Harry Turtledove: A World of Difference

“That’s a lykao shrub,” Reatur said. “Massi like the betlies.”

“Oh. What’s that?” She pointed in a different direction.

“That’s an eloc.”

“Oh. It doesn’t look much like its meat, does it? What’s that?”

She pointed again.

But instead of answering, Reatur pointed at her. “That is a mate who looks as though she’ll be wandering around asking questions for the next year, now that she has so many new things to ask questions about.”

“You’re right,” Lamra said happily.

“Good heavens,” Irv said. “what happened to your calculator?.”

Pat held it up. The only thing that held the batteries in was a big piece of duct tape. “Beats me,” she said. “I thought I left the stupid thing on my bed a while ago, but I found it on the floor with the back smashed to hell.”

“You must have stepped on it without noticing,” Irv said.

“How do you not notice something that goes crunch?” Pat retorted.

“Speaking of not noticing,” Louise said, looking up from a tape she was feeding into the computer for transmission back to Earth, “that calculator’s been patched since-“ She thought back. “I guess since the day Lamra had her budlings, the day of the big battle.”

Pat nodded. “That’s right. I remember having to fix it right after we all came back from Reatur’s castle.”

“Oh,” Irv said. “Well, hush my mouth.” He made as if to pull his head inside his shirt. Louise pretended to throw the tape cassette at him. He ducked. Everybody in the control room laughed. He spread his hands in defeat. “If that’s when it happened, I give up. None of us will forget anything about that day, not if we live to be ninety.”

“You better believe it,” Louise said.

Irv remembered coming back from the castle, too, after Sarah had sped out there to make sure Lamra really was all right. He remembered drawing the privacy curtain to their cubicle afterward, so he and Sarah could celebrate her being alive, Lamra’s being alive, everyone’s being alive. And he remembered a pink-purple not-quite-mark, not-quite-bruise, in the middle of her left buttock.

At the time, he had thought nothing of it. He’d had other, more immediate things on his mind. But he remembered. And, it occurred to him now, that mark had been just about the size and shape of Pat’s calculator.

So what had Sarah been doing that involved lying on a calculator, or maybe lying on one and then, say, throwing it to the floor? The only answer Irv came up with was the immediately obvious one.

And with whom? The answer to that was immediately obvious, too. Sarah liked men, at least in situations where-where one might be apt to lie on a calculator, Irv thought. The joke he tried to make fell flat, though he only told it to himself.

Another question filled his mind: What the hell am I going to do about this? Unlike the couple that had preceded it, that one had no immediately obvious answer. Confronting Emmett struck him as either useless or suicidal, depending on how much he annoyed the pilot.

Confronting Sarah-oh, that’d be real good, he said to himself: you’d even have to lie to claim the moral advantage.

He glanced over at Pat, then at Louise. So far as he knew, she hadn’t done anything she wasn’t supposed to with anybody. But if Emmett had, she was affected, too. “Great,” Irv muttered. Two, count ‘em, two unsanctioned bellybumps and the whole damn crew was involved.

Or was it just two? On reflection, I decided it probably was. Since the day of the battle, Sarah had stuck a lot tighter to him than had been her habit before. Maybe she had all the same regrets he did. He hoped so, partly for the sake of their marriage and partly just because he wanted someone else to be as confused as he was.

The psychologists back home had warned about this kind of thing, for exactly these reasons. One of the rare times the psychologists were dead right, Irv thought, so of course nobody paid attention to them.

He laughed a little, under his breath. It was funny, in a French-movie sort of way. Then he sobered. In French movies, sooner or later everybody found out what was going on, and the fur really started to fly. That could happen here, too, from the same kind of accidental revelation he had just had. He hoped it wouldn’t, but it could.

“And wouldn’t that be wonderful?”

He didn’t realize he had spoken more or less out loud until Pat said, “What?”

“Nothing,” he said firmly. “I was just thinking, it ought to be an interesting flight home.”

Snow swirled around Ternat. Fall was here early this year, he thought. Under most circumstances, that would have made him happy; he had no more use for summer heat than Reatur did. Now, though, he was looking for something, and the snow made it hard to find.

His feet scraped ice. “We’re down to the very bottom of the gorge,” he told the males with him. The frozen patch he was standing on, and others he knew to be nearby, were all that was left of the summer floods.

“How are we supposed to find the end of a rope in the middle of all this?” grumbled one of his companions. “We could look from now till the next flood comes through and washes us away.”

“The Skarmer said it would be easy, when their humans talked with ours,” Ternat said. “Of course, the Skarmer have been known to lie.”

“They’d better not try it now,” said the male who had complained, “not while we still hold their warriors.” The rest of the band growled agreement.

“Exactly,” Ternat said. “So we have to figure the cursed thing is around here someplace. Let’s spread out a little and see what we can come up with. We have to try to keep each other in sight-we don’t want to go straggling up the side of the gorge by ones and two, as if we were so many of Dordal’s males.”

Eyestalks twitched. The loud male yelled, “If Dordal’s males act like that, it’s because he went home all by himself.” The laughter grew. When Grevil refused for the third time to ransom the northern domain master, Reatur had released him without payment. The civil war brewing between Dordal and his disloyal eldest showed the wisdom of the move. Ternat wondered if he would have thought of it.

The males formed a circle, as if they were warriors bracing to meet an attack from all sides. But this circle was wider, to let them search more ground and still stay in touch with one another.

They moved forward slowly, cautiously. People seldom went down to the bottom of Ervis Gorge, and of course it was never the same from one flood to the next, anyhow. Anything might be here. Ternat was glad he had a spear.

The male to one side of him suddenly stopped. “What’s that funny noise?” he said, suspicion thick in his voice. Ternat listened, heard only the wind. He went over to the other male, who pointed and said, “It’s coming from over there, I think.”

Ternat listened again. Now he also heard the strange, rhythmic thump, twang, and tinkle. For a moment he thought of the beasts legend put in the depths of the gorge, beasts that could lure a male to destruction. Then his eyestalks wiggled in relief. “That’s human music,” he said.

“There’s a human down here?” the male said incredulously. “I doubt it,” Ternat said. “They have gadgets that make music for them. My guess is that the Skarmer put one by their rope so the noise would guide us. A good idea, I must say.”

“Pretty sneaky, if you ask me,” the male said, as he would have about anything Skarmer. But then he shouted along with Reatur’s eldest to let the rest of the band know what they had found.

Ternat’s prediction proved good. The gadget sat on a large rock. Like a fair number of human gadgets, it looked like a box. Ternat wondered how the humans knew this box made music instead of, say, pictures. He let his arms and eyestalks shrug in and out: one more thing about humans he would probably never learn.