Harry Turtledove - A World of Difference

“Never mind,” Sarah said, embarrassed. Then she gave all her attention back to pedaling and to watching the little compass Irv had glued to the control stick. The far wall of the canyon was too far away to give her any landmarks toward which to steer and the sun was invisible through thick gray clouds. She laughed a little; Damselfly had not been designed for instrument night.

Some of the clouds were underneath her. Jotun Canyon was plenty big enough to have weather of its own. Sarah was just glad the clouds didn’t altogether block the western wall from view. Seeing it loom out of the fog too late to dodge was the stuff of nightmares.

“Everything all fight, hon?” Irv sounded as if he expected her to go spiraling down into the canyon any second now.

“No problems,” she answered, taking her left hand off the stick to flick on the radio’s send switch. “I’m even getting warm.

Exercise and all that.” Keeping Damselfly in the air was hard work, closer to running than to bicycling on the ground. “I should be across in less than half an hour. Off I go, into the wild gray yonder-”

“Oh, shut up,” Irv said. Chuckling, Sarah switched off. Her husband would be too busy fuming to worry about her for a while. She pedaled on. The breeze from the fresh air tube began to feel delicious, not icy.

Looking down between her busy feet, Sarah saw she was above the deepest part of the Jotun Canyon. Something moving down there caught her eye. She could not tell what sort of beast it was, any more than a jetliner passenger can name the makes of cars he sees from 30,000 feet. Just with level flight between the canyon’s walls, she was half that high over the bottom herself.

She wondered what lived down there. Whatever it was, it was not a fulltime resident, not unless it nailed itself to the biggest rock it could find when the yearly floods came through. Maybe not then, either.

Then all such mental busywork blew away with the gusting tailwind that swept Damselfly along with it and threatened to make the ultra-ultralight stall. Sarah gasped, pedaled harder, and hit the prop control switch to make the propeller grab more air. A moment later, she also turned on the plane’s little electric motor to add its power to hers.

For a few queasy seconds, she thought none of that would do any good. Gusts were the worst problem with human-powered aircraft; one of five miles an hour gave Damselfly as much of a jolt as a 30mph gust did to a Cessna. The flimsy little craft did not want to answer its controls. From the way the spars creaked, Sarah wondered if it was going to break up in midair. “Don’t you dare, you bastard,” she said fiercely, as if that would do any good at all.

Damsel. fly held together. Sarah brought the plane’s nose down. Her legs were blurs on the pedals. She never knew whether her efforts saved her or the gust simply subsided. What she did know was that all the sweat on her body had turned cold.

When she was sure the ultra-ultralight-and her voice-were in full control again, she thumbed the radio’s send switch. “Hello back there,” she said. “Before, I was worrying about whether the Russians would have blankets and such for me. Now all I care about is a change of underwear.” She was surprised at how easily she could joke about what had just happened. No one, she thought, really believes in the possibility of her own death.

While Irv and Louise exclaimed tinnily through Damselfly’s speaker, Sarah shook her head, annoyed at herself. Philosophizing after the fact was all very well, but the cold sweat still coated her and her joke had almost been no joke at all, but literally true. She had believed in death, all right.

The western edge of Jotun Canyon grew closer. Sarah resisted the temptation to put on another mad burst of effort so she could reach it fifteen seconds before she would have otherwise. As in distance running, staying within herself counted. She could feel how much the one emergency had taken out of her.

At last she had land under her once more at a distance to be measured in feet rather than miles. She hit the radio switch again. The Russians could not reply on the frequency Damselfly used, but they were supposed to be listening. “Damselfly calling the Soviet rover,” she said in slow, careful Russian. “I am on your side of the canyon. Please send up a flare to show me your location.” She repeated herself several times.

All the while, she was scanning the horizon. If her navigation had been good, the flare would rise straight ahead of her. No sign of it there. No sign of it anywhere, in fact. What was-

Sarah frowned, groping for the name-Rustaveli’s problem?

There! The brilliant crimson spark hung in the air. It was north of where she had expected it; the gust over the canyon must have thrown her off worse than she thought. She twisted the control stick, working first ailerons and then rudder to go into the long, slow turn that was the best Damselfly could do.

The flare slowly sank while she approached. Now she eyed the ground instead of the sky. Motion drew her gaze. That was no Minervan down there, that was a man! “Soviet rover, I have you visually,” she said triumphantly. “Coming in to land.”

Rustaveli waved her on.

“-Snap, crackle, pop-really bad,” came out of the radio. Irv didn’t think it was haunted by Rice Krispies. What he did think was than no one had planned for Damsel. fly to be on the ground ten miles from the nearest receiver. The transmitter was not made to carry that far. No wonder the signal had static in it.

“Say again, Sarah,” he urged.

More Kellogg’s noises, then, “-not really bad,” she said.

“Broken ulna, concussion, nasty cut, maybe”-static again- “cracked ribs. But no sign of internal bleeding. He’ll get-“ Sarah’s voice vanished once more.

“Say again,” Irv repeated, and kept on repeating it until the static cleared.

“He’ll get better,” Sarah said, almost as clearly as if she were standing beside him with Louise and Pat. Grinning, Louise clasped her gloved hands over her head. as if to say, “The winnab, and still champion…”

Nodding, Irv asked the question that was even more important to him. “And how are you, hon?”

“Tired. Otherwise okay,” she answered. “I won’t try to come back today. I need the rest, and it’s too close to sunset to make me want to risk any funny winds the change from day to night might bring on over the canyon. Once was too f-“ The signal broke up again, but Irv had no trouble filling in the participial phrase he had not actually heard.

“Concur,” Louise said, over and over till Sarah acknowledged. “Wait at least till midmorning; let the air settle as much as it’s going to.”

“Will you be warm enough tonight?” Irv worried. Even when Minervan days got above freezing, nights stayed in the teens or colder.

“Plenty, thank you, Grandmother,” Sarah answered, which made Pat giggle and Irv’s ears turn hot under the flaps of his cap. “You can all be jealous of me, too, because I’m eating something that doesn’t come off our ration list. The Russians have this very nice little smoked lamb sausage called, ah-”

“Damlama khasip,” an accented male voice supplied: Shota Rustaveli.

“Nobody wants to hear about it,” Irv said. He was jealous, and so were Pat and Louise, if the lean and hungry looks on their faces meant anything. The food they had with them, which they would have eaten without much thinking about it, suddenly seemed too dull for words. Smoked lamb sausage… Irv felt his mouth watering.

Pat touched his arm and held out her hand for the radio. When he gave it to her, she said, “Sarah, I’ll bet they’re as sick of that as we are of freeze-dried waffles.”

“You are only too right,” Rustaveli said. Under the rueful amusement in his voice, the Russian-no, Georgian-sounded perfectly serious. “A pity we have no better way to meet than this Damselfly of yours. Who knows what I might do for a freeze-dried waffle?”