Kingdom of Cages

by Sarah Zettel

  “Don’t you want to sit down?” asked Farin. “It’s going to be a long trip.”

  Chena shook her head. “I’ve been sitting for days.”

  Which was true. She’d sat on the boat from Offshoot to Stem, on the dirigible from Stem to Taproot, on the next boat from Taproot to Deciduous.

  It was also true, Chena admitted to herself, that she was simply too edgy to sit quietly with the rest of the passengers, their baggage, and their babies. So she stayed where she was and watched the lush tropical world slip past. Water slapped the hull, making an irregular counterpoint to the rhythm of the oars slapping the water. Neither sound was anywhere near loud enough to cover the chirping and hooting pouring from the jungle that surrounded the swift brown river, even in combination with the ticking of the metronome and the grunts of the rowers as they stretched and pulled.

  Five years ago, Chena would have wondered what idiot didn’t know machines could do this work. Now she knew better. Machines had to be built from artificial materials. They broke down and had to be repaired with more artificial materials. They could litter or disturb the ecology. Humans could be maintained with naturally occurring substances and they fixed and reproduced themselves without requiring spare parts to be shipped in from Athena. They also moved more slowly, and so were less likely to damage Pandora than robots or powered vehicles.

  Chena’s thoughts made her frown. In answer, Farin moved a little closer to her, a gesture which managed to be both reassuring and disconcerting. But for once Farin’s presence did not occupy her whole mind. She was too taken up with what she was about to try.

  She was going outside the fence today. She was going to walk in the wilderness and poach the sacred forests of Pandora. Today, Chena was on her own. On her own if she succeeded, and on her own if she got caught.

  Chena hoped her fellow passengers would assume the sheen of perspiration on her forehead was from the tropical heat.

  Teal had never understood why they had to live like this, or why Chena insisted that she stick to running errands while Chena was the apprentice lawbreaker. But Teal was Chena’s responsibility, and she would do what was best. Mom would have expected no less.

  Teal was getting her revenge, though. Chena couldn’t look at Farin without remembering their last fight.

  After their argument on the roof, Chena had walked into the bedroom to find that Teal had thrown herself flat on the broad pallet they shared. Chena had sat down cross-legged beside her and picked up her big traveling pack. She needed to finish unpicking some of the inner seams so she could sew in a hidden pocket. She got to work with her thick needle, waiting for Teal to say something.

  At last Teal did.

  “Why are you doing this?”

  Chena kept her eyes on her work. “Because I have to.”

  “The fuck you do!” Teal heaved herself to her feet.

  “Teal.” Chena sighed and lowered the canvas pack into her lap. “You don’t understand—”

  “What’s to understand?” Teal ripped the pack out of her hands. “You’re being a space-head. Again!”

  “A space-head for not wanting to run away when there are lives in danger?” Feeling childish but unable to stop herself, Chena snatched back the pack.

  “As if you really cared!” shouted Teal, just centimeters from Chena’s face. “You just want to go out there with your whore!”

  Chena’s fist clenched around the needle. Teal stood her ground defiantly, daring Chena to lash out at her. Chena took a long, slow breath and loosened her hand with great effort.

  People said Farin was a prostitute. People said women, and sometimes men, paid him to have sex with them. Chena had been stunned and upset when she first found out. She knew about prostitutes, she’d seen them on Athena, where they were illegal. They were mostly women up there, and not exactly the kind of people Mom let her and Teal make friends with. Of course, she’d also been a kid then and hadn’t understood a lot of things. She had asked Farin about what she had heard, and he had reassured her that he was just a performer. He sold his talents to the village, not his body. Teal just wanted to believe the rumors because she hated Farin, although Chena couldn’t understand why. Teal could still be so thick sometimes. Her friendship with Farin was real. He cared about her. He helped because he was Nan Elle’s blood family, but also because he truly liked Chena. He’d said so, plenty of times. One day, he would tell her he more than liked her. She was sure of it. In the meantime, she was not—she was not—going to let Teal’s stupid insults ruin anything.

  “You’re talking like a baby and you don’t understand anything,” she said, enunciating each word slowly and clearly. “So, just go away for a while, would you? We’ll talk when I get back.”

  “No. We won’t.”

  Teal had turned away then and walked out of the house. Chena had just sighed and gone back to rigging her pack.

  She sighed again now. She’d be back home in four days. Teal would have gotten over her snit by then and they would talk. This time, she’d find the words to make Teal truly understand why they were living this way. She’d make her understand about Farin too, once and for all. If this tailor, whoever it was, insisted on catering to Teal’s obsession with returning to Athena… well, Nan Elle had taught Chena a few ways to deal with that kind of problem too.

  Nan Elle said that once, a long time ago, the Pharmakeus had been a real network instead of just a loosely connected bunch of men and women with hand-me-down information about Pandora’s plants and a grand, paranoid name. They’d operated out of the hothouses, and they’d had people inside who would help diagnose and treat the illnesses. But then the Consciences came along, and suddenly none of them could do anything the rest of the family disapproved of. The hothouser Pharmakeus had babbled happily about what they were up to, and apologized, and the village networks were broken up, not just the doctors, but the computers. It was done, they said, so no one could introduce anything that would upset the delicate natural balance of Pandora’s microsphere.

  In the hothouse classes, they’d been told this all happened because the villages had not been originally supposed to operate for more than a couple of generations. When it was decided that the real work of Pandora lay in understanding the world around them rather than lecturing “those who did not want to hear,” changes had to be made.

  My ass, thought Chena, sneering at the river. If that’s what it was, why didn’t they just move everybody into the hothouses? It’s really just another way to control us. They’re afraid if there ever gets to be more of us than there are of them, we might decide not to put up with their shit anymore.

  Time, and miles of riverbank, slipped away, but Chena didn’t sit down. She leaned her elbows on the rail and ran her mind over everything Nan Elle had told her about the tropics—about the snakes, the big cats, the little parasites, and the huge bugs. Don’t drink the water, don’t step into blank patches of mud or areas of dead vegetation, and for the sake of God’s own, don’t eat anything you haven’t seen anyone else eat first. Chena’s comptroller, sewed securely into the seam of her pack along with her compass, was stuffed full of every note she could key in. Normally, Nan Elle frowned on her using the comptroller and insisted that she memorize every fact and name. This time she made an exception, because there was no time.

  “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 concentrate
d 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.
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  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.