Striking the Balance w-4

by Harry Turtledove

  A little scaly devil pointed his automatic rifle at the approaching humans. In fair Chinese, he said, “You will enter the tent. You will let us see you bring no concealed weapons with you. You will pass through this machine here.” He pointed to the device.

  Liu Han had gone through it once before, Nieh Ho-Ting many times. Neither of them had ever tried sneaking armaments through. Nieh had Intelligence that the machine made a positively demonic racket if it did detect anything dangerous. So far, the People’s Liberation Army hadn’t found a way to fool it. Liu Han suspected that would come, sooner or later. Some very clever people worked for the Communist cause.

  The machine kept quiet. Beyond it, another armed little devil said, “Pass on.” His words were almost unintelligible, but no one could mistake the gesture he made with the barrel of the gun.

  Inside the tent, the little scaly devil called Ppevel sat behind the table at which Liu Han had seen him before. Beside him sat another male with much plainer body paint: his interpreter. Ppevel spoke in his own hissing, popping language. The interpreter turned his words into Chinese: “You are to be seated.” He pointed to the overstuffed chairs in front of Nieh and Liu Han. They were different from the ones that had been there on Liu Han’s last visit, and perhaps implied higher status for the envoys of the People’s Liberation Army.

  Liu Han noticed that only peripherally. She had hoped to see Ttomalss sitting at the table with Ppevel, and had hoped even more to see her daughter. She wondered what the baby would look like, with her for a mother and the foreign devil Bobby Fiore for a father. Then a really horrible thought struck her if the little devils wanted to substitute another baby of the right age and type for the one she had borne, how would she know?

  The answer to that was simple and revolting: she wouldn’t, not with any certainty. She muttered an inaudible prayer to the Amida Buddha that such a thought had not occurred to the devils. Nieh Ho-T’ing, she knew, had no more use for the Amida Buddha than for any other god or demon, and did not think anyone else should, either. Liu Han shrugged. That was his ideology. She did not discern certain truth in it.

  Ppevel spoke again. The interpreter translated: “We will return this hatchling to the female as a token of our willingness to give in exchange for getting. We expect in return a halt to your guerrilla attacks here in Peking of half a year. Is this the agreement?” He added an interrogative cough.

  “No,” Nieh Ho-T’ing answered angrily. “The agreement is for three months only-a quarter year.” Liu Han’s heart sank. Would she lose her daughter again for the sake of a quarter of a year?

  Ppevel and the interpreter went back and forth in their own tongue. Then the interpreter said, “You will please pardon me. A quarter of a year for you people is the correct agreement. This is half a year for my people.”

  “Very well,” Nieh said. “We are agreed, then. Bring out the girl child you stole as part of your systematic exploitation of this oppressed woman.” He pointed to Liu Han. “And, though we did not agree, I tell you that you should apologize to her for the treatment she suffered at your hands, and also for the propaganda campaign of vilflication you recently conducted against her in an effort to keep from returning the smallest victim of your injustice.”

  The interpreter translated that for Ppevel. The little devil with the fancy body paint spoke a single short sentence by way of reply, ending it with an emphatic cough. The interpreter said, “There is no agreement for the apology, so there shall be no apology.”

  “It’s all right,” Liu Han said softly to Nieh. “I don’t care about the apology. I just want my baby back.”

  He raised an eyebrow and didn’t say anything. She realized he hadn’t made his demand for the apology for her sake, or at least not for her sake alone. He was working for the cause, trying to win a moral advantage over the scaly devils as he would have done over the Japanese or the Kuomintang clique.

  Ppevel turned both his eye turrets away from the human beings, back toward an opening that led to the rear part of the large tent. He spoke in his own language. Liu Han’s hands knotted into fists-she caught Ttomalss’ name. Ppevel repeated himself. Ttomalss came out. He was carrying Liu Han’s daughter.

  For a moment, she couldn’t see what the baby looked like-her eyes blurred with tears. “Give her to me,” she said softly. The rage she’d expected to feel on confronting the little devil who’d stolen her child simply wasn’t there. Seeing the little girl had dissolved it.

  “It shall be done,” Ttomalss answered in his own language, a phrase she understood. Then he switched to Chinese: “My opinion is that returning this hatchling to you is an error, that it would have served a far more useful purpose as a link between your kind and mine.” That said, he angrily thrust the baby out at Liu Han.

  “My opinion is that you would serve a more useful purpose as night soil than you do now,” she snarled. The rage wasn’t gone after all, merely suppressed. She snatched her daughter away from the scaly devil.

  Now, for the first time, she took a good look at the little girl. Her daughter was not quite the same color as a purely Chinese baby would have been: her skin was a little lighter, a little ruddier. Her face was a little longer, a little more forward-thrusting, too, with a narrow chin that reminded Liu Han of Bobby Fiore’s and laid to rest any fears that the little devils had switched children on her. The baby’s eyes had the proper shape; they weren’t round and staring like those of a foreign devil.

  “Welcome back to your home, little one,” Liu Han crooned, hugging her daughter tightly to her. “Welcome back to your mother.”

  The baby began to cry. It looked not to her but to Ttomalss, and tried to get away from her to go back to him. That look was like a knife in her heart. The sounds her daughter made were not like those of Chinese, nor even like those of the foreign devil language Bobby Fiore had spoken. They were the hisses and pops of the little scaly devils’ hateful speech. Among them was an unmistakable emphatic cough.

  Ttomalss spoke with what sounded like spiteful satisfaction: “As you see, the hatchling is now used to the company of males of the Race, not to your kind. Such language as it has learned is our language. Its habits are our habits. It looks like a Big Ugly, yes, but its thoughts are those of the Race.”

  Liu Han wished she had somehow smuggled a weapon into the tent. She would cheerfully have slain Ttomalss for what he’d done to her daughter. The baby kept twisting in her arms, trying to get away, trying to go back to the slavery with Ttomalss that was all it had ever known. Its cries dinned in her ears.

  Nieh Ho-T’ing said, “What has been done can be undone. We shall reeducate the child as a proper human being. This will take time and patience, but it can be done and it shall be done.” He spoke the phrase in Chinese.

  “It shall be done.” Liu Han used the little devils’ language, throwing the words in Ttomalss’ face and adding an emphatic cough of her own for good measure.

  Her daughter stared up at her, eyes wide with wonder, at hearing her use words it understood. Maybe it would be all right after all, Liu Han thought. When she’d first met Bobby Fiore, the only words they’d had in common had been a handful from the speech of the little scaly devils. They’d managed, and they’d gone on to learn fair amounts of each other’s languages. And babies picked up words at an astonishing rate once they began to talk. Nieh was right-before long, with luck, her daughter would pick up Chinese and would become a proper human being rather than an imitation scaly devil.

  For now, she’d use whatever words she could to make the baby accept her. “All good now,” she said in the little devils’ language. “All good.” She grunted out another emphatic cough to show how good having her daughter back was.

  Again, the little girl gaped in astonishment. She gulped and sniffed and then made a noise that sounded like an interrogative cough. She might have been saying, “Is itreally?”

  Liu Han answered with one more emphatic cough. Suddenly, like the sun coming out from behind rain clouds, he
r daughter smiled at her. She began to cry, and wondered what the baby would make of that.

  “Ready for takeoff,” Teerts reported. A moment later, the air traffic control male gave him permission to depart. His killercraft roared down the runway and flung itself into the sky.

  He was glad he’d climbed quickly, for an antiaircraft gun not far west of the Kansas air base threw several shells at him. The Race had been in nominal control of the area for some time, but the Big Uglies kept smuggling in weapons portable on the backs of their males or beasts and made trouble with them. It wasn’t so bad here as he’d heard it was in the SSSR, but it wasn’t a holiday, either.

  He radioed the approximate position of the antiaircraft gun back to the air base. “We’ll tend to it,” the traffic control male promised. So they would-eventually. Teerts had seen that before. By the time they got around to sending out planes or helicopters or infantrymales, the gun wouldn’t be there any more. But it would pop up again before long, somewhere not far away.

  Nothing he could do about that. He flew west, toward the fighting outside of Denver. Now that he’d carried out several missions against the Tosevite lines outside the city, he understood why his superiors had transferred him from the Florida front to this one. The Big Uglies here had fortflied their positions even more strongly than the Nipponese had outside Harbin in Manchukuo. They had more antiaircraft guns here, too.

  He didn’t like thinking about that. He’d been shot down outside Harbin, and still shuddered to remember Nipponese captivity. The Americans were said to treat captives better than the Nipponese did, but Teerts was not inclined to trust the mercies of any Tosevites, not if he could help it.

  Before long, he spied the mountains that ridged the spine of this landmass like the dorsal shields of aneruti back on Home. Rising higher than any of the peaks were the clouds of smoke and dust from the fighting.

  He contacted forward air control for guidance to the targets that most urgently needed hitting. “We are having success near the hamlet known to the Tosevites as Kiowa. The assault they launched in that area has failed, and they are ripe for a counterattack.” The male gave Teerts targeting coordinates, adding, “If we break through here, we may be able to roll up their line. Strike them hard, Flight Leader.”

  “It shall be done,” Teerts said, and swung his killercraft in the direction ordered.

  For Rance Auerbach, the war was over. For a while there, he’d thought he was over. He’d wished he was, with a bullet in the chest and another in the leg. Rachel Hines had tried to drag him back to the American lines after he was hit. He remembered coming to in the middle of that, a memory he wouldn’t have kept if he’d had any choice in the matter.

  Then the Lizards, sallying out of Karval against the cavalry raiders he’d led, got close. He remembered blood bubbling from his nose and mouth as he’d croaked-he’d tried to yell-for Rachel to get the hell out of there. He’d figured he was done for anyhow, and why should they get her, too?

  The one good memory he had from that dreadful time was the kiss on the cheek she’d given him: not an attention he would have wanted from most cavalry troopers. He hoped she’d got away. He didn’t know whether she had or not; his lights had gone out again right about then.

  Next thing he knew, he was in Karval, which was a hell of a mess after the shelling the Americans had given it. A harassed-looking human doctor was sprinkling sulfa powder into the wound in his thigh, while a Lizard who had red crosses in white circles added to his Lizardly body paint watched with two-eye-turreted fascination.

  Auerbach had tried to raise his right arm to let the doc-and the Lizard who looked to be a doctor, too-know he was among those present. That was when he noticed the needle stuck in his vein and the tubing that led up to the plasma bottle a young woman was holding.

  The motion was feeble, but the girl noticed it and exclaimed. He’d been too woozy to notice her face, which was masked anyhow, but he recognized her voice. He’d lost Rachel Hines, but now he’d found Penny Summers.

  “You understand me?” the human doctor had asked. When he’d managed a quarter-inch’s worth of nod, the fellow had gone on, “Just in case you’re wondering, you’re a POW, and so am I. If it weren’t for the Lizards, odds are you’d be dead. They know more about asepsis than we’ll learn in a lifetime. I think you’re gonna make it. You’ll walk again, too-after a while.” At that moment, walking hadn’t been the biggest thing on his mind. Breathing had seemed plenty hard enough.

  Now that the Lizard armor had moved out of Karval, the aliens were using it as a center for wounded prisoners they’d taken. Pretty soon, the few battered buildings left in town weren’t enough to hold everybody. They’d run up tents of a briliant and hideous orange, one to a patient. Auerbach had been in one for several days now.

  He didn’t see the doctor as often as he had at first. Lizards came by to look him over several times a day. So did human nurses, Penny Summers as often as any and maybe more often than most. The first couple of times he needed it, he found the bedpan mortifyingly embarrassing. After that, he stopped worrying about it: it wasn’t as if he had a choice.

  “How’d they get you?” he asked Penny. His voice was a croaking whisper, he hardly had breath enough to blow out a match.

  She shrugged. “We were evacuating wounded out of Lamar when the Lizards were comin’ in. You know how that was-they didn’t just come in, they rolled right on through. They scooped us up like a kid netting sunfish, but they let us go on takin’ care of hurt people, and that’s what I’ve been doin’ ever since.”

  “Okay,” he said, nodding. “Yeah, they seem to play by the rules, pretty much, anyhow.” He paused to get some more air, then asked. “How’s the war going?”

  “Can’t hardly tell,” she answered. “Ain’t no people around here with radios, none I know about, anyways. I’ll say this much, though-they been shippin’ a whole lot o’ POWs back here lately. That’s liable to mean they’re winning, isn’t it?”

  “Liable to, yeah,” he said. He wanted to cough, but held what little breath he had till the urge went away. He’d coughed once or twice already, and it felt as if his chest was going to rip to pieces. When he could speak again, he went on, “Do you know what kind of casualties they’re taking?”

  She shook her head. “No way for me to tell. They ship their own wounded back somewheres else.”

  “Ah,” he said, then shook his head-carefully, because that pulled at the stitches that were holding him together. Boris Karloff might have had more when he played inFrankenstein, but not a whole lot. “Darned if I know why I’m even bothering to ask. It’s going to be a long time before I’m able to worry about that kind of stuff.”

  He said it that way to keep from thinking it would never matter to him again. If his chest healed. If his leg healed, he’d eventually go to a real POW camp, and maybe there, however many months away that was, he could start planning how to escape. If his chest healed but his leg didn’t, he wouldn’t be going anywhere-nowhere fast, anyhow. If his leg healed but his chest didn’t… well, in that case, they’d stick a lily in his hand and plant him.

  Penny looked at him, looked down at the shiny stuff-it was like thick cellophane, but a lot tougher-the Lizards had used to cover the dirt on which they’d set up the tent, then back at him again. In a low voice, she said, “Bet you wish now you would have laid me when you had the chance.”

  He laughed, panted, laughed again. “You really want to know, I’ve been wishing that ever since the Lizards bombed Lamar. But look at me.” His left arm worked, more or less. He gestured with it. “Not much I can do about that now, so why worry about it?”

  “No, you can’t, that’s so.” Penny’s eyes kindled. She knelt beside the government-issue cot on which he was lying and flipped back the blanket. “But I can.” She laughed as she took him in hand and bent over him. “If I hear anybody comin’, I’ll make like I was givin’ you the bedpan.”

  He gasped when her mouth came down on him. He
didn’t know whether he’d rise. He didn’t know whether he wanted to rise. Suddenly he understood how a woman had to feel when the guy she was with decided he was going to screw her then and there and she was too drunk to do anything about it.

  Rise he did, in spite of everything. Penny’s head bobbed up and down. He gasped again, and then again. He wondered if he was going to have enough air in him to come, no matter how good it felt… and her lips and teasing tongue felt as good-well, almost as good-as getting shot up felt bad.

  She closed her hand around his shaft, down below her busy mouth, and squeezed him, hard. Not more than two heartbeats later, he shuddered and exploded. For a moment, purple spots swam before his eyes. Then the inside of the tent filled with light, so clear and brilliant it seemed to be-

  The Lizard fighter-bomber broke off its attack run and began to gain altitude. Omar Bradley scratched at the little bandage on his nose; he’d had a boil there lanced a couple of days before. “I’m glad we’re doing this with a radio signal to back up the wire,” he said. “Lay you seven to two the bombs and rockets broke the link.”

  “My old man always told me never bet when I was liable to lose,” Leslie Groves answered. “No flies on him.”

  “Not a one,” Bradley agreed. “You’ve got the buttons right there, General. One of them had better work. You want to do the honors and push them?”

  “You bet I do,” Groves said. “I’ve been building these damn things for a hell of a long time now. About time I get to find out what they’re like when they go off.”

  One of the ignition devices had an insulated wire coming out of it. The other one didn’t. Groves’ broad right thumb came down on one red button, his left on the other.

  “Take that, you scaleless, egg-addled, stiff-jointed things!” Teerts cried as his rockets turned a stretch of Tosevite defenses into an oven where the meat would be diced and ground as it was roasted.