Upsetting the Balance w-3
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Ttomalss wondered more and more often these days why he had ever found the psychology of alien races an interesting study. If he’d taken up, say, landcruiser gunning, he would have dealt with the Big Uglies only through the barrel of a cannon. If he’d taken up something like publishing, he’d probably still be back on Home, comfortably getting on with his career.
Instead, he found himself trying to raise a Tosevite hatchling without any direct help from the Big Uglies. If he could, that would teach the Race a lot about how the Tosevites would do as subjects when the Empire finally succeeded in establishing its control here. If…
The more he worked on the project, the more he wondered how any Big Uglies ever survived to adulthood. When a male or female of the Race emerged from its egg, it was in large measure ready to face the world. It ate the same foods adults did, it could run around, and the biggest problem in civilizing it was teaching it the things it should not do. Since it was obedient by nature, that didn’t usually present too big a challenge.
Whereas the hatchling Big Ugly female Ttomalss had taken from Liu Han…
He glared resentfully at the lumpish little thing. Not only couldn’t it run around, it couldn’t even roll over. It thrashed its arms and legs as if it hadn’t the slightest idea they were part of it. Ttomalss marveled that natural selection could have favored the development of such an utterly helpless hatchling.
The hatchling also couldn’t eat just anything. It had evolved as a parasite on the female from whose body it emerged, and was able to consume only the fluids that female secreted. Not only did Ttomalss find that disgusting, it also presented him with an experimental dilemma. He wanted to raise the Tosevite hatchling in isolation from others of its kind, but required the stuff Big Ugly females produced.
The result, like so many things connected with Tosev 3, was a clumsy makeshift. One thing-almost the only thing-the hatchling could do was suck. Some of the Big Uglies had developed artificial feeding techniques which took advantage of that with elastomeric nipples. They also used artificial equivalents of the female’s natural product.
Ttomalss didn’t care to do that. Very little of what the Race had learned about the Big Uglies’ medical technology impressed him. He made arrangements for females in the Race’s camps who were already secreting for their own hatchlings to give some additional secretion for the one he was trying to raise. He’d feared that would make the Tosevites volatile, but, to his relief, it didn’t, and his hatchling enthusiastically sucked from an elastomer copy of the bodily part evolution had given Big Ugly females.
The hatchling also voided enthusiastically; Tosevite excretory arrangements were much messier than those of the Race. The liquid wastes from Big Ugly adults strained the plumbing facilities of the Race’s spacecraft. But adults, at least, had conscious control over their voiding.
As far as Ttomalss could tell, the hatchling didn’t have conscious control over anything. It released liquid and solid waste whenever it felt the need, no matter where it was: it could be lying in its little containment cage, or he could be holding it. More than once, he’d had to wash off the evil-smelling liquid it passed, and to refurbish his body paint afterwards.
For that matter, its solid wastes barely deserved the adjective. They clung to the hatchling; they clung to everything. Keeping the little creature clean was nearly a full-time job. Ttomalss learned the Big Uglies lessened the problem by wrapping absorbent cloths around their hatchlings’ excretory organs. That helped keep the hatchling’s surroundings cleaner, but he still had to wash it every time it voided.
And the noises it made! Hatchlings of the Race were quiet little things; they had to be coaxed into talking. From an evolutionary point of view, that made sense: noisy hatchlings drew predators, and didn’t survive long enough to reproduce. But natural selection on Tosev 3 seemed to have taken a holiday. Whenever the hatchling was hungry or had fouled itself, it howled. Sometimes it howled for no reason Ttomalss could find. He’d tried ignoring it then, but that didn’t work. The hatchling could squall longer than he could ignore it, and he also feared ignoring it might lead to damage of some kind.
Gradually he began picking it up when it raised a ruckus. Sometimes that made it belch up some air it had swallowed along with the secretions it ate (and sometimes it belched up those secretions, too, in a partially digested and thoroughly revolting state). When that happened, it sometimes brought the hatchling enough relief to make it shut up.
Sometimes, though, the hatchling had nothing whatever wrong with it and still made noise, as if it wanted to be held. And holding it would sometimes calm it. That bewildered Ttomalss, and made him wonder if the Tosevites didn’t start the socialization process earlier in life than the Race did.
His colleagues’ mouths dropped open when he suggested that. “I know it sounds funny,” he said defensively. “They’ve fragmented themselves into tens of tiny empires that fight all the time, while we’ve been comfortably united for a hundred millennia. On the other hand, they have that powerful year-round sexual drive to contend with, and we don’t.”
“You’re tired, Ttomalss,” his fellow psychologists said, almost in chorus.
Ttomalsswas tired. Adult Tosevites had the decency to be respectably diurnal-one of the few decencies they did have. The hatchling was asleep whenever it felt like sleeping and awake whenever it felt like waking, and when it was awake, Ttomalss was perforce awake, too, feeding it or cleaning it (or feeding itand cleaning it) or simply holding it and trying to persuade it to calm down and go back to sleep and let him go back to sleep. No wonder his eye turrets felt as if someone had poured sand in them when they swiveled.
As days passed, the hatchling gradually began to develop a pattern to its sleeping and waking. That was not to say that it didn’t wake up once or twice or sometimes three times in the night, but it seemed more willing to go back to sleep then and to be awake during the day. Little by little, Ttomalss began to reckon himself capable of coherent thought once more.
He also began to believe the hatchling might one day be capable of coherent thought-or thought as coherent as that of Big Uglies ever got. It began to make noises more complex than its first primordial yowls. It also began to look at him with more attention than it had formerly shown him or anything else.
One day, the corners of its mouth lifted in the facial twitch the Tosevites used to express good humor. Ttomalss wished he could return the twitch and reinforce it, but his own features were respectably immobile.
In spite of the hatchling’s increasing responsiveness, in spite of everything he was learning from it, there were a great many times when he wished he’d left it with the Tosevite female from whose body it had come. Better it should drive her mad than him, he thought.
It was not the proper attitude for a scientist, but then again, a proper scientist got enough sleep.
Liu Han’s breasts ached with milk. She’d earned money and food as a wet nurse on her way to Peking, but for the past day and a half she hadn’t found anyone with a baby that needed to nurse. If she didn’t come on one soon, she’d have to squeeze out some milk by hand. She hated to waste it that way, but being so painfully full was no delight, either.
Sometimes, when she was worn and hungry and her feet felt as if they couldn’t take another step, she almost wished she was back in the camp. She’d had plenty to eat there, and not much to do. But she’d also had the little scaly devils spying on everything she did, and finally stealing her baby. Even if it was a girl, it washers.
Getting away from camp hadn’t been easy. Not only did the little devils have cameras mounted inside the hut, they also frequently followed her when she went out and about-and she could hardly walk through the gates in the razor wire. No human walked out through those gates.
If it hadn’t been for the poultry seller who was a Communist, she never would have got out. One day when he was shutting up his stall, he said to her, “Come with me. I’d like you to meet my sister.”
The poultry seller turned his back on them. The woman said, “Oh, Liu Han, I love your clothes so much. Will you trade them for mine, right down to your sandals and underwear?”
Liu Han had stared down at herself for a moment, wondering if the woman was out of her mind. “These rags?” she said. The “sister” nodded emphatically. Then Liu Han understood. The scaly devils were very good at making small things. They might have put some of those small things in her clothes, even in her drawers, to keep track of where she was.
She undressed without bothering to see whether the poultry seller peeked at her. So many men had seen her body that her modesty had taken a severe beating. And anyhow, so soon after childbirth, her body, she was sure, hadn’t been one to rouse a man’s lust.
When the exchange was complete, the poultry seller had turned around and said to the other woman, “I will take you back to your own home, Liu Han.” He turned to Liu Han. “Sister, you wait here for me. I will be back soon.”
Wait Liu Han did, marveling at his gall. She knew the scaly devils had trouble telling one person from another. If the poultry seller’s “sister” dressed like her, they might think she was Liu Han, at least for a while. And while they were fooled…
As he’d promised, the poultry seller had soon returned. He took Liu Han through deepening twilight to another hut that was bare but for mats on the floor. “Now we wait again,” he said. Twilight had given way to night. The camp fell as nearly silent as it ever did.
She’d expected him to demand her body, lumpy from childbirth though it was. She’d even made up her mind not to protest; he was, after all, risking his life to help her, and deserved such thanks as she could give. But he made no advances; he used the time to talk of the paradise China would become when Mao Tse-Tung and the Communists freed it from the scaly devils, the eastern devils from Japan, the foreign devils, and its native oppressors. If a quarter of what he said was true, no one would recognize the country after a generation of new rule.
At last, he’d unrolled a mat near one wall. It concealed a wooden trapdoor that he’d slid aside. “Go down this tunnel,” he said. “Keep going ahead, no matter what. Someone will be waiting for you at the far end.”
She’d quaked like bamboo stalks when the wind blew through them. Bobby Fiore had gone down a tunnel like this, and he’d never come back; he’d ended up lying in a pool of his own blood on a Shanghai street. But down the wooden ladder she’d climbed, and then on hands and knees through damp and the smell of earth and blackness so perfect and intense, it seemed to close in on her until she wanted to huddle where she was and wait for it to swallow her.
But on and on she’d crawled, and at last she came to a rock barring the way. When she pushed it aside, it fell with a splash into an irrigation ditch and she could see again. “Come on,” a voice hissed to her. “This way.”
Liu Han had done her best to go “this way,” but, like the stone, she fell into the ditch. She stood up, wet and dripping, and staggered in the direction from which the voice had come. A hand reached out to pull her onto dry land. “That’s not so bad,” her rescuer whispered. “The cold water will make it harder for the scaly devils to see your heat.”
At first she’d just nodded. Then, though the night breeze on her dripping clothes left her shivering, she drew herself up very straight.
This man knew the little scaly devils could see heat! That information had come from her, and people outside the prison camp were using it. In a life without much room for pride, Liu Han cherished the moments when she knew it.
“Come on,” the man hissed to her. “We have to get farther away from the camp. You’re not safe yet.”
Safe! She’d wanted to laugh. She hadn’t known a minute’s safety since the little scaly devils had attacked her village-not even before that, for the town had been full of Japanese when the little devils came in their dragonfly planes and turned her whole life-to say nothing of the world-upside down.
But as the days went by, as she tramped through the Chinese countryside, one of uncounted thousands of people going along the dirt tracks, she did begin to feel safe, or at least safe from the little scaly devils. She still saw them now and again: soldiers in their vehicles, or sometimes marching on foot and looking no more happy about it than human troops. Every so often, one would turn an eye turret her way, but only idly, or perhaps warily, to make sure she was not a danger to him. But to them, she was just another Big Ugly, not a subject for study. What a relief that was!
And now Peking. Peiping-Northern Peace-it had been renamed, but no one paid much attention to that. Peking it had been, Peking it was, and Peking it would remain.
Liu Han had never seen a walled city before; the closest to such a thing she’d known was the razor wire around the camp in which the little devils had confined her while waiting for her to give birth. But Peking’s walls, in the shape of a square perched atop a broader rectangle, ran for almost forty-fiveli around the perimeter of the city; further internal walls separated the square-the Tartar City-from the rectangle-the Chinese City.
Broad streets ran north and south, east and west, paralleling the walls. The little scaly devils controlled those streets, at least to the point of being able to travel on them by day or night. Between the avenues, there twisted innumerablehutungs — lanes-where the bulk of the city lived its life. The little scaly devils took their lives in their little clawed hands when they went along thehutungs. They knew it, too, so they seldom went there.
Ironically, prison camp had been Liu Han’s best preparation for life in bustling, crowded Peking. Had she come straight from her village, she would have been altogether at sea. But the camp had been a fair-sized city in its own right, and readied her to deal with a great one.
She quickly had to learn how to get around in the Chinese City, for the Communists kept shifting her from one dingy lodging house to another, to throw off any possible pursuit from the little devils. One day they took her to a place not far from the Ch’ien Men, the Western Gate. As she came in, one of the men sitting around and talking over rice spoke a few syllables that were not Chinese. Liu Han recognized them anyway.
She broke away from her escort and walked up to the man. He was a few years older than she, compact, clever-looking. “Excuse me,” she said, politely lowering her eyes, “but did I hear you speak the name of a foreign devil called Bobby Fiore?”
“What if you did, woman?” the man answered. “How do you know this foreign devil’s name?”
“I-knew him in the scaly devils’ prison camp west of Shanghai,” Liu Han said hesitantly. She did not go on to explain that she had borne Bobby Fiore’s child; now that she was fully among her own people once more, having lain with a foreign devil seemed shameful to her.
“You know him?” The man’s eyes raked her. “Are you then the woman he had at that camp? Your name would be-” He looked up to the ceiling for a moment, riffling through papers in his mind. “Liu Han, that was it.”
“Yes, I am Liu Han,” she said. “You must have known him well, if he spoke to you of me.” That Bobby Fiore had spoken of her left her touched. He’d treated her well, but she’d always wondered if she was anything more than an enjoyable convenience to him. With a foreign devil, who could say?
“I was there when he died-you know he is dead?” the man said. When Liu Han nodded, the man went on, “I am Nieh Ho-T’ing. I tell you this, and tell you truly: he died well, fighting against the little scaly devils. He was brave; by doing what he did, he helped me and several others escape them.”
Tears came into Liu Han’s eyes. “Thank you,” she whispered. “They brought his picture-his picture dead-to me in the camp. I knew he died in Shanghai, but not how. He hated the little devils. I am glad he ha
d revenge.” Her hands curled into fists. “I wish I could.”
Nieh Ho-T’ing studied her. He was an alert, thoughtful-looking man, with the controlled movements and watchful eyes that said he was probably a soldier. He said, “Do I remember right? You were going to have a child.”
“I had it-a girl,” she answered. If Nieh thought she was a slut for bedding Bobby Fiore, he didn’t show it. That by itself was enough to earn her gratitude. She continued, “You may know the little scaly devils do things to try to understand how real people work. They took my baby from me when it was just three days old, and they keep it for themselves.”
“This is a great wickedness,” Nieh said seriously. He looked up at the ceiling again. “Liu Han, Liu Han…” When they swung back to her, his eyes had brightened. “You are the woman who learned the scaly devils had machines that could see heat.”
“Yes-they used one of those machines on me, to help see inside my womb before the baby was born,” Liu Han said. “I thought they would use it for other things as well.”
“And you were right,” Nieh Ho-T’ing told her, his voice full of enthusiasm. “We have used this to give us a tactical advantage several times already.” Hewas a soldier, then. He went back from tactics to her. “But if you want revenge against the little scaly devils for their heartless oppression and exploitation of you, you shall have your chance to get it.”
Not just a soldier, a Communist. She easily recognized the rhetoric now. It came as no surprise: the poultry seller, after all, had been a Communist, and passed on her information to his comrades. If the Communists were best at resisting the scaly devils, then she didn’t see anything wrong with them. And she owed those little devils so much. If Nieh Ho-T’ing would help her get her own back… “Tell me what you want me to do,” she said.