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“Thank you, Comrade!” Ku Cheng-Lun exclaimed. Hard labor was hard labor; his overseers might well end up working him to death. He probably knew that, too-he seemed very well informed. But to come through one of these trials without getting executed was something close to a miracle. Ku had to be aware of that.
Sure enough, Liu Han sent the next man brought before her to the firing squad, and the one after him, and the one after him as well. Revolutionary justice ruled in Peking now. The little scaly devils had held sway for a generation. Traitors and collaborators and running dogs by the thousands, by the tens of thousands, needed to be hunted down and purged.
The fourth man after Ku Cheng-Lun claimed to be in the service of the Kuomintang. That presented Liu Han with another dilemma. The Kuomintang had risen along with the People’s Liberation Army, but, having less in the way of armaments, was very much a junior partner in the struggle against the little scaly devils. Still, Liu Han didn’t want to damage the popular front, so she sentenced the fellow to hard labor. If his fellow reactionaries chose to rescue him later, she wouldn’t worry about it.
Nieh Ho-T’ing had also been trying traitors. They met for supper after nightfall ended the trials till morning. Over buckwheat noodles and bits of shredded pork, Nieh said, “Even if the little devils do end up putting down this revolt, they will have a hard time finding anyone to help them administer China.”
“That is good… I suppose,” Liu Han said. “Better would be driving them back so we go on ruling here.”
“Yes, that would be better,” Nieh agreed. “I do not know if it can happen, though. Wherever they concentrate their strength, they can beat us. That remains true, even with our new weapons-and we’ve used up a lot of those.”
“The Russians will have to send us more, then,” Liu Han said.
“That won’t be so easy, not any more,” Nieh Ho-T’ing replied. “The scaly devils have already shot up a couple of caravans-and Molotov, damn him, doesn’t dare get caught in the act of helping us. If he does get caught, the little devils land on him instead, and he won’t take that chance. So we’re liable to be stuck with what we’ve got.”
“Not good,” Liu Han said, and used one of the scaly devils’ emphatic coughs.
“No, not good at all,” Nieh said. “And we had an unpleasant report today from down in the south.”
“You’d better tell me,” Liu Han said, though she was anything but sure she wanted to hear.
“Here and there, the scaly devils are starting to use human troops against us,” Nieh Ho-T’ing said.
“They’ve tried that before,” Liu Han said. “It doesn’t work well. Before long, the soldiers go over to us, or enough of them do, anyhow. Humans naturally have solidarity with one another.”
But Nieh shook his head. “This is different. Before, they would try to use Chinese soldiers here in China, and you’re right-that didn’t work. But these men, whoever they are, aren’t Chinese. They’re mercenaries in the pay of the little devils. They don’t speak our language, so we can’t reach them. They just do what the scaly devils tell them to do-they’re the perfect oppressors.”
“Now that is not good. That is not good at all.” Liu Han scratched her jaw, as she had while judging Ku Cheng-Lun. What she decided here was a good deal more important than her verdict in the clerk’s case-though Ku would not have agreed with that. After some time, she said, “We will have to speak in the little scaly devils’ language. The mercenaries are bound to understand that, or some of them are. Otherwise, the scaly devils couldn’t give them their orders.”
Nieh Ho-T’ing nodded. “Yes, that is a good idea. Better than anything we’ve tried yet-it’s bound to be. Some people say these soldiers are from South America, others say they’re from India. Either way, they might as well come from Home for all the sense we can make of what they say.”
“We have to make them understand,” Liu Han said. “Once we do, the rot will start.”
“Here’s hoping, anyhow,” Nieh said.
Before Liu Han could answer, jet engines started howling low over Peking. Antiaircraft guns barked. Antiaircraft missiles took off with roaring whooshes. Bombs burst. The ground started to shake. Little waves shimmered in Liu Han’s bowl of broth and noodles. She picked it up. “I wish we had airplanes of our own,” she said. “The way things are, the little devils can hit us, but we can’t hit back.”
“I know.” Nieh Ho-T’ing shrugged. “Nothing we can do about that, though. Molotov isn’t about to pack fighter planes on camelback, any more than he’s likely to send us landcruisers. But now, at least, we make the scaly devils pay a price when they use those things.”
“Not enough,” Liu Han said. More bombs burst, some not very far away. She glanced at the oil lamps that lit the inside of the noodle shop. So easy for a hit to knock them into the rubble and start a fire… Broad stretches of Peking had already burned from fires of that sort.
“If we fail this time, we try again,” Nieh said, “and again, and again, and as often as need be. Sooner or later, we win.”
Or we give up, Liu Han thought. But she would not say that; saying it seemed to make it more likely to come true. Part of her realized that was nothing but peasant superstition, but she kept quiet all the same. She’d grown up a peasant, never expecting to be anything else, and couldn’t always escape her origins.
Bombs fell again, some nearer, some farther away. Nieh Ho-T’ing said, “If they keep doing this, there won’t be anything left of Peking but ruins.”
“Maybe not,” Liu Han said, “but they’ll be our ruins.”
Nieh eyed her with more than a little admiration. “You would say that about all of China, wouldn’t you?”
“If it meant being rid of the little scaly devils for good, I would,” she replied.
He nodded. “You always have taken the hard line against them.”
“I have my reasons, even if some of them are personal and not ideological,” Liu Han said. “But I am not really a hardliner. My daughter, now, she would say, ‘Let all of China be ruined even if it doesn’t necessarily mean getting rid of the little devils for good, just so they can’t have it.’ ”
Nieh Ho-T’ing nodded again. “I see the difference. Mao would probably agree with Liu Mei, you know.”
“Well, he’ll have his chance with this uprising,” Liu Han said. Unless the people refuse to fight any more-unless they would sooner have peace regardless of who rules them. She kept that to herself, too.
“Mao has been a revolutionary his whole life,” Nieh said. “A lot of us have. We will go on fighting, however long it takes. We are patient. The dialectic is on our side. We will bring the country with us.”
“Of course we will,” Liu Han declared. But then the doubts that never quite went away came out: “The only thing that worries me is, the little scaly devils are patient, too.” Nieh Ho-T’ing looked at her as if he wished she hadn’t said any such thing. She too wished she hadn’t said it. But she feared that didn’t make it any less true. More bombs rained down on Peking.
Just seeing Tosevite railroads had convinced Nesseref that she didn’t like them. Instead of being clean and quiet, they roared and puffed and chugged and belched filthy, stinking black smoke into the air. One of these days, she was told, the Race would replace the horrible engines in Poland with more modern machinery. But it didn’t look as if that would happen any time soon. There were so many more urgent things to do. No matter how filthy the locomotives the Big Uglies built, they did work after a fashion, and so they stayed in service.
And now she found herself in a passenger car behind one of those noxious locomotives. The rolling, swaying, jouncing ride was even worse than she’d expected, and left her as nervous as a wild Big Ugly would have been to fly in a shuttlecraft for the first time.
Fortunately, few Tosevites saw her discomfiture: one car on each train was reserved for males and females of the Race. In fact, Nesseref had the entire compartment to herself. A Tosevite conductor came th
rough and spoke in her language (a relief, because she’d learned only a handful of words in either Polish or Yiddish): “Przemysl is the next stop. All out for Przemysl.”
Out she went, in some anxiety. If no one was waiting for her here at the station, she would have to brave a taxi. That would be doubly difficult: first finding a driver who understood her and then surviving a trip through terrifying Tosevite traffic. Having experienced both, she vastly preferred space travel, which had fewer things that could go wrong.
But a Big Ugly on the platform waved to her, waved and called, “Shuttlecraft Pilot! Nesseref! Superior female! Over here!”
With more than a little relief, Nesseref waved back. “I greet you, Mordechai Anielewicz. I am glad to see you.”
“And I am glad to see you,” her Tosevite friend replied. “I was even gladder to see you when I came out of that house in Kanth. Seeing any friends there was very good indeed.”
“I can understand how it would have been.” Nesseref’s eye turrets swiveled this way and that. To her, this crowded platform in Przemysl, full of shouting, exclaiming Big Uglies, was a frightening place; she would not have wanted to be here without a friend, and especially a Tosevite friend. But this was different from what Anielewicz had gone through inside the Reich. She was, fortunately, sensible enough to understand as much. No one wanted to kill her here-she certainly hoped not, at any rate. But Anielewicz could have died at any moment in Kanth, and he’d volunteered to go there understanding that was so.
