A World of Difference

VIII

Minervan summer days were not bad, not for someone used to Moscow weather as Oleg Lopatin was. Minervan nights were something else again, almost always ten below Celsius or worse. Every night reminded Lopatin of his military snow-survival course.

That he was in the middle of an armed camp now only brought the memory into sharper focus. Fralk’s forces, battered and scattered by the crossing of Jotun Canyon, were back together now, as much as they ever would be. The Omalo had not struck at them. Tomorrow, with luck, the Skarmer would be out of the immense canyon altogether and up onto fiat ground. Lopatin did not plan to be with them.

Helping the Skarmer win the war against their neighbors to the east, maybe squeezing off half a clip at any Americans foolish enough to try to help the feudal Omalo resist the ineluctable logic of the historical dialectic…, all that would be wonderful, so long as he did it step by step, in contact with Tsiolkovsky. Then he would be not only one of the instruments through which the dialectic unfolded but also carrying out Soviet policy, as defined before he headed east with Fralk’s army. Losing his radio changed everything.

Any Soviet officer who took matters into his own hands asked for trouble and usually got it. If he showed hostility toward Athena’s crew without being hooked into the chain of command that could authorize such behavior, he knew exactly what would happen. The Americans would scream bloody murder. They were probably screaming bloody murder already about Frank Marquard.

Moscow would say, would have to say, that Lopatin had been sent across Jotun Canyon purely as an observer. All the blame would land right on his shoulders. He could see it coming, just as he had seen that mountain of ice bearing down on his coracle.

As he had done in the coracle, he intended to get away now. He only saw one course that might let that happen, and he hated it. But if he yielded himself up to the Americans, and told them how Marquard had died, he might put out for his own benefit the line he expected from Moscow. As far as his actions went, all he needed to do was tell the truth. Unfortunately, though, as a KGB man he knew for how little the truth often counted.

The Skarmer slept all around him. In an Earthly camp, fires would have lit his way-and let sentries see him. The Minervans had no fires; they liked the weather fine. Lopatin knew they had set sentries. With luck, he could evade them in the dark.

He slid out of his sleeping bag, quietly rolled it up, and stuffed in into his pack. He slung his rifle over his shoulder. He wanted to carry it, but knew he might need both hands free. Shooting his way to freedom would surely fail anyhow; even if it didn’t, it would wreck the Soviet mission. But he missed the comfort of having the Kalashnikov ready to fire.

He slipped through the slumbering natives. Going in the right direction was easy, even in the darkness: any way uphill was right.

He wondered how he would ever get back across Jotun Canyon to return to Tsiolkovsky-after abandoning the Skarmer here, he would not be popular among them. Perhaps it would not matter. With Marquard dead, the Americans would have the supplies to let him fly home aboard Athena.

Home? No, to fly back to Earth. He doubted he could ever go home again. Times had changed since the Great Patriotic War, when so many Soviet soldiers earned time in the Gulag merely for seeing what western Europe was like. They had not changed so much, however, that a KGB man could expect to be greeted with open arms after being debriefed by the CIA, as Lopatin knew he would be.

He wanted to laugh. He wanted to cry. He wanted to swear. He was a good Party man and a loyal Soviet citizen, and he knew he would have to defect. Very slowly, he kept creeping out of the Skarmer camp.

Finally, after what seemed forever, the Skarmer began to thin out. Lopatin no longer had to pay attention to his every footstep for fear of falling over a native. He could move faster now.

The wind picked up. Clouds scudded by. One of the Minervanmoons-Lopatin had no idea which one-shone through a break in the cover overhead. Far fainter than Earthly moonlight, it was better than the near-blackness he had known before. He picked up the pace again.

The moonlight also let a Skarmer sentry spot motion he might otherwise have missed. “Halt!” the male called. “Who goes?” Lopatin froze. Too late-the sentry had already picked up the alien quality of the way he moved. “The human! The human is running away!” the Minervan screamed.

That did it, Lopatin thought, hearing hubbub break out behind him as the outcry jerked warriors from sleep. “This way! This way!” the sentry shouted.

Swearing now in good earnest, the KGB man ran that way. Don’t panic, he told himself. The terrain gave him plenty of cover. He dashed from boulder to boulder, keeping low, trying not to give that cursed sentry another glimpse of him. The Minervan moon stayed visible. Where moments before he had been glad to see it, now he wished it into the hottest pits of hell.

He scuttled over to yet another rock and paused, listening.

Most of what he heard from the camp was chaos, but not all. Some males were moving purposefully after him, calling as they came. He shivered in his latest hiding place. Not even his darkest nightmares included pursuit by a pack of screaming maenads.

They were getting closer, too, terrifyingly fast. That alarmed him in a way different from their banshee cries-he had swerved away from his earlier direction of travel, away from where the sentry spied him. Yet the Minervans somehow still tracked him.

He found out how a moment later, when the warriors drew close enough for him to make sense of some of their shouts. “No, fool,” one male yelled to another, “the scent trail leads this way!”

Scent! Lopatin was up and running again in an instant. Hiding would do him no good if the Minervans did not need to see him to find him. The KGB had cooked up a dozen stenches to throw dogs off the track. They would have been of more use to Lopatin had they been on the same planet as he was.

He was tempted to turn around and fire a couple of clips into the warriors behind him. That would drive them off, he knew. What he did not know was what would happen to his crewmates if-no, when-someone from here got back across Jotun Canyon with word that he had opened fire.

And so he hesitated and suffered the usual fate of those who hesitate. A Minervan sprang out from in back of a rock. Either Fralk had shouted orders at the beginning of the chase or the warrior was uncommonly wise about firearms: the first thing he did was smash the rifle out of Lopatin’s hand with a spear. It clattered to the ground and rolled away. Lopatin dove after it. The Minervan jumped on him.

The spear had fallen, too. Even so, it was not much of a fight. Lopatin got in a kick that made the warrior wail, but the Minervan’s fingerclaws stabbed through clothes to pierce the KGB man’s flesh. One scored his cheek and missed his eye by only a couple of centimeters.

By then, other males were rushing up. “Human, we all have spears!” one shouted. “We will use them if you do not yield.”

Lopatin went limp. The male he had been wrestling with cautiously disengaged. “Good idea,” he said when he was convinced the fight was gone from his foe. “You almost kicked my insides out-those cursed funny big legs you humans have.” He sounded more professionally interested than angry; after a moment, Lopatin recognized Juksal’s voice.

“Here is his strange weapon,” a male said from a few meters away.

“Good,” Juksal said. “Hang on to that. We need it. We need it more than we need him. Without their fancy tools, these humans aren’t so dangerous.” If any Minervan had the right to say that, Lopatin thought dully, Juksal did. He wished none of them had the right.

Wishing did not help. Prodding him along with spears, the warriors led him back toward the camp. They met Fralk before they got there. “Oleg Borisovich, have you gone mad?” the Minervan demanded. Hearing the question in Russian only made Lopatin feel worse.

“Nyet,” was all he said.

“Then what?” Excited or upset people waved their arms in the air. So did excited or upset Minervans. Having three times as many arms as a human being, Fralk looked three times as excited or upset. He sounded that way, too.

“Politics. Human politics. I am sorry, Fralk, but I cannot help you anymore against the Omalo or the Americans.”

The KGB man expected Fralk to get even more upset, perhaps to threaten all sorts of torture: he would have, standing where Fralk was. Instead, the Minervan wiggled his eyestalks with a peculiar rhythm Lopatin had not seen before.

He said just what Juksal had. “Oleg Borisovich, it no longer matters whether or not you help us. We have your rifle, we have your bullets. We do not need you.”

He was still speaking Russian. For the benefit of the warriors standing around, he translated his words into the Skarmer tongue. They all wiggled their eyestalks that same strange way.

So now, Lopatin thought, I know how Minervans laugh a nasty laugh. It was one bit of knowledge he would just as soon have been without.

Reatur had never seen more than half an eighteen of Skarmer at one time before. If he never saw even another one again, that would suit him fine. Altogether too many of them were coming up to the rim of Ervis Gorge now, straight at him.

He peered down at them. The gorge’s slope grew shallower at the top; the warriors were approaching almost as quickly as if they had been on flat ground. But the ground was not fiat. As soon as the Skarmer drew a little nearer, they would find out why he had let them come so close to getting out of the gorge before he dealt with them.

Which one was Fralk? The domain master wanted to smash him personally. But, he decided reluctantly, he could not let the Skarmer get close enough for him to tell them apart. They were still well out of spear range, especially uphill. That was fine with Reatur. He did not need spears to smash them.

“Ready, warriors?” he called. Up and down his line, males shouted and waved their arms to show they were. “Then shove!” the domain master yelled.

The Omalo had spent the last few days dragging as many large stones as they could to the edge of Ervis Gorge. Now, by ones, twos, threes, sixes, they stood behind the stones. At Reatur’s command, they strained against them, pushed them down into the gorge.

The slope was shallow. Some of the boulders just skidded briefly. Others turned over one or twice, then fetched up against rocks sticking up from the ground and stopped. But still others picked up speed, crashed into the ranks of the Skarmer.

The Omalo shouted again, watching row upon row of their enemies go down in writhing heaps. “Don’t just stand there!” Reatur shouted. “More stones!”

But as the males swarmed back to the next piles of stones, something dreadful happened. It was so far outside the domain master’s experience that at first he did not fully grasp it. He saw flashes of light coming from a male in the front rank of the Skarmer, heard a loud, barking roar unlike anything he had known before. Something went craaack past an arm. And somewhere not far away, males, Reatur’s males, were falling down and screaming.

He and his warriors, all of whom were seeing and hearing the same things, took a long, terrible moment to understand that all those strange, terrible things were eyestalks of the same beast. For Reatur, the realization came when he saw a human near the male from whom the flashes of light and the terrible noise were coming.

He had never seen the humans he knew using anything like this-weapon, he supposed it was-but it was too strange to have come from his own people, or even from the Skarmer. Compared to humans, he thought, surprised at himself, the Skarmer were closest kin. If humans had weapons, they would be strange, too.

Strange and deadly. A male not two steps from Reatur was on the ground, thrashing. The domain master saw that he had a hole in him, the sort a spear might give, between two of his arms. As Reatur watched, the male voided bloodily and stopped moving.

Craaack! Another-whatever it was-whizzed by Reatur. He heard a wet slapping noise. A male behind him started to shriek. It all happened in the same instant. The domain master pointed to the Skarmer with the weapon. “Get him!” he shouted. “Get him!”

More stones rumbled down. One just missed the human, another would have smashed the male with the weapon had it not kicked up and flown over his eyestalks. The Skarmer kept right on wielding it, though, and Reatur’s males kept going down.

“More stones!” Reatur yelled. “More! More!”

His males heaved against a few more boulders. Others, though, stayed where they were, for the Omalo who should have pushed them into Ervis Gorge were running back toward Reatur’s castle. In a way, the domain master did not blame them. He wanted to run away, too, especially since a male died or was horribly wounded almost every time the strange weapon flashed and barked.

And now the rest of the Skarmer, encouraged both because of their foes’ dismay and because they were no longer being pelted so heavily, reached the rim of the gorge. They were eager; Reatur’s males, even the ones who had not fled, were wavering.

Off to one side, the Skarmer who had already gained the flatlands were starting to swing round to cut Reatur’s males off from the way back. If they could manage that, they could surround and destroy them at their leisure, even without their cursed weapon. With it… Reatur did not like to think about what would happen with it.

“Back!” he shouted, hating himself for it but seeing no better course. He quickly added another command he hoped his males would obey: “Keep your order as you go!”

Most of them did. And, to his relief, the Skarmer let them escape. Why not, the domain master thought bitterly. They’ll already done what they needed to do. Reatur tried to stay optimistic. He thought about how much his avalanche had battered the invaders.

Enoph tramped by. He said just what Reatur was thinking:

“We hurt them.”

“Aye.” The domain master sighed; he could not afford the luxury of wishful thinking, not now. “But they hurt us worse. They beat us, Enoph, and right now I have no idea how to keep them from beating us again.”

“What are we going to do?” Sarah hated having to rely on Emmett Bragg. Making a career soldier mission commander had always struck her as part and parcel of the Washington mindset about extraterrestrial intelligence, which, she was convinced, had been formed by too many bad science fiction movies-aliens had to be enemies, therefore had to be fought, therefore a soldier should be in charge. Simple. Simpleminded, too.

But now the crew of Athena found itself in the middle of a war. The aliens weren’t all enemies; some of them had become good friends. They were better friends, certainly, than Oleg Lopatin ever would be, and Oleg Lopatin’s AKT4 had killed and maimed more of them than she liked to think about.

Her medical training had not prepared her for war wounds. They were as ghastly on Minervans as on people, not just for themselves but because they were deliberately inflicted.

So she turned to Emmett. Having him in charge suddenly looked like a good idea after all. The trouble was, instead of instantly coming up with an answer that would solve their problems, he only scowled and said, “What are we going to do? I don’t see too much we can do, right now. Maybe the best thing to hope for is that old Oleg didn’t bring that many spare clips for his rifle.”

Sarah felt her lips tighten. That wasn’t what she wanted to hear. She said, “In your cubicle-”

He grinned at her, put her offstride. “What do you know about that? Haven’t hardly coaxed you in there.”

“Will you shut up?” The heat of her fury amazed her. Picking her words carefully, saying them even more carefully, she went on, “In your cubicle, there is a cabinet you keep locked. I thought that perhaps-”

“-I had an Armalite stashed away there-a rifle,” he amended quickly, seeing that she did not follow. She gave him reluctant credit for being all business once more. “Or maybe a crate of grenades. Trouble is, I don’t.”

Sarah set hands on hips. “Well, what the hell do you keep in there, then?” She was furious at him all over again, this time for having her hopes dashed.

“This and that,” he said. She thought that meant he wasn’t going to tell her, but he did, a little. “Some real special codes, for one thing, the kind you hope you never have to use-I mean, there’s a lot worse things could go wrong than one crazy Russian.”

“Like for instance?” Sarah asked, genuinely curious.

“Like the whole crew of Tsiolkovsky attackin’ us on purpose when we set out, remember, we didn’t know how far apart we were from them. Or like the natives bein’ high-tech after all, just without radio on account of they’re telepaths or some stupid thing, and overrunnin’ Athena. They’d have to be ready back home then, in case we had somethin’ happen out of Invaders from Minerva.”

In spite of herself, Sarah giggled. “Stupid damn movie,” she said, having watched it on TV at least two dozen times since she was a kid. A late-fifties low-budget scifi classic turkey, it featured “Minervans”-who looked nothing like real Minervans-remarkable chiefly because the zippers in their costumes were visible in several scenes. Every so often, coming up with something silly like that, Emmett could surprise her and remind her that he was human, too.

“Isn’t it?” he said now, quietly laughing himself. “I’ll tell you what I wish I had in there, and it’s got nothin’ to do with guns and such.” He waited for Sarah to raise an eyebrow, then went on, “I wish I had a couple o’ bottles o’ good sippin’ whiskey put away, for celebrating gettin’ down here, gettin’ back home…” He paused, studied her in that way she found alarming and attractive at the same time. “Maybe sharin’ a little, now and again.”

“Hmm,” was all she said. She was damned if she would encourage him.

“Doesn’t matter anyhow,” he said when he decided that was the only response he’d get. “NASA doesn’t understand that sippin’ whiskey is for sippin ‘, if you know what I mean.

When I put the idea to ‘em, they just reckoned I wanted to get lit.”

“When you what?” There was about as much likelihood of NASA bureaucrats okaying a couple of fifths of Jim Beam, she thought, as there was of dying of heatstroke on Minerva. My God, the manifest might leak out one day, and then somebody could kiss a career goodbye.

If anybody could see that, it was Emmett. He had boundless contempt for all bureaucracies save the military. For all Sarah knew, he had asked about the bourbon just to give the three-piece-suit boys fits. That was his style.

She expected him to chuckle and own up to twisting NASA’s tail just for the fun of it. Instead, she saw with a thrill of alarm that he had what she thought of as his sniper’s face back on- behind his eyes, he was taking dead aim at something. After a moment, she realized it wasn’t her.

Or was it? “Get lit,” he said dreamily. “That just might work.” Now he was focused on her, sharply.

“What might work?” she demanded. “I hate it when people think through things and then leave out all the interesting parts when they start talking. It’s like-“ She started to say “sex without foreplay,” but decided that might not be a good idea. “I hate it,” she finished.

Bragg nodded. “Can’t say I blame you.” He spent the next several minutes explaining.

By the time he was done, Sarah wished she hadn’t asked. She knew that was stupid. As soon as Emmett got this brainstorm, he would have come to her with it. The real trouble was, it made too much sense for her to tell him he was crazy.

But when he said, “You know, I’m jealous as hell,” she had all she could do not to reach up and bust him fight in his grinning chops. She probably would have, had it not been so obvious that he meant it.

Fralk watched the latest raiding party come in from the north. They were leading enough massi and eloca to keep the Skarmer army fed for a couple of days. “We’ll squeeze the Omalo domain until Reatur’s eyes pop off their stalks,” Fralk declared grandly.

His warriors cheered as the beasts, complaining every step of the way, passed through the gaps in the barricade of frozen snow. Other males, high-ranking by virtue of their closeness to Hogram-but none so close as Fralk spoke up in loud and prompt agreement.

Then someone said, “May the domain come down with the purple itch. When are we going to take out the cursed Omalo army?”

Sudden silence fell. The officers edged away from the male who had spoken, as if they wanted to show they had nothing to do with his words. It was Juksal, Fralk saw. What rank he had sprang only from his ability to fight and fight and fight and stay alive. Still, he had a great deal of that ability-and he had kept the human from escaping. Thus Fralk spoke firmly but politely:

“By plundering the domain, Juksal, we also weaken the army, you know.”

Juksal grunted. “Beat the army and the domain is ours. No matter what we do to the domain, the Omalo army can take it back if they beat us. We should have crushed them just as soon as we fought our way out of the gorge.”

“Do you recall the state we were in when we made it out of the gorge?” Fralk asked indignantly. “Those accursed boulders almost wrecked us altogether, in spite of the rifle.” He pulled in arms and eyestalks at the memory.

“The Omalo were worse,” Juksal retorted. “Otherwise they wouldn’t have run from us. We should have chased ‘em and slaughtered ‘em instead of letting ‘em get away to have another chance at us.”

“All in good time.” Fralk saw his skin begin to take on the yellow tint of anger. With an effort of will, he made himself turn green again. He would not let Juksal make him angry. Now that the warrior was under his command instead of the other way around-that ghastly, endless series of drills with spears and shields, he could listen or ignore, as he pleased. And now he was pleased to ignore. “In a few more days, when we are fed, rested, and otherwise recovered from the ordeal just past, we will sally forth and put an end to the Omalo once and for all.” Juksal had the stubborn rudeness Fralk would have expected from someone who could find nothing better than fighting with which to make his way through life. “The Omalo will be feeding and resting and recovering, too, eldest of eldest.” In his mouth, Fralk’s title was a reproach.

When Fralk started to turn yellow this time, he did nothing to try to hide his feelings. “Yes, Juksal, I am eldest of eldest,” he said proudly. “I am also commander of this army. Remember that, please. Moreover, as commander I have just won a victory. Remember that, too.”

“You may have won it,” Juksal said, “but you don’t know what to do with it.”

“Warrior Juksal, you are dismissed,” Fralk shouted. He was yellow as the sun now.

Juksal widened himself, a salute as sardonic as his use of Fralk’s title. Still widened, the veteran waddled away. But he could not resist having the last word. “There’s humans here, too, remember,” he shouted back. “What if they have rifles, too? What then, commander?” Resuming his full height, he tramped off.

What then? Fralk did not like to think about that. But Lopatin had said the humans over here probably did not have rifles. The human Juksal had killed certainly was without one, or the warrior never would have gotten close enough to use a spear. Still, Fralk trusted Lopatin’s word much less than he had before the human tried to escape. And probably was a far more reassuring word on the other side of Ervis Gorge than here. Here, being wrong would kill a lot of males.

All the more reason, then, for proceeding slowly and carefully, Fralk thought. Otherwise, he might run the army into a krong’s nest before he found out the beast was there. He remembered how Tolmasov’s rifle had riddled the krong back on the west side of Ervis Gorge. What would have happened, though, had the krong had a rifle, too?

“Hit them now!” Ternat shouted. His males cried “Reatur!” and rushed through the brush toward Dordal’s waiting warriors. They yelled back. The snorts and whistles of the massi Ternat’s band had already freed only added to the din.

This time, Ternat thought as he drew near the enemy, his warriors lacked the advantage of surprise. They had just finished smashing one half of Dordal’s would-be ambush and sent the survivors fleeing to warn the other half. Ternat wished Dordal’s warriors were like humans, blind to half the world around them. Were that so, none of the first batch of males might have escaped.

As it was, Reatur’s eldest was happy enough with himself. Because people were as they were, surprise attacks were hard to pull off. But Dordal’s males had been surprised, sure enough, when the war band came crashing through the undergrowth at them. A good three out of every eighteen had turned blue and thrown down their spears; Ternat’s warriors had some of them back with the massi. Even the ones who hadn’t turned craven also had not fought well, most of them.

Then Ternat had no more time for reflection. Spears were flying, out toward his males and from them back at Dordal’s. This second band was larger than the one his warriors had already smashed and better situated, too, with several large boulders giving Dordal’s males almost the protection of a wall. If they stayed back there, they would have an edge.

Some did. More did not. As was true of the band Ternat led, most of Dordal’s warriors were young males with more temper than sense. They charged to do battle with their southern neighbors.

Along with Reatur’s name, the war band also shouted, “Thieves!” Dordal’s males screamed insults back at them.

“Why aren’t you hiding in the chambers under your castle, waiting for the Skarmer?” one of them yelled.

Ternat froze and almost took a spear in the gut because of it. But he had heard that voice before. “That’s Dordal himself!” he cried. “Get him and we bring a lot more than massi home!”

The warriors surged forward. Now fewer spears were in the air, and more clutched tight between males’ fingerclaws. One of Dordal’s warriors thrust at Ternat. He turned the stroke aside with his shield, tilting it upward as he had been drilled. He thrust back, low. The male managed to get a shield down to block that spear but left himself open for Ternat’s other one. He wailed as Reatur’s eldest drove it home and bled like a mate when Ternat pulled it free.

Ternat and another warrior engaged one of Dordal’s males from three arms apart. The beset male was good, but not good enough to resist for long two foes attacking from opposite directions. He went down, briefly yammering.

A rock grazed Ternat, just below one arm. He swore, twisted an eyestalk so he could look down at himself. He wasn’t bleeding or swelling up too badly. He decided he would live.

He looked around for another male to take on. There weren’t any, not close. The bravado that had fed that first rush from Dordal’s warriors faded as they found Ternat’s war band meant business-and had more males than their own force. Even the chance to gain glory by excelling where the domain master could see them was not enough. The northern males gave ground.

“This is harder work than stealing massi that can’t fight back, isn’t it?” Ternat shouted.

Dordal’s males were less interested in returning taunts now, more concerned with finding safety behind their heap of boulders. For a moment they made a stand there, but the rocks proved an insufficient barricade. One of Ternat’s males-Phelig, he saw it was-killed a warrior in the gap between two stones and then took control of it for himself. His fellows swarmed after him into the breach.

Then Ternat’s warriors forced their way through another opening. That proved too much for their foes. Some surrendered, others fled. Dordal was one of those who tried to run. When three of Ternat’s males dragged him to the ground, the last fight went out of his warriors.

“Get their spears and other weapons, and see to the wounded,” Ternat said. As his warriors began to obey, he walked slowly over to Dordal. That bruise he had taken started to hurt. He had forgotten all about it till now.

As Reatur’s eldest had remembered, Dordal was a large, imposinglooking male, very much the opposite of Elanti the massiherder: even standing tall, he was so well fed he looked widened. His eyestalks, however, were at the moment drooping dispiritedly. He raised one eye a little to see who was coming up. He did not widen himself, though Ternat saw that he recognized him.

“Domain master, you made a mistake,” he said, giving Dordal the courtesy of a title he knew his captive might not enjoy much longer.

“What are you doing here, Ternat?” Dordal’s voice was still proud but confused-he hadn’t changed much since the embassy, Ternat thought.

“I would think that was obvious, domain master-we are taking back what is ours. If you hadn’t crossed the border, we wouldn’t have come. Since you did-“ Reatur’s eldest let Dordal draw his own conclusions.

Those, as was characteristic of the northern domain master, were bizarre. “I think you were lying about the Skarmer this whole time, to lure me into raiding you without enough males.” Dordal sounded thoroughly indignant.

Ternat thought Dordal was a fool, but then he had thought that for a long while. “I’m afraid your greed made you stretch your eyestalks further than your arms would reach,” he said.

Dordal started to turn yellow. Ternat’s eyestalks twitched. Dordal quickly greened up again. Even he was not so stupid as to show his captor he was angry. “What will you do with me?” he asked.

“Take the lot of you back to our domain, I suppose,” Ternat said. He hadn’t thought much about that; he hadn’t expected to win such a complete victory. “Reatur will decide in the end. If I had to guess, I’ll say he’s likely to let you go back home after your eldest pays enough ransom to remind you not to trifle with us again.”

He waited for Dordal’s reaction. It did not disappoint him. This time Dordal turned yellow in earnest. “My eldest!” he shouted. “Grevil won’t pay a strip of dried meat for me! Let that grabby budling loose among my treasures and mates and he’ll want to keep everything for himself.”

Maybe Dordal did have some sense: that confirmed Ternat’s impression of the northern domain master’s eldest. It also confirmed that Grevil was his father’s budling. Dordal, Ternat was certain, would have done exactly the same thing in Grevil’s place.

“Well, we’ll just let Reatur sort that out,” Ternat said. “Perhaps if Grevil doesn’t grant you the respect and obedience a clanfather deserves, Reatur will send some males north to help you reclaim your domain-after the Skarmer are settled, of course.”

“I don’t care a three-day-old massi voiding about the Skarmer,” Dordal howled. “And if I get my domain back with help from Reatur’s males, there will be cords running from his arms to mine forever after.”

“Yes, there will, won’t there?” Ternat agreed cheerfully. “Maybe you should have thought about that before you decided to go massi-raiding. As it is, you’ll have some lovely three-day-old voidings to look at as we travel back to my clanfather’s domain.”

Dordal twisted all his eyestalks away from Ternat. Reatur’s eldest did not care how petulant Dordal felt. While the northern domain master was not looking, he walked away. Dordal started to talk again. He abruptly fell Silent when he turned one eyestalk back and noticed that no one was listening to him.

Ternat didn’t care about that, either. He was shouting to his own warriors now, getting them back into some kind of order so they could lead their prisoners and the re.c. aptured beasts home without half escaping in the process. Ternat did not have three eighteens of plans for overthrowing his clanfather. His time would come one day. Until then, he was content to wait.

And that, he supposed, only went to show that he was Reatur’s budling. “Good enough,” he said out loud.

Sergei Tolmasov watched Rustaveli lean back in his chair. As usual, the Georgian was wearing a mischievous expression. He said, “I doubt much work is getting done aboard Tsiolkovsky at the moment-not much that involves the brain, anyway, unless Yuri is reading Katya some of his poetry.” He had just brought the rover back to Hogram’s town after Katerina drove it down to the ship.

“Not much work getting done here, either,” Tolmasov said, not rising to the bait.

“You, my friend, are entirely too serious, as I’ve said at least a hundred times.”

“At least,” Tolmasov agreed. Rustaveli snorted.

“That does not mean he is wrong, Shota Mikheilovich,”

Valery Bryusov put in. He often had trouble recognizing a joke.

“No, it doesn’t,” the pilot said, “because there isn’t much getting done here.” He had never imagined he could become irrelevant during the Minerva mission, but he had. He didn’t like it one bit.

Damn Oleg Lopatin! Athena was screaming at Washington and, almost incidentally now, at Tolmasov; Washington was screaming at Moscow; and Moscow, not incidentally at all, was screaming at Tolmasov. He could not even blame any of them- had he been any place in the loop but where he was, he would have been screaming, too. But he had no one to scream at, not when Lopatin wouldn’t use his cursed radio.

He couldn’t even ask Hogram to send on a written message. For one thing, the local domain master was barely in communication with his army on the far side of Jotun Canyon. Crossing that stream was almost as hard for the Minervans as getting to Minerva had been for the Soviet Union and United States.

For another, problems between people meant nothing to Hogram. Because Hogram had talked with the Omalo domain master on the radio, he had to acknowledge there were more humans than the ones he had met. But he simply did not believe in a whole planet full of them, all at each other’s throats because one man had gone berserk. Given what Hogram knew, Tolmasov wouldn’t have believed it, either. Unfortunately, it was true.

And so the crew of Tsiolkovsky went through the motions of doing more research: Bryusov comparing country and town dialects, Rustaveli working on his rocks, Katerina and Voroshilov joining together on a biochemical study. None of it seemed to mean much now.

“Yuri isn’t sorry Lopatin’s gone and got himself in this mess,” Rustaveli observed.

“Then why did he cut you off when you called the Americans?” Tolmasov answered his own question. “Because his head might roll, too, I suppose, if anyone back home”-as polite a euphemism as he had ever come up with for the KGB-“thought he’d overhead you and done nothing. But I daresay you’re right, because of Katya if for no other reason.”

“There are others,” Rustaveli said slowly. The pilot glanced over at him, he rarely sounded so serious. Seeing he had Tolmasov’s attention, the geologist went on, “Yuri complained that Lopatin snooped through the poems he wrote for her and stored them in his secret computer file. Evidence, I imagine, but only a chekist could say of what.”

“I’d hate a man for that, too,” Tolmasov said.

“And I,” Bryusov agreed, though Tolmasov had trouble imagining Bryusov worked up enough about anything to hate the man who did it. Maybe if an academician from Arkhmolinsk stole something from one of his papers and published it first: anyone would be furious over that kind of pilfering.

Then the full meaning of Rustaveli’s words got through to the pilot. “Wait a minute,” he said. “How does Yuri know they’re in Lopatin’s secure file?”

“How else?” Rustaveli put a flippant shrug in his voice. “He read them.”

“That’s impossible.” Tolmasov had tried to access Lopatin’s secure file, tried and failed. If the pilot of a mission was not trusted with the passwords he needed to get into a KGB man’s files, what were the odds a chemist would be? There was no way…, no, there was one.

Rustaveli was waiting when Tolmasov looked up. The Geol’gian nodded. “That’s right,” he said. “But you will notice I have not told you any such thing.”

“Like that, eh? No, of course, you haven’t, Shota Mikheilovich. But Yuri! Who ever would have thought that about Yuri?”

“Shota hasn’t what?” Bryusov asked. “Who would have thought what about Yuri?” The linguist sounded as confused as if his companions had started speaking Navajo.

“Never mind, Valery Aleksandrovich. Nothing important,” Tolmasov said kindly. Some people, he thought, were really too innocent to be running around loose.

His feeling of smug superiority lasted not quite two minutes. Then he remembered he had thought the same thing about Yuri Voroshilov. He shook his head. Sometimes you just couldn’t tell.

“Are you all right, Reatur?” Lamra asked when the domain master finally got around to paying attention to her. Them, though, she had little to complain about: he hurried through his hellos to the rest of the mates so he could spend uninterrupted time with her.

If he had looked tired before, now he looked tired and battered. One of his arms jerked when he sighed, a wince that showed he had been hurt. “I’ve been better, little one,” he answered. “The domain has been better, come to that. The Skarmer beat us, beat us badly.”

She saw herself start to turn blue and tried to stop but couldn’t.

“What will we do?” she said.

“’We’?” Reatur asked gently. “Lamra, right now there isn’t much you can do. I wish there were. As for me, I am going to fight them again. Maybe here, closer to the castle, closer to where most of my males live, they will make a better showing.”

“What if they don’t?”

The domain master pulled in arms and eyestalks, released them: a shrug. “Then we won’t have to fight a third time, that’s certain. Do you understand what I mean?”

Lamra thought about it. “We’ll have lost?” She didn’t want to say that; she didn’t even want to think it.

But Reatur seemed to approve. “That’s right,” he said. “Your thoughts should always be thin, clear ice, Lamra, so you can use them to see through to what’s there, no matter what it is. If you don’t think clearly, it’s like trying to look through muddy ice.”

“Oh,” Lamra said. She wanted to show Reatur she could use what he was telling her. “Then are you going to show me why you haven’t opened one of your hands since you came into the mates’ chambers? Do you have something in there? Is it for me?”

His eyestalks wiggled-slowly, but they wiggled. “Thin, clear ice indeed, little one. Yes, I have something for you in that hand.” He turned so it was in front of her.

She held out a hand of her own. He gave her the present. She peered down at it with three eyestalks at once. “It’s a runnerpest!” she exclaimed. “A little runnerpest, carved all out of wood. It’s wonderful, Reatur. Thank you.” She felt proud for remembering to say that. “Where did you get it? Did you carve it yourself?”

“Yes,” he said. He hesitated, as if unsure whether to go on, but after a moment he did. “I wanted you to have something to remember me by, even if-the worst happens.”

“I’ll keep it always,” Lamra promised. Then, wanting him to know she was still thinking clearly, she amended, “For as long as I have, anyhow.”

“For you, that’s always,” Reatur said firmly.

“I suppose so.” Lamra kept looking at the little runnerpest.

‘I’m going to poke this around a corner and scare Peri silly with it. Not that she isn’t silly already, that is.” No matter how hard she worked at it, staying serious was never easy.

This time, Reatur’s laugh was unrestrained. “I’m glad I came to see you, little one. One way or another, you always make me feel better.” He turned an eyestalk down toward her bulges. “Do you want to hear something foolish, Lamra?”

“I don’t think you can be foolish, clanfather,” she declared. “That only shows how young and foolish you are still,” Reatur said. “I was just thinking it’s a shame you’re carrying budlings. I’d like to plant them on you now.”

‘That is foolish,” Lamra agreed. Once Reatur had succeeded in planting budlings on her, her interest in mating, once so intense, disappeared. She did her best to think like a male. Altogether unsure how well she was succeeding, she said, “There are lots of other mates here.”

“I know,” Reatur said. “It wouldn’t be the same, somehow. Planting buds on you now would be like, like”-the domain master sounded like someone groping after an idea-“like mating with a friend.” He stopped in surprise. “That must be what the humans do,. with their mates who live as long as males. It would be comforting, I think, especially in bad times.”

“I suppose so,” Lamra said indifferently. But the notion Reatur had presented was so strange, she couldn’t help thinking about it. “If the humans keep me alive after my budlings drop, will I want to mate with you again?”

That seemed to surprise Reatur all over again. “I truly don’t know, Lamra. If we’re all very, very lucky, maybe we’ll find out.”

“Sometimes you just can’t tell, Pat.” Irv felt like an idiot the moment the words were out of his mouth, but he was lucky-

Pat wasn’t listening to him. She was off in that disconnected place where she had spent so much time since Frank hadn’t answered his last radio call.

His wife glanced toward him and Pat, toward Athena, toward Reatur’s castle. “I don’t think that eloc mate is ever going to drop its budlings,” Sarah said. They had checked the mate five times in the last two days. It looked ready, but it wasn’t doing anything. “I’m going over to the castle to examine Lamra again,” Sarah went on. “I just keep hoping she can hang on until we know we have some real chance of doing her some good.”

Irv shrugged. “I think I’ll head back to the ship. I’m hungry.”

“Okay.”

Sarah and Irv both paused, waiting for Pat to decide what she was going to do. She paused, too, as if rerunning a tape of the last few seconds in her head so that she could catch up with what was going on. Then she said, “I guess I’ll go back to the ship, too.”

“Make sure she eats something,” Sarah told Irv. He thought about asking her whether she was speaking as doctor or Jewish mother, but keeping his mouth shut seemed smarter. A nod couldn’t land him in trouble, but his big mouth had, many times already.

Sarah headed for the castle, pausing once to wave before she trudged on again. “Come on,” Irv said to Pat. Again there was that delayed response, but less this time than before. She followed him to Athena.

Emmett Bragg met them just inside the airlock.” ‘Bout time somebody showed up here,” he grumbled. His pistol was belted on; Irv would have bet he had been pacing the corridor. “Don’t want to leave the ship empty, and I need to go out and scout the route the Skarmer’ll be using when they finally decide to get moving again. Won’t be long now, I suspect.” “Where’s Louise?” Irv asked.

Bragg’s eyes flicked to Pat. “She’s-out,” he said. Irv thought unkind thoughts about his mouth as he remembered Louise was out because she was doing some seismographic work that would-should-have been Frank’s. Pat, luckily, didn’t make the connection.

“Don’t get too close to the Skarmer-or to Oleg Lopatin,” Irv said. “Don’t forget you’re our ride home.”

Emmett grimaced. “Don’t remind me. I know I have to be a good boy, but I don’t have to like it.” He hurried out through the airlock, not bothering to hide his impatience to be gone. Things had been dull for him since Athena landed, Irv thought; Air Force pilots were adrenaline junkies from the word go. Well, Emmett had his fix now.

Irv turned back to Pat. “Let’s see what we can find to eat.”

“All right,” she said indifferently.

The freeze-dried beef stew, Irv thought after he poured hot water into the package, tasted almost like what mother used to make, but not quite. He’d been eating it for so long that he had trouble defining the difference, but he knew it was there. Real food was one of the things he looked forward to about going home.

He rinsed the plastic tray, tossed it in the trash. Pat had only pushed her food around; hardly any of it was gone.

“Come on. Eat,” Irv said. He felt as if he were coaxing a reluctant toddler.

Pat took a couple of forkfuls, then put the package of stew down. “I don’t feel much like eating. I don’t feel much like anything.” She would not look at Irv; she kept her eyes on her hands in her lap.

“You really should, Pat. We need you-“ He hesitated. “as strong as you can be.” He hated himself for that little pause. Even more than the polite words it had been intended to replace, it called attention to what had happened.

Pat didn’t answer… For a moment, Irv thought she was disconnected from the here-and-now again. Then he saw her shoulders shaking, saw two tears splash onto the backs of her wrists before she jerked up her arms to cover her face.

She hadn’t cried before, not when Irv was there to see it and not, so far as he knew, any other time, either. “That’s right,” he urged, standing next to her. “It’ll help you feel better. It’s all right.”

“It’s not-all right.” A gasped, hitching breath broke the sentence in half. “It’s never going to be all right.”

What do I say to that, Irv wondered, especially when it’s true. Except for two of his grandparents, he had never lost anyone he loved. He knew how lucky he was. Because he was so lucky, he did not know firsthand how Pat felt, but he knew it was bad- worse now, he supposed, because she was letting what she had blocked away come out.

He bent down on one knee and put an awkward arm around her. She started to shake him off, then twisted in the chair until her head found the hollow of his shoulder. His other arm wrapped around her. Her tears were hot on the side of his neck. He held her while she cried herself out.

She looked ghastly when she finally raised her head-all the more so in the harsh blue-white glow of the fluorescent tube in the ceiling. Her blotched, wetstreaked face reminded Irv again of the toddler he had thought about a few minutes before. But the feel of her against him was like no toddler’s.

He shook his head at the distracting thought and reached out and snagged a paper towel off the tabletop. “Here,” he said. “Blow.”

Pat did, noisily, and dabbed at her eyes. “Thank you,” she said, and then again, in a different tone of voice, “Thank you.”

“It’s all right.”

He was still holding her with one arm. When he started to pull back, she clung to him. “Don’t let go, not yet, please,” she said. “I wasn’t, haven’t been able to feel anything since-“ Irv thought she was going to let that hang, but she made herself go on. “-since Frank got killed. It’s like most of me’s been stuck inside a glass specimen jar. I see things, hear things, but they don’t connect, they just bounce off the glass. This-I really know you’re here with me.”

“Okay.” That was one way of dealing with shock, Irv knew.

If nothing got through the glass, nothing could hurt.

“Give me that paper towel again, would you?” Pat wiped at her face, crumpled the towel, and threw it away. “I must look like hell.”

“Frankly, yes.”

She let out a strangled snort that might have been-Irv hoped it was-the first laugh from her since her husband died. “You always say the sweetest things, Irv.”

“I try.”

He kept his tone deliberately light, but Pat’s reply was serious. “I know. Thanks one more time.” She held on to him, too, as if afraid to stop. “So good to feel something, anything, again.”

“Good. That’s good, Pat.” Irv’s brain was handling mixed signals. Consciously, he was glad he was able to do as a friend should, able to help Pat begin to accept her loss. Through his hands, through his skin, he picked up another message. He was very much aware that for some time he had been holding a woman in his arms.

More than anything else, he was annoyed with his physical response to that. Not the time or place, he thought. For a crazy moment, he felt seventeen again, walking from class to class with his books held awkwardly in front of him to hide an incongruous erection.

The Pat leaned close and kissed him on the cheek. It was not meant to be a passionate kiss; thinking back later, Irv was sure of that. Nor was the one he intended to give back. But instead of her cheek, his mouth found hers. With a sound half sigh, half groan, she clutched him to her.

There must have been some time in the minutes that followed when their lips were separated long enough for Irv to say no or stop or something of the sort. Afterward, that seemed logically certain, but he never could figure out when it might have been. Even when they were helping each other pull off boots and trousers, their mouths stayed glued together, and his still covered hers and helped quiet her moan soon after. A moment later, he made noises of his own and was similarly muffled.

Coming back to himself was nothing like the afterglow he cherished. It felt more like breaking a fever: what had just ended seemed strange and unreal, as if it had happened to someone else. But Pat’s smooth thighs still gripped him; he still looked into her face from only a couple of inches away.

I’m sorry, was the first thing that occurred to him to say. That, he knew, was wrong. He levered himself with his arms and pushed off against the floor so he sat back on his knees. “I think we’ve been stupid,” he said slowly.

Pat sat up, too, and reached for her pants. “You’re probably right,” she said as she started to put them on. “This isn’t like the last time I-wanted you, though. I didn’t expect it to happen. I didn’t even particularly want it to happen. It just did.”

“Yeah,” Irv said. He started getting dressed, too. “t know.” And what the hell am I going to do about it, he wondered. At the moment, he had no idea. “I didn’t expect it to happen, either. I was just trying to comfort you, any way I could-“ He pulled on socks. One didn’t fit. It was Pat’s. He tossed it to her.

She was nodding. “mand God knows I was looking for comfort, any place I could find it. You want to call it shared battle fatigue or something, and let it go at that?”

“That might be the best thing to do.” That way, Irv thought, we can pretend-I can pretend-it never happened at all. He wished it never had happened at all. Wishing did just as much good as usual.

“Okay,” Pat said. “I know what you were trying to do. Maybe you even did it. I guess I have to make myself go on, figure out how to go on, without Frank.” She stood up. “Right now, I’m going off to the john for a minute.” Irv winced. Pat saw it. “All right,” she said, “I won’t talk about it anymore. But this once, happening like it did, wasn’t the same as it would have been a lot of other ways.”

“Yeah,” Irv said. He watched Pat walk out, then climbed into a chair. What she said was true. It even helped. Trouble was, it didn’t help enough.

He got up, looked at himself in the glass of the microwave’s door. It wasn’t much of a mirror, but he doubted he could look at himself in much of a mirror. “Stupid,” he told his reflection. It didn’t argue with him.

He heard the airlock doors open, first the outer, then the inner. “Anybody home?” Sarah called. Irv was not an adrenaline junkie. The sound of his wife’s voice almost made him jump out of his skin. “Anybody home?” Sarah said again.

“Back here,” he answered. His voice, he thought, came out as a hoarse croak. He discovered another reason why he hadn’t cheated on Sarah before: he didn’t seem to be very good at it.

Sarah came walking down the passageway. “What took you so long?” she asked, sticking her head into the galley.

“Sorry.”

She shrugged, took off her gloves, rubbed her hands together.

“I’m going to make myself some coffee. Want any?”

Maybe he was only imagining how he sounded; Sarah didn’t seem to notice anything wrong. “Sure,” he said. “Thanks.”

Sarah put two cups of water in the microwave. Pat came in. Sarah glanced up. Irv waited for the world to fall to pieces. Sarah said, “In. I’m making coffee. Shall I put another cup in for you?”

“Would you?” Pat said. “I could use some.”

“Sure.” Sarah filled a third cup. The microwave started its soft whir. Over it, Sarah said to Pat, “You sound a little better.”

Pat nodded. “I think maybe I am, finally. I’ve got to-we all have to-get on with things, no matter what’s happened. I’m sorry I’ve been so useless. I just… needed some time, I guess.”

“Of course you did,” Sarah said. The microwave chimed. She got out the boiling water, poured in instant coffee, passed around the cups. “Here you go, folks, caffeinated mud. Real coffee is another thing I’ll want lots of when we get home.”

“Amen,” Irv agreed. “Could be worse, though-don’t the Russians have instant tea?” The idea of that drew groans from everyone.

“How’s Lamra?” Pat asked.

“You are better,” Sarah said, sounding pleased. “That’s the first time in a good long while you’ve cared about what’s going on. As for Lamra, she’s very much herself, only more so, if you know what I mean. She has this new wooden toy runnerpest- maybe Reatur made it for her; I don’t know it that she carries around everywhere. Won’t let go of it for hell. She doesn’t try to mother it, though, the way a little girl would with a doll. Not much call for learning to be a mommy on Minerva.” That comment extinguished smiles from the faces of Pat and Irv. “Not much longer now,” Irv said.

“No-we have to keep those clamps and bandage packs handy,” Sarah said. “We may need ‘era any time. I just hope they’ll do some good.”

“We give it our best shot. That’s all we can do. Having Pat he did not look at her and picked his words carefully-“ feeling more like herself can’t do anything but help.” “I hope so,” Pat said.

“Irv’s right. We might make this work yet.” Sarah looked happier at the prospect than she had for a while herself.

Irv finished his coffee. Relief almost drowned guilt: evidently he didn’t have a large scarlet A tattooed on his forehead after all. He couldn’t forget those few incandescent minutes with Pat, but maybe, just maybe, he could convince himself they didn’t matter very much.

And maybe he couldn’t, too. While Sarah slept quietly beside him, her warm breath sometimes tickling his ear, he lay awake himself most of the night. “A conscience is a useless piece of baggage,” he whispered. His, however, wasn’t listening. For that matter, not even the rest of him believed it.