“Superior sir,” Liu Han began, bowing to Ttomalss as if he were her village headman back in the days (was it really less than a year before?) when she’d had a headman . . . or a village, “we use these things to put on a show to entertain people here in this camp and earn money and food for ourselves.”
Ttomalss hissed to translate that to his companion, who might not have known any human language. The other scaly devil hissed back. Ttomalss turned his words into Chinese: “Why do you need these things? We give you this house, we give you enough to get food you need. Why do you want more? Do you not have enough?”
Liu Han thought about that. It was a question that went straight to the heart of the Tao, the way a person should live. Having too much—or caring in excess about having too much—was reckoned bad (though she’d noticed that few people who had a lot were inclined to give up any of it). Cautiously, she answered, “Superior sir, we seek to save what we can so we will not be at want if hunger comes to this camp. And we want money for the same reason, and to make our lives more comfortable. Can this be wrong?”
The scaly devil did not reply directly. Instead, he said, “What sort of show is this? It had better not be one that endangers the hatchling growing inside you.”
“It does not, superior sir,” she assured him. She would have been happier for his concern had it meant he cared for her and the baby as persons. She knew it didn’t. The only value she, the baby, and Bobby Fiore had to the little devils was as parts of their experiment.
That worried her, too. What would they do when she’d had the child? Snatch it away from her as they’d snatched her away from her village? Force her to find out how fast she could get pregnant again? The unpleasant possibilities were countless.
“What do you do, then?” Ttomalss demanded suspiciously.
“Mostly I speak for Bobby Fiore, who does not speak Chinese well,” she said. “I tell the audience how he will hit and catch and throw the ball. This is an art he brings with him from his own country, and not one with which we Chinese are familiar. Things that are new and strange entertain us, help us pass the time.”
“This is foolishness,” the little devil said. “The old, the familiar, should be what entertains. The new and strange—how could they be interesting? You will not be—what is the word?—familiar with them. Is this not frightening to you?”
He was even more conservative than a Chinese, Liu Han realized. That rocked her. The little scaly devils had torn up her life, to say nothing of turning China and the whole world on their ear. Moreover, the little devils had their vast array of astonishing machines, everything from the cameras that took pictures in three dimensions to the dragonfly planes that could hover in the sky. She’d thought of them as flighty gadgeteers, as if they were Americans or other foreign devils with scales and body paint.
But it wasn’t so. Bobby Fiore had almost burst with excitement at the idea of bringing something new into the prison camp and making a profit from it. She’d liked the notion, too. To the scaly devil, it seemed as alien and menacing as the devil did to her.
Her wool-gathering irritated Ttomalss. “Answer me,” he snapped.
“I’m sorry, superior sir,” she said quickly. She didn’t want to get the little devils annoyed at her. They might cast her and Bobby Fiore out of this home, they might take her back to the plane that never came down and turn her into a whore again, they might take her baby away as soon as it was born . . . or they might do any number of appalling things she couldn’t imagine now. She went on, “I was just thinking that human beings like new things.”
“I know that.” Ttomalss did not approve of it; his blunt little stump of a tail switched back and forth, like an angry cat’s. “It is the great curse of you Big Uglies.” The last two words were in his own language. Liu Han had heard the little scaly devils use them often enough to know what they meant. Ttomalss resumed, “Were it not for the mad curiosity of your kind, the Race would have brought your world under our sway long ago.”
“I am sorry, but I do not follow you, superior sir,” Liu Han said. “What does this have to do with preferring new entertainments to old? When we see the same old thing over and over, we grow bored.” How getting bored at old shows was tied to the devils’ not conquering the world was beyond her.
“The Race also has this thing you call growing bored,” Ttomalss admitted, “but with us it comes on more slowly, and over a long, long time. We are more content with what we already have than is true of your kind. So are the other two races we know. You Big Uglies break the pattern.”
Liu Han did not worry about breaking patterns. She did wonder if she’d understood the scaly devil aright. Were there other kinds of weird creatures besides his own? She found it hard to believe, but she wouldn’t have believed in the scaly devils a year earlier.
Ttomalss stepped forward, squeezed at her left breast with his clawed fingers. “Hey!” Bobby Fiore said, and started to get to his feet. The scaly devil with a gun turned it his way.
“It’s all right,” Liu Han said quickly. “He’s not hurting me.” That was true. His touch was gentle; although his claws penetrated her cotton tunic and pricked against her skin, they did not break it.
“You will give the hatchling liquid from your body out of these for it to eat?” Ttomalss asked, his Chinese becoming awkward as he spoke of matters and bodily functions unfamiliar to his kind.
“Milk, yes,” Liu Han said, giving him the word he lacked.
“Milk.” The scaly devil repeated the word to fix it in his memory, just as Liu Han did when she picked up something in English. Ttomalss continued, “When you mate, this male”—he pointed at Bobby Fiore—“chews there, too. Does he get milk as well?”
“No, no.” Liu Han had all she could do not to laugh.
“Then why do this?” Ttomalss demanded. “What is its—function, is that the proper word?”
“That is the proper word, yes, superior sir.” Liu Han sighed. The little devils talked so openly about mating that her own sense of shame and reticence had eroded. “But he does not draw milk from them. He does it to give me pleasure and to arouse himself.”
Ttomalss gave a one-word verdict: “Disgusting.” He spoke in his own language to the other little devil with fancy paint. That one and the guard both swung their eyes from Liu Han to Bobby Fiore and back again.
“What’s going on?” Fiore demanded. “Honey, they asking filthy questions again?” Though he liked publicly showing affection in a way in which no Chinese would have felt easy, he was and had stayed far more reticent than Liu Han in speaking of intimate matters.
“Yes,” she answered resignedly.
The scaly devil with fancy paint who didn’t speak Chinese sent several excited sentences at Ttomalss, who turned to Liu Han. “You use the kee-kreek? This is our speech, not yours.”
“I am sorry, superior sir, but I do not know what the kee-kreek is,” Liu Han said.
“The—” Ttomalss made the little devils’ interrogative cough. “Do you understand now?”
“Yes, superior sir,” Liu Han said. “Now I understand. Bobby Fiore is a foreign devil from a country far away. His words and my words are not the same. When we were up in the plane that never came down—”
“The what?” Ttomalss interrupted. When Liu Han explained, the little devil said, “Oh, you mean the ship.”
Liu Han still wondered how it could be a ship if it never touched water, but the little devil seemed insistent about the point, so she said, “When we were up in the ship, then, superior sir, we had to learn each other’s words. Since we both knew some of yours, we used those, too, and we still do.”
Ttomalss translated for the other little scaly devil, who spoke volubly in reply. “Starraf”—Ttomalss finally named the other devil—“says you could do without all this moving back and forth between languages if you spoke only one, as we do. When your world is all ours, all you Big Uglies who survive will use our language, just as the Rabotevs and Halessi, the other r
aces in the Empire, do now.”
Liu Han could see that having everyone speak the same language would be simpler: even other dialects of Chinese were beyond her easy comprehension. But the unspoken assumptions in the scaly devil’s words chilled her. Ttomalss seemed very sure his kind would conquer the world, and also that they would be able to do as they pleased with its people (or as many of them as were left when the conquest was complete).
Starraf spoke again, and Ttomalss translated: “You have shown, and we have seen at other places, that you Big Uglies are not too stupid to learn the tongue of the Race. Maybe we should begin to teach it in this camp and others, so that you can begin to be joined to the Empire.”
“Now what?” Bobby Fiore asked.
“They want to teach everyone how to talk the way we do,” Liu Han answered. She’d known the scaly devils were overwhelmingly powerful from the moment they first descended on her village. Somehow, though, she’d never thought much about what they were doing to the rest of the world. She was only a villager, after all, and didn’t worry about the wider world unless some part of it impinged on her life. All at once, she realized the little devils didn’t just want to conquer mankind; they aimed to make people as much like themselves as they could.
She hated that even more than she hated anything else about the little scaly devils, but she hadn’t the slightest idea how to stop it.
Mordechai Anielewicz stood at attention in Zolraag’s office as the Lizard governor of Poland chewed him out. “The situation in Warsaw grows more unsatisfactory with each passing day,” Zolraag said in pretty good German. “The cooperation between you Jews and the Race which formerly existed seems to have disappeared.”
Anielewicz scowled; after what the Nazis had done to the Warsaw ghetto, hearing the word “Jews” in German was plenty to set his teeth on edge all by itself. And Zolraag used it with arrogance of a sort not far removed from that of the Germans. The only difference Anielewicz could see was that the Lizards thought of all humans, not just Jews, as Untermenschen.
“Whose fault is that?” he demanded, not wanting Zolraag to know he was concerned. “We welcomed you as liberators; we shed our blood to help you take this city, if you’remember, superior sir. And what thanks do we get? To be treated almost as badly under your thumb as we were under the Nazis.”
“That is not true,” Zolraag said. “We have given you enough guns to make your fighters the equal of the Armija Krajowa, the Polish Home Army. Where you were below them, we set you above. How do you say we treat you badly?”
“I say it because you care nothing for our freedom,” the Jewish fighting leader answered. “You use us for your own purposes and to help make slaves of other people. We have been slaves ourselves. We didn’t like it. We don’t see any reason to think other people like it, either.”
“The Race will rule this world and all its people,” Zolraag said, as confidently as if he’d remarked, The sun will come up tomorrow. “Those who work with us will have higher place than those who do not.”
Before the war, Anielewicz had been a largely secularized Jew. He’d gone to a Polish Gymnasium and university, and studied Latin. He knew what the Latin equivalent of work together was, too: collaborate. He also knew what he’d thought of the Estonian, Latvian, and Ukrainian jackals who helped the German wolves patrol the Warsaw ghetto—and what he’d thought of the Jewish police who betrayed their own people for a crust of bread.
“Superior sir,” he said earnestly, “with the guns we have from you, we can protect ourselves from the Poles, and that is very good. But most of us would rather die than help you in the way you mean.”
“This I have seen, and this I do not understand,” Zolraag said. “Why would you forgo such advantage?”
“Because of what we would have to do to get it,” Anielewicz answered. “Poor Moishe Russie wouldn’t speak your lies, so you had to play tricks with his words to make them come out the way you wanted them. No wonder he disappeared after that, and no wonder he made you out to be liars the first chance he got.”
Zolraag’s eye turrets swung toward him. That slow, deliberate motion held as much menace as if they’d contained 38-centimeter battleship guns rather than organs of vision. “We are still seeking to learn more of these events ourselves,” he said. “Herr Russie was an associate, even a friend, of yours. We wonder how and if you helped him.”
“You questioned me under your truth drug,” Anielewicz reminded him.
“We have not learned as much with it as we hoped from early tests,” Zolraag said. “Some early experimental subjects may have deceived us as to their reactions. You Tosevites have a gift for being difficult in unusual ways.”
“Thank you,” Anielewicz said, grinning.
“I did not mean it as a compliment,” Zolraag snapped.
Anielewicz knew that. Since he’d been up to his eyebrows in getting Russie away and in making the recording in which Russie blasted the Lizards, he was less than delighted to learn the Lizards had found their drug was worthless.
Zolraag resumed, “I did not summon you here, Herr Anielewicz, to listen to your Tosevite foolishness. I summoned you here to warn you that the uncooperative attitude of you Jews must stop. If it does not, we will disarm you and put you back in the place where you were when we came to Tosev 3.”
Anielewicz gave the Lizard a long, slow, measuring stare. “It comes to that, does it?” he said at last.
“It does.”
“You will not disarm us without a fight,” Anielewicz said flatly.
“We beat the Germans. Do you think we cannot beat you?”
“I am sure you can,” Anielewicz said. “Superior sir, we will fight anyhow. Now that we have guns, we will not give them up. You will beat us, but one way or another we will manage to hurt you. You will probably set off the Poles, too. If you take our guns away, they’ll fear you’ll take theirs, too.”
Zolraag didn’t answer right away. Anielewicz hoped he’d managed to distress the Lizard. The Race was good at war, or at least had machines of almost invincible power. When it came to diplomacy, though, they were as children; they had no feel for the likely effects of their actions.
The Lizard governor said, “You do not seem to understand, Herr Anielewicz. We can hold your people hostage to make sure you turn in your rifles and other weapons.”
“Superior sir, you are the one who does not understand,” Anielewicz answered. “Whatever you want to do to us, we went through worse before you came. We will fight to keep that from happening again. Will you start up Auschwitz and Treblinka and Chelmno and the rest again?”
“Do not make disgusting suggestions.” The German death camps had revolted all the Lizards, Zolraag included. They’d gotten good propaganda mileage out of them. There, Russie and Anielewicz and other Jews had felt no compunctions about helping the Lizards tell the world the story.
“Well, then, in that case we have nothing to lose by fighting,” Anielewicz said. “We were getting ready to fight the Nazis even though we had next to nothing. Now we have guns. If you are going to treat us the way the Nazis did, do you think we’d not fight you? What would we have to lose?”’
“Your lives,” Zolraag said.
Anielewicz spat on the floor of the governor’s office. He didn’t know whether Zolraag knew how much scorn the gesture showed, but he hoped so. He said, “What good are our lives if you push us back into the ghetto and starve us once more? No one will do that to us again, superior sir, no one. Do what you like with me. The next Jew you pick as puppet leader will tell you the same—or his own people will deal with him.”
“You are serious in this matter,” Zolraag said in tones of wonder.
“Of course I am,” Anielewicz answered. “Have you talked with General Bor-Komorowski about taking guns away from the Home Army?”
“He did not seem pleased with the idea, but he did not reject it in the way you have,” Zolraag said.
“He’s politer than I am,” Anielewicz said, add
ing the alter kacker to himself. Aloud, he went on, “That doesn’t mean you’ll get any real cooperation from him.”
“We get no real cooperation from any Tosevites,” Zolraag said mournfully. “We thought you Jews were an exception, but I see it is not so.”
“We owed you a lot for throwing out the Nazis and saving us from the death camps,” Anielewicz said. “If you’d treated us as free people who deserved respect, we would have worked with you. But you just want to be another set of masters and treat everyone on Earth the way the Nazis treated us.”
“We would not kill the way the Germans did,” Zolraag protested.
“No, but you would enslave. When you were through, not a human being on this world would be free.”
“I do not see that this matters,” Zolraag said.
“I know you don’t,” Anielewicz said—sadly, for Zolraag was, given the limits of his position, a decent enough being. Some of the Germans had been that way, too; not all by any means enjoyed exterminating Jews for the sake of extermination. But enjoy it or not, they’d done it, as Zolraag resented freedom now.
That ate at Anielewicz’s. Nineteen hundred years before, Tacitus had remarked with pride that good men—the one in particular he had in mind was his father-in-law—could serve a bad Roman emperor. But when a bad ruler required good men to do monstrous things, how could they obey and remain good? He’d asked himself the question more times than he could count, but never yet found an answer.
Zolraag said, “You claim we cannot make you obey by force. I do not believe this, but you say it. Let us think . . . does this language have a word for thinking of something so as to examine it?”
“ ‘Assume’ is the word you want,” Anielewicz said.
“Assume. Thank you. Let us assume, then, that what you say is true. How in this case are we to rule you Jews and have you obey our requirements?”
“I wish you would have asked that before events drove a wedge between you and us,” Anielewicz answered. “The best way, I think, is not to force us to do anything that would damage the rest of mankind.”
Turtledove: World War Page 89