In the Balance

He was glancing through the Signal again, trying to figure out what some of the Norwegian (or were they Danish?) words meant, when the door opened. He wondered what the Lizards wanted. He wasn’t hungry yet; the pork and beans still felt like a medicine ball in his stomach. But instead of a Lizard with canned goods, in walked Liu Han.

“Your mate,” said one of the Lizards escorting her. His mouth fell open. Fiore thought that meant he was laughing. That was all right He laughed at the Lizard, too, for not being able to mate.

He gave Liu Han a hug. Neither of them wore anything; they stuck to each other wherever they touched. “How are you?” he said, letting her go. “It’s good to see you.” It was good to see anyone human, but he didn’t say that aloud.

“Good also to see you,” Liu Han said, adding the Lizards’ emphatic cough to end the sentence. They spoke to each other in a jargon they invented and expanded each time they were together, one no other two people could have followed: English, Chinese, and the Lizards’ language pasted together to yield ever-growing meaning.

She said, “I am glad the scaly devils do not force us to mate”-she used the Lizards’ word for that-“each time we see each other now.”

“You’re glad?” He laughed. “I can only do so much.” He flicked his tongue against the inside of his upper lip as he blew air out through his mouth, making a noise like a window shade rolling up-and him with it.

He’d done that often enough for her to understand it. She smiled at his foolishness. “Not that I don’t like what you do when we mate”-again she used the Lizards’ emotionless word, which let her avoid choosing a human term with more flavor to it-“but I do not like having to do it at their order.”

“Yeah, I know,” he said. Being a specimen didn’t appeal to him, either. Then he wondered what they ought to do instead. Besides their bodies, the only thing they had in common was that the Lizards had shanghaied both of them.

Since Liu Han plainly didn’t feel like screwing to pass the time, he went through the Signal with her. He’d decided a while ago that she was anything but stupid, but he found how little she knew of the world outside the village from which she’d come.

He couldn’t read the text of the magazine, but he recognized faces and places in the pictures: Goebbels, Marshal Petain, Paris, North Africa. To Liu Han, they were all strange. He wondered if she’d even heard of Germany.

“Germany and Japan are friends,” he told her, only to discover that Japan wasn’t Japan in Chinese. He tried again: “Japan fights”-that in pantomime-“America and fights China, too.”

“Oh, the eastern devils,” she exclaimed. “Eastern devils kill my man, my child, just before little scaly devils come. This Germany friends with eastern devils? Must be bad.”

“Probably,” he said. He’d been sure the Germans were the bad guys when they declared war on the United States. Since then, though, he’d heard they had done a better job of fighting the Lizards than most. Did that all of a sudden turn them back into good guys? He had trouble figuring out where loyalty to his own country stopped and loyalty to-to his planet, would it be? — started. He wished Sam Yeager were around. Yeager was more used to thinking in terms like those.

He also noticed, not for the first time but more strongly than ever before, that anything not Chinese was somehow devilish to Liu Han. The Lizards were scaly devils; he himself, when he wasn’t Bobbyfiore

pronounced all as one word, was a foreign devil; and now the Japs were eastern devils. Given what they’d done to her family, he couldn’t blame her for thinking of them like that, but he was pretty sure she would have hung the same label on them no matter what.

He asked her about it, using multilingual circumlocutions. When she finally understood, she nodded, surprised he needed to put the question to her. “If you are not Chinese, of course you are a devil,” she said, as if stating a law of nature.

“That’s not how it is,” Fiore told her; but she didn’t look convinced. Then he remembered that, till he’d started playing ball and meeting all sorts of people instead of just the ones from his neighborhood, he’d been sure everybody who wasn’t Catholic would burn in hell forever. Maybe this devil business was something like that.

They went back to looking at the Signal. The high-kicking nightclub dancer in her skimpy satin outfit made Liu Han laugh. “How can she show herself, wearing so little?” she asked, forgetting for the moment that she herself wore nothing. Fiore laughed in turn. Except when he stuck to the mat, he often forgot he was naked, too. Amazing what you got used to.

Liu Han pointed to an advertisement for an Olympia typewriter. “What?” she said in English, adding the Lizard interrogative cough.