Upsetting the Balance (17 page)

“It shall be done, superior sir,” Teerts said. Actually, he outranked the male at the gun, but he was not part of the helicopter crew—and, after so long in Nipponese captivity, he was used to attaching honorifics to anyone with whom he spoke. As the land of Nippon receded behind them, his wits began to work again. “You couldn’t have flown straight here from any land the Race controls: you must have used in-flight refueling.”

“That’s right,” the crewmale said. “We’re on our way out for more hydrogen now, too. That should be enough to take us back to base.” He paused, listening to the microphone fastened to one hearing diaphragm. “Pilot says our killercraft cover just shot down three of the Big Uglies’ aircraft and the rest have broken off pursuit. Now I really start to think we’re going to be all right.”

“Emperor be praised,” Teerts said, dropping his eye turrets to the grimy mats on the floor of the helicopter. When he raised them again, he asked, “How is the conquest faring? I’ve been away from our kind for what has to be more than a year.”

“Between you, me, and this gun here, not so well,” the crewmale answered. “We were driving the Russkis hard, and then they somehow exploded an atomic bomb and made us stop there. These Big Uglies are a thousand times worse than we expected when we got to this stinking planet.”

“You don’t know the half of it,” Teerts said feelingly. “The Nipponese told me about—gloated about—the Russkis’ atomic bomb. I was afraid they were telling the truth, but I wasn’t sure.” He suddenly sat bolt upright on the hard, uncomfortable seat. “They’re working on their own nuclear project, too. They spent endless time interrogating me about atomic energy. They got everything out of me, too. That’s how I managed to escape: they were taking me somewhere else so they could ask me about different things.”

“We’ll send
that
news upstairs, by the Emperor,” the crewmale exclaimed, lowering his eyes as Teerts had. “And after that, unless I miss my guess, we’ll have a present for these Big Uglies. You can show us where this work was being done?”

“The city was Tokyo,” Teerts answered. “Where in the city—”

“—Likely won’t matter,” the crewmale finished for him.

Teerts shivered. The male was probably right: the Nipponese would discover firsthand what nuclear weapons were like. They were only Big Uglies, and vicious ones to boot, but did they deserve that? Whether they did or not, he would have bet they were going to get it.

No point in arguing about that; the decision would come from levels far higher in the hierarchy than himself or the crewmale. He said, “Do you have any food here? The Nipponese didn’t give me a lot to eat.”

The crewmale unsnapped a pouch on the side of the helicopter wall, pulled out a couple of ration packs, and tossed them to Teerts. They were unheated and inherently unexciting: just fuel for the body to keep a male going until he had a chance to stop and rest and eat something better. Teerts thought he’d never eaten anything so wonderful in his life.

“After so long without the tastes of home, this may be the best meal I ever had,” he said ecstatically. His tongue cleansed the hard outer surfaces of his mouth. Every crumb it encountered brought him fresh delight.

“I’ve heard others we rescued say the same thing,” the crewmale answered. “That may be true for them, but I just can’t see it.” He let his mouth fall open to show he didn’t expect to be taken altogether seriously.

Teerts laughed, too; he remembered the rude jokes he and the rest of his flight had made about ration packs in the days before he’d been captured. He also remembered something else, remembered it with a physical longing more intense than anything he’d ever known outside of mating season. Hesitantly, he said, “The Nipponese fed me a Tosevite herb. They made me depend on it; my body craves it still. I don’t know what I’ll do without it.”

To his surprise, the crewmale laughed again. He rummaged in a pouch he wore on one of his belts, pulled out a tiny plastic vial, and offered it to Teerts. “Who says you have to do without it, friend? Here, have a taste on me.”

Liu Han grunted as the labor pain washed over her. “Oh, that is a good one!” Ho Ma, the midwife, said enthusiastically. She’d been saying that for a long time now. She went on, “Soon the baby will come, and then you will be happy.” She’d been saying that for a long time, too, which only proved she didn’t know Liu Han very well.

Several midwives had set up shop in the prison camp. Liu Han recognized the red-tasseled signs they set up outside their huts, and knew what the characters on those signs said even if she could not read them: “light cart and speedy horse” on one side and “auspicious grandmother-in-law” on the other. The midwife who’d worked in her now-wrecked village had had just the same sign.

Ttomalss said, “Move aside, please, female Ho Ma, so the camera can see as it should.”

The midwife grumbled under her breath but moved aside. The little scaly devils were paying her extravagantly in silver and food and even, she’d boasted to Liu Han, in tobacco they’d got from who could say where. They had to pay her extravagantly to ignore the bright lights they’d put into Liu Han’s hut, to ignore their presence and that of their cameras, and to ignore the way that, contrary to all custom and decency, they’d insisted on Liu Han’s being naked through the entire delivery so those cameras could do their work as the little scaly devils thought proper.

To the scaly devils’ payment, Liu Han had added several dollars Mex from her own pocket to persuade Ho Ma not to gossip about the humiliations she would witness. The midwife had agreed at once—for money, a midwife would agree to almost anything. Whether she would keep her promise afterward was a different question.

Another contraction shook Liu Han. Ho Ma peered between her legs. “I can see the top of the baby’s head,” she said. “Lots of nice black hair . . . but then, the father had proper black hair even if he was a foreign devil, didn’t he?”

“Yes,” Liu Han said wearily. Bobby Fiore’s being the baby’s father would just add to the scandal of this already extremely irregular delivery. Liu Han feared she could never bribe Ho Ma enough to be sure of keeping her quiet.

Then her body made its own demands, and she stopped worrying about what Ho Ma would say. The urge to push the baby out of her became overwhelming. She held her breath and bore down with all her might. A squealing grunt told of her effort.

“Again!” Ho Ma exclaimed when Liu Han had to stop because, like a punctured pig’s bladder, she had no more air left in her. Liu Han needed no urging. She panted for a moment, gathering her strength, took a deep breath and held it, and pushed once more. The urgency seemed unbearable, as if she were passing night soil at last after months of complete constipation.

“Once more!” Ho Ma said, reaching down to help guide the baby out. A couple of the little scaly devils with their accursed cameras shifted so they could still see what they wanted to see. Caught up in her body’s travail, Liu Han barely noticed them.

“Here, I have the head,” the midwife said. “A pretty baby, considering who its father was—not big-nosed at all. One more push, now, and I’ll bring the baby out of you.” Liu Han pushed. Now that the head had emerged, the rest was easy. A moment later, Ho Ma said, “A girl baby.” Liu Han knew she should have been disappointed, but she was too worn to care.

A couple of more pushes brought out the afterbirth, looking like a great bloody chunk of raw liver. One of the little scaly devils set down his camera and ran out of the hut, slamming the door behind him.

Ho Ma tied off the umbilical cord with two pieces of silk thread. Then she cut the cord with a pair of shears. She pinched the baby’s feet. After a moment, it began to squall like an angry kitten. The midwife thrust an iron poker into the flames of the fireplace, then touched the hot tip of it to the end of the umbilical stump.

“Do you do that to kill the little invisible demons—not the word I want, but as close as your language has—that cause sickness?” Ttomalss asked.

“I do that because it is custom to do that,” Ho Ma answered, rolling her eyes at the foolish questions the scaly devils asked. She wrapped the afterbirth in a cloth to take it away and bury it in some out-of-the-way place.

Liu Han had long since resigned herself to the little devils’ ignorant and presumptuous questions. “Give me the baby, please,” she said. Just talking was an enormous effort. She remembered that crushing weariness from the son she’d borne to her husband not long before a Japanese attack killed him and the boy.

Ho Ma handed her the child: as she’d said, a girl, her private parts swollen as newborns’ often were. Liu Han set the baby to her breast. The tiny mouth rooted, found the nipple, and began to suck. Liu Han turned to Ttomalss and said, “Have you seen everything you need? May I put my clothes on again?” She wanted to put some rags between her legs; she knew she would pass blood and other discharge there for weeks to come.

The little scaly devil did not answer, not directly. Instead, he asked another question: “Why do you not clean off the hatchling, which is still covered with these disgusting substances from inside your body?”

Liu Han and Ho Ma exchanged glances. How stupid scaly devils were! The midwife answered, “The baby is still too new to the world to bathe. On the third day after it is born, it will be more solid. We will wash it then.”

Ttomalss spoke to one of his machines in his own language. The machine answered back. Liu Han had seen that too often to be amazed by it any more. The scaly devil switched to Chinese and said, “My information is that other groups of Big Uglies do not do this.”

“Who cares what foreign devils do?” Ho Ma said scornfully. Liu Han nodded. Surely Chinese ways were best. Cradling the baby in one arm, she sat up, ever so slowly and carefully—she felt as if she’d aged about fifty years this past half-day—and reached for her tunic and trousers. When Ttomalss did not object, she set the baby down for a moment and got dressed, then picked up the child again, set it to her shoulder, and patted it on the back till it belched out the air it had sucked in with her milk.

Ho Ma gave her some tea, a single hard-boiled egg (had she had a son, she would have got five), round sugar cakes of fermented dough, and little sponge cakes shaped like fans, pomegranates, and ingots of silver. She devoured the traditional food, for she’d eaten nothing and drunk only a glass of hot sugar water with a dried shrimp in it—she hadn’t eaten the shrimp—since her labor began. She was stuffed when she was through, but felt she could have eaten twice as much.

One of the little scaly devils holding a camera spoke to Ttomalss in their language: “Superior sir, that was one of the most revolting processes I have ever had the misfortune to observe.”

“I thank you for maintaining your position,” Ttomalss answered. “We may have lost valuable information when Dvench fled this hut; he failed in his duty to the Race.”

“You are generous in your praise, superior sir,” the other scaly devil said. “Shall we now proceed with the experiment?”

Liu Han had listened to their hisses and squeaks with half an ear; not only was she exhausted from childbirth and distracted by her newborn daughter, but she also had only a halting command of the scaly devils’ tongue. But the word “experiment” made her start paying close attention, though she tried not to show it; she’d been part of the little devils’ experiments ever since they first appeared. They had their purposes, which emphatically were
not
hers.

Ttomalss said, “No, the matter is not yet urgent. Let the Chinese carry on with their ceremonies. These may conceivably produce an increased survival rate for infants: more Tosevites appear to be of this Chinese variety than any other.”

“It shall be as you say, superior sir,” the other little devil said. “My opinion is that it’s surprising the Big Uglies retain their numbers, let alone increase them, with this system of reproduction. Passing an egg is far simpler and less dangerous and harrowing to the female involved than this gore-filled procedure.”

“There we agree, Msseff,” Ttomalss said. “That is why we must learn to understand how and why the Tosevites do in fact increase. Perhaps the risks inherent in their reproductive processes help explain their year-round sexual activity. This is another connection we are still exploring.”

Liu Han stopped listening. Whatever their latest experiment was, they weren’t going to tell her any more about it now. Ho Ma took up the cloth with the afterbirth and carried it away. Even Ttomalss and the other scaly devils got out of the hut, leaving Liu Han alone with the baby.

She set the sleeping little girl in the scrapwood cradle she’d readied. As Ho Ma had said, it did look like a proper Chinese baby, for which she was glad. If she ever escaped the camp, she could raise it properly, too, with no awkward questions to answer.

If she ever escaped the camp—Her laugh rang bitter. What chance of that, with or without the baby? Then all thought, no matter how bitter, dissolved in an enormous yawn. Liu Han lay down on top of the
k’ang—
the raised, heated platform in the middle of the hut—and fell deeply asleep. The baby woke her a few minutes later. She had groggy memories of her first child doing that, too.

The next two days passed in a blur of fatigue. Ho Ma came back with food, and the little scaly devils with their cameras. Then on the third day the midwife brought incense, paper images of the gods and paper goods to sacrifice to them, and a basin to be filled with water and a spicy mixture of ground locust branch and catnip leaves.

Ho Ma prayed to the family kitchen god, the goddess of smallpox, the goddess of playmates, the goddess of breast milk, the six minor household gods, the god of heaven and the god of earth, and the god and goddess of the bed, and burned offerings to each. She set out round cakes in a row before their images.

Msseff said to Ttomalss, “Superior sir, if all this is necessary for survival, then I am an addled egg.” Ttomalss’ mouth fell open.

The midwife bathed the baby, dried her, and sprinkled alum on her here and there. Then she laid the child on her back and set slices of ginger by the blackened stump of the umbilical cord. She put a little smoldering ball of catnip leaves on the ginger, and another at the baby’s head. A couple of the scaly devils let out hisses of longing for the ginger. Ttomalss took no notice of those, perhaps not recognizing what they signified.