“Well, all right.” Of their own accord, Lamra’s eyestalks started to twitch. Imagine her telling off the domain master! Better yet, imagine her getting away with it! She remembered that Sarah had not answered her question. She asked it a new way. “If you don’t know how to keep me from ending yet, how will you find out?”
“Good question again,” Sarah said.
Lamra felt herself yellowing up once more-she wanted an answer that was an answer, not just words that sounded nice but didn’t tell her anything. Finally she got one.
“Try with animals budding,” the human said. “See if animal mates live after what I do. If yes, I do with you. If no, I do new thing with another animal mate, see if live after that.”
Lamra thought it over. “That sounds like it might work,” she admitted. “What if none of the animal mates lives, though?”
Sarah opened her mouth, then closed it again without saying anything.
“Then you won’t, either, Lamra-” Reatur said.
“That’s what I thought. That’s what’s supposed to happen, though, so I don’t need to worry about it, do I?”
“Of course not,” he answered at once. “I’ll do all the worrying. That’s one of the things a domain master is supposed to do. I worry so other people don’t have to.”
“All right,” Lamra said, relieved. “I’m not much good at worrying-you need to think about one thing for a long time to do it right, and I have trouble with that. There are so many interesting things to think about that sticking to just one is hard.”
“All mates like this?” Sarah asked Reatur, again as though Lamra were somewhere else.
“No,” was all he answered.
“Then I see why you want this one to save.”
“Yes,” Reatur said.
The way they talked made Lamra feel foolish. She was just herself and could not imagine being any different from what she was. Her only perception that she was in any way remarkable was that she found other mates boring some of the time. And since they often did not seem to know what to make of her, either, that worked both ways.
“Sarah, if you do find out how to keep me from ending when my buds drop, will it be something only humans can do, or will Reatur be able to do the same thing with other mates later on?”
“Other mates?” Reatur exclaimed. “I hadn’t even begun to think about that.” He started to turn blue, which startled Lamra-what had frightened him? until he went on, “If all our mates and all their budlings and all their mate budlings lived to grow up, how would we feed them all? This domain just raises enough for the folk it has now.”
He and Lamra both turned anxious extra eyestalks toward Sarah. All the human-the human mate, Lamra reminded herself; somehow humans dealt with the problem that worried the domain master-said, though, was, “Not know.”
“Fair enough,” Reatur said. “Worry about one thing at a time. If Lamra lives after budding, then we will see what to do next.”
“Yes,” Sarah said. “Good sense.”
Lamra had not thought so far ahead when she asked her question, but she recognized the trouble once Reatur showed her it was there. “If this harms the domain, clanfather, you don’t have to let Sarah do it.” The sacrifice seemed small to her. She had been going to end when her buds dropped, and the time that might come after still did not feel as though it belonged to her.
Sarah started to say something, then stopped with her mouth half open. As was fitting, she looked toward Reatur-the choice was his.
“I don’t suppose one full-grown mate will eat up all the spare food in the domain,” he said. “Go on, Sarah; I said yes before and I say yes again. No matter what happens later, Lamra is worth it.”
Lamra widened herself to the domain master. She had done that countless times before, but only because she had been taught to. For the first time it was the gesture of conscious respect and gratitude it was meant to be-now she understood why she did it.
Sarah bent from the middle toward Lamra-the human gesture that meant the same as widening. “I try hard to save you,” she said.
“Thank you.” Still strongly feeling the ceremony inherent in the gesture, Lamra widened herself in return. Sarah bent again. They could have gone on saluting each other for some time, but Reatur chose that moment to leave, and Sarah walked away with him.
The mates’ chambers were always boisterous, with mates chasing one another and yelling at one another all through the day. To Lamra, the place seemed empty without Reatur and Sarah. She did not feel like playing with her friends. Even if she had, the growing buds were starting to make her too slow to keep up.
Another mate came up to her. Peri was left out of games a lot, too, as she was also growing buds. “What did the domain master and the-the funny thing want with you?” she asked, awe in her voice. Why did Reatur keep spending time with a mere mate, especially one with whom he had already mated?
“Reatur and the human,” Lamra said, flaunting her superior knowledge, “are working on ways to keep mates alive after budding.”
“You’re teasing me,” Peri said shrilly. “Nobody can do that.”
“I’m not, either. They are so.”
“Don’t be silly,” Peri said. “You can’t fool me, Lamra, not this time. Who ever heard of an old mate?”
Something moved, down in the bottom of Jotun Canyon. The motion was tiny, but anything visible at all from down there had to be good-sized. Shota Rustaveli swung up binoculars for a closer look. Having the depths of the canyon suddenly seem to jump seven times closer always unnerved him; it was as if he were flinging himself down into the abyss.
“What is it?” asked Yuri Voroshilov, who did not have field glasses with him.
“Yuri Ivanovich, I don’t know.” Rustaveli could feel his forehead crinkle in a puzzled frown. “I can’t figure it out. Maybe it was just the sun, flashing off water down there.”
‘”Bozhemoi,” Voroshilov said softly.
Rustaveli did not follow him for a moment. Then the biologist echoed that “My God” himself. Yesterday the bottom of the canyon had been dry. If it had water in it today, it would have more tomorrow, and as for the day after that… “Forty days and forty nights and then some,” he said.
“Da.” Voroshilov laughed softly. “Strange, is it not, how after three generations of a godless society, we still have the biblical images in the back of our minds, ready to call up when we need them?”
“Ask the devil’s mother why that’s so,” Rustaveli suggested.
They both laughed then.
“Such impudence.” If Oleg Lopatin had said that, Rustaveli would have bridled. Voroshilov only sounded amused. Then, sighing, the chemist grew more serious. “The flood is upon us, Shota Mikheilovich, in more ways than one.”
“Eh? What’s that?” Rustaveli’s mind was elsewhere. He wanted to get down to the water. There might be-there likely were-plants and animals down in the canyon that stayed dormant until the yearly floods came and then burst into feverish activity. Plenty of Earthly creatures did things like that, but who could guess what variations on the theme Minerva might offer?. No one could guess-that was why they were here, to find out.
But Voroshilov was thinking along very different lines. “We will have trouble, for one thing, if Lopatin does not leave Katerina alone. I know, because I will cause it.”
That got Rustaveli’s attention. His head snapped toward Voroshilov. The chemist was such a quiet fellow that he even announced insurrection as if it were no more important than a glass of tea. He meant what he said, though. The Georgian could see that.
“Slowly, my friend, slowly,” Rustaveli urged, wondering how-or whether-to head off Voroshilov. He had no use for Lopatin, but still… “The chekist is also a man, Yuri Ivanovich,” he said carefully. “I suppose he has the right to try his luck with her.”
“This I know,” Voroshilov said heavily. “To approach her is one thing. But he has hit her, Shota Mikheilovich; I have seen the marks. That is something else again. That I will not stand, even if he has made her too afraid to speak up for herself.”