In the Balance & Tilting the Balance

by Harry Turtledove

  “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 races 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?”<
br />
  “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, adding 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.”

  “Even the Germans?” Zolraag asked.

  The Jewish fighting leader’s lips curled in what was not a smile. Zolraag knew his business, sure enough. What the Nazis had done to the Jews in Poland—all over Europe—cried out for vengeance. But if the Jews collaborated with the Lizards against the Germans, how could they say no to collaborating with them against other peoples as well? That dilemma had sent Moishe Russie first into hiding and then into flight.

  “Don’t use us as your propaganda front.” Anielewicz knew he wasn’t answering directly, but he could not force himself to say yes or no. “Whether you win your war or lose it, you make the rest of the world hate us by doing that.”

  “Why should we care?” Zolraag asked.

  The trouble was, he sounded curious, not vindictive. Sighing, Anielewicz replied, “Because that would give you your best chance of ruling here quietly. If you make other people hate us, you’ll also make us hate you.”

  “We gave you privileges early on, because you did help us against the Germans,” Zolraag said. “By our way of thinking, you abused them. Issuing threats will not make us want to give you more. You may go, Herr Anielewicz.”

  “As you say, superior sir,” Anielewicz answered woodenly. Trouble coming, he thought as he left the Lizard governor’s office. He’d managed to get Zolraag to hold off on trying to disarm the Jews, or at least he thought he had, but that wasn’t concession enough.

  He sighed. He’d found a hiding place for Russie. Now he was liable to need one himself.

  VII

  “I wish we were in Denver,” Barbara said.

  “Well, so do I,” Sam Yeager answered as he helped her out of the wagon. “The weather can’t be helped, though.” Late-season snowstorms had held them up as they made their way into Colorado. “Fort Collins is a pretty enough little place.”

  Lincoln Park, in which several Met Lab wagons were drawn up, was a study in contrasts. In the center of the square stood a log cabin, the first building that had gone up on the Poudre River. The big gray sandstone mass of the Carnegie Public Library showed how far the area had come in just over eighty years.

  But Barbara said, “That’s not what I mean.” She took his arm and steered him away from the wagon. He looked back toward Ulhass and Ristin, decided the Lizard POWs weren’t going anywhere, and let her guide him.

  She led him over to a tree stump out of earshot of anybody else. “What’s up?” he asked, checking the Lizards again. They hadn’t poked their heads out of the wagon; they were staying down in the straw where it was warmer. He was as sure as sure could be that they wouldn’t pick this moment to make a break, but ingrained duty made him keep an eye on them anyhow.

  Then Barbara asked him something that sounded as if it came out of the blue: “Remember our wedding night?”

  “Huh? I’m not likely to forget it.” As Sam remembered, a broad smile spread over his face.

  Barbara didn’t smile back. “Remember what we didn’t do on our wedding night?” she persisted.

  “There wasn’t a whole lot we didn’t do on our wedding night. We—” Yeager stopped when he took a close look at Barbara’s half-worried, half-smiling expression. A light went on inside his head. Slowly, he said, “We didn’t use a rubber.”

  “That’s right,” she said. “I thought it would be safe enough, and even if it wasn’t—” Her smile grew broader, but still had a twist in it. “My time of the month should have started a week ago. It didn’t, and I’ve always been very steady. So I think I’m expecting a baby, Sam.”

  Had it been a normal marriage in a normal time, he would have shouted, That’s wonderful! The time was anything but normal, the marriage very new. Yeager knew Barbara hadn’t wanted to get pregnant. He set down his rifle, took her in his arms. They clung to each other for a couple of minutes. “It’ll work out,” he said at last. “One way or another, we’ll take care of it, and it’ll be okay.”

  “I’m scared,” she said. “Not many doctors, or equipment, and us in the middle of the war—”

  “Denver’s supposed to be better off than most places,” he said. “It’ll be all right, honey.” Please, God, make it all right, he thought, something that would have been closer to a real prayer if God had given any signs lately of listening. After another few seconds, he went on, “I hope it’s a girl.”

  “You do? Why?”

  “Because she’d probably look just like you.”

  Her eyes widened. She stood up on tiptoe to give him a quick kiss. “You’re sweet, Sam. It wa
sn’t what I expected, but—” She kicked at the dirty snow and at the mud that showed through it. “What can you do?”

  For a career minor leaguer, What can you do? was an article of faith that ranked right alongside the commandments Moses had brought down from the mountain. Actually, Yeager knew there was something you could do if you wanted to. But finding an abortionist wouldn’t be easy, and the procedure was liable to be more dangerous than having the baby. If Barbara brought it up, he’d think about it then. Otherwise, he’d keep his mouth shut.

  She said, “We’ll just do the best we can, that’s all. Right?”

  “Sure, honey,” Sam said. “Like I said, we’ll manage. The idea kind of grows on me, you know what I mean?”

  “Yes, I do.” Barbara nodded. “I didn’t want this to happen, but now that it has … I’m scared, as I said, but I’m excited, too. Something of ours, to go on after we’re gone—that’s something special, and something wonderful.” “Yeah.” Yeager saw himself tying a little girl’s shoes, or maybe playing catch with a boy and teaching him to hit well enough to get all the way to the top in pro ball. What the father might have done, the son would. He would, anyhow, if the Lizards were beaten and there ever was pro ball again. Sam should have been in spring training, getting ready for yet another season on the road, hoping to move up as better players got drafted, still with a ghostly chance at a big-league slot and glory. As it was …

  Someone shouted, “Back to the wagons, everybody. They’re going to billet us at the college on the south edge of town.”

  Yeager hadn’t thought Fort Collins big enough to boast a college. “You never can tell,” he muttered, which would have been a good handle for the whole past year. Hand in hand, he and Barbara walked back toward Ullhass and Ristin. “Careful getting up there,” he warned as she scrambled in.

  She made a face at him. “For God’s sake, Sam, I’m not made out of cut glass. If you start treating me as if I were going to fall to pieces any minute now, we’ll have trouble.”

  “Sorry,” he said. “I’ve never had to worry about anybody expecting before.”