Harry Turtledove - A World of Difference

It wasn’t, she told herself, that she didn’t love Frank. She did; she was sure of that. But it had been a long time now since she had left clawmarks on his back. She wondered if he still could turn her on.

She also rather wished she hadn’t thought about Irv just after yet another unsatisfactory time with Frank. From the noises she occasionally couldn’t help noticing on Athena, Irv had had no trouble keeping Sarah happy. Sometimes she wondered if the secret was transferable.

Reatur felt his claws dig into the smooth ice of the floor, a mute sign of his disbelief. “You’re sure?” he said for the third time.

“No, clanfather, I’m not sure,” Ternat repeated patiently, “but it looked to me as if the two humans were mating, and one of them seemed to have male mating parts-or rather, a single male mating part. Does that not imply that the other human is a female?”

“I suppose so,” Reatur said unwillingly. He still had trouble taking in what his eldest was telling him. “A female that acts like a male-by the gods, a female that has lived long enough to learn a male’s wisdom. Even from people as strange as humans are…” His voice trailed away.

“Why not just ask them?” Ternat said.

“Would they tell the truth? If I had that kind of female with me, would I admit it? It’s as unnatural as-as-“ Reatur stopped, at a loss for a comparison. He thought for a while, groping for a way to understand. “Maybe it means these females have never mated.”

“Then what were the two humans doing behind the rock?” Ternat asked. “Clanfather, you know as well as I, when the urge comes on you to mate, you mate.”

“And if you are a female, when you mate, you bud, and when you bud, you die. There is no other way. With us, with nosver, even with runnerpests it is so. How could it be different with humans?”

Ternat did not answer; he had no good reply to make. Reatur had no answers, either, only endless questions-and the same hopeless hope he always felt when he thought of the sorrow of the mates. What would Lamra be like, if somehow she could live on after the buds dropped from her? Reatur tried to imagine Lamra’s wild and sunny nature transformed by, say, Ternat’s years. He gave up; he could not make the mental leap.

Then he had another thought. As long as he was imagining Lamra surviving one budding, why not more than one? What would it be like, coupling with a mate who could appreciate the act with full wit, as well as skin? If the humans had that-

“They may be luckier than any people dreamed of being,” he said softly.

“Clanfather?” Ternat did not follow him.

“Never mind.” Reatur’s breath hissed out under his arms. “I suppose you’re right, eldest. I’ll just have to ask them.”

Ternat walking after him, Reatur began looking for a human. Usually he could not go down a hallway without stumbling over three of them; now that he wanted one, they were nowhere to be found. He finally saw one some ways off in the fields, pointing his picture-maker at a male pulling weeds between crop plants. The subject seemed uninspiring to Reatur.

When the human heard the domain master coming, he turned his head so his two poor trapped eyes would point the right way. The human hesitated before asking, “Reatur, yes?”

“Yes.” Reatur was not offended; he had trouble telling humans apart. This was one of the three that rumbled. “Irv?” he guessed. His odds of being right were better than one in three. He was certain neither the rumbler called Emmett nor the one called Frank cared about weeds.

“Yes,” Irv said, and Reatur felt pleased with himself.

The domain master turned an extra eyestalk on the male who was weeding. “Why don’t you go do that someplace else, Gurtz?” When Irv started to follow the male, Reatur muttered to himself. “You stay, Irv; I need to speak with you.”

“Reatur?.” The human plainly did not yet understand why the domain master had come to talk with him.

“You did well to get Gurtz out of the way, clanfather,” Ternat said. “The fewer who know of this, the better.”

“Yes, wouldn’t the gossip fly?” Reatur agreed. He gave his attention back to Irv, who was not following the conversation between the domain master and his eldest. Reatur tried to find a way to get around to his question an eyestalk at a time but saw no way to do anything but ask it straight. “Irv, are you a male or a mate?”

Quick and unambiguous, the answer came back: “A male.”

Reatur was surprised at how relieved he felt.

Still, finding out that one human was respectably male did not mean they all were. The domain master thought about the two most often in company with Irv and picked one of their names. “Is Sarah a male or a mate?”

The long pause before Irv answered told Reatur what he had to know. He felt his arms droop. Irv must have realized there was a problem, for even when he did reply at last, his voice was much softer than Reatur was used to from him. “A mate,” he said.

“I was right, clanfather,” Ternat said.

“So you were, eldest.” Reatur’s voice was as heavy as Ternat’s. Intellectually imagining something was a long way from having it confirmed, especially when it was something as hard to believe as this. “Are any other humans mates?” the domain master asked Irv.

He had to try that one a couple of times before he was sure Irv understood it. The answer he finally got rocked him from mouth to feet. Half the humans were mates.

“Sarah and Pat and Louise?” Ternat echoed, as stunned as Reatur.

“Do you use them?” the domain master asked. That required more explanations before Irv saw what he meant, and then even more as the human tried to respond. Human ideas of society left Reatur even more confused than he had been; he had not thought that possible. He got the salient point, though. “You do mate with them.’?”

“Yes,” Irv said.

Reatur forgot his own earlier speculation. “How could you bring them along with you, then, to die far from more of their own kind?” he asked, appalled at the human’s callousness.

Despite Irv’s growing fluency with his language, Reatur took a while to grasp that his wild guesses had been somewhere close to right. From what the human said, his people’s mates did not necessarily bud when they coupled-”What’s the point of coupling, then?” Ternat said; Reatur hushed him-and did not die when they budded.

“How can that be?” the domain master asked. “The blood-”

“We made different, people and humans,” Irv began.

“A good thing, too. I wouldn’t want to look like that,” Ternat said. Though he privately agreed, Reatur waved his eldest to silence again.

Luckily, the interruption had not thrown Irv far off stride.

“Different inside, not just outside.”

“Different how?” Reatur persisted. When buds fell from a mate, they left holes. Blood had to gush through holes, he thought. Maybe human mates did not drop six buds at a time. But even if-wildly unlikely notion-they only dropped one, that should be plenty.

“Ask Sarah how different,” Irv said. “Sarah knows of bodies.”

“All right, I’ll do that.” Humans’ characters were still hard for Reatur to gauge, but Sarah struck him as being a very straightforward and competent male… The domain master flailed his arms-not a male! “Ask a mate?”

Irv spread his hand, a take-it-or-leave-it gesture humans used. “Sarah knows,” he said. “Sarah knows of bodies, well and not well.”

“A doctor?” Reatur said.

“Doctor.” Irv repeated the word several times.

Reatur used the same trick when he was trying to remember something. He was glad to notice any point of similarity with humans, now that this gaping gorge of difference had opened up. The idea of learning from a mate still jolted him, so he asked, “Do any other humans know of bodies?” “Pat does,” Irv said after a moment’s pause.