Tilting the Balance

As she had when he’d taken out the Lizard tank with her bottle of ether, she let him kiss her but she didn’t do anything in the way of kissing back “What’s the matter with you?” he growled. “Don’t you like me?”

“I like you fine Mutt,” she answered calmly. “I think you know it, too. You’re a good man. But that doesn’t mean I want to sleep with you-or with anybody else, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

Over the years, Mutt had done a fair number of things he’d enjoyed at the time but wasn’t proud of afterwards. Forcing a woman who said-and obviously meant-she wasn’t interested wasn’t any of them, though. Frustrated almost past words, he said, “Well, why the… dickens not? You’re a fine-lookin’ lady, it ain’t like you don’t have any juice in you-”

“That’s so,” she said, and then looked as if she regretted agreeing.

“By Jesus,” Mutt murmured. In a lifetime knocking around the United States, he’d seen and heard about a lot of things nobody who stayed on a Mississippi farm ever dreamt of. “Don’t tell me you’re one o’ them-what do they call ’em? — lizzies, is that right?”

“It’s close enough, anyhow.” Lucille’s face shut up as tight as a poker player’s-especially one who was raising on a busted flush. Poker-faced still, she said, “Okay, Mutt, what if I am?”

She hadn’t said she was, not quite, but she didn’t deny it, either, only waited to see what he’d say next He didn’t know what the hell to say. He’d run across a few queers in his time, but to find out somebody he liked not just because he wanted to lay her but on account of who she was-and he couldn’t be fooled on something like that, not when they’d been living in each other’s pockets through months of grinding combat-was one of these creatures almost as alien as a Lizard… that was a jolt, no doubt about it.

“I dunno,” he said at last. “Reckon I’ll keep my mouth shut. Last thing I want to do is cost us a medic as good as you are.”

She startled him immensely by leaning forward and kissing him on the cheek. An instant later, she looked contrite. “I’m sorry, Mutt. I don’t want to play games with you. But that’s one of the kindest things anybody ever said about me. If I’m good at what I do, why should the rest matter?”

Words like unnatural and perverted flashed across his mind. But he’d had plenty of chances to see that Lucille was good people-somebody you could trust your life to, in the most literal sense of the words.

“I dunno,” he repeated, “but it does, somehow.” Just then, the Lizards started shelling the front part of Danforth again, probably sowing their little artillery-carried mines to keep the Shermans from pushing farther south anytime soon. Mutt had never imagined he could be relieved to take cover from a bombardment, but right at that moment he was.

Liu Han hated going out to the market. People looked hard at her and muttered behind her back. Nobody had ever done anything to her-the little scaly devils were powerful protectors-but the fear was always there.

Little devils paced through the prison camp marketplace, too. They were smaller than people, but nobody got too close to them; wherever they went, they took open space with them. It was, more often than not, the only open space in the crowded market.

The baby in her belly gave her a kick. Even the loose cotton tunic she wore couldn’t disguise her pregnancy any longer. She didn’t know what to feel about Bobby Fiore: sadness that he was gone and worry about whether he was all right mingled with shame over the way the scaly devils had forced them together and a different sort of shame at conceiving by a foreign devil.

She let the market din wash over her and take her away from herself. “Cucumbers!”-a fellow pulled a couple of them from a wicker basket tied round his middle. They were long and twisty like snakes. A few feet away another man cried the virtues of his snake meat. “Cabbages!” “Fine purple horseradish!”

“Pork!” The man selling disjointed pieces of pig carcass wore shorts and an open jacket. His shiny brown belly showed through, and looked remarkably like one of the bigger cuts of meat he had on display.

Liu Han hesitated between his stall and the one next to it, which displayed not only chickens but fans made from chicken feathers glued to brightly painted horn frames. “Make up your mind, foolish woman!” somebody screeched at her. She hardly minded; that, at least, was an impersonal insult.

She went up to the man who sold chickens. Before she could say anything, he quietly told her, “Take your business somewhere else. I don’t want any money from the running dogs of the imperialist scaly devils.”

A Communist, she thought dully. Then anger flared in her. “What if I tell the scaly devils who and what you are?” she snapped.