Kingdom of Cages (41 page)

“So,” said Farin brightly, breaking the silence and making Chena jump. “You do your visiting and I’ll meet you in the library
before sunset?”

“Right.” Chena tried to match his cheerful, casual tone. She didn’t think she managed very well. Down the bank, Peristeria’s
short wooden dock protruded from the rain forest and every nerve in Chena’s body hummed with fear and excitement. If she did
this, if she found the mushroom Nan Elle needed and got it back to Offshoot, she would strike her first real blow against
the hothousers since they murdered Mom. But if she got caught…

She rubbed the nail on her little finger. It was not real anymore and underneath it waited a quarter teaspoon of concentrated
alkaloid poison. If she got caught, the hothousers would not have the chance to do to her what they did to Sadia or Mom.

The dock pulled closer. The boatmen raised their oars. One opened the locked door by the prow and leapt from the deck to the
pier so he could catch the mooring ropes and secure the boat alongside.

With that as their signal, the passengers stood, rocking gently with the motion of the boat, and gathered what possessions
they had, mostly bundles to be slung on their backs or settled on shoulders or head.

Chena hitched the straps of her pack up on her shoulders, and looking to Farin for a last reassuring glance, she joined the
file of passengers waiting in the center aisle for the front door to open.

But as they filed toward the dock, she moved slowly backward until her hand closed around the latch for the stern door. She
hadn’t actually seen Captain Aban work the lock, and there was no way during the journey to check without someone noticing.
Still, Aban owed Nan Elle for the life of his child. Surely he would do as he promised. He would not leave her hanging.

The handle turned under Chena’s fingers. The door opened. Chena stepped out onto the deck. Without hesitation, she slipped
into the brown river water and promptly sank into muck up to her ankles.

Great.
She pulled her first foot free, wincing at the sucking sound it made.
A really promising beginning here.

Screened by the boat’s hull, she waded through warm, translucent water up to her waist toward the thick reeds and leaves of
the bank, praying the whole time she’d knotted her boots tightly enough. If she lost one in the river mud, she’d never see
it again.

Finally she made dry land, and there she clung, half in, half out of the water, trying not to think of the snakes and the
carnivorous fish she had read about. Something did brush past her ankle then, and something else nibbled her shin delicately.
Chena shivered, but she held still, keeping her eyes on the activity on the dock. She could not move until they cleared out,
and it seemed to be taking forever. The rowers lounged about talking to the passengers, who seemed to disperse only reluctantly
to their homes. Something else sampled Chena’s shin through her trousers. Chena shivered again.

Finally, finally, the people on the dock filtered away, leaving only a couple of rowers, who slapped each other on the shoulder
and retreated into the riverboat.

Gritting her teeth, Chena pulled herself out onto the bank and crouched in the thick green undergrowth. Ahead of her, she
could see the gleaming metal fence posts surrounding the village.

She was outside. She’d done it.

No, you’ve done part of it,
she reminded herself.
Only one part.

Chena couldn’t see anyone moving beyond her screen of greenery, which probably meant no one could see her. But just to be
safe, she crawled farther into the undergrowth. Water cascaded down onto her from the broad flat leaves, and she startled
a whole flock of emerald-green lizards that took flight up the trunk of the nearest tree.

She carefully unslung her pack, trying to make sure that neither her elbows nor her head popped up above the sheltering leaves.
Awkward in her crouching position, she unpacked Nan Elle’s precious camouflage suit. It was a pair of mottled green and brown
trousers, and a matching jacket with a hood that would cover all her hair and a gauze screen to hide her face. None of this
would truly hide her from the hothousers’ cameras, but the suit’s reflective and refractive properties would confuse the visual
and infrared signals and make her look more like a large animal than a human being. The hothousers used these suits to observe
animal behavior in the forests. Administrator Tam had given Nan Elle this one to help with her poaching. Once again, Chena
found she had reason to thank that particular hothouser, and once again, she wondered, if they couldn’t take a stand against
their own family, why he was helping hers. That implant in his head couldn’t possibly allow him to feel guilty about letting
Mom get killed… could it?

Chena pulled her small knife out of her pocket and slit the pack’s false bottom seam, removing her comptroller and compass.
She strapped the one to her wrist and tucked the other in her pocket. Then she shouldered her pack again and got to her feet,
maintaining her crouch. Somewhere her nervousness had vanished. In its place was a kind of elation. She was doing it. She
was invading the wilderness, and there was not one thing the hothousers could do about it.

Grinning to herself, Chena got her bearings from the compass, then hurried up the bank and plunged into the rain forest.

The alarm from Gem’s observational subsystem startled the city-mind out of three conversations, two Conscience downloads,
and a statistical data review. His annoyance was blue and red to his inner senses, but brief. The forest camera data was complicated
to interpret and false alarms were common, but every one had to be checked out, or else how could Pandora be properly protected?

Gem liked to keep things orderly. So he prioritized the tasks in process, assigned the data analysis to a subsystem, apologized
to the citizens undergoing Conscience downloads, and rescheduled, while bringing the conversations to a swift conclusion with
another apology.

All that done, he set the city monitors on auto-receive and turned his attention toward the alarm. The mote cameras were not
truly cameras. They were insects and spiders augmented with sensory transmitters so the scents and vibrations that the organisms
detected, along with any visual information, would be returned to the city. This way, there could be thousands of detectors
within a square mile of forest, returning streams of useful data with only minimal intrusion into the biosphere.

A cluster of motes in one of the river sectors had detected traces of what might be human sweat and, as their instincts required,
they were trailing after the source of the scent. The subsystem had alerted him because the source of the scent was not following
the confines of the quarantine fence.

Gem studied the forest map and the patterns of chemicals, vibrations, and light that the subsystem had already collected.
It was all suggestive, but he was not ready to raise further alert quite yet. He opened five separate signal-and-source databases
and routed the fresh input to them. His inorganic processors chewed both new and old data over for a few dozen seconds and
came back with a disturbing answer. All four databases agreed that there was a ninety to ninety-five percent probability that
this struggling bundle of light and scent was a human being outside the confines of the village.

Anger touched Gem, followed by a healthy dose of sorrow. Who would choose to do this? What reason could this person have?
The villagers had all the room they needed. The families of the complexes had luxury and company, creativity and safety. Why
did people persist in invading the biosphere?

There was, at least, no question as to what his actions should be. He passed the alarm on to the Guardians so they could alert
the family. An automatic transmission shot out to the constables in the four closest villages so they could be on the alert
for strangers and set up fence patrols. Finally he opened the subsystem that would allow himself and the Guardians to connect
with the interceptors.

Chena lifted her veil and wiped at the sweat pouring down her face as she wrestled through another few yards of rain-spattered
under-growth.
Should’ve allowed more time. Should’ve gone out yesterday. Dell had passenger clearance. No, couldn’t go with him. Dell would
sell out his mother, and if anybody asked questions, he’d say anything to cover his ass.

No, today is the only day. I’ll just have to make this work.

Nan Elle had taken her down to Peristeria once before so she could learn the routes and some of her connections, but she hadn’t
actually been in the forest then. She’d expected hot, and damp, with the water dripping from the canopy as if the trees themselves
were sweating. She’d been ready for the bugs swarming around her head and hands and rising in clouds around her ankles with
each step. Thongs tied her sleeves and pants legs tight. Her sealed collar almost choked her, but nothing was getting inside
her clothing. She knew this overwhelming caution was caused by a leftover fear from the day she saw the ants swarm, but she
did it anyway.

What she hadn’t been ready for was how unrelievedly dense the tropical undergrowth was. This wasn’t like the forest around
Offshoot, where there were large patches of shadow so thick that nothing grew there except piles of leaves. Every square inch
of ground here grew something, and it was usually big, broad, tough, dripping wet, and home to something reptilian or insectoidal.
Snakes hung like overripe fruit from the low branches. Eyes peered at her from shadows. Unseen things rustled the fallen leaves.

She thought wistfully of the machete in her pack as she wrestled her way between a
Siphonia magnum
and a
Cyclonia pandoran.
But unless she wanted to start a real manhunt, there were limits to what she could do. If she went hacking at Pandora’s precious
vegetation, she’d be starting a whole new game.

There were times she wanted to do just that. Hack at the whole world, make it bleed, make it scream, watch the hothousers,
who guarded the place so jealously that they didn’t even care about other
people,
go pale and sick with horror. It would be worth anything, she thought some days, to make them scream.

But then she’d swallow that thought and get back to work.

Like you should be doing now,
she reminded herself. Chena made herself stop in a fairly clear patch to catch her breath and think.

The secret to plant hunting, Nan Elle told her over and again, was to be aware of your surroundings. Every single plant in
the forest was linked to every other, making a great chain. If you could follow that chain, you could find the link you were
looking for, but if you saw it all as some kind of great green stew, you were done for.

So, all right, where am I on the chain? Salix tropica,
the tropical willow tree that sheltered her mushroom, needed standing water to grow. So Chena needed a marsh. She scanned
around her and decided the vegetation clustered more densely toward the north, a good indicator of water. She sucked in her
breath and tried to glide forward, as Nan Elle seemed able to do no matter where she was.

The ferns thickened around her, reaching up to her knees, then her shins, then her waist. The insects thickened too, and pitcher
plants yawned wide to lure them in. Getting there. She passed a cluster of bright yellow Peristeria orchids and, oh, glory,
Cerastium aquaticum,
which would grow thick and tall near standing water, but less so near running streams. She was approaching her marsh.

Splash!

Correction—Chena pulled her boot back, chagrined—she was
in
her marsh. There were the
Salix tropica
trees with their leaves like fat hands drooping down to trail in the pools of standing water, where frogs the size of Chena’s
head sat submerged to their eyeballs in black water and watched the fog of insects skimming the ponds. The tropical willow’s
gray bark was a terrarium for at least a dozen kinds of fungus, and some of the fungus grew other fungus, like the parasitic
belladonna mushroom.

The stuff she wanted would grow higher up, near the canopy, in the crooks of the branches where the dribbling moisture gathered.
Chena set down her pack, unlaced her boots, stuffed her socks inside, and slung them over her shoulder. When you had no help
and didn’t want to harm the tree, the best way to climb was barefoot. Especially knowing that if her unfeeling soles smashed
too many little fungi, she would effectively be leaving boot prints.

Chena dug her fingers and toes into the grooves in the bark and started climbing. She enjoyed climbing trees. She was good
at it. Even with a fully loaded pack on her back, she could swarm up the sides of the tallest tree like any squirrel. When
she was climbing, she felt strong and free.

All too soon, she reached a wide crook where the branches were patched with telltale umbrellas of pink and brown. Chena broke
off a piece of fungus and sniffed it, then broke a piece off the piece and tasted it, spitting it out instantly after she
did. Her tongue didn’t numb or itch, and the taste was salt and nut. This was the stuff.

Chena squatted on the branch, braced against the main trunk, and opened the collecting sacks hanging from her belt. Three
pounds of the stuff would be enough to dose fifty or sixty people and was a small enough amount that it could still be smuggled
to where it was needed. They’d have to hope the whole village wasn’t sick by the time Chena made it back. What they really
needed was a hundred pounds of the stuff, or a thousand, but they couldn’t have that.

Madra, after her third trip inside the hothouse, said they were giving all the same old reasons for not helping Offshoot.
Antibiotics and antivirals, they said, would introduce “an artificial pressure” on the microsphere, causing artificial evolution
of the microorganisms. Changes in the microsphere would have repercussions all the way up the life chain and therefore could
not be allowed.