In the Balance

He leaned close to the microphone, went back into his language. Again, the screen showed fresh Lizard writing. It really was a note-taker, Fiore realized. He wondered what else it could do-besides showing movies that should never have been made.

Tessrek said, “You Big Uglies are of the kind of Tosevite creature where the female feeds the hatchling with a fluid that comes out of her body?” It wasn’t exactly a question, even though he made the interrogative noise at the end: he already knew the answer.

Bobby Fiore had to take a mental step backward and work out what the Lizard was talking about. After a second, the light bulb went on. “With milk, you mean, superior sir? Yeah, we feed babies milk.” He’d been a bottle baby himself, not nursed, but he didn’t complicate the issue. Besides, what had the bottle held?

“Milk. Yes.” Now Tessrek sounded as if Bobby had admitted humans picked their noses and fed babies on boogers, or else like a fastidious clubwoman who for some reason had to talk about syphilis. He paused, pulled himself together. “Only the females do this, am I correct? Not the males?”

“No, not the males, superior sir.” Imagining a baby nursing at his flat, hairy tit made Fiore squeamish and also made him want to laugh. And it rammed home, just when he was starting to get used to the Lizards again, how alien they were. They didn’t have a clue about what being human meant. Even though Liu Han and he had to use some Lizard words to talk with each other, they used them in a human context they both understond just because they were people, and probably used them in ways the Lizards would have found nonsensical.

That made him wonder how much Tessrek, in spite of his fluent English, truly grasped of the ideas he mouthed. Passing information back and forth was all very well; the Lizard psychologist’s grasp of the language was good enough for that. But once he had the information, how badly would he misinterpret it just because it was different from anything he was used to?

Tessrek said, “If you males do not give-milk-to hatchlings, what point to staying by them and by females?”

“Men help women take care of babies,” Fiore-answered, “and they can feed babies, too, once the babies start eating real food. Besides, they usually make the money to keep families going.”

“Understand what you Big Uglies do; not understand why,” Tessrek said. “Why males want to stay with females? Why you have families, not males with females at random, like the Race and other species we know?”

In an abstract way, Bobby thought males with females at random sounded like fun. He’d enjoyed himself with the women with whom the Lizards had paired him before he’d ended up with Liu Han. But he enjoyed being with her, too, in a different and maybe deeper sense.

“Answer me,” Tessrek said sharply.

“I’m sorry, superior sir. I was trying to figure out what to say. I guess part of the answer is that men fall in love with women, and the other way round, too.”

“Love.” Tessrek used the word with almost as much revulsion as he had when he said milk. “You Big Uglies talk loudly of this word. You do not ever make this a word with a meaning. You, Bobby Fiore, tell me what this love word means.”

“Uh,” Fiore said. That was a tall order for a poet, a philosopher, or even Cole Porter, let alone a minor-league second baseman. As he would have at the plate overmatched against Bob Feller, he gave it his best shot: “Love is when you care about somebody and want to take care of them and want them to be happy all the time.”

“You say what. I want why,” the Lizard psychologist said with a discontented hiss. “Is because you Big Uglies mate all the time, use mating as social bond, form families because of this mating bond?”

Fiore was anything but an introspective man. Nor had he ever spent much time contemplating the nature of the family: families were what you grew up in, and later what you started for yourself. Not only that, all the talk about sex, even with a Lizard, embarrassed him.

“I guess maybe you’re right,” he mumbled. When he thought about it, what Tessrek had to say did make some sense.

“I am right,” Tessrek told him, and added the emphatic cough. “You help me show the disgusting habits of you Big Uglies are to blame for you being so strange, so-what is word? — so anomalous. Yes, anomalous. I prove this, yes I do.” He spoke in his own language to the guards, who started marching Fiore back to his cell.

As he went, he reflected that while the Lizards were massively ignorant of humanity, they and people weren’t so different in some ways: just like a lot of people he’d known, Tessrek was using his words to prop up an idea the Lizard had already had. If he’d said just the opposite, Tessrek would have found some way to use that, too.

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