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“Not for you to know.” The scaly devil spoke in Chinese, even though she’d used his language. He gestured with his rifle at Liu Han. “You come.”
“I am coming,” she said wearily. “Where are you taking me?”
“You come, you see.” The scaly devil jerked the business end of his rifle again. Liu Han sighed and left the hut.
Even though she was wearing a quilted cotton jacket, the cold the kang held at bay smote with full force when she went outside. The little scaly devil let out an unhappy hiss; he liked the winter weather even less than she did. Old, dirty snow crunched under her feet-and under his. He plainly wanted to skitter ahead. To annoy him, Liu Han walked as slowly as he would let her. Maybe he would get frostbitten or catch chest fever. She didn’t know if little scaly devils could catch chest fever, but she hoped so.
The camp was depressingly large. The scaly devils were doing their best to hold China down. Some of the people they’d scooped up were Communists like Liu Han, others Kuomintang reactionaries, still others men and women of no particular party whom they’d seized more or less at random. They didn’t even try to keep the Communists and Kuomintang followers from one another’s throats-their theory seemed to be that, if the humans quarreled among themselves, they wouldn’t have to do so much work. Partly because of that, the Party and the Kuomintang did their best to keep a truce going.
“Here. This building.” The scaly devil pointed again, this time not with his rifle but with his tongue. The building toward which he directed Liu Han stood near the prison camp’s razor-wire perimeter. It was not the building where most interrogations were conducted; that one lay closer to the center of the camp. Some of the interrogators were the little devils’ human running dogs; that building had an attached infirmary and a sinister reputation.
Liu Han had been there a couple of times. No one had done anything too dreadful to her, but she was relieved to be going somewhere else. Even though this building had machine guns mounted on it, she thought it was only an administrative center. She’d never heard of anyone being tortured there.
When she went inside, she opened her jacket and then took it off; the place was heated to the scaly devils’ standard of comfort, which meant she’d gone from winter to hottest summer in a couple of steps. The scaly devil who’d fetched her from her hut sighed with pleasure.
Another little devil took charge of her. “You are the Tosevite Liu Han?” he asked in his own language, knowing she could use it.
“Yes, superior sir,” she answered.
“Good. You will come with me,” he said. Liu Han did, to a chamber that contained nothing but a stool, a television camera, and a monitor; another scaly devil looked out of the monitor, presumably seeing her televised image. “You may sit on the stool,” her guide told her. The little devil with the rifle positioned himself in the doorway to make sure she didn’t do anything else. Her guide folded himself into the posture of respect before the little devil in the monitor, saying, “Here is the Tosevite female called Liu Han, Senior Researcher.”
“Yes, I see her,” that little devil replied. He raised his eye turrets, so that he seemed to look right at Liu Han. When he spoke again, it was in halting Chinese: “You remember me, Liu Han?”
“I’m sorry, but I don’t,” she replied in the same language. As far as she was concerned, one little scaly devil looked very much like another.
He shrugged just as if he were a person and returned to his own tongue: “I would not have recognized you, either, but we spent a lot of time making each other unhappy during the fighting. My name is Ttomalss.”
“I greet you,” she said, not wanting to acknowledge the pang of fear that ran through her. “The advantage is yours now. I did not kill you when I had the chance.” That was as close as she would come to begging for mercy. She bit down on the inside of her lower lip. She hoped that was as close as she would come to begging for mercy. If Ttomalss wanted vengeance for being captured and imprisoned and threatened, what could she do to stop him?
At the moment, he seemed mild enough. He asked, “Is your hatchling-Liu Mei was the name you gave her, not so? — well?”
“Yes,” Liu Han answered. Then she returned to Chinese for a sentence she couldn’t say in the scaly devils’ language: “She never did learn how to smile, though. You had her too long for that.”
“I suppose I did,” Ttomalss said. “I encountered this same problem with a Tosevite hatching I succeeded in raising after you released me. I believe it lacks a solution, at least for Tosevites raised by the Race. Our faces are not mobile enough to give your hatchlings the cues they need to form expressions.”
“So you did finally manage to steal another Tosevite hatchling?” Liu Han said. “Too bad. I had hoped I frightened you enough when I captured you to keep you from trying that again. Somewhere, a Tosevite female mourns, as I mourned when you took Liu Mei away from me.”
“The Race needs to conduct this research,” Ttomalss said. “We must learn how Tosevites and the Race can get along. We must learn what Tosevites raised as citizens of the Empire are like. I know you disapprove, but the work is important to us-and to everyone on Tosev 3.”
“How would you like it if some of us stole your hatchlings from you and tried to raise them as Tosevites?” Liu Han asked. “That is what you have done to us.”
“You could never do such a thing,” Ttomalss told her. “You would never do such a thing. A project like the one I have undertaken requires far more patience than the usual Big Ugly has in him.”
Liu Han wanted to set up a project to steal eggs from the little scaly devils and raise the chicks-or whatever one called newly hatched little devils-as if they were human beings. She had no idea how to go about it, and the little devils had learned a good deal about security since their early days in China, so she couldn’t get in touch with anyone outside the prison camp anyhow. But the urge to take Ttomalss down a peg burned in her anyhow. As things were, she could only say, “I think you are mistaken.”
“I do not,” Ttomalss said calmly. Liu Han glared at him. Despite what she’d done to him years before, he had the little devils’ arrogance in full measure.
Still, things could have been worse. As long as he was talking with her about hatchlings, he wasn’t interrogating her about the Party. Of themselves, the scaly devils did not go in for painful questioning, but now they had Chinese stooges who did. If they gave her to them…
“When I first studied you, I did not think you would rise to become a power in the resistance against the Race hereabouts,” Ttomalss said. “Your goals are not admirable, but you have shown great strength of character in trying to achieve them.”
“I think freedom is admirable,” Liu Han said. “If you do not, that is your misfortune, not mine.”
“There is only one proper place for all the subregions of this planet: under the administration of the Race,” Ttomalss said. “In the course of time, those subregions will take their proper place.”
“Freedom is good for the Race, but not for the Big Uglies,” Liu Han jeered. “That is what you are saying.”
But Ttomalss made the negative hand gesture. “You misunderstand. You Tosevites always misunderstand. When the conquest is complete, Tosev 3 will be as free as Home, as free as Rabotev 2, as free as Halless 1. You will be contented subjects o
f the Emperor, as we are.” He swung his eye turrets down toward the surface of the desk at which he sat, a gesture of respect for the ruler among the little scaly devils.
“I take it back,” Liu Han said. “You do not think freedom is good for anyone, even your own kind.”
“Too much freedom is not good for anyone,” Ttomalss said. “Even your own faction would agree with that, seeing how it punishes Tosevites who disagree with it in any way.”
“This is a revolutionary situation,” Liu Han said. “The Communist Party is at war with you. Of course we have to weed out traitors.”
Ttomalss let his mouth fall open: he was laughing at her. “I do not believe you. I do not even think you believe yourself. Your faction rules the not-empire called the SSSR, and kills off members regardless of whether they show allegiance to any other power or not.”
“You do not understand,” Liu Han said, but Ttomalss understood too well. He was, Liu Han recalled, a student of the human race in his own fashion. Liu Han had seen purges were sometimes necessary, not only to get rid of traitors but also to keep up the energy, enthusiasm, and alertness of people who didn’t get purged.
“Do I not?” the little scaly devil said. “Perhaps you will enlighten me, then.” In his own language, he had a fine, sarcastic turn of phrase.
Nettled, Liu Han started to answer him in great detail. But she bit down on the words before they passed her lips. She had seen many years before that Ttomalss was a clever little devil. He wasn’t arguing abstracts with her here. He was trying to anger her, to make her say things before she thought about them. And he’d come within a hairsbreadth of succeeding.
What she did say after checking herself was, “I have nothing to tell you.”
“No? Too bad,” the little scaly devil said. “Shall we see whether you have anything to tell me after you watch your hatchling tormented in front of you? Your strong feelings for your blood kin can be a source of weakness for you, you see, as well as a source of strength. Or perhaps the hatchling should watch your interrogation. Which do you think would produce the better results?”
