Nieh said, “I hope you will not let your personal triumph blind you to the importance of the cause you also serve.” He might have less in the way of feelings than an ordinary person-or might just keep those feelings under tighter rein-but he was far from stupid.
A little scaly devil pointed his automatic rifle at the approaching humans. In fair Chinese, he said, “You will enter the tent. You will let us see you bring no concealed weapons with you. You will pass through this machine here.” He pointed to the device.
Liu Han had gone through it once before, Nieh Ho-Ting many times. Neither of them had ever tried sneaking armaments through. Nieh had Intelligence that the machine made a positively demonic racket if it did detect anything dangerous. So far, the People’s Liberation Army hadn’t found a way to fool it. Liu Han suspected that would come, sooner or later. Some very clever people worked for the Communist cause.
The machine kept quiet. Beyond it, another armed little devil said, “Pass on.” His words were almost unintelligible, but no one could mistake the gesture he made with the barrel of the gun.
Inside the tent, the little scaly devil called Ppevel sat behind the table at which Liu Han had seen him before. Beside him sat another male with much plainer body paint: his interpreter. Ppevel spoke in his own hissing, popping language. The interpreter turned his words into Chinese: “You are to be seated.” He pointed to the overstuffed chairs in front of Nieh and Liu Han. They were different from the ones that had been there on Liu Han’s last visit, and perhaps implied higher status for the envoys of the People’s Liberation Army.
Liu Han noticed that only peripherally. She had hoped to see Ttomalss sitting at the table with Ppevel, and had hoped even more to see her daughter. She wondered what the baby would look like, with her for a mother and the foreign devil Bobby Fiore for a father. Then a really horrible thought struck her if the little devils wanted to substitute another baby of the right age and type for the one she had borne, how would she know?
The answer to that was simple and revolting: she wouldn’t, not with any certainty. She muttered an inaudible prayer to the Amida Buddha that such a thought had not occurred to the devils. Nieh Ho-T’ing, she knew, had no more use for the Amida Buddha than for any other god or demon, and did not think anyone else should, either. Liu Han shrugged. That was his ideology. She did not discern certain truth in it.
Ppevel spoke again. The interpreter translated: “We will return this hatchling to the female as a token of our willingness to give in exchange for getting. We expect in return a halt to your guerrilla attacks here in Peking of half a year. Is this the agreement?” He added an interrogative cough.
“No,” Nieh Ho-T’ing answered angrily. “The agreement is for three months only-a quarter year.” Liu Han’s heart sank. Would she lose her daughter again for the sake of a quarter of a year?
Ppevel and the interpreter went back and forth in their own tongue. Then the interpreter said, “You will please pardon me. A quarter of a year for you people is the correct agreement. This is half a year for my people.”
“Very well,” Nieh said. “We are agreed, then. Bring out the girl child you stole as part of your systematic exploitation of this oppressed woman.” He pointed to Liu Han. “And, though we did not agree, I tell you that you should apologize to her for the treatment she suffered at your hands, and also for the propaganda campaign of vilflication you recently conducted against her in an effort to keep from returning the smallest victim of your injustice.”
The interpreter translated that for Ppevel. The little devil with the fancy body paint spoke a single short sentence by way of reply, ending it with an emphatic cough. The interpreter said, “There is no agreement for the apology, so there shall be no apology.”
“It’s all right,” Liu Han said softly to Nieh. “I don’t care about the apology. I just want my baby back.”
He raised an eyebrow and didn’t say anything. She realized he hadn’t made his demand for the apology for her sake, or at least not for her sake alone. He was working for the cause, trying to win a moral advantage over the scaly devils as he would have done over the Japanese or the Kuomintang clique.
Ppevel turned both his eye turrets away from the human beings, back toward an opening that led to the rear part of the large tent. He spoke in his own language. Liu Han’s hands knotted into fists-she caught Ttomalss’ name. Ppevel repeated himself. Ttomalss came out. He was carrying Liu Han’s daughter.
For a moment, she couldn’t see what the baby looked like-her eyes blurred with tears. “Give her to me,” she said softly. The rage she’d expected to feel on confronting the little devil who’d stolen her child simply wasn’t there. Seeing the little girl had dissolved it.
“It shall be done,” Ttomalss answered in his own language, a phrase she understood. Then he switched to Chinese: “My opinion is that returning this hatchling to you is an error, that it would have served a far more useful purpose as a link between your kind and mine.” That said, he angrily thrust the baby out at Liu Han.
“My opinion is that you would serve a more useful purpose as night soil than you do now,” she snarled. The rage wasn’t gone after all, merely suppressed. She snatched her daughter away from the scaly devil.
Now, for the first time, she took a good look at the little girl. Her daughter was not quite the same color as a purely Chinese baby would have been: her skin was a little lighter, a little ruddier. Her face was a little longer, a little more forward-thrusting, too, with a narrow chin that reminded Liu Han of Bobby Fiore’s and laid to rest any fears that the little devils had switched children on her. The baby’s eyes had the proper shape; they weren’t round and staring like those of a foreign devil.
“Welcome back to your home, little one,” Liu Han crooned, hugging her daughter tightly to her. “Welcome back to your mother.”
The baby began to cry. It looked not to her but to Ttomalss, and tried to get away from her to go back to him. That look was like a knife in her heart. The sounds her daughter made were not like those of Chinese, nor even like those of the foreign devil language Bobby Fiore had spoken. They were the hisses and pops of the little scaly devils’ hateful speech. Among them was an unmistakable emphatic cough.
Ttomalss spoke with what sounded like spiteful satisfaction: “As you see, the hatchling is now used to the company of males of the Race, not to your kind. Such language as it has learned is our language. Its habits are our habits. It looks like a Big Ugly, yes, but its thoughts are those of the Race.”
Liu Han wished she had somehow smuggled a weapon into the tent. She would cheerfully have slain Ttomalss for what he’d done to her daughter. The baby kept twisting in her arms, trying to get away, trying to go back to the slavery with Ttomalss that was all it had ever known. Its cries dinned in her ears.
Nieh Ho-T’ing said, “What has been done can be undone. We shall reeducate the child as a proper human being. This will take time and patience, but it can be done and it shall be done.” He spoke the phrase in Chinese.
“It shall be done.” Liu Han used the little devils’ language, throwing the words in Ttomalss’ face and adding an emphatic cough of her own for good measure.
Her daughter stared up at her, eyes wide with wonder, at hearing her use words it understood. Maybe it would be all right after all, Liu Han thought. When she’d first met Bobby Fiore, the only words they’d had in common had been a handful from the speech of the little scaly devils. They’d managed, and they’d gone on to learn fair amounts of each other’s languages. And babies picked up words at an astonishing rate once they began to talk. Nieh was right-before long, with luck, her daughter would pick up Chinese and would become a proper human being rather than an imitation scaly devil.