A World of Difference (31 page)

“Neither do I, but Hogram does,” Reatur said. “The humans’ magic or machine or whatever it was let me talk with him, don’t forget. He thinks he can cross. If he didn’t, why would he try to turn my domain topsy-turvy?”

“Who can tell why a Skarmer does anything?” Garro said scornfully.

“Hogram is sly, but not stupid,” Reatur said. “I wish he were.” The domain-master paused a while in thought and then gave his orders. “Find Ternat. Tell him to march eight—no, nine—eighteens of males into Dordal’s domain. They are to take more animals than were stolen from us, and to bring them back to our land. Tell him to move fast, too; no one knows when the Skarmer are coming, and to beat them back we may need every male we can find.”

Garro repeated the orders until Reatur was satisfied he had them all. Then the younger male hurried away. Reatur watched him go. He wished Dordal’s eldest would overthrow him, not the sort of thing a domain-master often wished even on an enemy—such wishes had a way of coming back to bite the male who made them.

Reatur abruptly repented of his wish, not because he feared overthrow—Ternat was the best eldest a domain-master could hope for—but because Dordal’s replacement might prove competent. Having a competent domain-master on his northern border was not something Reatur needed.

Having an incompetent one there was quite bad enough.

What he really ought to do one of these years, he told himself, was topple Dordal and install a loyal male of his own budding—someone like Enoph, say—as domain-master up there. That would solve the problem once for all, or at least until Enoph’s eldest succeeded him, which presumably would be Ternat’s problem and not Reatur’s.

And if I set Enoph in Dordal’s place, Reatur asked himself, how is that any different from Hogram’s wanting to put Fralk in mine? For one thing, he thought, Enoph and Dordal were both from the first Omalo bud, not foreigners like the Skarmer. For another, Reatur would be doing the overthrowing, not having it done to him.

He doubted whether Dordal would appreciate that part of the argument. Too bad for Dordal, one of these years.

His plans for doing unpleasant things to his neighbor melted as he saw a male hurrying toward him in a way that could only mean something else had gone wrong. He wanted to turn all six of his eyestalks away from the male, to pretend the fellow did not exist. That, sadly, was not what being domain-master was about. “What is it, Apbajur?” he asked, letting the air sigh through his breathing-pores.

“We’re beginning to get enough melting on the northern walls of the castle to be a nuisance, clanfather,” Apbajur told him.

Reatur sighed again. That was a nuisance every summer, and in a hot one—as this one was looking to be—a major nuisance. “We’ll just have to start spreading dirt, I suppose,” the domain-master said. A good layer of dirt on the roof and walls helped shield the ice beneath from the heat of the sun.

“I thought so, too, clanfather,” Apbajur said. He was a master water-molder and ice-carver, and had a good feel for such matters. “But I wanted to get your permission before I started pulling males from the fields for the work.”

“You’d best do it,” Reatur said, though he felt like cursing instead. First, males to watch Ervis Gorge for the Skarmer, then more to deal with Dordal, and now this. The crops would suffer because of it. Of course, they would suffer a good deal more if the Skarmer invasion succeeded or if Dordal’s males kept raiding, and Reatur did not want to live in a castle falling down around him.

Taken by itself, any one thing was always easy to justify. Weighing that one thing against all the others going on at the same time, though, was not so simple.

Two males came rushing toward Reatur from different directions. One was shouting, “Clanfather, the eloca are—!”

At the same time, the other cried, “Clanfather, the nosver have got into the—!”

Reatur felt like pulling in all his eyestalks and pretending to be a stump. He might have done so, had he thought Onditi and Venots—or even one of them—would let him get away with it. Sadly, he knew better.

“One at a time, please,” he said wearily. Onditi had got to him before Venots, so the domain-master pointed to him first. “What have the cursed, miserable, stupid eloca gone and done now?”

*   *   *

“Are you sure you should have brushed Tolmasov off that
way?” Irv asked Emmett Bragg after listening to the tape of the conversation between the two pilots.

Bragg bristled. “Damn straight I’m sure.” When he swore, Irv knew, he was both angry and in earnest. “Long as the Russians keep to their side of Jötun Canyon, none o’ their business what we do over here. Besides, if they even think we’ve given guns to the Minervans here, maybe they’ll get serious about keeping Hogram’s gang on their own side where they belong.”

“Or maybe they’ll give them guns, too, to keep things balanced,” Irv pointed out.

“Hadn’t thought of that.” Bragg frowned, but his face cleared after a moment. “I don’t believe it. Tolmasov’s not that dumb. No matter what he thinks of us, no way he’d let the natives have the drop on him. I wouldn’t, not in his long johns.”

“I suppose not,” Irv said. “If we started shooting at each other here, it could even touch off a war back home.”

“Yeah.” Bragg nodded. “Like I said, Tolmasov’s not that dumb. But he’s no friend of ours, either—good for his digestion to get stirred up every once in a while. Let him stew.”

“All right, Emmett.” Somewhat reassured, Irv went back to work. He had spoken his piece, and Emmett hadn’t gone along. Fair enough. Bragg’s judgment had been good so far, he told himself. Likely it was this time, too. He didn’t necessarily trust the Russians that far himself, either.

Tolmasov listened to the tape from Earth once more. He shook his head. He wasn’t used to getting orders this simple. “ ‘Use your own best judgment regarding firearms for the Minervans,’ ” he repeated. “Who would have thought Moscow could be so generous?”

“And what is your best judgment, O mighty boyar?” Shota Rustaveli asked.

“If I were a boyar, my best judgment would be to clip the tongue of such an impudent subject,” Tolmasov retorted, but he could not help smiling. Rustaveli reveled in being impossible. More seriously, the pilot went on, “My best judgment is to be very sorry that I have to tell Fralk my domain-masters will not let us sell them any Kalashnikovs.”

Rustaveli wore gloves, even inside the tent. He clapped just the same. “That is an excellent best judgment to have, I think.”

“
Da,
” Katerina said, looking up from a microscope.

Oleg Lopatin did not say anything. His wide shoulders jerked in a shrug. Tolmasov did not think Lopatin was pleased. He did
not much care. If the KGB man knew what was good for him, he would follow orders. To give Lopatin his due, something the pilot did only reluctantly, he had been obeying Tolmasov with military exactness. Let him keep right on doing it, Tolmasov thought as he went out to find Fralk.

As he explained himself, he watched the Minervan turn yellow. He had seen them do that among themselves, but rarely at him: humans and Minervans tried to stay on best behavior around each other. He knew it was not a good sign.

“Your domain-masters do not understand that we need these rifles,” Fralk said. “They are far away. You are here. Let us buy a rifle, and the success we have with it will float above their orders as ice floats on water.”

“I am sorry.” Tolmasov spread his hands. “Even though they are far, I cannot disobey my domain-masters any more than you can Hogram.”

“Cannot?” Fralk said, now resembling nothing so much as an outraged banana with a great many arms. “Will not, I think, comes nearer the truth.” An outraged sarcastic banana, Tolmasov thought. He shook his head to try to drive away the mental image—this was what he got for spending so much time with Rustaveli.

The real problem was that Fralk had it right. Tolmasov did not like lying to the Minervan. He did not hesitate, either. “Do you go against Hogram’s wishes as soon as he cannot see you? My domain-masters would punish my disobedience when we got home.”

“This is your final word?” Fralk demanded.

“I am sorry, but it is.”

“You will be sorrier.” Had Fralk been a human, he would have turned on his heel and stomped off. Instead he averted all his eyestalks from Tolmasov as he left. That got the same message across, the pilot thought glumly.

He walked through one of the market areas that ringed Hogram’s town. If he shut his eyes, the racket there reminded him of the little stalls in Smolensk—and every other Russian town—where farm women sold city housewives the beets and chickens they raised on their private plots of land. Minervan males’ high voices only made the resemblance closer.

Two males came up to Tolmasov, one on either side. One carried a spear, the other a Soviet-made hatchet. “Please go back to your cloth house now, human,” the male with the spear said. It did not sound like a request.

“Why?” Tolmasov asked. Doubting whether either male spoke any Russian past the word
human
, he went on in their language. “Many times I, people like me come here. Not do harm, not bother Hogram’s males. Just look. Why not look now?”

“Because Fralk demands it, in Hogram’s name,” that male replied. He lifted the spear to block the pilot’s path. “Go back to your cloth house now.”

“I go,” Tolmasov said, thinking Fralk had wasted no time in starting his petty revenge.

When he got back to the tent, he found the revenge was not petty. More armed males surrounded the orange nylon bubble. One of them was laying down the law to Oleg Lopatin—the Minervans had never heard of the KGB. Lucky them, Tolmasov thought.

Then he got close enough to hear what the Minervan was saying, and things abruptly stopped being even a little bit funny. “You strange creatures have interesting devices, and for their sake we have let you do and go as you would,” the male told Lopatin. “Now you will not share one of these devices with us, so why should we keep extending to you the privileges you earned only with good behavior?”

He sounded like a soldier repeating a memorized message. Tolmasov suspected that was partly because Lopatin’s grasp of the Skarmer language was still weak, and he would not have understood everything on the first try.

“Only want to go out, look,” Lopatin protested.

“You strange creatures have interesting devices—” The male went through his routine again. As far as Tolmasov could tell, he used just the same words he had before. Someone had given him those words. Hogram or Fralk, the pilot thought, disquieted. They were ready for us to say no.

Shedding his own escort, he strode over to the male who was keeping Lopatin just outside the tent. Lopatin actually gave him a grateful look, something he had never before earned from the
chekist
. The Minervan, of course, used a spare eyestalk to see Tolmasov coming—no chance of taking a native by surprise, as he might have a human guard.

“What you do here?” Tolmasov asked in his sternest tones. When the male started to go into his routine once more, the pilot cut him off. “I hear this before. What you do with us humans?”

The Minervan had more than one groove to his record after
all. “From now on, you stay here inside this ugly house. You do not go out for any reason. If you do not do what we want, the domain-master says, we will not let you do what you want. He is a trader, not a giver.”

“We only do what our domain-masters order,” Tolmasov said.

“And I only do what my domain-master orders of me,” the male retorted.

Tolmasov tried a new tack. “We show we Hogram’s friends many times, many ways. Why so angry now, at one small thing?”

In warmer weather, he would have been sweating. This—house arrest—would wreck the mission’s ability to gather data. He had the bad feeling Hogram knew that. Being manipulated by the natives was not something the pilot had anticipated; their technology was too primitive to let him think of them as equals. But that did not, worse luck, mean they were stupid.

For that matter, they knew more about humans than Tolmasov had suspected. “One small thing, is it?” the male said. “Then why did you conceal the fact that one of you is, of all the disgusting notions, a grown-up mate? Did you know it would only make us reckon you more monstrous than we do already?”

“Not hide,” Tolmasov insisted. He shared an appalled glance with Lopatin. They had known about Minervan females’ short lives for some time now and had slowly gotten used to the idea. This was not Earth. Expecting everything to work the same way would have been foolish. So, evidently, would have been expecting the Minervans to understand that. Tolmasov fell back on the only answer that might do some good. “No one ask us.”

“Ah, and so you said nothing. A merchant’s reply, we call that,” the male said. Relief flowed through Tolmasov; he had helped himself rather than hurt. But the male went on, “If you are merchants, too, you will see that we do what we must to make you deal as we want. When you do, all your privileges will be restored. Till then, you stay in here. Now go in.”

“How long we stay?” Tolmasov asked.

“Till you show us what we need to know. I told you that. How long it is depends on you.”

“Cannot do what you want,” the pilot said.

“Then you’ll stay in there a long time,” the male answered.

“We don’t have the food to withstand a long siege,” Lopatin said, in Russian.

“We don’t have anything to withstand a long siege,” Tolmasov
answered in the same language. That was—what was the fine American phrase?—a self-evident truth.

“Go in now,” the Minervan male said, in no mood to let the two humans chatter away in a speech he could not follow. At his gesture, his followers raised their weapons. Short of opening fire, Tolmasov and Lopatin had no choice but to obey.

Inside the tent, Shota Rustaveli and Katerina had been listening to everything that was going on. Rustaveli greeted Lopatin with an ironic bow. “Good day, Oleg Borisovich, and welcome to the Gulag.”

“That’s enough from you, you Georgian—” Lopatin growled before Tolmasov followed him in.

“That’s enough from both of you,” the pilot said sharply. “I cannot command us to like one another, but we
will
treat each other with respect, all the more so in this tight space. Think of it as spaceship discipline if you must.”