A World of Difference Read online

  “So what, clanfather?” Talk about laws meant nothing to Lamra. Mates lived as they lived, and that was all there was to it.

  “So perhaps…” Reatur’s voice trailed away. When he resumed, Lamra wondered whether he was talking to himself or to her. “So perhaps, just perhaps, now it might be all right for you to go outside the mates’ chambers and live-well, almost as if you were a male, I suppose.” He sounded surprised at where his mouth was taking him but went on anyhow. “Would you like that, Lamra?”

  “I don’t know.” The idea was so alien to her, she could hardly take it in. She seized on the part of it closest to her troubles and asked, “Will males like me better than mates do?”

  “I don’t know,” Reatur said. “Some will, some won’t, I expect. That’s the way it usually is. Some people don’t like anything strange and different. But I think your chance is better now than it would be another time. What with the humans still being here, things are already so strange that you may be just one oddity among many.”

  “That’s better than what I am now, here.” Lamra thought some more. “You mean I’ll be able to see and touch and smell all the things on the other side of that door?” “As many of them as you want.”

  For all her life, that door had marked the end of Lamra’s universe. She saw the outside world, faintly, through the sandy ice that let light into the mates’ chambers. To mingle with those moving shapes, though, to find out what they truly were-

  “Come on!” she said, and hurried toward the door. The slits of skin that had opened to let out her budlings flapped as she ran. They were healing together, slowly and raggedly; she would never have quite the same smooth up-and-down lines as before she had begun to bud, no matter how long she lived.

  Reatur followed her. “Open,” he told the guard on the far side of the door. Lamra heard the male lift the bar from the brackets that held it. Before the door opened, the domain master said, “You can still change your mind, you know.”

  “Why would I want to do that?” Lamra asked. The door started to swing open. The first glimpse she had of the world beyond it gave her answer. That corridor seemed to stretch on forever, though it was only a tiny part of the castle. And outside the castle was the whole world, unimaginably big, unimaginably strange. For a moment staying where she was, knowing everything-and everyone around her, felt like the only safe thing to do.

  But strangeness had already come in through that door. Had it not, she would not be standing here turning blue with fright at the prospect of going out. Air hissed through her breathing pores. “Come on,” she said again, not an excited squeal this time but determined even so.

  “Let me go first.” Lamra moved aside so Reatur could pass.

  The guard started to shut the door after the domain master.

  “Wait, please, Orth,” Reatur said.

  “Sorry, clanfather. Did one of the humans go in before my duty started?” Orth poked an eyestalk around the edge of the door. “No,” he answered himself, seeing only Lamra.

  “No,” Reatur agreed. He paused, as if he, too, was having second thoughts. But when he resumed, he spoke firmly. “This is the mate Lamra, the one the humans saved when she dropped her budlings. As you can see, she will not be ready to have buds planted on her again for some time, if ever. I am going to bring her out of the mates’ chambers into the world. Treat her as you would a male of the same age.”

  “Clanfather?” Orth sounded so shocked, Lamra wondered if he would leave the door open for her. He did. Perhaps he was too surprised not to. His eyestalks kept moving back and forth between Reatur and Lamra.

  She widened herself as much as she could, far wider than she made herself for Reatur these days. “Hello, Orth,” she said. Barring humans, she had never talked to any male but Reatur before.

  “Orth-“ Reatur prompted.

  “Hello,” the guard managed to say. His eyestalks returned to the domain master. “A mate out by herself, living like a male? Forgive me, clanfather, but not even a massi-herder living off by himself with a couple of mates would let them run loose. How could he? They don’t know enough not to get into mischief, and then-“ Orth suddenly seemed to realize Lamra was a person of sorts, even if a mate. “-and then they’re, uh, done,” he finished weakly.

  “They die before they learn enough not to get into mischief, you mean, because they drop their budlings,” Reatur said. “Lamra has dropped her budlings and isn’t dead. She can learn. She has time to learn.”

  Orth stood silent. “Hello,” Lamra said again in a soft voice. Orth didn’t answer. He doesn’t like me, Lamra thought-nobody likes me out here, either. She started to go back into the mates’ chambers. With the mates, at least she could remind herself how foolish they were. But grownup males weren’t foolish. She knew that. If they didn’t like her, maybe she wasn’t worth liking.

  But Reatur said, “Come along,” and started down the corridor. She found herself following him; he was the one link with certainty she had left.

  “What’s that?” she exclaimed a little later, pointing into a small room. She had expected to see different things outside the mates’ chambers, but none so different as the-animal? monster? in there.

  Reatur wiggled his eyestalks. “For years-for longer than you’ve been alive-I wondered the same thing. I found it in the hills not far from here. Turns out the humans made it. It’s one of their gadgets, fancier than most.”

  “Oh,” Lamra said. “Then there were humans so long ago.

  I hadn’t thought of that.”

  Reatur looked at her. “I hadn’t, either, not in that way. They certainly never showed themselves till this past spring. But you never can tell with humans.”

  “No, you can’t,” Lamra said, “because if you could, I wouldn’t be here with you now.”

  Males walked by as Lamra stood in the doorway, peering at the human gadget. They peered at her, too. None of them spoke to her, though, or even to Reatur about her. She wondered if they were trying to pretend she didn’t exist. She squeezed her runnerpest. The pressure of it in her hand reminded her she was real.

  Then a male said, “Well, well, what have we here? You must be Lamra.”

  He was talking to her. She widened herself and stammered, “Yyes, I am. Who are you?”

  “I’m Ternat, Reatur’s eldest. Are you, ah, doing well, Lamra?

  You must find this whole business about as odd as we do.”

  Someone who understood! Someone who wasn’t Reatur or a human but understood! So that could happen! “I’m-better now, thank you very much, Ternat.”

  “Good.” Ternat turned an eyestalk toward Reatur. “Why did you decide to bring her out, clanfather?.”

  “The mates were harassing her,” the domain master answered. “Males will, too, I fear, but they’ll have the sense to obey me when I tell them to stop. And they’re grown; they won’t try to hurt her just because she’s different. Or if anyone does, the example I make of him will show the others it’s not a good idea.”

  Lamra widened herself to Reatur this time. “Thank you for thinking ahead and looking out for me, clanfather.”

  “You don’t know how to look out for yourself yet, Lamra. I expect you’ll learn. Some males get to be old and saggy-skinned without ever figuring it out.” Reatur’s eyestalks twitched. “In fact, there’s one of just that sort I’d like you to meet.” He started down the corridor, then paused to wave an encouraging arm to Ternat. “You come, too, eldest. I think you’ll enjoy this.”

  The domain master led Lamra out through an open door. Suddenly she realized no walls were anywhere nearby. She stopped walking and watched herself turn blue. “Is this- outside?” she asked faintly. She felt like a speck of dust floating in the middle of infinite space.

  “Yes, it is,” Reatur said. “What do you think of it?” He did not mention her color.

  “It’s-very big.”

  “So it is. Come on, now; we don’t have far to go.” And off he went, Ternat beside him. Lamra had a
choice of staying frozen while the two people in the world who cared about her went away or of going after them. She took a step, then another and another. They came ever more easily. Reatur went outside all the time, she thought, and it didn’t hurt him. It probably wouldn’t hurt her, either.

  But there was so much of it!

  Several eighteens of males-more eighteens than Lamra could easily count-milled about in a large pen made of branches.

  Others, these carrying spears, stood all around the pen.

  “These are the males from Dordal’s domain that Ternat captured,” Reatur explained. “We’d send them back, but for some reason”-his eyestalks wiggled briefly-“Dordal’s eldest, Grevil, isn’t interested in paying for them.”

  One of the males, a large impressive one near the edge of the pen, was saying in a loud voice, “All this talk of humans”-

  Lamra knew mates who pronounced the word better than he did-“bores me no end. They’re weird things, true enough, but what can they really do? I’m tired of hearing impossible lies and fables.”

  “Hello, Dordal,” Reatur said. “So you want to know what humans can do, eh? Here, let me present you to the mate Lamra. The humans saved her when she dropped her budlings not long after Ternat captured you.”

  Dordal’s eyestalks jounced up and down with humor that was obviously forced. “Tell me another tale, Reatur.” Then one of those moving eyes lit on Lamra. “It is a mate,” he said in surprise. “I’d not have thought even one like you would let them run loose. But why does it look so-tattered?”

  “I told you, Dordal. You listen about as well as you plan. Lamra dropped her budlings, and the humans kept her from dying afterward.”

  “That’s what happened, Dordal,” Lamra agreed. “I was there. I ought to know.” She reached down, pulled wide the still partially open flaps of skin that had once bulged over a budling. Dordal drew back in alarm. Lamra could not see why; only the clamps were still in there, and Sarah had promised that even they could come out in another few days.

  “She’ll live longer than you will, Dordal,” Ternat said cheerfully. “A lot longer, if Grevil doesn’t come up with your ransom soon.”

  “Humans did that?” Dordal muttered. He turned blue, hurried away from the fence. “Then they’re worse monsters than she is!”

  “Don’t let him bother you,” Reatur told Lamra. “He hasn’t any more sense than a runnerpest, you know.”

  Lamra squeezed her toy. “I do know,” she said, unruffled. “Some mates are like that, too, even ones who got older than I am before they started budding. I didn’t think it would be true of males, too, that’s all. Of course, the only male I’ve really known till now is you, Reatur.” For some reason she could not fathom, the domain master and his eldest started laughing at each other. “Stop it! What’s funny?”

  “Never mind, little one,” Reatur said. To Ternat, he went on, “You see why I wanted to keep this one?”

  “Because she can tell you’re brighter than Dordal? A nosver could figure out that much.”

  “Disrespectful-“ But Reatur’s eyestalks were wiggling again. “No, because she thinks about the way things work. Don’t you, Lamra?”

  “I try to,” she said absently. She wasn’t paying too much attention to the domain master. She was too busy looking at the wide, wide world, or rather, at pieces of it. If she examined one thing at a time, the wideness was less oppressive. She pointed. “What’s that?”

  “That’s a lykao shrub,” Reatur said. “Massi like the betlies.”

  “Oh. What’s that?” She pointed in a different direction.

  “That’s an eloc.”

  “Oh. It doesn’t look much like its meat, does it? What’s that?”

  She pointed again.

  But instead of answering, Reatur pointed at her. “That is a mate who looks as though she’ll be wandering around asking questions for the next year, now that she has so many new things to ask questions about.”

  “You’re right,” Lamra said happily.

  “Good heavens,” Irv said. “what happened to your calculator?.”

  Pat held it up. The only thing that held the batteries in was a big piece of duct tape. “Beats me,” she said. “I thought I left the stupid thing on my bed a while ago, but I found it on the floor with the back smashed to hell.”

  “You must have stepped on it without noticing,” Irv said.

  “How do you not notice something that goes crunch?” Pat retorted.

  “Speaking of not noticing,” Louise said, looking up from a tape she was feeding into the computer for transmission back to Earth, “that calculator’s been patched since-“ She thought back. “I guess since the day Lamra had her budlings, the day of the big battle.”

  Pat nodded. “That’s right. I remember having to fix it right after we all came back from Reatur’s castle.”

  “Oh,” Irv said. “Well, hush my mouth.” He made as if to pull his head inside his shirt. Louise pretended to throw the tape cassette at him. He ducked. Everybody in the control room laughed. He spread his hands in defeat. “If that’s when it happened, I give up. None of us will forget anything about that day, not if we live to be ninety.”

  “You better believe it,” Louise said.

  Irv remembered coming back from the castle, too, after Sarah had sped out there to make sure Lamra really was all right. He remembered drawing the privacy curtain to their cubicle afterward, so he and Sarah could celebrate her being alive, Lamra’s being alive, everyone’s being alive. And he remembered a pink-purple not-quite-mark, not-quite-bruise, in the middle of her left buttock.

  At the time, he had thought nothing of it. He’d had other, more immediate things on his mind. But he remembered. And, it occurred to him now, that mark had been just about the size and shape of Pat’s calculator.

  So what had Sarah been doing that involved lying on a calculator, or maybe lying on one and then, say, throwing it to the floor? The only answer Irv came up with was the immediately obvious one.

  And with whom? The answer to that was immediately obvious, too. Sarah liked men, at least in situations where-where one might be apt to lie on a calculator, Irv thought. The joke he tried to make fell flat, though he only told it to himself.

  Another question filled his mind: What the hell am I going to do about this? Unlike the couple that had preceded it, that one had no immediately obvious answer. Confronting Emmett struck him as either useless or suicidal, depending on how much he annoyed the pilot.

  Confronting Sarah-oh, that’d be real good, he said to himself: you’d even have to lie to claim the moral advantage.

  He glanced over at Pat, then at Louise. So far as he knew, she hadn’t done anything she wasn’t supposed to with anybody. But if Emmett had, she was affected, too. “Great,” Irv muttered. Two, count ‘em, two unsanctioned bellybumps and the whole damn crew was involved.

  Or was it just two? On reflection, I decided it probably was. Since the day of the battle, Sarah had stuck a lot tighter to him than had been her habit before. Maybe she had all the same regrets he did. He hoped so, partly for the sake of their marriage and partly just because he wanted someone else to be as confused as he was.

  The psychologists back home had warned about this kind of thing, for exactly these reasons. One of the rare times the psychologists were dead right, Irv thought, so of course nobody paid attention to them.

  He laughed a little, under his breath. It was funny, in a French-movie sort of way. Then he sobered. In French movies, sooner or later everybody found out what was going on, and the fur really started to fly. That could happen here, too, from the same kind of accidental revelation he had just had. He hoped it wouldn’t, but it could.

  “And wouldn’t that be wonderful?”

  He didn’t realize he had spoken more or less out loud until Pat said, “What?”

  “Nothing,” he said firmly. “I was just thinking, it ought to be an interesting flight home.”

  Snow swirled around Ternat. Fall
was here early this year, he thought. Under most circumstances, that would have made him happy; he had no more use for summer heat than Reatur did. Now, though, he was looking for something, and the snow made it hard to find.

  His feet scraped ice. “We’re down to the very bottom of the gorge,” he told the males with him. The frozen patch he was standing on, and others he knew to be nearby, were all that was left of the summer floods.

  “How are we supposed to find the end of a rope in the middle of all this?” grumbled one of his companions. “We could look from now till the next flood comes through and washes us away.”

  “The Skarmer said it would be easy, when their humans talked with ours,” Ternat said. “Of course, the Skarmer have been known to lie.”

  “They’d better not try it now,” said the male who had complained, “not while we still hold their warriors.” The rest of the band growled agreement.

  “Exactly,” Ternat said. “So we have to figure the cursed thing is around here someplace. Let’s spread out a little and see what we can come up with. We have to try to keep each other in sight-we don’t want to go straggling up the side of the gorge by ones and two, as if we were so many of Dordal’s males.”

  Eyestalks twitched. The loud male yelled, “If Dordal’s males act like that, it’s because he went home all by himself.” The laughter grew. When Grevil refused for the third time to ransom the northern domain master, Reatur had released him without payment. The civil war brewing between Dordal and his disloyal eldest showed the wisdom of the move. Ternat wondered if he would have thought of it.

  The males formed a circle, as if they were warriors bracing to meet an attack from all sides. But this circle was wider, to let them search more ground and still stay in touch with one another.

  They moved forward slowly, cautiously. People seldom went down to the bottom of Ervis Gorge, and of course it was never the same from one flood to the next, anyhow. Anything might be here. Ternat was glad he had a spear.

  The male to one side of him suddenly stopped. “What’s that funny noise?” he said, suspicion thick in his voice. Ternat listened, heard only the wind. He went over to the other male, who pointed and said, “It’s coming from over there, I think.”