Tropic of Creation by Kay Kenyon Read Free Book Online Page B

bragged of safety records, projected outputs, maintenance cycles, and increments of cost. He bypassed this propaganda with irritation, barely suppressing a pallor of disgust. Nefer and her numbers. Slime data.
    His backmind quickly scanned the data streams. News strands were full of the human among them. Wagers clogged the fields: the human would stay, for how long; he would leave, by when. Nefer would kill him, the choice of execution style. Some wagered that there were more humans, their true numbers, what they would do. Some bet on war.
    Vod noted with chagrin that Maret was assigned as the human’s custodian. A flurry of exploratory wagers flickered into view. She would fail, by when. She would lose favor, she would fail in training, she would achieve ronid, she would not. So this was the path, Vod thought, by which Nefer would ruin Maret. He forced himself to attend tothe wager streams. There appeared a shocking wager on which past kin the human had defiled in the reliquary. Many calls for censure greeted this wager; it was withdrawn. Then a flood of sentimental remembrances, wagers in honor of past kin, a show of devotion, many halfhearted and skimpy, an emotional crest in the data flow soon subsumed by the general flood of speculation on the human captain and the baleful events that his arrival must portend. Events that fluxors saw as
interesting
and statics as
ominous
.
    All in all, it was an uproar. A fine distraction that he would not put it past Nefer to have orchestrated. Diggers were dying in the relentless boring through Down World.
But now we have a human among us to breed new fortunes in the wager fields
. Well, Maret was less and less the fluxor to lead them from their misery. Maret tended strongly to study, and though scholarship was all very well, scholars were not leaders.
    Nefer herself groomed Maret for scholarship, funded her. So Maret studied. Already she knew more than most of her teachers. She knew mathematics, history, her kin to the twelfth net, and even spoke the human standard language. It would be so like Nefer to use Maret’s strengths against her.
    In the tendency of dwellers to be either fluxor or static, Maret was, Vod believed, more central on the scale than most. Though a fluxor, she tended more toward tradition and caution than most fluxors—more than himself, certainly—and therefore had appeal as a leader who could command the respect of statics. Vod had alienated most dwellers at one time or another. But it was his birth stamp, his pattern. Dwellers do not change their markings, the saying went.
    As his tendril disengaged from the gate, he noticed Irran sitting next to him along the tunnel wall. Her scent stirred him. But already the diggers were moving back towork, and he abandoned the idea of finding a side lobe with her. Irran was always one to rush the season.
    Along with Harn and Wecar, he traipsed back toward their stations in the borer.
    Wecar spoke. “The human,” she began. “Maret-as will show you the human before we see him.” She was curious to see this fabled creature.
    Vod hurried to answer before the machine drowned out all talk. “We’ll see what Nefer decrees. Maret has no say in this.”
    “They say he is pale as a mushroom,” Wecar said.
    “And bad smelling,” Harn added.
    “Nefer Ton Enkar will kill him,” Wecar said. She climbed onto the borer, into the driver’s well.
    Before Wecar could close herself in, Harn threw back: “Nefer won’t
kill
him, she
sent
for him. Otherwise, how could he be here?”
    There was no good answer for this question. But if Nefer had sent for him, Vod mused, why?
We are done with war
. They had fought the humans to their knees. Hemms, who even Nefer must attend, bragged that the humans had sued for peace. And ahtra granted it, even though it would have been only justice to kill them all.
    As Wecar slammed the driver’s well door, Vod and Harn took their places in the cab. The cutterhead growled to life, biting into