Free Aftershocks by Harry Turtledove Page B

has the Americans’ response been?”
    Queek hesitated. Molotov thought he understood that hesitation: the Lizard wanted to lie, but was realizing he couldn’t, for Molotov had but to ask the American ambassador to learn the truth. After the hesitation, Queek said, “The Americans have also raised a certain number of objections to our reasonable proposal, I must admit.”
    Molotov was tempted to laugh in his scaly face. Instead, the leader of the Soviet Union said, “Why, then, do you suppose we would acquiesce where they refuse?” He had not a doubt in the world that the Americans’ ”objections” had been expressed a great deal more stridently than his own.
    With an amazingly human sigh, Queek replied, “Since the Soviet Union prides itself on rationality, it was hoped you would see the plain good sense manifest in our proposal.”
    “It was hoped we would give in without protest, you mean,” Molotov said. “This was an error, a miscalculation, on your part. We are more wary of the Race now than we were before your war against Germany. I am sure the Americans feel the same way. I am especially sure the Japanese feel the same way.”
    “We are most unhappy with the Nipponese,” Queek said. “We have never accorded them recognition as a fully independent empire, even though we also never occupied most of the land they ruled at the time of our arrival. Now that they have begun detonating their own explosive-metal bombs, they have begun to presume for themselves a rank above their station.”
    “Now they too are beginning to be able to defend themselves against your imperialist aggression,” Molotov said. “Our relations with Japan have been correct since the war we fought against the Japanese when I was young.”
    “They still claim large stretches of the subregion of the main continental mass known as China,” Queek said. “Regardless of what sort of weapons they have, we do not intend to yield this to them.”
    “The people of China, I might add, maintain a strong interest in establishing their own independence once more, and in remaining neither under your control nor under that of the Japanese,” Molotov pointed out. “This desire for freedom and autonomy is the reason for their continued revolutionary struggle against your occupation.”
    “This is a revolutionary struggle the Soviet Union encourages in ways inconsistent with maintaining good relations with the Race,” Queek said.
    “I deny that,” Molotov said stonily. “The Race has continually made that assertion, and has never been able to prove it.”
    “This is fortunate for the Soviet Union,” Queek replied. “We may not be able to prove it, but we believe it to be a truth nonetheless. Many of the Chinese bandits proclaim an ideology identical to yours.”
    “They were in China before the Race came,” Molotov said. “They are indigenous, and unconnected to us.” The first of those statements was true, the second tautology—of course Chinese were Chinese—and the last a resounding lie. But the Lizards hadn’t caught the NKVD or the GRU in the act of supplying the Chinese People’s Liberation Army with munitions to go on with the struggle. Till they did, Molotov would go right on lying.
    Queek remained unconvinced. “Even that pack of bandits who have lately taken hostages from among our regional subadministrators and threatened them with death or torment if we do not return to them certain of their comrades”—the Polish interpreter, no friend to Marxist-Leninist thought, pronounced
tovarishchi
with malicious glee—“whom we are now holding imprisoned?” he demanded.
    “Yes, even those freedom fighters,” Molotov answered calmly. He could not prove the Lizard wasn’t talking about Kuomintang reactionaries, who also carried on guerrilla warfare against the Race. And, even if Queek was talking about the patriots of the People’s Liberation Army, nothing would have made Molotov admit it.
    He doubted Queek was, in any