A World of Difference Page 19

A few of Fralk’s companions were veterans of border clashes with other Skarmer clans-the two who had set on him were of that sort. More, like he, had never seen action. They shook themselves out into a crescent-shaped skirmish line and rushed in the direction Juksal had shown.

  “Yell, curse it!” the drill leader shouted at his warriors.

  “Make ‘em want to void right where they’re standing!”

  Fralk yelled as loud as he could, feeling foolish all the while. Soldiers were necessary things for a clan to have, but as eldest of eldest he had never expected to be one himself. But then, he had never expected Hogram to conceive of planting a new Skarmer subclan east of Ervis Gorge.

  Every time he was tempted to imagine himself wilier than the clanfather, he broke a mental fingerclaw on the hard ice of that fact. The Great Gorges had been barriers between great clans as long as there had been great clans. Thinking of one as anything else required a leap of imagination beside which Fralk’s own schemes were as so many tiny runnerpest budlings.

  “Come back, the lot of you,” Juksal called, breaking into the younger male’s musings. The band reversed itself. “All right, enough for the day. Fling your spears at the targets and then knock off.” As if suddenly remembering to be harsh, the drill leader added, “Try to scare ‘em if you can’t hit ‘em!”

  Neither of Fralk’s casts hit the leaf stuffed massi-hide target. Neither missed by much, though. He consoled himself with the thought that if the target had been a male caught in a volley, maybe he would have dodged someone else’s spear and been brought down by one of these.

  He was also glad none of the humans had been watching. They did watch the Skarmer males drill fairly often; the sound of their picture-makers clicking away had become a familiar part of the exercises. At first Fralk thought they were filled with awe at the might and savagery of the Skarmer forces.

  Most of the males still thought that. Juksal certainly did; whenever a human came around, he urged his warriors to show the strange creatures how fierce they were.

  But Fralk, unlike his fellows, had learned to read expressions on the humans’ strange, boringly colored features. When the corners of their odd mouths curved up, they were amused. Fralk did not know why the Skarmer drills amused them, but he was sure they did.

  Well, he thought, still feeling the ache under one arm, he’d like to see how a human would fare, attacked by four spears at once. Attack a human on the side where he had no eyes and he was yours-he wouldn’t even know he was in trouble until he was dead.

  Fralk stopped. A couple of human concepts he had been having trouble with suddenly made sense. Right and left had given him no problems; they were just opposites of one another, what he thought of as three arms apart. But behind…, behind was the direction where humans had no eyes, the hidden direction. Made as they were, poor strange creatures, no wonder they needed a special word for it.

  Behind… it even had a weird kind of logic to it, or at least economy, which to Fralk’s mercantile mind was about the same thing. Like those of any reasonable language, Skarmer prepositions classified objects through their relative distance outward from oneself. Sometimes that led to clumsy ways of thinking and of speaking: Juksal, for instance, was closer to Fralk than the male named Ising, but farther from Fralk than the one called Kattom.

  How much easier to say-and to think-that Juksal was behind Kattom. And how much easier to wish the miserable drill leader were behind Ising, and behind a good many more males as well, so he could neither see nor bother Fralk anymore.

  Fralk knew what wishes were worth. If wishes were all that mattered, every starving tenant farmer would become a clanfather overnight. Most times, Fralk knew that too well to need to remind himself of it.

  But wishing Juksal would disappear was too pleasant a thought to slap down. Fralk’s eyestalks quivered with guilty pleasure as he walked back toward Hogram’s town.

  IV

  Reatur had left a piece of hide with some writing on it in the mates’ quarters. It had been there a few days. Most of the mates paid no attention to it. A couple scribbled on the blank parts. Then Lamra rescued it. She could not read, not really, but she did know that the written signs had sounds that went with them and knew what some of those were.

  If you made one sound, and then the next one right after it- why, you’d just said ice! That was what those two signs had to mean! Ice! Lamra was so excited at her discovery that she stared at the hide with all six eyes at once, paying no attention to anything going on around her. She might have heard the door to the mates’ chambers opening, but if she did, she ignored that, too.

  She was taken by surprise, then, when Reatur asked from right beside her, “What do you have there?”

  Three eyestalks jerked up from the hide. Not only was Reatur standing there, but Sarah the human, as well. How had they managed to sneak up on her? Well, no matter. She was glad they were here, Reatur especially. “Look!” Lamra said, pointing to the signs she knew. “This means ‘ice,’ doesn’t it?” None of the mates cared about anything like that.

  Reatur bent an eyestalk down to see what she was talking about. “Why, yes, it does,” he said slowly. “How did you know that?” He kept one eyestalk on the word she had figured out and moved another around so he could see what was going on; the remaining four peered straight at Lamra.

  “If you say the sounds of these two signs together, they make the word,” she explained. Reatur did not answer. He just kept looking at her with those four intent eyestalks. She began to worry. “Am I in trouble?” she asked. She had never heard of mates knowing what writing meant. Maybe they weren’t supposed to.

  After a long pause that made Lamra worry even more, Reatur said, “No, you’re not in trouble.” She watched herself go from alarmed blue to the green of relief and happiness.

  “What?” Sarah asked. The talk had passed her by.

  “I know what these two signs say,” Lamra told the human proudly, showing which ones with a fingerclaw. She pronounced them separately, then together.” ‘Ice!’ Do you understand?”

  “Yes. Understand,” Sarah said. She beat her two hands together, again and again. The noise startled Lamra, who pulled her eyestalks in halfway. “No, no,” Sarah said quickly. “With humans, noise means, ‘good for you.’”

  Humans were very strange, Lamra thought, not for the first time: trust them to scare someone when all they meant was “good for you.” The mate let her eyestalks come out again, though.

  She watched Sarah turn her head so her eyes pointed at Reatur. “You see?” the human said. If a person had been talking, Lamra would have thought that was triumph in her voice.

  Maybe it was. Reatur’s grunt lay between annoyance and resignation. “I told you once already, did I not?” he said sharply. The human bent her head down-a person would have widened himself instead.

  “You see about what, Reatur?” Lamra asked.

  “About you,” the domain master said. Seeing that Lamra did not follow him, he went on. “The human will try to see that you don’t die when your time comes to bud.”

  “Oh,” Lamra said, and then, louder, “Oh!” She still did not know what to think about that and was surprised that Reatur would even let Sarah try. “Are you sure?” she asked him.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t know if I should be doing this at all. I don’t know if Sarah can keep you alive. But I do know I don’t want you to die. If it turns out you don’t have to, good. If not- the sorrow of the mates.”

  If Reatur thought things might turn out all right, Lamra was willing to accept that. The same curiosity that had helped her begin to figure out written signs made her turn a couple of eyestalks on Sarah and ask, “How will you go about keeping my blood inside me? It comes out very quickly.” She had never watched a budding; Reatur didn’t let mates do that. But once or twice she had seen the chamber afterward, before it was cleaned, and she had picked up ideas from overheard snatches of talk. She more or less knew what happened in there.

 
; Sarah turned her head back to Lamra. “Not know. Try to find out.” Then the human’s head swung toward Reatur again. “Mate knows good questions to ask, yes?”

  “That she does,” the domain master said. “She always has, ever since she learned what words are for. It’s one of the reasons I would like to see her stay alive.”

  “I wish the two of you wouldn’t talk about me like that, as if I weren’t there,” Lamra said indignantly.

  Reatur and the human both stood quite still for a moment. Then Sarah started making the odd noise humans used instead of honest, eyestalk-wriggling laughter, while Reatur widened himself as if he were a mate and Lamra the domain master. “I humbly crave your pardon, clanf-ah, clanmother,” he said.

  “Don’t you make jokes at me.” Now Lamra really was angry, angry enough to turn yellow.

  Reatur’s voice changed. “I’m sorry, little one. I didn’t mean to tease.”

  “Well, all right.” Of their own accord, Lamra’s eyestalks started to twitch. Imagine her telling off the domain master! Better yet, imagine her getting away with it! She remembered that Sarah had not answered her question. She asked it a new way. “If you don’t know how to keep me from ending yet, how will you find out?”

  “Good question again,” Sarah said.

  Lamra felt herself yellowing up once more-she wanted an answer that was an answer, not just words that sounded nice but didn’t tell her anything. Finally she got one.

  “Try with animals budding,” the human said. “See if animal mates live after what I do. If yes, I do with you. If no, I do new thing with another animal mate, see if live after that.”

  Lamra thought it over. “That sounds like it might work,” she admitted. “What if none of the animal mates lives, though?”

  Sarah opened her mouth, then closed it again without saying anything.

  “Then you won’t, either, Lamra-” Reatur said.

  “That’s what I thought. That’s what’s supposed to happen, though, so I don’t need to worry about it, do I?”

  “Of course not,” he answered at once. “I’ll do all the worrying. That’s one of the things a domain master is supposed to do. I worry so other people don’t have to.”

  “All right,” Lamra said, relieved. “I’m not much good at worrying-you need to think about one thing for a long time to do it right, and I have trouble with that. There are so many interesting things to think about that sticking to just one is hard.”

  “All mates like this?” Sarah asked Reatur, again as though Lamra were somewhere else.

  “No,” was all he answered.

  “Then I see why you want this one to save.”

  “Yes,” Reatur said.

  The way they talked made Lamra feel foolish. She was just herself and could not imagine being any different from what she was. Her only perception that she was in any way remarkable was that she found other mates boring some of the time. And since they often did not seem to know what to make of her, either, that worked both ways.

  “Sarah, if you do find out how to keep me from ending when my buds drop, will it be something only humans can do, or will Reatur be able to do the same thing with other mates later on?”

  “Other mates?” Reatur exclaimed. “I hadn’t even begun to think about that.” He started to turn blue, which startled Lamra-what had frightened him? until he went on, “If all our mates and all their budlings and all their mate budlings lived to grow up, how would we feed them all? This domain just raises enough for the folk it has now.”

  He and Lamra both turned anxious extra eyestalks toward Sarah. All the human-the human mate, Lamra reminded herself; somehow humans dealt with the problem that worried the domain master-said, though, was, “Not know.”

  “Fair enough,” Reatur said. “Worry about one thing at a time. If Lamra lives after budding, then we will see what to do next.”

  “Yes,” Sarah said. “Good sense.”

  Lamra had not thought so far ahead when she asked her question, but she recognized the trouble once Reatur showed her it was there. “If this harms the domain, clanfather, you don’t have to let Sarah do it.” The sacrifice seemed small to her. She had been going to end when her buds dropped, and the time that might come after still did not feel as though it belonged to her.

  Sarah started to say something, then stopped with her mouth half open. As was fitting, she looked toward Reatur-the choice was his.

  “I don’t suppose one full-grown mate will eat up all the spare food in the domain,” he said. “Go on, Sarah; I said yes before and I say yes again. No matter what happens later, Lamra is worth it.”

  Lamra widened herself to the domain master. She had done that countless times before, but only because she had been taught to. For the first time it was the gesture of conscious respect and gratitude it was meant to be-now she understood why she did it.

  Sarah bent from the middle toward Lamra-the human gesture that meant the same as widening. “I try hard to save you,” she said.

  “Thank you.” Still strongly feeling the ceremony inherent in the gesture, Lamra widened herself in return. Sarah bent again. They could have gone on saluting each other for some time, but Reatur chose that moment to leave, and Sarah walked away with him.

  The mates’ chambers were always boisterous, with mates chasing one another and yelling at one another all through the day. To Lamra, the place seemed empty without Reatur and Sarah. She did not feel like playing with her friends. Even if she had, the growing buds were starting to make her too slow to keep up.

  Another mate came up to her. Peri was left out of games a lot, too, as she was also growing buds. “What did the domain master and the-the funny thing want with you?” she asked, awe in her voice. Why did Reatur keep spending time with a mere mate, especially one with whom he had already mated?

  “Reatur and the human,” Lamra said, flaunting her superior knowledge, “are working on ways to keep mates alive after budding.”

  “You’re teasing me,” Peri said shrilly. “Nobody can do that.”

  “I’m not, either. They are so.”

  “Don’t be silly,” Peri said. “You can’t fool me, Lamra, not this time. Who ever heard of an old mate?”

  Something moved, down in the bottom of Jotun Canyon. The motion was tiny, but anything visible at all from down there had to be good-sized. Shota Rustaveli swung up binoculars for a closer look. Having the depths of the canyon suddenly seem to jump seven times closer always unnerved him; it was as if he were flinging himself down into the abyss.

  “What is it?” asked Yuri Voroshilov, who did not have field glasses with him.

  “Yuri Ivanovich, I don’t know.” Rustaveli could feel his forehead crinkle in a puzzled frown. “I can’t figure it out. Maybe it was just the sun, flashing off water down there.”

  ‘”Bozhemoi,” Voroshilov said softly.

  Rustaveli did not follow him for a moment. Then the biologist echoed that “My God” himself. Yesterday the bottom of the canyon had been dry. If it had water in it today, it would have more tomorrow, and as for the day after that… “Forty days and forty nights and then some,” he said.

  “Da.” Voroshilov laughed softly. “Strange, is it not, how after three generations of a godless society, we still have the biblical images in the back of our minds, ready to call up when we need them?”

  “Ask the devil’s mother why that’s so,” Rustaveli suggested.

  They both laughed then.

  “Such impudence.” If Oleg Lopatin had said that, Rustaveli would have bridled. Voroshilov only sounded amused. Then, sighing, the chemist grew more serious. “The flood is upon us, Shota Mikheilovich, in more ways than one.”

  “Eh? What’s that?” Rustaveli’s mind was elsewhere. He wanted to get down to the water. There might be-there likely were-plants and animals down in the canyon that stayed dormant until the yearly floods came and then burst into feverish activity. Plenty of Earthly creatures did things like that, but who could guess what variations on th
e theme Minerva might offer?. No one could guess-that was why they were here, to find out.

  But Voroshilov was thinking along very different lines. “We will have trouble, for one thing, if Lopatin does not leave Katerina alone. I know, because I will cause it.”

  That got Rustaveli’s attention. His head snapped toward Voroshilov. The chemist was such a quiet fellow that he even announced insurrection as if it were no more important than a glass of tea. He meant what he said, though. The Georgian could see that.

  “Slowly, my friend, slowly,” Rustaveli urged, wondering how-or whether-to head off Voroshilov. He had no use for Lopatin, but still… “The chekist is also a man, Yuri Ivanovich,” he said carefully. “I suppose he has the right to try his luck with her.”

  “This I know,” Voroshilov said heavily. “To approach her is one thing. But he has hit her, Shota Mikheilovich; I have seen the marks. That is something else again. That I will not stand, even if he has made her too afraid to speak up for herself.”

  Rustaveli scowled. Unfortunately, that sounded all too much like Lopatin. And Katerina had been down to Tsiolkovsky lately; she and Voroshilov had just come back to the environs of Hogram’s town. The chemist probably knew whereof he spoke.

  “What will you do?” Rustaveli asked.

  “Give him a taste of his own when he rotates up here next week. I was hoping you would join me-on the left, of course.”

  “A blackmarket beating, eh?” Though not a native Russian speaker, Rustaveli understood the slang expression; everyone who lived in the Soviet Union dealt on the left, some more often, some less. Had the Georgian caught Lopatin cuffing Katerina around, he was sure he would cheerfully have pummeled him. Doing it in cold blood, planning it well in advance, was not the same thing. “Lopatin is a pig, da, but should we not see first if Tolmasov can bring him to heel?”

  “A pig and a snake both,” Voroshilov growled. “Not only does he abuse Katya, he paws through my cabin and types my poems into his computer file for evidence. Evidence of what I do not know-perhaps only that, no matter how I try, I am no Akhmatova or Yevtushenko.” The chemist’s broad, fair face darkened with anger. His gloved hands folded into fists; had Lopatin been there at that moment, he would have had a bad time of it.