Upsetting the Balance (8 page)

“If we were, you’d be dead meat,” Skoob retorted. A short pause showed he was letting his mouth fall open in laughter.

“Let’s get moving,” Nejas said. “Driver, start the engine.”

“It shall be done, superior sir.” The return to routine heartened Ussmak; however battered by fate he’d been, he was still a male of the Race. The hydrogen-burning turbine caught on the first try. He would have been astonished at anything else. The Race’s engineering was solid.

“We’ll clean up the Deutsche here and then resume our advance,” Nejas said as the landcruiser began to move. “A little delay won’t matter.” Ussmak wondered if he’d had his tongue in the ginger jar, too. But no. Nejas and Skoob had never developed the habit. They were everything a male of the Race should be, and so unselfconscious about it that he couldn’t even resent them.

Landcruisers and troop carriers rumbled up the road together. The farmland to either side had probably been fertile once, but armies going back and forth across it hadn’t done much to help that. Ruins, craters, and the tumbled corpses of Tosevite animals were appalling. Ussmak didn’t see any Big Uglies. They weren’t too stupid to get out of the way of the war.

Not far ahead, a male in the gray sacks the Deutsche wore to protect themselves from their world’s beastly climate popped up out of a concealed hole in the ground and pointed something at a troop carrier. Flame shot from the rear of the device; a projectile rocketed toward the carrier. Without looking to see whether he’d scored a hit, the Big Ugly ducked back into his hole.

Troop carriers were armored against small-arms fire but, unlike landcruisers, not against heavy weapons. The projectile struck just below the turret. The carrier burst into flames at once. Escape hatches popped open as its crew and the fighting males it bore tried to escape. Some did; fire from Deutsch gunners cut down others.

“Smash that Tosevite!” Nejas screamed from the intercom speaker taped to Ussmak’s hearing diaphragm. Normally a calm, collected commander, he sounded as furiously excitable as any ginger-licker after three tastes.

By contrast, Ussmak was coldly furious. “It shall be done, superior sir,” he said grimly, and steered straight for the foxhole from which the Big Ugly had emerged. He made sure he put a tread right on it, then locked that tread and turned the landcruiser in its own length, crushing the Deutsch male as if he were grinding an insect underfoot. Then he drove on.

“It’s not revenge enough,” Skoob complained.

“It certainly isn’t, by the Emperor,” Nejas agreed. “The Deutsche came out ahead in that exchange.”

As he’d been trained since hatchlinghood to do, Ussmak cast down his eyes at the mention of his sovereign. Before he could raise them—WHAM! The impact against the front of the landcruiser was like a kick in the muzzle. He’d been in a landcruiser that had taken shell hits back in the SSSR, but never one like this. But the armor held—if it hadn’t, he wouldn’t have been sitting there thinking about how hard he’d just been hit.

Commander and gunner normally went through a series of orders identifying a target and designating it for destruction. This time, Skoob just said, “With your permission, superior sir,” and fired after a tiny pause. That hesitation was enough to let the Deutsche fire again, too. WHAM! Again an impact that jolted Ussmak, again the shell failed to penetrate.

The landcruiser rocked with the round Skoob fired. “Hit!” Ussmak shouted as flame and smoke spurted from behind bushes. Not even the best Big Ugly landcruiser gun could pierce the frontal armor of one of the Race’s landcruisers, but the reverse did not hold true.

“Forward,” Nejas ordered. Ussmak gave the engine more throttle. The landcruiser leaped ahead.

More Deutsche, Ussmak discovered, were armed with those alarming rocket projectors. They killed two troop carriers that he saw, and managed to set one landcruiser afire. Few of the males who used the projectors escaped. The blast from the launchers showed just where they were, and gunners sent heavy fire their way—nor was Ussmak the only male to take more direct measures of extermination.

He’d almost reached a town marked on the map as Rouffach when Nejas ordered, “Driver halt.”

“Halting, superior sir,” Ussmak said obediently, though the command puzzled him: despite the antivehicle rockets, they’d been driving the Big Uglies before them.

“Orders from the unit commander,” Nejas said. “We’re to pull back from this position and resume our previous offensive.”

“It shall be done,” Ussmak said, as he had to say. Then, not only because he’d been through a lot of combat with a lot of crews but also because the deaths of his previous crewmales made him much more an outsider than males of the Race usually became, he went on, “That doesn’t make a lot of sense, superior sir. Even if we were beating them, we haven’t smashed the Big Uglies here, and by going off we’ve just given the Deutsche by the big river a couple of days’ rest to strengthen their defenses. They were tough enough before, and they’d stay that way, even if we had forced our way through some of them.”

For a considerable time, Nejas did not answer him. At last, the landcruiser commander said, “Driver, I fear you demonstrate imperfect subordination.” Ussmak knew he was imperfect in any number of ways. That was a long way from saying he was wrong.

“Take off your clothes,” Ttomalss said. The little scaly devil’s Chinese held a thick, hissing accent, but Liu Han was used to it and followed it without trouble.

She used the little devil’s speech in return: “It shall be done, superior sir.” She wondered if Ttomalss could detect the weary resignation in her voice. She didn’t think so. The little scaly devils were interested in learning everything they could about people, but only as people might be interested in learning everything they could about some new kind of pig. That people might have feelings didn’t seem to have occurred to them.

Sighing, Liu Han pulled off her black cotton tunic, let her baggy trousers and linen drawers fall to the dirt floor of the hut in the refugee camp west of Shanghai. Outside, people chattered and argued and scolded children and chased chickens and ducks. The marketplace lay not far away; the racket that came from there was never-ending, like the plashing of a stream. She had to make a deliberate effort to hear it.

Ttomalss’ weird eyes swiveled independently as they examined her. She stood still and let him look all he cared to; one thing more than a year’s association with the little scaly devils had taught her was that they had no prurient interest in mankind . . . not that she would have aroused prurient interest in many men, not with a belly that looked as if she’d swallowed a great melon whole. Her best guess was that the baby would come in less than a month.

Ttomalss walked up to her and set the palm of his hand on her belly. His skin was dry and scaly, like a snake’s, but warm, almost feverish, against hers. The little devils were hotter than people. The few Christians in the camp said that proved they came from the Christian hell. Wherever they came from, Liu Han wished they’d go back there and leave her—leave everyone—alone.

The baby kicked inside her. Ttomalss jerked his hand away, skittering back a couple of paces with a startled hiss. “That is disgusting,” he exclaimed in Chinese, and added the emphatic cough.

Liu Han bowed her head. “Yes, superior sir,” she said. What point to arguing with the scaly devil? His kind came from eggs, like poultry or songbirds.

Cautiously, Ttomalss returned He reached out again and touched her in a very private place. “We have seen, in your kind, that the hatchlings come forth from this small opening. We must examine and study the process most carefully when the event occurs. It seems all but impossible.”

“It is true, superior sir.” Liu Han still stood quiet, enduring his hand, hating him. Hate filled her, but she had no way to let it out. After the Japanese overran her village and killed her husband and little son, the little scaly devils had overrun the Japanese—and kidnapped her.

The little devils had mating seasons like farm animals. Finding out that people didn’t had repelled and fascinated them at the same time. She was one of the unlucky people they’d picked to learn more about such—again, as people might explore the mating habits of pigs. In essence, though they didn’t seem to think of it in those terms, they’d turned her into a whore.

In a way, she’d been lucky. One of the men they’d forced on her, an American named Bobby Fiore, had been decent enough, and she’d partnered with him and not had to endure any more strangers. The baby kicked again. He’d put it in her belly.

But Bobby Fiore was dead now, too. He’d escaped from the camp with Chinese Communist guerrillas. Somehow, he’d got to Shanghai. The scaly devils had killed him there—and brought back color photos of his corpse for her to identify.

Ttomalss opened a folder and took out one of the astonishing photographs the little scaly devils made. Liu Han had seen photographs in magazines before the little devils came from wherever they came from. She’d seen moving pictures at the cinema a few times. But never had she seen photographs with such perfect colors, and never had she seen photographs that showed depth.

This one was in color, too, but not in colors that seemed connected to anything in the world Liu Han knew: bright blues, reds, and yellows were splashed, seemingly at random, over an image of a curled-up infant. “This is a picture developed by the machine-that-thinks from scans of the hatchling growing inside you,” Ttomalss said.

“The machine-that-thinks is stupid, superior sir,” Liu Han said scornfully. “The baby will be born with skin the color of mine, except pinker, and it will have a purplish patch above its buttocks that will fade in time. It will not look like it rolled through a painter’s shop.”

Ttomalss’ mouth dropped open. Liu Han couldn’t tell if he was laughing at her or he thought the joke was funny. He said, “These are not real colors. The machine-that-thinks uses them to show which parts of the hatchling are warmer and which cooler.”

“The machine-that-thinks is stupid,” Liu Han repeated. She didn’t understand everything Ttomalss meant by the phrase; she knew that. The scaly devils were pretty stupid themselves, even if they were strong—maybe they needed machines to do their thinking for them. “Thank you for showing me I will have a son before it is born,” she said, and bowed to Ttomalss. “How could the machine-that-thinks see inside me?”

“With a kind of light you cannot see and a kind of sound you cannot hear,” the little devil said, which left Liu Han no wiser than before. He held out other pictures to her. “Here are earlier pictures of the hatchling. You see it looks more like you now.”

He was right about that. Foolish colors aside, some of the pictures hardly looked like anything human. But Liu Han had talked with women who’d miscarried, and remembered them speaking of the oddly shaped lumps of flesh they’d expelled. She was willing to believe Ttomalss wasn’t lying to her.

“Will you take more pictures now, superior sir, or may I dress?” she asked.

“Not of the hatchling, but of you, that we may study how your body changes as the hatchling grows inside.” Ttomalss took out what had to be a camera, although Liu Han had never seen one so small in a human’s hands. He walked all around her, photographing from front, back, and sides. Then he said, “Now you dress. I see you again soon.” He skittered out the door. He did remember to close it after himself, for which Liu Han was duly grateful.

Sighing, she got back into her clothes. Other cameras hidden in the hut probably recorded that. She’d given up worrying about it. The little scaly devils had had her under close surveillance ever since she fell into their clutches, and that had grown closer yet after Bobby Fiore somehow managed to get out of the camp.

Yet no matter how tight it was, there were ways around it. Ttomalss had told her something worth knowing. She took a couple of silver Mex dollars from a hiding place among her pots and pans, then left the hut herself.

A lot of people gave her a wide berth as she walked slowly down the dirt road that ran in front of the house—anyone who was so obviously involved with the little devils was not to be trusted. But children didn’t skip alongside her chanting “Running dog!” as they once had.

The market square brawled with life, merchants selling pork and chicken and ducks and puppies and vegetables of every sort, jade and silk and cotton, baskets and pots and braziers—anything they could raise or find or trade for (or steal) in the refugee camp. Women in clinging dresses with slits pasted alluring smiles on their faces and offered to show men their bodies, a euphemism for prostituting themselves. They didn’t lack for customers. Liu Han pitied them; she knew what they had to endure.

She dodged a mountebank juggling knives and bowls as he strolled through the market. Her sidestep almost made her upset the ivory tiles of a mahjong player who made his living by matching wits against all comers (and maybe by unduly clever fingers as well). “Watch where you’re going, stupid woman!” he shouted at her.

Bobby Fiore had used a one-fingered gesture to answer shouts like that; he knew what it meant and the Chinese didn’t, so he could vent his feelings without getting them angry. Liu Han just kept walking. She paused in front of a cart full of straw hats. As she tried one on, she said to the man behind the cart, “Did you know the little scaly devils have a camera that can see how hot things are? Isn’t that amazing?”

“If I cared, it would be,” the hat seller answered in a dialect she could hardly follow; the camp held people from all over China. “Do you want to buy that hat or not?”

After haggling for a while, she walked on. She talked about the camera at several other stalls and carts, and bought some
bok choi
and a small brass pot. She’d wandered through half the market before she came to a poultry seller whose stand was next to that of a pig butcher. She told him about the camera, too, while she bought some chicken feet and some necks. “Isn’t that amazing?” she finished.

“A camera that can see how hot things are? That
is
amazing,” he said. “You think I give you that much for thirty cents Mex? Woman, you are crazy!”