A World of Difference (26 page)

“Because I worry about you, too, Katya.”

Her eyes, challenging a moment before, softened. “Sweet of you, Shota, but truly, no need. I’m hardly even sore anymore.”

“A bruise is a bruise,” Rustaveli shrugged. “Where it comes from is something else again.”

“Sergei went on the same way.” Katerina tossed her head. “It came from my own clumsiness, nowhere else—I tripped over my own feet and fell against the edge of a lab table. Lucky I didn’t break a rib.”

If she was dissembling, Rustaveli thought, she had talent to go on stage. “I begin to think I have made a fool of myself,” he said slowly. He grinned. “Not for the first time, I fear.”

He did not win an answering smile from Katerina. “Will you please talk sense?” she snapped. “Did you think we would go through the whole mission without accidents? Even if you did, hasn’t Valery’s arm taught you better?”

“Without accidents, of course not. Without other things—”

“What other things?” She was starting to sound angry.

Tolmasov, Rustaveli realized, must have been so circumspect that Katerina had no idea what he was driving at. That made sense, in case Voroshilov’s accusation happened to be wrong. Rustaveli had not thought it was; it fit too well with what he knew—well, what he thought he knew—of Lopatin.

The Georgian sighed. He wished he had been more discreet himself. Actually, he wished he had kept his mouth shut. But since he hadn’t, he had to ask it straight out: “Then the
chekist
truly did not hit you?”

Her eyes widened—suddenly, he saw, all the roundabout
questions fit together. “Oleg? No. He is …” Her grimace made her lack of enthusiasm plain, but she went on. “In his own way, he has discipline, too, Shota Mikheilovich. What he might like to do, I would sooner not think. But he values the mission, and holds himself in; one can tell such things.” She spoke calmly, dispassionately, then grew more urgent. “I value the mission, too; I want no trouble rising over me. Do you understand, Shota?”

“
Da,
” Rustaveli said, a little regretfully. “But you’d better let Yuri know. He is not thinking kindly thoughts of Oleg Borisovich Lopatin.”

“Yuri? He is so quiet, one never knows what he thinks. If he were to let loose of his temper—and isn’t Lopatin due up here tonight? Yuri!” she said again, in an entirely different tone of voice. “
Bozhemoi!
” She turned and ran in the direction of the tent as if she had forgotten Rustaveli was beside her.

And so, he thought as he watched her sidestep Minervans, she likely had. He supposed he should have felt virtuous, having saved the mission from what might well have been serious trouble. He did not feel virtuous. He was thinking of his grandfather instead. The old bandit was dead now, but he would have boxed Rustaveli’s ears if he ever found out his grandson had saved a KGB man a beating.

The Georgian laughed and swatted himself lightly on the ear-flaps of his cap. Penance paid, he followed Katerina back toward the tent.

The noise was so loud, it did not let Frank Marquard think. A few days before, he had looked down into Jötun Canyon, observed the flood, taken some pictures, and gone back to
Athena
conscious of nothing more than a job well done. Now he was a half a mile from the edge of the canyon, but the roar and boom coming up out of it were enough to stun. And the flood was just beginning.

He lifted the flaps of his cap and stuck in earplugs. They helped, but only somewhat. As at a rock concert, he still felt the noise through his feet, through his skin, and through his soft palate when he opened his mouth to breathe.

And with the earplugs in place, he could not talk to Enoph. He took them out and tried to yell above drumroll and thunder. “How you stand noise?”

The Minervan spoke through the din rather than over it, not raising his voice but talking more slowly so each word came out
distinctly. “It happens every year,” he said. “We can get used to it or we can go mad. Getting used to it is easier.”

“I suppose so.” Frank tried speaking as Enoph had and found to his surprise that it worked. He had heard stories of men talking in normal tones under factory racket but had never believed them. Now he did.

The vibration of the ground grew more severe as he got closer and closer to the edge of the canyon, until it was like walking during a moderate earthquake. Being a Los Angeles native, Frank had done that more times than he cared to remember. Here, though, the shaking went on and on. He consoled himself by thinking that anything that could have shaken loose would have done so millions of years before. That reassured the rational part of him; the rest still wanted to find a doorway to stand in.

He crawled the last few feet to the edge of the canyon, not wanting to be pitched over it if a slab of ice or a boulder happened to smash into the side especially hard. As he looked down, though, awe cast away fear.

The mist above the waters was thick and sparkling, like a sun-dappled fogbank viewed from above. That was exactly what it was, Frank realized. It would have concealed a great deal on Earth but it could not hide the Minervan floods.

Water thundered, roared, bellowed, cast itself upward off obstacles or off itself, and flung iceberg fragments and great stones into the air with mindless abandon. Frank squeezed off several pictures, knowing none of them could convey the sheer scale of what he was seeing. It was like watching gray whales mate in deep water. He had done that once, off the California coast.

He stuck an infrared filter on his lens. After that, the color values on his shots went south, but they did a better job of piercing the mist to show the watery fury that rampaged beneath.

“It grows steadier later in the season,” Enoph said. “More of the gorge is filled, and a more regular flow replaces this first rush of water.”

Marquard nodded; that was as computer models had predicted. The models had even warned of the mist above the water. What they had not done, could not do, was prepare him for the wonder the spectacle brought.

“Flood ever rise to top of canyon, spill out?” he asked. The computer had said that might happen, if everything went exactly right—exactly wrong, he supposed, from the Minervans’ point of view.

Enoph turned blue with fear at the very idea. “You humans have terrible thoughts! What would be left of a domain?” Not much, Frank thought, not when the main local building stone was ice. For Enoph’s sake, he was glad the simulation had been on the extravagant side.

The geologist took two more pictures, which finished off the roll. He decided against reloading; better to wait a couple of days and come back. That would tell him something about how fast the water was rising in the canyon.

He walked back toward
Athena
. He wanted to feed the roll into the developer now, so that he could see how it came out. When he got back to the ship, he found one roll processing and another in the
IN
bin with a Post-it note from Sarah attached: “Bump yours ahead of this and you die!” Knowing Sarah, she meant it. Frank sighed and stuck his film behind the other waiting roll.

He heard his wife’s voice from the front cabin. No one else seemed to be aboard. Even Emmett and Louise, who hardly ever went away, were off doing something or other with Reatur; he had seen them by the castle. Frank grinned to himself. Such chances were not to be wasted. He walked forward, whistling to let Pat know he was coming.

She turned around in her seat, waved so he could tell she saw him, then went back to speaking Russian. “I had hoped the creature lived on your side of the canyon, too, Shota Mikheilovich, or had relatives there, but if not, not.
Athena
out.”

Rustaveli also signed off. With a discontented grunt, Pat complained to her husband. “He doesn’t have any idea about what’s related to what. He’s just thinking in terms of this species or that, not genera or families or orders. He’ll end up hauling all his data home so the bigwigs in Moscow can try to make sense of it. Why’d he bother to come?”

“He doesn’t have the computers we do,” Frank answered. He scratched his head, trying to remember what she had told him a couple of days before. Succeeding made him smile. “If he’d found that little burrowing thing, he’d never have guessed it was related to the one the Minervans call a runnerpest. They don’t look anything alike.”

Pat smiled, too. “Oh, you were listening after all. You’re right. That burrower is so adapted to underground life that without computer extrapolation of what its ancestors used to look like there’d be no telling which order it belonged to.”

“Mm-hmm.” Frank paused a moment. “Quiet in here.”

“It is, isn’t it?” Pat’s gaze swung back to him. “Is that a hint?”

“More than a hint, you might say. Call it an invitation.”

Something passed over Pat’s face and was gone before Frank was sure he had seen it. Then her eyes went to the floppy she had been using while she talked with her Russian opposite number. Finally, though, she shrugged and said, “Why not?” Not the most enthusiastic response in the world, Frank thought, but it would do. He slipped his arm around her waist as she got up. They walked back to their cubicle.

Afterward, he leaned up on his elbow in the narrow bottom bunk. Pat lay beside him, not moving, not talking, looking up at the foam rubber mattress pad over their heads. “All right?” he asked, more hesitantly than he had expected.

“I guess I’m just tired,” she said, shrugging again. Bare as she was, that should have been enchanting. Somehow it was not. She’d said that more than once lately, times when she’d been less responsive than he had hoped. And she still did not look at him.

He thought for a while. Over the years, he had grown used to pleasing Pat and pleasing himself thereby. He took things as he found them, but this failure was something he would sooner not find again. “Anything I can do to help?” he said hesitantly.

Now her eyes turned his way. “This is the first time you’ve offered that,” she said. Curiosity mingled with—accusation?—in her voice.

“Didn’t think I needed to before.”

“Hmm.” She was studying him as dispassionately as if he were one of her specimens. “Well, maybe.” Her tone was judicious, too.

“Is that ‘well maybe I didn’t think so’ or ‘well maybe I can’?” He pantomimed the confusion he was feeling.

She laughed. Now the jiggles that produced excited Frank. He could not have said why, unless it was relief at no longer being studied like a runnerpest. “Well, maybe”—she paused wickedly—“a little of both.” Her hand took his and guided it.

“Better?” he asked some time later. She bit him on the arm. It wasn’t the answer he had looked for, but he did not complain.

Fralk and Hogram let thunder wash over them as they watched the flood. A boulder the size of Hogram’s castle slammed into the side of Ervis Gorge. The ground quivered like the skin of a massi with an itch. “You propose to send our boat through
that?
” the domain-master demanded, stabbing a fingerclaw at the chaos far below.

Invading the Omalo lands wasn’t
my
idea, Fralk wanted to say. He had too much sense to yield to temptation. Hogram appreciated frankness, but he did not appreciate males showing how clever they were at his expense.

“The flood is still new, clanfather,” the younger male said carefully, “and is sweeping along the debris that has accumulated in the gorge since last summer. It will grow calmer.”

“It had better,” Hogram snapped. He turned an eyestalk from the flood to Fralk. “How would that runnerpest in the toy boat you showed me have fared if you dropped half my roof on it, eh? That’s what the trash in the water will be doing to the boats trying to go across, isn’t it?”

“I suppose there may be a few accidents.”

“Accidents?” Hogram echoed. “Is that all you can say? Accidents? Can you be sure any of these
boats”—
the way he stressed the word emphasized that it was foreign—“will get across Ervis Gorge at all? Or will the folk far north of here, picking corpses from the gorge after the flood subsides, be surprised at how many foolish males got themselves killed in the water?”

Anger burst inside Fralk. “Clanfather, are you pulling in your eyestalks? If so, tell me plainly, so I can free the males who are building boats for more productive duty. I also suggest that you release your males from weapons training, if you do not intend to use us as warriors.”

After being so blunt, Fralk wondered whether Hogram would turn all eyestalks toward or away from him. How many males, he thought, could claim total rejection by their own domain-master and his Omalo counterpart? It was not a distinction Fralk craved.

But Hogram, with the perspective age brings, was not infuriated by the younger male’s presumption. If he was amused, he was too canny to let his eyestalks show it. “We must press on,” he said. “Think of the profit wasted if we let that labor go for naught. But I still turn blue whenever I think of trusting myself to one of the contraptions those males are building.”

You
won’t be in one of them, Fralk thought. But that was not something even he dared say aloud. Instead he answered, “Clanfather, we will succeed. The Skarmer will be the only great clan to straddle a floodgorge. One day, our domains will fill the eastern lands.”

Hogram’s eyestalks quivered now. “May you prove right. That day, however, is not one I will live to see, nor you, either. Worry about planting our first bud, not the ones that may spring from it.”

“As you say, clanfather.” No denying that Hogram made sense. But Fralk’s ambition ran further than he would admit to anyone, especially to the domain-master, whose position only made his already suspicious nature more so. If Fralk established a new domain on the far side of Ervis Gorge, and if his descendants kept pushing back the Omalo and setting up new domains of their own, might they not eventually prefer to style themselves after their first domain-master?

Great clan Fralk. The young male had repeated that to himself often enough, when he was sure no other male could hear. He liked the sound of it.

“Hello,
Athena
. Houston here.” Irv Levitt thumbed on the recorder. The mission controller back home would not pause for acknowledgment, not with back-and-forth transmission time near twenty minutes. Irv was about to go on about his business—most of what Houston had to say was Emmett Bragg’s problem, not his—when the controller, as if reading his mind, continued. “We have some new instructions for you, Irv.” His voice came in scratchy across the millions of miles but was perfectly understandable.