Mary Rosenblum (3 page)

So she was safe. For the moment. Long enough to give her options. Ahni swal¬lowed the sweetness of the mango. Tiny orange spheres of juice floated away from her lips. She wasn’t at all good at catching them and Koi rolled his eyes at her. The tiny constellation of mango juice pearls drifted close to one of the tubes, this one planted with ruffled bells of pink and white. Ahni caught a flicker of motion, and suddenly, one of the tiny droplets was gone. Fascinated, she watched as one by one, the wayward juice drops vanished. With a jolt of recog¬nition, she finally spotted the author of the movement. “A frog.”

“Partly.” Dane had finished his mango, was sending bits of the peel sailing into the greenery. “When the platforms were first built, the garden was pretty primitive. Blue-green algae, mostly, then a few plant species in the tubes. Hydroponics at its most basic, producing nutrition, but not much fun. And the plants took a lot of work. You had to pollinate, deal with fungus, and keeping the par¬ride count down was a bear. Over the years we created a system that tends to itself.”

”The gardens clean the water for the entire can,” Dane went on. It all comes here. The digester uses a sequence of aerated tanks full or tailored bacteria strains and fish to recover the heavy metals and liquify any solid organics. Then it flows slowly through the tubes. They’re full of granular polymer–an artificial soil we manufacture here and populate with a thriving microbial ecosystem. The plants root in them and use the organic compounds. If you balance the va¬riety just right, the water that comes out is clean enough to drink.” He touched an orchid blossom reflectively. “I’d like to visit Dragon Home one day.

They do rice. I’d like to see how.”

She glanced again at Koi as his sudden alert pricked her atten¬tion. She followed his gaze and had to use an instant of Pause to quell her reaction.

Two more of the strange faces peered from the flower-wall at her. She caught only a glimpse before they vanished. They had the same features as Koi, and she retained an image of long toes grasp¬ing delicately between the blossoms and leaves.

“Yes, there’s a breeding population.” Dane’s pewter eyes fixed on her. “I didn’t create them. No one did.

This isn’t Earth.” He leaned toward her, anchored in his hammock. “You think it is, you think that it’s nothing more than another New York or Moscow, only stuck up in the sky with variable gravity as a nice tourist attrac¬tion. But you’re wrong. This isn’t Earth and your Earthly boogey¬men under the bed don’t scare us up here.” He laughed softly, mirthlessly. ”We have our own.”

“Dane … I’m sorry.” Koi broke in, voice low and intense. “I know not to show … but he was ugly, and not supposed to be here, and she was like my baby sister when she was born, she couldn’t even drift right. And … she was pretty.”

Pretty, again. A child’s crush-bright word. She had not been called “pretty” very often.

“It’s all right.” Dane’s assurance had the feel of summer’s warmth. “It’s not a wrong thing to save a life.”

He touched Koi’s shoulder lightly, barely stirring him from where he floated. “She doesn’t wear a chip, Koi. That’s how come she surprised you like that. The locks won’t keep her kind out. But they don’t care about us.” A flicker of his eyes challenged her. “They run the planet down below. We don’t matter.”

He knew she wasn’t chipped. Ahni froze inside. She held his life in her hand, and he knew that he could kill her with impunity. If the gardens processed the waste from the entire orbital, a few more pounds of organic solids wouldn’t be noticeable. “You’re right,” she said. “I’m a member of the Taiwan Family. My father sits on the World Council.” She gave him truth, because that was all she had to offer and he would read a lie anyway. “Krator family killed my half¬-twin.” She couldn’t quite block the stab of those words, even now. “I don’t know why they chose to unbalance relations like that. But they did. Our father … sent me to restore balance.” She drew a low breath that barely stirred her. “You’re right. I don’t care what you do here.”

“Balance.” Dane’s voice was low and charged with a still anger. “Killing does not restore balance.”

“I agree.” She met his eyes, not trying to hide her bitterness. “But I am Xai’s sister and my father’s daughter and I cannot say no.”

”Why not?” His eyes were cold.

The reasons could not be shrunk to a handful of words. “You’re perfect up here?” she said instead.

“Nobody ever kills?”

”Not often.” Dane looked away.

That truth troubled him. Ahni untangled herself from the mesh and pulled herself carefully between the flower tubes, waiting for him to stop her. He didn’t. The leaves and blossoms closed in be¬hind her as she pulled herself out of his private bower. She pushed off, her trajectory erratic, steering by fending herself off the planted columns.

AHNI CURBED HER URGE TO SPRINT. THEY COULD CATCH her in a second. She pushed off from the planted columns gently, figuring out how to twist her body and change her trajectory. She wasn’t sure why she still lived and had no idea where the nearest elevator down to the Level One might be. The kid-thing, Koi, was following her, of course. His bright, puppy-enthusiasm burned like an old fashioned incandescent bulb in her wake. The man wouldn’t be far behind.

Moving randomly through the tubes, one eye on the trailing Koi, she searched for an elevator. Slowly, she became aware of the small hum of lives around her. It reminded her of a summer forest’s life-song.

That sense of … a living ecosystem … surprised her. The orbital seemed so artificial.

Ahead, she saw things moving, many things. Wary, she caught a tube coated with spirals of small green ovate leaves, holding herself still, to watch. It was too bright to see clearly, and she squinted.

Many-legged robots like gray plastic spiders minced along the tubes, a slowly expanding bladder trailing behind each one. She caught a glimpse of red and shaded her eyes. More beets, she decided at last. The robots were plucking the huge round balls from the surface of the tubes. Only a single tail of root penetrated the polymer and the harvester-spiders plucked them with apparent ease. The tube healed instantly. They didn’t take all, but apparently picked and chose, col-ecting just the right ones. Behind them, smaller robot spiders crept in the harvest-spiders’ wake, four jointed front legs busy, dancing up and down as they moved slowly forward. Curious in spite of her need for hurry, she drifted nearer, because they were only robots. Planting, she realized. Each small spider left a tiny tuft of green in place where the beet had been harvested. Ahni nudged herself gantly forward, drifted over to the newly planted tube. The beet seedling sat in the center of the space vacated by the harvested beet, a tiny thread of root embedded in the translucent tube. She touched the tube, found it resilient with a sluggish give that made her think of a gel. She poked it with her fingernail and her finger penetrated it easily. Cool. Wet. She pulled her finger out and the surface healed behind her, but not before a silvery drop of water escaped.

Something small and green zipped out from the leaves, scooped up the water in trailing legs and vanished into the shadows.

The intricacy of this place stunned her. Programs would do most of it, she thought. Balance harvest with planting, start adequate seeds in culture somewhere here, so that the planting-spiders could follow the harvesters. You could chart the eating habits of a million or so people, predict the trends, supply the restaurants and food shops, and clean the water while you were at it. Energy flooded in from the sun, free, ready to be turned into sugar, carbo-hydrates, and proteins.

This was not a hydroponics farm. This was a … garden. Ahni shook her head, which sent her drifting up against a tube planted with small leafy plants studded with green, unripe mangos like the one she had eaten.

“Don’t get in their way. There’s not supposed to be anyone down here but Dane.”

She turned at the sound of Koi’s voice. ”You mean the spiders?” she asked.

He looked blank, but nodded when she gestured toward the slow steady scuttle of the robots. “Them,”

he agreed. “They’ve got a video link and nobody probably ever looks at it, but somebody might.” He shrugged. “It’s a Security link, so Dane can’t fix it. Here.” Koi thrust something at her. “Dane told me to give you this. He said to use them.”

Goggles. The small, thick lenses were what Dane had worn out here in the perpetual flood of photons.

She slipped them on, her squint relaxing as the glare dimmed, leaving headache in its wake.

Koi drifted gently closer, his curiosity pricking at her. He had pupils after all, she realized. The cloudy lenses of his eyes obscured them. “You don’t need goggles?” she asked him.

“No.” He blinked at her. “Dane says my eyes filter the light so that it won’t damage the inside, you know? He says we’re changing to fit up here. Like he does with the plants and things, only it just happens on its own in us and really fast. He called it a genetic shift, and he said that’s why so many babies die–our genes keep trying new stuff and it doesn’t always work.” He looked away from her, gently grieving. “Like my baby sister. Why did that man kill your half-twin?” He twisted idly, upside down to her now, his long toes wrapped around one of the little mango shrubs. “And what is a half-twin? I don’t understand.”

Genetic shift? Ahni eyed his long limbs realizing that she hadn’t been dreaming, that there was a hint of flexibility in his long bones. A pretty extreme genetic shift, even accounting for radiation-induced mutation up here. She still didn’t believe it. “It’s a long story,” she said. Family politics didn’t make for a five-minute summary. “I don’t really know why Krator Family killed Xai.” Already, economic levers were being applied, nudging small pebbles that would in turn dislodge stones, that would in turn, send economic boulders crashhing down on Krator business interests. Individuals would suffer in this silent war as a vegetable business lost its loan here, a metals immporter had her downporting license revoked there, an info-service lost its creative talent. Why? She shook her head, thinking that Xai could have told her. He thrived on the three dimensional chess game of power. “He’s my half-twin,” she said slowly, “because we have the same father and were born together. Are there a lot of you?”

“There’s my fanllly.” Koi’s shiver of worry sent him drifting. “Dane’s really worried. I was really bad.”

“I’m not going to tell anyone, Koi,” Ahni said softly. “I don’t care how you came to be.” She smiled at him. “This is a … beautiful world. And you fit it.”

Suddenly, Koi’s ‘family’ appeared all around her, as if he had called them. They darted like dragonflies and looked as fragile as dragonflies, too. She caught flashing glimpses of slender limbs, those strange, milkey, blind-looking eyes. Their curiosity tidded her. One tiny female hovered in front of Ahni. She held out a hand and cool, slender fingertips brushed hers. Then the girl darted away and they all vanished.

Ahni drew a slow breath. “Can you show me a way out, Koi?”

“It’s nice up here,” he said wistfully. “You can stay.”

He had a crush on her. She smiled and he smiled back, hopefully. “I have to go home,” Ahni said. “If you show me the elevator, I’ll come back one day, okay?”

“I’ll have to ask Dane.” Koi pushed himself gently off with ne toe.

“He’s afraid I’ll tell people about you. But I won’t.” She stretched, took Koi’s hand. “I promise. It’s okay to let me leave. In fact … it’s dangerous for me to stay here. The people who want to hurt me will come back and they may find out about you.”

“Dane’ll be mad.” Koi sighed, gave her one more yearningg-puppy look, then pushed off with his long toes, gliding forward in a perfect trajectory between the thickly planted tubes. She followed, clumsy, but managing to keep up with him, although she left drifting leaves and bruised fruit and vegetables in her wake. “What do you know about tlle world outside of here?” she asked as he paused, pretending to consider the route. Waiting for her to catch up. “Do you have any … stories about where you came from?”

“Dane said we came up from down below. Where you come from. We can’t ever go back. Dane says we’d die.”

“Aren’t you curious?”

“About what?” His surprise was genuine.

Ahni shook her head. “Nothing,” she said. “How much farther is the elevator?”

“Not far.” He grinned. “Real close now.”

And she felt them. Coming fast. She didn’t know what they had, some kind of scanner, but they knew she was there. One was the man who had darted her before. She recognized his bright hunter’s certainty.

The other’s icy determination made her guess he was the man who had been waiting for her at the elevator. That determination tasted coppery with vengeance.

“Run,” she snapped at Koi, pointing away from their pursuers. “They’ve spotted us.” She grabbed a tube thick with ripening strawberries, spun herself around and pushed off with her foot, heedless of the crushed berries and shredded leaves. She shot forward, at the edge of control, guiding herself crudely with her hands, ricocheting off tube after tube, leaving a visible trail of damage behind her. They wouldn’t need anything technical to track her. A tube thick with something round and green like guavas appeared in front of her. She pushed off with one hand, spiraled off at a tangent, utterly out of control now. Felt twin cold novas of triumph behind her, managed to grab a tube, plant her feet, and shoot away from that

‘gotcha’ gloating behind her. Intent on the narrow spaces between the leaves, she lucked out, arrowing between thickly leafed tubes into relatively clear space where the tiny plantlets must have been newly inserted. She soared through the narrow clearing and into the leaves on the other side, leaving no trace of her passage. Let herself slow. “Koi?” She twisted cautiously, expecting to find him on her heels. “I need another way down.”

He wasn’t there, and then she felt him. His terror and pain, flared like lightning in the quiet of the axle garden, with that ‘gotcha’ triumph.

They had been after Koi, not her.

Best choice; find the nearest alternative elevator and get out.