A World of Difference (47 page)

“You’re right,” Lamra said happily.

“Good heavens,” Irv said. “What happened to your calculator?”

Pat held it up. The only thing that held the batteries in was a big piece of duct tape. “Beats me,” she said. “I thought I left the stupid thing on my bed a while ago, but I found it on the floor with the back smashed to hell.”

“You must have stepped on it without noticing,” Irv said.

“How do you not notice something that goes crunch?” Pat retorted.

“Speaking of not noticing,” Louise said, looking up from a tape she was feeding into the computer for transmission back to Earth, “that calculator’s been patched since—” She thought back. “I guess since the day Lamra had her budlings, the day of the big battle.”

Pat nodded. “That’s right. I remember having to fix it right after we all came back from Reatur’s castle.”

“Oh,” Irv said. “Well, hush my mouth.” He made as if to pull his head inside his shirt. Louise pretended to throw the tape cassette at him. He ducked. Everybody in the control room laughed. He spread his hands in defeat. “If that’s when it happened, I give up. None of us will forget anything about that day, not if we live to be ninety.”

“You better believe it,” Louise said.

Irv remembered coming back from the castle, too, after Sarah had sped out there to make sure Lamra really was all right. He remembered drawing the privacy curtain to their cubicle afterward, so he and Sarah could celebrate her being alive, Lamra’s being alive, everyone’s being alive. And he remembered a pink-purple not-quite-mark, not-quite-bruise, in the middle of her left buttock.

At the time, he had thought nothing of it. He’d had other, more immediate things on his mind. But he remembered. And, it occurred to him now, that mark had been just about the size and shape of Pat’s calculator.

So what had Sarah been doing that involved lying on a calculator, or maybe lying on one and then, say, throwing it to the floor? The only answer Irv came up with was the immediately obvious one.

And with whom? The answer to that was immediately obvious, too. Sarah liked men, at least in situations where—where one might be apt to lie on a calculator, Irv thought. The joke he tried to make fell flat, though he only told it to himself.

Another question filled his mind: What the hell am I going to do about this? Unlike the couple that had preceded it, that one had no immediately obvious answer. Confronting Emmett struck him as either useless or suicidal, depending on how much he annoyed the pilot.

Confronting Sarah—oh, that’d be real good, he said to himself: you’d even have to lie to claim the moral advantage.

He glanced over at Pat, then at Louise. So far as he knew, she
hadn’t done anything she wasn’t supposed to with anybody. But if Emmett had, she was affected, too. “Great,” Irv muttered. Two, count ’em, two unsanctioned belly-bumps and the whole damn crew was involved.

Or was it just two? On reflection, Irv decided it probably was. Since the day of the battle, Sarah had stuck a lot tighter to him than had been her habit before. Maybe she had all the same regrets he did. He hoped so, partly for the sake of their marriage and partly just because he wanted someone else to be as confused as he was.

The psychologists back home had warned about this kind of thing, for exactly these reasons. One of the rare times the psychologists were dead right, Irv thought, so of course nobody paid attention to them.

He laughed a little, under his breath. It
was
funny, in a French-movie sort of way. Then he sobered. In French movies, sooner or later everybody found out what was going on, and the fur really started to fly. That could happen here, too, from the same kind of accidental revelation he had just had. He hoped it wouldn’t, but it could.

“And wouldn’t that be wonderful?”

He didn’t realize he had spoken more or less out loud until Pat said, “What?”

“Nothing,” he said firmly. “I was just thinking, it ought to be an interesting flight home.”

Snow swirled around Ternat. Fall was here early this year, he thought. Under most circumstances, that would have made him happy; he had no more use for summer heat than Reatur did. Now, though, he was looking for something, and the snow made it hard to find.

His feet scraped ice. “We’re down to the very bottom of the gorge,” he told the males with him. The frozen patch he was standing on, and others he knew to be nearby, were all that was left of the summer floods.

“How are we supposed to find the end of a rope in the middle of all this?” grumbled one of his companions. “We could look from now till the next flood comes through and washes us away.”

“The Skarmer said it would be easy, when their humans talked with ours,” Ternat said. “Of course, the Skarmer have been known to lie.”

“They’d better not try it now,” said the male who had complained,
“not while we still hold their warriors.” The rest of the band growled agreement.

“Exactly,” Ternat said. “So we have to figure the cursed thing is around here someplace. Let’s spread out a little and see what we can come up with. We have to try to keep each other in sight—we don’t want to go straggling up the side of the gorge by ones and two, as if we were so many of Dordal’s males.”

Eyestalks twitched. The loud male yelled, “If Dordal’s males act like that, it’s because he went home all by himself.” The laughter grew. When Grevil refused for the third time to ransom the northern domain-master, Reatur had released him without payment. The civil war brewing between Dordal and his disloyal eldest showed the wisdom of the move. Ternat wondered if he would have thought of it.

The males formed a circle, as if they were warriors bracing to meet an attack from all sides. But this circle was wider, to let them search more ground and still stay in touch with one another.

They moved forward slowly, cautiously. People seldom went down to the bottom of Ervis Gorge, and of course it was never the same from one flood to the next, anyhow.
Anything
might be here. Ternat was glad he had a spear.

The male to one side of him suddenly stopped. “What’s that funny noise?” he said, suspicion thick in his voice. Ternat listened, heard only the wind. He went over to the other male, who pointed and said, “It’s coming from over there, I think.”

Ternat listened again. Now he also heard the strange, rhythmic thump, twang, and tinkle. For a moment he thought of the beasts legend put in the depths of the gorge, beasts that could lure a male to destruction. Then his eyestalks wiggled in relief. “That’s human music,” he said.

“There’s a human down here?” the male said incredulously.

“I doubt it,” Ternat said. “They have gadgets that make music for them. My guess is that the Skarmer put one by their rope so the noise would guide us. A good idea, I must say.”

“Pretty sneaky, if you ask me,” the male said, as he would have about anything Skarmer. But then he shouted along with Reatur’s eldest to let the rest of the band know what they had found.

Ternat’s prediction proved good. The gadget sat on a large rock. Like a fair number of human gadgets, it looked like a box. Ternat wondered how the humans knew this box made music instead of, say, pictures. He let his arms and eyestalks shrug in
and out: one more thing about humans he would probably never learn.

The box had a handle. Tied to the handle was a thin string. “This is what we came for,” Ternat said. “We have to be careful now, so we don’t break it on the way back.”

The other end of the string was nowhere in sight. Ternat knew that eventually, back toward the Skarmer side of Ervis Gorge, it would join a cord, the cord a rope, the rope a thicker rope, and so on by increments until it linked to the massive cordage of the bridge that would once more span the gorge.

His small band, though, could scarcely have moved that massive final rope, let alone hauled it back to the stones to which it would be attached. Thus the lighter precursors: getting them to the attachment point, where a good-sized crew waited, would be easy.

“What are you going to do with the box?” a male asked.

“Keep it,” Ternat replied at once. “It can be part of Hogram’s first payment to get his miserable males back, and if he doesn’t like that, too bad. Maybe our humans can tell us if it’s good for anything besides their funny music.”

“Me, I don’t know that I want to be linked up to the Skarmer anymore, not after this summer,” a male said.

“We can always cut the rope again, you know,” Ternat said.

“Not till we get all those cursed hungry Skarmer out of our domain,” another male put in. “I know we’ll be fat this winter with what Hogram’s sending us, but it’s only right. We’ve been thin up to now, what with them eating up so much of our food.”

“And Dordal’s,” said yet another, who had accompanied Ternat on the raid into the northerner’s domain. “Let’s not forget all those greasy-fat massi we brought back with us. Hogram’s males didn’t complain about the way they tasted.”

“Hogram’s males weren’t in a position to complain about anything,” Ternat said. “They’re just glad we’ve fed them at all. And do you know what? They’re lucky we have.”

The band shouted agreement. Ternat still wondered if keeping the prisoners alive had been a good idea. Had the humans not urged otherwise, he was sure Reatur would have massacred the Skarmer. The ransom the domain-master was squeezing out of Hogram was more than enough to pay for the cost of maintaining the captives, but was it enough to compensate for having to look at them all through summer and fall, enough to compensate for remembering all the damage they had done, the lives they had taken?

Ternat did not know; where was the scale on which to balance such weights? Reatur had accepted. His eldest, trusting him, supposed that was good enough.

He lifted the string. “Come on. Time to go home.”

“Here,” Sarah said, dumping the jingling metal clamps in front of Reatur. “I, other humans show you now, many times, how to use to save mates. Wish I had more to give you. Use as you think best. Often, I hope.”

Her shiver had nothing to do with the cold, though the weather was down to Minnesota winter and heading straight for Antarctica. Half a dozen clamps, as many as she could spare from her medical supplies. The thought of doing, say, an appendectomy in free-fall on the way home gave her cold chills, but far worse was the thought of what happened to all mates on Minerva, and how those six little clamps could help. She wished she had six thousand, or six million.

“I will use them, Sarah,” Reatur said. “I have spoken with you of the sorrow of the mates, have I not?”

She nodded. “Yes, Reatur, you have.”

“I thought so. Males have felt it for as long as there have been males and mates. Now I have a chance to get free of it, the first of all my kind. I will take that chance. I also wish you had more clamps. But perhaps it is for the best this way. These clamps will end by changing our world as much as the spring floods change Ervis Gorge. Like the floods, such changes should start slowly, I think.”

Sarah nodded again, this time reluctantly. “Likely that is wise.” To her, even one mate’s dying without need was tragedy worse than the sorrow the domain-master knew when such death was inevitable. On the other hand, she knew that turning such a basic of Minervan life upside down overnight would bring plenty of dislocations of its own. If anyone could safely steer between extremes, she thought, Reatur could. He had a knack for finding the right questions to ask; maybe Lamra got it from him.

Now he came up with another one: “Might we also use these clamps to keep alive, say, eloc mates as well, to keep our herds large?”

Sarah rubbed her chin in consideration and discovered she could barely feel it. “If no mate—no mate of your people—will drop budlings before you can take clamps off animal, then yes. Otherwise no, if you want to save own mates.”

“Ah,” Reatur said. “That is sensible. Yes. Well, Sarah, I will say that all this has worked out better than I thought it would. Lamra has been, if not accepted, at least tolerated by my males. And the more mates we have who survive budding, the greater the chance the males will have to get used to them.”

“I hope so,” Sarah said. She had her doubts, though. Lamra was unique and, being unique, created scant antagonism. Some of Reatur’s males, in fact, regarded her with almost superstitious awe. That would change when saved mates grew common. How it would change, Sarah was not sure. But if Minervans reacted like people, it probably would not change for the better.

The domain-master cut into her thoughts. “I understand you humans will be leaving soon.”

“Yes, before too much snow drifts around, uh, flying house.”

Then Reatur surprised Sarah. “Why not wait until the snow begins to melt next spring? I would like to have you stay.”

She bowed. “I thank you, but no. Cannot do. Not enough of our food, for one thing. Also have to leave before certain time this winter, no matter what.” Orbital mechanics, she knew, meant nothing to Reatur.

He sighed. “You do what you must, of course. But I will miss you.” He widened himself to her.

She bowed again. “I miss you, too. All us humans miss you. But must go back to our home.”

“Maybe you will come back one day?” Reatur asked.

Did he sound hopeful? Sarah wondered if she was reading too much into his voice. She didn’t think so. “I like to see you again, like to see your eldest again, like to see Lamra again.” That thought did warm her, despite the worse than icy chill of Reatur’s castle. Then reality returned. “Other humans come one day, Reatur, I think. I hope so,” she said sadly. “But not us, not me. Hard for us to come here—will be turn of other humans next time we do.”

“Let it be as it will, then.” The domain-master wiggled his eyestalks, catching Sarah by surprise. “Tell the humans back at your home that I am sorry I broke their fancy picture-making machine, all those years ago. When I saw it, I thought it was a monster. When I saw you humans, I thought you were monsters, too. But it is not so.”

“I tell them, Reatur.” Sarah felt tears come into her eyes. Angrily, she brushed them away with the back of her glove. They were worse than foolish, she thought—in this weather they were dangerous. Just what she would need, trying to explain to
the domain-master how and why her eyelashes were freezing together.