In the Balance (16 page)

“Give him my polite greetings,” Atvar answered, thinking the Tosevite empire was too small to deserve such a big name. Like most Tosevites, though, the emissary himself was substantially larger than the fleetlord.

The interpreter talked haltingly in Molotov’s speech. Part of the problem was that Tosevite languages did not fit well in the mouths of the Race: to Atvar, all Tosevites sounded as if they had their mouths full of pap. Tosevite languages were also hard for the Race because they were so maddeningly irregular; they had not spent long millennia being smoothed into
efficient rationality. And, even without those difficulties, the languages remained incompletely familiar to the officers assigned to learn them. Up until the actual landings on Tosev 3, they’d had only radio transmissions from which to work (the first convenient thing Atvar could see about the Tosevites’ possessing radio), and comprehension had emerged slowly out of those, even with the help of computers programmed to deduce probable word meanings by statistics.

Molotov listened to the fleetlord’s greeting, gave back one of his own. Unlike the Tosevite from Deutschland, he had sense enough to speak slowly so as not to overwhelm the interpreter. Also unlike that Tosevite, he gave no sign of discomfiture at being off his home planet and in free-fall for the first time in his life.

A viewscreen showed a hologram of Tosev 3 as it appeared from the
127th Emperor Hetto
, but Molotov did not even deign to glance at it. Through the corrective lenses hooked in front of his fiat, immobile eyes, he stared straight toward Atvar. The fleetlord approved. He had not thought to find such singleness of purpose among these big barbarians.

Molotov spoke again, still slowly and without raising his voice. The interpreter turned both eye turrets toward Atvar in embarrassment; the fleetlord should have enjoyed the privilege of first address. But what could a Big Ugly know of proper protocol? Atvar said, “Never mind his manners. Just tell me what he says.”

“It shall be done, Exalted Fleetlord. Vyacheslav Mikhailovich—this is the polite way to address the Tosevites who speak Ruskii: by their own name and that of their father—well, never mind that; the Tosevite demands the immediate unconditional withdrawal of all our forces from the land and air belonging to the empire of the SSSR.”

“Oh, he does, does he?” The fleetlord let his jaws gape in a guffaw. “Remind him he is in no position to make demands. If he occupied Home, he might have the right to bend us to his will. But it is the surrender of the SSSR that is under discussion, not ours.”

Molotov listened to the interpreter’s translation without changing expression. To Atvar, the Tosevites he’d seen and met owned extraordinarily mobile features; his own facial hide and musculature were far less flexible. But this native might have been carved from stone. Still stubbornly ignoring his surroundings, he paused to think, then replied:

“We shall not yield. We have fought the Gitlerites [“By which he means the Deutsch Tosevites, exalted fleetlord,” the interpreter explained] to a standstill when they expected us to collapse. Our land is vast, our resources widespread. We are not to be easily overcome.”

“Tell him that his
vast
empire”—Atvar loaded the word with scorn—“would vanish almost without trace on any of the three worlds of
the
Empire.”

Molotov again listened, thought, answered: “All three of your worlds are not here with you, and you seek to conquer not just the SSSR but the whole of this world. Consider if you have not overextended yourselves.”

Atvar glared at the impassive Tosevite. The native might be barbarous, but he was no fool A whole world—even a world with too much water like Tosev 3—was a big place, bigger than the fleetlord had truly understood until he began this campaign. He hadn’t expected to face industrialized opposition, either.

Nevertheless, he and the Race had advantages, too. He bludgeoned Molotov with them: “We strike you as we please, but you come to grief whenever you try to hit us back. Once all your factories are in ruins, how do you propose to hit back at all? Yield now, and you will still have something left for your own people.”

Molotov wore the same sort of bulky garments most Tosevites preferred. His face was damp and shiny with water exuded as a metabolic coolant; the
127th Emperor Hetto
was at a temperature comfortable to the Race, not for natives. But he still answered back boldly enough: “We have many factories. We have many men. You have won battles against us, but you are far from winning your war. We will fight on. Even the Gitlerites have more sense than to yield to you.”

“As a matter of fact, I recently spoke with the foreign minister of Deutschland,” Atvar said. That Tosevite had also been too stubborn to yield until his empire was pounded flat, but Molotov did not have to know it.

The native looked intently at the fleetlord. “And what had he to say?” Since the SSSR and Deutschland were at war before the Race reached Tosev 3, it stood to reason that they had little reason to trust each other.

“We discussed the feasibility of Deutschland’s acknowledging the authority of the Emperor,” Atvar answered. On speaking of his sovereign, he cast down his eyes for a moment. So did the interpreter.

“Emperor, you say? I want to be sure I understand you correctly,” Molotov said. “Your—nation—is headed by a person who rules because he is a member of a family that has ruled for many years before him? Is that what you tell me?”

“Yes, that is correct,” Atvar said, puzzled by the Tosevite’s puzzlement. “Who else would rule an empire
—the
Empire—but the Emperor? The Tosevite named Stalin, I gather, is the emperor of your SSSR.”

So far as the fleetlord could see, Molotov still did not change expression. Nor was his voice anything but its usual mushy monotone. But what he said made the interpreter hiss in rage and astonishment, and even lash his tail stump back and forth as if in mortal combat. The officer mastered himself, spoke in Molotov’s language. Molotov answered. The interpreter trembled. Slowly, he mastered himself. Even more slowly, he turned to Atvar.

He still hesitated to speak. “What does the Big Ugly say?” Atvar demanded.

“Exalted Fleetlord,” the interpreter stammered, “this—this thing of a Tosevite tells me to tell you that the people—the people of his SSSR—that they, they executed—murdered—their emperor and all his family twenty-five years ago. That would be about fifty of our years,” he added, remembering his function as translator. “They murdered their emperor, and this Stalin, this leader of theirs, is no emperor at all, but the chief of the group of bandits that killed him.”

Atvar was a mature, disciplined male, so he did not show his feelings with a hiss as the interpreter had. But he was shocked to the very core of his being. Imagining a government without an emperor at its head was almost beyond him. Home had been unified for scores of millennia, and even in the distant days before unity had seen only the struggle between one empire and another. Halless 1 was a single empire when the Race conquered it; Rabotev 2 had been divided, but also among competing empires. What other way was there to organize intelligent beings? The fleetlord could conceive of none.

Molotov said, “You should know, invader from another world, that Deutschland has no emperor either, nor does the United—” The interpreter went back and forth with him for a little-while, then explained, “He means the empire—or not-empire, I should say—in the northern part of the small landmass.”

“These Tosevites are utterly mad,” Atvar burst out. He added, “You need not translate that But they are. By the Emperor”—just saying the name was a comfort—“it must have to do with the world’s beastly climate and excess water.”

“Yes, Exalted Fleetlord,” the interpreter said. “It may be so. But what shall I tell the creature here?”

“I don’t know.” Atvar felt befouled at even contemplating speech with anyone, no matter how alien, who was involved in impericide—a crime whose existence he had not thought of until this moment. All at once, cratering the whole world of Tosev 3 with nuclear weapons looked much more attractive than it had. But the fleet had only a limited number of them—against the sort of fight the Tosevites were expected to put up, even a few would have been more than necessary. And with Tosev 3’s land surface so limited, ruining any of it went against his grain.

He gathered himself. “Tell this Molotov that what he and his bandits did before the Race arrived will not concern us unless they refuse to yield and thereby force us to take notice of it. But if need be, we will avenge their murdered emperor.” Thinking of a murdered emperor, the fleetlord knew the first pity he’d felt for any Tosevite.

If his threat frightened Molotov, the Big Ugly gave no sign of it; the native truly was as frozen of countenance as anyone of the Race. He said, “It is true, then, that when you speak of an empire, you mean it in the exact and literal sense of the word, with an emperor and a court and all the trappings of the outworn past?”

“Of course that is true,” Atvar answered. “How else would we mean it?”

“The enlightened people of the SSSR have cast the rule of despots onto the ash-heap of history,” Molotov said.

Atvar laughed in his flat face. “The Race has flourished under its Emperors for a hundred thousand years. What do you know of history, when you were savages the last time we looked over your miserable pesthole of a planet?” The fleetlord heartily wished the Tosevites had stayed savages, too.

“History may be slow, but it is certain,” Molotov said stubbornly. “One day the inevitable revolution will come to your people, too, when their economic conditions dictate its necessity. I think that day will be soon. You are imperialists, and imperialism is the last phase of capitalism, as Marx and Lenin have shown.”

The interpreter stumbled through the translation of that last sentence, and added, “I have trouble rendering the natives’ religious terms into our language, Exalted Fleetlord. Marx and Lenin are gods or prophets in the SSSR.” He spoke briefly with Molotov, then said, “Prophets. Vyacheslav Mikhailovich knew this Lenin himself.”

Molotov said, “Lenin led the revolution which overthrew our emperor and established the rule of the people and workers of the SSSR. I am proud to say I assisted in this worthy task.”

Atvar stared at the Tosevite in disgust. He spoke to the interpreter: “Tell the bandit I have nothing further to say to him. If he and his murderers will not yield themselves to us, their punishment shall only be the harsher.”

The interpreter slowly, haltingly, turned the crisp words into the mushy native language. Molotov answered with one word.
“Nyet.”
The fleetlord glanced with one quick flick of an eye at the interpreter to see if that meant what he thought. It did.

“Get him off this ship,” Atvar snapped. “I am sorry he comes here under truce, or I would treat him as he deserves.” The idea of wantonly slaughtering an emperor—even a Tosevite emperor—gave him an atavistic urge to bite something: Molotov by choice, though the Big Ugly looked anything but appetizing.

The doorway out of Atvar’s office hissed open. The interpreter pushed off from the chair whose back he’d been holding and shot through it. Molotov followed more awkwardly, the graceless garments he wore flapping about him. As soon as he was gone, Atvar shut the door behind him.
The rather sharp smell of his body remained, like a bad memory. The fleetlord turned up the air scrubbers to make it go away.

While it still lingered, he phoned Kirel. When the shiplord’s face appeared in his screen, he said, “You will come to my quarters immediately.”

“It shall be done, Exalted Fleetlord.” Kirel blanked the screen. He was as good as his word. When he chimed for admittance, Atvar let him in, then closed the door again. Kirel asked, “How fare the talks with the Tosevites, Exalted Fleetlord?”

“Less well than I had hoped.” Atvar let his breath hiss out in a long, frustrated sigh. “All their greatest empires still refuse to acknowledge the glory of the Emperor.” He cast his eyes down in the ritual gesture. He would not tell Kirel what he’d learned from Molotov, not yet; his own pain remained too raw to permit it.

“This is altogether a more difficult task than we looked for when we set out from Home,” Kirel said. The shiplord had tact. He forbore to remind Atvar that he had urged a surrender demand before actual ground combat got under way. After a moment, he went on, “It has been too many generations since the Race fought a real war.”

“What do you mean?” Atvar tried to hold sudden suspicion from his voice. Tactful or not, Kirel coveted the ornate body paint the fleetlord wore. Atvar continued, “We are trained for this mission as well as we could possibly be.”

“Indeed we are,” Kirel agreed gravely, which only made Atvar more suspicious. “But the Tosevites are not merely trained; they are experienced. Weapon for weapon, we far surpass them. In craft on the battlefield, though, they exceed us. That has hurt us, again and again.”

“I know. They are worse foes than I expected them to be even after we learned of their abnormal technological growth. Not only are they wily, as you say, they are stubborn. I was confident they would break when they realized the advantages we enjoyed over them. But they keep fighting, as best they can.”

“It is so,” Kirel said. “Perhaps already being locked in combat among themselves has given them the discipline they need to carry on against us. Along with being stubborn, they are well-trained and skilled. We can continue to smash them for a long time yet; one of our landcruisers, one of our aircraft, is worth anywhere from ten to twenty-five of theirs. But we have only so many munitions. If we cannot overawe them, we may face difficulties. In my coldest dreams, I see our last missile wrecking a clumsy Tosevite landcruiser—while another such landcruiser rolls out of a factory and toward us.”

Of themselves, Atvar’s clawed hands twitched as if to tear a foe in front of him. “That
is
a cold dream. You should have left it in your coffin when
you awoke. We have set down our factory ships here and there, you know. As we gain raw materials, we shall be able to increase our stocks.”