A World of Difference (34 page)

Then it
was
past and some other boat’s problem. Heart pounding, Lopatin rested for a moment. A few more like that, he thought shakily, and the whole fleet would be someone else’s problem—probably the Virgin’s, in whose existence he did not believe. After angrily telling himself that, he wondered whether Minervans had souls.

“Is water like this all the time?” Fralk asked. If he did have a soul, he had been nearly frightened out of it; the blue of his skin was the next thing to purple.

“I hope not,” Lopatin answered, no sailor himself. In the aftermath of shared fright, he felt closer to the Minervan than he ever had, even during weapons training. Which reminded him: the only way Fralk would ever get his hands on the Kalashnikov was from Lopatin’s dead body.

That didn’t necessarily mean he would not get off a few shots of his own, though, when the time came.

The eastern wall of Jötun Canyon filled more and more of the sky ahead. Fralk saw it, too, and began to drift back toward his usual green. “We are doing it, Oleg Borisovich,” he said. Lopatin did not think he was reading surprise into the Minervan’s voice.

Nevertheless, he answered, “
Da
, Fralk, we
are
doing it.” That was no small feat, either, not when the Skarmer were inventing watergoing technology from scratch. He peered upstream, downstream. The water was still full of boats, in spite of the dreadful swath that enormous hunk of ice had cut through them. “So are most of the rest.”

Able to look in both directions at the same time, Fralk had already decided the same thing. “Enough of us will get across to fight well,” he said, “if we can assemble quickly once we’re there.”

Lopatin nodded. After a while, the coracle was close enough to the eastern shore for him to look for landing sites. “There!” he said, pointing. “Steer that way. Looks like good, sheltered anchorage.” He spoke the Skarmer tongue so the paddlers could understand him, but the key word, as happened so often, came out in Russian.

“Like a good what, Oleg Borisovich?” Fralk asked. “Tell me what that means.”

“A good place to put up a boat,” Lopatin answered. He
pointed again. “That piece of rock that juts out into the water shields the part behind it from the worst flow of the stream.”

“Oh.” Fralk did a token job of widening himself. “A good thought. It never would have occurred to me that something like that could make a difference. I’m glad you’ve come along.”

That, Lopatin decided, made one of them. A problem with new technology, human or Minervan, was that it didn’t have all the answers, not least because the people putting it together hadn’t asked all the right questions. Fralk would have been perfectly happy to land any old place on the eastern shore; he hadn’t refined his goals enough to see one place as better than another. That would be fine—until he needed his boat to get back to the other side and discovered it wasn’t where he’d left it anymore.

The KGB man’s mental grumbling did not keep him from helping to guide the coracle into the anchorage he had spotted. Fralk climbed out of the boat and tied it to a boulder. “I am back, Omalo, as I said I would be,” he declared. The rest of the males in the coracle waved their arms and hooted.

Lopatin did not join the celebration, though he was as relieved as any of the Minervans to have made it to the other side. He was also a thoroughly practical man. Instead of wasting time cheering, he scrambled after Fralk out onto dry land.

A few hundred meters away, Juksal was already heading upslope. Like Lopatin, he saw no point in staying in his boat an instant longer than he had to. He felt the same way about Ervis Gorge as a whole. The Omalo could do all sorts of hideous things to the Skarmer if they kept them trapped down here. Getting the warriors up to the flatlands was what needed doing, the veteran thought.

Warriors! Juksal’s hands tightened around the spears he was carrying till his fingerclaws bit into the shafts. Calling a bunch of peasants and clerks warriors didn’t make them such, nor did giving them spears. Just getting them to stay in their groups and do as they were told would be a fair-sized miracle.

Juksal wished he knew more about the Omalo. If they all got their eyestalks pointing the right way fast enough, the Skarmer might be in for a very unpleasant time. But who would believe anyone could cross a Great Gorge in the middle of the summer flood? A year ago, Juksal would not have believed it himself. With luck, the Omalo would not believe it, either, not until too late.

A spatter of snow blew past the warrior. He hoped for more.
It would help hide the boats—and the Skarmer males as they climbed the side of Ervis Gorge. Unless the Omalo were complete idiots, they would have watchers out. No one ever lived to be old by assuming his enemies were idiots. Juksal was no idiot.

As if thinking of watchers had made them spring into being, something moved far above him. Swearing to himself, he dove behind a rock. He stuck a cautious eyestalk around it to make sure of what he had just glimpsed. With luck, it would be an animal, not a male.

Now the snow hindered him. He could not tell what the thing up ahead was. He swore again, then paused to take stock of things.

“If I have trouble seeing it, it’ll have trouble seeing me, too,” he whispered. And he carried two spears long and sharp enough to make even a krong think twice.

Keeping himself widened as if before Hogram, Juksal dashed for the cover of another boulder. Again he poked an eyestalk around it and again found himself able to see little. If that was a male up there, though, he had not raised the alarm. More likely a beast, Juksal decided.

Then, through the muttering of the wind, he heard a sound that came from no beast: the
pound-pound-pound
of a hammer on stone. That was a male, then, and by the racket he was making, he had no idea Juksal was anywhere close.

The warrior scuttled forward, quiet as a zosid sneaking up on a runnerpest.

Shota Rustaveli looked nervously back over his shoulder as he stepped into
Tsiolkovsky
’s control room. He could have had a dozen legitimate reasons for coming forward, and in any case Yuri Voroshilov was, as usual, preoccupied in his lab at the other end of the spacecraft. Rustaveli was nervous anyhow.

“And I’m not even a soldier,” he murmured to himself, surprised at the way his heart was pounding. The murmur was in Georgian, so that even if someone had been standing right beside him, it would have been only a meaningless noise. Can’t be too careful, he thought—soldier or no, the idea of disobeying orders was seriously scary.

He glanced around again. Still no sign of Yuri. Of course not, he told himself angrily. He walked over to the radio, turned it on, found the frequency he needed.

“Hello,
Athena. Tsiolkovsky
calling.” He held the mike close to his lips, spoke very softly. “Hello,
Athena—
”

“
Athena
here: Louise Bragg.” The reply was likewise a whisper, for Rustaveli had turned the volume control down as far as he could and still hear. The tape would still be there to damn him later, but that was later. Now … now curiosity rode Louise’s voice: “Your call is unscheduled,
Tsiolkovsky
. What’s going on?”

“The Skarmer fleet is crossing Jötun Canyon, that’s what, and Oleg Lopatin with them. He has his friend Kalashnikov along, as I suggest you remember when you go to tell him hello. That’s all.
Tsiolkovsky
out.”

He reached out to switch off the set. His hand stopped, just above the switch. The dials had already gone dark by themselves. His jaw clenched until his teeth ground against one another. Of all the times for a malfunction-Then he heard footsteps coming up the passageway. Voroshilov paused at the entrance to the control room. He was shaking his head. “That was stupid, Shota Mikheilovich,” he said. “Stupid.”

“What was?” If Rustaveli could brazen it out, he would. “This damned radio seems to have gone out on us. I was just checking it.”

“By calling the Americans.” Voroshilov was not asking a question.

Rustaveli sagged. “I should have known the timing of the breakdown was too good.”

“Yes, you should have,” Voroshilov agreed. “I hope I managed to kill the circuit before you blabbed too much, but I’m not certain. You did surprise me, Shota.”

“I’m so glad,” Rustaveli muttered. Then, one by one, the implications of what had happened began to sink in. “You were monitoring me,” he said slowly. With a dignity curious for one admitting such a thing, Voroshilov nodded. “Which means”—Rustaveli went on; he had not really needed the nod—“you’re KGB.”

Voroshilov nodded again. “But you will not mention that to anyone else, Shota Mikheilovich. Not to anyone. It is not relevant. I would do this no matter what I was, if I came by and found you at the radio.”

“Why? You hate Lopatin,” Rustaveli blurted. He wondered how that was possible if they were both KGB. He also wondered if it was even true or just a cover the two snoops used.

“Lopatin is a pig,” Voroshilov said flatly. That answered that, Rustaveli thought, or at least proved Yuri an actor as well
as a chemist and a spy. After a moment, picking his words carefully, Voroshilov went on. “But he is also following the orders he received both from Colonel Tolmasov and from the
rodina
, the motherland. You have no business meddling with his mission.”

“No? What if he or his pet Minervan starts shooting at the Americans? Yuri Ivanovich, one of them risked her neck to fly the canyon and help Valery. Shall I repay that by not even warning them danger is coming their way?”

Voroshilov frowned. He still looked, as he always had, quiet, studious, a little boyish. And underneath it he was a
chekist
, Rustaveli thought. He swore to himself never to judge by appearances again.

“He may be
going
into danger, too,” the chemist answered. “Bragg would not tell Sergei Konstantinovich whether he was giving firearms to the Minervans on the far side of Jötun Canyon. Had we been sure he isn’t, maybe Lopatin could have stayed here. As it is, no.”

“Would Katya have wanted you to cut me off?” Before this moment, Rustaveli would never have imagined KGB men susceptible to appeals to their feelings. He could not imagine a
chekist
going home to a wife he loved, to children perhaps, and plopping down in a chair to complain about the hard day he’d had.

But Yuri was different. Damn it, he had lived almost inside Yuri’s socks for a lot more than a year now. Maybe he was a
chekist
, but he was not a bad fellow. And Rustaveli would have bet anything anyone cared to name that he did love Katerina.

“I don’t know,” he said now. He was troubled; Rustaveli could see that. But then he nodded toward the silent radio. “Too late to worry about it at the moment, though.” He walked back toward his laboratory—and presumably, Rustaveli thought, toward his microphones and secret switches.

“Shit!” the Georgian said. He slammed a fist against the back of a chair. The thing was padded and did not hurt. “Shit!” he said again.

Chip, chip, chip
. Frank Marquard went down on his knees so he could use his geologist’s hammer with greater precision. He had not seen a conglomerate quite this fine-grained before. Anything new and interesting deserved to be a specimen.

Even through padding, his knees began to freeze. He sighed. He was so sick of being cold. As a lifelong inhabitant of Los
Angeles, he had had no practice living in a refrigerator. He remembered somebody on the selection panel asking about that and remembered answering that it would not bother him. He had known he was lying even then. Luckily, the people on the panel had not.

Pat was as Californian as he, but the cold didn’t bother her as much. Or if it did, Frank thought, frowning, she didn’t let on. Not so long ago, that would not have occurred to him. Now he wasn’t so sure what Pat could hold back. He hoped—he thought—he was warming her up again, in a very different sense of the word, but he wasn’t sure.

As he usually did, he tried to make the best of that. He supposed it was all to the good that he wasn’t taking her for granted anymore. Boredom lay down that road.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw something move. He looked up. Where had the Minervan come from? “What do you here, male of Reatur’s clan?” he asked in the Omalo tongue.

The male did not answer. It came closer. How, Frank wondered, had it got below him without his noticing? Then he saw the spears in the Minervan’s hands.

“Frank!” Louise shouted over and over in
Athena
’s control room. “Are you there? Come in, Frank!”

“
Bozhemoi,
” Oleg Lopatin said softly when he saw the stained spears Juksal was displaying.

The warrior was proud of himself. “He had a little hammer with him, but he hardly even got it up before I struck him.” He raised the hand on the far side of his body, showed the Russian the geologist’s tool he had taken from the man he’d slain.

“
Bozhemoi,
” Lopatin said again. The idea of going to war had been attractive in the abstract. Having a fellow human killed by a Minervan, though, was not really what he had had in mind, no matter how socially advanced the Skarmer were.

“Don’t let your eyestalks droop, Oleg Borisovich,” Fralk said. “You’ve told us how the humans on this side of the gorge are enemies to your great clan.”

“Yes, but—” Sudden ghastly consequences flowered-in Lopatin’s mind. The Americans would assume he had killed their comrade. With the situation reversed, he would have jumped to the same conclusion. When a man with a rifle was around, who would think twice about natives and their spears?

Scowling, he thought furiously. Though the habit of secrecy
was deeply grained into him, he
decided
it could not serve him here. He would have to let
Tsiolkovsky
know what had happened, and that he had had nothing to do with it. He could not guess how far that would go toward mollifying the Americans, but nothing, now, could be worse than silence.

He thumbed the
ON
switch of his radio, brought it to his lips. “Calling
Tsiolkovsky
, calling—” he began. Then he noticed the
SEND
light had not gone on. When he switched to
RECEIVE
, no carrier wave hum, no static, came from the speaker.