Striking the Balance

“May I, Exalted Fleetlord?” Kirel asked, approaching the computer. At Atvar’s gesture of permission, he shifted the image to a more detailed map of the fighting front in Florida. He pointed. “Here, between this town called Orlando and the smaller one named… can it really be Apopka?”

His mouth fell open in surprised amusement. So did Atvar’s. In the language of the Race,apopka meant “to create a bad smell.” The fleetlord leaned forward to examine the map. “That does seem to be what the characters say, doesn’t it? And yes, that is a likely spot for retaliation.”

“Truth.” Kirel pointed to the dispositions on the map. “The Americans have concentrated a good deal of armor hereabouts. Let the bomb fall where you indicated-after our males withdraw just a bit too obviously. Perhaps we can lure the Tosevites with one of their own tricks.”

“Exalted Fleetlord, it shall be done,” Kirel said.

Nieh Ho-T’ing was glad the little scaly devils had finally stopped showing their pornographic films of Liu Han. They hadn’t succeeded in destroying her usefulness to the cause of the People’s Liberation Army, and, after they’d returned her daughter to her, there wasn’t much point in continuing to portray her as a slut.

If anything, she’d gained prestige from their attacks on her. That had partly been Nieh’s doing, through his showing how the films exposed not Liu Han’s character but the little scaly devils’ vicious exploitation of her when they had her in a situation where her only choice was to submit.

That proposition had proved persuasive to the people of Peking. The central committee, however, had been less impressed. Oh, they’d gone along with Nieh’s arguments, because it redounded to their advantage to do so-and, indeed, Liu Han had gained prestige there, too. But they couldn’t forget that she had been photographed in positions far beyond merely compromising. Since they couldn’t blame her for that, they looked askance at Nieh for taking up with a woman who had done such things.

“Not fair,” Nieh muttered under his breath. The complaints went unnoticed in thehutung down which he made his way. What with gossiping women, squealing children, yapping dogs, vendors crying. The virtues of their nostrums and fried vegetables, and musicians hoping for coins, anything less than machine-gun fire would have drawn scant attention. And even machine-gun fire, provided it wasn’t too close, went unremarked in Peking these days.

Nieh came out onto theLiu Li Ch’ang,

the Street of the Glazed Tile Factory. It would have been a pleasant place to pass time had he had more leisure, for it was full of shops selling old books and other curios. Though he’d been born in the dying days of the Chinese Empire, and though he’d been thoroughly indoctrinated in Marxist-Leninist thought, he still maintained more respect for antiquarian scholarship than he sometimes realized.

Now, though, instead of going into one of those booksellers’ establishments, he paused at the little devils’ outdoor cinema device in front of it. Instead of leering at Liu Han as she let some man’s potent pestle penetrate her, the crowd gaped at what looked like the mother of all explosions.

The smooth Chinese narrator for the newsreel-the same running dog who had so lovingly described Liu Han’s degradation-said, “Thus does the Race destroy those who oppose it. This blast took place in the American province called Florida, after the foolish foreign devils provoked the merciful servants of the Empire beyond measure. Let it serve as a warning to all those who dare to offend our masters here in China.”

From the fiery cloud of the bomb blast itself, the scene shifted to the devastation it wrought. A tank’s cannon sagged down as if it were a candle that had drooped from being too close to the fire. Some of the ground looked as if the heat of the bomb had baked it into glass. Charred corpses lay everywhere. Some of the charred chunks of meat were not yet corpses, for they wriggled and moaned and cried out in their unintelligible language.

“I wouldn’t want that happening to me,” exclaimed an old man with a few long white whiskers sprouting from his chin.

“It happened to the little scaly devils, too,” Nieh Ho-T’ing said. “The Americans used a bomb just like this one against them. This is the scaly devils’ retaliation, but people can make these bombs, too.” He was glad of that, even if the Americans were capitalists.

“Foreign devils can make these bombs, maybe. If what you say is true,” the old man answered. “But can we Chinese do this?” He paused a moment to let the obvious answer sink in, then went on, “Since we can’t we had better do what the little devils say here, eh?”

Several people nodded. Nieh glared at them and at the old man. “The little devils have never used that kind of bomb here, or even threatened to,” he said. “And if we don’t resist them, they’ll rule us the same way the Japanese did-with fear and savagery. Is that what we want?”