Free Tropic of Creation by Kay Kenyon Page B

the ridge grabbed Sascha’s attention. Two more soldiers, fully armed, climbed up onto the ridge from below.
    Cristin latched on to Sascha and urged her along the ridgeline, with soldiers leading and at the rear, watching everything.
    “What’s happened?” she asked her mother in a low voice.
    Cristin’s face was streaked with mud, sweat, and butterfly pulp. A pink wing with a lacy pattern was pasted onto her cheek like a tattoo. She spat to one side, an action that Sascha had never seen from her mother, much less in public. Evidently the prospect of swallowing bug juice overcame her scruples.
    “Something bit one of the men. It must have been venomous,” her mother said.
    “Is he all right?”
    “No. He’s dead.” Cristin brushed bug litter from Sascha’s face and braid, but Sascha broke away to walk next to her father.
    When she started to apologize, he stopped her. “Sascha, you’ll stay out of the forest now,” he said softly.
    “Yes, sir.” His gentle tone drove home his edict more than any lecture.
    All the way back to camp Sascha checked the backs of her hands, finding scratches that might or might not be bites, and listening to her body for evidence of venom.

9

    H oisted on the shoulders of dwellers, sixteen rugs wound their way to the reliquary. Vod knew the procession was under way and he wanted badly to be there, but only kin were excused from the digs to bury the dead. The digging must go on. Unless, as now, he was favored with one of the Paramount Borer’s regrettable lapses of efficiency.
    The borer was broken. By the look on the Second Engineer’s face, the delay would cost several spans of digging time. The old static looked directly into his face, as though it were Vod’s fault the day’s lineal output was ruined. Coworkers gathered around, staring balefully at the great borer with its mangled blade. A broken machine was ever a reminder that Down World could strangle as well as nurture. From the diggers’ expressions, Vod thought he could tell which of them had wagered on the output numbers, and which were losers.
    With the impassive skin of a true static, the engineer kept her color, but gazed long at the borer as though searching for a sign—perhaps a miraculous recovery from its broken condition. Engineers were a superstitious lot,putting great store in the timing and type of breakdowns, reading them against historical maintenance trends, discerning patterns. But to Vod, the meaning of breakdowns like this one was clear enough: dig too fast and the rock will kill you.
    As static maintenance workers swarmed over the borer, Vod slipped away from his work unit, aware that he must hurry before the borer growled back to life.
    The contusions on his body from the slide were nearly healed after the ministrations of the physiopath, but one knee protested his hurried pace. Limping, he hurried past fluxors digging side tunnels. They hailed him as he passed, and he acknowledged them, knowing each by name and many up to the third kin net.
    Vod slipped into a downway. A temporary stairset, it was a raw, crumbling place, without a growth of hab and supported by foam beams. He blinked so frequently from the suspended dust that his sight seemed to be a succession of pictures rather than a seamless reality. But this was error. The Data Guides said that all life was a process. It was error, they said, to believe in separate things and particles. All matter and all events were interrelated, all ways interrelated, as the realm of the submolecular was said to demonstrate. No one thing is fundamental; all is relational.
    But he was no scholar. He had dug since he was a child. The HumanWar required that everyone work, and many fluxors chose the patriotic way of digging and physical work. He had not got far with philosophy. Only as far as politics.
    He passed portals leading to the multilayered digs, where fluxors carved new ways forward. A major portal led onto the extension of the Prime Way, the major