“No, no.” Liu Han had all she could do not to laugh.
“Then why do this?” Ttomalss demanded. “What is its-function, is that the proper word?”
“That is the proper word, yes, superior sir.” Liu Han sighed. The little devils talked so openly about mating that her own sense of shame and reticence had eroded. “But he does not draw milk from them. He does it to give me pleasure and to arouse himself.”
Ttomalss gave a one-word verdict: “Disgusting.” He spoke in his own language to the other little devil with fancy paint. That one and the guard both swung their eyes from Liu Han to Bobby Fiore and back again.
“What’s going on?” Fiore demanded. “Honey, they asking filthy questions again?” Though he liked publicly showing affection in a way in which no Chinese would have felt easy, he was and had stayed far more reticent than Liu Han in speaking of intimate matters.
“Yes,” she answered resignedly.
The scaly devil with fancy paint who didn’t speak Chinese sent several excited sentences at Ttomalss, who turned to Liu Han. “You use the kee-kreek? This is our speech, not yours.”
“I am sorry, superior sir, but I do not know what the kee-kreek is,” Liu Han said.
“The-” Ttomalss made the little devils’ interrogative cough. “Do you understand now?”
“Yes, superior sir,” Liu Han said. “Now I understand. Bobby Fiore is a foreign devil from a country far away. His words and my words are not the same. When we were up in the plane that never came down-”
“The what?” Ttomalss interrupted. When Liu Han explained, the little devil said, “Oh, you mean the ship.”
Liu Han still wondered how it could be a ship if it never touched water, but the little devil seemed insistent about the point, so she said, “When we were up in the ship, then, superior sir, we had to learn each other’s words. Since we both knew some of yours, we used those, too, and we still do.”
Ttomalss translated for the other little scaly devil, who spoke volubly in reply. “Starraf”-Ttomalss finally named the other devil-“says you could do without all this moving back and forth between languages if you spoke only one, as we do. When your world is all ours, all you Big Uglies who survive will use our language, just as the Rabotevs and Halessi, the other races in the Empire, do now.”
Liu Han could see that having everyone speak the same language would be simpler: even other dialects of Chinese were beyond her easy comprehension. But the unspoken assumptions in the scaly devil’s words chilled her. Ttomalss seemed very sure his kind would conquer the world, and also that they would be able to do as they pleased with its people (or as many of them as were left when the conquest was complete).
Starraf spoke again, and Ttomalss translated: “You have shown, and we have seen at other places, that you Big Uglies are not too stupid to learn the tongue of the Race. Maybe we should begin to teach it in this camp and others, so that you can begin to be joined to the Empire.”
“Now what?” Bobby Fiore asked.
“They want to teach everyone how to talk the way we do,” Liu Han answered. She’d known the scaly devils were overwhelmingly powerful from the moment they first descended on her village. Somehow, though, she’d never thought much about what they were doing to the rest of the world. She was only a villager, after all, and didn’t worry about the wider world unless some part of it impinged on her life. All at once, she realized the little devils didn’t just want to conquer mankind; they aimed to make people as much like themselves as they could.
She hated that even more than she hated anything else about the little scaly devils, but she hadn’t the slightest idea how to stop it.
Mordechai Anielewicz stood at attention in Zolraag’s office as the Lizard governor of Poland chewed him out. “The situation in Warsaw grows more unsatisfactory with each passing day,” Zolraag said in pretty good German. “The cooperation between you Jews and the Race which formerly existed seems to have disappeared.”
Anielewicz scowled; after what the Nazis had done to the Warsaw ghetto, hearing the word “Jews” in German was plenty to set his teeth on edge all by itself. And Zolraag used it with arrogance of a sort not far removed from that of the Germans. The only difference Anielewicz could see was that the Lizards thought of all humans, not just Jews, as Untermenschen.
“Whose fault is that?” he demanded, not wanting Zolraag to know he was concerned. “We welcomed you as liberators; we shed our blood to help you take this city, if you’remember, superior sir. And what thanks do we get? To be treated almost as badly under your thumb as we were under the Nazis.”
“That is not true,” Zolraag said. “We have given you enough guns to make your fighters the equal of the Armija Krajowa, the Polish Home Army. Where you were below them, we set you above. How do you say we treat you badly?”
“I say it because you care nothing for our freedom,” the Jewish fighting leader answered. “You use us for your own purposes and to help make slaves of other people. We have been slaves ourselves. We didn’t like it. We don’t see any reason to think other people like it, either.”
“The Race will rule this world and all its people,” Zolraag said, as confidently as if he’d remarked, The sun will come up tomorrow. “Those who work with us will have higher place than those who do not.”
Before the war, Anielewicz had been a largely secularized Jew. He’d gone to a Polish Gymnasium and university, and studied Latin. He knew what the Latin equivalent of work together was, too: collaborate. He also knew what he’d thought of the Estonian, Latvian, and Ukrainian jackals who helped the German wolves patrol the Warsaw ghetto-and what he’d thought of the Jewish police who betrayed their own people for a crust of bread.
“Superior sir,” he said earnestly, “with the guns we have from you, we can protect ourselves from the Poles, and that is very good. But most of us would rather die than help you in the way you mean.”
“This I have seen, and this I do not understand,” Zolraag said. “Why would you forgo such advantage?”
“Because of what we would have to do to get it,” Anielewicz answered. “Poor Moishe Russie wouldn’t speak your lies, so you had to play tricks with his words to make them come out the way you wanted them. No wonder he disappeared after that, and no wonder he made you out to be liars the first chance he got.”
Zolraag’s eye turrets swung toward him. That slow, deliberate motion held as much menace as if they’d contained 38-centimeter battleship guns rather than organs of vision. “We are still seeking to learn more of these events ourselves,” he said. “Herr Russie was an associate, even a friend, of yours. We wonder how and if you helped him.”
“You questioned me under your truth drug,” Anielewicz reminded him.
“We have not learned as much with it as we hoped from early tests,” Zolraag said. “Some early experimental subjects may have deceived us as to their reactions. You Tosevites have a gift for being difficult in unusual ways.”
“Thank you,” Anielewicz said, grinning.
“I did not mean it as a compliment,” Zolraag snapped.
Anielewicz knew that. Since he’d been up to his eyebrows in getting Russie away and in making the recording in which Russie blasted the Lizards, he was less than delighted to learn the Lizards had found their drug was worthless.
Zolraag resumed, “I did not summon you here, Herr Anielewicz, to listen to your Tosevite foolishness. I summoned you here to warn you that the uncooperative attitude of you Jews must stop. If it does not, we will disarm you and put you back in the place where you were when we came to Tosev 3.”
Anielewicz gave the Lizard a long, slow, measuring stare. “It comes to that, does it?” he said at last.