Upsetting the Balance

Ttomalss didn’t care to do that. Very little of what the Race had learned about the Big Uglies’ medical technology impressed him. He made arrangements for females in the Race’s camps who were already secreting for their own hatchlings to give some additional secretion for the one he was trying to raise. He’d feared that would make the Tosevites volatile, but, to his relief, it didn’t, and his hatchling enthusiastically sucked from an elastomer copy of the bodily part evolution had given Big Ugly females.

The hatchling also voided enthusiastically; Tosevite excretory arrangements were much messier than those of the Race. The liquid wastes from Big Ugly adults strained the plumbing facilities of the Race’s spacecraft. But adults, at least, had conscious control over their voiding.

As far as Ttomalss could tell, the hatchling didn’t have conscious control over anything. It released liquid and solid waste whenever it felt the need, no matter where it was: it could be lying in its little containment cage, or he could be holding it. More than once, he’d had to wash off the evil-smelling liquid it passed, and to refurbish his body paint afterwards.

For that matter, its solid wastes barely deserved the adjective. They clung to the hatchling; they clung to everything. Keeping the little creature clean was nearly a full-time job. Ttomalss learned the Big Uglies lessened the problem by wrapping absorbent cloths around their hatchlings’ excretory organs. That helped keep the hatchling’s surroundings cleaner, but he still had to wash it every time it voided.

And the noises it made! Hatchlings of the Race were quiet little things; they had to be coaxed into talking. From an evolutionary point of view, that made sense: noisy hatchlings drew predators, and didn’t survive long enough to reproduce. But natural selection on Tosev 3 seemed to have taken a holiday. Whenever the hatchling was hungry or had fouled itself, it howled. Sometimes it howled for no reason Ttomalss could find. He’d tried ignoring it then, but that didn’t work. The hatchling could squall longer than he could ignore it, and he also feared ignoring it might lead to damage of some kind.

Gradually he began picking it up when it raised a ruckus. Sometimes that made it belch up some air it had swallowed along with the secretions it ate (and sometimes it belched up those secretions, too, in a partially digested and thoroughly revolting state). When that happened, it sometimes brought the hatchling enough relief to make it shut up.

Sometimes, though, the hatchling had nothing whatever wrong with it and still made noise, as if it wanted to be held. And holding it would sometimes calm it. That bewildered Ttomalss, and made him wonder if the Tosevites didn’t start the socialization process earlier in life than the Race did.

His colleagues’ mouths dropped open when he suggested that. “I know it sounds funny,” he said defensively. “They’ve fragmented themselves into tens of tiny empires that fight all the time, while we’ve been comfortably united for a hundred millennia. On the other hand, they have that powerful year-round sexual drive to contend with, and we don’t.”

“You’re tired, Ttomalss,” his fellow psychologists said, almost in chorus.

Ttomalsswas tired. Adult Tosevites had the decency to be respectably diurnal-one of the few decencies they did have. The hatchling was asleep whenever it felt like sleeping and awake whenever it felt like waking, and when it was awake, Ttomalss was perforce awake, too, feeding it or cleaning it (or feeding itand cleaning it) or simply holding it and trying to persuade it to calm down and go back to sleep and let him go back to sleep. No wonder his eye turrets felt as if someone had poured sand in them when they swiveled.

As days passed, the hatchling gradually began to develop a pattern to its sleeping and waking. That was not to say that it didn’t wake up once or twice or sometimes three times in the night, but it seemed more willing to go back to sleep then and to be awake during the day. Little by little, Ttomalss began to reckon himself capable of coherent thought once more.

He also began to believe the hatchling might one day be capable of coherent thought-or thought as coherent as that of Big Uglies ever got. It began to make noises more complex than its first primordial yowls. It also began to look at him with more attention than it had formerly shown him or anything else.

One day, the corners of its mouth lifted in the facial twitch the Tosevites used to express good humor. Ttomalss wished he could return the twitch and reinforce it, but his own features were respectably immobile.

In spite of the hatchling’s increasing responsiveness, in spite of everything he was learning from it, there were a great many times when he wished he’d left it with the Tosevite female from whose body it had come. Better it should drive her mad than him, he thought.