Tropic of Creation (30 page)

She was accustomed by now to the bouncing up and down, the loping gate. She rode on a crossbar, straddling it as she would a horse. Her nostrils were full of a sharp, musky scent. Maybe it came from the milk. She had been sucking and a warm trickle rolled down her throat.

She spat it out. In a moment of lucidity, she saw the huge triangular face of the creature she thought of as the Singer. It carried her in one long arm. The arm seemed to be broken, for it extended backward in an impossible way. One of her legs was bent against the Singer’s back.

Her parents were dead. She saw them die. Her mother died first, blood streaming from the back of her head. Then her father fell as the ripper jumped at him. He had run to Cristin, though Sascha could see the ripper coming. He’d run to Cristin, to help her, his face contorted in pain, more pain than he showed when the ripper killed him.

Sascha was sobbing hard now, leaning against the Singer. They were gone, both at once. The Singer might grow agitated by her noise and kill her, but it couldn’t be helped. Her cries stabbed into her head like ice picks.

The Singer had stopped moving. Sascha felt herself lowered to the ground, gently placed in a hole of warm mud. Perhaps her crying hurt the Singer’s ears. Or perhaps now it had leisure to eat her.

The beast crouched, dipping long hands into a rushing stream. It’s haunches were massive, three times a human’s girth. Compared to the lower limbs, the torso was narrow, with a thick neck supporting the great skull. A pronounced jaw sported a carnivore’s teeth. The rest of its face was a
triangular plate, large at the forehead, and narrow in the place where a nose should have been … and thin at the outer edges, so the plate could fold back and mold into a shape like Lieutenant Anning’s face. If she could trust what she’d seen.

It brought water up to its mouth in the cup of its hand.

Sascha began sidling away, slowly.

Then a clawed hand locked on to her ankle. It gripped her, while it calmly drank with its other hand. Sascha stared at the arm. Who would have thought the arm of the Singer could bend in that way? The arms were exceptionally long, and had an extra joint, making for a limb in three segments, not including the long hands. After drinking its fill, the Singer brought her a drink of water in the cup of its hand.

She slurped from its hand, and then again, when it brought more. As it turned back to the stream, it let go of her ankle, then turned to stare at her, as though daring her to move. Sascha remained still.

A movement—behind the Singer, in the reeds near the stream. It was a bot. She flattened herself on the ground, as Juric and the others had always done, expecting a volley of fire from the bot.

The Singer saw the bot, too. It rose to its full height—Sascha guessed it to be over seven feet tall—and turned its head back and forth, its notched top ridge fluttering slightly. From the reeds came a low whirring, the noise Sascha thought of as the bot’s thinking mode.

With an absent gesture, the Singer plucked Sascha from the ground and ensconced her in its left arm, so that she was straddling its mid-arm. It strode out, ignoring the bot. As they passed by the stand of reeds, Sascha could see the bot huddled there, pivoting to watch them go by.

“Follow me,” Sascha called back to the bot.

“Volo mee,” the Singer repeated.

Sascha wondered if she was delirious. Her head and
body ached, and she was sleeping much of the time. She could have sworn that milk came from the Singer’s arm before, but now, as her head rested against the muscular shoulder, it was only a tough, wrinkled hide. Gray skin with black whorls, oddly like ahtran pockmarks. No rosy pink … no perfect, fragile human ears …

Up ahead, she saw that the Singer was making for the Gray Spiny Forest.

“Father …” She mouthed the word. “Father …” She didn’t want the Singer to repeat it. It was her word. It meant love. And gone.

S
he had known it would come to this. Tirinn had told her, had drilled her over and over.
Swim, Maret, swim
.

She stood before a broad, slow-moving mass of water. Its surface sparkled where the sun hit it, from great shafts of sunlight leaking through gashes in the clouds. Beyond the WaterWay in the distance was the OverWoods. She had seen no vone since ascending, and felt that those dark reaches would be her place of consummation. But the WaterWay barred her path.

Her main problem now was exhaustion. Other candidates had entered dormancy before ronid, emerging with fresh power. But Maret had not rested during all the time Eli Dammond had been in her charge, when her duties to him, to Nefer, to her kin nets, and to training had pressed every increment into service. When, suddenly, she was free to ascend, she was at her lowest ebb of strength.

The WaterWay flowed before her, bearing life in its depths. Maret could see lights under the surface, as the photophoric creatures swam in their water world. When
she entered their domain, she would be
fair game
, as Eli called it. As with so many human expressions, she wanted to ask, when is a game not fair? Was Lioth fair game for the burrowers? Tradition said yes, but it was damp comfort, then and now.

But she would use her wits not to
become
fair game. That was tradition, also. Maret stripped off her tunic and pants, and the unaccustomed heavy boots. Now, between thunderstorms, the day burned bright, an ally to her plan. She began slathering herself with mud from the bank so that she would smell like soil instead of flesh. Turning slowly, she spread her arms to the suns, hardening the layer to a crusty pelt. As the mud dried, it tickled her skin, like small fingers tracing over her body. Gazing at the OverWoods, she hungered for its deeper pleasures.

She used her belt to cinch up her clothes, boots, and mav, strapping them on her back, with the tie biting against her ribs. Then she strode forward, entering the WaterWay without preamble, up to her shins, her waist, launching herself into the water’s cold clasp, parting the glittering surface.

The WaterWay was flowing faster than she had judged. Her purposeful arm-strokes took her downstream, not across. But she swam on, drifting sideways, losing her mud disguise by the moment. Caught in this wet snare, she fought panic … the darkness, the helplessness as she swallowed water, learning the awful gap between virtual and real moving water.

The current carried her, ignoring her fatigued thrashings. The shore was still impossibly far, and death by drowning, the worst death, loomed in her foremind. Struggling across the current, she replayed in backmind an image of power: her chain of kin, strong females holding on to the feet of beloved daughters as they stood on muscular
shoulders stretching upward into the immediate mystery of life yet to come. Someday she would hold up her own daughter on her shoulders. It was worth swimming for. She strove mightily toward the farther bank.

Then she was kneeling in the shallows of the other side of the WaterWay. Next to her, emerging from the water, a great, serrated claw. Two eyes bulged from a long body. It lunged just as Maret scrambled backward, slipping on the mud bank. A shadow fell across her as something stood nearby. A long, muscular arm grasped the water creature by the mandibles and hauled it into the air. Then she heard the loud cracking of the body shell.

Maret staggered to her feet, pulling herself from the mud, fleeing the WaterWay. Her spent legs collapsed under her. She was on her knees, at the feet of a giant vone.

It had broken the water scorpion in half and was sucking out its soft tissue. Then it lowered its arms, dropping its meal and staring at Maret, in what seemed frank surprise. Maret looked up at the great haunches, and the long, segmented arms, ending in translucent claws.

It looked at her with her own eyes, bright blue with concentric circles of iris. She was shivering uncontrollably. The river, the scorpion, the exhaustion. Fear raced over her skin. No.
Not like this. I was ready, I wasn’t afraid
. But her skin betrayed her, turning as pale as the palm of the vone’s hand.

It cocked its head to one side, eyeing her keenly. Then its features began to flow. Bulging here, receding there, collapsing into an ahtra face and skull, the visage of its last meal. A terrible sight, that dweller’s last moment. For an instant it looked like
her
.

The vone swept down its arm, a great claw gleaming. It missed her. But, no, it would kill her with an upward stroke.

Then a hole appeared in the creature’s forehead. It froze in place.

The crack of gunfire. She turned around.

Standing on the riverbank behind her was Firan Hil Assi.

“Move!” Firan snarled. Maret staggered away from the vone, as the great creature fell to its knees, as though dazed. But it was dead. It crouched in the mud of the bank, sitting upright on broad thighs. Dead.

She knew this Firan Hil Assi—but not well—as a Subordinate Data Trader in the PrimeWay. He had been UpWorld many times, she knew. He was scanning the vicinity, clasping his mav to his chest, ready to fire again.

“Firan-as,” Maret said as she hurriedly dressed.

The dweller turned to her.

“It was a vone …” Maret whispered, half-stupid with shock.

“Next time, welcome it.”

“Firan Hil Assi …” She looked into his face. “You … helped me.…” Against all tradition, he
knew
her UpWorld.

“Get up, Maret-as, put your minds together.” He didn’t look at her, but kept a watch on each shrub and hill.

She fastened on her boots, keeping her mav in the crook of her arm. He had saved her life. “Firan-as,” she began, wanting to ask, Why have you broken your oath?

He interrupted, “I’ve ascended five seasons, Maret Din Kharon.” He took time for a slow blink. “I’ve had a little help, too.”

She looked at him, stunned. UpWorld, dwellers
did
help each other. If so, it was a hidden tradition, a closely held secret of ronid.

Before she could respond, he was moving again,
hurrying off. He glanced back at her, calling out an admonition: “Run, Maret, run.”

She looked over at the vone, kneeling in the mud. The face had only imperfectly recovered its former shape, leaving it a disconcerting mixture of the familiar and the strange.

Then Maret ran.

I
t was very dark in the nest, but growing lighter. Through the canopy of vines overhead, Sascha noticed shards of sky. She lay very still, not wanting to attract the attention of Watchful Singer just now.

She had been among the Singers for a day or two, emerging from her stupor only intermittently. At first she thought she was in a huge hollow tree. But now, awake and more clearheaded, Sascha took closer note of her surroundings. In the gathering light, she could see that it wasn’t a single tree but rather a circular stockade of woody canes, buttressed by several pillars: the reborn sticks of the Gray Spiny Forest. Two gaps in the fortress formed what Sascha thought of as the front and back doors. Over all were twining vines, sprouting many broad leaves and lobes of fruit.

Each adult Singer staked out a circular nest on the perimeter. The one she called Triplet Singer commanded a position nearest to the nest Sascha shared with Watchful Singer. Triplet Singer had three young ones that ran wild in the nest, chasing one another and screeching. Triplet
hummed constantly, louder than any of them. Brat Singer, half the size of Watchful and Triplet, harried the three younger ones, keeping them at bay. In addition to these six, Sascha thought that a very large Singer had been in the center of the nest, but had left at first light.

Watchful Singer could sense Sascha’s return to consciousness. She—Sascha thought that the milk demonstrated her gender—licked at the wound in Sascha’s forehead. Watchful allowed the triplets, but not Brat, to approach Sascha. Her high-pitched hums got Brat’s attention, freezing the adolescent cub in mid-mischief.

Triplet began to thrash, throwing bits of sticks and leaves around her. Sascha thought the Singer was ailing.

The beasts did not talk. That had been hallucination. But they sang melodies of a sort, humming. The range of their humming sounds scaled from bass rumblings to soprano warbling. Watchful had a favorite tune, complex but recognizable by now, one that had been threading in and out of Sascha’s delirium.