Tropic of Creation (9 page)

She was in the spiny forest, standing in an eddy of light. The squall had passed, leaving her feet sunk halfway in mud, her shirt adhering like a droopy skin. A patina of pale green shone from the stick trees. It was an intermittently green world, where one slant of light brewed a verdant palette to the forest, another a gray-brown. On the nearest tree she noted that the inner grooves of nascent green now bulged as though swollen with water—ballooning over the ridges of the bark grooves, and grown lighter in color with the expansion. Sascha took out her knife and sample bag, cutting into the curdle of green, the first blush of an unguessed-at spring. From the tops of a few stick trees a green growing tip protruded from the sheath of gray bark.

Fingers of morning sunlight released fog from the forest
floor like smoke from a banked fire. She took off her hat and stood in place, steaming like the forest itself. Around her, in a bubble of life, small flying things, barely distinguishable from pollen, swooped in unison. She thought of the captain in his own bubble of life, that metal container. She had known it would kill him. She might have told him, but instead gave him that false, cheery good-bye.…

Sascha hurried on, trying to leave these thoughts behind. Striding through the ravine, deepening here in this wood, she made her way toward the cleft where she and her father had collected skeletals.

When she got to the ravine she found a swift stream, partially obscuring her boneyard. Rivulets cascaded down the flanks of the hills, carrying water opaque with silt. In the growing heat of the day, the water tempted her to leave her clothes in a pile and wade in, letting the waters renew her as they had the Sticks. She closed her eyes, letting the sun warm her eyelids. Through the slit of her eyes, she saw prisms, ripples of color chasing over the landscape like a slick of oil set alight.

A disk of color blossomed up on the ridgeline. She opened her eyes to stare.

A great yellow-green cloud undulated there, not fifty feet away. It flashed pink, then yellow-green, then pink again. In the midst was a dark center, and from it came a soprano wailing. Sascha stood up, shading her eyes from the sun which just now rose over the ridge, backlighting the miasma—and clearly silhouetting a human shape in the middle. She thought the screaming sounded like her mother.

Sascha scrambled up the muddy hill, slipping on the glasslike clay. Closer now, Sascha could see that it
was
her mother—surrounded by flying insects with colorful wings, butterflies perhaps, with downward beating wings flashing green, and upward, pink. They covered Cristin with bright fur and surrounded her as she ran along the ridge, screaming. She was careening away from Sascha. Then,
reversing in panic, she began running toward her. Her mother flapped her hands around her face, fending off the flying swarm. Sascha plunged straight into the cloud of insects. There in the blind buzz of wings, she reached out to her mother. Slapping hands pummeled Sascha before her mother registered the sight of her daughter.

As Cristin shouted, a butterfly flew into her mouth as into a red cave. She spat it out again, coughing, as around them fluttered the green, and then pink papery wings. Finally Sascha pulled on her mother’s arms until they both fell to their hands and knees. Cristin buried her face in the mud while Sascha swept the winged cloud from her mother’s hair. She noted that the slower she moved, the less they flocked, until, abandoning her swipes, she wrapped her arms around her mother’s trembling back and found a pocket of insect-free air to breathe in the crevasse between their bodies.

What frightened her more than the swarm was her mother, lying huddled in the mud, shaking. Sascha whispered in her ear: “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.…” She would never hear the end of this.

After a time she felt a firm hand on her shoulder. It was her father. The swarm had disappeared. She looked up into his face, mouth set, eyes hard. Mother sat up, catching her breath, and began pulling wings, legs, antennae from her person.

Cristin looked up at her husband, then at Sascha. “Hat,” she said to her daughter and rose to her feet with calm dignity, as though she were not covered with mud and bug juice.

Sascha’s father pulled her to her feet. It was then she saw the soldier with him, rifle drawn, facing outward, scanning down both sides of the ridge. She’d never thought her father one to bring a gun where soap and water would do.

His rigid arm fixed Sascha in place. “Stay right here,” he said, moving then to his wife’s side, saying something to
her in a whisper. Beneath the layer of filth, Cristin’s face flashed alarm. A noise from the other side of the ridge grabbed Sascha’s attention. Two more soldiers, fully armed, climbed up onto the ridge from below.

Cristin latched on to Sascha and urged her along the ridgeline, with soldiers leading and at the rear, watching everything.

“What’s happened?” she asked her mother in a low voice.

Cristin’s face was streaked with mud, sweat, and butterfly pulp. A pink wing with a lacy pattern was pasted onto her cheek like a tattoo. She spat to one side, an action that Sascha had never seen from her mother, much less in public. Evidently the prospect of swallowing bug juice overcame her scruples.

“Something bit one of the men. It must have been venomous,” her mother said.

“Is he all right?”

“No. He’s dead.” Cristin brushed bug litter from Sascha’s face and braid, but Sascha broke away to walk next to her father.

When she started to apologize, he stopped her. “Sascha, you’ll stay out of the forest now,” he said softly.

“Yes, sir.” His gentle tone drove home his edict more than any lecture.

All the way back to camp Sascha checked the backs of her hands, finding scratches that might or might not be bites, and listening to her body for evidence of venom.

H
oisted on the shoulders of dwellers, sixteen rugs wound their way to the reliquary. Vod knew the procession was under way and he wanted badly to be there, but only kin were excused from the digs to bury the dead. The digging must go on. Unless, as now, he was favored with one of the Paramount Borer’s regrettable lapses of efficiency.

The borer was broken. By the look on the Second Engineer’s face, the delay would cost several spans of digging time. The old static looked directly into his face, as though it were Vod’s fault the day’s lineal output was ruined. Coworkers gathered around, staring balefully at the great borer with its mangled blade. A broken machine was ever a reminder that Down World could strangle as well as nurture. From the diggers’ expressions, Vod thought he could tell which of them had wagered on the output numbers, and which were losers.

With the impassive skin of a true static, the engineer kept her color, but gazed long at the borer as though searching for a sign—perhaps a miraculous recovery from its broken condition. Engineers were a superstitious lot,
putting great store in the timing and type of breakdowns, reading them against historical maintenance trends, discerning patterns. But to Vod, the meaning of breakdowns like this one was clear enough: dig too fast and the rock will kill you.

As static maintenance workers swarmed over the borer, Vod slipped away from his work unit, aware that he must hurry before the borer growled back to life.

The contusions on his body from the slide were nearly healed after the ministrations of the physiopath, but one knee protested his hurried pace. Limping, he hurried past fluxors digging side tunnels. They hailed him as he passed, and he acknowledged them, knowing each by name and many up to the third kin net.

Vod slipped into a downway. A temporary stairset, it was a raw, crumbling place, without a growth of hab and supported by foam beams. He blinked so frequently from the suspended dust that his sight seemed to be a succession of pictures rather than a seamless reality. But this was error. The Data Guides said that all life was a process. It was error, they said, to believe in separate things and particles. All matter and all events were interrelated, all ways interrelated, as the realm of the submolecular was said to demonstrate. No one thing is fundamental; all is relational.

But he was no scholar. He had dug since he was a child. The HumanWar required that everyone work, and many fluxors chose the patriotic way of digging and physical work. He had not got far with philosophy. Only as far as politics.

He passed portals leading to the multilayered digs, where fluxors carved new ways forward. A major portal led onto the extension of the Prime Way, the major undertaking of every digger’s life in the constant migration through Down World to replenish their dwelling. The rolled dead were left behind in successive reliquaries, where now Wecar was borne on the shoulders of her kin.

Vod continued into the DeepReaches. Where a minor way dead-headed in an unfinished lobe, he came upon many rug looms, once lovingly stored, now forgotten. Threading his way among them he came to the hidden portal—also long forgotten.

Here was the entrance to his wondrous find, a secret he had not disclosed even to his nearest friends. The statics would certainly come and tidy up this place, if they knew of it. It was ancient and unmaintained, dangerously un-monitored: a relic of the past. For this reason, Vod loved it. Here was a separate and ancient chute, the original digger chute that carried workers to and from the new region six thousand cycles ago, to dig the new ways that would become Ankhorat.

He sidled through the portal and crawled a short distance to the cab, waiting where he had left it, its door filling the portal. He entered the cab in utter darkness. The lights didn’t work, but he knew from explorations that it contained thirty-six seats, the hard foam deeply carved with messages from the past—fluxor names, all the workers who created Ankhorat with their hands and lives. He stabbed his fingers into the overhead console, connecting to the simple on switch, and felt the cab lurch forward, carrying him along the deep, forgotten path.

In this very chute his ancient kin had traversed the fresh regions to renew Down World. The chute brought them to a forward position where they set to digging a new PrimeWay, boring back to meet the digging from the other side. Once the two sides broke through to each other, the chute fell into obscurity. But Vod knew the ways; had made it his life study. A scholar of digging; that perhaps described him best.

He hurtled along in blackness, under everything, steeped for this brief ride in timelessness, surrounded by the hum of the cab’s ancient motor. His fingers traced the etchings in the seat beneath him. Under his fingers he felt the
grooves that marked where a digger had carved a name. For a moment he thought he felt the name Wecar … Wecar, now as dead as the ancient digger who had once sat here.

Arriving at the end of the line, he scrambled out into another forgotten lobe in the DeepReaches. There, an oversized way housed a region of industrial noise. The ominous sound of water vats sloshed nearby amid the rumble of power generators and supplemental food refineries. He noted that a team of statics labored on an exposed flank of the hab, reconstructing networks embedded behind the sheath. They eyed him, a fluxor out of place. He hurried through this tunnel of noise.

In three spiral turns of an upway he came to a subminor way and saw the tail end of the reliquary procession. In this region were simple kin dens, the ancestral apartments of humble fluxors. More accomplished fluxors lived OverPrime, where their sensibilities would not be offended by the sight of rolled rugs. Vod fell in behind the line of mourners, their shadows hunching against the walls, thrown in relief by pockets of phosphorescent cella.

Proximity to apartments required strict inwardness. He neither looked to the side, nor, in foremind, noticed much outside his immediate purpose. Through the portals he saw that dwellers slept and studied and played with progeny and sat their rugs, but he registered little of all that. Walking next to a fellow digger, the fellow nodded at him, but kept the silence of the walk. He noted some static maintenance workers had joined the procession in a show of support.

And then, at the next curve of the way, stood Maret Din Kharon. She fell in beside him.

“Here are rugs we will never see again,” he muttered by way of greeting. “All for the whim of Nefer.”

“We renew our home, Vod-as. I have two sadnesses for the deaths, but sometimes there will be a lapse in safety.”

He spoke close to her ear. “Her
whim
, those tunnels.”

“We must renew our world,” she whispered.

The vision of Wecar’s hand protruding from the slide prompted his bitter reply: “You sound like a static.” At the rebuke, Maret fell silent. “If you will speak like a static, best you don’t come to lay the rugs down.”

Maret dropped back, and Vod stopped with her for a moment.

“Best you don’t come farther, Maret-as, if you still keep your color.”
While those with murdered kin pale with grief
. He thought it, but kept it to himself.

She nodded gravely, standing calm as stone while the procession retreated into the depths.

The sixteen rugs were borne along, tightly rolled, pattern facing inward. The footfalls of the mourners were the only sounds, as dwellers stopped their errands to let the procession pass by. With every step, Vod dug a deeper groove in his heart, hating Nefer Ton Enkar.