A World of Difference

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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 aliens.

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.”

“Why is that?” Now, when his words were quiet and controlled, Hogram did start to turn yellow. “Why should I not wish I had never seen any of you?”

Tolmasov took out his radio. “Because of this, honored clanfather. From this, we learn what happen to your army long before you find out otherwise, and what we learn, we tell you.”

“And, because of this”-Bryusov pointed to the radio, you can bargain with the Omalo on the east side of the gorge. What might Reatur do to your captive males if we, the other humans on that side of the gorge, and, through us, you did not speak up for kindness?”

The audience chamber grew silent. All Hogram’s males were related to one another more or less closely; all felt the anguish of having so many of their kin at their enemy’s mercy. None of them, Tolmasov was sure, considered that those males would not have been in that predicament had they not invaded Reatur’s domain. Back on Earth, the Germans still whined about how their POWs were treated during the Great Patriotic War.

Hogram was green again. Tolmasov was sure his brief show of anger had been just that, a show. When he had summoned the Russians to come before him, he had ordered them to bring a radio. He knew he would have to dicker with Reatur and needed his underlings to know it, too.

Yes, Hogram was a wily one. How much that would help remained to be seen. Reatur held most of the cards, to say nothing of the Skarmer warriors.

“To save our males, I will speak with the Omalo domain master, unless anyone here objects,” Hogram said. He waited. No one objected. He waved a three-fingered hand at Tolmasov.

“Please have the other humans summon Reatur.”

“I will try, honored clanfather,” the pilot said. He knew perfectly well that Reatur was not at the Americans’ beck and call, let alone Hogram’s. When the domain master’s summons came, he had asked Irv Levitt if Reatur would make himself available. Levitt had promised to try to arrange it. Now was the time to see if he had come through. Tolmasov spoke into the radio: “Ready with the relay, Shota Mikheilovich?”

Rustaveli was back at the orange tent; the more powerful transmitter there could reach across Jotun Canyon. “Da. Go ahead,” he answered after a moment.

“Soviet Minerva expedition calling Athena,” Tolmasov said in English; Bryusov translated for the Minervans.

The reply was prompt. “Zdrast ‘ye, Sergei Konstantinovich.

Irv Levitt here. What can I do for you?”

Speaking English, Tolmasov did not have to try to remember Irv’s patronymic. “The domain master Hogram wishes to speak to the domain master Reatur. He-Tolmasov picked his words carefully-“seeks terms for ending the, ah, hostilities between them.”

If Reatur didn’t even want to talk… Tolmasov preferred not to think about that. It would wreck the leverage he had on Hogram.

“Reatur will talk with Hogram, Sergei Konstantinovich,” Irv said in Russian. As the pilot felt a relieved grin stretch across his face, Irv went on in dry English, “We managed to talk him into it, because he feels he owes us one. But your fellow better not ask for much-he’s not very happy about westerners right now.”

The American anthropologist had style, Tolmasov thought, getting his warning across in a language none of the Skarmer could speak. Then Reatur’s contralto came from the speaker, using the trade talk Tolmasov had trouble following himself. “What have you to say for yourself, Hogram?”

The old Skarmer domain master waddled up to Tolmasov, who held the radio near his mouth. “Only that we tried and lost, Reatur. What else can I say? You hold my males. I hope-“ He hesitated, then went on. “I hope you are treating them better than we might have treated yours had we won.”

Some of Hogram’s advisors went blue with fear as he said that. Bryusov gave Tolmasov an appalled look. The pilot kept his face blank. He knew Hogram was gambling but thought it a good gamble. Reatur would recognize and scorn false sweetness; honesty might sway him.

“They’re not harmed, for now,” Reatur said after a short, thoughtful pause. “It’s up to you to persuade me to keep them that way. Put it like this, Hogram-why should I go on feeding all those males who are not mine?”

Hogram sighed. “Because I-my domain-will pay to keep them safe.”

“How much?” That was one short word in trade talk, maybe the basic word of trade talk.

“How much do you want?” Hogram asked.

“How much do you offer?. If it’s enough, I may listen to you.

If not-“ Reatur let the sentence trail away. Hogram sighed again. Even Tolmasov, who had had scant experience bargaining before he landed among these capitalist aliens, could see the cunning behind that ploy. Hogram could not afford to be miserly, not if he wanted to see his warriors again-and, not knowing Reatur’s price for certain, he would have to be doubly extravagant to make sure he met it.

“First, I will give you goods enough to pay the cost of main-mining my males from now until the flood subsides in Ervis Gorge. We can work out later exactly how much that is, but I will pay it.”

“What do I care about goods later, when I have trouble coming up with food now to keep them alive till then?”

Hogram widened himself very slightly to Tolmasov, who dipped his head in response. The domain master spoke into the radio: “Since you now dominate the domain to your north, I trust you will be able to come up with supplies.”

“You know that, do you?” Reatur started talking his own language, which Tolmasov did not speak at all. He heard Irv answer in the same tongue. The American sounded placating. Tolmasov chuckled, thinking, That’s what you get for bragging to me about how wonder0al your client is. The Omalo domain master returned to trade talk. “Well, what of it? Still easier for me to rid myself of my captives than go to the bother of caring for them.”

“That was only a token of good intentions,” Hogram said, “to assure you that forbearance will not harm your domain. Above it, for my males’ safe return I will pay-curse it, Reatur, I will pay that same amount twice more. May your eyestalks rot if you try to melt more out of me.”

“It is not a small price,” Reatur admitted. “Will you include in it, hmm, at least three eighteens of trade goods you have got from your humans, of at least, ah, nine different types?”

Hogram turned yellow. Tolmasov did not blame him. Reatur had all too good a grip on how the arrival of humans was changing Minerva. But the Skarmer chieftain said what he had to say. “I will.”

“Now tell me,” Reatur said, “why you want me to feed and house-and guard-your warriors until fall.”

“Because when the flood subsides, by your leave we will stretch the bridge across Ervis Gorge once more. Our males can cross to our side, and we will send payment to you in return.”

“Send the payment first,” Reatur said promptly.

“I trust you no more than you trust me,” Hogram retorted.

“Send the males first.” “No.”

Hogram turned yellow again. He did not answer.

“We’d best do something,” Bryusov whispered to Tolmasov.

Tile pilot nodded. The spectacle of Russians and Americans helping Minervans fight a war had done nothing for the prestige of the Soviet Union or the United States back home. Helping Minervans make peace might possibly repair it. But the silence was getting icy-a good word for silence on Minerva, Tolmasov thought.

“Suggest they takes turns,” Tolmasov whispered back. “Do it in trade talk, so they’ll both understand.” Bryusov, by now, was fairly fluent in the local lingua franca.

“Honored domain masters,” the linguist said, “perhaps if some males are freed, then some of the payment made, then more males freed-”

“Perhaps,” Hogram said thoughtfully. “A third of the males, a third of the payment, and so on.”

“First you pay, then we release males,” Reatur said. “And we will do it in six turns, not three. If we tried it the other way round, you could cheat us out of the last third of the payment and leave us with no arm of yours to grab.”

Tolmasov waited for Hogram to get angry again. Instead, the Skarmer domain master wiggled his eyestalks. He said, “You are wasted as an Omalo, Reatur; you should have been budded as one of us.”

“No, I’m no thief, Hogram. My job is keeping thieves in line.”

Irv Levitt quickly cut in, in English: “He’s laughing. Is your boy?”

“Yes,” Tolmasov answered, and switched to the Skarmer tongue to let Hogram know what the American had said. Hogram waved an indulgent arm-he had known without being told. Tolmasov felt annoyed, then resigned.

The Skarmer domain master spoke into the radio. “Do we agree?”

“Yes, provided we can work out the cost of feeding the captives each day,” Reatur said. “If not, I suppose I can always start getting rid of them.”

If that was humor, Tolmasov thought, it was in poor taste.

Hogram did not seem put out. “We will work it out,” he said.

“Are we finished, then?”

“I think so,” Reatur answered.

This time, Bryusov interrupted without Tolmasov’s prompting. “Honored domain masters, while you talk with each other now, why not pledge not to fight each other anymore so long as you both abide by today’s agreement?”

“What a foolish pledge that would be,” Hogram said. “Reatur and I do not spring from the same bud. We are not friends.

We may well go to war again, and we both know it. Why lie now?”

“For once we agree, Skarmer,” Reatur said. “And who can say on which side of Ervis Gorge the fight may be? We can make baskets that float on water, too, you know, now that we’ve seen some.”

Hogram made a whistling noise Tolmasov had never heard from a Minervan before, one that reminded him of a teapot coming to a boil. “None of my males grasps the importance of new things as quickly as you do, now that-now that Fralk is dead. I wish you were of my budding, Reatur; I would name you eldest-designate.”

“Dealing with humans”-Reatur said it in English; Tolmasov put it into Russian for the Skarmer-“has taught me more about new things than I ever expected to know.”

“Yes.” Hogram stepped away from the radio. He told Tolmasov, “That is all.”

“Levitt, are you there?” the pilot called. When the American answered, he went on, “We have a success to report, it seems.”

“Yes, they’ll be relieved back home,” Irv answered in English. “I don’t think people back home could stomach a cold-blooded prisoner massacre.” He let the obvious joke lie.

Tolmasov respected him because of it; this was business. “Come to that, I’m not sure I could, either.”

“Out,” was all Tolmasov said. He and Bryusov bowed their way out of Hogram’s presence and started back toward their big orange tent.

“Foolish, the Americans, foolish and soft,” Bryusov said after a while. “One deals with whomever one has to deal with.”

“They talk softer than they are, Valery Aleksandrovich. Never forget it.” Tolmasov had had that same swift flash of contempt for Irv Levitt but changed his mind after a little thought. “For one thing, as you said, Levitt would go right on dealing with Reatur no matter what Reatur did. He may not want to admit it to himself, but he would.

“And for another, before you call them soft, remember what happened to Fralk and Oleg Lopatin. I am trained as a combat pilot, but I would not care to attack a Kalashnikov with a glorified hang glider.”

Bryusov was very quiet for the rest of the walk. That suited Tolmasov fine.

Emmett Bragg was hurrying up the corridor when Sarah came through the airlock into Athena. He stopped and grinned at hex with the peculiarly male grin that never failed to set her teeth on edge. “Will you stop it?” she hissed. “Anyone who sees you will know exactly what that stupid expression means.”

The grin didn’t go away. “Nobody here but you and me.”

“Oh.” That hadn’t happened since the day of the battle. Since then, Sarah had stayed close to Irv most of the time, partly because they both spent a lot of time with Lamra and partly because it kept her from having to think about those frantic minutes on Pat’s mattress. Irv seemed happy enough to be with her, too; they had probably spent more continuous waking time together since Lamra’s budlings dropped than in all the previous months on Minerva put together.

Now she would have to think about those minutes. “Let it slide, Emmett, all right?” In similar circumstances Irv, she was sure, would have come back with a raunchy pun. Emmett just stood there, warrior-alert, and waited for her to go on. That her first thought was of Irv told her some of what she needed to know. “Not that it wasn’t good while it happened, but-”

“But what?” He stepped closer.

“Emmett!” She heard her voice get shrill. That infuriated her, but she couldn’t help it. If he went ahead regardless of whether she wanted him to, she would try to give him a dreadful surprise. But he was bigger, stronger, a trained soldier… Of all the nightmares shell had about being cooped up on Athena with too many people in too small a space for too long, this was the worst.

Smooth as ever, he moved away from her. Then he started to laugh. “What’s so goddamn funny?” she barked, angrier than ever.

“You, gearin’ up to kick me right where it’ll do the most good. You don’t need to do that. Have I ever gone any place I wasn’t welcome?”

“You’d know better than I would.” But that wasn’t fair, either. “Not with me,” Sarah admitted.

“All right, then. Probably better this way, anyhow.” That cool calculation of risk was Emmett to the core.

She did her best to imitate him. “I think you’re right. For the ship and for-everything else.”

“Suppose so.” He cocked his head, studied her. “Do you really think you could’ve stopped me?”

“No,” she answered honestly. “But I was going to give it my best shot.”

“I noticed. Okay-can’t ask for more than that. Now I’m gonna get back to work.” He headed toward the control room, never looking back. For all he showed, he and Sarah might have been at the office water cooler, talking about the weather. She envied his detachment and had no idea how to duplicate it.

“Come on, Peri, throw me the ball!” Lamra shouted. “Throw it to me! It’s my turn this time! I want to play, too!”

Peri threw the ball to another mate. Lamra hurried over toward that one, still trying to get into the game. “No, you can’t have it!” the mate said. She threw the ball to someone else. “You can’t play with us anymore, Lamra. You’re too ugly.”

“That’s right,” Peri said. “You’ve got holes in you from where your budlings fell out, and with them falling out, you shouldn’t even be here. You should have ended, like mates are supposed to do. Who ever heard of an old mate?”

“Who ever heard of an old mate? Who ever heard of an old mate?” A bunch of mates, maybe even an eighteen of them, formed a jeering ring around Lamra. Sun-yellow with fury, she rushed at them, but they skipped aside, jeering still. And even if she had managed to catch one, what good would it have done? The rest would all pile on her before she could get any of her own back.

Sometimes she wondered if letting the humans save her had been a good idea. Down deep, she hadn’t really expected them to do it. Before, when she had thought about what would come after, she just thought about going on as she always had, about running around and playing with the other mates without the big budling bulges getting in her way.

But the others didn’t want to play with her, not anymore. “Who ever heard of an old mate? Who ever heard of an old mate?”

They were so busy making fun of Lamra, they hardly noticed the door to the mates’ chambers opening. “What’s going on here?” Reatur shouted. He was as yellow as Lamra, but his rage was not helpless like hers.

Some of the mates turned blue and ran away. Others held their ground. “We don’t want her here,” Peri yelled at the domain master. “She should go away.”

“You go away, right now,” Reatur cried in a terrible voice. He turned all his eyestalks toward the wall three arms away from Peri. Her bravado collapsed. She went from yellow to blue so fast she wasn’t even green between, then tled with a squeak.

Reatur let his eyes look all around again. “That doesn’t help, you know,” Lamra said sadly. “You can’t make them like me, Reatur. As soon as you’re gone, this will just start again.”

“Will it?” Reatur said. “Does it?”

“Every time.” Lamra hesitated, then went on, “I thought it would get better. I mean, I’m not as odd-looking as I used to be. I don’t have tape all over me, and I don’t have those big bandages stuck where the budlings came out. But it isn’t any better, not with the other mates. I guess I’m still too strange. I think my runnerpest is the only thing that likes me anymore.” She opened a hand and looked down at the toy Reatur had given her.

“That is not true,” the domain master said. “I like you, you know.”

“Yes, of course I know that,” Lamra said. “After all, you made the runnerpest, and-and-“ She stopped when she realized the size of the compliment he had paid her. Widening herself was the least she could do, and she did it. Then she blurted, “But you’re not here to like me very often.”

“That is also true,” Reatur said slowly. “I cannot be here all the time, though, not if I intend to run the domain, too.” He paused a while in thought. “Shall I gather all the mates together and tell them they have to treat you just like anyone else?”

For a moment, hope tingled through Lamra. She wondered if that would work. “I don’t think so,” she said at last, sadly. “They’ll just be angry at me for getting them into trouble. And-I’m not just like them anymore, am I? I’m only like me, and I’m lonesome.”

“I know you are. There’s never been a mate like you before.” Reatur thought again himself, then went on, “Which means the laws that hold other mates don’t necessarily put fingerclaws on you.”

“So what, clanfather?” Talk about laws meant nothing to Lamra. Mates lived as they lived, and that was all there was to it.

“So perhaps…” Reatur’s voice trailed away. When he resumed, Lamra wondered whether he was talking to himself or to her. “So perhaps, just perhaps, now it might be all right for you to go outside the mates’ chambers and live-well, almost as if you were a male, I suppose.” He sounded surprised at where his mouth was taking him but went on anyhow. “Would you like that, Lamra?”

“I don’t know.” The idea was so alien to her, she could hardly take it in. She seized on the part of it closest to her troubles and asked, “Will males like me better than mates do?”

“I don’t know,” Reatur said. “Some will, some won’t, I expect. That’s the way it usually is. Some people don’t like anything strange and different. But I think your chance is better now than it would be another time. What with the humans still being here, things are already so strange that you may be just one oddity among many.”

“That’s better than what I am now, here.” Lamra thought some more. “You mean I’ll be able to see and touch and smell all the things on the other side of that door?” “As many of them as you want.”

For all her life, that door had marked the end of Lamra’s universe. She saw the outside world, faintly, through the sandy ice that let light into the mates’ chambers. To mingle with those moving shapes, though, to find out what they truly were-

“Come on!” she said, and hurried toward the door. The slits of skin that had opened to let out her budlings flapped as she ran. They were healing together, slowly and raggedly; she would never have quite the same smooth up-and-down lines as before she had begun to bud, no matter how long she lived.

Reatur followed her. “Open,” he told the guard on the far side of the door. Lamra heard the male lift the bar from the brackets that held it. Before the door opened, the domain master said, “You can still change your mind, you know.”

“Why would I want to do that?” Lamra asked. The door started to swing open. The first glimpse she had of the world beyond it gave her answer. That corridor seemed to stretch on forever, though it was only a tiny part of the castle. And outside the castle was the whole world, unimaginably big, unimaginably strange. For a moment staying where she was, knowing everything-and everyone around her, felt like the only safe thing to do.

But strangeness had already come in through that door. Had it not, she would not be standing here turning blue with fright at the prospect of going out. Air hissed through her breathing pores. “Come on,” she said again, not an excited squeal this time but determined even so.

“Let me go first.” Lamra moved aside so Reatur could pass.

The guard started to shut the door after the domain master.

“Wait, please, Orth,” Reatur said.

“Sorry, clanfather. Did one of the humans go in before my duty started?” Orth poked an eyestalk around the edge of the door. “No,” he answered himself, seeing only Lamra.

“No,” Reatur agreed. He paused, as if he, too, was having second thoughts. But when he resumed, he spoke firmly. “This is the mate Lamra, the one the humans saved when she dropped her budlings. As you can see, she will not be ready to have buds planted on her again for some time, if ever. I am going to bring her out of the mates’ chambers into the world. Treat her as you would a male of the same age.”

“Clanfather?” Orth sounded so shocked, Lamra wondered if he would leave the door open for her. He did. Perhaps he was too surprised not to. His eyestalks kept moving back and forth between Reatur and Lamra.

She widened herself as much as she could, far wider than she made herself for Reatur these days. “Hello, Orth,” she said. Barring humans, she had never talked to any male but Reatur before.

“Orth-“ Reatur prompted.

“Hello,” the guard managed to say. His eyestalks returned to the domain master. “A mate out by herself, living like a male? Forgive me, clanfather, but not even a massi-herder living off by himself with a couple of mates would let them run loose. How could he? They don’t know enough not to get into mischief, and then-“ Orth suddenly seemed to realize Lamra was a person of sorts, even if a mate. “-and then they’re, uh, done,” he finished weakly.

“They die before they learn enough not to get into mischief, you mean, because they drop their budlings,” Reatur said. “Lamra has dropped her budlings and isn’t dead. She can learn. She has time to learn.”

Orth stood silent. “Hello,” Lamra said again in a soft voice. Orth didn’t answer. He doesn’t like me, Lamra thought-nobody likes me out here, either. She started to go back into the mates’ chambers. With the mates, at least she could remind herself how foolish they were. But grownup males weren’t foolish. She knew that. If they didn’t like her, maybe she wasn’t worth liking.

But Reatur said, “Come along,” and started down the corridor. She found herself following him; he was the one link with certainty she had left.

“What’s that?” she exclaimed a little later, pointing into a small room. She had expected to see different things outside the mates’ chambers, but none so different as the-animal? monster? in there.

Reatur wiggled his eyestalks. “For years-for longer than you’ve been alive-I wondered the same thing. I found it in the hills not far from here. Turns out the humans made it. It’s one of their gadgets, fancier than most.”

“Oh,” Lamra said. “Then there were humans so long ago.

I hadn’t thought of that.”

Reatur looked at her. “I hadn’t, either, not in that way. They certainly never showed themselves till this past spring. But you never can tell with humans.”

“No, you can’t,” Lamra said, “because if you could, I wouldn’t be here with you now.”

Males walked by as Lamra stood in the doorway, peering at the human gadget. They peered at her, too. None of them spoke to her, though, or even to Reatur about her. She wondered if they were trying to pretend she didn’t exist. She squeezed her runnerpest. The pressure of it in her hand reminded her she was real.

Then a male said, “Well, well, what have we here? You must be Lamra.”

He was talking to her. She widened herself and stammered, “Yyes, I am. Who are you?”

“I’m Ternat, Reatur’s eldest. Are you, ah, doing well, Lamra?

You must find this whole business about as odd as we do.”

Someone who understood! Someone who wasn’t Reatur or a human but understood! So that could happen! “I’m-better now, thank you very much, Ternat.”

“Good.” Ternat turned an eyestalk toward Reatur. “Why did you decide to bring her out, clanfather?.”

“The mates were harassing her,” the domain master answered. “Males will, too, I fear, but they’ll have the sense to obey me when I tell them to stop. And they’re grown; they won’t try to hurt her just because she’s different. Or if anyone does, the example I make of him will show the others it’s not a good idea.”

Lamra widened herself to Reatur this time. “Thank you for thinking ahead and looking out for me, clanfather.”

“You don’t know how to look out for yourself yet, Lamra. I expect you’ll learn. Some males get to be old and saggy-skinned without ever figuring it out.” Reatur’s eyestalks twitched. “In fact, there’s one of just that sort I’d like you to meet.” He started down the corridor, then paused to wave an encouraging arm to Ternat. “You come, too, eldest. I think you’ll enjoy this.”

The domain master led Lamra out through an open door. Suddenly she realized no walls were anywhere nearby. She stopped walking and watched herself turn blue. “Is this- outside?” she asked faintly. She felt like a speck of dust floating in the middle of infinite space.

“Yes, it is,” Reatur said. “What do you think of it?” He did not mention her color.

“It’s-very big.”

“So it is. Come on, now; we don’t have far to go.” And off he went, Ternat beside him. Lamra had a choice of staying frozen while the two people in the world who cared about her went away or of going after them. She took a step, then another and another. They came ever more easily. Reatur went outside all the time, she thought, and it didn’t hurt him. It probably wouldn’t hurt her, either.

But there was so much of it!

Several eighteens of males-more eighteens than Lamra could easily count-milled about in a large pen made of branches.

Others, these carrying spears, stood all around the pen.

“These are the males from Dordal’s domain that Ternat captured,” Reatur explained. “We’d send them back, but for some reason”-his eyestalks wiggled briefly-“Dordal’s eldest, Grevil, isn’t interested in paying for them.”

One of the males, a large impressive one near the edge of the pen, was saying in a loud voice, “All this talk of humans”-

Lamra knew mates who pronounced the word better than he did-“bores me no end. They’re weird things, true enough, but what can they really do? I’m tired of hearing impossible lies and fables.”

“Hello, Dordal,” Reatur said. “So you want to know what humans can do, eh? Here, let me present you to the mate Lamra. The humans saved her when she dropped her budlings not long after Ternat captured you.”

Dordal’s eyestalks jounced up and down with humor that was obviously forced. “Tell me another tale, Reatur.” Then one of those moving eyes lit on Lamra. “It is a mate,” he said in surprise. “I’d not have thought even one like you would let them run loose. But why does it look so-tattered?”

“I told you, Dordal. You listen about as well as you plan. Lamra dropped her budlings, and the humans kept her from dying afterward.”

“That’s what happened, Dordal,” Lamra agreed. “I was there. I ought to know.” She reached down, pulled wide the still partially open flaps of skin that had once bulged over a budling. Dordal drew back in alarm. Lamra could not see why; only the clamps were still in there, and Sarah had promised that even they could come out in another few days.

“She’ll live longer than you will, Dordal,” Ternat said cheerfully. “A lot longer, if Grevil doesn’t come up with your ransom soon.”

“Humans did that?” Dordal muttered. He turned blue, hurried away from the fence. “Then they’re worse monsters than she is!”

“Don’t let him bother you,” Reatur told Lamra. “He hasn’t any more sense than a runnerpest, you know.”

Lamra squeezed her toy. “I do know,” she said, unruffled. “Some mates are like that, too, even ones who got older than I am before they started budding. I didn’t think it would be true of males, too, that’s all. Of course, the only male I’ve really known till now is you, Reatur.” For some reason she could not fathom, the domain master and his eldest started laughing at each other. “Stop it! What’s funny?”

“Never mind, little one,” Reatur said. To Ternat, he went on, “You see why I wanted to keep this one?”

“Because she can tell you’re brighter than Dordal? A nosver could figure out that much.”

“Disrespectful-“ But Reatur’s eyestalks were wiggling again. “No, because she thinks about the way things work. Don’t you, Lamra?”

“I try to,” she said absently. She wasn’t paying too much attention to the domain master. She was too busy looking at the wide, wide world, or rather, at pieces of it. If she examined one thing at a time, the wideness was less oppressive. She pointed. “What’s that?”

“That’s a lykao shrub,” Reatur said. “Massi like the betlies.”

“Oh. What’s that?” She pointed in a different direction.

“That’s an eloc.”

“Oh. It doesn’t look much like its meat, does it? What’s that?”

She pointed again.

But instead of answering, Reatur pointed at her. “That is a mate who looks as though she’ll be wandering around asking questions for the next year, now that she has so many new things to ask questions about.”

“You’re right,” Lamra said happily.

“Good heavens,” Irv said. “what happened to your calculator?.”

Pat held it up. The only thing that held the batteries in was a big piece of duct tape. “Beats me,” she said. “I thought I left the stupid thing on my bed a while ago, but I found it on the floor with the back smashed to hell.”

“You must have stepped on it without noticing,” Irv said.

“How do you not notice something that goes crunch?” Pat retorted.

“Speaking of not noticing,” Louise said, looking up from a tape she was feeding into the computer for transmission back to Earth, “that calculator’s been patched since-“ She thought back. “I guess since the day Lamra had her budlings, the day of the big battle.”

Pat nodded. “That’s right. I remember having to fix it right after we all came back from Reatur’s castle.”

“Oh,” Irv said. “Well, hush my mouth.” He made as if to pull his head inside his shirt. Louise pretended to throw the tape cassette at him. He ducked. Everybody in the control room laughed. He spread his hands in defeat. “If that’s when it happened, I give up. None of us will forget anything about that day, not if we live to be ninety.”

“You better believe it,” Louise said.

Irv remembered coming back from the castle, too, after Sarah had sped out there to make sure Lamra really was all right. He remembered drawing the privacy curtain to their cubicle afterward, so he and Sarah could celebrate her being alive, Lamra’s being alive, everyone’s being alive. And he remembered a pink-purple not-quite-mark, not-quite-bruise, in the middle of her left buttock.

At the time, he had thought nothing of it. He’d had other, more immediate things on his mind. But he remembered. And, it occurred to him now, that mark had been just about the size and shape of Pat’s calculator.

So what had Sarah been doing that involved lying on a calculator, or maybe lying on one and then, say, throwing it to the floor? The only answer Irv came up with was the immediately obvious one.

And with whom? The answer to that was immediately obvious, too. Sarah liked men, at least in situations where-where one might be apt to lie on a calculator, Irv thought. The joke he tried to make fell flat, though he only told it to himself.

Another question filled his mind: What the hell am I going to do about this? Unlike the couple that had preceded it, that one had no immediately obvious answer. Confronting Emmett struck him as either useless or suicidal, depending on how much he annoyed the pilot.

Confronting Sarah-oh, that’d be real good, he said to himself: you’d even have to lie to claim the moral advantage.

He glanced over at Pat, then at Louise. So far as he knew, she hadn’t done anything she wasn’t supposed to with anybody. But if Emmett had, she was affected, too. “Great,” Irv muttered. Two, count ‘em, two unsanctioned bellybumps and the whole damn crew was involved.

Or was it just two? On reflection, I decided it probably was. Since the day of the battle, Sarah had stuck a lot tighter to him than had been her habit before. Maybe she had all the same regrets he did. He hoped so, partly for the sake of their marriage and partly just because he wanted someone else to be as confused as he was.

The psychologists back home had warned about this kind of thing, for exactly these reasons. One of the rare times the psychologists were dead right, Irv thought, so of course nobody paid attention to them.

He laughed a little, under his breath. It was funny, in a French-movie sort of way. Then he sobered. In French movies, sooner or later everybody found out what was going on, and the fur really started to fly. That could happen here, too, from the same kind of accidental revelation he had just had. He hoped it wouldn’t, but it could.

“And wouldn’t that be wonderful?”

He didn’t realize he had spoken more or less out loud until Pat said, “What?”

“Nothing,” he said firmly. “I was just thinking, it ought to be an interesting flight home.”

Snow swirled around Ternat. Fall was here early this year, he thought. Under most circumstances, that would have made him happy; he had no more use for summer heat than Reatur did. Now, though, he was looking for something, and the snow made it hard to find.

His feet scraped ice. “We’re down to the very bottom of the gorge,” he told the males with him. The frozen patch he was standing on, and others he knew to be nearby, were all that was left of the summer floods.

“How are we supposed to find the end of a rope in the middle of all this?” grumbled one of his companions. “We could look from now till the next flood comes through and washes us away.”

“The Skarmer said it would be easy, when their humans talked with ours,” Ternat said. “Of course, the Skarmer have been known to lie.”

“They’d better not try it now,” said the male who had complained, “not while we still hold their warriors.” The rest of the band growled agreement.

“Exactly,” Ternat said. “So we have to figure the cursed thing is around here someplace. Let’s spread out a little and see what we can come up with. We have to try to keep each other in sight-we don’t want to go straggling up the side of the gorge by ones and two, as if we were so many of Dordal’s males.”

Eyestalks twitched. The loud male yelled, “If Dordal’s males act like that, it’s because he went home all by himself.” The laughter grew. When Grevil refused for the third time to ransom the northern domain master, Reatur had released him without payment. The civil war brewing between Dordal and his disloyal eldest showed the wisdom of the move. Ternat wondered if he would have thought of it.

The males formed a circle, as if they were warriors bracing to meet an attack from all sides. But this circle was wider, to let them search more ground and still stay in touch with one another.

They moved forward slowly, cautiously. People seldom went down to the bottom of Ervis Gorge, and of course it was never the same from one flood to the next, anyhow. Anything might be here. Ternat was glad he had a spear.

The male to one side of him suddenly stopped. “What’s that funny noise?” he said, suspicion thick in his voice. Ternat listened, heard only the wind. He went over to the other male, who pointed and said, “It’s coming from over there, I think.”

Ternat listened again. Now he also heard the strange, rhythmic thump, twang, and tinkle. For a moment he thought of the beasts legend put in the depths of the gorge, beasts that could lure a male to destruction. Then his eyestalks wiggled in relief. “That’s human music,” he said.

“There’s a human down here?” the male said incredulously. “I doubt it,” Ternat said. “They have gadgets that make music for them. My guess is that the Skarmer put one by their rope so the noise would guide us. A good idea, I must say.”

“Pretty sneaky, if you ask me,” the male said, as he would have about anything Skarmer. But then he shouted along with Reatur’s eldest to let the rest of the band know what they had found.

Ternat’s prediction proved good. The gadget sat on a large rock. Like a fair number of human gadgets, it looked like a box. Ternat wondered how the humans knew this box made music instead of, say, pictures. He let his arms and eyestalks shrug in and out: one more thing about humans he would probably never learn.

The box had a handle. Tied to the handle was a thin string. “This is what we came for,” Ternat said. “We have to be careful now, so we don’t break it on the way back.”

The other end of the string was nowhere in sight. Ternat knew that eventually, back toward the Skarmer side of Ervis Gorge, it would join a cord, the cord a rope, the rope a thicker rope, and so on by increments until it linked to the massive cordage of the bridge that would once more span the gorge.

His small band, though, could scarcely have moved that massive final rope, let alone hauled it back to the stones to which it would be attached. Thus the lighter precursors: getting them to the attachment point, where a good-sized crew waited, would be easy.

“What are you going to do with the box?” a male asked.

“Keep it,” Ternat replied at once. “It can be part of Hogram’s first payment to get his miserable males back, and if he doesn’t like that, too bad. Maybe our humans can tell us if it’s good for anything besides their funny music.”

“Me,! don’t know that I want to be linked up to the Skarmer anymore, not after this summer,” a male said.

“We can always cut the rope again, you know,” Ternat said. “Not till we get all those cursed hungry Skarmer out of our domain,” another male put in. “I know we’ll be fat this winter with what Hogram’s sending us, but it’s only right. We’ve been thin up to now, what with them eating up so much of our food.”

“And Dordal’s,” said yet another, who had accompanied Ternat on the raid into the northerner’s domain. “Let’s not forget all those greasyfat massi we brought back with us. Hogram’s males didn’t complain about the way they tasted.”

“Hogram’s males weren’t in a position to complain about anything,” Ternat said. “They’re just glad we’ve fed them at all. And do you know what? They’re lucky we have.”

The band shouted agreement. Ternat still wondered if keeping the prisoners alive had been a good idea. Had the humans not urged otherwise, he was sure Reatur would have massacred the Skarmer. The ransom the domain master was squeezing out of Hogram was more than enough to pay for the cost of maintaining the captives, but was it enough to compensate for having to look at them all through summer and fall, enough to compensate for remembering all the damage they had done, the lives they had taken?

Ternat did not know; where was the scale on which to balance such weights? Reatur had accepted. His eldest, trusting him, supposed that was good enough.

He lifted the string. “Come on. Time to go home.”