A World of Difference (10 page)

“They’re connected to their mother by their mouths,” Pat observed. “Very neat; they get their nourishment directly from her, and never had to evolve anything fancy like a placenta.”

“I wonder how they do dispose of their wastes, though,” Sarah said.

“There.” Pat pointed. “See those little tubes around the central mouth, the ones linking mother and infant? I’ll bet they have something to do with it. Six of them, of course. That seems to be the pattern here.”

“Yes,” Sarah said. She sounded curious, eager to find out what would happen next, trying to guess along. “How do you suppose the babies are going to separate from Biyal, Pat?”

“I don’t know, but I think we’ll find out pretty soon. Look—the ring of little tubes has already come free. She’s bleeding a little from where they went into her, do you see? Minervan blood is browner than ours, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Sarah said again. She leaned forward for a better look.

Irv was watching Reatur watch Biyal. When the bleeding began, the male stepped closer to her. He reached out to pat her on the side, then said something to her. Irv thought he heard the word “Good-bye” again. He touched his pocket. The tape recorder would tell him for sure.

“Here we go,” Sarah said. “Look, Pat—you can see the muscles loosening around the babies’ mouths. Must be some sort of sphincter ring there—”

“Yes, like marsupial babies’ mouths have, to keep them attached to the teat when they’re in their mother’s pouch,” Pat broke in. “Here, though, I’d say the babies will just let go and fall plop on the floor.”

The babies let go and fell plop on the floor.

Biyal’s blood spurted after them, six streams of it, one from each inch-and-a-half-wide circle where a baby had been attached. With so much being lost so fast, the streams quickly diminished. Less than a minute after she had given birth, Biyal’s arms and eyestalks went limp and flaccid. She swayed and started to topple.

“Good-bye,” Reatur said; this time Irv was certain he recognized the word. The male eased Biyal down, making sure she would not fall on any of the newborn Minervans.

“She’s dead.” Pat’s voice was shocked, indignant.

“She certainly is,” Sarah agreed grimly. She lifted one foot. Minervan blood dripped from her boot; it was all over the ground. “Judging by this, I’d say giving birth for a Minervan is just about the same as getting both carotids cut would be for one of us.”

“This can’t be normal,” Pat protested. “Something must have gone wrong—”

“No,” Irv said before his wife could answer. She glanced at him sharply, but he went on. “This must be what always happens. Look at Reatur. He knew exactly what to expect. He’s seen it before. He may not be happy about it, but he’s going on about his business.”

Reatur was doing just that. He was rounding up the six new little Minervans, which scurried about on the floor. Active as they were, they reminded Irv more of newly hatched lizards or turtles than of newborn human infants. Reatur caught them and picked them up, one after another. Finally he had three in one
hand, two in another, and the last separately in a hand on the other side of his body.

“Why apart?” Irv asked him, pointing at the last baby; Reatur had carefully transferred it away from the others, as if he wanted to keep special track of it.

“Male,” Reatur said. He held up the other struggling, squealing infants. “Females.” He said something else that Irv didn’t quite catch. The anthropologist spread his hands, a gesture of confusion Reatur had learned. The—baron?—paused to think for a moment, then lifted the females to show they were what he meant, saying, “Good-bye fast, like—” He used a free hand to point to Biyal’s still, dead body.

“That’s all females do here?” Sarah’s back was stiff with horror and outrage. “Get pregnant and then die? But they’re intelligent beings, too, and could be as much as the males, if, if—” She could not get it out.

“If they lived longer,” Irv finished for her. She nodded, her head down; she would not look at him, or at Reatur.

“Biologically, it makes a certain amount of sense,” Pat said reluctantly. “They reproduce, then get out of the way for the next generation.”

“But who takes care of the babies?” Sarah said.

Pat watched them squirm in Reatur’s grip. “They look like they’re pretty much able to take care of themselves. If they can find their own food—and I’ll bet they can—”

“Then males could nurture as well as females,” Irv broke in. “Or maybe they leave the females in here with their own kind, knowing, uh, knowing they’ll not last long, and take the one male out to train him up to be part of the bigger society.”

“That’s disgusting,” Sarah said. She still was not looking his way.

“I didn’t say I liked it.” Something else occurred to Irv, with force enough that he whacked himself in the forehead with a gloved hand. “We’d better be careful about how we let Reatur and the rest of the natives learn that we aren’t all males ourselves.”

At that, Sarah looked at him, and Pat, too. “We’d better leave,” his wife said in a tight, overcontrolled voice. “If I start laughing, I don’t think I’ll be able to stop.”

Irv waited until one of Reatur’s eyes found him. Then he bowed and said, “Good-bye,” in the local language. Using the word after what he had just watched sent a chill through him that had nothing to do with the icy air in the room.

“Good-bye,” Reatur said. Irv tried to read emotion in his voice and failed. In Reatur’s grip, the babies made noise. Reatur paid no attention to it, so Irv supposed it was the kind of noise baby Minervans were supposed to make.

“Come on,” the anthropologist said. The three humans left the females’ chambers through the room where most of Reatur’s—spouses? again Irv found himself stuck for a word—were still amusing themselves.

The females came crowding round, as full of curiosity as before. Irv was glad he could neither understand nor answer their questions.

Outside Reatur’s castle stood three all-terrain bicycles. They could go places a four-wheeled vehicle could not, and six of them weighed a lot less than a rover would have. “I’m going back to the ship,” Pat said, climbing aboard hers. “I want to get these pictures developed.”

“I just want to get away and think for a while,” Sarah said. She pedaled down the curved track that ran through Reatur’s fields. Her breath streamed out behind her like a frosty scarf.

Irv hesitated. “Which way are you heading?” Pat asked. “Want to ride along with me?”

“I think I’d better see to Sarah.”

“She’ll be all right.”

“I know. Even so, though—” He left the words hanging and started after his wife.

“Ah, well, see you later, then,” Pat called to his retreating back. When he did not answer, she slowly rode off toward
Athena
.

“I didn’t understand that, Valery Aleksandrovich,” Tolmasov said. “Ask Fralk to say it again.”

“He said—” Bryusov began.

The colonel raised a hand. “I thought you understood it. I want to make sure I do, too, and if you translate for me all the time, how can I?” Having decided to learn Minervan, Tolmasov was throwing himself into the project with his usual dogged persistence.

“Again, please,” Bryusov said in the best Minervan he could muster.

“Slowly,” Tolmasov added. That was one word he had used often enough to feel confident about it.

“You give me—” Fralk pointed to the hatchets, hammers, and other tools the Russians had brought for trade goods. “Some
I give Hogram, he—” The word that followed was unfamiliar to Tolmasov. He looked at Bryusov.

“Trade, I think,” the linguist said doubtfully. “Maybe context will make it clearer.” He turned back to Fralk. “Go on.”

“Hogram, he—” That word again. “Then he use what he get to get you things. Some things you give me, I not give Hogram. I”—and again—“them myself. Some of what I get for them, I keep and save. Some I use to get other things; them, to get more things. Some I use to get you things you want.”

“Not ‘trade,’ ” Tolmasov exclaimed. “I know what that word means—it means
sell
. Fralk will sell some of what he gets from us, use some of the profits to acquire more goods, whether from us or his own people, and invest the rest.” The colonel rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. “What does that make him?”

“A capitalist,” Bryusov said in a small voice.

“Just what I was thinking.” Tolmasov looked at Fralk, not altogether happily. As an alien, the Minervan could be studied for his own sake, without preconceptions. Thinking of him as a capitalist brought in a whole load of ideology. The colonel suddenly laughed out loud.

“What?” Bryusov said.

“He would look very strange, driving a large American car.”

“So he would.” Bryusov permitted himself a smile, but it was a nervous one. “Moscow will not find it funny,” he warned. “I doubt Oleg Borisovich will, either.”

“There is that,” Tolmasov said. Still, he wanted to be there when Lopatin got the news, just to see his expression.

Fralk made a noise that sounded amazingly like a woman clearing her throat when the two men with whom she is at dinner have spent too much time talking about their jobs and not enough with her. Tolmasov shook his head at the irony of that marvelous voice being wasted on an alien, and, the Russians had learned, a male alien at that. The colonel bowed to Fralk in polite apology for his woolgathering.

The Minervan widened himself in turn. “Want more—” He pointed at the hatchets and hammers again, and also at a box of little battery-powered lamps.

“Shall we give him more of the axes?” Bryusov asked.

“Well, why not? We brought them to trade, and the local tools and books and specimens we get in return will be worth a lot more than their weight in diamonds back on Earth. Still, I suppose you have a point, Valery.” Tolmasov tried to use his
tiny Minervan vocabulary. “These—” He pointed to the hatchets himself. “What you do with? Use for?”

“Use on Ornalo.”

Tolmasov took a certain small pride in noticing Fralk had chosen a preposition different from the one he had used. The object of the preposition, though, remained obscure. “Omalo? Omalo is what?” he asked.

Fralk said something. “Ervis Gorge” was all the colonel understood: the local name for Jötun Canyon. He turned to Bryusov. “Did you follow that?”

The linguist frowned. “The Omalo are something across Ervis Gorge.”

Tolmasov frowned, too. That was better than he had done, but not enough to tell him much. “Again please, slowly,” he said to Fralk.

The Minervan pointed to himself. “Skarmer,” he said. He pointed to the castle where his—king? grandfather?—lived, the castle that was much the biggest building in this settlement. “Hogram Skarmer.”

“A surname?” Tolmasov asked.

“We’ve seen no signs of such yet,” Valery Bryusov answered. “And while he might use an ax on Hogram, he would not use one on himself. Besides, let him go on—I don’t believe he’s finished.”

The linguist was right. Seeing he had not yet made his point, Fralk said, “Ervis Gorge—this side—Skarmer—all.” He waved his six arms to emphasize his words. “Ervis Gorge—across—Omalo.”

“Bozhemoi,”
Tolmasov said softly. He was afraid he did understand that. “Valery, I think he’s trying to tell us these Omalo on the other side of the canyon are another whole country. I think we should think three times before we go arming these folk for war.”

“I think also, Sergei Konstantinovich, that we should consult with Moscow,” Bryusov said.

The colonel made a sour face. Bryusov wanted to consult with Moscow to decide which pair of socks to put on in the morning. Then, reluctantly, Tolmasov nodded. “I am afraid you are right. The Americans, after all, are also on the other side of Jötun Canyon. War against them, even by proxy, would not be well received back home, I suspect. We came too close to falling off the big cliff, the nuclear cliff, in Lebanon.”

“We need to learn more of the situation here as well,” Bryusov said.

“So we do.” They could not hope to learn enough, either, Tolmasov thought, not in the limited time they had on Minerva. In the end, they might act anyway. People did things like that.

“Shall we tell the Americans?” Bryusov asked.

“We’ll let Moscow worry about that, too,” Tolmasov decided. “If it were my choice, though, I’d say no, at least not yet.”

Reatur finished cleaning the chamber where the new budlings had burst into the world. It was somber work. That was one of the reasons he did not give it to the mates. The other, of course, was simply that, being as they were, they would have done a bad job of it.

He dragged Biyal’s corpse out of the room, toward the door that kept the mates in their own part of the castle. The evening was growing dark, and he hoped the mates would be back in the little rooms where they slept.

Seventeen evenings out of eighteen, they would have been. Even tonight, most of them were. But Numar and Lamra were still chasing each other up and down the hall. They came to a stumbling stop when they saw the domain-master and his burden.

“It’s Biyal,” Numar said.

“How sad,” Lamra echoed. But she did not sound full of grief, no more than if she were speaking of a broken pot or, at most, a dead animal she did not care much about one way or the other. She was too young to grasp that Biyal’s fate awaited her as well. As if to underscore that, she said, “Feel me, Reatur. I think I’m going to bud.”

Reatur ran fingers along her body. Sure enough, the barest beginnings of bulges were there. “I think you are, too, Lamra,” he said, as gently as he could.

“Good,” Lamra said. No, Reatur thought, she did not understand the connection between buds and death that so abridged mates’ lives. Sadness pressed on him. Lamra was a mate he cared for more than he had for any in years. She was more uniquely herself than most mates ever got to be in their limited spans. He would miss her when her time came. Maybe, he thought, a minstrel would be visiting the domain then, and he could pay the fellow for a song by which to remember her.

While he was musing, Numar was getting bored and annoyed
that no one was paying attention to her anymore. She poked Lamra with three arms at once, then raced off down the hall. Letting out a squawk loud enough to wake half the mates who were sleeping, Lamra dashed after her.