Tilting the Balance

The women giggled furiously, maybe at his accent, maybe just at his face: as far as they were concerned, anybody who wasn’t Chinese might as well have been a nigger. They spoke rapidly to each other; he caught the phrase foreign devil, which they applied to those not of their kind. He wondered what they were saying about him.

They didn’t stay long. After goodbyes to Liu Han and bows to him-he had been polite, even if he was a foreign devil-they headed back to wherever they lived. He hugged Liu Han. You still couldn’t tell she was pregnant when she wore clothes, but now he felt the beginning of a bulge to her belly when they embraced.

“You okay? ” he asked in English, and added the Lizards’ interrogative cough at the end.

“Okay, ” she said, and tacked on the emphatic cough. For a while, the Lizards’ language had been the only one they had in common. Nobody but the two of them understood the mish-mash they spoke these days. She pointed to the teapot, used the interrogative cough.

“M’goi-thanks, ” he said. The pot was cheap and old, the cups even cheaper, and one of them cracked. The Lizards had given them the hut and everything in it; Fiore tried not to think about what might have happened to whoever was living there before.

He sipped the tea. What he wouldn’t have given for a big mug of coffee with sugar and lots of cream! Tea was okay once in a while, but all the time every day? Forget it. He started to laugh.

“Why funny? ” Liu Han asked.

“Up there”-their shorthand for the spaceship-“you eat my kind food. ” Most of the canned goods the Lizards fed them with came from the States or from Europe. Fiore made a horrible face to remind her how well she’d liked them. “Now I eat your kind food. ” He made the face again, but this time he pointed to himself.

A mouse scuttled across the floor, huddled against the baked-clay hearth to get warm. Liu Han didn’t carry on the way a lot of American women would have. She just pointed at it.

Fiore picked up a brass incense burner and flung it at the mouse. His aim was still good. He caught the rodent right in the ribs. It lay there twitching. Liu Han picked it up by the tail and threw it out. She said, “You”-she made a throwing gesture-“good. ”

“Yeah, ” he said. With their three languages and a lot of dumb show, he told her how he’d nailed the chicken thief. “The arm still works. ” He’d tried explaining about baseball. Liu Han didn’t get it.

She made the throwing gesture. “Good, ” she repeated. He nodded; this wasn’t the first mouse he’d nailed. The camp was full of vermin. It had been a jolt, especially after the metallic sterility of the spaceship. It was also another reason not to want to know too much about what he ate. He’d never worried about what health departments back in the U. S. A. did. But seeing what things were like without them gave him a new perspective.

“Should make money, arm so good, ” Liu Han said. “Not do like here. ”

“God knows that’s so, ” Fiore answered, responding to the second part of what she’d said. Most Chinamen, he thought scornfully, threw like girls, shortarming it from the elbow. Next to them, he looked like Bob Feller. Then he noticed the key word from the first part. “Money? ”

He didn’t need much, not in camp. He and Liu Han were still the Lizards’ guinea pigs, so they didn’t pay rent for the hut and nobody dared haggle too hard in the marketplace. But more cash never hurt anybody. He’d made a little doing the hard physical work-hauling lumber and digging trenches-he’d started playing ball to avoid. And he won more than he lost when he gambled. Still…

Mountebanks did well here, among people starved for any other entertainment: jugglers, clowns, a fellow with a trained monkey that seemed smarter than a lot of people Fiore knew. All the baseball skills he had-throwing, catching, hitting, even sliding-were ones the people here didn’t use. He’d never thought about turning baseball into a vaudeville act, but you could do it.

He bent to kiss Liu Han. She liked that-not just that he did it, but that he made a production of it. She needed to know he kept caring for her. “Baby, you’re brilliant, ” he said. Then he had to stop and explain what brilliant meant, but it was worth it.

Ussmak was unenthusiastic about leaving the nice warm barracks at Besancon. The cold outside made his muzzle tingle. He hurried toward his landcruiser, whose crew compartment had a heater.

“We’ll kill all the stupid Deutsch Big Uglies as far as the eye can see, then come back here and relax some more. Shouldn’t take long, ” Hessef said. The landcruiser commander let the lid to his cupola fall with a clang.

That’s the ginger talking, Ussmak thought. Hessef and Tvenkel had both tasted just before they started this mission: ginger was cheap and easy to come by here in France. They’d both laughed at him for declining-he’d used even more than they had while sitting around waiting for something to happen.

But he still thought combat was different. The Big Uglies were barbarous, but he knew they could fight. He’d had landcruisers wrecked around him; he’d lost crewmales. And the Deutsche were supposed to be more dangerous than the Russki had been. That was plenty to make him want to go at them undrugged.

Tvenkel had sneered, “Don’t worry about it. The landcruiser just about fights itself. ”

“Do what you want, ” Ussmak had answered. “I’ll taste plenty when we get back, I promise you that. ” He missed the confidence and exuberance ginger gave him, but he didn’t think he really was smarter when he tasted-he only felt that way. A lot of tasters failed to draw the distinction, but he thought it was there.

At Hessef’s blithe order, he started the landcruiser’s engine. Part of a long column, the big, heavy machine rumbled out of the fortress and through the narrow streets of Besancon. Big Uglies in their ridiculous clothes stared as it went past. Some of the Big Uglies yelled things. Ussmak hadn’t learned any Francais, but the tone didn’t sound friendly.

Males of the Race, aided here and there by Tosevites in low, flat-topped cylindrical hats, held back local traffic until the column passed by. Most of the traffic was Big Uglies on foot or on the two-wheeled contraptions that used their own body energy for propulsion. Others sat atop animal-drawn wagons that seemed to Ussmak something straight out of an archaeology video.

One of the animals let a pile of droppings fall to the street. None of the Big Uglies rushed to clean it up; none of them seemed to notice it was there. Hessef spoke to Ussmak from the landcruiser’s intercom: “Filthy creatures, aren’t they? They deserve to be conquered, and we’re going to do it. ” An unnatural confidence filled, his voice.

But for the landcruisers, only a couple of motorized vehicles moved in Besancon. Both of them had big metal cylinders rising from the rear like tumors. “What are those things? ” Ussmak asked. “Their engines? ”