Striking the Balance

by Harry Turtledove

  From the fiery cloud of the bomb blast itself, the scene shifted to the devastation it wrought. A tank’s cannon sagged down as if it were a candle that had drooped from being too close to the fire. Some of the ground looked as if the heat of the bomb had baked it into glass. Charred corpses lay everywhere. Some of the charred chunks of meat were not yet corpses, for they wriggled and moaned and cried out in their unintelligible language.

  “I wouldn’t want that happening to me,” exclaimed an old man with a few long white whiskers sprouting from his chin.

  “It happened to the little scaly devils, too,” Nieh Ho-T’ing said. “The Americans used a bomb just like this one against them. This is the scaly devils’ retaliation, but people can make these bombs, too.” He was glad of that, even if the Americans were capitalists.

  “Foreign devils can make these bombs, maybe. If what you say is true,” the old man answered. “But can we Chinese do this?” He paused a moment to let the obvious answer sink in, then went on, “Since we can’t we had better do what the little devils say here, eh?”

  Several people nodded. Nieh glared at them and at the old man. “The little devils have never used that kind of bomb here, or even threatened to,” he said. “And if we don’t resist them, they’ll rule us the same way the Japanese did—with fear and savagery. Is that what we want?”

  “The little scaly devils, they’ll leave you alone if you leave them alone,” the old man said. Nieh resolved to find out who he was and arrange for his elimination; he was obviously a collaborator and a troublemaker.

  A couple of people nodded again. But a woman spoke up: “What about that poor girl, the one they made do all those horrible things in front of their cameras? What had she done to them beforehand?”

  The old man stared at her. He opened his mouth like a little devil laughing, but had far fewer teeth than the imperialist aggressors from the stars. While the fellow was still groping for a reply, Nieh Ho-T’ing headed back toward the roominghouse where he lived.

  When he got there, he found Hsia Shou-Tao sitting in the downstairs dining room, drinking tea with a pretty singsong girl whose green silk dress was slit to show an expanse of golden thigh. Hsia looked up and nodded to him, without the least trace of embarrassment. His self-criticism had not included any vows of celibacy, only a pledge to keep from bothering women who showed they were not interested in him. For the singsong girl, the transaction would be purely commercial. Nieh frowned anyhow. His aide had a way of letting pledges slip a finger’s breadth at a time.

  Nieh had other things on his mind at the moment, though. He trudged upstairs to the room he’d been sharing with Liu Han—and, lately, with her daughter, at last redeemed from the little scaly devils. As he climbed the stairs, he let out a small, silent sigh. That wasn’t yet working out as well as Liu Han had imagined it would.. In Nieh’s experience, few things in life did. He had not found a good way to tell that to Liu Han.

  He tried the door. It was locked. He rapped on it. “Who’s there?” Liu Han called warily from within. She hadn’t casually opened the door since the day Hsia Shou-Tao tried to rape her. But, when she heard Nieh’s voice, she lifted the bar, let him in, and stepped into his arms for a quick embrace.

  “You look tired,” he said. What she looked was haggard and harassed. He didn’t think he ought to say that to her. Instead, he pointed to her daughter, who sat over in a corner playing with a straw-stuffed doll made of cloth. “How is Liu Mei this afternoon?”

  To his surprise and dismay, Liu Han started to cry. “I gave birth to her, and she is still frightened of me. It’s as if she thinks she ought to be a little scaly devil, not a human being.”

  Liu Mei started to pull some of the stuffing out of the doll, which was far from new. “Don’t do that,” Liu Han said. Her daughter took no notice of her. Then she spoke a word in the little devils’ language and added one of their coughs. The little girl stopped what she was doing. Wearily, Liu Han turned to Nieh. “You see? She understands their tongue, not Chinese. She cannot even make the right sounds for Chinese. What can I do with her? How can I raise her when she is like this?”

  “Patience,” Nieh Ho-T’ing said. “You must remember patience. The dialectic proves Communism will triumph, but says nothing with certainty as to when. The little scaly devils know nothing of the dialectic, but their long history gives them patience. They had Liu Mei her whole life, and did their best to make her into one of them. You have had her only a few days. You must not expect her to change overnight for you.”

  “I know that—here.” Liu Han tapped a finger against her forehead. “But my heart breaks every time she flinches from me as if I were a monster, and whenever I have to speak to her in a language I learned because I was a slave.”

  “As I said, you are not viewing this rationally,” Nieh answered. “One reason you are not viewing it rationally is that you are not getting enough sleep. Liu Mei may not be a human child in every way, but she wakes up in the night like one.” He yawned. “I am tired, too.”

  Liu Han hadn’t asked him to help take care of the baby. That she might had never occurred to him. Caring for a child was women’s work. In some ways, Nieh took women and their place as much for granted as Hsia Shou-Tao did.

  So did Liu Han, in some ways. She said, “I wish I had an easier time comforting her. I am not what she wants. She makes that quite plain.” Her mouth twisted into a thin, bitter line. “What she wants is that little devil, Ttomalss. He did this to her. He should be made to pay for it.”

  “Nothing we can do about that, not unless we learn he’s come down to the surface of the world again,” Nieh said. “Not even the People’s Liberation Army can reach into one of the scaly devils’ ships high in the sky.”

  “The little devils are patient,” Liu Han said in a musing tone of voice. “He will not stay up in his ship forever. He will come down to steal another baby, to try to turn it into a little scaly devil. When he does—”

  Nieh Ho-T’ing would not have wanted her to look at him that way. “I think you are right,” he said, “but he may not do that in China. The world is a larger place than we commonly think.”

  “If he comes, he will come to China.” Liu Han spoke with the assurance of a man. “He speaks Chinese. I do not think he speaks any other human language. If he robs some poor woman, he will rob one from China.”

  Nieh spread his hands. “This is logical, I must say. What do you want us to do about it?”

  “Punish him,” she answered at once. “I will bring the matter before the central committee and get official approval for it.”

  “The central committee will not approve of an act of personal vengeance,” he warned her. “Getting agreement to put the rescue of your child on the negotiation agenda was difficult enough, but this—”

  “I think the motion will be approved,” Liu Han said steadily. “I do not intend to present it as a matter of personal vengeance, but as a symbol that the little devils’ oppression of mankind is not to be tolerated.”

  “Present it however you like,” Nieh replied. “It is still personal vengeance. I am sorry, Liu Han, but I do not feel able to give you my own support in this matter. I have spent too much political capital for Liu Mei already.”

  “I will present the motion anyhow,” Liu Han told him. “I have discussed it with several committee members. I think it will pass, whether you support it or not.”

  He stared at her. They’d worked well together, in bed and out, but he’d always been the dominant partner. And why not? He’d been an army chief of staff before the little scaly devils came and turned everything topsy-turvy, and she’d been nothing but a peasant woman and an example of the scaly devils’ oppression. Everything she was in the revolutionary struggle, she was because of him. He’d brought her onto the central committee to give him more support. How could she turn against him?

  By the look in her eye, she’d gained the backing she needed to get her motion adopted. She’d done that quietly, behind his
back. Hsia Shou-Tao hadn’t got wind of it, either. “You’re good,” he said in genuine admiration. “You’re very good.”

  “Yes, I am,” she said matter-of-factly, to herself as much as to him. Then her expression softened a little. “Thank you for putting me in a place where I’ve had the chance to show I could be.”

  She was very good. She was even letting him down easy, making sure he didn’t stay angry at her. And she was doing it as a man would, with words, rather than using her body to win the point. He didn’t think it was because she didn’t fancy him any more; it was just another way for her to show him what she could do.

  He smiled at her. She looked back in wary surprise. “The two of us will go far if we stick together,” he said. She thought about that, then nodded. Only later did he wonder whether he would be guiding her down his track or she guiding him down hers.

  The train groaned to a stop. Ussmak had never ridden on such a hideous conveyance in all his life. Back on Home, rail transport was fast, smooth, and nearly silent; thanks to magnetic levitation, trains never actually touched the rails over which they traveled. It wasn’t like that here. He felt every crosstie, every rail joint, that jounced the train as it slowly chugged along. His landcruiser had had a smoother, more pleasant ride on the worst broken terrain than the train did in its own roadbed.

  He let out a soft, sad hissing sigh. “If I’d had my wits about me, I never would have sunk my teeth into that Lidov creature. Ah, well—that’s what ginger does to a male.”

  One of the other males jammed into the compartment with him, a riflemale named Oyyag, said, “At least you got to bite one of the stinking Big Uglies. Most of us just got squeezed dry and used up.”

  A chorus of agreement rose from the others. To them, Ussmak was a hero of sorts, precisely because he’d managed to strike a blow against the SSSR even after the local Big Uglies got him in their claws. It was an honor he could have done without. The Tosevites knew why he was on this train, too, and treated him worse because of it. As Oyyag had said, the Soviets had simply run out of questions to put to most of the captive males. Not Ussmak, though.

  Two Big Uglies carrying automatic weapons opened the door to the compartment. “Out! Out!” they bawled in the Russkis’ ugly language. That was a word Ussmak had learned. He hadn’t learned many, but some of his fellows had been captive for a long time. They translated for those who, like him, were new-caught and innocent.

  Out he went. The corridor was chilly. The Tosevites pressed back against the outer wall, making sure no males could come close and attack them. Nobody was foolhardy enough to try; no one who had any experience in the SSSR could doubt that the Big Uglies would cheerfully shoot any male who gave them the least bit of trouble.

  The outer door at the far end of the railroad car was open. Ussmak made for it. He was used to being jammed into close quarters with many of his fellow males—he’d been a landcruiser crewmale, after all—but a little open space was welcome now and then, too. “Maybe they’ll feed us better here than they did on the train,” he said hopefully.

  “Silence!” one of the weapon-toting guards bawled in the Russki language. He’d learned that command, too. He shut up.

  If the corridor had been chilly, it was downright cold outside. Ussmak rapidly swiveled his eye turrets, wondering what sort of place this would be. It was certainly different from the battered city of Moskva, where he’d been brought after yielding up his base to the males of the SSSR. He’d got to see some on that journey, but he’d been a collaborator then, not a prisoner.

  Dark green Tosevite trees grew in great profusion all around the open area where the train had halted. He opened his mouth a crack to let his tongue drink in their scent. It was tangy and spicy and almost put him in mind of ginger. He wished he had a taste—anything to take his mind off his predicament. He wouldn’t try to attack these Big Ugly guards. Well, he didn’t think he would, anyhow.

  The Big Uglies’ shouts and gestures sent him and his comrades in misery skittering through a gateway in a fence made of many strands of the fanged stuff Tosevites used in place of razor wire, and toward some rough buildings of new, raw timber not far away. Other, more weathered buildings lay farther off, separated from these by more wire with fangs. Big Uglies in stained and faded coverings stared toward him and his companions from the grounds around those old buildings.

  Ussmak didn’t have much chance to look at them. Guards yelled and waved some more to show him which way to go. Some held automatic weapons, too; others controlled snarling animals with mouths full of big, sharp yellow teeth. Ussmak had seen those Tosevite beasts before. He’d had one with an explosive charge strapped to its back run under his landcruiser, blow itself up, and blow a track off the armored fighting vehicle. If the Big Uglies could train them to do that, he was sure they could train them to run over and bite males of the Race who got out of line, too.

  He didn’t get out of line, literally or figuratively. Along with the rest of the males from the train, he went into the building to which he’d been steered. He gave it the same swift, eye-swiveling inspection he’d used on the terrain surrounding it. Compared to the box in which he’d been stored in the Moskva prison, compared to the packed compartment in which he’d ridden from that prison to this place, it was spacious and luxurious. Compared to any other living quarters, even the miserable Tosevite barracks he’d had to inhabit in Besançon, it gave squalor a new synonym.

  There was a small open space in the center of this barracks, with a metal contraption in the middle of it. A guard used an iron poker to open a door on the device, then flung some black stones into the fire inside it. Only when he saw the fire did Ussmak realize the thing was supposed to be a stove.

  Surrounding it were row on row of bunks, five and six spaces high, built to a size that conformed to the dimensions of the Race, not those of the Big Uglies. As males hurried to get spaces of their own, the impression of roominess the barracks had given disappeared. They would be desperately crowded in here, too.

  A guard shouted something at Ussmak. He didn’t know exactly what it meant, but he got moving, which seemed to satisfy the Big Ugly. He claimed a third-tier bunk in the second row of frames away from the stove. That was as close as he could get; he hoped it would be close enough. Having served in Siberia, he had an awed respect for the extremes Tosevite weather could produce.

  The bunk’s sleeping platform was of bare boards, with a single smelly blanket—probably woven from the hairs of some native beast, he thought with distaste—in case that joke of a stove did not put out enough warmth. That struck Ussmak as likely. Next to nothing the Tosevites did worked the way it was supposed to, except when intended to inflict suffering. Then they managed fine.

  Oyyag scrambled up into the bunk above his. “What will they do with us, superior sir?” he asked.

  “I don’t know, either,” Ussmak answered. As a former land-cruiser driver, he did outrank the riflemale. But even males of the race whose body paint was fancier than his often awarded him that honorific salute now that they were captives together. None of them had ever led a mutiny or commanded a base after overcoming legitimate authority.

  What they don’t know is how much I wish I hadn’t done it, Ussmak thought sadly, and how much more I wish I hadn’t yielded the base up to Soviet troops once it was in my claws. Wishes did as much good as they usually did.

  The barracks quickly filled with males. As soon as the last new arrivals found bunks—bunks so far away from the stove that Ussmak pitied them when night came—another male and two Big Uglies came into the doorway and stood there waiting to be noticed. As they were, the barracks slowly quieted.

  Ussmak studied the newcomers with interest. The male of the Race carried himself like someone who was someone, though his body paint had been faded and abraded till little remained by which to judge his rank. The Tosevites with him presented an interesting contrast. One wore the type of cloth wrappings typical of the guards who had oppressed Ussmak ever since h
e went into captivity. The other, though, had the ragged accouterments of the males who had watched from the far side of the fanged-wire fence as Ussmak and his colleagues arrived. He’d also let the hair grow out on his face, which to Ussmak made him look even more scruffy than Tosevites normally did.

  The male spoke: “I am Fsseffel. Once I was an infantry combat vehicle band commander. Now I am headmale of Race Barracks One.” He paused; the Big Ugly with the fuzz on his face spoke in the Russki language to the one who wore the official-style cloth wrappings. Interpreter, Ussmak realized. He got the idea that a Big Ugly who understood his language might be a useful fellow with whom to become acquainted.

  Fsseffel resumed: “Males of the Race, you are here to labor for the males of the SSSR. This will henceforth be your sole function.” He paused to let that sink in, and for translation, then went on, “How well you work, how much you produce, will determine how well you are fed.”

  “That’s barbarous,” Oyyag whispered to Ussmak.

  “You expect Big Uglies to behave like civilized beings?” Ussmak whispered back. Then he waved Oyyag to silence; Fsseffel was still talking—

  “You will now choose for yourselves a headmale for this, Race Barracks Three. This male will be your interface with the Russki males of the People’s Commissariat for the Interior, the Tosevite organization responsible for administration of this camp.” He paused again to let the interpreter speak to the Big Ugly from the NKVD. “Choose wisely, I urge you.” He tacked an emphatic cough onto that. “If you do not make a selection, one will be made for you, more or less at random. Race Barracks Two had this happen. Results have been unsatisfactory. I urge against such a course.”

  Ussmak wondered what sort of unsatisfactory results Fsseffel had in mind. All sorts of nasty possibilities occurred to him: starvation, torture, executions. He hadn’t thought in terms like those before the mutiny. His frame of reference had changed since then, and not for the better.