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A conductor came through, too, screaming for the hawkers to get off or buy a ticket-they were going to get moving. The hawkers laughed and jeered; they knew to the second when the train would really set out, and they also knew the conductors always tried to get rid of them early. The last one leaped off just as the train started to roll. He stuck out his tongue in derision.
“That’ll cost him extra squeeze the next time this train crew comes through here,” Liu Han predicted.
“You’re probably right,” her daughter replied. “But he assented his freedom even so. In his small way, he is a revolutionary.”
He was more likely to be a bad-tempered fool, but Liu Han didn’t argue with Liu Mei. Instead, she wrestled with the window again. She had no luck; it was stuck, and looked as if it would stay stuck. The smoke that poured in was thick and black, because the train wasn’t going fast enough to dissipate it. Liu Han coughed and cursed. People nearby were coughing, too, and cursing her.
Things got better as the train picked up speed, but they never got very good. As far as Liu Han could tell, not very good was about as good as rail travel ever got in China.
And then, less then half an hour later, the train slowed to a stop again, not at a station but in the middle of the countryside. “Now what?” a woman behind Liu Han demanded indignantly.
“Have we broken down?” Three or four people asked the same question at the same time.
“Of course we’ve broken down,” Liu Han murmured to Liu Mei. “The little scaly devils don’t care whether trains work well, or even if they work at all, so they don’t bother keeping them up.”
But, for once, this wasn’t something she could blame on the scaly devils. A conductor poked his head into the car and shouted, “We can’t go on because bandits have blown up the tracks ahead of us. We are going to be here for a while. We may have to go back and find a way around the damage.”
That set people yelling and screaming at him and at one another. He just kept repeating what he’d said the first time. Most of the unhappy passengers cursed the bandits up one side and down the other. People would curse anything that made them late.
Liu Mei asked, “Do you suppose the People’s Liberation Army sabotaged the track?”
“It could be,” Liu Han said. “Not everyone will have known we were on this train. But it could have been the Kuomintang, too. No way to tell.”
The sun beat down on the car. Because it was standing still, it got hotter and hotter. People started opening more windows. Some wouldn’t open at all. People started breaking them. That brought in an angry conductor, but he had to flee in the face of the passengers’ wrath.
“Whoever it was probably wanted to make the train derail,” Liu Han said. “That would really have done damage.”
It would have done damage to us, she thought. Derailing trains was a favorite game of the People’s Liberation Army, and of the Kuomintang as well. It taught people that the rule of the little scaly devils remained insecure. It also caused a lot of casualties. She and Liu Mei could have been among them as easily as not.
And, of course, a machine-gun crew might have been waiting to shoot up the train once it derailed, Liu Han thought. That was another game both the People’s Liberation Army and the Kuomintang played. So did independent bandit outfits, who kept themselves in business by robbery. But no one started shooting here.
After what seemed like forever, the train began to inch backwards. Because it was going in reverse, the smoke from the engine’s stack blew away from the passenger cars, not into them. The breeze the slow motion stirred up wasn’t very strong, but it was ever so much better than nothing. Sweat began to dry on Liu Han’s face. She took off her conical straw hat and fanned herself with it. People all over the car were doing the same thing. They started smiling at one another. A couple of babies and a couple of dogs stopped howling. It was as pleasant a time on a train as Liu Han had ever known.
The train rolled back over a switch. Then it stopped, presumably so a couple of men from the engine could get down and use crowbars to shift the switch and let the train go down the other track. After that, the train started going forward again, and swung onto the route it hadn’t used before.
With the exhaust now blowing back once more, the car filled with coal smoke. Since the passengers had broken a good many windows, they couldn’t do anything about it. The conductor laughed at them. “You see, you stupid turtles? It’s your own fault,” he said. Somebody threw a squishy plum at him, and hit him right in the face. Juice dribbled down the brass-buttoned front of his uniform. He let out a horrified squawk and retreated in disorder. Everyone cheered.
But then somebody not far from Liu Han said, “Since we’re going up a track we’re not supposed to, I hope there’s no train coming down it toward us.”
That produced exclamations of horror. “Eee!” Liu Han said. “May ten thousand little demons dance in your drawers for even thinking such a thing.”
No train slammed head-on into theirs. No stretch of tracks on the new line had been blown up. Thoroughgoing guerrillas often did such things, which caused more than double the delay and aggravation of a single strike. On the receiving end for once, Liu Han was glad these raiders hadn’t been thorough.
Her train was scheduled to get into Peking in the early evening. Even at the best of times, even under the little devils, railroad schedules in China were more optimistic guesses than statements of fact. When things went wrong… Trying to sleep sitting up on a hard seat, with the air full of smoke and other stinks and noise, was a daunting prospect. Liu Han thought she dozed a little, but she wasn’t sure.
She was sure she watched the sun rise over the farmlands to the east a couple of hours before the train did at last roll into the railroad yard in the southwestern part of Peking. It took more time crawling up to the station itself. Liu Han minded that less. It let her look around the city.
Liu Mei was doing the same thing. “We fought them hard. We fought them with everything we had,” she said, and pride rang in her voice.
“So we did,” Liu Han agreed. Wrecked buildings outnumbered those still intact. Laborers carrying buckets on shoulder poles were everywhere, hauling away rubble. Liu Han sighed. “Fighting hard is important, but only up to a point. More important, even so much more important, is winning.”
The little scaly devils had won this fight, and taken Peking back for their own. Liu Han found fresh proof of that at the station. Along with the other passengers, she and her daughter had to walk through a machine that could tell if they were carrying weapons. They weren’t, and had no trouble. Someone else in the car was. Chinese police, running dogs to the imperialist scaly devils, hustled him away. Liu Han and Liu Mei walked out of the station and into the city. “Home,” Liu Mei said, and Liu Han had to nod.
10
Though Atvar had promised him his freedom, Straha found himself more nearly a prisoner in Cairo than he had been in Los Angeles. “Is this how you reward me?” he asked one of his interrogators, a female named Zeshpass. “I hoped to return to the society of the Race, not to be closed off from it forever.”
“And so you will, superior sir,” Zeshpass said soothingly. But Straha was not soothed. Back in the USA, even the Big Uglies who exploited him had called him Shiplord. Whatever he was here, he wasn’t a shiplord, and he never would be again. Zeshpass went on, “As soon as the crisis is resolved, a final disposition of your situation will be made.”
That sounded soothing, too-till Straha turned an eye turret toward it. “What did you just say?” he demanded. “Whatever it was, it did not mean anything.”
“Of course it did.” Zeshpass sounded irate. Like any interrogator, she took her own omniscience for granted, and resented it when others failed to do likewise.
“All right, then,” Straha said. “Suppose you explain to me why my case cannot be disposed of now.”
Most reluctantly, the female said, “I do not have that information.”
Straha laughed
at her. “I do. Atvar has not yet figured out what to do with me because he has not yet decided whether I am a hero or a nuisance or both at once. My opinion is that I am both at once, which is bound to make me more annoying to the exalted fleetlord.” As he was in the habit of doing, he laced Atvar’s title with as much scorn as he could.
Her voice stiff with disapproval, Zeshpass said, “It is not for me to judge the exalted fleetlord’s reasons. It is not for you, either.”
“And if no one judges him, how will anyone know when he makes a mistake?” Straha inquired. “He has made enough of them already, in my not so humble opinion. How is he to be held accountable for them?”
“Held accountable? He is the fleetlord.” Zeshpass sounded as if Straha had suddenly started speaking English rather than the language of the Race.
Plainly, the idea that the fleetlord, like any other mortal, needed to be questioned and criticized when he made a mistake had never crossed her mind.
