Harry Turtledove - A World of Difference

“All right,” Sarah breathed. She had been irrationally certain that the eloc would drop its budlings when she was sound asleep or, worse, when she was just on her way back from Athena for another peek at it. Maybe luck was with her after all.

As poor Biyal had, the female eloc grew calm as the budding process advanced-almost, Sarah thought, as if it knew it would soon have nothing more to worry about. She hoped to change that.

All the same, she doubted she would succeed, not with this first try. Surely some Minervan somewhere would have thought of-would have tried-packing the cavities from which the budlings dropped to keep the inevitable flood of blood from following. But if so, Reatur was ignorant of it. Did that mean the effort had earlier been discarded as useless, or that Minervans could not see what seemed obvious to her? Before long, she would find out.

The budding proceeded much as Biyal’s had. It seemed uneventful; all that happened was that the split over each bud steadily grew wider and longer. Knowing how it would end, Sarah was not lulled as she had been before. She used the time she had before the crisis to prepare for it.

From her backpack she drew out six gauze pads, each stuffed into one of her socks. Her last couple of pairs would just have to do till she got home. She slapped a strip of duct tape onto each sock, to hold it in place on the clot’s hide. As she set each makeshift bandage on the ground, she shook her head in wry amusement. These were not the instruments she was used to working with.

“I never thought I‘d be a vet, either,” she said out loud. The eloc steadied at the sound of her voice. She suddenly realized that sounding like a male Minervan had its advantages: the eloc had the habit of obeying voices much like hers. She laughed at herself. She also was not used to feeling macho.

She could see the budlings’ feet now. They wiggled and thrashed, though the baby eloca were still attached to the female. The budlings were the size of terriers. Sarah hoped they would not get in her way when she tried to work on the female. Why, she wondered, did she think of these things too late to do anything about them?

Then such bits of irrelevance vanished from her mind. The budlings grew to be entirely visible; she could see how they were joined to the female’s circulatory system by their mouths.

They dropped off, all of them at once.

Sarah never noticed whether they got in her way or not; she was too busy with the female. As Biyal had, it simply stood, bleeding its life away. It did not try to gore her or strike at her when she began slapping her bandage packs over its spurting wounds.

Streams of its cold blood drenched her parka and trousers. She ignored that, too. Two bandages were in place now, the hemorrhaging from those orifices reduced to a trickle. She shoved a third plug into place, pressing hard on the duct tape so that it would cling to the eloc’s skin. She grabbed for the fourth bandage.

About then she noticed how limp the eloc’s arms and eyestalks had gone. She also noticed that the stream of blood from the fourth orifice was less than it had been from the first three. Even as she watched, the flow grew slower still and then stopped. The female eloc was dead.

“Oh, hell,” Sarah said, surprised at how disappointed she was. She had not expected to succeed with this first try, but her hopes had risen when she saw that her bandages seemed to do some good. The eloc, though, lost enough blood through the orifices she had not plugged to kill it before she could get to them.

Two things occurred to her. One was the most ancient medical joke around: The operation was a success but the patient died. The joke was old, of course, exactly because it was rooted in human fallibility. Ever since the first medicine man, every doctor in the world had seen his best fall short of being good enough.

Her second thought sounded frivolous but wasn’t: What would the little Dutch boy have done if he had had to stick his finger into six holes in the dike at once? “He’d’ve got help or drowned,” she answered herself out loud.

Only then did she realize what a mess she was. She might have been working in an alien abattoir, for the eloc’s blood dripped from her hands and arms and was splashed over the rest of her clothes. The fabrics were all supposed to repel moisture, but they hadn’t been designed for a workout like this. Neither had Athena’s laundry facilities.

She picked up the socks and gauze packs that were still clean. After taking a step away from the female eloc, she went back to salvage the three she had used. The gauze would never be the same, but her goresoaked socks might come clean. And even if they didn’t, she could use them again the next time she tried to save an animal. Nothing from Earth was automatically disposable on Minerva.

The eloca budlings scattered as Sarah walked toward the gate of the pen. She did not look like any Minervan creature that ate eloca, but she was bigger than they were, and that was plenty to set off the alarms evolution had built into them.

A couple of budlings got out before she could slam the gate shut. A Minervan caught one of them after a brief chase and shouted for other males farther away to run down the other. While they were pursuing it, the first Minervan, still holding the squawking eloc budling, said to Sarah, “You shouldn’t have let them get loose like that. They might have been lost for good.”

“Sorry.” She studied the local. One reason she found Minervans harder to tell apart than humans was that they did not always keep the same side of their bodies to her. Still, this one both looked and sounded familiar. “Sorry, Ternat.”

“Never mind now; just remember for next time.” Reatur’s eldest, Sarah thought, seemed a good deal like the domain master. He turned a couple of eyestalks toward the dead female eloc. “You didn’t have much luck there.” “No, not much,” she admitted.

“Reatur wants you to succeed.” That sounded like an accusation, but was Ternat condemning her for failure or Reatur for hoping for something else?

She answered carefully. “This first try. Here learn some, try again. Maybe learn enough so Lamra lives. Try.”

“What if you cannot learn enough before Lamra’s budlings drop?”

“Then I fail. Not say to Reatur I do, only I try.” Make something of it if you’re going to, she added, but only to herself.

But Ternat’s reply was mild. “That makes me think you are honest. People who give wild promises generally cannot live up to them. I suppose it must be the same with you humans.” He turned an eyestalk toward the newly budded eloc he was holding. “I will take this one to the herd, so it can get used to being among its own kind. If I delay too long, the foolish thing will grow up thinking it is a person, and fall easy prey to wild animals because it will stray too far from the big males who could protect it.”

Sarah’s gloves left unpleasant smears on the notebook she pulled from a pocket. Ignoring them, she scrawled, “Imprinting, tell Pat” on the first blank page she found. Humans knew so little about Minerva that even casual conversation like this gave important new data.

Ternat was already moving away. “What you do with dead eloc mate?” she called after him.

“Thank you for reminding me,” he said without stopping.

“I’ll make sure someone sees to the butchering.”

It was, she reminded herself, only a domestic animal. She knew the Minervans did not treat their own mates so. All the same, she had a vision of bright, funny little Lamra hacked apart by stone knives and served up with the local equivalent of Brussels sprouts. It made her more determined than ever to save the mate.

Sighing, she walked back toward Athena. She wished for a shower even more than she did after a turn in Damselfly. Wishing, however, kept failing to equip the spacecraft with the requisite plumbing.