Striking the Balance

by Harry Turtledove

  “We’d better not have to use it,” he answered, hooking a foot in the stirrup at the bottom of the fuselage that let him climb up onto the wing and into the cockpit. Ludmila followed. She pulled down the door and dogged it shut. Her finger stabbed at the self-starter. The motor caught. She watched the soldiers scatter, glad she hadn’t had to ask one to spin the prop for her.

  “Have you got your belt on?” she asked Jäger. When he said yes, she let the Storch scoot forward across the field: the acceleration might have shoved her passenger out of his seat if he hadn’t been strapped in place.

  As usual, the light plane needed only a handful of ground on which to take off. After one last hard bump, it sprang into the air. Jäger leaned to one side to peer down at the landing strip. So did Ludmila, but there wasn’t much to see. Now that they were airborne, the fellows with the lanterns had doused them. She supposed—she hoped—they were helping Jäger’s crewmen get the ammunition either under cover or back into the regimental store.

  Over her shoulder, she asked him, “Are you all right?”

  “Pretty much so,” he answered. “They hadn’t done much of the strongarm stuff yet—they weren’t sure how big a traitor I am.” He laughed bitterly, then amazed her by going on, “A lot bigger than they ever imagined, I’ll tell you that. Where are we going?”

  Ludmila was swinging the Storch back toward the east. “I was going to take you to the partisan unit I’ve been with for a while. No one will try and come after you there, I shouldn’t think; we’ll have a good many kilometers between us and German-held territory. Is that good enough?”

  “No, not nearly,” he said, again surprising her. “Can you fly me down to Lodz? If you like, you can let me out of the airplane and go back to the partisans yourself. But I have to go there, no matter what.”

  “Why?” She could hear the hurt in her own voice. Here at last they had the chance to be together and stay together and . . . “What could be so important in Lodz?”

  “That’s a long story,” Jäger said, and then proceeded to compress it with a forceful brevity that showed his officer’s discipline. The more he talked, the wider Ludmila’s eyes got—no, the SS hadn’t arrested him on account of her, not at all. He finished, “And so. If I don’t get back into Lodz, Skorzeny is liable to blow up the town and all the people and Lizards in it. And if he does that, what becomes of the cease-fire? What becomes of the Vaterland? And what becomes of the world?”

  Ludmila didn’t answer for a few seconds. Then, very quietly, she said, “Whatever you call yourself, you weren’t a traitor.” She gained a little altitude before swinging the Storch in a rightward bank. Numbers spun round the dial of the compass on the instrument panel till it steadied on south-southeast “We’ll both go to Lodz,” Ludmila said.

  XIX

  Ttomalss must have slept through the opening of the outer door to the building that confined him. The sharp click of the lock to the inner door, though, brought him up to his feet from the hard floor, his eye turrets swiveling wildly as he tried to see what was going on. Next to no light came through the narrow window that illuminated and ventilated his cell.

  Fear coursed through him. The Big Uglies had never come here at night before. Like any male of the Race, he found a break in routine threatening in and of itself. This particular change, he suspected, would have felt ominous even to a Tosevite.

  The door opened. Not one but three Big Uglies came in. Each carried in one hand a lantern burning some smelly fat or oil and in the other a submachine gun. The lanterns were primitive: much the sort of tools the Race had expected the natives of Tosev 3 to possess. The submachine guns, unfortunately, were not.

  In the dim, flickering light, Ttomalss needed a moment to recognize Liu Han. “Superior female!” he gasped when he did. She did not answer right away, but stood looking at him. He commended his spirit to Emperors past, confident they would care for it better than the Race’s authorities had protected his body while he lived.

  “Be still!” Liu Han snapped. Ttomalss waited for the weapon in her hand to stitch him full of holes. Instead of shooting him, though, she set it on the floor. She pulled out something she had tucked into the waist of her cloth leg-covering: a sack made of coarse, heavy fabric.

  While the two males with her kept their submachine guns pointed at Ttomalss, Liu Han came up to him and pulled the sack down over his head. He stood frozen, not daring to resist. If they shoot me now, I will not see the guns go off before the bullets strike, he thought. Liu Han tied the bag closed around his neck, not quite tight enough to choke off his breath.

  “Can he see?” one of the males asked. Then the fellow spoke directly to Ttomalss: “Can you see, miserable scaly devil?”

  Miserable Ttomalss was. “No, superior sir,” he answered truthfully.

  Liu Han shoved him. He almost fell over. When he recovered, she put a hand in the middle of his back. “You walk in the directions I choose for you,” she said, first in Chinese and then in the language of the Race. “Only in those directions.” She used an emphatic cough.

  “It shall be done,” Ttomalss gasped. Maybe they were just taking him out to shoot him somewhere else. But if they were, wouldn’t they have told him as much, so they could enjoy his terrified anticipation? Big Uglies were dreadfully sophisticated when it came to inflicting pain.

  Liu Han shoved him again, lightly this time. He walked forward till she said, “Go left,” and emphasized that by moving the hand on his back in the appropriate way. He turned to the left. Why not? In the sphere of blackness in which he moved, one direction was as good as another. A little later, Liu Han said, “Go right.” Ttomalss went right.

  He had not known where he was when he set out. Had he known, he soon would have become hopelessly lost. He turned right and left and right and left tens of times, with what seemed to him random intervals and choices. The streets of Peking were very quiet. He guessed it was somewhere between the middle of the night and dawn, but could not be certain.

  At last, Liu Han said, “Stop.” Ttomalss did, in apprehension. Was this the moment? Was this the place? Liu Han untied the cord fastening the cloth sack over his head. She said, “Count to one hundred, out loud, slowly, in your language. Then lift off the hood. If you lift it before you reach one hundred, you will die at once. Do you understand?”

  “Y-Yes, superior female,” Ttomalss quavered. “It shall be done. One . . . two . . . three . . .” He went on, as steadily as he could: “Ninety-eight . . . ninety-nine . . . one hundred.” As he reached for the sack, he waited for bullets to tear into him. He yanked the cloth from his head in a quick, convulsive gesture.

  No one shot him. His eye turrets scanned all around. He was alone, at the mouth of one of Peking’s innumerable little hutungs. He threw down the sack. The soft thwap! it made hitting the ground was the only sound that reached his hearing diaphragms. Ever so cautiously, he stepped out into the street onto which the hutung opened.

  To his amazement, he recognized it. It was the Lower Slanting Street, in Chinese the Hsia Hsieh Chieh. And there stood the ruins of the Ch’ang Ch’un Ssu, the Temple of Everlasting Spring. He knew how to get back to the Race’s headquarters in the center of Peking. He did not know if he would be allowed to do so, but he knew he had to try. The Lower Slanting Street even led in the right direction.

  Before long, he ran into a patrol of males of the Race. Where the Tosevites had let him go, the patrol almost shot him before recognizing him as one of their own. That would have been an irony on which to end his career! But when he told them who he was, they hurried him off to the thoroughly fortified citadel the Race retained in what had been the Forbidden City.

  He was pleased to find his arrival important enough to justify rousing Ppevel. Soon the assistant administrator, eastern region, main continental mass, came into the chamber where Ttomalss was enjoying proper food for the first time in ever so long and said, “I am glad to see you at liberty once more, Researcher. The Tosevites informed us yesterday
they would release you, but they are not always reliable in their assertions, as you know.”

  “Truth, superior sir—as I know too well,” Ttomalss said with an emphatic cough. “Did they say why they were releasing me? To me, they never gave a reason.” Without waiting for an answer, he dug into the plate of fried worms the cooks had given him. Even though they’d been desiccated for the trip to Tosev 3 and then reconstituted, they were still a taste of Home.

  Ppevel said, “By their messages, partly as a goodwill gesture and partly as a warning: typical of the Big Uglies to try to do both at once.” As if to give his words a different sort of emphatic cough, a rattle of gunfire broke out, off in the distance. He went on, “They say this shows us they can move at will through this city and other cities in this not-empire, releasing whom they will, taking whom they will, killing whom they will. They warn us the struggle to integrate China into the Empire will fail.”

  Before coming down to the surface of Tosev 3, perhaps even before his kidnapping, Ttomalss would have found that laughable, ludicrous. Now—“They are determined, superior sir, and they are both ingenious and surprisingly well armed. I fear they may trouble us for years, maybe generations, to come.”

  “It could be so,” Ppevel admitted, which surprised Ttomalss.

  He said, “While I was a captive, the female Liu Han claimed the Race had granted certain Tosevite not-empires a cease-fire. Can this be so?”

  “It can. It is,” Ppevel said. “These are the not-empires capable of producing their own nuclear weapons and desperate enough to use them against us. China—all of its factions—has no such weapons, and is excluded from the cease-fire. This offends the Chinese, or so it would seem, and so they redouble their annoyances in an effort to be included.”

  “The Race—treating with barbarous Tosevites as if they were equals?” Ttomalss looked up toward the ceiling in wonder and dismay. “Even from your mouth, superior sir, I have trouble believing it.”

  “It’s truth nonetheless,” Ppevel answered. “Even with these Chinese, we have negotiated, as you know, though we have not granted them the concessions the other not-empires have gained. We shall share dominion of this planet with the Tosevites until the colonization fleet arrives. Perhaps we shall share it after the colonization fleet arrives. I would not care to guess as to that. It is the fleetlord’s decision, not mine.”

  Ttomalss’ head reeled, almost as if he had ingested too much of the Tosevite herb so many males found alluring. So much had changed while he lay in captivity! He would have to work hard to adapt himself, always unsettling to the Race. He said, “We shall need more than ever, then, to seek to understand the essential nature of the Big Uglies.”

  “Truth,” Ppevel agreed. “When you are physically recovered from your ordeal, Researcher, we shall obtain for you, with the greatest discretion possible, a new Tosevite hatchling, with which you can resume your interrupted work.”

  “Thank you, superior sir,” Ttomalss said, his voice far more hollow than he would have expected. After what had happened to him with the last hatching—with Liu Mei, he made himself remember—the work that had once consumed him now seemed liable to be more dangerous than it was worth. “With your generous permission, superior sir, I shall carry on this research back aboard a starship laboratory rather than here on the surface of Tosev 3.”

  “That may well be arranged,” Ppevel said.

  “Thank you, superior sir,” Ttomalss repeated. He hoped the distance between the surface and the cleanness of open space would protect him from Big Uglies wild for revenge because of their familial and sexual structure. He hoped so—but he was not so confident of it as he had been in the days when Tosev 3 was new and conquest had seemed certain to be quick and easy. He cherished that certainty, and knew he would never have its like again.

  Patients and refugees crowded around the Lizard with the fancy body paint and the hand-held electrified megaphone. Rance Auerbach moved up slowly and carefully—the only way of moving he had—to get as good a vantage point as he could. Since so many other people had as much trouble moving as he did, he got up pretty close, almost to the gun-toting guards around the speaker.

  He looked around for Penny Summers and spotted her on the opposite side of the crowd. He waved to her, but she didn’t see him.

  The electrified megaphone made flatulent noises. Somewhere close by, a child laughed. Then, in pretty fair English, the Lizard began to speak: “We leave this place now. The Race and the government of this not-empire here, the United States, we make agreement now. No more fight. The Race to leave the land of the United States. That include this place, this Karval, Colorado, too.”

  He couldn’t go on, not right away. A buzz ran through the crowd, and then a cheer. A woman started singing “God Bless America.” Inside the second line of the song, everybody there was singing with her. Tears stung Auerbach’s eyes. The Lizards were leaving! They had won. Even getting shot up suddenly seemed worth it.

  When the singing stopped, the Lizard resumed: “You free now, yes.” More cheers rang out. “We go now.” Auerbach cut loose with a Rebel yell: more of a coughing yip than the wild shriek he’d wanted, but good enough. The Lizard went on, “Now you free, now we go—now we not have to take care for you no more. We go, we leave not-empire of United States to take care for you now. They do it or nobody do it. We go now. That is all.”

  The Lizard guards had to gesture threateningly with their weapons before the people would clear aside and let them and the speaker out. For a few dreadful seconds, Auerbach was afraid they would start shooting. With people packed so tight around them, that would have been a slaughter.

  He made his halting way toward Penny Summers. This time, she did spot him, and moved, far more nimbly than he could, to meet him. “What did that scaly bastard mean, exactly?” she asked. “Way he was talking, it sounded like the Lizards are just gonna up and leave us on our own.”

  “They couldn’t do that,” Auerbach said. “There’s what?—thousands of people here, and a lot of ’em—me, for instance—aren’t what you’d call good at getting around. What are we supposed to do, walk to the American lines up near Denver?” He laughed at the absurdity of the notion.

  But the Lizards didn’t think it was absurd. They piled into trucks and armored personnel carriers and rolled out of Karval that afternoon, heading east, back toward wherever their spaceships were parked. By the time the sun went down, Karval was an altogether human town again.

  It was a good-sized human town, too, and one utterly without government of any sort. The Lizards had taken as many of the supplies as they could load into their vehicles. Fights broke out over what was left. Penny managed to get hold of some hard biscuits, and shared them with Rance. They made his belly rumble a little less than it would have without them.

  Off to the left, not quite far enough away from his convalescent tent to be out of earshot, somebody said, “We ought to string up all the stinking bastards who kissed the Lizards’ butts while they was here. String ’em up by the balls, matter of fact.”

  Auerbach shivered, not so much because of what the fellow said as at the calm, matter-of-fact way he said it. In Europe, they’d called people who’d gone along with the Nazis, people like Quisling, collaborators. Auerbach had never figured anybody would need to worry about collaborators in the U.S.A., but he didn’t know everything there was to know, either.

  Penny said, “There’s gonna be trouble. Anybody who’s got a score to settle against somebody else will say they went along with the Lizards. Who’s gonna be able to sort out what’s true and what ain’t? Families will be feuding a hundred years from now on account o’ this.”

  “You’re probably right,” Rance said. “But there’s going to be trouble sooner than that.” He was thinking like a soldier. “The Lizards may have pulled out of here, but the Army hasn’t pulled in. We’ll eat Karval empty by tomorrow at the latest, and then what do we do?”

  “Walk toward Denver, I reckon,” Penny answe
red. “What else can we do?”

  “Not much,” he said. “But walk—what? A hundred miles, maybe?” He gestured toward the crutches that lay by his cot. “You might as well go on without me. I’ll meet you there in a month, maybe six weeks.”

  “Don’t be silly,” Penny told him. “You’re doin’ a lot better than you were.”

  “I know, but I’m not doing well enough.”

  “You will be,” she said confidently. “Besides, I don’t want to leave you, darling.” She blew out the one flickering candle that lit the inside of the tent. In the darkness, he heard cloth rustle. When he reached out toward her, his hand brushed warm, bare flesh. A little later, she rode astride him, groaning both in ecstasy and, he thought, in desperation, too—or maybe he was just guessing she felt the same thing he did. Afterwards, not bothering to dress, she slept beside him in the tent.

  He woke before sunrise, and woke her, too. “If we’re going to do this,” he said, “we’d better get started early as we can. That way we can go a long way before it gets too hot, and lie up during the hottest part of the day.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Penny said.

  The eastern sky was just going pink when they set out. They were far from the first to leave Karval. Singly and in small groups, some people were making their way north along one of the roads that led out of town, others along the westbound road, and a few hearty souls, splitting the difference, heading northwest cross-country. Had Auerbach been in better shape, he would have done that. As things were, he and Penny went west: the Horse River was likelier to have water in it still than any of the streams they would cross heading north.

  He was stronger and better on his crutches than he had been, but that still left him weak and slow. Men and women passed Penny and him in a steady stream. Refugees from Karval stretched out along the road as far as he could see.