Tilting The Balance (15 page)

The woman quit kicking the chicken thief and started after the bird that hadn’t come near Fiore. That hen had sensibly decided to go elsewhere. The woman stopped screeching and started wailing. What with all the racket she made, Fiore decided he was on the chicken’s side. That wouldn’t help the bird; if it stayed anywhere in camp, it would end up in somebody’s pot pretty damn quick.

Fiore picked his way through the crowded, narrow streets back toward his hut. He was glad he had a good sense of direction. Without it, he wouldn’t have gone out past his own front door. Nobody here had ever heard of street signs, and even if signs hung on every corner, they wouldn’t have been in a language he could read.

Liu Han was chattering away in Chinese with a couple of other women when he walked in. They turned and stared at him, half in curiosity, half in alarm. He bowed, which was good manners here. “Hello. Good day,” he said in his halting Chinese.

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 Besangon. 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.

77?af’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 Besangon. Big Uglies in their ridiculous clothes stared as it went past. Some of the Big Uglies yelled things. Ussmak hadn’t learned any Frangais, 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 Besangon. Both of them had big metal cylinders rising from the rear like tumors. “What are those things?” Ussmak asked. “Their engines?”

“No,” Tvenkel answered. The gunner went on, “They’re built to burn petroleum byproducts, like Tosevite landcruisers. But they can’t get those byproducts any more. The gadgets you see extract burnable gas from wood. They’re ugly makeshifts like most of what the Big Uglies do, but they work after a fashion.”

“Oh.” Up in the fortress that overlooked Besangon, Ussmak had grown used to smells he’d never smelled before. Now that he saw what produced some of those smells, he wondered what they were doing to his lungs.

The operations order said the landcruisers were to proceed northeast from Besangon. Through the town, however, they rumbled northwest. Ussmak wondered if that was right, but didn’t say anything about it. All he was doing was following the male in front of him. You couldn’t possibly get in trouble if you did that.

The male in front of him – and all the males in the column, right up to the lead driver, who had to make his own decisions – proved to know what they were doing. They rattled across a bridge (to the relief of Ussmak, who wasn’t sure it would take his landcruiser’s weight), past the earthworks of yet another fort, and then out onto a road that led in the proper direction.

Ussmak undogged his entry hatch and stuck out his head. Driving unbuttoned gave him the best view, even if the breeze in his face was chilly. Shouldn’t be dangerous here, he thought. Nothing even slightly out of the ordinary had happened since he came to Besancon. He’d become convinced the area was thoroughly pacified.

Up ahead, something went whump. Ussmak recognized that noise from the SSSR: somebody had driven over a land mine. Sure enough, landcruisers started going off the road on either side to get around a disabled vehicle. From the commander’s cupola, Hessef said, “Ah, will you look at that? It’s blown the track right off him.”

The ground to either side of the paved road was soft and soggy: not surprising, Ussmak supposed, since the highway ran parallel to the river that flowed through, Besangon. He didn’t think anything of it until a landcruiser, and then another one, bogged down in the muck.

From the woods to the north of the road came another sound with which Ussmak had become intimately familiar in the SSSR: a sharp, fast, harsh tac-tac-tac. He slammed the hatch with a clang. “They’re shooting at us!” he screamed. “That’s an egg-addled machine gun, that’s what that is!” Bullets ricocheting from the landcruiser’s composite armor underscored his words.

In the turret, Hessef shouted in high excitement. “I see muzzle flashes, by the Emperor! There he is, Tvenkel, right over there! Bring the turret around – that’s the way. Give him some with the machine gun, and then a round of high explosive. We’ll teach the Big Uglies to fool with usl”

Ussmak let out a slow hiss of wonder. Hessef s sloppy commands weren’t anything like the ones that had been drilled into the landcruiser crews in endless days of simulator training and exercises back on Home. Ussmak realized he was listening to the ginger talking again. An adjutant monitoring Hessef would have swelled up as if he had the gray staggers.

However unorthodox the orders, though, they accomplished their purpose. Hydraulics whirred as the turret smoothly traversed. The coaxial machine gun opened up. Heard from inside the landcruiser,

it wasn’t loud at all. “Fool with us, will they?” Tvenkel yelled. “I’ll teach them this world belongs to the Race!” He fired a long, long burst. Not being turned toward the Big Uglies with the machine gun, Ussmak at first had trouble judging how effective Tvenkel’s shooting was. But then more bullets pattered off the landcruisers like pebbles thrown at a metal roof. They did no more damage than pebbles would have, but showed the Tosevite gunners were still in business.

“Give ‘em the real thing,” Hessef said. Again, thick armor muffled the cannon’s roar, though the landcruiser rocked slightly on its treads as it took up the recoil.

“There, that’s done it,” Tvenkel said with satisfaction. “We put enough rounds on that machine gun so the Big Uglies running it won’t bother their betters again.” As if to underscore his words, bullets stopped hitting the landcruiser.

Ussmak peered through his forward vision slits.

Some of the other vehicles in the column were already moving ahead. A moment later, Hessef said, “Forward.”

“It shall be done, superior sir.” Ussmak released the brake, put the landcruiser into low gear. It rumbled forward. He steered very close to the machine that had thrown a track, keeping one of his own on the paved road to make sure he didn’t bog down. As soon as he was past the crippled landcruiser, he sped up to try to recapture some of the time everyone had lost shooting at the Big Uglies and their machine gun.

Hessef said, “Not bad at all. The column commander reports only two wounds, neither serious. And we obliterated those Tosevites.”

The ginger was still talking through him, Ussmak thought. Landcruiser crews shouldn’t have taken any casualties from a nuisance machine gun. Besides which, Hessef was ignoring the disabled fighting vehicle and the delay that sprang from the little firefight. If you’d tasted ginger a while before, such setbacks were too small to be worth noticing. Had Ussmak tasted along with the rest of the crew, he wouldn’t have noticed them, either. Without a particle of the herb in him, though, they bulked large. He wondered just how clever he really was after a good taste.

From behind and to the left, bullets clattered off the landcruiser’s rear deck and the back of the turret. The Big Uglies at their machine gun had lived through the firestorm around them after all.

“Halt!” Hessef screeched. Ussmak obediently hit the brake. “Five rounds high explosive this time,” the commander ordered. “Do you hear me, Tvenkel? I want those maniacal males blown to bloody bits.”

“So do I,” the gunner said. He and his commander agreed perfectly, just as training said members of a landcruiser crew should. The only trouble was that the tactic on which they agreed struck Ussmak as insane.

The landcruiser’s main armament boomed, again and again. And Hessefs was not the only crew that had halted. Through his vision slits, Ussmak watched several other landcruisers stop so they could pour fire down on the Tosevites who had had the temerity to annoy them. The driver wondered if their commanders were tasting, too.

When the barrage was done, Hessef said, “Forward,” in tones of self-satisfaction. Ussmak obeyed again. Not much later, the landcruiser column came to an enormous hole blown in the highway. “The Big Uglies can’t stop us with nonsense like that,” Hessef declared. And sure enough, the armored fighting vehicles’ swung off the road one by one.