Second Contact (44 page)

Most of the time, Reuven took that for granted. Now, when he looked at it, he found it depressing. Couldn’t people get along well enough so they didn’t need to have disinterested aliens keeping them from quarreling with one another?

His quiet laugh was rueful. His father would have known better even than to bother shaping the question in his own mind. If Poland hadn’t taught that the only possible answer was,
Of course not, you fool,
what would? The squabbles in Palestine even under Lizard rule should have driven the point home with a sledgehammer.

Before he let it depress him too much, a student from the Soviet Union named Anna Suslova asked, “Permission to speak, superior sir?” Reuven sometimes wondered how she’d got into the medical college, and whether someone capable had taken the entrance exams for her. She often seemed out of her depth here. The question she put to Shpaaka showed how her mind worked: “Superior sir, why not punish ginger users so severely, fear of punishment keeps females from using the drug?”

“We have been trying to do this with our males since we came to Tosev 3,” Shpaaka replied. “We have not succeeded. By all indications, ginger causes pleasure even more acute in females. How likely is it that we will eliminate its use among them through intimidation?”

Maybe he’d thought that sardonic rejoinder would quash Anna Suslova. If so, he had misjudged her. With a toss of her head, she replied, “It could be that you have not yet made the punishment severe enough to intimidate properly.”

“Yes, it could be,” Shpaaka admitted. “But it could also be that we are not so fond of spilling one another’s blood as Tosevites often seem to be.”

Anna Suslova tossed her head again. “In an emergency, superior sir, one does what is immediately necessary and worries about its consequences later. Had the Soviet Union not followed this principle, is it not likely my not-empire would be under the rule of the Race today?”

“Yes, I suppose that is likely,” Shpaaka said. “My opinion is, many of the Tosevites of your not-empire would be happier were that so.”

Where he hadn’t before, he got through to the Russian girl with that. She glared at him, furious and not even trying to hide it. For a Lizard, he was good at recognizing human facial expressions, but he didn’t call her on this one. Reuven Russie scratched his head. If he’d justified the Race’s rule in Palestine on the grounds of utility for the human population, how could he avoid extending the principle over the whole planet?

He contributed little to the discussion for the rest of the period.

Liu Han looked out from the window of her suite in the Biltmore Hotel at the wide street and the automobiles that packed it to the point where hardly any of them could move. With no small reluctance, she turned to her daughter and said, “I am beginning to believe that the Americans’ constant boasting about their prosperity is not boasting, but is a simple statement of fact.”

“They eat well,” Liu Mei said. Then she corrected herself: “They have plenty to eat, and they eat whenever they like. I see that, even if I do not care for much of their food. They have many more motorcars and televisors and radios than we do. They have more
room
than we do. This is a large city, not so large as Peking but still large, but it does not feel crowded. All these things do make for prosperity, yes. Who could disagree?”

“I myself disagreed,” Liu Han said. “This hotel is a hotel for rich people. Anyone can see that. The Americans do not bother pretending otherwise. Any country will treat rich people, important people, well, no matter how it treats its workers and peasants. You cannot judge how prosperous the United States is by the way the American ruling classes treat us.”

“I understand that, Mother.” Liu Mei’s voice showed amusement, even if her face did not. “It is good, though, that the Americans treat us as important people. They cannot be treating us as rich people, for we are not.”

“No, we are not rich people,” Liu Han agreed. “We should have trouble paying for a day’s stay in this hotel, let alone a stay of weeks like the one they are giving us. But we have been enough other places and seen enough other things for me to be sure they are not simply showing us their best, as we have sometimes done for foreign visitors over the years.”

She thought of televisors and radios and motorcars, as Liu Mei had. She thought of machines to wash dishes, which she’d seen in some of the homes she’d visited, and machines to wash clothes, which she’d seen in almost all of the homes. Those machines were like proletarians who could not be oppressed and so would never need to rise up in revolution against their capitalist overlords.

And she thought of something simpler, something far more fundamental. In every house she visited, she made sure she asked to use the toilet. And every house boasted one, sometimes more than one, not just a squatting-style toilet like those some rich men in China had, but a veritable porcelain throne. And every house boasted not just the cold running water that made the toilet flush but also hot, hers to command at the turn of a tap. If that was not prosperity, what was?

Liu Mei said, “And all the books they have! So many more people have libraries of their own here than back home. That major’s house, for instance, had more bookshelves than I was able to count.”

“Yes, I remember,” Liu Han said, more than a little discontentedly. When she and Liu Mei went to visit Major Yeager, she’d thought the books that packed his house another attempt at deception—
a Potemkin village,
the Russians called it: something meant to be seen but not used. But when she plucked a book off a shelf at random, Yeager had talked animatedly about it in both English and the language of the Race. Liu Han sighed. “His wife is a scholar. Maybe that helps account for it.”

“He knew my father,” Liu Mei said in tones of wonder. “I never thought I would meet anyone who knew my father. I have cousins in this country. I never thought I would have cousins anywhere.”

Absurdly, Liu Han felt a stab of jealousy. So far as she could tell, she had no relatives except Liu Mei alive anywhere in China. Between them, the little scaly devils and the Japanese had ground her ancestral village to powder; of her family, only she had got out from between the millstones.

“Major Yeager knew your father better than I ever did,” Liu Han said slowly. A strange thing to say, she knew, when Bobby Fiore had sown the seed that grew into Liu Mei deep inside her womb. Strange—but true. “He knew him longer than I did, and they spoke the same language, so they could understand each other. Your father and I spoke in broken bits of Chinese and the little scaly devils’ language and English. He never learned to speak Chinese very well.”

And with our bodies,
she thought, though she did not say that aloud.
Our bodies understood, even when we did not.
That, by the spirit of the compassionate Buddha, was knowledge of Bobby Fiore Major Yeager did not have.

Liu Mei said, “Is it tonight we are going back to Major Yeager’s house?”

“Yes, tonight,” Liu Han answered. “Why do you ask?”

“Because it is good to go to a place where people understand the little devils’ language,” her daughter answered. “It is not as good as if Major Yeager and his wife and his son spoke Chinese, but we both know more of the little devils’ language than we do English, and all three of them are fluent in it.”

“I will not tell you you are wrong,” Liu Han said. Even so, she glanced over toward Liu Mei. “And you will have a chance to talk with that son—Jonathan, his name is. Do not be too free with him. The Americans have less restraint in their dealings between young people than we do.”

“Do you know what he reminded me of?” Liu Mei said. “The young people in Peking who imitate the scaly devils, that’s what. Except he knows more about them than the young people in Peking do.”

“There was that one we saw,” Liu Han began. But then she shrugged. “You are probably right. You have to remember, though, that his father and mother deal with the scaly devils every day. If he has learned much of them, he has learned it because of what his parents do.” Liu Mei nodded, accepting that. Liu Han let out a silent sigh of relief. She did not want her daughter to have any excuse for developing an infatuation for any American youth.

By the time evening came, she was ready and more than ready to go down to Major Yeager’s home, if only to relax. She had spent the day conferring with several American members of Congress. Frankie Wong helped by interpreting, but she tried to speak as much English as she could, because she did not fully trust him to translate accurately. That made it a grueling session, one in which she felt as if her brains were being rolled out onto something flat and hard like dough being made into noodles.

And the congressmen were less sympathetic than she’d hoped they would be. “Let me say I do not see why we should be helping international Communism,” declared one, a man with a long nose and jowls that showed even more dark stubble than Bobby Fiore had had.

Frankie Wong gave her an expectant look, but she answered that one herself, in English: “You help us, you help people go free from Lizards.” The long-nosed American abruptly stopped asking questions.

Another congressman said, “Why shouldn’t we just send you lots of ginger, to keep the Lizards too drugged up and too horny”—Wong did have to translate that for her—“to be able to fight back?”

“Power come from barrel of a gun. War and politics never separate,” Liu Han replied. “So say Mao. He say true, I think.”

She got through the hearing. She thought she held her own. But letting an American drive her and Liu Mei down the wide but still crowded highways of Los Angeles was still a relief. She’d spent more time in motorcars here in the American city than in all her life in China. Fair enough: these foreign devils did reckon her an important personage. But so many people in the city had automobiles, had them and took them for granted. Even the way the city was built took them for granted. She’d seen that from the start.
Prosperity,
she thought again.

Only the richest Chinese would have been able to afford the home in which the Yeagers lived. Only those who collaborated with the little scaly devils would have been able to get the electrically powered machines that were so common in this country. “We greet you,” Barbara Yeager said in the little devils’ language when Liu Han and Liu Mei rang the doorbell (even it ran on electricity). Her husband and son nodded behind her. She went on, “Supper will be ready soon.”

Supper was an extravagantly large slab of beef served with a baked potato. Potatoes, Liu Han had found, were harmless; they took the place of rice and noodles in a lot of American cooking. The beefsteak was another declaration of U.S. affluence. Liu Han had never eaten so much meat in China as she did at almost every supper in the United States.

After supper, Major Yeager surprised her by helping his wife clean up. No Chinese man would have done such a thing, despite the Communists’ preaching of equality between the sexes. When the job was done, he went into the front room and pulled a paperbound book off a shelf. “I had to do some shopping around before I found this,” he said in English, sounding pleased with himself, “but I did.”

He handed it to Liu Han. She read English haltingly.
“Nineteen Thirty-eight Spalding Official Base Ball Guide.”
She looked over at him. “Why you show me this?”

“Open it at the page where I put a card in,” he answered. She did, and looked down at small pictures of men in caps of the sort Americans still sometimes wore. After a moment, one of the faces leapt out at her. She pointed. “That is Bobby Fiore.”

Major Yeager nodded. Yes, he was pleased with himself. “Truth,” he said in the scaly devils’ tongue before returning to English: “He is wearing a baseball uniform there. I wanted your daughter to have the chance to see what her father looked like.”

Liu Mei had gone off to talk with Jonathan Yeager. When she came into the room after Liu Han called, her mother looked closely to see if she was rumpled. Liu Han would not have bet American youths behaved much differently from their Chinese counterparts if they got the chance. But everything here seemed as it should.

Liu Han pointed to the photograph. “Your father,” she said, first in English and then in Chinese. Liu Mei’s eyes got very wide as she stared and stared at the picture. When at last she looked up, they were wet with tears. Liu Han understood that. She and her daughter were good Marxist-Leninists, but the ancient Chinese tradition of respect for one’s ancestors lived in both of them.

“Thank you,” Liu Mei said to Major Yeager. She’d spoken in English, but added an emphatic cough. That let her shift to the little devils’ language: “This means very much to me.”

“I am glad to do it,” Yeager replied in the same language. “He was your father, and he was my friend.” He turned to Liu Han. “Keep the book, if you want to. It will help you remember, even when you go home.”

“I thank you,” Liu Han said softly. She still believed—she had to believe—the American system was flawed, regardless of the prosperity it produced. But some of the foreign devils could be men as good as any Chinese. She’d seen that with Bobby Fiore, and now she saw it again with this other man who had been his friend.

Flight Lieutenant David Goldfarb studied the radar screen. “Another American launch,” he remarked. “The Yanks have been busy the past couple of weeks, haven’t they?”

“Aye, sir,” Sergeant Jack McKinnon answered. He chuckled. “Likely they’ve got a lot o’ ginger to fly up to all those poor Lizards who’ve had to do without their womenfolks for so long.” He laughed at his own wit.

So did Goldfarb, but he had a harder time of it. He wished the Lizards had never discovered that ginger made their females randy. Such a discovery could only mean they’d want more of the stuff. Oh, their leaders would do their best to keep them from getting more, but those same leaders had been doing their best for a long time. They’d had little luck yet.

He didn’t think they’d have much luck in future, either. He sighed—not too loud, so the sergeant wouldn’t notice. That meant Group Captain Roundbush would keep moving the stuff by the bushel basket, which meant Roundbush was liable to ask him for more help one day before too long.