by Horizons
”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.
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.
TWO
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. “Th
ey’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?”
