Harry Turtledove - Striking the Balance

Before she could say “see,” the rifle-crack of a slap cut through the chatter in the White Horse Inn. A Marine captain raised a hand to his cheek. Naomi, quite unperturbed, set a pint of beer in front of him and went about her business.

“Timed that well, I did, though I say so my own self,” Sylvia remarked with more than a little pride.

“That you did,” Goldfarb agreed. He glanced over toward Naomi. Their eyes met for a moment. He smiled. She shrugged, as if to say, All in a day’s work. He turned back to Sylvia. “Good for her,” he said.

Liu Han was nervous. She shook her head. No, she was more than nervous. She was terrflied. The idea of meeting the little scaly devils face-to-face made her shiver inside. She’d been a creature under their control for too long: first in their airplane that never came down, where they made her submit to one man after another so they could learn how people behaved in matters of the pillow; and then, after she’d got pregnant, down in their prison camp not far from Shanghai. After she’d had her baby, they’d stolen it from her. She wanted her child back, even if it was only a girl.

With all that in her past, she had trouble believing the scaly devils would treat her like someone worth consideration now. And she was a woman herself, which did nothing to ease her confidence. The doctrine of the People’s Liberation Army said women were, and should be, equal to men. In the top part of her mind, she was beginning to believe that. Down deep, though, a lifetime of teachings of the opposite lesson still shaped her thoughts-and her fears.

Perhaps sensing that, Nieh Ho-T’ing said, “It will be all right. They won’t do anything to you, not at this parley. They know we hold prisoners of theirs, and what will happen to those prisoners if anything bad happens to us.”

“Yes, I understand,” she said, but she shot him a grateful glance anyhow. In matters military, he knew what he was talking about. He’d served as political commissar in the first detachment of Mao’s revolutionary army, commanded a division in the Long March, and been an army chief of staff. After the Lizards came, he’d led resistance against them-and against the Japanese, and against the counterrevolutionary Kuomintang clique-first in Shanghai and then here in Peking. And he was her lover.

Though she’d been born a peasant, her wits and her burning eagerness for revenge on the little devils for all they’d done to her had made her a revolutionary herself, and one who’d risen quickly in the ranks.

A scaly devil emerged from the tent that his kind had built in the middle of the Pan Jo Hsiang Tai- the Fragrant Terrace of Wisdom. The tent looked more like a bubble blown from some opaque orange shiny stuff than an honest erection of canvas or silk. It clashed dreadfully not only with the terrace and the walls and the elegant staircases to either side, but also with everything on the Ch’iung Hua Tao, the White Pagoda Island.

Liu Han stifled a nervous giggle. Peasant that she was, she’d never imagined, back in the days before the little scaly devils took hold of her life and tore it up by the roots, that she would find herself not just in the Imperial City inside Peking, but on an island the old Chinese Emperors had used as a resort.

The little devil turned one turreted eye toward Liu Han, the other toward Nieh Ho-T’ing. “You are the men of the People’s Liberation Army?” it asked in fair Chinese, and added a grunting cough at the end of the sentence to show it was a question: a holdover from the usages of its own language. When neither human denied it, the scaly devil said, “You will come with me. I am Essaff.”

Inside the tent, the lamps glowed almost like sunlight, but slightly more yellow-orange in tone. That had nothing to do with the material from which the tent was made; Liu Han had noticed it in all the illumination the little scaly devils used. The tent was big enough to contain an antechamber. When she started to go through the doorway, Essaff held up a clawed hand.

“Wait!” he said, and tacked on a different cough, one that put special emphasis on what he said. “We will examine you with our machines, to make sure you carry no explosives. This has been done to us before.”

Liu Han and Nieh Ho-T’ing exchanged glances. Neither of them said anything. Liu Han had had the idea of sending beast-show men whose trained animals fascinated the scaly devils to perform for them-with bombs hidden in the cases that also held their creatures. A lot of those bombs had gone off. Fooling the little devils twice with the same trick was next to impossible.

Essaff had the two humans stand in a certain place. He examined images of their bodies in what looked like a small film screen. Liu Han had seen its like many times before; it seemed as common among the little devils as books among mankind.

After hissing like a bubbling pot for a minute or two, Essaff said, “You are honorable here in this case. You may go in.”

The main chamber of the tent held a table with more of the scaly devils’ machines at one end. Behind the table sat two males.

Pointing to them in turn, Essaff said, “This one is Ppevel, assistant administrator, eastern region, main continental mass-China, you would say. That one is Ttomalss, researcher in Tosevite-human, you would say-behavior.”

“I know Ttomalss,” Liu Han said, holding emotion at bay with an effort of will that all but exhausted her. Ttomalss and his assistants had photographed her giving birth to her daughter, and then taken the child.

Before she could ask him how the girl was, Essaff said, “You Tosevites, you sit down with us.” The chairs the scaly devils had brought for them were of human make, a concession she’d never seen from them before. As she and Nieh Ho-T’ing sat, Essaff asked, “You will drink tea?”

“No,” Nieh said sharply. “You examined our bodies before we came in here. We cannot examine the tea. We know you sometimes try to drug people. We will not drink or eat with you.”

Ttomalss understood Chinese. Ppevel evidently did not. Essaff translated for him. Liu Han followed some of the translation. She’d learned a bit of the scaly devils’ speech. That was one reason she was here instead of Nieh’s longtime aide, Hsia Shou-Tao.

Through Essaff, Ppevel said, “This is a parley. You need have no fear.”

“You had fear of us,” Nieh answered. “If you do not trust us, how can we trust you?” The scaly devils’ drugs did not usually work well on people. Nieh Ho-T’ing and Liu Han both knew that. Nieh added, “Even among our own people-human beings, I mean-we Chinese have had to suffer under unequal treaties. Now we want nothing less than full reciprocity in all our dealings, and give no more than we get.”

Ppevel said, “We are talking with you. Is this not concession enough?”

“It is a concession,” Nieh Ho-T’ing said. “It is not enough.” Liu Han added an emphatic cough to his words. Both Ppevel and Essaff jerked in surprise. Ttomalss spoke to his superior in a low voice. Liu Han caught enough to gather that he was explaining how she’d picked up some of their tongue.

“Let us talk, then,” Ppevel said. “We shall see who is equal and who is not when this war is over.”

“Yes, that is true,” Nieh Ho-T’ing agreed. “Very well, we shall talk. Do you wish this discussion to begin with great things and move down to the small, or would you rather start with small things and work up as we make progress?”

“Best we start with small things,” Ppevel said. “Because they are small, you and we may both find it easier to give ground on them. If we try too much at the beginning, we may only grow angry with each other and have these talks fail altogether.”