A World of Difference Read online

  The human touched a button; the box, which had been letting out a quiet hiss, became completely silent. “You, Hogram make peace?” Irv asked. “Not follow all words-you, Hogram not use same words you, me use.”

  “Trade talk has Omalo words, Skarmer words, and words from other great clans all mixed together; males from different great clans use it when neither speaks the other’s language,” Reatur explained. He was glad to blather on about trade talk. While he was doing that, he would not have to think about everything Hogram had said.

  “Lingua franca,” Irv muttered. Then, as if noticing that meant nothing to Reatur, he did some explaining himself. “Humans with words not same do same thing sometimes.”

  “Ah,” Reatur said politely. Interesting how, every once in a while, humans acted very much like people.

  But no male of his domain would have been so rude as to ask again, as Irv did, “You, Hogram make peace?”

  “No,” Reatur said. “I didn’t think we would, I told you we wouldn’t, and yet, curse it, you kept at me, making me waste time I could have spent helping my domain get ready for whatever the miserable Skarmer have in their sneaking minds.”

  Irv spread his hands in the human gesture that meant it wasn’t his fault. “My domain masters tell me what to do. I must go in direction they point. Your males do that for you.” Then Irv bent at the middle and stayed bent. Had he been a person, Reatur realized, he would have been widening himself in apology.

  The domain master gestured for him to resume his usual height. Irv did-yes, apology was what he had meant. “You are right-you should obey your domain masters,” Reatur conceded, although the plural puzzled him. “This time, though, they were wrong. Hogram and I had nothing to say to each other, not about peace.”

  Irv spread his hands once more. Reatur hardly noticed. He was thinking about Hogram now, like it or not, and about how confident the Skarmer had sounded. If Hogram’s males could not cross Ervis Gorge, he had no business sounding like that. But how could they, with the yearly flood rising day by day? Reatur could hear the waters booming and could feel their pounding through his feet. He turned his mental eyestalks in all directions but could not see how the Skarmer might best the flood.

  But Hogram could. Reatur was sure of that. It frightened him.

  VI

  The Female eloc saw Sarah coming. Of course it did, she thought in some annoyance-with eyes that looked every which way at once, Minervan creatures were next to impossible to sneak up on. The eloc had seen Sarah before. It did its best to run away.

  Its best was not good enough. It was so very gravid that it could scarcely waddle to the far end of its little pen. She hurried after it. It was right on the point of dropping its buds, and she wanted to see what she could do to keep it from bleeding to death immediately afterward.

  The female eloc, unfortunately, knew nothing about that. As far as it was concerned, Sarah was weird, probably a predator, and certainly dangerous. It made a brief rush at her, trying to stick her with one of the horns that projected out from its body below each arm.

  She skipped backward faster than the eloc could come after her. The horns were not very long, anyhow; the Minervans, who had to herd eloca, had sensibly bred them so they were less formidably equipped than their wild relatives.

  “It’s all right,” Sarah crooned, as if to a spooked horse back on Earth. Maybe that had some effect; maybe the eloc decided that making the little charge satisfied its honor. At any rate, it stood quiet and let her come up to it, though the four eyes it kept turned her way showed that it still did not trust her.

  She crooned some more. She needed the beast relaxed; it was not much shorter than she and a lot thicker. And this was a female, an animal sure to die young. Male eloca were the size of a cow, even if they looked more like what would happen if a squid seduced the Jolly Green Giant’s hockey puck.

  The female flinched from Sarah’s hand. Although she wore gloves, her flesh was warm enough to disturb the Minervan animal. She moved slowly and carefully. At last the eloc let her stroke and prod the tight stretched skin over one of its buds.

  Was that the beginning of a split, or was she only feeling what she wished she would? She stooped to take a good look. Sure enough, the female’s skin had begun to crack.

  “All right,” Sarah breathed. She had been irrationally certain that the eloc would drop its budlings when she was sound asleep or, worse, when she was just on her way back from Athena for another peek at it. Maybe luck was with her after all.

  As poor Biyal had, the female eloc grew calm as the budding process advanced-almost, Sarah thought, as if it knew it would soon have nothing more to worry about. She hoped to change that.

  All the same, she doubted she would succeed, not with this first try. Surely some Minervan somewhere would have thought of-would have tried-packing the cavities from which the budlings dropped to keep the inevitable flood of blood from following. But if so, Reatur was ignorant of it. Did that mean the effort had earlier been discarded as useless, or that Minervans could not see what seemed obvious to her? Before long, she would find out.

  The budding proceeded much as Biyal’s had. It seemed uneventful; all that happened was that the split over each bud steadily grew wider and longer. Knowing how it would end, Sarah was not lulled as she had been before. She used the time she had before the crisis to prepare for it.

  From her backpack she drew out six gauze pads, each stuffed into one of her socks. Her last couple of pairs would just have to do till she got home. She slapped a strip of duct tape onto each sock, to hold it in place on the clot’s hide. As she set each makeshift bandage on the ground, she shook her head in wry amusement. These were not the instruments she was used to working with.

  “I never thought I‘d be a vet, either,” she said out loud. The eloc steadied at the sound of her voice. She suddenly realized that sounding like a male Minervan had its advantages: the eloc had the habit of obeying voices much like hers. She laughed at herself. She also was not used to feeling macho.

  She could see the budlings’ feet now. They wiggled and thrashed, though the baby eloca were still attached to the female. The budlings were the size of terriers. Sarah hoped they would not get in her way when she tried to work on the female. Why, she wondered, did she think of these things too late to do anything about them?

  Then such bits of irrelevance vanished from her mind. The budlings grew to be entirely visible; she could see how they were joined to the female’s circulatory system by their mouths.

  They dropped off, all of them at once.

  Sarah never noticed whether they got in her way or not; she was too busy with the female. As Biyal had, it simply stood, bleeding its life away. It did not try to gore her or strike at her when she began slapping her bandage packs over its spurting wounds.

  Streams of its cold blood drenched her parka and trousers. She ignored that, too. Two bandages were in place now, the hemorrhaging from those orifices reduced to a trickle. She shoved a third plug into place, pressing hard on the duct tape so that it would cling to the eloc’s skin. She grabbed for the fourth bandage.

  About then she noticed how limp the eloc’s arms and eyestalks had gone. She also noticed that the stream of blood from the fourth orifice was less than it had been from the first three. Even as she watched, the flow grew slower still and then stopped. The female eloc was dead.

  “Oh, hell,” Sarah said, surprised at how disappointed she was. She had not expected to succeed with this first try, but her hopes had risen when she saw that her bandages seemed to do some good. The eloc, though, lost enough blood through the orifices she had not plugged to kill it before she could get to them.

  Two things occurred to her. One was the most ancient medical joke around: The operation was a success but the patient died. The joke was old, of course, exactly because it was rooted in human fallibility. Ever since the first medicine man, every doctor in the world had seen his best fall short of being good enough.

  Her
second thought sounded frivolous but wasn’t: What would the little Dutch boy have done if he had had to stick his finger into six holes in the dike at once? “He’d’ve got help or drowned,” she answered herself out loud.

  Only then did she realize what a mess she was. She might have been working in an alien abattoir, for the eloc’s blood dripped from her hands and arms and was splashed over the rest of her clothes. The fabrics were all supposed to repel moisture, but they hadn’t been designed for a workout like this. Neither had Athena’s laundry facilities.

  She picked up the socks and gauze packs that were still clean. After taking a step away from the female eloc, she went back to salvage the three she had used. The gauze would never be the same, but her goresoaked socks might come clean. And even if they didn’t, she could use them again the next time she tried to save an animal. Nothing from Earth was automatically disposable on Minerva.

  The eloca budlings scattered as Sarah walked toward the gate of the pen. She did not look like any Minervan creature that ate eloca, but she was bigger than they were, and that was plenty to set off the alarms evolution had built into them.

  A couple of budlings got out before she could slam the gate shut. A Minervan caught one of them after a brief chase and shouted for other males farther away to run down the other. While they were pursuing it, the first Minervan, still holding the squawking eloc budling, said to Sarah, “You shouldn’t have let them get loose like that. They might have been lost for good.”

  “Sorry.” She studied the local. One reason she found Minervans harder to tell apart than humans was that they did not always keep the same side of their bodies to her. Still, this one both looked and sounded familiar. “Sorry, Ternat.”

  “Never mind now; just remember for next time.” Reatur’s eldest, Sarah thought, seemed a good deal like the domain master. He turned a couple of eyestalks toward the dead female eloc. “You didn’t have much luck there.” “No, not much,” she admitted.

  “Reatur wants you to succeed.” That sounded like an accusation, but was Ternat condemning her for failure or Reatur for hoping for something else?

  She answered carefully. “This first try. Here learn some, try again. Maybe learn enough so Lamra lives. Try.”

  “What if you cannot learn enough before Lamra’s budlings drop?”

  “Then I fail. Not say to Reatur I do, only I try.” Make something of it if you’re going to, she added, but only to herself.

  But Ternat’s reply was mild. “That makes me think you are honest. People who give wild promises generally cannot live up to them. I suppose it must be the same with you humans.” He turned an eyestalk toward the newly budded eloc he was holding. “I will take this one to the herd, so it can get used to being among its own kind. If I delay too long, the foolish thing will grow up thinking it is a person, and fall easy prey to wild animals because it will stray too far from the big males who could protect it.”

  Sarah’s gloves left unpleasant smears on the notebook she pulled from a pocket. Ignoring them, she scrawled, “Imprinting, tell Pat” on the first blank page she found. Humans knew so little about Minerva that even casual conversation like this gave important new data.

  Ternat was already moving away. “What you do with dead eloc mate?” she called after him.

  “Thank you for reminding me,” he said without stopping.

  “I’ll make sure someone sees to the butchering.”

  It was, she reminded herself, only a domestic animal. She knew the Minervans did not treat their own mates so. All the same, she had a vision of bright, funny little Lamra hacked apart by stone knives and served up with the local equivalent of Brussels sprouts. It made her more determined than ever to save the mate.

  Sighing, she walked back toward Athena. She wished for a shower even more than she did after a turn in Damselfly. Wishing, however, kept failing to equip the spacecraft with the requisite plumbing.

  She stripped off her outer clothing just inside the air lock and walked down the hall to the lavatory and mini washer-dryer in her long johns. Minervan body fluids smelled stronger and nastier in Athena’s heated air than they had outside, where the mercury reached an all-time-since the landing, anyway-high of 46o.

  Emmett Bragg stuck his head out of his cubicle to see who was going by. His eyes flicked to the parka and pants slung on Sarah’s arm. “No luck, eh?” he asked, adding, “You’re dripping on the floor.”

  “I know, and on my sleeve, too. One more thing to wash. No, no luck, Emmett. The damned female bled right on out on me. I might as well not have been there. How do you plug six holes at once with just two hands?”

  “Three times two is-“ He let the words hang in the air.

  “-too much manpower to commit,” she finished for him. Then she stopped. Emmett did not say things by accident. “Or is it? Would you let me train a couple of people-Irv and Pat, I guess, because they know most about the Minervans-to be ready to try to save Lamra, all at once? It’d take a lot of time, to practice with me on animals, time they may not have because they’ll be busy with other things.”

  “Have ‘em make the time. Can you think of anything more important we’re doing here, for us or the Minervans?”

  “No, but I know I’m not objective about it. Thanks for seeing things the same way.” She leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek.

  For a moment, the look he gave her made her feel more naked under her long johns than she had during any of the who-knew-how-many times before when he’d happened to see her wearing a lot less. She also realized she didn’t dislike the feeling. She rather wished Irv looked at her that way more often.

  Telling herself it would be purely in the nature of an experiment, she thought about kissing Emmett again and making a proper job of it this time. Just then, though, from behind the privacy curtain Louise called, “Come on, Emmett, get back here and help me make sense of this latest weirdness from Houston.”

  “Be fight with you-have to make sure the decks get swabbed, though,” he said.

  Sarah snapped off a parody of a salute and made a face at him as he disappeared. “Aye, aye, Captain Bligh.” Saved by the bell, she thought as he went back to the rear of Athena.

  She sternly told herself not to wonder whether she had been saved or thwarted.

  As if to put that question to rest, she waylaid Irv when he got back to the ship, all but dragging him to their cubicle. She had no complaints once they were there; even if Irv took her for granted out of bed, she liked what he did in it. Finding that that was still so relieved her more than a little.

  “Well,” he said as she slid off him, “what brought that on?”

  “What do you mean?” she asked, hoping her guilty start did not show.

  Evidently it didn’t. “You’ve been too busy to be interested almost since we landed,” Irv said, “and now you go and rape me. Don’t get me wrong-I kind of like it. I’ve missed you, if you know what I mean.”

  “Mmhmm,” she said, wondering who had been taking whom for granted. “I do know. I’m sorry. It’s just that-”

  “-we’re busy all the damned time. Yeah. I know.” He poked her in the fibs.

  She yelped. “What was that for?”

  “For not answering my question.”

  “Oh.” She tried to keep things light. “Does it really matter where you get your appetite, so long as you eat at home?”

  When Irv didn’t answer right away, she was afraid she had made things worse instead of better. She could not tell what was going on behind his eyes. That worried her, too; back on Earth she’d never had trouble reading him. When had she stopped being able to, and why hadn’t she noticed?

  Then his face took on an expression she recognized: mischief. He rearranged her on the mattress pad. “Best idea you’ve had in a while,” he said. Of themselves, her fingers tightened on the back of his head.

  Tolmasov took a skipping half step to stay up with Fralk. Comfortable Minervan walking pace was a little faster than what was comfort
able for him. “You building all boats you need?” he asked.

  “Da, Sergei Konstantinovich, we will have enough,” Fralk answered.

  His Russian was better than Tolmasov’s command of the local language. Knowing he needed the practice, the pilot tried to get his thoughts across in the Skarmer tongue anyway. “You having all males you need to go in boats?”

  “Da,” Fralk said again. His three-armed wave encompassed the camp growing outside Hogram’s town. He and the human were a couple of kilometers away, walking and talking as Tolmasov might have with a friend back on Earth.

  Something made a noise in the bushes off to one side of the path. Things had been making noises in the bushes all along; by now the Russian paid no attention to them. Fralk also had ignored them-till now. Now he turned blue and started moving away from the bushes that hid whatever was making the noise.

  Tolmasov backed off, too. “What is that?” he asked, pointing to the animal he faintly glimpsed through foliage.

  “A krong,” Fralk said; it was not a word Tolmasov had heard before. “I did not know they came so close to the town anymore,” the Minervan went on. “With luck, it will have just fed and not be interested in eating anything else.”

  When the pilot heard that, he unslung his Kalaslmikov and clicked the change lever down from safe to full automatic. Whatever a krong was, it didn’t sound like a household pet.

  The beast emerged from the undergrowth. Tolmasov was surprised to discover that he recognized it. He doubted there could he many kinds of brown and white, long-legged, big-clawed large predators in the Minervan ecology. This had to be the same sort of animal as the one that had attacked Valery and Shota in the rover.

  Fralk was getting bluer and bluer. Tolmasov did not blame him. Had he been facing this monster unarmed, he would have been frightened, too. Even with a rifle in his hands, he wished for zoo bars between the krong and him.