Tropic of Creation (33 page)

Shouts came from down the way. The den emptied as each gomin dashed out. When they pulled the rug aside to depart, angry voices surged louder in the way.

“Follow me,” Zehops hissed.

She moved to the back of the den, and into a narrow corridor, Vod following. Crawling into a cramped storage gallery, past stacks of supplies, she stopped suddenly. In the shadows, her face was lost in the dark patterns of the season.

“I’m about to commit an act of trust, Vod Ceb Rilvinn. Would it be foolish to trust you?” She looked past him, listening. Muffled cries came from nearby.

Vod wasn’t sure what he was being asked to do, but he had enough trouble of his own without compounding it with gomin troubles. “Why are you helping me?”

“We want something, certainly.”

“Something I can give?”

She stopped, listening again. Then she whispered, “This is my gamble. That you can help us.”

Loud voices echoed through Zehops’ quarters. Thinking fast, he responded: “I won’t betray you. More, I don’t promise.”

She leaned forward in the dim recess. A section of the wall slid away. They moved through, crawling into an odd tunnel. The walls were smooth and blank. This was not the hab.

“Zehops-as, what is this place?” They were able to stand, but barely.

“The Second Way. We hide here when they come to kill us.”

“Who? Who comes to kill you?”

She turned to fix him with a calm gaze. “You. You all do. But especially statics. The worst statics whip dwellers up against us. Sometimes a mob comes down to our quarter to beat the unnaturalness out of us. And always during Red Season, as now.”

Sometimes the diggers grumbled against the gomin, and at times dwellers talked about correcting gomin ways, but he’d never thought it came to violence. “I thought that no one was hurt by such … events.”

“Merely gomin,” Zehops said.

It wasn’t only digger ills that were never discussed DownWorld, Vod realized.

“Come,” Zehops said, leading him onward.

Their shoes clicked against the floor, creating a clatter. Vod reached out to touch the walls, finding that his fingers slipped from the surface. “Where is the hab?”

Moving quickly ahead of him, and turning into a side tunnel, Zehops said, “You think our ships in the FarReaches carry the hab? Not all ways are of the hab. These walls avoid detection, keep us separate from Ankhorat.”

They came to a large gallery where gomin lay on pallets, bandaged and tended by medipractor devices.

Zehops knelt by one pallet where a gomin lay, his face bruised and swollen.

“How do you tend now, Uril-as?”

Vod saw a pulse of bright chemicals thread through the medipractor tube into Uril’s arm.

The injured gomin whispered, but his throat was nearly swollen shut.

“They beat him on just the right side, so they thought themselves kind,” Zehops said, rising.

Vod counted twenty wounded, but all of them suffered silently. It shamed him.

“Several intervals ago, they came without warning.”

“Do you fight back?”

“It’s worse if we do. We sustain their beatings, then
they leave. If we’re lucky, nobody dies.” She watched him closely. “You wonder why we don’t report it?”

After a pause he said, “No. Not to Nefer.” And not to Hemms Pre Illtek, lost in his preoccupations of ritual and dynasty. “I never knew.”

“You never wanted to know,” Zehops said simply.

All his life he had lived DownWorld—a world, he was beginning to realize he apprehended less than perfectly.

Leading him out of the sick gallery, Zehops continued into the maze of the SecondWay. The corridors were narrower than the dwelling he knew, but extensive, running in long stretches. Zehops explained that it was possible to slip into the SecondWay at many points DownWorld. They passed a DreamGallery, where dormant gomin rested in safety. In other dens and galleries, the scent of sex was strong. Vod averted his eyes, but chanced to catch Zehops’ gaze. She stopped in the corridor, and faced him with irritation. “You are surprised to note sexual contact? Perhaps you thought that we clung to each other only out of season?”

“No,” Vod answered, automatically. But then, the truth: “Yes, that’s what I thought.” They were gomin, after all; even they did not deny it.

“Digger,” she said with some heat, “I will tell you what makes us unnatural to you: that we want each other in all seasons.” She looked at him with a scouring stare. “And that includes Red Season.”

Chastened, Vod followed her as she led him down the way. Now the clatter of feet grew louder, and down the far end of the corridor came a press of gomin, helping the injured walk, or carrying them. To let them pass, Zehops pulled Vod into a side lobe.

“We can’t all disappear during the raids,” Zehops said. “Some must stay visible, lest they come searching for our hiding place. These are such volunteers.”

She gestured for him to sit on the low platform hugging the wall of the lobe. Drawing up one leg and circling her arms around it, as though such mayhem happened every day, she said, “It is a great service we perform, is it not, for the gomin to allow violence such a harmless release?”

Her bitterness showed its bulky form beneath the softness of her words.

“Do we need a release for violence?”

“Yes, during peacetime, as now. Though some purge the inclination with ronid. Others prefer better odds.”

Zehops seemed to be implying that dwellers needed war or they turned on each other. She was cynical and suspicious, perhaps with reason. But Vod could not subscribe to such pessimism. That was not the kind of world he was fighting for.

As though Vod had spoken his doubts, Zehops said, “The Well carries our history, where you can see how gomin were tolerated during the HumanWar. It was a better time, in some ways, for gomin. It’s all in the Well. Usually Data Guides aren’t paid to explore such topics.”

Vod wished Maret were here. She had left him with a world crumbling around his shoulders, and all for a lineage that might be prime, but that could not matter for many years.
Here and now, Maret, this interval. This is what matters.…

That much he knew. Yet he felt he had little grip on the rest. “What do you want, then, Zehops Cer Aton?”

She traced a finger along the hard shell of the tunnel, as though probing for the softness of the hab in the lifeless white lining.

“Honor,” she said.

“Few of us have that.”

“No, you
all
have that. Honor is different than position. Gomin—static and fluxor alike—find their level of ability, and we ask for no preference.”

The last of the wounded limped by, leaving the way quiet. Zehops’ voice was very low. “You have heard that the human, Eli Dammond, was sent UpWorld?”

Vod blinked in surprise. He hadn’t heard, but cared little for the human’s fate.

“He honored me in the PrimeWay. He called me by name. Every gomin heard, and dared to hope for the first time.” She looked at him, dark and steady. “Even some diggers rallied to us.” At his look of confusion, she said, “You heard of Eli Dammond’s wager with Nefer Ton Enkar? He won a gamble with her. For his prize he chose the fate of a mere gomin. Tirinn Vir Horat engaged both you and me to help Eli leave DownWorld. I was caught and banished from the flow. Now I am gated back in, because of Eli Dammond.”

She stood, looking down on him. “That is what we want. A public acknowledgment. Not your secret tolerance. We want honor.”

“If it were mine to give, so I would, Zehops-as.”

She looked at him with indulgence. “Vod-as, there are statics among the dwellers of the SecondWay who say the static cycle has ended. The fluxors among us have long thought so.”

Her silent blue stare kept on and on.

“But Maret …”

“Forget Maret. We want to know if we should support
you.”

He could not have been more dumbfounded.

Forget Maret
. Maret of the fine lineage, Maret of deep learning, Maret of high judgment. He was only a digger, had ever been the least of the fluxors. But now, with Nefer’s dark fleet ready to burst from hiding … there was no time to wait for Maret. Perhaps Vod would have to do.

In backmind, he saw the vision of the hundred diggers arrayed in front of him in the AncientWay, carrying their axes, shovels, and prods. He saw, in clear backmind replay,
that they looked eager for a fight. Eager to fight by his side. He had never spoken to any of them about his vision of how the digs should be, of how their lives would be better. No, they knew nothing of that; they wanted to fight for
him
. Even Harn would have died to defend Vod, to defend the thing that Vod stood for.

In that case, he must certainly decide what he did stand for. Could he in any way seek redress for diggers and exclude the gomin?

Zehops gripped his hand.

“We will fight,” she said, “alongside the diggers and any others who incline to see the last of Hemms Pre Illtek and Nefer Most Prime.”

“It’s revolution, Zehops-as.” The thought shook him powerfully.

“It would tend toward disorder.” Zehops, no coward, smiled.

He looked down at his gomin robes. Colors flashed from the creases of the fabric in a most undiggerlike way. He would have to get used to this. So would they all.

M
aret ran for the OverWoods. It was farther than it looked. It seemed that she had been running this race ever since she could remember. But it had only been since the
Recompense
, that ship whose name she now knew—since the
Recompense
avenged its kin by taking all of hers…

The woods beckoned. She had seen the worst that UpWorld could present, and it was bearable: the sky, the fruiting land, the cold, black gullies of moving water, the vone with their terrible appetites. So far she had survived by luck and mercy alone, and though she longed to test her courage, she was buoyed by the discovery that there
was
luck and mercy in the world.

As she ran, she passed a carrier, and wondered how its occupants fared. Since the carrier was still here, it might bode ill for them. Musing on their fate, Maret lost her concentration for a moment. When she snapped back to watchfulness, her skin chilled.

The shapes up ahead were not bushes, as she had
assumed. They were large, furred creatures on stalklike legs. Dozens of heads snapped up all at once, swinging on long necks to rivet her with their eyes.

She stopped instantly, mav lights blinking
ready
.

The creatures had seen her, and there were many of them, all frozen still. Very slowly she turned her head and saw that she was three-quarters surrounded by the furred creatures, possessed of such claws as could leave no doubt as to their diets. She noted, too, the four-toed feet, with three slashing claws pointed forward, and a far larger one pointing backward. At any moment the claws would flash.

She was retreating in slow motion. It wasn’t a move she had planned. In fact, she couldn’t think at all. Both her minds were as blank as the sky. But she was backing up. She had lifted one foot far enough that it just cleared the ground, and moved it behind her, setting it down. That action took several increments. Then her other foot, slowly, moving backward.

One of the claws jerked its head to the left. It was eyeing her foot.

She held her foot poised above the ground. If she moved, they would attack. She might take out ten or fifteen before the main group was upon her. After a moment, she succeeded in lowering her foot to the ground, almost without moving it at all.

Incredibly, some of the claws seemed to lose interest, and bent to munch on grass. Perhaps they had recently feasted. Or perhaps they didn’t recognize prey that was stationary…

She moved at the pace of lorel growing, of bones thickening, of memories fading. After many increments she realized that her feet were leading her to the carrier, though her mind had not the wit to think of the carrier, or the faith.

The day was dripping hot, and her skin burned with
the suns’ blackening gazes. Her body felt like a stone pressed in the earth. She feared if the claws charged, her arm would be too paralyzed to raise the mav.

Backward, slowly, slowly. More of the claws returned to feeding, but the foremost one was not fooled. This leader watched her for a signal. Any jerky movement would do. This one played with her.

Where was the carrier? She dared not even look down to follow her own trail. Blind and slow as a tree root, she moved.

The lead claw took a step toward her. She blinked. That seemed to inspire another step toward her. Still, she held her fire, held her pace.

Her mind remained clear, but empty. It was as though nothing else existed in the whole world but this backing up, this calm certainty of moving slowly. It took more strength than anything she had ever physically done. But she felt she could continue forever, until the water ran out of the gullies, until the life of Up World sank back into the sand.

At last a moment came when, with her peripheral vision, she glimpsed the carrier. It was closer on her left than she had dared hope. Her mind, sluggish until now, began to calculate the odds, the distance, and the moves.