A World of Difference

V

Enoph turned blue with fear at the very idea. “You humans have terrible thoughts! What would be left of a domain?” Not much, Frank thought, not when the main local building stone was ice. For Enoph’s sake, he was glad the simulation had been on the extravagant side.

The geologist took two more pictures, which finished off the roll. He decided against reloading; better to wait a couple of days and come back. That would tell him something about how fast the water was rising in the canyon.

He walked back toward Athena. He wanted to feed the roll into the developer now, so that he could see how it came out. When he got back to the ship, he found one roll processing and another in the lN bin with a Postit note from Sarah attached:

“Bump yours ahead of this and you die!” Knowing Sarah, she meant it. Frank sighed and stuck his film behind the other waiting roll.

He heard his wife’s voice from the front cabin. No one else seemed to be aboard. Even Emmett and Louise, who hardly ever went away, were off doing something or other with Reatur; he had seen them by the castle. Frank grinned to himself. Such chances were not to be wasted. He walked forward, whistling to let Pat know he was coming.

She turned around in her seat, waved so he could tell she saw him, then went back to speaking Russian. “I had hoped the creature lived on your side of the canyon, too, Shota Mikheilovich, or had relatives there, but if not, not. Athena out.”

Rustaveli also signed off. With a discontented grunt, Pat complained to her husband. “He doesn’t have any idea about what’s related to what. He’s just thinking in terms of this species or that, not genera or families or orders. He’ll end up hauling all his data home so the bigwigs in Moscow can try to make sense of it. Why’d he bother to come?”

“He doesn’t have the computers we do,” Frank answered.

He scratched his head, trying to remember what she had toldhim a couple of days before. Succeeding made him smile. “If he’d found that little burrowing thing, he’d never have guessed it was related to the one the Minervans call a runnerpest. They don’t look anything alike.”

Pat smiled, too. “Oh, you were listening after all. You’re right. That burrower is so adapted to underground life that without computer extrapolation of what its ancestors used to look like there’d be no telling which order it belonged to.”

“Mmhmm.” Frank paused a moment. “Quiet in here.”

“It is, isn’t it?” Pat’s gaze swung back to him. “Is that a hint?”

“More than a hint, you might say. Call it an invitation.”

Something passed over Pat’s face and was gone before Frank was sure he had seen it. Then her eyes went to the floppy she had been using while she talked with her Russian opposite number. Finally, though, she shrugged and said, “Why not?” Not the most enthusiastic response in the world, Frank thought, but it would do. He slipped his arm around her waist as she got up. They walked back to their cubicle.

Afterward, he leaned up on his elbow in the narrow bottom bunk. Pat lay beside him, not moving, not talking, looking up at the foam rubber mattress pad over their heads. “All right?” he asked, more hesitantly than he had expected.

“I guess I’m just tired,” she said, shrugging again. Bare as she was, that should have been enchanting. Somehow it was not. Shell said that more than once lately, times when she’d been less responsive than he had hoped. And she still did not look at him.

He thought for a while. Over the years, he had grown used to pleasing Pat and pleasing himself thereby. He took things as he found them, but this failure was something he would sooner not find again. “Anything I can do to help?” he said hesitantly.

Now her eyes turned his way. “This is the first time you’ve offered that,” she said. Curiosity mingled with-accusation in her voice.

“Didn’t think I needed to before.”

“Hmm.” She was studying him as dispassionately as if he were one of her specimens. “Well, maybe.” Her tone was judicious, too.

“Is that ‘well maybe I didn’t think so’ or ‘well maybe I can’?”

He pantomimed the confusion he was feeling.

She laughed. Now the jiggles that produced excited Frank. He could not have said why, unless it was relief at no longer being studied like a runnerpest. “Well, maybe”-she paused wickedly-“a little of both.” Her hand took his and guided it.

“Better?.” he asked some time later. She bit him on the arm. It wasn’t the answer he had looked for, but he did not complain.

Fralk and Hogram let thunder wash over them as they watched the flood. A boulder the size of Hogram’s castle slammed into the side of Ervis Gorge. The ground quivered like the skin of a massi with an itch. “You propose to send our boat through that?” the domain master demanded, stabbing a fingerclaw at the chaos far below.

Invading the Omalo lands wasn’t my idea, Fralk wanted to say. He had too much sense to yield to temptation. Hogram appreciated frankness, but he did not appreciate males showing how clever they were at his expense.

“The flood is still new, clanfather,” the younger male said carefully, “and is sweeping along the debris that has accumulated in the gorge since last summer. It will grow calmer.”

“It had better,” Hogram snapped. He turned an eyestalk from the flood to Fralk. “How would that runnerpest in the toy boat you showed me have fared if you dropped half my roof on it, eh? That’s what the trash in the water will be doing to the boats trying to go across, isn’t it?”

“I suppose there may be a few accidents.”

“Accidents?” Hogram echoed. “Is that all you can say? Accidents? Can you be sure any of these boats”-the way he stressed the word emphasized that it was foreign-“will get across Ervis Gorge at all? Or will the folk far north of here, picking corpses from the gorge after the flood subsides, be surprised at how many foolish males got themselves killed in the water?”

Anger burst inside Fralk. “Clanfather, are you pulling in your eyestalks? If so, tell me plainly, so I can free the males who are building boats for more productive duty. I also suggest that you release your males from weapons training, if you do not intend to use us as warriors.”

After being so blunt, Fralk wondered whether Hogram would turn all eyestalks toward or away from him. How many males, he thought, could claim total rejection by their own domain master and his Omalo counterpart? It was not a distinction Fralk craved.

But Hogram, with the perspective age brings, was not infuriated by the younger male’s presumption. If he was amused, he was too canny to let his eyestalks show it. “We must press on,” he said. “Think of the profit wasted if we let that labor go for naught. But I still turn blue whenever I think of trusting myself to one of the contraptions those males are building.”

You won’t be in one of them, Fralk thought. But that was not something even he dared say aloud. Instead he answered, “Clanfather, we will succeed. The Skarmer will be the only great clan to straddle a flood gorge. One day, our domains will fill the eastern lands.”

Hogram’s eyestalks quivered now. “May you prove right. That day, however, is not one I will live to see, nor you, either. Worry about planting our first bud, not the ones that may spring from it.”

“As you say, clanfather.” No denying that Hogram made sense. But Fralk’s ambition ran further than he would admit to anyone, especially to the domain master, whose position only made his already suspicious nature more so. If Fralk established a new domain on the far side of Ervis Gorge, and if his descendants kept pushing back the Omalo and setting up new domains of their own, might they not eventually prefer to style themselves after their first domain master?

Great clan Fralk. The young male had repeated that to himself often enough, when he was sure no other male could hear. He liked the sound of it.

“Hello, Athena. Houston here.” Irv Levitt thumbed on the recorder. The mission controller back home would not pause for acknowledgment, not with back-and-forth transmission time near twenty minutes. Irv was about to go on about his business- most of what Houston had to say was Emmett Bragg’s problem, not his-when the controller, as if reading his mind, continued. “We have some new instructions for you, Irv.” His voice came in scratchy across the millions of miles but was perfectly understandable.

Now that the mission controller-his name was Jesse Dozier was talking to him, Irv said, “Me? What’s up?” just as if the man could hear him. Catching himself, the anthropologist laughed at his own foolishness.

He had only talked over a sentence or so, and that not directly relevant to him, or so he thought. “-continued excellent response to the assistance you folks gave the Soviets, both here and in the States and from around the world,” Dozier was saying. “Interest in the Minerva mission hasn’t been so high-or so favorable-since just after Athena touched down. The polls are running strongly for continued contact and exploration.”

Polls… Irv felt his mouth twist. He half wished polling had never been invented. These days, no politicians dared moved half an inch past what their polls told them. They followed so closely that most of them had forgotten how to lead.

Again Dozier’s words ran parallel to his thoughts. “We’re preparing to have the new appropriation submitted while things look so good. And to help nail it down, we It like to be able to show Congress another major success. That’s where you come in, Irv.”

Levitt blinked. “Me?”

Dozier, of course, took no notice. Irv shut up and listened.

“From the data you folks and Tsiolkovsky have sent back, it seems likely that the two groups in whose lands you find yourselves will soon be at war. We want you to arrange a radio hookup with the Soviets, so that the leader on your side of Jotun Canyon can confer with the ruler on the western side. Think what a feather in your caps it will be if you can mediate a dispute between rival factions of an alien species.

“Louise”-the mission controller changed the subject-“we have some new subroutines to speed up your number crunching.

First-”

“Dozier, you are stoned out of your gourd,” Irv said. Now he didn’t care if he missed some of the feed from Houston. He wished he hadn’t heard any of what Dozier had just finished saying. What did they think back home, that Reatur and the domain master across the canyon were a couple of Third World dictators, to be brought into line by threatening to cut off their weapons shipments?

“Sounds like it,” Emmett Bragg said when Irv, throwing his hands in the air for extra emphasis, shouted that question at him.

“But we don’t have anything like that kind of leverage on them,” Irv said, still loudly. “Tolmasov had it right-they were going to fight whether we were here or not. The other fellows want to cross, Reatur doesn’t want to let them. Where’s the room for discussion?”

“Good question.” Bragg laughed two syllables of a humorless laugh. “Maybe, if we’re real lucky, the Russians won’t cooperate. That’d get us off the hook.”

“Maybe.” Irv was as skeptical of that as Emmett sounded. The Russians spent even more time beating their breasts about how peace loving they were than the United States did. They would have to link-Hogram? Irv wasn’t sure he remembered the western chieftain’s name-up with Reatur, assuming Reatur was willing to talk… “Do you suppose Houston would let me beg off if I told them the domain master would feed me to the crows for bringing up the idea at all?”

“You could try, I suppose, but I don’t think it’ll fly. Trouble is, Houston already knows Reatur’s got an open mind, because if he didn’t, he’d never have gone along with your wife’s trying to save that female. If he’s game for that, chances are he’d be willing to talk peace, too.”

“You have this disgusting habit of being right.” Irv sighed. “Of course, just because he’ll talk doesn’t mean he’ll agree to anything. I wouldn’t, in his shoes.”

“Neither would I, not that he wears shoes. And somehow I don’t think the art of negotiation’s come as far here as it has back home. Which is to say that Reatur’s more likely to call the westerner every name in the book than talk turkey with him.” Bragg grinned crookedly. “Which is what you said a while ago.”

“You know it, I know it, the Russians here know it, I’m sure the Minervans know it, too. What do you think the odds are of convincing Houston?”

“Slim, Irv, slim. After all, they have the experts there. Just ask ‘em.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“Valery Aleksandrovich, do you seriously believe Hogram will make peace with the clans east of Jotun Canyon?” Oleg Lopatin demanded. “He has been preparing for war since we landed, and for some time before that.”

“You are right, Oleg Borisovich,” Valery Bryusov agreed. The linguist did not like admitting Lopatin was right about anything. He consoled himself by mentally sneering at the way the KGB man pronounced Hogram’s name: he said it as if it started with a G, as most Russians did with foreign words that began with the sound of rough breathing. “Still,” Bryusov went on, “we must make the effort. Moscow would not be pleased if we let the Americans brand us as warmongers.”

“No,” Lopatin growled, dragging out the word as if it pained him. “But Moscow will not be pleased if we forfeit the position of trust we have earned here, either. And asking Hogram to do something he manifestly does not wish to do may well bring that fate down on our heads.”

“You are right,” Bryusov said again. This second admission hurt twice as much as the first one had. Bryusov scratched at his arm. His fingers clicked on the plaster of his cast. He knew it was there, but reflex made him scratch every so often anyhow. Both long-unwashed skin and healing bone itched ferociously.

“Now I wish I were up at the tent by Hogram’s town instead of here on Tsiolkovsky,” Lopatin grumbled. “We must tread carefully, subtly.”

“Colonel Tolmasov will do well.” Bryusov slightly stressed the pilot’s rank to remind the chekist who was in charge. All Lopatin knew of subtlety, the linguist thought, was how to knock on a door at midnight. “Sergei will make Hogram understand that the request to confer with the eastern chieftain comes from our own domain masters,” he continued, “and as dutiful males we have no choice but to convey it to him.”

“I suppose so,” Lopatin said in a tone that supposed anything but. “Negotiations have their uses, like any other tool. But once these fail-and fail they will, quite without help from us-we must be prepared to extend our full support to Hogram and his males.”

Bryusov frowned, wondering if he had heard the KGB man correctly. He saw he had. Coughing, he reminded Lopatin, “Oleg Borisovich, these are capitalists about whom you speak in such glowing terms. Alien capitalists, da, but capitalists even so.” Had it been the end of the sixteenth century rather than the end of the twentieth, he would have been accusing Lopatin of devil-worship.

But the chekist was no mean Marxist-Leninist theologian himself. “There is nothing wrong with capitalism as it emerges, Valery Aleksandrovich, only when in its decadence it stands in the way of the arrival of true socialism, as it does on Earth. Here on Minerva, capitalism is the progressive ideology and economic structure. To the east of the canyon, the domains are feudal in organization, is it not so?”

“Bozhemoi. “Bryusov was not used to eyeing the KGB man with respect; carefully veiled contempt was what he usually felt for him. But he had to confess, “That is a very pretty argument, Oleg Borisovich.”

“Yes, I know,” Lopatin said complacently.

A clever chekist is still a chekist, Bryusov reminded himself. “Interesting also, I think,” Lopatin went on, “how here as well as on Earth the Americans find themselves aligned with the forces of reaction while we stand with those of progress.”

“Most interesting,” the linguist agreed. The more he thought through the implications of what Lopatin had said, the less he liked them. He held up his healing arm. “Don’t forget how the Americans helped us-helped me-at great risk to themselves. Here on Minerva, if nowhere else, we truly have a classless society of humans.”

“Of humans, perhaps,” Lopatin said, as if making a great concession, “but not of intelligent beings. And what we do here will also be closely observed by people’s movements all over the world back home.”

“And by the Americans and their friends.” Now Bryusov was genuinely alarmed. Bringing quarrels from Earth to Minerva was bad enough, but letting a Minervan quarrel create trouble on Earth struck him as worse.

“Moscow will instruct us as to our proper course,” Lopatin said.

He sounded as if he were trying to reassure the linguist, but Bryusov remained unassured. The apparatchiks back home were as rigid as Lopatin. “I would sooner let us make our decisions on the spot,” Bryusov said. “Surely we have a better feel for the Minervans than do men who have never seen one.”

“Even the Americans, with their prattling of liberty, are not so foolish as that,” Lopatin said. “When Houston gives an order as it did about these talks-the crew of Athena simply obeys.”

“Oleg Borisovich, this is the first time I have ever heard you argue that we can do no better than imitating the Americans,” Bryusov answered mildly. He cherished the glower the chekist gave him.

Reatur glowered at the box Irv held in one of his large, strange hands. The domain master had come to accept and eventually to ignore such boxes in humans’ hands, even when the voices of other humans came out of them. He had never imagined a person’s voice might also travel in such fashion-especially not if the person was a Skarmer. “He won’t be able to see as well as hear, will he?” Reatur asked for the third time.

“No,” Irv answered. “You see into Skarmer lands?”

“No,” Reatur admitted unhappily. “Let me listen to his lies, then, and have done, so I can go on working to keep my domain safe from his greed.”

When humans sighed, the domain master thought, they sounded eerily like people. Irv pressed the box here and there and then spoke into it. A rumbling voice-a human male’s voice-replied at once. It belonged to neither Emmett nor Frank.

Reatur recognized the way they sounded. So there truly were more humans than he had seen… Despite everything the weird creatures had said, he had wondered.

Irv brought him out of his eyestalk-twiddling by handing him the box. “Talk into it,” the human said. “Hogram hears you.” “Reatur underhanded in trade talk.”

“How should I know?” Hogram used the same clipped, simplified speech. He sounded old, Reatur thought. The Omalo domain master had known that; it had to be so, if Hogram’s eldest of eldest was a male who could be entrusted with responsibility. But heating Hogram’s voice made the knowledge real in a way it had not been before.

“Why are you talking to me, then?” Reatur said.

“Because the”-Hogram used a word Reatur did not know-“asked me to.”

“The who?”

“The two legged, two armed creatures who make strange things like the box we are using to talk now. That’s what they call themselves in their own language.”

“Oh. The ones here call themselves ‘humans,’ and so we use that name for them, too.”

“Call them whatever you like. They are strange enough and strong enough that I do not care to tell them no without some truly pressing reason-nor do you, I notice.”

“Never mind what I do,” Reatur snapped. “The humans here say that if we talk, perhaps we can find a way not to fight. Stay on your side of Ervis Gorge and you will prove them right.”

“If I could, I would. But we have too many males, too many mates for our land to feed. If you peaceably yield your domain, perhaps we can work out a fate for your males less drastic than the one Fralk first proposed to you. Some of your budlings might be allowed to live on, to plant buds themselves and to work with us toward building a new land.”

“What do you mean, work with you?” Reatur did not trust the sound of that smooth-sounding phrase. “As what?”

“You know that many of us are traders rather than farmers or herders,” Hogram said. “We could, I suppose, use some males whose talents lie in those directions.”

Rage tipped through Reatur. “Use them as slaves, you mean, without even right of appeal to clanfather. For they’d not be of the same clan as your precious young Fralk, now, would they? You Skarmer aren’t traders, Hogram, you’re cheats and thieves.”

He was deliberately insulting, trying to infuriate Hogram as he had been infuriated. The Skarmer domain master, though, seemed armored against insult. “In your obstinacy, Omalo, you have made me become more generous. Cherish that; not many may boast of it.”

“Imagine my delight.” Reatur made his voice as hot with scorn as the meltwater that brawled through Ervis Gorge. “Save such praise for dealings with your fellow Skarmer, who can properly appreciate it.” He shortened his eyestalks in surprise as he thought of something new. “Why even think of crossing the gorge, Hogram? Why not seize the domains of your neighbors, if you need land so badly? Surely that would be simpler for you.”

“I wish you had been budded a fool; my life would be easier.” This time Hogram sounded as though he really was giving a compliment, not sardonic as he had been before. “In truth, though, all the Skarmer domains hereabouts find themselves in the same straits as do I: too many folk, not enough food. My domain might be bigger were I to conquer them, but no better off.”

That made sense to Reatur. He almost wished it had not; he had not expected to be able to see out of Hogram’s eyestalks. Thinking of the Skarmer domain master as a male with problems of his own was less comfortable than simply thinking of him as the enemy. It could be useful, though, if it gave him clues about how Hogram would plot.

As if changing the subject, Reatur asked, “Do your humans come in two kinds, one with a deep rumbling voice and the other that sounds like a person?”

Hogram, Reatur thought, was sharp or at least suspicious. The Skarmer domain master’s voice turned cautious at once as he answered, “Yes, they do. What of it?”

The reply was innocuous enough, but Reatur felt like hooting with glee. Instead, as casually as before, he asked, “Have they told you that the ones who sound like people are mates, and the others males?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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