A World of Difference (16 page)

“She took my ball away,” Peri said, squirming away from Lamra and pointing at her with the arms that—too bad!—she hadn’t got to knot up after all.

“Not your ball,” Lamra said. She gathered herself to grab Peri again and really give her what for. Reatur turned an extra eyestalk her way and pointed at her with an arm that did not seem to have anything better to do. Regretfully, she subsided. She might have known he would notice.

“Back to what you were doing, the rest of you,” Reatur told the crowd of mates around Peri and Lamra. They went, though
almost all of them kept an eyestalk on what was going on. Even so, Lamra wished they would do what
she
told them to like that. Maybe being big like Reatur helped.

He had been talking to Peri. Filled with her own not quite happy thoughts, Lamra had paid no attention to whatever he was saying. She was a little surprised when Peri, after squeaking, “I will,” hurried away. Several of the other mates were playing a game of tag. Peri joined them. In a moment, her trouble with Lamra forgotten, she was frisking about.

“Now you,” Reatur said to Lamra. He had not forgotten, even if silly Peri had.

“It
wasn’t
her ball,” Lamra said.

“I know that,” Reatur said. “You all play with everything here in the mates’ chambers, so how could any of it belong especially to any one of you? That’s not what I wanted to talk with you about, Lamra.”

Then he did something Lamra had never seen him do with any other mate, though he had before with her, once or twice: he widened himself down very low, so that he was hardly taller than she. She still did not know what to make of that—she felt proud and nervous at the same time.

“You ought to know better than to squabble that way with Peri,” he said.

“It’s not fair,” Lamra said. “She squabbled with me, too.”

She saw Reatur’s eyestalks start to wiggle, saw him make them stop. That was just one more thing she did not understand: Why would he want to make himself stop laughing? Laughing was fun.

“So she was,” he said. “But she”—he lowered his voice a little, so the others could not hear—“is just an ordinary mate, and you, I think, are something more. So I expect more from you.”

“Not fair,” Lamra said again.

“Maybe not. Would you rather I expected less from you than you are able to give?”

“Yes. No. Wait.” Lamra had to stop and work that one through. Reatur was talking to her as if she were another male. His words were as badly tangled as she had hoped to make Peri’s arms. “No,” she said at last.

“Good,” Reatur said. “So you’ll behave yourself, then?”

“Yes,” Lamra said. Then she wailed, “I don’t want to behave myself!” The world suddenly seemed a more complicated place than she wanted it to be.

“I know you don’t,” Reatur said gently. “Doing it anyway is the hard part. It’s called being responsible.”

“I don’t want to be whatever you said—responsible. It’s silly, like not laughing when you want to laugh.” Lamra turned an eyestalk away from Reatur to show she was not happy with him. “And like widening yourself so you’re so short and fat that you look like a toy nosver.”

“Do I?” Reatur laughed then, so hard that Lamra doubted he could see straight. He also resumed his regular height. “Is this better?”

“Yes,” Lamra said, though she could hear the doubt in her own voice.

“All right.” Reatur hesitated. “How are the buds?”

Lamra looked down at herself. She was beginning to have a swelling above each foot, but the buds did not inconvenience her yet, and so she did not think about them very much. “They’re just—there,” she said, which seemed to satisfy Reatur. “How are Biyal’s budlings?”

She saw that she had startled Reatur; his eyestalks drew in, then slowly extended themselves again. “One mate has died,” he said. “The others seem to be holding their own. It won’t be long before we bring them back to live in here. The male is doing well.”

“I miss Biyal. She was fun to play with—not like Peri, who squawks all the time,” Lamra added pointedly. She let air hiss out from her breathing-pores in quite a good imitation of Reatur sighing. “I suppose the new ones will be even more foolish.”

“I suppose they will.” Reatur turned an extra eye her way. “I’ve hardly ever heard a mate say she missed another one after that one—after that one budded,” he said slowly. “You remember more than most, don’t you?”

“How can I tell that?” Lamra asked. There Reatur went, confusing her again. “I only know what I remember, not what anyone else remembers.”

“That’s true.” Reatur was trying not to laugh again, she saw. He stopped for a while, then went on in a musing tone. “What would you be like if you could hope for my years, or even Ternata?”

“Don’t be silly,” she told him. “Who ever heard of an old mate?”

“Who indeed?” he said, and gave a sigh so much like hers that she could not help wiggling her eyestalks. He reached out and awkwardly patted her between her eyestalks and her arms.
“All I can tell you, Lamra, is that I hope the male you bear takes after you. Having such wits around to grow would be precious.”

Lamra thought about it. She was not used to taking such a long view; being as they were, mates did not have occasion to. Finally she said, “You know, that would be nice, but I’d rather it was me.”

Reatur looked at her with all six eyes at once for a moment, something he had never done before. “So would I, little one. So would I.” Then he said something she did not understand at all. “I’m beginning to envy humans, curse me if I’m not.”

He left the mates’ chambers very quickly after that.

Several Minervans
kept an eye, or two, or three, on Frank Marquard as he got ready to descend. The lead male of the group was the one called Enoph. “Why are you going down?” he asked for the third time as Marquard checked and rechecked the lashing of his line around the big boulder that would secure it. “Tell me again, in words I can understand.”

“I try,” the geologist said in halting Omalo. He knew he could not have explained even if he spoke the language fluently. The Minervans had not developed the concepts they needed to grasp what he was up to.

“You know I walk on path down this far, more than halfway down Jöt—” He caught himself; the human name for the canyon meant nothing to the locals. “Down Ervis Gorge.”

“Not just on the path,” Enoph said with the sinuous wriggle of his arms that Marquard mentally translated as a shudder. “Away from it, too. How do you dare go where you might fall? Especially since you have only two arms and two legs to hold on with.”

“How I go? Carefully.” Marquard sighed when Enoph only opened and closed a couple of his hands in agreement. So much for the old joke. “You see how I go. When not on path, always have rope—how you say?—tied to big rock. If fall, not fall far.”

“Yes, I grasp that,” Enoph said—a natural image for a six-armed folk to use. “You humans are clever with ropes. I suppose you have to be. But
why
do you do what you do?”

“To learn from rocks,” Marquard said. That was as close as he had come to rendering
geology
into Minervan.

“A rock is a rock.” Enoph had said that before. Now, though,
he paused to think it over. “Maybe not,” he amended. “Some rocks are harder than others, some better to chip at than others. Do you want to learn which ones are best for tools? I could show you that.”

“No, not for tools. Want to see how rocks change in time. New rocks near top of Ervis Gorge, rocks older down low.”

Enoph wiggled his eyestalks, which meant he was laughing at Frank. I do better as a comedian when I’m not trying, Marquard thought. “All rocks are as old as the world. How could one be older than another?” Enoph asked.

Marquard shook his head; like other Minervans who had spent a good deal of time with humans, Enoph understood the gesture. “Think of two
fossils
I find in rocks,” the geologist said.

The key word was in English. Again, though, Enoph followed; the locals had not really started wondering about long-ago life preserved in rocks, but Maquard had shown them the couple of specimens he had discovered and had found giving them a new word easier than the elaborate circumlocution he would have needed to say the same thing in Minervan.

“I remember,” Enoph said. “One looked just like the foot of a nosver turned to stone. How can a nosver turn to stone?”

That, Marquard thought, needed a longer and more complicated explanation than he could give. Fortunately, it also was not quite relevant. “Where that rock like nosver from?”

“Not far from the top of the gorge, as I recall,” Enoph answered. “What of it?”

“Now think on other
fossil.
”

“That weird creature?” Enoph made the shuddery gesture again. “It looked like an eloc, or rather a piece of an eloc, but hardly bigger than a runnerpest. Even new-budded eloca are three times that size.”

“No animal like that now, yes?” Marquard asked. Enoph repeated his hand-closing gesture. The geologist went on. “Then that rock old, old, old, yes? No animal like that left now, yes? And that rock from where?”

Enoph pointed an eyestalk at a spot halfway down the side of the canyon. He suddenly turned four of his other eyes toward Marquard. The geologist smiled; no Minervan had ever shown him that much respect before. He also realized Enoph was no fool—he had not had to point out all the implications to the male. With data presented the right way, Enoph was plenty smart enough to work out implications for himself.

“You humans have the oddest notions,” he said. “I see this
one is true, but who would have thought rocks could have ages? How does it help you to know this?”

The Minervan, Marquard thought unfairly, sounded like a congressman about to vote against a research appropriation. “The more you know, the more you can find out,” the geologist answered. “If you know nothing, how find out anything? Know one thing: this big rock”—he pointed to the boulder to which he had lashed himself—“come down from up
there.
” He pointed to a level not far from the one the older fossil had come from.

Minervans did not jump when they were surprised. If they had, Enoph would have. “How can you know that? I helped move it—and a nasty job it was—to secure the bridge to the Skarmer side of the gorge.”

Getting the idea of “bridge” across took a good deal of gesturing and guessing, not least because there was no bridge for Enoph to point at. When Frank Marquard finally thought he understood, he asked the Minervan, “Where bridge now? Not see.”

That got a response from several of the males who had come down, and not a polite one. They turned all their eyestalks away from the western side of the canyon and extended sharp finger-claws as far as they would go. They also turned the bright yellow that Marquard had learned to be the color of anger.

“The stupid Skarmer wanted to cross to this side of Ervis Gorge and take our land and our mates from us,” Enoph said. “Seeing them try with the rope bridge up would have been plenty funny. How they propose to cross the gorge without it I cannot say.”

“Anyone with the wit even of a mate would see it can’t be done,” another male said. There was loud agreement from his companions.

Marquard looked toward the western horizon, which was, in essence, the distance-blurred western wall of Jötun Canyon. He had not thought his Minervan vocabulary would need to include terms like “invasion.” He looked again. Like Enoph, he had no idea how the Skarmer would get across the canyon if the people on this side did not feel like letting them.

“They say they do this?” he asked at last.

“The Skarmer
say
all manner of foolish things,” Enoph said scornfully. “I think that comes down to them from the first Skarmer bud. What they can
do
is something else again.”

“I hope you right,” Marquard said. All the same, he remembered,
and rather wished he hadn’t, something he had read or heard so long before that he had forgotten just where: “Son, if a man comes up to you in a bar and wants to bet he can make the jack of spades leap out of the deck and spit apple cider in your ear, never bet with that man because, son, if you do, sure as hell you’ll end up with an earful of cider.”

He snorted, imagining the fun he would have translating that into Minervan. His breath steamed out. What he did say was, “You watch, ah, Skarmer side of gorge to know Skarmer not come?”

“Aye, we watch,” Enoph said. “A waste of time, but we watch—the domain-master would have it so. Like you when you check your rope so carefully, he takes few chances.”

“Thank you,” Marquard said; being compared to Reatur had to be a compliment. The geologist gave the line another yank, though now he was convinced it would hold—if that boulder had supported a rope long enough to stretch across Jötun Canyon, his relatively tiny weight would not send it tumbling into the abyss.

He made the check just the same. It was, after all, his neck. Moving slowly and cautiously, he began to descend. The going was still a long way from extreme; he did not need to think to pick hand- and footholds. He thought about the Skarmer instead. Jötun Canyon struck him as a handy sort of thing to have between oneself and unfriendly neighbors.…

“At least,” he muttered, “till they figure out how to shoot across it.” He reminded himself to tell Irv about what Enoph had said—and Emmett Bragg, too, come to think of it. Assessing threats was part of Bragg’s job.

As he lowered himself, he began concentrating more and more on his own job. The wall of Jötun Canyon was like an enormous geological layer cake, with him the tiniest of ants nibbling data from it.

In more literal terms, the canyon wall was sandstone alternating with conglomerate, with an occasional thin layer of igneous rock telling of a time of vulcanism. Frank felt like cheering every time he came across one of those. He collected igneous specimens with special care. Potassium-argon dating from them would give him absolute dates on which to hang the relative dates of the stratigraphy he was developing.

Thought about another way, the conglomerates might have been even more impressive than granite or basalt. The rocks accreted in the sandy matrix ranged up from pea-sized to bigger
than a VW bus. When the glacier meltoff got rolling, it did not care what it moved. Anything in the way went.