“Yes, it was,” Barbara said with a nod that wasn’t altogether comfortable. She lowered her voice. “I wish you wouldn’t call the colored women that.”
“What? Mammies?” Sam scratched his head. “It’s what they are.”
“I know that, but it sounds so-” Barbara groped for the word she wanted and, being Barbara, found it. “So antebellum, as if we were down on the plantation with the Negroes singing spirituals and doing all the work and the kind masters sitting around drinking mint juleps as if they hadn’t the slightest idea their whole social system was sick and wrong-and so much of what was wrong then is still wrong now. Why else would the Lizards have given guns to colored troops and expected them to fight against the United States?”
“They sure were wrong about that,” Sam said.
“Yes, some of the Negroes mutinied,” Barbara agreed, “but I’d bet not all of them did. And the Lizards wouldn’t have tried it in the first place if they hadn’t thought it would work. The way they treat colored people down here… Do you remember some of the newsreels from before we got into the war, the ones that showed happy Ukrainian peasants greeting the Nazis with flowers because they were liberating them from the Communists?”
“Uh-huh,” Sam said. “They found out what that was worth pretty darn quick, too, didn’t they?”
“That’s not the point,” Barbara insisted. “The point is that the Negroes here could have greeted the Lizards the same way.”
“A good many of them did.” Sam held up a hand before she could rhetorically rend him. “I know what you’re getting at, hon: the point is that so many of ’em didn’t. Things down here would have been mighty tough if they had, no two ways about it.”
“Now you understand,” Barbara said, nodding. She always sounded pleased when she said things like that, pleased and a little surprised: he might not have a fancy education, but it was nice that he wasn’t dumb. He didn’t think she knew she was using that tone of voice, and he wasn’t about to call her on it. He was just glad he could come close to keeping up with her.
He said, “Other side of the coin is, whatever the reasons are, these colored women-I won’t call ’em mammies if you don’t want me to-they can’t do the job you’re doing right now. Since theyare on our side, shouldn’t we give ’em jobs theycan do, so the rest of us can get on with doing the things they can’t?”
“That isn’t just,” Barbara said. But she paused thoughtfully. Her fingernails clicked on the home keys of the typewriter, enough to make the type bars move a little but not enough to make them hit the paper. At last, she said, “It may not be just, but I suppose it’s practical.” Then she did start typing again.
Sam felt as if he’d just laced a game-winning double in the ninth. He didn’t often make Barbara back up a step in any argument. He set a fond hand on her shoulder. She smiled up at him for a moment. The clatter of the typewriter didn’t stop.
Liu Han cradled the submachine gun in her arms as if it were Liu Mei. She knew what she had to do with it if Ttomalss got out of line: point it in his direction and squeeze the trigger. Enough bullets would hit him to keep him from getting out of line again.
From what Nieh Ho-T’ing had told her, the gun was of German manufacture. “The fascists sold it to the Kuomintang, from whom we liberated it,” he’d said. “In the same way, we shall liberate the whole world not only from the fascists and reactionaries, but also from the alien aggressor imperialist scaly devils.”
It sounded easy when you put it like that. Taking revenge on Ttomalss had sounded easy, too, when she’d proposed it to the central committee. And, indeed, kidnapping him down in Canton had proved easy-as she’d predicted, he had returned to China to steal some other poor woman’s baby. Getting him up here to Peking without letting the rest of the scaly devils rescue him hadn’t been so easy, but the People’s Liberation Army had managed it.
And now here he was, confined in a hovel on ahutung not far from the roominghouse where Liu Han-and her daughter-lived. He was, in essence, hers to do with as she would. How she’d dreamed of that while she was in the hands of the little scaly devils. Now the dream was real.
She unlocked the door at the front of the hovel. Several of the people begging or selling in the alleyway were fellow travelers, though even she was not sure which ones. They would help keep Ttomalss from escaping or anyone from rescuing him.
She closed the front door after her. Inside, where no one could see it from the street, was another, stouter, door. She unlocked that one, too, and advanced into the dim room beyond it.
Ttomalss whirled. “Superior female!” he hissed in his own language, then returned to Chinese: “Have you decided what my fate is to be?”
“Maybe I should keep you here along time,” Liu Han said musingly, “and see how much people can learn from you little scaly devils. That would be a good project, don’t you think, Ttomalss?”
“Thatwould be a good project for you. You would learn much,” Ttomalss agreed. For a moment, Liu Han thought he had missed her irony. Then he went on, “But I do not think you will do it. I think instead you will torment me.”
“To learn how much thirst you can stand, how much hunger you can stand, how much pain you can stand-that would be aninteresting project, don’t you think, Ttomalss?” Liu Han purred the words, as if she were a cat eyeing a mouse it would presently devour-when it got a little hungrier than it was now.
She’d hoped Ttomalss would cringe and beg. Instead, he stared at her with what, from longer experience with the scaly devils than she’d ever wanted, she recognized as a mournful expression. “We of the Race never treated you so when you were in our claws,” he said.
“No?” Liu Han exclaimed. Now she stared at the little devil. “You didn’t take my child from me and leave my heart to break?”
“The hatchling was not harmed in any way-on the contrary,” Ttomalss replied. “And, to our regret, we did not fully understand the attachment between the generations among you Tosevites. This is one of the things we have learned-in part, from you yourself.”
He meant what he said, Liu Han realized. He didn’t think he had been wantonly cruel-which didn’t mean he hadn’t been cruel. “You scaly devils took me up in your airplane that never landed, and then you made me into a whore up there.” Liu Han wanted to shoot him for that alone. “Lie with this one, you said, or you do not eat. Then it was lie with that one, and that one, and that one. And all the time you were watching and taking your films. And you say you never did me any harm?”
“You must understand,” Ttomalss said. “With us, a mating is a mating. In the season, male and female find each other, and after time the female lays the eggs. To the Rabotevs-one race we rule-a mating is a mating. To the Hallessi-another race we rule-a mating is a mating. How do we know that, to Tosevites, a mating is not just a mating? We find out, yes. We find out because of what we do with people like you and the Tosevite males we bring up to our ship. Before that, we did not know. We still have trouble believing you are as you are.”
Liu Han studied him across a gap of incomprehension as wide as the separation between China and whatever weird place the little scaly devils called home. For the first time, she really grasped that Ttomalss and the rest of the little devils had acted without malice. They were trying to learn about people and went ahead and did that as best they knew how.
Some of her fury melted. Some-but not all. “You exploited us,” she said, using a word much in vogue in the propaganda of the People’s Liberation Army. Here it fit like a sandal made by a master shoemaker. “Because we were weak, because we could not fight back, you took us and did whatever you wanted to us. That is wrong and wicked, don’t you see?”
“It is what the stronger does with the weaker,” Ttomalss said, hunching himself down in a gesture the little devils used in place of a shrug. He swung both eye turrets toward her. “Now I am weak and you are strong. You have caught me and brought me here, and you say you will use me for experiments. Is this exploiting me, or is it not? Is it wrong and wicked, or is it not?”