Striking the Balance

by Harry Turtledove

  “Sneaking up on the Lizards isn’t easy anyhow,” Dr. Smithson said.

  Auerbach looked down at himself, at the much-battered excuse for a carcass he’d be dragging around for the rest of his life.

  “Matter of fact, I found out about that. Sneaking away from ’em’s not so easy, either.”

  “They have Lizard doctors in Denver, looking out for their people that we caught?” Penny asked.

  “Yes—it’s all part of the cease-fire,” Smithson answered. “I almost wish I could have stayed in town to watch them work, too. If we don’t keep fighting them, they’re going to push our medicine forward a hundred years in the next ten or fifteen, we have so much to learn.” He sighed. “But this is important work, too. We may even be able to set up a large-scale prisoner exchange, wounded men for wounded Lizards.”

  “That would be good,” Auerbach said. Then he looked over at Penny, whose face bore a stricken expression. She wasn’t a wounded prisoner. He turned his head back toward Smithson. “Would the Lizards let noncombatants out?”

  “I don’t know,” the doctor answered. “I can understand why you’d want to find out, though. If this comes off—and there are no guarantees—I’ll see what I can do for you. How’s that?”

  “Thank you, sir,” Auerbach said, and Penny nodded. Auerbach’s gaze went toward the canvas tents and old wagons and shelters of brush housing the Americans who’d come to Karval to beg for crumbs of the Lizards’ largesse. Thinking about that brought home like a kick in the teeth what the war had done to the country. He looked down at himself. “You know something? I’m not so bad off after all.”

  The buzz of a human-built airplane over Cairo sent Moishe Russie hurrying to the windows of his hotel-room cell for a glimpse. Sure enough, there it was, painted lemon yellow as a mark of truce. “I wonder who’s in that one,” he said to Rivka.

  “You’ve said Molotov is already here,” she answered, “so that leaves von Ribbentrop”—she and her husband both donned expressions redolent of distaste—“and the American foreign minister, whatever his name is.”

  “Marshall,” Moishe said. “And they call him Secretary of State, for some reason.” He soaked up trivia, valuable or not, like a sponge; the book-learning in medical school had come easy for him because of that. Had his interest lain elsewhere, he would have made a formidable yeshiva-bucher. He turned back to the window. The yellow airplane was lower now, coming in for a landing at the airfield east of town. “That’s not a Dakota. Marshall would fly in one of those, I think. So it’s probably a German plane.”

  Rivka sighed. “If you see Ribbentrop, tell him every Jew in the world wished a kholeriyeh on him.”

  “If he doesn’t know that by now, he’s pretty stupid,” Moishe said.

  “Tell him anyway,” his wife said. “You get a chance like that, you shouldn’t waste it.” The drone of the motors faded out of hearing. Rivka laughed, a little uneasily. “That used to be a sound you took for granted. Hearing it here, hearing it now—it’s very strange.”

  Moishe nodded. “When the truce talks started, the Lizards tried to insist on flying everyone here in their own planes. I suppose they didn’t want the Nazis—or anyone else—sending a plane full of bombs instead of diplomats. Atvar was very confused when the Germans and the Russians and the U.S.A. all said no. The Lizards haven’t really figured out what all negotiating as equals means. They’ve never had to do it before; they’re used to dictating.”

  “It shall be done,” Rivka said in the aliens’ hissing language. Anyone who was around them long learned that phrase. She dropped back into Yiddish: “That’s the way they think. It’s about the only way they think.”

  “I know,” Moishe answered. He made as if to pound his head against the wall. “Oy, do I know.”

  Through loudspeakers, the muezzins called the faithful to prayer. Cairo slowed down for a little while. Another bright yellow airplane flew low over the city, making for the airport. “That is a Dakota,” Rivka said, coming up to stand by Moishe. “So—Marshall?—is here, too, now.”

  “So he is,” Moishe answered. He felt as if he were setting up a game of chess with a friend back in Warsaw, and had just put the last couple of pieces where they belonged. “Now we see what happens next.”

  “What will you tell Atvar if he summons you to ask what you think of these people?” Rivka asked.

  Moishe used a few clicks and pops himself. “The exalted fleetlord? You mean, besides geh in drerd?” Rivka gave him a dangerous look, one that meant, Stop trying to be funny. He sighed and went on, “I don’t know. I’m not even sure why he keeps bringing me in to question me. I wasn’t—”

  Rivka made urgent shushing motions. Moishe shut up. He’d started to say something like, I wasn’t anywhere near the caliber of those people. Rivka was right. The Lizards surely monitored everything he said. If they hadn’t figured out for themselves how small a fish he was, no point telling them. Being thought more important than he was might improve both his treatment and his life expectancy.

  And sure enough, a couple of hours later Zolraag walked into the hotel room and announced, “You are summoned to the quarters of the exalted fleetlord Atvar. You will come immediately.”

  “It shall be done, superior sir,” Moishe answered. The Lizards certainly hadn’t bothered learning to negotiate with him as an equal. They told him where to go and what to do, and he perforce did it.

  The guards didn’t seem quite so eager to shoot him if he so much as stumbled as they had when the Lizards first brought him to Cairo. They still turned out for him full force, though, and transported him from hither to yon and back again in one of their armored personnel carriers, as uncomfortable a mode of travel for a human being as any ever invented.

  While they were on their way to Atvar’s headquarters, Zolraag remarked, “Your insights into the political strategies likely to be utilized are of interest to the exalted fleetlord. Having headed a not-empire yourself, you will be prepared to empathize with these other Tosevite males.”

  “That’s certainly better than being shot,” Moishe said gravely. He was glad he’d had practice holding his face straight. Yes, he’d headed up the Jews of Poland for a little while after the Lizards came, till he found he could no longer stand to obey them. To imagine that that put him in the same class as Hitler and Hull and Stalin—well, if you could imagine that, you had a vivid and well-stocked imagination. From what he’d gathered, anything smaller than the entire surface of a planet was too small for the Lizards to bother making what they reckoned subtle distinctions in size. The distinctions were anything but subtle to him, but he—thank God!—was not a Lizard.

  Atvar rounded on him as soon as he came into the machine-strewn suite the fleetlord occupied. “If we make an agreement with these males, is it your judgment they will abide by it?” he demanded, using Zolraag to translate his words into Polish and German.

  This to a man who’d watched Poland carved up between Germany and the USSR after they’d made their secret agreement, and then watched them go to war against each other less than two years later in spite of the agreement still formally in force. Picking his words with care, Moishe answered, “They will—so long as they see keeping the agreement as being in their interest.”

  The fleetlord made more mostly unintelligible noises. Again, Zolraag interpreted for him: “You are saying, then, that these Tosevite males are altogether unreliable?”

  By any standard with which the Lizard was familiar, the answer to that had to be yes. Moishe didn’t think putting it so baldly would help end the fighting. He said, “You have much to offer that would be in their interest to accept. If you and they can agree upon terms for your males’ leaving their countries, for instance, they would probably keep any agreements that would prevent the Race from coming back.”

  As he’d seen with Zolraag’s efforts in Warsaw, the Lizards had only the vaguest notions of diplomacy. Things that seemed obvious even to a human being who had no governmental experien
ce—to Moishe himself, for instance—sometimes struck the aliens with the force of revelation when they got the point. And sometimes, despite genuine effort, they didn’t get it.

  As now: Atvar said, “But if we yield to the demands of these importunate Tosevites, we encourage them to believe they are our equals.” After a moment, he added, “And if they believe themselves equal to us, soon they will come to think they are superior.”

  That last comment reminded Moishe the Lizards weren’t fools; they might be ignorant of the way one nation treated with another, but they weren’t stupid. Ignoring the difference could be deadly dangerous. Carefully, Moishe said, “What you have already done should make it plain to them that they are not your superiors. And what they have done to you should show you that you are not so much superior to them as you thought you were when you came to this world. When neither side is superior, isn’t talking better than fighting?”

  After Zolraag had translated what he’d said, Atvar fixed Russie with what certainly looked like a baleful stare. The fleetlord said, “When we came to Tosev 3, we thought you Big Uglies would still be the spear-flinging barbarians our probes of this planet had shown you to be. We discovered very soon we were not so superior as we had thought we would be when we went into cold sleep. It is the most unpleasant discovery the Race has ever known.” He added an emphatic cough.

  “Nothing stays the same here, not for long,” Moishe said. Some of the Polish Jews had tried to pretend time had stopped, to live their lives as they had before the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution blew across Europe. They’d even thought they were succeeding—till the Nazis brought all the worst parts of the modern world to bear against them.

  Moishe had spoken with more than a little pride. That wasn’t what he touched off in the fleetlord. Atvar replied in considerable agitation: “This is what is wrong with you Tosevites. You are too changeable. Maybe we can make peace with you as you are now. But will you be as you are now when the colonization fleet reaches this world? It is to be doubted. What will you be? What will you want? What will you know?”

  “I have no answers to these questions, Exalted Fleetlord,” Moishe said quietly. He thought of Poland, which had had a large army, well trained to fight the sort of war fought on that frontier a generation before. Against the Wehrmacht, the Poles had fought with utmost bravery and utmost futility—and had gone down to ignominious defeat in a couple of weeks. While they weren’t looking, the rules had changed.

  “I have no answers to these questions, either,” Atvar said. Unlike the Polish army, he at least sensed the possibility of change. It frightened him even more than it had frightened the pious Jews who tried to turn their backs on Voltaire and Darwin and Marx, Edison and Krupp and the Wright brothers. The fleetlord went on, “I have to be certain this world will be intact and ready for settlement by the males and females of the colonization fleet.”

  “The question you must ask yourself, Exalted Fleetlord,” Moishe said, “is whether you would sooner have part of the world ready for settlement than all of it in ruins.”

  “Truth,” Atvar said. “But there is also another question: if we let you Tosevites retain part of the land surface of this world on your own terms now, for what will you use that base between now and the arrival of the colonization fleet? Do we end one war now but lay the eggs for another, larger one later? You are a Tosevite yourself; your people have done little but fight one war after another. How do you view this?”

  Moishe supposed he should have been grateful the fleetlord was using him for a sounding board rather than simply disposing of him. He was grateful, but Atvar had given him another essentially unanswerable question. He said, “Sometimes war does lead to war. The last great war we fought, thirty years ago now it started, sowed the seeds for this one. But a different peace might have kept the new war from happening.”

  “Might,” the fleetlord echoed unhappily. “I cannot afford might. I must have certainty, and there is none on this world. Even you Big Uglies cannot come into concord here. Take this Poland where you lived, where Zolraag was provincelord. The Deutsche claim it because they had it when the Race came to Tosev 3. The SSSR claims half of it because of an agreement they say the Deutsche violated. And the local Tosevites claim it belongs to neither of these not-empires, but to them alone. If we leave this Poland place, to whom shall we in justice restore it?”

  “Poland, Exalted Fleetlord, is a place I hope you do not leave,” Moishe said.

  “Even though you did everything you could to undermine our presence there?” Atvar said. “You may have the egg, Moishe Russie, or you may have the hatchling. You may not have both.”

  “I understand that,” Moishe said, “but Poland is a special case.”

  “All cases on Tosev 3 are special—just ask the Big Uglies involved in them,” Atvar answered. “One more reason to hate this world.”

  XVI

  Vyacheslav Molotov gulped down yet another glass of iced tea, pausing halfway through to swallow a couple of salt tablets. The heat of Cairo was unbelievable, enervating, even deadly dangerous: one of his aides, an NKVD colonel named Serov, who spoke the Lizards’ language as fluently as any human being in the Soviet Union, had collapsed of heatstroke, and was now recovering in an air-conditioned hospital suite the English had set up to treat similarly afflicted folk of their own nation.

  Neither the Semiramis Hotel, in which the Soviet delegation and other human diplomats were staying, nor Shepheard’s, in which the negotiations were being conducted, enjoyed the benefits of air-conditioning. Here, the Soviets kept enough fans going at all times to make paperweights mandatory to prevent a blizzard of documents from blowing around the suite. Even if it did move, the air the fans blew remained hot.

  No fans blew during the negotiations. The Lizards, as Molotov had discovered to his dismay when he was first flown up to one of their spaceships to discuss the war with their fleetlord, reveled in heat. Before Colonel Serov was rendered hors de combat, he’d reported that the Lizards here continually talked about how fine the weather was—almost like their home, they said.

  As far as Molotov was concerned, they were welcome to it.

  He reached in the drawer and pulled out a dark blue necktie. As he fastened the collar button of his shirt, he allowed himself a small, martyred sigh: here in Cairo, he envied the Lizards their body paint. Knotting the tie, he reflected that he still had an advantage over most of his colleagues. His neck was thin, which let air circulate under his shirt. A lot of the Soviets were beefy types, with double chins and rolls of fat at their napes. For them, closed collar and cravat were even worse torment.

  Just for a moment, he wondered how the USSR’s Lizard prisoners enjoyed the labor camps northeast of Leningrad and up in the northern reaches of Siberia. He wondered how they would enjoy them come February.

  “As much as I enjoy Cairo now,” he murmured, checking in the dresser mirror to make sure the tie was straight. Satisfied, he put on his hat and went downstairs to wait for the Lizard vehicle that would take him to today’s negotiating session.

  His interpreter, a birdlike little man named Yakov Donskoi, was pacing about the hotel lobby. He brightened on seeing Molotov arrive. “Good morning, Comrade Foreign Commissar,” he said. With Molotov here, he had a set place to be and set things to do.

  “Good morning, Yakov Beniaminovich,” Molotov answered, and looked pointedly at his wristwatch. The Lizards were . . .

  Exactly at the appointed hour, an armored personnel carrier pulled up in front of the hotel. He kept expecting the Lizards to be late, and they never were. Donskoi said, “I have been down for some time. Von Ribbentrop left about forty minutes ago, Marshall about twenty. Before that, I do not know.”

  The Lizards did not transport human diplomats together. Molotov supposed that was to keep them from conferring with one another. The tactic had its advantages for them. The humans didn’t dare speak too freely among themselves at the hotel, either. The NKVD had swept Molotov’s room
for listening devices. He was sure the Gestapo, the OSS, and other intelligence agencies had done likewise for their principals’ quarters. He was equally sure they hadn’t found everything there was to find. The Lizards had too long a lead on humanity in that kind of technology.

  He turned to Donskoi. “Tell the Lizards it would be kulturny if they provided seats in this machine suitable to the shape of our fundaments.”

  Donskoi addressed the Lizard with the fanciest body paint not in his own language but in English, the human tongue in which the talks were being conducted. It was the native tongue of George Marshall and Anthony Eden, while von Ribbentrop and Shigenori Togo were fluent in it. Eden and Togo were not formal conference participants, but the Lizards had let them come and sit in.

  The Lizard replied to Donskoi in English that sounded to Molotov not much different from the alien’s native tongue. The interpreter, however, made sense of it: that was his job. He translated for Molotov: “Strukss says no. He says we should be honored they deign to talk with us at all, and that we have no business asking for anything more than they provide.”

  “Tell him he is nye kulturny,” Molotov said. “Tell him he is an ignorant barbarian, that even the Nazis whom I hate know more of diplomacy than his people, that his superior will hear of his insolence. Tell him in just those words, Yakov Beniaminovich.”

  Donskoi spoke in English. The Lizard made horrible spluttering noises, then spoke English himself. Donskoi said, “He says, with the air of one granting a great concession, he will see what arrangements can be made. I take this to mean he will do as you say.”

  “Ochen khorosho,” Molotov said smugly. In some ways, the Lizards were very much like his own people: if you convinced one of them you had superior status, he would grovel, but he would ride roughshod over you if he thought himself of the higher rank.

  The armored vehicle—far quieter and less odorous than its human-made equivalent would have been—pulled to a stop in front of Shepheard’s Hotel, where Atvar made his headquarters. Molotov found it amusing and illuminating that the Lizard should choose for his own the hotel that had had the highest status under the British colonialist regime.