In the surging crowds, she was just one among many. Anonymity suited her. The kind of attention she got these days was not what she wanted.

A man selling fine porcelain cups that certainly looked as if they might have been stolen saw her, pointed, and rocked his hips back and forth. She walked over to him with a large smile on her face. He looked half eager, half apprehensive.

She made her voice high and sweet, like a singsong girl’s. Still smiling, she said, “I hope it rots off. I hope it shrinks back into your body so you can’t find it even if you’ve tied a string around its tiny little end. If you do find it, I hope you never, ever get it up.”

He stared at her, his mouth falling open. Then he reached under the table that held his wares. By the time he’d pulled out a knife, Liu Han had a Japanese pistol pointed at his midsection. “You don’t want to try that,” she said. “You don’t even want to think about trying that.”

The man gaped foolishly, eyes and mouth wide and round as those of the goldfish in their ornamental ponds not far away. Liu Han turned her back and walked away. As soon as a few people got between her and him, he started screaming abuse at her.

She was tempted to go back and put a bullet in his belly, but shooting every man in Peking who mocked her would have wasted a lot of ammunition, and her peasant upbringing made her hate the idea of waste.

A minute later, another merchant recognized her. He followed her with his eyes but didn’t say anything. By the standards she’d grown used to, that was a restrained response. She paid him the compliment of ignoring him.

Before, I had only Hsia Shou-Tao to worry about,she thought bitterly.Thanks to the little scaly devils and their vile cinemas, I have hundreds. A great many men had watched her yield to the desires of Bobby Fiore and the other men aboard the airplane that never came down. Having seen that, too many of them supposed she would be eager to yield to their desires. The little devils had succeeded in making her notorious in Peking.

Someone patted her backside from behind. She lashed out with a shoe and caught him in the shin. He howled curses. She didn’t care. Notorious or not, she refused to vanish into a hole. The scaly devils had done their best to destroy her as an instrument of the People’s Liberation Army. If they succeeded, she would never see her daughter again.

She had no intention of letting them succeed.

They had made her an object of derision, as they’d planned. But they had also made her an object of sympathy. Women could tell that she’d been coerced in some of the films the little devils had taken of her. And the People’s Liberation Army had mounted an aggressive propaganda campaign to educate the people of Peking, men and women alike, as to the circumstances in which she’d found herself. Even some men were sympathetic to her now.

Once or twice, she’d heard foreign devil Christian missionaries talking in their bad Chinese about martyrs. At the time, she hadn’t understood the concept-what point to suffering when you didn’t have to? These days, she was a martyr herself, and exploiting the role for all it was worth.

She came to the little stall of a woman who was selling carp that looked like ugly goldfish. She picked one up by the tail. “Are these fish fresh?” she asked dubiously.

“Just caught this morning,” the woman answered.

“Why do you expect me to believe that?” Liu Han sniffed at the carp. In grudging tones, she said, “Well, maybe. What do you want for them?”

They haggled, but had trouble coming to an agreement. People watched them for a while, then went back to their own concerns when they didn’t prove very interesting. Lowering her voice, the carp seller said, “I have the word you were looking for, Comrade.”

“I hoped you would,” Liu Han answered eagerly. “Tell me.”

The woman looked around, her face nervous. “How you hear this must never be known,” she warned. “The little scaly devils have no idea my nephew understands their ugly language as well as he does-otherwise they would not talk so freely around him.”

“Yes, yes,” Liu Han said with an impatient gesture. “We have put many like that in among them. We do not betray our sources. Sometimes we have even held off from making a move because the little scaly devils would have been able to figure out where we got the information. So you may tell me and not worry-and if you think I will pay your stinking price for your stinking fish, you are a fool!” She added the last in a loud voice when a man walked by close enough to eavesdrop on their conversation.

“Why don’t you go away, then?” the carp seller shrilled. A moment later, she lowered her voice once more: “He says they will soon let the People’s Liberation Army know they are willing to resume talks on all subjects. He is only a clerk, remember; he cannot tell you what ‘all subjects’ means. You will know that for yourself, though, won’t you?”

“Eh? Yes, I think so,” Liu Han answered. If the scaly devils meant what they said, they would return to talking about giving her back her daughter. The girl would be approaching two years old now, by Chinese reckoning: one for the time she’d spent in Liu Han’s womb and the second for the time since her birth. Liu Han wondered what she looked like and how Ttomalss had been treating her. One day before too long, maybe, she’d find out.

“All right, I’ll buy it, even if you are a thief.” As if in anger, Liu Han slapped down coins and stalked away. Behind her angry facade, she was smiling. The carp seller was almost her own personal source of news; she didn’t think the woman knew many others from the People’s Liberation Army. She would get credit for bringing news of impending negotiations to the central committee.

With luck, that would probably be enough to ensure that she got her own seat on the committee. Nieh Ho-T’ing would back her now; she was sure of that. And, once she had her seat, she would support Nieh’s agenda-for a while. One of these days, though, she would have occasion to disagree with him. When she did, she’d have backing of her own.

She wondered how Nieh would take that. Would they be able to go on being lovers after they had political or ideological quarrels? She didn’t know. Of one thing she was sure: she needed a lover less than she had before. She was her own person now, well able to face the world on her own two feet without requiring a man’s support. Before the little scaly devils came, she hadn’t imagined such a thing possible.

She shook her head. Strange that all the suffering the little devils had put her through had led her not only to be independent but to think she ought to be independent. Without them, she would have been one of the uncounted peasant widows in war-torn China, trying to keep herself from starving and probably having to become a prostitute or a rich man’s concubine to manage it.

She passed by a man selling the conical straw hats both men and women wore to keep the sun off their faces. She had one back at the roominghouse. When the little scaly devils first began showing their vile films of her, she’d worn the hat a lot. With its front edge pulled low over her features, she was hardly recognizable.

Now, though, she walked through the streets andhutungs of Peking bareheaded and unashamed. A man leered at her as she left the Small Market. “Beware of revolutionary justice,” she hissed. The fellow fell back in confusion. Liu Han walked on.

The little scaly devils had one of their movie machines playing on a streetcorner. There, bigger than life, Liu Han rode astride Bobby Fiore, her skin and his slick with sweat. The main thing that struck her, looking at her somewhat younger self, was how well fed and well rested she seemed. She shrugged. She hadn’t been committed to the revolutionary cause yet.

A man looked from the three-dimensional image to her. He pointed. Liu Han pointed back at him, as if her finger were the barrel of a gun. He found something else to do-and found it in a hurry.