Tropic of Creation (43 page)

There, a tall, upright beast stood watching him. One moment, it had been only thick, sticky fog. The next, there materialized a muscular giant of a creature. Thirty feet away. Now moving slowly toward him, humming.

The thing advanced. One step, another, great feet so gentle against the ground, arms too long, claws winking in the melted light. No time to reach for the rifle, lying on the ground. Eli drew his knife.

Still the monster lumbered toward him, in no hurry, or time itself drifted to a standstill. Now, stopping before Eli, one arm upraised, the beast paused, forehead rippling as though an index of its rampaging thoughts. The gray skin was a version of Maret’s, pocked with circles within circles, the blue eyes were ahtran, the arms, a prodigious length, past which no other arm could hope to thrust.

“Release her, you son of hell,” Eli growled, knowing the beast as a vone, knowing it kept her, knowing, suddenly and with perfect clarity, everything.

As though in answer, the vone’s head crumpled in on itself, changing form and color. In the mist, Eli thought he saw the very likeness of Sascha. Without her hair, she looked oddly ahtran.… But it was the same Sascha he
knew from before, gone wild, half starved and bruised. The moment before her death. She had been brave, to stare so defiantly.

So it was over. But then he felt a howl moving up his throat. Not over. Not yet.

He charged. His mouth was open, and he was bellowing, charging the monster. His feet took two strides, bringing him forward into the long arms, close to the broad belly. He would kill this monster that had killed her. By God, he would kill the beast. He rammed forward his knife. As he did, a long arm with gleaming claws came between his eyes, ripping his skin and skull.

Maret heard him scream. Bursting out of the tent, she came running.

There was an enormous vone. It turned now, to face her.

Eli lay crumpled there. Whether there was blood or not, Maret couldn’t see. But of course there was blood. Humans bled, like real dwellers.

She strode forward. Having killed Eli, it would be content. It would eat him, and leave her in peace. But she walked closer. All she had worked for, longed for, now given away. She walked within the vone’s striking distance. Now if it all ended, it would still be for kin. It would be for Eli.

She was so close, she had to strain her neck to look up at the great vone. It displayed the human girl for her, and, shocked as she was, her color held.

It dipped its head closer, breathing her in. It paused. The pause stretched past the breaking point.

Maret felt a smile pull at her face. The vone could smell her quickening with new life. She hadn’t thought of that protection. She wasn’t even sure it
was
a protection. But the vone hesitated.

“Go back,” she whispered. “Enough. The season is over.”

One clawed hand lay on the mud next to Eli. The vone tucked its arms in close to its body, looking with steady, fearless eyes over Maret’s head to something beyond her. Then it turned, slowly, magisterially, and walked away. It faded by degrees, passing one curtain of mist after another. It was a ghost, then a shape, then a tremor in the fog. Then gone.

Maret was holding Eli in her arms. He was alive, but his face was flowing blood. She wiped at his wound, a terrible gash that appeared to have sliced his temple in half and crushed part of his face. She dug in her hip pack for dressings, pressing them into his ragged face. They filled with blood over and over.

His garbled words were at first unintelligible.

“Dead,” he seemed to be saying.

“No, Eli, a wound. You will live.”

“Sascha. Sascha. Dead.”

Maret was fumbling for more bandages.

“The vone keeps her,” he whispered.

Maret found herself smiling again. “Eli, one is confused. Understandably.” She took the compress off his face long enough to hold his attention with her gaze. “Sascha is alive, Eli.”

Humans could be so outward with their expressions. She read him, as she had learned to do, below. Then she repeated the words.

After struggling with him whether he could move yet or not, Maret managed to affix a bandage to his face, and helped him to stand. He leaned heavily on her, swaying. Moving slowly through the ankle-deep water, she steered him to the place where she had found Sascha Olander.

*   *   *

As Eli stood inside the tent, at first he couldn’t see in the dimness. Maret braced him up as he swayed, unsteady from shock. Slowly, he began to pick out details in the enclosure. Cots, computers, a litter of clothes on the floor.

She lay on the farthest cot. Or something lay there. Black hair hung down from cot to floor, a heavy drift of tangled strands. As he walked closer, he saw her huddled there, mud-caked, curled up like a creature in a burrow. Legs bare, she wore a belted army shirt with a private’s insignia, and heavy army boots encrusted with mud. Her deeply tanned face and hands were covered with scratches—small blows, as though the forest had branded her.

Her chest rose and fell. In the circle of her arms she held an assortment of things: her father’s hat, a gold-rimmed mirror, and a geologist’s hammer.

“Sleeping,” Eli said. The word came out silently. His throat was raw, words got stuck rather far down.

“Ronid,” Maret replied, “will do that.” At his stare, she continued, “The vone held her essence, after mating.” A pause. “And she is—pregnant, you would say.”

The words didn’t want to sink in, but they did. He whispered, “Mother of God. Maret, no …”

She eyed him coldly. “It is all that kept her alive. That vone’s protection. I saw this great one patrolling the nest. Then he took her and kept her.”

“She’s only a girl.…”

Maret looked at the sleeping huddle of hair and mud. “Not anymore.”

He thought of the vone’s shaping of her features. Her clear blue eyes, fearless, wise … the flat plane of her cheek, no child’s … but he was beyond thinking. Whatever had happened to her, he would take her home now. He shook off Maret’s arm and moved to the cot.

As he sat on the edge of the bed, Sascha stirred, still not waking, clutching her pile of objects.

“Sascha,” he whispered. “Sascha, wake up.”

She burrowed her face into the blankets. He put a hand on her head, onto hair so matted it felt like a nest of twigs.

At his touch she opened her eyes. She looked at him for several long seconds. Then her eyes looked beyond him, scanning the tent, as though, if he were here, others might be as well. Noting Maret, Sascha stared hard, but said nothing. Perhaps she had seen other ahtra, or perhaps she had seen far stranger things.

As she sat up, her pile of treasures clattered to the tent floor, where eddies of mud and silt had thrown down a wet carpet. She reached over to retrieve the hat, brushing at the mud on the brim, smearing it.

“We must clean everything,” she said. “You’ve all tracked in mud.” She looked again at Maret as though trying to decide if bringing in mud was her worst offense.

“Yes,” Eli said softly. Looking at the hat, he said, “We’ll clean it.” He took Sascha lightly by the shoulders. She turned to face him. When he was sure he had her attention, he said, “I’ll take you home now, Sascha. It’s time.”

He thought she understood him. But her face was smooth and closed as marble.

She reached up to touch the bloody bandage on his face. “What happened to you?”

There were several questions there. He answered, “A battle.”

“Did you win?”

For a moment he couldn’t speak. Then he said, “Sascha, I don’t know. But I’m back.”

Around the rim of her eyes glittered a store of tears. “I’ve been waiting for you.” Her voice finally wavered.

He wasn’t sure if it was a reproach or proof of faith, but he held out his arms, and she moved toward him, burying her face in his chest, the hat crushed between
them. Her ragged breaths emerged from the mass of muddy black hair as he held her.

“I know,” he whispered. “I know.”

Eli awoke to find the hatchway fully open, sun streaming inside. They had cocooned in the refuge provided by a hexadron. They had been lucky to find a remaining one. Red Season was ending, Maret said, and now there were fewer working craft. In a last gambit, Eli led them to the copse of trees where he had found the slaughtered ahtra, where he had left the bots. Here, the hexadron remained, opening to them. Maret kept watch while her human companions rested.

Next to him lay Sascha, sleeping fitfully as she had for the better part of two days. He left her to her dreams and climbed outside, finding Maret gazing at the early-morning sky.

“One admits it is impressive,” she said. “An awful beauty? Would that be sensible?”

“Yes.” He accepted some food from her, mercifully not a yellow polyp, but a half-decent dried mushroom. “I think I could say the same thing about this place.”

She smiled. “And not about DownWorld?”

“Not the part I saw.” As he chewed, his face felt like it had been cloven in half and glued back together.

Maret said, deadpan, “We did not put our best hand forward, in your case.”

“No” was all he could say.

“You slept a very long interval, Eli.” She smiled. “And therefore you have missed all the news.”

By her expression it was good news. They had need of some.

She continued, “Vod has won. Gomin and Nefer’s troops all rallied to him. The ships rest in their slots.”

A breath filled his chest, deep and cleansing. It was good news indeed.

“There are still stragglers coming Up World. But these were the last. Now, if we would access the flow,’ we must go Down.”

He wouldn’t argue, for the moment, who she meant by
we
.

“You were right, Eli.” At his questioning looks she said, “About the gomin. She brought all her people over to Vod. Because of you.”

He thought of Zehops Cer Aton, blessing her. “Now we can talk peace,” he said. “Now Congress Worlds may listen.”

“No, I think not.” Maret turned away, looking up to the patch of sky.

“It’s a start,” he insisted.

She was still looking at the sky. “All our world is now at the mercy of your Congress Worlds forces. Our hidden, sacred world—is no longer hidden.”

So she hadn’t given up her argument, the argument they’d been having from the moment they’d found Sascha.

Steam rose around him, dissipating in the morning heat. He knew what Maret was going to say: how Sascha’s place was DownWorld, as evidence of peaceful human intention. She would be safe; after all, the vone accepted her. Could DownWorld do less?

He circled around the subject, looking for handholds. Sascha had sacrificed enough. It was out of the question. He shook his head.

“You protect her, Eli Dammond, as though she were your own kin.” Maret shrugged, to show how odd this was.

“That’s not the point.”

“How does the point tend to be?”

“It tends to be …” He sighed. “The girl’s grandfather
will take it highly amiss if I don’t bring her home. He may be inclined to retaliate. He has the further excuse of all our deaths. You will have broken the armistice, after all.”

“Which we have not.”

“Which is impossible to prove.” Now they were at the same point as they had come to so often over two days of arguing.

“One piece of this you have wrong, Eli.”

He figured he was going to learn which piece.

“You think you will be a peacemaker. Your sole mind is full of what you will do and say to keep a peace between us. But you are not the peacemaker. Sascha is.”

From behind them they heard a stirring. Turning, Eli saw Sascha standing in front of the hexadron, disheveled, but awake.

In a soft voice, she asked, “What will my child be?” She locked her gaze on Maret.

So Sascha knew. Eli had hoped to spare her until she was stronger. And more, he hoped Maret was wrong, that a life had not quickened from the mating. How could it?

Maret looked steadily at her, unblinking. “One does not know. The vone, as you have seen, play with forms.”

Eli concealed his dismay. He was sure she
meant
to be reassuring.…

Sascha walked toward them, accepting a drink of water from Eli’s canteen. “If the baby is Singer or ahtran—or other,” she said, “how will Congress Worlds accept us?” As Eli struggled to answer, Sascha pressed on: “If my child is one of these, how will we fare, do you think?”

Sascha had changed into her mother’s camp clothes. With her hair pulled back into a clasp, she looked not so much like her mother but her father. She spoke logically and clearly, as though, after what she had been through, this part was easy.

He answered her. “Better than below, Sascha. What choice do we both have other than to go back home and
face what comes?…” But from her expression, he thought his words fell flat.

“That’s not home anymore.”

He didn’t like this heading. Home was home. Null was Null. This was no time to blur the two.

“Sascha,” he began again, “you won’t be in the forest. The forest will go away, and you’ll be in the world of tunnels, among strangers.” It had gone far enough. “I can’t allow it.”

“Captain Dammond.” She stood taller. “I know the forest will go away. I’m not a child.” He had trouble meeting her steady gaze.
Not a child
. But should be, still…

“Maybe I am … what Maret said.”

“This is war, Sascha, not chess,” he said with some heat.

A small smile greeted his comment. “You think Grandpa will blow up Null if I’m down below?”

He gave her the courtesy of a moment’s silence. The moment stretched on. Was he thinking to relent? Had the vone knocked all sense out of him? No … but yet, could he bear to force her?

Maret watched them, immobile, unblinking, not arguing, but watching him with those damn placid eyes.

When he didn’t answer, Sascha strolled over to the bots, which stood deactivated near the hexadron.

Eli and Maret followed her out of the copse and across the muddy flat to the gentle slope where, days ago, he and his unit had left the bots to rust.

Sascha stood by the bots, looking closely at them. Then she nodded and said, “This one,” indicating the nearer one. “This one is mine.” Her fingers traced a dent along the upper housing, as though she well knew where it came from.