Upsetting the Balance

It was lying on the soft mat where it slept-when it slept. Lately, Ttomalss had had to install wire mesh around the mat, because the hatchling had-finally-developed enough neuromuscular control to roll over. At this stage of their lives, hatchlings of the Race were aggressive little predators: keeping them from hurting themselves and others counted for more than anything else in raising them. The only way the Tosevite could hurt itself would be to roll off a high place and fall down. No hatchling of the Race would have been so foolish.

The little Big Ugly looked up at Ttomalss out of its dark, narrow eyes. Its elastic face twisted into the grimace Tosevites used to show amiability. It kicked its arms and legs, as if that added to the effect of the facial grimace. Most of the time, it seemed sublimely unaware of its limbs, though it was beginning to suspect it had hands.

It let out a long sequence of meaningless noises. That still unnerved Ttomalss every time he heard it. Hatchlings of the Race were silent little things, which made sense in evolutionary terms: if you were small and quiet, you were less likely to get eaten than if you were small and raucous.

Ttomalss said to it, “You are the most preposterous specimen of a preposterous planet.”

The hatchling made more burbling noises. It liked him to talk to it. Its arms and legs kicked more. Then it started to whimper. He knew what that meant: it wanted to be picked up.

“Come here,” he said, bending over and lifting it off the mat. Its head didn’t flop around so loosely that it had to be supported, as had been true at the onset. Now it could hold that big, ungainly head up and look around. It liked being held against his warm skin. When its mouth fell onto his shoulder, it started sucking, as if he secreted nutrient fluid. He found the wet, slimy touch most unpleasant. It would suck on anything its mouth could reach; it would even suck when it was asleep.

“What am I going to do with you?” he asked it, as if it could understand. Males of the Race often embarked on lifetime research projects, but raising a Tosevite up to what passed for adulthood in the species? He’d had something like that in mind when he took the work the job involved. If it kept on being so much work for years to come…

“I’ll fall over dead,” he told the hatchling. It wiggled at the sound of his voice. It was a social little thing. “I’ll fall over dead,” he repeated. It seemed to recognize the repetition, and to like it. It made a noise which, after a moment, he recognized as a hatchling-sized version of the vocalization Big Uglies used for laughter.

“I’ll fall over dead,” he said, again and again. The hatchling found that funnier and funnier for several repetitions, laughing and squealing and kicking its feet against his chest. Then, for whatever reason, the joke wore thin. The hatchling started to fuss.

He gave it a bottle of nutrient fluid, and it gulped avidly. He knew what that meant: it was sucking in air along with liquid. When it did that, the air had to be got out of the hatchling’s stomach; it commonly returned along with slightly digested fluid, which stank even worse than the stuff that came out the other end.

He was glad the hatchling seemed healthy, such revolting characteristics aside. The Race’s knowledge of Tosevite biochemistry and pathogens still left a great deal to be desired, while the Big Uglies were as ignorant about that as they were about everything else save military hardware. Some of their not-empires knew how to immunize against some of their common diseases, and had begun to get the idea that there might be such things as antibiotics. Past that, their knowledge stopped.

Ttomalss wondered if he should give the hatchling such immunizations as the Big Uglies had developed. The little Tosevite would eventually encounter others of its own kind. The Big Uglies had a concept called “childhood diseases”: illnesses that were mild if a hatchling contracted them but could be serious if caught in adulthood. The notion made Ttomalss, who had never suffered from any such misfortunes, queasy, but research showed the Race had shared it in the earliest days of recorded history.

The hatchling started to wail. Ttomalss had heard that particular cry many times before, and knew it meant genuine distress. He knew what kind of distress, too: the air it had sucked in was distending its stomach. He resignedly picked up one of the cloths used for containing bodily wastes and draped it over his shoulder.

“Come on, get the air out,” he told the hatchling as he patted its back. It twisted and writhed, desperately unhappy at what it had done to itself. Not for the first time, the Big Uglies’ feeding arrangements for their young struck him as being inefficient as well as revolting.