Tropic of Creation (7 page)

Soil drilled up his nose, and he knew the terror of suffocation … but then a draft of cool air touched his head and his face. He snatched a breath. The dirt fell over him again. He was pinned in the slide like a boulder. He felt someone—Wecar he hoped—squeeze his ankle, once, twice. He lay rigid in the weight of the spill, wiggling his head a little to form a hole by his nose. Then he heard voices and someone was freeing the dirt around his head, then his shoulders. As strong hands gripped under his armpits and pulled him free, he saw Wecar’s hand protruding from the snub end of the slide.

“Wecar,” he gasped, looking into the faces of his fellow diggers. “Find Wecar.”

They left him propped up against the wall and returned to the fray. Moments later a rumble heralded a further slump of debris. He scrambled back to the massive incursion of soil, digging with bare hands alongside his coworkers.

Much later, when all hope was spent, he staggered out of the fresh dig, past the terrible faces of kin assembling down-tunnel, carrying the rugs of those they feared dead.

But it was Wecar’s hand reaching from the soil that long remained in his mind.

D
uring the night the rains came. At first, lying on her cot and awakened by the noise of droplets on the tent, Sascha thought that someone was showering the tent with pebbles. She lay listening to the staccato beat, her body tingling, as though registering the taps herself. In the dark, her body was vast, her mind a gentle curl in the midst of a hot, dark realm.

A puff of wind punched at the tent, carrying the smell of mud and rain. She looked over to her parents’ cots. “Father?” she whispered.

“I hear it.” His voice was barely audible.

“Rain,” she said. After a pause: “They said it never rained.”

“They were wrong.”

The mirror on the center tent pole shone with a blue iridescence, reflecting Cristin’s nearby computer screen, still active, running her mother’s equations. Sascha thought she might sleep, lulled by the soothing white noise of rain. She remembered a line from an old poem: “For rain, it hath a friendly sound/ To one who’s six feet underground.” She
wondered if Captain Dammond could hear the rain. She wondered about him constantly, one moment hoping he was alive, and then—considering his entombment—hoping he had died swiftly.

Sleep was impossible. She sat up, hearing voices outside.

Her mother’s drowsy voice: “Go back to sleep, Sascha.”

But Sascha found her boots and went to the tent flap. Peering out, she saw a sheet of rain lit by the nearest camp light. “It’s raining, Mother,” she said.

“Yes. And now we shall have mud as well as heat.”

More voices. The camp was waking up, though morning was nowhere in sight. A few people stood in the aisles between the tents and let the rainfall wash them. Sascha put out her arm, feeling the rain like small stabbing needles. Her body shivered in the cool lashing. She had seen many rains, but this one was so different. Perhaps she reacted to the crew of the
Fury
—without rain these three years—gathering outside, seeing it with the eyes of wonder.

By dawn, it was a revitalized camp. Everyone remarked on the rain, enjoying the clean, cooler air. Soldiers wiped down items that had been left out and were now spattered with mud. Remnants of clouds scudded overhead, receding as the sun took over, boosted by its dwarf twin.

She wandered through camp, jumping the queue at the mess tent, and grabbing a piece of bread. Munching on it, she sloshed through puddles, already disappearing into the sand.

Captain Marzano and Lieutenant Roche were standing in the clearing at the center of camp. Marzano’s brown uniform and Roche’s blue—Infantry and Transport, respectively. As Marzano and Roche conferred, Sascha wished
she could eavesdrop as they discussed the subject on everyone’s mind.

Captain Dammond had been gone two days. The first few hours were the worst, with everyone waiting for his return or expecting—though no one spoke it—an attack if ahtra were below. From snippets of conversation, Sascha knew what the enlisteds were thinking; that Dammond got caught in a rocky grave trying to play hero. They had never thought ahtra hid below; everyone knew that pocks lived in hexadrons. If the ahtra came to this world, as it seemed they had, perhaps they, too, tried to investigate the tunnels, and failed—as Dammond had.

Now Lieutenant Roche’s Transport crew were eager to leave. They’d finished combing the wreck of the
Fury
. The evidence—neither condemning nor exonerating Marzano—was boxed up and loaded on the
Lucia
. But they waited, giving Dammond the benefit of the doubt.

Shamelessly, Cristin added her voice to the arguments, urging a return to what she called civilization. Sascha saw clearly what civilization would mean for her; a life like her mother’s, talking and steering conversations, attending to people and their endless social stirrings. Sascha might have an avocation, a ladylike pursuit such as math or physics, but she would not go mucking about in the wilderness, not once grown. So Sascha stayed just one step this side of womanhood. But she felt—with a numb certainty—that once she wore the dresses of the general’s granddaughter, everything would betray her at once. Her bosom would show itself beneath the thin silks, her first blood would come. And it would all be over.

She made her way among the uniforms, the soldiers winding their way to breakfast, eyes averted, except those regen eyes that seemed to focus in all directions at once. She had seen a soldier in a regen bath once, floating like a sea plant, a small nub appearing at each of the three
severed limbs. The limbs would grow perfectly, except for color, which rumor had it could be done better and wasn’t, by design. The enlisteds liked their fleshy medals of valor.

A sheen of iridescence caught the sun, a long ribbon of pink and lavender at the bottom of the ditch. This trickle was all that remained of the small torrent that swept through last night: a mere line of moisture, bubbling before sinking into the dirt. Sascha walked closer, kneeling next to the rivulet. Instead of bubbles, the froth was composed of a myriad of tiny insects, their backs draped in the diaphanous shawls of their wings. She had to lean very close to see them.

From behind her came a voice. “Mind they don’t bite your pretty nose.”

She looked up to see Sergeant Ben Juric. With the sun behind him, his face was backlit, and she couldn’t tell by his expression how much sarcasm he intended. “They must like the water,” she said, pointing at the insects. “Or what’s left of it.”

“They do. Crawled right out of it.”

Sascha looked more closely. She’d assumed they’d flown and alighted there. But even as she watched, the gnats crawled from the mud, wings slicked back and rapidly drying in the sun. She squinted up at the sergeant. “Most people wouldn’t notice something like that.”

“I pay attention.”

This was the longest conversation she’d had with the sergeant in their three months of shipboard acquaintance.

Emboldened, she asked: “You think he’s coming back?” No preamble needed for the question on everyone’s mind. If he answered yes, he’d be on the captain’s side; if he answered no, then not. People showed their hearts by what they hoped for and what they thought they’d get. Like the disappointment her mother saw every time she looked at her daughter.

The question got him moving. He strode past her, his left side to her, the side they said was all new growth.

“No,” she heard him say, low and certain.

Sascha stood up, unwilling to leave it. “It was a brave thing, to hunt them out down there.” When Juric didn’t stop, she added, “All by himself.”

Juric paused then, turning to fix her with one cooked eye. “Don’t confuse brave with stupid.”

She tramped up to him, the words cascading out. “What have you got against him, all of you?”

Juric probed at his teeth with his tongue. “Well, let’s see. How about your alpha captain taking an old man’s job in Transport? How about your captain skating through twelve years of war and never taking a wound? Skin as smooth as a baby’s bottom.”

“Those aren’t fair reasons to hate a man.” She had an urge to shake some sense into him as he stood there with his ugly grin.

“Every soldier knows
fair
when he sees it, princess.”

She advanced a step. “Don’t … ever … call me that.”

His grin broadened, and he gave a mock salute, leaving her fuming in the heat.

Later that morning she and Nazim hooked up for chess. Nazim looked to be alone in her crew tent; no subtext to their chess game today, then. Sascha was mildly disappointed, but thought she might therefore have a better chance to win, undistracted.

“Hey, Olander,” Nazim said, advancing a pawn on-screen. Her unlit cigarette rested behind one ear like an extra weapon. Sascha knew that Nazim had given up smoking. Keeping the cigarette at hand was sheer bravado.

“Nazim, you ugly bastard,” Sascha threw back, enlisted-style.

“I feel real lucky today, Olander. Gonna beat your alpha ass,” Nazim said cheerily,

“Bull
shit,”
Sascha said.

But perhaps Nazim’s white hair might be proof of luck. Then again, getting half her skull blown off might be proof of
bad
luck.

M
aret hurried down the Prime Way, fury in her chest and a fine mask of calm over her features. She spoke to those she should, according respect, but moved on as quickly as propriety allowed.

Data stewards beckoned to her from posts along the way, promising strands into the flow. When they saw her, they offered tidbits of archival data on the human species, along with wagers on the human’s fate. Failing to close a deal, they tailored wagers for her kin nets, issues that her kin had once followed and would wager on now if they lived. Most times she would have placed a wager or two, remembering her kin as though they still strove in fluxor affairs and surrounded her with close relation.

Pausing, she purchased a few remembrances of those lost in the tunnel cave-in, and then resumed her course to the galleries of Nefer Ton Enkar. It was well that Nefer had locked her out of access to a chute this time. If Maret had arrived in Nefer’s presence earlier, she would have disgraced herself with a display of emotion. She wasn’t sure which emotion would have exposed itself: anger at being
denied access to Tirinn Vir Horat, her Data Guide, or fear that Nefer had at last turned on her as Vod always predicted she would.

Nefer was her benefactor. Nefer opened the gates of opportunity for Maret, lavishing resources on her, enabling her to perform prodigious devotions, and sweeping aside every obstacle to study, paying for almost unbridled access to the data flow. Sometimes Maret thought that Nefer had some feeling for her.

She believed this less and less these days.

The Prime Way was fragrant today. Lorel blossomed from cultivated patches on the walls, beckoning with a new odor, tailored to the coming season. Maret stopped to pluck some, taking sustenance for the interview with Nefer Most Prime—ever an exhausting prospect.

A steward nearby whispered to her, “It’s been many spans since I had a wager of you, Maret-as.”

She turned to face him, her reverie impinged. “Tomorrow, Bir-as, tomorrow.” She hurried on, shunting to backmind the obligation to Bir and also backminding how much she could afford to wager. Sometimes backmind was more cautious than prime mind; but in matters of wealth, this was proper.

Striving to maintain her color, Maret hurried on. All along the way, dwellers watched her for a sign of whether the human among them was a portent of disaster. All humans carried the scent of carnage and war. For Maret, their odor carried a further strand of revulsion.…

She was in training for ronid. She was the last of her bloodline; if she died in war the thread of her lineage would dissolve, except in the deep wells of data where nothing was lost.

Nefer looked at her with a friendly expression, taking up a tiny wand of snuff and inhaling.

“How fares the grave-defiler?” Nefer asked, as Maret seated herself on the adjoining rug.

A small plate of food lay between them. Maret ate a morsel for sociability, answering, “He hides his distress poorly.”