Tilting the Balance w-2

by Harry Turtledove

  “Yes, superior sir.” Being bold came anything but easy for Liu Han, however useful she found it. She always breathed a silent sigh of relief when she returned to the submissive behavior that had been drilled into her since childhood.

  The scaly devil said, “You will be closely watched. If you have any sense, you will act in a way that shows you’remember this.” He stalked out of Liu Han’s dwelling. Had he been a man, he would have, slammed the door behind him. Since he was a scaly devil, he left it open. Liu Han had learned that meant he thought anyone on the street was welcome to come in.

  She poured herself a cup of tea from the battered brass pot that simmered above a charcoal brazier. Sipping it helped relax her-but not enough. She walked over and closed the door, but that didn’t make her feel any more secure. She was as much the little devils captive here as she had been in the metal cell on the airplane that never came down.

  She wanted to scream and curse and tell Ttomalss exactly what she thought of him, but made herself hold back Screaming and cursing would make her a scandal among her neighbors, and being the little scaly devils’ creature made her scandal enough already. Besides, they might be taking talking cinema pictures of her as they had to her shame up in that metal cell if she cursed them, they could find out about it.

  The baby moved inside her not a kick this time but a slow oceanic roll followed by a quick flutter Again her arms went protectively round her belly If she kept on obeying the little devils, what would the baby’s fate be?

  And if she didn’t obey them, what would its fate be then? She didn’t think the Communists would disappear even if the scaly devils conquered all of China (all of the world, she added to herself something that never would have occurred to her before she spent time with Bobby Fiore). They’d kept right on fighting the Japanese; they would count on the people to hide them from the little devils. And they were very good at revenge.

  In the end, fear wasn’t what made her go out of her house and walk slowly toward the prison camp marketplace. Fury was: fury with the little scaly devils for turning her life upside down, for treating her like a beast rather than a human being, or showing her, without the slightest worry over what she night feel to see him dead, the picture of the man she’d come to love-all they wanted from her was to confirm the body did belong to Bobby Fiore.

  “Bean sprouts!” “Candles!” “Fine tea here!” “Carved jade!” “Peas in their pods!” “Sandals and straw hats!” “You can’t eat my tasty ducks!” “Fine silk parasols-keep your pretty skin white!” “Pork sits sweet in your belly!”

  The hubbub of the market square surrounded Liu Han. Along with vendors shouting the virtues of their wares, customers shouted scorn in the age-old struggle to get a better price. The din was dreadful. Liu Han could hardly hear herself think.

  Ttomalss had warned her she would be closely watched. She believed that; the little scaly devils didn’t understand people well enough to lie convincingly. But just because they watched her and listened to her, could they understand anything she said in this racket? She couldn’t understand people who were yelling right beside her, and the little devils had trouble following even the most plain-spoken Chinese. She could probably say most of what she wanted without their being any the wiser. She went slowly through the market, stopping now here, now there to haggle and gossip. Even had she been foolish enough to go straight to her contact in the marketplace, the Communists would have trained her to know better. As things were, she spent a lot of time loudly complaining about the little devils to a cadaverous-looking man who sold herbal medicines-and who worked for the Kuomintang. If the scaly devils landed on him, they’d be doing the Communists a favor.

  Eventually, in the course of her wanderings, she reached the poultry dealer who had his stand next to the big-bellied pork merchant with the open vest. As she looked over the cut-up chunks of duck and chicken, she remarked, as if it were something that mattered little to her, “The little devils showed me a picture of Bobby Fiore today. They do not say so, but they put an end to him.”

  “I am sorry to hear this, but we know the ghost Life-Is-Transcendent has been seeking him.” The poultry seller also spoke obliquely; that prancing ghost was a precursor of the god of death.

  “He was in a city,” Liu Han said.

  “May he have aided the rise of the proletarian movement,” the poultry seller answered. He paused, then asked very quietly, “Was the city Shanghai?”

  “What if it was?” Liu Han was indifferent. To her, one city was just like another. She’d never lived in a place that had more people than this prison.

  “If it was,” the fellow went on, “a heavy blow against oppression and for the liberty of the oppressed peasants and workers of the world was struck there not long ago. In his passing, the foreign devil may well have shown himself to be a hero of the Chinese people.”

  Liu Han nodded. Since the scaly devils had the photo of Bobby Fiore dead, she’d figured they were likely the ones who had shot him-and the likeliest reason they had for shooting him was his being part of a Red raiding team. He wouldn’t have thought of himself as a hero of the Chinese people: she was sure of that. Though living with her had rubbed some of the rough edges off him, at heart he remained a foreign devil.

  She didn’t much care that he had died a hero, either. She would rather have had him back at her hut, foreign and difficult but alive. She would rather have had many things that hadn’t happened.

  The poultry seller said, “What other interesting gossip have you heard?” The kind of gossip he found interesting had to do with the little scaly devils.

  “What do you want for these chicken backs here?” she asked, not responding right away. He named a price. She shrieked at him. He yelled back. She attacked his gouging with a fury that astonished her. Then, after a moment, she realized she’d found a safe way to vent her sorrow for Bobby Fiore.

  For whatever reasons he had, the poultry seller got caught up in the squabble, too. “I tell you, foolish woman, you are too stingy to deserve to live,” he shouted, waving his arms.

  “And I tell you, the little scaly devils are on especial watch for your kind, so you had better take care!” Liu Han waved her arms, too. At the same time, she watched the poultry seller’s face to make sure he understood your kind to mean Communists, not thieving merchants He, nodded. He followed that perfectly well. She wondered how long he’d been a conspirator, looking for double meanings everywhere and finding them, too.

  She hadn’t been a conspirator long, but she’d managed to put a double meaning across. Even if the little devils were listening to and understanding every word she said, they wouldn’t have grasped the second message she’d given the poultry seller. She was learning the ways of conspiracy herself.

  XIX

  London was packed with soldiers and RAF men sailors and government workers. Everyone looked worn and hungry and shabby. The Germans and then the Lizards had given the city a fearful pounding from the air. Bombs and fires had cut broad swaths of devastation through it. The phrase on everyone s lips was, “It’s not the place it used to be.”

  All the same it struck Moishe Russie as a close approximation to the earthly paradise. No one turned to scowl at him as he hurried west down Oxford Street toward Number 200. In Warsaw and Lodz, gentiles had made him feel he still wore the yellow Star of David on his chest even after the Lizards drove away the Nazis. The Lizards weren’t hunting him here, either. There were no Lizards here. He didn’t miss them.

  And what the English reckoned privation looked like abundance to him. People ate mostly bread and potatoes, turnips and beets, and everything was, rationed, but nobody starved. Nobody was close to starving. His son Reuven even got a weekly ration of milk: not a lot but, from what he remembered of his nutrition textbooks, enough.

  They’d apologized for the modest Soho flat in which they’d set up his family, but it would have made three of the ones he’d had in Lodz He hadn’t seen so much furniture in years: they weren�
�t burning it for fuel here. He even had hot water from a tap whenever he wanted it.

  A guard in a tin hat in front of the BBC Overseas Services building nodded as he showed his pass and went in. Waiting inside, sipping a cup of ersatz tea quite as dreadful as anything available in Poland stood Nathan Jacobi. “Good to see you, Mr. Russie,” he said in English, and then fell back into Yiddish: “And now, shall we go and give the Lizards’ little stumpy tails a good yank?”

  “That would be a pleasure,” Moishe said sincerely. He pulled his script from a coat pocket. “This is the latest draft, with all the censors’ notes included. I’m ready to record it for broadcast.”

  “Jolly good,” Jacobi said, again in English. Like David Goldfarb, he flipped back and forth between languages at will, sometimes hardly seeming to realize he was doing so. Unlike Goldfarb’s, his Yiddish was not only fluent but elegant and unaccented; he spoke like an educated Warsaw Jew. Russie wondered if his English was as polished.

  Jacobi led the way to a recording studio. But for a couple of glass squares so the engineers could watch the proceedings, the walls were covered with sound-deadening tiles, each punched with its own square grid of holes. On the table sat a microphone with a BBC plaque screwed onto its side. A bare electric bulb threw harsh light down onto the table and the chairs in front of it.

  The arrangements were as up-to-date as human technology could produce. Moishe wished they impressed him more than they did. They were certainly finer than anything the Polish wireless services had had in 1939. But that was not the standard by which Russie judged them. In the first months after the Lizards took Warsaw, he’d broadcast anti-Nazi statements for them. Compared to their equipment, the BBC gear looked angular, bulky, and not very efficient, rather like an early wind-up gramophone with trumpet speaker set alongside a modem phonograph.

  He sighed as he sat down on one of the hard-backed wooden chairs and set his script in front of him. The censors’ stamps-a triangular one that said PASSED FOR SECURITY and a rectangle that read PASSED FOR CONTENT-obscured a couple of words. He bent down to peer at them and make sure he could read them without hesitation; even though the talk was being recorded for later broadcast, he wanted to be as smooth as he could.

  He glanced over to the engineer in the next room. When the man suddenly shot out a finger toward him, he began to talk: “Good day, people of Earth. This is Moishe Russie speaking to you from London in free England. That I am here shows the Lizards lie when they say they are invincible and their victory inevitable. They are very strong; no one could deny that. But they are not supermen”-he’d had to borrow Ubermenschen from the German to put that across-“and they can be beaten.

  “I do not intend to say anything about how I came from Poland to London, for fear of closing that way for others who may come after me. But I will say that I was rescued from a Lizard prison in Lodz, that Englishmen and local Jews took part in the rescue, and they defeated both the Lizards and their human henchmen.

  “Too many men, women, and children live in parts of the world under Lizard occupation. I understand that, if you are to survive, you must to some degree go on about your daily work. But I urge you from the bottom of my heart to cooperate with the enemy as little as you can and to sabotage his efforts wherever you can. Those who serve as their prison guards and police, those who seek work in their factories to make munitions that will be used against their fellow human beings-they are traitors to mankind. When victory comes, collaborators will be remembered… and punished. If you see the chance, move against them now.”

  He had his talk nicely timed-he’d practiced it with Rivka back in the flat. He was just reaching his summing-up when the engineer held, up one finger to show he had a minute left, and came to the end as the fellow drew his index finger across his throat. The engineer grinned and gave him a two-finger V for victory.

  Then it was Nathan Jacobi’s turn. He read an English translation (similarly stamped with censors’ marks) of what Russie had just said in Yiddish, the better to reach as large an audience as possible. His timing was as impeccable as Moishe’s had been. This time the engineer signaled his approval with an upraised thumb.

  “I think that went very well,” Jacobi said. “With any luck at all, it should leave the Lizards quite nicely browned off.”

  “I hope so,” Moishe said. He got up and stretched. Wireless broadcasting was not physically demanding, but it left him worn all the same. Getting out of the studio always came as a relief.

  Jacobi held the door open for him. They went out together. Waiting in the hallway stood a tall, thin, tweedy Englishman with a long, craggy face and dark hair combed high in a pompadour. He nodded to Jacobi. They spoke together in English. Jacobi turned to Moishe and switched to Yiddish: “I’d like to introduce you to Eric Blair. He’s talks producer of the Indian Section, and he goes in after us.”

  Russie stuck out his hand and said, “Tell him I’m pleased to meet him.”

  Blair shook hands with him, then spoke in English again. Jacobi translated: “He says he’s even more pleased to meet you: you’ve escaped from two different sets of tyrants, and honestly described the evils of both.” He added, “Blair is a very fine fellow, hates tyrants of all stripes. He fought against the fascists in Spain-almost got killed there-but he couldn’t stomach what the Communists were doing on the Republican side. An honest man.”

  “We need more honest men,” Moishe said.

  Jacobi translated that for Blair. The Englishman smiled, but suffered a coughing fit before he could answer. Moishe had heard those wet coughs in Warsaw more times than he cared to remember. Tuberculosis, the medical student in him said. Blair mastered the coughs, then spoke apologetically to Jacobi.

  “He says he’s glad he did that out here rather than in the studio while he was recording,” Jacobi said. Moishe nodded; he understood and admired the workmanlike, professional attitude. You worked as hard as you could for as long as you could, and if, you fell in the traces you had to hope someone else would carry on.

  Blair pulled his script from a waistcoat pocket and went into the studio. Jacobi said, “I’ll see you later, Moishe. I’m afraid I have a mountain of forms to fill out. Perhaps we should put up stacks of paper in place of barrage balloons. They’d be rather better at keeping the Lizards away, I think.”

  He headed away to his upstairs office. Moishe went outside. He decided not to head back to his flat right away, but walked west down Oxford Street toward Hyde Park. People mostly women, often with small children in tow-bustled in and out of Selfridge’s. He’d been in the great department store once or twice himself. Even with wartime shortages, it held more goods and more different kinds of goods than were likely to be left in all of Poland. He wondered if the British knew how lucky they were.

  The great marble arch where Oxford Street, Park Lane, and Bayswater Road came together marked the northeast corner of Hyde Park. Across Park Lane from the arch was the Speakers’ Corner where men and women climbed up on crates or chairs or whatever they had handy and harangued whoever would hear. He tried to imagine such a thing in Warsaw, whether under Poles, Nazis, or Lizards. The only thing he could picture was the public executions that would follow unbridled public speech. Maybe. England had earned its luck after all.

  Only a handful of people listened to-or heckled-the speakers. The rest of the park was almost as crowded with people tending their gardens. Every bit of open space in London grew potatoes, wheat, maize, beets, beans, peas, cabbages. German submarines had put Britain under siege; the coming of the Lizards brought little relief. They weren’t as hard on shipping, but America and the rest of the world, had less to send these days.

  The island wasn’t having an easy time trying to feed itself. Perhaps in the long run it couldn’t not if it wanted to keep on turning out war goods, too. But if the English knew they were beaten, they didn’t let on.

  All through the park, trenches, some bare, some with corrugated tin roofs were scattered among the garden plots. L
ike Warsaw, London had learned the value of air raid shelters no matter how makeshift. Moishe had dived into one of them himself when the sirens began to wail a few days before. The old woman sprawled in the dirt a few feet away had nodded politely as if they were meeting over tea. They d stayed in there till the all clear sounded, then dusted themselves off and gone on about their business.

  Moishe turned and retraced his steps down Oxford Street. He explored with caution; wandering a couple of blocks away from the streets he’d already learned had got him lost more than once. And he was always looking the wrong way, forgetting traffic moved on the left side of the street, not the right. Had more motorcars been on the road, he probably would have been hit by now.

  He turned right onto Regent Street, then left onto Beak. A group of men was going into a restaurant there-the Barcelona, he saw as he drew closer. He recognized the tall, thin figure of Eric Blair in the party; the India Section man must have finished his talk and headed off for lunch.

  Beak Street led Russie to Lexington and from it to Broadwick Street, on which sat his block of flats. As with much of the Soho district, it held more foreigners than Englishmen: Spaniards, Indians, Chinese, Greeks-and now a family of ghetto Jews.

  He turned the key in the lock, opened the door. The rich odor of cooking soup greeted him like a friend from home. He shrugged out of his jacket; the electric fire here kept the flat comfortably warm. Not sleeping under mounds of blankets and overcoats was another reward of coming to England.

  Rivka walked out of the kitchen to greet him. She wore a white blouse and a blue pleated skirt that reached halfway from the floor to her knees. Moishe thought it shockingly immodest, but all the skirts and dresses she’d been given when she got to England were of the same length.