A World of Difference

by Harry Turtledove

  The domain master was flabbergasted but did his best not to show it. “Aye, we will,” he answered. “You have my vow on it.”

  “Good enough,” the Skarmer said. He spoke to his males in their own language. They began throwing down their spears and knives and axes. The Skarmer widened himself to Reatur. “We would’ve gotten away if you hadn’t somehow posted warriors in there to block our path. That was well done-I never saw them leave the battle, and I don’t miss much. Juksal, I’m called.” Juksal suddenly seemed to think of something. “Did you use tricks from the funny creatures to get them here?” “The funny creatures?” Reatur asked.

  “Trade talk doesn’t have a word for them. You know-the ones with two arms and two legs.”

  “Oh. Our name for them is ‘humans.’ No, no human tricks,” Reatur said, wondering just where the warriors-his warriors had sprung from. Only one thing occurred to him. He walked toward the defile. Some of his males came with him, in case the Skarmer decided to unsurrender. “Ternat?” he called.

  “Yes,” came the reply, and the warriors with the domain master started to cheer. “How do we stand, clanfather?”

  “Well. Very well now, eldest, very well. The other half of the Skarmer army has already yielded to us.” That brought answering cheers from Ternat and his warband. Reatur went on, “How fare you, eldest?”

  “Also well. I have many, many massi with me, and Dordal as a captive, too.”

  “Do you?” Reatur said when the clamor among his males subsided enough to let him be heard. “Do you? Then, eldest, it is very well indeed.” He thought about that, decided it was too small a thing to say. “Eldest, it is as well as I could have hoped.”

  As soon as Damselfly touched down by Athena, Sarah knew she had made a mistake. If she didn’t want to damage the ultra-ultralight, she would need help getting out, and it looked as though Irv, Louise, and the stepladder were still over on the other side of Reatur’s castle.

  She reached for the radio switch, then dropped her hand. All she wanted to do was sit and shake for a minute. Flying across Jotun Canyon had been tougher physically but had not left her drained and limp the way this bombing run had: terror was harder to take than exhaustion.

  Cold started seeping into her bones as she rested. If she did too much of that, she knew, she would stiffen up and be sore for days. Her hand moved toward the radio again.

  Something hissed through the couple of inches of snow outside. Sarah turned to see what it was; she had never heard any Minervan creature make a noise like that. It wasn’t any Minervan creature, as it turned out: it was Emmett Bragg, speeding up on his bicycle.

  He slid to a smooth stop, waved. “Need a hand getting out of that contraption, don’t you?”

  “Yes, but doesn’t Reatur still need you back at the fight?” “Nope.” He got off the bike. “For one thing, I’m out of ammo, so I’m less use to him now than one of his own warriors who really knows what to do with a spear. For another, he was moppin’ up when I left. With you takin’ out the Kalashnikov, the Skarmer didn’t have anything in the middle, and Reatur broke ‘em in two and defeated ‘am in detail.”

  “All right.” As usual, Sarah thought, Emmett had a good mason for everything he did. She laughed a little-he wasn’t eight feet tall, though. “What are you going to get me out with? The stepladder’s a couple of miles from here.”

  “I’ll manage.” He climbed up the chain ladder to the airlock and disappeared into Athena. When he emerged a minute later, he was carrying a large, square plastic-mesh box. He set it down by Damselfly and then climbed on top. “This ought to do the job.”

  “I think you’re right.” Sarah unlatched the ultra-ultralight’s canopy and swung it open. She stood up on the pedals and reached out for Emmett. He more than half lifted her out of Damselfly’s cabin. The box made a crunching noise under the weight of the two of them. They jumped off it. Sarah stumbled.

  Emmett steadied her with an arm around her shoulder.

  “Let’s get you inside,” he said. “Wearing that skimpy getup, you’re gonna be a lump of ice in a couple of minutes.” They walked over to Athena. He didn’t take his arm away. She started to shrug him off, changed her mind. He was warm.

  She sighed in relief when he shut the inner airlock door after them. “Till I got to Minerva, I never knew how wonderful the words ‘room temperature’ could be,” she said.

  “You know it.” Emmett grinned a lopsided grin. “Of course, they take on a whole other meaning when the walls of the room are made of ice.” He turned serious again. “You did a hell of a job there, Sarah, a hell of a job.”

  “Thanks,” she said, most soberly. “I don’t quite know how I did it, but I guess I did. Right now I’m just so glad to be back here in one piece that I can hardly think about anything else.”

  “Glad to be alive. I know what you mean-do I ever.” The grin got wider. Suddenly Emmett let another yell rip free. “Hot damn, gift, we did it!” he shouted.

  He hugged her, tight enough to make the breath hiss from her lungs. Her arms went around his back. The solid feel of him against her was a welcome affirmation that she was alive. He tilted her face up and kissed her.

  She was kissing him back before she wondered whether she ought to be. “Mmm,” he said, back deep in his throat, without letting up on the kiss. Then his mouth slid to her neck; his teeth gently worried the lobe of her ear.

  She closed her eyes and let her head 1oll back. “Nice,” she purred. Perhaps because of her brush with death, every sensation, the touch of his tongue against the soft skin under the angle of her jaw, his warm breath on her cheek, seemed deliciously magnified.

  His hands were on her hips, planted there as if without the slightest doubt they belonged. “Come on,” he urged, nodding back toward the cubicles.

  She did not hesitate. She had known for months that he wanted her and occasionally wondered how she would react if he ever did anything about it. Then the question had been academic, and easy to answer with a no. Now… “Why not?” she said, feeling almost drunk on excitement.

  His hand guided her into Pat’s cubicle. It was the one farthest forward, but afterward she wondered if he had chosen it because it held nothing that belonged to Irv or Louise and could set off guilt.

  That was afterward. During, she only wanted him to go on. She stood while he quickly undressed her, then did the same for him. They embraced again. He steered her to the foam mattress and lowered himself onto her.

  Low comedy briefly ousted desire. “Wait!’ She wriggled frantically. “Get up for a second!”

  “What the-“ Frowning, Emmett took some weight on his elbows.

  That sufficed. Sarah reached under herself and threw aside whatever it was she had been lying on. Her arms went around his neck and pulled him back to her. “Now!” she said.

  Had she not already known he was a test pilot, she might have guessed it by the way he took her. He flew her as if she were some new plane, she thought before all thought vanished, trying this, trying that, seeing how she responded, what the limits of her performance were. Gasping, she doubted she had any limits.

  He laughed when, at the end, she tried to sink her teeth into his shoulder. “Easy there. Shouldn’t leave marks,” he said, mind still in full control even as his body quivered and drove deep into hers.

  That brought her back to herself faster than she wanted to return and brought her also to the beginning of anger. She suddenly suspected-no, she knew-the flying itself was more important to him than the plane he flew. Being just another test vehicle on which he could prove his expertise grated.

  He sprang up from the mattress and bounded down the passage. “What the hell?” she squawked, startled out of annoyance.

  “Radio buzzer.” His words floated back to her. “I wonder how long it was on while we were busy here.” Then she heard the insistent signal, too, and started to giggle. He had paid some attention to her after all. She heard him pick up the mike. Then he called loudly, “Sarah, y
ou’d better come. It’s about Lamra.”

  She raced to the control room. Only when Emmett handed her the microphone did she realize that they were both still naked. She didn’t care. “What about Lamra?” she demanded.

  “Hon?”

  It was Irv. It would be Irv, she thought. Now she cared who she was standing with, and how. She felt herself go hot, then cold. But what Irv was calling about mattered more than anything, at least for the moment. “What about Lamra?”

  Lamra looked at herself. How funny I look, was the first thought that went through her mind, well ahead of I’m alive and the surprise that accompanied it. Her budbulges, which had been so firm and full, were split open like ebster fruit and sagged clown almost onto her feet. Great strips of the sticky hide the humans used to hold things together clung to her skin. She supposed they were helping to hold her together.

  She really was the most ridiculous creature imaginable. Four eyestalks quivered. The motion was less than she had though it would be. For some reason, they didn’t want to do what she told them to. But she was laughing.

  “Lamra?” Three voices all at once, two sounding like people but oddly accented, the third deep and strange: humans.

  She tried to talk. Her mouth didn’t seem to want to work, either. She tried again. “Where’s my runnerpest?” she demanded at last. The humans abruptly stopped paying attention to her. They yelled and screamed and, she saw when she managed to raise her eyestalks a little, jumped up and down.

  “Where’s my runnerpest?” she repeated, louder this time.

  One of the humans finally handed her the toy. It was bloody.

  She squeezed it anyhow.

  “How are you? How do you feel.?” the humans all asked over and over again once they got coherent enough to talk sensibly.

  “Tired,” she answered. More thought produced, “Sore. Messy.” She was thinking just clearly enough to know she wasn’t thinking very clearly. “Hungry, too.”

  “Sore where?” Pat sounded anxious. “Hurt bad?”

  “I’m sore where-I guess where-you put those clamps”-she used the human word she had learned-“on me. No, Pat, I don’t hurt bad. When you put them on, I hardly felt it at all. I hardly felt anything at all. It was funny.” When she laughed this time, her eyestalks wiggled the way they should. “It was like being asleep and awake at the same time. Do you know what I mean?”

  “No.” Pat made the up-and-down gesture humans used for a shrug. “Glad you are not hurt, though.”

  Louise held up a couple of squirming, squalling… At first Lamra thought they were big runnerpests, but then she remembered seeing their like before sometimes, when Reatur would walk out after a mate had dropped. “Oh. The budlings,” she said.

  “Yes. You want to see?”

  “I suppose so.” Everything was interesting to Lamra, at least for a little while. But the budlings got boring fast. All they did was flail about and make noise. “That’s enough. You can put them down now.”

  Irv spoke into his talkingbox. The box, to Lamra, was much more interesting than budlings. She had started out wondering how humans made themselves small enough to fit inside, for their voices surely came out of it. Later she realized they didn’t hide in there, but talked with each other at a distance. To her, that was more marvelous, not less.

  Irv spoke into the talkingbox again. This time, nobody answered. Irv shook the box, broke it in half-Lamra hadn’t known it opened up-looked inside, made a human shrug, put the box back together. He held it to his mouth once more. He spoke louder now.

  When nothing happened, Pat got out her talkingbox and offered it to Irv. But just then, noise came out of his: another rumbling human voice talking. Irv answered. Lamra knew only a handful of words of human speech but recognized her name and Sarah’s.

  And sum enough, Sarah’s voice came from the talkingbox a moment later. She was talking about Lamra, too. Suddenly she started using words a person could understand. “Lamra, how are you? How do you feel?”

  Lamra’s eyestalks wiggled. “You humans all ask the same questions,” she said when Irv held the talkingbox above her mouth.

  “Never mind jokes!” Sarah said sharply. “Tell me fight now how you are!”

  Lamra looked at herself again. “Ugly, I think. And the tape”-another human word she had picked up-“itches.”

  “Not what I mean!” Sarah sounded the way humans sometimes did when Lamra couldn’t figure out what they wanted fast enough.

  “Please don’t be angry.” Lamra wanted to pull in all her arms and eyestalks. “I think I’m all right, Sarah, except for the holes in me where the budlings were. Will they close up, or will I look like this from now on?”

  “Not know, Lamra.” Not counting a tiny hiss, only silence came out of the talkingbox for a while. Then Sarah went on, “Sorry, Lamra, not mean to be angry at you. Angry at me.”

  “Why would you be angry at yourself?” Sometimes humans made no sense at all to Lamra.

  “Angry because I not there when your budlings come,” Sarah answered. “Want to be there to help you, but not can do.”

  “Oh. Don’t worry, Sarah. It’s all fight,” Lamra said. “Irv and Pat and”-she had to think for a moment-“Louise helped me very well. What could you have done that they didn’t?”

  Another silence, longer this time. Irv fiddled briefly with the talkingbox and then said, “Lamra, Sarah thought of the way we used to save you. She showed us what to do. We were lucky to do it fight without her here. If we make-had made-a mistake, she show us how to fix it.” His strange voice held the gentleness Reatur used when explaining something to a new mate who was hardly more than a hurling herself.

  “Oh.” Lamra thought about the tone Irv had used, about his words, and decided she had been silly. “Sarah?” she said. Irv put the talkingbox above her mouth again. “I’m sorry, Sarah; I wish you’d been here, too. You must have been doing something important, or you would have been.”

  Still more silence. Then: “Not as important as you, Lamra; not as important as you. But did Reatur ever talk to you about Skarmer males on this side of Ervis Gorge?”

  “Yes, Sarah.” Lamra squeezed the toy runnerpest again.

  “He beat them. I helped him beat them.”

  “That is important, Sarah,” Lamra said. “If Reatur hadn’t beaten them, then what happened with me wouldn’t matter much, would it?”

  “No, not much,” Sarah said. “But still, curse it, Lamra, I wish I there with you instead!”

  “All right, Sarah,” Lamra said, thinking once more that even when humans used people’s words, they didn’t always make sense with them. Trying to figure out what they meant was fun, though, and now, she realized, she would have more time to do it. She liked that.

  X

  The males standing guard outside Hogram’s audience chamber hefted their spears as Tolmasov and Bryusov walked by. Their eyestalks followed the two humans. Seeing a spearpoint twitch a couple of centimeters toward him, Tolmasov wished he were carrying his AKT4 instead of a radio. But no, he thought-an AKT4 had helped cause his predicament.

  “They are not fond of us anymore, Sergei Konstantinovich,” Bryusov said quietly. He could feel it, too, then.

  “No,” the pilot agreed. “I only hope they are not in the habit of blaming the messenger for the news he brings.” He felt like some luckless boyar coming to Ivan the Terrible with word of a disaster against the Tatars.

  The Minervans talking in file audience chamber fell silent as the humans entered. A couple of males ostentatiously turned all their eyes away from Tolmasov and Bryusov. “They deny that we have the right to exist,” Bryusov murmured.

  “Like turning their backs-but they have no backs. Yes, I understand, Valery Aleksandrovich.” Even though the linguist kept stating the obvious, Tolmasov was glad he was along. Being able to speak the Skarmer tongue fluently ought to give him insight into the way the locals thought. And having another human close by was comforting in this room full of hostile alie
ns.

  Hogram waited at the far end of the hall. Tolmasov approached the domain master, bowed low in lieu of widening himself. Beside him, Bryusov did the same. Before, Hogram had always widened in reply, as much as he would have to one of his high advisors. The minimal widening he gave the humans now told how their status had changed.

  “We have come as you asked us to come, clanfather,” Tolmasov said. Let Hogram remember who needed whom now.

  “Yes, I asked you to come,” Hogram said. Tolmasov watched him closely, looking for any color change, but Hogram was far too wily to let his skin reveal his feelings. “I want you to explain once more, not just to me but to all my councilors here, how the rifle for which we paid such a great price failed to help us defeat the Omalo.”

  So you want to say everything is our fault, do you, Tolmasov thought. It made Hogram seem very human, but the pilot did not intend to let him get away with it. “Honored clanfather, am I wrong, then?” he asked innocently. “If we humans not come down in your domain, you stay on this side of Ervis Gorge, not send males across?”

  Though Hogram stayed green, several of his advisors turned a furious yellow. “We thought we’d surely win with your weapon!” one of them shouted. “Instead-”

  “Instead,” Hogram broke in, “instead, those Skarmer males who are not dead are Reatur’s captives, and Fralk, my eldest of eldest, is slain. As my eldest died years ago, the domain must now pass to Lorkis, my second, who is far from ready to take mastery. And I am old, so he may have to do so at any time.”

  “Honored clanfather, one of our males also died east of Ervis Gorge, a sixth part of all our numbers,” Bryusov said.

  “Sooner all you humans than Fralk,” Hogram said. The rest of the Minervans shouted agreement. Tolmasov wished for the Kalashnikov again.

  “Hogram, in war nothing is sure, not with rifle, not without,” he said. He could not talk prettily in the Skarmer speech the way Bryusov could, but he knew he talked plain clear sense. “But you should be glad some humans still alive, on this side of Ervis Gorge and on other side.”