Tropic of Creation (21 page)

Reproachfully, she said, “If you would have told me about the worm, I could have saved you from error. The gomin is not clever, and has only made things worse.”

“She was teaching me things.”

“Do not believe what she says.”

“She said the same thing about you. What is Nefer going to do to her?”

“Oh, she has already done it. She has cast her from the flow. Disallowed her access to the Well.”

“Is that a harsh sentence?”

“Oh, certainly. One is cut off from our ancestral converse.”

“I regret that she suffers for my sake.”

“Do not worry about such a one. I wonder more who sent the gomin.”

“I thought it was you.”

Maret sighed, a mannerism she copied from Eli. “How could you think I would so turn from my duty?”

He watched the stars overhead, imagining new constellations. “Friendship. Sentimentality. Rebellion. Any number of stupid impulses.”

After a beat: “We are very different, Eli.”

“Are we? How do you feel about your Nefer, now that you know she used you?”

“One is hers to use.”

“Like hell. You’re in Shit Creek Club, Maret, and you can thank your Nefer. She had us parading around together, ruining your chances for UpWorld. Is that about it?”

Maret’s voice was very soft. “Yes, that is true. I have lost all affection for Nefer Ton Enkar.”

“Really?”

“Irony,” Maret said in a forlorn voice. “I have been thinking of why Nefer has ruined me. Now I tend to conclude that she perceives me as a threat to Hemms. That she always saw me as a threat, and hoped to keep me safely in scholarship, and barred from the glory of ronid. She is regrettably foolish. All I ever hoped for was study, not revolution.”

“I suspect she hates you for her own reasons, not for Hemms’ sake.”

A virtual shooting star scudded across the sky.

Her voice was soft. “I hated you once, Eli. I have reveled in your suffering. You suffered so outwardly, so vigorously. Through you, I grieved all my lost kin, in ways that I could not in all propriety do myself.”

He turned away from her voice, but she went on.

“Now, however, I cannot blame you for what my own fluxor kind have done. Nefer says the HumanWar was brought on by fluxors, because we wanted outwardness and trade with humans. We had never, in all our history, met another sentient race. Fluxors lobbied for trade while statics were reluctant. So all this began with fluxor error. Compounding the error, I have been in your company improperly. If I had observed proper ways I would have descendants. And you would not be in such danger.”

“I was always in danger, Maret.”

“But worse now, Eli, because I have shown you our
world. Nefer will never release you, given what you know of us. She will not allow you to use your knowledge against us. She has used me to ruin you.”

He heard her shift position on the lip of stone where she crouched. Her voice came nearer to him. “My foolishness is beyond repairing. But Eli, there is one thing I can give you. Such a small thing …” She paused. “Nefer will come to you, one believes. When she does, she will command the Well to be disagreeable.”

So
,
he thought
,
now comes the part I expected all along
.

“She will search for things to distress you. But my mistress does not know human ways and may be inclined to error. If she guesses correctly, do not respond. She will wish for you to respond.”

“What does she want from me, Maret?”

“Nothing, anymore. Now she will … toy with you. She is pursuing an instinct. It is Red Season, Eli. Sex is very free among us now.”

“You’ve lost me.” At her momentary hesitation, he rephrased, “I don’t understand.”

“Idiom,” she said absently. Then, “Statics—Nefer is a static—have only a vestigial interest in sex. They sometimes … require high stimulation to feel conducive.”

“She wants to have sex with me?” He would have much preferred more garden-variety torture.

“No, certainly not. Not
with
you.
Because
of you. It is hard to explain.” After a moment she continued. “Fear is a stimulation of long-standing tradition. She will want you to fear.”

In the long silence that followed, Eli squinted up at the star patterns, seeing one or two click into place. He realized he’d already been used. If Nefer wanted fear, he’d given her plenty in their last interview. It was why she described the deaths Up World. That he had unknowingly given Nefer pleasure was a worm in his gut.

“Eli,” she said, “I have two sadnesses over you. Please forgive my many errors.”

“I don’t blame you, Maret. I chose to come here. It was my job.”

“It shames me that you forgive my debts so easily.”

Lying on his back watching the sky, Eli thought about debts and what it took to forgive. And whether some things were beyond forgiving
.
If you forgave, would you betray those who suffered, who were dead, and therefore unable to forgive? What did the dead want of us, or we of them?

“No,” Eli said. “That wasn’t it.…”

“What?”

“It wasn’t my job. To come here.”

“You are a soldier.”

“I was, once. It was what I wanted to be. An officer of Congress Worlds. None of my family ever graduated from an upper form school. To four generations, we worked the asteroids and took enlistment in the army. But I wanted something more.”

“You are a captain of ships, Eli. That is a high office.”

“No, not of the ships I have now. Luce Marzano, she is—or was—an officer of the army. She had a real command.”

“Luce Marzano,” Maret said. “The captain of the first ship …”

“They hated me for holding myself superior to her. I hated it myself.”

“It was your job.”

“Yeah. Like your job was to parade me around. Sometimes the job is a nasty one.” He knew then that he would tell her everything. He didn’t want to be stuck with her admiration. It was starting to fester.

A pause while he gathered his thoughts. They were close to hand, as always. “Suzan Tenering was old army,” he began. “You would have liked her. Big on tradition. By the book.”

“By the book … she followed the rules,” Maret said.

“Yes, the rules. There are the rules written down, and the ones in the margins.”

“Sometimes the rules in the margins are the most important ones,” Maret said wistfully.

“We were patrolling in a squadron. I was assigned to Tenering’s flagship, the
Recompense
. Oddly, the
Recompense
was the only ship that survived. It took a hit on the external solar array, and one of the cargo bays took a bad crease. It looked like a bad parking job, nothing worse.…”

“Is the rule you must die when others do?”

She startled him, jumping to the heart of it so fast. But he said, “Only if you’re in charge.”

“This is called ‘the captain going down with the ship,’ is that the phrase?”

“No. Yes. Hell, if I knew the rules maybe I wouldn’t be here now. Don’t ask me what the rules are. But I’ll tell you what happened.”

He told her the best he could remember it, which was perfectly. The expressions on the bridge crew’s faces; who said what; what happened and in what order. At the hearing it took a long time for him to tell the story, and the panel of officers stopped taking notes after a while and stared at him as though they would rather have a shorter version, not one embellished by Captain Eli Dammond with good reason to concoct a version to save his neck. In the end they dropped formal charges. He had fought bravely in the boarding party, so it was hard to charge cowardice and make it stick. They left it that he’d discharged his duty; badly perhaps, but not dishonorably, or not the sort of dishonor they could openly punish. Sometimes dishonor is in the margins.

There were on their way to a CW world, a way station, not a battle zone, but they were combat-ready and searching, as always, for ahtran warships. If they caught them at
first blip, they had a chance to fry them. The balance of power was Congress World numbers against ahtran speed. CW could stand to lose the ships it did, at the rate of thirteen to one, the infamous Baker’s Dozen rule. By that day the tally was eighteen to one, so they were overdue for a hit. Soon after that day they sued for peace. It was war by the numbers, and the numbers had been against them for a long time.

So when the blip came that day on the
Recompense
, they’d been more than ready for engagement. But in the next instant, word came it wasn’t an ahtran warship, it was something else. An asteroid, but under propulsion … And then Lieutenant Onaka said it was a world ship, the construct seen only a few times before, the habitat of the ahtra, presumed to be carrying its cities, its culture. Its noncombatants. Always, the world ships fled at ahtran speed.

But not this one. Techs said it might be crippled. Later Eli would understand how much more deadly that made it.

With Colonel Tenering off the bridge, Eli had said, “Hold fire, Lieutenant,” speaking to Lieutenant Nule, who would have shot first and thought later. But Eli ran the numbers. At the dimensions of these world ships, they’d be housing two hundred thousand individuals, Intelligence estimated. And such world ships had never fired on CW ships …

That was the progression of his thoughts, in the space of a second.

“Captain?” Lieutenant Nule’s eyes were wild. He looked to the door through which Colonel Tenering, just five minutes before, had walked off the bridge. “Captain?”

Slightly forward of the convoy, the
Raptor’s
captain was on comm, standing by to engage. Tenering, on her way, was barking over the headset, “What’s happening? Report!”

And then the
Raptor
disintegrated in pulsing blooms of incandescent color, and in a sickening one-two punch, the
Fidelity
. In a heartbeat, Eli gave the order to fire.

Colonel Tenering came bursting onto the deck shouting,
“Fire, fire!”
The gunners hit it with everything on board. One nuclear-class pellet struck home, and another. The screen glowed with the conflagrations of the sister ships, pretty squares of fire, casting an orange glow on the faces of the crew on the
Recompense
bridge.

The transport ship
Hera
was calling for evacuation, the vessel now commanded by a pale eighteen-year-old ensign, the last one left on the bridge. On another channel, they were hailed by the world ship. As Tenering continued firing, Eli heard the ahtran screams. The translator barked in his ears, “One agrees to withdraw, agrees to withdraw.…”

Tenering, desperate to salvage the battle and her career, gave no quarter. She wanted the world ship, its submission, and its treasure of enemy intelligence. She ordered a boarding party, and sent Eli commanding it. Once admitted by the crippled world ship, Eli’s detail found a nightmare world of labyrinthine corridors filled with the dead and dying enemy, some of whom fought the intrusion with suicidal forays. Spiraling out of control, the mission took losses, then fell back, fighting hard, with CW troops wild, firing on the ahtra regardless of threat. Eli ordered restraint, and his men responded by turning off the comm units in their radiation suits, all the while firing, firing. The corridors echoed with bass ahtran screams.…

A few survived that boarding party. But only Eli Dammond survived it without wounds.

Then, having used the time to regain flight capability, and after the CW shuttle was clear, the world ship fled.

The battle toll was: the
Raptor
, all hands lost, 146; the
Fidelity
, all hands lost, 117; the transport ship
Hera
, damaged collaterally by a slug of molten drive-matter from the
Raptor
; 68 lost; the
Recompense
boarding party, 31 lost. In total, 422 soldiers died, including the ones that never made it out of the regen baths. And though no one was reprimanded at the hearing, the very mention of the
Recompense
came to stand for disaster, and in the army way of things, Suzan Tenering’s career was effectively over. At fifty-eight, she took an early retirement. Eli was thirty-three.

When he finished his story, he sat staring out over the jungle canopy seeing, as though with Olympian sight, the struggles of humans far below.

Maret was silent for so long he thought she might have left. But at last he heard: “It was mercy.…”

“Mercy?”

“Yes,” Maret whispered. “Mercy that you held off to fire. They despise you because of that.”

“Cowardice, some called it.” After all these years he still couldn’t say which one it was. He had never thought himself a coward in battle. But it was courage of another sort to make a hard decision, a decision that will damn you one way or the other.

“Eli,” she said in a small, low voice, “it was that world ship where I lost them. All my kin.”

By the love of God
. He closed his eyes. But he wasn’t surprised. The battle returned and returned, like a phantom ache in a severed limb. Eventually he found some words. “I’m sorry, Maret. With two sadnesses.”

Silence then. What was there to say, that would not give the nightmare more power?

After a long while he heard her climbing down the cliff face, her slippers shuffling against the rock sides.

“About Nefer,” he said softly, “thank you for warning me.”

In a husky whisper she said, “Do not think much of it,” mangling the idiom.

Through the night, Eli had been hearing noises in the jungle below: human cries, and the roar of beasts.

When it was light enough in the virtual dawn, he could see figures far below, appearing now and then in the clearings. They were so small, he couldn’t see whether the ahtra had somehow divined what individuals in his command looked like. They all wore army brown, so Nefer’s minions didn’t pick up on that detail.

The details they did best had to do with killing. The denizens of the forest pursued their prey with fan, beak, and claw: alien predators of horrible aspect. The figures in brown died and died.

He heard Nefer’s voice behind him. “You wanted to join your people, Eli Dammond. One is so limited in how one can help. Forgive one’s halting attempts to be useful.”