A World of Difference

III

This time, though, Fralk had the edge. He had gotten the humans to promise not to give out the little redcased tools through any other male. A similar promise from him to Cutur made the price the merchant paid hefty enough to suit him.

Of course, a good part of that price would go back to the humans, in exchange for the little cylinders that kept some of their gadgets alive. Hogram would get a fair chunk himself, as was the domain master’s right. Even Fralk, though, had little about which to complain over what was left. Before long, he thought, he would be the richest male who was not a domain master throughout all the Skarmer lands.

The humans, taken as a group, would not be much poorer, although Fralk was convinced he was cheating them outrageously. Their trade goods were not only unlike any that had ever come into the Skarmer domains but did things Fralk had never imagined tools doing. They could have demanded eighteen times as much for them as they got.

But as long as they stayed satisfied with perfectly ordinary local products in exchange for their unique ones, Fralk was not about to argue with them. No one held a knife to their eyestalks to make them deal as they did. And no one, Fralk thought, had to hold a knife to his eyestalks to make him turn a profit. None of the males sprung from Hogram’s buds was that kind of fool.

Irv was at the control board when the ship-to-ship light went on. He picked up the mike. “Athena here, Levitt speaking,” he said in fairly good Russian. “Go ahead, Tsiolkovsky.”

“Thank you so much, Irving Samuelovich. Colonel Tolmasov here. Be so good as to fetch Brigadier Bragg, if you please. What I have to say must be discussed at the command level.”

“Hold, please.” Frowning a little, Levitt cut the mike. Tolmasov’s English always sounded starchy, but this was worse than usual. Irv hit the intercom switch; Bragg, he knew, was in his cabin, going over computer printouts. When the pilot answered, Levitt said, “Tolmasov’s calling-says he won’t talk with anyone but you. Something’s hit the fan, sounds like.”

“Doesn’t it just?” As usual, Bragg sounded calm, unhurried. Irv was reasonably sure that behind his cool facade he had the same worries and fears as any other man, but if so, he did a hell of a job of hiding them. “Be right there,” Bragg finished. “Out.”

Levitt opened the channel to Tsiolkovsky again. Tolmasov replied at once. “Sergei Konstantinovich, here is my commander,” the anthropologist said as Bragg came in and sat down beside him.

“What do you have to say to me that you cannot tell my crew?” the pilot demanded. The blunt question sounded even ruder in Russian than it would have in English.

“Brigadier Bragg, I am calling to convey to you a formal protest over your concealment of the true landing site of the Viking, and over your cynical exploitation of this concealed knowledge to contact the natives who encountered that spacecraft after it touched down.”

“Protest all you like, Sergei Konstantinovich,” Bragg said. “We got new landing coordinates just a little before we set down-we had to recompute our burn to get down where the boys in Houston told us to.”

“The new coordinates were contained in the coded message you received?”

“You know better than to expect an answer to a question like that.”

“Perhaps I do.” Tolmasov’s chuckle fell into place as if it had been included in stage directions. He went on reprovingly. “The cultured thing, Brigadier Bragg, would have been to share your new information with us. Your failure to do so naturally makes us doubt your cooperative spirit.”

“The cultured thing, Sergei Konstantinovich, would have been to tell us the Minervans on your side of Jotun Canyon were thinking about mounting an invasion of this side.” Bragg’s voice went hard. “Since you didn’t bother doing that, I don’t see how you have any cause for complaint.” Silence stretched.

“The natives here are not under our control, Brigadier Bragg,” Tolmasov said finally. “Whatever they intend, they had it in mind long before our arrival.”

“I never said they didn’t. I only said it was uncultured not to warn us about it, which it is. Bragg out.” The mission commander broke the connection. He leaned back in his chair, pleased with himself.

Irv Levitt did not blame him. “That hit Tolmasov where he lived. Call a Russian uncultured and then take away his chance to say anything back-”

“Mmhmm.” Bragg steepled his fingertips. “Have to remember to thank Frank for picking up on that-it let me embarrass Tolmasov instead of the other way around. He ought to be about ready to chew nails.” The pilot blinked. “You know what, Irv? I wish I had a cigarette. I quit fifteen years ago, but the urge still comes back sometimes. Sneaks up on me, I guess.”

Irv had a tough time imagining anything sneaking up on Emmett Bragg. Picturing him through a haze of tobacco smoke was much easier. No wonder, Levitt thought with one of those odd bursts of insight that are at once crazy and illuminating. Bragg looked like nothing so much as the original Marlboro Man.

The mission commander got up and stretched. “That was fun, but I’m going back to work now.”

“Off to paint a hammer and sickle under the window?” Irv asked innocently.

Bragg snorted. “You know, I just might. Only trouble is, Sergei’s got hisself-himself-a Yankee star or two under his. Just stayin’ even with that one is nothing to be ashamed of.” He turned serious. “Them and us, we’ve been saying that about each other since the end of the Second World War now, and each usin’ the other to push himself along. And here we both are on Minerva. Not too shabby, is it?”

He was gone before Irv came up with an answer. Even after a year, Bragg had depths that could take him by surprise.

Lamra scratched herself in four places at once. The skin that stretched over her growing buds itched. Sarah pointed a picture-maker at her. It clicked. “Give me a picture of me, please?” Lamra asked. She held out the two hands that were not busy.

“Not that kind of picture-maker,” Sarah said after Lamra had repeated herself two or three times.

Embarrassed, Lamra pushed in her eyestalks. “That’s right. I forgot. The one that lets you give pictures right away voids them out of its bottom. This is the other kind, the one that holds them in.”

“Yes, Lamra.” Pat stooped beside her. That made the mate nervous, the same way she had felt funny when Reatur widened himself to her. The human went on. “Other mates not see that. Some males not see that.”

“I have eyes. Eyes are for seeing with.” Lamra shut all of them at once. Sure enough, the world went away. She opened them and it came back. Both of Sarah’s eyes were pointed at her. “How can you stand only seeing half of things?”

Sarah’s body made the jerky motion that meant the human was not sure what to say. Finally Sarah answered, “Humans like this. No humans different-humans not think what different like.”

“How sad,” Lamra said.

The place where Sarah’s arms and body were joined jerked again. “Some ways you people not think what different like, too.”

Lamra turned a third eyestalk toward the humans-this was the kind of talk she loved, and she got it too seldom. None of the other mates cared about it; even Reatur did not talk that way with her every time he visited the mates’ chambers. It was as if he had to remind himself to take her seriously, while Sarah always seemed to.

“What could be different about us?” Lamra asked. “We’re only people, after all. People are just people, aren’t they?” Sarah did not say anything. “Tell me what’s different about us,” Lamra persisted. “Tell me. Tell me!” In her eagerness to find out what Sarah was talking about, she hopped up and down.

“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 fight. 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 fight 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 fight, then it’s all fight 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 fight. 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.

Morea 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. Morea 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 rockribbed than it was around Tsiolkovsky’s landing site. Of course, by now the ship was 120 kilometers to the southwest; Jotun Canyon lay only a few kilometers eastward. If the land hereabouts was rockribbed, Rustaveli thought, the canyon madea 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.”

“l 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 AKT4. 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.”

“I won’t be sorry to get back to heating.” Rustaveli knew he was repeating himself and did not care. He climbed onto the rover and buckled on his shoulder belt. The machine glided away, leaving the dead beast to whatever passed for scavengers on Minerva.

The snow began falling heavily-thick, wet flakes that clung to the rover’s windscreen and made Bryusov slow down. “Springtime on Minerva,” the linguist grunted.

“Yes,” Rustaveli agreed, as sardonically. “The southern latitude equivalent to Havana, Katerina said, and at a season much like May. I wonder how our ally Comrade Castro would enjoy the weather-about as much as I do, I daresay.”

Bryusov slowed still more. “I don’t like this at all. I can’t see what I’m doing.”

“If it gets worse, we can stop and put tent fabric over the rover’s frame till it blows itself out. I hate to do that, though, when we’re on the way back, no matter how much I’d like to be warm.”

“I feel the same way. Besides, the heater uses a lot of energy, and the solar panels aren’t putting out much in this weather. Even so, though, we may have to if-“ The linguist never got his “if” out. The rover’s front wheels went into an enormous hole filled with drifted snow. The rover was not supposed to flip over, no matter what happened. It flipped over anyhow.

Bryusov and Rustaveli shouted as the world turned upside down. Both shouts cut off abruptly. The Georgian had the wind jerked from him as his shoulder harness brought him up short. The linguist was less fortunate. He had not bothered to strap himself in after standing up to photograph the Minervan carnivore. His head smacked a bar of the rover’s roll cage.

When he could breathe again, Rustaveli made several choice comments in his own language. After a moment, he noticed that Bryusov was not answering-the linguist lay unmoving in the snow. Rustaveli wished he had not wasted his curses before.

He reached out to kill power to the wheels. Then, holding on to the frame of the rover with one. hand, he unbuckled his safety belt with the other. Olga Korbut, he thought, would have spun around in midair to land gracefully. He was happy enough not to have dislocated his shoulder.

Bryusov was breathing. Rustaveli muttered silent thanks for that. The linguist remained unconscious, though, with blood on his face and the side of his head. None of the cautious things Rustaveli did to try rousing him had any effect.

The Georgian tried the radio and got only static for an answer. That sent panic shooting through him. He certainly wasn’t getting any incoming signal. If he wasn’t getting out, either, the rest of the crew would not even know that Bryusov and he were in trouble until they missed their next scheduled ca. ll-and even then, what could they do? Assuming they could find the rover at all, they were several days’ forced march from it. And Bryusoy might not have several days.

Knowing that he had to think straight for his companion’s sake helped bring Rustaveli out of his fright. He scrambled out of the rover. Turning it back over, unfortunately, proved more than a one-person job. Another design flaw, he thought, and immediately filed the idea away. No time to worry about it now. The radio was the pressing concern.

The most obvious reason for its failure was damage from the accident. Rustaveli could do nothing about that. But, he reasoned, crash damage should have silenced the radio, not left it flatulent. “The antenna!” he said out loud. It would hardly do much good, buried in a snowdrift.

He had to bend a kink in the springy wire to make it go up past the body of the rover. Even then, it was less than half as tall as it should have been. That was the best he could do, though. He crawled back under the rover’s chassis and tried the radio again. “Rustaveli calling, Rustaveli calling. Do you read? Emergency. Do you read?” The repetition was very much like prayer.

“Shota! What’s wrong?” Katerina Zakharova’s voice sounded as if she were talking from behind a waterfall, but it was the most welcome thing Rustaveli had ever heard.

“Katya!” he exclaimed, then went on more calmly. “We’ve had an accident-this damned buggy overturned. Valery’s hurt.”

“Hurt? How? How badly?” Even through the roaring static, the Georgian could hear Katerina turning into Dr. Zakharova.

“How badly I don’t know,” he told her. “He’s unconscious- hit his head. This was fifteen minutes ago, maybe more, and he hasn’t come to yet. I haven’t tried moving him-“ “Good,” she broke in. “Don’t, not unless you have to.”

“I know that. I also didn’t much fancy the idea of undressing him to check for anything else wrong, not while it’s snowing.” As it always did, his wry sense of humor reasserted itself. “So much for springtime in Havana.”

“Rustaveli.” That was Colonel Tolmasov, doing his best to mask the concern in his voice. “Give me your exact position.”

The panel connected to the gyrocompass was hard to read upside down, but Rustaveli managed. “Distance 112.T kilometers, bearing 63o.”

There was silence for a moment from the radio; Rustaveli could picture Tolmasov drawing a line on a map. “Near Jotun Canyon,” the colonel said at last.

“Da, Sergei Konstantinovich.” Somehow, Rustaveli managed a chuckle. “A good deal closer to the Americans than to you, as a matter of fact. Only one tiny obstacle in the way.” He laughed again-only a gorge that dwarfed anything Earth knew!

Tolmasov was businesslike as usual. “Can you right your vehicle?”

“Not by myself. I’ve tried. If Valery comes around-“ As if on cue, Bryusov moved and groaned. “Rustaveli out,” Shota said. He bent by his companion. “Valery! Are you all right? Do you know who I am?”

“Head-“ Bryusov muttered. He started to lift his left hand to his head, then stopped with another, louder groan. Under the blood that splashed it, his face was gray.

Katerina and Tolmasov were both screaming at Rustaveli on the radio. He ignored them until Bryusov drifted away from consciousness again. This time, though, the linguist seemed less deeply out. He was also, Rustaveli saw with much relief, able to move his legs and right arm, although he whimpered whenever his left arm so much as twitched. The Georgian relayed the news.

“No broken back or neck, then,” Katerina said. “That’s something.”

“Exactly what I was thinking. But that arm…, and he has no idea of where he is or what he’s doing. He took a nasty shot in the head.”

“Do you think he can hold out until Dr. Zakharova and I can reach you?” Tolmasov asked, still sounding very official.

“Comrade Colonel, I do not know,” Rustaveli said with equal formality. “What choice has he, however?.”

“I am coming to that.” Now something was in Tolmasov’s voice: distaste. Whatever he was about to say, Rustaveli thought, he was not happy about it. Then Tolmasov went on, and the Georgian understood why. “Shota Mikheilovich, you were facetious when you said the Americans were nearer to you than we are, but you were also right. They have some sort of very light aircraft with them. If I ask, they may be able to cross the gorge and treat Valery. If I ask. Do you want me to ask?”

Rustaveli knew the colonel wanted to hear a no. Tolmasov had been ready to bite nails in half when the Americans proved as able as he to throw around charges of deception. Begging help from them had to be the last thing he wanted to do. Or almost the last thing-he couldn’t be eager to have Bryusov die, either. To say nothing of the linguist himself, news of a death on Minerva would hurt the Soviet space program the same way one would damage the Americans’ effort.

It all came down to how badly Bryusov was hurt. If he just had a knock on the head and, say, a broken wrist, Rustaveli knew enough first aid to patch him up. If, on the other hand, he had managed to do something nasty like rupturing his spleen, the Georgian would never know it till too late. “You better call Athena,” he said.

There was a long silence from Tolmasov, followed by an even longer sigh. “Damnation. Very well.”

Rustaveli could tell he had just lost points with the colonel.

“Sergei Konstantinovich, think of it this way: if Valery dies after we summon the American doctor, of if the doctor refuses to come and he dies, whose fault is that? Not ours, certainly. But if we do not call-”

“A point,” Tolmasov admitted after another pause. He was sounding official again, which Rustaveli took as a good sign. “I will call the Americans.”

“How do I know what would happen if a mate survived budding?” Reatur demanded. “They come to ripeness, they mate, and then they die. Always. That is what it is to be a mate.”

“But what if one does-did-live?” Sarah Levitt persisted. “If mates grow up, too, what they like then?” She wished her grammar were better and her vocabulary bigger. She needed to be persuasive. “What-how much-of lives you waste when mates not live, die young?”

Reatur did not just order her to shut up and go away, as a medieval English baron might have dealt with someone proposing revolutionary social change. Sarah had to give him that much. Baron was about as close as anyone had come to translating the Minervan word that literally meant “domain master,” but Sarah knew it lacked meanings that were there in the Minervan and added connotations missing from it. And Reatur’s domain was a long, long way from medieval England.

The domain master turned a third eyestalk her way. He began to sing something, or perhaps to declaim. Since he had no music to accompany the words, Sarah was not sure which; whichever it was, he used his arms to help her follow the rhythm of his words. The meaning was something else again. With an obviously memorized piece like this one, Reatur could not pause and explain himself as he went along. Sarah gathered it was a sad-song, but that was about all.

Eventually Reatur realized she could not fully understand. He broke off and started speaking simply again. “It is about a domain master who has had three of his mates bud all on the same day, and about his sorrow as he gives the last of them to the scavengers. Every male who has brought a mate to budding knows this sorrow. How could we not? We are not beasts, and mates are not beasts.”

“No, but mates not people, not now-die too soon. Let mates be people, too. I try to let Lamra live after budding, let her be person, let her grow to be person. Yes?” Sarah watched Reatur intently. She wanted nothing in the world-nothing in two worlds-more than the chance to try to save Lamra. She could feel her face twisting into a frown of concentration as she cast about for the words to make him see things her way. At last she found the very phrase she needed.

The radio on her belt squawked.

She jumped. That perfect phrase vanished from her head.

Reatur was startled, too, startled enough to jerk in his eyestalks.

“You read me, Sarah?” Emmett Bragg asked from the tinny little speaker. “Acknowledge, please.”

“I’m here, Emmett-at the castle, talking with Reatur.”

“Come back to the ship, please, right away.” Even with the “please,” it was an order.

“Five minutes?” she pleaded. Maybe those right words would come back.

“This second,” Emmett said flatly. “Emergency.”

“On my way.” Sarah’s hands folded into fists. Wearing gloves, she did not even get the painful release of nails biting flesh. She turned back to Reatur. “Must go now. Talk more of Lamra later, yes?”

“I suppose we may,” Reatur said.

Sarah had to be content with that. “Damn, damn, damn,” she muttered under her breath as she trotted down the hallway toward her bicycle. The timing could not have been worse. Reatur had been weakening. She was sure of it.

She leapt onto the bicycle and worked out some of her frustration by fairly flying back to the ship. She braked so violently that she almost went headfirst over the handlebars. If this wasn’t a genuine life or death emergency, she thought, she was going to peel some paint off the corridor walls.

But it was. She could see that on Emmett Bragg’s face. Then she hesitated. Emmett was in the control room, and so was Irv- she breathed silent thanks that the emergency had nothing to do with him-and so were Louise and Frank and Pat. Nobody looked damaged, though everyone was as somber as Emmett.

Somber, to Sarah’s way of thinking, did not constitute an emergency. She set hands on hips. “What the hell’s going on?” she snapped. “Where’s the beef?”

“Hon, it’s on the other side of Jotun Canyon,” Irv said.

She stared at him.

“The Russian rover’s had an accident,” Emmett said. “One of their people is down and out-head and arm injuries at the very least, maybe more.”

“What’s that got to do with me?” she demanded. “They have a doctor of their own.”

“Who is at the moment almost seventy miles from the rover, and stuck on foot without it,” Bragg said. “Whereas we have bikes to get to the edge of the canyon fast, and Damselfly to get over it-the rover’s only a mile or so away from the far edge of the canyon.” He held up a map with a red dot felt tipped in to show the location. “This mess happened an hour ago, tops. You could be there before sunset, but their doc is three days away.”

“Get Damselfly over Jotun Canyon?” Sarah said faintly. “Any kind of nasty wind and I could be several miles straight down, too.”

Bragg nodded. “I know that. I told Tolmasov I wouldn’t give you any orders, and I’m not. But he asked for our help, and if there is any, you’re it. You’re the doctor, and you’re the pilot here, too. It’s up to you, Sarah. No hard feelings if you say no.”

“Except to the hurt Russian,” she pointed out. “If he lives to have them.”

“There is that,” Bragg said.

“Sarah-“ Irv began, and then shut up. She knew a moment’s gratitude that he recognized the decision was not his to make.

“Let me see the map,” she said. Emmett Bragg passed it to her. She studied it. “How wide is the canyon fight here? It seems to be one of the narrower stretches. Is it less than ten miles? It looks like it.”

Bragg took the map back. He pulled a clear plastic ruler from one of his coverall pockets and applied it to the image of the gap and then to the scale of miles at the bottom left-hand comer of the sheet. “Good eyeballing,” he said. “It’s just under nine, as a matter of fact.”

“Bryan Allen flew Gossamer Albatross across the English Channel. That’s twice as far and then some, and I’ve got a better plane than the Albatross ever dreamed of being,” Sarah said. “I’m going.”

“If the Gossamer Albatross came apart, all what’s-his-name would have got was wet,” Irv said. “If something goes wrong with Damselfly, or if you get the winds you know perfectly well you could-”

Sarah did not want to think about that. Jotun Canyon was deep enough that, if the worst did happen, she would have plenty of time to reflect on her folly as she fell. “Irv, if you were hurt on this side of the canyon and the Russians had a plane, I hope they’d try to help.”

Frank Marquard had been quiet till now. “How high are the canyon walls on either side, relative to each other?” he asked abruptly. “If the land west of the canyon is a quartermile higher than it is on this side, you won’t be able to climb up to it. If it’s a quartermile lower, you’ll never get back.”

Everyone crowded around to peer at the map, either upside down or over Emmett Bragg’s shoulder. “Seems all right,” Sarah said after a long, hard look. “Call Tolmasov, Emmett. Tell him I’m on my way. Find out what first aid supplies their rover has, too. I’ll save weight with my kit that way, because I won’t carry anything they already have.”

“Right.” Bragg turned to his wife and Irv. “Y’all heard the lady. Break out the pieces of Damselfly and get ‘em onto the towing carts. Pulling ‘em to the edge of the canyon, I. expect you’ll be working near as hard as Sarah will going over.” Louise simply nodded and left. Irv followed a moment later, shaking his head and muttering under his breath.

There’s nothing I can do about it, Sarah wanted to call after him. But he knew that as well as she did. Knowing and accepting were two different things-all she needed to do was think of Lamra to see the truth there.

“I’ll get my bike, too,” Pat Marquard said.

“What for?.” Sarah, Emmett, and Frank all spoke together. “So you can ride behind me,” Pat said to Sarah, as if the two men were not there. “You should be fresh when you get into Damselfly, not worn out from spending half a day pedaling.”

That made such plain good sense that Sarah could only nod her thanks and hug Pat, who returned the embrace. Emmett Bragg lifted the radio microphone. “Athena calling Soviet expedition.”

The reply was immediate. “Tolmasov here. Go ahead, old man.”

“Sergei Konstantinovich, our doctor will try, repeat try, to fly Damselfly across Jotun Canyon to help your injured crewman.”

“Thank you very much, Brigadier Bragg. We are in your debt.”

“You don’t thank me, you thank the lady, and I just may call in that debt one day, if I see a way to do it.”

“Er, yes.” Tolmasov sounded wary again, Sarah thought, frowning. Emmett never let up; he saw everything as a confrontation.

As if to belie that, the mission commander went on, “For now, though, we only need to know what your rover has in the way of medical gear, so we can avoid duplication.”

With Athena’s computers, any of the Americans could have called up the answer to that as fast as he typed in the question. Tolmasov’s promised “One moment, please,” stretched to sew eral minutes. At least he had what Sarah needed when he finally did come back on the air. That, she supposed, counted for something.

Mist and distance shrouded the land on the western side of Jotun Canyon. Sarah did stretching exercises to work out the kinks of a morning and early afternoon spent riding behind Pat Marquard. After a moment, Sarah turned her back on the canyon. She did not want to think about it before she had to.

Instead, she watched her husband and Louise Bragg reassemble Damselfly. Irv was whistling something as he made sure every wingnut was tight. Sarah took longer than she should have to recognize “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.” She started to let out a snort, then stopped abruptly. If using a silly song helped remind him to be careful, that was all right with her.

“Ready when you are,” Louise said a little later. Pat, who had been reduced to a spectator once they got to the edge of the canyon, made herself useful by carrying the special wide stepladder to Damselfly.

“Let’s do it.” Sarah got out of her jacket and insulated pants and immediately started to shiver. Jogging over to Damselfly did nothing to warm her up.

Irv waited at the top of the stepladder to help her down into the ultra-ultralight. When she was seated, he handed her the clear plastic bag in which she had put her supplies-it was a pound or more lighter than her regular medical bag. She secured it to a spar behind her with duct tape.

“Be careful,” Irv said. “I love you.”

“I know. I love you, too.” She strapped the biking helmet under her chin. When she was done, she reached up to touch his cheek. “This is what you get for marrying a doctor. I’ll be all right.”

“You I wouldn’t worry about. But this damn contraption isn’t made for the kind of air you may get over the canyon.”

She shrugged. “People aren’t made for banging their heads, either.” Checking to be sure the prop was not engaged, she started pedaling furiously to charge the battery-and to stop her teeth from chattering. She hardly noticed Irv lowering the canopy over her and dogging it in place.

“Radio check,” Louise said. “Testing, one, two, three.”

“Read you five by five,” Sarah answered. “How do you read me?”

They went through the rest of the preflight checklist, making sure all the controls worked. Sarah watched the charge gauge climb. By the time the battery was all the way up, she was no longer freezing. She glanced to either side. Irv and Louise were standing by at Damselfly’s wingtips. She waved to show them she was ready. When they waved back, she flicked the propeller-control switch. The big airfoil, taller than she was, began to spin.

Damselfly rolled bumpily forward, the two wingpersons-a word Sarah formed and rejected in the same instant-running alongside to hold it level. “Airborne!” Irv yelled as the ultra-ultralight lifted off the ground.

“Roger,” Sarah said, to let him and Louise know she knew. As always, Damselfly was painfully slow gaining altitude. Even so, after less than a minute the ground dropped away as if the plane had a rocket in its tail. “Watch that first step,” she murmured to herself as she peered down and down and down into Jotun Canyon. “It’s a mother.”

“Say again, Damselfly?” Louise quested.

“Never mind,” Sarah said, embarrassed. Then she gave all her attention back to pedaling and to watching the little compass Irv had glued to the control stick. The far wall of the canyon was too far away to give her any landmarks toward which to steer and the sun was invisible through thick gray clouds. She laughed a little; Damselfly had not been designed for instrument night.

Some of the clouds were underneath her. Jotun Canyon was plenty big enough to have weather of its own. Sarah was just glad the clouds didn’t altogether block the western wall from view. Seeing it loom out of the fog too late to dodge was the stuff of nightmares.

“Everything all fight, hon?” Irv sounded as if he expected her to go spiraling down into the canyon any second now.

“No problems,” she answered, taking her left hand off the stick to flick on the radio’s send switch. “I’m even getting warm.

Exercise and all that.” Keeping Damselfly in the air was hard work, closer to running than to bicycling on the ground. “I should be across in less than half an hour. Off I go, into the wild gray yonder-”

“Oh, shut up,” Irv said. Chuckling, Sarah switched off. Her husband would be too busy fuming to worry about her for a while. She pedaled on. The breeze from the fresh air tube began to feel delicious, not icy.

Looking down between her busy feet, Sarah saw she was above the deepest part of the Jotun Canyon. Something moving down there caught her eye. She could not tell what sort of beast it was, any more than a jetliner passenger can name the makes of cars he sees from 30,000 feet. Just with level flight between the canyon’s walls, she was half that high over the bottom herself.

She wondered what lived down there. Whatever it was, it was not a fulltime resident, not unless it nailed itself to the biggest rock it could find when the yearly floods came through. Maybe not then, either.

Then all such mental busywork blew away with the gusting tailwind that swept Damselfly along with it and threatened to make the ultra-ultralight stall. Sarah gasped, pedaled harder, and hit the prop control switch to make the propeller grab more air. A moment later, she also turned on the plane’s little electric motor to add its power to hers.

For a few queasy seconds, she thought none of that would do any good. Gusts were the worst problem with human-powered aircraft; one of five miles an hour gave Damselfly as much of a jolt as a 30mph gust did to a Cessna. The flimsy little craft did not want to answer its controls. From the way the spars creaked, Sarah wondered if it was going to break up in midair. “Don’t you dare, you bastard,” she said fiercely, as if that would do any good at all.

Damsel. fly held together. Sarah brought the plane’s nose down. Her legs were blurs on the pedals. She never knew whether her efforts saved her or the gust simply subsided. What she did know was that all the sweat on her body had turned cold.

When she was sure the ultra-ultralight-and her voice-were in full control again, she thumbed the radio’s send switch. “Hello back there,” she said. “Before, I was worrying about whether the Russians would have blankets and such for me. Now all I care about is a change of underwear.” She was surprised at how easily she could joke about what had just happened. No one, she thought, really believes in the possibility of her own death.

While Irv and Louise exclaimed tinnily through Damselfly’s speaker, Sarah shook her head, annoyed at herself. Philosophizing after the fact was all very well, but the cold sweat still coated her and her joke had almost been no joke at all, but literally true. She had believed in death, all right.

The western edge of Jotun Canyon grew closer. Sarah resisted the temptation to put on another mad burst of effort so she could reach it fifteen seconds before she would have otherwise. As in distance running, staying within herself counted. She could feel how much the one emergency had taken out of her.

At last she had land under her once more at a distance to be measured in feet rather than miles. She hit the radio switch again. The Russians could not reply on the frequency Damselfly used, but they were supposed to be listening. “Damselfly calling the Soviet rover,” she said in slow, careful Russian. “I am on your side of the canyon. Please send up a flare to show me your location.” She repeated herself several times.

All the while, she was scanning the horizon. If her navigation had been good, the flare would rise straight ahead of her. No sign of it there. No sign of it anywhere, in fact. What was-

Sarah frowned, groping for the name-Rustaveli’s problem?

There! The brilliant crimson spark hung in the air. It was north of where she had expected it; the gust over the canyon must have thrown her off worse than she thought. She twisted the control stick, working first ailerons and then rudder to go into the long, slow turn that was the best Damselfly could do.

The flare slowly sank while she approached. Now she eyed the ground instead of the sky. Motion drew her gaze. That was no Minervan down there, that was a man! “Soviet rover, I have you visually,” she said triumphantly. “Coming in to land.”

Rustaveli waved her on.

“-Snap, crackle, pop-really bad,” came out of the radio. Irv didn’t think it was haunted by Rice Krispies. What he did think was than no one had planned for Damsel. fly to be on the ground ten miles from the nearest receiver. The transmitter was not made to carry that far. No wonder the signal had static in it.

“Say again, Sarah,” he urged.

More Kellogg’s noises, then, “-not really bad,” she said.

“Broken ulna, concussion, nasty cut, maybe”-static again- “cracked ribs. But no sign of internal bleeding. He’ll get-“ Sarah’s voice vanished once more.

“Say again,” Irv repeated, and kept on repeating it until the static cleared.

“He’ll get better,” Sarah said, almost as clearly as if she were standing beside him with Louise and Pat. Grinning, Louise clasped her gloved hands over her head. as if to say, “The winnab, and still champion…”

Nodding, Irv asked the question that was even more important to him. “And how are you, hon?”

“Tired. Otherwise okay,” she answered. “I won’t try to come back today. I need the rest, and it’s too close to sunset to make me want to risk any funny winds the change from day to night might bring on over the canyon. Once was too f-“ The signal broke up again, but Irv had no trouble filling in the participial phrase he had not actually heard.

“Concur,” Louise said, over and over till Sarah acknowledged. “Wait at least till midmorning; let the air settle as much as it’s going to.”

“Will you be warm enough tonight?” Irv worried. Even when Minervan days got above freezing, nights stayed in the teens or colder.

“Plenty, thank you, Grandmother,” Sarah answered, which made Pat giggle and Irv’s ears turn hot under the flaps of his cap. “You can all be jealous of me, too, because I’m eating something that doesn’t come off our ration list. The Russians have this very nice little smoked lamb sausage called, ah-”

“Damlama khasip,” an accented male voice supplied: Shota Rustaveli.

“Nobody wants to hear about it,” Irv said. He was jealous, and so were Pat and Louise, if the lean and hungry looks on their faces meant anything. The food they had with them, which they would have eaten without much thinking about it, suddenly seemed too dull for words. Smoked lamb sausage… Irv felt his mouth watering.

Pat touched his arm and held out her hand for the radio. When he gave it to her, she said, “Sarah, I’ll bet they’re as sick of that as we are of freeze-dried waffles.”

“You are only too right,” Rustaveli said. Under the rueful amusement in his voice, the Russian-no, Georgian-sounded perfectly serious. “A pity we have no better way to meet than this Damselfly of yours. Who knows what I might do for a freeze-dried waffle?”

Louise Bragg grabbed the radio. “Sarah, did you check that one for brain damage, too?” The humans on both sides of 16tun Canyon laughed together.

“People, I think the best thing we all could do now is rest,” Sarah said. “We’ve had a long day, and another one is coming up tomorrow.” She switched from pragmatic physician to wife, but only for a moment. “Love you, Irv. Out.”

“Love you, too. Out.” Irv fired up the portable stove to melt snow and then boil water for the dinner packs he, Pat, and Louise had brought along. The chicken h la king, he knew, wasn’t really bad. But that was the trouble-he knew it. Damlama khasip-such an exotic name. What would it taste like? He was intrigued enough to wonder out loud.

“Like making love with a stranger after being married for years,” Pat suggested. She dug a spoon into her own food, tasted it, and sadly shook her head. “Married to somebody boring,” she amended. No one argued with her.

It was nearly dark by the time they were done.

“We’d better keep watch through the night,” Irv said, “or your husband, Louise, who I hope is not boring”-she stuck out her tongue at him-“will have our hides when we get back to Athena.”

He tore three scraps of paper off a notebook page, kept one, and handed the others to the women. “Write a number between one and ten,” he said, “and then show it.” He scrawled a 5 himself. Louise revealed an 8, Pat a 2. “All right, I’m odd man out; I’ll stay awake a while. Who shall I roust when I sack out?”

Pat and Louise looked at each other. After a few seconds, Pat said, “I’ll take the middle watch.”

“If you’re silly enough to volunteer, I’m silly enough to let you,” Louise said at once. “I hate sleeping in shifts.” Yawning, she unrolled her sleeping bag. “And I am beat.” She climbed in and zipped the bag up so little more than her nose showed. “G’night.”

Pat got into her sleeping bag, too. “I’ll wake you about ten, Minervan Standard Wristwatch Time,” Irv said. She nodded. Louise was already breathing slowly and regularly.

Irv walked around, wishing for a big blazing campfire; as night fell, the horizon seemed to close in on him, until the unknown lay hardly farther away than his outstretched fingertips. City boys like me don’t really realize how dark night can be without street lights and such, he thought. It took all of his will not to turn on his flashlight and wave it for the sake of something to see.

Stars would have helped, at least to ease his mind, but the clouds wrapped them away in cotton wool. Once, for a moment, he saw a wan smudge of light in the sky-one of the three little Minervan moons, though without a set of tables he had no idea which. Thicker clouds soon drifted over it and made it disappear.

That left Irv his ears and nose, left him a wolf pacing a prairie not his own. He was not evolved to know which little innocuous night noises were not innocuous after all, which of the scents on the chilly breeze would have sent any sensible Minervan beast running for its life. The local odors reminded him of nothing so much as how an organic chemistry lab smelled from a good way down the hall.

Something crunched behind him. He whirled, one hand grabbing for the flashlight, the other for the.45 on his belt. “It’s only me,” Pat said softly. “I can’t sleep.”

“Jesus.” Irv felt himself getting angry. He knew it was his adrenaline all dressed up with no place to go, but knowing that did not make the anger any less real. “Good thing you didn’t try sneaking up on Emmett like that,” he said, inhibited in volume because he did not want to wake Louise. “He’d’ve handed you your head instead of going into palpitations like me.” His heart was still thumping in his chest.

“Sorry.” Pat made her whisper sound contrite. She stepped closer to him. “I just figured I’d wander over and keep you company for a while, that’s all. If you want, I’ll go away again.”

“No, never mind. Now that you’re here, I’m glad you’re here-but damn, Pat!” They both laughed. Remembering his earlier thought, Irv went on, “We’ll have to keep it down so we don’t bother Louise.”

“Sure, but I don’t think it’ll be a problem. She sleeps like a stone-must be a clear conscience or something.” Was that bitterness there? Hard to be sure, with only a whisper to go on. Hard to imagine anyone having anything against Louise, too.

Irv’s brain finally paid attention to what his nose had been telling him. He scratched his head. Odds were, knowing him, that he had just missed it before, but still… “Did you have perfume on while we were biking up?” The sweet muskiness cut through the strange Minervan odors and struck deep into his senses.

“No,” she said.

He scratched his head again. “Don’t tell me you put it on just for me. I’m flattered, but-”

Pat interrupted him, but not with words. Her mouth was soft against his and clung with something close to desperation when he started to pull away. She was almost as tall as he and just about as strong. “I’ve wanted to do that for a long time,” she murmured.

“Have you?” Irv said, amazed. Even through his protective clothing and hers, he could feel her breasts press against him; his gloved hand found itself at the curve of her waist. “You’ve done a good job of hiding it, then.”

“I’ve done a good job of hiding lots of things. The worst part is, Frank doesn’t even notice.” Her low voiced laugh had knives in it. “And don’t tell me you’ve been getting all you want from Sarah, either. There isn’t enough privacy on Athena to let you get away with a lie. There isn’t enough privacy on Athena for anything.” She made it into a curse.

What she said was true enough, he thought dizzily as Pat kissed him again. No privacy… He knew, for instance, that she had a tiny brown mole just under her fight nipple, that the hair between her legs was a couple of shades darker than the tarnished gold curls of her head. Till this moment, he had not spent much time thinking about any of that, but he knew.

He also knew that Sarah had told him no more times lately than he had been happy with. It was hard to think of Sarah right now, with Pat’s tongue, agile as a snake, trailing warmly over his cheek and under his cap to tease his ear.

He felt his body respond. Her hand pressed him through his trousers. For a moment, his hands pressed, too; the firm flesh of her buttocks yielded beneath his fingers. She arched her back, thrusting her hips against him.

At last their mouths separated. The chill of the long breath of air Irv gulped in helped him bring his body partly back under the control of his will. Trying to make light of what was happening, he said shakily, “God, Pat, if I were twenty-one again I’d haul your pants down and screw you fight here, even if we both froze our asses off.”

“Do it,” she said. “I want you to.” She was still rubbing him, stroking him, trying to goad him to action.

“Pat, this is foolish,” he said as gently as he could, reaching down to take her hand away and suppressing a spasm of regret almost before he knew it was there. “I’m not twenty-one anymore; I don’t let my cock do all my thinking for me. You’re not twenty-one, either. Don’t you think we’re too far from home to do anything that would hurt any of us?”

“I hurt now,” Pat retorted. “You would, too, if you’d been faking it all the way out from Earth orbit. And the only way Sarah’d be hurt is if she found out.”

“She would. I’m a lousy liar about that kind of thing.” Not, Irv thought, that I’ve ever had much to lie about. His one brush with infidelity had come at a drunken party a few years back. He and a girl-God, he’d forgotten her name-were fooling around in a walk-in closet when he passed out between second and third base.

He had always reckoned the next day’s killer hangover punishment to fit the crime. He had not been seriously tempted to wander since. Come to think of it, he had not been seriously drunk since, either.

“You don’t want me.” Pat’s voice was fiat, despairing.

“You know better than that-you damn well ought to.”

Though subsiding, Irv still stirred at the memory of her touch. “But what I want and what I’m going to do are two different things. Pat, jumping on you is tempting as hell, but it’s just more trouble than it’s worth-for me, for Sarah, for Frank, and for you. For Louise, too, if she happens to get up to pee at the wrong moment.”

“She won’t,” Pat said, but Irv saw her sag.

He nodded slowly to himself. If privacy was her hang-up, reminding her she didn’t have it seemed like a good idea- assuming, of course, that he really didn’t feel like getting laid. Well, that was the assumption he had made, and he still thought it was the right one. “Pat, if what you need is being alone, you should have had a good time on the collecting trips you took with Frank.”

“I hoped that, too,” she said bleakly. “Didn’t work, not for me, anyway. Frank, now-Frank had lots of fun. It’s easy for a man-you get your jollies every time.”

“Frank doesn’t know you don’t?” he asked. She shook her head. “Maybe you ought to let him know.” Maybe I ought to shut up, too, he thought. A marriage counselor I’m not.

“How am I supposed to do that?” she demanded, setting her hands on her hips.” ‘Gosh, I’m so sorry, honey, but for the last year you haven’t turned me on at all’?” Her voice was a dangerous parody of sweetness.

Irv winced. Definitely I ought to shut up, he thought. “There are probably better ways,” he said carefully.

To his surprise, she started to laugh, and even sounded as though she meant it. “Do you know, Irv, you may be too sensible for your own good. It’s hard to be sensible when you’re horny.”

“Tell me about it,” he said. “It’s hard to be sensible when a fine-looking wench tries to kick your feet out from under you, too.”

“Hmm. I didn’t think of that. You suppose it would have worked?” Pat leaned toward him. “No, don’t run away,” she said when he started to pull back. “Now the only question is, should I kiss you or punch your lights out?” She ended up doing a little of both, pecking his cheek and tromping on his foot hard enough to hurt. “There. That’ll keep you guessing. Now, what time has it gotten to be?”

He blinked at the change of subject, then pulled back his sleeve so he could check his watch. “A little before nine.”

“Go to sleep,” she told him. “I’m too wound up to sleep now, so I may as well start my stretch early.” “Are you sure?”

“Yes. Go on, will you? I’ll be fine.”

“Okay. Thanks.” Irv took a couple of steps, then looked back doubtfully. Pat sent him on with an impatient wave. He got out of his shoes, climbed quickly into his sleeping bag, and zipped it up. Sleep took a while coming, though.

Louise lay a few feet away. From the way she was snoring, she was out like a light. Irv suspected that he could have led a brass band past her without waking her up, let alone playing slap and tickle with Pat. Suddenly he wanted her more than he had when she was in his arms.

He shook his head. Turning down a woman who offered herself like that was not one of the easier things he had done. He laughed at himself. “It’s not as if I’ve had a lot of practice,” he said under his breath.

“What’s that?” Pat asked.

“Nothing. Just brainfuzz.” He rolled over and eventually went to sleep.

“Adin, dva, tri!” Rustaveli shouted. At “three,” he and the American doctor pushed on the rover with all their might. She was even smaller than Katerina, but determination and no little strength made up for her lack of size. Grunting and sweating, she and Rustaveli fought the rover’s weight until it overbalanced and flipped back onto its wheels. It jounced a couple of times, then sat still.

“Well done!” Valery Bryusov cheered from a few meters away. His left arm was splinted and in a sling rigged from a piece of blanket. He made a rueful gesture with his good hand. “I wish I could have helped.”

“Never mind, Valery Aleksandrovich.” Rustaveli sprang onto the rover and tried the motor. The vehicle rolled ahead. He stopped it and grinned. “Thanks to Sarah, ah, Davidovna, you are fixed, now it is fixed, and we will be going back to our comrades.”

“Carefully, I hope,” Sarah said. She picked up the blankets she used to supplement the flimsy costume that was all she wore inside her pedal powered plane and started to redrape them.

Bryusov stepped forward to help her, but Rustaveli beat him there. After so long with just Katerina to think about, he was astonished at how much the mere sight of a different woman excited him. But when his hands “accidentally” started to slide down from her shoulders, the flinty look she gave him stopped him in his tracks. “Excuse me,” he muttered, surprised at how embarrassed he was.

“All right, then,” she said. But her voice did not imply that it was all right; her voice warned him not to try it again. This, he thought, could be one seriously stubborn woman. Maybe he should be just as well pleased not to be spending three years of his life in close company with her. Nevertheless-

“Sarah Davidovna, we are in your debt,” he said.

“I especially,” Bryusov agreed. “The more so as you had tomake a journey dangerous to yourself to help me, and our nations are not the best of friends.”

Under the awkward blankets, she shrugged. “There aren’t any nations here, just people-and not very many of us. Compared to anyone or anything else on Minerva, we’re all closer than brothers. If we don’t help each other, who will?”

“You are right,” Rustaveli said, though he knew Oleg Lopatin would have hurt himself laughing at such a notion-and perhaps Colonel Tolmasov, too. For that matter, he doubted that all the Americans on Minerva were as altruistic as this Dr. Levitt; otherwise, for instance, Tolmasov would have been happier dealing with Emmett Bragg.

While Rustaveli was working through that chain of thought, Bryusov asked what the Georgian should have. “How may we help you now, Sarah Davidovna?”

“You, Valery Aleksandrovich, can help best by staying out of the way and not risking any further harm to yourself,” she said firmly. “Shota Mikheilovich, if you would, you could help me swing Damselfly around so that it faces back toward Jotun Canyon once more. That will save me the trouble of flying around in a long, slow semicircle before I can head back to my own people.”

So much for the brotherhood of all men on Minerva, Rustaveli thought. Still, the request was entirely reasonable. “Show me what to do.”

He walked over to the ultra-ultralight with her. “Very simple,” she said. “You take one wingtip, I’ll take the other. Then we walk around till the plane points the way we want it to. Just be careful not to poke your fingers through the plastic skin.”

“Da,” he said absently. He was amazed at how easily the plane moved. “This, ah, Damselfly cannot weigh even as much as I do.”

“Not even close,” the American doctor agreed. The aircraft soon pointed east, but she still looked discontented. Rustaveli understood why when she said, as much to herself as to him, “Now how am I supposed to get into the blasted thing?”

He saw the problem at once. The canopy opened at the top, and there was no way to clamber up without tearing the plastic film of the fuselage to ribbons. He rubbed his chin; whiskers rasped under his gloves as he thought. Finally he snapped his fingers, or tried to-the gloves effectively muffled the noise. “Suppose I drive the rover alongside your plane here? You could climb on top of the roll cage, and I will help you down onto the seat inside the plane.”

After his try at feeling her up, he wondered if she would hesitate. She didn’t, not even for a second. “Fine,” she said. “Let’s do it.”

The rover purred up to Damsel. fly. Rustaveli turned off the engine and set the brakes on all four wheels. Then he scrambled up onto the top of the machine. Sarah Levitt came swarming after him. “You do that very well,” he said.

“I haven’t been on a jungle gym since I was nine years old, but it’s not the sort of thing you forget.” Sarah undid the canopy and sat on the metal bars of the roll cage with her feet dangling down into-what would one call it? The pilot’s compartment? The engine room? Wondering that, Rustaveli was almost caught by surprise when the American doctor said, “Lower me.”

Rustaveli hooked his feet at the corners of intersecting bars and took a firm grip on Sarah Levitt’s waist. He was glad she was a small woman; it made her weight easier to control as she slid into Damselfly. Although his arms traveled up her torso as she descended, he took no undue liberties.

“Thank you,” she said, in a way that thanked him for that as well as for his help.

He backed the rover out of the way and walked around to the other side of Damselfly so he could close the canopy. When it was latched, he asked, “Now what?”

“No need to shout,” she said. “The skin is too thin to cut down on sound.” She was already pedaling hard, though the propeller had not yet begun to spin. Her legs did not slow down as she went on, “Go to the end of one wing and run along with me, holding it level, when I start to taxi.”

He sprang to attention, and snapped off a salute sharper than any Tolmasov would ever wring from him. “I am yours to command.”

Under her white plastic helmet, the American doctor’s eyes twinkled. “You are a very silly man, Shota Mikheilovich. How did you manage to sneak past all the selection boards?”

He winked at her. “Simple. I did not tell them.” He was whistling as he walked out to the wingtip.

The big propeller, tall as he was, revolved slowly at first, then faster and faster. “Now!” Sarah Levitt shouted. Damselfly rolled forward, startlingly fast; Rustaveli was into a trot almost at once. Then he was running, and running for all he was worth. For a moment, it seemed to him that he was the one on the point of becoming airborne.

Then Damselfly wheels lifted clear of the ground. The plane was going faster than the Georgian could match. He pulled to a stop and stood panting, his breath a cloud of fog around his head. The American doctor briefly took one hand off the control stick to wave to him and Bryusov.

They both waved back. The linguist walked up to Rustaveli as Damselfly skimmed eastward, toward Jotun Canyon. “I’m sorry you will have to do all the driving as we return to our comrades,” Bryusov said.

Rustaveli was still watching the ultra-ultralight diminish in the distance. “Nichevo,” he said. “It doesn’t matter. At least I won’t have to pedal home.”

“There!” Louise Bragg shouted. She slapped Irv on the back. He staggered, straightened and followed her pointing finger with his eyes. At first he could make out nothing through the mist, but then he, too, spied the moving speck. He held the radio to his mouth. “Honey-uh, Damselfly-we have you visually.”

“Good. I don’t see you yet. Now shut up and let me work.”

Sarah’s voice came in panting gasps.

Irv picked up the video camera and kicked in the zoom lens. Damselfly seemed to leap toward him, though it was still well out over Jotun Canyon. No gusts, not now, he thought-as close to a prayer as a secular man would let himself come.

Beside him, he heard Pat saying, “Come on, dammit, come on,” over and over to herself. He nodded, which made the image he was taping jump. Somehow, the way Pat was pulling for Sarah made him easier about what had happened-and what had almost happened-the night before.

Then he could hear the prop’s whoosh and the rattle of the bicycle chain that fed the power of Sarah’s legs to the ultra-ultralight. She was above level ground now, on this side of the canyon. Irv switched off the camcorder and set it down so he could jump and yell.

“Damselfly has landed,” Sarah said, touching down only a few feet from where she had taken off. Her ribs were heaving with exhaustion; she sat slumped over the control stick.

She managed a tired wave for Irv as he set the wide stepladder beside Damselfly. He undid the latches to the canopy, flung it open, and leaned over to help her climb out.

“Thanks,” she said when she stood beside him. “All I can say is, the next time the Russians want my services, they can jolly well come see me.”

He sadly shook his head. “I knew it had to happen-all that exercise has made your brain atrophy.”

“Not to the point where I can’t feel cold.” She poked him in the ribs with an elbow. “Help me into my gear, will you?”

He did, saying, “I’m glad you’re back.”

“You and me both,” she agreed feelingly. “There were a few seconds on the way over when I doubted-but let’s not talk about that. I don’t even want to think about it.”

“Neither do I. Why don’t you just relax and let Louise and me knock down Damselfly so we can take it back to Athena?”

“If I sit still too soon, I’ll stiffen up.” Sarah walked around while Irv and Louise attacked the ultra-ultralight with wrenches. Pat fell into step beside her. Irv felt a nervous twinge whenever they happened to look his way. Stupid, he told himself-nothing happened.

The only time Sarah said anything even remotely sexual on the way back, though, was just after she emerged from behind a boulder where she had gone to answer a call of nature. “I have stiffened up,” she grumbled, then she grinned wryly at Irv. “Better not ask me to get on top anytime in the next few days.”

“Damn, just when I was hoping to break out the trampoline,” he said, so innocently that she almost forgot to glare.

They got back to Athena a little before sunset. Emmett Bragg took the 8mm cassette from the video camera as if it were worth its weight in diamonds and handed it to his wife. “We transmit this first thing tomorrow,” he told her.

“Why?” she demanded. “It’ll tie up the link. Wouldn’t you rather send data than pretty pictures?”

“Most of the time, sure. With this, I’d sooner be on the network news. And we will, too-tape of the American doctor flying back after saving the Russians’ bacon? They’ll show that all over the world. When you think about what it’ll do for our program, the data can wait.”

They all looked at each other. No one argued with him.

Reatur had grown used to having humans around. He did not realize it-he would have indignantly denied it-until four of the six strange creatures went away on their traveling contraptions and the other two stayed close by the building that had fallen from the sky. Without their poking their stalkless eyes into every comer of his domain and throwing questions at him like snowballs, he found himself bored.

Now they were back, and Sarah, just as though he-she, curse it-had never been away, was pestering him about Lamra. He did not want to think about Lamra right now. To keep from having to do so, he changed the subject. “Why did the four of you leave so suddenly the other day?” “To help a hurt human.”

“Ah,” Reatur said. Then he brought himself up short. “Wait. Four of you went away. None of you was hurt, am I right?” At Sarah’s headwag, he went on, “The two who stayed were not hurt, either, true?” Again the human wagged her head. “That accounts for all the humans there are, doesn’t it?” he asked. “So where did the hurt one come from?”

“He from domain called Russia,” Sarah replied, which told Reatur nothing. “Not same domain as ours. He hurt on far side of Ervis Gorge.”

More humans? More domains of humans? The idea disconcerted Reatur as badly as it had Fralk. The domain master started to ask about it, then stopped. Something else Sarah had said was of more immediate concern to him. “You went across Ervis Gorge?” he asked, hoping he had misunderstood. But Sarah was moving her head up and down once more. “How?” Reatur asked faintly.

“In small machine that goes through air.” Sarah spread her single pair of arms to mimic wings and moved her two legs as she did when she was inside the contraption.

Reatur felt brief relief, then had another unsettling thought. “These other humans from the other domain”-he did not try to pronounce it-”do they also have one of these machines for moving through the air?.”

“No.” Sarah’s answer was quick and positive.

“Then they couldn’t give one to the Skarmer?” The idea of humans dropping out of the sky was quite bad enough. Thinking of armed westerners crossing Ervis Gorge through the air was simply horrifying.

But Sarah said “No” again. Reatur turned an eyestalk on himself. Good-he had not been alarmed enough to turn blue. Showing fear to any human would have been embarrassing; showing fear to a human mate did not bear thinking about. Mates had enough trouble in their poor short lives that they should never be burdened with a male’s concerns, as well. Intellectually, Reatur knew the three human mates were not like those of his kind. Emotionally, that still had not sunk in.

Sarah helped drive the point home, though. “About Lamra-“ she resumed, more stubborn than any of Reatur’s males would have been when the domain master was so plainly unwilling to discuss the matter.

“We will talk about Lamra another time, not now,” Reatur declared.

That should have settled the matter, but Sarah rudely refused to let it stay settled. “What you do now instead? What more important than Lamra? You not talk of Lamra, Lamra die. What more important than Lamra not dying?”

He had to think for a moment to come up with an answer, but at last he did. “I am going to check with the watchers I have placed at the edges of Ervis Gorge. If the Skarmer somehow manage to root themselves on this side, Lamra will not be the only one who dies.” He started to leave.

“You run from me,” Sarah said. Reatur watched himself start to go yellow. That it was partly true only made him angrier. The human went on. “How Skarmer-how anyone-cross Ervis Gorge?”

“How should I know?” Reatur yelled, so loud that Sarah stepped back a pace and a male stuck an eyestalk around a corner to make sure everything was all fight. The domain master was a person who, if poked by one fingerclaw, hit back with three. He kept fight on shouting. “Until you told me, Sarah, I didn’t think anyone could cross it through the air. For all I know, the sneaky westerners may come by way of water when the gorge fills up.” That was the most ridiculous thing he could think of, but he was cursed if he would admit it. “Since I don’t know what they’ll do, I have to point my eyestalks every which way at once, don’t I?”

“Yes,” the human mate conceded reluctantly. Reatur had not intimidated her, though, for she continued. “We talk of Lamra later, yes?”

“Later, yes. Not now.” This time, when the domain master walked past Sarah, she let him go.

But her voice pursued him. “Maybe Skarmer does-do-use water. Humans go by water sometimes.”

Reatur kept walking. His color slowly faded. He decided he preferred being bored to being harassed. He had grown so used to being harassed by humans that it had taken some time without them to remind him how things had been not so very long ago.

A drop of water hit him in an eye as he walked out of his castle. Summer was close now, everything was starting to melt. Dealing with humans gave the domain master the same feeling as that splash. They melted all his certainties just as the summer sun worked on his home.

The males working in the fields, he saw, were not working very hard. He started to shout at them, then decided he would be wasting his temper. Stone tools made everyone slow. At least the males were accomplishing more with those than they would have with ice, which grew more frangible day by day.

Some of the males were working in the very shadow of Athena, and not turning so much as a single eyestalk toward the huge, strange structure. They were used to humans, too. Reatur wondered if that was good or bad. Good, he supposed: nothing at all would have gotten done if everyone was still as bemused as at first. But finding a human as normal as an eloc did not seem right, either.

Having.just had that thought, Reatur had to wiggle his eyestalks at himself when he passed the human called Frank, who was on his way back from Ervis Gorge, without even stopping to chat. And this Frank had shown Enoph that rocks, of all the crazy ideas, had ages just like people! That was a notion deserving of days of talk, but Reatur had other things on his mind at the moment. Frank, after all, would be here tomorrow, and the day after, too.

Reatur had watchers posted along the entire stretch of Ervis Gorge that marked the western frontier of his domain, but most of them clustered close to the castle. That was where most of his people lived and also where the bridge across the gorge had been.

Ternat was one of the watchers. He carded three javelins, as if he expected a horde of Skarmer males to come roaring across the gorge at any moment. He widened himself when he saw Reatur approaching.

“Never mind that, eldest,” Reatur said impatiently, and Ternat resumed his normal height. “I’m glad to see you so alert.”

“One day the domain will be mine, clanfather, unless the Skarmer steal it from me. I do not intend to let them.”

“Well said. I came to ask you to spread word to your fellow watchers: use one eyestalk to look at the sky from time to time.”

“The sky, clanfather? No one can go through the sky. No one save humans, I mean,” Ternat amended, as he would not have before Athena came down.

“Aye, humans,” Reatur said-no escaping the creatures, not anymore. “I learn there are humans on the western side of Ervis Gorge, too, humans of a different clan from the ones here. Who knows what treacherous tricks they may have taught the Skarmer?”

“The Skarmer need no one to teach them treachery,” Ternat said. “But-more humans?”

“I don’t like the thought any better than you, eldest, but pulling in my eyestalks won’t make it go away. So-look to the sky.”

Ternat let the air sigh out through his breathing pores. “The sky, clanfather.” He sounded as happy as Reatur felt.

The two males bored in on Fralk. Each of them carded two spears and two light spears, as did he. Each watched him with three eyestalks and used a fourth to see what the other was doing. The smooth way they moved together told of how often they had done this before-to them, Fralk was just another victim to be dispatched.

He sprang at one of the males, hoping to put him out of action and make the fight even. But, though he shifted his own spears to the hands near the male he had chosen, that warrior blocked his blows with almost bored ease. And Fralk, who needed a shield of his own to protect himself against that male’s counterthrusts, had but a single shield to withstand the onslaught of the fellow’s comrade.

That sort of fight could not last long. Fralk knew a brief moment of triumph when he managed to deflect a couple of thrusts from the second male, but all too soon one got home.

Fralk let out a high-pitched squeal of pain.

“Eldest of eldest, you are as dead as a strip of sundried massi meat,” declared the drill leader, a skinny, cynical male named Juksal. “Or you would be, if we were fighting with spears with real points. And the rest of you,” he called to the crowd of males watching the fight. “What does this teach you?”

“Not to get caught between two males,” his audience chorused.

Juksal feigned deafness. “Did I hear some runnerpests chirping? I asked, what does this teach you?”

“Not to get caught between two males!” This time it was a shout.

“All right,” Juksal said grudgingly. “You budlings know what to say, anyhow. Do you know what to do so that won’t happen?”

“Form circle!” the males shouted.

Fralk yelled with the rest, but all the while was thinking that what he really wanted to do was kill the accursed drill leader. Any other time, any other place, Juksal would have widened himself the instant he saw Fralk and stayed widened till the younger male was gone. Not, Fralk added to himself, that Juksal frequented places where he would be likely to see him.

But here on this practice field, because he had managed to live through a few brawls, Juksal had clanfather’s authority over the group of males in which Fralk found himself. He used it, too, and seemed to take special delight in making Fralk the object of his lessons. Fralk ached after every one of them.

He knew he had to learn to fight. As the male in charge of the boats, he would be going across in one of the very first ones. He did not think the Omalo on the other side of the gorge would greet him with hoots of delight. He even realized that being singled out this way by Juksal might earn him his comrades’ sympathy and make them more inclined to protect him than if they thought of him as a pampered noble. Maybe Juksal thought he was doing him a favor.

Maybe, in fact, Juksal was doing him a favor. That did not make him hurt any less, or like the drill leader any more.

“All right,” Juksal suddenly screamed. “You’ve just spotted eighteen eighteens of Omalo, all running toward you! Don’t justtalk about your stinking circle-make it, or you’re dead males.

Now, now, now!”

Predictably, a good deal of waste motion and rushing to and fro followed. The band of males got into their double ring a lot faster than they had the first time they tried it, though. Then Juksal had been screaming that they should have brought along a tray of relishes so the Omalo would have something to eat them with. Now all he did was turn yellow. Since he seemed to be yellow about half the time, Fralk doubted he was very angry.

“All right.” The drill leader swept out an arm. “They’re that way, and there aren’t as many of them as you thought at first. Matter of fact, there’s more of you. Go poke holes in ‘em.”

A few of Fralk’s companions were veterans of border clashes with other Skarmer clans-the two who had set on him were of that sort. More, like he, had never seen action. They shook themselves out into a crescent-shaped skirmish line and rushed in the direction Juksal had shown.

“Yell, curse it!” the drill leader shouted at his warriors.

“Make ‘em want to void right where they’re standing!”

Fralk yelled as loud as he could, feeling foolish all the while. Soldiers were necessary things for a clan to have, but as eldest of eldest he had never expected to be one himself. But then, he had never expected Hogram to conceive of planting a new Skarmer subclan east of Ervis Gorge.

Every time he was tempted to imagine himself wilier than the clanfather, he broke a mental fingerclaw on the hard ice of that fact. The Great Gorges had been barriers between great clans as long as there had been great clans. Thinking of one as anything else required a leap of imagination beside which Fralk’s own schemes were as so many tiny runnerpest budlings.

“Come back, the lot of you,” Juksal called, breaking into the younger male’s musings. The band reversed itself. “All right, enough for the day. Fling your spears at the targets and then knock off.” As if suddenly remembering to be harsh, the drill leader added, “Try to scare ‘em if you can’t hit ‘em!”

Neither of Fralk’s casts hit the leaf stuffed massi-hide target. Neither missed by much, though. He consoled himself with the thought that if the target had been a male caught in a volley, maybe he would have dodged someone else’s spear and been brought down by one of these.

He was also glad none of the humans had been watching. They did watch the Skarmer males drill fairly often; the sound of their picture-makers clicking away had become a familiar part of the exercises. At first Fralk thought they were filled with awe at the might and savagery of the Skarmer forces.

Most of the males still thought that. Juksal certainly did; whenever a human came around, he urged his warriors to show the strange creatures how fierce they were.

But Fralk, unlike his fellows, had learned to read expressions on the humans’ strange, boringly colored features. When the corners of their odd mouths curved up, they were amused. Fralk did not know why the Skarmer drills amused them, but he was sure they did.

Well, he thought, still feeling the ache under one arm, he’d like to see how a human would fare, attacked by four spears at once. Attack a human on the side where he had no eyes and he was yours-he wouldn’t even know he was in trouble until he was dead.

Fralk stopped. A couple of human concepts he had been having trouble with suddenly made sense. Right and left had given him no problems; they were just opposites of one another, what he thought of as three arms apart. But behind…, behind was the direction where humans had no eyes, the hidden direction. Made as they were, poor strange creatures, no wonder they needed a special word for it.

Behind… it even had a weird kind of logic to it, or at least economy, which to Fralk’s mercantile mind was about the same thing. Like those of any reasonable language, Skarmer prepositions classified objects through their relative distance outward from oneself. Sometimes that led to clumsy ways of thinking and of speaking: Juksal, for instance, was closer to Fralk than the male named Ising, but farther from Fralk than the one called Kattom.

How much easier to say-and to think-that Juksal was behind Kattom. And how much easier to wish the miserable drill leader were behind Ising, and behind a good many more males as well, so he could neither see nor bother Fralk anymore.

Fralk knew what wishes were worth. If wishes were all that mattered, every starving tenant farmer would become a clanfather overnight. Most times, Fralk knew that too well to need to remind himself of it.

But wishing Juksal would disappear was too pleasant a thought to slap down. Fralk’s eyestalks quivered with guilty pleasure as he walked back toward Hogram’s town.