A World of Difference Read online

  “Pat?” Louise called.

  “In here.” Irv shook his head when he noticed from which chamber the answer came. It was the one in which Biyal had died. He did not think of himself as superstitious, but he wished Lamra were somewhere else.

  Lamra lifted an eyestalk when he and Louise came in. “Hello,” the mate said. “Pat told me I should not say goodbye, not yet.”

  “No, not yet,” Irv said soberly. Soon, though, maybe, he thought and scowled at himself. He could hear the unease in his voice when he asked Pat, “How’s she doing?” “See for yourself. The skin is splitting.”

  “So it is.” Irv stooped and switched to the Omalo language. “Lift the arm by me, please, Lamra.” Lamra did. The mate kept her fist closed, but Irv saw the graybrown of Minervan wood between her fingerclaws: the precious toy runnerpest, he supposed.

  He smiled at that a little and waved Louise down beside him. “See?” he said, pointing at the growing vertical slit over the bud. Louise nodded. “In a few minutes, as the opening gets longer and wider, you’ll be able to see the whole budling, and how it’s hooked on to Lamra by its mouth. When it falls away- when it’s born, I mean-it’ll drop off. That’ll be that, unless we can clamp the vessel it was feeding from, and the ones for the other five, too. With two for each of us, we may have a chance.”

  “We can’t afford any fumbling, though.” Pat sounded as if she was talking as much to herself as to Louise. “We’ve got to be right the first time.”

  Louise got clamps, bandage packs, and rolls of tape out of Sarah’s parka. “I’ll do the best I can,” she said. She didn’t seem nervous; she sounded intrigued, like an engineer sizing up a new and challenging problem. Only fair, Irv thought-she was one.

  “Let’s take our places,” he said. The budling’s wiggling feet were already pushing through the opening in Lamra’s skin. So, through the other slits, were those of its brothers and sisters. Irv slid over to Louise’s right; Pat was on her left.

  “What about the six vessels around each central one?” Louise asked. “Shouldn’t we clamp those, too?”

  “The bandages should take care of them,” Pat said. “They’re all small, compared to the one in the middle. That’s the one- the two, rather-you’ve got to worry about. When the budlings drop, they’ll go like a fire hydrant hit by a car.”

  Irv grimaced. That was a more graphic simile than he wanted to think about. He switched to the Omalo tongue again. “How do you feel, Lamra?” The mate, after all, was no experimental animal, but a person, too, and a young person, at that. She had to be wondering, worrying about, what would happen next.

  “It doesn’t hurt now,” Lamra said after a moment’s pause, perhaps for taking stock. “Will it hurt later, when you stop me from ending?”

  “I don’t think so,” Irv said, as reassuringly as he could. Actually, he had no idea. He hoped he-and Lamra-would find out. He also hoped the mate was as confident as she sounded. When you stop me from ending… He knew that when was an if. If Lamra didn’t, more power to her, for as much time as she had.

  They would soon know how long that would be. The arms and eyestalks of the budling in front of Irv were twitching now along with its legs; its mouth was tightly clamped round the big blood vessel that fed it.

  “Any minute-“ Pat breathed. If she was going to add “now,” she never got the chance. Lamra’s budlings all let go at once. Blood gushed forth in a torrent that astonished Irv anew every time he saw it.

  The clamps were on the ground between his feet. He seized the spurting vessel in front of him with one hand, snatched up a clamp, stuck it on. That flood slowed to a drip. He shifted leftward, grabbing for the second bleeder and the other clamp.

  At almost the same instant, Pat shifted to her right. Just as he had, she had started on the blood vessel further away from Louise so she could deal with both of hers and be in position to help.

  Irv fumbled with the second clamp, got it on at last. He looked toward Louise. “How you doing?” he asked. “Need a hand?” From the engineer’s other side, Pat was using nearly the same words to ask the same thing.

  “I’m done, I think,” Louise answered. Like her colleagues- like the chamber-she was spattered and dripping with gore. She wiped the back of a hand across her face, which only made matters worse. With an engineer’s caution, she went on, “Check me, will you?”

  Irv looked at one of the vessels she had repaired, Pat at the other. Irv gave a thumbsup a moment later; the clamp was on perhaps more securely than either of the ones he had done.

  “This one’s fine, Louise,” Pat said. “Well done. I’m officially impressed.”

  “You told me what to do, and I did it.” Louise seemed surprised anyone would make much of simple competence. “Shall we get the bandage packs on now?”

  “Yeah, we’d better.” Irv started to walk over to pick up bandages and tape, but almost tripped on one of the newIy hatched budlings. All six of them were scrambling around like so many little wild animals-which, Irv supposed, in essence they were. Their squawks were calliope whistle shrill. “When we’re done, we’ll have to catch these critters,” he said.

  He was taping the first gauze-soaked sweat sock into place when he suddenly realized Lamra had neither said anything nor moved in some time. He could not afford to think about that, not until the other bandage was on. Then, with the emergency work done as well as could be, he took a step back-a careful step, so as not to step on a budling-to see how the mate was doing.

  “Lamra?” he asked. She did not answer. All the eyes Irv could see were closed, and her eyestalks hung down against her body. So did her arms. They were not as limp, he thought, as those of the eloc mates he had failed to save. But the toy runnerpest had fallen in the blood between her feet.

  “Lamra?” he asked again. Still no reply.

  “Now what.’?” Louise asked.

  Irv shook his head, baffled, fearful, but still hopeful. “Now we wait…”

  “Progress at last!” Fralk shouted. At the eastern end of the fight, the Skarmer warriors had finally forced Reatur’s males back from the barrier. But the Omalo, curse their stubborn ways, would not flee. They fought on, holding a line against Fralk’s warriors. Progress it was, but not enough.

  And from where he was, Fralk could not help make it more. His males stood between him and the enemy. He could not use the rifle, not without doing the Skarmer more harm than the Omalo.

  “We shall advance,” he declared. “From a position nearer the barricade, I will be able to pour a flood of bullets into the foe. They will surely break then, and our gallant males will be able to surround them.”

  “We advance!” the males with him shouted. They shook their spears and axes. Most of them, Fralk guessed, had resented being kept out of the fighting. “The pistol-“ Oleg said.

  “Shut up, coward! Come on,” his keeper growled, understanding the word the human had used before. He tugged on the rope. Oleg stumbled forward.

  “Do not worry about the pistol, Oleg Borisovich,” Fralk said in the human speech. “It has not boomed for a long time now. Surely the human who has it is out of bullets.” He waited for Oleg’s reply. Oleg only made the gesture humans used for a shrug. Fralk shrugged, too. “Toward the fighting!” he cried grandly, playing to the pride of the warriors with him.

  “Toward the fighting!” they yelled back, and toward the fighting they went.

  “He’s in among that little bunch near the center… There!

  He just fired a burst. See the muzzle flashes?”

  “I see them, Emmett.” Sarah wondered how Emmett’s voice could come so calmly through the radio. The battlefield ahead looked like 200proof chaos, nothing else but. Down there, she knew she would have been scared shitless-she was scared plenty up here. But Emmett seemed in his element.

  He had read the Minervans well, too. So far none of the Skarmer had spotted her, though she was less than half a mile behind their army, flying straight down its line of march. A minute to ta
rget, maybe a minute and a half. Time to get ready.

  Her left thumb clicked the POWER switch to ON. She would need all the help she could get from the batteries, because her pedaling was going to have to suffer now.

  She reached down, peeled up a square of mylar that was only taped in place. Cold wind blew into her face. She pulled a butane lighter from the waistband of her shorts and flicked the little metal lever till it caught. She lowered the flame toward the wick on the gallon bottle that hung just behind her front wheel. The wind blew it out.

  She swore, flicked the lever again, and then glanced up to see if the Minervans had spotted her yet. Damn, they had! She would never get to make another pass. The lighter lit. Thanking God for the fire retardant chemicals that were stinking up the cabin, she made the flame Bunsen burner big.

  The wick was not soaked with fire retardants-very much the opposite. This time, it caught.

  “Move, curse you, you worthless traitor,” snarled the Minervan who had hold of Oleg Lopatin’s leash. Lopatin had no choice but to move. He glared at the warrior. If only I had you back in Lefortovo Prison, he thought longingly, you would learn just what an amateur at torment you are. The KGB man knew how futile such dreams of revenge were. But they helped keep him going, anyhow.

  Fralk fired again. His band was less than a hundred meters from the Omalo barricade. Any second now, Lopatin expected the American back of the barrier to prove Fralk wrong and with a little luck fill him full of holes. Lopatin would have saved a few rounds for another good chance at taking out the Kalashnikov, and he was sure anyone smart enough to make it onto Athena’s crew would also be smart enough to do the same.

  Maybe, he thought with a sudden savage grin, the American would fill his kennelmaster full of holes. There was a revenge that might be no dream.

  One of the other high-ranking Minervans in Fralk’s group let out a startled squeal-he sounded amazingly like a housewife spotting a rat. “A monster in the sky!” he shrieked. “Look! Three arms away from the battlemit’s coming straight at us!”

  Eyestalks writhed. Lopatin’s head whipped around. He had never seen Damselfly before, but he knew what it was. The Skarmer did not. That first scream was quickly echoed by many more.

  Lopatin’s keeper had two eyes on the human, two on the battle, and two on the new flying horror. That left none to pay attention to the small green-brown bush by his feet. One of those feet brushed it. The keeper jerked, went limp. The rope slipped from his fingerclaws.

  “A pestilence!” one of the other males shouted. “Nogdar just stepped on a stunbush! Grab that rope, somebody!”

  Too late. Lopatin was free.

  A spear, wildly flung, whizzed past Damselfly. Sarah did her best to ignore it; she couldn’t do anything about it, anyway. Fortunately, most of the Minervans seemed too scared of the ultra-ultralight to think of trying to bring it down.

  There was her target, dead ahead. She leaned down again, this time with a Swiss army knife in her hand.

  Seeing the monster fly hissing toward him, Fralk wanted to void where he stood. He needed an instant to remember he was still holding the rifle. A rifle had chewed the krong to bloodyrags. Anything that could kill a krong ought to be able to take out a skymonster, he thought.

  The cursed rifle was on the wrong side of his body to shoot at the thing! Fast as he could, he passed it from arm to arm.

  Oleg Lopatin looked at Damselfly, looked at Fralk, and discovered, as so many had before him, one of the great flaws of international socialism: when faced with a choice between their own kind and an ideology, most people chose their own kind.

  Lopatin did not pause to reason that out. He just yelled and jumped on Fralk.

  The Swiss army knife cut the string that ran through the handle of the gallon jug filled with wood alcohol, naphtha, and butane. Damselfly seemed to leap higher in the air as the weight it had never been designed to carry dropped away.

  The Kalashnikov bellowed, right under Sarah. She screamed, expecting to die in the next second. No bullets ripped through her. Damselfly did not tumble in ruins to the ground.

  She couldn’t even look back. She didn’t have a rearview mirror. All she could do was pedal and pray.

  Then Emmett Bragg’s hoarse voice came yelling out of the radio: “You can play in my league any day, darlin’! One extra large Molotov cocktail, right on target. Smoked ‘em both!” He let go with a rebel yell that was almost too much for the little speaker.

  “Both?” Sarah panted. She flew over Reatur’s barricade, onto the side his males held. As her fear-induced adrenaline rush began to fade, she realized how tired she was. “The Minervan and the Russian, too.”

  “Oh. Oh, Jesus. Didn’t I see him fighting with the Minervan, trying to keep him from shooting me down?” If she had dumped hellfire on somebody trying to save her… She wanted to be sick.

  But Bragg said coldly, “Well, what if you did? Hadn’t been for Lopatin, that Minervan never would have had a rifle in the first place. And if he didn’t, a lot of people-Frank maybe, a lot of Reatur’s males for sure-would still be alive. Besides, nothin’ you can do about it now, anyhow.”

  “You’re right,” she conceded, still wishing he had not told her.

  “Look, if it makes you feel any better, we can turn the KGB bastard into a hero when we talk to Tsiolkovsky. Best part is, I guess it’s even true.”

  “Yeah.” It did make her feel better, less guilty. I’d never make a soldier, she thought. But then, she had never wanted to be a soldier. “Okay. I’m heading back for Athena.”

  “Good. We should have somebody minding the store. Now to win this battle-that’s the point of the exercise, after all. Out.”

  “Out.” Sarah pedaled on.

  Reatur stared in mixed awe and dread at the flames consuming his foe. His watersmiths used fire, of course, to melt ice and pour it into molds for tools. Hot water could bore through walls or, dropped from above, scald attackers. But to turn fire itself into a weapon for war-the domain master shuddered.

  He tried to imagine how humans fought among themselves. Imagining a battlefield full of noiseweapons and fire falling out of the sky made him shudder all over again.

  Only for a moment, though. He had his own battle to worry about, and enormous opportunity looking fight at him. “Come on!” he shouted to the males around him. “Their whole center depended on the noiseweapon. Now that it’s gone, nothing’s left there. We can split their whole army in half”

  He scrambled over the barricade. Yelling, his warriors followed. He heard a long series of roars from a noiseweapon, back where the Skarmer had forced his males to give ground. A pause, another long string of blasts. Emmett could shoot as he would now, without having to fear the enemy’s more powerful weapon. Then came the sweetest sound Reatur had heard on the battlefield: his warriors cheering, going over to the attack.

  “That way!” he called. “We’ll cut off the Skarmer retreat.” He hurried east, his males rushing with him in their eagerness to close with the enemy. Suddenly he stopped. He divided the warband with him in two, pointed to the larger group. “You’ll come with me.” To the others, he said, “You go west instead. Maybe we’ll be able to surround each half of their army.” That hope made his males shout louder than ever.

  As the domain master ran toward the much-battered rampart, his eyestalks started twitching of their own accord. He had never expected to be fighting from the north side of the barrier! Here he was, though, reaching across with a spear to thrust at the Skarmer on the other side.

  The foe was frantic now, caught between the males they had pushed back and the barrier from which they had pushed them. Some started climbing over it, this time in the opposite direction from before. The arrival of Reatur and his warriors put an end to that.

  “Surrender!” the domain master shouted in trade talk. “We will not slay any male who throws down his weapons and widens himself before us!” He waited to see if the Skarmer would yield.

  They didn’t,
not fight away. But after a couple of desperate attacks failed to dislodge Reatur and his warriors, Skarmer males began casting aside axes and spears and widening themselves. When the first few who did so were not harmed, more and more followed their lead.

  Reatur began telling off warriors to take charge of prisoners. Clamor to the west made him turn a couple of eyestalks that way. He cursed-the Skarmer there had broken out to the north, through his hastily dispatched containment force. Were they to swing back on his males now…

  They did not. Instead, they streamed back the way they had come, all thought of fight forgotten. The western half of the Omalo army pursued. Reatur spotted Enoph close by. “Take charge of the captives. Let our males loot as they will, but they are not to injure the Skarmer unless they try to escape.”

  “It will be as you say,” Enoph promised-and what Enoph promised, the domain master knew, he would deliver. “But where are you going, clanfather?” the reliable male asked.

  Reatur was already hurrying north. “To join the chase. I want to rid my domain of the Skarmer once and for all.”

  The western half of the Skarmer army, though beaten, was still a force large enough to disrupt his lands. And whoever led it now that Fralk was dead knew his business-knew it better, perhaps, than Hogram’s eldest of eldest ever had. The invaders fought a series of stubborn rear guard actions to keep Reatur’s warriors away from their main body.

  “Curse them!” the domain master shouted as his males finally broke through the third such delaying warband. “They’ll escape, scatter, and cause us untold grief.”

  “Worse yet,” one of his warriors said gloomily, pointing ahead to a defile. “A rearguard there will hold us off till sunset, and they’ll be able to reform on the far side at their leisure.”

  “You’re right,” Reatur said, and cursed again. Another battle to fight, then, he thought bleakly. Even winning would cost him the lives of males the domain could not afford to lose.

  But instead of racing through the defile, the Skarmer piled up at its southern end. They milled about in confusion. A male, all his arms outstretched to show he carried no weapons, advanced from their ranks toward Reatur and his oncoming warriors. “Will you spare us if we yield?” he shouted in trade talk.