was alone; he never stopped worrying that one of the tarts Hsia brought back here would prove to be an agent of the scaly devils or the Kuomintang or even the Japanese. Hsia simply was not careful enough about such things.
In front of him stood a jar of samshu identical to the one from which Hou Yi had been drinking. He also had plates with crackers and meat dumplings and pickled baby crabs and a salad of jellyfish and gelatin. When he saw Nieh, he called, “Come join my feast There’s enough here for two to celebrate.”
“I’ll gladly do that,” Nieh said, waving to the serving girl for a cup and a pair of chopsticks. “What are we celebrating?”
“You know Yang Chüeh-Ai, the mouse man? The little scaly devils liked his act, and they want him back. He says they didn’t do a careful search of the cages he carries his mice in, either. We shouldn’t have any trouble planting our bomb inside there.” Hsia slurped at his samshu. “Ahh, that’s good.”
Nieh poured himself a cup of the potent millet liquor. Before he drank, he ate a couple of crackers and a pickled crab. “That is good news,” he said as he finally lifted his cup. “Hou Yi, one of the fellows who shows dung beetles, told me the same thing. We can get bombs in amongst the little scaly devils; that much seems clear. The real trick will be to have them invite all the beast-show men at the same time, so we can do them as much damage as possible.”
“You’re not wrong there,” Hsia said with a hoarse, raucous chuckle. “Can’t use the beast-show men more than once, either, poor foolish fellows. Once should do the job, though.” He made a motion of brushing something disgusting from the front of his tunic.
To Hsia, the beast-show men were to be used and expended like any other ammunition. Nieh was just as willing to expend them, but regretted the necessity. The cause was important enough to use innocent dupes to further it, but he would not forget the blood on his hands. Hsia didn’t worry about it.
“The other thing we need to make sure of is that we have good timers on all our explosives,” Nieh said. “We want them to go off as close to the same time as we can arrange.”
“Yes, yes, Grandmother,” Hsia said impatiently. He’d had a good deal to drink already, unless Nieh was much mistaken. “I have a friend who is dickering with the Japanese outside of town. From what he says, they have more timers than they know what to do with.”
“I believe that,” Nieh said. With the coming of the little scaly devils to China, Japanese forces south of their puppet state in Manchukuo were reduced to little more than guerrilla bands, and, unlike the Communist guerrillas, did not enjoy the protection of the populace in which they moved. Too many atrocities had taught the Chinese what sort of soldiers the Japanese were.
But Japan was an industrial power. It had been able to manufacture for its troops all sorts of devices the Chinese, unable to produce the like locally, had to beg, borrow, or steal. They had got matériel from the British, the Americans, and the Russians, but now both capitalist imperialists and fraternal socialist comrades were locked in their own struggle for survival. That left the Japanese remnants as the best source for advanced munitions.
Nieh said, “A pity the little scaly devils did not wait another generation before beginning their imperialist onslaught. The spread of industry over the world and the advance of revolutionary progressive forces would have made their speedy defeat a certainty.”
Hsia Shou-Tao reached for a dumpling with his chopsticks. They crossed in his fingers, leaving him with a confused expression on his face. If he was too drunk to handle them properly, he had indeed had quite a lot of samshu. He said, “We’ll beat them anyway, and the damned eastern dwarfs from Japan, and the Kuomintang, and anybody else who gets in our way.” He tried for the dumpling again, and succeeded in capturing it He popped it into his mouth, chewed, swallowed. “Jus’ like that.”
Nieh thought about lecturing him on the difference between something’s being historically inevitable and its being easy to accomplish, but concluded he’d be wasting his breath. Hsia didn’t need a lecture. What he needed was a bucket of cold water poured over his head.
Hsia belched heroically. From confused, his face took on a look of drunken foxiness. “You think Liu Han is going to get her brat back?” he asked, breathing samshu fumes across the table into Nieh Ho T’ing’s face.
“That I don’t know,” Nieh said. Like any scientific doctrine, the historical dialectic considered the motion through time of mankind as a mass; the vagaries of individuals were beneath its notice.
Leering, Hsia found another question: “You get inside her Jade Gate yet?”
“None of your business,” Nieh snapped. How did Hsia know he wanted her? He was sure he’d been discreet—but evidently not discreet enough.
His aide laughed at him. “That means no.”
Looking at Hsia Shou-Tao’s red, mirth-filled countenance, Nieh decided Hsia didn’t need just a bucket of water poured over him. Clobbering him with the bucket afterwards seemed a good idea, too.
Kirel stood beside Atvar and studied the evolving dispositions of the Race’s infantrymales and armor. For a moment, one of his eye turrets slid away from the map and toward his superior. “Exalted Fleetlord, this had better work,” he said.
“I am aware of that, yes,” Atvar answered. He was painfully aware of it, and having Kirel remind him of it so bluntly didn’t make him feel any easier about what he’d set in motion. “If spirits of Emperors past look down on us in approval, we shall smash Deutschland once for all.”
Kirel did not say anything, but his tailstump twitched a little. So did Atvar’s, in irritation. He could read his subordinate’s thoughts: not so very long ago—though it seemed an age—he’d promised to smash Britain once for all. That hadn’t worked out. In spite of hurting the British, the Race had hurt itself worse, and Britain remained in the war.
“This time, it will be different,” the fleetlord insisted. “This time, our logistics are far better than they were for the invasion of that pestiferous island.” He brought up highlights on the map. “Instead of having to fly males and materiel long distances to bring them into the battle, we shall be operating from our own long-established strongholds on either side of the Deutsche, from France and Poland. We shall move forward with both forces and crush the Big Uglies between us.”
“So the operational planners have maintained,” Kirel said. “So they would maintain, the better to underline their usefulness to our efforts. If reality matches the computer simulations, this operation will succeed. But how often, Exalted Fleetlord, does reality match simulations on Tosev 3?”
“We know what the Deutsche have,” Atvar said. “We have even extrapolated that they will have some new weapons, with performance improved over those with which we are familiar: when dealing with the Big Uglies, as you say, an upward slope on the projection line seems as reasonable as one that is flat for us. Even given that, though, the projections show us beating them.”
“Do the projections take into account the wretched weather on that part of the planet at this time of its year?” Kirel stroked computer keys. A corner of the screen that displayed the simulations map went first to a satellite image of endless storm systems rolling east from Deutschland toward Poland, and then to a video of wind whipping crystallized frozen water across a desolate landscape that resembled nothing so much as the inside of some tremendous refrigeration plant. “Our males and our equipment do not perform at optimum levels in such conditions.”
“Truth. But we have improved ove
r our levels during the previous local winter,” Atvar said stoutly. “And the cold, ironically, also hinders the activities of the Deutsche. Their poisonous gases are far less effective now than when the weather is warmer. We’ve also succeeded in developing filters to keep most gases out of the interior compartments of our fighting vehicles. This will boost both performance and morale.”
“Except, perhaps, among the infantrymales still compelled to leave their fighting vehicles from time to time and perform their duties in the open,” Kirel said.
Atvar sent him a dubious look. Ever since Straha’s attempted coup, Kirel had been scrupulously, almost ostentatiously, loyal. Unlike Straha, he did not believe in adventure for its own sake. Indeed, he hardly believed in adventure at all, as witness his protests against the upcoming campaign. But his very conservatism, a quality that endeared him to most males of the Race, might yet make him the focus for disaffected shiplords and officers. Atvar had enough troubles worrying about the political effects on his campaign on the Big Uglies. When he also had to worry about its political effects on his own males, he sometimes thought be was having to bear too heavy a burden.
“Let us look at the benefits of success,” he said. “With Deutschland defeated, the whole northwest of the main continental mass comes under our control. We gain improved positions for any future assaults, whether by air alone or with ground forces, against Britain. We go from active combat to pacification over that whole area, freeing up troops for operations elsewhere. And the psychological impact on the remaining Tosevite not-empires will be profound.”
“Truth, all of it, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said. “But, as the saying goes, to get the hatchling, you first must have the egg.”
Atvar’s tailstump lashed harder now. “Let us not mince words, Shiplord,” he said coldly. “Do you advise me to abandon this planned effort, or shall we go forward with it? Proceeding in the face of your obstructionism is difficult.”
“I obstruct nothing, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said. Almost involuntarily, he hunched down into the posture of obedience. “I merely question methods and timing to obtain the best possible results for the Race. Have I not labored long and hard to support the implementation of this plan?”
“Truth.” Atvar knew be sounded reluctant to admit as much, but he couldn’t help it. Externally, Kirel had done as he’d said. The fleetlord had been inferring the thoughts behind his actions. Maybe he was wrong. He hoped he was. Sighing, he said, “Blame it on Tosev 3, Shiplord. Anything that has anything to do with this cursed planet goes wrong one way or another.”
“Exalted Fleetlord, there we agree completely,” Kirel said. “As soon as we detected radio signals from it, we should have realized all our previous calculations needed revising.”
“We did realize that,” Atvar said. “What we didn’t have, what we should have had, was a feel for how much revising they needed.”
“And yet,” Kirel said in tones of wonder, “we may yet succeed, in spite of having to abandon plans already made.”
For a Big Ugly, as Atvar had seen time after time—generally to his consternation—abandoning plans and making new ones on the spur of the moment (or even going ahead and acting without making new plans) was so common as hardly to be worth noting. For the Race, that attitude started at traumatic and got worse from there. Routine, organization, forethought—thanks to them, the Empire had endured for a hundred millennia and made two other species reverence the Emperor in the same way the Race did. Adhering to routine on Tosev 3 as often as not led straight to disaster, for the Big Uglies anticipated and exploited routine behavior.
But deviating from routine had dangers of its own. The routine pattern was often the best one; deviations just made things worse. And the Race wasn’t good at thinking under such stress: the snap decisions males came up with were usually bad decisions. The Big Uglies exploited those, too.
Atvar removed from the screen the map of the planned campaign against Deutschland. In its place he substituted a detailed chart of an urban area on the lesser continental mass. “As you say, we may yet succeed,” he told Kirel. “Here in Chicago, we have reversed the setbacks the American Tosevites inflicted upon us when the weather first turned, and are now moving forward once more. If the trend continues, the entire city may be in our hands by the end of local winter.”
“May it prove so,” Kirel said. “Even if we do achieve victory there, the cost has proved very high. We threw many males, many fighting vehicles, many landcruisers into that grinding machine.”
“Truth,” Atvar said sadly. “But once having begun the campaign to wrest control of the city from the Big Uglies, we had to go forward with it. If we abandoned it, the Tosevites would conclude we dared not press our attacks in the face of stiff opposition. We invested more than our males in the fight for Chicago; we invested our prestige as well. And that prestige will rise with a victory.”
“This is also truth,” Kirel agreed. “Once joined, the battle could not be abandoned. Had we been able to anticipate the full cost, however, we might not have initiated the battle in the first place.” He let out a hissing sigh. “This has proved true in all too many instances on Tosev 3.”
“Not always, though,” Atvar said. “And I have a special reason for hoping the conquest of Chicago will be successfully completed. Somewhere in the not-empire called the United States skulks the oh-so-redoubtable shiplord Straha.” He laced his voice with all the scorn he could muster. “Let the traitor see the might of the Race he abandoned. Let him have some time to contemplate the wisdom first of revolt against me and then of treachery. And, when our triumph is at last complete, let us bring him to justice. On Tosev 3, his name shall live forever among the colonists as a symbol of betrayal.”
The Race’s memory was long. When Atvar said forever, he intended to be taken literally. He thought of Vorgnil, who had tried to murder an Emperor sixty-five thousand years before. His name survived, as an example of infamy. Straha’s would stand alongside it after the conquest of Tosev 3 was complete.
Mordechai Anielewicz strode down the sidewalk, as if enjoying every moment of his morning outing. That the temperature was far below freezing, that he wore a fur cap with earflaps down, two pairs of wool trousers one inside the other, a Red Army greatcoat and felt boots, and heavy mittens, that his breath smoked like a chimney and crystals froze in his beard and mustache—by the way he strolled along, it might have been spring in Paris, not winter in Lodz.
He was far from the only person on the street, either. Work had to get done, whether it was freezing or not. People either ignored the weather or made jokes about it “Colder than my wife after she’s talked with her mother,” one man said to a friend. They both laughed, building a young fogbank around themselves.
The Lizards were busy on the streets of Lodz, too. Alien police, looking far colder and more miserable than most humans Mordechai saw, labored to get traffic off the main east-west streets. They had their work cut out for them, too, for as fast as they shooed people away, more spilled onto the boulevards they were fighting to clear.
Not all of that was absentminded cussedness; quite a few men and women were being deliberately obstructive. Anielewicz hoped the Lizards didn’t figure that out. Things might get ugly if they did.
Finally, the Lizards cleared away enough people and wagons to get their armored column through. The males peering out of the cupolas of tanks and armored personnel carriers looked even more miserable than the ones on the street. They also looked absurd: a Lizard wearing a shaggy wolfskin cap tied on under his jaws resembled nothing so much as a dandelion gone to seed.
Four tanks, three carriers . . . seven tanks, nine carriers . . . fifteen tanks, twenty-one carriers. He lost track of the lorries, but they were in proportion to the armored vehicles they accompanied. When the parade was done, he whistled softly between his teeth. West of Lodz, the Lizards had something big laid on. You didn’t have to be Napoleon to figure out what, either. West of Lodz lay . . . Germany.
He wrapped his purchases in an old ragged cloth and carried them back to the fire station on Lutomierska Street. His office was upstairs, not far from the sealed room where people took refuge when the Nazis threw gas at Lodz. If they’d known what he knew, their rockets would have been flying an hour earlier.
He fiddled around with the draft of a letter for Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski to present to the Lizard authorities, asking them to release more coal for heating. Having to rely on the Lizards’ dubious mercy grated on him, but every so often Rumkowski did win concessions, so the game was worth playing. Rumkowski had begged Himmler for concessions, too, and won a few. As long as he could be a big fish in the little pool of Jewish Lodz, he’d debase himself for the bigger fish in the bigger pools.
People wandered in and out. Bertha Fleishman’s sister had had a baby girl the night before; along with everyone else, Anielewicz said mazeltov. Even as people kept blowing one another to bits, they were having babies, too. He’d seen that in the ghetto. In the midst of horror worse than any he’d imagined, people kept falling in love and getting married and having children. He wondered if that was absolutely meshuggeh or the sanest thing they could possibly do.
Finally, three o’clock rolled around. That hour corresponded to a change of shift at the telephone exchange. Anielewicz picked up the phone and waited for an operator to come on the other end of the line. When one did, he called his landlady, Mrs. Lipshitz, and told her he’d be working late. She bore up under the news with equanimity. He tried again. When he heard the operator’s voice, he asked her to put him through to Rumkowski’s office. He asked a meaningless question about the upcoming request for more coal, then hung up.