A World of Difference (20 page)

“I won’t be sorry to get back to heating.” Rustaveli knew he was repeating himself and did not care. He climbed onto the rover and buckled on his shoulder belt. The machine glided away, leaving the dead beast to whatever passed for scavengers on Minerva.

The snow began falling heavily—thick, wet flakes that clung to the rover’s windscreen and made Bryusov slow down. “Springtime on Minerva,” the linguist grunted.

“Yes,” Rustaveli agreed, as sardonically. “The southern latitude equivalent to Havana, Katerina said, and at a season much like May. I wonder how our ally Comrade Castro would enjoy the weather—about as much as I do, I daresay.”

Bryusov slowed still more. “I don’t like this at all. I can’t see what I’m doing.”

“If it gets worse, we can stop and put tent fabric over the rover’s frame till it blows itself out. I hate to do that, though, when we’re on the way back, no matter how much I’d like to be warm.”

“I feel the same way. Besides, the heater uses a lot of energy, and the solar panels aren’t putting out much in this weather. Even so, though, we may have to if—” The linguist never got his “if” out. The rover’s front wheels went into an enormous
hole filled with drifted snow. The rover was not supposed to flip over, no matter what happened. It flipped over anyhow.

Bryusov and Rustaveli shouted as the world turned upside down. Both shouts cut off abruptly. The Georgian had the wind jerked from him as his shoulder harness brought him up short. The linguist was less fortunate. He had not bothered to strap himself in after standing up to photograph the Minervan carnivore. His head smacked a bar of the rover’s roll cage.

When he could breathe again, Rustaveli made several choice comments in his own language. After a moment, he noticed that Bryusov was not answering—the linguist lay unmoving in the snow. Rustaveli wished he had not wasted his curses before.

He reached out to kill power to the wheels. Then, holding on to the frame of the rover with one hand, he unbuckled his safety belt with the other. Olga Korbut, he thought, would have spun around in midair to land gracefully. He was happy enough not to have dislocated his shoulder.

Bryusov was breathing. Rustaveli muttered silent thanks for that. The linguist remained unconscious, though, with blood on his face and the side of his head. None of the cautious things Rustaveli did to try rousing him had any effect.

The Georgian tried the radio and got only static for an answer. That sent panic shooting through him. He certainly wasn’t getting any incoming signal. If he wasn’t getting out, either, the rest of the crew would not even know that Bryusov and he were in trouble until they missed their next scheduled call—and even then, what could they do? Assuming they could find the rover at all, they were several days’ forced march from it. And Bryusov might not have several days.

Knowing that he had to think straight for his companion’s sake helped bring Rustaveli out of his fright. He scrambled out of the rover. Turning it back over, unfortunately, proved more than a one-person job. Another design flaw, he thought, and immediately filed the idea away—no time to worry about it now. The radio was the pressing concern.

The most obvious reason for its failure was damage from the accident. Rustaveli could do nothing about that. But, he reasoned, crash damage should have silenced the radio, not left it flatulent. “The antenna!” he said out loud. It would hardly do much good, buried in a snowdrift.

He had to bend a kink in the springy wire to make it go up past the body of the rover. Even then, it was less than half as tall as it should have been. That was the best he could do, though.
He crawled back under the rover’s chassis and tried the radio again. “Rustaveli calling, Rustaveli calling. Do you read? Emergency. Do you read?” The repetition was very much like prayer.

“Shota! What’s wrong?” Katerina Zakharova’s voice sounded as if she were talking from behind a waterfall, but it was the most welcome thing Rustaveli had ever heard.

“Katya!” he exclaimed, then went on more calmly. “We’ve had an accident—this damned buggy overturned. Valery’s hurt.”

“Hurt? How? How badly?” Even through the roaring static, the Georgian could hear Katerina turning into Dr. Zakharova.

“How badly I don’t know,” he told her. “He’s unconscious—hit his head. This was fifteen minutes ago, maybe more, and he hasn’t come to yet. I haven’t tried moving him—”

“Good,” she broke in. “Don’t, not unless you have to.”

“I know that. I also didn’t much fancy the idea of undressing him to check for anything else wrong, not while it’s snowing.” As it always did, his wry sense of humor reasserted itself. “So much for springtime in Havana.”

“Rustaveli.” That was Colonel Tolmasov, doing his best to mask the concern in his voice. “Give me your exact position.”

The panel connected to the gyrocompass was hard to read upside down, but Rustaveli managed. “Distance 112.7 kilometers, bearing 63°.”

There was silence for a moment from the radio; Rustaveli could picture Tolmasov drawing a line on a map. “Near Jötun Canyon,” the colonel said at last.

“
Da
, Sergei Konstantinovich.” Somehow, Rustaveli managed a chuckle. “A good deal closer to the Americans than to you, as a matter of fact. Only one tiny obstacle in the way.” He laughed again—only a gorge that dwarfed anything Earth knew!

Tolmasov was businesslike as usual. “Can you right your vehicle?”

“Not by myself. I’ve tried. If Valery comes around—” As if on cue, Bryusov moved and groaned. “Rustaveli out,” Shota said. He bent by his companion. “Valery! Are you all right? Do you know who I am?”

“Head—” Bryusov muttered. He started to lift his left hand to his head, then stopped with another, louder groan. Under the blood that splashed it, his face was gray.

Katerina and Tolmasov were both screaming at Rustaveli on the radio. He ignored them until Bryusov drifted away from consciousness again. This time, though, the linguist seemed less
deeply out. He was also, Rustaveli saw with much relief, able to move his legs and right arm, although he whimpered whenever his left arm so much as twitched. The Georgian relayed the news.

“No broken back or neck, then,” Katerina said. “That’s something.”

“Exactly what I was thinking. But that arm … and he has no idea of where he is or what he’s doing. He took a nasty shot in the head.”

“Do you think he can hold out until Dr. Zakharova and I can reach you?” Tolmasov asked, still sounding very official.

“Comrade Colonel, I do not know,” Rustaveli said with equal formality. “What choice has he, however?”

“I am coming to that.” Now something was in Tolmasov’s voice: distaste. Whatever he was about to say, Rustaveli thought, he was not happy about it. Then Tolmasov went on, and the Georgian understood why. “Shota Mikheilovich, you were facetious when you said the Americans were nearer to you than we are, but you were also right. They have some sort of very light aircraft with them. If I ask, they may be able to cross the gorge and treat Valery. If I ask. Do you want me to ask?”

Rustaveli knew the colonel wanted to hear a no. Tolmasov had been ready to bite nails in half when the Americans proved as able as he to throw around charges of deception. Begging help from them had to be the last thing he wanted to do. Or almost the last thing—he couldn’t be eager to have Bryusov die, either. To say nothing of the linguist himself, news of a death on Minerva would hurt the Soviet space program the same way one would damage the Americans’ effort.

It all came down to how badly Bryusov was hurt. If he just had a knock on the head and, say, a broken wrist, Rustaveli knew enough first aid to patch him up. If, on the other hand, he had managed to do something nasty like rupturing his spleen, the Georgian would never know it till too late.

“You’d better call
Athena,
” he said.

There was a long silence from Tolmasov, followed by an even longer sigh. “Damnation. Very well.”

Rustaveli could tell he had just lost points with the colonel. “Sergei Konstantinovich, think of it this way: if Valery dies after we summon the American doctor, of if the doctor refuses to come and he dies, whose fault is that? Not ours, certainly. But if we do not call—”

“A point,” Tolmasov admitted after another pause. He was sounding official again, which Rustaveli took as a good sign. “I will call the Americans.”

“How do
I know what would happen if a mate survived budding?” Reatur demanded. “They come to ripeness, they mate, and then they die. Always. That is what it is to be a mate.”

“But what if one does—
did—
live?” Sarah Levitt persisted. “If mates grow up, too, what they like then?” She wished her grammar were better and her vocabulary bigger. She needed to be persuasive. “What—how much—of lives you waste when mates not live, die young?”

Reatur did not just order her to shut up and go away, as a medieval English baron might have dealt with someone proposing revolutionary social change. Sarah had to give him that much.
Baron
was about as close as anyone had come to translating the Minervan word that literally meant “domain-master,” but Sarah knew it lacked meanings that were there in the Minervan and added connotations missing from it. And Reatur’s domain was a long, long way from medieval England.

The domain-master turned a third eyestalk her way. He began to sing something, or perhaps to declaim. Since he had no music to accompany the words, Sarah was not sure which; whichever it was, he used his arms to help her follow the rhythm of his words. The meaning was something else again. With an obviously memorized piece like this one, Reatur could not pause and explain himself as he went along. Sarah gathered it was a sad—song?—but that was about all.

Eventually Reatur realized she could not fully understand. He broke off and started speaking simply again. “It is about a domain-master who has had three of his mates bud all on the same day, and about his sorrow as he gives the last of them to
the scavengers. Every male who has brought a mate to budding knows this sorrow. How could we not? We are not beasts, and mates are not beasts.”

“No, but mates not people, not now—die too soon. Let mates be people, too. I try to let Lamra live after budding, let her be person, let her grow to be person. Yes?” Sarah watched Reatur intently. She wanted nothing in the world—nothing in two worlds—more than the chance to try to save Lamra. She could feel her face twisting into a frown of concentration as she cast about for the words to make him see things her way. At last she found the very phrase she needed.

The radio on her belt squawked.

She jumped. That perfect phrase vanished from her head. Reatur was startled, too, startled enough to jerk in his eyestalks.

“You read me, Sarah?” Emmett Bragg asked from the tinny little speaker. “Acknowledge, please.”

“I’m here, Emmett—at the castle, talking with Reatur.”

“Come back to the ship, please, right away.” Even with the “please,” it was an order.

“Five minutes?” she pleaded. Maybe those right words would come back.

“This second,” Emmett said flatly. “Emergency.”

“On my way.” Sarah’s hands folded into fists. Wearing gloves, she did not even get the painful release of nails biting flesh. She turned back to Reatur. “Must go now. Talk more of Lamra later, yes?”

“I suppose we may,” Reatur said.

Sarah had to be content with that. “Damn, damn, damn,” she muttered under her breath as she trotted down the hallway toward her bicycle. The timing could not have been worse. Reatur had been weakening. She was sure of it.

She leapt onto the bicycle and worked out some of her frustration by fairly flying back to the ship. She braked so violently that she almost went headfirst over the handlebars. If this wasn’t a genuine life or death emergency, she thought, she was going to peel some paint off the corridor walls.

But it was. She could see that on Emmett Bragg’s face. Then she hesitated. Emmett was in the control room, and so was Irv—she breathed silent thanks that the emergency had nothing to do with him—and so were Louise and Frank and Pat. Nobody looked damaged, though everyone was as somber as Emmett.

Somber, to Sarah’s way of thinking, did not constitute an
emergency. She set hands on hips. “What the hell’s going on?” she snapped. “Where’s the beef?”

“Hon, it’s on the other side of Jötun Canyon,” Irv said.

She stared at him.

“The Russian rover’s had an accident,” Emmett said. “One of their people is down and out—head and arm injuries at the very least, maybe more.”

“What’s that got to do with me?” she demanded. “They have a doctor of their own.”

“Who is at the moment almost seventy miles from the rover, and stuck on foot without it,” Bragg said. “Whereas we have bikes to get to the edge of the canyon fast, and
Damselfly
to get over it—the rover’s only a mile or so away from the far edge of the canyon.” He held up a map with a red dot felt-tipped in to show the location. “This mess happened an hour ago, tops. You could be there before sunset, but their doc is three days away.”

“Get
Damselfly
over Jötun Canyon?” Sarah said faintly. “Any kind of nasty wind and I could be several miles straight down, too.”

Bragg nodded. “I know that. I told Tolmasov I wouldn’t give you any orders, and I’m not. But he asked for our help, and if there is any, you’re it. You’re the doctor, and you’re the pilot here, too. It’s up to you, Sarah. No hard feelings if you say no.”

“Except to the hurt Russian,” she pointed out. “If he lives to have them.”

“There is that,” Bragg said.

“Sarah—” Irv began, and then shut up. She knew a moment’s gratitude that he recognized the decision was not his to make.

“Let me see the map,” she said. Emmett Bragg passed it to her. She studied it. “How wide is the canyon right here? It seems to be one of the narrower stretches. Is it less than ten miles? It looks like it.”

Bragg took the map back. He pulled a clear plastic ruler from one of his coverall pockets and applied it to the image of the gap and then to the scale of miles at the bottom left-hand corner of the sheet. “Good eyeballing,” he said. “It’s just under nine, as a matter of fact.”