A World of Difference Read online

  “Best offer I’ve had today so far.”

  Sarah had been turning away. Now she glanced back at him sharply. His tone had been easy, but he was watching her, too.

  Marksman’s eyes, she thought again, discomfited.

  “To sleep,” she said, ready to be really irritated if he made something of that. He didn’t. But as she walked out of the galley, she still imagined she felt his gaze on her back. She did not turn around again; she was just as glad not to know for sure.

  The sun skipped in and out from behind clouds. Ternat felt its warmth as he slowly walked south, back toward his father’s castle from the domain of Dordal. Summer really was on its way, he thought. The warm weather fit in well with his sour mood.

  Reatur had said Dordal was an idiot, the domain master’s eldest remembered. If anything, that had been generous of Reatur. Dordal cared not a runnerpest voiding for the threat from across the Ervis Gorge. His eyestalks had wiggled until Ternat thought-hoped-they would fall off. Reatur’s eldest was not used to being laughed at. He did not care for it.

  He did not care for anything about Dordal’s domain. Its crops were scrubby, and of varieties he did not like. Of its meat animals, the massi were too fat and the eloca too thin. Half the herders chewed ompass root-good luck to them if those scrawny eloca ever got loose and started running all over the landscape.

  Maybe ompass root was Dordal’s problem, too, Ternat thought. His hands closed as he disagreed with himself: he would have smelled the fumes from the root. Dordal was a happy fool all by himself.

  He had not even cared to learn about humans, though the bellow of their flying house had been heard in his domain. Some quiet questioning among the younger males in Dordal’s castle had made that plain to Ternat. But Dordal dismissed the roar as “a freak storm” and could not imagine humans as anything but ugly people.

  Ternat almost sympathized with that. Dordal was plenty ugly himself.

  The sun came out again and stayed out. The weather got warmer and warmer-easily warm enough to melt ice, Ternat thought. Yes, it was shaping up to be a miserably hot year. The humans might enjoy it-they were and somehow stayed hotter than anything alive had a right to be-but the excess melt it would cause would only make trouble and work for people.

  As if thinking of humans were enough to summon them into his presence, Ternat saw a couple of their traveling contraptions leaning against a large rock. Ternat envied them those gadgets. He wished he had one, but his legs were both too short and too many for the thing to do him any good. But the round legs the gadget had-and, come to think of it, the humans’ flying house, too-looked to be better for travel than skids, at least when snow was not drifted deep.

  Behind the boulder, Ternat saw a human’s foot. To judge by the posture, the human was lying down. That might be interesting, he thought. Except when sleeping, humans were no fonder of being horizontal than people were. And humans, so far as Ternat knew, did not have the habit of sleeping at midday.

  He stepped off the path so he could get a better view of what was going on back of the rock. It was not one human back there, he saw after a moment, it was two. Well, that made sense-one for each traveling contraption on the other side of the boulder. But they were lying together in such a tangle of arms and legs that he had to look with three eyes before he was sure.

  Under their outer layers, he saw, humans had the same pinkishtan skins they did on their faces-at least their legs, the uncovered parts, did. Ternat wondered what they were doing. Humans did a lot of strange things, but he had never seen them at anything so strange as this before.

  They separated and got up off the square of woven stuff on which they had been lying. They quickly began putting on the outer layers for their legs. They were too engrossed in that to pay any attention to Ternat and soon had the task done.

  Before they did, though, Ternat noticed they were different. The taller one had a dangling organ that reminded him a little of his own male parts, though those only came out when he was with a mate. He was sorry for the human for having only one, and thought it ludicrous for the thing to be sticking out there all the time.

  Then he thought about the other human, the male without the organ… He suddenly stood stockstill in the field as the possible meaning of that sank in. Given what he had watched, it made only too much sense.

  He hurried back to the path and started home as fast as he could go. Reatur had to hear this news right away. Maybe he would know what to do about it.

  Pat Marquard put on her long johns as fast as she could; the skin on her thighs and calves, wherever they had not pressed directly against Frank’s, was all over gooseflesh. She pulled her pants over the thermal underwear and bent down to put her socks and boots back on. That was when she saw the Minervan. “We’ve been watched,” she told Frank.

  “Huh?” His head jerked up; he had been tying his boots, too. “Oh, it’s just a native,” he said in relief. He grinned a lazy grin at her. “Maybe he learned something.”

  “Maybe he did.” She rolled up the blanket, shivering briefly at the idea of fooling around without it on this planet full of permafrost, then carried it around the rock and strapped it behind her bicycle seat.

  She wondered if the Minervan would come over and try to talk with them, but he seemed to have business of his own. With a touch of regret, she let him go on. Still, she supposed Irv had a point when he recommended against forcing contact on the natives. Things could get nasty if Athena’s crew made themselves unwelcome.

  “Shall we get going again?” Frank climbed onto his bicycle.

  So did Pat. “Sure.”

  “Only way to keep warm is to keep moving,” Frank said as he began to pedal. He grinned again. “Well, almost the only way.”

  “Uhhuh.” Pat looked at the ground instead of at her husband. The alleged path they were riding on was rough enough that he saw nothing out of the ordinary there. But while Frank whistled cheerfully and his breath steamed out as if it were the traditional aftersex cigarette smoke, Pat was anything but satisfied.

  Frustration stretched her nerves taut. She had been so sure a couple of miles’ worth of isolation would let her find the release she needed, but it had not worked out that way. Now she didn’t know what to do.

  She knew exactly when things had begun to go wrong: aboard Athena. She had always needed privacy to relax when she made love, and a curtain spread in front of a cubicle was not enough. Every noise from outside made her tense up, fearing-irrationally, she knew, but no less powerfully on account of that-that she and Frank would be interrupted. After most of a year, failure became as ingrained as success had been before.

  It wasn’t, she told herself, that she didn’t love Frank. She did; she was sure of that. But it had been a long time now since she had left clawmarks on his back. She wondered if he still could turn her on.

  She also rather wished she hadn’t thought about Irv just after yet another unsatisfactory time with Frank. From the noises she occasionally couldn’t help noticing on Athena, Irv had had no trouble keeping Sarah happy. Sometimes she wondered if the secret was transferable.

  Reatur felt his claws dig into the smooth ice of the floor, a mute sign of his disbelief. “You’re sure?” he said for the third time.

  “No, clanfather, I’m not sure,” Ternat repeated patiently, “but it looked to me as if the two humans were mating, and one of them seemed to have male mating parts-or rather, a single male mating part. Does that not imply that the other human is a female?”

  “I suppose so,” Reatur said unwillingly. He still had trouble taking in what his eldest was telling him. “A female that acts like a male-by the gods, a female that has lived long enough to learn a male’s wisdom. Even from people as strange as humans are…” His voice trailed away.

  “Why not just ask them?” Ternat said.

  “Would they tell the truth? If I had that kind of female with me, would I admit it? It’s as unnatural as-as-“ Reatur stopped, at a loss for a comparison. He tho
ught for a while, groping for a way to understand. “Maybe it means these females have never mated.”

  “Then what were the two humans doing behind the rock?” Ternat asked. “Clanfather, you know as well as I, when the urge comes on you to mate, you mate.”

  “And if you are a female, when you mate, you bud, and when you bud, you die. There is no other way. With us, with nosver, even with runnerpests it is so. How could it be different with humans?”

  Ternat did not answer; he had no good reply to make. Reatur had no answers, either, only endless questions-and the same hopeless hope he always felt when he thought of the sorrow of the mates. What would Lamra be like, if somehow she could live on after the buds dropped from her? Reatur tried to imagine Lamra’s wild and sunny nature transformed by, say, Ternat’s years. He gave up; he could not make the mental leap.

  Then he had another thought. As long as he was imagining Lamra surviving one budding, why not more than one? What would it be like, coupling with a mate who could appreciate the act with full wit, as well as skin? If the humans had that-

  “They may be luckier than any people dreamed of being,” he said softly.

  “Clanfather?” Ternat did not follow him.

  “Never mind.” Reatur’s breath hissed out under his arms. “I suppose you’re right, eldest. I’ll just have to ask them.”

  Ternat walking after him, Reatur began looking for a human. Usually he could not go down a hallway without stumbling over three of them; now that he wanted one, they were nowhere to be found. He finally saw one some ways off in the fields, pointing his picture-maker at a male pulling weeds between crop plants. The subject seemed uninspiring to Reatur.

  When the human heard the domain master coming, he turned his head so his two poor trapped eyes would point the right way. The human hesitated before asking, “Reatur, yes?”

  “Yes.” Reatur was not offended; he had trouble telling humans apart. This was one of the three that rumbled. “Irv?” he guessed. His odds of being right were better than one in three. He was certain neither the rumbler called Emmett nor the one called Frank cared about weeds.

  “Yes,” Irv said, and Reatur felt pleased with himself.

  The domain master turned an extra eyestalk on the male who was weeding. “Why don’t you go do that someplace else, Gurtz?” When Irv started to follow the male, Reatur muttered to himself. “You stay, Irv; I need to speak with you.”

  “Reatur?.” The human plainly did not yet understand why the domain master had come to talk with him.

  “You did well to get Gurtz out of the way, clanfather,” Ternat said. “The fewer who know of this, the better.”

  “Yes, wouldn’t the gossip fly?” Reatur agreed. He gave his attention back to Irv, who was not following the conversation between the domain master and his eldest. Reatur tried to find a way to get around to his question an eyestalk at a time but saw no way to do anything but ask it straight. “Irv, are you a male or a mate?”

  Quick and unambiguous, the answer came back: “A male.”

  Reatur was surprised at how relieved he felt.

  Still, finding out that one human was respectably male did not mean they all were. The domain master thought about the two most often in company with Irv and picked one of their names. “Is Sarah a male or a mate?”

  The long pause before Irv answered told Reatur what he had to know. He felt his arms droop. Irv must have realized there was a problem, for even when he did reply at last, his voice was much softer than Reatur was used to from him. “A mate,” he said.

  “I was right, clanfather,” Ternat said.

  “So you were, eldest.” Reatur’s voice was as heavy as Ternat’s. Intellectually imagining something was a long way from having it confirmed, especially when it was something as hard to believe as this. “Are any other humans mates?” the domain master asked Irv.

  He had to try that one a couple of times before he was sure Irv understood it. The answer he finally got rocked him from mouth to feet. Half the humans were mates.

  “Sarah and Pat and Louise?” Ternat echoed, as stunned as Reatur.

  “Do you use them?” the domain master asked. That required more explanations before Irv saw what he meant, and then even more as the human tried to respond. Human ideas of society left Reatur even more confused than he had been; he had not thought that possible. He got the salient point, though. “You do mate with them.’?”

  “Yes,” Irv said.

  Reatur forgot his own earlier speculation. “How could you bring them along with you, then, to die far from more of their own kind?” he asked, appalled at the human’s callousness.

  Despite Irv’s growing fluency with his language, Reatur took a while to grasp that his wild guesses had been somewhere close to right. From what the human said, his people’s mates did not necessarily bud when they coupled-”What’s the point of coupling, then?” Ternat said; Reatur hushed him-and did not die when they budded.

  “How can that be?” the domain master asked. “The blood-”

  “We made different, people and humans,” Irv began.

  “A good thing, too. I wouldn’t want to look like that,” Ternat said. Though he privately agreed, Reatur waved his eldest to silence again.

  Luckily, the interruption had not thrown Irv far off stride.

  “Different inside, not just outside.”

  “Different how?” Reatur persisted. When buds fell from a mate, they left holes. Blood had to gush through holes, he thought. Maybe human mates did not drop six buds at a time. But even if-wildly unlikely notion-they only dropped one, that should be plenty.

  “Ask Sarah how different,” Irv said. “Sarah knows of bodies.”

  “All right, I’ll do that.” Humans’ characters were still hard for Reatur to gauge, but Sarah struck him as being a very straightforward and competent male… The domain master flailed his arms-not a male! “Ask a mate?”

  Irv spread his hand, a take-it-or-leave-it gesture humans used. “Sarah knows,” he said. “Sarah knows of bodies, well and not well.”

  “A doctor?” Reatur said.

  “Doctor.” Irv repeated the word several times.

  Reatur used the same trick when he was trying to remember something. He was glad to notice any point of similarity with humans, now that this gaping gorge of difference had opened up. The idea of learning from a mate still jolted him, so he asked, “Do any other humans know of bodies?” “Pat does,” Irv said after a moment’s pause.

  Wondering at his hesitation didn’t the fool human know what his friends were good for? the domain master said, “All right, I’ll ask him.” Then he stopped-from what Irv had said, Pat was no more male than Sarah. “I’ll ask one of them,” Reatur said lamely. One of these days, he added to himself.

  “Irv, you should have spoken sooner of this-difference- between humans and people.” Ternat sounded accusing. Reatur had trouble blaming him, but hoped Irv could not read his tone.

  If the human did, he hid it well. “How?” he asked. “You thought us like you, yes?”

  “Yes,” Reatur said. “Of course,” Ternat agreed.

  “We thought you like us,” Irv said. “Till Biyal, we thought you like us. After Biyal-“ The human stopped.

  Reatur wished humans really changed colors or did something he could gauge to show what they were feelin8. The movements of their strangely placed mouths told a bit, but not enough, at least not for him. He would have given a lot right then to be inside Irv’s head, to know which words the human was choosing and which he was casting aside.

  Irv finally resumed, “After Biyal, we knew you not like us. We not know what you think when you know you not like us, so we not say. Now you know, now we talk. Yes, Ternat?”

  “Yes,” Reatur’s eldest said reluctantly. The domain master made sure he did not let his eyestalks wiggle. Irv had done a neat job of turning things around on Ternat. However weird humans were-and the more he learned of them, the weirder they got-they were not stupid. He would have to
make sure he remembered that.

  Ternat got the point, too. “From how far away do you come, to be so strange?” he asked.

  “Very far away.” It was all the humans ever said.

  Now that Reatur was beginning to get a feel for both how odd and how closemouthed they were, he wondered what surprises lurked behind those three self-evident words. “I believe it,” he said, and for the moment let it go at that.

  “Fralk, one of the humans is outside,” a retainer said. “He wishes to speak with you.”

  “Do you know what he wants, Panjand?” Fralk asked.

  “No, eldest of eldest,” Panjand said stolidly.

  Fralk suspected that the servant had not bothered to ask. He felt the muscles around his mouth tightening in annoyance. He did not have time for humans now, even if he was Hogram’s liaison with them. The domain master had given him enough other things to do to keep any three males busy.

  “Will you see him, eldest of eldest, or shall I send him away?”

  Panjand asked.

  “I’ll see him,” Fralk said mournfully. He put his pen beside the cured hide on which he had been writing and stepped away from the table. “Put a few more drops of porjuice into that bowl of isigot blood to keep it from clotting,” he told Panjand. “I’ll finish up these notes in a while, after I’m done with the human.”

  Panjand widened himself. “Yes, eldest of eldest.”

  Fralk, meanwhile, was gathering effusiveness around himself as if it were one of the outer skins humans wore. He opened the door Panjand had shut. “Zdrast‘ye,” he said, and then peered with three eyes at the human standing in front of him. “Sergei Konstantinovich,” he finished after a barely perceptible pause.

  “Hello, Fralk,” the human replied in the Skarmer tongue.

  “How are you?”

  His accent, Fralk thought, was improving. “Well, thank you. What can I do for you today?” He discarded some of his expansive manner; Sergei was as businesslike as Hogram.