Tropic of Creation (23 page)

“What the hell was that?” Vecchi said.

The bot trundled up the hillock, deploying a pole from its center. Aiming the periscope, it followed the retreating animals with what seemed its own brand of amazement.

“The top of the food chain, maybe,” Juric said softly.

“Lucky for us,” Vecchi said.

“You feel lucky, Chi Chi,” Juric said, “you check out that river, find us a place to cross.”

“Maybe I don’t feel so lucky after all.”

They watched as the creatures disappeared over a rise in the distance. Then Juric led them back down to the river. “Who’s hurt?” he growled, as though anybody being hurt would be held against them.

Pig nodded down at Tafoya’s body, mangled by a ripping claw down his centerline.

“Blood attracts the eurypterids,” Sascha said.

Juric smiled down at her, using what the men called the “sunny side” of his face—the side that could still move. “Don’t show off, girl; just tell what you saw.”

“It was a water scorpion, or looked like one. Pincers, stinging tail.”

Pig said, “It don’t like her flashlight.”

Juric glanced at the lamp hooked on her chest strap, still shining.

Late that night, when she crawled a distance away to pee, she snapped the lamp off to gain some privacy. Finished relieving herself, she was about to return when she saw a movement in the grass. By the light of brown dwarf, she saw something that so startled her she had to stare to be sure she hadn’t imagined it.

It was an ahtra. She knew it must be—she’d seen pictures.… One pocked hand had parted the grass to stare at her in turn. In the darkness, the face was obscured by shadows, but the major features—the large eyes and oval markings—were unmistakable. The ahtra and human stared at each other in what might have been stupefaction. Both remained perfectly still. Then, after what seemed a very long while, the grass fell back into place, and the ahtra was gone.

Sascha hurried back to tell Sergeant Juric, but instead she came face-to-face with Vecchi. She could see his thin face in the dwarf light, bleached of life. A knife blade flashed. Her finger flew to the on switch, and she shone the light in his face.

“That don’t cut it with me,” he said, “but I’ll be taking that flashlight, girl.” He lunged. Then he was sprawling on the ground.

Juric hauled him by the collar into camp and kicked him to his hands and knees. At the commotion, Pig and Lemon drew their weapons, swiveling, looking for targets.

Juric stared at his three remaining men, shaking his head. “If any of you had the brains of a gum ball, we might make it out of here alive. Since you don’t, I’m about ready to give up on you. We don’t need stupidity. Next
stupid thing I see, that man’s staying behind. He’s on his own.”

“She shouldn’t have the lamp, she doesn’t fight,” Vecchi muttered.

“Doesn’t fight.” Juric nodded. “You noticed that this fourteen-year-old girl doesn’t fight. You’re a scholar, Chi Chi.” He walked over to Sascha, who stood on the fringe of the group, and clamped on to her shoulder. “This here, if you didn’t get a chance for formal introductions, is Miss Sascha Olander, granddaughter of Gordon T. Ridenour, General of the CW Army, with enough stripes as makes no difference to any of you patches. Take a good look.” He thrust her in front of him, paw still on her shoulder. “Now, your job, if you didn’t figure it out yet, is to get this young lady back to Granddad. ‘Cause if you don’t, if any of us makes it home and she doesn’t, Gramps is going to give you a lifetime cruise on a mining asteroid, if he doesn’t put a fragmenting cluster up your ass first.” He gave each of them in turn a deadpan stare. “Anybody confused about the assignment?”

In the ensuing silence, Juric said, “Anybody like to guess who keeps the lamp?”

Pig ventured, “The girl?”

Juric looked at him with half a grin. “That’s right. You pay attention, Pig. You and me gonna fly that ship home, the only bastards smart enough to get out alive.”

As the camp settled down, Sascha lay clutching her lamp to her chest, keeping her own counsel. But she whispered to the bot, “Captain Dammond was right. There
are
ahtra here.”

She had no idea if the bot heard anything she said, but it went through a series of clicks like it did when morphing, or perhaps thinking hard.

S
o many carriers ascended at once, it set the hab vibrating. One did not begrudge others’ good fortune … 
one did not
 … but one could wish the hab to devour her ere this moment had ever come. Of course, she had no right to expect ronid as her due; it was not a foregone conclusion. Thus by Hemms’ decree, she had been left behind. She looked at her forearm, her hand … and her color held. It was always good practice to maintain camouflage.

Other sorrows beckoned: Eli’s fate—and Vod’s. Vod who had tried for her sake to aid Eli’s escape and who now ran from Nefer’s wrath. In his final gift, Vod had transferred his funds to her, a notable sum for a digger. She would expend a goodly sum now on Eli Dammond, lately her arch enemy.

She doubly bribed the guards. First, to allow her access to Eli’s cell, and second, to keep their tendrils flat about it. They gave her forty-nine increments, little enough for her handsome payment.

And then she was in, facing Eli, where he stood on the high pinnacle. He looked thinner. But Nefer had allowed
him to shave and clean himself, so he did not look as repulsively hairy as he had. Maret had grown used to Eli’s physical form, at first so bizarre. His pale, undifferentiated skin, the disconcerting patch of hair on the top of his skull. His eyes, though small, were attractively dark—deep gray in tone—and expressive, easy to read with a little practice. To one used to reading nuances, humans were … an open book. How could he know such a thing could kill him?

“I thought you weren’t coming back,” he said.

“This is the last time I will be able to come here, Eli.”

He nodded, accepting. “Try to help the gomin,” he said. “I don’t want that on my conscience.”

“Do not worry about such a one.” At his dark look she said, “That one tends to make difficulties for loyal gomin. The flow carries many tides of censure. You must forget the gomin, and worry more about yourself. Do not fight the guards, for one thing, Eli. You incur a reputation for discourteousness.”

“There’ve been worse things said about me.”

She looked to the side as a shuddering noise shook the ground. “Eli, they are leaving.”

“Who?”

“The chosen. That is the sound you hear, of the carriers ascending. For ronid.” It had been many cycles since an Extreme Prime had overturned a Data Guide’s decision. Rumor had it Tirinn was furious.

“She really screwed you over, didn’t she?”

“Sex and making mistakes?” she asked, puzzling with the phrase
screwed over
. “Sit down, Eli; one gets a crick in the neck always looking up at you.”

As he did so, he reached out to brush her sleeve with his hand. “You’re really here.”

“Yes.” She traced her hand on the sandy ground. UpWorld was a world of soil and untidiness. She knew that what she felt on this data stage was a once-removed
sensation, much as the dark waters she swam in on Tirinn’s orders were not truly wet like the dreadful wet of UpWorld. She mustered her next words with difficulty. “I have studied that humans have tears when they are distressed.”

“Yes. Or when profoundly happy.”

“I thought it was only for sad.”

“Humans are complicated.”

She nodded slowly. “We do not cry.”

“Maybe that’s why you’re so crazy.”

She glanced up sharply, to see him smiling. “A joke?”

“Yes.”

He pressed his own hand over hers, as it lightly rested on her knee.

She looked at their two hands, one cupped over the other. His light skin looked fragile against her own, bred for the season. “When my people are sad, Eli, or in other high emotion, our markings fade. UpWorld, this reduces our camouflage. So we learn not to have emotion.”

“Like you’re not having now?”

“Yes, like that.” She smiled, proud that they could speak in this mode of irony so favored by humans. She would have liked to continue thus, but in second mind she would rather be done with what came next.

The roar of an animal in the forest below showed that Nefer had not yet given up on coaxing responses from Eli.

He looked to the edge of his plateau. “Why does she think I fear the jungle?”

He was hopeless. No matter how she tried to help him, he would be a babe in the river. “UpWorld is a forest.”

He frowned. “It’s a desert.”

“No longer, Eli. Now the wet season has come and with it, the tendency toward growing things.”

“If so, it happened fast.”

“The season is short.”
And my time
. She gently pulled
her hand away. “Eli, you have tended to believe that UpWorld is the realm of mating, yes?”

“So you’ve told me.”

“You will have many errors in your understanding. Now I will tell you the way of it. Our practice is that we ascend, and though many die, those who live create descendants. The vone decide who is fit to mate. We must not fear them, lest we tend to smell like their prey. If we fear them, they do not recognize us as their own.”

“Their own?”

“They are like us. And unlike.”

“Monsters, Nefer said.”

Tradition imposed its frown and she lowered her voice. “But we mate with them. If we survive.”

Now it was his turn to blink.

In profound embarrassment, she shivered, fixing her gaze on the ground.

At last Eli broke the quiet, asking, “What are the vone, Maret?”

“They are ourselves.”

He was gazing at her, waiting. She plunged on.

“Our physical forms Up and Down are vastly different, but each is suited to its place,” she said.

She would need to start from the beginning. This she did, telling him the story; not the story as told in enactments in the PrimeWay—those dramas of myth and ritual and poetic indirection—but the plain story, as it was recorded in the Well. “Long ago,” she said, “we were like them, cycles past remembering. We lived as they did, and our society—for it
was
a society, however primitive—was unified. Then it happened that some of us hid in holes in the ground to escape the ravages of Red Season when all manner of creatures walk abroad. But there were bonds of kinship across the two enclaves, and as more chose the underground way we yet longed to be one cohesive group.
These bonds—social and cultural, you perceive—have always been strong among us. And it is our unique custom to honor such ties, as you have noticed, Eli.”

“I’ve noticed.” His tone conveyed that she had committed an understatement.

He had become very attentive. Perhaps he strained to follow her. Perhaps he could not see past the simplicity of his own people’s sex-for-progeny. But now that she had begun her story, she would finish it. “Thus began the tendency to seek out each other, to breed between our two enclaves … even so far as to discourage intra-enclave breeding. Finally it became a taboo. During Red Season, we sought out members of the other—clan, you might say. And they sought
us
.

“Over fathomless cycles, we dug deeper. And DownWorld, we changed, we ceased to sleep through dry season. We left behind true dormancy. We built our dwelling here below, we domesticated the hab—a precious reminder of the primeval, natural world. But all this time, we never lost the thread of cultural practice—to return to our first community.”

His forehead furrowed in thought. “You said that sex is very free among you DownWorld. How is it a taboo?”

“Over time the taboo waned, then disappeared. But we found—as did the vone—that our offspring from such matings were infertile. I have told you we are few in number; we lacked genetic diversity. So we continued to go Up. And though statics were not disposed to venture into the sunlit realm, their fluxor cousins were. Even fluxor males, because vone need us for their fertility as well, and in the long view—and we have always tended to the long view—the vone must be viable.”

“But you never used your technology to overcome the problem of DownWorld sterility?”

She suppressed her exasperation. “Eli, we never
wished
to overcome it. It is …”

“Cultural,” he finished for her, with the hint of smile. Then he went on: “Such unions between ahtra and vone, produce … ahtra?”

“That depends. Most female fluxors have several issue. Some could be vone. One would hope not.”

“But separate morphology. No hybrids?” Eli was thinking, as was his habit, in terms of his familiar biology. She feared her time would slip away in a morass of questions.

But she answered: “No, no mixing, no hybridization.”

His eyebrow raised, his human way of showing doubt.

“We are more complex than you, Eli. We have, for example, mechanisms that prevent mixing. And, above all, we have the vone—masters of creation. If you experienced a vone, you would know they create forms.…” And he
would
experience a vone, soon, she thought.

But she went on: “UpWorld, if a vone bears an ahtra, the progeny dies quickly, due to the harshness of the place.”