A World of Difference (19 page)

“How you different?” Sarah said at last. Something had changed in the human’s voice. Lamra could hear that, but she did not know enough of humans to be sure what the change meant. Sarah hesitated again, then went on. “Lamra, you know what happens after—after you bud?”

“After I bud, I’m over, of course,” Lamra answered. “Who ever heard of an old mate?”

“Humans not like that. Not male, me—mate.” Sarah pointed at himself—no, herself, Lamra thought through roaring confusion. “I old—old like any other human. Mates—human mates—who, uh, bud not die then. Can live on.”

“Live on?” From her tone, Lamra might have been talking about one of the three moons coming down from the sky and dancing in the fields. She did not so much disbelieve Sarah as find her words beyond comprehension. “Live on?” she repeated. “Who ever heard of an old mate?”

The proverb helped anchor her to the familiar, the here and now. She had never needed such an anchor before—this was
much
stranger than Reatur’s turning all his eyes on her.

“Who ever heard of humans?” Sarah asked. Lamra had no answer to that. The human—the human
mate!—
continued. “Because a thing
is
, does that mean it
must be?
” He—no, she—said that several different ways, working hard to get the meaning across to Lamra.

Even so, it was a struggle. “Too hard,” Lamra complained. She hadn’t liked it when Reatur asked that sort of question, either.

“All right. Question not so hard: You want to have buds, live on after?”

Sarah asked it as if it could only have one possible answer. Lamra did not see it so. “What would I do?” she wailed. “Who ever heard of an old mate?” This time the saying truly reflected how perplexed she was.

“
Not
want to live on?” Sarah pressed. “Want to die like Biyal, put blood over whole floor?”

Lamra had never really thought about not dying until the human raised the question in her mind. Now that she turned a couple of eyestalks on it, the prospect of spilling her blood out all over the floor did seem unpleasant if another choice was available. “Will you make my buds go away?” she asked. “I don’t think I want you to do that.”

“Not know how,” Sarah said.

“What
will
you do, then?”

Sarah muttered something to himself—no, herself; Lamra would be a long time getting used to that—in her own language, then dipped her head to the mate in the human motion that meant the same as widening herself. After a moment, the human started talking people talk again. “You know right question to ask.”

Sarah sounded like Reatur, Lamra thought. The mate realized that was true in a couple of ways—Sarah’s voice was like a male’s. How could she be a mate? That whole tangle of eyestalks would just have to keep. “You didn’t answer me,” Lamra said accusingly.

“Not know good answer.” Sarah’s sigh was just like a person’s. “Try to stop blood when buds fall from you. Not know how now. Not even know if able. Try, if you want.”

“I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.” Lamra again thought how much Sarah sounded like a male, both in the timbre of her voice and in the complex way her mind worked. That thought helped the mate find a reply at last. “Ask Reatur,” she said. “If Reatur says it’s all right, then it’s all right with me, too.”

“Your body,” Sarah said. “Your life.”

“Ask Reatur.”

Sarah threw her hands in the air. Lamra had never seen a human do that and did not know what it meant. All Sarah said, though, was, “All right. Ask Reatur. Ask Reatur now.” She stood up and started out of the mates’ chambers.

Lamra watched her go. She scratched the itchy skin over her buds again. The notion of not ending when the buds dropped
off was still a long way from real to her. For that matter, the time when the buds would drop still seemed a very long way off. To a mate, anything further away than tomorrow seemed a long way off.

Morna came rushing in. Lamra was so lost in her own thoughts that the other mate managed to grab two of her arms and almost pull her over. That roused Lamra. She squealed, straightened up, and tugged back. Morna jerked free. She ran away, squealing herself. Eyestalks wiggling happily, Lamra dashed after her.

The rover purred along until the right front wheel hit a big rock hidden by a snowdrift. The tough little vehicle climbed over the stone but came down with a jolt that rattled its two riders—it did not have much in the way of springs or padding for the seats. Every possible gram of weight had been left off.

Shota Rustaveli’s teeth came together with a click that effectively served as a period to the song he had been singing. He clutched at his kidneys with a theatrical groan. “So this is what it’s like to serve in the tank corps,” he said.

Valery Bryusov did not reply for a moment; he was busy wrestling the rover back on course. “I would not mind having a few tons of steel around me to smooth out the ride,” he said as the machine finally straightened out.

“Nor would I.” Rustaveli shivered. “A few tons of steel would also enclose a space which could be heated,” the Georgian went on wistfully. Only a windscreen and a roll cage separated him from the cold all around; not enough, he thought, but again it saved weight. He did not think well of saving weight, not after nine days in the chilly, drafty rover.

Snow spattered off the windscreen. Some blew over and spattered off Rustaveli’s face. He swore and wiped it away. It was blowing on Bryusov, too, but the Russian paid it no mind. Like everyone aboard
Tsiolkovsky
but the Georgian, he seemed perfectly comfortable on Minerva and wore his coat and fur hat as if he had thrown them on only as an afterthought.

“I want something warm,” Rustaveli said. “A woman, by choice.”

“Sorry I can’t oblige you there,” Bryusov grunted. “Will you settle for some tea?” Without waiting for an answer, he pulled to a stop so Rustaveli could pour from the vacuum flask without spilling tea all over himself.

The Georgian drank quickly; had he hesitated, he would have been taking iced tea by the time he got to the bottom of his
glass. He savored the warmth. “Not a woman,” he said, “but it will have to do.”

“I wouldn’t mind a glass myself,” Bryusov said. “I could use a break.”

Rustaveli felt his cheeks grow hot—
not
the kind of warmth he had been looking for. “I’m sorry, Valery Aleksandrovich. That was thoughtless of me.” He poured for the linguist. Baiting Bryusov was enjoyable when he did it on purpose; being accidentally rude was something else again.

Despite the snow flurries, the day did seem less grimly chill without the wind of the rover’s motion. Rustaveli looked around. “Good enough for some pictures,” he decided, and reached for the camera beside him.

Through the spattering snow, the countryside was much more rock-ribbed than it was around
Tsiolkovsky
’s landing site. Of course, by now the ship was 120 kilometers to the southwest; Jötun Canyon lay only a few kilometers eastward. If the land hereabouts was rock-ribbed, Rustaveli thought, the canyon made a gash big enough for a heart transplant.

Something moved that was not snow. Rustaveli and Bryusov saw it at the same time. The linguist grabbed for binoculars, Rustaveli for a long lens for his Nikon. “Not a Minervan,” Bryusov said after a moment. “Not one of their domestic animals, either, or not one we’ve seen before.”

“No.” Rustaveli watched the animal through the camera’s viewfinder. “It doesn’t move like a domestic animal.” The more the Georgian studied the beast, the greater the unease that flowered in him. He held the camera in one hand while making sure with the other that he knew where the Kalashnikov was.

The Minervan animal did not move like anything domesticated. It moved like a tiger, as nearly as could a creature built on this planet’s lines. Like all Minervan beasts the Soviets knew about, it was radially symmetrical, with six legs, six arms, and six eyestalks above them.

But where Minervans ambled and their domestic animals plodded, this creature stalked. Its legs were long and graceful, its arms, by contrast, relatively short but thick with muscle and appended with talons that put Minervans’ fingerclaws to shame. Even its eyestalks had a purposeful motion different from anything Rustaveli had seen before. Somehow they reminded him of so many poisonous snakes.

Three of those eyestalks fixed on the rover. “It’s spotted us,”
Bryusov said, dismay in his voice. A moment later, he sounded unhappier yet. “It’s coming this way.”

“I noticed that myself, thank you.” Rustaveli was pleased he was able to make light banter when he would sooner have jumped off the rover and fled. That was what his body was screaming he ought to do, though his brain had a nasty suspicion the animal would be faster than he was. Instead of running, he set down the Nikon and picked up the assault rifle.

The Minervan animal drew closer. Even when less than a hundred meters away, it was not easy to see; its mottling of brown and dirty white made it blend into the background the same way a tiger’s stripes camouflage it in tall grass. The parallel, Rustaveli thought, was probably no coincidence.

The Georgian’s head swiveled as the beast prowled around the rover, peering at it—and its occupants—from all sides. “Maybe we ought to get moving again,” Bryusov said nervously.

“I have a feeling the beast can go faster than twenty kilometers an hour, and I know quite well the rover can’t,” Rustaveli said. “Or were you planning to outmaneuver the thing?”

Bryusov did not bother answering that. With their six equally spaced legs, Minervans were more agile than Earthly beasts or machines. The linguist slipped out of his safety harness and stood up so he could take a picture of the creature without also including a view of the back of Rustaveli’s head.

Maybe the motion set the beast off. Things happened too quickly for Rustaveli to be certain afterward of cause and effect. He was sure that Bryusov had not got all the way to his feet when the Minervan animal let out a shriek—an unearthly shriek, he would think later and then reject the word; how else was a Minervan animal supposed to sound?—and sprang at the rover.

Reflex screamed
attack
. The Kalashnikov was hammering against Rustaveli’s shoulder before he realized he had raised it. Hot brass cartridge cases spit backward. The assault rifle’s staccato bark drowned the squall of the Minervan beast.

That squall cut off abruptly, as, a moment later, did the AK-74. Rustaveli grabbed for another magazine and slapped it into place. He did not fire again, though—no need. He was sure he had missed as often as he had hit, but even part of the clip of high-velocity 5.45mm bullets had been plenty to knock down the Minervan creature. It was still twitching and thrashing, but it was not going anywhere, not anymore.

Bryusov sat down with a thump that made the rover shake.
Then he half rose again and used a gloved hand to brush spent cartridges off the seat. He cut in power to the wheels; the rover silently rolled toward the dying animal. “Let’s see what we have,” the linguist said.

“We have at least one person, Valery Aleksandrovich, who is glad these beasts don’t hunt in packs.”

Bryusov thought about that and gave a shiver that had nothing to do with the weather. “Make that two, Shota Mikheilovich. My old grandmother always used to go on about the wolves that would come out of the deep woods to raid the farms around her village when she was a girl. The only wolves I’ve ever seen are the ones in the Moscow Zoo, and that suits me just fine.”

“Me, too.” For once, Rustaveli agreed completely with his companion.

The Minervan animal had fallen over, giving the two humans a good view of the mouth in the center of its circle of eyestalks. The needlelike teeth inside were plenty to cancel any lingering doubts about its nature.

One of the beast’s arms lashed out and smacked against the side of the rover, hard enough for the two riders to feel the jolt. Rustaveli swore and put a couple more bullets into it, carefully aimed to pierce the nerve centers Minervan creatures had under their eyestalks. The big carnivore convulsed one last time and lay still.

Bryusov took more photos. Rustaveli got down from the rover and used a gloved hand to dig through snow till he found a few pebbles. He tossed one at the beast. When it did not stir, he moved closer and threw another pebble, hard this time. Only then was he satisfied that the beast was dead.

Its claws were too big to fit into a specimen bottle. He took one anyway. If all else failed, he thought, he could have it mounted on a chain and wear it around his neck. He took other, more conventional specimens, too; Katerina would never have forgiven him for failing there. The stink of alien body fluids made him cough.

The dead Minervan beast still had one twitch left. Rustaveli gave a backward leap any Russian folk-dancer would have been proud of. He came down next to his Kalashnikov and had it pointed at the carnivore in essentially the same instant. The beast was inert again. He shook his head in self-reproach. “Jumpy,” he muttered.

“In the most literal sense of the word,” Bryusov said admiringly. “Had you thought about the Olympics?” The Georgian
really looked for the first time at the distance he had put between himself and the animal. He whistled softly. “Talents you had not dreamed of?” Bryusov asked.

Rustaveli was not one to stay shaken for long. Grinning, he switched to English. “I’ve always been good at the broad jump—ask Katerina.”

“Why? What does she know about your ath—” Bryusov made a sour face as he finally caught on.

“Yes, she was once one of my chief athletic supporters,” Rustaveli went on blithely, still in English. This time Bryusov did not respond at all. Calls himself a linguist, Rustaveli thought scornfully—he’s only a dictionary that walks like a man. Sighing, the Georgian went back to hacking bits off the animal he had killed. When he was sure he had enough to keep Katerina happy, he got up. “Let’s go back, Valery Aleksandrovich. So long as we don’t exactly retrace our way, every kilometer we cover is a new one.”

“True enough.” Bryusov pulled his fur cap down a little farther on his forehead; it was starting to snow harder. “I won’t be sorry to get back to our comrades.”