A World of Difference (35 page)

Hopelessly, he peeled off the back of the set. Water gleamed on the integrated circuits inside. He had tried to keep the radio dry crossing Jötun Canyon, but its case was not waterproof. Who would have thought, on frozen Minerva, it would have to be? He dried the works as best he could, tried again to send. The radio was still dead.

Of course, it had taken a good many bangs, too, as he scrambled up toward the top of the canyon. Without tools he did not have, he could not tell what was wrong with the cursed gadget if nothing obvious like a loose wire leapt out at him. He could not fix anything more complicated than a loose wire, either.

And this, he asked himself bitterly, makes you a modern electronic engineer? The trouble was, it did. But that, at the moment, was the least of the trouble he was in, and he knew it.

Emmett Bragg would be wild when he found out about his countryman’s death. And even Tolmasov was leery of Bragg.

“You
get
him on the radio and you find
out
what the hell he’s playing at, do you hear me, Sergei Konstantinovich?” Bragg sounded like an angry tiger, Tolmasov thought. He did not blame his American opposite number, either.

“I am calling, Brigadier Bragg, calling repeatedly, I assure you. But he does not reply.”

“Neither does Frank Marquard. What does that say to you?”

“Nothing I like,” Tolmasov admitted.

“Me either,” Bragg growled. “Near as I can see, it says your man’s gone rogue on this side of the canyon. I don’t like that, Sergei Konstantinovich, not one little bit. You better believe I’ll do anything I need to, to protect the rest of my crew. Anything. Don’t say you weren’t warned.”

“I understand.” If Tolmasov could have got Lopatin in his sights, he might have dealt with him himself.

“You’d better. Bragg out.”

Silence crashed down in the tent outside Hogram’s town. Tolmasov
sat staring at the radio for a minute or two before he got up. The mission had gone so well for so long, but when it decided to come apart, it didn’t fool around. Someone on
Tsiolkovsky—
Rustaveli or Voroshilov, that had to be—calling the Americans, and whoever had not called cutting him off in mid-sentence. The pilot did not know whether to be angrier at caller or cutter.

And Lopatin! Tolmasov still did not know what to make of that. He did not want to think even a
chekist
could go out of control the moment he got off on his own, but he did not know what else to think, either. The fool’s stubborn refusal to start or accept communication did not speak well of him.

The pilot turned to Valery Bryusov and Katerina, who had listened to his exchange with Bragg with as much shock and dismay as he had felt. “Comments?” he asked. Maybe, just maybe, one of them had seen something he had missed.

“Sergei, we have a major problem,” Katerina said. Bryusov nodded solemnly. So, after a moment, did Tolmasov. The only trouble was, he already knew that.

Irv peered down into Jötun Canyon. He’d had the weight of a pistol on his hip before, but now he really felt it. The idea of using the gun on a Minervan horrified him. The idea of using it against an AK-74 horrified him, too, for a different reason—he was glad he had made a will before leaving Earth.

By rights, he thought, trying to blend into the bushes, this was Emmett Bragg’s job. Emmett was a soldier, not an anthropologist playing pretend. But Emmett was also the pilot—the number one pilot and, if the worst
had
happened to Frank, the only pilot. He was not expendable as a scout.

The Minervans down in the canyon did not look any different from Reatur’s males. Irv knew, though, that none of Reatur’s males were there. These had to be the enemy, then—the Skarmer, the Russians called them.

And Oleg Lopatin. Without the frantic call from
Tsiolkovsky
, Irv would not have know which Russian accompanied the Skarmer over Jötun Canyon, but a human being’s jointed, jerky motions were instantly recognizable against a backdrop of waving Minervan arms and tentacles. For one giddy moment, Irv hoped the human down there was Frank, but the Americans did not wear fur hats.

How had the Skarmer crossed, anyhow? Irv let his binoculars sweep past the knot of natives to water’s edge. At first, the round
bowl-shapes he saw there meant nothing to him. Then he realized they had to be boats. They looked dreadfully small and flimsy to stack against the current in the canyon, let alone the drift ice there.

Maybe, he thought, the Skarmer had not known the risk they were taking when they set out. Being too ignorant to worry about trouble had fueled a lot of human enterprises, too. Too bad this one was aimed in his direction.

Some of the Skarmer began moving upslope. Seen through lenses, the motion was magnified, menacing. Irv scuttled backward even while the rational part of his mind insisted he was in no danger. That did not stop his retreat. It did make him keep the binoculars trained as he backed away.

The tight knot of Minervans he had been watching broke up in the advance. He saw what they had been gathered around: Frank Marquard’s crumpled corpse. The sight came as no surprise, but it was like a kick in the belly all the same.

Irv scrambled onto his bike and raced back toward
Athena
.

Ternat wished Dordal had been budded as a mate, so he—no, she, he would have been; this was almost as complicated as remembering half the humans were mates—could have died young, while budding six offspring as idiotic as himself. Reatur’s eldest refused to perform the mental gymnastics he knew he needed to make the last arm of that sentence point in the same direction as the rest.

“Is this still our domain, eldest, or is it Dordal’s?” one of the males with him asked.

Ternat considered. He had come this way earlier in the year, trying to convince Dordal that the Skarmer threat was real. All he had succeeded in doing was convincing Dordal that Reatur thought it was real, and so could be raided with impunity. “Still ours, Phelig,” he answered, hoping he would make a better war-leader than he had an envoy.

The male’s eyestalks drooped in disappointment. “Then we have to leave that fence alone?”

“I’m afraid so.” Ternat had had an eye or three on the enclosure, too, until he decided where they were. “Don’t worry. It won’t be long.”

That proved even truer than he had expected. The sun was falling west through clouds toward Ervis Gorge when the war band came upon a pen that had been thrown down. Snow had fallen since then, to cover any tracks, but Ternat still caught the
rancid stink of massi voidings. He did not have to see to follow the trail. It led north. “Anything from here on, we can take back with us. Either Dordal’s males stole it from us, or we’ll steal it from them,” Ternat shouted. His comrades cheered.

No formal post marked the border between Reatur’s domain and Dordal’s. On either side of the border that was not marked, though, males knew who their clanfather was. The ones on Dordal’s side knew to run away when a large band of strangers came up from the south.

The scent trail grew stronger. Ternat began to wonder if he and his males were walking into a trap. He doubted whether Dordal had the wit to set one, but one of the northern domain-master’s bright young males—say, a male much like Ternat—might.

Sure enough, not long after the idea crossed Ternat’s mind, a male pointed casually toward a large boulder off to the side of the path. Just as casually, Reatur’s eldest turned an eyestalk in that direction. Someone was peeking out at them.

“Let’s go on a little ways and then rush back,” Ternat said after a moment’s thought. “That way we’ll stand between the spy and his friends, so he won’t be able to run to them.”

As if unaware, the males ambled past the boulder. Ternat swung an arm down. Shrieking, brandishing their spears, the raiding party reversed themselves and ran to catch the male who had been watching them.

“Take him alive!” Ternat yelled. “We need answers.”

Had the spying male fled, he would not have got far, not with nine eighteens of warriors after him. But he did not flee. Indeed, Ternat wondered if he could flee. Even after he widened himself in submission, he was one of the thinnest males Reatur’s eldest had ever seen, and one of the filthiest as well.

He was not blue with fear under his dirt, though, and Ternat understood why a moment later, when he cried out, “Hurrah! You’ve come to get the beasts back!”

Anticlimax, Ternat thought. Having been all keyed up to fight or pursue, here he was, greeted as a savior. Lowering his spears—surely there could be no harm in one starveling male—he said, “ ‘Back’? You’re one of Reatur’s herders?”

“That I am—Elanti the massi-herder, at your service. I’m glad you fellows came at last. I was getting right hungry, skulking around here so’s I could keep one eyestalk on the animals.”

“I believe that,” Ternat said. “Phelig, give him something to eat.” While Elanti fed with every sign of ecstasy, Ternat
quietly asked the warriors, “Does anyone know if he’s truly ours?”

Eyestalks writhed as the males stared at Elanti and at one another. A male named Ollect, whom Fralk knew to be from the northern part of the domain, said, “He’s ours, eldest. He’s been herding massi up here near the border for a long time.” A couple of other males spoke up in agreement.

Elanti stopped gobbling for a moment and said reproachfully, “Eldest, eh? Reatur’d know who I was without asking.”

That, Ternat thought, was probably true. “The domain-master knows all sorts of things I must learn one day,” he answered.

“Hmm. Not stuck up about it, anyway.” Elanti popped yet another chunk of dried meat into his mouth. When it was gone, he said, “Dordal’s thieves have my massi—well, suppose you’d say Reatur’s massi, but I’m the one herds ’em—in a little valley not far from here, along with some herds of their own. They’ve also got males posted on both sides of the trail there, so’s they can jump on anybody coming straight up to take them home again.”

“Sounds like the cursed robbers,” Ternat said, forgetting he had been thinking it would take someone much like him to set an ambush.

“There’s more,” Elanti said. “I’ve had a lot of eyestalks on the land hereabouts lately, and a bit before then, too.” Ternat suspected he meant he had done some smuggling over the border; he turned all his eyes away from Elanti for a moment to show he did not care. The herder sounded relieved as he went on, “Happens I know a way that gets you round the far side of one of those bands. You hit ’em from a direction they’re not expecting, nip in and grab the beasts, then deal with the other band—”

“Yes,” Ternat said slowly, liking the scheme. “If you’re right, Elanti, the clanfather will make you rich for this.” And if you’re wrong, he did not add, you’ll never betray anyone else again. The herder ought to be able to figure that out for himself.

Evidently he could. “Don’t much care about being rich,” he answered. “Getting my massi back, that’s the important thing, them and maybe a few of Dordal’s better ones to pay me back for the trouble I’ve had. Maybe even more than a few.”

“You’ll get them,” Ternat promised, carefully not wiggling his eyestalks at the greed in Elanti’s voice. After all this was over, he told himself, detailing someone to watch the herder for
a while would be a good idea. Elanti might have more stashed away somewhere than Reatur did under the clan castle.

But all that was for later. Now he and the war band followed Elanti away from the plain, inviting trail of the massi toward the other path the herder said he had found.

Lamra looked down at herself, all around. Half the time, she thought the six big bulges that almost hid her feet looked ridiculous. The other half of the time, she hardly noticed them. They had been part of her so long that she was used to them.

She tried to remember what she had looked like before the budlings began to grow. Like any other mate, she supposed. It was hard to believe that. When she stopped peering at herself, she could see several nearby. It was even harder to imagine she would ever look so straight-up-and-down again. The humans kept saying she might, but then humans were pretty hard to imagine, too.

She had trouble playing now, she who had once been among the swiftest and most agile mates. Because she had grown so clumsy and slow, the others hardly tried to include her in their games anymore.

She wondered if the idea that she would probably not be around much longer also made them want to stay away from her. She doubted it. Few mates could think far enough ahead to conceive of death as anything but a word. She had trouble doing so herself. She was not aware of a time when she had not been, so would she not always be?

But she knew that, no matter how things seemed, the reality was that Reatur, unchanged so far as she could tell in the time she had been alive, had been about the same long before that. And she knew mates, many mates, had ended in the time since she had started paying attention to the world around her. She could die, too.

She looked at the piece of cured hide she held in one hand and at the marks written on it. Reatur knew she had this piece and did not mind. More of the marks were beginning to make sense to her. Each one she learned made the rest easier to understand. If she lived, one day she would be able to read.

The door to the mates’ chambers opened. Reatur came through. He looked tired, Lamra thought—his eyestalks, even his arms, drooped. He had not come to see the mates so often lately as before, and when he did, he was always tired.

The mates swarmed around him. He had kind words for all
of them, as he usually did: praise for Peri’s scribbles—which, Lamra thought, did not look a thing like real writing—an eyestalk wiggle of glee when some other mate in the crowd—Lamra could not see who—threw a ball that actually went in his direction.

Lamra tried to wait for him to notice her. She was at the edge of the group because she could not move quickly anymore, and a lot of mates had dashed by to be with the domain-master. That made her angry, and she was not very patient, anyhow. When she could not wait any longer, she shouted “Reatur!” as loud as she could.

Two of his eyestalks looked in her direction. “Your turn will come, little one,” he said, and went on with what he was doing. The promise kept her quiet a while longer. Then she shouted for him again.