Tropic of Creation (15 page)

“I am alive,” he responded. He adjusted his position, favoring the side of his body not swollen with bruises.

“Alive—yes. That shall be agreeable to me.”

“I do strive to be agreeable.”

“I would not have said so, Eli Dammond. You are regrettably unruly for one who has been offered my protection.”

“It is a gilded cage, Nefer-as.”

She blinked. “One has difficulty understanding you. Your language has a—proclivity to error.”

In other words, she was still learning. In the pause that followed her statement, he asked, “Are our two peoples at war?” If they were, it would explain why she didn’t worry about provoking Congress Worlds in her actions against his mission.

“Would your ships coming here show such a tendency?” she countered.

“No, as I’ve said already. The first ship suffered equipment failure. My ship was to rescue them.”

“One hopes not to give offense by saying one doubts. Failure of equipment in the FarReaches is a most seriously regrettable safety lapse. Perhaps humans tend not to be adequately prepared for venturing into FarReaches?”

“In the recent war, the FarReaches held some surprises for ahtra as well.”

“One remembers.” She licked her teeth. He noticed her tongue seemed to have a nap. “But the HumanWar is concluded. Now we are conducive to more delightful topics.”

She helped herself to a morsel of food on a plate in front of her. The food looked like fragments of fungus. After chewing slowly for a moment, Nefer pointed to the plate in a graceless gesture for him to help himself. There were no noxious varieties displayed, but he declined.

“Eli Dammond, we will speak of things Above. Shall that become agreeable?”

“Yes.” She had his full attention now, and she seemed more keenly focused on him as well.

“One will try to explain as much as your flawed language may tolerate. Please forgive any unintended error. The risk may be that you become outward with your feelings. One wishes you to have the understanding that if you make a threatening gesture toward one’s person, you will immediately receive injuries that shall be regrettably difficult to remedy.”

“I will remain calm.” He sat very still, to show how calm he was.

“Yes,” Nefer continued. “As one has already said, your ship and its contents are dead.”

She was new to the language. But he wondered if her choice of words was deliberate.

She reached for a short, narrow stick resting on a plate at her side and inhaled from it a powder. Sniffing noisily, she continued, “Do you know what tradition is?”

“Yes, it’s a long-standing way of doing things.”

“Even among humans, I would guess, some things seem like they shall be longtime-standing ways.”

“Like protecting those under one’s command.”

“Yes, very like that,” she said with some satisfaction.

“In the case of ahtra, we do not venture Up World except under traditional—happenstances.”

“But you sometimes travel in ships at your whim.”

“Ships.” She blinked. “Yes, you call them ships. But that, Eli Dammond, would not be Up World. That would be away from the world. You discern the difference?”

“When do you venture UpWorld?”

Ignoring this, Nefer continued, “Given that we shall not pass UpWorld except for our traditional ways, we cannot remove the bodies for burial. Generally, there will not tend to be bodies in any case, you apprehend.” She paused, pointing at the plate of fungus.

He controlled his response with difficulty. “It is deeply offensive to offer food when discussing news of disaster.”

“One forgets courtesies. Your language drifts so easily toward error, does it not?” She watched him with great intensity. Her large eyes seemed to gather up all the light of the room. At last she continued, “One does not rejoice in the misfortunes of others … but one might wager on them.”

She watched him as he shifted his position, stretching out a leg that had begun to throb with his cross-legged posture.

She went on: “Thus we wager on happenstances, such as when and in what manner all of your people died. Of course, winning or losing still proves nothing. It would be a tradition.”

Fire flicked across his skin, and in his gut. “Understood. We have traditions like that. Such as taking revenge against betrayal. It proves nothing, but it’s satisfying.”

“Certainly,” Nefer replied. “We do the same. We have much in common, I think.”

He held her gaze. “If it’s war you want, there are easier ways to get it.”

“One does not look for war. You will tell your betters
that to pass Up World is our high tradition. You would not be permitted to return in this season.”

“Even if it might lead to reprisals?”

“The stakes are thrillingly high, you apprehend.”

“You risk calamity, and blame it on tradition. Unless your command of my language lends to error.” He let her digest this insult, then slipped in the question: “What do the vone have to do with the alleged deaths of my people?”

She paused. “You are accustomed to speak of the vone?”

He did want to guard the source of that intelligence, so he merely shrugged.

“Maret makes very free,” Nefer observed with a feral smile.

“Do the vone attack my encampments, then?”

“Perhaps. You must pray they do not.”

“What are the vone?”

She took a morsel of food, chewing slowly. Then she answered: “Beasts. Horrors of the sunlit world. Some of your people killed themselves rather than face them. One could understand the tendency.”

“Others of my people would hunt the vone, if they are beasts.”

“Yes, certainly, they would be disposed to try.”

“If you faced a vone, Nefer-as, how would you prevail?”

She had a startle reflex, the smallest twitch of her tendril. “One does not.”

“Prevail?”

“Face the vone,” she said, very low.

“If you did, would you fight or retreat?”

A long silence. Then: “Neither one or the other.”

“Perhaps my people will react similarly, doing neither one nor the other.”

“The odds are against this.”

It was not lost on him that she used, at last, the present
tense.
The odds are against this
. “Even so. Traditionally, we do not give up.”

“Then they suffered longer than they might have.”

“Yes, perhaps. But I would wager they are not all dead.”

She blinked. “Do you offer a wager?”

In the next instant, he responded, “Yes.”

“But one discerns you have nothing to wager.”

“There’s always something to be gained and lost.”

“Yes.” She took another piece of fungus. “Describe your wager.”

“Someone survives, UpWorld. Some of my people. If I’m wrong, I’ll give you what you want from me that is in my power to give.”

“That would be?”

“You tell
me.”

Her lips slid away from her teeth a fraction. “Perhaps one could think of something.…”

“But if I win, you will give me what I want that is in your power to give.”

“One has interest in this wager, since everyone is dead, and therefore one risks nothing.… Understanding that one would not break traditions.”

“And understanding that one will not use traditions to cheat on the wager, or to influence the outcome.”

She regarded him.

“Take it or leave it.”

“An apt expression.” She stared at her plate of fungus for a long time. Then she looked up at him, her eyes wide with pleasure. “One takes it.” She made some movement that called the guards. When they came to escort him, she said: “That would be your expression, ‘to take it’?”

“No,” he answered. “We say ‘done.’ ”

“Done, then.”

“I hope you’ll abide fairly by the wager,” he said. Though he had no such hopes, he also had little to lose.

She smiled, showing small white teeth. “Eli Dammond,
it has been long and long since I have received such delightful insults. One is apt to enjoy conversation with you again. Would that be conducive?”

“I’m at your disposal,” he said with mock courtesy.

“An interesting phrase,” he heard her murmur as he was led away.

S
ascha awoke to glorious sunshine. Peeking out of the tent, she beheld a steaming world.

Split rays of low morning sun streamed through the Gray Spiny Forest, some one hundred feet away. The forest was no longer gray or spiny, its pillars growing a foot a day. The growing tips bore upward the green vines and mosses that were hitching a ride to the best light.

The
monsoons
, the enlisteds called this deluge of rain. Without more detailed study, the term might suit, her father said. Half a world away, winds crossing the great ocean were heated ever warmer by the approach of the red sun. Bearing higher moisture content than in the dry season, the moist winds rushed in to fill the void left by rising hot air over the land. And so once in four years it rained. And rained.

Her mother stirred, one eye always on Sascha—even, it seemed, when Cristin Olander was asleep. “Don’t go outside, now.”

“No, Mother.” She stood in the tent flap opening, the boundary line.

Her father was melded into his cot, not budging after an all-night session with the commander and his lieutenants.

Already at least ninety degrees, the air sucked up moisture from the forest, the camp’s drainage ditch, the tents, and the enlisteds who, soaking wet, were just returning from sentry duty. Behind wisps of dissipating fog, the sky flickered neon blue. On such a day, Sascha could almost forget the unsettling conversation with Badri Nazim, the fate of Eli Dammond. Except it was the second day of clear skies, and still no sign of the
Lucia
. Nor of Baker Camp.

Outside, one of the off-duty sentries walked by, nodding at her.

“Quiet watch?” Sascha asked.

As he passed her he said, “Gets louder every night.” He was a corporal, with black skin splashed here and there with the mottled regen that proclaimed his battle history.

She thought of all the young men and women whose lives were interrupted for a time—or permanently—by the Great War. By the time of the armistice, two generations of young lives were winnowed down to a surviving few, all patchwork bodies, with what some said were patchwork hearts to match.

Then she heard the sound. It was a human wail. In the distance, from across camp, came a long scream. And it didn’t stop, but grew louder, more insistent. Her father, who’d slept in his clothes and boots, charged past her, commanding her to remain, while her mother sat on the side of her cot, shoulders slumping, as though she would not be surprised by any bad news the screams might herald.

The terrible howls were now punctuated by some dozen gunshots. Sascha peeked out the tent flap. Soldiers dashed to their squads under the shouted orders of their officers.

Sergeant Ben Juric was standing in the aisle between the tents just in front of her. He was facing away from her,
away from the source of screams, watching the forest. He held a Dominator Gun, called a domino, loosely in his left hand while running enlisteds parted around him like a river around a boulder.

Sporadically, the screaming pummeled them from across camp. Finally, when her mother could stand it no more, she stalked to the tent opening and ducked outside, threatening Sascha with disinheritance if she followed. But after a long interval of quiet, Sascha judged the crisis over and, emerging from the tent, hurried in the direction of the crowd of soldiers. The ditch running through camp had been covered in a dozen places by sheets of metal matrix, forming bridges. But in their hurry, some of the enlisteds now hopped over the open ditch, defying the water to produce monsters such as those, rumor had it, that lived in the new rivers of the forest. Sascha used a bridge, determined not to get busted for a minor infraction of rules.

As she wound into the crowd, she heard soldiers swearing, using combinations of profanity she had never heard before, not even from Nazim. Just in front of her, an infantry private was talking to his buddies, filling in what he knew for the benefit of the newcomers.

“…  four to a tent,” he was saying. “One moment these guys are sleeping, then those things are inside and grabbing hold. Nobody calls out, nobody wakes up. When we killed them, they just dropped off our guys, all full of blood, too full and happy to care if they got blown to kingdom come.” To a question, he answered, “Dead? Yeah, they’re dead. Twenty of our guys never gonna wake up.”

Turning, he saw her standing behind. He grinned at her, wild-eyed. “You wanna see?” He made as though he would hoist her up to have a look.

A commotion off to their left made him pause a moment. Then he turned back to her. “Did I say twenty? Oh man,
should
have been twenty! But it was only nineteen, ‘cause one patch, see, he just sleeps through the whole
thing. No little bloodsuckers on him, but when he wakes up he finds his three tent-mates are white as your behind.” She wished he would stop, wished he wasn’t looking at her with that flat, eager stare. He chewed on his upper lip for a moment before continuing. “Now, Farley, here—he’s the screamer—he must wonder how nineteen good buddies can die in such peace and sweet quiet. He must wonder how we all can be lying asleep and dreaming of goin’ home, and wake up hoping for bacon and eggs, all the while monsters been sucking the life out of guys like they was nothin’ but a milkshake.”