Harry Turtledove - A World of Difference

“But-“ Sarah gave up. Emmett was a pilot first and then an astronaut; of course his world revolved around checklists. He even had a point, she supposed. But medicine was less predictable than fighters or spacecraft; things happened all at once instead of sequentially, and so many variables were running around loose together and bouncing off each other.

“Never mind.” Bragg came around to look over her shoulder. She heard him suck in a quick, sharp breath of air. All he said, though, was, “Not pretty.”

“No.” Sarah was almost disappointed that he had not reacted more strongly, before she remembered that he had been through Vietnam. If anything could give him what was close to a doctor’s clinical detachment, that was probably it.

The pictures were anything but pretty. No matter how alien Biyal’s body was, what had happened to it was grimly obvious, and the stark background of the field where Reatur had left it only made it more pitiful.

“This is how they get more Minervans?” Emmett asked. Then, without waiting for an answer, he went on. “Not much in the way of obstetrics hereabouts, is then:?”

“No,” Sarah said again. Then her helpless fury burst out. “There’s not one goddamn bloody bit of obstetrics here, and I don’t know if there ever will be, or even can be. You see the big wounds?” Her finger hovered over them, first on one print, then on another.

“I see ‘era,” Bragg said.

“That’s where each baby is attached to the female-attached by a big blood vessel. When the babies reach term, the skin over them splits and they let go and the mother bleeds out, all over the floor.” She had cleaned her boots several times. Biyal’s blood was still in the crevices.

“Anything you could do to keep it from happening?”

Bragg, Sarah thought, saw straight through to essentials, as with, she reluctantly admitted to herself, his comeback about the Polaroid. Such automatic competence was-daunting. She answered the only way she could. “I don’t know. I doubt it. I wish I could, but I don’t know.”

“You want the chance to try, don’t you?”

Startled, she swung around. He was closer to her than she had thought, well inside her personal space when they were facing each other. “How could you tell?” she asked. She did not pull back right away.

“Way you talk.” The crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes crinkled in amusement, but the eyes themselves were watchful as ever, a flyer’s eyes or, Sarah thought, a marksman’s. Being u.. targeted like that was faintly unnerving. But Bragg’s voice was light. “You sound like a test pilot going into training with a new machine.”

“I guess I do,” she said, laughing. “Only with this one, I’m not only not sure whether it will fly, but whether it ought to fly.”

The crow’s feet crinkled a different way. Sarah was not sure how it was different, but it was. “Why shouldn’t it fly?” Bragg kept with her metaphor.

“Because it looks-“ For a variety of reasons, Sarah did not feel like going on, but in the end she did. “It looks like Minervan females are just designed-evolved, whatever, to have one set of babies and then die. Pat’s trying to find out if it works that way with the animals here, too, not just the people, And I think the females have those babies young, really young-none of them is much more than half as big as a male.”

Bragg pursed his lips, sucked in air between them. “Doesn’t leave a whole lot of room for women’s lib here, does it?”

“It’s not funny, Emmett,” she said hotly.

“I never said it was.”

It was not an apology, but it was close enough for Sarah to let herself sag wearily as she said, “Suppose I can save a few females while we’re here. What happens then? Will they conceive again, and just die next time? Will they live and not conceive again? If they do that, can the Minervans handle the idea of adult females? I don’t think the question even arises here.”

“Is it your business to turn their whole society upside down?”

Bragg asked. “That’s what you’d be doing, sounds like.”

“I know,” she said unhappily. “But is it my business to watch people-intelligent creatures, anyway-die before they have to? And die like this?” She held up the pictures. As if to emphasize her words, another one came out of the developer and lay in its tray, mute evidence of horror.

“Maybe your business is just that. Minervans aren’t people- aren’t humans,” Bragg corrected himself before Sarah could. “We get into enough trouble back home, trying to ram our ways of doing things down our neighbors’ throats. Maybe you ought to just let these folks go to hell-or even heaven-their own way.”

“Maybe I should.” Regretfully, Sarah let it go at that. Bragg, as usual, was straightforward, logical, probably even sensible- and everything in her rebelled at what he was saying. If she ever thought she had a way to keep Minervan females from dying in childbirth, she would try it, and Minervan society would just have to take its lumps.

Bragg started for the galley. “I’m going to get something to munch on,” he said. “Want to come along?”

“Why not? God knows when-or if-Irv’s coming back to night, lie’s slept in Reatur’s castle a couple of times already this week. Even inside a sleeping bag-”

“That’s a cold bed,” Bragg finished for her.

She nodded. “And after looking at these pictures, I don’t think I’ll rest easy tonight, anyhow. I could use the company.”

The pilot gave a thoughtful grunt at that.

In the galley, he chose a packet of smoked, salted almonds. Tearing open the aluminum foil, he said, “I don’t suppose the Minervans have anything like beer.” He sounded wistful rather than hopeful.

“You know perfectly well they don’t,” she said, rehydrating a tube of apricots-all the food on Athena was in freefall-safe containers. “If you ever head away from the ship, make sure you take rations along. The local water or ice ought to be all right, but don’t try eating anything. You’d regret it.”

“That’s what you’ve been saying,” he agreed, crunching.

“Believe it,” she told him. “The more I find out about biochemistry here, the more toxic it looks.”

“Funny,” Bragg said. “Same basic chemicals, right?” At Sarah’s nod, he went on, “So how come they didn’t work out the same way they did back home?”

She held up a finger so he would wait while she swallowed. “Back home, life got started in the tropical seas. You could call the water here a lot of different things, but tropical’s not any of them.”

“Isn’t that the sad and sorry truth?” Bragg’s drawl thickened, reminding her of where he was from. A moment later, he was focused again. “Different conditions, you’re saying?”

“Exactly. Back on Earth, everything is geared to functioning well at high temperatures. Even animals that live in weather not much better than Minerva’s-polar bears and such-do it by using a lot of insulation to keep warm. But there’s no such thing as warm weather on Minerva, and from the biochemistry there never has been. Instead, all the adaptations have been to meeting the cold on its own terms. Minervan tissues are full of every different kind of antifreeze you can think of. Not tasty.”

“Like drinking your radiator, eh?” Bragg chuckled.

Sarah stayed serious. “Just exactly. The Viking results suggested that, but of course the biochemistry experiments were nowhere near done when-when Reatur smashed it.”

“And now it’s in his trophy room. That’s pretty strange.”

Bragg shook his head.

“I know.” Sarah nodded slowly. “I was in my senior year when Viking landed, and I was heartbroken when the transmissions stopped. I never thought then I’d meet the-person who stopped them.”