Tropic of Creation Read Online Free Page A

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. “Thiswill 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 regretted 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.”
    She thought she heard her mother say, barely audible, “I doubt that.”
    Sascha burst into the bright wall of light just outside. Her father raised his eyebrows, she raised her own, and off they set for the hexadron.
    They passed the rows of tents, and the wood huts that supplemented Marzano’s military-issue hutches. Salted in among the tattered quarters were Captain Dammond’s crisp new igloo-style tents. These were the quarters of those soldiers with whom she’d shared three months’ berth, and who therefore had had time to hate her.
Privilege
, their eyes said when they looked at her.
Money. General’s whelp
. Some of the enlisteds were cleaning weapons, sitting in the last of the morning shade.
    All the long way from Keller’s star—Congress World Four—she got a double dose of education. The formalone, in math and manners from her mother, who finally had her daughter entirely under her thumb at close quarters; and the informal one, learned from the ranks of the enlisteds, on envy and the art of despising, even over such a small thing as the Olanders having a ship berth large enough for ten enlisteds and taking their meals with the officers.
    Thus it was that when assigned to the
Lucia
for transport to their new post—and seeing how the soldiers sneered at Captain Dammond behind his back, Sascha came to take his side. Whoever the enlisteds hated was someone very like herself.
    To catch the meager shade, she and her father walked along the edge of the Sticks, those tall spines of wood that sprouted like quills from the land, and which inspired her father to dub this the Gray Spiny Forest. Of the two camps established by Captain Marzano, Sascha and her parents were assigned to Charlie Camp, where the water requirements of ninety-four people engaged a harvesting operation covering two square miles of the Sticks. Baker Camp, established far enough away to assure its own water supply, exploited the eastern stick cisterns.
    What the enlisteds saw as sticks were actually plants of great complexity, ranging from short stubs to pillars over twelve feet high. Many of them were vertically striated with ridges, between which tracings of green appeared to carry on the plants’ photosynthesis. The grooves were deeply folded into the wood, as