Tropic of Creation (46 page)

The old man made a barely perceptible nod. Nothing need be said. And already the general had turned away, holding on to the chain, standing very still.

At the door, Colonel Foss said in a low and not unkind voice, “Have the surgeon take a look at that wound, Captain.”

“Thank you, sir. I will.”

As Foss opened the door, Eli stopped for a moment, gazing into the corridor.

There, Corporal Nazim stood, coming to attention at
the sight of Eli. Next to her, Pig saluted, letting one of his crutches lean against the wall. On the other side of the corridor, Sergeant Juric stood ramrod straight, his sleeve pinned up where his arm used to be. With his good arm, he snapped a smart salute.

Eli returned the salutes, hearing the door close softly behind him. He nodded at the three of them, deciding not to trust his voice.

The way they looked at his bandaged head, they must have wondered how rough the proceedings were.

Rough
, Eli thought.
But we’ve seen worse
.

They followed him back to quarters.

The surgeon peered closely at Eli. He had removed the temporary dressing and was prepping him for microknits. Turning his head toward Sergeant Juric’s bunk in the med lab, he grumbled, “Next time you leave that bed without my permission, I’ll have your stripes, Sergeant.”

“Okay, Doc,” Juric mumbled from his cot, where he was again connected to tubes and monitors. His tone conveyed massive impudence or drug-fogged incoherence. Eli figured he knew which.

Nearby, Pig, confined to bed rest, was kept company by Nazim, a chessboard between them on the bunk.

She snorted. “You can’t jump pieces. You occupy the square where it was, that’s all.”

“Not like checkers?” Pig responded.

Nazim’s muttered response, inaudible at Eli’s surgery table, was harsh enough to turn Pig’s ears bright pink.

Colonel Barada had finished cleaning the wound and was bending in now to begin subcutaneous regen. He smiled reassuringly at Eli. “By the time I’m through with you, Captain, you’ll be good as new.” He reached for the plasma wand offered by his assistant. “The remarkable thing is, the wound traveled from your hairline down the
bridge of your nose and into mid-cheek, and missed both eyes. I’m surprised it didn’t take your face off. But not to worry, Captain. Good as new.”

From Juric’s bunk came the suddenly lucid growl, “Leave it like it is.”

The surgeon bent in to his task. But Eli gripped his arm. “You heard him, Doc. Just sew it up. Nothing fancy.”

Barada coughed daintily. “Captain. That would leave quite a bad scar.” He exchanged glances with his assistant.

“I know,” Eli said. With the grisly wound denting the center of his face, his smile took on a decidedly menacing cast.

While Badri Nazim stared at this interchange, Pig took the opportunity to jump two of her pawns with his rook.

The mirror wasn’t a reflective surface, but rather an imaging screen that functioned like a mirror. Zehops paused at Sascha’s side, holding a very sharp knife.

“It would not be required, Sascha-as,” she said again.

Sascha smiled, trying to reassure her. “It’s OK, really. Go ahead and slice.”

“And it would not tend to hurt, you are quite certain?”

“No. Cutting hair doesn’t hurt. Go for it.”

The sight of Sascha’s hair, especially as much of it as she had, was distressing to the dwellers here. Though Zehops was reluctant to insult her, Sascha had managed to learn that with her long and rather tangled hair, she looked repulsive to the ahtra. If she was going to be DownWorld for a while, Sascha had decided that hair was not an asset. And from what she was viewing of herself on the screen, a good haircut would be an improvement.

Zehops cut a strand of hair, her expression conveying her reluctance to touch it. The lock fell to the floor, and
Zehops sucked it up into a vacuum hose. She plucked at another strand. At this rate, it would take hours.

“Zehops-as, you speak Standard CW very well. It’s hard to believe you just learned it.”

The ahtra looked with hesitation at Sascha’s tresses, as though overwhelmed where to cut next. “One absorbs information easily. But meaning is harder.”

“My mother always insisted I learn languages of places we stayed. I have French, Latin, Dalarri, and Parth, besides Standard. I hope I can learn your tongue.”

Zehops sliced another hank of hair, backing out of the way as it fell. “Though I am an imperfect teacher, I will help you, Sascha-as. Your sole mind is strong. You will learn fast.”

“Will the hab eat my hair?”

“Certainly. It consumes all our organic wastes.”

“Does it excrete?”

“There are small tillings left in the trailing edge of Ankhorat. These would be wastes, but of small proportion. Living as we do, all must be used efficiently.”

“I have many questions, Zehops-as.”

Her beautician had become more bold with her knife, now cutting steadily away at great falls of hair. “Relative to the hab?”

“Relative to everything. Of fluxor and static. I must learn everything about fluxor and static. And about the hab and the mycelium …” She wanted to add the Singers, but she knew Zehops would avoid discussing them. She put her hand on her belly. As a scientist, being here was a great opportunity to learn about cross-species breeding. As a young woman, she was not quite so eager to find out. Once she was rested she might have time to be afraid, to wonder what she would bear.

Zehops had cut a short bob around Sascha’s head and now stood staring at her.

“How do I look?” Sascha asked.

Zehops blinked. “It … would be hard to say.”

Sascha smiled. “Not so hot, huh?” At Zehops confirming expression, she said, “Cut it all off, then.”

Zehops looked pleased at the assignment. She bent to her task, saying, “I would not be suitable to answer all your questions, Sascha-as. But you will have a conducive Data Guide, Nemon Es Marn, who studied with Tirinn Vir Horat. Vod Extreme Prime will spare no expense for you.”

Looking at the screen, Sascha saw a young woman. A woman rather like her mother, but with darker hair, and blue eyes instead of brown. The short hair was the very emblem of womanhood. But as Zehops continued her shearing, the image began to change. Now, with her head bare, she looked more like Zehops than Sascha Olander, which was to say she didn’t any longer know exactly who she was—or who she would become.

When Zehops had finished, she vacuumed all wisps of hair from Sascha’s clothes and from the floor.

“Now, one is very deeply conducive,” Zehops said, looking at Sascha’s smooth skull on-screen.

“You realize that we have to do this every few days?” Sascha said mischievously.

Zehops’ face fell. “It grows thus, so rapidly?”

“No. Not so fast. But there will be tiny hairs all over in a few days.”

Zehops flashed her knife. “I will tend to be ready.” She smiled at Sascha. “One has a question for you, in exchange for your many questions.” She sat down opposite Sascha. “Eli. Tell me how happenstances are disposed toward Eli, Up World.”

“He will be well. He saved my life. That will count in his favor.”

“He saved my life as well, Sascha-as.”

Sascha turned to face her. “While he was a prisoner among you?”

“Yes.”

“Well. I told them he was a hero.” She had only been a child then. But she had known the truth of it.

Sascha looked at her image. It wavered in front of her. She saw dun-colored sand, gray spiny trees with minor green ridges bulging between cracked bark … the world before it changed, before everything changed.

She turned back to Zehops, conscious of the missing hair, but not regretting it. “I’m ready,” she said.

And Zehops led her from the den into the ways.

S
eems peaceful enough,” General Ridenhour said.

Standing on the shuttle ramp, taking some air, the general looked across the grassy field and beyond, to the distant hills, where clouds were massing for an afternoon squall.

“Looks that way,” Eli responded. But he noted the platoon had set up small artillery at the base of the shuttle and were keen on the watch.

Colonel Barada had joined them, bored waiting, no doubt.

The general nodded in the direction of Marzano’s
Fury
. “That ship was loaded with firepower. Still is. Even a laser cannon, they tell me.”

“It was seven miles away,” Eli said evenly.

The general shook his head at the irony of the
Fury’s
armament lying fallow while good soldiers died. Eli didn’t venture to disabuse him of the notion that firepower would have saved them.

He thought of Maret’s prediction that only the merciless would survive. She’d been right about a lot of things,
but maybe not that one. What did the survivors have in common? They were by turns smart and simple, young and older, dark and light, man and woman, officer, non-com, and enlisted. Each brought a different brand of endurance to the killing valley that he gazed out on. But from what he knew of mercy, he thought he saw it in Sascha, Nazim, Pig, and even Juric, if mercy was what you forgave as well as who you spared. Sometimes what you forgave was yourself.

He touched the swath of bandage, stretching down from brow to cheek, feeling the pull of tissue binding one thing to the next, re-creating his face as best it could remember. An approximation would do. Beyond that, all he wanted for himself was the army. Maybe even a decent command. But, in any case, if they made him a hero, they’d have a damn hard time drumming him out.

“Do you believe the claims, Captain?” Ridenhour gazed out over the clearing, gone to extreme green from the monsoons.

“Claims, sir?”

“The ahtra. Original DNA, all that.”

He’d been thinking about it, talking about it with the ship’s surgeon. But the general had asked
him
. So he answered. “Why else has all other life we’ve found been based on the same DNA?”

Ridenhour stepped back into the last piece of remaining shade on the ship’s ramp. “Damn hot,” he commented.

Barada threw out, “We still had to climb up the ladder of evolution. They didn’t help us with
that.”
He looked at Eli as though he was still resentful that Eli had ruined a nice surgery.

Continuing his line of thought, the general said, “Some would say that God made it all from one mold.”

Eli knew he was treading on thin ice, but said, “Miracles aside, General, it’s one hell of a coincidence.”

The doctor spat into the grass. “It’s an impossible
coincidence. It’s either a divine miracle—and I have to say I’m not a believer—or it’s panspermia, rather like the ahtra claim. Someone broadcast the precursor molecules.”

“I’d sooner thank God than the ahtra,” the general muttered.

Eli heard the message
.
I’d rather not be beholden. And don’t care to be related, thank you
.

It was no surprise. Thirty years of war, and the CW worlds were content with their enemy as he was. Some—perhaps like Ridenhour—would never accept a new viewpoint. For others, a billions-of-years-old debt of creation was too remote to matter. Even the ahtra had forgotten their act, their original impulse to share the universe with other sentient beings. Then, when they met their progeny at long last, they took up arms. And when humanity met its parents, it raised a collective hand to strike them down. It had been a mutually agreed on war. Sadly, it was far easier than a mutually desired peace.

He looked at Ridenhour calmly surveying the territory around the shuttle, and saw a man comfortable with his enemy. It would take more than a creation story to mold the peace. Whatever it took would begin with Sascha and Maret. Sascha with the ahtra, Maret with Congress Worlds.

She had said that she would come. So they waited.

Eli hoped she would bring the ahtra starship technology, as a peace offering. But even more, he hoped she would come herself, to live among them. So they might know their ancient kin, their recent foe, in a new way.

He would be glad to see her, whatever she brought.

Just at dusk, a soldier came to fetch Eli, bringing him to the ship’s ramp. The last fragments of soil were still cascading from the hexadron as its engines shuddered to a standstill forty yards away.

Eli noted the guns trained on the hexadron.

“Sir,” he said to Ridenhour, “Maret Din Kharon is an ambassador, not a soldier.”

“Stand down,” the general told his commander.

“I’ll escort her, sir. It might be best if she saw me first.”

Ridenhour nodded, and Eli set out across the field. It hadn’t rained in forty-eight hours, and the mud beneath his feet had cracked into tiles. The primary sun, setting now, was half-buried in the horizon, like an ancient hexadron. The red sun lingered above, small and fierce, following the yellow star down the sky.

He waited as the hatchway swung open. Maret emerged gracefully, climbing down to stand next to the carrier. She was dressed as he had seen her the first time, in cropped shirt and simple trousers of a red and brown pattern of squares within squares. Everything had changed since that first time. She was pregnant, for one thing. Amid all their obstacles, he thought a child might be an advantage for their mission. Depending on what
kind
of child it was …