Striking the Balance

The little scaly devil was clever. Whatever Liu Han said, he had an answer. Whatever she said, he had a way of twisting her words against her-she wouldn’t have minded listening to a debate between him and Nieh Ho-T’ing, who was properly trained in the dialectic. But Liu Han had one argument Ttomalss could not overcome: the submachine gun. “It is revenge,” she said.

“Ah.” Ttomalss bowed his head. “May the spirits of Emperors past look kindly upon my spirit.”

He was waiting quietly for her to kill him. She’d seen war and its bloody aftermath, of course. She’d had the idea for bombs that had killed and hurt and maimed any number of little scaly devils-the more, the better. But she had never killed personally and at point-blank range. It was, she discovered, not an easy thing to do.

Angry at Ttomalss for making her see him as a person of sorts rather than an ugly, alien enemy, angry at herself for what Nieh would surely have construed as weakness, she whirled and left the chamber. She slammed the inner door after her, made sure it was locked, then closed and locked the outer door, too.

She stamped back toward the roominghouse. She didn’t want to be away from Liu Mei a moment longer than absolutely necessary. With every word of Chinese the baby learned to understand and to say, she defeated Ttomalss all over again.

From behind her, a man said, “Here, pretty sister, I’ll give you five dollars Mex-real silver-if you’ll show me your body.” He jingled the coins suggestively. His voice had a leer in it.

Liu Han whirled and pointed the submachine gun at his startled face. “I’ll show you this,” she snarled.

The man made a noise like a frightened duck. He turned and fled, sandals flapping as he dashed down thehutung.

Wearily, Liu Han kept on her way. Ttomalss was smaller than the human exploiters she’d known (she thought of Yi Min the apothecary, who’d taken advantage of her as ruthlessly as any of the men she’d had the displeasure to meet in the airplane that never landed save only Bobby Fiore), he was scalier, he was uglier, he was-or had been-more powerful.

But was he, at the bottom, any worse?

“I just don’t know,” she said, and sighed, and kept on walking.

“This is bloody awful country,” George Bagnall said, looking around. He, Ken Embry, and Jerome Jones no longer had Lake Peipus and Lake Chud on their left hand, as they had through the long slog north from Pskov. They’d paid a chunk of sausage to an old man with a rowboat to ferry them across the Narva River. Now they were heading northwest, toward the Baltic coast.

The forests to the east of Pskov were only a memory now. Everything was flat here, so flat that Bagnall marveled at the lakes’ and rivers’ staying in their beds and not spilling out over the landscape. Embry had the same thought. “Someone might have taken an iron to this place,” he said.

“Someone did,” Jones answered: “Mother Nature, as a matter of fact. In the last Ice Age, the glaciers advanced past here for Lord knows how many thousand years, then finally went back. They pressed down the ground like a man pressing a leaf under a board and a heavy rock.”

“I don’t much care what did it,” Bagnall said. “I don’t fancy it, and that’s that. It’s not just how flat it is, either. It’s the color-it’s off, somehow. All the greens that should be bright are sickly. Can’t blame it on the sun, either, not when it’s in the sky practically twenty-four hours a day.”

“We aren’t very far above lake level,” Embry said. “We can’t be very far above sea level. I wonder how far inland the salt has soaked. That would do something to the plants, I daresay.”

“There’s a thought,” Bagnall said. “Always nice having an explanation for things. I’ve no idea whether it’s the proper explanation, mind you, but any old port in a storm, what?”

“Speaking of which-” Embry took out a map. “As best I can tell, we’re about ten miles from the coast.” He pointed northwest. “That great plume of smoke over there, I think, is from the great industrial metropolis of Kohtla-Jarve.” He spoke with palpable irony; had it not been for the name of the place beside it, he would have taken the dot on the map for a flyspeck.

“Must be something going on in whatever-you-call-it,” Jerome Jones observed, “or the Lizards wouldn’t have pounded it so hard.”

“I don’t think that’s war damage,” Ken Embry said. “The volume of smoke is too steady. We’ve seen it for the past day and a half, and it’s hardly changed. I think the Germans or the Russians or whoever controls the place have lighted off a big smudge to keep the Lizards from looking down and seeing what they’re about.”

“Whatever it is, at the moment I don’t much care,” Bagnall said. “My question is, are we likelier to get a boat if we saunter blithely into Kohtla-Jarve or if we find some fishing village on the Baltic nearby?”

“Would we sooner deal with soldiers or peasants?” Jones asked.