Upsetting the Balance w-3

by Harry Turtledove

  That didn’t necessarily mean his name was Jacques, Jager noted. Nonetheless, he said,“Merci, Jacques. I am Jean, and this is Francois.” Skorzeny snickered at the alias he’d been given. Francois was a name for a fussy headwaiter, not a scar-faced fighting man.

  Jacques’ eyes had heavy lids, and dark pouches under them. They were keen all the same. “You would be Johann and Fritz, then?” he said in German a little better than Jager’s French.

  “If you like,” Skorzeny answered in the same language. Jacques’ smile did not quite reach those eyes. He, too, knew aliases when he heard them.

  The interior of the farmhouse was gloomy, even after Jacques switched on the electric lamps. Again, Jager reminded himself no one had fought a war in this part of France for generations; the amenities that had been here before 1940 were still likely to work.

  Jacques said, “You will be hungry, yes? Marie left a stew I am to reheat for us.” He got a fire going in the hearth and hung a kettle above it. Before long, a delicious aroma filled the farmhouse. Jacques poured white wine from a large jug into three mismatched glasses. He raised his. “For the Lizards-merde.”

  They all drank. The wine was sharp and dry. Jager wondered if it would tan his tongue to leather inside his mouth. Then Jacques ladled out the stew: carrots, onions, potatoes, and bits of meat in a gravy savory with spices. Jager all but inhaled his plateful, yet Skorzeny finished ahead of him. When drunk alongside the stew, the wine was fine.

  “Marvelous.” Jager glanced over at Jacques. “If you eat this well all the time, it’s a wonder you don’t weigh two hundred kilos.”

  “Farming is never easy,” the Frenchman answered, “and it has grown only harder these past few years, with no petrol at hand. A farmer can eat, yes, but he works off his food.”

  “What kind of meat is it?” Skorzeny asked, looking wistfully back toward the kettle.

  “Wild rabbit.” Jacques spread his hands. “You must know how it is,messieurs. The livestock, it is too precious to slaughter except to keep from starving orpeut-etre for a great feast like a wedding. But I am a handy man with a snare, and so-” He spread his work-gnarled hands.

  He made no move to offer Skorzeny more stew, and even the brash SS man did not get up to refill his plate uninvited. Like Jager, he likely guessed Jacques would need what was left to feed himself after the two of them had moved on.

  Jager said, “Thank you for putting us up here for the night.”

  “Pas de quoi,”Jacques answered. His hand started to come up to his mouth, as if with a cigarette. Jager had seen a lot of people make gestures like that, this past year. After a moment, the Frenchman resumed: “Life is strange,n’est-ce pas? When I was a young man, I fought youBoches, you Germans, at Verdun, and never did I think we could be allies, your people and mine.”

  “Marshal Petain also fought at Verdun,” Skorzeny said, “and he has worked closely with the German authorities.”

  Jager wondered how Jacques would take that. Some Frenchmen thought well of Petain, while to others he was a symbol of surrender and collaboration. Jacques only shrugged and said, “It is late. I will get your blankets.” He took for granted that soldiers would have no trouble sleeping on the floor. At the moment, Jager would have had no trouble sleeping on a bed of nails.

  The blankets were rough, scratchy wool. The one Jager wrapped around himself smelled of a woman’s sweat and faintly of rose water. He wondered whether it belonged to Jacques’ wife or his daughter, and knew he couldn’t ask.

  Skorzeny had already started snoring. Jager lay awake a while, trying to remember how long it had been since he’d lain with a woman. Occasional visits to a brothel didn’t really count, except to relieve pressure like the safety valve of a steam engine. The last one that mattered had been Ludmila Gorbunova. He sighed-most of a year now. Too long.

  Breakfast the next morning was slabs of bread cut from a long, thin loaf like those the policeman had carried in his bicycle basket. Jager and Skorzeny washed the bread down with more white wine. “You might prefer coffee, I know,” Jacques said, “but-” His Gallic shrug was eloquent.

  “By me, wine is plenty good,” Skorzeny said. Jager wasn’t so sure he agreed. He didn’t make a habit of drinking part of his breakfast, and suspected the wine would leave him logy and slow. Skorzeny picked up the loaf from which Jacques had taken slices. “We’ll finish this off for lunch, if you don’t mind.”

  His tone said Jacques had better not mind. The Frenchman shrugged again. Jager would have taken the bread, too, but he would have been more circumspect about how he did it. Circumspection, however, did not seem to be part of Skorzeny’s repertoire.

  To smooth things over, Jager asked, “How far to Albi, Jacques?”

  “Twenty kilometers, perhaps twenty-five,” the farmer answered indifferently. Jager projected a mental map of the territory inside his head. The answer sounded about right. A good day’s hike, especially for a man who was used to letting panzers haul him around.

  The sun beat at the back of his neck and Skorzeny’s when they set out. Sweat started running down his cheeks almost at once.The wine, he thought, annoyed. But it was not just the wine. The air hung thick and breathless; he had to push through it, as if through gauze, to move ahead. When the sun rose higher in the sky, the day would be savagely hot.

  A stream of Lizard lorries came up the road toward Jager and Skorzeny. They scrambled off onto the verge; what were a couple of human beings dead by the side of the road to the Lizards? He kicked at the tarmac. If a couple of Russian civilians hadn’t gotten out of the way of a German motor convoy, what would have happened to them? Probably the same thing.

  Skorzeny hadn’t been thinking about civilians of any sort. He said, “You know what they’re hauling in those lorries.”

  “If it isn’t gas masks, one of us will be the most surprised man in France, and the other will be runner-up,” Jager answered.

  “How right you are,” Skorzeny said, chuckling. “Our job is to make sure they don’t keep shipping them out of there in such great lots.”

  He sounded as if that posed no more problems than hiking along this all but deserted road. Maybe he even believed it. After his coups-playing Prometheus by stealing explosive metal from the Lizards, absconding with Mussolini from right under their snouts, doing the same with a Lizard panzer, and driving the aliens out of Split and out of all of Croatia-he had a right to be confident. There was, however, a difference between confidence and arrogance. Jager thought so, anyhow. Skorzeny might have had other ideas.

  They rested for a while in the heat of midday, going down to the banks of the Tarn to drink some water and to splash some on their faces. Then, under the shade of a spreading oak, they shared the bread Skorzeny had appropriated from Jacques. A kingfisher dove into the river with a splash. Somewhere back in the brush, a bee-eater took off with a cry of“Quilp, quilp!”

  “I should have lifted some of that wine, too,” Skorzeny said. “God only knows how many Frenchmen have been pissing in this river, or what we’re liable to catch from drinking out of it.”

  “I used to worry about that, too,” Jager answered. “I still do, but not so much. Do it often enough and you stop thinking about it.” He shook his head. “Like you stop thinking about killing people, but on a smaller scale, if you know what I mean.”

  Skorzeny’s big head bobbed up and down. “I like that. It’s true, too, no doubt about it.”

  Cautiously, Jager said, “Like killing Jews, too, don’t you think, Skorzeny? The more you do, the easier it gets.” There were just the two of them, here in the quiet of southern France. If you couldn’t speak your mind, or at least part of it, here, where could you? And if you couldn’t speak your mind anywhere, was life really worth living? Were you a man or just a mindless machine?

  “Don’t start in on me about that,” Skorzeny said. Now he tossed his head like a man shaking flies. “I didn’t have anything to do with it. I fought alongside those Jews in Russia, remember, same as
you did, when we raided the Lizards for their explosive metal.”

  “I remember,” Jager said. “I don’t have anything to do with-” He stopped. How many of the prisoners extracting uranium from the failed nuclear pile outside Hechingen and bringing it to Schloss Hohentubingen had been Jews? A good many, without a doubt. He might not have condemned them himself, but he’d exploited them once they were condemned. He tried again: “When theReich’s hands are dirty, how can anyone’s hands be clean?”

  “They can’t,” Skorzeny said placidly. “War is a filthy business, and it dirties everything it touches. The whole business with the Jews is just part of that. Christ on His cross, Jager, are you going to feel clean after we give Albi our little dose of joy and good tidings?”

  “That’s different.” Jager stuck out his chin and looked stubborn. “The Lizards can shoot back-they shoot better than we do. But marching the Jews up to a pit and shooting them a row at a time-or the camps in Poland… People will remember that sort of thing for a thousand years.”

  “Who remembers the Armenians the Turks killed in the last war?” Skorzeny said. “When they’re gone, they’re gone.” He rubbed his dry palms back and forth, as if washing his hands.

  Jager couldn’t match that callousness. “Even if you were right-”

  “Iam right,” Skorzeny broke in. “Who worries about the Carthaginians these days? Or, for that matter, about the-what’s the right name for them,Herr Doktor Professor of archaeology? — the Albigensians, that’s it, from the town just ahead?”

  “Even if you were right,” Jager repeated, “they aren’t all gone and they won’t be all gone, not with the Lizards holding Poland. And those ones who are left will see to it that our name stays black forever.”

  “If we win the war, it doesn’t matter. And if we lose the war, it doesn’t matter, either.” Skorzeny climbed to his feet. “Come on. We’ll get into Albi by sundown, and then it’s just a matter of waiting for our toys to arrive.”

  That closed out the possibility of more talk. Jager also got up.I shouldn’t have expected anything else, he told himself. Most German officers wouldn’t talk about Jews at all. In a way, Skorzeny’s candor was an improvement. But only in a way. Sighing, Jager tramped on toward Albi.

  Liu Han felt invisible. With a wicker basket in hand, she could wander from one of Peking’s markets to the next without being noticed. She was just one more woman among thousands, maybe millions. No one paid the least attention to her, any more than you paid attention to one particular flea among the many on a dog’s back.

  “Think of yourself as a flea,” Nieh Ho-T’ing had told her. “You may be tiny, but your bite can draw blood.”

  Liu Han was sick to death of being a flea. She was sick to death of being invisible. She’d been invisible all her life. She wanted to do something bold and prominent, something to make the scaly devils regret they’d ever interfered with her. Of course, the one time she’d not been invisible was when she’d been in the little devils’ clutches. She prayed to the Amida Buddha and any other god or spirit who would listen that she never attain such visibility again.

  “Bok choi,very fresh!” a merchant bawled in her ear. Others hawked barley, rice, millet, wheat, poultry, pork, spices-any sort of food or condiment you could imagine.

  Back in another market, somebody had been selling canned goods: some Chinese, others made by foreign devils with their foods inside. Liu Han’s gorge rose, thinking about those. The little scaly devils had kept her alive with them while they held her prisoner on the plane that never came down. If she tasted them again, she would remember that time, and she wanted to forget. The only good that had come from it was her baby, and it was stolen and Bobby Fiore, its father, dead.

  She’d stayed close to the can salesman for some time, though. Canned goods were scarce in Peking these days, especially canned goods produced by the foreign devils. To show such a stock, the fellow who was selling them had to have connections with the little scaly devils. Maybe they would come around to his stall-and if they did, she would eavesdrop. Nieh Ho-T’ing had told her he’d used Bobby Fiore the same way in Shanghai; people who could make sense of the scaly devils’ language were few and far between.

  But the can seller, though he might have been what Nieh called a running dog, was no fool. “You, woman!” he shouted at Liu Han. “Do you want to buy something, or are you spying on me?”

  “I am just resting here for a moment, sir,” Liu Han answered in a small voice. “I cannot afford your excellent canned goods, I fear.” That was true; he asked exorbitant prices. For good measure, she added, “I wish I could,” which was a crashing lie.

  She did not mollify the can seller. “Go rest somewhere else,” he said, shaking his fist. “I think you are telling lies. If I see you again, I will set the police on you.” He was a running dog, then; the Peking police, like police in any Chinese city, were the tools of those in power.

  Liu Han retreated across the little market square to the edge of ahutung. She pointed back at the man who sold cans and screeched, “See the fool with his nose up the little devils’ back passage!” as loud as she could, then vanished down the alleyway. With a little luck, she’d have created ill will between the can seller and his neighbors in the market, maybe even cost him some customers.

  She couldn’t reckon it a victory, though, because he’d driven her away before any scaly devils showed up at his stall. She bought someliang kao from a man with a basket of them-rice cakes stuffed with mashed beans and peas and served with sweet syrup-ate them, and then left thehutungs for Peking’s more prominent avenues. The scaly devils did not usually venture into the lanes and alleys of the city. If she wanted to find out what they were doing, she would have to go where they were.

  Sure enough, when she came out on theTa Cha La, the Street of Large Gateposts, she found scaly devils aplenty. She was not surprised; the street was full of fancy silk shops and led to neighborhoods where fine eateries abounded.

  But the scaly devils bought no silks and sought no restaurants. Instead, they gathered several deep around a mountebank whose show might have enlivened a child’s birthday party. “See how fat my mules are, and how warm my carriages!” the fellow cried.

  Because the little devils were so short, Liu Han was able to see over them to the folding table the fellow had set up. His carriages were about six inches long, made of cast-off bits of cardboard, and used thin sticks for axles. The little scaly devils hissed with excitement as he pulled out a tin can from the box that held his paraphernalia. Out of the can he took one large, black dung beetle after another. He deftly fastened them to the carriages with reins of thread. They pulled those carriages-some of which resembled old-fashioned mule carts, others Peking water wagons-around and around the tabletop; every so often, he had to use a forefinger to keep his steeds from falling off the edge.

  Even in the village where Liu Han had grown up, a beetle-cart show was nothing out of the ordinary. By the way the scaly devils reacted, though, they’d never seen anything like it in their lives. Some of them let their mouths hang open in mirth, while others nudged each other and exclaimed over the spectacle. “They make even pests into beasts of burden,” one of the little devils said.

  “See, that one has upset the cart. Look at its little legs wave as it lies on its back,” another replied. He tossed a dollar Mex, and then another, to the mountebank. His comrades also showered the fellow with silver.

  The little devils paid Liu Han no attention. The only way they would have noticed her was if she’d got in their way while they were watching the antics of the beetles. But those antics had so fascinated them, they weren’t talking about anything else. After a while, Liu Han decided she wouldn’t hear anything worthwhile here. TheTa Cha La was full of scaly devils. She headed up it toward the next group she saw.

  When she got up to them, she discovered they were all staring at a monkey circus going through its paces. Like most of its kind, the circus also included a Pekinese dog and a
trained sheep. Both men who ran it clanged brass gongs to draw a bigger crowd.

  Growing impatient, one of the little scaly devils said, “You show us these creatures, what they do,now.”

  The two men bowed nervously and obeyed. The monkey, dressed in a red satin jacket, capered about. It put on masks, one after another, cued by more taps on the gong.

  “See how it looks like a little Tosevite,” one of the scaly devils said in his own language, pointing to the monkey. His mouth opened in mirth.

  The little devil beside him said, “It’s even uglier than the Big Uglies, I think. All that fuzz all over it-” He shuddered in fastidious disgust.

  “I don’t know,” yet another little scaly devil said. “It has a tail, at least. I think the Big Uglies look funny without them.”

  Liu Han pretended she was watching the show without listening to the little devils. She’d known they had no proper respect for mankind-were that not so, they never would have treated her as they had. But hearing their scorn grated. Liu Han rocked slowly back and forth.You will pay, she thought.Oh, how you will pay for all you’ve done to me. But how to make them pay? Vowing revenge was easy, getting it something else again.

  The monkey went through the rest of its turns, imitating a wheelbarrow man and a rickshaw puller and then playing on a swing at the top of a bamboo pole. The little devils showered the men who ran the monkey circus with coins. After the monkey itself came the Pekinese. It jumped through hoops of different sizes that the men held at varying heights above the ground. Even in her village, Liu Han had seen dogs that could leap much higher. But the little scaly devils admired the Pekinese as much as they had the monkey.

  For the finale, the sheep came out and the monkey sprang onto its back, riding it around in circles like a jockey on a racehorse. The little scaly devils had only to look about them to see men on horseback. They caught the analogy, too, and laughed harder than ever. When at last the show was over, they gave the two men who ran it still more silver-they seemed to have an unlimited supply-and went off in search of further entertainment.