Mary Rosenblum - Horizons

“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 kaleidoscope 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, Chinese 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 restricted.”

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 except 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 Arrival 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 unalterable 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. Different 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 surrounded 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 attention, 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.