The Tatja Grimm's World by Vinge Vernor Read Free Book Online

that for sure—”
    “We know, Master Guille,” Janna Kats’s tough exterior broke for an instant, and she looked just as frightened as the others. “In the last two days they’ve taken three of us from the pit. W-we could hear the screams; one we could see. Each took longer to die than the last.”
    There was a moment of silence, and then the cougher said, “I think the Termiters are scared, too—of their Seraph gods. If they can’t come up with the proper death for us, they think the gods will apply that death to them. The three they killed were … little experiments.”
    “But there will be no more.” The toughness was back in Janna’s voice. “The next time they come, one big surprise we’ll show them. We won’t be skoats waiting for the slaughter.”
    Rey looked up, at the rim of the pit. There were Termite Folk all around. Most carried spears, but that wasn’t the most deadly thing; spears kill one at a time, make a slow thing of a massacre. Much more ominous were the priests carrying torches. They
stood near the three petroleum vats Brailly had spotted earlier. Each tank was mounted on a crude swivel. Should they choose, the torchbearers could drown their prisoners in flame. A few hours before, that prospect had filled him with sympathetic dread. For Janna and the others, it had come to be the only imaginable out.
     
    The hours passed. At the top of the sky, Seraph widened toward full, its western ocean turning dark and reddish with the start of the midnight eclipse. The villagers marched steady patrols around the edge of the pit. Mostly they were silent. The Science’s anthropologist said they had long ago stopped responding to his shouted questions.
    There were no more “experiments,” but Rey gradually realized the pit was in itself a killing place. The only water was in the shallow pool at the bottom of the pit, and that became steadily more foul. The only food was what the villagers threw into the pit: slabs of skoat cheese and balls of what turned out to be pressed termite larva. Rey had eaten some exotic things in his years with Tarulle, but the larva patties were half rotted. Hungry as they were, only a few of the prisoners could keep them down. Three of the Tarulle prisoners were dead, their bodies broken by the explosion. Two of the survivors had compound fractures; their moans came less frequently with each passing hour.
    The prisoners were not alone in the pit. The true builders of the village were here, too. In the silence that dragged between conversations and occasional screaming, Rey heard a scritching sound coming from all directions. At the corner of his vision, a
pebble would move, something would scuttle from one hole to another. The termites were no bigger than a man’s thumb, but there must have been millions of them in the sides of the pit. They avoided the humans, but their activity was ceaseless. The sides of the pit were not ordinary earth. All the way down to the pool, this was moundstuff. It had to be old, the detritus of thousands of years of towers, but it was still used by the tiny creatures. The stones in this “soil” must have washed down from the hills to the north. The coming of humans was a recent event in the hives’ history.
    The towers of the village crowded around three sides of the pit, but beyond the broken southern lip, they could see the harbor. The Tarulle Barge was less than a quarter mile out. Deck piled on deck, loading cranes sticking out in all directions, masts and rising windmills into the reddish blue sky—the barge had never seemed so beautiful to Rey as now. Safety was just twelve hundred feet away; it might as well be on the other side of Seraph. An hour earlier, a hydrofoil had arrived from the ocean and docked in a starboard slip. There was no other boat activity, though Rey fancied he saw motion on the bridge: another meeting? And this time, a final decision to leave?
    Most of the prisoners huddled on the north slope of the depression;