Harry Turtledove - Upsetting the Balance

“If I cared, it would be,” the hat seller answered in a dialect she could hardly follow; the camp held people from all over China. “Do you want to buy that hat or not?”

After haggling for a while, she walked on. She talked about the camera at several other stalls and carts, and bought some bok choi and a small brass pot. She’d wandered through half the market before she came to a poultry seller whose stand was next to that of a pig butcher. She told him about the camera, too, while she bought some chicken feet and some necks. “Isn’t that amazing?” she finished.

“A camera that can see how hot things are? That is amazing,” he said. “You think I give you that much for thirty cents Mex? Woman, you are crazy!”

She ended up paying forty-five cents Mex for the chicken parts, which was too much, but she kept her temper about it. With the poultry seller, “Isn’t it amazing?” was a code phrase that meant she had information to pass, and his “That is amazing” said he’d understood. Somehow-she had no idea how, and didn’t want to know-he’d get word to the Chinese Communists outside the camp.

She knew the little scaly devils watched her closely, not only because they were interested in her pregnancy but also because of what Bobby Fiore had done. But if she spread gossip all through the marketplace, how could they figure out which person who heard it was the one who mattered? She just seemed like a foolish woman chattering at random.

What she seemed and what she was were not one and the same. As best she could, she was getting her revenge.

Having a rifle in his hands again made Mordechai Anielewicz feel he was doing something worth doing once more. The months he’d spent in the little Polish town of Leczna had been the most pleasant he’d passed since the Germans invaded in 1939-especially the romance he’d had with Zofia Klopotowski, who lived next door to the people who had taken him in-but that memory made him feel guilty, not glad. With a war raging all around, what right did he have to take pleasure in anything?

Back in the Warsaw ghetto, he’d been readying an uprising against the Germans when the Lizards came. The Jews of the ghetto had risen, all right, against the Nazis and for the Lizards-and he’d become head of all the Jewish fighters in Lizard-held Poland, one of the most powerful humans in all the land.

But the Lizards, while they weren’t interested in exterminating the Jews the way the Nazis had been, were intent on enslaving them-and the Poles and the Germans and the Russians and everybody else. Joining them for the short term had helped save his people. Joining them for the long term would have been ruinous for all peoples.

So, quietly, he’d begun working against them. He’d let the Germans smuggle explosive metal west, though he had diverted some for the British and Americans. He’d smuggled his friend Moishe Russie out of the country after Moishe couldn’t stomach telling any more lies for the Lizards on the wireless. But the Lizards had grown suspicious of Mordechai, and so…

Here he was in the forest in dead of night with a rifle in his hands. Some of the partisans with him were Jews, some were Poles, a few were Germans. The Germans still alive and fighting in Poland a year after the Lizards came were some very tough customers indeed.

Somewhere up ahead, an owl hooted. He didn’t mind that. A few nights before, he’d heard wolves howling. That had sent the hair on his arms and at the back of his neck prickling up in atavistic terror.

Also up ahead, but closer, the point man for the partisan band let out a hiss. Everybody froze. A whisper came back down the line: “Jerzy’s found the highway.”

The road from Lublin up to Biala Podlaska was paved, which by the standards of Polish country roads made it worthy of that handle. One of the Germans in the band, a hulking blonde named Friedrich, thumped Anielewicz on the shoulder and said, “All right, Shmuel, let’s see how this works.”

“It worked once, or something like it,” Mordechai answered in German cleaner than the Wehrmacht man’s. First names were plenty in the partisan band. His was false-anybody who figured out who he really was might be tempted to betray him to the Lizards-but had to be Jewish in spite of his unaccented German and Polish. Languages were all very well, but some things they couldn’t disguise.

“All right,” Friedrich said. “We see if it works again.” His voice carried an implied threat, but Anielewicz didn’t think that had anything to do with his own Judaism. Friedrich just didn’t want things to go wrong. That much he still kept from his army days. Otherwise he didn’t look much like the spit-and-polish soldiers who’d made life hell for the Jews in Warsaw and Lodz and everywhere in Poland. A floppy hat had replaced his coalscuttle helmet, he wore a fuzzy yellow beard, and the bandoliers crossed over the chest of his peasant blouse gave him a fine piratical air.

With a grunt of relief, Anielewicz unstrapped the crate he’d been carrying along with his knapsack. Some enterprising soul had stolen it from the Lizards’ base at Lublin. It wasn’t anything special, just an ordinary Lizard supply container. As he carried it toward the road, other partisans put in cans and jars of food, some from purloined Lizard stock, others of human make.

Up by the highway, Jerzy had the piece de resistance: a jar full of ground ginger. “Stick it in my pocket,” Mordechai whispered to him. “I’m not going to put it in there yet.”

“This is your play,” the point man whispered back as he obeyed. He grinned, his teeth for a moment startlingly visible. “You sneaky Jew bastard.”

“Fuck you, Jerzy,” Anielewicz said, but he grinned, too. He stepped out onto the asphalt and tipped the supply crate over sideways. Cans and jars rolled out of it along the surface of the road. He decided that wasn’t good enough. He stomped on a couple of cans, smashed two or three jars.

He stepped back, considered the artistic effect, and found it good. The crate looked as if it had fallen off a supply lorry. He took the jar of ginger from his pocket, unscrewed the lid, and spilled half the contents over the cans and jars still inside. Then he set the jar and the lid by the crate and retreated back into the woods.

“Now we set up the ambush and we wait,” he told Jerzy.

The point man nodded. “They’re fools for not cutting the brush farther back from the sides of the road,” he remarked.

“Fools?” Anielewicz said. “Well, maybe. You ask me, though, they just don’t have the manpower to do everything they need. Good thing, too. If they did, they’d beat us. But trying to take on the whole world spreads them thin.”

He found a good hidey-hole behind a shrub-as a city boy, he couldn’t identify it any more closely than that. He detached the bayonet from his Mauser and used it to dig himself a little deeper into the soft, rich-smelling dirt. He was too aware of how much better he could have done with a proper entrenching tool.

Then it was lie and wait. A mosquito bit him in the hand. He swatted at it. It or one just like it bit him on the ear. Somebody warned he was making too much noise. Another mosquito bit him. He lay still.

Lizard vehicles weren’t as noisy as the grunting, flatulent machines the Nazis used. Sometimes the racket from the German tanks and troop carriers was intimidating, but it always told you right where they were. The Lizards could sneak up on you if you weren’t careful.

Mordechai was careful. So were the rest of the partisans; the ones who hadn’t been careful-and some of the ones who had-were dead now. When the faint rumble of northbound vehicles came to his ears, he flattened himself against the earth, to be as nearly invisible as he could. The Lizards had gadgets that could see in the dark like cats.