Second Contact by Harry Turtledove Read Free Book Online Page B

world is today.”
    When she was Liu Mei’s age and even older, all she’d wanted to do was go on living as she and her ancestors always had. But the Japanese had come to her village, killing her husband and her little son. And then the little scaly devils had come, driving out the eastern dwarfs and capturing her. She, who had not even thought of going to the city, was uprooted from everything she’d ever known.
    And she’d thrived. Oh, it hadn’t been easy, but she’d done it. She had abilities she hadn’t even suspected. Once in a while, when she was in an uncommonly kindly mood, she thought she owed the little scaly devils some gratitude for liberating her from her former, ever so limited, life.
    She glanced over to Liu Mei. She owed the scaly devils something else for what they’d done to her daughter. And she’d been giving them what she owed them ever since. That debt might never be paid in full, but she intended to keep on trying.
    Liu Mei’s face did not change much even when she laughed. She laughed now, laughed and pointed. “Look, Mother! More devil-boys!”
    “I see them,” Liu Han said grimly. She did not find the young people—boys and shameless girls, too—in any way amusing. When foreign devils from Europe spread their imperialistic web through China, some Chinese had imitated them in dress and food and way of life because they were powerful. The same thing was happening now with respect to the scaly devils.
    This particular pack of devil-boys took things further than most. Like most such bands, they wore tight shirts and trousers printed in patterns that mimicked body paint, but several had shaved not only their heads but also their eyebrows in an effort to make themselves look as much like scaly devils as they could. They larded their speech with affirmative and interrogative coughs and words from the little scaly devils’ language.
    Many older people gave way before them, almost as they might have for real scaly devils. Liu Han did not. Stolid as if she were alone on the sidewalk, she strode straight through them, Liu Mei beside her. “Be careful, foolish female!” one of the devil-boys hissed in the scaly devils’ tongue. His friends giggled to hear him insult someone who would not understand.
    But Liu Han did understand. That she was part of the revolutionary struggle against the little scaly devils did not mean she had not studied them—just the opposite, in fact. She whirled and hissed back: “Be silent, hatchling from an addled egg!”
    How the devil-boys stared! Not all of them understood what she’d said. But they could hardly fail to understand that a plain, middle-aged woman spoke the little devils’ language at least as well as they did—and that she was not afraid of them. The ones who did understand giggled again, this time at their friend’s discomfiture.
    The boy who had first mocked Liu Han spoke in Chinese now: “How did you learn that language?” He did not even add an interrogative cough.
    “None of your business,” Liu Han snapped. She was already regretting her sharp answer. She and Liu Mei were not perfectly safe in Peking. Sometimes the little devils treated Chinese Communist Party officials like officials from the foreign devils’ governments they recognized. Sometimes they treated them like bandits, even if the Communists made them sorry when they did.
    “What about you, good-looking one?” The devil-boy shifted back to the scaly devils’ speech to aim a question at Liu Mei. He showed ingenuity as well as brashness, for the little devils’ language was short on endearments. They did not need them among themselves, not when they had a mating season and no females to put them into it.
    “I am none of your business, either,” Liu Mei answered in the little devils’ tongue. She’d begun to pick it up as her birth speech before Ttomalss had to return her to Liu Han. Maybe that had helped her reacquire it later, after she’d become fluent in Chinese.