Tropic of Creation (34 page)

The claws were now advancing with her, very slowly closing the distance. She knew which one she must kill first. It was the one that had never taken its eyes from her. This one now turned to look at the carrier. Its movements were jagged and sudden, causing Maret to pale. But she had no need of camouflage now, only time, a few more increments. She crept toward the door of the carrier.

That was when the leader made its decision. It sprinted from a standstill, furred arms tucked into its body, screeching, in human Standard:
“Run! Vucking hell!”
Her mav was firing, missing. Her hand was on the latch.

Throwing open the door, she fell backward into it, firing,
kicking the
close
mechanism, but not before the creature’s head poked in. The hatch slammed shut on the claw’s long neck, squeezing the head from the body, leaving it inside with her. She scrambled to the back of the cell, away from the gory appendage.

She began to shake. Her elbow was thrumming against the bulkhead. Then her tremors were answered by drumming noises outside. The claws were hammering against the carrier with what sounded like their beaks. She heard them screeching,
“Here! No!”
She heard her own cries, but she didn’t know what she was saying, if anything.

After a time, her throat was raw, and the outside noises diminished to the occasional hammer tap. She seemed to be floating, though she lay on the hard metal floor. Her muscles slumped, and her minds flowed downward like water.

Her backmind was shutting down. She sensed it disengage, releasing her, leading her into a deep unconscious state.

With persistent beaks still hacking at the carrier, Maret fell dormant.

Sascha awoke early, before dawn, just as Madame Singer was leaving the nest. Madame was the largest of them, except for perhaps Demon Singer, whose true size was hard to judge, as he was always on the outside, looking in.

Madame Singer strode out most mornings before dawn and didn’t return until late—unlike the other adults, who tended the young. She bore home carcasses of meat for Triplet and Watchful, who daintily ate their allotments, sharing with Brat and the three cubs. Brat and two of the cubs were the lone males in the grouping. Brat’s maleness reared up at times, most often around Sascha, and on these occasions he quickly lost enthusiasm as Watchful sang out her anger, driving him away.

Sascha stared at the slab of bloody flesh that Watchful had offered her. She couldn’t bring herself to eat flesh, although her benefactor hummed impatiently. Watchful even demonstrated to her slow learner how to eat meat. Enterprising, Watchful also brought Sascha various kinds of fruit. Sascha looked at the scarred and patient Singer with some affection, uncertain why she had been adopted. Or did every mother recognize an orphan when she saw one?

Remembering her manners, Sascha thanked Watchful for the food, singing a melody that Watchful was trying to learn, a lullaby from Dalarri, her mother’s home world. The old Singer could now hum parts of that song, in an odd key.

Watchful bent low to smell the pieces of fruit that Sascha had tied to her leg with coils of vines. In places, her leg was splotched from food reactions. After making herself sick on fruit, Sascha was determined to be more careful. Meanwhile, she drank the milk that flowed freely at times from Watchful’s shoulder.

Demon, she felt sure, saw past her ruse of cub-in-the-nest. When she tired of Demon’s great blue eyes spying at her through the stockade, she flashed her lamp at him, which, if done up-close, would cause him to veer away, humming a high-pitched protest.

As the light saturated the dawn gloom she could see the bot perched atop the stockade, looking into the Gray Spiny Forest, its periscope extended to command a better view. Sascha worried about the bot. It had reconciled itself to the Singers, but it was clearly not happy. Day after day it kept a vigil high on the wall, watching for an enemy to fight, or perhaps a human who might more value its services.

Sascha would be sad to see it go. It was her last connection to a world that seemed to retreat from her by the hour. Beyond this, the bot did provide some protection:
from boisterous cubs, from Demon, from amphibs that sometimes conducted suicide raids into the den. Even Watchful grew comfortable with the bot. Now she occasionally left the nest; first for short intervals, and last night for a good part of the evening. Sascha had recorded with the bot how the Singers didn’t sleep, which Sascha theorized was due to the brevity of the wet season, when every hour must be spent consuming or mating.…

Sascha was working on a theory that the ahtra had two stages of their lives, one as humanoid ahtra, and one as the great Singers. The Singer stage might have to be accomplished on Null, but while in ahtran form, they might roam the stars in ships. She hadn’t yet told the bot her theory.

“We publish when we’re ready with our facts, Sascha,” her father would say when she urged him to rush to print.

“But what if somebody beats you to it?”

“It’s not a race, Sascha,” he would say. And then with a grin, “Or not entirely.”

But a more promising theory had to do with the tree boles. There were two boles within this nest circle, both hanging limp against the sides of the trees, as though they had softened, split, and sagged after disgorging their contents. The sacks looked large enough to hold the likes of Watchful or Triplet, if curled up. Perhaps these creatures had lain folded up within the Sticks all the while the army had camped next to it. Now, in wet season, animals had come from all the hiding places that the world could devise: from boles in trees, from the mud of dried-up rivers, from the rocklike carapaces thrown up by animals that made their own calcified dens, from the millennial mats of vines on the floor of the Gray Spiny Forest. Null afforded myriad retreats from the hammering drought, and as many ways to revive, to drink the sudden waters.

Watchful was leaving again. Eyeing the back door where Demon lurked, and humming angrily in his direction,
Watchful pulled up several long strands of vines and, bundling them together, pushed them over Sascha, with a gesture that conveyed,
Stay in bed until I get back
.

As Watchful left, Triplet—for the first time—roused herself from tending the cubs to follow.

Now, with no adult Singer in the nest, Sascha considered escape. Brat was entertaining himself by pulling down vines bearing his favorite polyps, and she wasn’t sure he would try to stop her in any case. She felt almost strong enough to confront the forest. But it was many miles to the
Lucia
, and the remnant of the crew might well have left by now. Besides, there was the guard at the door—the hungry one: Demon.

A commotion came from Triplet’s nest.

Rising up, she saw the three cubs worrying at the new infant.

She threw off the blanket of vines and rushed to Triplet’s nest. The cubs had drawn blood from their sibling, which kicked reflexively, rather like a human babe.

“Stop!” she shrieked at them, waving her arms and stomping.

The cubs hesitated before her as she gesticulated and shouted at them. They were intent on killing their younger sibling, perhaps for food, or perhaps just to remove competition. When they dove for the baby again, Sascha surged forward and turned her lamp full into the face of the nearest one. The forward cub hummed in a low-throated rumble, a junior approximation of the sound she’d heard from Demon. It faced off with her, cocking its head. Pushing past it, she flashed her lamp in the eyes of the other two, but as she did so, the first cub made a lunge for the baby, and broke its neck with a sickening crunch.

Now the three cubs turned from their kill to face Sascha’s lamp. Looking at their cold blue eyes, they didn’t seem harmless cubs anymore. With Watchful out, they might look for larger sport. She backed away.

At that moment, and woefully late, Triplet returned through the front door. She stopped, staring. Sascha hoped she wouldn’t be blamed for the killing. As the cubs bounded away, Triplet slowly approached, gazing intently at the dead babe, her forehead crest crinkling in a Singer’s approximation of worry. She nudged it several times, trying to get it to move.

Though Triplet had been careless, Sascha couldn’t doubt that she was upset by the death. The Singer began a soft humming, such as Sascha had heard her use with her cubs to soothe them. Saddened, Sascha crept back to Watchful’s nest.

She closed her eyes in weariness, as her belly cramped over and over, as it had for days now. She listened to Triplet humming a melody that seemed part dirge, part lullaby. Sascha found herself crying, though with so much else to grieve for, it seemed silly and useless.

Late that night she awoke to see the sky stained with a red and gold light. As she watched, it quickly faded to nothing. But then again, incandescence splashed the sky. It was a flare, a military flare. Sergeant Juric, she knew, had no flares. It was someone else.

Watchful sometimes tolerated Sascha’s climbing of the stockade, and made no move to prevent her this time. She used the close weave of the vines to crawl to the top. She joined the bot at the top of the stockadelike circle of sticks. Although at times one of the cubs climbed up to join her, she had no wish for their company today, and to her relief, none was offered.

From below came a rustle and huffing noise that told her Demon was close by. Ignoring him, Sascha gazed outward, seeing another plume of light shoot upward from its source in the valley.
Someone still lives out there
, she thought. It was a heartening notion, and she gazed at the
flare as though it contained a message for her alone. If she could just discern the code, she could decipher the message:

I said I’d come back, didn’t I?

What will he find, Father?—Abandoned war bunkers, perhaps
.

Your hat, Sascha, your hat
.

See you in a little while, then.…

Next to her, the bot had extended its periscope the highest it had yet mustered, swiveling the eyepiece, searching, searching.

“Go,” Sascha whispered to it. “Bring my field notes home.”

Small screams issued from deep within the bot, perhaps some complicated strategic thought, or an expression of frustration.

“Go,” she repeated. “Save someone else.”

She had the distinct impression that it was considering doing so. If it did, she thought, her research would come to an end. Left alone, she would become a denizen of the forest. Already she drank the milk of monsters, buried their dead, defended her status, slept in an animal nest.

As she stood watching the last of the flare fade into the night, she was aware of the night breeze lifting her long hair and spreading it out behind her like a mane.

D
uring Eli’s telling of his Down World tale, Nazim’s rifle commanded his attention. She held it casually, pointed at his foot. They both knew she did, and that she had a right to.

He told of the underground fastness; how they had kept him, despite all he could do, until his final escape. He thought Nazim smiled a little at his outwitting of Nefer—the cunning of it. But Vecchi never left off staring as though he expected Eli to discard his human disguise at any moment.

As he came to the end of his tale, the rifle gave way a couple inches, perhaps showing Nazim’s provisional judgment.

She said, “We wondered, was all.”

It wasn’t all. Not a simple matter of
Where have you been?
It wasn’t his being missing that troubled them, of course. It was that he’d come back unscathed, save for a bruise or two. Wearing a nice uniform, looking like it had been laundered—as it had.

“Still
wonder,” Vecchi threw in.

“But it squares with seeing pocks,” Nazim said. “And why they don’t fire on us.”

“Still,” Vecchi muttered.

Eli had had enough of this ad hoc court-martial. He owed them an explanation. And they owed him an officer’s due. He stood up and Nazim turned aside then, as though the matter was settled.

If it had been anyone else, maybe the matter would have been. But for the likes of Eli Dammond, the standard of proof was higher, always higher. They would obey, but they’d watch him, weigh his every move. Like before the hexadron and the tunnels. Only worse.

Now, in mid-morning, rain washed over the bunker in successive curtains as a storm scoured its way down-valley. While Vecchi huddled in the far end of the bunker, still bound, Nazim went collecting edibles on the lower flanks, where fog created dangerous camouflage for predators. But she was hungry, and it gave her an urgent courage, though she hardly needed any more than she was born with.

During a lull in the deluge, Eli realized it was not just rain he’d been hearing, but the staccato burst of an L-31. He squinted down the hillside, seeing only lumps of fog floating in lethal silence.

Then came a shout. “Hold fire, Captain.” Nazim’s voice. “Some of ours!”

He peered into the gray murk. Here and there, lights flickered, like glowing vacuoles in the cells of fog. From one of these cells three people emerged. In the front, Nazim, followed by two men, one tall and lean, the other tall and beefy.