Upsetting the Balance (75 page)

“Which means only that they hold us in contempt,” Stalin snapped. “The Nazis, they think, are more dangerous to them. But us? They can deal with us at any time. And why do they think this? Because the Nazis can make these bombs on their own and we, it seems, cannot. It all comes down to these bombs.”

Molotov thought about pointing out that the Lizards had reduced their forces in the north and west of Russia to attack Germany before they knew the Nazis had explosive-metal bombs, and that the one the Germans set off came as a complete and most unpleasant surprise to them.

He kept quiet, though. This once, it wasn’t because he feared what would happen if he contradicted Stalin—although that would be bad. In the end, though, the General Secretary was right. It did all come down to those bombs. If the Soviet Union could make more, it might survive. If it couldn’t, it would go under, if not to the Lizards, then to the Germans and Americans.

Kurchatov and his crew
could
make more bombs; Molotov was certain of that. He was just as certain nobody else in the Soviet Union could in any conceivably useful amount of time.

Stalin glared at Molotov, in lieu of glaring at the entire world. “These bunglers you have gathered together, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich, have six months. If they have not made an explosive-metal bomb by then, they shall suffer the consequences—and so shall you.”

Molotov licked his lips. Stalin did not forget threats like that. Molotov took a deep breath. “Comrade General Secretary, if that is how you feel, call the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs and have them deal with me now. The Kurchatov group cannot make us a bomb within six months. No one else you can find will do better.”

He hated taking such a risk. Stalin might very well ring up the NKVD, in which case the Soviet Union would have a new foreign commissar in short order. But defusing Stalin now would also defuse the threat half a year away.

Stalin kept staring at him, now musingly. Molotov did not talk back to him; that was like a law of nature. Molotov went hot and cold at the same time; his legs felt like jelly. Facing Churchill, even facing Hitler, was one thing, facing Stalin quite another. He was in Stalin’s power, and he knew it.

At last, the General Secretary said, “Well, we shall see.” Molotov almost spilled out of his chair and onto the floor in relief—he’d won. He’d managed to talk the leader of his country into not destroying it—and, incidentally, into not destroying him. It shouldn’t have been as hard as it was. Hard or easy, though, he’d survived. So had Kurchatov’s team. The war would go on, and the Soviet Union, too.

Liu Han hated Peking winter. She was from hundreds and hundreds of
li
farther south; the cold months were bad enough there. Here, every time she went outdoors she was acutely reminded the Mongolian steppe lay just to the west. She piled on quilted garments till she looked like a perambulating pile of bedding, and she was still cold.

Nevertheless, tonight she was out on the streets, making her way on
hutungs
and broader avenues toward the Forbidden City, where the little scaly devils, like the Chinese Emperors before them, made their headquarters. Let the icy wind do with her as it would. Tonight, she wanted to be close to the little devils’ center.

She turned to Nieh Ho-T’ing. “I hope their Emperor has a happy birthday,” she said savagely.

“Yes.” His smile was more a predator’s grimace than one of genuine mirth. “They are the strangest creatures in all the world—the little devils, I mean. They celebrated their Emperor’s birthday—they call it hatching day—six months ago, too, in summertime. How can a man, or even a scaly devil, have two birthdays each year?”

“They tried to explain this to me when I was on their plane that never came down,” Liu Han said. “They were talking about different worlds and different years. I didn’t understand much of it, I’m afraid.” She hung her head. Time in the plane that never came down, in the scaly devils’ camp, and in the city had shown her how ignorant she was. If she’d stayed in her village the rest of her life, as most Chinese peasant women did, she never would have known.

Nieh said, “Yes, they are from a different world. That is so. I had not thought on what it might mean for birthdays and such, to have a world with a different year from ours.”

Even knowing things, sometimes, was not enough. She’d seen that, too. You also had to know how the things you knew fit together. Knowing one thing here and one there wasn’t worth much. If you could put them together, you had something.

“How much longer?” she asked him.

He took a watch from his pocket, looked at it, and quickly replaced it “Fifteen minutes,” he said. If you openly showed you had a watch these days, you ran the risk of being mistaken for one of the little devils’ rich running dogs, or, conversely, having the lackeys think you were a resistance leader who needed to know exactly what time it was so your raid would go as you’d planned. If you were, in fact, such a leader, you didn’t want people to know it.

Fifteen minutes. Save for when she was in labor, Liu Han had never known time to pass so slowly. “Will we be able to hear the songs we’re listening for?” she asked, guarding her meaning in case any of the people milling around was a spy.

“Oh, yes,” Nieh assured her. “I’m sure my friend from the Big Wine Vat will sing very loud and clear, and he is far from the only man in the chorus.” He lowered his voice, careful even though he was speaking in code. “This song will be heard all over China tonight.”

Liu Han hugged herself, partly against the numbing cold and partly from excitement. If all went as she hoped, she would soon have the beginning of her revenge on the little scaly devils who had brought her so much grief. A boy ran past her with a bundle of strips of paper in one hand and a paste pot in the other. He found a blank stretch of wall, slapped paste onto it, and put up a couple of the strips. Then he ran to look for a spot where more might go.

“You had a clever idea there,” Liu Han said, nodding toward the ragamuffin. “Picking boys who can’t read makes it harder for the little scaly devils to trace those messages. All the boys know is that someone gave them money to put them up.”

“Doctrine,” Nieh said. “If you use someone for a purpose like that, the less he knows, the better.” He chuckled. “Our singers are the same way. If they knew just what sort of songs we were asking them to perform, some of them might want to do something else instead.”

“Yes.” Liu Han thought about doctrine. Nieh often seemed to know what to do without having to consider first. The thing he called doctrine told him what he needed, almost as if it let him toss the coins for the
I Ching
inside his own head. That made it a valuable tool. But he also sometimes seemed unable to think outside the framework his doctrine gave him, as if it were not tool but master. The Communists in the scaly devils’ prison camp had acted the same way. She’d heard Christian missionaries gabble about a Truth they claimed to have. The Communists thought they owned truth, too. It sometimes made them uncomfortable allies, even if she could never have struck the little devils such a blow without them.

Nieh Ho-T’ing was casually tapping the palm of his hand against a trouser leg. His mouth shaped silent words:
eight, seven, six . . .

As he said the word
five
, a sharp, deep
bang!
came from inside the walls of the Forbidden City. “Early,” Nieh said, “but not so bad.” The grin he was wearing belied even the partial criticism.

He’d hardly finished the sentence when another
bang!
went off, and then another. Liu Han felt as if she were drunk on
samshu,
though she’d had nothing stronger than tea. “We give the Emperor a happy birthday,” she said, and added the emphatic cough for good measure.

Two more bombs went off among the scaly devils, then one, then silence. Nieh Ho-T’ing frowned. “We had eight arranged for in all here in Peking,” he said. “Perhaps two timers failed, or perhaps they ran late and the little devils found them before they could blow up.”

That made Liu Han remember the bombs had not got in among the little scaly devils by themselves. The Communists had promised her they’d care for the families of the beast-show men killed in the explosions, and she believed them; they had a good reputation in such things. But money did not pay for the anguish the wives and children of those men would know. She knew how hard losing a family was. It had happened to her twice now.

Had she not had her idea, those beast-show men would still be living, working at their trade. She hung her head. Hurting the little scaly devils might justify what she’d done, but could not make her proud of it.

The little devils’ hissing alarms started going off. Gunfire came from inside the Forbidden City. That wasn’t the raiders. That was the little scaly devils, shooting either at innocent people (there were waiters and other servants who’d also still be alive and well if she hadn’t had her idea; she remembered them, too) or at one another.

Suddenly Liu Han and Nieh Ho-T’ing stood almost alone, not far from the walls of the Forbidden City. People in Peking had seen a lot of war. They knew that, when explosions went off anyplace nearby, going elsewhere was one of the best ideas you could have. She started drifting away with the crowd, and tugged at Nieh’s sleeve when he didn’t move fast enough to suit her.

“You’re right,” he said sheepishly, once she’d finally got his attention. They’d just ducked back into a
hutung
out of sight of the wall when a little scaly devil up there started shooting with his automatic rifle. A moment later, others up and down the wall poured fire at the humans out and about in the night. What had been a withdrawal became a stampede, some people screaming in panic, others because they were hit.

“Hurry!” Liu Han cried. “We have to get away. If they send their males out of the Forbidden City, they’ll slaughter everyone they can find.” Nieh hurried but, to her surprise, wore a big, fierce grin on his usually solemn face. “What’s funny?” Liu Han demanded indignantly. “They’re killing us.”

“That is what’s funny,” he answered, which made no sense to her till he explained: “They play into our hands. If they kill people who had nothing to do with setting off the bombs among them, they do nothing to help themselves and only make people hate them. Even some of their lackeys will think twice about backing them now, and may come over to us or give us useful information. The scaly devils would have been wiser to do nothing till they found out who had bombed them, then to strike hard at us. That way, they could have claimed they were punishing the guilty. Do you understand?”

He’d taken that tone—almost as if he were a village schoolmaster—with her before when he was instructing her in matters of doctrine. She thought as she fled. Nieh looked at the world cold-bloodedly, more so than anyone else she’d ever known. But he was a war leader. Such men could not afford to be anything but cold-blooded.

She said, “We’ll have to stay in the shadows for a while, till the little devils stop hounding us.”

Nieh Ho-T’ing shook his head. “No. Now we hit them harder than ever, harass them in every way we can, so we keep them too busy to launch a proper campaign against us. If we can keep them off balance, they will be foolish.”

Liu Han thought about that as they trotted along through the
hutungs.
They went arm in arm to keep from being swept apart by the crowds surging away from the Forbidden City. She decided it made sense. If you were in a fight with someone, you didn’t hit him once and then stand back to see what he’d do next. You hit him again and again, as often as you could, to make sure he gave up or at least didn’t have the chance to hit you back.

The landlord of their roominghouse screamed at them to close the door and stop letting out the heat. “What’s all the commotion outside?” he added.

“I don’t know,” Nieh and Liu Han said together, and then laughed. She’d picked up a good deal of doctrine listening to him. If she showed undue knowledge, the landlord might wonder how she came by it.

Hsia Shou-Tao sat at a table in the eating room. With him was a pretty young woman in a brocaded silk dress with so many slits in it that Liu Han wondered how she kept from freezing to death. A jar of
samshu
sat between them. By the foolish expression on Hsia’s face, it was not the first one that had been there.

“Is all well?” he called to Nieh Ho-T’ing.

“I think so,” Nieh answered, with a pointed glance toward Hsia’s companion. She glared at him like a cat with ruffled fur. If she wasn’t a security risk, Liu Han had never seen one. Could Hsia keep his mouth shut after he took her upstairs to see her body? Liu Han hoped so, but hope wasn’t enough in a game of this importance.

“Join us?” Hsia Shou-Tao asked.

“No, thank you,” Nieh Ho-T’ing answered, rather coldly. The pretty girl muttered something through her painted lips; Liu Han had no doubt it wasn’t a compliment. She was pleased at Nieh’s answer. She didn’t want to sit at the same table with Hsia, even if he had another woman to distract him from her.

She and Nieh Ho-T’ing went to the stairway together. She saw Hsia smirking at the two of them, which only made her more angry with him. The stairwell was cold and dark. She stumbled. Nieh caught her elbow before she could fall. “Thank you,” she said.

“My pleasure,” he answered, and then laughed at himself. “I sound like a perfect member of the bourgeoisie, don’t I? But it
is
my pleasure. This was your idea, Comrade. I wouldn’t want you to hurt yourself just as it begins to unfold. You deserve the credit.”

“Thank you,” she said again. Her room was a couple of floors higher than Nieh’s, but she didn’t mind when he walked up past his floor with her. She wondered why she didn’t. Maybe she’d decided to pay Hsia Shou-Tao back for that smirk, maybe she felt filled with the triumph of finally paying back the scaly devils for all they’d done to her. Her mouth twisted. Maybe, after so long, she just wanted a man. Her hand was all right in its way—it knew exactly what she liked—but it couldn’t hold her and hug her afterwards. Of course, not all men did that, either, but the hope was always there.