Harry Turtledove - A World of Difference

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 outwalls.

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.