Harry Turtledove - Tilting the Balance

“Yes, superior sir,” Liu Han said; by his perplexed look, Bobby Fiore hadn’t understood the question. Even though the scaly devil used words that were individually intelligible, she had trouble following him, too. Imagine calling the airplane that never came down a ship!

“Which of you is carrying the growing thing that will become a human being in her belly?” the devil with the fancy paint asked.

“I am, superior sir.” Not for the first time, Liu Han felt a flash of contempt for the little scaly devils. They not only couldn’t tell people apart, they couldn’t even tell the sexes apart. And Bobby Fiore, with his tall nose and round eyes, was unique in this camp, yet the little devils didn’t recognize him as a foreign devil.

One of the gun-carrying little devils pointed at Liu Han and hissed something to a companion. The other devil’s mouth fell open in a devilish laugh. They found people preposterous, too.

The little devil who spoke Chinese said, “Go in this little house, the two of you. We have things to say to you, things to ask of you.”

Liu Han and Bobby Fiore went into the hut. So did the two little devils with elaborate paint on their scaly hides, and so did one of the more drably marked guards. The two higher-ranking little devils skittered past Liu Han so they could sit on the hearth that also supported the hut’s bedding. They sank down on the warm clay with rapturous sighs-Liu Han had seen they didn’t like cold weather. The guard, who liked it no better, had to stand where he could keep his eyes on the obviously vicious and dangerous humans.

“I am Ttomalss,” the scaly devil who spoke Chinese said-a stutter at the front of his name and a hiss at the end. “First I ask you what you were doing with these strange things.” He turned his eye turrets toward the ball and bat and glove Bobby Fiore held, and pointed at them as well.

“Do you speak English?” Fiore asked in that language when Liu Han had put the question into their peculiar jargon. When neither little scaly devil answered, he muttered, “Shit,” and turned back to her, saying, “You better answer. They won’t follow me any more than I follow them.”

“Superior sir,” Liu Han began, bowing to Ttomalss as if he were her village headman back in the days (was it really less than a year before?) when she’d had a headman… or a village, “we use these things to put on a show to entertain people here in this camp and earn money and food for ourselves.”

Ttomalss hissed to translate that to his companion, who might not have known any human language. The other scaly devil hissed back. Ttomalss turned his words into Chinese: “Why do you need these things? We give you this house, we give you enough to get food you need. Why do you want more? Do you not have enough?”

Liu Han thought about that. It was a question that went straight to the heart of the Tao, the way a person should live. Having too much-or caring in excess about having too much-was reckoned bad (though she’d noticed that few people who had a lot were inclined to give up any of it). Cautiously, she answered, “Superior sir, we seek to save what we can so we will not be at want if hunger comes to this camp. And we want money for the same reason, and to make our lives more comfortable. Can this be wrong?”

The scaly devil did not reply directly. Instead, he said, “What sort of show is this? It had better not be one that endangers the hatchling growing inside you.”

“It does not, superior sir,” she assured him. She would have been happier for his concern had it meant he cared for her and the baby as persons. She knew it didn’t. The only value she, the baby, and Bobby Fiore had to the little devils was as parts of their experiment.

That worried her, too. What would they do when she’d had the child? Snatch it away from her as they’d snatched her away from her village? Force her to find out how fast she could get pregnant again? The unpleasant possibilities were countless.

“What do you do, then?” Ttomalss demanded suspiciously.

“Mostly I speak for Bobby Fiore, who does not speak Chinese well,” she said. “I tell the audience how he will hit and catch and throw the ball. This is an art he brings with him from his own country, and not one with which we Chinese are familiar. Things that are new and strange entertain us, help us pass the time.”

“This is foolishness,” the little devil said. “The old, the familiar, should be what entertains. The new and strange-how could they be interesting? You will not be-what is the word? — familiar with them. Is this not frightening to you?”

He was even more conservative than a Chinese, Liu Han realized. That rocked her. The little scaly devils had torn up her life, to say nothing of turning China and the whole world on their ear. Moreover, the little devils had their vast array of astonishing machines, everything from the cameras that took pictures in three dimensions to the dragonfly planes that could hover in the sky. She’d thought of them as flighty gadgeteers, as if they were Americans or other foreign devils with scales and body paint.

But it wasn’t so. Bobby Fiore had almost burst with excitement at the idea of bringing something new into the prison camp and making a profit from it. She’d liked the notion, too. To the scaly devil, it seemed as alien and menacing as the devil did to her.

Her wool-gathering irritated Ttomalss. “Answer me,” he snapped.

“I’m sorry, superior sir,” she said quickly. She didn’t want to get the little devils annoyed at her. They might cast her and Bobby Fiore out of this home, they might take her back to the plane that never came down and turn her into a whore again, they might take her baby away as soon as it was born… or they might do any number of appalling things she couldn’t imagine now. She went on, “I was just thinking that human beings like new things.”

“I know that.” Ttomalss did not approve of it; his blunt little stump of a tail switched back and forth, like an angry cat’s. “It is the great curse of you Big Uglies.” The last two words were in his own language. Liu Han had heard the little scaly devils use them often enough to know what they meant. Ttomalss resumed, “Were it not for the mad curiosity of your kind, the Race would have brought your world under our sway long ago.”

“I am sorry, but I do not follow you, superior sir,” Liu Han said. “What does this have to do with preferring new entertainments to old? When we see the same old thing over and over, we grow bored.” How getting bored at old shows was tied to the devils’ not conquering the world was beyond her.

“The Race also has this thing you call growing bored,” Ttomalss admitted, “but with us it comes on more slowly, and over a long, long time. We are more content with what we already have than is true of your kind. So are the other two races we know. You Big Uglies break the pattern.”

Liu Han did not worry about breaking patterns. She did wonder if she’d understood the scaly devil aright. Were there other kinds of weird creatures besides his own? She found it hard to believe, but she wouldn’t have believed in the scaly devils a year earlier.

Ttomalss stepped forward, squeezed at her left breast with his clawed fingers. “Hey!” Bobby Fiore said, and started to get to his feet. The scaly devil with a gun turned it his way.

“It’s all right,” Liu Han said quickly. “He’s not hurting me.” That was true. His touch was gentle; although his claws penetrated her cotton tunic and pricked against her skin, they did not break it.

“You will give the hatchling liquid from your body out of these for it to eat?” Ttomalss asked, his Chinese becoming awkward as he spoke of matters and bodily functions unfamiliar to his kind.