Harry Turtledove - Second Contact

“I understand, Mother,” Liu Mei said. “But this also works for the Kuomintang, doesn’t it?”

“Oh, yes,” Liu Han agreed. “A knife will cut for whoever takes it in hand.” She nodded to her daughter. “You are quick. You need to be quick, the way the world is today.”

When she was Liu Mei’s age and even older, all she’d wanted to do was go on living as she and her ancestors always had. But the Japanese had come to her village, killing her husband and her little son. And then the little scaly devils had come, driving out the eastern dwarfs and capturing her. She, who had not even thought of going to the city, was uprooted from everything she’d ever known.

And she’d thrived. Oh, it hadn’t been easy, but she’d done it. She had abilities she hadn’t even suspected. Once in a while, when she was in an uncommonly kindly mood, she thought she owed the little scaly devils some gratitude for liberating her from her former, ever so limited, life.

She glanced over to Liu Mei. She owed the scaly devils something else for what they’d done to her daughter. And she’d been giving them what she owed them ever since. That debt might never be paid in full, but she intended to keep on trying.

Liu Mei’s face did not change much even when she laughed. She laughed now, laughed and pointed. “Look, Mother! More devil-boys!”

“I see them,” Liu Han said grimly. She did not find the young people-boys and shameless girls, too-in any way amusing. When foreign devils from Europe spread their imperialistic web through China, some Chinese had imitated them in dress and food and way of life because they were powerful. The same thing was happening now with respect to the scaly devils.

This particular pack of devil-boys took things further than most. Like most such bands, they wore tight shirts and trousers printed in patterns that mimicked body paint, but several had shaved not only their heads but also their eyebrows in an effort to make themselves look as much like scaly devils as they could. They larded their speech with affirmative and interrogative coughs and words from the little scaly devils’ language.

Many older people gave way before them, almost as they might have for real scaly devils. Liu Han did not. Stolid as if she were alone on the sidewalk, she strode straight through them, Liu Mei beside her. “Be careful, foolish female!” one of the devil-boys hissed in the scaly devils’ tongue. His friends giggled to hear him insult someone who would not understand.

But Liu Han did understand. That she was part of the revolutionary struggle against the little scaly devils did not mean she had not studied them-just the opposite, in fact. She whirled and hissed back: “Be silent, hatchling from an addled egg!”

How the devil-boys stared! Not all of them understood what she’d said. But they could hardly fail to understand that a plain, middle-aged woman spoke the little devils’ language at least as well as they did-and that she was not afraid of them. The ones who did understand giggled again, this time at their friend’s discomfiture.

The boy who had first mocked Liu Han spoke in Chinese now: “How did you learn that language?” He did not even add an interrogative cough.

“None of your business,” Liu Han snapped. She was already regretting her sharp answer. She and Liu Mei were not perfectly safe in Peking. Sometimes the little devils treated Chinese Communist Party officials like officials from the foreign devils’ governments they recognized. Sometimes they treated them like bandits, even if the Communists made them sorry when they did.

“What about you, good-looking one?” The devil-boy shifted back to the scaly devils’ speech to aim a question at Liu Mei. He showed ingenuity as well as brashness, for the little devils’ language was short on endearments. They did not need them among themselves, not when they had a mating season and no females to put them into it.

“I am none of your business, either,” Liu Mei answered in the little devils’ tongue. She’d begun to pick it up as her birth speech before Ttomalss had to return her to Liu Han. Maybe that had helped her reacquire it later, after she’d become fluent in Chinese. She threw in an emphatic cough to show how much she wasn’t the devil-boy’s business.

Instead of deflating, he laughed and folded himself into the scaly devils’ posture of respect. “It shall not be done, superior female!” he said, with an emphatic cough of his own.

That was when he began to interest Liu Han. “You speak the little scaly devils’ language well,” she said in Chinese. “What is your name?”

“I ought to say, ‘None of your business,’ ” the devil-boy replied. That was apt to be true in more ways than one; people who asked such questions could put those who answered them in danger. But the devil-boy went on, “It does not much matter, though, for everyone knows I am Tao Sheng-Ming.” He returned to the scaly devils’ tongue: “Is that not a foolish name for a male of the Race?”

Those of his friends who understood whooped with glee and slapped their thighs with the palms of their hands. In spite of herself, Liu Han smiled. Tao Sheng-Ming seemed to take nothing seriously, not his own Chinese blood and not the little devils he aped, either. But he was plainly bright; if he discovered the proper ideology, he might become very valuable.

Thoughtfully, Liu Han said, “Well, Tao Sheng-Ming, if you are ever on Nan Yang Shih K’uo — South Sheep Market Mouth-in the eastern part of the city, you might look for Ma’s brocade shop there.”

“And what would I find in it?” Tao asked.

“Why, brocade, of course,” Liu Han answered innocently. “Ask for Old Lin. He will show you everything you need.”

If Tao Sheng-Ming did ask for Old Lin, he would be recruited. Maybe he would pay attention. Maybe, being a devil-boy with an itch for trouble, he wouldn’t. Still, Liu Han judged the effort worth making.

Lieutenant Colonel Johannes Drucker was one of the lucky ones who went out into space: he enjoyed being weightless. Some of the men in the Reich Rocket Force had to nurse their stomachs through every tour in orbit. Not Drucker. His problem was working hard enough on the exercise bicycle to keep from coming home a couple of kilos heavier than when he’d gone up.

And the view from up here was beyond compare. Right now, his orbit was carrying him southeast across the United States, toward the Gulf of Mexico. Through swirling clouds, he could see plains and forests and, coming up swiftly, the deep blue of the sea. And, when he lifted his eyes to the stars blazing in the black sky of space, that was just as fine in a different way.

But he couldn’t gawp for too long. His eyes flicked to the instruments that monitored oxygen, CO2, the batteries-literally, the things that kept him breathing. Everything there was fine. And he’d used very little fuel from the maneuvering rockets so far this tour. He could change his orbit considerably if he had to.

Then he was looking out the window again, this time to the sides and rear. Like its smaller predecessors, the A-45 was an Army project, but the Focke-Wulf design bureau had given the manned upper stage a cockpit view a fighter pilot might have envied. He needed it; he depended far more on his own senses than did Lizard pilots, who had fancier electronics to help them.

Below and to either side were the bulges of his missile tubes, a thermonuclear sting in each of them. If he got the order, he could blow a couple of Lizards or Russians or Americans out of the sky-or, for that matter, aim the missiles at land targets.

Sun sparkled off the titanium wings on which he’d ride back to Earth. The swastikas on the wings were due for repainting; this upper stage had made several landings since the last time they’d been slapped on. He shrugged. That sort of stuff was for people down on the ground to worry about. Up here, as in any combat assignment, what you did counted. What you looked like didn’t.