Upsetting the Balance (78 page)

The hatchling turned its head to look at him. He’d been around Big Uglies enough that he no longer found that unnerving. The creatures were just too poorly made to move their eyes as the Race did. The hatchling’s face twisted into a Tosevite gesture of amiability: the rest of its features were far more mobile than Ttomalss’. He didn’t think that made it superior; he thought it made the hatchling and its race even uglier than they would have been otherwise.

It screwed up its face and let out a noise that sounded amazingly like an interrogative cough. It had done that two or three times already. As best he could tell, it began by making all sorts of sounds, and then gradually started picking out those the beings around it used in their language.

He wondered if its vocal apparatus would be able to handle the language of the Race. By two or three thousand years after the conquest, all the Big Uglies would be speaking that tongue; they would, unlikely as the notion now seemed, be normal subjects like the Rabotevs and Hallessi. A lot of them were good at languages. With so many different ones on Tosev 3, that was hardly surprising. But one of the things Ttomalss needed to learn was how they would handle the Race’s tongue when learning it from hatchlinghood. If this hatchling was returned to Liu Han, he would have to start that process over again.

Tessrek stuck his head into the laboratory. “Enjoy your Little Ugly while you have it,” he said.

What Ttomalss would have enjoyed was sending Tessrek out the airlock with no space suit. “The creature is not here to enjoy,” he said stiffly. “Animals are to exploit, not to befriend as the Big Uglies do.” Remembering his earlier thought, he added, “Not that the Tosevites are animals. Once the conquest is complete, they will be our subjects.”

“It would be much more convenient if they
were
animals,” Tessrek said. “Then this world would be ours. Even if they were barbarians—remember the image of the Tosevite warrior the probe sent Home?”

“The sword-swinging savage in rusty iron, mounted on a beast? I’m not likely to forget.” Ttomalss hissed out a sigh. Would that that image were still truth on Tosev 3. It would have made his life—the Race’s life—ever so much simpler. But he wasted only a moment on the barbarous past of the Tosevites. “What do you mean, enjoy the hatchling while I have it? No decision to abandon it to the Big Uglies has reached me.”

“As far as I know, the decision hasn’t been made,” Tessrek admitted. “But when it is made, what do you think it will be? Everybody’s eye turrets are swiveling every which way because of the atomic bombs the Tosevites have started using against us, but the Chinese raids cost us a lot of capable males, too. If giving back one hatchling can get us a respite from more of those, don’t you think we ought to take it?”

“That depends,” Ttomalss said judiciously. “If we do return the hatchling, we encourage the Big Uglies to make other demands of us, and then to harm us if we don’t obey. They’re supposed to be afraid of us, not the other way round.”

“If they are, they hide it very well,” Tessrek said, “and who can blame them? Now that they have atomic weapons, they can do us severe damage. We may have to treat with them as equals.”

“Nonsense,” Ttomalss said automatically. The Race recognized no equals. The Rabotevs and Hallessi had legal equality in most areas of life, and had their own social hierarchies, but their worlds were in the Race’s hands even so. Yet, on reflection, maybe it wasn’t nonsense. Tosev 3 wasn’t in the Race’s hands, not yet Ttomalss still assumed it eventually would be, but the assumption looked less and less assumable all the time.

Tessrek said, “Besides, as I and other males have noted, the presence of the small Tosevite aboard this vessel has had noxious consequences for the local environment In short, the creature still stinks. Many males would be glad to see it gone for that reason alone, and have stated as much.”

“My personal attitude is that that viewpoint has a far more noxious odor than the Tosevite,” Ttomalss answered. He did his best to disguise the stab of fear that ran through him. If all the other researchers and psychologists banded together against his experiment, it might be terminated regardless of its virtues. That wasn’t fair, but sometimes it was the way the egg hatched.

He wondered if the Big Uglies let personalities get in the way of scientific research. He doubted it. Otherwise, how could they have so quickly moved forward from barbarism to rivaling a Race unified perhaps before their species had evolved its present form? It was itchy to think of the Tosevites as more advanced, in a way, than his own people, but the logic seemed inescapable.

He said, “Until I am told otherwise, the experiment will continue in its present form. Even if I am told otherwise, I shall not surrender the hatchling to the inept mercies of the Big Uglies without an appeal to highest authority. And I, too, have backers for my cause. This work is an important part of understanding not only our future relations with the Tosevites but also that of their sexuality and its consequences for their species. Terminating it would disrupt several research tracks.”

“And probably send you back down to the surface of Tosev 3,” Tessrek said maliciously.

“At least I’ve
been
down to the surface of Tosev 3,” Ttomalss retorted. Though he regarded that surface and the Big Uglies who dwelt on it as rivaling each other for unpleasantness, he added, “Some males seem to be of the opinion that research can be conducted only in sterile laboratory settings; they do not understand that interactions with the environment are significant, and that results obtained in the laboratory are liable to be skewed precisely because the setting is unnatural.”

“Some males, on the other fork of the tongue, simply enjoy stepping into lumps of excrement and stooping to wash it out from between their toes.” Tessrek turned his eye turrets toward the Tosevite hatchling. “And some males, I might add, are in a poor position to sneer at the practices of others when they themselves are comfortably ensconced in a laboratory aboard ship.”

“Being here is a necessary component of my research,” Ttomalss answered angrily. “I am trying to determine how well the Big Uglies can be made to conform to our practices if those are inculcated into them from hatchlinghood. Just as one intending fraud goes to a computer for access to resources, I have brought the hatchling here for access to the Race undiluted by contact with the Tosevites. Such would be most difficult to arrange down on the surface of Tosev 3.”

“You’ve certainly given the rest of us undiluted olfactory contact with the wretched little creature,” Tessrek said. “The scrubbers up here are designed to eliminate
our
wastes from the air, not its, and some of those odors have proved most persistent and most disgusting.” He added an emphatic cough.

The hatching made a noise that, if you were in a charitable mood, you might have recognized as an emphatic cough. Perhaps you didn’t need to be in a charitable mood; Tessrek’s eyes swung sharply toward the little Tosevite, then moved away as if to say he refused to acknowledge what he’d just heard.

Triumphantly, Ttomalss said, “There, you see? The hatching, despite its deficiencies, is being socialized toward our usages even at this early stage in its development.”

“It was just another in the series of loud, unpleasant sounds the creature emits,” Tessrek insisted. “It held no intelligible meaning whatsoever.” To show he meant what he said, he let out a second emphatic cough.

Now Ttomalss looked anxiously toward the hatchling. Even he would have been willing to concede it did not know the meanings of the noises it made in imitation of his. It seemed likely to learn meanings by observing what the beings around it did in response to the stimuli varying sounds evoked. But despite his knowledge, he would have yielded a pay period’s wages to have it come out with another emphatic cough.

He didn’t think it was going to happen. But then, just when he’d given up hope, the little Tosevite did make a noise that sounded like an emphatic cough—sounded more like one, in fact, that its first effort had.

“Coincidence,” Tessrek declared, before Ttomalss could say a thing. Yet no matter how dogmatically certain he sounded, he did not presume to tack yet a third emphatic cough on behind his assertion.

“I think not,” Ttomalss said. “This is how the Big Uglies go about acquiring language. Since we are the language possessors with whom the hatchling is in constant contact, it is imitating our repertoire of sounds. Eventually, I believe, it will attach mental signification to the sounds it uses: in other words, it will begin to speak intelligibly.”

“The Big Uglies have enough trouble doing that no matter what language they use,” Tessrek said. But he did not try directly refuting Ttomalss, from which Ttomalss inferred he conceded the point.

Ttomalss said, “Since video and audio monitors constantly record the activities in this chamber, I want to thank you for adding to our store of data concerning Tosevite language acquisition.”

Tessrek hissed something unpleasant and departed more quickly than he’d come in. Ttomalss let his mouth fall open in a long laugh, which he thought well-earned. The Tosevite hatchling emitted one of the squeals it used in place of a sensibly quiet gesture. Sometimes those squeals, so unlike any sound the Race made, annoyed Ttomalss no end. Now he laughed even harder. The hatchling had understood his mirth and responded with its own.

For the benefit of the recorders, he emphasized that point aloud, adding, “This growing level of successful interspecies communication appears to me to warrant further serious investigation.” He looked at the little Tosevite with something more nearly approaching warmth than he ever remembered showing it. “Let’s see them try to take you away from me now. Even if you are a nuisance, you’re too valuable to give back to the Big Uglies.”

20

Jens Larssen peered out the window of the farmhouse where he’d taken shelter for the past several days. That was what he’d been doing lately: peering out the window and waiting for the searchers to give up and go away. “They aren’t going to catch me,” he muttered. “I’m too smart for them. I won’t let them catch me.”

He was pretty sure he could have outrun pursuit from Denver and made it to Lizard-held territory. Pursuit wasn’t the only problem, though. People would have been waiting for him out east. He hadn’t forgotten telegraph and telephone lines (even if those were likely to be down, could you take the chance?) and radio and even carrier pigeons. They’d know he was coming, oh yes they would.

So he’d been waiting for them to give up and quit looking for him. Sooner or later, they’d figure he’d got caught in a snowstorm and frozen to death, or that he’d managed a clean getaway, or else the war would heat up and they’d forget all about him and go off to fight. Then he’d start moving again. The time, he judged, was nearly ripe.

He laughed. “They aren’t going to catch me,” he repeated. “Hell, they were right in this house and they didn’t have a clue.”

He’d been smart. He was a physicist—he was supposed to be smart. He’d picked a house with a storm cellar in it. Whenever prying eyes came around, he’d ducked down into the cellar. He’d even tied a throw rug to a chair near the cellar door so it kept that door covered up after he went down below. He’d heard combat boots thumping up above his head, but none of the soldiers had had a hint that he was sitting in the darkness with his finger on the trigger of his Springfield in case anything had gone wrong.

He laughed again. The soldiers hadn’t had the brains to look beyond the ends of their noses. He’d expected nothing different, and he’d been right. “I usually am,” he said. “If those fools would have listened to me—” He shook his head. They hadn’t listened. The Lizards would.

Even though they hadn’t been physicists, the people who’d built this farm had been pretty smart, too. They weren’t around, though, so they hadn’t been smart enough to escape the Lizards. Or maybe they hadn’t been lucky enough. You never could tell. Whichever way it was, they were gone.

But they’d left behind that storm cellar, stocked with enough home-canned goodies to feed a platoon for a month. That was how it seemed to Jens, anyhow. Beef, pork, chicken, vegetables—they didn’t seem to have had any fruit trees, and he missed sweets till he came upon a gallon jar of tapioca pudding. The wife of the house must have made a lot more than she could use right away, and put up the rest. He ate tapioca till it started coming out of his ears.

He’d found cigarettes down there, too, but he hadn’t smoked any. The odor would linger in the house. When he got on the road again—ah, that was another matter. He looked forward to it, although the first couple of times he’d lit up after going without for a long time, he’d been like Tom Sawyer after Huck Finn gave him his first pipe.

He walked over to the window that looked across the fields toward US 40. It was snowing again, not so hard as it had back when he was a kid in Minnesota but plenty hard enough to cut way back on visibility. In a way, that was bad, because he couldn’t tell who, if anybody, was out there. He didn’t think anybody was. The highway had been quiet since that search party stomped through the house, and that was days ago now. And the snow could work for him, too. It would make him harder to spot, and harder to recognize if somebody did spot him.

“Well, then, time to get moving,” he said. He was just the Denver side of Limon. Once he made it past there, he’d be getting close to frontier country. He’d have to be careful again: the frontier meant soldiers. But unless he had it all wrong, they’d be worrying about Lizards, not about him.

And he didn’t have it all wrong. He couldn’t have it all wrong. The only mistake he’d made was not doing something like this a hell of a lot sooner. He went down into the storm cellar and hauled out his bicycle. As soon as he was on the road, he lit up a King Sano. Yeah, it made him halfway want to puke, but goddamn did it taste good.

The Russies had been buried alive before, first in the bunker under a Warsaw block of flats and then in the submarine that brought them from Poland to England. That didn’t mean Moishe enjoyed repeating the process. There were, however, worse choices these days.

A sandy-haired naval officer named Stansfield commanded the HMS
Seanymph.
“Welcome aboard,” he’d said as, somewhere off the coast of Portugal, or perhaps Spain, Moishe, Rivka, and Reuven transferred to his boat from the freighter that had brought them down from England. “I’d wager you’ll be glad to submerge for a spell.”

Like a lot of military types Moishe had met—Poles, Nazis, Englishmen, Lizards—he seemed almost indecently offhanded about the implications of combat. Maybe the only way he could deal with them was not to think about them. Moishe had answered, “Yes,” and let it go at that.

When the British decided to send him to Palestine, getting him and his family there hadn’t looked like a problem. The Lizards hadn’t acted very interested in attacking ships. But then the Americans had touched off atomic bombs, first in Chicago and then in Miami. When Moishe thought of Chicago, he thought of gangsters. He’d never heard of Miami before it abruptly ceased to be.

What he thought of those places didn’t much matter, though. The Lizards must have thought ships had something to do with their destruction, because from then on they’d started hitting them a lot harder than they ever had before. Moishe didn’t know how many times his eyes had flicked to the air on the long, rough haul down from England. It was, he realized, a pointless exercise. Even if he spotted a Lizard fighter-bomber, what could he do about it? That didn’t keep him from looking anyhow.

Diving with the
Seanymph
had seemed reassuring at first. Not only was he out of sight of the Lizards, he was also out of the waves that had made the passage something less than a traveler’s delight No rolling and pitching, down however many meters they were.

That was just as well, too, for the submarine was not only cramped but also full of pipes and projecting pieces of metal and the rims of watertight doors, all of which could bang heads or shins or shoulders. In a proper design, Moishe thought, most of those projections would have been covered over by metal sheeting or hidden away behind walls. He wondered why they hadn’t been. In his halting English, he asked Commander Stansfield.

The naval officer blinked at the question, then answered, “Damned if I know. Best guess I can give you is that S-class boats are built in such a tearing hurry, no one cares about anything past getting them out there to sink ships. Give us another couple of generations of engineering and the submarines will be much more comfortable to live in. Compared to what we had in the last war, I’m told, this is paradise.”

To Russie’s way of thinking, paradise was not to be found in a narrow, smelly, noisy metal tube lit by dim orange lights so that it resembled nothing so much as a view of the Christian hell. If this was an improvement, he pitied the men who had put to sea in submarines about the time he was born.

He, Rivka, and Reuven shared what normally would have been the executive officer’s cabin. Even by the dreadful standards of the Warsaw ghetto, it would have been cramped for one and was hideously crowded for three. When set against the sailors’ triple-decker bunks, though, it seemed a luxury flat. A blanket attached with wires to one of the overhead pipes gave some small semblance of privacy.

In Yiddish, Rivka said, “When we went from Poland to England, I was afraid to be the only woman on a ship full of sailors. Now, though, I don’t worry. They aren’t like the Nazis. They don’t take advantage.”

Moishe thought about that. After a little while, he said, “We’re on the same side as the English. That makes a difference. To the Nazis, we were fair game.”

“What’s ‘fair game’ mean?” Reuven asked. He remembered the ghetto as a time of hunger and fear, but he’d been away from it most of a year now. In the life of a little boy, that was a long time. His scars had healed. Moishe wished his own dreadful memories would go away as readily.

After being submerged for what he thought was most of a day—though time in tight, dark places had a way of slipping away from you if you didn’t hold it down—the
Seanymph
surfaced. Hatches let in fresh air to replace the stale stuff everyone had been breathing over and over again. They also let in shafts of sunlight that clove straight through the gloom inside the submarine. No winter sun in London or Warsaw could have shone so bright.

“We’ll lay over in Gibraltar to recharge our batteries and pick up whatever fresh produce they have for us here,” Commander Stansfield told Moishe. “Then we’ll submerge again and go on into the Mediterranean to rendezvous with the vessel that will take you on to Palestine.” He frowned “That’s what the plan is, at any rate. The Lizards are strong around much of the Mediterranean. If they’ve been as vigorous attacking ships there as elsewhere—”

“What do we do then?” Moishe asked.

Stansfield grimaced. “I don’t precisely know. I gather your mission is of considerable importance: it must be, or it wouldn’t have been laid on. But I’ve neither fuel nor supplies to take you there, I’m afraid, and I don’t really know where I should acquire more. Here, possibly, though I should have to get authority from London first. Let us hope it does not come to that.”

“Yes,” Moishe said. “Let us.”

He and his family stretched their legs on the deck of the
Seanymph
a few times while she resupplied. The sun beat down on them with a vigor it seldom found in summer in more northerly climes. Like those of the sailors, their skins were fish-belly pale. Before long, they began to turn pink.

The Germans and Italians had bombed Gibraltar, back when the war was a merely human affair. The Lizards had bombed it since, more persistently and more precisely. Nonetheless, it remained in British hands. No great warships used the harbor, as they had in earlier days, but Moishe spotted a couple of other submarines. One looked considerably different in lines from the
Seanymph.
He wondered if it was even a British boat. Could the Axis powers be using a harbor they’d tried to destroy?

When the crew dogged the hatches, Moishe felt a pang, as if he were being dragged unwilling into a cave. After the spirited Mediterranean sun, the dim interior lamps seemed particularly distressing. A couple of hours later, though, he’d got used to the orange twilight once more.

Time crawled on. The sailors were all either asleep or busy keeping the submarine running. Moishe had slept as much as he could, and he was useless on the boat. That left him as bored as he’d ever been in his life. In the bunker under the Warsaw ghetto flats, he’d passed a lot of time making love with Rivka. He couldn’t do that here.

Keeping Reuven out of mischief helped occupy him. His son was every bit as bored as he was, and couldn’t understand why he wasn’t allowed to go out and get under people’s feet “It’s not fair!” he said, again and again. He was probably right, but not right enough to be turned loose.

The
Seanymph
sailed east, altogether cut off from the outside world. Moishe wondered if traveling between worlds in a Lizard spaceship was anything like this. If it was, he pitied the Lizards. They had to endure it for a lot longer than mere hours.

When the submarine surfaced, it was black night outside. That made transferring Moishe and his family safer, but also harder. “Like trying to find a black cat in a coal cellar at midnight,” Commander Stansfield grumbled. “And we’re not even certain the cat is here.”

“How well can you find where you are going when this ship is underwater?” Russie asked.

“Boat,” Stansfield corrected absently. “That is the rub, of course. If we’re a couple—or more than a couple—of miles from where we ought to be, we might as well have sailed to Colorado.” He smiled, as if at some remembered joke. Whatever it was, it made no sense to Moishe. Stansfield went on, “It’s a clear night. We can read our positions from the stars and move at need. But dawn will be coming before too long—now that we’re further south, night ends earlier than it would in British waters—and I’m not keen on being spotted around here.”