A World of Difference (11 page)

Reatur got Biyal out of the mates’ quarters and barred the door behind him. He was taking the corpse to the fields when he almost ran into Enoph, who was on his way back from the humans’ flying house. More questions, Reatur supposed; the humans asked more questions and poked their eyes—even without eyestalks—into more places than any people the domain-master had ever known. If they had not been so spectacularly strange-looking, he would have suspected them of being Skarmer spies.

Enoph peered through the gloom. When he recognized what Reatur was dragging after him, he asked, “Would you like me to take care of that for you, clanfather?”

“Eh? No, thank you, Enoph. Mates get all too little in life; I try to give them what I can, and to honor them as I can after they die, as well.”

Enoph opened and closed a hand in agreement. “Yes, I think you act rightly, clanfather. I have two mates in my booth, and treat them as well as I can. For one thing, they’re more fun to be with that way than when you don’t try to train them and just leave them like animals.”

“I certainly think so,” Reatur said.

“Are the budlings well?” Enoph asked.

“The male is large, and seems sturdy. So do the five mates, come to that.” Reatur let air sigh through his breathing-pores. “Time will tell.” So many budlings died young. If a male lasted five years, he might well live a long life … if. Many mate budlings never lived to receive buds themselves. And those who did, no matter how strong and healthy they were, had only Biyal’s fate to look forward to.

“How many males is it for you now?” Enoph asked.

Reatur had to count on his fingers and was not quite sure even when he had finished. “I think this puts me within three of filling my fourth eighteen,” he said at last.

“A goodly sum,” Enoph said. In the gathering darkness, Reatur could hardly see the younger male’s eyestalks. “I’ve had four myself, only one still alive. The mates budded with them have not done well, either.”

It was Reatur’s turn to open and close his hand. “Few who aren’t domain-masters have the food to spare to keep many mates
alive even to budding age,” he said sympathetically. “I daresay we’d run short of them if they didn’t come five to our one.”

“Something to that.” Enoph widened himself. “I’ve kept you long enough from what you came out here for, clanfather. I’ll leave you to it now.” He started back toward the castle’s out-walls.

Reatur let him go, though he had been glad enough of the interruption. Saying farewell to a mate was not a task he approached eagerly. He dragged Biyal’s corpse to a part of the field where the humans’ flying house had seared the crops. Scavengers, he knew, would make off with most of it, but the rest would decay and give fresh value to the soil.

Farther north, he had heard, were folk who, at least in summer, dug holes in the ground as resting-places for their dead. That was practical there, where the ground unfroze to a depth greater than a male’s height and stayed soft half the year. In Reatur’s domain, and those around him, burial was more trouble than it was worth.

He murmured a prayer, asking the gods to grant Biyal the long life she had not been able to enjoy here. He added a brief petition for the budlings’ health, then widened himself in a last gesture of respect for their mother.

He was just returning to his full height when two of his eyes were suddenly blinded by a brilliant flash of violet light. He almost jumped out of his skin. Glaring afterimages filled those eyes even after he shut them, as if on a rare clear day he had looked straight at the sun.

Before he had the sense to tell himself not to, he had turned another eyestalk in the direction of the flash. He saw a human pointing something at him. “I might have known,” he muttered. A moment later, the flash went off again, putting that third eye out of commission. “Enough!” he shouted.

“What?” It was one of the humans with a voice that sounded like a person’s—the small one, Reatur thought, though without several humans together it was harder to be sure.

He noticed that the afterimages were fading from the first two eyes that had been flashed and opened them again. Yes, they could see. He was relieved to find he was not blind for good through a third—no, half—of his field of vision. Blind as a human, he thought, and through his annoyance knew a moment’s pity for the strange creatures.

“What is that thing?” he asked, walking toward the human
and pointing at whatever he was holding. The domain-master spoke slowly and repeated himself several times.

“Reatur?” The human put the question-ending on his name.

“Who else?” he said. For the first time, it occurred to him to wonder whether real people looked as strange to humans as humans did to real people. He pointed again and asked again, “What is that thing?”

The human—yes, he decided, it was the male called Sarah—finally understood.
“Camera,”
he said in his own language, then “picture-maker” in the Omalo tongue.

“Ah,” Reatur said. He had no idea of how the humans’ picture-making gadgets worked, but he admired what they did. Some of them would spit out pictures right away, pictures as marvelously detailed and accurate as the one of the strange thing the humans had shown him just after their house fell from the sky. Reatur had an image of himself, one of Ternat, and another of his castle; the humans, to his surprise, had not even charged him for them.

“Why the big light?” he asked.

Sarah tried to explain; Reatur gave credit where it was due. But he did not understand the explanation. For one thing, Sarah did not have enough words. For another, the domain-master suspected that some of the ideas were as strange as humans. As best he could gather, the picture-making thing needed a lot of light to see by. He supposed that made sense.

Sarah put the picture-maker into one of the pockets of the coverings humans wore. Reatur had only gradually realized those
were
coverings, not part of the humans’ skins.

From a different pocket, Sarah drew out something else. Reatur heard a click. Light streamed out of the thing, not in a single blinding flash but steadily and at a lower, more comfortable level.
“Flashlight,”
Sarah said. Reatur tried to remember the word; his language had no equivalent for it.

Sarah shone the light at Reatur’s feet, courteously keeping it out of his eyes. The light splashed over Biyal’s body. “The budding female?” Sarah asked.

“Well, of course,” Reatur said gruffly—humans had a gift for asking about the obvious.

“At the budding female I close look?”

It took several tries, backed by a good deal of gesturing, before Reatur figured out what Sarah meant. The domain-master hesitated. He had cleared the chamber in the mates’ quarters by himself after Biyal died—he did not want other males to have
anything to do with
his
mates, or even to venture into that part of the castle. But he had not kept the humans out of the mates’ quarters. They were too odd to worry about their planting buds on his mates. And poor Biyal would never bud again, that was certain.

“Look if you care to,” the domain-master said at last. “Yes,” he added a moment later. Humans needed things kept simple.

He started back toward the castle. One of his eyes watched Sarah bend over Biyal’s corpse. That peculiarly human motion still struck him as grotesque. Humans could not widen, though. He was sure of that. They did the best they could with the weird bodies they had.

As did everyone else, he thought. That reminded him of the watch he was still posting on Ervis Gorge. Nothing whatever had happened there since Fralk—on whose eyestalks the domain-master wished the purple rash—was urged to go back to his own side and stay there. Reatur wondered whether he was wasting his males’ time by keeping them at the gorge. He decided to leave them in place a while longer. Up against a rogue like Fralk, fewest chances were best.

The male dropped the lamp at Fralk’s feet; in fact, he almost dropped it on one of Fralk’s feet. “What’s all this about, Mountenc?” Fralk asked. He was both surprised and a little angry. As eldest of eldest, he was not often exposed to such rude behavior.

But Mountenc was angry, too. “This stinking thing didn’t even live as long as a mate, Fralk,” he snapped. “It doesn’t light up anymore, and I want my eighteen stone blades back for it.”

“I never said how long it would last, Mountenc,” Fralk pointed out.

“Four nights isn’t long enough,” the other male retorted. “I kept it on all through the dark so I could see to work, and now look.” He picked it up and used a fingerclaw to click the little switch that made the light come out. No light came. “It’s dead,” Mountenc said contemptuously, “and I want my blades back.”

“First let me see if I can make it live again,” Fralk said. He did not have the blades anymore. He had traded them for something else. At the moment, he could not remember what, but he had turned a profit.

From the way Mountenc was glaring at him with three eyes at once, he did not think the other male would care about that. “You’d better,” Mountenc said.

“I will do what I can.” Fralk was pleased to notice that none of his concern showed in his voice. He was a good deal less pleased when he remembered how many little lamps he had sold. If they all started dying, he was liable to end up dead himself.

By the time Fralk was done talking Mountenc around, though, the other male was halfway polite again. Of course, had someone given him the promises he had made Mountenc, he would have been happy, too. He wondered if he could make those promises good. Time to find out, he thought as he carried the defunct lamp over to the humans’ tent.

Next to the tent stood the thing—Fralk thought of it as a land-boat—the humans used to travel about. It rolled on the round contraptions humans seemed to prefer to skids. Thinking about the flying boat that had almost fallen on him, Fralk reflected that humans not only seemed to like traveling, but also seemed very good at it.

That only made him wonder again why nobody had ever seen any of them before. Maybe they really did come from the Twinstar.

As the humans liked, he paused beside the tent and did not go straight in. “Hello!” he called, and then added the human word:
“Zdrast’ye!”
Nothing happened. He hailed again. Still nothing. He said something unhappy, not quite out loud. Sometimes the humans went wandering through Hogram’s town on foot. He hoped they had not chosen today to do that. Today he really needed them.

He hailed again. Finally the entrance to the tent opened. Fralk was so relieved that he hardly minded the hot air that came blasting through the doorway. The human who looked out was still adjusting the outer skins he and his kind wore.
“Brrr!”
the human said, a word whose exact meaning eluded Fralk.

A moment later, another human appeared beside the first. This one was also playing with his outer skins and taking too long to do it for Fralk’s taste. Having only two arms made humans clumsy, he thought with a touch of scorn.

“Fralk, yes?” the second human said. He was the only male with a voice like a person’s, which made him easier for Fralk to name. He still found humans hard to tell apart by sight.

“
Da
, Katerina Fyodorovna.” Fralk said the name carefully; he still stumbled when he used human speech. He had learned, though, that the second part of each human’s name was a memory of his father. There, amid so much strangeness, was a eustom
that made perfect sense. Back to the business in his claws, Fralk thought. He asked, “Is Valery Aleksandrovich here?” Of all the humans, he could speak with that one best.

The male Katerina moved his head back and forth, which Fralk thought weird but had come to learn meant no. “Shota, me here,” Katerina said. “Valery, Sergei—” The human groped for a word. “Gone.”

“Gone looking, make pictures,” Shota said.

“
Da
,” Fralk said, to show he understood. The humans were as curious about Hogram’s domain as Fralk was about them.

Shota said something in his own language, too fast and complex for Fralk to follow. He made Fralk more nervous than any other human. Maybe it was a holdover from their first wary meeting, when Fralk had feared the human’s picture-making device was a weapon. Or maybe it was that Shota made the alarming yip Fralk had decided was human laughter more often than any of the others.

He was yipping now, as he reached out to touch Katerina in the area below the front of the other male’s head, between the arms. Katerina knocked his hand away; the smaller male’s face, always pink, turned a deeper shade of red. Humans’ colors did not mean nearly so much as his own folk’s, but the change, accompanied as it was by a hostile-looking gesture, made Fralk wonder if Katerina and Shota were about to fight.

But Shota said something else that made both humans yip. Katerina turned his head back toward Fralk, as Fralk might have turned a polite eyestalk on someone with whom he was talking. “You, ah, want what?” the human asked.

Fralk held up the lamp that had failed Mountenc. He clicked the little fingerclaw sticking up out of it that was supposed to make it light, then clicked it over and over, back and forth. “No light,” he said. “Dead. Can you fix it, make it light again?”

Shota scrambled down from the tent. “Give to me,” he said. Fralk put the lamp in his hand. The act made him notice the human’s two extra fingers. They did not make up for his missing arms, Fralk thought.

Shota shook the lamp. Fralk had done that, too, trying to make it work again. He had heard nothing and asked the human if he did.
“Nyet,”
Shota said. He bared the grinders in his mouth. “Not hear is good. Not—” He made as if to throw the lamp on the ground.

“Broken,” Fralk supplied. “If it is not broken, why does it stay dark?”

Shota called something to Katerina. Then he turned the lamp upside down, so the part that lit was on the bottom. He twisted the lamp in his hands; to Fralk’s surprise, it came apart into two pieces.

Fralk extended an eyestalk to peer at what Shota was doing. The human was trying to pull out part of the lamp’s guts and having trouble. Muttering, he put down the lamp and drew off the outer skins from his hands.
“Brrr!”
he said again. He picked up the lamp, moving quickly now, and pulled out two cylinders. Under those outer skins, Fralk saw, fascinated, his fingers had claws after all, though they were small and blunt.