Harry Turtledove - Striking the Balance

“It shall be done,” Ussmak answered. He did some more chopping, with results equally unsatisfactory to the guard. When he first came to the camp, that would have left him quivering with fear. Now it rolled off his skinny flanks. They had put him here. Try as they would, how could they do worse?

He shambled back to camp for lunch. Worn as he was, he could eat little. Again, someone quickly disposed of his leftovers. When, too soon, it was time to return to the forest, he stumbled and fell and had trouble getting up again. Another male aided him, half guiding, half pushing him out toward the Tosevite trees.

He took up his axe and went back to work on the pale-barked tree. Try as he would, he could not make the blade take more than timid nips at the trunk. He was too weak and too apathetic for anything more. If he did not chop it down, if the work gang did not saw it into the right lengths of wood, they would fall short of their norm and would get only penalty rations. So what? Ussmak thought. He hadn’t been able to eat a regular ration, so why should he care if he got less?

All the other males would get less, too, of course. He could not care about that, either. A proper male of the Race would have; he knew as much. But he’d begun to get detached from the rest of the Race when a Tosevite sniper killed Votal, his first landcruiser commander. Ginger had made things worse. Then he’d lost another good landcruiser crew, and then he’d led the mutiny for which he’d had such hope. And the results of that had been… this. No, he was no proper male, no longer.

He was so tired. He set down the axe. I’ll rest for a moment, he thought.

“Work!” a guard shouted.

“Gavno?” Ussmak said, adding an interrogative cough. Grudgingly, the Big Ugly swung aside the muzzle of his weapon and bobbed his head up and down to grant permission. The guards let you evacuate your bowels-most of the time. It was one of the few things they did let you do.

Stumbling slowly away from the tree, Ussmak went behind a screen of bushes. He squatted to relieve himself. Nothing happened-not surprising, not when he was so empty inside. He tried to rise, but instead toppled over onto his side. He took a breath. A little later, he took another. Quite a bit later, he took one more.

Of themselves, the nictitating membranes slid across his eyes. His eyelids drooped, closed. In those last moments, he wondered if Emperors past would accept his spirit in spite of all he had done. Soon, he found out what he would find out.

When the Lizard didn’t come out of the bushes after taking a shit, Yuri Andreyevich Palchinsky went in after it. He had to scuffle around to find it, and it would not come out when he called. “Stinking thing will pay,” he muttered.

Then he did find it, by tripping over it and almost falling on his face. He cursed and drew back his foot to give it a good kick, but didn’t. Why bother? The damn thing was already dead.

He picked it up, slung it over his shoulder-it didn’t weigh anything to speak of-and carried it back toward the camp. Off to one side was a trench in which to toss the ones who starved or worked themselves to death this week. In went the latest body, on top of a lot of others.

“We’re liable to fill this one up before it’s time to dig next week’s,” Palchinsky muttered. He shrugged. That wasn’t his worry. The work gang was. He turned his back on the mass grave and headed out to the woods.

“We have shown we can be merciful,” Liu Han declared. “We have let one little scaly devil go back to his kind in spite of his crimes against the workers and peasants.” I have let him go in spite of his crimes against me, she added to herself. Let no one say now that I cannot put the interests of the Party, the interests of the People’s Liberation Army, above my own. “In a few days, the truce to which we agreed with the scaly devils expires. They still refuse to make us party to the larger cease-fire. We shall show them we can be strong as dragons, too. They will become sorry enough to make concessions.”

She sat down. The men of the Peking central committee put their heads together, discussing what she had said and how she said it. Nieh Ho-T’ing murmured something to a newcomer, a handsome, plump-cheeked man whose name she hadn’t caught. The man nodded. He sent Liu Han an admiring glance. She wondered if he was admiring her words or her body. She stared back steadily, measuring him with her eyes. Country bumpkin, she decided, forgetting for a moment how recently she had been a peasant with no politics whatever.

Sitting on Nieh’s other side was Hsia Shou-Tao. He got to his feet. Liu Han had been sure he would. If she said the Yangtze flowed from west to east, he would disagree because she had said it.

Nieh Ho-T’ing raised a warning finger, but Hsia plunged ahead anyhow: “Zeal is important to the revolutionary cause, but so is caution. Through too much aggressiveness, we are liable to force the little devils into strong responses against us. A campaign of low-level harassment strikes me as a better plan, one more likely to yield the results we desire, than going at once from truce to all-out war.”

Hsia looked around the room to see what sort of reaction he’d received. Several men were nodding, but others, among them four or five upon whom he’d counted, sat silent and stony. Liu Han smiled inside while keeping her own features impassive. As was her way, she’d prepared this ground before she began to fight on it. Had Hsia Shou-Tao an ounce of sense, he would have realized that beforehand. Learning of it now, the hard way, made his face take on almost the rictus of agony it had worn when Liu Han kneed him in the private parts.

To her surprise, the bumpkinish fellow by Nieh Ho-T’ing spoke up: “While war and politics cannot be divorced for a single instant, still it is sometimes necessary to remind the foe that power springs ultimately from the barrel of a gun. The little scaly devils, in my view, must be forcibly shown that their occupation is temporary and shall in the end surely fail. Thus, as Comrade Liu has so ably stated, we shall strike them a series of hard blows the instant the truce expires, gauging our subsequent actions on their response.”

He didn’t talk like a bumpkin; be talked like an educated man, perhaps even a poet. And now, up and down the table, heads bobbed in approval of his words. Liu Han saw more was involved there than how well he’d spoken: he had authority here, authority everyone acknowledged without question. She wished she’d learned what his name was.

“As usual, Mao Tse-Tung analyzes clearly,” Nieh Ho-T’ing said. “His viewpoint is most reasonable, and we shall carry out our program against the little scaly devils as he directs.”

Again, the members of the Peking central committee nodded as if a single puppeteer controlled all their heads. Liu Han nodded along with everyone else. Her eyes were wide with amazement, though, as she stared at the man who headed the revolutionary cause throughout China. Mao Tse-Tung had thought well of something she said?

He looked back at her, beaming like Ho Tei, the fat little god of luck in whom proper Communists did not believe but whom Liu Han had trouble dismissing from her mind. Yes, he’d approved of her words. His face said that clearly. And yes, he was looking at her as a man looks at a woman: not crudely, as Hsia Shou-Tao did when he all but spread her legs with his eyes, but unmistakably all the same.

She wondered what she ought to do about that. She’d already had doubts about her attachment to Nieh Ho-T’ing, doubts both ideological and personal. She was a little surprised to note Mao’s interest; a lot of the central committee members, probably most of them, lusted after revolution more than after women. Hsia was a horrible example of why that rule worked well. But Mao was surely a special case.