Harry Turtledove - In the Balance

He was glancing through the Signal again, trying to figure out what some of the Norwegian (or were they Danish?) words meant, when the door opened. He wondered what the Lizards wanted. He wasn’t hungry yet; the pork and beans still felt like a medicine ball in his stomach. But instead of a Lizard with canned goods, in walked Liu Han.

“Your mate,” said one of the Lizards escorting her. His mouth fell open. Fiore thought that meant he was laughing. That was all right He laughed at the Lizard, too, for not being able to mate.

He gave Liu Han a hug. Neither of them wore anything; they stuck to each other wherever they touched. “How are you?” he said, letting her go. “It’s good to see you.” It was good to see anyone human, but he didn’t say that aloud.

“Good also to see you,” Liu Han said, adding the Lizards’ emphatic cough to end the sentence. They spoke to each other in a jargon they invented and expanded each time they were together, one no other two people could have followed: English, Chinese, and the Lizards’ language pasted together to yield ever-growing meaning.

She said, “I am glad the scaly devils do not force us to mate”-she used the Lizards’ word for that-“each time we see each other now.”

“You’re glad?” He laughed. “I can only do so much.” He flicked his tongue against the inside of his upper lip as he blew air out through his mouth, making a noise like a window shade rolling up-and him with it.

He’d done that often enough for her to understand it. She smiled at his foolishness. “Not that I don’t like what you do when we mate”-again she used the Lizards’ emotionless word, which let her avoid choosing a human term with more flavor to it-“but I do not like having to do it at their order.”

“Yeah, I know,” he said. Being a specimen didn’t appeal to him, either. Then he wondered what they ought to do instead. Besides their bodies, the only thing they had in common was that the Lizards had shanghaied both of them.

Since Liu Han plainly didn’t feel like screwing to pass the time, he went through the Signal with her. He’d decided a while ago that she was anything but stupid, but he found how little she knew of the world outside the village from which she’d come.

He couldn’t read the text of the magazine, but he recognized faces and places in the pictures: Goebbels, Marshal Petain, Paris, North Africa. To Liu Han, they were all strange. He wondered if she’d even heard of Germany.

“Germany and Japan are friends,” he told her, only to discover that Japan wasn’t Japan in Chinese. He tried again: “Japan fights”-that in pantomime-“America and fights China, too.”

“Oh, the eastern devils,” she exclaimed. “Eastern devils kill my man, my child, just before little scaly devils come. This Germany friends with eastern devils? Must be bad.”

“Probably,” he said. He’d been sure the Germans were the bad guys when they declared war on the United States. Since then, though, he’d heard they had done a better job of fighting the Lizards than most. Did that all of a sudden turn them back into good guys? He had trouble figuring out where loyalty to his own country stopped and loyalty to-to his planet, would it be? — started. He wished Sam Yeager were around. Yeager was more used to thinking in terms like those.

He also noticed, not for the first time but more strongly than ever before, that anything not Chinese was somehow devilish to Liu Han. The Lizards were scaly devils; he himself, when he wasn’t Bobbyfiore pronounced all as one word, was a foreign devil; and now the Japs were eastern devils. Given what they’d done to her family, he couldn’t blame her for thinking of them like that, but he was pretty sure she would have hung the same label on them no matter what.

He asked her about it, using multilingual circumlocutions. When she finally understood, she nodded, surprised he needed to put the question to her. “If you are not Chinese, of course you are a devil,” she said, as if stating a law of nature.

“That’s not how it is,” Fiore told her; but she didn’t look convinced. Then he remembered that, till he’d started playing ball and meeting all sorts of people instead of just the ones from his neighborhood, he’d been sure everybody who wasn’t Catholic would burn in hell forever. Maybe this devil business was something like that.

They went back to looking at the Signal. The high-kicking nightclub dancer in her skimpy satin outfit made Liu Han laugh. “How can she show herself, wearing so little?” she asked, forgetting for the moment that she herself wore nothing. Fiore laughed in turn. Except when he stuck to the mat, he often forgot he was naked, too. Amazing what you got used to.

Liu Han pointed to an advertisement for an Olympia typewriter. “What?” she said in English, adding the Lizard interrogative cough.

Fiore had more trouble explaining it than he’d expected. After a while, he figured out that she couldn’t read or write. He’d known a few ballplayers, mostly from the South, who had the same trouble, but it wasn’t something that automatically occurred to him.

Now he wished more than ever that the Signal was in English; he would have started teaching her on the spot. He thought about showing her the alphabet-despite crossed o ’s and a ’s with little circles above them, the ABCs didn’t change much. But if he didn’t understand what he was reading, how was she supposed to? He gave it up as a bad job and turned to the next page.

It showed a flight of German bombers over some Russian city. In spite of the sweltering heat, she shivered and pressed herself against him. She might not know what a typewriter was for, but she recognized bombers when she saw them. Fiore clicked his tongue between his teeth. Wasn’t that a hell of a thing?

They came to the article about Marshal Petain. Fiore thought he was going to have trouble putting across what Vichy France was all about, the more so as he didn’t understand all the details himself. But as soon as he managed to convey to her that it was a German puppet state, she nodded and exclaimed, “Manchukuo!”

“That’s right, the Japs have puppets, too, don’t they?” he said.

“Puppets?” She had the concept, but the word eluded her. He resorted to pantomime again until she got the idea. He hammed up his dumb show as much as he could; she always enjoyed that. she did smile now, but only for a moment. Then she said, “The scaly devils have made puppets of us all.”

He blinked; that was as serious an idea as she’d ever gotten across. She was also dead right. If it weren’t for the Lizards, he’d be… doing what? The answer he arrived at brought him up short. If it weren’t for the Lizards, all he’d be doing was trying to keep a floundering minor-league career alive, getting an off-season job, and waiting for Uncle Sam to send him a draft notice. When you stepped back and looked at it, none of that was worth writing home about.

“Maybe we were already puppets before the Lizards came,” he said harshly. His voice grew softer as he added, “if they hadn’t come, I never would have known you, so I guess I’m glad they did.”

Liu Han did not answer right away. Her face was unreadable as she studied Fiore. He flinched from that quiet scrutiny, wondering how badly he’d just stuck his foot in his mouth. He knew she’d been through hard times, and it was a lot rougher for a, woman to have to lie down with a strange man than the other way around. He suddenly wondered exactly what she thought of him. Was he something good, or simply something better than she’d known in captivity before?

How much the answer mattered surprised him. Till now, he hadn’t asked himself what Liu Han meant to him, either. Sure, getting laid was fine, and he’d found out more about that from her than he’d thought he needed to learn until the Lizards brought him up here. But there was more to it. In spite of all the dreadful things that had happened to her, she remained good people. He wanted to take care of her. But did she want him for anything more than an insurance policy?