Tropic of Creation (20 page)

Voices, again.

He ducked into a stairwell. Someone paused to look at him from the way. Was he descending an up way? He casually continued down the narrow stairs, which quickly swallowed him from the view of whoever had stopped in the corridor. He listened for the sound of their steps in pursuit, but all was silent. He plunged down, sweat streaming, throat parched.

Down, down. The stairway was the longest continuous stairway he had seen. The gomin had said nothing about such a downway, but he descended, passing great shelves of fungus, similar to those he’d seen in other stairways and ways of the place. The smell of the fungus pressed in on him. The stairwell was so narrow, the very walls seemed to sag toward him, but he went on. He must.

At the bottom, he found himself at a dead end. Here was a vast, hexagonal room, full of cubby holes. Many of them were occupied. Ahtra lay very still in the slots, perhaps a hundred or more … but not rolled up in rugs—just lying very still.
Asleep
, he thought.
They sleep communally
. He slowly backed up, then heard a noise behind him. He pivoted around.

It was Maret. Her markings paled, and she steadied herself against the door for a moment. “Eli, quickly,” she whispered, and he hurried to her side. They turned out of
the chamber and she led the way, dashing up the stairs. “The guards are everywhere, searching for you—if they find you it will not be well.”

They crossed the first way and wound into the next stairwell.

“Maret,” he said, between gasps of breath, “the gomin said to go
down.”

She took him by the elbow and hauled him forward. Though a full head shorter and slim, she had surprising strength in her hands. “No, Eli,” she said. “We go up.” For a moment they paused as she faced off with him, blue eyes to gray. “Back to your den.”

His limbs hardened, locking him in place on the stairs. He looked back down the way he had come.

“You are hopelessly lost, Eli. What made you believe you would ascend against all tradition?” In her deeply patterned skin, her eyes and mouth were merely two more disfiguring ovals in a pockmarked face. “It was a gamble,” he said, voice flat.
Friend
. How could he have thought an ahtra would be his ally?

Her nostrils flared in an ahtran sneer. “A poor one.” Then she turned and walked up, leaving him to follow or not.

He stood his ground, contemplating his chances. Then, from below, voices. A group of ahtra approached on the stairs, stopping to stare when they saw Eli, his cowl thrown back. With rigid calm, he turned and walked up the stairs, joining Maret at the top where she waited for him. As they walked down the way, several guards trailed them, uncertain, because of Maret’s presence, whether to approach or not. But it was over.

Returning to his cell, he found a visitor waiting. Nefer. Behind her, workers had pulled back a flap of the hab where
the gomin’s virtual bubble had emerged. Pinkish blood pearled up on the severed edges.

Nefer looked from Eli to Maret and back to Eli again.

“One has been uneasy about your disappearance, Eli Dammond,” she said in Standard.

Eli gazed back at the creature, wondering if it was true that ahtran skulls were delicate, and how many he could damage before he sustained injuries that would be regrettably difficult to remedy.

Then he heard Maret say, “We have been walking together on the way. As my mistress commanded.”

Something flickered across Nefer’s face. As the pause among them lengthened, an attendant offered Nefer a dusting of snuff on an ivory stick, which she inhaled, murmuring, “One is reassured by such obedience, when it occurs.” She gestured at the workers. “This den would be infected by a worm, one discerns. One regrets any impertinence by the
unnatural
. One deals with the gomin as she deserves.”

She moved to the door, then turned at the threshold. “Given that you had a private walk where few saw you, Maret-as, one surmises you would have missed the Extreme Prime’s news strand.”

Maret looked at Nefer, her eyelids fully retracted.

Everyone in the small den watched the two of them, even the workers who turned for a moment from their repairs on the wall.

“One surmises that the Extreme Prime disapproves of your frequent walks with our hostage enemy. One must admire his judgment. Therefore you are required to correct your behavior, Maret-as. You will return to your studies, and one will monitor your expenditures carefully. It is your happenstance that ronid is beyond you now.” Her lips parted in a fragment of a smile. “Perhaps next season?”

She left, chatting with her attendants.

*   *   *

Vod bent down for a closer view of the artifact. It was a mask from an ancient play. It crumbled to dust in his hands as his headlamp shone on it. Here, where the hab was blackened and petrified, was a way that no ahtran had seen for a million cycles.

Tirinn Vir Horat had told him where the place lay buried, far under all. The Ancient Way, Tirinn called it, before Ankhorat. Even before Longorr habitat, before data stages and the Great Well. Before dwellers cared to build world ships and roam the galaxy. Before they cared to build warships to confront the humans. In ancient times, Down World was enough, buried deep and safe, beyond any predation. Vod had thought that his secret digger chute was old and forgotten, but this place was far deeper than the chute, accessed by an almost endless downway in such disrepair that he thought it might cave in on him just from his footfalls.

He let the mask, now all threads and dust, fall to the floor, as ruined as his attempt to eject Eli Dammond from Down World. Tirinn had said Eli would be in a certain way confluent to a certain downway, but he had not been. Nor was he in the next downway, or the next. Then the flow announced that Eli was escaped, and almost as fast, that he was captured again. Then Vod had plunged downward, following Tirinn’s directions, though now it had no greater purpose.

What Tirinn’s greater purpose was, Vod didn’t know. He had been summoned to the old guide’s presence, high AbovePrime. Surveying Vod’s grimy workman’s garb, Tirinn growled, “Ask no questions. You can’t afford me.” Then he gave him explicit instructions, which Vod memorized into backmind. One of the instructions was “Keep your tendril flat,” by which Vod knew the information he now possessed was dangerous, completely outside the flow.

No old mountain of flesh was going to order Vod
around, high fluxor or not. But Tirinn’s interest was the same as Vod’s: get rid of the human. So he agreed to the plot, making a mess of everything.

The human was still among them, pale and ruinous. And Maret’s reputation unraveled—though Hemms’ condemnation of her might actually give her a boost among fluxors. Hemms cared nothing for diggers’ lives. And while the Extreme Prime recited his kin nets, better dwellers were buried alive in rubble …

Vod returned to the AncientWay the next day, wandering with dark thoughts, shining his lamp, thinking of his kin who’d once added their numbers to the thronging PrimeWay, thinking of other cycles when fluxors had ruled, when safety and long lineage were due both static and fluxor.

It was on his third foray into the subworld that Vod first heard the noises. It began as pinging in his ears, produced, he thought, by his own head, the depths to which he was unaccustomed—for he was a half hexal under Ankhorat. But he walked forward, pausing at upways and downways to listen.

He stood at the foot of an upway where once fluxors had passed UpWorld for ronid, in the days when all ascents went on foot instead of by conveyance. Here, the noises had more variety: thuds and pings and buzzing, dripping down from high overhead, as though drawn by gravity. For an instant he thought he might be hearing UpWorld itself, the ghastly sunny realm that he would never see. A superstitious dweller might think it was the sound of departed kin, denied their rugs, still roaming there. A superstitious dweller might listen for whispers telling him how he might save Maret, or save his people from a digger’s death, buried in slumps of stone, forgotten by mad Hemms, driven by the clear-eyed Nefer.

Vod listened harder. And then he was ascending.

The stairset turned and turned in relentless coils. As his
footfalls echoed, he almost felt himself accompanied by terrified fluxors who chose to ascend, who proved their worthiness. He followed the helix upward.

He passed an agricultural lobe, long abandoned. Here lorel still bore its fruit in patches, the latest generation of the unbroken line from earliest times. It was as close to immortality as Vod could imagine, these fruiting bodies sprouting from the vast plait of mycelium crisscrossing Down World. He broke off a tidbit to chew, replenishing his energy, and continued his climb. Coming upon way stations where the ancient fluxors had adjusted to depth changes, he rested there, too. Then he went on, climbing, his legs aching, then numbing.

At the top he faced a wall of dirt. And began to dig, feeling the vibrations from up ahead.

In a sudden fall of soil, he poked through a hole to the other side. A cool draft of air hit his face. There, before him he glimpsed the source of the noise. It was a foundry, a great cavern, crowded with workers. They were no dwellers he knew. But he knew what they built.

Voices mixed with the pounding noises of metal and machine. He was high in the wall of a great cavern where no hab lived. It was a gallery defined by stone. Within this nest, many hexadrons took shape. Warships. Massive ships, larger than any he had ever heard of. Down a cavernous tunnel to one side the ships massed in a long line to the limit of sight.

Backmind told him what lay above this foundry realm. It was the latest fluxor dig. There lay the hurried and pointless shafts that Nefer required, the long digs that never seemed in relation to Ankhorat. Instantly he knew why Nefer wanted those shafts, and why they needn’t be executed with care. They would provide egress for the ships. Nefer was orchestrating a massive collapse of the fragile, riddled soil. Freed of their nest, the beasts would fly.

Nearby, a fluxor turned to stare at Vod. It was a face he
remembered, kin from a world hexadron, kin he hadn’t seen since she’d come home for ronid last season. Then he saw that she wasn’t looking at him, but gazing at the vast, high ceiling, as though dreaming of the moment when the warships would ascend.

He backed up into his hand-carved tunnel, but as he jerked back, his headlamp toppled away, clattering down into the great cavern. Vod quickly packed the short tunnel full again.

Plunged into darkness, he sat stunned. The scale of the thing … Yet how methodically and neatly it had all been carried out. To build such a place, such ships—it had to be
years
in the undertaking. And all beneath the very noses of those Nefer had duped. All on the backs of those digger lives lost in the
disposable
tunnels.

The great, hulking ships … the globes of war. It would all begin again. The great slaughter would engulf them all once more. She had never accepted the armistice.
Hemms’ armistice
. Likely she had never accepted Hemms, either. All these spans he’d thought that digger’s lives meant nothing to Nefer, but his eyes had been plugged with soil.

Ahtran
lives meant nothing to her. Now, like Wecar, they would all be buried before their time.

He began the descent of the long, long stairset, staggering at times in the absolute dark, the only light a flame in his two minds, burning away the last hiding places of Nefer Ton Enkar.

E
li sat on a shaved-off pinnacle jutting a thousand feet or more into the air above a green, foaming jungle. At night he dreamed of tossing and turning, rolling close to the edge. They fed him now and again. Guards climbed from below, bearing food trays. Puffing and sweating, they deposited the tray on the plateau, then secured their repelling gear and returned to the base of the pinnacle.

He would watch their feat, trying to discern the telltale shimmer of a virtual environment. But it was a perfect rendition, aside from the one-handed climbing. He wasn’t sure why they had chosen a jungle setting for him, but they had designed it beautifully, from what he could tell at this height.

Hours passed, and perhaps days—if days existed anymore. Sometimes Maret climbed up, staying just below sight on the cliff-side. “Eli,” her deep voice would float to him. He had sworn at her and heaped some highly creative curses on her relatives. But she’d never been other than his jailer, though he sought information from her, then hope, then connection. The familiar behavior of the kidnapped.
It rankled him, despite the multitude of his more serious problems.

“I am very deeply sorry, Eli,” she said mournfully.

He would be happy to never hear that expression again.

The sky darkened into night as the red sun followed the yellow one to the horizon. They couldn’t know what pleasure it brought him to see sky and day and night again, even in simulations.

“Eli,” Maret said in the dark. She lurked just out of view, as though in response to his anger. Or perhaps she couldn’t penetrate as far as the guards. “We are in a club, Eli.” She had taken to the phrase “welcome to the club,” when he’d responded to her statement that she’d lost everything.