Tilting the Balance

If the old woman had thought that first ball was like a bomb landing, she must have figured the Lizards had singled out her house for bombardment practice by the time the next hour had passed. One of the things Liu Han discovered about her countrymen during that time was that they didn’t throw very well. A couple of them missed the shack altogether. That sent boys chasing wildly after the runaway ball, and meant Liu Han had to pay small bribes to get it back.

When no one else felt like trying to hit the quick-handed foreign devil, Liu Han said, “Who has a bottle or clay pot he doesn’t mind losing?”

A tall man took a last swig from a bottle of plum brandy, then handed it to her. “Now I do,” he said thickly, breathing plummy fumes into her face.

She gave the bottle to Bobby Fiore, who set it on an upside-down bucket in front of the wall. He walked back farther than the spot from which the Chinese had taken aim at him.

“The foreign devil will show you how to throw properly,” Liu Han said. This last stunt made her nervous. The bottle looked very small. Bobby Fiore could easily miss, and if he did he’d lose face.

His features were set and tight-he knew he could miss, too. His arm went back, then snapped forward in a motion longer and smoother than the Chinese had used. The ball flew, almost invisibly fast. The bottle shattered. Green glass flew every which way. Chatter from the crowd rose to an impressed peak. Several people clapped their hands. Bobby Fiore bowed, as if he were Chinese himself.

“That’s all for today,” Liu Han said. “We will present our show again in a day or two. I hope you enjoyed it.”

She picked up all the food the show had earned them. Bobby Fiore carried the money. He also hung onto ball and bat and glove. That made him different from all the Chinese men Liu Han had known: they would have added to her burden without a second thought. She’d already seen up in the plane that never came down that he had the strange ways ascribed to foreign devils. Some of them, such as his taste in food, annoyed her; this one she found endearing.

“Show good?” he asked, tacking on the Lizards’ interrogative cough.

“The show was very good.” Liu Han used the emphatic cough to underline that, adding, “You were very good too there, especially at the end-you took a chance with the bottle, but it worked, so all the better.”

Of necessity, she spoke mostly in Chinese, which meant she had to repeat herself several times and go back to use simpler words. When Fiore understood, he grinned and slipped an arm around her thickening waist. She dropped an onion so she could break away to pick it up. Showing affection in public was one foreign devil way she wished he would forget in a hurry. It not only embarrassed her, but lowered her status in the eyes of everyone who saw her.

As they approached the hut they shared, she stopped fretting over such relatively trivial concerns. Several little scaly devils stood outside, two with fancy body paint and the rest with guns. Their unnerving turreted eyes swung toward Liu Han and Bobby Fiore.

One of the little devils with fancy paint spoke in hissing but decent Chinese: “You are the human beings who live in this house, the human beings brought down from the ship 29th Emperor Fessoj?” The last three words were in his own language.

“Yes, superior sir,” Liu Han said; by his perplexed look, Bobby Fiore hadn’t understood the question. Even though the scaly devil used words that were individually intelligible, she had trouble following him, too. Imagine calling the airplane that never came down a ship!

“Which of you is carrying the growing thing that will become a human being in her belly?” the devil with the fancy paint asked.

“I am, superior sir.” Not for the first time, Liu Han felt a flash of contempt for the little scaly devils. They not only couldn’t tell people apart, they couldn’t even tell the sexes apart. And Bobby Fiore, with his tall nose and round eyes, was unique in this camp, yet the little devils didn’t recognize him as a foreign devil.

One of the gun-carrying little devils pointed at Liu Han and hissed something to a companion. The other devil’s mouth fell open in a devilish laugh. They found people preposterous, too.

The little devil who spoke Chinese said, “Go in this little house, the two of you. We have things to say to you, things to ask of you.”

Liu Han and Bobby Fiore went into the hut. So did the two little devils with elaborate paint on their scaly hides, and so did one of the more drably marked guards. The two higher-ranking little devils skittered past Liu Han so they could sit on the hearth that also supported the hut’s bedding. They sank down on the warm clay with rapturous sighs-Liu Han had seen they didn’t like cold weather. The guard, who liked it no better, had to stand where he could keep his eyes on the obviously vicious and dangerous humans.