Tropic of Creation (19 page)

M
aret stood before the Extreme Prime’s galleries, waiting for her interview. She hoped to find Hemms Pre Illtek in a conducive mood, but in Red Season he was often snappish. Her own mood was restive.
Up, up
, her thoughts tended. She was ready to go, her body primed, responding to the hab’s nectar. But she was still
down
as others ascended.

Hemms, a friend to her dear prime, Ellod, was disposed in her favor. With Nefer growing colder toward her, she had need of a powerful supporter. Hemms was likely to approve her traditional choice to bear progeny, though it meant jeopardizing her studies.
Her studies
. She thought of Eli with confusion and shame. She had studied humans, she now realized, only to hate them more fully.…

In her hand she carried a scroll on which Nefer had painted data coordinates. This was an official communiqué from Nefer Most Prime to Hemms Extreme Prime, and Maret was to deliver it personally. She was to make sure that Hemms, often absentminded, attended to the scroll, though Nefer had told her nothing of the subject
matter. Perhaps, if Hemms needed data interpretation, Maret might offer some small service to him. It was regrettable to admit, but without Nefer to administrate, he would have made a less than satisfactory leader, despite his splendid genotype.

When the attendant led her inside, she found Hemms seated on his carpet, where skilled weavers had traced his rich ancestral line. The huge carpet placed him at a considerable remove from her. He was alone, Maret noted with relief. Sometimes interviews did not go well if attendants were there to whisper in his ear.

“Maret-as,” he said. Then, without preamble: “Recite.”

She began the chant, still holding Nefer’s scroll, still standing, not even being asked to sit.

After reciting to the sixth net, Maret paused, hoping to be given permission to execute her mission. She had recited his lineage for him before. It was almost a tradition between them, and seemed to give Hemms great pleasure.

Hemms’ eyes, half-lidded with relaxation, snapped open.

She plowed on, to the seventh net, a level of recitation that only his close attendants were expected to perform. But the seventh net was very long, and her time slipped away.

At last she finished. Surely he would not require her to go further.

He did not. “You misspoke the seventh,” he said, allowing some irritation to show. He picked at a piece of lint on his pant leg.

Maret cast into backmind to see what had gone amiss. With chagrin, she realized her mistake. “Forgive my inexcusable and shameful error, Extreme Prime.”

He waved a hand, saying peevishly, “You should study more, Maret-as. Nefer gives you leave to study, does she not?” Without waiting for an answer, he said, “It is a very
great privilege to study, but one’s dwellers are immersed in wagers and entertainments, a shameful waste of resources.” He glanced up at her.

“Yes, shameful indeed.”

“Many cannot even recite to the sixth, and if they can”—here he glanced at her again—“they make errors, and tend toward self-satisfaction.”

“Yes, Hemms-as, this is a sad thing, when it occurs.”

“When it occurs!” His voice rose beyond all propriety. “You think it would be seldom?”

“No, one does not disagree …”

“Disagree.” He nodded to himself as though confirming an ugly opinion. “What right have you to disagree with your high prime? Have you such a right? Have you?”

Maret was so surprised by this attack that she hesitated to answer. By then it was too late.

He rose to his feet. “You are not as pious as one thought, Maret-as, may your prime, Ellod, forgive you. Your kin nets are very faint in the flow. Who carries your kin names forward? Are all your kin as lax as you?”

“My kin, Prime of my life, are all …”

“Yes, your kin! This neglect becomes very deeply regrettable.”

The room pumped out odorants to cover his agitation. It was shocking for Hemms Extreme Prime to display such temper. She feared he might be ill.

“You waste your days, Maret-as. You prepare for ronid. Let others undertake such things! One is in entire agreement with Nefer Ton Enkar on this matter. Furthermore, you embarrass us by fraternizing with the Human, who is our hostage.”

She jerked her head up in surprise.

“Did you think one took no notice of such things?” He paced around her, and she dared not follow him with her eyes. He circled her, muttering,
“Lost, lost.”

Maret’s distress now was beyond containing. Was she fraternizing? How had her conduct fallen so far from his pleasure?

But he had veered back to the topic of study. “A very sad thing it is to see you waste your heritage, Maret-as. Study, that’s the thing!”

Maret stared fixedly at the eighteenth concentric circle in Hemms’ ancestral rug. She dared not answer.

“Well?” He glared at her. Then, pausing at a wall sconce, he indulged in a wand of snuff.

“I have failed to please you. Please forgive this inadequate person.” She would have studied all her life and been content. But study would have to wait.

Calmer now, Hemms settled himself on the rug once more. “One doubts, Maret-as,” he said sadly. “One doubts those around one.” He looked over her head, toward the door. “Everywhere, there are dwellers who oppose me, against all tradition. You knew?”

“No,” she said in alarm. “Oppose you?”

“Oppose, we say! Who plot for their Extreme Prime’s ruin, who loose their rogue strands of lies into the data flow, who forget our lineage, who bring barbarians into the heart of Down World, who falter in their seventh kin net recitation, who fail in their studies!” The hab pumped and pumped, but his distress came to her nostrils like a burning wick of flesh. She heard herself indicted in his list. Maret, the most loyal of his subjects.

Then his shoulders slumped, and his voice was so soft, she barely heard him say, “Well, give us the scroll. Or must one beg leave to read one’s missives?” His skin had waxed pale, smudging the aristocratic lines that had bred true for a thousand cycles.

She approached his rug and handed it to him, leaning over it as far as she could without stepping on the sacred threads. The scroll fluttered as she placed it in Hemms’
palm. He murmured: “Our dwellers neglect their devotions. Scandalous. So many lost in the HumanWar, and so few remembered in the flow. We had thought that you, Maret-as, would never stumble in devotion. One can never predict the outcome of genetic gifts. We are very sad.” As he unrolled the scroll, a data plug descended from the ceiling, and his tendril snapped into it.

Scanning the coordinates, Hemms shunted the results onto a wall screen.

To Maret’s consternation, the screen showed Eli Dammond entering a reliquary. He shone a light about him, disturbing the peace of the rugs. She watched in horror as he pulled a rug from its rest, laying open the contents, bending down to inspect the sacred bones.… It would have been far better not to have provoked Hemms Extreme Prime with a remembrance of that unfortunate happening, but now Maret learned that Hemms was more than provoked.

He sprang to his feet, barking, “Shame! Shame!”

His reaction so startled her that she froze, unable to speak or defend herself.

The door flew open as attendants flooded inside. They stood, wondering at the high tension in the room, while Hemms sputtered, “This! This!” He pointed at the terrified Maret. “This
fluxor
defies us! This
fluxor
caters to a barbarian who desecrates our dead!” He stalked close to her, bending low to look into her eyes as she crouched at his feet. “You knew?”

“Yes, Extreme Prime …” And she had thought
he
knew. Could it be that Hemms was so out of the flow?

“…  knew,” he was saying, “and walked publicly with the—the …” His lips quivered as he fought for an epitaph.

The human, Maret filled in for him. The human. How easily Nefer has arranged my ruin
.

Nefer had kept Hemms ignorant of the desecration. All this time, it wasn’t Hemms who required her to attend on the human. It was only Nefer.

“My mistress commanded me to attend the human. Please forgive—”

“You dare to blame your benefactor, Nefer Most Prime? Shame, Maret-as, shame! Nefer has told me you are
not
obedient.” He turned to his astonished attendants. “Not obedient! Our dwellers are not obedient! Our kingdom sickens before our eyes.” His face collapsed into open, displayed grief. “One had thought Maret-as the best of you, though she is only a fluxor. But if Maret is the best, then one is lost, lost …”

As the attendants led her away, she heard Hemms ranting after her, “Your bloodlines are shamed! Your descendants do not exist!”

The words struck her like blows. The attendants let loose of her, not wanting to touch one so cursed.

J
ust as Eli turned into the first downway, he looked behind, back the way he’d come, seeing a soldier standing with the gomin, talking. He knew it was the gomin by the sheen of her clothes, and by the fact that she was naked from the waist up, by which he understood that she was distracting the guard by offering sex. He slipped into the stairwell.

His muscles were tense enough to lift a piano. Six steps down he spied a lump of cloth that, once shook out, became a cape and cowl. He rammed his fists into the sleeves, noticing the powerful smells of the fabric, to mask his humanness. He took the stairs two at a time; then, hearing voices above him, he ducked into a narrow lobe and turned aside to hide his face.

The voices faded down the steps.

In the stairwell, he repeated the gomin’s instructions:
left at the downway, right at the way, right at the downway, right at the way, and two rights again on downways and ways …

But despite the specificity of the directions, he was in
trouble. He had not thought to ask her how to tell the difference between a downway and an upway. Each stairwell, Maret had said, was used in only one direction. And downways might lead to different levels than stairwells designated as upways. Furthermore, each time he turned into a stairwell and rushed down, he knew that he might meet an ahtra coming
up
, and so betray himself, cape or no.

Right, then right, then left, but right into the downway …

All his life he had remembered things in excruciating detail. Dates, numbers, useless facts, names, faces, songs, and things said and done, and things not done, the lost moments when things could have been set to rights. It stood him well in academics, vaulting him to the top of his classes. While his fellow students sweated over the minutiae, Eli read it once and had it. Some felt he was getting something for nothing, that he had an unfair advantage, despite his protestations that being able to forget things was a great gift.

Now left
 … As he turned down, he saw someone coming up, and he stepped quickly back and walked to the next stairwell with as much dignity as he could muster. He didn’t think the ahtra had had time to notice his misstep. He hurried on, sweating copiously under the cape, his thoughts turning on how, by going down, he would eventually go up—and whether the gomin was part of some plot by Nefer to use his escape to finally kill him, despite the puzzling desire of someone here that he be kept alive.

The tunnels and ways were strangely dim, a change from the bright ambient light usually emitted by the hab. Perhaps the gomin had arranged this as well, or whoever assigned the gomin her mission to
tell him to leave
—and he thought he knew who that might be. In any case the dim lighting worked in his favor, as he passed two ahtra in a way, deeply involved in conversation, intent on each
other. They paid him no notice. He began to hope that he might succeed, might find the
ancient way
, and the one who would
guide him farther
. It could only be Maret. He looked for her, hoping that by some stroke of fortune he had stumbled on the
right way
.

But now, after five or ten minutes he was hopelessly lost. He had come to the end of the gomin’s lefts and rights. He faced down an endless, dim way with many stairs. And it looked exactly the same as the one he had just come from, and the one before that.
Maret
, he thought,
where are you?