Upsetting the Balance

Sighing, Liu Han pulled off her black cotton tunic, let her baggy trousers and linen drawers fall to the dirt floor of the hut in the refugee camp west of Shanghai. Outside, people chattered and argued and scolded children and chased chickens and ducks. The marketplace lay not far away; the racket that came from there was never-ending, like the plashing of a stream. She had to make a deliberate effort to hear it.

Ttomalss’ weird eyes swiveled independently as they examined her. She stood still and let him look all he cared to; one thing more than a year’s association with the little scaly devils had taught her was that they had no prurient interest in mankind… not that she would have aroused prurient interest in many men, not with a belly that looked as if she’d swallowed a great melon whole. Her best guess was that the baby would come in less than a month.

Ttomalss walked up to her and set the palm of his hand on her belly. His skin was dry and scaly, like a snake’s, but warm, almost feverish, against hers. The little devils were hotter than people. The few Christians in the camp said that proved they came from the Christian hell. Wherever they came from, Liu Han wished they’d go back there and leave her-leave everyone-alone.

The baby kicked inside her. Ttomalss jerked his hand away, skittering back a couple of paces with a startled hiss. “That is disgusting,” he exclaimed in Chinese, and added the emphatic cough.

Liu Han bowed her head. “Yes, superior sir,” she said. What point to arguing with the scaly devil? His kind came from eggs, like poultry or songbirds.

Cautiously, Ttomalss returned He reached out again and touched her in a very private place. “We have seen, in your kind, that the hatchlings come forth from this small opening. We must examine and study the process most carefully when the event occurs. It seems all but impossible.”

“It is true, superior sir.” Liu Han still stood quiet, enduring his hand, hating him. Hate filled her, but she had no way to let it out. After the Japanese overran her village and killed her husband and little son, the little scaly devils had overrun the Japanese-and kidnapped her.

The little devils had mating seasons like farm animals. Finding out that people didn’t had repelled and fascinated them at the same time. She was one of the unlucky people they’d picked to learn more about such-again, as people might explore the mating habits of pigs. In essence, though they didn’t seem to think of it in those terms, they’d turned her into a whore.

In a way, she’d been lucky. One of the men they’d forced on her, an American named Bobby Fiore, had been decent enough, and she’d partnered with him and not had to endure any more strangers. The baby kicked again. He’d put it in her belly.

But Bobby Fiore was dead now, too. He’d escaped from the camp with Chinese Communist guerrillas. Somehow, he’d got to Shanghai. The scaly devils had killed him there-and brought back color photos of his corpse for her to identify.

Ttomalss opened a folder and took out one of the astonishing photographs the little scaly devils made. Liu Han had seen photographs in magazines before the little devils came from wherever they came from. She’d seen moving pictures at the cinema a few times. But never had she seen photographs with such perfect colors, and never had she seen photographs that showed depth.

This one was in color, too, but not in colors that seemed connected to anything in the world Liu Han knew: bright blues, reds, and yellows were splashed, seemingly at random, over an image of a curled-up infant. “This is a picture developed by the machine-that-thinks from scans of the hatchling growing inside you,” Ttomalss said.

“The machine-that-thinks is stupid, superior sir,” Liu Han said scornfully. “The baby will be born with skin the color of mine, except pinker, and it will have a purplish patch above its buttocks that will fade in time. It will not look like it rolled through a painter’s shop.”

Ttomalss’ mouth dropped open. Liu Han couldn’t tell if he was laughing at her or he thought the joke was funny. He said, “These are not real colors. The machine-that-thinks uses them to show which parts of the hatchling are warmer and which cooler.”

“The machine-that-thinks is stupid,” Liu Han repeated. She didn’t understand everything Ttomalss meant by the phrase; she knew that. The scaly devils were pretty stupid themselves, even if they were strong-maybe they needed machines to do their thinking for them. “Thank you for showing me I will have a son before it is born,” she said, and bowed to Ttomalss. “How could the machine-that-thinks see inside me?”

“With a kind of light you cannot see and a kind of sound you cannot hear,” the little devil said, which left Liu Han no wiser than before. He held out other pictures to her. “Here are earlier pictures of the hatchling. You see it looks more like you now.”