It all came down to how badly Bryusov was hurt. If he just had a knock on the head and, say, a broken wrist, Rustaveli knew enough first aid to patch him up. If, on the other hand, he had managed to do something nasty like rupturing his spleen, the Georgian would never know it till too late. “You better call Athena,” he said.
There was a long silence from Tolmasov, followed by an even longer sigh. “Damnation. Very well.”
Rustaveli could tell he had just lost points with the colonel.
“Sergei Konstantinovich, think of it this way: if Valery dies after we summon the American doctor, of if the doctor refuses to come and he dies, whose fault is that? Not ours, certainly. But if we do not call-”
“A point,” Tolmasov admitted after another pause. He was sounding official again, which Rustaveli took as a good sign. “I will call the Americans.”
“How do I know what would happen if a mate survived budding?” Reatur demanded. “They come to ripeness, they mate, and then they die. Always. That is what it is to be a mate.”
“But what if one does-did-live?” Sarah Levitt persisted. “If mates grow up, too, what they like then?” She wished her grammar were better and her vocabulary bigger. She needed to be persuasive. “What-how much-of lives you waste when mates not live, die young?”
Reatur did not just order her to shut up and go away, as a medieval English baron might have dealt with someone proposing revolutionary social change. Sarah had to give him that much. Baron was about as close as anyone had come to translating the Minervan word that literally meant “domain master,” but Sarah knew it lacked meanings that were there in the Minervan and added connotations missing from it. And Reatur’s domain was a long, long way from medieval England.
The domain master turned a third eyestalk her way. He began to sing something, or perhaps to declaim. Since he had no music to accompany the words, Sarah was not sure which; whichever it was, he used his arms to help her follow the rhythm of his words. The meaning was something else again. With an obviously memorized piece like this one, Reatur could not pause and explain himself as he went along. Sarah gathered it was a sad-song, but that was about all.
Eventually Reatur realized she could not fully understand. He broke off and started speaking simply again. “It is about a domain master who has had three of his mates bud all on the same day, and about his sorrow as he gives the last of them to the scavengers. Every male who has brought a mate to budding knows this sorrow. How could we not? We are not beasts, and mates are not beasts.”
“No, but mates not people, not now-die too soon. Let mates be people, too. I try to let Lamra live after budding, let her be person, let her grow to be person. Yes?” Sarah watched Reatur intently. She wanted nothing in the world-nothing in two worlds-more than the chance to try to save Lamra. She could feel her face twisting into a frown of concentration as she cast about for the words to make him see things her way. At last she found the very phrase she needed.
The radio on her belt squawked.
She jumped. That perfect phrase vanished from her head.
Reatur was startled, too, startled enough to jerk in his eyestalks.
“You read me, Sarah?” Emmett Bragg asked from the tinny little speaker. “Acknowledge, please.”
“I’m here, Emmett-at the castle, talking with Reatur.”
“Come back to the ship, please, right away.” Even with the “please,” it was an order.
“Five minutes?” she pleaded. Maybe those right words would come back.
“This second,” Emmett said flatly. “Emergency.”
“On my way.” Sarah’s hands folded into fists. Wearing gloves, she did not even get the painful release of nails biting flesh. She turned back to Reatur. “Must go now. Talk more of Lamra later, yes?”
“I suppose we may,” Reatur said.
Sarah had to be content with that. “Damn, damn, damn,” she muttered under her breath as she trotted down the hallway toward her bicycle. The timing could not have been worse. Reatur had been weakening. She was sure of it.
She leapt onto the bicycle and worked out some of her frustration by fairly flying back to the ship. She braked so violently that she almost went headfirst over the handlebars. If this wasn’t a genuine life or death emergency, she thought, she was going to peel some paint off the corridor walls.
But it was. She could see that on Emmett Bragg’s face. Then she hesitated. Emmett was in the control room, and so was Irv- she breathed silent thanks that the emergency had nothing to do with him-and so were Louise and Frank and Pat. Nobody looked damaged, though everyone was as somber as Emmett.
Somber, to Sarah’s way of thinking, did not constitute an emergency. She set hands on hips. “What the hell’s going on?” she snapped. “Where’s the beef?”
“Hon, it’s on the other side of Jotun Canyon,” Irv said.
She stared at him.
“The Russian rover’s had an accident,” Emmett said. “One of their people is down and out-head and arm injuries at the very least, maybe more.”
“What’s that got to do with me?” she demanded. “They have a doctor of their own.”
“Who is at the moment almost seventy miles from the rover, and stuck on foot without it,” Bragg said. “Whereas we have bikes to get to the edge of the canyon fast, and Damselfly to get over it-the rover’s only a mile or so away from the far edge of the canyon.” He held up a map with a red dot felt tipped in to show the location. “This mess happened an hour ago, tops. You could be there before sunset, but their doc is three days away.”
“Get Damselfly over Jotun Canyon?” Sarah said faintly. “Any kind of nasty wind and I could be several miles straight down, too.”
Bragg nodded. “I know that. I told Tolmasov I wouldn’t give you any orders, and I’m not. But he asked for our help, and if there is any, you’re it. You’re the doctor, and you’re the pilot here, too. It’s up to you, Sarah. No hard feelings if you say no.”
“Except to the hurt Russian,” she pointed out. “If he lives to have them.”
“There is that,” Bragg said.
“Sarah-“ Irv began, and then shut up. She knew a moment’s gratitude that he recognized the decision was not his to make.
“Let me see the map,” she said. Emmett Bragg passed it to her. She studied it. “How wide is the canyon fight here? It seems to be one of the narrower stretches. Is it less than ten miles? It looks like it.”
Bragg took the map back. He pulled a clear plastic ruler from one of his coverall pockets and applied it to the image of the gap and then to the scale of miles at the bottom left-hand comer of the sheet. “Good eyeballing,” he said. “It’s just under nine, as a matter of fact.”
“Bryan Allen flew Gossamer Albatross across the English Channel. That’s twice as far and then some, and I’ve got a better plane than the Albatross ever dreamed of being,” Sarah said. “I’m going.”
“If the Gossamer Albatross came apart, all what’s-his-name would have got was wet,” Irv said. “If something goes wrong with Damselfly, or if you get the winds you know perfectly well you could-”
Sarah did not want to think about that. Jotun Canyon was deep enough that, if the worst did happen, she would have plenty of time to reflect on her folly as she fell. “Irv, if you were hurt on this side of the canyon and the Russians had a plane, I hope they’d try to help.”
Frank Marquard had been quiet till now. “How high are the canyon walls on either side, relative to each other?” he asked abruptly. “If the land west of the canyon is a quartermile higher than it is on this side, you won’t be able to climb up to it. If it’s a quartermile lower, you’ll never get back.”
Everyone crowded around to peer at the map, either upside down or over Emmett Bragg’s shoulder. “Seems all right,” Sarah said after a long, hard look. “Call Tolmasov, Emmett. Tell him I’m on my way. Find out what first aid supplies their rover has, too. I’ll save weight with my kit that way, because I won’t carry anything they already ha
ve.”
“Right.” Bragg turned to his wife and Irv. “Y’all heard the lady. Break out the pieces of Damselfly and get ‘em onto the towing carts. Pulling ‘em to the edge of the canyon, I. expect you’ll be working near as hard as Sarah will going over.” Louise simply nodded and left. Irv followed a moment later, shaking his head and muttering under his breath.
There’s nothing I can do about it, Sarah wanted to call after him. But he knew that as well as she did. Knowing and accepting were two different things-all she needed to do was think of Lamra to see the truth there.
“I’ll get my bike, too,” Pat Marquard said.
“What for?.” Sarah, Emmett, and Frank all spoke together. “So you can ride behind me,” Pat said to Sarah, as if the two men were not there. “You should be fresh when you get into Damselfly, not worn out from spending half a day pedaling.”
That made such plain good sense that Sarah could only nod her thanks and hug Pat, who returned the embrace. Emmett Bragg lifted the radio microphone. “Athena calling Soviet expedition.”
The reply was immediate. “Tolmasov here. Go ahead, old man.”
“Sergei Konstantinovich, our doctor will try, repeat try, to fly Damselfly across Jotun Canyon to help your injured crewman.”
“Thank you very much, Brigadier Bragg. We are in your debt.”
“You don’t thank me, you thank the lady, and I just may call in that debt one day, if I see a way to do it.”
“Er, yes.” Tolmasov sounded wary again, Sarah thought, frowning. Emmett never let up; he saw everything as a confrontation.
As if to belie that, the mission commander went on, “For now, though, we only need to know what your rover has in the way of medical gear, so we can avoid duplication.”
With Athena’s computers, any of the Americans could have called up the answer to that as fast as he typed in the question. Tolmasov’s promised “One moment, please,” stretched to sew eral minutes. At least he had what Sarah needed when he finally did come back on the air. That, she supposed, counted for something.
Mist and distance shrouded the land on the western side of Jotun Canyon. Sarah did stretching exercises to work out the kinks of a morning and early afternoon spent riding behind Pat Marquard. After a moment, Sarah turned her back on the canyon. She did not want to think about it before she had to.
Instead, she watched her husband and Louise Bragg reassemble Damselfly. Irv was whistling something as he made sure every wingnut was tight. Sarah took longer than she should have to recognize “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.” She started to let out a snort, then stopped abruptly. If using a silly song helped remind him to be careful, that was all right with her.
“Ready when you are,” Louise said a little later. Pat, who had been reduced to a spectator once they got to the edge of the canyon, made herself useful by carrying the special wide stepladder to Damselfly.
“Let’s do it.” Sarah got out of her jacket and insulated pants and immediately started to shiver. Jogging over to Damselfly did nothing to warm her up.
Irv waited at the top of the stepladder to help her down into the ultra-ultralight. When she was seated, he handed her the clear plastic bag in which she had put her supplies-it was a pound or more lighter than her regular medical bag. She secured it to a spar behind her with duct tape.
“Be careful,” Irv said. “I love you.”
“I know. I love you, too.” She strapped the biking helmet under her chin. When she was done, she reached up to touch his cheek. “This is what you get for marrying a doctor. I’ll be all right.”
“You I wouldn’t worry about. But this damn contraption isn’t made for the kind of air you may get over the canyon.”
She shrugged. “People aren’t made for banging their heads, either.” Checking to be sure the prop was not engaged, she started pedaling furiously to charge the battery-and to stop her teeth from chattering. She hardly noticed Irv lowering the canopy over her and dogging it in place.
“Radio check,” Louise said. “Testing, one, two, three.”
“Read you five by five,” Sarah answered. “How do you read me?”
They went through the rest of the preflight checklist, making sure all the controls worked. Sarah watched the charge gauge climb. By the time the battery was all the way up, she was no longer freezing. She glanced to either side. Irv and Louise were standing by at Damselfly’s wingtips. She waved to show them she was ready. When they waved back, she flicked the propeller-control switch. The big airfoil, taller than she was, began to spin.
Damselfly rolled bumpily forward, the two wingpersons-a word Sarah formed and rejected in the same instant-running alongside to hold it level. “Airborne!” Irv yelled as the ultra-ultralight lifted off the ground.
“Roger,” Sarah said, to let him and Louise know she knew. As always, Damselfly was painfully slow gaining altitude. Even so, after less than a minute the ground dropped away as if the plane had a rocket in its tail. “Watch that first step,” she murmured to herself as she peered down and down and down into Jotun Canyon. “It’s a mother.”
“Say again, Damselfly?” Louise quested.
“Never mind,” Sarah said, embarrassed. Then she gave all her attention back to pedaling and to watching the little compass Irv had glued to the control stick. The far wall of the canyon was too far away to give her any landmarks toward which to steer and the sun was invisible through thick gray clouds. She laughed a little; Damselfly had not been designed for instrument night.
Some of the clouds were underneath her. Jotun Canyon was plenty big enough to have weather of its own. Sarah was just glad the clouds didn’t altogether block the western wall from view. Seeing it loom out of the fog too late to dodge was the stuff of nightmares.
“Everything all fight, hon?” Irv sounded as if he expected her to go spiraling down into the canyon any second now.
“No problems,” she answered, taking her left hand off the stick to flick on the radio’s send switch. “I’m even getting warm.
Exercise and all that.” Keeping Damselfly in the air was hard work, closer to running than to bicycling on the ground. “I should be across in less than half an hour. Off I go, into the wild gray yonder-”
“Oh, shut up,” Irv said. Chuckling, Sarah switched off. Her husband would be too busy fuming to worry about her for a while. She pedaled on. The breeze from the fresh air tube began to feel delicious, not icy.
Looking down between her busy feet, Sarah saw she was above the deepest part of the Jotun Canyon. Something moving down there caught her eye. She could not tell what sort of beast it was, any more than a jetliner passenger can name the makes of cars he sees from 30,000 feet. Just with level flight between the canyon’s walls, she was half that high over the bottom herself.
She wondered what lived down there. Whatever it was, it was not a fulltime resident, not unless it nailed itself to the biggest rock it could find when the yearly floods came through. Maybe not then, either.
Then all such mental busywork blew away with the gusting tailwind that swept Damselfly along with it and threatened to make the ultra-ultralight stall. Sarah gasped, pedaled harder, and hit the prop control switch to make the propeller grab more air. A moment later, she also turned on the plane’s little electric motor to add its power to hers.
For a few queasy seconds, she thought none of that would do any good. Gusts were the worst problem with human-powered aircraft; one of five miles an hour gave Damselfly as much of a jolt as a 30mph gust did to a Cessna. The flimsy little craft did not want to answer its controls. From the way the spars creaked, Sarah wondered if it was going to break up in midair. “Don’t you dare, you bastard,” she said fiercely, as if that would do any good at all.
Damsel. fly held together. Sarah brought the plane’s nose down. Her legs were blurs on the pedals. She never knew whether her efforts saved her or the gust simply subsided. What she did know was that all the sweat on her body had turned cold.
When she was sure the ultra-ultr
alight-and her voice-were in full control again, she thumbed the radio’s send switch. “Hello back there,” she said. “Before, I was worrying about whether the Russians would have blankets and such for me. Now all I care about is a change of underwear.” She was surprised at how easily she could joke about what had just happened. No one, she thought, really believes in the possibility of her own death.
While Irv and Louise exclaimed tinnily through Damselfly’s speaker, Sarah shook her head, annoyed at herself. Philosophizing after the fact was all very well, but the cold sweat still coated her and her joke had almost been no joke at all, but literally true. She had believed in death, all right.
The western edge of Jotun Canyon grew closer. Sarah resisted the temptation to put on another mad burst of effort so she could reach it fifteen seconds before she would have otherwise. As in distance running, staying within herself counted. She could feel how much the one emergency had taken out of her.
At last she had land under her once more at a distance to be measured in feet rather than miles. She hit the radio switch again. The Russians could not reply on the frequency Damselfly used, but they were supposed to be listening. “Damselfly calling the Soviet rover,” she said in slow, careful Russian. “I am on your side of the canyon. Please send up a flare to show me your location.” She repeated herself several times.
All the while, she was scanning the horizon. If her navigation had been good, the flare would rise straight ahead of her. No sign of it there. No sign of it anywhere, in fact. What was-
Sarah frowned, groping for the name-Rustaveli’s problem?
There! The brilliant crimson spark hung in the air. It was north of where she had expected it; the gust over the canyon must have thrown her off worse than she thought. She twisted the control stick, working first ailerons and then rudder to go into the long, slow turn that was the best Damselfly could do.
The flare slowly sank while she approached. Now she eyed the ground instead of the sky. Motion drew her gaze. That was no Minervan down there, that was a man! “Soviet rover, I have you visually,” she said triumphantly. “Coming in to land.”
A World of Difference Page 16