Harry Turtledove - A World of Difference

She really was the most ridiculous creature imaginable. Four eyestalks quivered. The motion was less than she had though it would be. For some reason, they didn’t want to do what she told them to. But she was laughing.

“Lamra?” Three voices all at once, two sounding like people but oddly accented, the third deep and strange: humans.

She tried to talk. Her mouth didn’t seem to want to work, either. She tried again. “Where’s my runnerpest?” she demanded at last. The humans abruptly stopped paying attention to her. They yelled and screamed and, she saw when she managed to raise her eyestalks a little, jumped up and down.

“Where’s my runnerpest?” she repeated, louder this time.

One of the humans finally handed her the toy. It was bloody.

She squeezed it anyhow.

“How are you? How do you feel.?” the humans all asked over and over again once they got coherent enough to talk sensibly.

“Tired,” she answered. More thought produced, “Sore. Messy.” She was thinking just clearly enough to know she wasn’t thinking very clearly. “Hungry, too.”

“Sore where?” Pat sounded anxious. “Hurt bad?”

“I’m sore where-I guess where-you put those clamps”-she used the human word she had learned-“on me. No, Pat, I don’t hurt bad. When you put them on, I hardly felt it at all. I hardly felt anything at all. It was funny.” When she laughed this time, her eyestalks wiggled the way they should. “It was like being asleep and awake at the same time. Do you know what I mean?”

“No.” Pat made the up-and-down gesture humans used for a shrug. “Glad you are not hurt, though.”

Louise held up a couple of squirming, squalling… At first Lamra thought they were big runnerpests, but then she remembered seeing their like before sometimes, when Reatur would walk out after a mate had dropped. “Oh. The budlings,” she said.

“Yes. You want to see?”

“I suppose so.” Everything was interesting to Lamra, at least for a little while. But the budlings got boring fast. All they did was flail about and make noise. “That’s enough. You can put them down now.”

Irv spoke into his talkingbox. The box, to Lamra, was much more interesting than budlings. She had started out wondering how humans made themselves small enough to fit inside, for their voices surely came out of it. Later she realized they didn’t hide in there, but talked with each other at a distance. To her, that was more marvelous, not less.

Irv spoke into the talkingbox again. This time, nobody answered. Irv shook the box, broke it in half-Lamra hadn’t known it opened up-looked inside, made a human shrug, put the box back together. He held it to his mouth once more. He spoke louder now.

When nothing happened, Pat got out her talkingbox and offered it to Irv. But just then, noise came out of his: another rumbling human voice talking. Irv answered. Lamra knew only a handful of words of human speech but recognized her name and Sarah’s.

And sum enough, Sarah’s voice came from the talkingbox a moment later. She was talking about Lamra, too. Suddenly she started using words a person could understand. “Lamra, how are you? How do you feel?”

Lamra’s eyestalks wiggled. “You humans all ask the same questions,” she said when Irv held the talkingbox above her mouth.

“Never mind jokes!” Sarah said sharply. “Tell me fight now how you are!”

Lamra looked at herself again. “Ugly, I think. And the tape”-another human word she had picked up-“itches.”

“Not what I mean!” Sarah sounded the way humans sometimes did when Lamra couldn’t figure out what they wanted fast enough.

“Please don’t be angry.” Lamra wanted to pull in all her arms and eyestalks. “I think I’m all right, Sarah, except for the holes in me where the budlings were. Will they close up, or will I look like this from now on?”

“Not know, Lamra.” Not counting a tiny hiss, only silence came out of the talkingbox for a while. Then Sarah went on, “Sorry, Lamra, not mean to be angry at you. Angry at me.”

“Why would you be angry at yourself?” Sometimes humans made no sense at all to Lamra.

“Angry because I not there when your budlings come,” Sarah answered. “Want to be there to help you, but not can do.”

“Oh. Don’t worry, Sarah. It’s all fight,” Lamra said. “Irv and Pat and”-she had to think for a moment-“Louise helped me very well. What could you have done that they didn’t?”

Another silence, longer this time. Irv fiddled briefly with the talkingbox and then said, “Lamra, Sarah thought of the way we used to save you. She showed us what to do. We were lucky to do it fight without her here. If we make-had made-a mistake, she show us how to fix it.” His strange voice held the gentleness Reatur used when explaining something to a new mate who was hardly more than a hurling herself.

“Oh.” Lamra thought about the tone Irv had used, about his words, and decided she had been silly. “Sarah?” she said. Irv put the talkingbox above her mouth again. “I’m sorry, Sarah; I wish you’d been here, too. You must have been doing something important, or you would have been.”

Still more silence. Then: “Not as important as you, Lamra; not as important as you. But did Reatur ever talk to you about Skarmer males on this side of Ervis Gorge?”

“Yes, Sarah.” Lamra squeezed the toy runnerpest again.

“He beat them. I helped him beat them.”

“That is important, Sarah,” Lamra said. “If Reatur hadn’t beaten them, then what happened with me wouldn’t matter much, would it?”

“No, not much,” Sarah said. “But still, curse it, Lamra, I wish I there with you instead!”

“All right, Sarah,” Lamra said, thinking once more that even when humans used people’s words, they didn’t always make sense with them. Trying to figure out what they meant was fun, though, and now, she realized, she would have more time to do it. She liked that.

The males standing guard outside Hogram’s audience chamber hefted their spears as Tolmasov and Bryusov walked by. Their eyestalks followed the two humans. Seeing a spearpoint twitch a couple of centimeters toward him, Tolmasov wished he were carrying his AKT4 instead of a radio. But no, he thought-an AKT4 had helped cause his predicament.

“They are not fond of us anymore, Sergei Konstantinovich,” Bryusov said quietly. He could feel it, too, then.

“No,” the pilot agreed. “I only hope they are not in the habit of blaming the messenger for the news he brings.” He felt like some luckless boyar coming to Ivan the Terrible with word of a disaster against the Tatars.

The Minervans talking in file audience chamber fell silent as the humans entered. A couple of males ostentatiously turned all their eyes away from Tolmasov and Bryusov. “They deny that we have the right to exist,” Bryusov murmured.

“Like turning their backs-but they have no backs. Yes, I understand, Valery Aleksandrovich.” Even though the linguist kept stating the obvious, Tolmasov was glad he was along. Being able to speak the Skarmer tongue fluently ought to give him insight into the way the locals thought. And having another human close by was comforting in this room full of hostile aliens.

Hogram waited at the far end of the hall. Tolmasov approached the domain master, bowed low in lieu of widening himself. Beside him, Bryusov did the same. Before, Hogram had always widened in reply, as much as he would have to one of his high advisors. The minimal widening he gave the humans now told how their status had changed.

“We have come as you asked us to come, clanfather,” Tolmasov said. Let Hogram remember who needed whom now.

“Yes, I asked you to come,” Hogram said. Tolmasov watched him closely, looking for any color change, but Hogram was far too wily to let his skin reveal his feelings. “I want you to explain once more, not just to me but to all my councilors here, how the rifle for which we paid such a great price failed to help us defeat the Omalo.”