Harry Turtledove - A World of Difference

He stuck an infrared filter on his lens. After that, the color values on his shots went south, but they did a better job of piercing the mist to show the watery fury that rampaged beneath.

“It grows steadier later in the season,” Enoph said. “More of the gorge is filled, and a more regular flow replaces this first rush of water.”

Marquard nodded; that was as computer models had predicted. The models had even warned of the mist above the water. What they had not done, could not do, was prepare him for the wonder the spectacle brought.

“Flood ever rise to top of canyon, spill out?” he asked. The computer had said that might happen, if everything went exactly right-exactly wrong, he supposed, from the Minervans’ point of view.

Enoph turned blue with fear at the very idea. “You humans have terrible thoughts! What would be left of a domain?” Not much, Frank thought, not when the main local building stone was ice. For Enoph’s sake, he was glad the simulation had been on the extravagant side.

The geologist took two more pictures, which finished off the roll. He decided against reloading; better to wait a couple of days and come back. That would tell him something about how fast the water was rising in the canyon.

He walked back toward Athena. He wanted to feed the roll into the developer now, so that he could see how it came out. When he got back to the ship, he found one roll processing and another in the lN bin with a Postit note from Sarah attached:

“Bump yours ahead of this and you die!” Knowing Sarah, she meant it. Frank sighed and stuck his film behind the other waiting roll.

He heard his wife’s voice from the front cabin. No one else seemed to be aboard. Even Emmett and Louise, who hardly ever went away, were off doing something or other with Reatur; he had seen them by the castle. Frank grinned to himself. Such chances were not to be wasted. He walked forward, whistling to let Pat know he was coming.

She turned around in her seat, waved so he could tell she saw him, then went back to speaking Russian. “I had hoped the creature lived on your side of the canyon, too, Shota Mikheilovich, or had relatives there, but if not, not. Athena out.”

Rustaveli also signed off. With a discontented grunt, Pat complained to her husband. “He doesn’t have any idea about what’s related to what. He’s just thinking in terms of this species or that, not genera or families or orders. He’ll end up hauling all his data home so the bigwigs in Moscow can try to make sense of it. Why’d he bother to come?”

“He doesn’t have the computers we do,” Frank answered.

He scratched his head, trying to remember what she had toldhim a couple of days before. Succeeding made him smile. “If he’d found that little burrowing thing, he’d never have guessed it was related to the one the Minervans call a runnerpest. They don’t look anything alike.”

Pat smiled, too. “Oh, you were listening after all. You’re right. That burrower is so adapted to underground life that without computer extrapolation of what its ancestors used to look like there’d be no telling which order it belonged to.”

“Mmhmm.” Frank paused a moment. “Quiet in here.”

“It is, isn’t it?” Pat’s gaze swung back to him. “Is that a hint?”

“More than a hint, you might say. Call it an invitation.”

Something passed over Pat’s face and was gone before Frank was sure he had seen it. Then her eyes went to the floppy she had been using while she talked with her Russian opposite number. Finally, though, she shrugged and said, “Why not?” Not the most enthusiastic response in the world, Frank thought, but it would do. He slipped his arm around her waist as she got up. They walked back to their cubicle.

Afterward, he leaned up on his elbow in the narrow bottom bunk. Pat lay beside him, not moving, not talking, looking up at the foam rubber mattress pad over their heads. “All right?” he asked, more hesitantly than he had expected.

“I guess I’m just tired,” she said, shrugging again. Bare as she was, that should have been enchanting. Somehow it was not. Shell said that more than once lately, times when she’d been less responsive than he had hoped. And she still did not look at him.

He thought for a while. Over the years, he had grown used to pleasing Pat and pleasing himself thereby. He took things as he found them, but this failure was something he would sooner not find again. “Anything I can do to help?” he said hesitantly.

Now her eyes turned his way. “This is the first time you’ve offered that,” she said. Curiosity mingled with-accusation in her voice.

“Didn’t think I needed to before.”

“Hmm.” She was studying him as dispassionately as if he were one of her specimens. “Well, maybe.” Her tone was judicious, too.

“Is that ‘well maybe I didn’t think so’ or ‘well maybe I can’?”

He pantomimed the confusion he was feeling.

She laughed. Now the jiggles that produced excited Frank. He could not have said why, unless it was relief at no longer being studied like a runnerpest. “Well, maybe”-she paused wickedly-“a little of both.” Her hand took his and guided it.

“Better?.” he asked some time later. She bit him on the arm. It wasn’t the answer he had looked for, but he did not complain.

Fralk and Hogram let thunder wash over them as they watched the flood. A boulder the size of Hogram’s castle slammed into the side of Ervis Gorge. The ground quivered like the skin of a massi with an itch. “You propose to send our boat through that?” the domain master demanded, stabbing a fingerclaw at the chaos far below.

Invading the Omalo lands wasn’t my idea, Fralk wanted to say. He had too much sense to yield to temptation. Hogram appreciated frankness, but he did not appreciate males showing how clever they were at his expense.

“The flood is still new, clanfather,” the younger male said carefully, “and is sweeping along the debris that has accumulated in the gorge since last summer. It will grow calmer.”

“It had better,” Hogram snapped. He turned an eyestalk from the flood to Fralk. “How would that runnerpest in the toy boat you showed me have fared if you dropped half my roof on it, eh? That’s what the trash in the water will be doing to the boats trying to go across, isn’t it?”

“I suppose there may be a few accidents.”

“Accidents?” Hogram echoed. “Is that all you can say? Accidents? Can you be sure any of these boats”-the way he stressed the word emphasized that it was foreign-“will get across Ervis Gorge at all? Or will the folk far north of here, picking corpses from the gorge after the flood subsides, be surprised at how many foolish males got themselves killed in the water?”

Anger burst inside Fralk. “Clanfather, are you pulling in your eyestalks? If so, tell me plainly, so I can free the males who are building boats for more productive duty. I also suggest that you release your males from weapons training, if you do not intend to use us as warriors.”

After being so blunt, Fralk wondered whether Hogram would turn all eyestalks toward or away from him. How many males, he thought, could claim total rejection by their own domain master and his Omalo counterpart? It was not a distinction Fralk craved.

But Hogram, with the perspective age brings, was not infuriated by the younger male’s presumption. If he was amused, he was too canny to let his eyestalks show it. “We must press on,” he said. “Think of the profit wasted if we let that labor go for naught. But I still turn blue whenever I think of trusting myself to one of the contraptions those males are building.”

You won’t be in one of them, Fralk thought. But that was not something even he dared say aloud. Instead he answered, “Clanfather, we will succeed. The Skarmer will be the only great clan to straddle a flood gorge. One day, our domains will fill the eastern lands.”