Mary Rosenblum (2 page)

The end of the line.

She’d never spent time in microG before. Rabbit in the thorn patch. The Krator clan, Xai’s murderer, was an Earthside clan, just like the Huang clan. They wouldn’t look for her here.

So why NYUp, where Krator had as little presence as Huang? Not even Pause had yielded an answer, but this was where the assas¬sin’s trail had led her. I will avenge you, she promised her brother’s spirit as the elevator slowed and beeped at her. Xai would want vengeance. As their father did. Secure for MinimalG. The letters ran silver and gold across the wall in multiple languages, chasing them¬selves around and around the tubular walls. Not that she needed them, she was barely anchored to the floor by a shadow of down. Her stomach stirred, protesting, as she slipped into one of the padded harnesses that lined the wall.

Movement resumed. The harness cut into her shoulders slightly, not enough to be painful. Then … the downward tug ceased and she floated, held by the straps.

So far so good. Ahni slipped out of the straps. She swallowed, groping for up and down, but the featureless tube of the elevator offered her no orientation. The doors didn’t open and the annoyed blip of a beep told her that she was neglecting something … prob¬ably a password. Her palm tingled just above the threshold of feel¬ing as her embedded hardware dealt with the control plate. The door slid open …

… and she gasped.

She recoiled, a knee-jerk primate reaction, uncontrollable. That flinch started her tumbling and she bounced off the wall. Stomach knotting, she grabbed wildly for the door frame, missed, tumbled out into the blinding glare, floundering, helpless. Up. Down! She struggled for orientation as the world wheeled around her. Damp air, rich with unfamiliar smells. Soft green things brushed her. Hy¬droponics at the axis, she remembered, and the soft brush became recognizable as leaves, but up and down still refused to fall into place. Bad choice of thorn patch! She forced her burning eyes open, strug¬gling to bring the green glare into some kind of focus. Goggles. You had to use something up here. Would the fierce light blind her? She used Pause to quell a spurt of fear adrenaline, grabbed, feeling soft plant things crush beneath her hands. She tore free and grabbed again, palms slick with plant juices. This time the stems held and she halted. Behind her, the elevator beeped and the door whispered closed. Somebody wanted it.

So much for the thorn patch.

Still clutching handfuls of moist, bruised leaves, Ahni stretched out a cautious foot, holding tight to the anchoring plants. She felt something thick and fairly solid beneath her foot. A large column? Behind her, the elevator chimed again and she caught a flicker of movement off at the edge of vision–the door opening.

Before her conscious mind could catch up, she planted both feet against the leaf-covered column, knees bent. Her thigh muscles bunched and she shot forward, blind, arms shielding head and face, praying to all her ancestors that whoever had come down in the ele¬vator would miss.

She felt him, intent and at ease. Sure of himself.

Her shoulder slammed hard into something that gave some and sent her tumbling wildly, cartwheeling like a kid’s pinwheel or a kite spiraling down. She curled into a fetal ball, head down, rebounded from another column, grabbed, felt stems tear in a spray of moisture. One foot landed squarely on something and she pushed again, hard. Just go! She rocketed forward again.

Felt something tiny sting her shoulder. Felt his triumph.

Damn.

Vision faded and her body no longer worked. Paralysis? Or death? Her face hit something thin and whippy, then something harder, bruised, couldn’t do anything. Slowing … vision fading …

Ahni tried to close her burning eyes as her body drifted. Couldn’t do it.

An apparition appeared in front of her. Narrow face, like a hairless skull drawn into caricature by some art program. Weird milky eyes with no pupil, limbs too long for their thin boniness and they … bent. Like green bamboo. A demon. I am dying, Ahni thought.

The demon grinned at her, grabbed her wrist. She felt that … and experienced a moment of surprise, then more nausea as the demon yanked at her. Green and light fled by her and then she plunged into darkness.

“WHY?’” THE VOICE penetrated a midnight sea filled with half-seen sharks. Anger rumbled in it and fear. “What were you thinking of? Koi, you know better.”

“He was going to kill her. She’s pretty. And she couldn’t get around any better than a new baby. Why did he want to kill her? It … wasn’t fair. She couldn’t get away.”

Different voice, high and thin like a child’s. She didn’t feel a child’s butterfly presence, but rather a clear stillness, like a pool of water.

“Damn.” The anger voice rumbled. “Now what?”

Ahni tested muscle groups and was rewarded by a whisper of response. Sank deeper into Pause. Play dead … or maybe get dead.

“I can take her back, Dane,” the child-voice said. “Before she wakes up. I thought downsiders couldn’t come up here. Look at all those muscles! I’ll take her back and send her down.”

“Too late. She’s listening to us.”

Uh oh. Another empath. Change tactics. With a mental shrug, Ahmi opened her eyes and gasped, not needing to pretend confusion. The light stunned her.

“You’ll be all right,” the rich, rumbling voice said. “In the short term, the light won’t damage your eyes.”

She blinked, a major effort, struggling to sort out a kaleido¬scope of images.

Plants, her brain told her. But they were too big. She had walked in the jungle preserves of Indonesia and the Amazon and that was what first came to mind. Jungle. She floated amidst a forest of tubes as thick as her leg, furred with leaves and tendrils of a dozen different shapes and styles. Pea. She recognized the tendrils suddenly, starred with white blossoms and the small scimitar shapes of forming pods. Nearby, she made out a tangle of bean vines, Chi¬nese long beans, their skinny pods more than a meter long.

The images began to parse. Pea, bean, tomato, she recognized, eggplant, their furry leaves sheltering long, skinny thrusts of shiny purple black fruit, and peppers, green, orange, and yellow–all too large, and slightly strange. The light, turned thick and green by the dense tapestry of leaves, was tolerable. The plants grew on thick columns that vanished into a blur of green light above and below.

”Who are you and how did you get up here? This level is re¬stricted.”

She twisted toward the voice, tensed as the movement set her drifting. A hand caught her, damped the motion, and she found herself staring into the weird milky eyes and long face that she had seen as the dart hit her. The demon. Not a dream, then. She studied it. Cataracts? From the light? Not a child, but child sized, naked ex¬cept for an intricately wrapped band of fabric that hid its genitals. He–not it–had no body hair she noticed, and he clung to one of the thick leafy vines with long prehensile toes. He was the source of that pool-clear curiosity. And not human. She stifled her reaction, her gut icy, looking death in the face. They couldn’t let her leave now. The creature was pleased and excited, like the puppy she’d had as a kid. If he’d had a tail, he’d be wagging it.

“Meet Koi,” the voice said, tinged with bitter amusement now. “You’re wrong about him. And he just saved your life. He thinks he did, anyway.”

He was reading her very accurately. Ahni tore her eyes away from the grinning kid-thing– Koi? Like the golden fish in her mother’s courtyard pool? She turned toward the rumble-voice. Not old, not young, in that middle balance. Ropy muscles and thin limbs of a native, he expressed a wild mix of genes, European, a bit of North AFrica, maybe some Amerind, she guessed. He wore the green and silver NYUp singlesuit, same one the officials in the Ar¬rival Hall had worn, but his eyes were hidden by dark goggles. She couldn’t read him at all. Which made him a Class Ten empath. And there weren’t any Class Tens employed on NYUp. She had checked.

She dropped fully into Pause, accessing Data, scanning through it in the space of a breath for a match to the face in front of her.

Dane Nilsson. Hydroponics Plant Administrator with a degree in Botany and a Class Three Genengineer license. According to the specs, employee Nilsson was a plant waterer, a low-level gene splicer, who checked up on the automated equipment.

His smile was broader now, which really bothered her, because his empathic rating in the personnel file was Two. Which was slightly higher than a rock’s. She blinked out of Pause.

”We need to sort this mess out,” the man Dane, said, his tone cold but without threat. “Why don’t you come and eat with us, get a little rest?” It wasn’t a suggestion. “Your hunter gave up. He must not have wanted you very badly.”

But he had and his departure bothered her. A lot. Ahni scanned the crowded columns of growing things, senses straining for an echo of pursuit. None.

“He’ll be back, won’t he?”

“I … don’t know.” Humiliating. And scary. So far, Krator had known her moves as if she had handed them an itinerary … and that wasn’t possible, because she’d been making them up as she went along ever since she’d stepped into that elevator lobby on Level Four. She needed to figure out how they knew. But right now it didn’t matter much. Only one crime brought an automatic and unal¬terable death penalty from the World Council. That was the dilution of human DNA with DNA from a nonhuman source.

Maybe she should hope they did come after her. Caught between tiger and dragon? “I’ll go with you,”

she said. As if it was a genuine invitation.

Nilsson eased closer with a complex shiver of muscles, utterly in control of his motion. He was a whole lot more skilled in microG than she was. She flinched as his fingers closed around her wrist.

He towed her and she went limp, letting him. The weird kid¬-thing followed. The ease with which the two of them moved made her think of dolphins swimming through a kelp bed. These leafy columns, as thick as her body, didn’t sway the way the kelp stems did. The leaves remained still, unless you brushed them, and then their recoil was quick–a product of mass-in-motion transfer of momentum, rather than the damped sway of underwater stems. She caught a glimpse of translucent plastic tubes where plants were small, spaced to grow. Mature plants thickly furred other tubes. She identified a tube covered with beets, the perfectly round crimson mots the size of her head, the thick, lush leaves, red veined and as large as an elephant’s ear. Another tube sprouted the bright green leaves and red jewels of strawberries as large as chicken eggs.

These strange versions of familiar plants scared her. As did the kid-thing who carried death in his face, and the man’s cold calm. Dif¬ferent rules here. And she didn’t know them. Dane planted a toe here, ball of a foot there, nudging them smoothly and swiftly forward, barely disturbing the leaves. Bare feet. She studied the kid-thing from the corner of her eye. He flanked her, and she had a sudden flashback to a summer afternoon swimming off the family compound at the southern tip of Taiwan when a pod of dolphins had suddenly sur¬rounded her.

The kid-thing had the “so what” attitude of the dolphins that had brushed against her, leaped over her, that day. Who are you? What do we care? This is our worldy not yours.

I can kill youy she thought. With one word to the authorities. And !: many too. And he knows it.

They were slowing, had clearly reached a destination. The tubes seemed oddly close together, forming a solid wall of green. “In here,” the man said, let go of her, and slipped into what seemed to be a solid wall of leaves. Ahni hesitated, aware of the kid-thing’s at¬tention, like a finger prodding her. Well, she wasn’t going to outrun them. She shrugged, which set her immediately drifting, grabbed a handful of stems, and propelled herself clumsily between the close-set tubes.

A curtain of blossoms shimmered along the walls of a small open space, bright as living jewels. The light was muted here, fil¬tered by the wall of leaves and she realized that the tubes had been bent and spliced to form a spherical space. Anchored nets held per¬sonal items, clothes, and bedding. Clearly the man Dane lived here, among the blossoms. He pulled off his goggles, lodged them in a net full of junk and rummaged in another for a squeeze of water. His eyes gleamed like pewter, contrasting sharply with his dark skin. He sent the squeeze of water sailing suddenly toward her, and as she automatically caught it, only then became aware of her fierce thirst. “Thanks,” she said, equal to equal. An honor he didn’t ac¬knowledge. She awkwardly settled herself in an empty net among sprays of purple and white flowers that looked like oversized or¬chids and probably were.

Dane sent a fat orange and yellow fruit zipping toward the kid¬-thing who snagged it with casual skill, damping his reaction With one foot, his long toes curling around the tube without bruising a single leaf.

The kid cut into the fruit with a small blade and handed her a thick slice. Ahni touched it tentatively with her tongue. Blinked “How do you get mango up here?”

“Dane engineered the plants to grow small like eggplants.” The kid-thing grinned at her, the tips of his teeth showing, laughing at her again. “But they have big fruit. Dane’s really good with genes.” He sliced more mango. “It’s got a full compliment of amino acids, too. He says that makes it a complete protein. So you don’t really need to eat anything else. A lot of stuff’s like that now.” He bit into his slice, expertly catching tiny globules of juice with his tongue.

Koi. She remembered his name, studied him. He was happy, ex¬cited, with a child’s uncomplicated enjoyment of company, some¬thing new and interesting. They’d euthanize him instantly. You could do a lot with engineered human DNA–cure disease, extend life, regrow a damaged spine or a failed kidney.

But bring in traits frrom another species … turn a human being into a gilled water creature with amphibian genes, or a furred little seal-girl, and you died. No appeal. No second chance. The Chaos Years had fright¬ened all of humanity. So why hadn’t this Dane person killed her?

Because he thought she was chipped, of course. He didn’t know who she was–a Family daughter who didn’t wear the birth-¬implanted ID tag, someone who had the single luxury that only power and birth could buy. Privacy. He assumed that if she died, the where would be on record, and so would the how.