Tropic of Creation (6 page)

Bad luck that they’d come upon him in the burial chamber—but his reception might bode worse than offended sensibilities. He had discovered an extensive underground warren; this labyrinth was no longer an ahtran secret. Unless they killed him …

His escort brought him to a room where a patterned carpet covered half the floor.

Two ahtra faced him, one seated on the carpet, the other on the bare floor. One of them—from the discernible oval in the center of her forehead—might be the one who had inspected him earlier. The other individual was seated off to the side, wearing more simple attire, yet patterned. This aide—if that was the designation—spoke:

“I have your speech, and will signify for Nefer Ton Enkar, who requires your attention.”

The accent was an excellent approximation of Standard. “I understand,” Eli said. Perfume saturated the air, bringing a slight nausea upon him. Or perhaps it was this close view of the hairless, bronze-skinned creatures, aliens he
had
seen before, had seen close up … and under worse circumstances.

The one called Nefer spoke, articulating the guttural ahtran speech.

The interpreter said, “My mistress wishes to know how you came to the burial place.”

He decided on the short answer. “In the digging machine, which we found on the surface. We meant no harm.”

“How many came with you?”

“Just myself.”

The interpreter spoke now to Nefer, and they conferred for some time, with Nefer keeping her gaze on the
carpet. Complex symbols nested in squares within squares, like a mandala in reds, black, and gray.

The interpreter translated. “Why did you venture to disturb our departed kin? Do your people not tend to show honor to the dead?”

“It was an error of ignorance. I couldn’t guess it was a burial site. My people don’t bury our dead this way.”

“You would not be aware of human catacombs?” the interpreter asked without reference to Nefer.

Old Earth had societies where catacombs were used. It astonished him that the ahtra knew this. “Yes,” he said, “but it is a very ancient custom, no longer much known. I apologize for the offense.”

The blink came from the bottom up. “Perhaps you were careless?”

He ignored the rebuke. He had no wish to convey undue deference. “Please translate my apology for your mistress.”

As far as he could tell, his interpreter did so. Hearing this, Nefer raised her hands slightly in a gesture he took for acceptance, but which might also have been a shrug of indifference. Nefer looked at Eli for the first time. He thought he had seen more sympathetic eyes on drill sergeants. But ahtran eyes were very large—larger than a horse’s. It was disconcerting, and perhaps accounted for their look of a raptor. Seeing the two ahtra together, he noticed that this Nefer looked different than the interpreter, with less prominent markings.

The interpreter spoke again. “My mistress would know your rank and mission among us and how many are with you … above.”

He told the truth, since it wasn’t clear to him if more or fewer troops would be to his advantage. He explained the situation of the marooned group, and that he had intended to leave the surface within a week, having stayed long
enough to collect evidence in regard to the absence from duty of Luce Marzano and her crew. The discovery of the working hexadron and the tunnels, however, prompted an investigation, armistice or no.

There was a long silence as both ahtra stared at the floor. Finally, Nefer asked, through the aide, “What armament have you brought with you?”

“We have little. We are a transport ship. No threat to you.”

When the aide translated this, he noted that the lead ahtra’s data tendril jerked, almost like a startle reflex. The interpreter looked up at him. The dark eyes fixed him in a disconcerting, long gaze. When the gaze was withdrawn, it was like a sentence being passed. The room grew stifling—overwarm and more perfumed.

“Release my bonds, as a courtesy,” he said. “You have my word I intend no violence.”

Nefer granted permission and the aide came over to unfasten the ties. The aide’s facial patterns were mirror images on each side, with the largest ovals resting on the cheekbones.

“What is your name?” he asked.

The ahtra’s head turned to the side, avoiding his eyes while working the ties. The light caught the skin tracings in high definition for a moment, showing gradations of bronze coloring, deepening to brown. “I am Maret,” the aide answered very low.

Eli rubbed at his wrists and arms while the aide moved back into place. Before questions could resume, he said, “My superiors will want to know the purpose of your presence here. How shall I answer them?”

Nefer took a long time to answer.

Maret translated. “We occupy this world as is our right. Below.”

They sat for some time, waiting for Nefer to continue.
When she did not, Eli ventured, “You abide by the treaty terms?” Not that he would believe their answer.

“It happens we have always been here. It is not forbidden by treaty.”

“I am free to go?” The silence greeting this was rather longer than he would have liked. “It would be against the treaty for you to keep me here.”

“Yes. This presents a difficulty.”

He filled the silence by saying, “Perhaps I can help you with your difficulty.”

Nefer turned to the interpreter and spoke softly for a time. Then she rose and moved past him, toward the entrance. She spoke something directly to him for the first time. The words were like rocks ground together. She left the room, ushering in four other ahtra, who remained standing by the door.

Maret looked at the floor as she translated, “My mistress says she is very sorry.”

The heat in the room was mounting. “I hope she has no reason to be sorry for what she can still avoid doing.” The gaps in their conversation were swollen silences, with a presence of their own. He waited.

Finally Maret looked at him. “You cannot leave now.”

“Then when?”

“As you measure it, you would say … a few weeks. I am very sorry.”

“My people will grow alarmed at such a delay. It will attract military attention.” He thought that might not be true. They could leave without him, assuming he had suffocated in the capsule or in the tunnels.

“Yes, regrettably.”

“What is the difficulty? Your position, if you hoped it to remain secret, is likely to be exposed, even if you never release me. There’s no point in keeping me here, and much reason to permit my return.”

After a slow blink, she said: “I very deeply regret to bear the news to you that your people will all die. I am very sorry. There is nothing we can do.”

He stared at her.

Her dark eyes were calm as she said, “No one will survive—above. I am sorry.”

He fought back his alarm. “If you attack, Congress Worlds will find you and destroy you. These tunnels can’t protect you.” That was no bluff. They would come, for the general’s daughter and granddaughter—eventually.

“We will not attack. It will not be our doing. You have no armament … to speak of. You will tend to be overwhelmed.”

“Let me go back, then, to warn them.” She was standing up to go. He also rose, aware of the guards shifting behind him. “No matter who attacks my people, you will be blamed. The armistice is fragile. Maret, do you want war?”

“No.”

“Then help us. Let me warn them.”

“This would not be possible.”

Her passivity was maddening. He found himself stepping toward her, gripping her by the forearm. “By God, it
is
possible!” As he held her arm, she visibly paled.

The guards grabbed him from behind, and he allowed them to restrain him for the moment.

Maret’s eyes took on a glaze as she stood taller and brushed at the place where he had grabbed her. “They are as dead already,” she said placidly.

He surged forward, despite the restraints. Strong hands locked him in place. Maret hastily backed away from him, retreating toward the door. He cried out after her: “No, this will not happen!”

She paused in the doorway, saying, “No one can hear you.” Then the door closed behind her with sucking noise.

A thin stream of dirt cascaded onto Vod’s head from the bare rock overhead. He looked up into the blackness where foam girders held the lid of the tunnel in place. So far from the comforting walls of DownWorld, the smell of dirt and the sight of oozing water claimed his senses. He was uneasy, though he’d spent his whole life working amid the dirt and the wet.

The tunnels here were
wrong
, no matter what the Prime Engineer said.

They had eighteen increments of rest before work resumed. Around him, his fellow workers slumped against the walls, fatigued, plugged in. Crouching among the shavings of the tunnel, he sank his tendril into the temporary gates strung along the work shaft.

His backmind swelled with data.

Nefer Ton Enkar commandeered a forward position for her latest data. It hove into view, bragging of completion rates, hexals of ways dug, rebored, renewed, and inspected. She bragged of safety records, projected outputs, maintenance cycles, and increments of cost. He bypassed this propaganda with irritation, barely suppressing a pallor of disgust. Nefer and her numbers. Slime data.

His backmind quickly scanned the data streams. News strands were full of the human among them. Wagers clogged the fields: the human would stay, for how long; he would leave, by when. Nefer would kill him, the choice of execution style. Some wagered that there were more humans, their true numbers, what they would do. Some bet on war.

Vod noted with chagrin that Maret was assigned as the human’s custodian. A flurry of exploratory wagers flickered into view. She would fail, by when. She would lose favor, she would fail in training, she would achieve ronid, she would not. So this was the path, Vod thought, by which Nefer would ruin Maret. He forced himself to attend to
the wager streams. There appeared a shocking wager on which past kin the human had defiled in the reliquary. Many calls for censure greeted this wager; it was withdrawn. Then a flood of sentimental remembrances, wagers in honor of past kin, a show of devotion, many halfhearted and skimpy, an emotional crest in the data flow soon subsumed by the general flood of speculation on the human captain and the baleful events that his arrival must portend. Events that fluxors saw as
interesting
and statics as
ominous
.

All in all, it was an uproar. A fine distraction that he would not put it past Nefer to have orchestrated. Diggers were dying in the relentless boring through Down World.
But now we have a human among us to breed new fortunes in the wager fields
. Well, Maret was less and less the fluxor to lead them from their misery. Maret tended strongly to study, and though scholarship was all very well, scholars were not leaders.

Nefer herself groomed Maret for scholarship, funded her. So Maret studied. Already she knew more than most of her teachers. She knew mathematics, history, her kin to the twelfth net, and even spoke the human standard language. It would be so like Nefer to use Maret’s strengths against her.

In the tendency of dwellers to be either fluxor or static, Maret was, Vod believed, more central on the scale than most. Though a fluxor, she tended more toward tradition and caution than most fluxors—more than himself, certainly—and therefore had appeal as a leader who could command the respect of statics. Vod had alienated most dwellers at one time or another. But it was his birth stamp, his pattern. Dwellers do not change their markings, the saying went.

As his tendril disengaged from the gate, he noticed Irran sitting next to him along the tunnel wall. Her scent stirred him. But already the diggers were moving back to
work, and he abandoned the idea of finding a side lobe with her. Irran was always one to rush the season.

Along with Harn and Wecar, he traipsed back toward their stations in the borer.

Wecar spoke. “The human,” she began. “Maret-as will show you the human before we see him.” She was curious to see this fabled creature.

Vod hurried to answer before the machine drowned out all talk. “We’ll see what Nefer decrees. Maret has no say in this.”

“They say he is pale as a mushroom,” Wecar said.

“And bad smelling,” Harn added.

“Nefer Ton Enkar will kill him,” Wecar said. She climbed onto the borer, into the driver’s well.

Before Wecar could close herself in, Harn threw back: “Nefer won’t
kill
him, she
sent
for him. Otherwise, how could he be here?”

There was no good answer for this question. But if Nefer had sent for him, Vod mused, why?
We are done with war
. They had fought the humans to their knees. Hemms, who even Nefer must attend, bragged that the humans had sued for peace. And ahtra granted it, even though it would have been only justice to kill them all.

As Wecar slammed the driver’s well door, Vod and Harn took their places in the cab. The cutterhead growled to life, biting into stone.

Vod’s tendril no more than touched the data plug when he knew something was wrong. The pressures had mounted to limits of tolerance, ground shifts signaled from all sides. He beat the warning system by a breath, shouting over the voice path, “Out, out! Get out!” He heard the driver’s cab door open, heard bells clanging. Through the cab window he saw the First Engineer racing away to safety, a sure sign from a cowardly static that a ground shift was under way. Vod found himself outside the borer amid pandemonium. The Second Engineer tried to urge Wecar to return to the
driver’s well to back the machine out, but she refused. Now Vod was in a crowd of workers shoving to get out of the tunnel even as the ground creaked around them. Sand cascaded from overhead. Rocks spit onto their helmets.

Vod stooped beside Wecar, her helmet dented by a great stone. As he dragged her forward, a roar sped toward them from the habitat of death itself. Billowing dust overtook them, followed by a deluge of rock and soil. It caught Vod’s feet, pitching him headlong, then carried him forward in a monstrous wave of dirt. It struck the breath from his chest and locked his arms in place, ripping Wecar from his grasp.