Harry Turtledove - A World of Difference

Three eyestalks jerked up from the hide. Not only was Reatur standing there, but Sarah the human, as well. How had they managed to sneak up on her? Well, no matter. She was glad they were here, Reatur especially. “Look!” Lamra said, pointing to the signs she knew. “This means ‘ice,’ doesn’t it?” None of the mates cared about anything like that.

Reatur bent an eyestalk down to see what she was talking about. “Why, yes, it does,” he said slowly. “How did you know that?” He kept one eyestalk on the word she had figured out and moved another around so he could see what was going on; the remaining four peered straight at Lamra.

“If you say the sounds of these two signs together, they make the word,” she explained. Reatur did not answer. He just kept looking at her with those four intent eyestalks. She began to worry. “Am I in trouble?” she asked. She had never heard of mates knowing what writing meant. Maybe they weren’t supposed to.

After a long pause that made Lamra worry even more, Reatur said, “No, you’re not in trouble.” She watched herself go from alarmed blue to the green of relief and happiness.

“What?” Sarah asked. The talk had passed her by.

“I know what these two signs say,” Lamra told the human proudly, showing which ones with a fingerclaw. She pronounced them separately, then together.” ‘Ice!’ Do you understand?”

“Yes. Understand,” Sarah said. She beat her two hands together, again and again. The noise startled Lamra, who pulled her eyestalks in halfway. “No, no,” Sarah said quickly. “With humans, noise means, ‘good for you.’”

Humans were very strange, Lamra thought, not for the first time: trust them to scare someone when all they meant was “good for you.” The mate let her eyestalks come out again, though.

She watched Sarah turn her head so her eyes pointed at Reatur. “You see?” the human said. If a person had been talking, Lamra would have thought that was triumph in her voice.

Maybe it was. Reatur’s grunt lay between annoyance and resignation. “I told you once already, did I not?” he said sharply. The human bent her head down-a person would have widened himself instead.

“You see about what, Reatur?” Lamra asked.

“About you,” the domain master said. Seeing that Lamra did not follow him, he went on. “The human will try to see that you don’t die when your time comes to bud.”

“Oh,” Lamra said, and then, louder, “Oh!” She still did not know what to think about that and was surprised that Reatur would even let Sarah try. “Are you sure?” she asked him.

“No,” he said. “I don’t know if I should be doing this at all. I don’t know if Sarah can keep you alive. But I do know I don’t want you to die. If it turns out you don’t have to, good. If not- the sorrow of the mates.”

If Reatur thought things might turn out all right, Lamra was willing to accept that. The same curiosity that had helped her begin to figure out written signs made her turn a couple of eyestalks on Sarah and ask, “How will you go about keeping my blood inside me? It comes out very quickly.” She had never watched a budding; Reatur didn’t let mates do that. But once or twice she had seen the chamber afterward, before it was cleaned, and she had picked up ideas from overheard snatches of talk. She more or less knew what happened in there.

Sarah turned her head back to Lamra. “Not know. Try to find out.” Then the human’s head swung toward Reatur again. “Mate knows good questions to ask, yes?”

“That she does,” the domain master said. “She always has, ever since she learned what words are for. It’s one of the reasons I would like to see her stay alive.”

“I wish the two of you wouldn’t talk about me like that, as if I weren’t there,” Lamra said indignantly.

Reatur and the human both stood quite still for a moment. Then Sarah started making the odd noise humans used instead of honest, eyestalk-wriggling laughter, while Reatur widened himself as if he were a mate and Lamra the domain master. “I humbly crave your pardon, clanf-ah, clanmother,” he said.

“Don’t you make jokes at me.” Now Lamra really was angry, angry enough to turn yellow.

Reatur’s voice changed. “I’m sorry, little one. I didn’t mean to tease.”

“Well, all right.” Of their own accord, Lamra’s eyestalks started to twitch. Imagine her telling off the domain master! Better yet, imagine her getting away with it! She remembered that Sarah had not answered her question. She asked it a new way. “If you don’t know how to keep me from ending yet, how will you find out?”

“Good question again,” Sarah said.

Lamra felt herself yellowing up once more-she wanted an answer that was an answer, not just words that sounded nice but didn’t tell her anything. Finally she got one.

“Try with animals budding,” the human said. “See if animal mates live after what I do. If yes, I do with you. If no, I do new thing with another animal mate, see if live after that.”

Lamra thought it over. “That sounds like it might work,” she admitted. “What if none of the animal mates lives, though?”

Sarah opened her mouth, then closed it again without saying anything.

“Then you won’t, either, Lamra-” Reatur said.

“That’s what I thought. That’s what’s supposed to happen, though, so I don’t need to worry about it, do I?”

“Of course not,” he answered at once. “I’ll do all the worrying. That’s one of the things a domain master is supposed to do. I worry so other people don’t have to.”

“All right,” Lamra said, relieved. “I’m not much good at worrying-you need to think about one thing for a long time to do it right, and I have trouble with that. There are so many interesting things to think about that sticking to just one is hard.”

“All mates like this?” Sarah asked Reatur, again as though Lamra were somewhere else.

“No,” was all he answered.

“Then I see why you want this one to save.”

“Yes,” Reatur said.

The way they talked made Lamra feel foolish. She was just herself and could not imagine being any different from what she was. Her only perception that she was in any way remarkable was that she found other mates boring some of the time. And since they often did not seem to know what to make of her, either, that worked both ways.

“Sarah, if you do find out how to keep me from ending when my buds drop, will it be something only humans can do, or will Reatur be able to do the same thing with other mates later on?”

“Other mates?” Reatur exclaimed. “I hadn’t even begun to think about that.” He started to turn blue, which startled Lamra-what had frightened him? until he went on, “If all our mates and all their budlings and all their mate budlings lived to grow up, how would we feed them all? This domain just raises enough for the folk it has now.”

He and Lamra both turned anxious extra eyestalks toward Sarah. All the human-the human mate, Lamra reminded herself; somehow humans dealt with the problem that worried the domain master-said, though, was, “Not know.”

“Fair enough,” Reatur said. “Worry about one thing at a time. If Lamra lives after budding, then we will see what to do next.”

“Yes,” Sarah said. “Good sense.”

Lamra had not thought so far ahead when she asked her question, but she recognized the trouble once Reatur showed her it was there. “If this harms the domain, clanfather, you don’t have to let Sarah do it.” The sacrifice seemed small to her. She had been going to end when her buds dropped, and the time that might come after still did not feel as though it belonged to her.

Sarah started to say something, then stopped with her mouth half open. As was fitting, she looked toward Reatur-the choice was his.