Tilting the Balance

Get killed, that’s what, Ussmak thought. He’d come too close to getting killed already, he’d seen too many males die around him, to contemplate that with equanimity. He wiggled and twisted on the lowered seat, trying to find a position where he wouldn’t have to think. The manufacturers of the seat seemed to have overlooked that important design feature.

When sleep would not come no matter bow he tried to lure it, he sat up and ever so cautiously took his vial of ginger from its hiding place. Even though he was alone in the landcruiser, he let his eye turrets swivel in all directions to make sure no one was watching him. Only then did his tongue flick out to taste the precious powder.

Instantly, his worries about how the advance into Deutschland would continue fell away. Of course the Race would do whatever was required. Ussmak could see, could all but reach out and touch, the best and easiest way to smash the Big Uglies once and for all. He wished Nejas and Skoob were in here with him. His wisdom would amaze them.

But somehow, try as he would, he couldn’t make the image glittering in his ginger-filled mind turn from mere image into concrete words and plans. That was the herb’s frustration: what it showed you seemed real until you tried to make it so. Then it proved as evanescent as the steam of his breath on a chilly Tosevite morning.

“Maybe if I have another taste, everything will come clear,” Ussmak said. He reached for the vial again. Even before his hand closed on it, his tongue flicked out in anticipation.

Liu Han hated the little scaly devils’ photographs, whether they moved or stood still. Oh, they were marvelous in their way, full of lifelike color and able to be viewed from more than one perspective, almost as if they were life itself magically captured.

But they had seldom shown her anything she wanted to see. When the little devils held her prisoner on the airplane that never came down, they’d made moving pictures of the congress they’d forced her to have with men she hadn’t wanted. Then, after Bobby Fiore put a child in her, they’d terrified her with images of a black woman dying in childbirth. And now…

She stared down at the still photograph the scaly devil named Ttomalss had just handed her. A man lay on his back on the paved sidewalk of some city. His face looked peaceful, but he rested in a great glistening pool of blood and a submachine gun lay beside him.

“This is the Big Ugly male named Bobby Fiore?” Ttomalss asked in fair Chinese.

“Yes, superior sir,” Liu Han said in a small voice. “Where is this picture from? May I ask?”

“From the city called Shanghai. You know this city?”

“Yes, I know this city-I know of it, I should say, because I have never been there. I have never been close to it.” Liu Han wanted to make that as plain as she could. If Bobby Fiore had been killed fighting against the scaly devils, as certainly looked likely, she didn’t want Ttomalss to suspect she was involved. Of that she was innocent.

The little devil turned one eye turret toward the photograph, the other toward her. She always found that disconcerting. He said, “This male of yours met these evil males who fight us while he was in this camp. He met with them here, in this house. We have proof of this, and you do not ever say it is a lie. If he is with the Big Ugly bandits, maybe you are with these bandits, too?” In spite of the interrogative cough, his words sounded much more like a threat.

“No, superior sir.” Liu Han used the other cough, the emphatic one. She would have been more emphatic still had she not been feeding the Communists information for weeks. Fear clogged her throat. To the little scaly devils, she was hardly more than an animal. Moreover, she was a woman, and women always ended up with the raw end of any deal.

“I think you are telling me lies.” Ttomalss used the emphatic cough, too.

Liu Han burst into tears, Part of that was strategy as calculating as any general’s. Tears bothered the little scaly devils even more than they bothered men: the little devils never cried. Seeing water from a person’s eyes affected them much as seeing smoke coming out of someone’s ears would have affected her. It distracted them and kept them from pushing as hard as they would have otherwise.

But if she forced the timing of the tears, at bottom they were real enough. Without the scaly devils, she never would have had anything to do with Bobby Fiore; he’d been just another of the men with whom they’d paired her. But he’d been as good to her as circumstances allowed-and he was the father of the child that kicked in her belly even now. Seeing him dead in a great puddle of his own blood was like a blow to the face.

And she wept for herself. Just before the little scaly devils came down from the sky, the Japanese had bombed her village and killed her husband and son. Now Bobby Fiore was gone, too. Everyone she cared about seemed to die.