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Authors: Kay Kenyon

Tropic of Creation

BOOK: Tropic of Creation
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Praise for Kay Kenyon’s
TROPIC OF CREATION

“The real mystery in SF these days is why isn’t Kay Kenyon better known? She writes beautifully, her characters are multilayered and complex, and her extrasolar worlds are as real and nuanced as any place you’ve ever visited on Earth, while at the same time truly alien. If you missed the Kay Kenyon train when it first left the station, fear not:
Tropic of Creation
is a perfect place to jump aboard—for what, I promise, will be an exciting, fascinating, mind-blowing ride.”

Nebula Award-winning author of
Calculating God

—Robert J. Sawyer,

“Kenyon draws vivid characters you care about, both human and alien, striving on a harsh and memorable distant world.”

DON’T MISS THESE OTHER PROVOCATIVE BOOKS BY KAY KENYON

—David Brin

THE SEEDS OF TIME

“A fast-moving plot and a memorable heroine. You couldn’t ask for a better first novel.”


Mike Resnick

“Kenyon has created a winning heroine, a gripping adventure, and a setting that shows some imaginative thinking on current theories of Earth’s ecological ruin and of time travel.”


Publishers Weekly

LEAP POINT

“An extraordinary genre writing achievement—exciting, involving, chilling, comic, deeply disturbing and altogether enthralling … 
Leap Point
should firmly establish [Kenyon] among the very finest science fiction writers in the nation.”

—Statesman Journal
, Salem, OR

“Intricately plotted … The author skillfully blends people and events in an isolated alfalfa-growing small town with out-of-this-world happenings and galactic beings.”


The Third Age

RIFT

“A grand adventure filled with genuine surprise. It is rife with new ideas, delicious fears, and compelling events.… Put it at the top of your reading list.”

—Statesman Journal
, Salem, OR

“In a science fiction market where terraforming has gotten to be a tried-and-true setting, a planet that refuses to be subjugated by human science is a gift and a wonder.”


Talebones

“Kenyon has created a powerful book driven by characters with clear moral imperatives … and the stakes are survival of entire races.”


Writers NW

“Kay Kenyon has done it again. Her third out-of-this-world science fiction novel confirms the quality of her writing skills and a quantity of creative leaps of imagination.”


The Third Age

“A great, fast-paced read with all that I could ask of an sf novel.”

—Jacqueline Lichtenberg

 

 

 

A
LSO BY
K
AY
K
ENYON

THE SEEDS OF TIME
LEAP POINT
RIFT

TROPIC OF CREATION
A Bantam Spectra Book

SPECTRA and the portrayal of a boxed “s” are trademarks of
Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2000 by Kay Kenyon.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any
form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
For information address: Bantam Books.

eISBN: 978-0-307-78029-4

Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, 1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036.

v3.1

For Donald Maass

 

 

 

 

My intention is to tell
Of bodies changed
To different forms
.

The heavens and all below them
,
Earth and her creatures
All change
,
And we, part of creation
,
Also must suffer change
.

—Ovid
, Metamorphoses

Contents
1

T
wo suns beat down on the eroded hills, cooking the air, making it hard to see the landscape except through a wavering mirage of heat. Captain Eli Dammond removed his hat, wiping the perspiration from his forehead, and peered for a moment at the sun—not the primary, but its dwarf sister: small, red, and swelling in the sky. The dwarf star was no bigger than his thumbnail at arm’s length, but even so, it seemed to stoke the morning’s heat to a near boil.

This far from camp the landscape lay barren and uniform—gully and dune, gully and dune—for miles. It looked like so many lands in the Congress Worlds: blasted and sere from war. But here on Null, nature alone had done the job.

At the crest of the next gully he saw Corporal Willem waving his arm.

“Captain Dammond, over here. It’s here.” Corporal Willem pointed into the wadi and skidded down the far side, disappearing from view.

Young Sascha Olander looked up at Captain Dammond
for permission to run ahead and see Corporal Willem’s prize.

“It’s no place for a youngster,” Willem had groused on the hike out from camp, and he’d been right. But Eli was not about to deny the general’s granddaughter her small adventure. At fourteen, she was beyond spoiling. The word had no meaning for a young woman who would have every privilege and never think twice about it.

“Go ahead, then, Sascha,” he said.

He caught a glimpse of her grin before she was sprinting down the lee side of the hard-packed dune and up the next one.

Eli set out after her, his boots crunching over a litter of sticks protruding from the soil. He went heavily armed, the range gun a comfortable bulk at his hip. Though the armistice had held for over a year now, if the ahtra broke the peace, no one would be surprised. Some, like Corporal Willem, hoped for it. The corporal had a regen arm and eye and looked forward to a little payback. As bad as regen limbs looked, the eyes were the worst, swollen translucent fruits that nevertheless gathered light and saw the world as well as the original,
alpha
eyes—better, the enlisteds vowed.

Still, it was an uncharted world, and he had his people go armed.

Topping the rise, he saw the three of them waiting for him in the wadi, poking at the dusty hulk that Corporal Willem had found earlier that morning. Next to Willem stood Luce Marzano, captain of the ship and 112 crew marooned on the planet for the past three years. Like Willem, she wore the brown uniform of infantry, patched in places, and faded by now to the color of sand. Alert but relaxed, she’d had plenty of time to ferret out trouble if there was any. But she’d made her report: the locale was devoid of life, inimical or otherwise. The enlisteds called
the planet Null; in three years, they’d had no occasion to change their minds.

The massive continent dominating this hemisphere was a quiet, scoured land, rumpled only by fingers of wind through sand. The most action this place would see was the dwarf star, coming round for a visit after a four-year absence, and bright enough now to cast a shadow at night.

Sascha was already climbing on the bank above the contraption, kicking sand from around its metallic sides.

“Sascha,” Eli called. He waved her away from the device. The thing might be booby-trapped. But in three years, Marzano’s crew had found twenty-eight similar objects—now twenty-nine—and none of them was wired to detonate.

Captain Marzano met Eli as he strode down the bank into the wadi. She cocked her head toward the machine—a craft, by all appearances, just like the others. “Looks like this one’s newly minted,” she said. “Hell, it’s in better shape than I am.”

Eli smiled at that, then fell back to neutral. Best to remember he might soon be a witness in an inquiry into her possible desertion from duty … But he liked Luce Marzano. She was tough and confident, and at forty-some, still handsome. And also gone missing the last two years of a war that had bled off the better part of a generation. Now, a year into the armistice, Eli’s ship had found the marooned crew and the ruined ship
Fury
, presumed lost in action. Or now, it would seem, just lost.

“So they’ve been here recently,” Eli said, walking with Marzano toward the hexadron. It was half buried, like all the others, in the soil. Maybe it was good they went armed.

“Recent enough,” Marzano said. “They used this place for
something
. Training, maybe?” She squinted at the small vessel before them.

Corporal Willem wiped a small section of hull clean of dust. “Like it’s right off the assembly line, sir.”

When Willem said
sir
,he looked at Captain Marzano, instead of Captain Dammond, a slight that Eli ignored for now. He saved his object lessons for bigger lapses.

Marzano’s crew didn’t like him snooping around the crashed
Fury
looking for signs of cowardice. Hell,
he
didn’t like it. But Marzano herself was pushing hardest for a thorough search, urging Eli to inspect and document every ship system, mangled or not.

BOOK: Tropic of Creation
8.92Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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