Harry Turtledove: A World of Difference

“Come on, Peri, throw me the ball!” Lamra shouted. “Throw it to me! It’s my turn this time! I want to play, too!”

Peri threw the ball to another mate. Lamra hurried over toward that one, still trying to get into the game. “No, you can’t have it!” the mate said. She threw the ball to someone else. “You can’t play with us anymore, Lamra. You’re too ugly.”

“That’s right,” Peri said. “You’ve got holes in you from where your budlings fell out, and with them falling out, you shouldn’t even be here. You should have ended, like mates are supposed to do. Who ever heard of an old mate?”

“Who ever heard of an old mate? Who ever heard of an old mate?” A bunch of mates, maybe even an eighteen of them, formed a jeering ring around Lamra. Sun-yellow with fury, she rushed at them, but they skipped aside, jeering still. And even if she had managed to catch one, what good would it have done? The rest would all pile on her before she could get any of her own back.

Sometimes she wondered if letting the humans save her had been a good idea. Down deep, she hadn’t really expected them to do it. Before, when she had thought about what would come after, she just thought about going on as she always had, about running around and playing with the other mates without the big budling bulges getting in her way.

But the others didn’t want to play with her, not anymore. “Who ever heard of an old mate? Who ever heard of an old mate?”

They were so busy making fun of Lamra, they hardly noticed the door to the mates’ chambers opening. “What’s going on here?” Reatur shouted. He was as yellow as Lamra, but his rage was not helpless like hers.

Some of the mates turned blue and ran away. Others held their ground. “We don’t want her here,” Peri yelled at the domain master. “She should go away.”

“You go away, right now,” Reatur cried in a terrible voice. He turned all his eyestalks toward the wall three arms away from Peri. Her bravado collapsed. She went from yellow to blue so fast she wasn’t even green between, then tled with a squeak.

Reatur let his eyes look all around again. “That doesn’t help, you know,” Lamra said sadly. “You can’t make them like me, Reatur. As soon as you’re gone, this will just start again.”

“Will it?” Reatur said. “Does it?”

“Every time.” Lamra hesitated, then went on, “I thought it would get better. I mean, I’m not as odd-looking as I used to be. I don’t have tape all over me, and I don’t have those big bandages stuck where the budlings came out. But it isn’t any better, not with the other mates. I guess I’m still too strange. I think my runnerpest is the only thing that likes me anymore.” She opened a hand and looked down at the toy Reatur had given her.

“That is not true,” the domain master said. “I like you, you know.”

“Yes, of course I know that,” Lamra said. “After all, you made the runnerpest, and-and-“ She stopped when she realized the size of the compliment he had paid her. Widening herself was the least she could do, and she did it. Then she blurted, “But you’re not here to like me very often.”

“That is also true,” Reatur said slowly. “I cannot be here all the time, though, not if I intend to run the domain, too.” He paused a while in thought. “Shall I gather all the mates together and tell them they have to treat you just like anyone else?”

For a moment, hope tingled through Lamra. She wondered if that would work. “I don’t think so,” she said at last, sadly. “They’ll just be angry at me for getting them into trouble. And-I’m not just like them anymore, am I? I’m only like me, and I’m lonesome.”

“I know you are. There’s never been a mate like you before.” Reatur thought again himself, then went on, “Which means the laws that hold other mates don’t necessarily put fingerclaws on you.”

“So what, clanfather?” Talk about laws meant nothing to Lamra. Mates lived as they lived, and that was all there was to it.

“So perhaps…” Reatur’s voice trailed away. When he resumed, Lamra wondered whether he was talking to himself or to her. “So perhaps, just perhaps, now it might be all right for you to go outside the mates’ chambers and live-well, almost as if you were a male, I suppose.” He sounded surprised at where his mouth was taking him but went on anyhow. “Would you like that, Lamra?”

“I don’t know.” The idea was so alien to her, she could hardly take it in. She seized on the part of it closest to her troubles and asked, “Will males like me better than mates do?”

“I don’t know,” Reatur said. “Some will, some won’t, I expect. That’s the way it usually is. Some people don’t like anything strange and different. But I think your chance is better now than it would be another time. What with the humans still being here, things are already so strange that you may be just one oddity among many.”

“That’s better than what I am now, here.” Lamra thought some more. “You mean I’ll be able to see and touch and smell all the things on the other side of that door?” “As many of them as you want.”

For all her life, that door had marked the end of Lamra’s universe. She saw the outside world, faintly, through the sandy ice that let light into the mates’ chambers. To mingle with those moving shapes, though, to find out what they truly were-

“Come on!” she said, and hurried toward the door. The slits of skin that had opened to let out her budlings flapped as she ran. They were healing together, slowly and raggedly; she would never have quite the same smooth up-and-down lines as before she had begun to bud, no matter how long she lived.

Reatur followed her. “Open,” he told the guard on the far side of the door. Lamra heard the male lift the bar from the brackets that held it. Before the door opened, the domain master said, “You can still change your mind, you know.”

“Why would I want to do that?” Lamra asked. The door started to swing open. The first glimpse she had of the world beyond it gave her answer. That corridor seemed to stretch on forever, though it was only a tiny part of the castle. And outside the castle was the whole world, unimaginably big, unimaginably strange. For a moment staying where she was, knowing everything-and everyone around her, felt like the only safe thing to do.

But strangeness had already come in through that door. Had it not, she would not be standing here turning blue with fright at the prospect of going out. Air hissed through her breathing pores. “Come on,” she said again, not an excited squeal this time but determined even so.

“Let me go first.” Lamra moved aside so Reatur could pass.

The guard started to shut the door after the domain master.

“Wait, please, Orth,” Reatur said.

“Sorry, clanfather. Did one of the humans go in before my duty started?” Orth poked an eyestalk around the edge of the door. “No,” he answered himself, seeing only Lamra.

“No,” Reatur agreed. He paused, as if he, too, was having second thoughts. But when he resumed, he spoke firmly. “This is the mate Lamra, the one the humans saved when she dropped her budlings. As you can see, she will not be ready to have buds planted on her again for some time, if ever. I am going to bring her out of the mates’ chambers into the world. Treat her as you would a male of the same age.”

“Clanfather?” Orth sounded so shocked, Lamra wondered if he would leave the door open for her. He did. Perhaps he was too surprised not to. His eyestalks kept moving back and forth between Reatur and Lamra.

She widened herself as much as she could, far wider than she made herself for Reatur these days. “Hello, Orth,” she said. Barring humans, she had never talked to any male but Reatur before.