Harry Turtledove - In the Balance

“It was,” Yi Min said.

Liu Han dressed, then walked over to the door and knocked on it, again and again. “We kept our part of the bargain,” she said. “Now you devils keep yours.”

Whether thanks to the racket she was making or not, the door slid open a couple of minutes later. The devil who opened it was the one who spoke Chinese. “You come,” he said, pointing to her and Yi Min.

She followed without fuss; every other choice looked worse. Yi Min walked right behind her. She gave a long, slow nod when she noticed that. she’d taken the lead here, as in their just-completed joining, simply by acting as if she had the right to do so. She wondered if it was always that simple.

Certainly it was not while facing the little scaly devils, especially here in their lair. Here she was only too aware she was in their power. she ducked to get through the entrance of the chamber to which the devil led her. So did Yi Min; being taller, he had to bend farther. If they had to stay in this strange place any length of time, she was sure they would both end up smashing their foreheads in doorways every so often.

The devils who had been in the original chamber (or at least the same number of devils; Liu Han was still shaky about telling them apart) now gathered around what looked like a tall pedestal with no statue on top of it. Their heads turned when the two people came in. Their, mouths dropped open, almost in unison.

Liu Han did not like the look of all those pointed teeth. The scaly devil who spoke Chinese said, “You watch you go screw.”

That made no sense to Liu Han. She turned to Yi Min. “What is the little devil trying to say? Try and find out, since you speak his language.”

Yi Min made hissing and bubbling noises. Liu Han listened, bemused. Getting him to do what she wanted had been easy-all she needed to do was tell him in a firm way. In this weird place, his man’s arrogance had dried up and blown away: he was no master here, and he knew it.

“The devil says we’re going to watch ourselves couple,” Yi Min reported after a couple of minutes’ back-and-forth. “It’s the same in his speech as it is in Chinese. He seems very sure. He-”

The apothecary shut up. One of the other little scaly devils, impatient with all the chatter, had stuck a clawed finger into a recess near the top of the pedestal. An image sprang into being above it-an image of the two people making love on the shiny mat in the other chamber.

Liu Han stared and stared. She had spent, coppers to see moving pictures two or three times, but this was no ordinary moving picture. For one thing, it was not in shades of gray, but perfectly reproduced the tans and golds and pinks of flesh. For another, the image looked solid, not flat, and, as she discovered when she took a step, her view of it shifted whenever she moved. She walked all the way around the pedestal and saw herself and Yi Min from every side.

The devils watched her, not the image. Their mouths fell open again. All at once, she was sure they were laughing at her. And no wonder-there she lay in miniature, doing publicly what she’d thought private. Watching herself made a third difference from seeing an ordinary moving picture, and made her hate the little devils for tricking her so.

“You people, you screw any time, no season?” the Chinese-speaking devil demanded. “This true for all peoples?”

“Of course it is,” Liu Han snapped. Yi Min didn’t say anything. He was watching his rather beefy buttocks move up and down, twisting his head to get the best possible view of things. As far as he was concerned, being in a moving picture was just fine.

The devil said, “Any man screw any woman any time?”

“Yes, yes, yes.” Liu Han felt like screaming at the nasty little creature. Had it no decency? But then, who could say what was decent for a devil?

The devils talked back and forth among themselves. Every so often, one or another of them would point at the two people, which made Liu Han nervous. The devils’ voices rose. Yi Min said, “They’re arguing. Some of them don’t believe it.”

“What could it matter to them, anyhow?” Liu Han said.

The apothecary shook his head; he had no idea, either. But the Chinese-speaking scaly devil answered the question a little later: “Maybe this screw so what do you Big Uglies so different than Race. Maybe screw any man, woman all time make you so-” He needed a brief colloquy with Yi Min before he found the word he wanted: “So progressive. Yes. Progressive.”

The words, the sentences, made sense to Liu Han, but she did not really take hold of the concepts behind them. Progressive, to her, was a word from Communist propaganda that meant “our way.” As far as she could see, people and the little scaly devils had no way in common. In fact, they seemed to use progressive to mean “The opposite of our way.”

She could not ask them to explain, either, for they were arguing among themselves again. Then the one who spoke Chinese said, “We find out if you speak true. We make test. Make-” He went word hunting with Yi Min again. “Make experiment. Bring for man many womans here, for woman many mans. See if screw all time like you say.”

When he heard that, when he understood it through bad grammar and twisted syntax, Yi Min smiled beatifically. Liu Han stared in disbelieving horror at the little devil, who seemed pleased at his own cleverness. she’d wondered what could be worse than coming to this strange, unpleasant place. Now she knew.

Bobby Fiore picked up a rock, chucked it at a crumpled piece of paper forty or fifty feet away. He didn’t miss by more than a couple of inches. His chuckle was sour. Chucking rocks was as close as he’d come to taking infield since the Lizards grabbed him. He didn’t even dare do that near the perimeter of the camp. The last time anybody’d thrown a stone at a Lizard, five people were shot immediately afterward. That stopped that.

One of the Lizards’ whirligig planes racketed in from the northwest. It landed at their encampment, right outside the fence that cut off the peninsula on which sat Cairo, Illinois. Fiore found another rock, chucked it too, let out a new chuckle more sour than the old. He’d never expected to come back to-to come down to-Cairo again. He’d played there in the Class D Kitty League in-was it 1931 or 1932? He didn’t remember any more. He did remember it had been a funny kind of town. It still was.

A levee surrounded the place to protect it from floods on the Mississippi and the Ohio, at whose confluence Cairo sat. Over the top of the eastern barrier, Fiore could see magnolias and gingkos. They gave the town a Southern atmosphere that seemed out of place for Illinois. Also Southern was the feel of good times now long gone. Cairo had thought it would end up as the steamboat capital of the Mississippi. That didn’t happen. Now it was just a Lizard prison camp.

He supposed it made a good one. Because it had water on three sides, the Lizards had just wrecked the Mississippi highway bridge and run up their fast fences across the neck of Cairo Point. They didn’t have gunboats in the river, but they did have soldiers, with machine guns and rockets on the levee and on the far shores. A couple of boats were supposed to have snuck across at night, but a lot more than a couple got sunk.

Fiore mooched along till he came to the Lizards’ fence. It wasn’t exactly barbed wire; it was more like long strips of narrow, double-edged razor blade. It did the same job as barbed wire, though, and did it just as well.

On the far side-on the free side-of the fence, the Lizards had run up guard towers. They looked the same way, say, Nazi prison-camp guard towers would have looked. A soldier in the nearest one swung the muzzle of his machine gun toward Fiore.