A World of Difference by Harry Turtledove Page A

field where the humans’ flying house had seared the crops. Scavengers, he knew, would make off with most of it, but the rest would decay and give fresh value to the soil.
    Farther north, he had heard, were folk who, at least in summer, dug holes in the ground as resting-places for their dead. That was practical there, where the ground unfroze to a depth greater than a male’s height and stayed soft half the year. In Reatur’s domain, and those around him, burial was more trouble than it was worth.
    He murmured a prayer, asking the gods to grant Biyal the long life she had not been able to enjoy here. He added a brief petition for the budlings’ health, then widened himself in a last gesture of respect for their mother.
    He was just returning to his full height when two of his eyes were suddenly blinded by a brilliant flash of violet light. He almost jumped out of his skin. Glaring afterimages filled those eyes even after he shut them, as if on a rare clear day he had looked straight at the sun.
    Before he had the sense to tell himself not to, he had turned another eyestalk in the direction of the flash. He saw a human pointing something at him. “I might have known,” he muttered. A moment later, the flash went off again, putting that third eye out of commission. “Enough!” he shouted.
    “What?” It was one of the humans with a voice that sounded like a person’s—the small one, Reatur thought, though without several humans together it was harder to be sure.
    He noticed that the afterimages were fading from the first two eyes that had been flashed and opened them again. Yes, they could see. He was relieved to find he was not blind for good through a third—no, half—of his field of vision. Blind as a human, he thought, and through his annoyance knew a moment’s pity for the strange creatures.
    “What is that thing?” he asked, walking toward the humanand pointing at whatever he was holding. The domain-master spoke slowly and repeated himself several times.
    “Reatur?” The human put the question-ending on his name.
    “Who else?” he said. For the first time, it occurred to him to wonder whether real people looked as strange to humans as humans did to real people. He pointed again and asked again, “What is that thing?”
    The human—yes, he decided, it was the male called Sarah—finally understood.
“Camera,”
he said in his own language, then “picture-maker” in the Omalo tongue.
    “Ah,” Reatur said. He had no idea of how the humans’ picture-making gadgets worked, but he admired what they did. Some of them would spit out pictures right away, pictures as marvelously detailed and accurate as the one of the strange thing the humans had shown him just after their house fell from the sky. Reatur had an image of himself, one of Ternat, and another of his castle; the humans, to his surprise, had not even charged him for them.
    “Why the big light?” he asked.
    Sarah tried to explain; Reatur gave credit where it was due. But he did not understand the explanation. For one thing, Sarah did not have enough words. For another, the domain-master suspected that some of the ideas were as strange as humans. As best he could gather, the picture-making thing needed a lot of light to see by. He supposed that made sense.
    Sarah put the picture-maker into one of the pockets of the coverings humans wore. Reatur had only gradually realized those
were
coverings, not part of the humans’ skins.
    From a different pocket, Sarah drew out something else. Reatur heard a click. Light streamed out of the thing, not in a single blinding flash but steadily and at a lower, more comfortable level.
“Flashlight,”
Sarah said. Reatur tried to remember the word; his language had no equivalent for it.
    Sarah shone the light at Reatur’s feet, courteously keeping it out of his eyes. The light splashed over Biyal’s body. “The budding female?” Sarah asked.
    “Well, of course,” Reatur said gruffly—humans had a gift