Aftershocks (8 page)

Not to be outdone, Molotov replied, “Indeed. That, no doubt, is why even the Race can reckon itself progressive.”

The chair in which Queek sat had an opening through which his short, stumpy tail protruded. That tail quivered now. Molotov watched it with an internal smile—the only kind he customarily allowed himself. He’d succeeded in angering the Lizard.

Queek said, “No matter what sort of denials you give me, I am going to reiterate a warning I have given you before: if the Chinese rebels and bandits who profess your ideology should detonate an explosive-metal bomb, the Race will hold the Soviet Union responsible, and will punish your not-empire most severely. Do you understand this warning?”

“Yes, I understand it,” Molotov said, suddenly fighting to keep from showing fear rather than glee. “I have always understood it. I have also always reckoned it unjust. These days, I reckon it more unjust than ever. A disaffected German submarine officer might give his missile warheads to Chinese factionalists of any political stripe in preference to surrendering them to you. And the Japanese might furnish the Chinese such weapons to harm the Race and harm the peace-loving Soviet Union at the same time.” He found the first of those far-fetched; the second struck him as only too possible. He would have done it, were he ruling in Japan.

But Queek said, “Did you not just tell me your relations with the Nipponese were correct? If they are not your enemies, why would they do such a thing to you?”

Was that naïveté, or was it a nasty desire to make Molotov squirm? Molotov suspected the latter. He replied, “Until recently, the leaders of Japan have not been in a position to embarrass the Soviet Union in this way. Do you not think it would be to their advantage to use an explosive-metal bomb against the Race and to do so in such a way as to go unpunished for it?”

To his relief, Queek had no fast, snappy comeback. After a pause, the Lizard said, “Here, for once, you have given me a justification for caution that may not be altogether self-serving. I think you may be confident that the Nipponese will receive a similar warning from our representatives to their empire. As you probably know, we do not maintain an embassy in Nippon at present, though recent developments may force us to open one there.”

Good,
Molotov thought.
I did distract him, then
.
Now to try to make him feel guilty:
“Any assistance the Race could provide us in reducing the effects on our territory from your war with the Germans would be appreciated.”

“If you seek such assistance, ask the
Reich,
” Queek said curtly. “Its leaders were the cause of the war.”

Molotov didn’t push it. He’d got the Lizard ambassador to respond to him instead of his having to react to what Queek said. Given the Race’s strength, that was something of a diplomatic triumph.

A squad of little scaly devils strode through the captives’ camp in central China. They stopped in front of the miserable little hut Liu Han shared with her daughter, Liu Mei. One of them spoke in bad Chinese: “You are the female Liu Han and the hatchling of the female Liu Han?”

Liu Han and Liu Mei were both sitting on the
kang,
the low clay hearth that gave the hut what little heat it had. “Yes, we are those females,” Liu Han admitted.

A moment later, she wondered if she should have denied it, for the little devil gestured with his rifle and said, “You come with me. You two of you, you come with me.”

“What have we done now?” Liu Mei asked. Her face stayed calm, though her eyes were anxious. As a baby, she’d been raised by the scaly devils, and she’d never learned to smile or to show much in the way of any expression.

“You two of you, you come with me,” was all the little scaly devil would say, and Liu Han and Liu Mei had no choice but to do as they were told.

They didn’t go to the administrative buildings in the camp, which surprised Liu Han: it wasn’t some new interrogation, then. She got another surprise when the scaly devils led her and Liu Mei out through the several razor-wire gateways that walled off the camp from the rest of the world.

Outside the last one stood an armored fighting vehicle. Another little devil, this one with fancier body paint, waited by it. He confirmed their names, then said, “You get in.”

“Where are you taking us?” Liu Han demanded.

“You never mind that, you two of you,” the scaly devil answered. “You get in.”

“No,” Liu Han said, and her daughter nodded behind her.

“You get in right now,” the scaly devil said.

“No,” Liu Han repeated, even though he swung the muzzle of his rifle in her direction. “Not till we know where we’re going.”

“What is wrong with this stupid Big Ugly?” one of the other scaly devils asked in their own hissing language. “Why does she refuse to go in?”

“She wants to know where they will be taken,” answered the little devil who spoke Chinese. “I cannot tell her that, because of security.”

“Tell her she is an idiot,” the other little scaly devil said. “Does she want to stay in this camp? If she does, she must be an idiot indeed.”

Maybe that conversation was set up for her benefit; the little devils knew she spoke their language. But they were not usually so devious. Liu Han had feared they were taking Liu Mei and her out to execute them. If they weren’t, if they were going somewhere better than the camp, she would play along. And where, on all the face of the Earth, was there anywhere worse than the camp? Nowhere she knew.

“I have changed my mind,” she said. “We will get in.”

“Thank you two of you.” The little devil who spoke Chinese might not be fluent, but he knew how to be sarcastic. He was even more sarcastic in his own language: “She must think she is the Emperor.”

“Who cares what a Big Ugly thinks?” the other scaly devil replied. “Get her and the other one in and get them out of here.”

He evidently outranked the scaly devil who spoke Chinese, for that male said, “It shall be done.” He opened the rear gate on the mechanized combat vehicle and returned to Chinese: “You two of you, get in there.”

Liu Han went in ahead of Liu Mei. If danger waited inside, she would find it before her daughter did. But she found no danger, only Nieh Ho-T’ing. The People’s Liberation Army officer nodded to her. “I might have known you would be coming along, too,” he remarked, as calmly as if they’d met on the streets of Peking. “Is your daughter with you?” Before Liu Han could answer that, Liu Mei climbed up into the troop-carrying compartment of the combat vehicle. Nieh smiled at her. She nodded back; she couldn’t smile herself. “I see you are here,” he said to her.

“Where are they taking us? Do you know?” Liu Han asked.

Nieh Ho-T’ing shook his head. “I haven’t the faintest idea. Wherever it is, it has to be better than where we have been.”

Since Liu Han had had the identical thought, she could hardly disagree. “I was afraid they were going to liquidate us, but now I don’t think they will.”

“No, I don’t think so, either,” Nieh said. “They could do that in camp if they decided it served their interests.”

Before Liu Han could answer, the scaly devils slammed the rear gate shut. She heard clatterings from outside. “What are they doing?” she asked, still anything but trusting of the little scaly devils.

“Locking us in,” Nieh Ho-T’ing answered calmly. “The gates on this machine are made to open from the inside, from this compartment, to let out the little scaly devils’ soldiers when they want to fight as ordinary infantry. But the little devils will want to make sure we do not go out till they take us wherever they take us.”

“That makes sense,” Liu Mei said.

“Yes, it does,” Liu Han agreed. It went some distance toward easing her mind, too. “Maybe we are being taken to a different camp, or for a special interrogation.” She assumed the little devils could hear whatever she said, so she added, “Since we are innocent and know nothing, I do not see what point there is to interrogating us any more.”

Nieh Ho-T’ing chuckled at that. There were, surely, some things of which they were innocent, but carrying on the proletarian revolution against the small, scaly, imperialist oppressors was not one of them.

The mechanized combat vehicle started moving. The seats in the fighting compartment were too small for human fundaments, and the wrong shape to boot. Liu Han felt that more when the ride was jouncy, as it was here. Along with her daughter and Nieh, she braced herself as best she could. That was all she could do.

It had been cool outside. It soon became unpleasantly warm in the fighting compartment: the little scaly devils heated it to the temperature they found comfortable, the temperature of a very hot summer’s day in China. Liu Han undid her quilted cotton jacket and shrugged out of it. After a while, she had a good idea: she put it on the seat and sat on it. It made things a little more comfortable. Her daughter and Nieh Ho-T’ing quickly imitated her.

“I wish I had a watch,” she said as the scaly devils’ vehicle rattled along. Without one, she could only use her stomach to gauge the passage of time. She didn’t think they would be giving out the midday meal in camp yet, but she wasn’t sure.

“We will get where we’re going, wherever that is, when we get there, and nothing we can do will make that time come sooner,” Nieh said.

“You sound more like a Buddhist than a Marxist-Leninist,” Liu Han teased. With only him and her daughter to hear, that was safe enough to say. Had it reached anyone else’s ears, it might have resulted in a denunciation. Liu Han didn’t want that to happen to Nieh, who was not only an able man but also an old lover of hers.

“The revolution will proceed with me or without me,” Nieh said. “I would prefer that it proceed with me, but life does not always give us what we would prefer.”

Liu Han knew that only too well. When the Japanese overran her village, they’d also killed her family. Then the little scaly devils drove out the Japanese—and kidnapped her and made her part of their experiments on how and why humans mated as they did. That was why Liu Mei had wavy hair and a nose unusually large for a Chinese—her father had been an American, similarly kidnapped. But Bobby Fiore was long years dead, killed by the scaly devils, and Liu Han had been fighting them ever since.

She peered out through one of the little openings in the side wall of the combat vehicle—a viewport for the closed firing port just below. She saw rice paddies, little stands of forest, peasant villages, occasional beasts in the fields, once an ox-drawn cart that had hastily gone off to the side of the road so the combat vehicle wouldn’t run it down.

“It looks a lot like the country around my home village,” she said. “More rice—I liked eating it in the camp. It was an old friend, even if the place wasn’t. I’d got used to noodles in Peking, but rice seemed better somehow.”

“Freedom would seem better,” Liu Mei said. “Liberating the countryside would seem better.” She was still a young woman, and found ideology about as important as food. Liu Han shook her head, somewhere between bewilderment and pride. When she was Liu Mei’s age, she’d hardly had an ideology. She’d been an ignorant, illiterate peasant. Thanks to the Party, she was neither ignorant nor illiterate anymore, and her daughter never had been.

With more jounces, the mechanized combat vehicle went off the road and into a grove of willows. There, with newly green boughs screening off the outside world, it came to a stop, though the motor kept running. A rattle at the back of the vehicle was a male undoing whatever fastening had kept the rear gate closed. It swung open. In the language of the Race, the scaly devil said, “You Tosevites, you come out now.”

If they didn’t come out now, the little devils could shoot them while they were in the troop-carrying compartment. Liu Han saw she had no choice. Out she came, bumping her head on the roof of the vehicle.

She looked around as soon as she had her feet on the ground. The turret of the combat vehicle mounted a small cannon and a machine gun. Those bore on the Chinese men with submachine guns and rifles who advanced toward the machine. In their midst were three woebegone little scaly devils. One of the Chinese called, “You are Nieh Ho-T’ing, Liu Han, and Liu Mei?”

“That’s right,” Liu Han said, her agreement mixing with those of the others. She added, “Who are you?”

“That doesn’t matter,” the man answered. “What does matter is that you are the people for whom we are exchanging these hostages.” He swung the muzzle of his submachine gun toward the unhappy little devils he and his comrades were guarding.

Negotiations between the men of the People’s Liberation Army—for that was what they had to be—and the little scaly devils who made up the crew of the combat vehicle did not last long. When they were through, the little scaly devils in Chinese hands hurried into the vehicle while Liu Han and her daughter and Nieh hurried away from it. The scaly devils slammed the doors to the troop compartment shut as if they expected the Chinese to start shooting any second.

And the Chinese leader said, “Hurry. We have to get out of here. We can’t be sure the little scaly devils don’t have an ambush laid on.”

Fleeing through the willow branches that kept throwing little leaves in her face, Liu Han said, “Thank you so much for freeing us from that camp.”

“You are experienced revolutionaries,” the People’s Liberation Army man answered. “The movement needs you.”

“We will give it everything we have,” Nieh Ho-T’ing said. “The Kuomintang could not defeat us. The Japanese could not defeat us. And the little scaly devils shall not defeat us, either. The dialectic is on our side.”

The little scaly devils knew nothing of the dialectic. But they, like the Party, took a long view of history. Eventually, history would show which was correct. Liu Han remained convinced the proletarian revolution would triumph, but she was much less certain than she had been that it would happen in her lifetime.
But I’m back in the struggle,
she thought, and hurried on through the willows.

Not even during the fighting after the conquest fleet landed on Tosev 3 had Gorppet seen such devastation as he found when the small unit he commanded moved into the Greater German
Reich.