Down to Earth (48 page)

“You’re cooking up a deal with
him
?” Rance said, and Penny nodded. He stopped in his tracks; standing still hurt marginally less than walking. Before he said anything more, he paused to think. Penny wasn’t wrong. Gorppet struck him as a Lizard who’d done a lot and seen a lot and wouldn’t blab any of it. Still . . . “He’s not that high-ranking. If he makes a deal with you, can he hold up his end of it?”

“Has he got the cash, you mean?” Penny asked, and Rance nodded. She said, “You don’t have to be a general to be a big-time ginger smuggler, sweetie. A lot of the big ones are just clerks. They don’t buy the stuff with their salaries—they buy it with what they make selling it to their buddies.”

“Okay,” Auerbach said after more thought. “I guess that makes sense. But Gorppet doesn’t strike me as the type who’d do a lot of tasting. Didn’t he get transferred down here on account of he’s some kind of hero?”

“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t been tasting for years—I asked him,” Penny said.
You would,
Rance thought. She went on, “He hasn’t been in the selling end of the business till now, though. You’re right about that. Part of what he got for being a hero, along with this transfer and his promotion, was a hell of a big reward for catching some Arab or other.”

“Can he turn it into any kind of cash we can use?” Rance inquired.

“We, huh?” Penny said, and he felt foolish. She let him down easy by answering the question: “It’s not that hard here in South Africa, you know. Everything turns into gold if you work it a little.”

She was right about that. He couldn’t deny it. “Only trouble with gold,” he said slowly, “is that it’s heavy if we’ve got to leave town in a hurry.”

“It’s heavy, yeah, but it doesn’t take up much space,” Penny replied. All of a sudden, she grabbed him and kissed him. A little black kid walking past smoking a cigarette giggled around it. She took no notice. When she was done with the kiss, she said, “And now you’re starting to sound like somebody who might be interested in this deal after all.”

“Who, me?” Auerbach looked back over his shoulder, as if Penny might be talking to somebody else. She made as if to hit him in the head. He ducked, then winced when his shoulder twinged. “I don’t know what the devil gave you that idea.”

“Can’t fool me—I know you too well,” Penny said. Since that was probably true, he didn’t answer. She went on, “We can do it—I know we can. And when we do, Tahiti here we come.”

Not for the first time, Rance thought of warm, moist tropical breezes and warm, moist native girls. But his long-ago West Point days made him also think of logistics. “How do we get there from here? Either way we go, it’s through Lizard-held territory. They sent us down here to be good little boys and girls, remember? They’re liable not to want to let us loose again.”

“If we’ve got the cash to get to Free France and live there, we’ll have the cash to pay off whoever we need to pay off to get us the hell out of here,” Penny said, and Rance could hardly deny that was odds-on to be true. She continued, “Come on, let’s get over to the Boomslang. I’ve got to talk to Frederick.”

Alarm bells clanged in Auerbach’s mind. “What do you need to talk to him about?” He didn’t like Frederick much, not least because he thought the Negro might like Penny a little too well.

She set her hands on her hips. “I’ve got to get the ginger from somebody, don’t I?” she said patiently. “Frederick’s got ginger, but he doesn’t have the connections with the Lizards for anything more than nickel-and-dime deals. I damn well do.”

“Frederick’s got connections with the local tough guys, though,” Rance said, “or I figure he does, anyhow. He probably would have woke up dead one morning if he didn’t. How’s he going to like you pulling off a big score on his home turf?”

“He’ll get enough to keep him sweet—plenty for everybody,” Penny said. “Rance, honey, this’ll work. It
will
.”

Her confidence was infectious—and Rance didn’t feel like living in South Africa for the rest of his life. It might be better than a Lizard jail, but it wasn’t a patch on the States. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s go to the Boomslang.” He wondered how much trouble he was getting into. He’d find out. He was all too sure of that.

Penny kissed him again. Nobody on the street snickered this time. “You won’t be sorry,” she promised.

“I’m sorry already,” Rance said, which wasn’t quite true but wasn’t quite a lie, either.

Frederick wasn’t in the saloon when Rance and Penny went inside. That surprised him; from everything he’d seen, Frederick damn near lived in the Boomslang. But, sure enough, the big black man breezed in before they’d got very far into their drinks. He sat down beside them as if he expected to talk business. And so he probably did—Penny must have started setting up this deal a while ago.

“So . . . we go forward?” he said.

“We go forward,” Rance answered before Penny could say anything, “as soon as you convince us you’re not going to sell us out to the Lizards or try to do us in and keep all the loot for yourself.”

Frederick laughed as if those were the funniest ideas in the world. Auerbach didn’t find them so amusing. Frederick might be greedy for cash, or he might want to screw them over because they were white. But then the Negro started to talk. He had a good line; Rance had to admit as much. The longer he listened, the more convinced he got—and the more he wondered how big a fool he was being this time.

No one in the village where Liu Han, Liu Mei, and Nieh Ho T’ing had taken refuge dared destroy the altar to the spirits of Emperors past the little scaly devils had set up at the edge of the square. Despite protests from the three Communists, the villagers went right on burning offerings in front of the altar, as if it commemorated their ancestors and not forward-slung creatures with eye turrets.

“They are ignorant. They are superstitious,” Liu Mei complained to her mother.

“They are peasants,” Liu Han answered. “Living in Peking, you never really understood what the countryside is like. Now you’re finding out.” Living in Peking, she’d forgotten how abysmally ignorant the bulk of the Chinese people were, too. Returning to a village reminded her in a hurry.

“We have to instruct them,” Liu Mei said.

“Either that or we have to get out of here,” Liu Han said unhappily. “We probably should have already. The little devils are learning to use propaganda better and better. Before too long, the peasants in this village—and the peasants in too many villages all through China—will take sacrificing to the spirits of the little devils’ dead Emperors as much for granted as they do sacrificing to the spirits of their own ancestors. It will help turn them into contented subjects.”

“What can we do?” Liu Mei demanded. “How can we start a counterpropaganda campaign?”

It was a good question. It was, in fact, the perfect question. Liu Han wished she had the perfect answer for it. She wished she had any answer this side of flight for it—and how much good would flight do, if other villages were like this one? She didn’t, and knew as much. “If the Lizards punish villages that harm the altars, no one will harm altars,” she said. “Burning paper goods in front of them seems too cheap and easy to be very bothersome.”

“But it enslaves,” Liu Mei said, and Liu Han nodded. Her daughter went on, “How do we know the little scaly devils really are watching those altars, the way they say they are?”

“We don’t,” Liu Han admitted. “But they could be doing it, and who has the nerve to take a chance?”

“Someone should,” Liu Mei insisted.

“Someone should, yes—but not you,” Liu Han said. “You’re all I have left in the world. The little devils already took you away from me once, and they tore my heart in two when they did. I couldn’t stand it if they took you again.”

Reproof in her voice, Liu Mei said, “The revolutionary cause is more important than any one person.”

Liu Mei had been around revolutionary rhetoric all her life. She took it seriously—as seriously as the scaly devils took their spirits of Emperors past. Liu Han took revolutionary rhetoric seriously, too, but not quite in the same way. She was willing to fight for the Communist cause, but she didn’t care to be a martyr for it. Maybe that was because she’d come to the Party as an adult. She believed its teachings, but she didn’t believe
in
them the way she believed in the ghosts and spirits about whom she’d learned in childhood. Liu Mei did.

Liu Han didn’t say any of that; Liu Mei would have ignored it. What Liu Han did say was, “What happens to people matters, too. I probably wouldn’t have become a revolutionary if the little scaly devils hadn’t kidnapped you.”

“Even if you hadn’t, the cause would go on.” Liu Mei’s logic was perfect—and perfectly irritating.

“I think it has gone on better with me in it,” Liu Han said. Yes, she could hear the anger in her own voice.

And, for a wonder, Liu Mei heard it, too. “Well, maybe it has,” she said, and walked out of the hut the two of them shared.

Staring after her, Liu Han stayed where she was: on the
kang,
the raised hearth where she spent as much time as she could during the winter. She’d been in the north more than twenty years now, and never had got used to the wretched weather. The wind off the Mongolian desert blew hot and dusty in the summer and sent blizzard after blizzard down on the countryside in winter. If Liu Mei wanted to stamp through snow, that was her business. She took it as much for granted as she did revolutionary fervor. After growing up near Hankow, Liu Han didn’t.

She wondered what Liu Mei was doing out there. Glaring at the memorial tablet the scaly devils had set up, more than likely. Liu Han bit her lip. Her daughter wasn’t going to listen to her. She could feel that in her bones. What would happen when Liu Mei took a hatchet to the tablet or smashed it with a rock or did whatever else she was thinking of doing?

Maybe nothing. Maybe the little devils were bluffing. Their propaganda was better these days than it had been—maybe they were paying more attention to their Chinese running dogs. But maybe they weren’t bluffing. The spirits of Emperors past played a big role in their ideological system. Liu Mei didn’t understand that. She thought superstitions were unimportant because they were false. She didn’t understand the power they could hold over people’s—and scaly devils’—minds.

Would she listen to Nieh Ho-T’ing if he told her the same things Liu Han had been telling her? Unfortunately, Liu Han doubted it. Liu Mei would do whatever she would do. She lacked the almost blind respect for her elders Liu Han had had at the same age. That lack of filial piety sprang from revolutionary rhetoric, too. Most of the time, Liu Han applauded it; it made Liu Mei freer than she had been. This once, Liu Han would have been content—would have been delighted—with a little old-fashioned blind obedience.

That evening, Liu Mai carried the chamber pot out to dump it in the snow. She was gone longer than Liu Han thought she should have been. Liu Han craned her neck, listening for smashing noises. None came, but she didn’t rest easy. The next morning, she went out herself to make sure the memorial tablet was still there. When she saw it, she breathed a long, foggy sigh of relief. She said nothing of that to her daughter. Silence seemed wiser.

Less than a week later, she bitterly regretted that silence. Excited exclamations in the village square brought her out of her hut, hastily fastening the toggles of her quilted, cotton-stuffed jacket Sure enough, it was just as she’d feared: someone had overturned and wrecked the memorial tablet.

“Eee!”
the village headman squealed, looking about ready to tear his hair. He rounded on Liu Han and Nieh Ho-T’ing. “If the scaly devils come down on us, it will be your fault! Yours, do you hear me?”

“I don’t think the scaly devils will do one thing,” Liu Han said, much more calmly than she felt. Standing in front of his own hut, Nieh nodded. The headman subsided. Having important Communists in his village had taught him there were authorities greater than his.

All Liu Han could do was hope she’d been right. That she did, for the village’s sake, and her own, and most of all her daughter’s. She didn’t know Liu Mei had destroyed the memorial tablet, but couldn’t think who else might have. She didn’t want to ask her daughter, either, for fear interrogators might tear the truth from her if she knew it.

The day passed quietly. So did the night. In the morning, helicopters that looked like flying tadpoles came thuttering toward the village from the east, from the direction of fallen Peking. They landed in the frozen, snow-covered fields. Little scaly devils, looking miserably cold, got out of them. Almost all the little devils carried weapons. Liu Han’s heart sank.

One of the little devils, an unarmed one, spoke Chinese. “Let everyone assemble!” he shouted. “A crime has been committed here, a vile crime, and justice shall be done on the criminals.”

“How do you even know who the criminals are?” someone shouted. “You weren’t here. You didn’t see.”

“We were not here,” the scaly devil agreed. “But we did see.” He set down a machine he’d been carrying. Liu Han had seen its like in Peking: the little devils used them to display images. “This will show us who the criminal was,” the little scaly devil declared, sticking a clawed forefinger into a control on the side of the machine.

As Liu Han had expected, a three-dimensional image sprang to life above the device. Several of the villagers exclaimed; even though they lived close to Peking, they’d never seen, never imagined, such a thing. They’d probably never even seen a human-made motion picture. Liu Han kept hoping some other villager had decided to wreck the memorial tablet. No such luck: there came Liu Mei, advancing on the tablet with a pick-axe handle in her hand and smashing it till it abruptly stopped recording. She must have done that during the night, but the image was as clear as if it were daylight.

Numbly, Liu Han waited for the little scaly devils to seize her daughter, or perhaps to shoot her down on the spot. But the one who spoke Chinese said, “Now you will tell us who this person is, and tell us immediately.”

They have as much trouble knowing one person from another as we do with them,
Liu Han thought. Hope surged in her. It grew even higher when no one gathered there in the snowy square said a word.