Tropic of Creation (26 page)

Nodding at her chest, all he said was “Did your lamp scare off that pock?”

He squinted at her as she answered, “I don’t know.”

It had been Juric’s idea to climb to the ridge above the deadly streams of the valley. After hearing Sascha’s tale of the water scorpion, the unit decided that no way would they wade that river.

“Chopper at three o’clock,” Lemon announced from above her.

Sascha looked up to see the small rodent flying overhead. Its tail ended in an umbrella of bristles and matted hair that carried it on the thermals. Sighting a prey, it collapsed its tail and dove upon its meal. The bot aimed a segmented arm at the creature, but withheld fire. Only in marauding groups were the drifting creatures much of a threat. This one was alone, its prodigious front teeth sparkling in the sun.

Sascha told the bot, “Remember this: Rodentia, small parasailing creatures that may swarm for cooperative hunting when the prey is large.” She thought she could hear the bot recording, the brief whispering vibration deep under its metal skin. Her catalogue had dozens of entries by now.

“Shut up,” Lemon hissed at her.

She had come to like the bot, with its doglike loyalty, its mute acceptance of the task at hand, its shiny black body that took on gleams of blue and teal green in certain lights. It was always slightly warm, like a living thing, and adapted with enviable swiftness. For the climb it had sprouted segmented appendages, three to a side, gripping the vine ropes with agility.

She defied Lemon, whispering, “Each ecological niche is filled. The rippers don’t come up where they’d need forearms for climbing. Their predatory role is filled by the rodentia. Prey include the rock crabs, if they can catch them before they roll up into their pleated casings. The rock crabs fling off their armor to catch flying insects, triggered by shadows passing over their shells, if not actual landings.” The reassuring vibration was the bot’s only comment on her analysis.

At last they reached the narrow ridge at the summit. Juric clambered up beside her, and several minutes behind, Pig came lumbering up.

From their vantage point they commanded a panoramic view. Across the valley the transformed Gray Spiny
Forest looked impenetrable, a wall of sage green. Streams webbed the valley floor, eventually meandering into the forest. To north and south, the narrow basin stretched into the distance, hazy with evaporation and transpiration. Six miles to the south, Sascha knew, the
Lucia
waited for them, the focal point of all their striving.

“Head out,” Juric said, hoisting his L-31 over his shoulder and nodding in the direction of the
Lucia
, a jagged course along the ridge that would take them down as often as up, clinging to the highest point of land available to them.

Pig, still winded, was slow to rise. “Wait up,” he mumbled. No one paid him any attention, Juric had made it clear: whoever keeps up is with the group, whoever falls behind is on his own.

The rodentia were back, this time a cluster of them, twisting their bodies to change the angle of their sails, coming in on a brisk thermal. The bot emitted a series of clicks, and everyone hit the ground at once to stay out of its line of fire. It spattered the air with efficient stitches, bringing down a bevy of the creatures faster than Pig could have aimed the domino. The remnant scattered on the updrafts or dropped down on their own wounded.

Continuing along the ridgeline, the group followed what seemed like a flowered road. The thread of the path was studded with flesh-colored, radial flowers. They spread out in a straight line like landing lights on an airstrip. When Vecchi kicked at one, his boot bounced off the tough petals.

“Looks like somebody planted these,” Pig said. “All regular and everything.”

“Yeah,” Vecchi said, “them flying rats just love purty things. Like your hairy ass, Pig.”

Sascha told the bot, “Flowers on the ridgeline in a row,
sprouting from continuous rhizomes. Just like the grass and vines, it all goes back to root stock in the dry season. A rhizomous world.”

Vecchi, just behind her, muttered, “Who you think’s gonna give a shit about flowers and flying rats? Your daddy’s not around anymore to go nuts over plants.”

Sascha didn’t miss a step. Without turning around she said, “No one in the history of the galaxy has ever been to this ridge. My father will want a complete report.”

“Dead as that flying rat back there is what he is,” Vecchi persisted.

Sascha slowed her pace, feeling her face as hot as cooked tomatoes. After a moment she was standing still in the middle of the path, and everyone else had stopped, too, watching her. She looked at Private Vecchi, seeing his hatchet-face, his smirk, his flat black eyes.

“Never mind him,” Pig said, his face bright pink and sprouting a hairy growth of beard. “He’s got no daddy. Never had one. That’s how come he’s so mean.”

Struggling to keep her composure, Sascha said to the bot, “Remember this: The ridge flowers store water in their petals, prolonging their growing season beyond what might be a drastically short wet season.” The bot thrummed next to her as Sascha resumed her walk, and the men followed suit.

“Crazy rich girl,” Lemon said. “Them rich types are all crazy.”

“Quiet,” Juric growled from on point.

As though in defiance of his order, a volley of shots came from the valley, the crack and sizzle of fire from the other bot. Proof positive that someone yet lived. But once all were dead, Sascha wondered, would the bots keep fighting? In their complex AI minds, was there an imperative to win when the cause had been lost? Or would they, like her, have the grace to stop caring?

Forced to temporarily descend, they picked their way down a precipitous drop in the trail, then back onto the connecting ridge, where the path grew marginally wider. In the north, drumrolls of thunder announced the approaching battle-gray clouds. Then, in a wall of wind, the temperature dropped by fifteen degrees. The bot stopped, making morphing noises, the ones that sounded like the screams of mice. Everyone stopped to watch.

“Sprouting rain gear?” Lemon offered.

In organized sequence the machine elongated and retracted appendages, reformulating them until it became something resembling a tall box on legs. Then it turned around, facing in the direction from which they’d come. Sergeant Juric turned to gaze down the trail toward the ridgeline of the previous hill. Down the bot’s centerline a crack appeared, and close underneath it, a ridge, with nubs that began growing into nozzles, then barrels.

The men drew their weapons, but they still didn’t know why, except that the bot sensed something.

Continuing its morphing, the bot extruded military business equipment from every side, and began walking back the way they’d just come.

They watched it go. Pig was fingering the domino with repetitive movements. Vecchi and Lemon crouched and aimed down path, while Sascha moved forward to stand next to Juric, who could be counted on, more than any of the others, not to shoot her by accident.

As they waited, Juric turned his head from side to side in that way he had of scanning things with his regen eye, which, they said, was equipped with infrared.

They lost sight of the bot in a twist of the path.

A tick caused Lemon’s left eyebrow to quiver. “What’s up there?” he croaked.

No one answered. The sky was swept clear of rodentia,
as the air took on a soaked green glow. The quiet was almost suffocating.

In a high, thin voice Pig said to nobody in particular, “Tell her I did good, if anything happens. Tell my mom I did good, I didn’t go coward.”

Vecchi cracked a sickly grin. “Ain’t been proved yet, Pig.”

Juric nodded at Pig. “I’ll tell her.” He started forward, passing them each in turn, heading down the path the bot had taken. “I don’t plan to die, unlike you patches.”

Lemon squeaked, “Hey, Sarge, where you going?”

Juric turned around wearily. “The fewer of us in one place the better, like I told you a hundred times, Lemon.” Eyeing the group with pity he said, “You’re safer without me.” Behind the words Sascha heard, “And I’m safer without
you
.” From down the trail came his dark mutter, “I’d give my good eye never to hear somebody call me
sarge
again.”

Fat drops of rain splatted at their feet, but no one moved. There was nowhere to go but forward or backward, and the men seemed paralyzed by the choice. Rolling thunder came close upon cracks of lightning. Pig wiped the rain from his face in a dainty movement while shouldering the domino in business mode.

Then, from down trail, came zings of bot fire, joined a second later by pops from a rifle. In the next instant Vecchi was dashing toward the sound of battle, heedless of the narrow path, charging with gun blasting already. Pig and Lemon hunkered down, legs dangling over the steep side of the ridge, trying in vain to dig in. Their guns pointed down trail, waiting for the charge of God only knew what. Meanwhile, Sascha stood in the rain in the middle of the path.

She felt a tickle in her feet. Lightning tension was gathered in the ground, causing a low twanging sound. Aware
that she was the tallest thing on the ridge, Sascha crouched down, feeling her whole body quiver in resonance with the electrical charge building up. When it finally discharged, it threw her up in the air. She seemed to be flying for a long while. Perhaps this was how death felt, she had time to think, like being picked up off the world.

The impact of the fall stunned her, forcing breath from her lungs. She was wedged into a crack in the hillside, unable to move. A relentless rain battered her face as she lay staring into the towering galleons of clouds. Her hearing was gone. She closed her eyes to be sure. After a few minutes she heard muffled screams and shouts. She managed, by a powerful twist, to dislodge her lower right leg, but she could get no leverage on the muddy hillside.

Squinting, she watched the ridge for one of the men, listening for voices. Thunder beat the sky in wave after wave of abuse. She most desperately wanted to see Pig and Juric and even Vecchi once more.

Then she heard the sound of someone moving down the hillside. Someone had seen her. It would be Juric who would come. Juric, who wanted to look her granddad in the face and say, “We brought her back, sir.”

With a lurch of her heart, she saw a creature scaling down the vine-massed valley wall. Within moments it disappeared from view behind a hillock. But she could hear its steady progress toward her. She hoped she was wrong about what she saw.

In her terror, she began to sing. The song came from nursery times. Her voice sounded like the noises bottles make when you blow across their tops.

“Hush little baby, don’t say a word, Papa’s gonna buy you a mockingbird.…”

The creature’s face and then torso loomed over her. A humming noise seemed to be coming from it.

“If that mockingbird don’t sing, Papa’s gonna buy you …”

She looked up at the monster, holding on to her song:
“…  a diamond ring.”

Its large face was a pronounced triangle with eyes as big as a baby’s fists. When it stood up on hugely muscular hind legs it looked to be seven or eight feet tall. From its narrow torso sprouted two arms jointed in two places, ending in very long hands with impressive claws. As it paused, regarding her, she saw that the broad forehead bore a crenelated ridge. Great jaws were just visible under its triangular faceplate. From the muscular throat came a deep humming sound.

She heard herself sing:
“If that diamond ring is brass …”

The crenelated brow ridge undulated slightly as though sensing her more fully. Sascha noticed it was studded with small holes.

“Papa’s gonna buy you a looking glass.”

The creature’s face began to twist. The broad end of the triangular surface curled back to form a rounded cranium, while on one side a knob of flesh emerged, sculpting into something very like a human ear. The entire face was changing, but Sascha could only stare at that ear as it flowered into a delicate shell, flushed with a rosy pink color. The flesh tone spread outward in a wave…

Sascha thought if she just concentrated on the ear she would be all right. She knew better than to look full in the eyes of the visage forming before her.

“If that looking glass gets broke, Papa’s gonna buy you a billy goat.…”

But she must look.

A human face bulged, fully formed, from the creature’s head, as though trying to crawl out of the monster’s body.

Her voice collapsed into a whisper.
“If that billy goat don’t pull, Papa’s gonna buy you a cart and bull …”

She knew that face. It was Lieutenant Anning. He looked very angry. Then surprised.

Her tattered voice persisted
.
“If that cart and bull turn over, Papa’s gonna buy you a … dog named Rover.…”

It bent very close to her as she sang
.

“If that dog named Rover don’t bark … Papa’s gonna buy you …”
It was very important to keep singing. She whispered, “…  a horse and cart.”

The creature’s face was two feet from her own. Lieutenant Anning growled out, “Horz an cart.”