A World of Difference (17 page)

For the moment, though, Marquard was scrambling over neither pragmatically valuable igneous rock nor awe-inspiring conglomerates. This layer was just rather weathered yellow-brown sandstone. He got out his geologist’s hammer and took several small specimens.

He grinned wryly as he wrote up a data tag for each one. If he had taken all the specimens he wanted,
Athena
would have ended up too heavy to get them back to Earth.

His eyes flicked over an oddly shaped shadow, and he bent down for a closer look. Only remembering that he would alarm the Minervans above kept him from shouting out loud. Finding a fossil was always good for a rush.

The thing was not very big and was built on the same radial pattern dominant all over Minerva. Aside from that, it didn’t look like anything with which Frank was familiar. No reason it should, he thought; it was a couple of hundred million years old if it was a day. Maybe Pat would have some idea of what it was related to.

He photographed the fossil in situ. Then, using hammer and chisel, he freed the stone in which it was embedded from the canyon wall. He was glad it was small. That way he could get it all out, which would make his wife happy.

He wondered what Pat would have done had he stumbled over the Minervan equivalent of, say,
Brachiosaurus
. He had a picture of her holding a gun on the rest of
Athena
’s crew and as many locals as possible until they dug out the whole specimen. When Pat set her mind on something, she generally got it.

She would have nothing to complain about this time, he thought as he wrapped the fossil in bubbled plastic and stuck it in the bag he carried on his belt just for such lucky finds. Minervan fossils, Frank thought fondly, were the most fun Pat had out of bed.

Tolmasov pulled off the headphones—both the static of the scrambled transmission and Lopatin’s furious shouts were giving his ears a workout. “Calmly, Oleg Borisovich, calmly,” he urged.

“The devil’s grandmother take calmly,” Lopatin yelled across the kilometers from
Tsiolkovsky
.

Tolmasov scowled. When a KGB man started calling on the devil and his relations, something really had gone wrong somewhere.
The oath was a surer sign of trouble than Lopatin’s using the scrambler, as a matter of fact: give a security man a scrambled circuit and of course he will use it.

“At least stop swearing long enough to tell me what you’re swearing about,” the pilot suggested.

“The Americans, those deceiving sons of—”

“What about them?” Tolmasov broke in sharply, though Lopatin seemed ready to go on in that vein for some time yet. “What about the Americans?” the colonel repeated, letting the snap of command enter his voice.

“Sergei Konstantinovich, the Americans deceitfully concealed the true location where their
Viking
came down. When
Athena
landed east of Jötun Canyon, it was no navigational error. They knew where their spacecraft was, and went there. All the data they published over the last decade and a half were false, and deliberately false at that.”

Tolmasov rubbed his chin as he thought. “How can you be certain of this?” The whole thing struck him as a ploy more in character for the KGB than the Americans, who were usually too naive to come up with such ideas.

“We have people in NASA,” Lopatin reminded him. Tolmasov would have been surprised if the Americans did not know that, too. As if reading his mind, Lopatin went on, “No, Sergei Konstantinovich, this is not disinformation fed our folk by the CIA.
Athena
’s crew has sent word back to Houston that they are in contact with the very male who wrecked the
Viking
. Do you think any navigational error would have been likely to put them so precisely on the spot?”

“
Nyet,
” Tolmasov said flatly. More to himself than to the KGB man, he mused, “How best to use the information?”

“Beat them over the heads with it,” Lopatin answered at once. “The American hypocrites always embarrass us for not blabbing everything to the heavens as they do. Now we can pay them back, and let us see how they enjoy it.”

“You know, Oleg Borisovich, I like that.” Tolmasov could not keep the surprise from his voice; he was not used to liking Lopatin’s suggestions. He let out an anticipatory laugh. “I will enjoy seeing the good Brigadier Bragg embarrassed. Till this moment, I had not thought such a thing possible.”

What I really would enjoy, Tolmasov thought, is seeing Bragg’s fighter in the center of my radar screen, and hearing the tone that tells me my missile has locked on to his tailpipe. He
sighed. Even in a fantasy, it was all too easy to imagine Bragg somehow evading him. The man was good.

The colonel blinked. Lopatin had said something, and he had missed it. “I’m sorry, Oleg Borisovich. I was wool-gathering.”

“I said, is Katerina Fyodorovna still occupied with her researches at the town? Perhaps she should return to
Tsiolkovsky
for a time, to perform data analysis and transmit some concrete results to Moscow.”

“I will inquire, Oleg Borisovich,” Tolmasov said blandly. “Out.” He knew how delighted Katerina was with Lopatin.

When the rover came back, Tolmasov decided, he would send it off to
Tsiolkovsky
with Katerina aboard. She would want to examine Rustaveli and Bryusov before she left.

The colonel’s mouth twitched wryly, and he sighed. Ever since the rover had left, he had had the only woman on this part of the planet all to himself—and made love with her exactly once. They were both too busy.

Sighing again, Tolmasov killed the scrambler circuit. He switched frequencies to the one the Soviets and Americans used to talk back and forth. He felt his blood heat. Dueling with Emmett Bragg brought its own excitement.

Reatur walked down the spiral ramp into the cellars. The flashlights he carried in two of his hands gave much more light than the ice globes full of glitterers set into the wall every so often. The domain-master was glad to be carrying the twin bright beams. More than once, he had almost stumbled off the edge of the ramp and reached the bottom faster than he wanted to.

Come to that, the glitterers were not shedding as much light as they should have. Reatur made a mental note to get after a couple of the younger males to feed them more often. Nothing, he thought resentfully, ever got done unless he turned an eyestalk toward it himself.

The cellars might have been dim, but at least they were cool. Down half a male’s height below the surface, there was always ice in the ground—never any risk of the cellar collapsing, as there was in very hot weather with the parts of the castle above-ground. If it weren’t for the lighting problem, Reatur would have been just as happy living underground. He did not like summer.

“Never hurts to have something to complain about,” he said aloud. “Especially something I can’t help.” He listened to his voice echoing back from the gloomy corridors.

There was no help for breaking out the stone tools, either, not
any more. As the weather grew warm, small pieces of worked ice like hoe blades got soft and brittle and started to melt. So, unfortunately, did swordblades. Hardly anyone made war during high summer. Swinging weapons of stone and timber was usually reckoned more trouble than it was worth.

Usually. Reatur kept remembering Fralk’s threats. Nobody could tell what the Skarmer would do. They were so sneaky, the domain-master thought, they likely could not even tell themselves. He paused. Did that mean they took themselves by surprise?

He chased the thought around his arms a couple of times, then gave it up as a bad job. The miserable Skarmer would do whatever they did, and he would deal with it. That was what a domain-master was for. A domain-master was also for making sure the crops stayed tended no matter what the Skarmer did. A fine thing it would be if those wretches stayed on their own side of Ervis Gorge and the domain went hungry because everyone had forgotten the crops from worry over them!

Reatur got to the threshold of the chamber where the stone farm tools had been stored after good weather had returned last fall. He shone one of the flashlights into the underground room.

The furious hoot he let out rang through the cellar. Turning the other flashlight on himself, he saw he was as yellow as the sun, and no wonder! He had every right to be furious. The tools, which should have been grouped in neat rows by type, were dumped in a higgledy-piggledy pile.

The domain-master stormed up the ramp. Males who spied his yellow color got out of his path as fast as they could. He let them go until he saw Ternat. Almost literally by main force, he took his eldest back down to the cellar with him.

“This was your job!” the domain-master shouted. “Look at the mess you made of it! Did you let a herd of massi run through here, or what? Curse it, Lamra could have done better than this—eighteen times better! How do you propose to run this domain one day if you can’t do the simplest things properly?” He turned the second flashlight on his eldest, to see how he was taking it.

Ternat’s eyestalks drooped with shame, but he was as yellow as Reatur. “I’m going to tear an arm off Gurtz, or maybe two, that worthless mate-budling of a nosver. He said he would see it was taken care of, and sounded as though he knew how to do it. After a while, none of the stone tools were left above ground, so I assumed he’d dealt with things.”

As Ternat’s fury grew, Reatur’s abated. He let air hiss out through his breathing-pores. “So that’s how it was, then?”

“By the first Omalo bud, yes, clanfather. That Gurtz! I’ll melt his—”

“Yes, do, but he’s taught you a lesson, too, hasn’t he, eldest?” Reatur watched Ternat’s eyestalks lengthen and shrink in surprise and confusion. “Simple enough—if you give a male something to do, always check to make sure he’s done it. You may sleep less on account of it, but you’ll sleep better.”

Ternat thought that over. He slowly began to regain his usual color. “I think you’ve found truth here, clanfather. Yes, I will remember. And now,” he added grimly, “I’ll go and deal with Gurtz.”

“Don’t leave him too sore to work,” was all Reatur said. “After all, having made this mess, who better than he to set it right again? And I will want it set right again, and soon. If we lose any time cultivating the crops because of Gurtz’s blundering, what you do to him won’t be enough. I’ll settle the slacker myself, even if he is a bud I planted.”

“I’ll tell him you said so.”

“Yes, do.”

Reatur and Ternat went up the ramp together, the domain-master lighting the way. While his eldest hurried off to deal with the luckless Gurtz, Reatur went to check on how the infant male budded from Biyal was doing.

“He will be a fine one, clanfather,” said the budling-keeper, a male named Sittep. “He is the youngest here, of course, but already tries to take food away from males a quarter of a season older than he is.”

“Bring him out. Let me turn three eyes on him.”

Sittep returned with the young male a few moments later. Wriggling in his grasp, it was blue with fear. It tried to bite him, then voided on the two hands that were holding it. “A spirited budling,” Sittep said. His eyestalks gave the slow wiggle of resigned amusement.

“Yes,” Reatur said, admiring the budling-keeper’s patience. He stepped closer to give the budling the careful examination he had promised. It lashed out with the three sharp fingerclaws of one tiny hand. The domain-master jerked an eyestalk back just in time. “He moves quickly enough, that’s certain. You said he’s been eating well?”

“Yes, clanfather—nothing shy about him at all, as you’ve seen. Usually, with the very small ones, I have to make sure they get
their fair share, but this one has no troubles there. He’s fast, he’s strong—”

“Good. We’ll set him to running down vermin in the halls,” Reatur said. Sittep’s eyestalks started to quiver again, then stopped, as if he were not quite sure the domain-master was joking. “Never mind,” Reatur told him. “Seeing the new budling reminds me life goes on, that’s all. With the humans’ being here tying everyone’s eyestalks in knots, sometimes that’s hard to remember.”

“I understand, clanfather. The combination of the humans and the Skarmer would be plenty to make anyone worry,” Sittep said sympathetically.

“Aye, sometimes it all seems too much—” Reatur broke off, embarrassed to have shown his mind so clearly to one of his males. Not even Ternat should have to listen to him maundering on so, let alone the budling-keeper, whose biggest responsibility was making sure his charges did not kill one another before they understood that they were not supposed to.

Just then, the budling did managed to break loose from Sittep. It scuttled around like a berserk runnerpest until the budling-keeper and Reatur managed to catch it again. In that undignified process, it clawed Reatur twice and bit him once.

“With your permission, clanfather, I’ll put him back now,” Sittep said, holding the squirming, squalling budling a good deal tighter than he had a moment before.

“Go ahead.” Reatur was still working the hand the budling had bitten, trying to squeeze out the pain. “You’d think the idiot little thing would know who’d planted its bud,” he grumbled. “Or at least that you and I were the same sort of creature it was, not a couple of clemor out to run it down and eat it.”

“It’s still very young,” the budling-keeper reminded him.

“I know, I know.” All the same, Reatur thought as Sittep returned the budling to its chamber, the foolish creature should have had more sense—but then, Biyal had never had much sense, even for a mate. Somehow Reatur was sure the budlings from Lamra, male and mates, would behave better.

He could only see if he was right, though, after Lamra was dead. He hated the idea of that, more than he had for any other mate he had known. Air hissed out through his breathing-pores. Even without the humans, he would have had plenty to keep his eyestalks all knotted up.

*   *   *

“The boats are coming along excellently, clanfather,” Fralk told Hogram. “We have plenty of workers to put frames together and stretch hides over them. As you foretold, the prospect of work has drawn males from many straggling farms.” A little flattery never hurt, Fralk thought, especially when what he was saying also happened to be true.