A World of Difference (39 page)

“Well, we’ll just let Reatur sort that out,” Ternat said. “Perhaps if Grevil doesn’t grant you the respect and obedience a clanfather deserves, Reatur will send some males north to help you reclaim your domain—after the Skarmer are settled, of course.”

“I don’t care a three-day-old massi voiding about the Skarmer,” Dordal howled. “And if I get my domain back with help from Reatur’s males, there will be cords running from his arms to mine forever after.”

“Yes, there will, won’t there?” Ternat agreed cheerfully. “Maybe you should have thought about that before you decided to go massi-raiding. As it is, you’ll have some lovely three-day-old voidings to look at as we travel back to my clanfather’s domain.”

Dordal twisted all his eyestalks away from Ternat. Reatur’s eldest did not care how petulant Dordal felt. While the northern domain-master was not looking, he walked away. Dordal started to talk again. He abruptly fell silent when he turned one eyestalk back and noticed that no one was listening to him.

Ternat didn’t care about that, either. He was shouting to his own warriors now, getting them back into some kind of order so they could lead their prisoners and the recaptured beasts home without half escaping in the process. Ternat did not have three eighteens of plans for overthrowing his clanfather. His time would come one day. Until then, he was content to wait.

And that, he supposed, only went to show that
he
was Reatur’s budling. “Good enough,” he said out loud.

Sergei Tolmasov watched Rustaveli lean back in his chair. As usual, the Georgian was wearing a mischievous expression. He said, “I doubt much work is getting done aboard
Tsiolkovsky
at the moment—not much that involves the brain, anyway, unless Yuri is reading Katya some of his poetry.” He had just brought the rover back to Hogram’s town after Katerina drove it down to the ship.

“Not much work getting done here, either,” Tolmasov said, not rising to the bait.

“You, my friend, are entirely too serious, as I’ve said at least a hundred times.”

“At least,” Tolmasov agreed. Rustaveli snorted.

“That does not mean he is wrong, Shota Mikheilovich,” Valery Bryusov put in. He often had trouble recognizing a joke.

“No, it doesn’t,” the pilot said, “because there
isn’t
much getting done here.” He had never imagined he could become irrelevant during the Minerva mission, but he had. He didn’t like it one bit.

Damn Oleg Lopatin!
Athena
was screaming at Washington and, almost incidentally now, at Tolmasov; Washington was screaming at Moscow; and Moscow, not incidentally at all, was screaming at Tolmasov. He could not even blame any of them—had he been any place in the loop but where he was, he would have been screaming, too. But he had no one to scream at, not when Lopatin wouldn’t use his cursed radio.

He couldn’t even ask Hogram to send on a written message. For one thing, the local domain-master was barely in communication with his army on the far side of Jötun Canyon. Crossing that stream was almost as hard for the Minervans as getting to Minerva had been for the Soviet Union and United States.

For another, problems between people meant nothing to Hogram. Because Hogram had talked with the Omalo domain-master on the radio, he had to acknowledge there were more
humans than the ones he had met. But he simply did not believe in a whole planet full of them, all at each other’s throats because one man had gone berserk. Given what Hogram knew, Tolmasov wouldn’t have believed it, either. Unfortunately, it was true.

And so the crew of
Tsiolkovsky
went through the motions of doing more research: Bryusov comparing country and town dialects, Rustaveli working on his rocks, Katerina and Voroshilov joining together on a biochemical study. None of it seemed to mean much now.

“Yuri isn’t sorry Lopatin’s gone and got himself in this mess,” Rustaveli observed.

“Then why did he cut you off when you called the Americans?” Tolmasov answered his own question. “Because his head might roll, too, I suppose, if anyone back home”—as polite a euphemism as he had ever come up with for the KGB—“thought he’d overhead you and done nothing. But I daresay you’re right, because of Katya if for no other reason.”

“There are others,” Rustaveli said slowly. The pilot glanced over at him—he rarely sounded so serious. Seeing he had Tolmasov’s attention, the geologist went on, “Yuri complained that Lopatin snooped through the poems he wrote for her and stored them in his secret computer file. Evidence, I imagine, but only a
chekist
could say of what.”

“I’d hate a man for that, too,” Tolmasov said.

“And I,” Bryusov agreed, though Tolmasov had trouble imagining Bryusov worked up enough about anything to hate the man who did it. Maybe if an academician from Arkh-molinsk stole something from one of his papers and published it first: anyone would be furious over that kind of pilfering.

Then the full meaning of Rustaveli’s words got through to the pilot. “Wait a minute,” he said. “How does Yuri know they’re in Lopatin’s secure file?”

“How else?” Rustaveli put a flippant shrug in his voice. “He read them.”

“That’s impossible.” Tolmasov had tried to access Lopatin’s secure file, tried and failed. If the pilot of a mission was not trusted with the passwords he needed to get into a KGB man’s files, what were the odds a chemist would be? There was no way … no, there was one.

Rustaveli was waiting when Tolmasov looked up. The Georgian
nodded. “That’s right,” he said. “But you will notice I have not told you any such thing.”

“Like that, eh? No, of course, you haven’t, Shota Mikheilovich. But Yuri! Who ever would have thought that about Yuri?”

“Shota hasn’t what?” Bryusov asked. “Who would have thought what about Yuri?” The linguist sounded as confused as if his companions had started speaking Navajo.

“Never mind, Valery Aleksandrovich. Nothing important,” Tolmasov said kindly. Some people, he thought, were really too innocent to be running around loose.

His feeling of smug superiority lasted not quite two minutes. Then he remembered he had thought the same thing about Yuri Voroshilov. He shook his head. Sometimes you just couldn’t tell.

“Are you all right, Reatur?” Lamra asked when the domain-master finally got around to paying attention to her. There, though, she had little to complain about: he hurried through his hellos to the rest of the mates so he could spend uninterrupted time with her.

If he had looked tired before, now he looked tired and battered. One of his arms jerked when he sighed, a wince that showed he had been hurt. “I’ve been better, little one,” he answered. “The domain has been better, come to that. The Skarmer beat us, beat us badly.”

She saw herself start to turn blue and tried to stop but couldn’t. “What will we do?” she said.

“ ‘We’?” Reatur asked gently. “Lamra, right now there isn’t much you can do. I wish there were. As for me, I am going to fight them again. Maybe here, closer to the castle, closer to where most of my males live, they will make a better showing.”

“What if they don’t?”

The domain-master pulled in arms and eyestalks, released them: a shrug. “Then we won’t have to fight a third time, that’s certain. Do you understand what I mean?”

Lamra thought about it. “We’ll have lost?” She didn’t want to say that; she didn’t even want to think it.

But Reatur seemed to approve. “That’s right,” he said. “Your thoughts should always be thin, clear ice, Lamra, so you can use them to see through to what’s there, no matter what it is. If you don’t think clearly, it’s like trying to look through muddy ice.”

“Oh,” Lamra said. She wanted to show Reatur she could use what he was telling her. “Then are you going to show me why you haven’t opened one of your hands since you came into the mates’ chambers? Do you have something in there? Is it for me?”

His eyestalks wiggled—slowly, but they wiggled. “Thin, clear ice indeed, little one. Yes, I have something for you in that hand.” He turned so it was in front of her.

She held out a hand of her own. He gave her the present. She peered down at it with three eyestalks at once. “It’s a runnerpest!” she exclaimed. “A little runnerpest, carved all out of wood. It’s wonderful, Reatur. Thank you.” She felt proud for remembering to say that. “Where did you get it? Did you carve it yourself?”

“Yes,” he said. He hesitated, as if unsure whether to go on, but after a moment he did. “I wanted you to have something to remember me by, even if—the worst happens.”

“I’ll keep it always,” Lamra promised. Then, wanting him to know she was still thinking clearly, she amended, “For as long as I have, anyhow.”

“For you, that’s always,” Reatur said firmly.

“I suppose so.” Lamra kept looking at the little runnerpest. “I’m going to poke this around a corner and scare Peri silly with it. Not that she isn’t silly already, that is.” No matter how hard she worked at it, staying serious was never easy.

This time, Reatur’s laugh was unrestrained. “I’m glad I came to see you, little one. One way or another, you always make me feel better.” He turned an eyestalk down toward her bulges. “Do you want to hear something foolish, Lamra?”

“I don’t think you can be foolish, clanfather,” she declared.

“That only shows how young and foolish you are still,” Reatur said. “I was just thinking it’s a shame you’re carrying budlings. I’d like to plant them on you now.”

“That
is
foolish,” Lamra agreed. Once Reatur had succeeded in planting budlings on her, her interest in mating, once so intense, disappeared. She did her best to think like a male. Altogether unsure how well she was succeeding, she said, “There are lots of other mates here.”

“I know,” Reatur said. “It wouldn’t be the same, somehow. Planting buds on you now would be like, like”—the domain-master sounded like someone groping after an idea—“like mating with a friend.” He stopped in surprise. “That must be what the humans do, with their mates who live as
long as males. It would be comforting, I think, especially in bad times.”

“I suppose so,” Lamra said indifferently. But the notion Reatur had presented was so strange, she couldn’t help thinking about it. “If the humans keep me alive after my budlings drop, will I want to mate with you again?”

That seemed to surprise Reatur all over again. “I truly don’t know, Lamra. If we’re all very, very lucky, maybe we’ll find out.”

“Sometimes you just can’t tell, Pat.” Irv felt like an idiot the moment the words were out of his mouth, but he was lucky—Pat wasn’t listening to him. She was off in that disconnected place where she had spent so much time since Frank hadn’t answered his last radio call.

His wife glanced toward him and Pat, toward
Athena
, toward Reatur’s castle. “I don’t think that eloc mate is ever going to drop its budlings,” Sarah said. They had checked the mate five times in the last two days. It looked ready, but it wasn’t doing anything. “I’m going over to the castle to examine Lamra again,” Sarah went on. “I just keep hoping she can hang on until we know we have some real chance of doing her some good.”

Irv shrugged. “I think I’ll head back to the ship. I’m hungry.”

“Okay.”

Sarah and Irv both paused, waiting for Pat to decide what she was going to do. She paused, too, as if rerunning a tape of the last few seconds in her head so that she could catch up with what was going on. Then she said, “I guess I’ll go back to the ship, too.”

“Make sure she eats something,” Sarah told Irv. He thought about asking her whether she was speaking as doctor or Jewish mother, but keeping his mouth shut seemed smarter. A nod couldn’t land him in trouble, but his big mouth had, many times already.

Sarah headed for the castle, pausing once to wave before she trudged on again. “Come on,” Irv said to Pat. Again there was that delayed response, but less this time than before. She followed him to
Athena
.

Emmett Bragg met them just inside the airlock. “ ’Bout time somebody showed up here,” he grumbled. His pistol was belted on; Irv would have bet he had been pacing the corridor. “Don’t
want to leave the ship empty, and I need to go out and scout the route the Skarmer’ll be using when they finally decide to get moving again. Won’t be long now, I suspect.”

“Where’s Louise?” Irv asked.

Bragg’s eyes flicked to Pat. “She’s—out,” he said. Irv thought unkind thoughts about his mouth as he remembered Louise was out because she was doing some seismographic work that would—should—have been Frank’s. Pat, luckily, didn’t make the connection.

“Don’t get too close to the Skarmer—or to Oleg Lopatin,” Irv said. “Don’t forget you’re our ride home.”

Emmett grimaced. “Don’t remind me. I know I have to be a good boy, but I don’t have to like it.” He hurried out through the airlock, not bothering to hide his impatience to be gone. Things had been dull for him since
Athena
landed, Irv thought; Air Force pilots were adrenaline junkies from the word go. Well, Emmett had his fix now.

Irv turned back to Pat. “Let’s see what we can find to eat.”

“All right,” she said indifferently.

The freeze-dried beef stew, Irv thought after he poured hot water into the package, tasted almost like what mother used to make, but not quite. He’d been eating it for so long that he had trouble defining the difference, but he knew it was there. Real food was one of the things he looked forward to about going home.

He rinsed the plastic tray, tossed it in the trash. Pat had only pushed her food around; hardly any of it was gone. “Come on. Eat,” Irv said. He felt as if he were coaxing a reluctant toddler.

Pat took a couple of forkfuls, then put the package of stew down. “I don’t feel much like eating. I don’t feel much like anything.” She would not look at Irv; she kept her eyes on her hands in her lap.

“You really should, Pat. We need you—” He hesitated. “—as strong as you can be.” He hated himself for that little pause. Even more than the polite words it had been intended to replace, it called attention to what had happened.

Pat didn’t answer. For a moment, Irv thought she was disconnected from the here-and-now again. Then he saw her shoulders shaking, saw two tears splash onto the backs of her wrists before she jerked up her arms to cover her face.