A World of Difference Read online

  The mates swarmed around him. He had kind words for all of them, as he usually did: praise for Peri’s scribbles-which, Lamra thought, did not look a thing like real writing-an eyestalk wiggle of glee when some other mate in the crowd-Lamra could not see who-threw a ball that actually went in his direction.

  Lamra tried to wait for him to notice her. She was at the edge of the group because she could not move quickly anymore, and a lot of mates had dashed by to be with the domain master. That made her angry, and she was not very patient, anyhow. When she could not wait any longer, she shouted “Reatur!” as loud as she could.

  Two of his eyestalks looked in her direction. “Your turn will come, little one,” he said, and went on with what he was doing. The promise kept her quiet a while longer. Then she shouted for him again.

  “Soon,” Reatur said, more sharply this time. Lamra shifted from foot to foot to foot to foot to foot to foot. Finally, when the domain master had talked with or cuddled the rest of the mates, he turned his eyestalks toward her again. “Now, little one, come with me and we will talk.”

  He led her off to one of the smaller chambers. The other mates dispersed. At first they had resented the special attention Reatur gave Lamra, but now they were used to it. They quickly got used to things that had once been strange-humans, for instance. Lamra was much like her companions in that respect.

  “Well, little one,” Reatur said, “what have you been doing since I saw you last?”

  She waved her piece of hide. “I’ve learned a lot more marks. Look, this says, ‘that was the year so much ice melted that the roof’-did something. I don’t know what this part means.” She pointed at the words that had defeated her.

  He.turned an eyestalk toward it. “’Fell in,’ “he told her.

  “That’s very good, Lamra. You’ve been working hard.”

  “So have you,” she retorted, “or you’d have come around more often to see me.”

  Air hissed out of his breathing pores. “You’re right-I have and I would. It’s-“ He paused, as if wondering whether to go on, but at last he did. “-it’s been difficult.”

  Lamra responded more to his tone than to his words. “Why are you sad, Reatur?”

  “Among other reasons, because the humans still haven’t had any luck with mates from the herds, and your budding time draws near,” he said. “I never wanted you to die, Lamra, but finding hope that you might not and then seeing it fade is hard.”

  “I don’t want to die, either, Reatur. Maybe I won’t, still. But if I do, well-”

  “Don’t say it,” the domain master said, and so Lamra did not repeat the old saying about old mates. After a moment, the domain master went on, “Aside from that, Dordal’s males have stolen some of our massi, the Skarmer have crossed Ervis Gorge in things the humans call ‘boats,’ and they or another, different kind of human killed one of the ones we know. And aside from that, everything is fine.”

  Lamra did not always recognize sarcasm. It escaped her this time. Even had she caught it, she would have paid it no mind, not when it came along with Reatur’s other news. A human dead! She had not even been sure humans could die. “Which one is dead?” she asked anxiously; three of the strange creatures had become closer friends of hers than anybody save Reatur.

  “The one called Frank,” he answered. Lamra knew relief- she had hardly even seen that one.

  Still, she said, “How sad for the humans. There were so few of them even before.”

  Reatur angrily jerked his arms. He started to turn yellow. “It will be sad for us if we can’t push the cursed Skarmer back down the gorge. If this domain gets a new master, a Skarmer master, your budlings will never live to grow up. And you-if you do live but we lose, what would a Skarmer chieftain make of you? Nothing good, I tell you that.”

  Lamra tried to keep herself from turning blue. She hadn’t thought about any of the things Reatur had said, and they all sounded terrifying. “We have to win, then,” she said at last. “We will. We have you, and the Skarmer don’t.” Even as she said that, she saw herself greening up again. Reatur, she was convinced, could handle anything.

  “I wish it were that simple.” The domain master sighed. “I came to see you to get away from my worries, and here I’ve given them to you instead. You’re brave for not fussing about them.”

  He widened himself to her, then left before she could figure out how to respond. The boom of the door closing after him sounded very final.

  Pat Marquard stumbled as she walked toward the latest pennedeloc mate on the point of budding. “Careful,” Irv said. He had said it several times already-wherever her eyes were focused, it was not on the ground under her feet.

  “Sorry,” she answered. Her voice sounded far away. She did not look at him.

  Sarah said gently, “It’s all right if you want to go back to the ship, Pat.” Irv nodded.

  Thinking about how to reply brought Pat back toward the here-and-now. She shook her head. “If I don’t have anything to do, I’ll go even crazier than I am now. I’d rather try to work than just sit and brood.”

  Sarah glanced toward Irv. He nodded again-he would have said the same thing. His wife shrugged. They walked on. Irv wondered how much they were going to accomplish. For one thing, they hadn’t kept a mate alive yet. For another, if the invaders from the west won, the future for which they were trying to save Lamra would prove depressingly short.

  Irv also thought about Oleg Lopatin. Tolmasov sounded as anxious to be rid of him as was everyone on Athena. He must have flipped out, Irv thought for the umpty-umpth time. That was very bad, especially if some of the Russians had been worried enough about him to try to warn the American ship. And especially since he had his rifle with him.

  Irv did not want to go up against a Kalashnikov, not even with six pistols-no, five now. “How are we going to fight back?” he asked Sarah, quietly, so Pat would not notice. Sarah only shook her head. Irv wondered whether that meant she didn’t know or she didn’t want to think about it now. Probably both.

  The eloc mate in the pen was used enough to humans that it did not try to attack or waddle away as the three of them came up. It only turned one extra eyestalk in their direction.

  “Now we wait,” Sarah said grimly. By the look of things, Irv thought, they would not have to wait long. The eloc mate bulged like a fat lady trying to explode out of a spandex suit. Irv had learned, though, that as with pregnant women, appearances could be deceiving. Once they had spent three cold days waiting for a mate to drop her budlings, only to come back the next morning to find the small eloca scampering about the pen and the mate dead.

  Waiting had been easier then, before-before Frank died, Irv told himself firmly. He did not know Oleg Lopatin had killed him. It was, however, a lot likelier than anything else he could think of.

  And no matter how Frank had died, he was dead now, and Pat no longer the bantering companion she had been. She kept pacing back and forth in the pen with that distant look in her eyes. Sometimes she answered when Irv or Sarah spoke to her, sometimes she didn’t. The other two couldn’t just talk with each other, either, not with her there. Time stretched endlessly.

  After what seemed like six weeks but was in fact two and a half hours, Sarah, who had been peering and poking at the eloc mate so often it wasn’t even resentful anymore, abruptly stood up straight. “The skin is starting to split. Let’s get ready.”

  Irv squatted next to the eloc mate, two arms around it on Sarah’s left. Pat came more slowly and squatted with two arms around the eloc on Sarah’s fight, so the three humans were equally spaced around it.

  “We’ll try it a little differently this time,” Sarah said, reminding them of what they were about. “Instead of just trying to bandage those bleeders, we’re going to shut ‘em off. Here.”

  She passed two large surgical clamps to Irv, two more to Pat. “As soon as the budlings drop off, clamp the protruding blood vessel stumps. You’ll need both hands for the job, so don’t try to do ‘em b
oth at once. Do one, then the other, quick as you can without making a mistake. The way the blood comes gushing out, a whole lot of fumbling and you’ll be too late to do much good.”

  Remembering how Biyal had bled out, remembering how he had watched several eloc and massi mates pour their blood onto the ground-and onto him-Irv knew his wife was fight. He opened and closed a clamp several times.

  The eloc grew placid-resigned was the other word that crossed Irv’s mind, though he knew that was anthropomorphizing-as the budding process went on. The split in the skin above each bud grew longer and longer. Soon Irv saw the wet legs and bottoms of the two budlings in front of him. The legs were already wiggling, as if the newborn eloc were preparing to hit the ground running.

  “Soon, now,” Sarah breathed. Irv glanced over at her for a split second, suppressing a grin-she was nervously opening and closing a clamp, too. Veterinary OB was not what she had studied in med school. She did not notice him. “Soon,” she said again.

  Irv saw she was right. Now just about all of each budling was visible; he could see the blood vessels between their eyestalks that connected them to the mate, could see the much bigger vessels around which their mouths were sealed. The big ones were the ones he had to worry about. The bleeding from the others could be handled. Sarah thought so, anyhow, and Irv had nothing but respect for his wife’s judgment.

  As it had before, the moment came without warning. One instant, the budlings were still attached to the mate. The next, they were at Irv’s feet, doing their best to get in his way. The mate’s blood fountained out.

  Irv had practiced what he was going to do countless times back on Athena. Grabbing and clamping a piece of rubber tube, though, was not nearly enough like reaching for a blood vessel when spurting gore not only made it hard for him to see what he was doing but also froze his fingers as it splashed over and between them.

  The last time he had done such blind groping, he thought, he had been fifteen and had gotten slapped for it. He let out a grunt of triumph as his left hand closed round the big, soft, pulsing vessel. He squeezed, hard. The flow slowed. He slapped on the clamp.

  He felt like shouting-the vessel was sealed. But no time for shouts. How much blood had the mate already lost where the other budling had dropped free? Too much? Only one way to find out. He leaned, grabbed, and after a few desperate fumbling seconds, clamped.

  Then he had a chance to look up. Sarah had finished her part of the task just seconds before him. That made him feel proud- he was very much an amateur at this sort of thing. But then, with Minervans, so was everyone.

  Seeing him finished, Sarah said, “Nice and quick. Good. We just may get a live mama out of this yet.” She raised her voice a little. “How you doing, Pat?”

  Again, hesitation. Then Pat answered, “I’ve got the first one just about clamped. I’ll go to the other as fast as I can.”

  “Oh, hell!” Sarah exclaimed. She scrambled over to Pat’s side. “Give me that!” Irv went around the eloc mate to see if he could do anything to help. His face fell when he saw the size of the pool of blood under the vessel Sarah was finally clamping. He could not imagine how any animal, Earthly or Minervan, could lose so much and live.

  And sure enough, the eloc mate was sagging, its arms and eyestalks going limp in a pattern he had seen too many times before. Sarah recognized that, too. She looked at the eloc-the dead eloc-and at the clamp in her hand. She threw the clamp down, hard, on the frozen ground. It bounced away.

  “I’m sorry,” Pat said miserably. “I just can’t-”

  “I know,” Sarah said. “Nothing to be done about it.” But she could not help adding, “] really had hopes for this, though. Now we may not get another chance to test it before-before the real thing. Having a success behind us would have been nice. Oh, well.”

  She looked around to see where the clamp had gone, walked over to it, picked it up. Irv undid the five they had managed to place on the eloc mate. Only a few more drops of blood dribbled out as he freed each one; the mate was empty. He said, “We might as well head back to Athena.”

  Head down, Pat walked a few paces apart from her two companions. Sarah said, low voiced, “Maybe I should show a Minervan what to do. A male would probably be more reliable than Pat is right now. I don’t blame her, but-”

  “I know.” Irv thought about it. After a few seconds, he shook his head. “Not a good idea,” he said as quietly as Sarah. “As far as I can tell, none of the males but Reatur and maybe Ternat would react well to the idea of helping mates survive. Too far outside their mental horizons. If he didn’t think Lamra was special, I doubt Reatur would let us go on, either. And right now Ternat isn’t here, and Reatur-”

  “Has problems of his own,” Sarah finished for him. She sighed. “Don’t we all?”

  VIII

  Minervan summer days were not bad, not for someone used to Moscow weather as Oleg Lopatin was. Minervan nights were something else again, almost always ten below Celsius or worse. Every night reminded Lopatin of his military snow-survival course.

  That he was in the middle of an armed camp now only brought the memory into sharper focus. Fralk’s forces, battered and scattered by the crossing of Jotun Canyon, were back together now, as much as they ever would be. The Omalo had not struck at them. Tomorrow, with luck, the Skarmer would be out of the immense canyon altogether and up onto fiat ground. Lopatin did not plan to be with them.

  Helping the Skarmer win the war against their neighbors to the east, maybe squeezing off half a clip at any Americans foolish enough to try to help the feudal Omalo resist the ineluctable logic of the historical dialectic…, all that would be wonderful, so long as he did it step by step, in contact with Tsiolkovsky. Then he would be not only one of the instruments through which the dialectic unfolded but also carrying out Soviet policy, as defined before he headed east with Fralk’s army. Losing his radio changed everything.

  Any Soviet officer who took matters into his own hands asked for trouble and usually got it. If he showed hostility toward Athena’s crew without being hooked into the chain of command that could authorize such behavior, he knew exactly what would happen. The Americans would scream bloody murder. They were probably screaming bloody murder already about Frank Marquard.

  Moscow would say, would have to say, that Lopatin had been sent across Jotun Canyon purely as an observer. All the blame would land right on his shoulders. He could see it coming, just as he had seen that mountain of ice bearing down on his coracle.

  As he had done in the coracle, he intended to get away now. He only saw one course that might let that happen, and he hated it. But if he yielded himself up to the Americans, and told them how Marquard had died, he might put out for his own benefit the line he expected from Moscow. As far as his actions went, all he needed to do was tell the truth. Unfortunately, though, as a KGB man he knew for how little the truth often counted.

  The Skarmer slept all around him. In an Earthly camp, fires would have lit his way-and let sentries see him. The Minervans had no fires; they liked the weather fine. Lopatin knew they had set sentries. With luck, he could evade them in the dark.

  He slid out of his sleeping bag, quietly rolled it up, and stuffed in into his pack. He slung his rifle over his shoulder. He wanted to carry it, but knew he might need both hands free. Shooting his way to freedom would surely fail anyhow; even if it didn’t, it would wreck the Soviet mission. But he missed the comfort of having the Kalashnikov ready to fire.

  He slipped through the slumbering natives. Going in the right direction was easy, even in the darkness: any way uphill was right.

  He wondered how he would ever get back across Jotun Canyon to return to Tsiolkovsky-after abandoning the Skarmer here, he would not be popular among them. Perhaps it would not matter. With Marquard dead, the Americans would have the supplies to let him fly home aboard Athena.

  Home? No, to fly back to Earth. He doubted he could ever go home again. Times had changed since the Great Patriotic War, when so ma
ny Soviet soldiers earned time in the Gulag merely for seeing what western Europe was like. They had not changed so much, however, that a KGB man could expect to be greeted with open arms after being debriefed by the CIA, as Lopatin knew he would be.

  He wanted to laugh. He wanted to cry. He wanted to swear. He was a good Party man and a loyal Soviet citizen, and he knew he would have to defect. Very slowly, he kept creeping out of the Skarmer camp.

  Finally, after what seemed forever, the Skarmer began to thin out. Lopatin no longer had to pay attention to his every footstep for fear of falling over a native. He could move faster now.

  The wind picked up. Clouds scudded by. One of the Minervanmoons-Lopatin had no idea which one-shone through a break in the cover overhead. Far fainter than Earthly moonlight, it was better than the near-blackness he had known before. He picked up the pace again.

  The moonlight also let a Skarmer sentry spot motion he might otherwise have missed. “Halt!” the male called. “Who goes?” Lopatin froze. Too late-the sentry had already picked up the alien quality of the way he moved. “The human! The human is running away!” the Minervan screamed.

  That did it, Lopatin thought, hearing hubbub break out behind him as the outcry jerked warriors from sleep. “This way! This way!” the sentry shouted.

  Swearing now in good earnest, the KGB man ran that way. Don’t panic, he told himself. The terrain gave him plenty of cover. He dashed from boulder to boulder, keeping low, trying not to give that cursed sentry another glimpse of him. The Minervan moon stayed visible. Where moments before he had been glad to see it, now he wished it into the hottest pits of hell.

  He scuttled over to yet another rock and paused, listening.

  Most of what he heard from the camp was chaos, but not all. Some males were moving purposefully after him, calling as they came. He shivered in his latest hiding place. Not even his darkest nightmares included pursuit by a pack of screaming maenads.