Striking the Balance (69 page)

“At ease, Lieutenant,” Patton said in a gravelly voice. He pointed across the lines toward a couple of Lizards who were busy doing whatever Lizards did. “So there is the enemy, face-to-face. Ugly devils, aren’t they?”

“Yes, sir,” Mutt said. “Of course, they say that about us, too, sir—call us Big Uglies, I mean.”

“Yes, I know. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, or so they say. In
my
eye, Lieutenant, those are ugly sons of bitches, and if they think me ugly, well, by God, I take it for a compliment.”

“Yes, sir,” Daniels said again. Patton didn’t seem inclined to start shooting up the landscape, for which he was duly grateful.

“Are they adhering to the terms of the cease-fire in this area?” the general demanded—maybe he
would
start the war up again if the answer turned out to be no.

But Mutt nodded. “Sure are, sir. One thing you got to give the Lizards: they make an agreement, they stick by it. More’n the Germans and the Japs and maybe the Russians ever learned.”

“You sound like a man who speaks from experience, Lieutenant . . .  ?”

“Daniels, sir.” Mutt almost laughed. He was Patton’s age, more or less. If you didn’t have experience by the time you were pushing sixty, when the devil would you? But that probably wasn’t what the general meant. “I went through the mill around Chicago, sir. Every time we dickered a truce with the Lizards for picking up wounded and such, they stuck right with it. They may be bastards, but they’re honorable bastards.”

“Chicago.” Patton made a sour face. “That wasn’t war, Lieutenant, that was butchery, and it cost them dear, even before we used our atomic weapon against them. Their greatest advantage over us was speed and mobility, and what did they do with it? Why, they threw it away, Lieutenant, and got bogged down in endless street fighting, where a man with a tommy gun is as good as a Lizard with an automatic rifle, and a man with a Molotov cocktail can put paid to a tank that would smash a dozen Shermans in the open without breaking a sweat. The Nazis fought the same way in Russia. They were fools, too.”

“Yes, sir.” Daniels felt like one of the kids he’d managed listening to him going on about the best time to put on the hit-and-run. Patton knew war the way he knew baseball.

The general was warming to his theme, too: “And the Lizards don’t learn from their mistakes. If they hadn’t come, and if the Germans had broken through to the Volga, do you suppose they would have been stupid enough to try and take Stalingrad house by house? Do you, Lieutenant?”

“Have to doubt it, sir,” said Mutt, who’d never heard of Stalingrad in his life.

“Of course they wouldn’t! The Germans are sensible soldiers; they learn from their mistakes. But after we drove the Lizards back from Chicago winter before last, what did they do? They slogged straight on ahead again, right back into the meat grinder. And they paid. That’s why. If these talks go the way they look to be going, they’re going to have to evacuate the whole U.S.A.”

“That’d be wonderful, sir. If it happens,” Mutt said.

“No, it wouldn’t,” Patton said. “Wonderful would be killing every one of them or driving them off our world here altogether.” One thing you had to give him, Mutt realized: he didn’t think small. He went on, “Since we can’t do that, worse luck, we’re going to have to learn to live with them henceforward.” He pointed across to the Lizards. “Has fraternization after the cease-fire been peaceful in this area, Lieutenant?”

“Yes, sir,” Daniels said. “Sometimes they come over and—I guess you’d call it talk shop, sir. And sometimes they want ginger. I reckon you know about that.”

“Oh, yes,” Patton said with a chuckle. “I know about that. It was good to find out we weren’t the only ones with vices. For a while there, I did wonder. And when they get their ginger, what do they use to pay for it?”

“Uh,” Mutt said. You couldn’t tell a lieutenant general
uh
, though, so he continued, “This and that, sir. Souvenirs, sometimes: stuff that doesn’t mean anything to them, like us trading beads to the Indians. Medical-kit supplies sometimes, too. They got self-stick bandages that beat our kind all hollow.”

Patton’s pale eyes glittered. “They ever trade—liquor for their ginger, Lieutenant? Has that ever happened?”

“Yes, sir, that’s happened,” Mutt allowed cautiously, wondering if the sky would fall on him in the next moment.

Patton’s nod was slow. His eyes still held Daniels. “Good. If you’d told me anything different, I’d know you were a liar. The Lizards don’t like whiskey—I told you they were fools. They’ll drink rum. They’ll even drink gin. But scotch, bourbon, rye? They won’t touch ’em. So if they can forage up something they don’t want and trade it for something they do, they think they’re getting the good half of the deal.”

“We haven’t had any trouble with drunk and rowdy, sir,” Mutt said, which was close enough to true to let him come out with it straight-faced. “I ain’t tried to stop ’em from takin’ a nip when they come off duty, not since the cease-fire, but they got to be ready to fight all the time.”

“You look like a man who’s seen a thing or two,” Patton said. “I won’t complain about the way you’re handling your men so long as they’re combat-ready, as you say. The Army isn’t in the business of producing Boy Scouts, is it, Lieutenant Daniels?”

“No, sir,” Mutt said quickly.

“That’s right,” Patton growled. “It’s not. Which is not to say—which is not to say for a moment—that neatness and cleanliness aren’t of importance for the sake of discipline and morale. I’m glad to see your uniform so tidy and in such good repair, Lieutenant, and even gladder to see those men over there bathing.” He pointed to the soldiers in the creek. “Too often, men at the front lines think Army regulations no longer apply to them. They are mistaken, and sometimes need reminding of it.”

“Yes, sir,” Daniels said, knowing how filthy he and his uniform had been till he finally took the time to spruce up a couple of days earlier. He was glad Herman Muldoon wasn’t anywhere around—one look at Muldoon and Patton (whose chin was neatly shaved, whose uniform was not only clean but showed creases, and whose spit-shined shoes gave off dazzling reflections) would have flung him in the brig.

“From the look of things, Lieutenant, you have a first-rate outfit here. Keep ’em alert. If our talks with the Lizards go as the civilian authorities hope, we’ll be moving forward to reclaim the occupied areas of the United States. And if they don’t, we’ll grab the Lizards by the snouts and kick ’em in the tail.”

“Yes, sir,” Mutt said again. Patton sent a final steely-eyed glare over toward the Lizards, then jumped back into the command car. The driver started the motor. Acrid exhaust belched from the pipe. The big, clunky Dodge rolled away.

Mutt let out a sigh of relief. He’d survived a lot of contact with the Lizards, and now he’d survived contact with his own top brass, too. As any front-line soldier would attest, your own generals could be at least as dangerous to you as the enemy.

Liu Han listened with more than a little annoyance to the men of the central committee discussing how they would bring over to the side of the People’s Liberation Army the large number of peasants who flooded into Peking to work for the little scaly devils in the factories they kept open.

The annoyance must have been visible; Hsia Shou-Tao stopped in the middle of his presentation on a new propaganda leaflet to remark, “I am sorry we seem to be boring you.”

He didn’t sound sorry, except perhaps sorry she was there at all. He hadn’t displayed that kind of scornful arrogance since before he’d tried to rape her. Maybe the lesson he’d got then, like most lessons, wore off if it wasn’t repeated till it stuck.

“Everything I have heard is very interesting to me,” Liu Han replied, “but do you think it really would catch the interest of a peasant with nothing more in his mind than filling his belly and the bellies of his children?”

“This leaflet has been prepared by propaganda specialists,” Hsia said in condescending tones. “How do you presume to claim you know more than they?”

“Because I was a peasant, not a propaganda specialist,” Liu Han retorted angrily. “If someone came up to me and started preaching like a Christian missionary about the dictatorship of the proletariat and the necessity of seizing the means of production, I wouldn’t have known what he was talking about, and I wouldn’t have wanted to learn, either. I think your propaganda specialists are members of the bourgeoisie and aristocracy, out of touch with the true aspirations of the workers and especially of the peasants.”

Hsia Shou-Tao stared at her. He had never taken her seriously, or he would not have tried to force himself upon her. He hadn’t noticed how well she’d picked up the jargon of the Communist Party; she relished turning that complex, artificial set of terms against those who had devised it.

From across the table, Nieh Ho-T’ing asked her, “And how would you seek to make his propaganda more effective?” Liu Han weighed with great care the way her lover—who was also her instructor in Communist Party lore—spoke. Nieh was Hsia’s longtime comrade. Was he being sarcastic to her, supporting his friend?

She decided he wasn’t, that the question was sincerely meant. She answered it on that assumption: “Don’t instruct new-come peasants in ideology. Most of them will not comprehend enough of what you are saying. Tell them instead that working for the little devils will hurt people. Tell them the things they help the scaly devils make will be used against their relatives who are still back in the villages. Tell them that if they do work for the scaly devils, they and their relatives will be liable to repisals. These are things they can understand. And when we firebomb a factory or murder workers coming out of one, they will see we speak the truth.”

“They will not, however, be indoctrinated,” Hsia pointed out, so vehemently that Liu Han got the idea he’d written most of the leaflet she was criticizing.

She looked across the table at him. “Yes? And so what? Most important is keeping the peasants from working for the little devils. If it is easier to keep them from doing that without indoctrinating them, then we shouldn’t bother trying. We do not have the resources to waste, do we?”

Hsia stared at her, half in anger, half in amazement. Liu Han might have been an ignorant peasant a year before, but she wasn’t any more. Could others be quickly brought up to her level of political consciousness, though? She doubted that. She had seen the revolutionary movement from the inside, an opportunity most would never enjoy.

Nieh said, “We can waste nothing. We are settling in for a long struggle, one that may last generations. The little scaly devils wish to reduce us all to the level of ignorant peasants. This we cannot permit, so we must make the peasantry ideologically aware at some point in our program. Whether that point is the one under discussion, I admit, is a different question.”

Hsia Shou-Tao looked as if he’d been stabbed. If even his old friend did not fully support him—“We shall revise as necessary,” he mumbled.

“Good,” Liu Han said. “Very good, in fact. Thank you.” Once you’d won, you could afford to be gracious. But not too gracious: “When you have made the changes, please let me see them before they go to the printer.”

“But—” Hsia looked ready to explode. But when he glanced around the table, he saw the other central committee members nodding. As far as they were concerned, Liu Han had proved her ability. Hsia snarled, “If I give you the text, will you be able to read it?”

“I will read it,” she said equably. “I had better be able to read it, wouldn’t you say? The workers and peasants for whom it is intended will not be scholars, to know thousands of characters. The message must be strong and simple.”

Heads again bobbed up and down along the table. Hsia Shou-Tao bowed his own head in surrender. His gaze remained black as a storm cloud, though. Liu Han regarded him thoughtfully. Trying to rape her had not been enough to get him purged even from the central committee, let alone from the Party. What about obstructionism? If he delayed or evaded giving her the revised wording for the leaflet, as he was likely to do, would that suffice?

Part of her hoped Hsia would fulfill his duty as a revolutionary. The rest burned for a chance at revenge.

Atvar paced back and forth in the chamber adapted—not quite well enough—to the needs of the Race. His tailstump quivered reflexively. Millions of years before, when the presapient ancestors of the Race had been long-tailed carnivores prowling across the plains of Home, that quiver had distracted prey from the other end, the end with the teeth. Would that the Big Uglies could have been so easily distracted!

“I wish we could change our past,” he said.

“Exalted Fleetlord?” The tone of Kirel’s interrogative cough said the shiplord of the conquest fleet’s bannership did not follow his train of thought.

He explained: “Had we fought among ourselves more before the unified Empire formed, our weapons technology would have improved. When it came time to duplicate those antique weapons for conquests of other worlds, we would have had better arms. What was in our data banks served us well against the Rabotevs and Hallessi, and so we assumed it always would. Tosev 3 has been the crematorium of a great many of our assumptions.”

“Truth—undeniable truth,” Kirel said. “But if our own internecine wars had continued longer and with better weapons, we might have exterminated ourselves rather than successfully unifying under the Emperors.” He cast his eyes down to the soft, intricately patterned woven floor covering.

So did Atvar, who let out a long, mournful hissing sigh. “Only the madness of this world could make me explore might-have-beens.” He paced some more, the tip of his tailstump jerking back and forth. At last, he burst out, “Shiplord, are we doing the right thing in negotiating with the Big Uglies and for all practical purposes agreeing to withdraw from several of their not-empires? It violates all precedent, but then, the existence of opponents able to manufacture their own atomic weapons also violates all precedent.”

“Exalted Fleetlord, I believe this to be the proper course, painful though it is,” Kirel said. “If we cannot conquer the entire surface of Tosev 3 without damaging great parts of it and having the Big Uglies damage still more, best we hold some areas and await the arrival of the colonization fleet. We gain the chance to reestablish ourselves securely and to prepare for the safe arrival of the colonists and the resources they bring.”