A World of Difference (29 page)

“Then I fail. Not say to Reatur I do, only I try.” Make something of it if you’re going to, she added, but only to herself.

But Ternat’s reply was mild. “That makes me think you are honest. People who give wild promises generally cannot live up to them. I suppose it must be the same with you humans.” He turned an eyestalk toward the newly budded eloc he was holding. “I will take this one to the herd, so it can get used to being
among its own kind. If I delay too long, the foolish thing will grow up thinking it is a person, and fall easy prey to wild animals because it will stray too far from the big males who could protect it.”

Sarah’s gloves left unpleasant smears on the notebook she pulled from a pocket. Ignoring them, she scrawled, “Imprinting—tell Pat” on the first blank page she found. Humans knew so little about Minerva that even casual conversation like this gave important new data.

Ternat was already moving away. “What you do with dead eloc mate?” she called after him.

“Thank you for reminding me,” he said without stopping. “I’ll make sure someone sees to the butchering.”

It was, she reminded herself, only a domestic animal. She knew the Minervans did not treat their own mates so. All the same, she had a vision of bright, funny little Lamra hacked apart by stone knives and served up with the local equivalent of Brussels sprouts. It made her more determined than ever to save the mate.

Sighing, she walked back toward
Athena
. She wished for a shower even more than she did after a turn in
Damselfly
. Wishing, however, kept failing to equip the spacecraft with the requisite plumbing.

She stripped off her outer clothing just inside the air lock and walked down the hall to the lavatory and mini washer-dryer in her long johns. Minervan body fluids smelled stronger and nastier in
Athena
’s heated air than they had outside, where the mercury reached an all-time—since the landing, anyway—high of 46°.

Emmett Bragg stuck his head out of his cubicle to see who was going by. His eyes flicked to the parka and pants slung on Sarah’s arm. “No luck, eh?” he asked, adding, “You’re dripping on the floor.”

“I know, and on my sleeve, too. One more thing to wash. No, no luck, Emmett. The damned female bled right on out on me. I might as well not have been there. How do you plug six holes at once with just two hands?”

“Three times two is—” He let the words hang in the air.

“—too much manpower to commit,” she finished for him. Then she stopped. Emmett did not say things by accident. “Or is it? Would you let me train a couple of people—Irv and Pat, I guess, because they know most about the Minervans—to be ready to try to save Lamra, all at once? It’d take a lot of time,
to practice with me on animals, time they may not have because they’ll be busy with other things.”

“Have ’em make the time. Can you think of anything more important we’re doing here, for us or the Minervans?”

“No, but I know I’m not objective about it. Thanks for seeing things the same way.” She leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek.

For a moment, the look he gave her made her feel more naked under her long johns than she had during any of the who-knew-how-many times before when he’d happened to see her wearing a lot less. She also realized she didn’t dislike the feeling. She rather wished Irv looked at her that way more often.

Telling herself it would be purely in the nature of an experiment, she thought about kissing Emmett again and making a proper job of it this time. Just then, though, from behind the privacy curtain Louise called, “Come on, Emmett, get back here and help me make sense of this latest weirdness from Houston.”

“Be right with you—have to make sure the decks get swabbed, though,” he said.

Sarah snapped off a parody of a salute and made a face at him as he disappeared. “Aye, aye, Captain Bligh.” Saved by the bell, she thought as he went back to the rear of
Athena
.

She sternly told herself not to wonder whether she had been saved or thwarted.

As if to put that question to rest, she waylaid Irv when he got back to the ship, all but dragging him to their cubicle. She had no complaints once they were there; even if Irv took her for granted out of bed, she liked what he did in it. Finding that that was still so relieved her more than a little.

“Well,” he said as she slid off him, “what brought that on?”

“What do you mean?” she asked, hoping her guilty start did not show.

Evidently it didn’t. “You’ve been too busy to be interested almost since we landed,” Irv said, “and now you go and rape me. Don’t get me wrong—I kind of like it. I’ve missed you, if you know what I mean.”

“Mm-hmm,” she said, wondering who had been taking whom for granted. “I do know. I’m sorry. It’s just that—”

“—we’re busy all the damned time. Yeah. I know.” He poked her in the ribs.

She yelped. “What was that for?”

“For not answering my question.”

“Oh.” She tried to keep things light. “Does it really matter where you get your appetite, so long as you eat at home?”

When Irv didn’t answer right away, she was afraid she had made things worse instead of better. She could not tell what was going on behind his eyes. That worried her, too; back on Earth she’d never had trouble reading him. When had she stopped being able to, and why hadn’t she noticed?

Then his face took on an expression she recognized: mischief. He rearranged her on the mattress pad. “Best idea you’ve had in a while,” he said. Of themselves, her fingers tightened on the back of his head.

Tolmasov took a skipping half step to stay up with Fralk. Comfortable Minervan walking pace was a little faster than what was comfortable for him. “You building all boats you need?” he asked.

“
Da
, Sergei Konstantinovich, we will have enough,” Fralk answered.

His Russian was better than Tolmasov’s command of the local language. Knowing he needed the practice, the pilot tried to get his thoughts across in the Skarmer tongue anyway. “You having all males you need to go in boats?”

“
Da
,” Fralk said again. His three-armed wave encompassed the camp growing outside Hogram’s town. He and the human were a couple of kilometers away, walking and talking as Tolmasov might have with a friend back on Earth.

Something made a noise in the bushes off to one side of the path. Things had been making noises in the bushes all along; by now the Russian paid no attention to them. Fralk also had ignored them—till now. Now he turned blue and started moving away from the bushes that hid whatever was making the noise.

Tolmasov backed off, too. “What is that?” he asked, pointing to the animal he faintly glimpsed through foliage.

“A krong,” Fralk said; it was not a word Tolmasov had heard before. “I did not know they came so close to the town anymore,” the Minervan went on. “With luck, it will have just fed and not be interested in eating anything else.”

When the pilot heard that, he unslung his Kalashnikov and clicked the change lever down from safe to full automatic. Whatever a krong was, it didn’t sound like a household pet.

The beast emerged from the undergrowth. Tolmasov was surprised to discover that he recognized it. He doubted there could be many kinds of brown and white, long-legged, big-clawed
large predators in the Minervan ecology. This had to be the same sort of animal as the one that had attacked Valery and Shota in the rover.

Fralk was getting bluer and bluer. Tolmasov did not blame him. Had he been facing this monster unarmed, he would have been frightened, too. Even with a rifle in his hands, he wished for zoo bars between the krong and him.

The animal let out a low, growling squall, almost what the pilot would have expected from an angry leopard. The krong did not charge at once, though. It slowly sidled forward. It kept more eyestalks on Tolmasov than on Fralk. Minervans it knew; he was an unknown quantity.

Its cry rose to a shriek. Even if Tolmasov did not, Fralk knew what that meant. “Run!” he shouted. “Here it comes!”

The krong’s first bound showed it was faster than a Minervan. It went straight after Fralk. Either it had decided Tolmasov was not dangerous or it hoped to deal with him after it had slain the more familiar prey.

The bark of the AK-74 rose above the krong’s screams. As the first bullets slammed into it, the animal changed direction with the agility of most Minervan beasts. It rushed at its new tormentor. Tolmasov fired in short bursts, watched blood and tissue spray from the wounds he made. He was wishing for something heavier than a Kalashnikov—say, an antitank missile—when, less than five meters from him, the krong went down at last.

Fralk had stopped fleeing as soon as he saw the krong was no longer after him. Now he slowly came back toward Tolmasov and the dead beast. His eyestalks kept shifting from it to the Russian and back again, as if he could not choose which was more important to look at. He was still bright blue.

“More krongii around?” Tolmasov demanded. He was trying to figure out how many rounds were left in his magazine and swearing at himself for not carrying a spare.

But Fralk answered, “No. They hunt alone.” He spoke his own language; he was still too rattled to use Russian. Several of his eyes went toward the krong again. “You killed it.” Green began to take the place of blue on his skin.

“
Da,
” Tolmasov said shakily. He was doing his best not to think about how close the krong had come to making it mutual. Big game hunting, which he had always slighted, suddenly looked a lot more like work.

“You killed it,” Fralk repeated. Now his eyestalks turned
toward the pilot—or rather, Tolmasov saw in a moment, toward his Kalashnikov. The Minervan said, still in his own speech, “You spoke of this weapon before. I am sorry, but I have forgotten its name.”

“Firearm,” Tolmasov supplied automatically. “Rifle, to be exact.”

“
Rifle. Spasebo
.” Fralk was pretty much himself again, if he could remember to say thank you in Russian. He went on in that language. “What we have to give you so you give us rifle? You say once firearms more strong than ax, hammer. Now see much more strong. What we give, to get rifle?”

Damnation, Tolmasov thought. So far as he knew, none of the Russians had ever fired a shot where the locals could hear it—Shota and Valery met their krong away from what passed for civilization here. But now Fralk knew what bullets could do.… Sure enough, he was staring with four eyes at the chewed-up carcass by his feet. “What we give, to get rifle?” he said again.

“Fralk, I am sorry, but I do not think we can sell you a rifle,” Tolmasov said.

“Why? Only want to use rifle on Omalo. Fill Omalo full of holes, like krong here full of holes.”

Tolmasov sighed. “Fralk, I told you before that there are other humans on the Omalo side of the canyon. If you used a rifle to fight the Omalo, you might also hurt or kill one of these other humans. That could bring their domain and ours to war, and in our homelands we have weapons much, much worse than rifles.” We’ve used some of them on each other, too, he thought, and as much by luck as anything else, not the worst ones.

“What if other humans give Omalo rifles, fill us full of holes?” the Minervan asked. “You leave us so we not fight back?”

The pilot frowned. “I will find out,” he promised. Fralk had asked before whether the Americans would give firearms to the Minervans east of Jötun Canyon. That had been before he knew what bullets could do, though. Now he was really worried. Tolmasov still could not imagine Emmett Bragg being so stupid as to arm the natives with weapons dangerous to humans, but he could not overlook the possibility, either. Helping the Skarmer would not look good back on Earth, but neither would standing idly by while they got slaughtered.

Tolmasov felt the wish that came over every commander now and then, the wish to be safely back in the ranks again, with nothing to worry about and nothing to do but what somebody
else told him to do. As every commander must, he strangled that wish in its cradle.

He would have had scant time to indulge it in any case, for Fralk was going on in a mixture of Russian and the Skarmer tongue. “We will give you whatever you want if you give us one of these rifles to take across the gorge and use against the Omalo. Anything! No price could be too great!” The Minervan abruptly stopped, realizing no sensible merchant said things like that.

“Fralk, if I gave a rifle to your people, I would not only have to worry about your hurting the humans east of the canyon; I would also fear for the safety of my own crew here.” Tolmasov spoke first in Russian, then as best he could in Fralk’s language—he needed the Minervan to understand.

“
Nyet
, Sergei Konstantinovich,
nyet,
” Fralk said urgently. “Never hurt you—you our friends. Give you—” He used a Skarmer word the pilot could not follow; Tolmasov raised a hand to show that. “Males you keep so you hurt them if we do any bad thing to you,” Fralk explained.

“Ah. Hostages.” Tolmasov gave him the Russian word.

“Hostages,” Fralk repeated. “Thank you. Yes, I am sure Hogram would agree to give you
hostages
”—he politely dropped the human term into a sentence in his own tongue—“so you could trust us with one of your rifles.”

Tolmasov knew he ought to say no and walk away. What the Minervans did to each other was their business. If humans meddled in it, only trouble would result. But he didn’t know what the Americans had done on their side of Jötun Canyon, and Fralk was so eager. He would have been, too, in the Minervan’s place.

The pilot decided to temporize. “I talk with my domain-masters,” he said. “If they say yes, then we trade rifle. If no, we cannot.” He was confident even the blockheads back in Moscow had better sense than to authorize letting the natives get their three-fingered hands on an AK-74.

From the way Fralk’s appendages were quivering, he was confident Tolmasov had in effect just said yes. “Thank you, Sergei Konstantinovich! We would have beaten the Omalo anyhow. Now we will surely smash them—they will widen themselves before us forevermore.”

“Hmm,” was all Tolmasov said. Fralk made a more enthusiastic would-be conqueror than he quite liked. Maybe changing the subject would calm the Minervan down. Tolmasov pointed at the krong’s carcass. “We leave this here?”