Tilting the Balance w-2

by Harry Turtledove

  Russie’s newly bared face must have shown his thoughts all too clearly. The Jewish fighter said, “I understand how you feel, Reb Moishe, but it’s the best place. No one, not even, God willing, a Lizard, would think to look for you there, and if you’re needed, we can bring you back in a hurry.”

  He could not fault the logic, but when he looked at Rivka, he saw the same sick dread in her eyes that he felt himself. The Jews of Lodz had passed into the valley of the shadow of death. Going to live in a town where that shadow had fallen…

  “Some of us still survive in Lodz,” the fighter said. “We’d not send you there otherwise, you may be sure of that.”

  “Let it be so, then,” Russie said with a sigh.

  The fighter with the pistol drove the horse-drawn wagon out of Warsaw. Russie sat beside him, feeling horribly visible and vulnerable. Rivka and Reuven huddled in back along with several other women and children amid scraps and rags and odd-shaped pieces of sheet metal: the stock of a junkman’s trade.

  The Lizards had a checkpoint on the highway just outside of town. One of the males there carried a photograph of Russie with his beard. His heart thuttered in alarm. But after a cursory glance, the Lizard turned to his comrade and said in his own language, “Just another boring bunch of Big Uglies.” The comrade waved the wagon ahead.

  After a couple of kilometers, the fighter pulled over to the side of the road. The women and children who had served to camouflage Reuven and Rivka got down and started walking back to Warsaw. The fighter flicked the reins, clucked to the horse. The wagon rattled down the road toward Lodz.

  Liu Han looked mistrustfully at the latest assortment of canned goods the little scaly devils had brought into her cell. She wondered what was most likely to stay down this time. The salty soup with noodles and bits of chicken, perhaps, and the canned fruit in syrup. She knew she wouldn’t touch the stew with the thick gravy; she’d already given that back twice.

  She sighed. Being pregnant was hard enough anywhere. It was even worse imprisoned here in this airplane that never came down. Not only was she alone in the little metal room except when the scaly devils brought Bobby Fiore to her, but almost all her food was put up by foreign devils like him and not to her taste.

  She ate what she could, wishing she were back in her Chinese village or even in the prison camp from which the little scaly devils had plucked her. In either place, she would have been among her own kind, not caged all alone like a songbird for the amusement of her captors. If she ever got out of here, she vowed she would free every bird she could.

  Not that getting out seemed likely. She shook her head-no indeed. Her straight black hair tumbled over her, face, over her bare shoulders-the scaly devils, who wore no clothes themselves, allowed their human prisoners none and kept the cell too warm to make them comfortable anyhow-and across her newly tender breasts. Her hair hadn’t been long enough to do that when the little devils brought her up here. It was now, and growing toward her waist.

  She belched uncomfortably and got ready to dash for the plumbing hole. But what she’d eaten decided to stay where it belonged. She wasn’t sure exactly how far gone she was, not in here where the little scaly devils never turned off the light to let her reckon the passage of days. But she wasn’t throwing up as much as she had at first. Her belly hadn’t started to swell, though. Getting close to four months was the best guess she could make.

  Part of the floor, instead of being metal like the rest, was a raised mat covered with slick gray stuff that looked more like leather than anything else but didn’t smell like it. Her body, sweaty in the heat, stuck to the mat when she lay down on it, but it was still better for resting than anywhere else in the cell. She closed her eyes, tried to sleep. She’d been sleeping a lot lately, partly because she was pregnant and partly because she had nothing better to do.

  She was just dozing off when the door to her cell hissed open again. She opened one eye, sure it would be the little devil who came in to take away the cans after every meal. Sure enough, in he skittered, but several others came with him. A couple of them had body paint more ornate than she was used to seeing.

  One, to her surprise, spoke Chinese after a fashion. Pointing to her, he said, “You come with us.”

  She quickly got to her feet. “It shall be done, superior sir,” she said, using one of the phrases she’d learned of the little devils’ language.

  The devils fell in around her at more than arm’s length. She was on the small side, an inch or so above five feet, but she towered over the scaly devils, enough so to make them nervous around her. She joined them eagerly enough; any trip out of her cell was unusual enough to count as a treat. And maybe, better still, they would take her to Bobby Fiore.

  They didn’t; they led her in the opposite direction from his cell. She wondered what they wanted with her. Wondering made her hopeful and anxious by turns. They might do anything at all to her, from setting her free to taking her away from Bobby Fiore and giving her to some new man who would rape and beat her. She had no say. She was just a prisoner.

  What they did reached neither extreme. They took her down an oddly curved stairway to another deck. She felt lighter there than she should have; her stomach didn’t like it. But much of her fear went away. She knew they’d brought Bobby Fiore here, and nothing too bad had happened to him.

  The scaly devils escorted her into a chamber full of their incomprehensible gadgetry. The devil sitting behind the desk surprised her by speaking fair Chinese: “You are the female human Liu Han?”

  “Yes,” she answered. “Who are you, please?” Her own language tasted sweet in her mouth. Even with Bobby Fiore, she spoke a curious mixture of Chinese, English, and the little devils’ tongue, eked out with much gesture and dumb show.

  “I am called Nossat,” the scaly devil answered. “I am a-I do not know it, your language has an exact word for it-I am a male who studies how you humans think. I am colleague to Tessrek, who spoke with your mate Bobby Fiore.”

  “Yes, I understand,” Liu Han said. That was the little scaly devil with whom Bobby Fiore had spoken down here. What had he called the devil Tessrek? English had a name for what that devil did-psychologist, that was it. Liu Han relaxed. Talking could not be dangerous.

  Nossat said, “You are going to lay an egg in the time to come? No, your kind does not lay eggs. You are going to give birth? Is that what you say, ‘give birth’? You will have a child?”

  “I am going to have a child, yes,” Liu Han agreed. Of themselves, the fingers of her right hand spread fanlike over her belly. She had long since resigned herself to being naked in front of the scaly devils, but she remained automatically protective of the baby growing inside her.

  “The child is from matings between Bobby Fiore and you?” Nossat said. Without waiting for her to reply, he stuck one of his thin, clawed fingers into a recess on the desk. A screen, as if for motion pictures, lit up behind him. The picture that moved upon it was of Bobby Fiore thrusting atop Liu Han.

  She sighed. She knew the little scaly devils took pictures of her while she made love, as well as any other time they chose. They had mating seasons like farm animals, and were utterly uninterested in matters of the flesh at any other time. The way people mated the whole year round seemed to fascinate and appall them.

  “Yes,” she answered as the picture played on, “Bobby Fiore and I made love to start this baby.” Before long, it would begin to kick inside her, hard enough to feel. She remembered what a marvel that was from the boy she’d borne her husband before the Japanese killed him and the child.

  Nossat stuck his finger into a different recess. Liu Han was not sorry to see the picture of her joined gasping to Bobby Fiore fade. A different moving picture took its place, this one of an immensely pregnant black woman giving birth to her baby. Liu Han watched the woman with more interest than the birth process: she knew about that, but she’d never before seen a black, man or woman. She hadn’t known the palms of their hands and soles of their f
eet were so pale.

  “This is how your young are born?” Nossat said as the baby’s head and then shoulders emerged from between the straining woman’s legs.

  “What else could it possibly be?” To Liu Han, the little scaly devils were an incomprehensible blend of immense and terrifying powers on the one hand and childishly abysmal ignorance on the other.

  “This is-dreadful,” Nossat said. The motion picture kept running. The woman delivered the afterbirth. It should have been over then. But she kept on bleeding. The blood was hard to see against her dark skin, but it spread over and soaked into the ground where she lay. The little scaly devil went on, “This female died after the young Tosevite came out of her body. Many females in the land we hold have died bearing their young.”

  “That does happen, yes,” Liu Han said quietly. It was not something she cared to think about. Not just bleeding, but a baby trying to come out while in the wrong position, or fever afterwards… so many things could go wrong. And so many babies never lived to see their second birthday, their first outside their mother.

  “But it’s not right,” Nossat exclaimed, as if he held her personally responsible for the way people had their babies. “No other kind of intelligent creature we know puts its mothers in such danger just to carry on life.”

  Liu Han had never imagined any kind of intelligent creatures but human beings until the little scaly devils came. Even after she knew of the devils, she hadn’t thought there could be still more varieties of such creatures. Irritation in her voice, she snapped, “Well, how do you have your babies, then?” For all she knew, the little devils might have been assembled in factories rather than born.

  “Our females lay eggs, of course,” Nossat said. “So do those of the Rabotevs and Hallessi, over whom we rule. Only you Tosevites are different.” His weird eyes swiveled so that one watched the screen behind him while the other stayed accusingly on Liu Han.

  She fought to keep from laughing, fought and lost. The idea of making a nest-out of straw, maybe, like a chicken’s-and then sitting on it till the brood hatched was absurd enough to tickle her fancy. Hens certainly didn’t seem to have trouble laying eggs, either. It might be an easier way to do the job. But it wasn’t the way people did it.

  Nossat said, “Your time to have the young come out of your body is now about a year away?”

  “A year?” Liu Han stared at him. Didn’t the little scaly devils know anything?

  But the devil said, “No-this is my mistake, for two years of the Race, more or less, make one of yours. I should say-should have said-you are half a year from your time?”

  “Half a year, yes,” Liu Han said. “Maybe not quite so long.”

  “We have to decide what to do with you,” Nossat told her. “We have no knowledge of how to help you when the young is born. You are only a barbarous Tosevite, but we do not want you to die because we are ignorant. You are our subject, not our enemy.”

  Fear blew through Liu Han, a cold wind. Give birth here, in this place of metal, with only scaly devils beside her, without a midwife to help her through her pangs? If the least little thing went wrong, she would die, and the baby, too. “I will need help,” she said, as plaintively as she could. “Please get some for me.”

  “We are still planning,” Nossat said, which was neither yes nor no. “We will know what we do before your time comes.”

  “What if the baby is early?” Liu Han said.

  The little devil’s eyes both swung toward her. “This can happen?”

  “Of course it can,” Liu Han said. But nothing was of course for the little scaly devils, not when they knew so little about how mankind-and, evidently, womankind-functioned. Then, suddenly, Liu Han had an idea that felt so brilliant, she hugged herself in delight. “Superior sir, would you let me go back down to my own people so a midwife could help me deliver the baby?”

  “This had not been thought of.” Nossat made a distressed hissing noise. “I see, though, from where you stand, it may have merit. You are not the only female specimen on this ship who will have young born. We will-how do you say? — consider. Yes. We will consider.”

  “Thank you very much, superior sir.” Liu Han looked down at the floor, as she had seen the scaly devils do when they meant to show respect. Hope sprang up in her like rice plants in spring.

  “Or maybe,” Nossat said, “maybe we bring up a-what word did you use? — a midwife, yes, maybe we bring up a midwife to this ship to help you here. We will consider that, too. You go now.”

  The guards took Liu Han out of the psychologist’s office, led her back to her cell. She felt heavier with each step up the curiously curving stairway that returned her to her deck-and also because the hope which had sprouted now began to wilt.

  But it didn’t quite die. The little scaly devils hadn’t said no.

  A blank-faced Nipponese guard shoved a bowl of rice between the bars of Teerts’ cell. Teerts bowed to show he was grateful. Feeding prisoners at all was, in Nipponese eyes, a mercy: a proper warrior would die fighting rather than let himself be captured. The Nipponese were in any case sticklers for their own forms of courtesy. Anyone who flouted them was apt to be beaten-or worse.

  Since the Nipponese shot down his killercraft, Teerts had had enough beatings-and worse-that he never wanted another (which didn’t mean he wouldn’t get one). But he hated rice. Not only was it the food of his captivity, it wasn’t something any male of the Race would eat by choice. He wanted meat, and could not remember the last time he’d tasted it. This bland, glutinous vegetable matter kept him alive, although he often wished it wouldn’t.

  No, that was a falsehood. If he’d wanted to die, he had only to starve himself to death. He did not think the Nipponese would force him to eat; if anything, he might gain their respect by perishing this way. That he cared whether these barbarous Big Uglies respected him showed how low he had sunk.

  He lacked the nerve to put an end to himself, though; the Race did not commonly use suicide as a way out of trouble. And so, miserably, he ate, half wishing he never saw another grain of rice, half wishing his bowl held more.

  He finished just before the guard came back and took away the bowl. He bowed again in gratitude for that service, though the guard would also have taken it even if he hadn’t finished.

  After the guard left, Teerts resigned himself to another indefinitely long stretch of tedium. So far as he knew he was the only prisoner of the Race the Nipponese held here at Nagasaki. No cells within speaking distance of him held even Big Ugly prisoners, lest he somehow form a conspiracy with them and escape. He let his mouth fall open in bitter laughter at the likelihood of that.

  Six-legged Tosevite pests scuttled across the concrete floor. Teerts let his eye turrets follow the creatures. He had nothing in particular against them. The real pests on Tosev 3 were the ones who walked upright.

  He drilled away into a fantasy where his killercraft’s turbofans hadn’t tried to breathe bullets instead of air. He could have been back at a comfortably heated barracks talking with his comrades or watching the screen or piping music through a button taped to a hearing diaphragm. He could have been snapping bites off a chunk of dripping meat. He could have been in his killercraft again, helping to bring the pestilential Big Uglies under the Race’s control.

  Though he heard footsteps coming down the corridor toward him, he did not swing his eyes to see who was approaching. That would have returned him to grim reality too abruptly to bear.

  But then the maker of those footsteps stopped outside his cell. Teerts quickly put fantasy aside, like a male saving a computer document so he can attend to something more urgent. His bow was deeper than the one he’d given the guard who fed him. “Konichiwa, Major Okamoto,” he said in the Nipponese he was slowly acquiring.

  “Good day to you as well,” Okamoto answered in the language of the Race. He was more fluent in it than Teerts was in Nipponese. Learning a new tongue did not come naturally to males of the Race; the Empire had had but one fo
r untold thousands of years. But Tosev 3 was a mosaic of dozens, maybe hundreds, of languages. Picking up one more was nothing out of the ordinary for a Big Ugly. Okamoto had been Teerts’ interpreter and interrogator ever since he was captured.

  The Tosevite glanced down the hall. Teerts heard jingling keys as a warder drew near. Another round of questions, then, the pilot thought. He bowed to the warder to show he was grateful for the boon of leaving the cell. Actually he wasn’t as long as he stayed in here, no one hurt him. But the forms had to be observed.

  A soldier with a rifle tramped right behind the warder. He covered Teerts as the other male used the key. Okamoto also drew his pistol and held it on Teerts. The pilot would have laughed, except it wasn’t really funny. He only wished he were as dangerous as the Big Uglies thought he was.

  The interrogation room was on an upper floor of the prison. Teerts had seen next to nothing of Nagasaki. He knew it lay by the sea; he’d come here by ship after being evacuated from the mainland when Harbin fell to the Race. He didn’t miss seeing the sea. After that nightmare voyage of storms and sickness, he hoped he’d never see-much less ride upon-another overgrown Tosevite ocean again.

  The guard opened the door. Teerts walked in, bowed to the Big Uglies inside. They wore white coats rather than uniforms like Okamoto’s. Scientists, not soldiers, Teerts thought. He’d come to realize the Tosevites used clothing to indicate job and status as the Race used body paint. The Big Uglies, however, were much less systematic and consistent about it-typical of them, he thought.

  Nonetheless, he was glad not to face another panel of officers. The military males had been much quicker than scientists to resort to the instruments of painful persuasion in the interrogation room.

  One of the men in white addressed Teerts in barking Nipponese, much too fast for him to follow. He turned both eye turrets toward Major Okamoto, who translated: “Dr. Nakayama asks whether, as has been reported, all members of the Race who have come to Tosev 3 are male.”