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is equal and who is not when this war is over.”
    “Yes, that is true,” Nieh Ho-T’ing agreed. “Very well, we shall talk. Do you wish this discussion to begin with great things and move down to the small, or would you rather start with small things and work up as we make progress?”
    “Best we start with small things,” Ppevel said. “Because they are small, you and we may both find it easier to give ground on them. If we try too much at the beginning, we may only grow angry with each other and have these talks fail altogether.”
    “You are sensible,” Nieh said, inclining his head to the little scaly devil. Liu Han listened to Essaff explaining to Ppevel that that was a gesture of respect. Nieh went on, “As we have noted”—his voice was dry; the People’s Liberation Army had noted it with bombs—“we demand that you return the girl child, you callously kidnapped from Liu Han here.”
    Ttomalss jumped as if someone had jabbed him with a pin. “This is not a small matter!” he exclaimed in Chinese, and added an emphatic cough to show he meant it. Essaff was put in the odd position of translating for one little devil what a different one said.
    Nieh Ho-T’ing raised an eyebrow. Liu Han suspected the gesture was wasted on the scaly devils, who had no eyebrows—nor any other hair. Nieh said, “What would you call a small matter, then? I could tell you I find the stuff from which you have made this tent very ugly, but that is hardly something worth negotiating. Compared to having all you imperialist aggressors leave China at once, the fate of this baby is small, or at least smaller.”
    When that had been translated, Ppevel said, “Yes, that is a small matter compared to the other. In any case, this land is now ours, which admits of no discussion—as you are aware.”
    Nieh smiled without replying in words. The European powers and the Japanese had said such things to China, too, but failed in their efforts to consolidate what they had taken at bayonet point Marxist-Leninist doctrine gave Nieh a long view of history, a view he’d been teaching to Liu Han.
    But she knew from her own experience that the little scaly devils had a long view of history, too, one that had nothing to do with Marx or Lenin. They were inhumanly patient; what worked against Britain or Japan might fail against them. If they weren’t lying, even the Chinese, the most anciently and perfectly civilized nation in the world, might have been children beside them.
    “Is my daughter well?” Liu Han asked Ttomalss at last. She dared not break down and cry, but talking about the girl made her nose begin to run in lieu of tears. She blew between her fingers before going on, “Are you taking good care of her?”
    “The hatchling is both comfortable and healthy.” Ttomalss took out a machine of a sort Liu Han had seen before. He touched a stud. Above the machine, by some magic of the scaly devils, an image of the baby sprang into being. She was up on all fours, wearing only a cloth around her middle and smiling wide enough to show two tiny white teeth.
    Liu Han did start to weep then. Ttomalss knew enough to understand that meant grief. He touched the stud again. The picture vanished. Liu Han didn’t know whether that made things better or worse. She ached to hold the baby in her arms.
    Gathering herself, she said, “If you talk to people as equals or something close to equals, you do not steal their children from them. You can do one or the other, but not both. And if you do steal children, you have to expect people to do everything they can to hurt you because of it.”
    “But we take the hatchlings to learn how they and the Race can relate to each other when starting fresh,” Ttomalss said, as if that were almost too obvious to need explanation.
    Ppevel spoke to him in the scaly devils’ tongue. Essaff declined to translate what he said. Nieh looked a question to Liu Han. She whispered, “He says one thing they have learned is