A World of Difference (12 page)

Katerina had gone back into the tent while Shota worked with the lamp. Now the smaller male reappeared and tossed Shota a pair of cylinders identical, as far as Fralk could see, to the ones that had just come out.

Shota put in the new ones and put the outer skins back on his hands. This time he said, “Ann!” He twisted the two pieces of the lamp together, and it was as if they had never been apart. He clicked the little fingerclaw. The lamp lit. He handed it back to Fralk.

“Thank you,” Fralk said, relieved—Mountenc would be no trouble now.

Shota picked up the cylinders he had removed from the lamp. “These dead,” he said. “Use much, they die, not give—” He ran out of words halfway through his explanation. Fralk got the idea, though. Somehow, light was stored in the little cylinders, and they held only so much. Mountenc had used his lamp all the time, so it failed faster than any other.

“They will
all
do this?” Fralk demanded in horror. The glow of the lamp he was holding caught one of his eyes. He hastily clicked the lamp off—why waste its precious life during the day?

“All,” Shota told him.

He felt as tenuously supported as he had crossing the bridge back from the Omalo domains. He pointed to the cylinders Shota was still holding. “You have more of those, I hope?”

Shota’s yipping laughter had an odd quality to it, one Fralk had not heard before. It sounded somehow ominous. It was. “We have,” Shota said. “What you pay?”

No wonder Shota made him nervous, Fralk thought as the bargaining began. No matter how peculiar the human looked, his stalkless eyes were as firmly on the main chance as Fralk’s own, or even Hogram’s. Fralk knew no higher praise.

*   *   *

The prints emerged from the developer, one after another. As each came out, Sarah Levitt pounced on it like a cat leaping onto a bird. She had been impatiently pacing ever since she put in the roll of film, three hours earlier. “Any mall back home has a shop that’ll run prints out in an hour flat, while I’m spending half my life waiting here,” she complained. “So much for high tech.”

Emmett Bragg was the only other person awake inside
Athena
. “The machines in those shops are about the size of a pickup truck, too,” he said. “They got this one small enough for us to take along. What difference does it make if it’s not quite as fast?”

Another picture came out. Even the roller was too slow to suit Sarah. She tugged the print free. “What if you need a picture sooner than in three hours?” she said.

The question was rhetorical, but he answered it. “Then you ought to think to bring a Polaroid along.”

She glared at him, thinking he was being sarcastic or patronizing or both at once. His face, though, was serious. “You mean it,” she said, surprised.

“Well, sure.” He looked at her across a mental gap perhaps as wide, some ways, as the one separating people from Minervans. “Get yourself good and ready beforehand, and the run you’re making is a piece of cake.”

“But—” Sarah gave up. Emmett was a pilot first and then an astronaut; of course his world revolved around checklists. He even had a point, she supposed. But medicine was less predictable than fighters or spacecraft; things happened all at once instead of sequentially, and so many variables were running around loose together and bouncing off each other.

“Never mind.” Bragg came around to look over her shoulder. She heard him suck in a quick, sharp breath of air. All he said, though, was, “Not pretty.”

“No.” Sarah was almost disappointed that he had not reacted more strongly, before she remembered that he had been through Vietnam. If anything could give him what was close to a doctor’s clinical detachment, that was probably it.

The pictures were anything but pretty. No matter how alien Biyal’s body was, what had happened to it was grimly obvious, and the stark background of the field where Reatur had left it only made it more pitiful.

“This is how they get more Minervans?” Emmett asked.
Then, without waiting for an answer, he went on. “Not much in the way of obstetrics hereabouts, is there?”

“No,” Sarah said again. Then her helpless fury burst out. “There’s not one goddamn bloody bit of obstetrics here, and I don’t know if there ever will be, or even can be. You see the big wounds?” Her finger hovered over them, first on one print, then on another.

“I see ’em,” Bragg said.

“That’s where each baby is attached to the female—attached by a big blood vessel. When the babies reach term, the skin over them splits and they let go—and the mother bleeds out, all over the floor.” She had cleaned her boots several times. Biyal’s blood was still in the crevices.

“Anything you could do to keep it from happening?”

Bragg, Sarah thought, saw straight through to essentials, as with, she reluctantly admitted to herself, his comeback about the Polaroid. Such automatic competence was—daunting. She answered the only way she could. “I don’t know. I doubt it. I wish I could, but I don’t know.”

“You want the chance to try, don’t you?”

Startled, she swung around. He was closer to her than she had thought, well inside her personal space when they were facing each other. “How could you tell?” she asked. She did not pull back right away.

“Way you talk.” The crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes crinkled in amusement, but the eyes themselves were watchful as ever, a flyer’s eyes or, Sarah thought, a marksman’s. Being … targeted like that was faintly unnerving. But Bragg’s voice was light. “You sound like a test pilot going into training with a new machine.”

“I guess I do,” she said, laughing. “Only with this one, I’m not only not sure whether it will fly, but whether it ought to fly.”

The crow’s-feet crinkled a different way. Sarah was not sure how it was different, but it was. “Why shouldn’t it fly?” Bragg kept with her metaphor.

“Because it looks—” For a variety of reasons, Sarah did not feel like going on, but in the end she did. “It looks like Minervan females are just designed—evolved, whatever—to have one set of babies and then die. Pat’s trying to find out if it works that way with the animals here, too, not just the people. And I think the females have those babies young, really young—none of them is much more than half as big as a male.”

Bragg pursed his lips, sucked in air between them. “Doesn’t leave a whole lot of room for women’s lib here, does it?”

“It’s not funny, Emmett,” she said hotly.

“I never said it was.”

It was not an apology, but it was close enough for Sarah to let herself sag wearily as she said, “Suppose I can save a few females while we’re here. What happens then? Will they conceive again, and just die next time? Will they live and not conceive again? If they do that, can the Minervans handle the idea of adult females? I don’t think the question even arises here.”

“Is it your business to turn their whole society upside down?” Bragg asked. “That’s what you’d be doing, sounds like.”

“I know,” she said unhappily. “But is it my business to watch people—intelligent creatures, anyway—die before they have to? And die like this?” She held up the pictures. As if to emphasize her words, another one came out of the developer and lay in its tray, mute evidence of horror.

“Maybe your business is just that. Minervans aren’t people—aren’t humans,” Bragg corrected himself before Sarah could. “We get into enough trouble back home, trying to ram our ways of doing things down our neighbors’ throats. Maybe you ought to just let these folks go to hell—or even heaven—their own way.”

“Maybe I should.” Regretfully, Sarah let it go at that. Bragg, as usual, was straightforward, logical, probably even sensible—and everything in her rebelled at what he was saying. If she ever thought she had a way to keep Minervan females from dying in childbirth, she would try it, and Minervan society would just have to take its lumps.

Bragg started for the galley. “I’m going to get something to munch on,” he said. “Want to come along?”

“Why not? God knows when—or if—Irv’s coming back tonight. He’s slept in Reatur’s castle a couple of times already this week. Even inside a sleeping bag—”

“That’s a cold bed,” Bragg finished for her.

She nodded. “And after looking at these pictures, I don’t think I’ll rest easy tonight, anyhow. I could use the company.”

The pilot gave a thoughtful grunt at that.

In the galley, he chose a packet of smoked, salted almonds. Tearing open the aluminum foil, he said, “I don’t suppose the Minervans have anything like beer.” He sounded wistful rather than hopeful.

“You know perfectly well they don’t,” she said, rehydrating
a tube of apricots—all the food on
Athena
was in free-fall-safe containers. “If you ever head away from the ship, make sure you take rations along. The local water or ice ought to be all right, but don’t try eating anything. You’d regret it.”

“That’s what you’ve been saying,” he agreed, crunching.

“Believe it,” she told him. “The more I find out about biochemistry here, the more toxic it looks.”

“Funny,” Bragg said. “Same basic chemicals, right?” At Sarah’s nod, he went on, “So how come they didn’t work out the same way they did back home?”

She held up a finger so he would wait while she swallowed. “Back home, life got started in the tropical seas. You could call the water here a lot of different things, but tropical’s not any of them.”

“Isn’t that the sad and sorry truth?” Bragg’s drawl thickened, reminding her of where he was from. A moment later, he was focused again. “Different conditions, you’re saying?”

“Exactly. Back on Earth, everything is geared to functioning well at high temperatures. Even animals that live in weather not much better than Minerva’s—polar bears and such—do it by using a lot of insulation to keep warm. But there’s no such thing as warm weather on Minerva, and from the biochemistry there never has been. Instead, all the adaptations have been to meeting the cold on its own terms. Minervan tissues are full of every different kind of antifreeze you can think of. Not tasty.”

“Like drinking your radiator, eh?” Bragg chuckled.

Sarah stayed serious. “Just exactly. The
Viking
results suggested that, but of course the biochemistry experiments were nowhere near done when—when Reatur smashed it.”

“And now it’s in his trophy room. That’s pretty strange.” Bragg shook his head.

“I know.” Sarah nodded slowly. “I was in my senior year when
Viking
landed, and I was heartbroken when the transmissions stopped. I never thought then I’d meet the—person who stopped them.”

“Something to that,” he admitted.

“At the time,” she recalled, “I wanted to kill him.”

“You and NASA both,” Bragg said. “The scientists, anyhow. I was just getting into the program then, and I think the administrators all wanted to give Reatur a big fat kiss, for guaranteeing them all the budget they wanted from then on. They saw farther down the road than the white-coat boys.”

“That makes once,” Sarah said tartly. Not being enamored
of the NASA bureaucracy, she added, “We could have got here three years faster if we’d just piled up all our paperwork into one stack and walked from Earth.”

Bragg let out a loud bray of laughter, then half choked trying to swallow more. “Got to keep quiet,” he reminded himself. “Everybody’s asleep. Now that we’ve got a world making day and night for us again, no more sleeping by schedule—naturally, soon as I’d finally got used to it.”

Sarah looked at her watch. “Half past two,” she said. “I didn’t know it was
that
late.” She yawned, almost as if by reflex. “Even the extra forty minutes a day we get here won’t help much. Let’s go to bed.”

“Best offer I’ve had today so far.”

Sarah had been turning away. Now she glanced back at him sharply. His tone had been easy, but he was watching her, too. Marksman’s eyes, she thought again, discomfited.

“To sleep,” she said, ready to be really irritated if he made something of that. He didn’t. But as she walked out of the galley, she still imagined she felt his gaze on her back. She did not turn around again; she was just as glad not to know for sure.

The sun
skipped in and out from behind clouds. Ternat felt its warmth as he slowly walked south, back toward his father’s castle from the domain of Dordal. Summer really was on its way, he thought. The warm weather fit in well with his sour mood.

Reatur had said Dordal was an idiot, the domain-master’s eldest remembered. If anything, that had been generous of Reatur. Dordal cared not a runnerpest voiding for the threat from across the Ervis Gorge. His eyestalks had wiggled until Ternat thought—hoped—they would fall off. Reatur’s eldest was not used to being laughed at. He did not care for it.

He did not care for anything about Dordal’s domain. Its crops were scrubby, and of varieties he did not like. Of its meat animals, the massi were too fat and the eloca too thin. Half the herders chewed ompass root—good luck to them if those scrawny eloca ever got loose and started running all over the landscape.

Maybe ompass root was Dordal’s problem, too, Ternat thought. His hands closed as he disagreed with himself: he would have smelled the fumes from the root. Dordal was a happy fool all by himself.

He had not even cared to learn about humans, though the bellow of their flying house had been heard in his domain. Some quiet questioning among the younger males in Dordal’s castle had made that plain to Ternat. But Dordal dismissed the roar as “a freak storm” and could not imagine humans as anything but ugly people.

Ternat almost sympathized with that. Dordal was plenty ugly himself.

The sun came out again and stayed out. The weather got warmer and warmer—easily warm enough to melt ice, Ternat thought. Yes, it was shaping up to be a miserably hot year. The humans might enjoy it—they were and somehow stayed hotter than anything alive had a right to be—but the excess melt it would cause would only make trouble and work for people.

As if thinking of humans were enough to summon them into his presence, Ternat saw a couple of their traveling contraptions leaning against a large rock. Ternat envied them those gadgets. He wished he had one, but his legs were both too short and too many for the thing to do him any good. But the round legs the gadget had—and, come to think of it, the humans’ flying house, too—looked to be better for travel than skids, at least when snow was not drifted deep.