Down to Earth (23 page)

“So it would,” Nieh agreed. “It would indeed.”

A couple of youths ran past, both with shaved heads and wearing tight-fitting shirts with the patterns of body paint printed on them. They looked and sounded frightened, not of the people around them but of the little scaly devils whom they aped. Now they were discovering where their loyalties truly lay.

Some of their number, though, would be joining the collaborators who’d escaped the purges in welcoming the little scaly devils back into Peking. Liu Han was sure of that. Some of them, before too long, would be marked down for liquidation. She was sure of that, too.

Liu Mei said, “I’m afraid I don’t really know how to live in the countryside. I haven’t gone out there very often.”

“It’s not like the city—that’s true,” Liu Han said, and this time Nieh nodded in response to her words. “But we’ll get along. One way or another, we will.” She set a hand on her daughter’s shoulder. “You’re not afraid to work. As long as you keep that in mind, you’ll do all right.”

The walls that in earlier years had shielded Peking from the world around it were now battered by the little scaly devils’ bombardment. People weren’t fleeing only at the gates; they were also scrambling out through breaches in the wall. Thousands—tens of thousands—of men and women would be descending on the villages around the city.

“Eee!” Liu Han said unhappily. “They will be like so many locusts—they will eat the countryside bare. There will be famine.”

That word, heard too often in China, was enough to make two women also hurrying toward the gate whip their heads around in alarm. Liu Mei said, “Would we do better trying to stay, then?”

“No.” Nieh Ho-T’ing and Liu Han spoke at the same time. Nieh continued, “Once we get among people who know who and what we are, we will not starve. They will set food aside for the leaders of the struggle against the little devils’ imperialism.”

“That is not as fair as it might be.” Had Liu Mei been able, she would have frowned. Her revolutionary fire burned very bright, very pure.

Nieh Ho-T’ing shrugged. “I could justify it dialectically. Maybe I will, when we have more time. For now, all I’ll do is say I don’t feel like starving, and I don’t intend to. When your belly cries for noodles or rice, you won’t feel like starving, either.”

That quelled Liu Mei till she and Liu Han and Nieh hurried out through the
Hsi Chih Mên
, the West Straight Gate. It led to the great park called the Summer Palace, a few miles northwest of Peking, but the fugitives did not go in that direction. Instead, they fled through suburbs almost as battered as the interior of the city until, at last, buildings began to thin out and open fields became more common.

By then, the sun was sinking ahead of them. The moon, nearly full, rose blood red through the smoke and haze above Peking. Nieh said, “I think we had better sleep under trees tonight. Any building will already have snakes in it—two-legged snakes. We’d better keep a watch through the night, too.” He wore a pistol on his hip, and tapped it with his right hand.

“Good idea,” Liu Han said. They weren’t really in the countryside, not yet, but the very air around her felt different from the way it had back in Peking. She couldn’t have told how, but it did. She cocked her head to one side. “Come on,” she said, pointing. “There will be water over there.”

“You’re right,” Nieh said. “I can tell by the way the bushes grow.” Liu Mei looked from one of them to the other as if they’d started speaking some foreign language she didn’t understand.

Unlike Nieh Ho-T’ing, Liu Han hadn’t consciously known why she was so sure they would find water in that direction. She’d spent half her life in Peking. So much she’d taken for granted when she was young would seen strange now, to say nothing of unpleasant. But she hadn’t forgotten everything. She might not have known how she knew water was there, but she had.

“It tastes funny,” Liu Mei said after they drank.

“You’re not used to drinking it when it hasn’t come out of pipes,” Liu Han said. For her, water straight from a little stream was a taste out of childhood. Nieh took it for granted, too. But for Liu Mei, it was new and different. Liu Han hoped it wouldn’t make her daughter sick.

They found a place where pine trees screened them from the road, and settled down to rest there. Liu Han took the first watch. Nieh Ho-T’ing handed her the pistol, lay down among the pine needles, twisted a few times like a dog getting comfortable, and fell asleep. Liu Mei had never tried sleeping on bare ground before, but exhaustion soon caught up with her.

The late spring night was mild. Explosions kept rocking Peking. Careless of them, owls hooted and crickets chirped. Flashes on the eastern horizon reminded Liu Han of heat lightning. Fugitives streamed away from the doomed city, even in darkness. Liu Han hung on to the pistol. She hoped nobody else would try to rest here among the trees.

No one did, not while she was on watch. In due course, she woke Nieh, gave him back the automatic, and went to sleep herself. She didn’t think she’d been asleep very long when three gunshots hammered her out of unconsciousness. Screams and the sound of pounding feet running away followed those thunderclaps.

“Somebody who thought he’d try being a bandit, to see what it was like,” Nieh said lightly. “I don’t think he cared for it as well as he expected to. Bandits never think victims are supposed to have guns of their own.”

“Did you hit him?” Liu Mei asked—she was sitting up, too.

“I hope so,” Nieh Ho-T’ing answered. “I’m not sure, though. I know I scared him off, and that’s what matters. Go back to sleep, both of you.”

Liu Han doubted she could, but she did. When she woke, birds were chirping and the sun was rising through the smoke above Peking. Her belly was a vast chasm, deeper than the gorges of the Yangtze. She went back to the little stream and drank as much water as she could hold, but that didn’t help much. “We have to have food,” she said.

“We’ll get some.” Nieh sounded confident. Liu Han hoped his confidence had some basis. Had she been a peasant villager, she wouldn’t have wanted anything to do with refugees from the city.

When they came to a village, the peasants greeted them with rifles in hand. “Keep moving!” one of them shouted. “We have nothing for you. We haven’t got enough for ourselves.”

But Nieh Ho-T’ing said, “Comrade, is that the proper revolutionary spirit?” He went up to the peasant leader and spoke to him in a low voice. Several other peasants joined the discussion. So did a couple of their womenfolk. At one point, Nieh pointed to Liu Han and spoke her name. The women exclaimed.

That seemed to turn the argument. A few minutes later, Liu Han and Liu Mei and Nieh Ho-T’ing were slurping up noodles and vegetables. A woman came up to them. “Are you really the famous Liu Han?” she asked.

“I really am,” Liu Han answered. “Now I am also the hungry Liu Han.”

But the woman didn’t want to take the hint. “How did you get to be the way you are?” she persisted.

Liu Han thought about that. “Never give up,” she said at last. “Never, ever, give up.” She bent her head to the noodles once more.

Straha made the negative hand gesture even though Sam Yeager couldn’t see it, not with the primitive Tosevite telephone he was using. “No,” the ex-shiplord said, and added an emphatic cough. “I was not aware of this. It did not come to my attention before I, ah, decided to leave the conquest fleet and come to the United States.”

“Okay,” Yeager answered, an English word he sometimes threw into conversations even in the language of the Race, just as he sometimes used emphatic and interrogative coughs while speaking English. “I did wonder, and thought you might know.”

“I did not,” Straha said. “That we should attempt to rear Tosevite hatchlings makes sense to me, however. How better to learn to what degree your species can come to conform to our usages?”

He waited for the Big Ugly to wax indignant. Tosevites—especially American Tosevites—often got very shrill about the rights of their kind, especially when they thought the Race was violating those rights. If they or their fellow Big Uglies violated them, though, they were much less strident.

To Straha’s surprise, all Yeager said was, “Yes, I can see how that would make sense from your point of view. But I have the feeling it is liable to be hard on the hatchling you are rearing.”

“That is part of the nature of experiments—do you not agree?” Straha said. “It is unfortunate when the experiments involve intelligent beings, but I do not see how it is avoidable. Sometimes such things are necessary.”

Again, he expected Sam Yeager to get angry. Again, Yeager failed to do so. “You may have something there, Shiplord,” he replied. Straha had to fight down a small, puzzled hiss. He’d known this Big Ugly longer than almost any other, and thought he knew him better than any other save perhaps his own driver. Now Yeager wasn’t responding as he should have. Straha knew the Tosevites were a highly variable species, but Yeager usually thought so much like a male of the Race that the ex-shiplord had expected him to maintain a respectable consistence.

“How did you happen to make the acquaintance of this Tosevite reared under the tutelage of the Race?” Straha asked, trying to find what lay behind Yeager’s curious indifference to the experiment.

“She identified me as a Big Ugly by the way I wrote,” Yeager answered. “I had no idea she was one till I heard her speak. You know we have trouble with some sounds in your language because of the way our mouths are made.”

“Yes, just as we do in Tosevite tongues,” Straha agreed. Yeager didn’t seem inclined to be very forthcoming, for which Straha could hardly blame him. That being so . . . “Have you anything else?”

“No, Shiplord. I thank you for your time,” the Big Ugly said, and broke the connection.

Straha also hung up the Tosevite-style telephone. He did let out the discontented hiss he’d held in before. Something was going on under his snout, and he didn’t know what it was. That annoyed him. He walked from the kitchen into the front room, where his driver sat leafing through a Tosevite news magazine.

“I greet you, Shiplord,” the Big Ugly said. As far as grammar and pronunciation went, he spoke the language of the Race as well as Yeager. He didn’t think like a male of the Race, though. His next question was sharp, not deferential. “What was that all about on the telephone?”

“That was Sam Yeager, the soldier and student of the Race,” Straha answered. His driver was not just an aide; the Tosevite was charged with monitoring what Straha did. The English description for such a male, which Straha found expressive, was
watchdog.

“Ah,” the driver said. “Sam Yeager has a gift for sticking his snout where it does not belong. What was he trying to learn from you that is none of his business?”

“Nothing, as a matter of fact,” Straha said tartly. “In my humble opinion”—a bit of sarcasm all too likely to sail past the Tosevite—“a female of your kind who has been raised by the Race from hatchlinghood to maturity is very much within Yeager’s area of responsibility.”

“Oh—that. Yes. Truth, Shiplord,” the driver said. Then he let out several barks of Big Ugly laughter. “More truth than you know about, as a matter of fact.”

“Suppose you enlighten me, then,” Straha suggested.

To a male of the Race, such a suggestion would have been as good as an order. The driver shook his head, and then, for good measure, also used the Race’s negative hand gesture. “Suppose I do
not,
Shiplord.” His tone was so emphatic, he didn’t bother with a cough. “You do not need to know that.”

Straha understood security without having a Big Ugly explain it to him. He also understood the driver had slipped. “Then you should not have alluded to such a thing,” he said. “Now my curiosity is aroused.”

“You speak truth, Shiplord—I should not have mentioned it,” the Tosevite admitted. “Since I did, I must ask you to pretend I did not.”

“Next I suppose you will ask a female to unlay an egg,” Straha snapped. “What would happen if I went back to the telephone and asked Sam Yeager to tell me what you will not?”

“He might do it. He has a way of talking too much,” the driver said. “But, Shiplord, I very strongly ask you not to do that.” Now he did use an emphatic cough.

He was not simply asking, Straha realized. He was giving an order, and expected to be obeyed. That the driver presumed to do such a thing spoke of who had power here and who had none. With an emphatic cough of his own, Straha said, “I am not your servant. Nor am I going to betray whatever I may learn to the Race. Nor is the Race likely to try to kidnap me, not after all these years.”

“Perhaps not,” the driver replied. “But the Race may well be monitoring your telephone line, and Yeager’s. I would be, were I a male from the conquest fleet’s intelligence service.” Straha hissed unhappily; his driver made a good point. The Big Ugly went on, “And we still do not know at whom the miscreants were shooting when you visited Yeager’s house while the Chinese females were also there. It could have been them. It could have been Yeager. But it could also have been you, Shiplord.”

“Me?” Straha swung both eye turrets sharply toward the driver: such was his surprise. “I assumed those females were the targets. The Race is not in the habit of using assassination as a weapon.”

“The Race has picked up all sorts of bad habits since coming to Tosev 3,” his driver answered. To compound his insolence, the Tosevite bent his head over one hand and pretended to taste ginger.

But what he said, while it held enough truth to be infuriating, did not hold enough to be convincing. “I am not involved in the ginger trade, except as one more male who tastes,” Straha said. “And, since you are giving forth with nonsense, who would want to murder Yeager, and why?”

“Who would want to kill Yeager?” Straha’s driver echoed. “Someone who got tired of his habit of sticking his snout where it does not belong, that is who. I assure you, he has made enemies doing so.”

“And are you one of those enemies?” the ex-shiplord asked. “You certainly speak as if you have considerable knowledge of them.”

I shall have to find some way to warn Sam Yeager,
Straha thought. Yeager had always behaved in a proper manner toward him. Like any well-trained male of the Race, Straha understood that loyalty from below created obligations in those above. Yeager had left Straha in his debt, and debt required repayment.