A World of Difference (32 page)

Everyone nodded. Then Katerina said, “Think of it as living in a two-room apartment with four generations of your family.” This time everyone laughed.

“
Da,
” Tolmasov said. He had lived like that himself. Everyone had lived that way in Smolensk when he was small, in one of the Stalin-Gothic apartment blocks that had gone up like ugly toadstools after the Great Patriotic War. Afterward, he had never thought those memories would be funny. Now he was grateful to Katerina for using them to break the tension of the moment.

“The resemblance will grow even closer when the chemical toilet clogs up,” Rustaveli said. He sounded sardonic as usual, but he looked serious. He was right, too. After a few days—a week, at most—with four people in permanent residence, the tent would be a decidedly unpleasant place to live.

“The heater will need another charge of gas before long, too,” Katerina said. “And the stove. Afterward, we’ll have no way to make tea, or to make our concentrates into hot food. Come to that, we may not even have water.”

Tolmasov grimaced. Maybe the Minervans would let them go out to gather ice and snow, maybe not. If not, the siege would end in a hurry.

“If the natives want our Kalashnikovs so badly, maybe we should give them a good taste,” Lopatin said. Then, before anyone could shout at him, he shook his head. “No, it would not do. Like it or not, we live in the age of media. Regardless of what a few well-placed bullets might accomplish here, they would do more damage back on Earth.”

“Imperialism
is
easier when word of what it takes to build an empire never leaks out,” Rustaveli said. “Georgia has learned that all too well, from underneath.” For a moment, the brooding expression in his dark, hooded eyes, the way the shadows sat on his narrow cheeks, made him seem almost as alien to the three Great Russians in the tent with him as did the Minervans outside.

A real fight might have sprung from his words. Maybe he intended that. Just then, though, a Minervan called, “Sergei Konstantinovich, come out, please. Come alone.” He spoke Russian.

“Fralk,” Tolmasov mouthed silently. Not seeing what other choice he had, he went. “
Zdrast’ye,
” he said somberly. “What do you aim to do with us?”

“Do with you?” Fralk returned to his own language. He sounded altogether innocent, a good enough reason, Tolmasov thought, to suspect he wasn’t. “Nothing at all. We will merely keep you here and at your sky-boat.”

His pause, again, was perfectly—too perfectly—contrived. “The machine that goes back and forth between here and your sky-boat may continue to do so … provided it goes by the same route it always uses. Other than that, you humans may not leave the sky-boat, either. Males are on the way to enforce Hogram’s command there.”

“Thank you for letting us eat and stay warm, at any rate.” Tolmasov did his best to stay polite. He was seething inside. Sure enough, the locals had spotted the humans’ weakness. Being on Minerva without exploring was like sharing a bed with a beautiful—and expensive, oh so expensive!—trollop without making love.

“We have no wish to harm you humans in any way,” Fralk assured him. “As you know, I owe you my life. But Hogram, wanting many other males to be preserved thanks to your rifle, can no longer cooperate with you when you do not cooperate with us.”

“You should write for
Pravda,
” Tolmasov muttered, which meant nothing to Fralk. But the Minervan was doing a good job of reproducing the more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger, it’s-for-your-own-good tone the paper often took. The pilot went on. “My domain-masters—”

“Are faraway,” Fralk interrupted. “Hogram is here, and so are you. You would do well to remember it.”

Tolmasov waved at the spear-carrying males. “Hard to forget.”

“Think of them as being here to protect you, if you like,” Fralk said.

Tolmasov did not know how to say “hypocrite” in the Skarmer tongue, and Fralk did not understand the Russian word. The conversation, accordingly, lagged. Tolmasov went back into the tent. Fralk’s voice pursued him. “Think on what you do, Sergei Konstantinovich.”

“Bah!” The pilot flung himself into the chair in front of the radio. He worked off some of his fury by profanely embellishing the warning he sent to Bryusov and Voroshilov in
Tsiolkovsky
.

After the sparks stopped shooting from Tolmasov’s mouth, the two men on the ship did not reply for some little while. At last, timidly, Valery Bryusov asked, “Do I understand that you want us to obey the Minervan males when they arrive?”

“Yes, curse it,” the pilot growled. “If they keep letting the rover travel back and forth, I don’t see what else we can do. We cannot fight them unless they attack us first—as Oleg Borisovich has said, public opinion back home would never support it. We will just have to see just who can be more stubborn, us or the Minervans.”

Over the next ten days, Tolmasov developed a rankling hatred for the color orange. He had never been fond of Oleg Lopatin; although the KGB man did his best to be self-effacing—something he could not have found easy—Tolmasov began to despise him in earnest. Shota Rustaveli’s jokes wore very thin, Even Katerina started getting on the pilot’s nerves. And he was grimly certain everyone crowded into the tent with him was sick of him, too.

Then Voroshilov called from
Tsiolkovsky
. “Moscow wonders why we aren’t sending them data based on new journeys, just analysis of what we’d done a while ago.”

“Screw Moscow, Yuri Ivanovich,” Tolmasov said. No one had said anything to Moscow about their confinement, hoping the standoff would resolve itself before they had to.

“Thank you, no,” the chemist answered. “What, though, do you propose to tell them back home? I cannot see us avoiding the issue any longer.”

Tolmasov sighed. “I fear we will have to tell them the truth.” Voroshilov was a quiet, patient man. When he started chiding—however gently—the pilot knew he could not sit on his hands any longer.

The message that came back to
Tsiolkovsky
was circumspect but not ambiguous: “Use whatever means necessary to stay on good terms with the natives and continue your scheduled program of exploration.”

“Which of us becomes drill-master?” Shota Rustaveli asked when Bryusov relayed the word from Earth.

That, Tolmasov thought gloomily, about summed things up.

Fralk watched with five eyes as the human opened a catch and clicked a curved brown box into place on the bottom of the rifle. “This holds bullets,” Oleg said.

“Bullets,” Fralk repeated—so many new words to learn! All of them were necessarily in the human language, too; his own lacked the concepts for easy translation. “Bullets, bullets, bullets.”

“
Da. Khorosho—
good. The bullets come out of the muzzle when you pull the trigger.”

“Muzzle. Trigger.” Fralk said the words while Oleg, holding the rifle in one many-fingered hand, pointed out the parts with the other.

The human held out the rifle. “Go ahead. Pull the trigger.”

“What?” Fralk watched himself turn blue with alarm. “You said, uh, bullets, would come out!” He had seen what bullets had done to the krong. He didn’t know how to make them go where he wanted and didn’t want them to do that to Oleg or him.

“Go ahead. Pull,” Oleg insisted.

Hesitantly, Fralk reached out with a fingerclaw. The trigger was hard as stone but smooth as ice. He pulled. Nothing happened. “No bullets,” he said, relieved.

“No, no bullets,” Oleg agreed. He took back the rifle, then touched part of it above and to one side of the trigger. Fralk had not realized it was a separate piece, but the front end of it, the end toward the muzzle, moved. “This is the change lever,” Oleg said.

“Change lever,” Fralk repeated dutifully.

“
Da
. When the front of the change lever is here, at the top, you cannot pull the trigger. Always carry the rifle with the change lever like that, so it does not shoot by accident.”

“At the top,” Fralk echoed. The idea of a rifle that could shoot by accident tempted him to turn blue again. A spear or an ax did what it did because some male made it work. If no one was around, it would just lie there. The rifle sounded as though
it had a mind of its own. Fralk wondered if he could trust it away from its human masters.

Oleg did not give him time to dwell on that. He moved the change lever. “With it here, in the center position, the rifle will shoot many bullets, one after the other.” He moved it again. “With it here, at the bottom, the rifle will shoot one bullet at a time.”

“Why the choice?” Fralk asked.

“If enemy is close, you use up fewer bullets and save them for other foes.”

“Oh,” Fralk said. That made sense, of a sort. So many things to think about …

The wind
howled out of the south, blowing the snow it carried along almost horizontally. Reatur stood in the middle of his field with all his arms happily stretched out. “A spell of decent weather at last,” he said. “I was sick of all that heat.”

“All
what
heat?” the human beside him muttered. Louise was bundled in even more false skins than humans usually wore; she—Reatur hardly had to remind himself of that anymore, something he could not have imagined a few eighteens of days ago—even had a covering for her eyes, transparent as ice but harder to melt.

The domain-master gestured expansively. “We often get a few stretches of nice southerly breeze,” he said. “I’m particularly glad to have this one, because it will help keep the castle walls solid.”

“ ‘Nice southerly breeze,’ ” Louise echoed. Then she sighed, a sound that, when human mates made it, was eerily like the one people used in the same situation. “Glad cold good for something.”

“It’s not cold,” Reatur protested, only to have Louise sigh again. One thing about which people and humans would never agree was what constituted good weather.

“Never mind,” Louise said—she realized that, too. “Much ice melting at edge of land where all ice—makes storms come, blow even here.”

Reatur started to answer but stopped. Not for the first time, one of the ideas a human casually tossed out made him look at the world in a different way. It had never occurred to him that
what happened in one place could affect weather somewhere else.

“Is the weather across Ervis Gorge the same as it is here?” he asked after a moment’s thought. “Not much different. Why?”

“The one bad thing about snow is that it makes things far away harder to see. If it’s snowing on the Skarmer side of the gorge, they made decide to hit us now because the males I have watching won’t know they’re coming till too late.”

Louise’s wrappings made trying to read her expression, always a tricky business with humans, a waste of time now. But when she said, “One more thing to worry about,” Reatur’s eyestalks could not help twitching. No matter how strange they looked, in some ways humans thought very much like domain-masters.

As if thinking about humans had conjured up more of them, three came into sight trudging along the new path that led from the castle to their flying house. Or perhaps, Reatur thought on seeing Irv, Pat, and Sarah together, it was Louise’s mention of one more thing to worry about that made them appear when they did.

The newcomers had their heads down. They were talking among themselves in their own language. They all jerked in surprise when Reatur called, “Any luck?”

They turned toward him. He saw how splattered with eloc’s blood they were; the wind brought its sharp scent to him, budding and death intermingled in the odor. With that smell so thick, he hardly needed to hear Sarah’s glum reply. “Not much.”

“Some,” Pat corrected. “Budding far along when we get to eloc’s pen. Not have much time to get ready. Do better next try.”

The humans had been saying that since Sarah’s first go at saving an eloc mate. They had yet to keep one alive, Reatur thought gloomily. As if picking his thought from the air like a snowflake, Sarah said, “Not enough luck, not yet. If eloc was Lamra, Lamra dead now.”

“How much longer till Lamra buds?” Irv asked. By dint of endless work, he was starting to speak the Omalo language quite well.

After a moment’s thought, Reatur answered, “An eighteen of days, an eighteen and a half at the outside.” When the humans first put forth the idea of saving Lamra, he had been of two minds about wishing them success. Now, though hope of that
success looked as far away as ever, he knew how downcast he would be if they failed. That made no sense to him, but he was getting used to common sense collapsing whenever humans touched it.

What Pat touched was the gore-splashed front of her false skins. “Go get clean,” she said to Reatur, and started to walk on toward the flying house. Then she added, “Wish I had hot water,” which left him almost as confused as when he had realized how his feelings about Lamra’s survival had changed.

One of water’s few virtues, to Reatur’s way of thinking, was being better for washing than ice or snow. But
hot
water? Hot water was a weapon of war, good for shooting at a foe from a distance or undermining the thick hard ice of his walls. Did Pat mean she was going to wash herself in it? The domain-master knew humans loved heat, but that was taking things altogether too far.

He never thought to wonder how Pat felt about his living in a castle made mostly of ice.

The boats bumped down the path toward Jötun Canyon. The path, meant only for occasional travelers, was not nearly wide enough to accommodate so much traffic. Minervans and their beasts of burden slogged eastward, using the roadway more as a sign of the direction in which they should go than as a means of travel in itself.

Oleg Lopatin marched along with them. He was whistling cheerfully, something which, had they heard it, would have filled the rest of the crew of
Tsiolkovsky
with disbelief. But, he thought, he had every reason to be happy.

For one thing, he was doing conspicuously less than the warriors all around him. True, his AK-74 was slung over his shoulder and he had a heavy pack on his back, but he was not hauling boats on ropes like the Minervans. Nothing satisfies the soul like watching others work harder than oneself.