5

Deep in the flow of data, Maret Din Kharon became aware of a disturbance. Something was pushing on her body. This would be highly discourteous in the public data lobe where she had gated in. Reluctantly she disengaged from her devotions.

Vod Ceb Rilvinn stood at her side, nudging her shoul-der. His gritty digger clothes were noted with sidelong glances by those nearby.

"Maret-as, attend me!" he said, careful not to touch her again.

"I am here, Vod-as." In truth, she was struggling to re-turn. She released the data plug, and curled the tendril to her neck. "What is it?"

"Nefer Ton Enkar. She calls for you, but you haven't heard a thing; you've been wasting yourself with kin wa-gers. " His expression conveyed what he thought of her de-votions.

Maret's skin prickled at the mention of Nefer. "She calls me? When?"

"Now! For the past span and more." His agitation drove him to his feet again, tugging at her.

If Nefer was calling her so urgently that even the dig-gers knew, then she was very late. More debits against her. Nefer would rejoice.

Vod hurried her along with a discreet touch at her left elbow, urging her past others who found this little side way conducive to their data needs. No one would inter-rupt here—unless it was Nefer Most Prime herself.

Vod fumbled at the portal to the nearest travel chute, opening it wide for her. He had paled in his emotional dis-tress, causing his markings to recede. Vod was ever too emotional, but his concern was sweet.

"Vod-as, why hurry me to my detractor?"

"So she won't debit you beyond recovery."

"I am ever in her debt."

"She'll ruin you," he growled. His eyes held hers in a gaze that would be rude had they not been friends so long.

"Nefer needs me." She was Nefer's Chief Data Illumi-nator. It was not a trivial position.

"Then don't keep her waiting." He slammed the hatch behind her.

"Nefer Ton Enkar," she vocalized, and the sled shot away, an approved transit from Nefer herself, no doubt, and a luxury of mixed benefit that Maret had come to as-sociate with excruciating audiences with her static mis-tress.

Eli fought his way back to consciousness. Through blurry vision he saw a small room without ornament or furniture other than the pallet on which he lay. But it was less a room than a smoothly carved space, walls meeting ceiling in an uninterrupted line. He was bound firmly, lying on his side.

An ahtra kneeled before him. He or she wore loose long pants and a cropped shirt, cut from a richly patterned material in brown and red. From his one previous encoun-ter with ahtra civilians, he recognized the typical garment pattern of squares within squares. Males and females dressed alike, he knew, but by the drape of the shirt he guessed this individual was a female. The face, hands, and forearms were covered with the faint circular markings for which humans gave ahtra the sobriquet pocks. This individual bore a large oval pattern precisely between the eyes.

Eli spoke. "I am Captain Eli Dammond, of Congress World Sixth Transport Division. I meant no harm, coming here." If they hadn't heard the war was over, he hoped they'd take the news well.

The ahtra gave no indication of having understood him. Eli noted the thick data tendril that curled from the left side of the back of the bald skull. It was folded tightly against the head, reaching almost to the neck.

The ahtra leaned in closely, staring at him, eyes pro-foundly dark blue, the whites no more than a halo around the extended iris. A nictitating membrane closed up from below as it blinked. Its graceful lips parted to reveal small white teeth and an expression that might have been a be-grudging smile or a heartfelt sneer.

They left him alone then, tightly bound, ignoring his calls of protest. When they finally came for him and sum-moned him to his feet, it was a relief to move.

They led him out of the cell, and down a brightly lit corridor with a ceiling just a little too low to look proper. He was taller than his guards, a full head taller, but it wasn't a great advantage when they were armed and he wasn't. Passages diverged frequently from the corri-dor they followed, revealing a bewildering array of tun-nels and stairwells. All were covered in a slightly irregular, rubbery-looking material. He took pains to remember this route, trying to maintain his orientation to his entry point.

Though he'd been stunned or drugged, he thought he had been conveyed some distance from the burial chamber on a mechanized transport.

Bad luck that they'd come upon him in the burial chamber—but his reception might bode worse than of-fended sensibilities. He had discovered an extensive under-ground warren; this labyrinth was no longer an ahtran secret. Unless they killed him…

His escort brought him to a room where a patterned carpet covered half the floor.

Two ahtra faced him, one seated on the carpet, the other on the bare floor. One of them—from the discernible oval in the center of her forehead—might be the one who had inspected him earlier. The other individual was seated off to the side, wearing more simple attire, yet patterned. This aide—if that was the designation—spoke:

"I have your speech, and will signify for Nefer Ton Enkar, who requires your attention."

The accent was an excellent approximation of Stan-dard. "I understand," Eli said. Perfume saturated the air, bringing a slight nausea upon him. Or perhaps it was this close view of the hairless, bronze-skinned creatures, aliens he had seen before, had seen close up… and under worse circumstances.

The one called Nefer spoke, articulating the guttural ahtran speech.

The interpreter said, "My mistress wishes to know how you came to the burial place."

He decided on the short answer. "In the digging ma-chine, which we found on the surface. We meant no harm."

"How many came with you?"

"Just myself."

The interpreter spoke now to Nefer, and they con-ferred for some time, with Nefer keeping her gaze on the carpet. Complex symbols nested in squares within squares, like a mandala in reds, black, and gray.

The interpreter translated. "Why did you venture to disturb our departed kin? Do your people not tend to show honor to the dead?"

"It was an error of ignorance. I couldn't guess it was a burial site. My people don't bury our dead this way."

"You would not be aware of human catacombs?" the interpreter asked without reference to Nefer.

Old Earth had societies where catacombs were used. It astonished him that the ahtra knew this. "Yes,"

he said, "but it is a very ancient custom, no longer much known. I apologize for the offense."

The blink came from the bottom up. "Perhaps you were careless?"

He ignored the rebuke. He had no wish to convey un-due deference. "Please translate my apology for your mis-tress."

As far as he could tell, his interpreter did so. Hearing this, Nefer raised her hands slightly in a gesture he took for acceptance, but which might also have been a shrug of indifference. Nefer looked at Eli for the first time. He thought he had seen more sympathetic eyes on drill ser-geants. But ahtran eyes were very large—larger than a horse's. It was disconcerting, and perhaps accounted for their look of a raptor.

Seeing the two ahtra together, he no-ticed that this Nefer looked different than the interpreter, with less prominent markings.

The interpreter spoke again. "My mistress would know your rank and mission among us and how many are with you… above."

He told the truth, since it wasn't clear to him if more or fewer troops would be to his advantage. He explained the situation of the marooned group, and that he had intended to leave the surface within a week, having stayed long enough to collect evidence in regard to the absence from duty of Luce Marzano and her crew. The discovery of the working hexadron and the tunnels, however, prompted an investigation, armistice or no.

There was a long silence as both ahtra stared at the floor. Finally, Nefer asked, through the aide, "What arma-ment have you brought with you?"

"We have little. We are a transport ship. No threat to you."

When the aide translated this, he noted that the lead ahtra's data tendril jerked, almost like a startle reflex.

The interpreter looked up at him. The dark eyes fixed him in a disconcerting, long gaze. When the gaze was with-drawn, it was like a sentence being passed. The room grew stifling—overwarm and more perfumed.

"Release my bonds, as a courtesy," he said. "You have my word I intend no violence."

Nefer granted permission and the aide came over to unfasten the ties. The aide's facial patterns were mirror images on each side, with the largest ovals resting on the cheekbones.

"What is your name?" he asked.

The ahtra's head turned to the side, avoiding his eyes while working the ties. The light caught the skin tracings in high definition for a moment, showing gradations of bronze coloring, deepening to brown. "I am Maret," the aide answered very low.

Eli rubbed at his wrists and arms while the aide moved back into place. Before questions could resume, he said, "My superiors will want to know the purpose of your presence here. How shall I answer them?"

Nefer took a long time to answer.

Maret translated. "We occupy this world as is our right. Below."

They sat for some time, waiting for Nefer to continue.

When she did not, Eli ventured, "You abide by the treaty terms?" Not that he would believe their answer.

"It happens we have always been here. It is not forbid-den by treaty."

"I am free to go?" The silence greeting this was rather longer than he would have liked. "It would be against the treaty for you to keep me here."

"Yes. This presents a difficulty."

He filled the silence by saying, "Perhaps I can help you with your difficulty."

Nefer turned to the interpreter and spoke softly for a time. Then she rose and moved past him, toward the entrance. She spoke something directly to him for the first time. The words were like rocks ground together. She left the room, ushering in four other ahtra, who remained standing by the door.

Maret looked at the floor as she translated, "My mis-tress says she is very sorry."

The heat in the room was mounting. "I hope she has no reason to be sorry for what she can still avoid doing." The gaps in their conversation were swollen silences, with a presence of their own. He waited.

Finally Maret looked at him. "You cannot leave now."

"Then when?"

"As you measure it, you would say… a few weeks. I am very sorry."

"My people will grow alarmed at such a delay. It will attract military attention." He thought that might not be true. They could leave without him, assuming he had suf-focated in the capsule or in the tunnels.

"Yes, regrettably."

"What is the difficulty? Your position, if you hoped it to remain secret, is likely to be exposed, even if you never release me. There's no point in keeping me here, and much reason to permit my return."

After a slow blink, she said: "I very deeply regret to bear the news to you that your people will all die. I am very sorry. There is nothing we can do."

He stared at her.

Her dark eyes were calm as she said, "No one will survive—above. I am sorry."

He fought back his alarm. "If you attack,'Congress Worlds will find you and destroy you. These tunnels can't protect you." That was no bluff. They would come, for the general's daughter and granddaughter—eventually.

"We will not attack. It will not be our doing. You have no armament… to speak of. You will tend to be over-whelmed."

"Let me go back, then, to warn them." She was stand-ing up to go. He also rose, aware of the guards shifting behind him. "No matter who attacks my people, you will be blamed. The armistice is fragile.

Maret, do you want war?"

"No."

"Then help us. Let me warn them."

"This would not be possible."

Her passivity was maddening. He found himself step-ping toward her, gripping her by the forearm. "By God, it is possible!" As he held her arm, she visibly paled.

The guards grabbed him from behind, and he allowed them to restrain him for the moment.

Maret's eyes took on a glaze as she stood taller and brushed at the place where he had grabbed her.

"They are as dead already," she said placidly.

He surged forward, despite the restraints. Strong hands locked him in place. Maret hastily backed away from him, retreating toward the door. He cried out after her: "No, this will not happen!"

She paused in the doorway, saying, "No one can hear you." Then the door closed behind her with sucking noise.

* * *

A thin stream of dirt cascaded onto Vod's head from the bare rock overhead. He looked up into the blackness where foam girders held the lid of the tunnel in place. So far from the comforting walls of DownWorld, the smell of dirt and the sight of oozing water claimed his senses. He was un-easy, though he'd spent his whole life working amid the dirt and the wet.

The tunnels here were wrong, no matter what the Prime Engineer said.

They had eighteen increments of rest before work re-sumed. Around him, his fellow workers slumped against the walls, fatigued, plugged in. Crouching among the shavings of the tunnel, he sank his tendril into the tempo-rary gates strung along the work shaft.

His backmind swelled with data.

Nefer Ton Enkar commandeered a forward position for her latest data. It hove into view, bragging of comple-tion rates, hexals of ways dug, rebored, renewed, and in-spected. She bragged of safety records, projected outputs, maintenance cycles, and increments of cost. He bypassed this propaganda with irritation, barely suppressing a pal-lor 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 hu-mans, 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 flick-ered into view. She would fail, by when. She would lose fa-vor, 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 to the 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 with-drawn. Then a flood of sentimental remembrances, wagers in honor of past kin, a show of devotion, many half-hearted 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 for-tunes 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 lan-guage. 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 tradi-tion 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 to work, 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 stone.

Vod's tendril no more than touched the data plug when he knew something was wrong. The pressures had mounted to limits of tolerance, ground shifts signaled from all sides. He beat the warning system by a breath, shouting over the voice path, "Out, out! Get out!" He heard the driver's cab door open, heard bells clanging. Through the cab window he saw the First Engineer racing away to safety, a sure sign from a cowardly static that a ground shift was under way. Vod found himself outside the borer amid pandemonium. The Second Engineer tried to urge Wecar to return to the driver's well to back the machine out, but she refused. Now Vod was in a crowd of workers shoving to get out of the tunnel even as the ground creaked around them. Sand cascaded from overhead. Rocks spit onto their helmets.

Vod stooped beside Wecar, her helmet dented by a great stone. As he dragged her forward, a roar sped toward them from the habitat of death itself. Billowing dust over-took them, followed by a deluge of rock and soil. It caught Vod's feet, pitching him headlong, then carried him for-ward in a monstrous wave of dirt. It struck the breath from his chest and locked his arms in place, ripping Wecar from his grasp.

Soil drilled up his nose, and he knew the terror of suf-focation… but then a draft of cool air touched his head and his face. He snatched a breath. The dirt fell over him again. He was pinned in the slide like a boulder. He felt someone—Wecar he hoped—squeeze his ankle, once, twice. He lay rigid in the weight of the spill, wiggling his head a little to form a hole by his nose. Then he heard voices and someone was freeing the dirt around his head, then his shoulders. As strong hands gripped under his armpits and pulled him free, he saw Wecar's hand protruding from the snub end of the slide.

"Wecar," he gasped, looking into the faces of his fellow diggers. "Find Wecar."

They left him propped up against the wall and returned to the fray. Moments later a rumble heralded a further slump of debris. He scrambled back to the massive incur-sion of soil, digging with bare hands alongside his co-workers.

Much later, when all hope was spent, he staggered out of the fresh dig, past the terrible faces of kin assembling down-tunnel, carrying the rugs of those they feared dead.

But it was Wecar's hand reaching from the soil that long remained in his mind.