Upsetting the Balance w-3

by Harry Turtledove

  Coming out of the gloomy confines of theKrom 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 forkulturny men. In the Soviet Union, she sometimes thought, they 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 anof 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 didnot 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 saydustbin in German, and getting it across in Russian took almost as much work as his trying to makeinitiative 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 kulturnymen.

  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 Jager 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 schone 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 areyou 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 ofsamshu, the potent, triple-distilled brew made fromkaoliang — 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 makesmy life more pleasant.”

  Hou Yi laughed a loud, sozzled laugh. He poured the last few drops from the jar ofsamshu 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.
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  Nieh let Hou freshen his cup ofsamshu, too. The tavern-it was called theTa 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.

  TheTa 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,PLEASE KEEP YOUR HONORABLE MOUTH SHUT. In less inherently futile fashion, other signs declaredCASH ONLY andNO 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-ofyour 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.

  Nieh looked down on him, then shrugged and left coins on the table to pay for thesamshu they had been drinking. He walked out of the Big Wine Vat and into the maze of Peking’shutungs. 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 ofsamshu 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 Chueh-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 hissamshu. “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 materiel 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 ofsamshu. 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’ likethat.”

  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, breathingsamshu 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 bucke
t 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.”