Harry Turtledove - A World of Difference

What Pat touched was the goresplashed front of her false skins. “Go get clean,” she said to Reatur, and started to walk on toward the flying house. Then she added, “Wish I had hot water,” which left him almost as confused as when he had realized how his feelings about Lamra’s survival had changed.

One of water’s few virtues, to Reatur’s way of thinking, was being better for washing than ice or snow. But hot water?. Hot water was a weapon of war, good for shooting at a foe from a distance or undermining the thick hard ice of his walls. Did Pat mean she was going to wash herself in it? The domain master knew humans loved heat, but that was taking things altogether too far.

He never thought to wonder how Pat felt about his living in a castle made mostly of ice.

The boats bumped down the path toward Jotun Canyon. The path, meant only for occasional travelers, was not nearly wide enough to accommodate so much traffic. Minervans and their beasts of burden slogged eastward, using the roadway more as a sign of the direction in which they should go than as a means of travel in itself.

Oleg Lopatin marched along with them. He was whistling cheerfully, something which, had they heard it, would have filled the rest of the crew of Tsiolkovsky with disbelief. But, he thought, he had every reason to be happy.

For one thing, he was doing conspicuously less than the warriors all around him. True, his AKT4 was slung over his shoulder and he had a heavy pack on his back, but he was not hauling boats on ropes like the Minervans. Nothing satisfies the soul like watching others work harder than oneself.

For another, he was doing, actually doing, something every Soviet officer dreamed of and planned for. He was marching to war against the Americans, in a place where they had no nuclear weapons to make life difficult. So, he whistled.

Fralk turned an eyestalk toward him. “How do you make that peculiar noise, Oleg Borisovich?” the Minervan asked in good Russian.

“You just pucker your lips and-“ Lopatin began in the same language. Then he remembered who-and what-he was talking to. “Never mind,” he said lamely, switching to the Skarmer tongue. “Your mouth, mine not same.”

Fralk sighed. “No, I suppose not.” Even so, a minute or so later he sent air hissing up and out through his mouth. It did not sound like whistling; it sounded like a steam valve with a leak, Lopatin thought. The sight of Fralk’s breath smoking out would have completed the illusion, but Fralk’s breath did not smoke. It was too cold.

The KGB man found another reason to be glad he was marching-he stayed warmer this way.

He passed Minervans practicing their paddling on boats set down by the side of the road. They were none too efficient at best; when they turned three or four eyestalks-and their concentration-on the human instead of their job, they grew positively ragged. Unlike Lopatin, they would not freeze in moments if their coracles flipped them into the icy water now rushing through Jotun Canyon. Also unlike him, though, none of them could swim a stroke.

He expected a good many to drown on the way across. That was too bad, but it could not be helped. Fralk and Hogram, he knew, felt the same way, or they never would have tried crossing the canyon in the first place. And Fralk was also forethoughtful enough to have got the best paddlers in the whole force for his boat.

Had Fralk not come up with that idea for himself, Lopatin would have suggested it. He was going into that coracle, too. But Fralk was no one’s fool. When it came to self-interest, Minervans and humans thought very much alike.

The roar of the torrent in Jotun Canyon had filled Lopatin’s ears all day. He was starting to screen it out, as he did the city noise of Moscow. Now he let himself hear it again. The irregular grind of ice on ice that was part of the racket made him frown. Even the best paddlers might not save him.

That thought came back to haunt him as he peered down from the rim of the canyon and saw through swirling snow the cakes of ice flowing by. He wondered whether Fralk was also full of second thoughts.

More likely, the Minervan was too busy to have time for them. Gangs of males had been laboring to smooth and widen the path down to the water since before the flood began. Even so, it was none too smooth and none too wide. It was also steep and icy. Getting warriors down to where they could cross the stream was no easy job. Getting the boats down there was worse. Lopatin was glad all that was Fralk’s problem, not his.

To give him his due, Fralk was as ready as anyone trying something for the first time could be. The changeovers of the rope crews had been planned with almost balletic precision. Moving the boats along was not the problem it had been on the trek from Hogram’s town. Keeping them from taking off on their own and sliding into the water without any warriors in them, however, presented problems of its own.

Though his own engineering talents were electronic rather than mechanical, Lopatin admired the solution Fralk and his comrades had come up with. At the top of the canyon, most of the boatpullers abruptly turned into boatholders, moving behind their burdens to control them and stop them from running away.

The KGB man clicked off several pictures, fast as the autowinder would let him. He wished he had Tsiolkovsky’s video camera with him, but understood why Tolmasov had said no. Both in the water and across it, he was going into real-serious danger-taking the precious camera along would have risked it as well.

But the stills he was getting could only suggest the smooth discipline of the maneuvers the warriors were carrying out. Ballet was not quite the right comparison after all, Lopatin decided after watching for a few minutes. The groups of males working together reminded him more of public Komsomol displays of mass exercises.

One of Fralk’s constantly twisting eyestalks happened to light on Lopatin. “Oleg Borisovich, you should be on your way down, not gawking up here,” the Minervan scolded.

The Russian felt his face grow hot, snow flurries or no. “You are right, eldest of eldest,” he said formally. “I apologize.” Hoping the spiked soles of his boots would hold, he started down the slope.

“Careful, there,” he heard Fralk yell behind him. “No, no, no, don’t foul the ropes, you spawn of a spavined eloc. Come around this way. There-better, isn’t it?” The general as traffic cop, Lopatin thought, smiling.

In spite of wearing spikes, he soon came to envy the Minervan males their six legs. They could slip the claws on their toes into the tiniest cracks in the roadway to anchor themselves. And even if they fell, they had six arms with which to reach out and grab something. Don’t fall, he told himself grimly, and tramped on.

Fralk hurried past him. Instead of shouting at males getting ready to maneuver boats down the path, now the Minervan was shouting at the males who were starting to put boats into the water. “No, you idiot! Keep the rope attached! Keep it-”

Too late. The boat was already sliding downstream. The warriors who had let it get away stared at it with a couple of eyestalks and apprehensively back at Fralk with the rest. He screamed abuse at them. Lopatin chuckled. He did not understand even half of what Fralk was yelling, but anyone who had ever soldiered recognized the tone.

One of the males past whom Lopatin was marching wiggled his eyestalks at the human. Even in an alien species, Lopatin could tell this was a veteran: his spears and shields were old and battered, not shiny new ones like those most of the warriors carried, and pale scars seamed his hide.

“Taught that little budling everything he knows about fighting, I did: me, Juksal,” the male said. “Even sounds like a warrior now, doesn’t he?”