Harry Turtledove - A World of Difference

Next to the tent stood the thing-Fralk thought of it as a landboat-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 something 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.

Katerina had gone back into the tent while Shota worked with the lamp. Now the smaller male reappeared and tossed Shota a pair of cylinders identical, as far as Fralk could see, to the ones that had just come out.

Shota put in the new ones and put the outer skins back on his hands. This time he said, “Ahh!” He twisted the two pieces of the lamp together, and it was as if th6y had never been apart. He clicked the little fingerclaw. The lamp lit. He handed it back to Fralk.

“Thank you,” Fralk said, relieved-Mountenc would be no trouble now.

Shota picked up the cylinders he had removed from the lamp. “These dead,” he said. “Use much, they die, not give-“ He ran out of words halfway through his explanation. Fralk got the idea, though. Somehow, light was stored in the little cylinders, and they held only so much. Mountenc had used his lamp all the time, so it failed faster than any other.

“They will all do this?” Fralk demanded in horror. The glow of the lamp he was holding caught one of his eyes. He hastily clicked the lamp off-why waste its precious life during the day? “All,” Shota told him.

He felt as tenuously supported as he had crossing the bridge back from the Omalo domains. He pointed to the cylinders Shota was still holding. “You have more of those, I hope?”

Shota’s yipping laughter had an odd quality to it, one Fralk had not heard before. It sounded somehow ominous. It was. “We have,” Shota said. “What you pay?”

No wonder Shota made him nervous, Fralk thought as the bargaining began. No matter how peculiar the human looked, his stalkless eyes were as firmly on the main chance as Fralk’s own, or even Hogram’s. Fralk knew no higher praise.

The prints emerged from the developer, one after another. As each came out, Sarah Levitt pounced on it like a cat leaping onto a bird. She had been impatiently pacing ever since she put in the roll of film, three hours earlier. “Any mall back home has a shop that’ll run prints out in an hour fiat, while I’m spending half my life waiting here,” she complained. “So much for high tech.”

Emmett Bragg was the only other person awake inside Athena. “The machines in those shops are about the size of a pickup truck, too,” he said. “They got this one small enough for us to take along. What difference does it make if it’s not quite as fast?”

Another picture came out. Even the roller was too slow to suit Sarah. She tugged the print free. “What if you need a picture sooner than in three hours?” she said.

The question was rhetorical, but he answered it. “Then you ought to think to bring a Polaroid along.”

She glared at him, thinking he was being sarcastic or patronizing or both at once. His face, though, was serious. “You mean it,” she said, surprised.

“Well, sure.” He looked at her across a mental gap perhaps as wide, some ways, as the one separating people from Minervans. “Get yourself good and ready beforehand, and the run you’re making is a piece of cake.”