Tropic of Creation (11 page)

“We will go back to your cell, Eli Dammond,” she said, her skin having taken on a slightly pale cast.

She was taking him on an alternative route, unwittingly giving him a further view of the labyrinth. They passed open doorways. Within, groups of ahtra mingled, sometimes sitting on rugs or engaged in various activities. Once, he saw what he thought might be a loom. Then they were descending a stairwell. After the vast cavern they had come from, the smaller ways and especially the stairwells seemed cramped and overwarm. The ceiling here barely cleared the top of his head.

She steered him by the arm, muttering, “You did not honor your promise.”

“What happened down there?”

She stopped suddenly. They were very close together, forcing him to look into the dark shafts of her eyes. This
close she did not look humanlike—not anything like. “Your
promise,”
she said, “to remain calm, to be courteous.”

“What is the courteous response to a mob?”

Resuming her pace, she turned them into a corridor he recognized. They were approaching his cell.

After a moment, she said, “It was your scent.” After a beat, she added, still hurrying him along: “You are different from us. But it is your human way, so you cannot be at fault.”

“What is the human way?”

“To be ready for sex at all times.”

She noted his surprise. “Your scent conveys a sexual meaning. Though it is alien to us, some perceive it strongly. Such as the gomin. This one was attracted to you. Then you looked directly at the gomin—as I instructed you not to—and she became agitated, which those around her found worthy of censure. And the happenings tended to disorder.”

He recognized the vicinity of his cell. He knew the place, the corridor, the environs. It was as though his very body remembered every turn, every advance, every retracing of steps. And more, he thought he knew where the access to the transit chute lay …

With Maret standing by the doorway, he walked into his prison. After gazing at him for a few moments she said, “Gomin are unnatural. They can participate in sex at any time, like humans. My people observe a time with sex and a time without. When the red season comes, we hunger for each other; otherwise not. Your human ways are peculiar to us. Nevertheless, since your scent upsets the dwellers, I will see that your needs are met. Do you require a sexual partner to be at ease?”

He looked down at her, diminutive as she was. Powerful as she was. “Leave me alone, Maret. That would make me at ease.” He didn’t plan to stay long enough to upset the dwellers.

She paused, blinking slowly, the lid arising from the bottom, and barely reaching the zenith before retracting. It was, Eli concluded, a kind of sigh of confusion or exasperation.

“We do not understand each other very well, Eli Dammond.”

“You can say that again,” he muttered.

She looked as though she might literally repeat her statement. Then, with the utmost dignity, she turned to the door, summoning it open. And then closed again. He stared at the door, acutely aware of the acrid odor of his own sweat.

S
ascha had been lying on her cot in a state of sensory deprivation, eyes closed, with the relentless rain masking all sound. She tried to sleep to escape her dark thoughts.

They had abandoned the search for Captain Dammond yesterday. The hole the bots dug was now full of water, seven feet deep. Lieutenant Roche pronounced the captain dead. How convenient for them, Sascha thought, that Captain Dammond should obligingly die just when they could no longer make headway against the pit of mud. She raged and argued, but her parents were the only ones she dared speak to, and they were tired of the subject. Sleep was the only answer, but she had slept enough to last weeks. Now all that was left was a state of semiconsciousness, alternating with her mother’s structured lesson plans. The high points of the day were trips to the mess tent, accompanied by her parents. Watchful. Afraid.

In two days of unremitting rain three soldiers had died. The venom of Null’s creatures was swift. Paralysis came within seconds, then death. The men died by suffocation, when their diaphragms froze up—a bad way to die, the
enlisteds said. You couldn’t
will
your chest to rise and let in air, not if your automatic nervous system was disconnected.

Cristin and Sascha felt no ill effects from their encounter with the butterflies—or what Sascha’s father had agreed could be
called
butterflies until the insects could be examined. It wasn’t the butterflies that killed the men, it was small semiaquatic creatures about as long as a hand, not including the tail. The enlisteds called them lizards, but what they really were could not be determined from the body of the only one in their possession—a blackened corpse, the target of four laser guns at once.

Through the drumbeat of rain, Sascha thought she heard a counterpoint. Voices shouting. In another moment, she was sitting up, swinging her feet off the cot.

“Easy does it,” her mother said, turning slowly from her work at the computer. She raised her hand, palm out, to stop Sascha from moving.

Geoff Olander walked to the tent flap, peering out into the encampment. “Someone’s coming. It’ll be Baker Camp coming in.” Baker Camp would be consolidating with their camp in readiness to move out. To debark the planet. “I’ll just check to see,” he said. Cristin looked at him with that
be careful
look she used so liberally.

Sascha bolted across the tent to his side. “Father, please. Let me come with you.” If Baker Camp was on its way in, Badri Nazim would be with them. She swung around to face her mother, plead with her. “The only ones that died were right next to the stream.” They called the ditch running through camp a stream, for it was now a permanent watercourse.

Geoff shook his head. “Stay with your mother.” He was weary of her entreaties, or perhaps of Cristin’s counter-entreaties.

Sascha locked eyes with her mother. “You can’t protect me forever. You can’t protect me from my own
life.”

Geoff looked at his wife for a long moment, challenging her to respond. Cristin took it as another of her husband’s small betrayals. “Go, then.” At Geoff’s hesitation, she waved at them resignedly. “Go.”

They plunged out of the tent without further argument. Sascha’s clothes were instantly drenched in the pelting rain. Through the cascade of water, Sascha could barely see the tents sharing a row with their own. With the rain leaching the color from the world, the camp and the hills beyond had gone gray and white. Beyond the camp perimeter Sascha watched great banks of fog rolling through, masking the low, jagged hills. She knew those hills were changing. In moments of abating rain Sascha had seen a green fur lying over the toothed ridges. It was grass sprouting.

The camp had awakened one morning to find the mossy fuzz everywhere, sprung up from the ground where rhizomous roots had lain dormant. Grass was a remarkable plant, her father had said—a strange comment, for Sascha had thought grass the simplest of growing things, the least worthy of consideration. But grass, her father said, had the odd characteristic of arising from underground structures without any growing tip protruding. Upon this quality depended all the grazing animals of all worlds, which otherwise might chew their local grass crop out of existence. And upon the grazers depended many a human settlement. So grass made human life possible, in a sense.

Well, if so, Null was indeed coming to life. And this miracle was occurring just as they were leaving. Just as they were abandoning Eli Dammond. When he came back—and Sascha was sure that he would come back—he would find the land changed. Perhaps he would hardly recognize it for the hot, scoured place it had been when he left. The only proof he would have that he was even on the right planet would be the sodden remains of their camp.
This lonely vision filled her with more dismay than the thought of his death.

A large crowd of enlisteds had gathered at the perimeter to see what the commotion was. It wasn’t, as Sascha’s father expected, the contingent of sixty-three soldiers coming in from Baker Camp. It was a military detail leaving. The corporal next to her murmured, “They’re going to bring in the
Lucia
. ‘Bout time.”

A unit of twelve soldiers was forming up under Lieutenant Roche’s direction. They learned the mission would be led by Captain Luce Marzano, tasked with hiking the six miles to the transport ship and flying it back. Marzano would be landing on the wide field to the south of Charlie Camp, but she’d have to wait for a break in the weather to maneuver down and avoid the ridge. There had been talk about evacuating on foot, but the ground was soggy and turning to marsh, the presumed niche of the poisonous lizards. Though some argued deploying on foot was safer than risking the
Lucia
on a tight landing, Lieutenant Roche made his decision. He had civilians to think about:
the general’s granddaughter
; for God’s sake.

Despite the eagerness to be rid of the place, the enlisteds were in a better mood, now that Marzano was going after the
Lucia
. With a little luck, they could lift off by the end of the day.

“Shoulda taken a dog with her,” the corporal next to her muttered.

Sascha saw that Captain Marzano was indeed leaving on her own, without the escort of a bot. The versatile machines were about the size of a dog, and dubbed accordingly by the enlisteds. Apparently Charlie Camp’s two bots would be reserved for defense of the camp.

She sidled her way closer to Lieutenant Roche and his officers, hoping to overhear any scrap of news that might relate to Captain Dammond or the dig, but in the
downpour, the officers’ voices melted. She could see their faces well enough, though. Roche looked sour, as though command didn’t suit him, not after losing five enlisteds. The expression on Luce Marzano’s face, however, couldn’t be mistaken for anything but glee. Today she had a small command and a chance to pull off a difficult mission, and no question of her fleeing army justice in the
Lucia
, for where in the eight worlds could she go?

As Marzano’s unit moved past the camp perimeter, the gathering broke up, except those that watched the line wend off, skirting the edge of the Gray Spiny Forest. Sascha and her father were among those who watched.

“I’m sorry, Sascha,” her father said.

She knew what about. Marzano’s mission was Dammond’s sentence of death or exile. Sascha tried to believe that Congress Worlds would send a ship out for him: a mop-up mission for the mop-up mission. But word had it, no one would ever be coming back here. Not for one man. A man who was probably dead.

All at once, Sascha found herself resting her head against her father’s chest, warm tears springing out to join the cold rain on her face. His arm cinched her close. She had no right to cry for Eli Dammond. She was only a girl who could barely presume to call the captain her friend.

Someone had come up next to them, saying: “Mr. Olander, got something for you.”

Sascha disengaged from her father’s arms, embarrassed to see Sergeant Ben Juric regarding them with a critical stare. She hated to be seen crying, by him of all people, a man so tough he’d been known to saw a soldier’s blasted leg off with a pocketknife.

“What’ve you got, Sergeant?”

“You’ll have to tell
me
.” Juric twisted his chin to the left, indicating where they should go.

They followed Juric through camp, avoiding the deeper puddles whose depths were suspect. As they walked, Juric
said, “Couple of my men been hunting.” He offered nothing more, but led them to a tent deep in the lower enlisteds’ section of camp.

As they entered the tent, two soldiers looked up from a game of cards on the bunk. One of them glanced to the middle of the tent where, on the floor, a covered wash-pan lay. A thick pane of clear plaz lay over the top. Juric waited by the tent flap as Sascha and her father stepped forward. Within the pan a small lizardlike creature skittered from one side of the pan to the other.

Geoff looked sharply up at Juric.

The sergeant shrugged. “You wanted to see a live one.”

Sascha noted its triangular, flattened head and four short legs and tail. The only remarkable feature was its smooth skin, gleaming silver, banded by black lateral stripes. Then it revealed its other remarkable feature: a jaw full of tiny, stiletto-sharp teeth.

The pan clattered gently as the creature began dashing around the perimeter of its cage.

“This what killed those men?” Geoff Olander asked.

The enlisted sitting nearest them said, “Yeah, and now we gonna kill
it.”
He flipped down a card on the mattress, with a flourish that roundly displayed his regen hand, pale as a fish belly.

“No,” Geoff said.
“I’ll
kill it.”

The one with the regen hand frowned at this appropriation of what he clearly considered his property.

“Dissection,” her father said.

Sascha ventured, “Looks like a salamander.” The smooth, moist skin would allow water evaporation, and the slits on the head might even be gills, such as some salamanders kept into adulthood.