Worldwar: Striking the Balance

by Harry Turtledove

  She took the knife away from his neck, stuck it in the small of the back. “Now crawl to the door,” she said. “If you think you can knock me down before I shove this all the way in, go ahead and try.”

  Hsia Shou-Tao crawled. At Liu Han’s order, he pulled the door open and crawled out into the hall. She thought about kicking him again as he left, but decided not to. After the humiliation from that, she would have to kill him. He hadn’t cared what humiliation he might visit on her, but she couldn’t afford to be so cavalier.

  She slammed the door after him, let the bar down with a thud. Only then, after it was over, did she start to shake. She looked down at the knife in her hand. She could never leave the room unarmed, not now. She couldn’t leave the knife in a drawer while she slept any more, either. It would have to stay in the bedding with her.

  She walked over, got her trousers, and started to put them back on. Then she paused and threw them down again. She took a scrap of rag, wet it in the pitcher on the chest of drawers, and used it to scrub at the spot where Hsia Shou-Tao’s penis had rubbed against her. Only after that was done did she get dressed.

  A couple of hours later, someone knocked on the door. Ice shot up Liu Han’s back. She grabbed the knife. “Who is it?” she asked, weapon in hand. She realized it might not do her any good. If Hsia had a pistol, he could shoot through the door and leave her dead or dying at no risk to himself.

  But the answer came quick and clear: “Nieh Ho-T’ing.” With a gasp of relief, she unbarred the door and let him in.

  “Oh, it’s so good to be back in Peking,” he exclaimed. But as he moved to embrace her, he saw the knife in her hand. “What’s this?” he asked, one eyebrow rising.

  What it was seemed obvious. As for why it was—Liu Han had thought she’d be able to keep silent about Hsia’s attack, but at the first question the tale poured forth. Nieh listened impassively; he kept silent, except for a couple of questions to guide her along, till she was through.

  “What do we do about this man?” Liu Han demanded. “I know I am not the first woman he has done this to. From the men in my village, I would have expected nothing different. Is the People’s Liberation Army run like my village, though? You say no. Do you mean it?”

  “I do not think Hsia will bother you again, not that way,” Nieh said. “If he did, he would be a bigger fool than I know him to be.”

  “It is not enough,” Liu Han said. The memory of Hsia Shou-Tao tearing at her clothing brought almost as much fury as had the actual assault. “It’s not me alone—he needs to be punished so he never does this to anyone.”

  “The only sure way to manage that is to purge him, and the cause needs him, even if he is not the perfect man for it,” Nieh Ho-T’ing answered. He held up a hand to forestall Liu Han’s irate reply. “We shall see what revolutionary justice can accomplish. Come down to the meeting of the executive committee tonight.” He paused thoughtfully. “That will also be a way of getting your views heard there more often. You are a very sensible woman. Perhaps you will be a member before too long.”

  “I will come,” Liu Han said, concealing her satisfaction. She had come before the executive committee before, when she was advocating and refining her plan for bombing the little scaly devils at their feasts. She hadn’t been invited back—till now. Maybe Nieh had ambitions of using her as his puppet. She had ambitions of her own.

  Much of the business of the executive committee proved stupefyingly dull. She held boredom at bay by glaring across the table at Hsia Shou-Tao. He would not meet her eye, which emboldened her to glare more fiercely.

  Nieh Ho-T’ing ran the meeting in ruthlessly efficient style. After the committee agreed to liquidate two merchants known to be passing information to the little devils (and also known to be backers of the Kuomintang) he said, “It is unfortunate but true that we of the People’s Liberation Army are ourselves creatures of flesh and blood, and all too fallible. Comrade Hsia has provided us with the latest example of such frailty. Comrade?” He looked toward Hsia Shou-Tao like—the comparison that sprang to Liu Han’s mind was like a landlord who’s caught a peasant cheating him out of his rents.

  Like that guilty peasant, Hsia looked down, not at his accuser. “Forgive me, Comrades,” he mumbled. “I confess I have failed myself, failed the People’s Liberation Army, failed the Party, and failed the revolutionary movement. Because of my lust, I tried to molest the loyal and faithful follower in the revolutionary footsteps of Mao Tse-Tung, our soldier Liu Han.”

  The self-criticism went on for some time. Hsia Shou-Tao told in humiliating detail how he had made advances to Liu Han, how she rebuffed him, how he tried to force her, and how she defended herself.

  “I was in error in all regards in this matter,” he said. “Our soldier Liu Han had never shown signs of being attracted to me in any way. I was wrong to try to take her for my own pleasure, and wrong again to ignore her when she made it plain she did not want me. She did right to rebuff me, and right again in courageously resisting my treacherous assault. I am glad she succeeded.”

  The oddest part of it was, Liu Han believed him. He would have been glad in a different way had he raped her, but his ideology drove him toward recognizing that what he had done was wrong. She didn’t know for certain whether that made her respect the ideology more or frightened her green.

  When Hsia Shou-Tao completed the self-criticism, he glanced toward Nieh Ho-T’ing to see whether it had been adequate. No, Liu Han thought, but it was not her place to speak. And, after a moment, Nieh said in a stern voice, “Comrade Hsia, this is not your first failing along these lines—your worst, yes, but far from your first. What have you to say of that?”

  Hsia bowed his head again. “I admit it,” he said humbly. “I shall be vigilant from now on in eliminating this flaw from my character. Never again shall I disgrace myself with women. If I should, I am ready to suffer the punishments prescribed by revolutionary justice.”

  “See to it that you remember what you have said here today,” Nieh Ho-T’ing warned him in a voice that tolled like a gong.

  “Women, too, are part of the revolution,” Liu Han added, which made Nieh, the other men of the executive committee, and even Hsia Shou-Tao nod. She didn’t say anything more, and everyone nodded again: not only did she say what was true, she didn’t rub people’s noses in it. One day, probably one day before too long, the executive committee would need a new member. People would recall her good sense. With that, and with Nieh backing her, she would gain a regular seat here.

  Yes, she thought. My time will come.

  George Bagnall stared in fascination at the gadgets the Lizards had turned over along with captive Germans and Russians to get their own prisoners back. The small disks were plastic of some sort, with a metallic finish that somehow had shifting rainbows in it. When you put one into a reader, the screen filled with color images more vivid than any he’d ever seen in the cinema.

  “How the devil do they do it?” he asked for what had to be the tenth time.

  Lizard talk came hissing out of the speakers to either side of the screen. Small as they were, those speakers reproduced sound with greater fidelity than any manufactured by human beings.

  “You’re the bleeding engineer,” Ken Embry said. “You’re supposed to tell the rest of us poor ignorant sods how it’s done.”

  Bagnall rolled his eyes. How many hundreds of years of scientflic progress for humanity lay between the aircraft engines he’d monitored and these innocent-looking, almost magical disks? Hundreds? Maybe how many thousands.

  “Even the alleged explanations we get from Lizard prisoners don’t make much sense—not that anyone here in Pskov speaks their language worth a damn,” Bagnall said. “What the bleeding hell is a skelkwank light? Whatever it is, it pulls images and sounds out of one of these little blighters, but I’m buggered if I know how.”

  “We don’t even know enough to ask the right questions,” Embry said in a mournful voice.

  “Too right
we don’t,” Bagnall agreed. “And even though we see the stories and hear the sounds that go with them, most of the time they still don’t make any sense to us: the Lizards are just too strange. And do you know what? I don’t think they’ll be a far-thing’s worth clearer to the Jerries or the Bolsheviks than they are to us.”

  “For that matter, what would a Lizard make of Gone With the Wind?” Embry said. “He’d need it annotated the way we have to put footnotes to every third word in Chaucer, but even worse.”

  “That bit in the one story where the Lizard kept doing whatever he was doing—looking things up, maybe—and the images appeared one after another on the screen he was watching . . . What the devil was that supposed to mean?”

  Embry shook his head. “Damned if I know. Maybe it was supposed to be all deep and symbolic, or maybe we don’t understand what’s going on, or maybe the Lizard who made the film didn’t understand what was going on. How can we know? How can we even guess?”

  “Do you know what it makes me want to do?” Bagnall said.

  “If you’re anything like me, it makes you want to go back to our house and drink yourself blind on that clear potato spirit the Russians brew,” Embry said.

  “You’ve hit it in one,” Bagnall said. He hefted another story disk and watched the shimmering rainbows shift. “What worries me most about having all these go to the Nazis and the Reds is that. If they do manage to decipher them better than we can in this one-horse town, they’ll learn things we won’t know in England.”

  “This thought has crossed my mind,” Embry admitted. “Do recall, though, the Lizards must have left all sorts of rubbish behind when their invasion failed. If we don’t have a goodly number of these skelkwank readers and the disks that go with them, I’ll be very much surprised.”

  “You have a point,” Bagnall said. “The trouble is, of course, it’s rather like—no, it’s exactly like—having a library scattered at random across the landscape. You never can tell beforehand which book will have the pretty picture you’ve been looking for all along.”

  “I’ll tell you what I’d like.” Embry lowered his voice; some Red Army men and a fair number from the Wehrmacht could follow English. “I’d like to see the Germans and the Russians—to say nothing of the bloody Lizards—scattered at random across the landscape. You couldn’t make me much happier than that.”

  “Nor me.” Bagnall looked around at the map-lined chamber where they regularly kept the Nazis and Bolsheviks from going for each other’s throats. The readers and disks were stored there not least because it was tenuously neutral ground, with neither side likely to try to steal everything for itself from it. He sighed. “I wonder if we’ll ever see England again. Not likely, I’m afraid.”

  “I fear you’re right.” Embry sighed, too. “We’re doomed to grow old and to die in Pskov—or, more likely, doomed not to grow old and to die in Pskov. Only blind luck’s kept us intact thus far.”

  “Blind luck and not getting infatuated with any snipers of the female persuasion, unlike poor Jones,” Bagnall said. He and Embry both laughed, though it wasn’t funny, not really. Bagnall added, “Being around the fair Tatiana is likelier to make certain you don’t grow old and die in Pskov than any other single thing I can think of offhand.”

  “How right you are,” Embry said feelingly. He would have gone on in that vein for some time, but Aleksandr German chose that moment to walk into the chamber. He went from English to halting Russian: “Good day, Comrade Brigadier.”

  “Hello.” German did not look like a brigadier. With his red mustache, long, unkempt hair, and blazing black eyes, he looked half like a bandit, half like an Old Testament prophet (which occasionally made Bagnall wonder how much distinction there was between those two). Now he looked over at the Lizards’ reading machines. “Marvelous devices.” He said it first in Russian, then in Yiddish, which Bagnall followed better.

  “That they are,” Bagnall answered in German, which German the partisan leader also understood.

  The brigadier tugged at his beard. He continued in Yiddish, in musing tones: “Before the war, you know, I was not a hunter or a trapper or anything of the sort. I was a chemist here in Pskov, making medicines that did not so much good.” Bagnall hadn’t known that; Aleksandr German usually said but little of himself. His eyes still on the reader, he went on, “I was a boy when the first airplane came to Pskov. I remember the cinema coming, and the wireless, and the talking cinema. How could anything be more modern than the talking cinema? And then the Lizards come and show us we are children, playing with children’s toys.”

  “I had this same thought not long ago,” Bagnall said. “I also had it when the first Lizard fighter plane flew past my Lancaster. It was worse then.”

  Aleksandr German stroked his beard again. “That is right; you are a flier.” His laugh showed bad teeth and missing ones. “Very often I forget this. You and your comrades”—he nodded to Embry, and with the plural included Jones, too—“have done such good work here keeping us and the Nazis more angry at the Lizards than at each other that I do not recall it is not why you came to Pskov.”

  “Sometimes we have trouble remembering that ourselves,” Bagnall said. Embry nodded emphatically.

  “They have never tried to involve you with the Red Air Force?” German said. Before either Englishman could speak, he answered his own question: “No, of course not. The only aircraft we’ve had around these parts are Kukuruzniks, and they wouldn’t bother foreign experts over such small and simple things.”

  “I suppose not,” Bagnall said, and sighed. The biplanes looked as if they flew themselves, and as if anyone with a spanner and a screwdriver could repair them. Having him work on one would have been like calling out the head of the Royal College of Surgeons for a hangnail, but he wouldn’t have minded fiddling about with any kind of aircraft.

  Aleksandr German studied him. He’d had a lot of Russians and Germans study him since he’d got to Pskov. Most of the time, he had no trouble figuring out what they were thinking: how can I use this chap for my own advantage? They were usually so obvious about it, it wasn’t worth getting annoyed over. He couldn’t so readily fathom the partisan brigadier’s expression.

  At last, perhaps talking as much to himself as to Bagnall, Aleksandr German said, “If you cannot use your training against the Lizards here, you might do well with the chance to use it someplace else. So you might.”

  Again, he didn’t wait for a reply. Scratching his head and muttering under his breath, he strode out of the chamber. Bagnall and Embry both stared after him. “You don’t suppose he meant he could get us back to England—do you?” Embry whispered, sounding afraid to mention the thought aloud.

  “I doubt it,” Bagnall answered. “More likely, he’s just wondering if he can turn us into a couple of Stalin’s Hawks. Even that wouldn’t be so bad—bit of a change from what we’ve been doing, what? As for the other—” He shook his head. “I don’t dare think about it.”

  “Wonder what’s left of Blighty these days,” Embry murmured. Bagnall wondered, too. Now he knew he would keep on wondering, and wondering if there really was a way to get home again. No point dreaming about what you knew you couldn’t have. But if you thought you might somehow—Hope was out of its box now. It might disappoint him, but he knew he’d never be without it again.

  The Tosevite hatchling was out of its box again, and all-seeing spirits of Emperors past only knew what it would get into next. Even with his swiveling eye turrets, Ttomalss had an ever more difficult time keeping track of the hatchling when it started crawling on the laboratory floor. He wondered how Big Ugly females, whose vision had a field of view far more limited than his own, managed to keep their hatchlings away from disaster.

  A lot of them didn’t. He knew that. Even in their most technologically sophisticated not-empires, the Big Uglies lost appalling numbers of hatchlings to disease and accident. In the less sophisticated areas of Tosev 3, somewhere between a third and a half of the hatchlin
gs who emerged from females’ bodies perished before the planet had taken one slow turn around its star.

  The hatchling crawled out to the doorway that opened onto the corridor. Ttomalss’ mouth dropped open in amusement. “No, you can’t get out, not these days,” he said.

  As if it understood him, the hatching made the irritating noises it emitted when frustrated or annoyed. He’d had a technician make a wire mesh screen he could set in the doorway and fasten to either side of it. The hatchling wasn’t strong enough to pull down the wire or clever enough to unscrew the mounting brackets. It was, for the moment, confined.

  “And you won’t risk extermination by crawling off into Tessrek’s area,” Ttomalss told it. That could have been funny, but wasn’t. Ttomalss, like most males of the Race, had no particular use for Big Uglies. Tessrek, though, had conceived a venomous hatred for the hatchling in particular, for its noise, for its odor, for its mere existence. If the hatchling went into his territory again, he might bring himself to the notice of the disciplinarians. Ttomalss didn’t want that to happen; it would interfere with his research.

  The hatchling knew none of that. The hatching knew nothing about anything; that was its problem. It pulled itself upright by clinging to the wire and stared out into the corridor. It made more little whining noises. Ttomalss knew what they meant: I want to go out there.

  “No,” he said. The whining noises got louder; no was a word the hatchling understood, even if one it usually chose to ignore. It whined some more, then added what sounded like an emphatic cough: I really want to go out there.

  “No,” Ttomalss said again, and the hatchling went from whining to screaming. It screamed when it didn’t get what it wanted. When it screamed, all the researchers along the whole corridor joined in hating both it and Ttomalss for harboring it.

  He went over and picked it up. “I’m sorry,” he lied as he earned it away from the door. He distracted it with a ball he’d taken from an exercise chamber. “Here, you see? This stupid thing bounces.” The hatchling stared in evident amazement. Ttomalss knew relief. It wasn’t always easy to distract any more; it remembered what it had been doing and what it wanted to do.