Harry Turtledove - In the Balance

“He’s telling us to go that way,” Yi Min replied, pointing in the same direction the little devil had. “He says they will not hurt us if we do as they say.”

Liu Han pushed against the arms of her seat. She floated up, lighter than a feather. The scaly devil did grab her, but only to straighten her course. Yi Min followed, still making queasy noises in the back of his throat.

The room from which the devils had come was smaller than the one in which they’d confined the humans. One wall was nothing but dials and buttons and screens. A scaly devil with a short sword floated in front of it. He hissed at Liu Han, as if warning her to come no closer. She wanted to laugh at him-she had no intention of doing that.

The devil’s small, skinny body did not cover all the screens. One showed cloud-covered blue and brown slowly moving past, as if seen from far above. The pretty colors had a sharp, curved edge; above was only black: “Look, Yi Min,” Liu Han said. “They can make pretty pictures. I wonder what it is.”

Yi Min looked at the screen, pointed to it, tried out his small command of the devils’ tongue on the one guarding it. That one answered at some length, Yi Min interrupting a couple of times with new questions. The apothecary said, “That’s our world going round many miles below us, Liu Han, our whole world. The Western devils with whom I studied were right, it seems-the world really is round like a ball.”

Liu Han kept her own opinion of that to herself. The world had always looked flat to her. But it certainly did seem to have a round edge now. Now was not the time to worry about it, not with so many more urgent concerns closer to hand.

The scaly devil hissed and pointed with his blade, urging her forward. She grabbed what had to be a handhold and went through another opening. Two more armed devils waited in the much bigger space out there. They pointed to an open circular doorway in the curved wall of that space. Liu Han obediently propelled herself toward it. It had handholds all around, for those whose aim was poor.

Hers wasn’t. She almost collided with the devil waiting inside that tunnel. Yi Min missed the doorway and had to scrabble in with the handholds. He was nursing a sprained wrist and cursing under his breath when he appeared. The two floating devils followed him.

The trip along that corridor was the strangest journey Liu Han had ever known, even surpassing the weightless flight in the roaring plane. With every foot she traveled away from the door way, she grew heavier. From floating, she went to bounding, then to walking with long strides, then to ordinary steps with what felt like about her proper weight.

“How do they do that?” she asked Yi Min; he was, after all, the only other person available, and could also talk with the devils, which she could not-although, now that she thought about it, what held her back from learning their words for herself?

He spoke, listened, spoke, listened, finally gave up. “I do not understand. It has something to do with spinning round and round, but how could that make us heavier or lighter?” He wiped his sweaty forehead with a sleeve. “It’s too hot in here, too.”

“It certainly is,” Liu Han said. It was as bad as any midsummer day, though less humid than usual in her village in summer. That helped, but not enough. The devils seemed perfectly happy in the heat. She remembered how warm the mat on which the devil was sitting had felt, just a few hours before. And the Christian priest, she recalled, had said devils lived in a hot place. She hadn’t taken him seriously, but he must have known what he was talking about. Maybe, being a Western devil himself, he’d had more intimate acquaintance with other sorts of devils than was possible for a Chinese.

The armed devils took the two humans out of the corridor and into another one. Other devils bustled past on errands of their own. Some of them turned one turreted eye toward Liu Han and Yi Min. Most just ignored the two people.

The escort led Liu Han and Yi Min into a large room. Already inside were several devils with fancier body paint than any Liu Han had yet seen and a mat covered not with cotton cloth but with some smooth shiny stuff, obviously of devilish manufacture. One of the waiting devils surprised Liu Han by speaking Chinese. What he said surprised her even more: “You two go screw now.”

She gaped at him, wondering if she’d heard correctly (his accent was dreadful) and whether he knew what he was saying. She knew a certain amount of relief to see that Yi Min looked as befuddled and as dismayed as she felt. To have endured both terror and wonder to get here, only to receive a blunt order to fornicate… She wondered about the little scaly devils in ways that had never occurred to her before.

“You go screw now,” the devil repeated.

“No,” she said, the word out of her mouth before she had time to wonder about its consequences.

And, “No,” Yi Min echoed, which surprised her very little. It was soon after he had taken her before, and he’d been through quite a lot since. Few men wanted to try when they weren’t likely to succeed.

“Not go screw, not leave,” the scaly devil said.

Liu Han and Yi Min stared at each other, appalled. No matter how interesting the journey hither had been, Liu Han did not want to spend the rest of her days in the company of devils and Yi Min. But she had no desire to exhibit herself to the devils either. “You are perverts if you think we will perform for you,” she burst out. “Go away and leave us alone; then we will see.”

“You can’t talk to them that way,” Yi Min said fearfully. But the devil who spoke Chinese hissed at the others. They filed out of the chamber, one by one. The last one closed the door. What sounded like a lock clicked. The devils might have left (and even that surprised her), but they hadn’t changed their minds.

Liu Han looked around. Without the scaly devils, the chamber was dreadfully bare: no food, no water, not even a pot for night soil. Just that cursed shiny mat. She looked from it to Yi Min, back again. She wished she could persuade herself otherwise, but she was convinced that door wouldn’t open again until she and the apothecary did what the devils wanted.

Resignedly, she started taking off her clothes. “What are you doing?” Yi Min said.

“What do you think I’m doing? I’m getting this over with,” she retorted. “If the choice is between having you and staying locked up here among the devils, I’d sooner have you. But once we’re back in camp, Yi Min, you’ll never touch me again.”

That warning was nothing but a bluff, and she knew it, she had no family in the camp to protect her from the apothecary, and he was bigger and stronger than she. But he did not argue. Muttering “Whatever you say,” he undid the waistband of his trousers, let them fall to the metal floor of the chamber.

He did not have an easy time of it. She had to help him with her hand and then her mouth before he would rise at all. He moved slowly and carefully within her, shepherding his strength, and went on almost endlessly before at last he managed to spend.

Maybe that long, slow passage was what helped Liu Han startle herself by also ascending to the Clouds and Rain. More probably, though, she decided later, she’d let herself go because for the first time the coupling was of her choosing, not forced upon her. True, the choice-Yi Min or the devils-had not been a good one, but it was her own. That made a lot of difference.

The apothecary was still puffing as he rolled off her. “I wonder what the little blinking orange light over there in the corner of the ceiling was,” he said, pointing.

“I didn’t notice it,” she confessed. That annoyed her; every time till now, she’d been more interested in where she was than in what Yi Min was doing to her. Now when they were finally in new and fascinating surroundings, her foolish body kept her from seeing everything there was to see. She glanced toward the ceiling. “It’s not there now.”