Free Tilting The Balance by Harry Turtledove Page B

the best guess she could make.
    Part of the floor, instead of being metal like the rest, was a raised mat covered with slick gray stuff that looked more like leather than anything else but didn’t smell like it. Her body, sweaty in the heat, stuck to the mat when she lay down on it, but it was still better for resting than anywhere else in the cell. She closed her eyes, tried to sleep. She’d been sleeping a lot lately, partly because she was pregnant and partly because she had nothing better to do.
    She was just dozing off when the door to her cell hissed open again. She opened one eye, sure it would be the little devil who came in to take away the cans after every meal. Sure enough, in he skittered, but several others came with him. A couple of them had body paint more ornate than she was used to seeing.
    One, to her surprise, spoke Chinese after a fashion. Pointing to her, he said, “You come with us.”
    She quickly got to her feet. “It shall be done, superior sir,” she said, using one of the phrases she’d learned of the little devils’ language.
    The devils fell in around her at more than arm’s length. She was on the small side, an inch or so above five feet, but she towered over the scaly devils, enough so to make them nervous around her. She joined them eagerly enough; any trip out of her cell was unusual enough to count as a treat. And maybe, better still, they would take her to Bobby Fiore.
    They didn’t; they led her in the opposite direction from his cell. She wondered what they wanted with her. Wondering made her hopeful and anxious by turns. They might do anything at all to her, from setting her free to taking her away from Bobby Fiore and giving her to some new man who would rape and beat her. She had no say. She was just a prisoner.
    What they did reached neither extreme. They took her down an oddly curved stairway to another deck. She felt lighter there than she should have; her stomach didn’t like it. But much of her fear went away. She knew they’d brought Bobby Fiore here, and nothing too bad had happened to him.
    The scaly devils escorted her into a chamber full of their incomprehensible gadgetry. The devil sitting behind the desk surprised her by speaking fair Chinese: “You are the female human Liu Han?”
    “Yes,” she answered. “Who are you, please?” Her own language tasted sweet in her mouth. Even with Bobby Fiore, she spoke a curious mixture of Chinese, English, and the little devils’ tongue, eked out with much gesture and dumb show.
    “I am called Nossat,” the scaly devil answered. “I am a – I do not know it, your language has an exact word for it – I am a male who studies how you humans think. I am colleague to Tessrek, who spoke with your mate Bobby Fiore.”
    “Yes, I understand,” Liu Han said. That was the little scaly devil with whom Bobby Fiore had spoken down here. What had he called the devil Tessrek? English had a name for what that devil did-psychologist, that was it. Liu Han relaxed. Talking could not be dangerous.
    Nossat said, “You are going to lay an egg in the time to come? No, your kind does not lay eggs. You are going to give birth? Is that what you say, ‘give birth’? You will have a child?”
    “I am going to have a child, yes,” Liu Han agreed. Of themselves, the fingers of her right hand spread fanlike over her belly. She had long since resigned herself to being naked in front of the scaly devils, but she remained automatically protective of the baby growing inside her.
    “The child is from matings between Bobby Fiore and you?” Nossat said. Without waiting for her to reply, he stuck one of his thin, clawed fingers into a recess on the desk. A screen, as if for motion pictures, lit up behind him. The picture that moved upon it was of Bobby Fiore thrusting atop Liu Han.
    She sighed. She knew the little scaly devils took pictures of her while she made love, as well as any other time they chose. They had mating seasons like farm animals,