A World of Difference

VI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They dropped off, all of them at once.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Never mind now; just remember for next time.” Reatur’s eldest, Sarah thought, seemed a good deal like the domain master. He turned a couple of eyestalks toward the dead female eloc. “You didn’t have much luck there.” “No, not much,” she admitted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Thank you for reminding me,” he said without stopping.

“I’ll make sure someone sees to the butchering.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She yelped. “What was that for?”

“For not answering my question.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The bark of the AKT4 rose above the krong’s screams. As the first bullets slammed into it, the animal changed direction with the agility of most Minervan beasts. It rushed at its new tormentor. Tolmasov fired in short bursts, watched blood and tissue spray from the wounds he made. He was wishing for something heavier than a Kalashnikov-say, an anti-tank missile when, less than five meters from him, the krong went down at last.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The pilot decided to temporize. “I talk with my domain masters,” he said. “If they say yes, then we trade rifle. If no, we cannot.” He was confident even the blockheads back in Moscow had better sense than to authorize letting the natives get their three-fingered hands on an AKT4.

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

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

“Yes, I suppose so-the meat is vile,” Fralk answered. “Long ago there was a bounty on their claws, but since none has been seen this near town in a good many years, I suppose that offer has melted.” He did not want to talk about the krong. He wanted to talk about Tolmasov’s rifle. “From how far away can it kill?”

“Farther than you can throw a stone,” the pilot answered. He did not want to tell Fralk the Kalashnikov was accurate out to three or four hundred meters and could kill from a kilometer away if a round happened to hit.

What he did say was plenty. “Wonderful!” Fralk exclaimed. “Wonderful!” Tolmasov had never heard a Minervan burbling before. “Hogram will be as excited as I am at the prospect of doing away with the wretched Omalo while at the same time keeping our males safe.”

“Remember what I say,” Tolmasov warned him. ‘.’My domain masters may not let us sell you rifle. They say no, we not sell.” He started walking away from the dead krong, back toward Hogram’s town. Maybe if Fralk could not see the beast anymore, he would stop being so heated not really the right word to apply to a Minervan, the pilot thought-about what the Kalashnikov could do.

No such luck. The Minervan went right on babbling until Tolmasov rudely left him outside the humans’ tent and went in alone. Oleg Lopatin looked up from the radio handset he was checking. “I’ve seen you looking happier, Sergei Konstantinovich,” he said.

Tolmasov was so frazzled, he did not even mind unburdening himself to the KGB man. “I almost wish I’d let the miserable creature eat us,” he finished. “That might have ended up doing the mission less harm than letting the locals find out about firearms.”

“Possibly not, Comrade Colonel,” Lopatin said. Tolmasov grew alert; Lopatin only used formal address when he had something on his mind. “Would it not accord well with Marxist-Leninist principles to render fraternal assistance to this advanced society in its struggle against the oppressive feudal aristocrats on the eastern side of Jotun Canyon? The dialectic of history supports the Skarmer; how can we not do the same?”

“Two good reasons: This is Minerva, not Earth; and there are people on the other side of the canyon. I have more loyalty to my own kind than I do to dialectical materialism.” The moment the words were out of his mouth, Tolmasov knew he had said too much. And words were never unsayable, not to a chekist.

But Lopatin’s response was mild. “Marxist-Leninist principles hold universally, Sergei Konstantinovich. You know that as well as I. Tell me, what had you planned to do about Fralk’s request?”

“Nothing,” Tolmasov answered honestly. “Or rather, say I had consulted with Moscow and they told me he could not have his rifle. A little discreet checking with Bragg will let me make sure he isn’t giving the Omalo firearms.”

“Yes, by all means check with Bragg,” Lopatin said. “But perhaps you also really should ask Moscow about this question. Then there can be no room for misunderstanding. This is only a suggestion, of course.”

But it wasn’t only a suggestion, as Tolmasov knew. That was what he got for leaving himself open to the KGB man. “Let me talk with Bragg first,” the pilot said, dickering now. “If I have his clear assurance that he is not giving guns to the locals, a decision from Moscow is unnecessary. Otherwise-”

“Good enough,” Lopatin said, to Tolmasov’s surprise and relief. “Call now, why don’t you? Even I will admit, Sergei Konstantinovich, that our colleagues back on Earth are not always as timely as they might be. The longer the opportunity we give them, the better.”

He said that with the air of a man making a great concession, perhaps so he could act as if he were repaying Tolmasov for his slip of a few minutes before. But the pilot, like most men on the frontier, already had a low opinion of the alleged experts back home. Not only were they slow in making up their minds, they were sadly disconnected from the reality he was living. That scheme for peace talks between Hogram and the eastern chieftain, for instance… Tolmasov could have told them-did tell them-it was a waste of time. They had forced him to go ahead with it anyway and proven him right.

So who knew what Moscow would instruct now? They might well order him to let the Minervans have an AKT4. That would leave the whole expedition vulnerable in a way it had not been before. As a soldier, he hated the idea of making himself more vulnerable.

Well, odds were Bragg would bail him out, he thought as he went over to the radio. The American mission commander was an enemy, but never a stupid one. He had to have better sense than to go arming the natives. Tolmasov turned a dial to get the frequency he needed. “Soviet Minerva base calling Athena,” he said in English.

The answer came promptly enough, in Russian. “Athena here, Sergei Konstantinovich.” A woman’s voice, more heavily accented than his when speaking her language. “Pat Marquard here.”

“Hello, Patricia Grigorovna. I need to ask a question of Brigadier Bragg, if I may.”

“Wait, please,” she said. He did, but not long. Bragg came on the other end of the hookup.

“Hello, Sergei Konstantinovich. Not your usual time for a call. What’s up?”

The shrill American flavor he gave his words and the lazy way he drawled them out should have made him sound like a fool when he spoke Russian. Tolmasov wished they did. Unfortunately, he could not imagine Bragg sounding like a fool no matter what language he used.

Swallowing a sigh, the colonel got on with it. “I was, ah, wondering, Brigadier, whether you’ve traded any firearms to the Minervans on your side of Jotun Canyon.” Only the faint pop of static came from the circuit. “Brigadier Bragg?” Tolmasov said at last.

“I’m here,” Bragg answered at once. “Why do you want to know?” Hard suspicion filled his voice.

Because if you haven’t gone and done something idiotic, then there’s no chance I’ll have to, either, Tolmasov wanted to say. He could not, not with a Soviet tape recorder and an American one preserving his every word. “I was curious about how they’ve adapted to them,” he replied instead. “Not what the natives are used to at all, don’t you know?”

“No, I don’t,” Bragg said flatly. “I don’t believe you, either, Sergei Konstantinovich. You sound more like someone sniffing around to find out what his little friends will be up against if they manage to get across the canyon. And that, Comrade Colonel”-the contempt with which he loaded Tolmasov’s rank was stinging-”is exactly none of your damned business. Athena out.”

Tolmasov found himself staring in numb dismay at a silent microphone. He made himself look up from it and saw Oleg Lopatin aiming his best I-told-you-so smirk at him. “Moscow,” the KGB man said.

“Moscow,” Tolmasov echoed dully.

“You should have seen it, clanfather!” Fralk exulted. “The krong was nearly on me, but then the “rifle”-he pronounced the human word with care-”roared louder than half an eighteen of klongii and put holes in it. It turned on Sergei, but he made the rifle roar again and again, till the krong fell over, dead.”

“A krong, so close to town?” Hogram’s fingers opened and closed in distress. “I’ll send out some males, to make sure none of its mates can drop her buds anywhere near here. I thought we’d hunted them out long ago. I’m glad you weren’t hurt, eldest of eldest.”

Not an eighteenth so glad as I am, Fralk thought. But it was not like Hogram to miss the main point so completely. “Aye, send out the hunters, clanfather,” Fralk said, “but get one of those rifles for us, no matter what it costs. If it fills a krong full of holes, think what it would do to the Omalo.”

“Hmm. I suppose so, yes. The humans are careful with them, aren’t they? They never left one lying around so we could, ah, borrow it to see how it works. That always made me think the things were valuable;”

“Valuable?” The younger male was still so excited, he could hardly contain himself. “Clanfather, listen to me: Sergei said that if his own domain masters refused his permission, he could not yield one to us no matter what we paid for it.” “Did he?”

That piqued Hogram’s interest, Fralk thought. “He did. He also said the humans on the other side of Ervis Gorge may have these firearms for the Omalo.”

“Did he?” Now Hogram was roused all right, Fralk thought.

“And these humans-our humans-would refuse them to us?”

“No matter what we paid,” Fralk agreed.

“The humans take our goods, aye, but I have not seen them go wild over anything, nor use it as we use the tools and trinkets we get from them,” Hogram said. “That says to me they are what they claim, explorers seeing the kinds of things we have rather than merchants in the same sense as ourselves.”

Fralk had not worked that through for himself, but it made sense. Hogram’s gift for pointing an eyestalk toward such subtle points had helped lift his clan to the status it enjoyed among the Skarmer these days. “If they do not truly need anything we have, it weakens us,” Fralk remarked. “How can we make them reach out with the arm that is turned in the direction best for us?”

“They have only two arms apiece, but they turn them every which way,” Hogram said. “Were they not so strange in seeming, I would take them for spies. If I were to order them to stay in their own tent and their skyboat until they do as we desire, I think that might persuade them to obey. After all, eldest of eldest, what good are explorers who are not allowed to explore?”

“None.” Quite without calculation, Fralk widened himself before Hogram. The domain master’s gift for subterfuge had not diminished as his years grew long. It grew with them instead, until even creatures as weird as the humans held few mysteries for him. Fralk was used to believing his own machinations hidden from Hogram. Suddenly he suspected that what he had imagined to be a wall of solid earth was in fact but a thin pane of clear ice.

A motion of Hogram’s arms recalled the younger male to himself. “You said our humans will be talking with those on the other side of Ervis Gorge, and with their own domain masters?”

“Yes, clanfather.” Fralk slowly resumed his usual height. “That will take some time. Let’s give them, oh, half an eighteen of days. If after that time they still refuse to sell us one of these what-ever-they-call-thems, we will find out how they enjoy exploring the hot, muddy inside of that gaudy orange tent-the cursed thing reminds me of the color a presap mate takes on when it’s ripe for budding.”

“It is ugly, isn’t it?” Fralk’s eyestalks quivered a little.

“Hideous is a better word.” Hogram changed the subject.

“The boats are now ready, I take it?”

“Yes, clanfather.” Fralk never would have come where Hogram’s eyestalks could spy him were that not so. “We have the boats, we have the males to fill them. Now we are only waiting for the waters to grow calmer. As you yourself said, we do not want accidents while we are crossing the gorge.” He knew there would be accidents anyway; if they waited for the waters in Ervis Gorge to be completely calm, they would wait until the flood had drained away.

The odor of resignation Hogram exuded said he knew the same thing. The domain master asked a different question. “How will our males react to being in these boats on the water? They will never have done anything like that before. If they are all blue with fright when they get across, they will prove nothing but prey for the Omalo.”

“Clanfather, I think I am more afraid of Juksal than I could be of any water,” Fralk blurted. This time Hogram’s eyestalks wiggled, and not a little. “Laugh all you like,” the younger male went on, “but I don’t think I’m the only male who feels that way.”

“Good.” Hogram was still laughing. “It’s good to know our veteran warriors can inspire fright. If they do the same to Reatur’s males as to our own, we will surely triumph.” The domain master paused; his eyestalks stopped moving. “Reatur… he worries me.”

“He is able, clanfather,” Fralk said, remembering that Reatur had scared him a good deal more than Juksal ever managed to do. “But he is not as able as you.”

“Hmm. Well, maybe.” Hogram’s skin turned a deeper green; Fralk’s flattery had pleased him. Flattered or not, though, he was still Hogram. “Let me point out to you, eldest of eldest, that I will not be east of Ervis Gorge meeting Reatur. You will.”

Fralk knew that was true. He would just as soon not have been reminded of it, though.

“They did what?” Reatur shouted. All the males who could hear him-which meant a lot of males-turned a couple of extra eyestalks in his direction. That shout meant trouble. What kind they would find out later, but the trouble was already here.

“They ran a whole herd of massi back into Dordal’s domain, clanfather,” the male named Garro repeated.

The domain master did not need to look down at himself to know he was turning yellow. “Dordal has gone mad if he thinks he can get away with that,” he said furiously. “He knows we outweigh him two to one. And he’s a lazy piece of runnerpest voiding to begin with. What stirred his eyestalks up all of a sudden, to let him think he can go raiding without our tying them in knots for him? I’ll take a band of warriors that will-”

Garro interrupted to answer Reatur’s rhetorical question. “A couple of his males were wiggling their eyestalks and jeering that we couldn’t do anything about it because we were too busy worrying about imaginary dangers from across Ervis Gorge.”

“Ervis-“ Reatur felt his breathing pores tightening up, as if they were trying to keep out a bad smell. Unfortunately, he knew the threat from west of the gorge was not imaginary. That limited what he could do. His first angry vision of arming all the males in the domain and leading them up to smash Dordal’s castle melted like ice in a hot summer.

His skin went back to its usual green as calculation ousted rage. “I can’t let him keep those massi,” he said slowly. “If I do, his males will steal more. Not only that, Grebur will think he can nibble at my domain, too. Between them, curse it, they could prove more trouble than the Skarmer.”

“Could and probably will, clanfather,” Garro agreed. “I still don’t see how anyone can cross Ervis Gorge when it’s full of water.”

“Neither do I, but Hogram does,” Reatur said. “The humans’ magic or machine or whatever it was let me talk with him, don’t forget. He thinks he can cross. If he didn’t, why would he try to turn my domain topsy-turvy?”

“Who can tell why a Skarmer does anything?” Garro said scornfully.

“Hogram is sly, but not stupid,” Reatur said. “I wish he were.” The domain master paused a while in thought and then gave his orders. “Find Ternat. Tell him to march eight-no, nine-eighteens of males into Dordal’s domain. They are to take more animals than were stolen from us, and to bring them back to our land. Tell him to move fast, too; no one knows when the Skarmer are coming, and to beat them back we may need every male we can find.”

Garro repeated the orders until Reatur was satisfied he had them all. Then the younger male hurried away. Reatur watched him go. He wished Dordal’s eldest would overthrow him, not the sort of thing a domain master often wished even on an enemy, such wishes had a way of coming back to bite the male who made them.

Reatur abruptly repented of his wish, not because he feared overthrow-Ternat was the best eldest a domain master could hope for-but because Dordal’s replacement might prove competent. Having a competent domain master on his northern border was not something Reatur needed.

Having an incompetent one there was quite bad enough.

What he really ought to do one of these years, he told himself, was topple Dordal and install a loyal male of his own budding- someone like Enoph, say-as domain master up there. That would solve the problem once for all, or at least until Enoph’s eldest succeeded him, which presumably would be Ternat’s problem and not Reatur’s.

And if I set Enoph in Dordal’s place, Reatur asked himself, how is that any different from Hogram’s wanting to put Fralk in mine? For one thing, he thought, Enoph and Dordal were both from the first Omalo bud, not foreigners like the Skarmer. For another, Reatur would be doing the overthrowing, not having it done to him.

He doubted whether Dordal would appreciate that part of the argument. Too bad for Dordal, one of these years.

His plans for doing unpleasant things to his neighbor melted as he saw a male hurrying toward him in a way that could only mean something else had gone wrong. He wanted to turn all six of his eyestalks away from the male, to pretend the fellow did not exist. That, sadly, was not what being domain master was about. “What is it, Apbajur?” he asked, letting the air sigh through his breathing pores.

“We’re beginning to get enough melting on the northern walls of the castle to be a nuisance, clanfather,” Apbajur told him.

Reatur sighed again. That was a nuisance every summer, and in a hot one-as this one was looking to be-a major nuisance. “We’ll just have to start spreading dirt, I suppose,” the domain master said. A good layer of dirt on the roof and walls helped shield the ice beneath from the heat of the sun.

“I thought so, too, clanfather,” Apbajur said. He was a master watermolder and icecarver, and had a good feel for such matters. “But I wanted to get your permission before I started pulling males from the fields for the work.”

“You’d best do it,” Reatur said, though he felt like cursing instead. First, males to watch Ervis Gorge for the Skarmer, then more to deal with Dordal, and now this. The crops would suffer because of it. Of course, they would suffer a good deal more if the Skarmer invasion succeeded or if Dordal’s males kept raiding, and Reatur did not want to live in a castle falling down around him.

Taken by itself, any one thing was always easy to justify. Weighing that one thing against all the others going on at the same time, though, was not so simple.

Two males came rushing toward Reatur from different directions. One was shouting, “Clanfather, the eloca are!”

At the same time, the other cried, “Clanfather, the nosver have got into the!”

Reatur felt like pulling in all his eyestalks and pretending to be a stump. He might have done so, had he thought Onditi and Venots-or even one of them-would let him get away with it. Sadly, he knew better.

“One at a time, please,” he said wearily. Onditi had got to him before Venots, so the domain master pointed to him first.

“What have the cursed, miserable, stupid eloca gone and done now?”

“Are you sure you should have brushed Tolmasov off that way?” Irv asked Emmett Bragg after listening to the tape of the conversation between the two pilots.

Bragg bristled. “Damn straight I’m sure.” When he swore, Irv knew, he was both angry and in earnest. “Long as the Russians keep to their side of Jotun Canyon, none o’ their business what we do over here. Besides, if they even think we’ve given guns to the Minervans here, maybe they’ll get serious about keeping Hogram’s gang on their own side where they belong.”

“Or maybe they’ll give them guns, too, to keep things balanced,” Irv pointed out.

“Hadn’t thought of that.” Bragg frowned, but his face cleared after a moment. “I don’t believe it. Tolmasov’s not that dumb. No matter what he thinks of us, no way he’d let the natives have the drop on him. I wouldn’t, not in his long johns.”

“I suppose not,” Irv said. “If we started shooting at each other here, it could even touch off a war back home.”

“Yeah.” Bragg nodded. “Like I said, Tolmasov’s not that dumb. But he’s no friend of ours, either-good for his digestion to get stirred up every once in a while. Let him stew.”

“All right, Emmett.” Somewhat reassured, Irv went back to work. He had spoken his piece, and Emmett hadn’t gone along. Fair enough. Bragg’s judgment had been good so far, he told himself. Likely it was this time, too. He didn’t necessarily trust the Russians that far himself, either.

Tolmasov listened to the tape from Earth once more. He shook his head. He wasn’t used to getting orders this simple. “’Use your own best judgment regarding firearms for the Minervans,’ “he repeated. “Who would have thought Moscow could be so generous?”

“And what is your best judgment, O mighty boyar?” Shota Rustaveli asked.

“If I were a boyar, my best judgment would be to clip the tongue of such an impudent subject,” Tolmasov retorted, but he could not help smiling. Rustaveli reveled in being impossible. More seriously, the pilot went on, “My best judgment is to be very sorry that I have to tell Fralk my domain masters will not let us sell them any Kalashnikovs.”

Rustaveli wore gloves, even inside the tent. He clapped just the same. “That is an excellent best judgment to have, I think.” “Da,” Katerina said, looking up from a microscope.

Oleg Lopatin did not say anything. His wide shoulders jerked in a shrug. Tolmasov did not think Lopatin was pleased. He did not much care. If the KGB man knew what was good for him, he would follow orders. To give Lopatin his due, something the pilot did only reluctantly, he had been obeying Tolmasov with military exactness. Let him keep right on doing it, Tolmasov thought as he went out to find Fralk.

As he explained himself, he watched the Minervan turn yellow. He had seen them do that among themselves, but rarely at him: humans and Minervans tried to stay on best behavior around each other. He knew it was not a good sign.

“Your domain masters do not understand that we need these rifles,” Fralk said. “They are far away. You are here. Let us buy a rifle, and the success we have with it will float above their orders as ice floats on water.”

“I am sorry.” Tolmasov spread his hands. “Even though they are far, I cannot disobey my domain masters any more than you can Hogram.”

“Cannot?” Fralk said, now resembling nothing so much as an outraged banana with a great many arms. “Will not, I think, comes nearer the truth.” An outraged sarcastic banana, Tolmasov thought. He shook his head to try to drive away the mental image-this was what he got for spending so much time with Rustaveli.

The real problem was that Fralk had it right. Tolmasov did not like lying to the Minervan. He did not hesitate, either. “Do you go against Hogram’s wishes as soon as he cannot see you? My domain masters would punish my disobedience when we got home.”

“This is your final word?” Fralk demanded.

“I am sorry, but it is.”

“You will be sorrier.” Had Fralk been a human, he would have turned on his heel and stomped off. Instead he averted all his eyestalks from Tolmasov as he left. That got the same message across, the pilot thought glumly.

He walked through one of the market areas that ringed Hogram’s town. If he shut his eyes, the racket there reminded him of the little stalls in Smolensk-and every other Russian town- where farm women sold city housewives the beets and chickens they raised on their private plots of land. Minervan males’ high voices only made the resemblance closer.

Two males came up to Tolmasov, one on either side. One carried a spear, the other a Soviet-made hatchet. “Please go back to your cloth house now, human,” the male with the spear said. It did not sound like a request.

“Why?” Tolmasov asked. Doubting whether either male spoke any Russian past the word human, he went on in their language. “Many times I, people like me come here. Not do harm, not bother Hogram’s males. Just look. Why not look now?”

“Because Fralk demands it, in Hogram’s name,” that male replied. He lifted the spear to block the pilot’s path. “Go back to your cloth house now.”

“I go,” Tolmasov said, thinking Fralk had wasted no time in starting his petty revenge.

When he got back to the tent, he found the revenge was not petty. More armed males surrounded the orange nylon bubble. One of them was laying down the law to Oleg Lopatin-the Minervans had never heard of the KGB. Lucky them, Tolmasov thought.

Then he got close enough to hear what the Minervan was saying, and things abruptly stopped being even a little bit funny. “You strange creatures have interesting devices, and for their sake we have let you do and go as you would,” the male told Lopatin. “Now you will not share one of these devices with us, so why should we keep extending to you the privileges you earned only with good behavior?”

He sounded like a soldier repeating a memorized message. Tolmasov suspected that was partly because Lopatin’s grasp of the Skarmer language was still weak, and he would not have understood everything on the first try.

“Only want to go out, look,” Lopatin protested.

“You strange creatures have interesting devices-“ The male went through his routine again. As far as Tolmasov could tell, he used just the same words he had before. Someone had given him those words. Hogram or Fralk, the pilot thought, disquieted. They were ready for us to say no.

Shedding his own escort, he strode over to the male who was keeping Lopatin just outside the tent. Lopatin actually gave him a grateful look, something he had never before earned from the chekist. The Minervan, of course, used a spare eyestalk to see Tolmasov coming-no chance of taking a native by surprise, as he might have a human guard.

“What you do here?” Tolmasov asked in his sternest tones. When the male started to go into his routine once more, the pilot cut him off. “I hear this before. What you do with us humans?”

The Minervan had more than one groove to his record after all. “From now on, you stay here inside this ugly house. You do not go out for any reason. If you do not do what we want, the domain master says, we will not let you do what you want. He is a trader, not a giver.”

“We only do what our domain masters order,” Tolmasov said.

“And I only do what my domain master orders of me,” the male retorted.

Tolmasov tried a new tack. “We show we Hogram’s friends many times, many ways. Why so angry now, at one small thing?”

In warmer weather, he would have been sweating. This- house arrest-would wreck the mission’s ability to gather data. He had the bad feeling Hogram knew that. Being manipulated by the natives was not something the pilot had anticipated; their technology was too primitive to let him think of them as equals. But that did not, worse luck, mean they were stupid.

For that matter, they knew more about humans than Tolmasov had suspected. “One small thing, is it?” the male said. “Then why did you conceal the fact that one of you is, of all the disgusting notions, a grownup mate? Did you know it would only make us reckon you more monstrous than we do already?”

“Not hide,’, Tolmasov insisted. He shared an appalled glance with Lopatin. They had known about Minervan females’ short lives for some time now and had slowly gotten used to the idea. This was not Earth. Expecting everything to work the same way would have been foolish. So, evidently, would have been expecting the Minervans to understand that. Tolmasov fell back on the only answer that might do some good. “No one ask us.”

“Ah, and so you said nothing. A merchant’s reply, we call that,” the male said. Relief flowed through Tolmasov; he had helped himself rather than hurt. But the male went on, “If you are merchants, too, you will see that we do what we must to make you deal as we want. When you do, all your privileges will be restored. Till then, you stay in here. Now go in.”

“How long we stay?” Tolmasov asked.

“Till you show us what we need to know. I told you that.

How long it is depends on you.”

“Cannot do what you want,” the pilot said.

“Then you’ll stay in there a long time,” the male answered.

“We don’t have the food to withstand a long siege,” Lopatin said, in Russian.

“We don’t have anything to withstand a long siege,” Tolmasov answered in the same language. That was-what was the fine American phrase? a self-evident truth.

“Go in now,” the Minervan male said, in no mood to let the two humans chatter away in a speech he could not follow. At his gesture, his followers raised their weapons. Short of opening fire, Tolmasov and Lopatin had no choice but to obey.

Inside the tent, Shota Rustaveli and Katerina had been listening to everything that was going on. Rustaveli greeted Lopatin with an ironic bow. “Good day, Oleg Borisovich, and welcome to the Gulag.”

“That’s enough from you, you Georgian-“ Lopatin growled before Tolmasov followed him in.

“That’s enough from both of you,” the pilot said sharply. “I cannot command us to like one another, but we will treat each other with respect, all the more so in this tight space. Think of it as spaceship discipline if you must.”

Everyone nodded. Then Katerina said, “Think of it as living in a two-room apartment with four generations of your family.” This time everyone laughed.

“Da,” Tolmasov said. He had lived like that himself. Everyone had lived that way in Smolensk when he was small, in one of the Stalin-Gothic apartment blocks that had gone up like ugly toadstools after the Great Patriotic War. Afterward, he had never thought those memories would be funny. Now he was grateful to Katerina for using them to break the tension of the moment.

“The resemblance will grow even closer when the chemical toilet clogs up,” Rustaveli said. He sounded sardonic as usual, but he looked serious. He was right, too. After a few days-a week, at most-with four people in permanent residence, the tent would be a decidedly unpleasant place to live.

“The heater will need another charge of gas before long, too,” Katerina said. “And the stove. Afterward, we’ll have no way to make tea, or to make our concentrates into hot food. Come to that, we may not even have water.”

Tolmasov grimaced. Maybe the Minervans would let them go out to gather ice and snow, maybe not. If not, the siege would end in a hurry.

“If the natives want our Kalashnikovs so badly, maybe we should give them a good taste,” Lopatin said. Then, before anyone could shout at him, he shook his head. “No, it would not do. Like it or not, we live in the age of media. Regardless of what a few well placed bullets might accomplish here, they would do more damage back on Earth.”

“Imperialism is easier when word of what it takes to build an empire never leaks out,” Rustaveli said. “Georgia has learned that all too well, from underneath.” For a moment, the brooding expression in his dark, hooded eyes, the way the shadows sat on his narrow cheeks, made him seem almost as alien to the three Great Russians in the tent with him as did the Minervans outside.

A real fight might have sprung from his words. Maybe he intended that. Just then, though, a Minervan called, “Sergei Konstantinovich, come out, please. Come alone.” He spoke Russian.

“Fralk,” Tolmasov mouthed silently. Not seeing what other choice he had, he went. “Zdrast’ye, “he said somberly. “What do you aim to do with us?”

“Do with you?” Fralk returned to his own language. He sounded altogether innocent, a good enough reason, Tolmasov thought, to suspect he wasn’t. “Nothing at all. We will merely keep you here and at your skyboat.”

His pause, again, was perfectly-too perfectly-contrived. “The machine that goes back and forth between here and your skyboat may continue to do so… provided it goes by the same route it always uses. Other than that, you humans may not leave the skyboat, either. Males are on the way to enforce Hogram’s command there.”

“Thank you for letting us eat and stay warm, at any rate.”

Tolmasov did his best to stay polite. He was seething inside. Sure enough, the locals had spotted the humans’ weakness. Being on Minerva without exploring was like sharing a bed with a beautiful-and expensive, oh so expensive trollop without making love.

“We have no wish to harm you humans in any way,” Fralk assured him. “As you know, I owe you my life. But Hogram, wanting many other males to be preserved thanks to your rifle, can no longer cooperate with you when you do not cooperate with us.”

“You should write for Pravda,” Tolmasov muttered, which meant nothing to Fralk. But the Minervan was doing a good job of reproducing the more-in-sorrow-than-imagine, it’s-for-your own-good tone the paper often took. The pilot went on. “My domain masters-”

“Are far away,” Fralk interrupted. “Hogram is here, and so are you. You would do well to remember it.”

Tolmasov waved at the spear-carrying males. “Hard to forget.”

“Think of them as being here to protect you, if you like,” Fralk said.

Tolmasov did not know how to say “hypocrite” in the Skarmer tongue, and Fralk did not understand the Russian word. The conversation, accordingly, lagged. Tolmasov went back into the tent. Fralk’s voice pursued him. “Think on what you do, Sergei Konstantinovich.”

“Bah!” The pilot flung himself into the chair in front of the radio. He worked off some of his fury by profanely embellishing the warning he sent to Bryusov and Voroshilov in Tsiolkovsky.

After the sparks stopped shooting from Tolmasov’s mouth, the two men on the ship did not reply for some little while. At last, timidly, Valery Bryusov asked, “Do I understand that you want us to obey the Minervan males when they arrive?”

“Yes, curse it,” the pilot growled. “If they keep letting the rover travel back and forth, I don’t see what else we can do. We cannot fight them unless they attack us first-as Oleg Borisovich has said, public opinion back home would never support it. We will just have to see just who can be more stubborn, us or the Minervans.”

Over the next ten days, Tolmasov developed a rankling hatred for the color orange. He had never been fond of Oleg Lopatin; although the KGB man did his best to be self-effacing- something he could not have found easy-Tolmasov began to despise him in earnest. Shota Rustaveli’s jokes wore very thin, Even Katerina started getting on the pilot’s nerves. And he was grimly certain everyone crowded into the tent with him was sick of him, too.

Then Voroshilov called from Tsiolkovsky. “Moscow wonders why we aren’t sending them data based on new journeys, just analysis of what we’d done a while ago.”

“Screw Moscow, Yuri Ivanovich,” Tolmasov said. No one had said anything to Moscow about their confinement, hoping the standoff would resolve itself before they had to.

“Thank you, no,” the chemist answered. “What, though, do you propose to tell them back home? I cannot see us avoiding the issue any longer.”

Tolmasov sighed. “I fear we will have to tell them the truth.” Voroshilov was a quiet, patient man. When he started chiding- however gently-the pilot knew he could not sit on his hands any longer.

The message that came back to Tsiolkovsky was circumspect but not ambiguous: “Use whatever means necessary to stay on good terms with the natives and continue your scheduled program of exploration.”

“Which of us becomes drillmaster?” Shota Rustaveli asked when Bryusov relayed the word from Earth.

That, Tolmasov thought gloomily, about summed things up.

Fralk watched with five eyes as the human opened a catch and clicked a curved brown box into place on the bottom of the rifle. “This holds bullets,” Oleg said.

“Bullets,” Fralk repeated-so many new words to learn! All of them were necessarily in the human language, too; his own lacked the concepts for easy translation. “Bullets, bullets, bullets.”

“Da. Khorosho-good. The bullets come out of the muzzle when you pull the trigger.”

“Muzzle. Trigger.” Fralk said the words while Oleg, holding the rifle in one manyfingered hand, pointed out the parts with the other.

The human held out the rifle. “Go ahead. Pull the trigger.” “What?” Fralk watched himself turn blue with alarm. “You said, uh, bullets, would come out!” He had seen what bullets had done to the krong. He didn’t know how to make them go where he wanted and didn’t want them to do that to Oleg or him.

“Go ahead. Pull,” Oleg insisted.

Hesitantly, Fralk reached out with a fingerclaw. The trigger was hard as stone but smooth as ice. He pulled. Nothing happened. “No bullets,” he said, relieved.

“No, no bullets,” Oleg agreed. He took back the rifle, then touched part of it above and to one side of the trigger. Fralk had not realized it was a separate piece, but the front end of it, the end toward the muzzle, moved. “This is the change lever,” Oleg said.

“Change lever,” Fralk repeated dutifully.

“Da. When the front of the change lever is here, at the top, you cannot pull the trigger. Always carry the rifle with the change lever like that, so it does not shoot by accident.”

“At the top,” Fralk echoed. The idea of a rifle that could shoot by accident tempted him to turn blue again. A spear or an ax did what it did because some male made it work. If no one was around, it would just lie there. The rifle sounded as though it had a mind of its own. Fralk wondered if he could trust it away from its human masters.

Oleg did not give him time to dwell on that. He moved the change lever. “With it here, in the center position, the rifle will shoot many bullets, one after the other.” He moved it again. “With it here, at the bottom, the rifle will shoot one bullet at a time.”

“Why the choice?” Fralk asked.

“If enemy is close, you use up fewer bullets and save them for other foes.”

“Oh,” Fralk said. That made sense, of a sort. So many things to think about…