Striking the Balance

Like that guilty peasant, Hsia looked down, not at his accuser. “Forgive me, Comrades,” he mumbled. “I confess I have failed myself, failed the People’s Liberation Army, failed the Party, and failed the revolutionary movement. Because of my lust, I tried to molest the loyal and faithful follower in the revolutionary footsteps of Mao Tse-Tung, our soldier Liu Han.”

The self-criticism went on for some time. Hsia Shou-Tao told in humiliating detail how he had made advances to Liu Han, how she rebuffed him, how he tried to force her, and how she defended herself.

“I was in error in all regards in this matter,” he said. “Our soldier Liu Han had never shown signs of being attracted to me in any way. I was wrong to try to take her for my own pleasure, and wrong again to ignore her when she made it plain she did not want me. She did right to rebuff me, and right again in courageously resisting my treacherous assault. I am glad she succeeded.”

The oddest part of it was, Liu Han believed him. He would have been glad in a different way had he raped her, but his ideology drove him toward recognizing that what he had done was wrong. She didn’t know for certain whether that made her respect the ideology more or frightened her green.

When Hsia Shou-Tao completed the self-criticism, he glanced toward Nieh Ho-T’ing to see whether it had been adequate.No, Liu Han thought, but it was not her place to speak. And, after a moment, Nieh said in a stern voice, “Comrade Hsia, this is not your first failing along these lines-your worst, yes, but far from your first. What have you to say of that?”

Hsia bowed his head again. “I admit it,” he said humbly. “I shall be vigilant from now on in eliminating this flaw from my character. Never again shall I disgrace myself with women. If I should, I am ready to suffer the punishments prescribed by revolutionary justice.”

“See to it that you remember what you have said here today,” Nieh Ho-T’ing warned him in a voice that tolled like a gong.

“Women, too, are part of the revolution,” Liu Han added, which made Nieh, the other men of the executive committee, and even Hsia Shou-Tao nod. She didn’t say anything more, and everyone nodded again: not only did she say what was true, she didn’t rub people’s noses in it. One day, probably one day before too long, the executive committee would need a new member. People would recall her good sense. With that, and with Nieh backing her, she would gain a regular seat here.

Yes,

she thought.My time will come.

George Bagnall stared in fascination at the gadgets the Lizards had turned over along with captive Germans and Russians to get their own prisoners back. The small disks were plastic of some sort, with a metallic finish that somehow had shifting rainbows in it. When you put one into a reader, the screen filled with color images more vivid than any he’d ever seen in the cinema.

“How the devil do they do it?” he asked for what had to be the tenth time.

Lizard talk came hissing out of the speakers to either side of the screen. Small as they were, those speakers reproduced sound with greater fidelity than any manufactured by human beings.

“You’re the bleeding engineer,” Ken Embry said. “You’re supposed to tell the rest of us poor ignorant sods how it’s done.”

Bagnall rolled his eyes. How many hundreds of years of scientflic progress for humanity lay between the aircraft engines he’d monitored and these innocent-looking, almost magical disks? Hundreds? Maybe how many thousands.

“Even the alleged explanations we get from Lizard prisoners don’t make much sense-not that anyone here in Pskov speaks their language worth a damn,” Bagnall said. “What the bleeding hell is askelkwank light? Whatever it is, it pulls images and sounds out of one of these little blighters, but I’m buggered if I know how.”

“We don’t even know enough to ask the right questions,” Embry said in a mournful voice.

“Too right we don’t,” Bagnall agreed. “And even though we see the stories and hear the sounds that go with them, most of the time they still don’t make any sense to us: the Lizards are just too strange. And do you know what? I don’t think they’ll be a far-thing’s worth clearer to the Jerries or the Bolsheviks than they are to us.”

“For that matter, what would a Lizard make ofGone With the Wind?” Embry said. “He’d need it annotated the way we have to put footnotes to every third word in Chaucer, but even worse.”

“That bit in the one story where the Lizard kept doing whatever he was doing-looking things up, maybe-and the images appeared one after another on the screen he was watching… What the devil was that supposed to mean?”

Embry shook his head. “Damned if I know. Maybe it was supposed to be all deep and symbolic, or maybe we don’t understand what’s going on, or maybe the Lizard who made the film didn’t understand what was going on. How can we know? How can we even guess?”

“Do you know what it makes me want to do?” Bagnall said.