“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…
VII
The wind howled out of the south, blowing the snow it carried along almost horizontally. Reatur stood in the middle of his field with all his arms happily stretched out. “A spell of decent weather at last,” he said. “I was sick of all that heat.”
“All what heat?” the human beside him muttered. Louise was bundled in even more false skins than humans usually wore; she-Reatur hardly had to remind himself of that anymore, something he could not have imagined a few eighteens of days
ago-even had a coveting for her eyes, transparent as ice but harder to melt.
The domain master gestured expansively. “We often get a few stretches of nice southerly breeze,” he said. “I’m particularly glad to have this one, because it will help keep the castle walls solid.”
“’Nice southerly breeze,’ “Louise echoed. Then she sighed, a sound that, when human mates made it, was eerily like the one people used in the same situation. “Glad cold good for something.”
“It’s not cold,” Reatur protested, only to have Louise sigh again. One thing about which people and humans would never agree was what constituted good weather.
“Never mind,” Louise said-she realized that, too. “Much ice melting at edge of land where all ice-makes storms come, blow even here.”
Reatur started to answer but stopped. Not for the first time, one of the ideas a human casually tossed out made him look at the world in a different way. It had never occurred to him that what happened in one place could affect weather somewhere else.
“Is the weather across Ervis Gorge the same as it is here?” he asked after a moment’s thought. “Not much different. Why?”
“The one bad thing about snow is that it makes things far away harder to see. If it’s snowing on the Skarmer side of the gorge, they made decide to hit us now because the males I have watching won’t know they’re coming till too late.”
Louise’s wrappings made trying to read her expression, always a tricky business with humans, a waste of time now. But when she said, “One more thing to worry about,” Reatur’s eyestalks could not help twitching. No matter how strange they looked, in some ways humans thought very much like domain masters.
As if thinking about humans had conjured up more of them, three came into sight trudging along the new path that led from the castle to their flying house. Or perhaps, Reatur thought on seeing Irv, Pat, and Sarah together, it was Louise’s mention of one more thing to worry about that made them appear when they did.
The newcomers had their heads down. They were talking among themselves in their own language. They all jerked in surprise when Reatur called, “Any luck?”
They turned toward him. He saw how splattered with eloc’s blood they were; the wind brought its sharp scent to him, budding and death intermingled in the odor. With that smell so thick, he hardly needed to hear Sarah’s glum reply. “Not much.”
“Some,” Pat corrected. “Budding far along when we get to eloc’s pen. Not have much time to get ready. Do better next try.”
The humans had been saying that since Sarah’s first go at saving an eloc mate. They had yet to keep one alive, Reatur thought gloomily. As if picking his thought from the air like a snowflake, Sarah said, “Not enough luck, not yet. If eloc was Lamra, Lamra dead now.”
“How much longer till Lamra buds?” Irv asked. By dint of endless work, he was starting to speak the Omalo language quite well.
After a moment’s thought, Reatur answered, “An eighteen of days, an eighteen and a half at the outside.” When the humans first put forth the idea of saving Lamra, he had been of two minds about wishing them success. Now, though hope of that success looked as far away as ever, he knew how downcast he would be if they failed. That made no sense to him, but he was getting used to common sense collapsing whenever humans touched it.
What Pat touched was the goresplashed front of her false skins. “Go get clean,” she said to Reatur, and started to walk on toward the flying house. Then she added, “Wish I had hot water,” which left him almost as confused as when he had realized how his feelings about Lamra’s survival had changed.
One of water’s few virtues, to Reatur’s way of thinking, was being better for washing than ice or snow. But hot water?. Hot water was a weapon of war, good for shooting at a foe from a distance or undermining the thick hard ice of his walls. Did Pat mean she was going to wash herself in it? The domain master knew humans loved heat, but that was taking things altogether too far.
He never thought to wonder how Pat felt about his living in a castle made mostly of ice.
The boats bumped down the path toward Jotun Canyon. The path, meant only for occasional travelers, was not nearly wide enough to accommodate so much traffic. Minervans and their beasts of burden slogged eastward, using the roadway more as a sign of the direction in which they should go than as a means of travel in itself.
Oleg Lopatin marched along with them. He was whistling cheerfully, something which, had they heard it, would have filled the rest of the crew of Tsiolkovsky with disbelief. But, he thought, he had every reason to be happy.
For one thing, he was doing conspicuously less than the warriors all around him. True, his AKT4 was slung over his shoulder and he had a heavy pack on his back, but he was not hauling boats on ropes like the Minervans. Nothing satisfies the soul like watching others work harder than oneself.
For another, he was doing, actually doing, something every Soviet officer dreamed of and planned for. He was marching to war against the Americans, in a place where they had no nuclear weapons to make life difficult. So, he whistled.
Fralk turned an eyestalk toward him. “How do you make that peculiar noise, Oleg Borisovich?” the Minervan asked in good Russian.
“You just pucker your lips and-“ Lopatin began in the same language. Then he remembered who-and what-he was talking to. “Never mind,” he said lamely, switching to the Skarmer tongue. “Your mouth, mine not same.”
Fralk sighed. “No, I suppose not.” Even so, a minute or so later he sent air hissing up and out through his mouth. It did not sound like whistling; it sounded like a steam valve with a leak, Lopatin thought. The sight of Fralk’s breath smoking out would have completed the illusion, but Fralk’s breath did not smoke. It was too cold.
The KGB man found another reason to be glad he was marching-he stayed warmer this way.
He passed Minervans practicing their paddling on boats set down by the side of the road. They were none too efficient at best; when they turned three or four eyestalks-and their concentration-on the human instead of their job, they grew positively ragged. Unlike Lopatin, they would not freeze in moments if their coracles flipped them into the icy water now rushing through Jotun Canyon. Also unlike him, though, none of them could swim a stroke.
He expected a good many to drown on the way across. That was too bad, but it could not be helped. Fralk and Hogram, he knew, felt the same way, or they never would have tried crossing the canyon in the first place. And Fralk was also forethoughtful enough to have got the best paddlers in the whole force for his boat.
Had Fralk not come up with that idea for himself, Lopatin would have suggested it. He was going into that coracle, too. But Fralk was no one’s fool. When it came to self-interest, Minervans and humans thought very much alike.
The roar of the torrent in Jotun Canyon had filled Lopatin’s ears all day. He was starting to screen it out, as he did the city noise of Moscow. Now he let himself hear it again. The irregular grind of ice on ice that was part of the racket made him frown. Even the best paddlers might not save him.
That thought came back to haunt him as he peered down from the rim of the canyon and saw through swirling snow the cakes of ice flowing by. He wondered whether Fralk was also full of second thoughts.
More likely, the Minervan was too busy to have time for them. Gangs of males had been laboring to smooth and widen the path down to the water since before the flood began. Even so, it was none too smooth and none too wide. It was also steep and icy. Getting warriors down to where they could cross the stream was no easy job. Getting the boats down there was worse. Lopatin was glad all that was Fralk’s problem, not his.
To give him his due, Fralk was as ready as anyone trying something for the first time could be. The changeovers of the rope crews had been planned with almost balletic precision. Moving the boats along was not the problem it had been on the trek from Hogram’s town. Keeping them from taking off on their own and sliding into the water without any warriors in them, h
owever, presented problems of its own.
Though his own engineering talents were electronic rather than mechanical, Lopatin admired the solution Fralk and his comrades had come up with. At the top of the canyon, most of the boatpullers abruptly turned into boatholders, moving behind their burdens to control them and stop them from running away.
The KGB man clicked off several pictures, fast as the autowinder would let him. He wished he had Tsiolkovsky’s video camera with him, but understood why Tolmasov had said no. Both in the water and across it, he was going into real-serious danger-taking the precious camera along would have risked it as well.
But the stills he was getting could only suggest the smooth discipline of the maneuvers the warriors were carrying out. Ballet was not quite the right comparison after all, Lopatin decided after watching for a few minutes. The groups of males working together reminded him more of public Komsomol displays of mass exercises.
One of Fralk’s constantly twisting eyestalks happened to light on Lopatin. “Oleg Borisovich, you should be on your way down, not gawking up here,” the Minervan scolded.
The Russian felt his face grow hot, snow flurries or no. “You are right, eldest of eldest,” he said formally. “I apologize.” Hoping the spiked soles of his boots would hold, he started down the slope.
“Careful, there,” he heard Fralk yell behind him. “No, no, no, don’t foul the ropes, you spawn of a spavined eloc. Come around this way. There-better, isn’t it?” The general as traffic cop, Lopatin thought, smiling.
In spite of wearing spikes, he soon came to envy the Minervan males their six legs. They could slip the claws on their toes into the tiniest cracks in the roadway to anchor themselves. And even if they fell, they had six arms with which to reach out and grab something. Don’t fall, he told himself grimly, and tramped on.
Fralk hurried past him. Instead of shouting at males getting ready to maneuver boats down the path, now the Minervan was shouting at the males who were starting to put boats into the water. “No, you idiot! Keep the rope attached! Keep it-”
A World of Difference Page 25