Harry Turtledove - In the Balance

She looked away from him. she didn’t know she was crying till the first scalding tears ran down her cheeks. Once she started, she discovered she could not stop. She wailed and keened for all she’d lost and suffered and endured, for her husband and her village, for her very world and her own violation. she’d never imagined she had so many tears inside her.

After a little while, she felt Bobby Fiore’s hand on her shoulder. “Hey,” he said. “Hey.” she didn’t know what it meant in his language. she didn’t know if it meant anything or was just a sound. she did know his voice held sympathy, and that he was the only human being who’d shown her any since her nightmare began. She twisted around and clung to him till she’d cried herself out.

He didn’t do much but let her hold him. He ran a hand through her hair once or twice and quietly said “Hey” a few more times. She hardly noticed, so consumed was she by her own grief.

As her sobs at last slowed to gasps and hiccups, she felt his erection pressed against her belly, hot as the tears she’d shed. She wondered how long he’d had it. It didn’t surprise her; she would have been surprised if a naked man in the arms of a naked woman failed to rise. What surprised her was that he’d been content to ignore it. What could she possibly have done to stop him if he’d decided to take her again?

His restraint made her want to cry again. She realized how desperate she’d grown when simply not being raped became a kindness worth tears.

He asked her something in his own language. She shook her head. He shook his, too, maybe angry at himself for forgetting she couldn’t understand. His eyebrows came together as he looked thoughtfully past her shoulder toward the blank metal wall of the chamber. He tried the scaly devils’ speech: “You, Liu Han, not bad now?”

“Not so bad, Bobby Fiore.” When she tried to say his name, she botched it at least as badly as he had hers.

“Okay,” he said. she did understand that; a city person in one of the films she’d seen had said it. People in the city picked up foreign devils’ slang along with their machines and funny clothes.

He let go of her. She looked down at herself. she’d held him so tight, the smooth skin of her chest had the marks of his hair pressed into it. His erection started to droop now that she no longer lay against him. She reached out and closed her hand around him. The Lizards had taken everything she’d ever had, leaving her with only her body with which to thank him.

That eyebrow of his went up again. So did what she was holding. Somehow, the heat of it against the palm of her hand brought comfort. If it was good this time, if she lost herself in her body, sheer sensation might let her forget for a little while the metal room in which she was trapped and the scaly devils who kept her here to satisfy their own perverse curiosity.

She moaned softly as she lay back on the mat once more. She wanted it to be good, hoped it would be. Bobby Fiore moved beside her. His lips came down on hers; his hand roamed her body. A bit sooner than she would have liked, his fingers found their way between her legs. They didn’t go quite to the right place. After a few seconds of frustration, she reached down and moved them to where they belonged.

He frowned for a moment. She hoped she hadn’t angered him. Who could say what might anger a foreign devil? He didn’t put his hand back where it had been, though. And now it was better, now her eyes closed and her buttocks clenched and her back began to arch. As if from far away, she heard him laugh, deep in his throat.

She was at the edge of the Clouds and Rain when he took his hand away. Her eyes opened. It was her turn to start to frown. But his weight pressed her against the slick surface of the mat. His tongue teased her left nipple as he guided himself into her. Her legs rose, clenched around him. With her inner muscles, she squeezed him as hard as she could. “Ah,” he said, in surprise or delight or both at once. Then she stopped listening to anything but what her body told her.

Afterward, they were both sweaty and breathing hard. The only thing wrong with making love, Liu Han thought as the afterglow faded, was that it didn’t really help. All the troubles pleasure had let her ignore were still here. None had got any better. Ignoring troubles was not meeting them. She knew that, but what else, here, could she do?

She wondered if foreign devils had the wit to be disturbed by such worries. She glanced over at Bobby Fiore. His hairy face had turned serious, his own gaze distant and inward. Surely thoughts much like her own were passing through his head.

But when he noticed her looking at him, he smiled and sat up in one smooth motion. He might have been imperfectly skilled in matters of the mattress, but he had a well-muscled body which he handled well otherwise. He also had a sense of foolishness-this time he pretended to smoke two cigarettes at once, one in each hand.

Liu Han laughed. A few seconds later, she rolled over and gave the foreign devil with the funny name a long, grateful hug. Whatever private fears or worries he’d been brooding about, he’d set them aside to make her feel better. That was something else that hadn’t happened since the scaly devils came (and not often before then; she was, after all, only a woman).

As if thinking of the little devils was enough to make them appear, the door to the hallway outside her chamber slid open. The devils who had brought Bobby Fiore in now returned to take him away again. That was how it went: they forced a man on her, then took him away so she never saw him again. Up till now, that had been only a relief. Now it wasn’t, or not so much. But the devils didn’t care one way or the other.

Or so she thought, until the scaly devil who spoke Chinese after a fashion said, “You do mating two times. Why two times? Never two times before.” Absurdly, he sounded suspicious, as if he’d caught her enjoying herself at what was supposed to be hard work. Well, in a way, he had.

she’d learned honest answers worked best with the little devils. “We did it twice because I liked him much more than I liked any of the others. I just wanted to be rid of them. But he is not a bad man; if he were Chinese, he might be a very good man.”

The other devil was talking with Bobby Fiore. He answered in his own language. It wasn’t Chinese, so Liu Han could make nothing out of it. Because it had no tones, it sounded to her more like animals grunting than speech. She wondered how-and if-foreign devils managed to understand one another. But compared to the hisses and coughs the scaly devils used, Bobby Fiore’s foreign devil language was as lovely as a beautiful song.

The little scaly devil who had been talking with her turned and spoke to the one who’d been talking with Bobby Fiore. They made their snaky noises back and forth. Liu Han tried to follow what they were saying, but couldn’t: they talked too fast. She worried. The last time she’d had a moment of feeling partway safe and secure, the scaly devils had turned her into a whore. What new horror were they plotting now?

The one who spoke Bobby Fiore’s language said something to him. He nodded as he answered. That seemed to mean the same thing to him as it did to her, so he’d probably just said yes. But yes to what?

The Lizard who knew a little Chinese turned both his eyes back to her. “You want come back again this man?”

The question took her by surprise. Again she gave an honest answer. “What I really want is to go back to the camp you took me from. If you will not do that, I wish you would just leave me alone here and not make me give my body for food.”

“This one choice not for you,” the scaly devil said. “This other choice not for you, either.”