Kay Kenyon - Tropic of Creation

TROPIC OF CREATION

Kay Kenyon

A Bantam Spectra Book /November 2000

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For Donald Maass

My intention is to tell Of bodies changed To different forms.

The heavens and all below them,

Earth and her creatures

All change,

And we, part of creation,

Also must suffer change.

—Ovid, Metamorphoses

I

Two suns beat down on the eroded hills, cooking the air, making it hard to see the landscape except

through a wavering mirage of heat. Captain Eli Dammond removed his hat, wiping the perspiration from

his forehead, and peered for a moment at the sun—not the primary, but its dwarf sister: small, red, and

swelling in the sky. The dwarf star was no bigger than his thumbnail at arm's length, but even so, it

seemed to stoke the morning's heat to a near boil.

This far from camp the landscape lay barren and uniform—gully and dune, gully and dune—for miles. It

looked like so many lands in the Congress Worlds: blasted and sere from war. But here on Null, nature

alone had done the job.

At the crest of the next gully he saw Corporal Willem waving his arm.

"Captain Dammond, over here. It's here." Corporal Willem pointed into the wadi and skidded down the

far side, disappearing from view.

Young Sascha Olander looked up at Captain Dammond for permission to run ahead and see Corporal

Willem's prize.

"It's no place for a youngster," Willem had groused on the hike out from camp, and he'd been right. But

Eli was not about to deny the general's granddaughter her small adventure. At fourteen, she was beyond

spoiling. The word had no meaning for a young woman who would have every privilege and never think

twice about it.

"Go ahead, then, Sascha," he said.

He caught a glimpse of her grin before she was sprint-ing down the lee side of the hard-packed dune and

up the next one.

Eli set out after her, his boots crunching over a litter of sticks protruding from the soil. He went heavily

armed, the range gun a comfortable bulk at his hip. Though the armistice had held for over a year now, if

the ahtra broke the peace, no one would be surprised. Some, like Corporal Willem, hoped for it. The

corporal had a regen arm and eye and looked forward to a little payback. As bad as re-gen limbs

looked, the-eyes were the worst, swollen trans-lucent fruits that nevertheless gathered light and saw the

world as well as the original, alpha eyes—better, the enlist-eds vowed.

Still, it was an uncharted world, and he had his people go armed.

Topping the rise, he saw the three of them waiting for him in the wadi, poking at the dusty hulk that

Corporal Willem had found earlier that morning. Next to Willem stood Luce Marzano, captain of the ship

and 112 crew marooned on the planet for the past three years. Like Willem, she wore the brown uniform

of infantry, patched in places, and faded by now to the color of sand. Alert but relaxed, she'd had plenty

of time to ferret out trouble if there was any. But she'd made her report: the locale was devoid of life,

inimical or otherwise. The enlisteds called the planet Null; in three years, they'd had no occasion to

change their minds.

The massive continent dominating this hemisphere was a quiet, scoured land, rumpled only by fingers of

wind through sand. The most action this place would see was the dwarf star, coming round for a visit

after a four-year absence, and bright enough now to cast a shadow at night.

Sascha was already climbing on the bank above the contraption, kicking sand from around its metallic

sides.

"Sascha," Eli called. He waved her away from the de-vice. The thing might be booby-trapped. But in

three years, Marzano's crew had found twenty-eight similar objects— now twenty-nine—and none of

them was wired to deto-nate.

Captain Marzano met Eli as he strode down the bank into the wadi. She cocked her head toward the

machine— a craft, by all appearances, just like the others. "Looks like this one's newly minted," she said.

"Hell, it's in better shape than I am."

Eli smiled at that, then fell back to neutral. Best to remember he might soon be a witness in an inquiry into

her possible desertion from duty… But he liked Luce Marzano. She was tough and confident, and at

forty-some, still handsome. And also gone missing the last two years of a war that had bled off the better

part of a genera-tion. Now, a year into the armistice, Eli's ship had found the marooned crew and the

ruined ship Fury, presumed lost in action. Or now, it would seem, just lost.

"So they've been here recently," Eli said, walking with Marzano toward the hexadron. It was half buried,

like all the others, in the soil. Maybe it was good they went armed.

"Recent enough," Marzano said. "They used this place for something. Training, maybe?" She squinted at

the small vessel before them.

Corporal Willem wiped a small section of hull clean of dust. "Like it's right off the assembly line, sir."

When Willem said sir, he looked at Captain Marzano, instead of Captain Dammond, a slight that Eli

ignored for now. He saved his object lessons for bigger lapses.

Marzano's crew didn't like him snooping around the crashed Fury looking for signs of cowardice. Hell,

he didn't like it. But Marzano herself was pushing hardest for a thorough search, urging Eli to inspect and

document every ship system, mangled or not.

There were things in her favor. Even if she could have repaired the giant fighting ship, it had no launch

capacity from the ground. She had pulled off a minor miracle just negotiating an atmospheric entry and

controlled crash-landing. So she wanted a clean bill of health exonerating her of sabotage, not an

ambiguous report that would dog her career… and by God, he would give her that respect. It wasn't as

though he had better things to do. Here he was, thirty-seven years old, a captain of the Sixth Trans-port

Division—advancement prospects slim to none— with a grimy kettle of a ship and a crew that said his

name like a wad of spit shot out. He wouldn't wish that fate on anyone, least of all Luce Marzano.

" 'Spose there's ahtra bodies in this one, sir?" Willem asked.

"That's what we'll find out," Eli answered.

Willem's eyes were flat. He hadn't been talking to Eli Dammond, and probably didn't like being answered

by an alpha captain who wore the blue of Transport while better men wore the brown of battle.

From the exposed section of the vessel, Eli could see the ship was a miniature of an ahtran warship, at

least in its shape, with six sides, sloping slightly toward the top. The craft, like the others Marzano's crew

had found in the vicinity, was big enough for two ahtra, maybe three in a tight squeeze. The intriguing

difference with this particular hexadron was that beneath a coating of dirt, it might be of recent

origin—might even be in working order.

Since his arrival here Eli had seen several of them, and like Marzano, he took them to be landing craft.

But they found no vestige of the late enemy, no electromagnetic sig-nature as they scanned the planet.

Nothing odd about finding implements of war strewn about, Eli admitted. Half of known space was

littered with skeletons of me-tal and bone from thirty years of mayhem. Except here there was no sign of

battle. Add to that, some of these craft were old—weathered, time-battered carcasses slumping to ruin.

And some were newer.

It was as though ahtra had been coming here for hun-dreds of years. By twos and threes.

A slap of wind came out of nowhere and grazed sweat from their faces, cooling their skin just when they

felt they might see flesh split open from the heat. Turning into the breeze, Eli scanned the horizon where

puffs of clouds massed like suds—a rare sight, Marzano commented. She'd had crew set out basins

against the possibility of rain for the last five days. But each afternoon the sun struck the clouds back with

hammer strokes of 115 degree heat, and the basins lay hot and empty. The only water was beneath the

ground, sucked up by the nearby stand of desiccated pillars that passed for trees: the copse the enlisteds

called the Sticks. The trees hoarded the water inside, in cisterns. From these, the crew tapped and

rationed out water, pure as snowmelt, hot as geysers.

Sascha was prying on the hatch door of the hexa-dron.

"That will do, Sascha," Eli said.

She obeyed, stepping back from the alien craft. She bumped her hat off her head, letting it hang down on

her back by its straps, and allowed her black hair to escape its long braid in sweat-soaked strands. The

freckles her mother so hated were popping out by the minute. Pocks, Cristin Olander called them, the

same as the enlisteds called the ahtra.

Corporal Willem released the hatch covering. As Eli peered into the dusky interior, he thought he caught

a whiff of the ahtra smell: sweet and sour, fermented. A thread of memory released sounds, like birds

startled from a bush… deep, throaty shouts and distant screams. Even the ahtra could scream, though

they showed no fear, not even with a domino gun shoved into a pocked cheek.

But it was empty.

Eli hoisted himself into the craft, sitting on the edge of the curved seat to gain headroom. The interior had

a spare look, despite the characteristic ahtran patterns over every square inch of the bulkheads. A simple

control panel faced him on one wall, showing quirky instrumentation with depressions where switches

should be. Forty-five years of contact with the species, and Congress Worlds still had no clue why they

covered their ship walls with concen-tric squares… where they came from… why they lived in world

ships… how they functioned with bicameral brains… or how their star drive got an extra twenty per-cent

of speed out of pulse engines.

In the end it was that twenty-percent advantage that forced CW to bend knee—in what was

euphemistically called an armistice—so ahtra kept the riches of the Neymium Belt for themselves, ceding

a pauper's share to CW, and the warring parties backed off, licking their wounds.

Eli's grandfather could remember the days before the Great War when, for the first time, fast ahtran ships

made trade between the human worlds worthwhile, but the honeymoon was soon over.

"Captain Dammond," he heard from outside. Marzano was crouching and probing under the hexadron.

"This is curious."

He joined her to look under the craft. The underside contained a plate, stuck in a half-open position,

revealing a round mechanism within. Marzano reached up to pull the plate fully open, but it didn't budge.

Eli crawled under the craft, lying on his back in the dirt, staring up. Willem handed him a lamp from his

kit, and Eli aimed its beam into a circular maw of metal teeth. He lay there, absorbing this view. As he

reached up to touch the serrated edges, a whisper of soil tumbled into his face.

His brothers would know what this was. Hell, he knew what this was.

Marzano's face was in shadow as she crouched next to him. "What do you make of it?"

Getting to his feet, Eli slapped the dirt from his uniform. "Where did you say the other hexadrons were

found?"

She shrugged. "They're everywhere. In the Sticks. The wadis. Buried in hillsides, embedded in the

dunes."

"And you never noticed anything like that mecha-nism?" He gestured to the jammed, half-open plate.

"No. The others were smooth-sided. Or we assumed they were." Defensively, she offered: "We've had

more pressing matters. Like surviving."

Marzano gestured Willem to take Sascha up the wadi, and the corporal left with the girl in tow. Sascha

looked back to where the action was, pleading with great blue eyes for the captain to countermand the

order, but he didn't.

Looking down at his feet, Eli sorted the possibilities. Two shadows, one faint, one dark, spread out from

the soles of his feet, as though there were two of him stand-ing there. He squinted up into the beady eye

of the dwarf sun.

"What is it, then, Captain?" Marzano asked.

"They're not landing craft." He looked at her straight on. "They're burrowing craft."

Luce Marzano pursed her lips and frowned, as though unable to reverse her opinions on the instant.

Then, with Eli, she looked down at the baked soil of the wadi with a long, appraising gaze.

2

Luce Marzano and Master Sergeant Ben Juric leaned over the screen. The soundings showed an

underground tun-nel with a side branch to the east. So far, readings were showing a uniformity in

dimensions, fueling speculations about mining shafts, a secret arms cache, and lava tubes.

In this case, one was half the size of the other.

"A natural system of tunnels isn't proportional," Eli said.

Ben Juric looked at him, gracing him with a crumpled lip. Juric didn't talk unless he had something to say,

so Eli had learned to read his face. Tell me something I don't know, the master sergeant managed to

convey.

From outside the tent, the noise of grinding gears erupted, as the techs put the craft through its paces,

dig-ging down a yard or two; digging back up. The engineers cracked the control system easily. The

controls were sim-ple; hardest were the calibrations for depth, and the techs were closing in on that.

Techs had been swarming over the craft since the gradiometer reading had revealed the tunnels earlier

that morning. The soundings crew were now some half mile up the wadi, still following the main tunnel,

measuring the gravity-gradient changes that implied subsurface struc-tures.

"Ahtran tunnels, I say," Marzano concluded. Maybe she hoped they were. He couldn't blame her if she

was ea-ger to fight the war she'd been denied, eager to forget the past year's truce with the enemy.

At the mention of ahtra, one side of Sergeant Juric's face hardened—the alpha side that still bore normal

ex-pression. Eli would have welcomed his assessment, but the sergeant was wary of him. There was no

history between the two of them, no loyalty. Like the general's daughter and granddaughter, Juric was

merely hitching a ride on this quick run down through Keller Space.

Only now the shuttle run had taken on a differ-ent complexion. They both wished he could radio for

or-ders. Armistice or no, if you had a cache of arms down here, and God knew what ahtra surprises,

you damn well got your orders from Command, especially if you're just a stinking tub of a transport with

a tarnished of-ficer in charge, occupying a post a better man would have had if most of them weren't

dead or in regen baths. But radio was down, as Marzano had told them. If they hadn't discovered her

Mayday beacon in orbit, they would never have found her—even though they had been looking for her.

The satellite wasn't broadcasting— whatever electromagnetic interference disrupted the sur-face

transmissions also extended well into the planet's exosphere—but on retrieval the ship's techs had

decoded its message.

Eli caught Sergeant Juric's eye, just long enough to lock on. "We get the kinks worked on that digger, I'm

sending someone down," Eli said.

Juric nodded. In the three months of their acquain-tance, Eli had never seen Juric show surprise. If you

were a veteran of battle, you didn't show surprise, not at an officer's order. If Eli had said, Take a

spoon, Sergeant, and dig your way down to that tunnel, Juric would have nod-ded in just that same

way.

"Let me send one of my people, Captain," Marzano said. It was her plea, maybe, for a chance to salvage

some-thing from Null. Maybe she looked at Eli and hoped to God she'd never fall so low. He didn't think

she would. Patrician Luce Marzano, of good family, of the right connections, looked a little different to

Command than up-through-the-ranks Eli Dammond with top scores, no connections, and a worse crime,

by some lights, than de-sertion.

"We'll see who goes. We'll see if we can go." He turned to Juric. "Sergeant, keep the tech teams

working here. Give them some backup for a complete scan of the tun-nels. See how far they extend."

"Yes, sir. And the ship?"

Luce Marzano's ship, the Fury, was still out there on the flats with Eli's crew combing its systems for

evidence— one way or the other. "Keep working," he told Juric, and Marzano nodded, relieved no

doubt that her situation wasn't upstaged by a more interesting one. "Box up what you have and transfer it

to the Lucia." The Lucia, a sweet name for his ship of command, which was little better than a bathtub

with fusion drive. And it'd be a full tub once its complement of 157 lifted off.

He heard a gentle cough outside the tent.

Juric cocked his head toward the flap. "Mrs. Olander, sir. Shall I send her in?"

"No."

Juric's face said, Got the balls to snub the daughter of the general, do you?

"I don't think she likes to camp," Marzano said, man-aging a wry smile, even as Eli ordered all her crew's

damn-ing evidence boxed and loaded up.

He hardened his heart toward Luce Marzano and strode out of the tent to deal with his civilian

passenger.

"Let's walk, Mrs. Olander," he said, according her a nod, and then striking out at a brisk pace across the

floor of the wadi, toward the hexadron. But it was no good act-ing busy—and damn it, he was busy.

Cristin Olander at-tached herself to him like a burr, matching his long strides, jumping to the point:

"Captain, we don't need all this." She waved at the crews at work in the wadi. "You've done your

mission, and it's got nothing to do with these… balls of junk. I've got business at home. We're overdue."

"Yes, ma'am, I'm well aware." / have my duty, he wanted to remind the daughter of the general. A duty

to bring her home and also to swing into the binary system— where the Fury was known to have been

headed when last heard from—and look for clues to the ship's fate. Now, with the leisure of the

armistice, MIAs were a priority to the army—if not to this general's daughter who had the wealth to earn

a doctorate in math and the leisure to pre-sent a paper at a seminar of alphas with more neurons than

they knew what to do with.

"If you were well aware, we'd be halfway home by now." She stopped with Eli some paces from the

hexa-dron, eyeing it with loathing.

The engineering team—Marzano's crew—were stripped down in the heat to undershirts and fatigue

pants, flaunt-ing their regen forearms, deltoids, fingers. They waved desultory salutes at Eli.

"There she is," Cristin Olander said, pointing into the distance where Sascha could be seen with her

father, sil-houetted against the caustic blue sky, scrounging in the dirt for specimens. "She'll be ruined by

the time we get home. No matter what I do."

Eli looked at Mrs. Olander, wondering how much she could know of ruin.

She gave him a twisted smile, eyes making contact. "I know what you think of me, Captain. That I throw

my weight around." The smile broadened at his discomfort. "You must think so. Even I do sometimes."

She gazed off in the direction of her daughter and husband up on the rise. "You must wonder why I fret

over Sascha—why I don't just let her muck in the dirt, let her study biology."

Eli knew that biology was no avocation for a lady. He'd learned that much cooped up with Cristin

Olander on the three-month junket from Keller's star.

She continued, "It's because my general father won't permit it." She gave him another twist of her lips, a

surro-gate smile. "You think people like us can do what we will, but you don't know a thing."

Before she could unburden her privileged woes any further, he said, "I have the responsibility to

investigate that ship, Mrs. Olander. The careers of 112 officers and enlisteds are on the line." When she

had the grace to re-main silent, he added, more softly, "Perhaps you could send your paper on ahead."

"With radio out?"

"We'll be outbound in a few days. Send it then?"

They held each other's gaze. Finally Cristin nodded, saying, "Fine," in a tone that made it clear it wasn't.

She glanced out at the ridge. Sascha was disappearing down its far flank. "Maybe you could talk to her,

Captain. She'll listen to you. She likes you."

It offered a quick exit. "If it will help." He excused himself and walked away from her, up the wadi, in the

di-rection of the youngster who was gathering fossils and freckles, ruining her nails and her pretty alpha

skin.

A shadow skittered over the plain, just missing Eli. Above, a cumulus cloud sailed in a massive, bleached

globule, carrying its load of moisture far out of reach. The other side of the planet must sprout these

things, Eli thought. In that great shallow ocean, animal life, marine life, might flourish. Given half a chance,

Geoff Olander would be wading in that shallow sea right now, prodding at mats of algae, sampling

pillows of bacteria, with some-thing close to rapture.

Given the hand Geoff Olander was dealt on this tem-porary stop, the parched fossils of this hemisphere

would have to do.

Eli found Geoff and his daughter in a deep, wind-scoured ravine revealing slabs of crumbling stone and,

in the near distance, the hump of another hexadron, half caved-in with age. Geoff waved to Eli—a brief,

cheery hello—and bent over his work once more. Sascha held a sack half her size, the satchel of their

finds.

"How's pickings?" Eli asked Sascha.

"We have five bags of specimens," she said. "Great defi-nition, full body skeletals." She rummaged in the

satchel for an example.

Geoff shaded his eyes, looking up at Eli, with the same piercing blue eyes as his daughter. "Not reining us

in, I hope?"

"Might be best if you stayed in camp," Eli said. "A pre-caution." Against what? Against the social

taboos of an overprotective mother? But he let Geoff draw his own conclusions.

The man looked down the ravine with longing. "Best site we've found so far." He tapped at a slab of rock

with his small hammer, sloughing off a crumbling layer of mud. Then he sighed and stood up. "Couldn't

you give us a few hours?"

Feeling Sascha's eyes burn a hole in his back, Eli said, "As soon as you can, then."

Geoff snorted, but said civilly enough, "Caught be-tween two Olanders, eh?"

Eli was saved from answering by Sascha sidling be-tween them, shoving a transparent specimen bag into

Eli's hand. It contained the remains of a small creature, a jumble of dust and bones. "Nice fossil," Eli said,

playing the dolt, goading Sascha the way she seemed to love.

"It's not a fossil. It's a skeleton. Real bones. We found the whole skeleton together, and it looked rather

like a frog, ex-cept for spinules on the back." She traced the long spinules with her index finger. "I found

it, so I might get to name it. Something olanderi. Or, I could immortalize you, Captain. I could make this

one something dammondi. If you were nice and gave us an extra day to make scientific history."

Geoff raised an eyebrow, daring Eli to deny her.

Eli found himself smiling. "I'll take your request under advisement."

"Kiss of death," Sascha declared, gently placing the bag in her satchel like a fine piece of porcelain.

"A lot of bones here, then, Mr. Olander?" Eli saw for himself that the ravine was littered with them.

"Yes, a world of them. A biologist's dream."

"Then the place had life once," Eli said, meaning the bones, but looking at the hexadron.

"Still does, somewhere, I expect. Drought's driven them off." Geoff twisted a bone fragment in his hand, a

narrow span with an odd socket joint.

Eli knew it was more than an odd bone to Geoff—it was the chance to pierce a mystery or leave it

forever buried. But he saw it in Geoff dander's eyes more than in the bones.

"We'll never come back here," Geoff said softly. No challenge to Eli's authority.

"I doubt it." The planet was so far off the service routes that the Lucia was lucky to have found Marzano

and her crew at all.

Geoff sighed at the waste. "Five, six billion years of life—and all we have is what's in those sacks. I'd

almost stay behind, you know?"

Eli knew. Knew that urge to bend the rules when they needed bending.

Nearly overhead now, the yellow sun lapped up the very shadows at his feet, wrung sweat from his

hairline. Down the ravine, the ancient hexadron still had a metal glint beneath the baked-on dust. He

gazed at the thing, his mind looking for ways to bend the rules…

Noting his gaze, Sascha asked, "What about the under-ground cave, Captain?" He was marshaling his

arguments. If there are ahtra down there, it will take an officer to han-dle the encounter; its a

political matter, not a firefight… but the justification could come later. The longer you think, the

worse your decision, went the army adage.

The chance of a lifetime rang in his ears. After a beat, Eli answered, making up his mind. "I'll be going

down."

"Can I come with you?"

"No place for a lady," he said, straight-faced.

She regarded him with an icy stare. "Will you bring Captain Marzano with you?"

"I expect not."

That seemed to mollify Sascha, who monitored the doling out of adventures with great acuity.

Eli picked Sascha's hat off the rock where she'd dis-carded it and handed it to her. "Mrs. Olander will be

hap-pier with me if you wear this. Help me win some points?"

Sascha sighed and donned the hat, a world-weary ex-pression flitting across her face.

Geoff Olander nodded in the direction of the next wadi. "Think there's something down there, then?"

/ hope so, sprang to Eli's mind. It was a Dammond brother's response. Always a nose for trouble, drawn

to the action. Sometimes the action was more than they bar-gained for. Now three of his four brothers

were dead, killed in the war—the real war, Eli's father said, not the elite officer's war, cushioned by

command, out of the fray.

Once, coming back from officer candidate school, Eli and his father had duked it out over whether Eli

thought he was too good for enlisted rank. Neither could remember who swung first, but they both

landed some hard blows. Later, spent and gasping, they washed up together and sat down to dinner at

the big family table. Nobody said a word about their bruises, swelling like bread dough.

Geoff was still waiting for his answer.

"Only one way to find out," Eli finally said.

From the distance came the grinding shudder of the hexadron, having another go at the hard pan floor of

the wadi.

3

Sascha Olander and her parents had a deluxe tent, officer-quality issue straight off the newly arrived

Lucia. Nearby, Captain Marzano's tent sagged from three years of peeling-hot sun. Geoff Olander had

offered their tent to Marzano. But she had declined, as she should.

In the middle of that spacious tent, Sascha sat on a chair as her mother rewove her braid in front of the

silver-edged mirror that she'd hung from the tent pole.

Sascha pursued her point, though her mother was weary of the topic: "Why do you hate him so?"

"I don't hate him." Cristin pulled the braid so tight Sascha's temples ached.

"Despise him, then."

"I neither despise nor hate him, dear. I seldom regard him at all." She secured the braid with a band,

frowning at the wisps that sprang loose.

"That's so… dismissive," Sascha returned with some heat. "You're just like all the rest."

Her father looked up from his worktable, catching Sascha's eye, conveying his rebuke.

For his sake, Sascha toned it down a notch. "We're friends, Mother. I just want to watch him go into the

mine. Or whatever it is."

"It's a military matter. You'll just be in the way." Cristin checked her own hair in the mirror, the

short-cropped, stylish cut of a woman graduated from girlish braids.

Sascha needed a deep, cooling breath, but when she inhaled, all she got was a chest full of Null's hot,

yeasty air.

From the shadows in back her father's voice came. "It may not hurt, Cristin. I'll go with her."

Cristin turned on her husband with ferocity. "You al-ways give in. Each little thing just encourages her.

You don't remember what it's like, the obligations she'll have. She's nearly grown, Geoff."

"Then, for God's sake, let her have a few more days of childhood."

Sascha could see the fire stoked in her mother's eyes. "You think that's going to make it easier on her?

You don't see, do you? Already in camp she's got an enlisted friend…"

"It's only electronic chess, Mother," Sascha interrupted.

Cristin rolled on past, still locked on the enemy, her husband. "… with a vocabulary that could singe

metal, and hair that looks like it did.'"

"Nevertheless," Geoff said, attempting a neutral end, to salvage a truce.

"That's regen hair, and Nazim's lucky she's got any," Sascha mumbled, invisible—and oddly beside the

point— to the dueling adults.

Cristin looked at her husband a few beats. Finally, all she said was "She can't take no for an answer,

God help her."

Geoff continued in the usual way, which was to give the verbal win to Cristin and then do what he chose.

"This will only take an hour. Then she's yours for the day." He stood up to make his intention clear.

Mother hated to lose these contests. Suppressing the delight on her face, Sascha offered, "I'll study

differentials when I get back."

Cristin waved her hand in tired dismissal.

Sascha headed for the tent door. Her father opened the flap. "Hat," he said, donning his own.

She dashed back, swiping her hat from the table. Too late, Cristin caught her gaze. "Be careful who you

pick for heroes, Sascha."

"What do you care who my heroes are?" Then she re-gretted saying it, knowing it could refer to her

preference for her father over her mother, for biology over math, and she tried so hard not to fuel that

rivalry, and not to force any edicts over whether she should study a man's science or a lady's.

"I care," Cristin Olander said.

Feeling guilty now, Sascha backed away, toward the flap door. "I'll be back."

Kay Kenyon - Tropic of Creation

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