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Nieh came out onto theLiu Li Ch’ang, the Street of the Glazed Tile Factory. It would have been a pleasant place to pass time had he had more leisure, for it was full of shops selling old books and other curios. Though he’d been born in the dying days of the Chinese Empire, and though he’d been thoroughly indoctrinated in Marxist-Leninist thought, he still maintained more respect for antiquarian scholarship than he sometimes realized.
Now, though, instead of going into one of those booksellers’ establishments, he paused at the little devils’ outdoor cinema device in front of it. Instead of leering at Liu Han as she let some man’s potent pestle penetrate her, the crowd gaped at what looked like the mother of all explosions.
The smooth Chinese narrator for the newsreel-the same running dog who had so lovingly described Liu Han’s degradation-said, “Thus does the Race destroy those who oppose it. This blast took place in the American province called Florida, after the foolish foreign devils provoked the merciful servants of the Empire beyond measure. Let it serve as a warning to all those who dare to offend our masters here in China.”
From the fiery cloud of the bomb blast itself, the scene shifted to the devastation it wrought. A tank’s cannon sagged down as if it were a candle that had drooped from being too close to the fire. Some of the ground looked as if the heat of the bomb had baked it into glass. Charred corpses lay everywhere. Some of the charred chunks of meat were not yet corpses, for they wriggled and moaned and cried out in their unintelligible language.
“I wouldn’t want that happening to me,” exclaimed an old man with a few long white whiskers sprouting from his chin.
“It happened to the little scaly devils, too,” Nieh Ho-T’ing said. “The Americans used a bomb just like this one against them. This is the scaly devils’ retaliation, but people can make these bombs, too.” He was glad of that, even if the Americans were capitalists.
“Foreign devils can make these bombs, maybe. If what you say is true,” the old man answered. “But can we Chinese do this?” He paused a moment to let the obvious answer sink in, then went on, “Since we can’t we had better do what the little devils say here, eh?”
Several people nodded. Nieh glared at them and at the old man. “The little devils have never used that kind of bomb here, or even threatened to,” he said. “And if we don’t resist them, they’ll rule us the same way the Japanese did-with fear and savagery. Is that what we want?”
“The little scaly devils, they’ll leave you alone if you leave them alone,” the old man said. Nieh resolved to find out who he was and arrange for his elimination; he was obviously a collaborator and a troublemaker.
A couple of people nodded again. But a woman spoke up: “What about that poor girl, the one they made do all those horrible things in front of their cameras? What had she done to them beforehand?”
The old man stared at her. He opened his mouth like a little devil laughing, but had far fewer teeth than the imperialist aggressors from the stars. While the fellow was still groping for a reply, Nieh Ho-T’ing headed back toward the roominghouse where he lived.
When he got there, he found Hsia Shou-Tao sitting in the downstairs dining room, drinking tea with a pretty singsong girl whose green silk dress was slit to show an expanse of golden thigh. Hsia looked up and nodded to him, without the least trace of embarrassment. His self-criticism had not included any vows of celibacy, only a pledge to keep from bothering women who showed they were not interested in him. For the singsong girl, the transaction would be purely commercial. Nieh frowned anyhow. His aide had a way of letting pledges slip a finger’s breadth at a time.
Nieh had other things on his mind at the moment, though. He trudged upstairs to the room he’d been sharing with Liu Han-and, lately, with her daughter, at last redeemed from the little scaly devils. As he climbed the stairs, he let out a small, silent sigh. That wasn’t yet working out as well as Liu Han had imagined it would… In Nieh’s experience, few things in life did. He had not found a good way to tell that to Liu Han.
He tried the door. It was locked. He rapped on it. “Who’s there?” Liu Han called warily from within. She hadn’t casually opened the door since the day Hsia Shou-Tao tried to rape her. But, when she heard Nieh’s voice, she lifted the bar, let him in, and stepped into his arms for a quick embrace.
“You look tired,” he said. What she looked was haggard and harassed. He didn’t think he ought to say that to her. Instead, he pointed to her daughter, who sat over in a corner playing with a straw-stuffed doll made of cloth. “How is Liu Mei this afternoon?”
To his surprise and dismay, Liu Han started to cry. “I gave birth to her, and she is still frightened of me. It’s as if she thinks she ought to be a little scaly devil, not a human being.”
Liu Mei started to pull some of the stuffing out of the doll, which was far from new. “Don’t do that,” Liu Han said. Her daughter took no notice of her. Then she spoke a word in the little devils’ language and added one of their coughs. The little girl stopped what she was doing. Wearily, Liu Han turned to Nieh. “You see? She understands their tongue, not Chinese. She cannot even make the right sounds for Chinese. What can I do with her? How can I raise her when she is like this?”
“Patience,” Nieh Ho-T’ing said. “You must remember patience. The dialectic proves Communism will triumph, but says nothing with certainty as to when. The little scaly devils know nothing of the dialectic, but their long history gives them patience. They had Liu Mei her whole life, and did their best to make her into one of them. You have had her only a few days. You must not expect her to change overnight for you.”
“I know that-here.” Liu Han tapped a finger against her forehead. “But my heart breaks every time she flinches from me as if I were a monster, and whenever I have to speak to her in a language I learned because I was a slave.”
“As I said, you are not viewing this rationally,” Nieh answered. “One reason you are not viewing it rationally is that you are not getting enough sleep. Liu Mei may not be a human child in every way, but she wakes up in the night like one.” He yawned. “I am tired, too.”
Liu Han hadn’t asked him to help take care of the baby. That she might had never occurred to him. Caring for a child was women’s work. In some ways, Nieh took women and their place as much for granted as Hsia Shou-Tao did.
So did Liu Han, in some ways. She said, “I wish I had an easier time comforting her. I am not what she wants. She makes that quite plain.” Her mouth twisted into a thin, bitter line. “What she wants is that little devil, Ttomalss. He did this to her. He should be made to pay for it.”
“Nothing we can do about that
, not unless we learn he’s come down to the surface of the world again,” Nieh said. “Not even the People’s Liberation Army can reach into one of the scaly devils’ ships high in the sky.”
“The little devils are patient,” Liu Han said in a musing tone of voice. “He will not stay up in his ship forever. He will come down to steal another baby, to try to turn it into a little scaly devil. When he does-”
Nieh Ho-T’ing would not have wanted her to look at him that way. “I think you are right,” he said, “but he may not do that in China. The world is a larger place than we commonly think.”
“If he comes, he will come to China.” Liu Han spoke with the assurance of a man. “He speaks Chinese. I do not think he speaks any other human language. If he robs some poor woman, he will rob one from China.”
Nieh spread his hands. “This is logical, I must say. What do you want us to do about it?”
“Punish him,” she answered at once. “I will bring the matter before the central committee and get official approval for it.”
“The central committee will not approve of an act of personal vengeance,” he warned her. “Getting agreement to put the rescue of your child on the negotiation agenda was difficult enough, but this-”
“I think the motion will be approved,” Liu Han said steadily. “I do not intend to present it as a matter of personal vengeance, but as a symbol that the little devils’ oppression of mankind is not to be tolerated.”
“Present it however you like,” Nieh replied. “It is still personal vengeance. I am sorry, Liu Han, but I do not feel able to give you my own support in this matter. I have spent too much political capital for Liu Mei already.”
“I will present the motion anyhow,” Liu Han told him. “I have discussed it with several committee members. I think it will pass, whether you support it or not.”
He stared at her. They’d worked well together, in bed and out, but he’d always been the dominant partner. And why not? He’d been an army chief of staff before the little scaly devils came and turned everything topsy-turvy, and she’d been nothing but a peasant woman and an example of the scaly devils’ oppression. Everything she was in the revolutionary struggle, she was because of him. He’d brought her onto the central committee to give him more support. How could she turn against him?
