Striking the Balance (24 page)

In pain, half stunned, for a moment she lay still and unresisting. Her mind flew back to the bad days aboard the little scaly devils’ airplane that never came down, when the little devils had brought men into her metal cell and they’d had their way with her, whether she wanted them or not. She was a woman; the scaly devils starved her if she did not give in; what could she do?

Then, she’d been able to do nothing except yield. She’d been altogether in the little scaly devils’ power—and she’d been an ignorant peasant woman who knew no better than to do whatever was demanded of her.

She wasn’t like that any more. Instead of fear and submission, what shot through her was rage so raw and red, she marveled it didn’t make her explode. Hsia Shou-Tao yanked her trousers off over her ankles and flung them against the wall. Then he pulled down his own, just halfway. The head of his organ, rampantly free of its foreskin, slapped Liu Han’s bare thigh.

She brought up her knee and rammed it into his crotch as hard as she could.

His eyes went wide and round as a foreign devil’s, with white all around the iris. He made a noise half groan, half scream, and folded up on himself like a pocketknife, his hands clutching the precious parts she’d wounded.

If she gave him any chance to recover, he’d hurt her badly, maybe even kill her. Careless that she was naked from the waist down, she scrambled away from him, snatched a long sharp knife out of the bottom drawer of the chest by the window, and went back to touch the edge of the blade to his thick, bull-like neck.

“You bitch, you whore, you—” He took one hand away from his injured privates to try to knock her aside.

She bore down on the blade. Blood trickled from the cut. “Hold very still,
Comrade,”
she hissed, loading what should have been an honored title with every ounce of scorn she could. “If you think I wouldn’t like to see you dead, you’re even stupider than I give you credit for.”

Hsia froze. Liu Han pressed the knife in a little deeper anyhow. “Careful,” he said in a tiny, strangled voice: the more he made his throat move, the more the knife cut him.

“Why should I be careful?” she snarled. It was, she realized, a good question. The longer this tableau held, the better the odds Hsia Shou-Tao would find a way to turn the tables on her. Killing him now would make sure he didn’t. If she left him alive, she’d have to move fast, while he was still too shocked and in too much pain to think clearly. “Are you ever going to do that to me again?” she demanded.

He started to shake his head, but that made the knife blade move in his flesh, too. “No,” he whispered.

She started to ask if he would ever do such a thing to any other woman again, but changed her mind before the words crossed her lips. He would say no to that, too, but he would undoubtedly be lying. Thinking of one lie would make it easier for him to think of others. Instead, she said, “Get on your hands and knees—slowly. Don’t do anything to get yourself bled out like a pig.”

He managed. He was awkward not just because of his battered testicles but also because his trousers were still in disarray, impeding his movement. That was one of the things Liu Han counted on: even if he wanted to grab her, having his pants around his ankles would slow him up.

She took the knife away from his neck, stuck it in the small of the back. “Now crawl to the door,” she said. “If you think you can knock me down before I shove this all the way in, go ahead and try.”

Hsia Shou-Tao crawled. At Liu Han’s order, he pulled the door open and crawled out into the hall. She thought about kicking him again as he left, but decided not to. After the humiliation from that, she would have to kill him. He hadn’t cared what humiliation he might visit on her, but she couldn’t afford to be so cavalier.

She slammed the door after him, let the bar down with a thud. Only then, after it was over, did she start to shake. She looked down at the knife in her hand. She could never leave the room unarmed, not now. She couldn’t leave the knife in a drawer while she slept any more, either. It would have to stay in the bedding with her.

She walked over, got her trousers, and started to put them back on. Then she paused and threw them down again. She took a scrap of rag, wet it in the pitcher on the chest of drawers, and used it to scrub at the spot where Hsia Shou-Tao’s penis had rubbed against her. Only after that was done did she get dressed.

A couple of hours later, someone knocked on the door. Ice shot up Liu Han’s back. She grabbed the knife. “Who is it?” she asked, weapon in hand. She realized it might not do her any good. If Hsia had a pistol, he could shoot through the door and leave her dead or dying at no risk to himself.

But the answer came quick and clear: “Nieh Ho-T’ing.” With a gasp of relief, she unbarred the door and let him in.

“Oh, it’s so good to be back in Peking,” he exclaimed. But as he moved to embrace her, he saw the knife in her hand. “What’s this?” he asked, one eyebrow rising.

What it was seemed obvious. As for why it was—Liu Han had thought she’d be able to keep silent about Hsia’s attack, but at the first question the tale poured forth. Nieh listened impassively; he kept silent, except for a couple of questions to guide her along, till she was through.

“What do we do about this man?” Liu Han demanded. “I know I am not the first woman he has done this to. From the men in my village, I would have expected nothing different. Is the People’s Liberation Army run like my village, though? You say no. Do you mean it?”

“I do not think Hsia will bother you again, not that way,” Nieh said. “If he did, he would be a bigger fool than I know him to be.”

“It is not enough,” Liu Han said. The memory of Hsia Shou-Tao tearing at her clothing brought almost as much fury as had the actual assault. “It’s not me alone—he needs to be punished so he never does this to anyone.”

“The only sure way to manage that is to purge him, and the cause needs him, even if he is not the perfect man for it,” Nieh Ho-T’ing answered. He held up a hand to forestall Liu Han’s irate reply. “We shall see what revolutionary justice can accomplish. Come down to the meeting of the executive committee tonight.” He paused thoughtfully. “That will also be a way of getting your views heard there more often. You are a very sensible woman. Perhaps you will be a member before too long.”

“I will come,” Liu Han said, concealing her satisfaction. She had come before the executive committee before, when she was advocating and refining her plan for bombing the little scaly devils at their feasts. She hadn’t been invited back—till now. Maybe Nieh had ambitions of using her as his puppet. She had ambitions of her own.

Much of the business of the executive committee proved stupefyingly dull. She held boredom at bay by glaring across the table at Hsia Shou-Tao. He would not meet her eye, which emboldened her to glare more fiercely.

Nieh Ho-T’ing ran the meeting in ruthlessly efficient style. After the committee agreed to liquidate two merchants known to be passing information to the little devils (and also known to be backers of the Kuomintang) he said, “It is unfortunate but true that we of the People’s Liberation Army are ourselves creatures of flesh and blood, and all too fallible. Comrade Hsia has provided us with the latest example of such frailty. Comrade?” He looked toward Hsia Shou-Tao like—the comparison that sprang to Liu Han’s mind was
like a landlord who’s caught a peasant cheating him out of his rents.

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 a
skelkwank
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 of
Gone 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.

“If you’re anything like me, it makes you want to go back to our house and drink yourself blind on that clear potato spirit the Russians brew,” Embry said.

“You’ve hit it in one,” Bagnall said. He hefted another story disk and watched the shimmering rainbows shift. “What worries me most about having all these go to the Nazis and the Reds is that. If they do manage to decipher them better than we can in this one-horse town, they’ll learn things we won’t know in England.”

“This thought has crossed my mind,” Embry admitted. “Do recall, though, the Lizards must have left all sorts of rubbish behind when their invasion failed. If we don’t have a goodly number of these
skelkwank
readers and the disks that go with them, I’ll be very much surprised.”

“You have a point,” Bagnall said. “The trouble is, of course, it’s rather like—no, it’s exactly like—having a library scattered at random across the landscape. You never can tell beforehand which book will have the pretty picture you’ve been looking for all along.”

“I’ll tell you what I’d like.” Embry lowered his voice; some Red Army men and a fair number from the
Wehrmacht
could follow English. “I’d like to see the Germans and the Russians—to say nothing of the bloody Lizards—scattered at random across the landscape. You couldn’t make me much happier than that.”

“Nor me.” Bagnall looked around at the map-lined chamber where they regularly kept the Nazis and Bolsheviks from going for each other’s throats. The readers and disks were stored there not least because it was tenuously neutral ground, with neither side likely to try to steal everything for itself from it. He sighed. “I wonder if we’ll ever see England again. Not likely, I’m afraid.”

“I fear you’re right.” Embry sighed, too. “We’re doomed to grow old and to die in Pskov—or, more likely, doomed not to grow old and to die in Pskov. Only blind luck’s kept us intact thus far.”