A World of Difference (28 page)

By Hogram’s response, he already knew that the humans on the Skarmer side of the gorge had not. And if Hogram suddenly learned something as unsettling as that, it might help drive him apart from his humans. Reatur was convinced that such a rift would prove useful; he still wasn’t sure what powers humans had, but keeping those powers estranged from the Skarmer had to be a good idea.

“I know what you are thinking: you want to make me fear the—” Hogram used his own word for humans. Yes, he was sharp. “But who ever heard of an old mate?” So the Skarmer had that cliche, too, did they? “I waggle my eyestalks at you and your deception both,” Hogram finished.

Reatur would have thought it funny, too, had he not known the truth. He thought of Lamra for a moment, but made himself dismiss her from his mind; Hogram demanded all his attention. “If you think I am lying, ask your humans for yourself.”

“Bluff all you like, Reatur. I will ask them, and afterward know you for the liar you are. That will be remembered, when we cross to the east side of the gorge.”

“Do you think your boasts make me blue with fright? If you are foolish enough to come, we will be ready for you. But”—Reatur remembered—“the humans asked us to talk so we would not fight, not so we would quarrel more with words. Can we find a way to keep you on your side of the gorge where you belong, and to keep our domains at peace?”

“There is no way to keep us on this side of the gorge alone,” Hogram declared. “As for peace, I have offered to let males of yours survive. If you do not resist us, obviously, more will live. We would not be deliberately harsh.”

“You offer less than I and mine have already. You know I will not accept.” As he sparred, Reatur had been thinking of what he could propose to Hogram. Now he set it forth. “If we knew you were not planning to invade, we might rebuild the bridge across the gorge. Then, in years when we had good crops, we could trade our surplus to you rather than to one of our Omalo neighbors who was less lucky. That would let you support more people on your domain.”

“How many more? How often do you have that kind of good year? If it were more than one year in three, I would be surprised—and try to buy your secret from you. Is it?”

“No,” Reatur said after thinking over and rejecting a lie. Melting the truth a little might save him trouble now but would earn more later.

“You bargain strangely, Omalo, but I accept your word. Well, then: if in one of those rare good years you do sell us food, how much do you suppose we could haul over the bridge? Enough for a few eighteens of males, perhaps, but not much more. That does not suffice.”

Reatur let the air hiss out through his breathing-pores. “Which leaves us where we began.”

“So it does.” Hogram also sighed. “For a moment there I had hope, but you are right. I could wish you sprang from a Skarmer bud, Reatur, but that is not so. As is, since you will not give us what we need, we shall take it from you.”

“You may try, Hogram, but you will fail.”

“If a Skarmer wants a thing, Omalo, be assured he will have it, and pay less than the former owner would like. Reatur, I want your domain, and I tell you you will not keep it. The day your eyestalks turn away from our direction, we will come.”

“You lie. Past that, I have nothing more to say to you.”

“Nor I to you,” Hogram said. “Our actions will speak.”

Reatur signed again. For the first, time since he and Hogram had confronted each other with their voices, he paid attention to the human who had made the confrontation possible. “Take your box away, Irv,” he said, suddenly so weary his arms and eyestalks felt like drooping. “We are finished.”

The human touched a button; the box, which had been letting out a quiet hiss, became completely silent. “You, Hogram make peace?” Irv asked. “Not follow all words—you, Hogram not use same words you, me use.”

“Trade talk has Omalo words, Skarmer words, and words from other great clans all mixed together; males from different great clans use it when neither speaks the other’s language,” Reatur explained. He was glad to blather on about trade talk. While he was doing that, he would not have to think about everything Hogram had said.

“Lingua franca,” Irv muttered. Then, as if noticing that meant nothing to Reatur, he did some explaining himself. “Humans with words not same do same thing sometimes.”

“Ah,” Reatur said politely. Interesting how, every once in a while, humans acted very much like people.

But no male of his domain would have been so rude as to ask again, as Irv did, “You, Hogram make peace?”

“No,” Reatur said. “I didn’t think we would, I told you we wouldn’t, and yet, curse it, you kept at me, making me waste time I could have spent helping my domain get ready for whatever the miserable Skarmer have in their sneaking minds.”

Irv spread his hands in the human gesture that meant it wasn’t his fault. “My domain-masters tell me what to do. I must go in direction they point. Your males do that for you.” Then Irv bent at the middle and stayed bent. Had he been a person, Reatur realized, he would have been widening himself in apology.

The domain-master gestured for him to resume his usual height. Irv did—yes, apology was what he had meant. “You are right—you should obey your domain-masters,” Reatur conceded, although the plural puzzled him. “This time, though, they were wrong. Hogram and I had nothing to say to each other, not about peace.”

Irv spread his hands once more. Reatur hardly noticed. He was thinking about Hogram now, like it or not, and about how confident the Skarmer had sounded. If Hogram’s males could not cross Ervis Gorge, he had no business sounding like that. But how could they, with the yearly flood rising day by day? Reatur could hear the waters booming and could feel their pounding through his feet. He turned his mental eyestalks in all directions but could not see how the Skarmer might best the flood.

But Hogram could. Reatur was sure of that. It frightened him.

The female
eloc saw Sarah coming. Of course it did, she thought in some annoyance—with eyes that looked every which way at once, Minervan creatures were next to impossible to sneak up on. The eloc had seen Sarah before. It did its best to run away.

Its best was not good enough. It was so very gravid that it could scarcely waddle to the far end of its little pen. She hurried after it. It was right on the point of dropping its buds, and she wanted to see what she could do to keep it from bleeding to death immediately afterward.

The female eloc, unfortunately, knew nothing about that. As far as it was concerned, Sarah was weird, probably a predator, and certainly dangerous. It made a brief rush at her, trying to stick her with one of the horns that projected out from its body below each arm.

She skipped backward faster than the eloc could come after her. The horns were not very long, anyhow; the Minervans, who had to herd eloca, had sensibly bred them so they were less formidably equipped than their wild relatives.

“It’s all right,” Sarah crooned, as if to a spooked horse back on Earth. Maybe that had some effect; maybe the eloc decided that making the little charge satisfied its honor. At any rate, it stood quiet and let her come up to it, though the four eyes it kept turned her way showed that it still did not trust her.

She crooned some more. She needed the beast relaxed; it was not much shorter than she and a lot thicker. And this was a female, an animal sure to die young. Male eloca were the size
of a cow, even if they looked more like what would happen if a squid seduced the Jolly Green Giant’s hockey puck.

The female flinched from Sarah’s hand. Although she wore gloves, her flesh was warm enough to disturb the Minervan animal. She moved slowly and carefully. At last the eloc let her stroke and prod the tight-stretched skin over one of its buds.

Was that the beginning of a split, or was she only feeling what she wished she would? She stooped to take a good look. Sure enough, the female’s skin had begun to crack.

“All right,” Sarah breathed. She had been irrationally certain that the eloc would drop its budlings when she was sound asleep or, worse, when she was just on her way back from
Athena
for another peek at it. Maybe luck was with her after all.

As poor Biyal had, the female eloc grew calm as the budding process advanced—almost, Sarah thought, as if it knew it would soon have nothing more to worry about. She hoped to change that.

All the same, she doubted she would succeed, not with this first try. Surely some Minervan somewhere would have thought of—would have tried—packing the cavities from which the budlings dropped to keep the inevitable flood of blood from following. But if so, Reatur was ignorant of it. Did that mean the effort had earlier been discarded as useless, or that Minervans could not see what seemed obvious to her? Before long, she would find out.

The budding proceeded much as Biyal’s had. It seemed uneventful; all that happened was that the split over each bud steadily grew wider and longer. Knowing how it would end, Sarah was not lulled as she had been before. She used the time she had before the crisis to prepare for it.

From her backpack she drew out six gauze pads, each stuffed into one of her socks. Her last couple of pairs would just have to do till she got home. She slapped a strip of duct tape onto each sock, to hold it in place on the eloc’s hide. As she set each makeshift bandage on the ground, she shook her head in wry amusement. These were not the instruments she was used to working with.

“I never thought I’d be a vet, either,” she said out loud. The eloc steadied at the sound of her voice. She suddenly realized that sounding like a male Minervan had its advantages: the eloc had the habit of obeying voices much like hers. She laughed at herself. She also was not used to feeling macho.

She could see the budlings’ feet now. They wiggled and
thrashed, though the baby eloca were still attached to the female. The budlings were the size of terriers. Sarah hoped they would not get in her way when she tried to work on the female. Why, she wondered, did she think of these things too late to do anything about them?

Then such bits of irrelevance vanished from her mind. The budlings grew to be entirely visible; she could see how they were joined to the female’s circulatory system by their mouths.

They dropped off, all of them at once.

Sarah never noticed whether they got in her way or not; she was too busy with the female. As Biyal had, it simply stood, bleeding its life away. It did not try to gore her or strike at her when she began slapping her bandage packs over its spurting wounds.

Streams of its cold blood drenched her parka and trousers. She ignored that, too. Two bandages were in place now, the hemorrhaging from those orifices reduced to a trickle. She shoved a third plug into place, pressing hard on the duct tape so that it would cling to the eloc’s skin. She grabbed for the fourth bandage.

About then she noticed how limp the eloc’s arms and eyestalks had gone. She also noticed that the stream of blood from the fourth orifice was less than it had been from the first three. Even as she watched, the flow grew slower still and then stopped. The female eloc was dead.

“Oh, hell,” Sarah said, surprised at how disappointed she was. She had not expected to succeed with this first try, but her hopes had risen when she saw that her bandages seemed to do some good. The eloc, though, lost enough blood through the orifices she had not plugged to kill it before she could get to them.

Two things occurred to her. One was the most ancient medical joke around: The operation was a success but the patient died. The joke was old, of course, exactly because it was rooted in human fallibility. Ever since the first medicine man, every doctor in the world had seen his best fall short of being good enough.

Her second thought sounded frivolous but wasn’t: What would the little Dutch boy have done if he had had to stick his finger into six holes in the dike at once? “He’d’ve got help or drowned,” she answered herself out loud.

Only then did she realize what a mess she was. She might have been working in an alien abattoir, for the eloc’s blood dripped from her hands and arms and was splashed over the rest
of her clothes. The fabrics were all supposed to repel moisture, but they hadn’t been designed for a workout like this. Neither had
Athena
’s laundry facilities.

She picked up the socks and gauze packs that were still clean. After taking a step away from the female eloc, she went back to salvage the three she had used. The gauze would never be the same, but her gore-soaked socks might come clean. And even if they didn’t, she could use them again the next time she tried to save an animal. Nothing from Earth was automatically disposable on Minerva.

The eloca budlings scattered as Sarah walked toward the gate of the pen. She did not look like any Minervan creature that ate eloca, but she was bigger than they were, and that was plenty to set off the alarms evolution had built into them.

A couple of budlings got out before she could slam the gate shut. A Minervan caught one of them after a brief chase and shouted for other males farther away to run down the other. While they were pursuing it, the first Minervan, still holding the squawking eloc budling, said to Sarah, “You shouldn’t have let them get loose like that. They might have been lost for good.”

“Sorry.” She studied the local. One reason she found Minervans harder to tell apart than humans was that they did not always keep the same side of their bodies to her. Still, this one both looked and sounded familiar. “Sorry, Ternat.”

“Never mind now; just remember for next time.” Reatur’s eldest, Sarah thought, seemed a good deal like the domain-master. He turned a couple of eyestalks toward the dead female eloc. “You didn’t have much luck there.”

“No, not much,” she admitted.

“Reatur wants you to succeed.” That sounded like an accusation, but was Ternat condemning her for failure or Reatur for hoping for something else?

She answered carefully. “This first try. Here learn some, try again. Maybe learn enough so Lamra lives. Try.”

“What if you cannot learn enough before Lamra’s budlings drop?”