Striking the Balance

It sounded easy when you put it like that. Taking revenge on Ttomalss had sounded easy, too, when she’d proposed it to the central committee. And, indeed, kidnapping him down in Canton had proved easy-as she’d predicted, he had returned to China to steal some other poor woman’s baby. Getting him up here to Peking without letting the rest of the scaly devils rescue him hadn’t been so easy, but the People’s Liberation Army had managed it.

And now here he was, confined in a hovel on ahutung not far from the roominghouse where Liu Han-and her daughter-lived. He was, in essence, hers to do with as she would. How she’d dreamed of that while she was in the hands of the little scaly devils. Now the dream was real.

She unlocked the door at the front of the hovel. Several of the people begging or selling in the alleyway were fellow travelers, though even she was not sure which ones. They would help keep Ttomalss from escaping or anyone from rescuing him.

She closed the front door after her. Inside, where no one could see it from the street, was another, stouter, door. She unlocked that one, too, and advanced into the dim room beyond it.

Ttomalss whirled. “Superior female!” he hissed in his own language, then returned to Chinese: “Have you decided what my fate is to be?”

“Maybe I should keep you here along time,” Liu Han said musingly, “and see how much people can learn from you little scaly devils. That would be a good project, don’t you think, Ttomalss?”

“Thatwould be a good project for you. You would learn much,” Ttomalss agreed. For a moment, Liu Han thought he had missed her irony. Then he went on, “But I do not think you will do it. I think instead you will torment me.”

“To learn how much thirst you can stand, how much hunger you can stand, how much pain you can stand-that would be aninteresting project, don’t you think, Ttomalss?” Liu Han purred the words, as if she were a cat eyeing a mouse it would presently devour-when it got a little hungrier than it was now.

She’d hoped Ttomalss would cringe and beg. Instead, he stared at her with what, from longer experience with the scaly devils than she’d ever wanted, she recognized as a mournful expression. “We of the Race never treated you so when you were in our claws,” he said.

“No?” Liu Han exclaimed. Now she stared at the little devil. “You didn’t take my child from me and leave my heart to break?”

“The hatchling was not harmed in any way-on the contrary,” Ttomalss replied. “And, to our regret, we did not fully understand the attachment between the generations among you Tosevites. This is one of the things we have learned-in part, from you yourself.”

He meant what he said, Liu Han realized. He didn’t think he had been wantonly cruel-which didn’t mean he hadn’t been cruel. “You scaly devils took me up in your airplane that never landed, and then you made me into a whore up there.” Liu Han wanted to shoot him for that alone. “Lie with this one, you said, or you do not eat. Then it was lie with that one, and that one, and that one. And all the time you were watching and taking your films. And you say you never did me any harm?”

“You must understand,” Ttomalss said. “With us, a mating is a mating. In the season, male and female find each other, and after time the female lays the eggs. To the Rabotevs-one race we rule-a mating is a mating. To the Hallessi-another race we rule-a mating is a mating. How do we know that, to Tosevites, a mating is not just a mating? We find out, yes. We find out because of what we do with people like you and the Tosevite males we bring up to our ship. Before that, we did not know. We still have trouble believing you are as you are.”

Liu Han studied him across a gap of incomprehension as wide as the separation between China and whatever weird place the little scaly devils called home. For the first time, she really grasped that Ttomalss and the rest of the little devils had acted without malice. They were trying to learn about people and went ahead and did that as best they knew how.

Some of her fury melted. Some-but not all. “You exploited us,” she said, using a word much in vogue in the propaganda of the People’s Liberation Army. Here it fit like a sandal made by a master shoemaker. “Because we were weak, because we could not fight back, you took us and did whatever you wanted to us. That is wrong and wicked, don’t you see?”

“It is what the stronger does with the weaker,” Ttomalss said, hunching himself down in a gesture the little devils used in place of a shrug. He swung both eye turrets toward her. “Now I am weak and you are strong. You have caught me and brought me here, and you say you will use me for experiments. Is this exploiting me, or is it not? Is it wrong and wicked, or is it not?”