Harry Turtledove - Tilting the Balance

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.

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.