Harry Turtledove - Second Contact

“Home,” Kassquit said again, making the word a drawn-out sigh of longing. I know what to do. If I am presented to the Emperor, I know how to bend, I know all the proper responses. I would make Ttomalss proud.

Another open-mouthed laugh, this one, at least, properly silent. As if anyone would present a Tosevite to the Emperor! Kassquit paused. A Tosevite might be presented to the Emperor, but as a curiosity, not as a person who reverenced him as the Race and the Hallessi and the Rabotevs did. That was not good enough. It made Kassquit angry. I deserve to reverence the Emperor like anyone else!

“Calm yourself. You are growing too excited,” Ttomalss would have said, had he been there and known what was in Kassquit’s mind. Calm did not come easily; as Ttomalss had explained it, the hormones that produced physical maturation in Tosevites were also liable to produce mood swings wilder than any the Race experienced outside the brief mating season.

Ttomalss told the truth there as elsewhere, Kassquit thought. All things considered, I would sooner not have gone through maturation.

Another reluctant trip to the mirror. This time, Kassquit did not stoop, but sighed after looking away at last. Sure enough, the twin bulges of tissue in the upper part of the torso made the lines of her body paint harder to read than they should have been.

And that was far from the worst of the changes she had undergone. Growing the new patches of hair had been very bad. And, had Ttomalss not warned her she would suffer a cyclic flow of blood from her genital opening, she would surely have thought she was ill from some dire disease when it began. The Race suffered no such grotesque inconveniences. Ttomalss had arranged to bring Tosevite sanitary pads up from the surface of the world below for her. They worked well enough, but that she needed such things galled her.

But more upsetting even than that were the feelings coursing through her for which the language of the Race seemed to have no names. With them, for once, Ttomalss had been little help. Dispassionate remarks about reproductive behavior did nothing to slow the thudding of Kassquit’s heart, the whistle of the breath through her, the feeling that the compartment was even warmer than normal.

She had found something that did. Her hand slid down along her painted belly. Of itself, her stance shifted so her feet were wider apart than usual. She looked up at the ceiling, not really seeing it, not really seeing anything. After a bit, she exhaled very hard and quivered a little. Her fingers were damp. She wiped them on a tissue. She knew she would be easier for a while now.

Peking brawled around Liu Han. She wore the long, dark blue tunic and trousers and the conical straw hat of a peasant woman. She had no trouble playing the role; she’d lived it till the little scaly devils came down from the sky and turned China-turned the whole world-upside down.

Her daughter, Liu Mei, who walked along the hutung — the alleyway-beside her, was proof of that. Turning to Liu Han, she said, “I hope we won’t be late.”

“Don’t worry,” Liu Han answered. “We’ve got plenty of time.”

Liu Mei nodded, her face serious. Her face was almost always serious, even when she laughed. The scaly devils had taken her from Liu Han right after she was born, and had kept her in one of their airplanes that never landed for her first year of life outside the womb-her second year of age, as the Chinese reckoned such things. When a baby, she should have learned to smile by watching people around her. But she’d had only little scaly devils around her, and they never smiled-they could not smile. Liu Mei hadn’t learned how.

“I should have liquidated that Ttomalss when I had the chance,” Liu Han said, her hands folding into fists. “Mercy has no place in the struggle against imperialism. I understand that now much better than I did when you were tiny.”

“Truly, Mother, too late to fret over it now,” Liu Mei replied- seriously. Liu Han walked on in grim silence. Her daughter was right, but that left her no happier.

She and Liu Mei both flattened themselves against the splintery front wall of a shop as a burly, sweating man with a load of bricks on a carrying pole edged past them going the other way. He leered at Liu Mei, showing a couple of broken teeth. “If you show me your body, I will show you silver,” he said.

“No,” Liu Mei answered.

Liu Han did not think that was rejection enough, or anywhere close to it. “Go on, get out of here, you stinking turtle,” she screeched at the laborer. “Just because your mother was a whore, you think all women are whores.”

“You would starve as a whore,” the man snarled. But he walked on.

The hutung opened out onto P’ing Tse Men Ta Chieh, the main street leading east into Peking from the P’ing Tse Gate. “Be careful,” Liu Han murmured to Liu Mei. “Scaly devils seldom come into hutungs , and they are often sorry when they do. But they do patrol the main streets.”

Sure enough, here came a squad of them, swaggering down the middle of the broad street and expecting everyone to get out of their way. When people didn’t move fast enough to suit them, they shouted either in their own language-which they expected humans to understand-or in bad Chinese.

Liu Han kept walking. Even after twenty years of practice, the scaly devils had trouble telling one person from another. Liu Mei bent her head so the brim of her hat helped hide her features. She did not look quite like a typical Chinese, and a bright little devil might notice as much.

“They are past us,” Liu Han said quietly, and her daughter straightened up once more. Liu Mei’s eyes were of the proper almond shape. Her nose, though, was almost as prominent as a foreign devil’s, and her face was narrower and more forward-thrusting than Liu Han’s. The black hair the hat concealed refused to lie straight, but had a springy wave to it.

She was a pretty girl- prettier than I was at that age, Liu Han thought-which worried her mother as much as or more than it pleased her. Liu Mei’s father, an American named Bobby Fiore, was dead; the scaly devils had shot him before she was born. Before that, he, like Liu Han, had been a captive on one of those airplanes that never landed. They’d been forced to couple-the little scaly devils had enormous trouble understanding matters of the pillow (hardly surprising, when they came into heat like barnyard animals)-and he’d got her with child.

Off to the east, toward or maybe past the Forbidden City, gunfire crackled. The sound was absurdly cheerful, like the fireworks used to celebrate the new year. Liu Mei said, “I didn’t know we were doing anything today.”

“We’re not,” Liu Han said shortly. The Communists were not the only ones carrying on a long guerrilla campaign against the scaly devils. The reactionaries of the Kuomintang had not abandoned the field. They and Mao’s followers fought each other as well as the little devils.

And the eastern dwarfs kept sending men across the Sea of Japan to raise trouble for the little scaly devils and the Chinese alike. Japan had had imperialist pretensions in China years before the little devils arrived, and resented being excluded from what had been her bowl of rice.

More scaly devils whizzed past, these in a vehicle mounting a machine gun. They headed in the direction of the firing. None of them turned so much as an eye turret in Liu Han’s direction. Liu Han decided to make a lesson of it. “This is why we are strong in the cities,” she said to Liu Mei. “In the cities, we swim unnoticed. In the countryside, where every family has known its neighbors forever and a day, staying hidden is harder.”