Tropic of Creation (8 page)

“Yes. I have been most concerned for him. But he is now calm.”

“Drugs?”

Nefer raised her hand, confirming it was so and of no importance.

If the human was drugged, Maret doubted she could win his confidence as she was expected to. “He may resent the drugs.”

“He was raving.”

“What did he say?”

“He voiced your name.”

“Why was I not called?”

A pause before Nefer answered. “You were determined to see Tirinn Vir Horat. We tried to reach you.” Nefer adjusted her position, seated cross-legged in front of Maret. “Hemms Extreme Prime must wonder if you neglect your duty.”

“But mistress, the human has reason to be in distress. I cannot much help him and I have many other obligations—such as ronid.”

“I cannot say how you will perform your duty.” She looked at Maret, still friendly. “Can I?”

Maret was shamed by the rebuke. “No, mistress. I will attend him.” She leaned forward to refill the snuff wand. “The flow swells with agitation over this event,” Maret went on. “The human camps will perish. Who among the human worlds will believe we did not kill them?”

Nefer answered, “Who will know they died? The first ship was lost for three years. Now another ship will have disappeared. Who will care now that never cared before?”

“Yes. But the human claims they will know.”

“He would.”

“Yes. But if he is right?”

Nefer sat very still, her color holding. “When was a fluxor admitted to high counsels?”

“Forgive, mistress.” Maret stared at Nefer’s rug, woven with her ancestral designs.

“There is much to forgive lately, Maret-as. One tends toward exasperation. But if you share in the regrettable agitation of your inferiors, I will assure you that we are ready to fight if the humans attack. Did you think me defenseless?”

“No, certainly not.” Maret looked steadfastly at the floor. “But …” Though the silence was a great weight, Maret pushed through it. “Why bother with this single human?”

Nefer waited a long time to answer. “Though we are not afraid to fight, it may be well to avoid an unnecessary conflict. This may require us to have a survivor. One who can vouch for us. To say what killed them.”

Maret looked up at her, barely containing her surprise. “Why would he do us this favor?”

“It will not be a favor. It will be the truth.” Nefer held Maret’s gaze as she added: “And though he will hate us, he will come to admire you.”

Maret concealed her disgust at the notion of the human forming any fond opinion of her. She would much rather have his hostility.

Within Nefer’s placid face, her eyes were unrelenting. Nailing home her point, she added, “This is the Extreme Prime’s hope, and mine.”

And so, Maret thought with a sinking heart, it was a command.

“One thing in addition,” Nefer said, taking another small line of snuff. “The matter of ronid.”

Maret held very still.

“Such a distraction from your work.” Nefer wiped a
remnant of snuff from her upper lip. “It is very disagreeable, is it not, to place oneself in needless danger? One must admire those who attempt ronid. A deeply proper occupation, certainly. But I have withdrawn all resources supporting your further training with Tirinn Vir Horat.” She pushed the plate of cella forward, encouraging Maret to partake. “One might leave such things to fluxors of—lower capacity. Might one not?”

At this statement, Maret felt her skin cool in anger. Nefer herself could never summon the courage to enter a freshly dug tunnel, much less attempt ronid.

Nefer watched Maret with a close gaze. “You do look well when you are distressed, Maret-as. A static pallor, might one say? You should have been born a static. It would make my job so much easier.” In the heavy silence that followed, she murmured, “Your genome is to study, Maret-as, as mine is to lead.”

Then, liking to finish with such a fine homily, she signaled the interview at an end.

He dreamed he was a young boy, walking through a puzzle.

It was a maze in a field, like the one he had once gone to with his father. The farmer had trodden down the cornstalks, creating paths that twisted in endless serpentine patterns. Looking up at the corn around him, Eli found himself in caverns of gold. A matching maze of blue above was the sky. By the time he looked ahead again, his father was gone, and he ran to catch up. But at the turn there were two directions to choose from, each one long and stalky and yellow. He called out, but the only answer was the scrape of husks in the wind. He ran on, taking all right turns, thinking to himself,
First I’ll try right, then left…
but there was no logic to the corn maze, and his father was gone, though from time to time he thought he saw,
through the sea of husks, a flicker of the man he sought. He pursued that flicker; it was all he had. When at last he saw a figure at the end of a row, and approached, it proved to be a creature with bronze skin, and the marks of a leopard.…

“Captain Eli Dammond.” The voice was low and cooing. “Eli Dammond, you will please make an effort to wake up.”

It was the voice of dry corn husks.

Again his name was spoken. This time by a goblin. He blinked as the room came into focus.

“If you wake up, I will remove your restraints.”

He thought of plunging back into the maze; it was preferable to where he feared he really was. But he opened his eyes. He was in a small round room devoid of furnishings except for the pallet beneath him. The ahtran at his side was the one with matching oval pocks on each high cheek.

“You are thirsty. Drink this.” The goblin had pulled him up into a sitting position. It put a tube in his mouth that delivered water. The goblin had a burnished brown skin with silver rings etched just below the surface, the size of a baby’s fist, a chicken’s egg … but his vision blurred. Events of the last few hours came back to him in nauseous snatches. They had drugged him—whether before or after the beating, he wasn’t sure.

“You are awake now.”

“Drugged, damn you.”

“So you will be calm.”

So he would be helpless
.

“My troops …”

“No, Eli Dammond.” Her voice sounded like a deep purr. “We will not speak of them.”

He rose up, braced by one hand, and tried to get his feet under him, but the room morphed into odd shapes,
dizzying him. Rage swelled in his chest. “Back … let me back …”

“You called for me. But I will leave if you tend toward this subject.”

He reached for her arm and managed to latch on to it, yanking her close. The goblin’s eyes were sapphire blue. Within the orbs, a lighter iris was set, and within that an inner ring. Worlds within worlds. Bonds within bonds.

He hauled her closer, pushing the words into her face: “My troops, my camp.”

“If you return you will die.”

“Don’t care …” he said, still gripping the slim wrist.

“My mistress does not permit you to die.”

“Then she is … my enemy.” They all—all were his enemy. He had fought his guards, and blows came. Then drugs. They were cowards to subdue him so. He tried to tighten his hold on her wrist, but the power in her hands was extraordinary.

She pried his fingers easily off her wrist. “Quiet yourself.”

“Kill me. Then I’ll be quiet.” His voice sounded like an ahtran growl. He sipped at the water from the tube. The room began to settle into a consistent shape.

Maret settled in front of him. “Now I will tell you how things are disposed to be for you.” Her voice was low and eerily calm. It stoked his fury, but he banked that for later. “You have shown unseemly agitation to your guards. Such outbursts shall not be tolerated.”

“They needed correction,” he mumbled. They had taken him into some awful communal bathroom where he was urged to void his bladder. Somewhere in that trip he had come to blows with his guards.

She looked at him with a long, slow blink. “You came among us as a criminal, insulting our dead. Leaving aside that graceless act, you came armed into the heart of
Down World. We did not look for you or ask for you. Your ships above are unwelcome, and incline toward deep offense. Yet we do not retaliate. Odds are, no one of you will survive above, but that is not of our doing. We know you are a soldier and your disgrace will be to live. Do not lecture me on human psychology. But what you want is not noticed among us. Nefer Ton Enkar wishes for you to remain safe and for me to see to your comfort. Her reasons will not be questioned. If you are violent, as is your birth stamp, you will be subdued. I do not wish to remove your last realm of freedom, your mind. Do not bring this upon yourself. Do not presume to have information of me. You will have information as may be permitted by the graciousness of Nefer Most Prime. Among the ahtra information is not free. I am very deeply sorry for the coming deaths of your command. But we have no responsibility for them, neither causing them nor shirking our responsibility to intervene. Be obedient, Eli Dammond. I am very deeply sorry to tell you of your harsh circumstances. Accept what you can and resolve to be calm.”

“Go to hell.” He closed his eyes to shut her up.

But she wouldn’t let him be. “That would be a human insult, Eli Dammond, not an ahtran one. You must study your enemy to know a proper insult.”

Eli thought her neck fragile enough to know a good insult. But he bided his time.

She continued, “It is a very human mistake to measure all things against yourselves. Your culture is young, and you tend to immature error. Thus you will not have a perspective to understand the ahtra. You believe, for example, that Hemms Extreme Prime is female, inferring female leadership from my position and my mistress’. Do not assume a gender bias in our culture because one exists in your own. Gender is irrelevant among us. Of much greater import is the tendency toward fluxor or static. You may take some liberties with a fluxor, Eli Dammond, but when
in the presence of a static, you will do well to conform. That was a static guard who gave you the disfiguring bruise, you apprehend.”

He opened his eyes to look at this creature. “And what is your tendency, Maret? Toward beating your prisoners, or not?”

“That would be an offensive question.”

An ahtran insult. Good
. He closed his eyes again as a wave of nausea overtook him.

The creature Maret remained silent then, watching him as he fell back into a stupor.

The usual pictures played out on the back of his eyelids. The bridge of the
Recompense
. Screens on every side, each one filled with fire, fire from the
Fidelity
, from the
Raptor
. Radio channels clogged with shouts, some incoherent, some all too clear. He thought he heard the ship hull scream, metal torqued beyond endurance.

The
Recompense
shuddered under a hit, lights failed, came back, failed again. In strobelike frames, Eli saw the bridge crew in random moments of chaos—Lieutenant Nule’s face was bleached, his eyes always on Eli, waiting for orders.

All the while the bridge filled with noise like the world cracking open, releasing monsters, bellowing.

T
he forest was changing. The enlisteds said so. Sascha had seen the grass sprouting in camp like a patchy beard. But she wanted to see the forest.

Sascha waited for one of the torrential rain squalls that lashed the camp and made a dash past the desultory guards on the perimeter.

Though both camps were officially on alert, few believed in the possibility of ahtran attack. Captain Dammond was missing from mischance, not malice. Meanwhile the enlisteds awaited the decision to leave. Soldiers stood around in tight knots, resigned to more waiting. Oddly, the ones that had been waiting three years seemed more patient than the ones that just got here. But for everyone, life was suspended until they dug the captain out or gave him up.

The digging reports were ominous. Field bots morphed into diggers had initially gouged out a crater some twenty feet wide and six deep, but the walls slumped in during the first rain, creating more of a mud wallow than an excavation. From gradiometer imaging they knew the hexadron was buried deep. If Captain Dammond was alive, he’d
be in the tunnel below, perhaps unable to activate the hexadron for the return trip. The plan, which every hour looked more desperate, was for the two bots to drill their way down and morph into a machine capable of repairs to the hexadron.

Sascha ran in the opposite direction from the digging operation, toward the Gray Spiny Forest, rumored to be outgrowing its name. After four days of pacing the compound, ducking her mother, pestering her father at his desk, and—in her mind—clawing out that muddy in-filled shaft with her own fingers, she needed a cheering sight.

Smells of wet soil and mud surrounded her. In the distance thunder ground out a swallowed roar, but the lightning was missing. Something was always missing. This world was bound up in secrets, like the hexadron to nowhere, like the fate of Captain Dammond, like the precursors of all those bones in the valley where she’d found her amphib.

Her father tolerated her nickname, amphib. By the dentition and morphology, many of the specimens they’d collected resembled amphibians. Now that Null revealed its water, the classification began to fit.