Worldwar: Striking the Balance

by Harry Turtledove

  But the ball seemed interesting. When it stopped bouncing, the hatchling crawled over to it, picked it up, and stuck it up against its mouth. Ttomalss had been sure it would do that, and had washed the ball beforehand. He’d learned the hatchling would stick anything it could into its mouth, and learned not to let it get its hands on things small enough to go inside there. Sticking his hand into its slimy little maw to retrieve this or that was not something he relished, and he’d already had to do it more than once.

  The communicator squawked for his attention. Before going to answer, he quickly scanned the area where the Tosevite sat to make sure nothing swallowable was close by. Satisfied over that, he answered the instrument.

  Ppevel’s face stared out of the screen at him. “Superior sir,” he said, activating his own video.

  “I greet you, Psychologist,” Ppevel said. “I am to warn you that there is an increased probability you will be required to turn over the Tosevite hatchling upon which you are currently conducting research to the Big Ugly female from whose body it emerged. Do not merely be prepared for this eventuality; anticipate it as near-term reality.”

  “It shall be done,” Ttomalss said; he was, after all, a male of the Race. Even as he pledged obedience, though, he knew a sinking feeling. He did his best not to show it as he asked, “Superior sir, what has led to this hasty decision?”

  Ppevel hissed softly; hasty was a term of condemnation among the Race. But he answered civilly enough: “The female from whose body this hatchling came has acquired increased status in the People’s Liberation Army, the Tosevite group in China responsible for most of the guerrilla activity against us there. Thus, propitiating her is of increased priority when compared to its importance a short while ago.”

  “I—see,” Ttomalss said slowly. As he tried to think, the Tosevite hatchling started whimpering. It got nervous now when he was out of its sight for very long. Doing his best to ignore the little squalling nuisance, he tried to keep his wits on the course they had begun. “If this female’s status in the outlaw organization is lowered, then, superior sir, the pressure to turn over the hatchling also lessens once more, is that not correct?”

  “In theory, yes,” Ppevel replied. “How you can hope to turn theory to practice in this particular instance is difficult for me to comprehend. Our influence over any Tosevite groups, even those allegedly favoring us, is more limited than we would like; our influence over those in active opposition to us is, for all practical purposes, nil except for measures military.”

  He was right, of course. The Big Uglies were prone to believe that what they wanted would come true merely because they wanted it. The delusion afflicted the Race to a lesser degree. And yet, Ttomalss thought, there ought to be a way. It wasn’t as if the female Liu Han had had no contact with the Race before giving birth to this hatchling. The small creature had been conceived in an orbiting starship; its mother had been part of the Race’s initial study cadre on the bizarre nature of Tosevite sexuality and mating patterns.

  All at once, Ttomalss’ mouth fell open. “Are you laughing at me, Psychologist?” Ppevel asked, his voice soft and dangerous.

  “By no means, superior sir,” Ttomalss answered hastily. “I do believe, however, that I have devised a way to lower the status of the female Liu Han. If successful, as you say, this will lower her rank and prestige in the People’s Liberation Army and will allow my vital research program to continue.”

  “My belief is that you place higher priority on the second than on the first,” Ppevel said. Since that was true, Ttomalss did not reply. Ppevel went on, “I forbid military action against or assassination of the female in question. Either of these tactics, even if successful, will raise rather than lower her status. Some males have fallen into the slipshod Tosevite habit of obeying only such orders as suit them. You would be most unwise, Psychologist, to number yourself among them in this particular case.”

  “It shall be done as you say in every particular, superior sir,” Ttomalss promised. “I have no plans for violence against the Big Ugly in question. I plan to reduce her status through ridicule and humiliation.”

  “If this can be done, well enough,” Ppevel said. “Getting the Big Uglies even to notice they have been humiliated, though, is a difficult undertaking.”

  “Not in all instances, superior sir,” Ttomalss said. “Not in all instances.” He made his good-byes, checked the hatchling—which, for a wonder, hadn’t got into any mischief—and then went to work on the computer. He knew just where to look for the data sequences he had in mind.

  Nieh Ho-T’ing turned south off Chang Men Ta—the street that led into the Chinese city of Peking from the Western Gate—and onto Niu Chieh. The district that centered on Cow Street was where the Muslims of Peking congregated. Nieh did not normally think much of Muslims; their outmoded faith blinded them to the truth of the dialectic. But, against the little scaly devils, ideology could for the moment be overlooked.

  He was reasonably well fed, which made the curio-shop owners standing in the doorways of their establishments shout and wave with particular vigor as he walked past. Nine out of every ten of that breed were Muslims. Given the trash they sold, that helped reinforce the view most Chinese had of the Muslim minority: that their honesty was not always above reproach.

  Further down Niu Chieh, on the eastern side of the street, stood the largest mosque in Peking. Hundreds, maybe thousands, worshiped there every day. The qadis who led them in prayer had a potentially large group of recruits ready to hand, recruits who could also give good service to the People’s Liberation Army—if they would.

  A large crowd of men stood around . . . “No, they aren’t outside the mosque, they’re in front of it,” Nieh said aloud. He wondered what was going on, and hurried down Cow Street to find out.

  As he drew nearer, he saw that the scaly devils had setup in the street one of their machines that could make three-dimensional pictures appear in the air above it. They sometimes tried broadcasting their propaganda on those machines. Nieh had never bothered suppressing their efforts; as far as he was concerned, the scaly devils’ propaganda was so laughably bad that it served only to estrange them from the people.

  Now, though, they were up to something new. The images floating in midair above the machine weren’t propaganda at all, not in any conventional sense of the word. They were just pornography: a Chinese woman fornicating with a man who was too hairy and who had too big a nose to be anything but a foreign devil.

  Nieh Ho-T’ing walked down Cow Street toward the display. He was a straitlaced sort himself, and wondered if the little devils hoped to provoke their audience into degeneracy. The show they were putting on here was disgusting but. If that wasn’t what they intended, apparently pointless.

  As Nieh drew nearer the picture machine, the foreign devil, who had had his head lowered for a while so he could tease the woman’s nipple with his tongue, raised it again. Nieh stopped in his tracks, so suddenly that a laborer behind him carrying two buckets on a shoulder pole almost ran into him and shouted angrily. Nieh ignored the fellow. He recognized the foreign devil. It was Bobby Fiore, the man who had put Liu Han’s baby into her.

  Then the woman whose straining thighs clenched Bobby Fiore’s flanks turned her face toward Nieh, and he saw that she was Liu Han. He bit his lip. Her features were slack with lust. The pictures had sound accompanying them. He listened to her little gasps of pleasure, just as he had when he held her in his arms.

  In the pictures, Liu Han moaned. Bobby Fiore grunted like a stuck pig. Both of them glistened with sweat. A Chinese man—a running dog for the little scaly devils—spoke over their ecstatic noises, explaining to the crowd what it was watching: “Here we see the famous people’s revolutionary Liu Han as she relaxes between her murders. Aren’t you proud to have this kind of person claiming to represent you? Don’t you hope she gets everything she wants?”

  “Eee,” said one of the men around the picture machine, “I think she is getting every
thing she wants. That foreign devil, he’s made like a donkey.” Everyone who heard him laughed—including Nieh Ho-T’ing, though stretching his mouth into the proper shape and making the right sounds come out of his throat hurt as if he were being flayed with knives.

  The machine started a new film of Liu Han—with a different man this time. “Here is true Communism,” the narrator said. “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.”

  The crowd of loafers guffawed at that, too. Again, Nieh Ho-T’ing made himself join the men around him. The first rule was not to look conspicuous. As he laughed, though, he noted that the narrator was probably a Kuomintang man—you had to be familiar with Marxist rhetoric to use it so effectively in burlesque form. He also noted that man down for assassination. If he could find out who he was.

  After Nieh had stood around for a couple of minutes, he went on to the mosque. He was looking for a man named Su Shun-Ch’in, and found him sweeping the prayer area clean. That bespoke sincerity and dedication. Had Su Shun-Ch’in been at his trade merely for profit, he would have had an underling do the unpleasant parts of the job.

  He looked at Nieh with something less than perfect liking. “How can you expect us to work with folk who are not only godless but who put sluts in positions of authority?” he demanded. “The scaly devils are right to scorn you for that.”

  Nieh did not mention that he and Liu Han were lovers. Instead, he said, “This poor woman was captured by the little scaly devils and forced to give her body to these men or be starved. Is it any wonder that now she burns for revenge against them? They seek to discredit her, to lower her effectiveness as a revolutionary leader.”

  “I have seen some of these pictures the little devils show,” Su Shun-Ch’in answered. “In one or two, the woman Liu Han looks to be forced, yes. In others, though—the ones with the foreign devil with the fuzzy back and chest—she is doing nothing but enjoying herself. This is very plain.”

  Liu Han had fallen in love with Bobby Fiore. At first, maybe, it had been nothing more than two miserable people thrown together in a situation where they had no relief save each other, but it had grown to more than that. Nieh knew it. He also knew, from his time with Bobby Fiore on the road and in Shanghai, that the foreign devil had loved her, too, even if he hadn’t bothered being faithful to her.

  No matter how true all that was, none of it would matter to the qadi. Nieh tried a different tack: “Whatever she did in the past that the little devils show, she did only because without doing it she would have been starved to death. Possibly she did not hate all of it; possibly this foreign devil was decent to her in a place where anything decent was hard to find. But whatever she did, it is the scaly devils’ fault, not hers, and she repents of having done it.”

  “Maybe,” Su Shun-Ch’in said. By Chinese standards, his face was long and craggy; he might have had a foreign devil or two in his distant ancestry. His features lent themselves to stern disapproval.

  “Do you know what else the scaly devils did to the woman Liu Han?” Nieh said. When the qadi shook his head, he went on. “They photographed her giving birth to a child, and photographed that child coming forth from between her legs. Then they stole it, to use it for their own purposes as if it were a beast of burden. You will not see them showing pictures of that, I would wager.”

  “This is so?” Su Shun-Ch’in said. “You Communists, you are good at inventing lies to advance your cause.”

  Nieh reckoned all religion a lie to advance a cause, but did not say so. “This is so,” he answered quietly.

  The qadi studied him. “You are not lying to me now, I do not think,” he said at last.

  “No, I am not lying to you now,” Nieh agreed. He wished he had not tacked on the last word. Then he saw Su Shun-Ch’in nodding soberly, perhaps pleased he was acknowledging he did sometimes lie. He went on, “In truth, the woman Liu Han gains face from these pictures the scaly devils show; she does not lose it. They prove that the little devils fear her so much, they need to discredit her by whatever means they can.”

  Su Shun-Ch’in chewed on that like a man working meat from a chunk of pork that was mostly gristle. “Perhaps there is some truth in this,” he said after a long pause. Nieh had to work hard not to show the relief he felt as the qadi continued, “I will present your interpretation of these pictures to the men who believe as I do, at any rate.”

  “That will be very fine,” Nieh said. “If we stand together in a popular front, we may yet defeat the little scaly devils.”

  “Perhaps there is some truth in this,” Su repeated, “but here, only some. When you say a popular front, you mean a front you will lead. You do not believe in equal partnerships.”

  Nieh Ho-T’ing put as much indignation as he could into his voice: “You are wrong. That is not true.”

  To his surprise, Su Shun-Ch’in started to laugh. He waggled a finger in Nieh’s face. “Ah, now you are lying to me again,” he said. Nieh started to deny it, but the qadi waved him to silence. “Never mind. I understand you have to say what you have to say to support your cause. Even if I know it is wrong, you think it is right. Go now, and may God, the Compassionate, the Merciful, someday put wisdom into your heart.”

  Sanctimonious old fool, Nieh thought. But Su Shun-Ch’in had shown he wasn’t a fool, and he was going to work with the Communists to fight the little devils’ propaganda. And he was right about one thing: if the People’s Liberation Army was part of a popular front, that front would come to reflect the views of the Communist Party.

  After Nieh left the mosque, he went wandering through the streets and narrow hutungs of Peking. The scaly devils had set up a lot of their picture machines. Liu Han’s images floated above every one of them, coupling with one man or another: usually Bobby Fiore, but not always. The little scaly devils turned up the sound at the moments when she neared and reached the Clouds and Rain, and also for the unctuous commentary of their Chinese lackey.

  The propaganda piece did some of what the scaly devils wanted it to do. A lot of the men watching Liu Han being penetrated called her a bitch and a whore (just as Hsia Shou-Tao had, from what she’d said) and mocked the People’s Liberation Army for having raised her to a position of leadership. “I know what position I’d like to raise her to,” one wit cracked, and raised a loud laugh around that particular picture machine.

  Not all the men reacted that way, though. Some did sympathize with her plight, and said so out loud. And Nieh found most interesting the reactions of the women who watched the record of Liu Han’s degradation. Almost without exception, they used the same words: “Ohh, poor thing.”

  They would use those words not only among themselves, but also to their husbands and brothers and sons. The Chinese way of life shoved women into the background, but that didn’t mean they had no way of making their opinions felt. If they thought the little scaly devils were oppressing Liu Han, they would let their men know about it—and, sooner or later, the opinions those men held would start to change, too.

  The Party’s counterpropaganda wouldn’t hurt there, either.

  Nieh smiled. With any luck at all, the little scaly devils had wounded themselves in a way the Party couldn’t have managed. And, he vowed, he’d give luck a hand.

  VII

  “All right, God damn it, where the hell is he?” That booming bad-tone, that look-out-world-here-I-am arrogance, could only have belonged to one man of Heinrich Jäger’s acquaintance. He had not expected to hear from that one man while campaigning against the Lizards in western Poland.

  He got to his feet, careful not to overturn the little aluminum stove on which his supper simmered. “Skorzeny!” he called. “What the devil are you doing here?”

  “The devil’s work, my lad; the devil’s work,” SS Standartenführer Otto Skorzeny answered, folding Jäger into a rib-crunching bearhug. Skorzeny towered over Jäger by fifteen centimeters, but dominated most men not because of his size but by sheer physical presence. When you fell unde
r his spell, you wanted to charge out to do whatever he told you to, no matter how impossible the rational part of your brain knew it was.

  Jäger had been on several missions with Skorzeny: in Russia, in Croatia, in France. He marveled that he remained in one piece after them. He marveled even more that Skorzeny did. He also set himself to resist whatever blandishments Skorzeny hurled his way. If you stood up to the SS man, you got respect. If you didn’t, you got run over.

  Skorzeny thumped his belly. The scar that furrowed his left cheek pulled up the corner of his mouth as he asked, “Got any food around these parts, or do you aim to starve me to death?”

  “You’re not wasting away,” Jäger said, looking him over with a critical eye. “We have some stew—pork and turnips—and some ersatz coffee. Will they suit your majesty?”

  “No truffled pheasant, eh? Well, stew will do. But fuck ersatz coffee and the dying horse that pissed it out.” Skorzeny pulled a canteen off his belt, undid the stopper, and passed the canteen to Jäger. “Have a snort.”

  Jäger drank warily. With Skorzeny’s sense of humor, you had to be wary. “Jesus,” he whispered. “Where did you come by this?”

  “Not a bad cognac, eh?” Skorzeny answered smugly. “Courvoisier VSOP five-star, smoother than the inside of a virgin’s twat.”

  Jäger took another sip, this one with appropriate reverence, then handed the felt-covered aluminum flask back to Skorzeny. “I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want to know where you found it. If you tell me, I’ll desert and go there myself. Wherever it is, it’s a nicer place than this.”

  “Which isn’t saying one hell of a lot, when you get down to it,” Skorzeny said. “Now, where’s that stew?” When he’d filled the metal bowl from his own mess kit, he gulped the stuff down, then sent a shot of cognac after it. “Shame to chase anything so vile, but the hooch doesn’t do me any good if I don’t drink it, eh?” He gave Jäger a shot in the ribs with his elbow.