Striking the Balance

by Harry Turtledove

  A scaly devil emerged from the tent that his kind had built in the middle of the Pan Jo Hsiang Tai—the Fragrant Terrace of Wisdom. The tent looked more like a bubble blown from some opaque orange shiny stuff than an honest erection of canvas or silk. It clashed dreadfully not only with the terrace and the walls and the elegant staircases to either side, but also with everything on the Ch’iung Hua Tao, the White Pagoda Island.

  Liu Han stifled a nervous giggle. Peasant that she was, she’d never imagined, back in the days before the little scaly devils took hold of her life and tore it up by the roots, that she would find herself not just in the Imperial City inside Peking, but on an island the old Chinese Emperors had used as a resort.

  The little devil turned one turreted eye toward Liu Han, the other toward Nieh Ho-T’ing. “You are the men of the People’s Liberation Army?” it asked in fair Chinese, and added a grunting cough at the end of the sentence to show it was a question: a holdover from the usages of its own language. When neither human denied it, the scaly devil said, “You will come with me. I am Essaff.”

  Inside the tent, the lamps glowed almost like sunlight, but slightly more yellow-orange in tone. That had nothing to do with the material from which the tent was made; Liu Han had noticed it in all the illumination the little scaly devils used. The tent was big enough to contain an antechamber. When she started to go through the doorway, Essaff held up a clawed hand.

  “Wait!” he said, and tacked on a different cough, one that put special emphasis on what he said. “We will examine you with our machines, to make sure you carry no explosives. This has been done to us before.”

  Liu Han and Nieh Ho-T’ing exchanged glances. Neither of them said anything. Liu Han had had the idea of sending beast-show men whose trained animals fascinated the scaly devils to perform for them—with bombs hidden in the cases that also held their creatures. A lot of those bombs had gone off. Fooling the little devils twice with the same trick was next to impossible.

  Essaff had the two humans stand in a certain place. He examined images of their bodies in what looked like a small film screen. Liu Han had seen its like many times before; it seemed as common among the little devils as books among mankind.

  After hissing like a bubbling pot for a minute or two, Essaff said, “You are honorable here in this case. You may go in.”

  The main chamber of the tent held a table with more of the scaly devils’ machines at one end. Behind the table sat two males.

  Pointing to them in turn, Essaff said, “This one is Ppevel, assistant administrator, eastern region, main continental mass—China, you would say. That one is Ttomalss, researcher in Tosevite—human, you would say—behavior.”

  “I know Ttomalss,” Liu Han said, holding emotion at bay with an effort of will that all but exhausted her. Ttomalss and his assistants had photographed her giving birth to her daughter, and then taken the child.

  Before she could ask him how the girl was, Essaff said, “You Tosevites, you sit down with us.” The chairs the scaly devils had brought for them were of human make, a concession she’d never seen from them before. As she and Nieh Ho-T’ing sat, Essaff asked, “You will drink tea?”

  “No,” Nieh said sharply. “You examined our bodies before we came in here. We cannot examine the tea. We know you sometimes try to drug people. We will not drink or eat with you.”

  Ttomalss understood Chinese. Ppevel evidently did not. Essaff translated for him. Liu Han followed some of the translation. She’d learned a bit of the scaly devils’ speech. That was one reason she was here instead of Nieh’s longtime aide, Hsia Shou-Tao.

  Through Essaff, Ppevel said, “This is a parley. You need have no fear.”

  “You had fear of us,” Nieh answered. “If you do not trust us, how can we trust you?” The scaly devils’ drugs did not usually work well on people. Nieh Ho-T’ing and Liu Han both knew that. Nieh added, “Even among our own people—human beings, I mean—we Chinese have had to suffer under unequal treaties. Now we want nothing less than full reciprocity in all our dealings, and give no more than we get.”

  Ppevel said, “We are talking with you. Is this not concession enough?”

  “It is a concession,” Nieh Ho-T’ing said. “It is not enough.” Liu Han added an emphatic cough to his words. Both Ppevel and Essaff jerked in surprise. Ttomalss spoke to his superior in a low voice. Liu Han caught enough to gather that he was explaining how she’d picked up some of their tongue.

  “Let us talk, then,” Ppevel said. “We shall see who is equal and who is not when this war is over.”

  “Yes, that is true,” Nieh Ho-T’ing agreed. “Very well, we shall talk. Do you wish this discussion to begin with great things and move down to the small, or would you rather start with small things and work up as we make progress?”

  “Best we start with small things,” Ppevel said. “Because they are small, you and we may both find it easier to give ground on them. If we try too much at the beginning, we may only grow angry with each other and have these talks fail altogether.”

  “You are sensible,” Nieh said, inclining his head to the little scaly devil. Liu Han listened to Essaff explaining to Ppevel that that was a gesture of respect. Nieh went on, “As we have noted”—his voice was dry; the People’s Liberation Army had noted it with bombs—“we demand that you return the girl child, you callously kidnapped from Liu Han here.”

  Ttomalss jumped as if someone had jabbed him with a pin. “This is not a small matter!” he exclaimed in Chinese, and added an emphatic cough to show he meant it. Essaff was put in the odd position of translating for one little devil what a different one said.

  Nieh Ho-T’ing raised an eyebrow. Liu Han suspected the gesture was wasted on the scaly devils, who had no eyebrows—nor any other hair. Nieh said, “What would you call a small matter, then? I could tell you I find the stuff from which you have made this tent very ugly, but that is hardly something worth negotiating. Compared to having all you imperialist aggressors leave China at once, the fate of this baby is small, or at least smaller.”

  When that had been translated, Ppevel said, “Yes, that is a small matter compared to the other. In any case, this land is now ours, which admits of no discussion—as you are aware.”

  Nieh smiled without replying in words. The European powers and the Japanese had said such things to China, too, but failed in their efforts to consolidate what they had taken at bayonet point Marxist-Leninist doctrine gave Nieh a long view of history, a view he’d been teaching to Liu Han.

  But she knew from her own experience that the little scaly devils had a long view of history, too, one that had nothing to do with Marx or Lenin. They were inhumanly patient; what worked against Britain or Japan might fail against them. If they weren’t lying, even the Chinese, the most anciently and perfectly civilized nation in the world, might have been children beside them.

  “Is my daughter well?” Liu Han asked Ttomalss at last. She dared not break down and cry, but talking about the girl made her nose begin to run in lieu of tears. She blew between her fingers before going on, “Are you taking good care of her?”

  “The hatchling is both comfortable and healthy.” Ttomalss took out a machine of a sort Liu Han had seen before. He touched a stud. Above the machine, by some magic of the scaly devils, an image of the baby sprang into being. She was up on all fours, wearing only a cloth around her middle and smiling wide enough to show two tiny white teeth.

  Liu Han did start to weep then. Ttomalss knew enough to understand that meant grief. He touched the stud again. The picture vanished. Liu Han didn’t know whether that made things better or worse. She ached to hold the baby in her arms.

  Gathering herself, she said, “If you talk to people as equals or something close to equals, you do not steal their children from them. You can do one or the other, but not both. And if you do steal children, you have to expect people to do everything they can to hurt you because of it.”

  “But we take the hatchlings to learn how they
and the Race can relate to each other when starting fresh,” Ttomalss said, as if that were almost too obvious to need explanation.

  Ppevel spoke to him in the scaly devils’ tongue. Essaff declined to translate what he said. Nieh looked a question to Liu Han. She whispered, “He says one thing they have learned is that people will fight for their hatchlings, uh, children. This may not have been what they intended to find out, but it is part of the answer.”

  Nieh neither replied nor looked directly at Ppevel. Liu Han had enough practice at reading his face to have a pretty good notion that he thought Ppevel no fool. She had the same feeling about the little devil.

  Ppevel’s eye turrets swung back toward her and Nieh Ho-T’ing. “Suppose we give back this hatchling,” he said through Essaff, ignoring another start of dismay from Ttomalss. “Suppose we do this. What do you give us in return? Do you agree to no more bombings like those that marred the Emperor’s birthday?”

  Liu Han sucked in a long breath. She would have agreed to anything to have her baby back. But that decision was not hers to make. Nieh Ho-T’ing had authority there, and Nieh loved the cause more than any individual or that individual’s concerns. Abstractly, Liu Han understood that that was the way it should be. But how could you think abstractly when you’d just seen your baby for the first time since it was stolen?

  “No, we do not agree to that,” Nieh said. “It is too much to demand in exchange for one baby who cannot do you any harm.”

  “Giving back the hatchling would harm our research,” Ttomalss said.

  Both Nieh and Ppevel ignored him. Nieh went on, “If you give us the baby, though, we will give you back one of your males whom we hold captive. He must be worth more to you than that baby is.”

  “Any male is worth more to us than a Tosevite,” Ppevel said. “This is axiomatic. But the words of the researcher Ttomalss do hold some truth. Disrupting a long-term research program is not something we males of the Race do casually. We require more justflication for this than your simple demand.”

  “Does child-stealing mean nothing to you as a crime?” Liu Han said.

  “Not a great deal,” Ppevel answered indifferently. “The Race does not suffer from many of the fixations on other individuals with which you Tosevites are so afflicted.”

  Worst, Liu Han realized, was that he meant it. The scaly devils were not evil, not in their own strange eyes. They were just so different from mankind that, when they acted by their own standards of what was right and proper, they couldn’t help horrifying the people on whom they inflicted those standards. Understanding that, though, did nothing to get her daughter back.

  “Tell me, Ppevel,” she asked with a dangerous glint in her eye, “how long have you been assistant administrator for this region?”

  Nieh Ho-T’ing’s gaze slid toward her for a moment, but he didn’t say anything or try to head her off. The Communists preached equality between the sexes, and Nieh followed that preaching—better than most, from what she’d seen. Hsia Shou-Tao’s idea of the proper position for women in the revolutionary movement, for instance, was on their backs with their legs open.

  “I have not had this responsibility long,” Ppevel said. “I was previously assistant to the assistant administrator. Why do you ask this irrelevant question?”

  Liu Han did not have a mouthful of small, sharp, pointed teeth, as the little scaly devils did. The predatory smile she sent Ppevel showed she did not need them. “So your old chief is dead, eh?” she said. “Did he die on your Emperor’s birthday?”

  All three scaly devils lowered their eyes for a moment when Essaff translated “Emperor” into their language. Ppevel answered, “Yes, but—”

  “Who do you think will replace you after our next attack?” Liu Han asked. Interrupting at a parley was probably bad form, but she didn’t care. “You may not think stealing children is a great crime, but we do, and we will punish all of you if we can’t reach the guilty one”—she glared at Ttomalss—“and you don’t make amends.”

  “This matter requires further analysis within the circles of the Race,” Ppevel said; he had courage. “We do not say yes at this time, but we do not say no. Let us move on to the next item of discussion.”

  “Very well,” Nieh Ho-T’ing said, and Liu Han’s heart sank. The little scaly devils were not in the habit of lying over such matters, and she knew it. Discussion on getting her daughter back would resume. But every day the little girl was away would make her stranger, harder to reclaim. She hadn’t seen a human being since she was three days old. What would she be like, even if Liu Han finally got her back?

  From the outside, the railroad car looked like one that hauled baggage. David Nussboym had seen that, before the bored-looking NKVD men, submachine guns in hand but plainly sure they wouldn’t have to use them, herded him and his companions in misfortune into it. Inside, it was divided into nine compartments, like any passenger car.

  In an ordinary passenger car, though, four to a compartment was crowded. People looked resentfully at one another, as if it was the fault of the person on whom the irritated gaze fell that he took up so much space. In each of the five prisoner compartments on this car . . . Nussboym shook his head. He was a scrupulous man, a meticulous man. He didn’t know how many people each of the other compartments held. He knew there were twenty-five men in his.

  He and three others had perches—not proper seats—upon the baggage racks by the ceiling. The strongest, toughest prisoners lay in relative comfort—and extremely relative it was, too—on the hard middle bunk. The rest sat jammed together on the lower bunk and on the floor, on top of their meager belongings.

  Nussboym’s rackmate was a lanky fellow named Ivan Fyodorov. He understood some of Nussboym’s Polish and a bit of Yiddish when the Polish failed. Nussboym, in turn, could follow Russian after a fashion, and Fyodorov threw in a word of German every now and again.

  He wasn’t a mental giant “Tell me again how you’re here, David Aronovich,” he said. “I’ve never heard a story like yours, not even once.”

  Nussboym sighed. He’d told the story three times already in the two days—he thought it was two days—he’d been perched on the rack. “It’s like this, Ivan Vasilievich,” he said. “I was in Lodz, in Poland, in the part of Poland the Lizards held. My crime was hating the Germans worse than the Lizards.”

  “Why did you do that?” Fyodorov asked. This was the fourth time he’d asked that question, too.

  Up till now, Nussboym had evaded it: your average Russian was no more apt to love Jews than was your average Pole. “Can’t you figure it out for yourself?” he asked now. But, when Fyodorov’s brow furrowed and did not clear, he snapped, “Damn it, don’t you see I’m Jewish?”

  “Oh, that. Yeah, sure, I knew that,” his fellow prisoner said, sunny still. “Ain’t no Russian with a nose that big, anyhow.” Nussboym brought a hand up to the offended member, but Ivan hadn’t seemed to mean anything by it past a simple statement of fact. He went on, “So you were in Lodz. How did you get here? That’s what I want to know.”

  “My chums wanted to get rid of me,” Nussboym said bitterly. “They wouldn’t give me to the Nazis—even they aren’t that vile. But they couldn’t leave me in Poland, either, they knew I wouldn’t let them get away with collaborating. So they knocked me unconscious, took me across Lizard-held country till they came to land you Russians still controlled—and they gave me to your border patrols.”

  Fyodorov might not have been a mental giant, but he was a Soviet citizen. He knew what had happened after that. Smiling, he said, “And the border patrol decided you had to be a criminal—and besides, you were a foreigner and a zhid to boot—and so they dropped you into the gulag. Now I get it.”

  “I’m so glad for you,” Nussboym said sourly.

  The window that looked out from the compartment to the hallway of the prison car had crosshatched bars over it. Nussboym watched a couple of NKVD men make their way toward the compartment entrance, which had no door, only a
sliding grate of similar crosshatched bars. The compartment had no windows that opened on the outside world, just a couple of tiny barred blinds that might as well not have been there.

  Nussboym didn’t care. He’d learned that when the NKVD men walked by with that slow deliberate stride, they had food with them. His stomach rumbled. Spit rushed into his mouth. He ate better in the prison car—a Stolypin car, the Russians universally called it—than he had in the Lodz ghetto before the Lizards came, but not much better.

  One of the NKVD men opened the grate, then stood back, covering the prisoners with a submachine gun. The other one set down two buckets. “All right, you zeks!” he shouted. “Feeding time at the zoo!” He laughed loudly at his own wit, though he made the joke every time it was his turn to feed the prisoners.

  They laughed too, loudly. If they didn’t laugh, nobody got anything to eat. They’d found that out very fast. A couple of beatings soon forced the recalcitrant ones into line.

  Satisfied, the guard started passing out a chunk of coarse, black bread and half a salted herring apiece. They’d got sugar once, but the guards said they were out of that now. Nussboym didn’t know whether it was true, but did know he was in no position to find out.

  The prisoners who reclined on the middle bunk got the biggest loaves and fishes. They’d enforced that rule with their fists, too. Nussboym’s hand went to the shiner below his left eye. He’d tried holding out on them, and paid the price.

  He wolfed down the bread, but stuck his bony fragment of herring in a pocket. He’d learned to wait for water before he ate the fish. It was so salty, thirst would have driven him mad till he got something to drink. Sometimes the guards brought a bucket of water after they brought food. Sometimes they didn’t. Today they didn’t.

  The train rumbled on. In summer, having two dozen men stuffed into a compartment intended for four would have been intolerable—not that that would have stopped the NKVD. In a Russian winter, animal warmth was not to be despised. In spite of being cold, Nussboym wasn’t freezing.