Harry Turtledove - Tilting the Balance

The feeling of power and wisdom flooded through Teerts again. While he reached that ecstatic, exalted peak, he did his best to come up with a way to escape the prison where the Nipponese held him. For an all but omnipotent genius, it should have been easy.

But no brilliant ideas came. Maybe the ginger did sharpen his analytical faculty a little: he swiftly concluded the feeling of brilliance it gave him was just that, a feeling, and nothing more. Had the powder not been coursing through his veins, he would have been bitterly disappointed. As things were, he noted the problem, then dismissed it.

Tosevites were impetuous, hot-blooded, always doing things. The Race’s virtues were study, patience, careful planning. So Teerts had been indoctrinated, and little he had seen inclined him to doubt what his killercraft squadron’s briefing officers had said. But now, out in the hallway, Okamoto stood quietly and waited as patiently as any male of the Race.

And Teerts? As the joy from the ginger ebbed in him, leaving only a memory of sensation, Teerts became a veritable parody of a Big Ugly, grabbing at the bars of his cell, shouting curses, reaching uselessly for Okamoto in a foredoomed effort to get more ginger onto his tongue: in short, he acted blindly, without the slightest concern for consequences. He should have been ashamed of himself. He was ashamed of himself-but not enough to stop.

Okamoto waited until his blustering had died away, swallowed in the crushing depression that followed ginger euphoria. Then, at just the right instant, the Nipponese said, “Tell me everything you know about the process that transforms element 92 to element 94.”

“The special word for this in our language is ‘transmutes,’ ” Teerts said. “It takes place in several steps. First-” He wondered how much Okamoto would make him talk before he got another taste.

Bobby Fiore threw an easy peg to the young Chinese man who stood waiting to catch the ball. The fellow actually did catch it, too; it slapped into the leather glove (a duplicate of Fiore’s) he wore, and he covered it with his bare hand.

“Good job!” Fiore said, using tone and expression and dumb show to get across what he still had trouble saying in Chinese. “Now throw it back.” Again, gesture showed what he wanted.

The Chinese, whose name was Lo, threw high. Fiore sprang and caught the ball. He landed lightly, ready to throw again himself: after so many years on so many infields, he could probably do that in his sleep. Drop a ball anywhere near him and he’d be on it like a cat.

“Don’t throw like a girl,” he told Lo; this once, it was just as well that his pupil didn’t understand exactly what he had to say. He demonstrated, exaggerating the from-the-elbow style the Chinese had used and shaking his head violently to show it wasn’t the best way to do the job. Then he showed the full-arm motion American kids picked up on farmyards, parks, and vacant lots.

Lo didn’t seem to think one better than the other. Instead of using his handmade, expensive baseball to prove the point, Bobby Fiore bent down to get an egg-sized rock. He and Lo were not far from the razor-wire fence around the Lizards’ camp. He turned and threw the rock as far as he could into the green fields beyond the perimeter.

He found another rock, tossed it underhand to Lo. “Let’s see you top that, throwing like you do,” he said. Again, gestures eked out meaning. Lo nodded and let fly, grunting with effort. His rock flew barely half as far as Fiore’s had. He looked at the American, nodded thoughtfully, and tried the full-arm motion. Fiore clapped his hands. “That’s the idea!”

The truth was, he couldn’t antagonize a cash customer. He and Liu flan still put on their baseball show, but it didn’t pull in as much as it had when it was new. A few Chinese had been interested enough to pay to learn more, so he was teaching them to hit and catch and throw. Had the camp had enough open space, they could have put on a real game.

He didn’t care to kowtow to Chinamen, but he’d grown used to the little luxuries spare cash allowed him to buy. And it wasn’t as if he was selling something they had to have. If he got ’em mad at him, they’d just leave. So he did his best to stay on good behavior.

“Come on, try it with the ball,” he said, and tossed it to Lo. The Chinese threw it back, still not too straight but with a better motion. “That’s the way to do it!” Fiore said, clapping his hands in encouragement.

After several more throws that showed he was starting to get the idea, Lo picked up another rock and flung it out over the razor wire into the field. Throwing with his whole arm, he made it go a good deal farther than he’d managed before, but still not as far as Fiore had flung it. The ballplayer puffed out his chest, thinking no Chink was going to get the better of him.

Maybe Lo thought the same thing, for he bowed to Fiore and spoke several sharp sentences. Almost in spite of himself, Fiore was starting to understand Chinese. He didn’t follow all of this, but, got the idea that Lo was praising his arm and wanted to bring by some friends who would also be interested in the way he threw.

“Yeah, sure, that’d be fine,” Fiore answered in English, and then did his best to turn it into Chinese. Evidently Lo got the idea, because he bowed again and nodded, then gave the glove back to Fiore and went on his way.

Well enough pleased with how the afternoon had gone, Fiore headed back toward the house he shared with Liu Han. He started whistling “Begin the Beguine” to himself as he walked along, but had to cut it out when the Chinese he walked past stared at him. As far as he was concerned, Chinese music sounded as if it were made by stepping on cats’ tails-out-of-tune cats, at that. The locals returned the sentiment when he made melodies he liked. Since there were lots of them and one of him, he shut up.

When he opened the door to the hut the Lizards had given him and Liu Han, his nostrils twitched appreciatively. Something tasty was cooking, even if the vegetables that went with it would be strange and underdone for his taste. “Smells good,” he said, and added the Lizards’ emphatic cough.

Liu Han looked up from the pan in which she was cooking. It was, to Fiore’s way of thinking, a funny kind of pan, being shaped like the wide, conical hats a lot of Chinese wore. It had a funny name, too: she called it a walk. Whenever he heard that, he pictured the pan tossing away its bat and trotting down to first base.

Liu Han tilted the walk on its stand so he could see the bite-sized pieces of chicken in it. “Cooked with five spices,” she said. He nodded, smiling. He didn’t know what all five spices were, but they made for mighty tasty cooking.

After supper, he gave her the trade dollars Lo had paid him for learning the art of throwing straight. “He has other people he may want me to teach, too,” he said. “If they all pay as well as he did, that should keep us in groceries a good long while.”

He said it first in English, then added Chinese and Lizard words till he was sure she’d got the idea. When she talked to him, she used a Chinese frame padded with English and Lizard. As time passed, they gained more and more words in common.

She said, “If they pay silver like this Lo, I be fat even without baby.” She was starting to show now, her belly pressing against the cotton tunic that had been loose.

“Babe, you still look good to me,” he said, which made her smile. He got the idea she was surprised he kept wanting her even though she was pregnant. He hadn’t been sure he would, either, but the growing mound of her belly didn’t bother him. It meant he couldn’t just climb on top all the time, but doing it other ways was broadening his horizons.