Upsetting the Balance

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 theywere 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.