Down to Earth

“We, huh?” Pe

She was right about that. He couldn’t deny it. “Only trouble with gold,” he said slowly, “is that it’s heavy if we’ve got to leave town in a hurry.”

“It’s heavy, yeah, but it doesn’t take up much space,” Pe

“Who, me?” Auerbach looked back over his shoulder, as if Pe

“Can’t fool me-I know you too well,” Pe

Not for the first time, Rance thought of warm, moist tropical breezes and warm, moist native girls. But his long-ago West Point days made him also think of logistics. “How do we get there from here? Either way we go, it’s through Lizard-held territory. They sent us down here to be good little boys and girls, remember? They’re liable not to want to let us loose again.”

“If we’ve got the cash to get to Free France and live there, we’ll have the cash to pay off whoever we need to pay off to get us the hell out of here,” Pe

Alarm bells clanged in Auerbach’s mind. “What do you need to talk to him about?” He didn’t like Frederick much, not least because he thought the Negro might like Pe

She set her hands on her hips. “I’ve got to get the ginger from somebody, don’t I?” she said patiently. “Frederick’s got ginger, but he doesn’t have the co

“Frederick’s got co

“He’ll get enough to keep him sweet-plenty for everybody,” Pe

Her confidence was infectious-and Rance didn’t feel like living in South Africa for the rest of his life. It might be better than a Lizard jail, but it wasn’t a patch on the States. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s go to the Boomslang.” He wondered how much trouble he was getting into. He’d find out. He was all too sure of that.

Pe

“I’m sorry already,” Rance said, which wasn’t quite true but wasn’t quite a lie, either.

Frederick wasn’t in the saloon when Rance and Pe

“So… we go forward?” he said.

“We go forward,” Rance answered before Pe

Frederick laughed as if those were the fu

No one in the village where Liu Han, Liu Mei, and Nieh Ho T’ing had taken refuge dared destroy the altar to the spirits of Emperors past the little scaly devils had set up at the edge of the square. Despite protests from the three Communists, the villagers went right on burning offerings in front of the altar, as if it commemorated their ancestors and not forward-slung creatures with eye turrets.

“They are ignorant. They are superstitious,” Liu Mei complained to her mother.

“They are peasants,” Liu Han answered. “Living in Peking, you never really understood what the countryside is like. Now you’re finding out.” Living in Peking, she’d forgotten how abysmally ignorant the bulk of the Chinese people were, too. Returning to a village reminded her in a hurry.

“We have to instruct them,” Liu Mei said.

“Either that or we have to get out of here,” Liu Han said unhappily. “We probably should have already. The little devils are learning to use propaganda better and better. Before too long, the peasants in this village-and the peasants in too many villages all through China-will take sacrificing to the spirits of the little devils’ dead Emperors as much for granted as they do sacrificing to the spirits of their own ancestors. It will help turn them into contented subjects.”

“What can we do?” Liu Mei demanded. “How can we start a counterpropaganda campaign?”

It was a good question. It was, in fact, the perfect question. Liu Han wished she had the perfect answer for it. She wished she had any answer this side of flight for it-and how much good would flight do, if other villages were like this one? She didn’t, and knew as much. “If the Lizards punish villages that harm the altars, no one will harm altars,” she said. “Burning paper goods in front of them seems too cheap and easy to be very bothersome.”

“But it enslaves,” Liu Mei said, and Liu Han nodded. Her daughter went on, “How do we know the little scaly devils really are watching those altars, the way they say they are?”

“We don’t,” Liu Han admitted. “But they could be doing it, and who has the nerve to take a chance?”

“Someone should,” Liu Mei insisted.

“Someone should, yes-but not you,” Liu Han said. “You’re all I have left in the world. The little devils already took you away from me once, and they tore my heart in two when they did. I couldn’t stand it if they took you again.”

Reproof in her voice, Liu Mei said, “The revolutionary cause is more important than any one person.”

Liu Mei had been around revolutionary rhetoric all her life. She took it seriously-as seriously as the scaly devils took their spirits of Emperors past. Liu Han took revolutionary rhetoric seriously, too, but not quite in the same way. She was willing to fight for the Communist cause, but she didn’t care to be a martyr for it. Maybe that was because she’d come to the Party as an adult. She believed its teachings, but she didn’t believe in them the way she believed in the ghosts and spirits about whom she’d learned in childhood. Liu Mei did.

Liu Han didn’t say any of that; Liu Mei would have ignored it. What Liu Han did say was, “What happens to people matters, too. I probably wouldn’t have become a revolutionary if the little scaly devils hadn’t kidnapped you.”

“Even if you hadn’t, the cause would go on.” Liu Mei’s logic was perfect-and perfectly irritating.

“I think it has gone on better with me in it,” Liu Han said. Yes, she could hear the anger in her own voice.

And, for a wonder, Liu Mei heard it, too. “Well, maybe it has,” she said, and walked out of the hut the two of them shared.

Staring after her, Liu Han stayed where she was: on the kang, the raised hearth where she spent as much time as she could during the winter. She’d been in the north more than twenty years now, and never had got used to the wretched weather. The wind off the Mongolian desert blew hot and dusty in the summer and sent blizzard after blizzard down on the countryside in winter. If Liu Mei wanted to stamp through snow, that was her business. She took it as much for granted as she did revolutionary fervor. After growing up near Hankow, Liu Han didn’t.