A World of Difference Read online

  After his try at feeling her up, he wondered if she would hesitate. She didn’t, not even for a second. “Fine,” she said. “Let’s do it.”

  The rover purred up to Damsel. fly. Rustaveli turned off the engine and set the brakes on all four wheels. Then he scrambled up onto the top of the machine. Sarah Levitt came swarming after him. “You do that very well,” he said.

  “I haven’t been on a jungle gym since I was nine years old, but it’s not the sort of thing you forget.” Sarah undid the canopy and sat on the metal bars of the roll cage with her feet dangling down into-what would one call it? The pilot’s compartment? The engine room? Wondering that, Rustaveli was almost caught by surprise when the American doctor said, “Lower me.”

  Rustaveli hooked his feet at the corners of intersecting bars and took a firm grip on Sarah Levitt’s waist. He was glad she was a small woman; it made her weight easier to control as she slid into Damselfly. Although his arms traveled up her torso as she descended, he took no undue liberties.

  “Thank you,” she said, in a way that thanked him for that as well as for his help.

  He backed the rover out of the way and walked around to the other side of Damselfly so he could close the canopy. When it was latched, he asked, “Now what?”

  “No need to shout,” she said. “The skin is too thin to cut down on sound.” She was already pedaling hard, though the propeller had not yet begun to spin. Her legs did not slow down as she went on, “Go to the end of one wing and run along with me, holding it level, when I start to taxi.”

  He sprang to attention, and snapped off a salute sharper than any Tolmasov would ever wring from him. “I am yours to command.”

  Under her white plastic helmet, the American doctor’s eyes twinkled. “You are a very silly man, Shota Mikheilovich. How did you manage to sneak past all the selection boards?”

  He winked at her. “Simple. I did not tell them.” He was whistling as he walked out to the wingtip.

  The big propeller, tall as he was, revolved slowly at first, then faster and faster. “Now!” Sarah Levitt shouted. Damselfly rolled forward, startlingly fast; Rustaveli was into a trot almost at once. Then he was running, and running for all he was worth. For a moment, it seemed to him that he was the one on the point of becoming airborne.

  Then Damselfly wheels lifted clear of the ground. The plane was going faster than the Georgian could match. He pulled to a stop and stood panting, his breath a cloud of fog around his head. The American doctor briefly took one hand off the control stick to wave to him and Bryusov.

  They both waved back. The linguist walked up to Rustaveli as Damselfly skimmed eastward, toward Jotun Canyon. “I’m sorry you will have to do all the driving as we return to our comrades,” Bryusov said.

  Rustaveli was still watching the ultra-ultralight diminish in the distance. “Nichevo,” he said. “It doesn’t matter. At least I won’t have to pedal home.”

  “There!” Louise Bragg shouted. She slapped Irv on the back. He staggered, straightened and followed her pointing finger with his eyes. At first he could make out nothing through the mist, but then he, too, spied the moving speck. He held the radio to his mouth. “Honey-uh, Damselfly-we have you visually.”

  “Good. I don’t see you yet. Now shut up and let me work.”

  Sarah’s voice came in panting gasps.

  Irv picked up the video camera and kicked in the zoom lens. Damselfly seemed to leap toward him, though it was still well out over Jotun Canyon. No gusts, not now, he thought-as close to a prayer as a secular man would let himself come.

  Beside him, he heard Pat saying, “Come on, dammit, come on,” over and over to herself. He nodded, which made the image he was taping jump. Somehow, the way Pat was pulling for Sarah made him easier about what had happened-and what had almost happened-the night before.

  Then he could hear the prop’s whoosh and the rattle of the bicycle chain that fed the power of Sarah’s legs to the ultra-ultralight. She was above level ground now, on this side of the canyon. Irv switched off the camcorder and set it down so he could jump and yell.

  “Damselfly has landed,” Sarah said, touching down only a few feet from where she had taken off. Her ribs were heaving with exhaustion; she sat slumped over the control stick.

  She managed a tired wave for Irv as he set the wide stepladder beside Damselfly. He undid the latches to the canopy, flung it open, and leaned over to help her climb out.

  “Thanks,” she said when she stood beside him. “All I can say is, the next time the Russians want my services, they can jolly well come see me.”

  He sadly shook his head. “I knew it had to happen-all that exercise has made your brain atrophy.”

  “Not to the point where I can’t feel cold.” She poked him in the ribs with an elbow. “Help me into my gear, will you?”

  He did, saying, “I’m glad you’re back.”

  “You and me both,” she agreed feelingly. “There were a few seconds on the way over when I doubted-but let’s not talk about that. I don’t even want to think about it.”

  “Neither do I. Why don’t you just relax and let Louise and me knock down Damselfly so we can take it back to Athena?”

  “If I sit still too soon, I’ll stiffen up.” Sarah walked around while Irv and Louise attacked the ultra-ultralight with wrenches. Pat fell into step beside her. Irv felt a nervous twinge whenever they happened to look his way. Stupid, he told himself-nothing happened.

  The only time Sarah said anything even remotely sexual on the way back, though, was just after she emerged from behind a boulder where she had gone to answer a call of nature. “I have stiffened up,” she grumbled, then she grinned wryly at Irv. “Better not ask me to get on top anytime in the next few days.”

  “Damn, just when I was hoping to break out the trampoline,” he said, so innocently that she almost forgot to glare.

  They got back to Athena a little before sunset. Emmett Bragg took the 8mm cassette from the video camera as if it were worth its weight in diamonds and handed it to his wife. “We transmit this first thing tomorrow,” he told her.

  “Why?” she demanded. “It’ll tie up the link. Wouldn’t you rather send data than pretty pictures?”

  “Most of the time, sure. With this, I’d sooner be on the network news. And we will, too-tape of the American doctor flying back after saving the Russians’ bacon? They’ll show that all over the world. When you think about what it’ll do for our program, the data can wait.”

  They all looked at each other. No one argued with him.

  Reatur had grown used to having humans around. He did not realize it-he would have indignantly denied it-until four of the six strange creatures went away on their traveling contraptions and the other two stayed close by the building that had fallen from the sky. Without their poking their stalkless eyes into every comer of his domain and throwing questions at him like snowballs, he found himself bored.

  Now they were back, and Sarah, just as though he-she, curse it-had never been away, was pestering him about Lamra. He did not want to think about Lamra right now. To keep from having to do so, he changed the subject. “Why did the four of you leave so suddenly the other day?” “To help a hurt human.”

  “Ah,” Reatur said. Then he brought himself up short. “Wait. Four of you went away. None of you was hurt, am I right?” At Sarah’s headwag, he went on, “The two who stayed were not hurt, either, true?” Again the human wagged her head. “That accounts for all the humans there are, doesn’t it?” he asked. “So where did the hurt one come from?”

  “He from domain called Russia,” Sarah replied, which told Reatur nothing. “Not same domain as ours. He hurt on far side of Ervis Gorge.”

  More humans? More domains of humans? The idea disconcerted Reatur as badly as it had Fralk. The domain master started to ask about it, then stopped. Something else Sarah had said was of more immediate concern to him. “You went across Ervis Gorge?” he asked, hoping he had misunderstood. But Sarah was moving her
head up and down once more. “How?” Reatur asked faintly.

  “In small machine that goes through air.” Sarah spread her single pair of arms to mimic wings and moved her two legs as she did when she was inside the contraption.

  Reatur felt brief relief, then had another unsettling thought. “These other humans from the other domain”-he did not try to pronounce it-”do they also have one of these machines for moving through the air?.”

  “No.” Sarah’s answer was quick and positive.

  “Then they couldn’t give one to the Skarmer?” The idea of humans dropping out of the sky was quite bad enough. Thinking of armed westerners crossing Ervis Gorge through the air was simply horrifying.

  But Sarah said “No” again. Reatur turned an eyestalk on himself. Good-he had not been alarmed enough to turn blue. Showing fear to any human would have been embarrassing; showing fear to a human mate did not bear thinking about. Mates had enough trouble in their poor short lives that they should never be burdened with a male’s concerns, as well. Intellectually, Reatur knew the three human mates were not like those of his kind. Emotionally, that still had not sunk in.

  Sarah helped drive the point home, though. “About Lamra-“ she resumed, more stubborn than any of Reatur’s males would have been when the domain master was so plainly unwilling to discuss the matter.

  “We will talk about Lamra another time, not now,” Reatur declared.

  That should have settled the matter, but Sarah rudely refused to let it stay settled. “What you do now instead? What more important than Lamra? You not talk of Lamra, Lamra die. What more important than Lamra not dying?”

  He had to think for a moment to come up with an answer, but at last he did. “I am going to check with the watchers I have placed at the edges of Ervis Gorge. If the Skarmer somehow manage to root themselves on this side, Lamra will not be the only one who dies.” He started to leave.

  “You run from me,” Sarah said. Reatur watched himself start to go yellow. That it was partly true only made him angrier. The human went on. “How Skarmer-how anyone-cross Ervis Gorge?”

  “How should I know?” Reatur yelled, so loud that Sarah stepped back a pace and a male stuck an eyestalk around a corner to make sure everything was all fight. The domain master was a person who, if poked by one fingerclaw, hit back with three. He kept fight on shouting. “Until you told me, Sarah, I didn’t think anyone could cross it through the air. For all I know, the sneaky westerners may come by way of water when the gorge fills up.” That was the most ridiculous thing he could think of, but he was cursed if he would admit it. “Since I don’t know what they’ll do, I have to point my eyestalks every which way at once, don’t I?”

  “Yes,” the human mate conceded reluctantly. Reatur had not intimidated her, though, for she continued. “We talk of Lamra later, yes?”

  “Later, yes. Not now.” This time, when the domain master walked past Sarah, she let him go.

  But her voice pursued him. “Maybe Skarmer does-do-use water. Humans go by water sometimes.”

  Reatur kept walking. His color slowly faded. He decided he preferred being bored to being harassed. He had grown so used to being harassed by humans that it had taken some time without them to remind him how things had been not so very long ago.

  A drop of water hit him in an eye as he walked out of his castle. Summer was close now, everything was starting to melt. Dealing with humans gave the domain master the same feeling as that splash. They melted all his certainties just as the summer sun worked on his home.

  The males working in the fields, he saw, were not working very hard. He started to shout at them, then decided he would be wasting his temper. Stone tools made everyone slow. At least the males were accomplishing more with those than they would have with ice, which grew more frangible day by day.

  Some of the males were working in the very shadow of Athena, and not turning so much as a single eyestalk toward the huge, strange structure. They were used to humans, too. Reatur wondered if that was good or bad. Good, he supposed: nothing at all would have gotten done if everyone was still as bemused as at first. But finding a human as normal as an eloc did not seem right, either.

  Having.just had that thought, Reatur had to wiggle his eyestalks at himself when he passed the human called Frank, who was on his way back from Ervis Gorge, without even stopping to chat. And this Frank had shown Enoph that rocks, of all the crazy ideas, had ages just like people! That was a notion deserving of days of talk, but Reatur had other things on his mind at the moment. Frank, after all, would be here tomorrow, and the day after, too.

  Reatur had watchers posted along the entire stretch of Ervis Gorge that marked the western frontier of his domain, but most of them clustered close to the castle. That was where most of his people lived and also where the bridge across the gorge had been.

  Ternat was one of the watchers. He carded three javelins, as if he expected a horde of Skarmer males to come roaring across the gorge at any moment. He widened himself when he saw Reatur approaching.

  “Never mind that, eldest,” Reatur said impatiently, and Ternat resumed his normal height. “I’m glad to see you so alert.”

  “One day the domain will be mine, clanfather, unless the Skarmer steal it from me. I do not intend to let them.”

  “Well said. I came to ask you to spread word to your fellow watchers: use one eyestalk to look at the sky from time to time.”

  “The sky, clanfather? No one can go through the sky. No one save humans, I mean,” Ternat amended, as he would not have before Athena came down.

  “Aye, humans,” Reatur said-no escaping the creatures, not anymore. “I learn there are humans on the western side of Ervis Gorge, too, humans of a different clan from the ones here. Who knows what treacherous tricks they may have taught the Skarmer?”

  “The Skarmer need no one to teach them treachery,” Ternat said. “But-more humans?”

  “I don’t like the thought any better than you, eldest, but pulling in my eyestalks won’t make it go away. So-look to the sky.”

  Ternat let the air sigh out through his breathing pores. “The sky, clanfather.” He sounded as happy as Reatur felt.

  The two males bored in on Fralk. Each of them carded two spears and two light spears, as did he. Each watched him with three eyestalks and used a fourth to see what the other was doing. The smooth way they moved together told of how often they had done this before-to them, Fralk was just another victim to be dispatched.

  He sprang at one of the males, hoping to put him out of action and make the fight even. But, though he shifted his own spears to the hands near the male he had chosen, that warrior blocked his blows with almost bored ease. And Fralk, who needed a shield of his own to protect himself against that male’s counterthrusts, had but a single shield to withstand the onslaught of the fellow’s comrade.

  That sort of fight could not last long. Fralk knew a brief moment of triumph when he managed to deflect a couple of thrusts from the second male, but all too soon one got home.

  Fralk let out a high-pitched squeal of pain.

  “Eldest of eldest, you are as dead as a strip of sundried massi meat,” declared the drill leader, a skinny, cynical male named Juksal. “Or you would be, if we were fighting with spears with real points. And the rest of you,” he called to the crowd of males watching the fight. “What does this teach you?”

  “Not to get caught between two males,” his audience chorused.

  Juksal feigned deafness. “Did I hear some runnerpests chirping? I asked, what does this teach you?”

  “Not to get caught between two males!” This time it was a shout.

  “All right,” Juksal said grudgingly. “You budlings know what to say, anyhow. Do you know what to do so that won’t happen?”

  “Form circle!” the males shouted.

  Fralk yelled with the rest, but all the while was thinking that what he really wanted to do was kill the accursed drill leader. Any other time, any other place, Juksal would have w
idened himself the instant he saw Fralk and stayed widened till the younger male was gone. Not, Fralk added to himself, that Juksal frequented places where he would be likely to see him.

  But here on this practice field, because he had managed to live through a few brawls, Juksal had clanfather’s authority over the group of males in which Fralk found himself. He used it, too, and seemed to take special delight in making Fralk the object of his lessons. Fralk ached after every one of them.

  He knew he had to learn to fight. As the male in charge of the boats, he would be going across in one of the very first ones. He did not think the Omalo on the other side of the gorge would greet him with hoots of delight. He even realized that being singled out this way by Juksal might earn him his comrades’ sympathy and make them more inclined to protect him than if they thought of him as a pampered noble. Maybe Juksal thought he was doing him a favor.

  Maybe, in fact, Juksal was doing him a favor. That did not make him hurt any less, or like the drill leader any more.

  “All right,” Juksal suddenly screamed. “You’ve just spotted eighteen eighteens of Omalo, all running toward you! Don’t justtalk about your stinking circle-make it, or you’re dead males.

  Now, now, now!”

  Predictably, a good deal of waste motion and rushing to and fro followed. The band of males got into their double ring a lot faster than they had the first time they tried it, though. Then Juksal had been screaming that they should have brought along a tray of relishes so the Omalo would have something to eat them with. Now all he did was turn yellow. Since he seemed to be yellow about half the time, Fralk doubted he was very angry.

  “All right.” The drill leader swept out an arm. “They’re that way, and there aren’t as many of them as you thought at first. Matter of fact, there’s more of you. Go poke holes in ‘em.”