Second Contact

by Harry Turtledove

  A male scrambled in after them and slammed the rear doors shut. The mechanized combat vehicle rattled forward on its treads. It hadn’t gone far before bullets started slamming into it. Its own machine gun and males at the firing ports shot back. The noise inside was deafening.

  Rioters kept shooting at the mechanized combat vehicle all through the short trip from the college to the dormitory. None of the hits penetrated, which Reuven took as a tribute to the Race’s engineering. One of the Lizards inside with him and Jane turned an eye turret their way and said, “We make them pay.”

  He was talking about human beings, people like Reuven. They were, unfortunately, also people doing their best to kill him. He couldn’t work up much sympathy for them. What came out of his mouth was, “Good.”

  The mechanized combat vehicle spun, backed, and stopped. The Lizard, who could see out, said, “We are just in front of your building. I will open the doors. When I do, you run inside.”

  “It shall be done,” Reuven and Jane said together. The doors flew open. Ducking low to keep from banging their heads on a roof made for shorter beings, they jumped out and ran. No bullets smote them. As soon as they were inside the dormitory, students who’d got there before them slammed the building’s doors shut again.

  “Are the telephones working?” Reuven asked. When somebody told him they were, he called his parents’ house. He got one of his twin sisters. “I’m at the dormitory. I’m going to spend the night here,” he said. “How are things around the house?”

  “Quieter here than last time,” Esther or Judith—he thought it was Judith—answered. “Getting home wouldn’t have been easy for you, though, I don’t suppose. I’m glad you’re all right.” She said that last with the air of someone granting a great concession.

  “I’m glad all of you are safe, too,” Reuven answered. “I’ll be home as soon as I can. Take care.” He hung up.

  “We have no vacant bedrooms,” one of the dormitory workers told him. “I will set up a cot for you in the hall.”

  Reuven hadn’t thought there would be any empty rooms. He’d dreamt of sharing a bedroom with Jane Archibald. By the way she’d kissed him every now and then, he’d dared hope he wasn’t the only one dreaming of such things. Whether he was or not, he wouldn’t find out tonight.

  She handed him a chicken sandwich and a bottle of Coca-Cola. She had a sandwich and a soda of her own, too. “Thanks,” he said, realizing how hungry he was. He gulped down an enormous bite, then went on, “That’s . . . almost as good as what I hoped for.”

  Her eyes widened a little; she could hardly misunderstand him. Then she said, “Not tonight, Reuven.” He nodded—he’d already figured that out for himself. But she was smiling, she wasn’t angry, and she didn’t say anything more. All of a sudden, the whole hellish day didn’t look so bad.

  Nieh Ho-T’ing was normally perhaps the most self-contained man Liu Han knew. Today, though, he seemed as bouncy as a sixteen-year-old who imagined himself in love for the first time. “We have more weapons than we know what to do with,” he said jubilantly. “We have weapons from the Americans—thanks to you, Comrade.” He grinned at Liu Han. They weren’t lovers any more, but seeing that grin reminded her of why they had been.

  “Thanks to the Americans, too, for trying till they got a ship-ment past the Japanese and the little scaly devils and their Chinese lackeys at the customs houses,” Liu Han said.

  Nieh brushed that aside. His mind was on other things. “And we have weapons from our Socialist brethren in the Soviet Union,” he burbled. “Theirs got through, too”—which might have meant he’d been listening to her after all. “And with all these toys in our hands, we ought to find something worthwhile to do with them.”

  “Something that will make the little scaly devils wish they’d never been hatched, you mean,” Liu Han said.

  “Well, of course,” Nieh Ho-T’ing replied in some surprise. “What other worthwhile use for weapons is there?”

  “The Kuomintang,” she said.

  “They are a small enemy,” Nieh said with a scornful wave. “The scaly devils are the great enemy. So it was before the scaly devils came: the Japanese were the great enemy, the Kuomintang the small. They cannot destroy us. The scaly devils might, if they had the will and the skill.”

  “Their will is considerable,” Liu Han said. “Never think too little of them.”

  “They have not the dialectic, which means their will won’t endure,” Nieh said sharply. “And they have little in the way of skill.”

  Liu Han could not disagree with that. Talking quietly over a couple of bowls of noodles in a neighborhood eatery on the west side of Peking, she and Nieh Ho-T’ing might have been deciding when to hold a party for a neighbor, not how best to visit death and destruction on the imperialist little devils. “What have you got in mind?” she asked.

  He slurped up another mouthful of noodles with his chopsticks before answering, “The Forbidden City. I think we have a chance to take it, or at least to wreck it so the little scaly devils cannot use it any more.”

  “Eee, wouldn’t that be something!” Liu Han exclaimed. “The Chinese Emperors kept the people out of it, and now the little devils do the same.” She’d seen some of the marvels at the heart of Peking when serving as an emissary to the little devils. Thinking of them in ruins hurt, but thinking of striking a blow against the little scaly devils made the hurt go away. She turned practical: “We should strike the little devils somewhere else first, so they will not be thinking about an assault on the Forbidden City.”

  Nieh Ho-T’ing nodded respectfully. “That is part of the plan, yes. You see things the way a general would.” As he was a general himself, that was not the sort of compliment he gave lightly.

  “Good.” Liu Han nodded, too. “Now, you have talked the Muslims into joining the first attack, the one that won’t go anywhere?”

  This time, Nieh stopped with a load of noodles halfway to his mouth. “I’ve dealt with the Muslims of Peking every now and then—you know that,” he said slowly, and waited for Liu Han to nod. When she did, he went on, “Why would you want me—why would you want us—to involve them now?”

  “Ah.” Liu Han smiled. She’d seen something he hadn’t—she’d seen something the rest of the Central Committee hadn’t. “Because the Muslims farther west are rebelling against the scaly devils. If we have an uprising here, why shouldn’t our Muslims get the blame, or part of it?”

  Nieh stared at her. The noodles, forgotten on the chopsticks, dripped broth down onto the tabletop. After a moment, he shook his head and started to laugh. “Do you know what a terror you would have been if you’d stayed a peasant in a little village?” he said. “You would be running that village by now—no one would dare sell a duck, let alone a pig, without asking what you thought first. And if you had daughters-in-law . . . Eee, if you had daughters-in-law, they wouldn’t dare breathe without asking you first.”

  Liu Han thought about it. After a moment, she laughed, too. “Maybe you’re right. That’s what mothers-in-law are for—making life miserable for daughters-in-law, I mean. Mine did. But it hasn’t got anything to do with anything now. Will you talk to the Muslims, or won’t you?”

  “Oh, I will—you’ve convinced me,” Nieh said. “I wish I’d thought of it myself, as a matter of fact. It’s good to have you back in China.”

  “It’s good to be back,” Liu Han said from the bottom of her heart. “If you know some of the things they eat in the United States . . . But never mind that. Why wasn’t I involved in planning the attack on the Forbidden City as soon as someone got the idea?”

  Suddenly, Nieh Ho-T’ing looked uncomfortable. “Oh, you know how Mao is about these things,” he said at last.

  “Ah.” Liu Han did indeed. “He thinks women are better in bed than at the council table. Hsia Shou-Tao thinks the same way. How much self-criticism has he had to give over the years because of it? Maybe Mao should criticize himself, too.”

  “Maybe he
should—but don’t hold your breath,” Nieh said. “Now you have shown you deserve to help plan the attack. Isn’t that enough?”

  “It will do, for now.” Liu Han leaned forward. “Let’s talk.”

  Theirs was not the only talk that went into the plan, of course. They met with leading officials from the Party and the People’s Liberation Army, hammering out what they wanted to do and also how to keep both the little scaly devils and the Kuomintang from getting wind of it before the attacks went on. Liu Han helped organize a disinformation campaign: not one that claimed there would be no attack, but one that said it was aimed at a different part of Peking a week later than the real assault would be launched.

  Nieh Ho-T’ing went several times to the Muslim quarter in the southwestern part of the Chinese city of Peking. He came back from one trip laughing. “I met with a mutton merchant,” he told Liu Han. “Across the street, an ordinary Chinese has set up as a pig butcher. The fellow painted a tiger in the front window of his shop, to frighten the Muslim’s sheep. The Muslim put a mirror in front of his own place, to make the tiger turn on the pigs, which the Muslim cannot eat himself. I thought it was a good joke.”

  “It is a good joke,” Liu Han agreed. “Now, will the Muslims make their diversion?”

  “I think they will,” Nieh answered. “The scaly devils oppress them because Muslims cause so much trouble in the west—you had a good notion there. That pig butcher is an example of this oppression: pigs offend Muslims, but the little devils let him open his shop in that district even so.”

  “If they are fools, they will pay for being fools,” Liu Han said. “A pity we have to give the Muslims weapons to help them rise up. The ones who live may end up turning some of those weapons against us.”

  “It can’t be helped,” Nieh said.

  “I suppose not,” Liu Han admitted. “I wish it could. But the Muslims are less dangerous to us than the Kuomintang, much less than the little scaly devils.”

  The chosen day dawned clear and cold, with a strong wind blowing out of the west. The wind brought with it yellow dust from the Mongolian desert; a thin coating of dust got everywhere, including between Liu Han’s teeth. That gritty feeling in the mouth and in the eyes was part of living in Peking. Liu Han quickly got used to it again, though she hadn’t missed it when she and Liu Mei went to America.

  She stayed in her roominghouse with her daughter, waiting for things to happen. In a way, she wished she were carrying an American tommy gun or a Russian PPSh submachine gun, but she wasn’t an ordinary soldier any more. She was of more use to the cause of popular revolution setting others in motion than moving herself.

  Right at the appointed hour, gunfire broke out south of the roominghouse. “It begins,” Liu Mei said.

  “Not yet, not for us,” Liu Han replied. “If the Muslims do not draw enough scaly devils away from the Forbidden City, our fighters will sit on their hands and let the little devils crush this uprising. That will be hard on the Muslims, but it will save our men for another time when we can get better use from them.”

  “We will give the Muslims to the Kuomintang if that happens,” Liu Mei said.

  “Truth,” Liu Han answered in the scaly devils’ language. Returning to Chinese, she went on, “It cannot be helped, though. If we waste the substance of the People’s Liberation Army, we have nothing left.”

  Before long, her practiced ear caught the rattle of the little scaly devils’ automatic weapons, a sound different from the one the Muslims’ rifles and submachine guns made. When she caught the rumble of tanks rolling through the narrow streets of Peking, she grinned at her daughter. Things were unfolding just as Nieh Ho-T’ing had planned them. Liu Mei didn’t grin back; that was not her way. But her eyes sparkled in an otherwise expressionless face, and Liu Han knew she was pleased.

  Had the People’s Liberation Army been fighting the Kuomintang, the attack on the Forbidden City would have come after sunset. But the Chinese Communists had learned to their sorrow that the scaly devils had devices allowing them to see in the dark like owls. And so the assault on the moated walls surrounding the rectangle of the Forbidden City began in the early afternoon. American submachine guns smuggled one by one into the surrounding Imperial City opened up on the walls. So did heavy Russian mortars. The gates into the Forbidden City—especially the Wu Mên, the Meridian Gate, at the south—would already be open, to let the soldiers of the little scaly devils and their fighting vehicles go forth to put down the Muslims. Teams of picked Chinese fighters were to rush in through them, to make sure they stayed open so more human beings could follow.

  “If we take the Forbidden City, can we keep it?” Liu Mei asked.

  “I don’t know,” Liu Han answered. “We can do a lot of damage. We can kill a lot of their officials and a lot of running dogs. And we can embarrass them, make them look like fools all over the world. It’s worth the price we’ll pay.”

  “They do fight hard,” her daughter remarked. “They will slay more of ours than we slay of theirs.”

  “I know that.” Liu Han’s shrug was not so much callous as calculating. “Mao is right when he says they can slay hundreds of millions of Chinese and still leave us with hundreds of millions to resist them. They cannot afford losses that match ours. They cannot afford losses that are the tenth part of ours. That is what this attack is supposed to tell them.”

  Someone pounded on her door. She opened it. A runner, a man she recognized as one of Nieh Ho-T’ing’s junior officers, stood panting in the hallway. Half his left ear had been shot away; blood dripped down onto his tunic. He didn’t seem to notice. “Comrade—Comrades”—he corrected himself, catching sight of Liu Mei behind Liu Han—“I am to tell you that the Tai Ho Tien, the Hall of Supreme Harmony, at the heart of the Forbidden City is in the hands of the People’s Liberation Army.”

  “So soon?” Liu Han exclaimed. The runner nodded. She shook her head in slow wonder. “I think we will conquer—I think we have conquered—after all.”

  Except on the days when he felt worse, Mordechai Anielewicz bicycled through the streets of Lodz. It was defiance as much as anything else, a refusal to let the nerve gas he’d breathed twenty years before do anything more to his life than he could help.

  When he saw Ludmila Jäger hobbling along on a stick, he pulled to a stop beside her. Her broad Russian face bore a look of intense concentration; she was fighting pain as best she could, too. “How is it today?” Mordechai called to her.

  She shrugged. “Today, not so good,” she answered. “When the weather is cold and wet, it hurts more,” she went on in her Russian-accented Polish. Then she eyed him. “But you know this for yourself.”

  “I suppose so,” he answered, again feeling oddly guilty that the gas had done worse to her than it had to him.

  She snapped her fingers. “Something I meant to tell you. Someone asked me yesterday where you live.”

  “Nu? Did you tell him?” Mordechai asked.

  Ludmila frowned. “I did, and now I wonder if I should have. That’s why I wanted to let you know: in case I was stupid.”

  Anielewicz grew alert. “Why? Do you think he was a Polish nationalist? Or did he like a Nazi talk?” He smiled as he put on the German accent, but the expression didn’t reach his eyes. He’d done the Greater German Reich a few favors during the fighting, but he’d done the Nazis any number of unfavors during it and since, not least refusing to let himself and Lodz go up in fire when the SS smuggled what was now the Jews’ explosive-metal bomb into the city.

  “No.” Ludmila shook her head. “And no again. As a matter of fact, he spoke Polish the same way I do. Not as well, I don’t think.”

  “A Russian?” Mordechai asked, and she nodded. Now he frowned. “What would a Russian want with me? I haven’t had anything to do with Russians . . . for a while.” Ludmila was his dear friend, but that didn’t mean she needed to know everything he did as one of the leaders of Poland’s Jews. She nodded again, understanding as much. He shrugged. �
��Isn’t that interesting? All right, I’ll keep an eye open for Russians. Can’t trust those Reds, after all. You never know what they might do.”

  “No, you never know.” Ludmila, former Red Air Force senior lieutenant, smiled at him. “Reds are liable to do all sorts of foolish things. They might even decide they like living in Poland.”

  “Oh, I doubt that,” Mordechai said. They both laughed. He went on, “I wonder what the fellow wants with me. I know some Russians—some Russians in Russia, I mean—but if they need to get hold of me, they know how.”

  Ludmila looked troubled. “Maybe I shouldn’t have told him anything. But I didn’t think it could do any harm.”

  “It probably won’t,” Anielewicz said. “Don’t worry about it. I don’t intend to.” He brought his feet back up onto the bicycle pedals and rode off. When he looked back over his shoulder—not the safest thing to do in the narrow, crowded, winding streets of Lodz—he saw Ludmila walking along with the same limping determination she’d shown ever since coming to the city. She never said anything more about the nerve gas that still tormented her than nichevo—it can’t be helped. Heinrich Jäger had been the same way till the aftereffects of the gas helped put him in an early grave.

  As Mordechai pedaled back toward his flat, he kept on pondering what Ludmila had told him. He couldn’t make heads or tails of it. Russians who dealt with him in official ways necessarily knew how to reach him. Those who dealt with him in unofficial ways, as David Nussboym had, could also get hold of him whenever they needed to. But he didn’t think he’d be seeing Nussboym, officially or unofficially, for a long time, if ever. By the word that filtered out of the Soviet Union, the NKVD was still being purged. Odds of Nussboym’s survival didn’t strike Mordechai as good.

  “And I won’t miss him a bit,” he muttered as he stopped in front of his block of flats. But what did that leave? After a little while, he realized it might leave a Russian who had nothing to do with the government of the Soviet Union. That government was so allembracing inside the USSR, it was no wonder the thought had taken so long to occur to him. The wonder was, he’d come up with it at all.