Striking the Balance by Harry Turtledove Page B

“You ask me, she’s liable to be too fine to make a go of it. You have to be able to put up with the drunken, randy sods who want anything they can get out of you—or into you.”
    “Thanks,” Goldfarb said. “You’ve just made me feel about two inches high.”
    “Blimey, you’re a gent, you are, next to a lot of these bastards,” Sylvia said, praising with faint damn. She went on, “Naomi, her way looks to be pretending she doesn’t notice the pushy ones, or understand what they want from her. That’s only good for so long. Sooner or later—likely sooner—somebody’s going to try reaching down her blouse or up her dress. Then we’ll—”
    Before she could say “see,” the rifle-crack of a slap cut through the chatter in the White Horse Inn. A Marine captain raised a hand to his cheek. Naomi, quite unperturbed, set a pint of beer in front of him and went about her business.
    “Timed that well, I did, though I say so my own self,” Sylvia remarked with more than a little pride.
    “That you did,” Goldfarb agreed. He glanced over toward Naomi. Their eyes met for a moment. He smiled. She shrugged, as if to say,
All in a day’s work.
He turned back to Sylvia. “Good for her,” he said.
     
    Liu Han was nervous. She shook her head. No, she was more than nervous. She was terrflied. The idea of meeting the little scaly devils face-to-face made her shiver inside. She’d been a creature under their control for too long: first in their airplane that never came down, where they made her submit to one man after another so they could learn how people behaved in matters of the pillow; and then, after she’d got pregnant, down in their prison camp not far from Shanghai. After she’d had her baby, they’d stolen it from her. She wanted her child back, even if it was only a girl.
    With all that in her past, she had trouble believing the scaly devils would treat her like someone worth consideration now. And she was a woman herself, which did nothing to ease her confidence. The doctrine of the People’s Liberation Army said women were, and should be, equal to men. In the top part of her mind, she was beginning to believe that. Down deep, though, a lifetime of teachings of the opposite lesson still shaped her thoughts—and her fears.
    Perhaps sensing that, Nieh Ho-T’ing said, “It will be all right. They won’t do anything to you, not at this parley. They know we hold prisoners of theirs, and what will happen to those prisoners if anything bad happens to us.”
    “Yes, I understand,” she said, but she shot him a grateful glance anyhow. In matters military, he knew what he was talking about. He’d served as political commissar in the first detachment of Mao’s revolutionary army, commanded a division in the Long March, and been an army chief of staff. After the Lizards came, he’d led resistance against them—and against the Japanese, and against the counterrevolutionary Kuomintang clique—first in Shanghai and then here in Peking. And he was her lover.
    Though she’d been born a peasant, her wits and her burning eagerness for revenge on the little devils for all they’d done to her had made her a revolutionary herself, and one who’d risen quickly in the ranks.
    A scaly devil emerged from the tent that his kind had built in the middle of the
Pan Jo Hsiang Tai—
the Fragrant Terrace of Wisdom. The tent looked more like a bubble blown from some opaque orange shiny stuff than an honest erection of canvas or silk. It clashed dreadfully not only with the terrace and the walls and the elegant staircases to either side, but also with everything on the
Ch’iung Hua Tao,
the White Pagoda Island.
    Liu Han stifled a nervous giggle. Peasant that she was, she’d never imagined, back in the days before the little scaly devils took hold of her life and tore it up by the roots, that she would find herself not just in the Imperial City inside Peking, but on an island the old Chinese Emperors had used as a