Tropic of Creation by Kay Kenyon

Author:Kay Kenyon [Kenyon, Kay]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-78029-4
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-03-02T05:00:00+00:00

23

Vod was seen and not seen. He appeared for an instant at the head of an up way; he was glimpsed jumping into a chute; he was seen OverPrime and, at the same moment, UnderPrime. Wagers began on where he would be seen again, and when. Sightings of Vod were sworn by fluxors and statics alike. He appeared in an enactment; dwellers who watched the drama thought he was an actor. Later the actors said it was all improvisation with Vod the Digger, who walked onstage and said: The world has changed. How shall we be?

It was a question Vod had no complete answers for. But when Maret joined him, together they would forge a change. Her brains, his fervor. The rumors in the flow gave him hope. Dwellers thought they saw him everywhere, but it was their own hopes they saw. They yearned for change, he thought, or had he become mad as Hemms?

At the head of the ancient upway, Vod dug a short tunnel through to Ankhorat, and, at the last, pierced the hab carefully to minimize bleeding. Peering out, he heard the pulsings of the recyclers and the throb of the generators. Down the way, shadows of maintenance workers—statics who would betray him in an instant—flickered against the hab. Arching snakes of hosing loomed large, as the workers labored beneath the exposed flap. He sprinted to the nearest nub and plugged in, there leaving a data trail for Maret, code terms for where she might find him.

Slipping back into the upway, he tended the hab, knitting the flesh into place, leaving only the smallest evidence of bruising. Though by tradition maintenance work was a static function, Vod was not unfamiliar with upkeep of the hab. As a digger, he was accustomed to repairing the sheath, where its growing tip extruded into raw digs.

He scurried down the stairs, disturbed at having to descend an upway. But here, with most stairs collapsed and choked with soil and stone, custom must give way to necessity, and, liking the sound of it, he filed the notion away in backmind.

Once back in the ancient Prime Way, Vod shone the light of his stolen headlamp on his water-collection tubes, still producing enough water for his hydration needs; as for food, the lorel proliferated here, where the hab placed no limits on its fruitings. The role of revolutionary went better on a full stomach, he had to admit.

The ways echoed with his footsteps, recalling the tread of so many who had gone before. The sheer darkness of the place coaxed images from shadows, to one unaccustomed to the dark. But when he brought his light to bear on the presumed spot, he found only the hab, creased and rigid, or a gaping portal to up- and downways, inhabited only by memories. Vod was not one to believe in the vitality of the dead. Here and now was life enough.

A thud of something behind him. He stopped, swinging his head around to shine the lamp. Nothing.

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