“Yes, Mother,” Liu Mei said dutifully. Less dutifully, she went on, “Will we be able to go outside this hotel again, now that assassins are loose?”

“I do not know the answer to that,” Liu Han said. “In part, it will be up to the Americans. I do not know if they will want to take the chance.”

“Why should they worry?” Liu Mei’s voice was expressive, even if her face was not. She sounded bitter now. “China cannot harm the United States. The People’s Liberation Army cannot conquer America-the People’s Liberation Army cannot even conquer China. We are not the little scaly devils, or even the Russian or German foreign devils. The Americans will not be very worried about letting us go into danger.”

She was probably right. That did not make her words any more pleasant for Liu Han to hear. “Mao would think well of you,” Liu Han said at last. “You see things in terms of power.”

“How else?” Liu Mei sounded surprised. Liu Han was surprised to hear that in her daughter’s voice, but realized she shouldn’t have been. She herself had been involved in the revolutionary struggle since before she’d managed to liberate Liu Mei from the scaly devils. That meant Liu Mei had been involved in the revolutionary struggle for as long as she could remember. No wonder she thought in those terms.

“I hope the assassins were after the little scaly devil,” Liu Han said, tacitly yielding the earlier point to her daughter. “I also hope the Americans can catch them and get answers out of them. That should not be too hard; this country does not have so many people among whom they could disappear.”

“No, but they were in a motorcar-the American who serves the little devil said so,” Liu Mei countered. “With a motorcar, they could go a long way from Major Yeager’s house, to a place where no one was looking for them.”

“You are right again.” Now Liu Han eyed her daughter with respectful curiosity. Liu Mei was getting the hang of the way the USA worked faster than her mother did. Maybe that was just because she was younger. Maybe it was because she was smarter, too. Liu Han didn’t like to admit the possibility even to herself, but she was too much a realist to be blind to it.

And Liu Mei, no matter how clever she was, still had certain blind spots of her own. In musing tones, she repeated, “The Americans were very brave when the shooting started.”

Liu Han didn’t know whether to laugh or to go over to her and shake her. “When you say ‘the Americans,’ you are talking about the younger one, the one called Jonathan, aren’t you?”

Liu Mei flushed. Her skin was slightly fairer than it would have been were she of pure Chinese blood, which let Liu Han more easily see the flush rise and spread. Her daughter lifted her head, which also made her stick out her chin. “What if I am?” she asked defiantly. She was bigger and heavier-boned than Liu Han; if they quarreled, she might do some shaking of her own.

“He is an American, a foreign devil.” Liu Han pointed out the obvious.

“He is the son of my father’s friend,” Liu Mei answered. Liu Han hadn’t realized how much that meant to her daughter till Liu Mei started learning about Bobby Fiore. Liu Han had known the American, known his virtues and his flaws-and he’d had plenty of each. He hadn’t-he couldn’t have-seemed quite real to Liu Mei, not till chance let her meet his friend. Jonathan Yeager drew especially favorable notice in her eyes because he was associated with Bobby Fiore.

Picking her words with care, Liu Han said, “He is one who likes the scaly devils a great deal, you know.” If her daughter was infatuated with Major Yeager’s son, she did not want to push too hard. That would only make Liu Mei cling to him and cling to everything he represented harder than she would have otherwise. Liu Han remembered the paradox from her own girlhood.

“So what?” Liu Mei tossed her head. Her hair bounced, as Liu Han’s would not have; Bobby Fiore had had wavy hair. Liu Mei went on, “Is it not so that having more people who better understood the little scaly devils would be useful for the People’s Liberation Army?”

“Yes, that is always so,” Liu Han admitted. She pointed a finger at her daughter. “What? Are you thinking of showing him your body to lure him back to China to help us against the scaly devils? Not even a maker of bad films would think such a plan could work.” And so much for being careful of what I say, she thought.

Liu Mei blushed again. “I would not do such a thing!” she exclaimed. “I would never do such a thing!” Liu Han believed her, though some young girls would have lied in such a situation. She remembered the scandal surrounding one in her home village… But the village was gone, and the girl who’d had a bulging belly very likely dead. Liu Mei went on, in more thoughtful tones, “But he is a nice young man, even if he is a foreign devil.”

And Liu Han could not even disagree with that, not when she’d thought the same thing herself. She did say, “Remember, he may have a foreign devil for a sweetheart.”

“I know that,” her daughter answered. “In fact, he does, or he did. He has spoken of her to me. She has hair the color of a new copper coin, he says. I have seen a few people like that here. They look even stranger to me than black people and blonds.”

“There is a fable,” Liu Han said. “When the gods first made the world, they did not bake the first men they made long enough, so they came out pale. Those are the usual foreign devils. They left the second batch of men in too long, and that is how blacks came to be. The third time, they baked them perfectly, and made Chinese. It is only a fable, because there are no gods, but we look the way people are supposed to look.”

“I understand,” Liu Mei said. “But I have got used to pale skins, because I see them around me all the time these days. Red hair, though, still seems strange.”

“And to me, too,” Liu Han agreed, remembering the redheaded man she’d seen the day the Liberty Explorer came into the harbor at San Pedro.

Before she could say anything more, someone knocked on the door to the suite the two Chinese women shared. Liu Han went to open it without hesitation; the U.S. government had posted armed guards in the hallway, and so she did not fear another attempt at murder.

Indeed, the fellow standing in the hallway could not have looked less like an assassin. He was pudgy and wore dark-rimmed spectacles. To her surprise, he spoke fairly good Mandarin, even though he was a white man: “Comrade Liu Han, I am Calvin Gordon, aide to the Undersecretary of State for the Occupied Territories. I am pleased to be able to tell you that the first shipments of arms for the People’s Liberation Army left San Francisco and San Pedro harbors, bound for China. I hope they will reach your country safely, and that your comrades use them well and wisely against the little scaly devils.”

“I thank you very much,” Liu Han said. “I did not expect anyone to tell me, especially in person.” She glanced toward the telephone that sat on a table by one end of the overstuffed sofa in the suite. Americans seemed to think talking on it was as good as actually being with a person.

But Calvin Gordon said, “President Warren ordered me to fly out from Little Rock and let you know. He wants you to understand that China is important to the United States, and we will do everything we can to help free your country.”

“That is good,” Liu Han said. “That is very good. But, of course, we do not know if these arms will actually reach the People’s Liberation Army.”

“No, we do not know that,” Gordon agreed. “The world is an uncertain place. If the weapons get past the Japanese and the little devils and the Kuomintang, the People’s Liberation Army will use them. And if they do not get past the Japanese and the little devils and the Kuomintang, we will send some more, and we will keep sending them until the People’s Liberation Army has them. Does that satisfy you?”