A World of Difference

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, however, 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-”

Too late. The boat was already sliding downstream. The warriors who had let it get away stared at it with a couple of eyestalks and apprehensively back at Fralk with the rest. He screamed abuse at them. Lopatin chuckled. He did not understand even half of what Fralk was yelling, but anyone who had ever soldiered recognized the tone.

One of the males past whom Lopatin was marching wiggled his eyestalks at the human. Even in an alien species, Lopatin could tell this was a veteran: his spears and shields were old and battered, not shiny new ones like those most of the warriors carried, and pale scars seamed his hide.

“Taught that little budling everything he knows about fighting, I did: me, Juksal,” the male said. “Even sounds like a warrior now, doesn’t he?”

“Yes, and a leader of warriors,” Lopatin agreed.

“Taught him everything he knows about fighting,” Juksal repeated. The Minervan boasted like a veteran, too, the KGB man thought. Lopatin had listened to more stories about the Great Patriotic War than he ever wanted to remember. Almost all of them, a security man’s automatic cynicism told him, were lies.

He was drawing near the boats at the makeshift landing when he happened to recall a piece of a war story he had thought long forgotten. The fellow who told it was a Stalingrad survivor and had the campaign ribbon to prove it. “The worst of the worst times,” he had said, “was when the Germans had us pinned back against the Volga and the drift ice on the river made it damn near impossible to get supplies across to us.”

Lopatin looked at the chunks of ice floating by, looked at the coracle to which he was about to entrust his precious, irreplaceable neck. He wished-oh, how he wished he had never remembered that story.

Emmet Bragg frowned as he examined the latest photo from one of the weather and mapping satellites Athena had left in orbit around Minerva. Emmet had a whole spectrum of frowns, Irv thought-this one went with real live serious problems. “What’s hit the fan?” Irv asked.

“I’m not quite sure,” Emmett answered; the frown changed shape, to reflect his uncertainty. “Here, see what you make of this.” He leaned over to show Irv the picture, pointing with a ballpoint pen at the part that was troubling him. “This dark line here?” Irv asked.

Emmet nodded. “That’s the one. Nothing like it on any earlier pictures o’ that area. That’s the country just west of Jotun Canyon from here, you know.”

“I recognized it.” Irv peered at the picture. Now he was frowning, too. “What do you suppose this is?”

“A lousy picture, for one thing, through scattered clouds and without enough resolution. I wish we had a Defense Department special instead of these miserable terrain-mappers-that’d tell us what was what.”

“Back when we set out, who’d have thought we’d need to be able to kibitz at card games from space?” Irv asked reasonably.

“Nobody, worse luck,” Emmett answered. “But I wish somebody had, because one of the things that line could be is the Skarmer army headed out to do its thing.”

Irv felt his frown deepen till it matched the one Emmet was wearing. “Yeah, it could, couldn’t it? They could be doing something else just as easily, too, though, or it might not be Minervans at all.”

“I know, I know, I know.” Bragg looked unhappy. “A spy bird would tell us, one way or the other. As is, all I can do is guess, and I hate that.” The mission commander sat brooding for a minute or so, then snatched at the radio set. “Who are you calling?” Irv asked.

“Frank,” Emmett said. He spoke into the microphone:

“Frank? You there? Answer, please.”

A moment later, Frank Marquard did. “Your humble canyon-crawler is here, humbly crawling his canyon. Found another fossil about twenty minutes ago, too. What’s up, Emmett?”

“I don’t know for sure, but I think maybe the Skarmer are coming. If they are, they’ll be heading up our side of Jotun Canyon. I don’t think you want to be there when they do.”

“Are you certain they’re coming?” Frank asked. “I’m further north than I’ve been before, and I’ve found some interesting strata here, things that don’t poke through down by Athena. I don’t want to leave if I don’t have to.”

“I’m not sure,” Bragg said, looking as though the admission pained him. He always looked that way when certainty eluded him, Irv thought.

“Then I’m not leaving,” Frank said.

Bragg made a fist, pounded it against his knee. He glanced over toward Irv. Order him back, the anthropologist thought. But before he could speak, Bragg turned back to the microphone. “You be alert out there, you hear me!” he said.

“Sure I will,” Frank said. “We need more lerts.”

“Not a good time for jokes,” Bragg said with a snort. “I mean it. Athena out.” He was shaking his head as he put down the mike. “Lerts.”

“If it’s not fight there in front of him, Frank doesn’t worry about it,” Irv said. He thought of Pat’s bitter words the night after Sarah had flown across Jotun Canyon. He had done his best to avoid thinking of that night ever since or thinking of Pat in anything but a purely professional way. Most of the time, that worked pretty well. For a moment, though, even his skin remembered how she had felt in his arms.

“Yeah, I know,” Emmett said, bringing Irv back to the here-and-now. “But I can’t make him come in just on account of my vapors. He’s got his job to do, down there in the canyon.”

“I suppose so,” Irv said. He sounded halfhearted, even to himself.

Bragg looked at him. “You, too, huh?”

“Yeah. Logically, though, you’re fight. Don’t misunderstand me, Emmett.” Walking in front of a train was surer trouble than getting on Emmett Bragg’s bad side. Offhand, Irv could not think of much else.

“Yeah, logically.” Bragg grunted. “Then why don’t I like it?”

The KGB studied Disneyland because visiting Soviet dignitaries liked to go there. One of the attractions, Lopatin had learned from a friend, was something called “Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride.” Never having read The Wind in the Willows, Lopatin did not know much about this Mr. Toad, but he was sure the fide he was taking was wild enough to horrify any amphibian ever hatched.

The coracle tossed in the surge like a toy boat in a bathtub with a rambunctious three-year-old. All the Minervans in it were blue with fright. Could Lopatin have changed color, he would have been blue, too. He wondered if Tolmasov had let him go along in the hope he would drown, and thought of ways he could get revenge even on a Hero of the Soviet Union when he got back to Earth.

If he got back to Earth. At the moment, he would not have given a counterfeit kopeck for his chances of making it to the far side of Jotun Canyon, let alone home again. Two boulders of ice had already missed the boat by a lot less than he cared to think about; he had fended off another one, fortunately smaller, with a pole.

And his coracle was luckier than many. One of the chunks of iceberg that just missed it smashed a boat a little further downstream. Minervans splashed into the water as the coracle instantly turned to kindling. A couple of warriors managed to hang on to floating debris; the rest simply disappeared.

Even if he managed to grab something, Lopatin knew, he would quickly perish; this temporary river was frigid as the waters around Vladivostok in December. There, at least, the Minervans had the advantage on him. To them, any liquid water was warm. They might drown, but they would not freeze. A dubious distinction, he thought.

The spray blowing in his face had already left his nose numb. And when he bent down to scoop water from the bottom of the coracle, the cold bit into his fingers through the heavy gloves he was wearing. His feet had also started to freeze.

Lopatin was bending to bail again when Fralk screamed, “Paddle! Paddle hard for your lives!” The KGB man jerked erect. A veritable ice mountain was bearing down on the boat.

“Mother of God!” Lopatin shouted. He had called on the devil’s relatives often enough in his career, but could not remember the last time he had named any of the Deity’s. Luckily the Minervans, unlike his comrades, would not notice.

He grabbed a paddle from one of the males, jammed it into the water again and again. He did not know whether he was a better paddler than the warrior but could not bear to depend only on the efforts of others for his survival. Slowly, so slowly, the coracle moved ahead. The blue-white slab of ice, sailing along as majestically as a dowager queen, took no notice of the artificial insect in its path.

The Minervan whose paddle Lopatin had taken let out a shrill scream of terror and leapt overboard. The rest of the locals, along with the KGB man, dug in even harder. Lopatin refused to look up; he would risk nothing that might distract him from his desperate rhythm.

Were they gaining? He almost tried not to believe it, for fear of slacking. But surely that mass of ice was not headed straight at the coracle anymore. Surely… The wave the ice mountain pushed ahead of itself lifted up the boat’s stern; Lopatin tried to tell himself he was imagining the wind of its passage.

Then it was past and some other boat’s problem. Heart pounding, Lopatin rested for a moment. A few more like that, he thought shakily, and the whole fleet would be someone else’s problem-probably the Virgin’s, in whose existence he did not believe. After angrily telling himself that, he wondered whether Minervans had souls.

“Is water like this all the time?” Fralk asked. If he did have a soul, he had been nearly frightened out of it; the blue of his skin was the next thing to purple.

“I hope not,” Lopatin answered, no sailor himself. In the aftermath of shared fright, he felt closer to the Minervan than he ever had, even during weapons training. Which reminded him: the only way Fralk would ever get his hands on the Kalashnikov was from Lopatin’s dead body.

That didn’t necessarily mean he would not get off a few shots of his own, though, when the time came.

The eastern wall of Jotun Canyon filled more and more of the sky ahead. Fralk saw it, too, and began to drift back toward his usual green. “We are doing it, Oleg Borisovich,” he said. Lopatin did not think he was reading surprise into the Minervan’s voice.

Nevertheless, he answered, “Da, Fralk, we are doing it.” That was no small feat, either, not when the Skarmer were inventing watergoing technology from scratch. He peered upstream, downstream. The water was still full of boats, in spite of the dreadful swath that enormous hunk of ice had cut through them. “So are most of the rest.”

Able to look in both directions at the same time, Fralk had already decided the same thing. “Enough of us will get across to fight well,” he said, “if we can assemble quickly once we’re there.”

Lopatin nodded. After a while, the coracle was close enough to the eastern shore for him to look for landing sites. “There!” he said, pointing. “Steer that way. Looks like good, sheltered anchorage.” He spoke the Skarmer tongue so the paddlers could understand him, but the key word, as happened so often, came out in Russian.

“Like a good what, Oleg Borisovich?” Fralk asked. “Tell me what that means.”

“A good place to put up a boat,” Lopatin answered. He pointed again. “That piece of rock that juts out into the water shields the part behind it from the worst flow of the stream.”

“Oh.” Fralk did a token job of widening himself. “A good thought. It never would have occurred to me that something like that could make a difference. I’m glad you’ve come along.”

That, Lopatin decided, made one of them. A problem with new technology, human or Minervan, was that it didn’t have all the answers, not least because the people putting it together hadn’t asked all the fight questions. Fralk would have been perfectly happy to land any old place on the eastern shore; he hadn’t refined his goals enough to see one place as better than another. That would be fine-until he needed his boat to get back to the other side and discovered it wasn’t where he’d left it anymore.

The KGB man’s mental grumbling did not keep him from helping to guide the coracle into the anchorage he had spotted. Fralk climbed out of the boat and tied it to a boulder. “I am back, Omalo, as I said I would be,” he declared. The rest of the males in the coracle waved their arms and hooted.

Lopatin did not join the celebration, though he was as relieved as any of the Minervans to have made it to the other side. He was also a thoroughly practical man. Instead of wasting time cheering, he scrambled after Fralk out onto dry land.

A few hundred meters away, Juksal was already heading upslope. Like Lopatin, he saw no point in staying in his boat an instant longer than he had to. He felt the same way about Ervis Gorge as a whole. The Omalo could do all sorts of hideous things to the Skarmer if they kept them trapped down here. Getting the warriors up to the flatlands was what needed doing, the veteran thought.

Warriors! Juksal’s hands tightened around the spears he was carrying till his fingerclaws bit into the shafts. Calling a bunch of peasants and clerks warriors didn’t make them such, nor did giving them spears. Just getting them to stay in their groups and do as they were told would be a fair-sized miracle.

Juksal wished he knew more about the Omalo. If they all got their eyestalks pointing the fight way fast enough, the Skarmer might be in for a very unpleasant time. But who would believe anyone could cross a Great Gorge in the middle of the summer flood? A year ago, Juksal would not have believed it himself. With luck, the Omalo would not believe it, either, not until too late.

A spatter of snow blew past the warrior. He hoped for more. It would help hide the boats-and the Skarmer males as they climbed the side of Ervis Gorge. Unless the Omalo were complete idiots, they would have watchers out. No one ever lived to be old by assuming his enemies were idiots. Juksal was no idiot.

As if thinking of watchers had made them spring into being, something moved far above him. Swearing to himself, he dove behind a rock. He stuck a cautious eyestalk around it to make sure of what he had just glimpsed. With luck, it would be an animal, not a male.

Now the snow hindered him. He could not tell what the thing up ahead was. He swore again, then paused to take stock of things.

“If I have trouble seeing it, it’ll have trouble seeing me, too,” he whispered. And he carried two spears long and sharp enough to make even a krong think twice.

Keeping himself widened as if before Hogram, Juksal dashed for the cover of another boulder. Again he poked an eyestalk around it and again found himself able to see little. If that was a male up there, though, he had not raised the alarm. More likely a beast, Juksal decided.

Then, through the muttering of the wind, he heard a sound that came from no beast: the pound-pound-pound of a hammer on stone. That was a male, then, and by the racket he was making, he had no idea Juksal was anywhere close.

The warrior scuttled forward, quiet as a zosid sneaking up on a runnerpest.

Shota Rustaveli looked nervously back over his shoulder as he stepped into Tsiolkovsky’s control room. He could have had a dozen legitimate reasons for coming forward, and in any case Yuri Voroshilov was, as usual, preoccupied in his lab at the other end of the spacecraft. Rustaveli was nervous anyhow.

“And I’m not even a soldier,” he murmured to himself, surprised at the way his heart was pounding. The murmur was in Georgian, so that even if someone had been standing right beside him, it would have been only a meaningless noise. Can’t be too careful, he thought-soldier or no, the idea of disobeying orders was seriously scary.

He glanced around again. Still no sign of Yuri. Of course not, he told himself angrily. He walked over to the radio, turned it on, found the frequency he needed.

“Hello, Athena. Tsiolkovsky calling.” He held the mike close to his lips, spoke very softly. “Hello, Athena-”

“Athena here: Louise Bragg.” The reply was likewise a whisper, for Rustaveli had turned the volume control down as far as he could and still hear. The tape would still be there to damn him later, but that was later. Now… now curiosity rode Louise’s voice: “Your call is unscheduled, Tsiolkovsky. What’s going on?”

“The Skarmer fleet is crossing Jotun Canyon, that’s what, and Oleg Lopatin with them. He has his friend Kalashnikov along, as I suggest you remember when you go to tell him hello. That’s all. Tsiolkovsky out.”

He reached out to switch off the set. His hand stopped, just above the switch. The dials had already gone dark by themselves. His jaw clenched until his teeth ground against one another. Of all the times for a malfunction-

Then he heard footsteps coming up the passageway. Voroshilov paused at the entrance to the control room. He was shaking his head. “That was stupid, Shota Mikheilovich,” he said. “Stupid.”

“What was?” If Rustaveli could brazen it out, he would. “This damned radio seems to have gone out on us. I was just checking it.”

“By calling the Americans.” Voroshilov was not asking a question.

Rustaveli sagged. “I should have known the timing of the breakdown was too good.”

“Yes, you should have,” Voroshilov agreed. “I hope I managed to kill the circuit before you blabbed too much, but I’m not certain. You did surprise me, Shota.”

“I’m so glad,” Rustaveli muttered. Then, one by one, the implications of what had happened began to sink in. “You were monitoring me,” he said slowly. With a dignity curious for one admitting such a thing, Voroshilov nodded. “Which means”-

Rustaveli went on; he had not really needed the nod-“ you ‘re KGB.”

Voroshilov nodded again. “But you will not mention that to anyone else, Shota Mikheilovich. Not to anyone. It is not relevant. I would do this no matter what I was, if I came by and found you at the radio.”

“Why? You hate Lopatin,” Rustaveli blurted. He wondered how that was possible if they were both KGB. He also wondered if it was even true or just a cover the two snoops used.

“Lopatin is a pig,” Voroshilov said flatly. That answered that, Rustaveli thought, or at least proved Yuri an actor as well as a chemist and a spy. After a moment, picking his words carefully, Voroshilov went on. “But he is also following the orders he received both from Colonel Tolmasov and from the Rodina, the motherland. You have no business meddling with his mission.”

“No? What if he or his pet Minervan starts shooting at the Americans? Yuri Ivanovich, one of them risked her neck to fly the canyon and help Valery. Shall I repay that by not even warning them danger is coming their way?”

Voroshilov frowned. He still looked, as he always had, quiet, studious, a little boyish. And underneath it he was a chekist, Rustaveli thought. He swore to himself never to judge by appearances again.

“He may be going into danger, too,” the chemist answered. “Bragg would not tell Sergei Konstantinovich whether he was giving firearms to the Minervans on the far side of Jotun Canyon. Had we been sure he isn’t, maybe Lopatin could have stayed here. As it is, no.”

“Would Katya have wanted you to cut me off?” Before this moment, Rustaveli would never have imagined KGB men susceptible to appeals to their feelings. He could not imagine a chekist going home to a wife he loved, to children perhaps, and plopping down in a chair to complain about the hard day he’d had.

But Yuri was different. Damn it, he had lived almost inside Yuri’s socks for a lot more than a year now. Maybe he was a chekist, but he was not a bad fellow. And Rustaveli would have bet anything anyone cared to name that he did love Katerina.

“I don’t know,” he said now. He was troubled; Rustaveli could see that. But then he nodded toward the silent radio. “Too late to worry about it at the moment, though.” He walked back toward his laboratory-and presumably, Rustaveli thought, toward his microphones and secret switches.

“Shit!” the Georgian said. He slammed a fist against the back of a chair. The thing was padded and did not hurt. “Shit!” he said again.

Chip, chip, chip. Frank Marquard went down on his knees so he could use his geologist’s hammer with greater precision. He had not seen a conglomerate quite this fine-grained before.

Anything new and interesting deserved to be a specimen.

Even through padding, his knees began to freeze. He sighed. He was so sick of being cold. As a lifelong inhabitant of Los Angeles, he had had no practice living in a refrigerator. He remembered somebody on the selection panel asking about that and remembered answering that it would not bother him. He had known he was lying even then. Luckily, the people on the panel had not.

Pat was as Californian as he, but the cold didn’t bother her as much. Or if it did, Frank thought, frowning, she didn’t let on. Not so long ago, that would not have occurred to him. Now he wasn’t so sure what Pat could hold back. He hoped-he thought-he was warming her up again, in a very different sense of the word, but he wasn’t sure.

As he usually did, he tried to make the best of that. He supposed it was all to the good that he wasn’t taking her for granted anymore. Boredom lay down that road.

Out of the comer of his eye, he saw something move. He looked up. Where had the Minervan come from? “What do you here, male of Reatur’s clan?” he asked in the Omalo tongue.

The male did not answer. It came closer. How, Frank wondered, had it got below him without his noticing? Then he saw the spears in the Minervan’s hands.

“Frank!” Louise shouted over and over in Athena’s control room. “Are you there? Come in, Frank!”

“Bozhemoi,” Oleg Lopatin said softly when he saw the stained spears Juksal was displaying.

The warrior was proud of himself. “He had a little hammer with him, but he hardly even got it up before I struck him.” He raised the hand on the far side of his body, showed the Russian the geologist’s tool he had taken from the man he’d slain.

“Bozhemoi,” Lopatin said again. The idea of going to war had been attractive in the abstract. Having a fellow human killed by a Minervan, though, was not really what he had had in mind, no matter how socially advanced the Skarmer were.

“Don’t let your eyestalks droop, Oleg Borisovich,” Fralk said. “You’ve told us how the humans on this side of the gorge are enemies to your great clan.”

“Yes, but-“ Sudden ghastly consequences flowered in Lopatin’s mind. The Americans would assume he had killed their comrade. With the situation reversed, he would have jumped to the same conclusion. When a man with a rifle was around, who would think twice about natives and their spears?

Scowling, he thought furiously. Though the habit of secrecy was deeply grained into him, he decided it could not serve him here. He would have to let Tsiolkovsky know what had happened, and that he had had nothing to do with it. He could not guess how far that would go toward mollifying the Americans, but nothing, now, could be worse than silence.

He thumbed the ON switch of his radio, brought it to his lips. “Calling Tsiolkovsky, calling-“ he began. Then he noticed the SEND light had not gone on. When he switched to mWAVE, no carrier wave hum, no static, came from the speaker.

Hopelessly, he peeled off the back of the set. Water gleamed on the integrated circuits inside. He had tried to keep the radio dry crossing Jotun Canyon, but its case was not waterproof. Who would have thought, on frozen Minerva, it would have to be? He dried the works as best he could, tried again to send. The radio was still dead.

Of course, it had taken a good many bangs, too, as he scrambled up toward the top of the canyon. Without tools he did not have, he could not tell what was wrong with the cursed gadget if nothing obvious like a loose wire leapt out at him. He could not fix anything more complicated than a loose wire, either.

And this, he asked himself bitterly, makes you a modem electronic engineer? The trouble was, it did. But that, at the moment, was the least of the trouble he was in, and he knew it.

Emmett Bragg would be wild when he found out about his countryman’s death. And even Tolmasov was leery of Bragg.

“You get him on the radio and you find out what the hell he’s playing at, do you hear me, Sergei Konstantinovich?” Bragg sounded like an angry tiger, Tolmasov thought. He did not blame his American opposite number, either.

“I am calling, Brigadier Bragg, calling repeatedly, I assure you. But he does not reply.”

“Neither does Frank Marquard. What does that say to you?”

“Nothing I like,” Tolmasov admitted.

“Me either,” Bragg growled. “Near as I can see, it says your man’s gone rogue on this side of the canyon. I don’t like that, Sergei Konstantinovich, not one little bit. You better believe I’ll do anything I need to, to protect the rest of my crew. Anything. Don’t say you weren’t warned.”

“I understand.” If Tolmasov could have got Lopatin in his sights, he might have dealt with him himself. “You’d better. Bragg out.”

Silence crashed down in the tent outside Hogram’s town. Tolmasov sat storing at the radio for a minute or two before he got up. The mission had gone so well for so long, but when it decided to come apart, it didn’t fool around. Someone on Tsiolkovsky-Rustaveli or Voroshilov, that had to be-calling the Americans, and whoever had not called cutting him off in midsentence. The pilot did not know whether to be angrier at caller or cutter.

And Lopatin! Tolmasov still did not know what to make of that. He did not want to think even a chekist could go out of control the moment he got off on his own, but he did not know what else to think, either. The fool’s stubborn refusal to start or accept communication did not speak well of him.

The pilot turned to Valery Bryusov and Katerina, who had listened to his exchange with Bragg with as much shock and dismay as he had felt. “Comments?” he asked. Maybe, just maybe, one of them had seen something he had missed.

“Sergei, we have a major problem,” Katerina said. Bryusov nodded solemnly. So, after a moment, did Tolmasov. The only trouble was, he already knew that.

Irv peered down into Jotun Canyon. He’d had the weight of a pistol on his hip before, but now he really felt it. The idea of using the gun on a Minervan horrified him. The idea of using it against an AKT4 horrified him, too, for a different reason-he was glad he had made a will before leaving Earth.

By rights, he thought, trying to blend into the bushes, this was Emmett Bragg’s job. Emmett was a soldier, not an anthropologist playing pretend. But Emmett was also the pilot-the number one pilot and, if the worst had happened to Frank, the only pilot. He was not expendable as a scout.

The Minervans down in the canyon did not look any different from Reatur’s males. Irv knew, though, that none of Reatur’s males were there. These had to be the enemy, then-the Skarmer, the Russians called them.

And Oleg Lopatin. Without the frantic call from Tsiolkovsky, Irv would not have know which Russian accompanied the Skarmer over Jotun Canyon, but a human being’s jointed, jerky motions were instantly recognizable against a backdrop of waving Minervan arms and tentacles. For one giddy moment, Irv hoped the human down there was Frank, but the Americans did not wear fur hats.

How had the Skarmer crossed, anyhow? Irv let his binoculars sweep past the knot of natives to water’s edge. At first, the round bowlshapes he saw there meant nothing to him. Then he realized they had to be boats. They looked dreadfully small and flimsy to stack against the current in the canyon, let alone the drift ice there.

Maybe, he thought, the Skarmer had not known the risk they were taking when they set out. Being too ignorant to worry about trouble had fueled a lot of human enterprises, too. Too bad this one was aimed in his direction.

Some of the Skarmer began moving upslope. Seen through lenses, the motion was magnified, menacing. Irv scuttled backward even while the rational part of his mind insisted he was in no danger. That did not stop his retreat. It did make him keep the binoculars trained as he backed away.

The tight knot of Minervans he had been watching broke up in the advance. He saw what they had been gathered around:

Frank Marquard’s crumpled corpse. The sight came as no surprise, but it was like a kick in the belly all the same.

Irv scrambled onto his bike and raced back toward Athena.

Ternat wished Dordal had been budded as a mate, so he-no, she, he would have been; this was almost as complicated as remembering half the humans were mates-could have died young, while budding six offspring as idiotic as himself. Reatur’s eldest refused to perform the mental gymnastics he knew he needed to make the last arm of that sentence point in the same direction as the rest.

“Is this still our domain, eldest, or is it Dordal’s?” one of the males with him asked.

Ternat considered. He had come this way earlier in the year, trying to convince Dordal that the Skarmer threat was real! All he had succeeded in doing was convincing Dordal that Reatur thought it was real, and so could be raided with impunity. “Still ours, Phelig,” he answered, hoping he would make a better warleader than he had an envoy.

The male’s eyestalks drooped in disappointment. “Then we have to leave that fence alone?”

“I’m afraid so.” Ternat had had an eye or three on the enclosure, too, until he decided where they were. “Don’t worry. It won’t be long.”

That proved even truer than he had expected. The sun was falling west through clouds toward Ervis Gorge when the war band came upon a pen that had been thrown down. Snow had fallen since then, to cover any tracks, but Ternat still caught the rancid stink of massi voidings. He did not have to see to follow the trail. It led north. “Anything’ from here on, we can take back with us. Either Dordal’s males stole it from us, or we’ll steal it from them,” Ternat shouted. His comrades cheered.

No formal post marked the border between Reatur’s domain and Dordal’s. On either side of the border that was not marked, though, males knew who their clanfather was. The ones on Dordal’s side knew to run away when a large band of strangers came up from the south.

The scent trail grew stronger. Ternat began to wonder if he and his males were walking into a trap. He doubted whether Dordal had the wit to set one, but one of the northern domain master’s bright young males-say, a male much like Ternat- might.

Sure enough, not long after the idea crossed Ternat’s mind, a male pointed casually toward a large boulder off to the side of the path. Just as casually, Reatur’s eldest turned an eyestalk in that direction. Someone was peeking out at them.

“Let’s go on a little ways and then rush back,” Ternat said after a moment’s thought. “That way we’ll stand between the spy and his friends, so he won’t be able to run to them.”

As if unaware, the males ambled past the boulder. Ternat swung an arm down. Shrieking, brandishing their spears, the raiding party reversed themselves and ran to catch the male who had been watching them.

“Take him alive!” Ternat yelled. “We need answers.”

Had the spying male fled, he would not have got far, not with nine eighteens of warriors after him. But he did not flee. Indeed, Ternat wondered if he could flee. Even after he widened himself in submission, he was one of the thinnest males Reatur’s eldest had ever seen, and one of the filthiest as well.

He was not blue with fear under his dirt, though, and Ternat understood why a moment later, when he cried out, “Hurrah! You’ve come to get the beasts back!”

Anticlimax, Ternat thought. Having been all keyed up to fight or pursue, here he was, greeted as a savior. Lowering his spears-surely there could be no harm in one starveling male- he said,” ‘Back’? You’re one of Reatur’s herders?”

“That I am-Elanti the massiherder, at your service. I’m glad you fellows came at last. I was getting right hungry, skulking around here so’s I could keep one eyestalk on the animals.”

“I believe that,” Ternat said. “Phelig, give him something to eat.” While Elanti fed with every sign of ecstasy, Ternat quietly asked the warriors, “Does anyone know if he’s truly ours?”

Eyestalks writhed as the males stared at Elanti and at one another. A male named Ollect, whom Fralk knew to be from the northern part of the domain, said, “He’s ours, eldest. He’s been herding massi up here near the border for a long time.” A couple of other males spoke up in agreement.

Elanti stopped gobbling for a moment and said reproachfully, “Eldest, eh? Reatur’d know who I was without asking.”

That, Ternat thought, was probably true. “The domain master knows all sorts of things I must learn one day,” he answered.

“Hmm. Not stuck up about it, anyway.” Elanti popped yet another chunk of dried meat into his mouth. When it was gone, he said, “Dordal’s thieves have my massi, well, suppose you’d say Reatur’s massi, but I’m the one herds ‘em-in a little valley not far from here, along with some herds of their own. They’ve also got males posted on both sides of the trail there, so’s they can jump on anybody coming straight up to take them home again.”

“Sounds like the cursed robbers,” Ternat said, forgetting he had been thinking it would take someone much like him to set an ambush.

“There’s more,” Elanti said. “I’ve had a lot of eyestalks on the land hereabouts lately, and a bit before then, too.” Ternat suspected he meant he had done some smuggling over the border; he turned all his eyes away from Elanti for a moment to show he did not care. The herder sounded relieved as he went on, “Happens I know a way that gets you round the far side of one of those bands. You hit ‘em from a direction they’re not expecting, nip in and grab the beasts, then deal with the other band-”

“Yes,” Ternat said slowly, liking the scheme. “If you’re right, Elanti, the clanfather will make you rich for this.” And if you’re wrong, he did not add, you’ll never betray anyone else again. The herder ought to be able to figure that out for himself.

Evidently he could. “Don’t much care about being rich,” he answered. “Getting my massi back, that’s the important thing, them and maybe a few of Dordal’s better ones to pay me back for the trouble I’ve had. Maybe even more than a few.”

“You’ll get them,” Ternat promised, carefully not wiggling his eyestalks at the greed in Elanti’s voice. After all this was over, he told himself, detailing someone to watch the herder for a while would be a good idea. Elanti might have more stashed away somewhere than Reatur did under the clan castle.

But all that was for later. Now he and the war band followed Elanti away from the plain, inviting trail of the massi toward the other path the herder said he had found.

Lamra looked down at herself, all around. Half the time, she thought the six big bulges that almost hid her feet looked ridiculous. The other half of the time, she hardly noticed them. They had been part of her so long that she was used to them.

She tried to remember what she had looked like before the budlings began to grow. Like any other mate, she supposed. It was hard to believe that. When she stopped peering at herself, she could see several nearby. It was even harder to imagine she would ever look so straight-up-and-down again. The humans kept saying she might, but then humans were pretty hard to imagine, too.

She had trouble playing now, she who had once been among the swiftest and most agile mates. Because she had grown so clumsy and slow, the others hardly tried to include her in their games anymore.

She wondered if the idea that she would probably not be around much longer also made them want to stay away from her. She doubted it. Few mates could think far enough ahead to conceive of death as anything but a word. She had trouble doing so herself. She was not aware of a time when she had not been, so would she not always be?

But she knew that, no matter how things seemed, the reality was that Reatur, unchanged so far as she could tell in the time she had been alive, had been about the same long before that. And she knew mates, many mates, had ended in the time since she had started paying attention to the world around her. She could die, too.

She looked at the piece of cured hide she held in one hand and at the marks written on it. Reatur knew she had this piece and did not mind. More of the marks were beginning to make sense to her. Each one she learned made the rest easier to understand. If she lived, one day she would be able to read.

The door to the mates’ chambers opened. Reatur came through. He looked fired, Lamra thought-his eyestalks, even his arms, drooped. He had not come to see the mates so often lately as before, and when he did, he was always tired.

The mates swarmed around him. He had kind words for all of them, as he usually did: praise for Peri’s scribbles-which, Lamra thought, did not look a thing like real writing-an eyestalk wiggle of glee when some other mate in the crowd-Lamra could not see who-threw a ball that actually went in his direction.

Lamra tried to wait for him to notice her. She was at the edge of the group because she could not move quickly anymore, and a lot of mates had dashed by to be with the domain master. That made her angry, and she was not very patient, anyhow. When she could not wait any longer, she shouted “Reatur!” as loud as she could.

Two of his eyestalks looked in her direction. “Your turn will come, little one,” he said, and went on with what he was doing. The promise kept her quiet a while longer. Then she shouted for him again.

“Soon,” Reatur said, more sharply this time. Lamra shifted from foot to foot to foot to foot to foot to foot. Finally, when the domain master had talked with or cuddled the rest of the mates, he turned his eyestalks toward her again. “Now, little one, come with me and we will talk.”

He led her off to one of the smaller chambers. The other mates dispersed. At first they had resented the special attention Reatur gave Lamra, but now they were used to it. They quickly got used to things that had once been strange-humans, for instance. Lamra was much like her companions in that respect.

“Well, little one,” Reatur said, “what have you been doing since I saw you last?”

She waved her piece of hide. “I’ve learned a lot more marks. Look, this says, ‘that was the year so much ice melted that the roof’-did something. I don’t know what this part means.” She pointed at the words that had defeated her.

He.turned an eyestalk toward it. “’Fell in,’ “he told her.

“That’s very good, Lamra. You’ve been working hard.”

“So have you,” she retorted, “or you’d have come around more often to see me.”

Air hissed out of his breathing pores. “You’re right-I have and I would. It’s-“ He paused, as if wondering whether to go on, but at last he did. “-it’s been difficult.”

Lamra responded more to his tone than to his words. “Why are you sad, Reatur?”

“Among other reasons, because the humans still haven’t had any luck with mates from the herds, and your budding time draws near,” he said. “I never wanted you to die, Lamra, but finding hope that you might not and then seeing it fade is hard.”

“I don’t want to die, either, Reatur. Maybe I won’t, still. But if I do, well-”

“Don’t say it,” the domain master said, and so Lamra did not repeat the old saying about old mates. After a moment, the domain master went on, “Aside from that, Dordal’s males have stolen some of our massi, the Skarmer have crossed Ervis Gorge in things the humans call ‘boats,’ and they or another, different kind of human killed one of the ones we know. And aside from that, everything is fine.”

Lamra did not always recognize sarcasm. It escaped her this time. Even had she caught it, she would have paid it no mind, not when it came along with Reatur’s other news. A human dead! She had not even been sure humans could die. “Which one is dead?” she asked anxiously; three of the strange creatures had become closer friends of hers than anybody save Reatur.

“The one called Frank,” he answered. Lamra knew relief- she had hardly even seen that one.

Still, she said, “How sad for the humans. There were so few of them even before.”

Reatur angrily jerked his arms. He started to turn yellow. “It will be sad for us if we can’t push the cursed Skarmer back down the gorge. If this domain gets a new master, a Skarmer master, your budlings will never live to grow up. And you-if you do live but we lose, what would a Skarmer chieftain make of you? Nothing good, I tell you that.”

Lamra tried to keep herself from turning blue. She hadn’t thought about any of the things Reatur had said, and they all sounded terrifying. “We have to win, then,” she said at last. “We will. We have you, and the Skarmer don’t.” Even as she said that, she saw herself greening up again. Reatur, she was convinced, could handle anything.

“I wish it were that simple.” The domain master sighed. “I came to see you to get away from my worries, and here I’ve given them to you instead. You’re brave for not fussing about them.”

He widened himself to her, then left before she could figure out how to respond. The boom of the door closing after him sounded very final.

Pat Marquard stumbled as she walked toward the latest pennedeloc mate on the point of budding. “Careful,” Irv said. He had said it several times already-wherever her eyes were focused, it was not on the ground under her feet.

“Sorry,” she answered. Her voice sounded far away. She did not look at him.

Sarah said gently, “It’s all right if you want to go back to the ship, Pat.” Irv nodded.

Thinking about how to reply brought Pat back toward the here-and-now. She shook her head. “If I don’t have anything to do, I’ll go even crazier than I am now. I’d rather try to work than just sit and brood.”

Sarah glanced toward Irv. He nodded again-he would have said the same thing. His wife shrugged. They walked on. Irv wondered how much they were going to accomplish. For one thing, they hadn’t kept a mate alive yet. For another, if the invaders from the west won, the future for which they were trying to save Lamra would prove depressingly short.

Irv also thought about Oleg Lopatin. Tolmasov sounded as anxious to be rid of him as was everyone on Athena. He must have flipped out, Irv thought for the umpty-umpth time. That was very bad, especially if some of the Russians had been worried enough about him to try to warn the American ship. And especially since he had his rifle with him.

Irv did not want to go up against a Kalashnikov, not even with six pistols-no, five now. “How are we going to fight back?” he asked Sarah, quietly, so Pat would not notice. Sarah only shook her head. Irv wondered whether that meant she didn’t know or she didn’t want to think about it now. Probably both.

The eloc mate in the pen was used enough to humans that it did not try to attack or waddle away as the three of them came up. It only turned one extra eyestalk in their direction.

“Now we wait,” Sarah said grimly. By the look of things, Irv thought, they would not have to wait long. The eloc mate bulged like a fat lady trying to explode out of a spandex suit. Irv had learned, though, that as with pregnant women, appearances could be deceiving. Once they had spent three cold days waiting for a mate to drop her budlings, only to come back the next morning to find the small eloca scampering about the pen and the mate dead.

Waiting had been easier then, before-before Frank died, Irv told himself firmly. He did not know Oleg Lopatin had killed him. It was, however, a lot likelier than anything else he could think of.

And no matter how Frank had died, he was dead now, and Pat no longer the bantering companion she had been. She kept pacing back and forth in the pen with that distant look in her eyes. Sometimes she answered when Irv or Sarah spoke to her, sometimes she didn’t. The other two couldn’t just talk with each other, either, not with her there. Time stretched endlessly.

After what seemed like six weeks but was in fact two and a half hours, Sarah, who had been peering and poking at the eloc mate so often it wasn’t even resentful anymore, abruptly stood up straight. “The skin is starting to split. Let’s get ready.”

Irv squatted next to the eloc mate, two arms around it on Sarah’s left. Pat came more slowly and squatted with two arms around the eloc on Sarah’s fight, so the three humans were equally spaced around it.

“We’ll try it a little differently this time,” Sarah said, reminding them of what they were about. “Instead of just trying to bandage those bleeders, we’re going to shut ‘em off. Here.”

She passed two large surgical clamps to Irv, two more to Pat. “As soon as the budlings drop off, clamp the protruding blood vessel stumps. You’ll need both hands for the job, so don’t try to do ‘em both at once. Do one, then the other, quick as you can without making a mistake. The way the blood comes gushing out, a whole lot of fumbling and you’ll be too late to do much good.”

Remembering how Biyal had bled out, remembering how he had watched several eloc and massi mates pour their blood onto the ground-and onto him-Irv knew his wife was fight. He opened and closed a clamp several times.

The eloc grew placid-resigned was the other word that crossed Irv’s mind, though he knew that was anthropomorphizing-as the budding process went on. The split in the skin above each bud grew longer and longer. Soon Irv saw the wet legs and bottoms of the two budlings in front of him. The legs were already wiggling, as if the newborn eloc were preparing to hit the ground running.

“Soon, now,” Sarah breathed. Irv glanced over at her for a split second, suppressing a grin-she was nervously opening and closing a clamp, too. Veterinary OB was not what she had studied in med school. She did not notice him. “Soon,” she said again.

Irv saw she was right. Now just about all of each budling was visible; he could see the blood vessels between their eyestalks that connected them to the mate, could see the much bigger vessels around which their mouths were sealed. The big ones were the ones he had to worry about. The bleeding from the others could be handled. Sarah thought so, anyhow, and Irv had nothing but respect for his wife’s judgment.

As it had before, the moment came without warning. One instant, the budlings were still attached to the mate. The next, they were at Irv’s feet, doing their best to get in his way. The mate’s blood fountained out.

Irv had practiced what he was going to do countless times back on Athena. Grabbing and clamping a piece of rubber tube, though, was not nearly enough like reaching for a blood vessel when spurting gore not only made it hard for him to see what he was doing but also froze his fingers as it splashed over and between them.

The last time he had done such blind groping, he thought, he had been fifteen and had gotten slapped for it. He let out a grunt of triumph as his left hand closed round the big, soft, pulsing vessel. He squeezed, hard. The flow slowed. He slapped on the clamp.

He felt like shouting-the vessel was sealed. But no time for shouts. How much blood had the mate already lost where the other budling had dropped free? Too much? Only one way to find out. He leaned, grabbed, and after a few desperate fumbling seconds, clamped.

Then he had a chance to look up. Sarah had finished her part of the task just seconds before him. That made him feel proud- he was very much an amateur at this sort of thing. But then, with Minervans, so was everyone.

Seeing him finished, Sarah said, “Nice and quick. Good. We just may get a live mama out of this yet.” She raised her voice a little. “How you doing, Pat?”

Again, hesitation. Then Pat answered, “I’ve got the first one just about clamped. I’ll go to the other as fast as I can.”

“Oh, hell!” Sarah exclaimed. She scrambled over to Pat’s side. “Give me that!” Irv went around the eloc mate to see if he could do anything to help. His face fell when he saw the size of the pool of blood under the vessel Sarah was finally clamping. He could not imagine how any animal, Earthly or Minervan, could lose so much and live.

And sure enough, the eloc mate was sagging, its arms and eyestalks going limp in a pattern he had seen too many times before. Sarah recognized that, too. She looked at the eloc-the dead eloc-and at the clamp in her hand. She threw the clamp down, hard, on the frozen ground. It bounced away.

“I’m sorry,” Pat said miserably. “I just can’t-”

“I know,” Sarah said. “Nothing to be done about it.” But she could not help adding, “] really had hopes for this, though. Now we may not get another chance to test it before-before the real thing. Having a success behind us would have been nice. Oh, well.”

She looked around to see where the clamp had gone, walked over to it, picked it up. Irv undid the five they had managed to place on the eloc mate. Only a few more drops of blood dribbled out as he freed each one; the mate was empty. He said, “We might as well head back to Athena.”

Head down, Pat walked a few paces apart from her two companions. Sarah said, low voiced, “Maybe I should show a Minervan what to do. A male would probably be more reliable than Pat is right now. I don’t blame her, but-”

“I know.” Irv thought about it. After a few seconds, he shook his head. “Not a good idea,” he said as quietly as Sarah. “As far as I can tell, none of the males but Reatur and maybe Ternat would react well to the idea of helping mates survive. Too far outside their mental horizons. If he didn’t think Lamra was special, I doubt Reatur would let us go on, either. And right now Ternat isn’t here, and Reatur-”

“Has problems of his own,” Sarah finished for him. She sighed. “Don’t we all?”