A World of Difference (7 page)

“I don’t blame you, Enoph,” Reatur said, an understatement if ever there was one. “A monster, you say? What is it like?”

“Like—like—” Enoph tried twice, gave up. “Like nothing I’ve ever seen before, or heard. Horrible!”

Reatur pushed past him. Enoph was a sober and reliable male. If he could not describe the sky-monster, Reatur needed to turn his own eyestalks on it. As he neared the entrance, he snatched up a spear. He did not know what it could do against anything with a voice like that, but he had no better weapon.

It was warm outside, warm enough to melt ice, though very slowly. His spearhead was in no danger unless he stayed out for days. More males milled about in the courtyard, and others were heading toward the castle from the farther reaches of the fields.

The palace’s thick walls had cut the din more than Reatur guessed; it smote him anew as he left their protection. “There!” males shouted, pointing east with two or three arms at once.

The domain-master let a pair of his eyestalks go that way. Sure enough, something was in the sky, a wedge-shaped something that looked to have no business in the domain of clouds and snow and sleet. It looked too small to be the source of the great noise, but that was undeniably coming from its direction.

To Reatur’s mind, the best thing about it was that it was getting smaller. “Whatever it is, it doesn’t seem to want to have anything to do with us,” he said.

“That works both ways, clanfather,” one of the males said. Everyone who heard waggled his eyestalks in a nervous laugh of agreement.

Afterward, Reatur often wondered if keeping his mouth shut would have averted what happened next. As it was, his words were hardly spoken when a male cried, “It’s changing its path!”

Moments later, another said the worst thing any of them could think of: “It’s coming back!”

The noise began to grow again. It tore at Reatur’s hearing and left him almost too stunned to move. The monster drew closer and closer, dropping lower and lower in the sky. Legs
came out of its belly. There was something worse to be said, after all. Enoph said it: “It’s going to come down in our fields!”

Reatur had never seen legs like the monster’s. They ended in clumps of fat, black, round things like no claws or sucker pads or hooves the domain-master knew. The deliberate way the legs descended from its belly was new to him, too … or was it? The arm that had come out of the strange thing had moved rather like that. Were they related?

He did
not
think the monster would be easy to kill as the strange thing had been. Too bad.

Dust and crops and a little drifted snow flew as the monster’s legs touched the ground. Behind it, crops withered, as if it voided raw heat. Perhaps it did; even from some distance away, Reatur felt a lick of warm air as it went by the castle.

The monster moved ever more slowly. At last, not far from the edge of the cleared land, it came to a stop. The noise died. Reatur waited for the monster to notice him and his males—or at least his castle, the only thing nearby of a size to compare to it—and to approach. But it did nothing of the kind. It stayed where it was, as if waiting for him to come to it.

The domain-master wanted to run, to hide. He saw, though, that while half the eyestalks of his males were turned on the monster, the other half pointed toward him. These were his sons and sons of sons and sons of sons of sons. They were under his power and would be as long as he lived. A third son of a fifth son of a fourth son might dream of becoming clanfather and taking a clanfather’s power one day and be safe in the dreaming, knowing it would never turn true. But Reatur knew he was as much in his males’ power as they in his. What he wanted meant nothing here. He knew what he had to do.

“Let’s go see what the cursed thing is,” he said. He hefted his spear and started walking toward the—the thing, he told himself firmly. If he did not think of it as a monster, maybe it would turn out not to be one.

Pride flowed all the way out to the tips of his fingerclaws when he saw how many of his males followed him. Against an ordinary foe—even against the Skarmer males, curse them, if Fralk was not a liar since the moment he was budded—Reatur would have expected to find all his males coming after him. Here, though, he found he could not blame the few who hung back.

He muttered angrily as he came to the track of destruction the
mon—no, the thing—had left behind. Its round feet made grooved tracks that pressed the ground down. How much did it weigh, to do that?

He looked at shriveled, sagging plant stems and muttered again. How much of his crop had he lost? Why did the monster have to choose him? Why not the Skarmer, who really deserved a monster’s attention? Thinking of it as a thing was not working. He gave up.

“Shall I make a cast at it, clanfather?” a very young male asked.

“As long as it’s content to just sit there, I’m willing to let it,” Reatur said dryly. “What if you made it roar again?” He quivered at the very idea. At such close range, the noise would probably tear his eyestalks off. The youngster, who did not seem to have thought of that, lowered his spear in a hurry.

“Surround it,” Reatur said. His males moved to obey. Unfortunately, they reminded him of so many little runnerpests trying to surround a nosver male. The monster’s round feet alone were taller than any of his people.

Its size was not the only curious—no, more than curious, alien—thing about it. Every animal Reatur had ever seen was arranged the same way males and mates were, with limbs and appendages spaced evenly all around its body. The monster was different. Its front end was nothing like its back; the only pieces that matched each other were the ones that would have resulted from its being split down the middle lengthwise.

And even that limited symmetry was not absolute, for on the far side of the creature Ternat shouted, “Clanfather, a mouth is opening!” A moment later, the domain-master’s eldest amended, “No, it’s doorway! Beasts are coming out of it!” Reatur saw no such doorway on his side.

“On my way!” he yelled back. Greatly daring, he ran under the monster’s belly. If it stooped, he would only be a smear on the ground, and Ternat the new domain-master. It did not stoop.

Breathing hard, Reatur emerged from its shadow. Only Enoph and a couple more of the bolder males had followed him. More were taking the long way around the monster. As with those who had stayed back by the castle, Reatur did not blame them. Only when he was back in the sunlight did he let himself think on what a fool he had been.

Fortunately, he had no time to brood about it. Ternat and other males were pointing with eyestalks, arms, and weapons.
“There, clanfather! Do you see them?” Ternat cried. “Aren’t they the
oddest
things you ever looked at?”

“They certainly are,” the domain-master agreed absently. He was too busy staring at the weird creatures to think much about what he said. The things were a mottled green and brown, all but one part of their—heads? Those were pinkish and had eyes that looked amazingly like people’s eyes, except that they were not on stalks.

One of the creatures turned so Reatur could see the other side of its head. It had no eyes there. It only had two arms, too, now that he had seen all the way around it, and, like its fellows, only two absurdly long legs. How, he wondered, did the things keep from falling over?

“Smoke is coming out of them!” shouted the young male who had wanted to spear the giant monster out of which these smaller beasts had come. The worst of it was, the youngster was right. Smoke streamed from the openings just below the creatures’ alarming eyes.

The young male waved his spear. One of the creatures reached for something it carried near where that ridiculous pair of legs joined his body. It held the thing in a paw—no, not a paw, Reatur saw; a hand, even if it had too many fingers. And the thing that hand was holding, whatever it was, was no random stone or chunk of ice; it had the purposeful shape of something made to carry out a specific task. Which meant, or could mean—

“Don’t throw that spear!” Reatur shouted. Half an eighteen males had been ready to hurl their spears—the creatures walking on the monster made far more tempting targets than that huge thing itself. At the domain-master’s cry, they all guiltily lowered their weapons, each sure that Reatur had shouted at him alone. “I think they’re people,” Reatur went on.

Had he not been clanfather, he was sure the males would have hooted him down. As it was, they respected his rank, but he knew they did not believe him. Even Ternat, who had a mind with more arms than most, said, “They’re too ugly to be people.”

“Ugly?” That had not even occurred to Reatur. The creatures were as far outside his criteria for judging such matters as was the strange thing back at the castle. “They aren’t ugly. Fralk, now, he’s ugly.” That got eyestalks wiggling with mirth and brought the males back toward his way of thinking. “These things, they’re just—different.”

Up above him, the creatures were making noise of their own.
Some had voices that sounded much like his; others used deeper, more rumbling tones. None of their babble sounded like any language he knew, but it did not sound like animal noises, either.

“Quiet!” Reatur said. The crowd of excited males obeyed slowly. When at last silence settled, the domain-master turned four of his eyes on the creatures above him. “I don’t want any trouble with you,” he told them, pointing first at himself and then at them. To emphasize his words, he set his spear on the ground.

As he had hoped, his speaking when the rest of the males were quiet drew the strange creatures’ attention to him. They turned their eyes his way—which brought on another thought: was that the only direction in which they could see? He decided to worry about it later—it was just one more weirdness among so many. Meanwhile, the creature that was holding the whatever-it-was put it back in the pouch where it had come from. Reatur chose to take that as a good sign.

The creature held up an arm. Reatur did the same. The creature stuck up one finger. Reatur did the same. “One,” he said. The creatures rumbled a reply. Reatur tried to imitate the noise it made, then said, “One,” again. This time, the creature came out with a rather blurry version of the same word.

“You were right, clanfather,” Ternat said. “They
are
people—or they aren’t animals, anyway.”

“No, they aren’t,” Reatur said. “This reminds me of the language lessons we go through whenever a traveler comes from so far away he hasn’t picked up trade talk.”

The domain-master returned his attention to the creature above him. He hoped the byplay with his eldest had not distracted the thing. Evidently not—it was getting something out of an opening in its mottled hide; something flat and square. The side Reatur could see was plain white.

The creature came to the edge of the monster’s back. It looked down at Reatur, then surprised him—(as if anything about it were anything but a surprise!)—by bending its legs and stooping. It reached down, holding the flat square out to him.

“Be careful, clanfather. It might be dangerous,” Ternat said.

“Thank you for worrying,” Reatur said. He held up an arm just the same. A goodly gap remained between his fingerclaws and the creature’s hand. He waved in invitation, urging it to come down to join him and his males. He wondered if it understood
and wondered what it meant by shaking its head back and forth.

Refusal, evidently; it did not come down. But it did let the flat square fall. The square thing flipped over and over in the air. Reatur saw that its other side was not just white. There was some kind of design on it, but the thing was turning too fast for him to tell what. He grabbed for it and missed. It fell to the ground. Naturally, it landed with the plain white side on top. He widened so that he could pick it up.

He turned it over—and almost dropped it in amazement. “The strange thing!” he exclaimed, holding it up so more males could see. It was a picture of the thing he had killed, the thing he and his males had dragged with so much labor back to the castle.

And what a picture! He had never imagined an artist could draw with such detail. With new respect, he used two eyes to look up at the creatures still standing on the monster, while he used two more to keep examining that incredible image. The creatures had more abilities than monster-riding, it seemed.

They were watching him, too. They were so peculiar, he realized, that they might not understand that he recognized the strange thing. He pointed at that unbelievable picture, at himself, back to the castle, and at the picture again.

By their reaction, they understood that. They yelled, leapt about, and hugged one another so tightly Reatur wondered if they were coupling. Then he laughed at himself for his foolishness. They were all about the same size, so they surely were all males. That made sense, he thought. Mates, by their nature, were not travelers.

Travelers … His thoughts abruptly turned practical. Travelers traveled for a reason. If these—people, he made himself think—were wandering artists, he wondered how much they would want for a portrait of him. No harm trying to find out.

Tolmasov clicked off the radio with a snarl of frustrated rage. “Not first,” he growled. “That damned uncultured old American son of a pig beat us down.” Despair lay on him, heavy as gravity.

“They may have been first, Sergei Konstantinovich, but we were better,” Valery Bryusov said, trying to console him. “They are eighty kilometers east of where they should be, and across the chasm from us. They will not have an easy time returning.”

Tolmasov only grunted.

He looked through the window. Seeing out only by way of monitors was one thing for which he emphatically did not envy
Athena
. Television, to him, was not quite real. It could lie so easily that even the truth became untrustworthy. Glass, now, a man could trust, streaks, smears, and all.

To the eye, the country reminded him of the Siberian tundra where
Tsiolkovsky
’s crew had trained. It was gently rolling land, with patches of snow here and there. From a distance, the plants looked like plants; Tolmasov was no botanist. Some were dark green, some brown, some yellow.