Down to Earth (69 page)

“That is a truth.” Kirel’s voice was mournful, too.

After calling up a map of Tosevite political conditions at the time of the conquest fleet’s arrival, Atvar examined it. “There are occasions when I would be tempted to return to the Nipponese the subregion known as China. Considering the difficulties its inhabitants have given us, some other Big Uglies might as well have the dubious privilege of trying to rule them.”

“You cannot mean that, Exalted Fleetlord!” Now Kirel sounded horrified.

And Atvar realized his chief subordinate was right. “No,” he said with a sigh, “I suppose I cannot. All the Tosevite not-empires would take it for a sign of weakness, and they leap on weakness the way befflem leap on meat.”

“What will you tell the Nipponese, then?” Pshing asked.

Atvar sighed once more. “Unfortunately, they have demonstrated strength. And they may be arrogant—or shortsighted—enough to use their new weapons without fear of punishment. Here, Pshing, tell them this: tell them we shall grant them all the diplomatic privileges they request. But tell them also that with privileges comes responsibility. Tell them we are now constrained to observe them more closely than ever before. Tell them we shall take a much more serious view of any potentially aggressive action they may prepare. Tell them they still are not powerful enough to seek any real test of strength against us, and that any attack on us will be crushed without mercy.”

“Very good, Exalted Fleetlord!” his adjutant said, and used an emphatic cough. “It shall be done, in every particular.”

“I thank you, Pshing. Oh—and one thing more,” Atvar said. Pshing and Kirel both looked curious. The fleetlord explained: “Now we hope they listen.”

As Liu Han paced through the prisoners’ camp, she kept shaking her head. “No,” she said. “I don’t believe it. I don’t want to believe it. It can’t possibly be true.”

Nieh Ho-T’ing gave her an amused look. “It can’t possibly be true because you don’t want to believe it? What kind of logic goes into a statement like that?”

“I don’t know,” she answered. “And I don’t care, either. What do you think of that? Tell me where you heard that the eastern dwarfs used an explosive-metal bomb. Did the little scaly devils tell you? I doubt it.” To show how much she doubted it, she used one of the little devils’ emphatic coughs.

But Nieh said, “You do not want to believe it of the Japanese because you hate them even more than you hate the scaly devils.”

“That . . .” Liu Han started to say that wasn’t true, but discovered she couldn’t. She did hate the Japanese, with a deep and abiding hatred. And why not, when they’d destroyed the village that had been her whole life and slaughtered the family she’d thought would be hers forever? She amended her words: “That doesn’t matter. What matters is what’s true and what isn’t. And you didn’t answer my question.”

“Well, so I didn’t,” the People’s Liberation Army officer admitted. He bowed to Liu Han, as if she were a noblewoman from the old days, the days of the Manchu Empire. “I will, then. No, the scaly devils didn’t tell me. But I heard the guards talking among themselves. I don’t think they knew I understood.”

“Oh,” Liu Han said unhappily. She knew the scaly devils often didn’t pay any attention to what their human captives might hear. Why should they? Even if the humans understood, what could they do about it? Nothing, as Liu Han also knew all too well. She scowled and kicked at the dirt. “Will the Japanese start using their bombs against the little devils here in China, then?”

“Who knows what the Japanese will do?” Nieh Ho-T’ing answered. “I often wonder if even they know ahead of time. But whether they use bombs or not, they’ve gained a lot of face by having them.”

“So they have,” Now Liu Han’s voice went savage. She kicked the dirt again, harder than before. “They learned imperialism from the round-eyed devils. All we ever learned was colonialist oppression. The little scaly devils threw them out of China, but they kept most of their empire and they kept their freedom. And what have we got from the little devils? More colonialist oppression. Where is the justice in that?”

Nieh shrugged. “Justice comes with power. The strong have it. And they give their version of it to the weak. We were unlucky, for we were found weak at the wrong time.”

When Liu Han looked out to the horizon, she did so through strands of razor wire the little scaly devils had set up around the perimeter of the camp. If that didn’t tell her everything she needed to know about strength and weakness, what would? She scowled. “How can we use the Japanese to our advantage?”

“Now that is a better thought.” Nieh Ho-T’ing set a hand on her shoulder for a moment, as if to remind her they’d been lovers once. “The Russians have always refused to give us explosive-metal bombs of our own. So have the Americans. Maybe the Japanese will be more reasonable.”

“Maybe they’ll hope the Russians get the blame,” Liu Han said, which made Nieh laugh and nod. “That might be a reasonable hope, too. I wonder if Mao has this news yet.”

“Mao always knows the news.” Nieh spoke with great assurance. “What he can do with it may be another question. I’m sure he’d be willing to deal with the Japanese to get an explosive-metal bomb. I’m not nearly so sure they’d be willing to deal with him.”

“If I were one of the eastern dwarfs, I’d be afraid of dealing with anyone Chinese,” Liu Han said. “They must know how much vengeance we owe them for what they did to us.”

“That’s true. No one would argue with it,” Nieh said. “But how much do we owe the scaly devils? If that is more, then the Japanese wouldn’t need to fear, for we would want to settle the bigger debt first.”

Though Liu Han knew how to make such cold-blooded calculations, they didn’t appeal to her. “I want to pay back the scaly devils, and I want to pay back the Japanese,” she said. “How can we be free till we punish all our enemies?”

Nieh sighed. “I’ve been fighting for our freedom since I was a young man, and it seems further away than ever. The struggle ahead won’t be any quicker or any easier than the one we’ve already made.”

That made sense, too, but it wasn’t what Liu Han wanted to hear. “I want Liu Mei to live in freedom,” she said, and then her lips twisted into a bitter smile. “I want to live in freedom myself. I don’t want either one of us to spend the rest of our days locked up in this prison camp.”

“I don’t want to spend the rest of my days here, either,” Nieh Ho-T’ing said. “I am not a young man any more. I do not have so many days to spend anywhere, and this isn’t the place I’d have chosen.” His own smile showed wry amusement. “But the little devils gave us no choice. Your daughter helped make sure they would give us no choice.”

Liu Han turned away. She didn’t want to hear that, either, even though she knew it was true. She started to explain that she understood why Liu Mei had done as she did, but what difference did it make? None. She kept walking.

A man she didn’t know came by her. He gave her a polite nod, so she returned one.
Probably with the Kuomintang,
she thought. Plenty of prisoners here were. The little devils didn’t care if they and the Communists went right on with their civil war here inside this razor-wire perimeter. That just made life easier for them.

The first time she’d been taken to a camp, things had been a lot easier. The little devils were newer at the game then—and she’d been only an experimental animal to them, not a dangerous political prisoner. The Reds had helped spirit her out of the camp through a tunnel, and no one had been the wiser for a long time. Things weren’t so simple here. No humans went into and out of this camp. People came in. They never went out.

Nothing seemed so tempting as giving way to despair. If she stopped caring about what happened to her, maybe she could accept the likelihood that she would never leave this place again. Then she could start shaping a life for herself within the razor-wire perimeter.

She shook her head. She wouldn’t give up. She couldn’t give up. She hadn’t given up after Ttomalss took her daughter away from her, and she’d got Liu Mei back. If she kept up the struggle, she might get her own life back one day, too. After all, who could guess what would happen? The Japanese might resume their war with the little scaly devils. Or the Germans might fight them. The Germans were strong, even if they were fascist reactionaries. If they caused the scaly devils enough trouble, maybe the little devils would have to loosen their grip on China. You never could tell.

She went back to the tent she shared with Liu Mei to tell her daughter the news she’d had from Nieh. But Liu Mei wasn’t in the tent. Liu Han’s carefully constructed bravado collapsed. If the little devils had taken her daughter off to do horrible things to her, what good was bravado?

A woman who lived in the tent next door said, “The scaly devils do not have her.” She had a southwestern accent that hardly seemed Mandarin at all to Liu Han, who had trouble following her.

When at last she did, she asked, “Well, where is she, then?”

The other woman, who was not a Communist, smiled unpleasantly. “She went out walking with a young man.”

“A young man!” Liu Han exclaimed. “Which young man?” The camp held a lot of them, far more than women.

“I have no idea.” The other woman was full of sour virtue. “
My
children would never do such a thing without my knowing.”

“You ugly old turtle, you must have had a blind husband if you have any children at all,” Liu Han said. That produced a splendid fight. Each of the women called the other everything she could think of. The other woman took a step toward Liu Han, who only smiled. “Come ahead. I will snatch you even balder than you are already.”

“Oh, shut up, you horrible, clapped-out whore!” the other woman screeched, but she backed away again.

Contemptuously, Liu Han turned her back. She listened for footsteps that would mean the other woman was rushing at her, but they didn’t come. She wondered if she ought to wait in her tent for her daughter or to go after her.

She decided to wait. Liu Mei came back about an hour later, alone. “What have you been doing?” Liu Han asked.

“Walking with a friend,” Liu Mei answered. Her face showed nothing, but then it never did—it never could.

“Who is this friend?” Liu Han persisted.

“Someone I met here,” her daughter said.

“And what other sort of person is it likely to be?” Liu Han said, full of sarcasm. “Someone you met in Peking, maybe? Or in the United States? I am going to ask you again, and I want a straight answer this time: who is this friend?”

“Someone I met here,” Liu Mei repeated.

“Is it a man or a woman? Is it a Communist or a Kuomintang reactionary?” Liu Han said. “Why do you beat around the bush?”

“Why do you hound me?” Liu Mei returned. If the nosy neighbor hadn’t told Liu Han her daughter was walking with a man, that would have. “I can walk with whomever I like. It’s not like there’s anything else to do.”

If she went walking with a man, they might soon find something else to do. Liu Han knew that perfectly well. If Liu Mei didn’t, it wasn’t because Liu Han hadn’t told her. “Who is he?” Liu Han snapped.

Liu Mei’s eyes blazed in her expressionless face. “Whoever he is, he’s none of your business,” she said. “Are you going to be a bourgeois mother worrying about a proper match? Or are you going to be an upper-class mother from the old days and bind up my feet till I walk like this?” She took several tiny, swaying, mocking steps. Her face might not show expression, but her body did.

“I am your mother, and I will thank you to remember it,” Liu Han said.

“Treat me like a comrade, if you please, and not the way the keeper in a traveling beast show treats his animals,” Liu Mei said.

“Is that what you think I do?” Liu Han demanded, and her daughter nodded. She threw her hands in the air. “All I want is for you to be happy and safe and sensible, and you always have—till now.”

“All you want is to keep me in a cage!” Liu Han shouted, and tears streamed down her face. She stormed off. Liu Han stared after her, then started to cry herself. Everything she’d worked for lay in ruins around her.

 
18

Much as he would have liked to, Straha hadn’t passed on to the Race what he’d learned about the hatchlings Sam Yeager was raising. In an odd sort of way, he was loyal to the United States. After all, if this not-empire hadn’t taken him in, Atvar would have given him a very hard time. And Yeager was a friend, even if he was a Big Ugly.

But those weren’t the main reasons he’d kept quiet about that business. His main concern was that he wouldn’t get the reward he most desired: a return to the society of the Race. After all, his own kind had done the same sort of thing with a Tosevite hatchling. How could they condemn the Americans without condemning themselves at the same time?

His driver walked into the kitchen. “I greet you, Shiplord,” he said casually. “Looks as if the sun is finally coming out.”

“You knew!” Straha said angrily. “You knew all along, and you said not a thing—not a single, solitary thing.”

Had the Big Ugly asked what he was talking about, Straha thought he would have taken a bite out of him. But his driver didn’t bother affecting innocence. “I was following the orders of my superiors, Shiplord. They wanted this secret kept, and so it was. I am surprised Sam Yeager obtained permission to have you visit his home, as a matter of fact.”

“How do you know he even asked permission?” Straha asked. “I do not know that he did,” the driver answered. “I know that he should have. If he did not, it will be one more black mark in the book against him.”

That was an English idiom, translated literally into the language of the Race. Straha had little trouble figuring out what it meant. He said, “Yeager is a good officer. He should not have difficulties with his superiors.”

“If he obeyed orders, if he did as he was told to do, he would not have difficulties with his superiors,” the Big Ugly said. Then he let out a couple of grunts of Tosevite laughter. “Of course, if he acted in that fashion, he might not be such a good officer, either.”

Straha would have reckoned a perfectly obedient officer a good officer. Or would he? He thought of himself as a good officer, and yet he was one of the most disobedient males in the history of the Race.
This planet corrupts everyone,
he thought.

His driver dropped into English. “You know what Yeager’s problem is, Shiplord? Yeager’s got too goddamn much initiative, that’s what.”

“Initiative is desirable, isn’t it?” Straha switched to English, too.

“Yes and no,” his driver replied. “Yes if you’re going after what your superiors tell you to go after. No if you go off on your own. Especially no if you keep sticking your nose into places they told you to stay away from.”

“Yeager does this?” Straha made a mental leap of his own. “Is that why he has had trouble with Tosevites trying to harm him and his family?”

“I really couldn’t tell you anything about that,” his driver said. “It might just be a run of bad luck, you know.”

Like any male of the Race, Straha read Big Uglies imperfectly. But he’d been associating with this one for a longtime. He had a fair notion when the Tosevite tried to lie by misdirection. This felt like one of those times.

He started to press his driver, to try to learn more from him: for he was sure the Big Ugly knew more. Instead, though, he left unuttered the questions he might have asked. He doubted the driver would have told him much; the Tosevite’s first loyalty was to his American superiors, not to Straha. And if word got back to them that Straha had been asking such questions, Sam Yeager might land in more trouble still. The exiled shiplord didn’t want that.

Maybe the Big Ugly had expected Straha to ask such questions. Eyeing him, the Tosevite asked, “Is there anything else, Shiplord?” He returned to the language of the Race, and with it to formality.

“No, nothing else,” Straha replied, also in his own language. “How you Big Uglies conduct your affairs is of no great consequence to me.”

That made his driver relax. Males of the Race—and females, too, these days—had a reputation among the Big Uglies for being contemptuous of everything pertaining to Tosev 3. Straha was contemptuous of a great deal about the Tosevites, but not of everything, and not about all Big Uglies. But he used the reputation to his own advantage here, to conceal a genuine interest.

With a laugh, his driver said, “After all, it’s not as if Yeager were a male of the Race,”

“It certainly is not,” Straha agreed. The driver nodded and went off making the small, somewhat musical noises the Big Uglies called
whistling.
That was a sign he was amused and unconcerned and happy.

Or maybe he wanted Straha to think it was a sign he was amused and unconcerned and happy. Big Uglies could be devious creatures. Straha knew from experience that his driver could be a devious creature. If he were to pick up the telephone now and call Sam Yeager, he had no doubt the driver would listen to every word he said. He wouldn’t have been surprised if the Americans listened to every word he said whenever he picked up the telephone.

He waited till he was using the limited access to the Race’s computer network a fellow male in exile had illicitly obtained for him before sending an electronic message to Maargyees, the false name Sam Yeager used on the network.
In case you did not know it, your own curiosity has amused curiosity in others
, he wrote. Yeager was a clever male. He would have no trouble figuring out what that meant.

Having written the message, Straha erased it from his own computer. It would, of course, remain in the network’s storage system, but the Americans didn’t have access to that. He hoped with all his liver that the Americans didn’t have access to it, anyhow. They’d known next to nothing about computers when the Race first came to Tosev 3. They knew a great deal more than that these days, worse luck.

The Race had phased in computers ever so gradually in the couple of millennia following the unification of Home. Devices with such important influence on society had to be phased in gradually, to minimize disruption. That was the way the Race looked at things, anyhow. The Big Uglies had other ideas.

Straha didn’t suppose he should have been surprised. When the Tosevites found a new technology, no matter what it was, they always felt they had to do as much with it as they could as soon as they could. Even if the troubles that would hatch as a result of rapid change were obvious, they went ahead all the same. They’d done as much with computers in a generation as the Race had in centuries.

Not all American Tosevites had the education they needed to use computer systems to best advantage—or at all. That didn’t deter the Big Uglies. Those of them who could use the new technology did . . . and flourished. Those who didn’t might as well have stayed inside their eggshells. Their failure, their falling behind, bothered the others not at all.

And if upheaval followed because some Tosevites gained more advantages than others—they didn’t seem to care. That struck Straha as madness, but it was as much dogma to the Americans as reverencing the spirits of Emperors past was to the Race. Straha knew an American saying:
look out for yourself and let the devil take the hindmost.
To him, that was individualism to the point of addlement, survival of the fittest made into a law of society. To the Americans, it seemed common sense. Those who succeeded in the United States succeeded spectacularly. Those who failed—and there were, by the nature of things, many who did—failed the same way.

“And, all things considered, I am one of the ones who have succeeded,” Straha murmured. He had less than he would have had back on Home, but he had everything with which the Big Uglies could supply him.

The sliding glass door at the back of the house was open. The spring air was chillier than he found ideal, but no worse than a brisk winter’s day back on Home. He didn’t even bother bundling up before he pushed open the sliding screen that kept little flying and crawling pests out of the house and walked out into the backyard.

He looked around with a certain amount of pride. Bare ground and sand and succulents, some smooth, some spiky, put him in mind of a landscape back on Home, though details differed. Here, even more than inside -the house, he’d shaped things to suit himself. Inside, the place was built to suit Tosevites, and many of the devices he used every day—telephone, stove, refrigerator—were perforce of American manufacture, different from and usually inferior to their equivalents on his native world. They always reminded him what an alien he was.

Out here, though, he could look around and imagine himself somewhere on Home, somewhere a long way from his native city. Few Big Uglies cared for the effect, any more than he was enamored of the boring green lawns they so admired.

The dog next door started barking. It often did when he came outside; it probably disliked his odor. For that matter, he wasn’t fond of the scent of its droppings, which the breeze sometimes wafted to his scent receptors. He didn’t like the noise it made, either. Nothing on Home sounded remotely like a dog, and its yaps and growls spoiled the illusion the yard gave him.

A small bird with a bright green back and an even brighter red head buzzed among the flowers; red ones particularly attracted it. It too reminded him he wasn’t on Home any more. Flying creatures there had bare, leathery wings, and none of them came close to matching the aerial gymnastics of a hummingbird. But, even though the flying creature was alien, it didn’t irk him the way the dog did. It was small and quiet and attractive, not loud and annoying.

Suddenly the hummingbird, which had been swooping low, darted away as if something had startled it. Straha strode closer, and saw a scaly, four-legged creature a little longer than the distance between his wrist and the end of his middle fingerclaw. It was a brown not much different from the color of the dirt, with darker stripes to break up its outline. Like the succulents among which it crawled, it looked familiar without being identical to anything on Home.

It stuck out a short, dark tongue. Then, as if nervous about coming out into the open, it scuttled back under some of the plants and disappeared. Straha started to root around after it, but decided not to bother. It was living where it belonged and doing what it was supposed to do. He wished he could say the same.

Maybe he could return to the society of the Race . . . if he betrayed Sam Yeager. Maybe. His mouth fell open in a laugh that held little in the way of real mirth. He’d just warned his friend of danger from other Big Uglies, but he hadn’t warned of danger from himself.

Of course, Yeager understood the Race about as well as any Tosevite could. He would have to understand that Straha might be able to buy his way back into Atvar’s good graces by passing on the story of the hatchlings . . . wouldn’t he?

From the exile that wasn’t quite comfortable, from the garden that wasn’t quite Home, Straha made the negative gesture. “If I have to buy my way back into Atvar’s good graces, they are not worth having,” the ex-shiplord said aloud. “Spirits of Emperors past turn their backs on him.” He feared those spirits would reject him when he came before them, but he’d feared that ever since ordering his shuttlecraft pilot to take him down to the USA. Yet those spirits wouldn’t approve of him if he betrayed a friend, either, not even if that friend was a Big Ugly. Now he made the affirmative gesture. He
would
stay quiet, and stay here.

“Okay, let’s give it a try,” Hal Walsh said. “David, would you like to do the honors?”

“As a matter of fact, no,” David Goldfarb said. “I want to get the bloody call. I don’t want to make it. I want to see the numbers light up on the gadget here. You don’t know how much I want that.”

His boss at the Saskatchewan River Widget Works eyed him. “Oh, maybe I do,” he said. He dug in his pocket and tossed a dime to Jack Devereaux. “Go find a phone booth and call David.”

“All right,” Devereaux said. He put on his overcoat before leaving the office. The calendar said spring had come to Edmonton, but the weather paid no attention. “I’ll even note the phone number, so we can see if it works the way it’s supposed to.”