A World of Difference (8 page)

He did not see anything moving. He had set
Tsiolkovsky
down well away from the buildings he saw in the landing approach. It was not that he wanted to, or could, keep the landing secret—as well keep sunrise hidden! But if the Minervans came to him, he would have an easier time meeting them on his terms.

He got out of his seat and walked over to the closet full of warm clothes. “What’s the temperature outside, Katerina Fyodorovna?” he asked.

She checked the thermometer. “One above.”

“Brr!” Shota Rustaveli gave a theatrical shiver. The five Russians, even quiet Voroshilov, laughed at him. A degree above freezing—that was weather to be enjoyed, not endured, Tolmasov thought.

“It
is
early afternoon, at a season that is the equivalent of May, in a southern latitude that corresponds to Havana’s,” Dr. Zakharova pointed out, and Tolmasov felt his mirth slip. Russian summer was brief, but it was there. On Minerva, the weather did not get a whole lot warmer than this.

“Thank you for coming to my defense, Katerina, in these bleak circumstances,” Rustaveli said. The doctor murmured something. So did Tolmasov, under his breath. Where had the Georgian learned to sound like a courtier from some perfumed court and, worse, to do it so well?

The colonel drew calf-length felt
valenki
over his feet and put his arms through the sleeves of his quilted
telogreika
. The rest of the crew, except for Lopatin and Voroshilov, crowded around to do likewise.

Next to the jackets, boots, and prosaic thermal underwear hung six full-length sable coats, for bad weather. Bryusov ran a loving hand down one of them. “Here is something the Americans cannot match,” he said.

“And here is something else,” Oleg Lopatin added. He had opened a locked cabinet not far from the protective gear. He started passing out weapons and brown plastic magazines.

Tolmasov took his gratefully. Even though it was the new model AK-74 with small-caliber, high-velocity ammunition and not the AK-47 he had trained with, a Kalashnikov was a Kalashnikov: a good friend to have if the going got rough.

“How long shall we wait for the natives to come to us before we start looking for them?” Rustaveli asked as all of them but Lopatin and Voroshilov stood in front of the airlock. Doctrine was two people on
Tsiolkovsky
at all times, one of them able to fly the ship, and Lopatin was backup pilot.

They went through the lock two by two, Tolmasov and Bryusov first. The pilot stood on
Tsiolkovsky
’s left wing and stared out at a world not his own. The view was broader than the one from the windows, but not much different—boring, barren, superficially familiar terrain. A thrill ran through the colonel all the same. He had been in his teens when Buzz Aldrin had first set foot on the moon. Well, Aldrin was envying him today.

The lock’s outer door came open behind him. Katerina and Rustaveli emerged and looked around. The Georgian tugged his jacket tighter around him. Tolmasov smiled to himself.

Rustaveli was carrying a chain-link ladder. He fixed it to brackets on the edge of the wing and let it unroll. The other end landed on the ground with a metallic
whump
. The biologist cocked an eyebrow at Tolmasov. “I suppose you’d shoot me if I tried to go down ahead of you.”

“I would try not to hit anything vital,” Tolmasov said. Rustaveli laughed, bowed, and stood aside with a sweeping gesture of invitation. Tolmasov slung his rifle, stood, and started down the ladder. He was glad he had managed to keep his tone light. The way his hands had tightened on the rifle at Rustaveli’s impudent suggestion made him know he was only half joking.

The ground felt like ground under his feet. He took a few steps away from the ship and away from the shadow of the wing. He glanced up at the sun. Did it seem too small in the sky? Hard to tell, the more so as he had got used to its shrinking as
Tsiolkovsky
traveled outward. He was sure though, that nowhere on Earth was the sky—or what he could see of it through patchy clouds—quite this shade of greenish blue.

The ladder rattled and clanked. Katerina Zakharova lowered herself down onto the Minervan surface. She took two heavy,
deliberate steps, then looked at her footprints. “Humanity’s marks on a new world,” she murmured.

“Ah, but the other question is, what marks will it leave on us?” Shota Rustaveli came next. Tolmasov would have bet on that. If Bryusov had tried preceding the Georgian, the linguist likely would have arrived on Minerva headfirst.

A moment later, Bryusov did join the other three. He looked ill at ease and soon revealed why. “I am not of much use here, until we actually meet the Minervans.”

That left him wide open to a sardonic retort from Rustaveli, but, rather to Tolmasov’s surprise, it did not come. Instead, just as Lopatin shouted in his earphone, he heard the biologist say quietly, “I do not think you will be useless long, Valery Aleksandrovich.”

Rustaveli was pointing; Tolmasov’s eyes followed his finger. A Minervan had been hiding behind a stone big enough to make Tolmasov glad
Tsiolkovsky
’s undercarriage missed it. Now the native came out, moving slowly toward the waiting humans.

It looked like its picture. That should not have surprised Tolmasov, but somehow it did. What he did next was as hard as anything else in his life. He stepped aside, saying, “Valery Aleksandrovich, now I am not of much use. You and Shota Mikheilovich must go forward from here.”

“The man who covers is as useful as the one who advances,” Rustaveli said. Hearing an army phrase from him caught Tolmasov off guard. So did finding out the Georgian meant it literally; Rustaveli set down his Kalashnikov before he walked away from
Tsiolkovsky
to meet the Minervan. After a moment’s hesitation, so did Bryusov.

The colonel automatically shuffled a few steps sideways, so his companions would not be between him and the Minervan. He turned his head to tell Katerina to do the same thing, but she already had.

She nodded at him. “You see, I was listening after all through those endless drills,” she said. He dipped his head in acknowledgment.

Their gloved hands open and empty before them, Bryusov and Rustaveli stopped a couple of meters in front of the Minervan. It kept two eyes on each of them, while its remaining pair refused to hold still on any target, even
Tsiolkovsky
, for more than a couple of seconds at a time. The spectacle was unsettling. Tolmasov wondered how the creature kept from tying its eyestalks in knots.

Bryusov pointed to himself. “Valery.” He pointed to Rustaveli. “Shota.” He pointed to the Minervan and waited. For this, Tolmasov thought, we need a linguist?

It might have been simple, but it worked. The native pointed toward itself with three arms at once and said, “Fralk.” Its voice startled Tolmasov again—it was a smooth contralto. To his way of thinking, nothing taller than he was, and unbelievably weird-looking to boot, had any business sounding like a woman—a sexy woman, at that.

Get used to surprises, the colonel told himself. Expect them. After all, you were just reminding yourself this is a whole different world. He wondered how many times he would end up giving himself that order. A great many, he guessed.

Bryusov was still talking at the Minervan, trying to pick up nouns. The tape recorder in his pocket would save the replies he got for more study later. Tolmasov chuckled to himself. The recorder was just as good as the Americans’. Both expeditions used Sonys.

While the linguist worked, Rustaveli walked halfway around Fralk so he could take some pictures of it—him? her?—and Bryusov. But when he pulled out his camera—also Japanese, again like the Americans’—the Minervan sprang away from him and Bryusov. Its body got short and plump, so its arms could reach the ground. A moment later it was tall again, and it was holding stones in three hands.

“Hold still!” Katerina shouted, startling Tolmasov and the Minervan both. A couple of Fralk’s eyestalks whipped toward her. The native did not put down the rocks it had seized, but it made no move to throw them, either.

At the same time Fralk was watching Katerina, it was also keeping an eye on Bryusov, another on Rustaveli, and one more on Tolmasov. A Minervan, the colonel realized, was a creature that had no behind—one direction was as accessible to it as another. He wondered how the natives chose which way to go.

Worry about that some other time, he told himself firmly. First things first. “I think the photographs will have to wait, Shota Mikheilovich,” he called. “At least until this Fralk understands that your camera is no weapon.”

The biologist’s thin, mobile features twisted in a grimace, but he lowered the camera, moving slowly and ostentatiously. The eyestalk Fralk was using to watch him followed the motion. The Georgian signed. “You appear to be right,” he said mournfully.
“I will go turn over some flat stones. With luck, nothing I find under them will want to slay me for taking its picture.”

Seeing Rustaveli go off to do something that had nothing to do with it seemed to reassure Fralk. It started giving long answers to Bryusov. It talked, in fact, at such length that the linguist threw his hands in the air. “This will be wonderful later, when I and the computers back at Moscow have a chance to analyze it,” he said plaintively, “but for now it’s only so much nonsense.”

He had picked up a couple of rocks of his own, a small white one and a larger gray one. He held the white rock above the gray one, then below it. “Spatial relationships,” he explained to Tolmasov, then turned back to Fralk, who was saying something or other.

Eventually, the colonel thought, he would have to learn Minervan. He ought to be just getting fluent in it when
Tsiolkovsky
lifted off. Then he likely would never use it again. Things worked that way sometimes.

The thought he had had before occurred to him again. “How are you going to learn the native words for ‘front’ and ‘back,’ Valery Aleksandrovich? This Fralk doesn’t have either one.”

For a moment, Bryusov looked scornful, as he did whenever anyone presumed to comment about his specialty. Then he must have realized he had no impressively crushing rejoinder handy. He tugged at his mustache. “A very good question, Sergei Konstantinovich,” he admitted.

The alarm rang in the headsets of the crewfolk on the ground. Oleg Lopatin’s voice followed it. “A large party of Minervans heading this way out of the northeast. They appear to be armed.”

“Then we should have the one here on good terms with us, to speak well of us to its companions,” Rustaveli said. He reached into a jacket pocket. The motion made Fralk turn an eye from Bryusov to him. The biologist pulled out a pocket knife and opened its blade. Fralk hefted the rocks it was holding.

“You are not endearing yourself to the native, Shota,” Katerina remarked.

That had comebacks obvious even to Tolmasov, but Rustaveli was, for once, pure business. “Hush,” was all he said. He bent, set the knife on the ground, and stepped back from it. Then he pointed to it and to Fralk and waved an invitation to the Minervan. “Go ahead; it’s yours,” he said, though Fralk could not hope to understand his words.

The gestures got through, though. Fralk moved toward the
knife, hesitantly at first but then with more confidence as Rustaveli and Bryusov backed farther away to show that it was all right. The Minervan grew short and wide and picked up the knife—by the handle, Tolmasov saw, which meant it knew what a knife was. Well, Lopatin had as much as said that.

Yes, Fralk knew what a knife was. It held the blade in one hand and tested it with the fingers of another. It must have approved of what it found. It pointed to the knife, then to itself, and made a noise that Tolmasov mentally translated as, “For
me
?”

Rustaveli must have read it the same way.
“Da, da,” he
said. When he did not try to take away the pocket knife, Fralk must have gotten the idea.

Tolmasov heard faint contralto cries in the distance. The Minervans sounded angry. His face quirked into a smile, almost against his will. Angry Minervans sounded like angry sexy women—an unexpected perk of the job. The American slang threatened to make his smile wider. He forced himself to seriousness.

Katerina also heard the locals approaching. She took cover behind one of
Tsiolkovsky
’s huge tires. That made such good sense that Tolmasov crouched behind another one.

He watched the Minervans approach. They were within a couple of hundred meters now, carrying spears and stones and other things less easy to identify. The Kalashnikovs could make bloody hash of them—and of the Soviet mission. If the Americans made peaceful contact while he got into a firefight … he shuddered. He would not end up a Hero of the Soviet Union when he got home. He would end up begging for a bullet, more likely.

Bryusov did not seem to have noticed the—army? gang? posse? He gestured vehemently, like a man in the grip of an overpowering itch. Maybe he was getting through to Fralk, though; the native had three eyes on him, for whatever that was worth.

“I suggest you come to the point, Valery.” Shota Rustaveli was on his belly on the cold ground, behind a stone that would give him some cover. He knew the Minervans were coming. So did Fralk, who kept an eye on them.

Evidently Bryusov did come to the point. Fralk hurried out toward its—countrymen? Probably, Tolmasov thought. If they were enemies, it would have run the other way.

Fralk shouted something. The onrushing Minervans came to
a ragged halt. A couple of natives emerged from the crowd and hurried up to Fralk. They made themselves short and wide, then resumed their usual shape. If Bryusov had gone through contortions before, they were not a patch on the ones Fralk put on now. Of course, having six arms and eyestalks gave it an unfair advantage there.

One of the natives who had approached Fralk said something. Fralk broke in loudly. The other native went short and wide again. “That must be a token of submission, like a salute or a bow,” Bryusov called.

Fralk shouted to the whole group of Minervans. They set their weapons on the ground. “Valery!” Fralk called in that thrilling voice.