He tossed the ball into the air once or twice, as if to get the feel of it in his hand, and then, as he’d said, threw it right at Bobby Fiore’s head. Whack! The noise it made striking that peculiar leather glove was like a gunshot. It startled Liu Han, and startled the people in the crowd even more. A couple of them let out frightened squawks. Bobby Fiore rolled the ball back to Liu Han.
She stooped to pick it up. Before long, that wouldn’t be easy, not with her belly growing. “Who’s next?” she asked.
“Whoever it is, he can wager with me that he misses, too,” said the fellow who liked to make side bets. “I’ll pay five to one if he hits.” If he couldn’t beat Bobby Fiore, he was convinced nobody could.
The next gambler paid Liu Han and let fly. Wham! That wasn’t ball hitting glove, that was ball banging against the side of the shack-the man had thrown too wildly for Bobby Fiore to catch his offering. Fiore picked up the ball and tossed it gently back to him. “You try again,” he said; he’d practiced the phrase with Liu Han.
Before the fellow could take another throw at him, the old woman who lived in the shack came out and screamed at Liu Han: “What are you doing? Are you trying to frighten me out of my wits? Stop hitting my poor house with a club. I thought a bomb landed on it.”
“No bomb, grandmother,” Liu Han said politely. “We are only playing a gambling game.” The old woman kept on screaming until Liu Han gave her three trade dollars. Then she disappeared back into her shack, obviously not caring what happened to it after that.
The fellow who hadn’t thrown straight took another shot at Bobby Fiore. This time he was on target, but Fiore caught the ball. The man squalled curses like a scalded cat.
If the old woman had thought that first ball was like a bomb landing, she must have figured the Lizards had singled out her house for bombardment practice by the time the next hour had passed. One of the things Liu Han discovered about her countrymen during that time was that they didn’t throw very well. A couple of them missed the shack altogether. That sent boys chasing wildly after the runaway ball, and meant Liu Han had to pay small bribes to get it back.
When no one else felt like trying to hit the quick-handed foreign devil, Liu Han said, “Who has a bottle or clay pot he doesn’t mind losing?”
A tall man took a last swig from a bottle of plum brandy, then handed it to her. “Now I do,” he said thickly, breathing plummy fumes into her face.
She gave the bottle to Bobby Fiore, who set it on an upside-down bucket in front of the wall. He walked back farther than the spot from which the Chinese had taken aim at him.
“The foreign devil will show you how to throw properly,” Liu Han said. This last stunt made her nervous. The bottle looked very small. Bobby Fiore could easily miss, and if he did he’d lose face.
His features were set and tight-he knew he could miss, too. His arm went back, then snapped forward in a motion longer and smoother than the Chinese had used. The ball flew, almost invisibly fast. The bottle shattered. Green glass flew every which way. Chatter from the crowd rose to an impressed peak. Several people clapped their hands. Bobby Fiore bowed, as if he were Chinese himself.
“That’s all for today,” Liu Han said. “We will present our show again in a day or two. I hope you enjoyed it.”
She picked up all the food the show had earned them. Bobby Fiore carried the money. He also hung onto ball and bat and glove. That made him different from all the Chinese men Liu Han had known: they would have added to her burden without a second thought. She’d already seen up in the plane that never came down that he had the strange ways ascribed to foreign devils. Some of them, such as his taste in food, annoyed her; this one she found endearing.
“Show good?” he asked, tacking on the Lizards’ interrogative cough.
“The show was very good.” Liu Han used the emphatic cough to underline that, adding, “You were very good too there, especially at the end-you took a chance with the bottle, but it worked, so all the better.”
Of necessity, she spoke mostly in Chinese, which meant she had to repeat herself several times and go back to use simpler words. When Fiore understood, he grinned and slipped an arm around her thickening waist. She dropped an onion so she could break away to pick it up. Showing affection in public was one foreign devil way she wished he would forget in a hurry. It not only embarrassed her, but lowered her status in the eyes of everyone who saw her.
As they approached the hut they shared, she stopped fretting over such relatively trivial concerns. Several little scaly devils stood outside, two with fancy body paint and the rest with guns. Their unnerving turreted eyes swung toward Liu Han and Bobby Fiore.
One of the little devils with fancy paint spoke in hissing but decent Chinese: “You are the human beings who live in this house, the human beings brought down from the ship 29th Emperor Fessoj?” The last three words were in his own language.
“Yes, superior sir,” Liu Han said; by his perplexed look, Bobby Fiore hadn’t understood the question. Even though the scaly devil used words that were individually intelligible, she had trouble following him, too. Imagine calling the airplane that never came down a ship!
“Which of you is carrying the growing thing that will become a human being in her belly?” the devil with the fancy paint asked.
“I am, superior sir.” Not for the first time, Liu Han felt a flash of contempt for the little scaly devils. They not only couldn’t tell people apart, they couldn’t even tell the sexes apart. And Bobby Fiore, with his tall nose and round eyes, was unique in this camp, yet the little devils didn’t recognize him as a foreign devil.
One of the gun-carrying little devils pointed at Liu Han and hissed something to a companion. The other devil’s mouth fell open in a devilish laugh. They found people preposterous, too.
The little devil who spoke Chinese said, “Go in this little house, the two of you. We have things to say to you, things to ask of you.”
Liu Han and Bobby Fiore went into the hut. So did the two little devils with elaborate paint on their scaly hides, and so did one of the more drably marked guards. The two higher-ranking little devils skittered past Liu Han so they could sit on the hearth that also supported the hut’s bedding. They sank down on the warm clay with rapturous sighs-Liu Han had seen they didn’t like cold weather. The guard, who liked it no better, had to stand where he could keep his eyes on the obviously vicious and dangerous humans.
“I am Ttomalss,” the scaly devil who spoke Chinese said-a stutter at the front of his name and a hiss at the end. “First I ask you what you were doing with these strange things.” He turned his eye turrets toward the ball and bat and glove Bobby Fiore held, and pointed at them as well.
“Do you speak English?” Fiore asked in that language when Liu Han had put the question into their peculiar jargon. When neither little scaly devil answered, he muttered, “Shit,” and turned back to her, saying, “You better answer. They won’t follow me any more than I follow them.”
“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 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 d
idn’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.”
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