A World of Difference (46 page)

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 fled 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 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 grown-up 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, “Y-yes, 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 berries.”

“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.”