Kingdom of Cages (16 page)

Smiling, she called up her schedule on her data display. Hagin Bhavasar, her birth uncle and the senior tender for the city-mind,
was coming in for his check next week. She could review his records easily before then and make her preparations. There would
soon be much work that they needed to do directly with Aleph, and it would be a great help to have Uncle Hagin in agreement
with them before then.

B
y the time she made it out of the forest, Chena was glad Mom had insisted she wear the stupid hat and carry a water bottle.

For a long time, the woods had looked just like they did around Off-shoot—an endless succession of thick, gnarled tree trunks
hung with cablelike vines. Here and there, one of the giants had fallen and turned into a moss-covered hillock overgrown with
ferns and saplings straining to reach the sunlight. She saw deer, squirrels, and quail. Once she even thought she saw a bear,
but she couldn’t be sure.

Gradually the trees became smaller and more slender. The ground between them filled with all kinds of bracken and underbrush,
turning the forest floor into a mosaic of greens and yellows dotted here and there with blue or white flowers. Sunlight brightened
the world and started Chena sweating. Insects flew in clouds out of the undergrowth, but she seemed to be moving too fast
for them to settle on her. Something else she was glad of. Bugs could be amazing to look at, but some of them bit.

Just one more thing nobody warns you about living on a planet.

She’d spent most of her free time during the month hanging around Offshoot’s tinky little library, trying to find a decent
map of where the railbikes went and how far away the villages were from each other. But there didn’t seem to be a single complete
map anywhere. She had to piece together the information she found, but there were still big gaps where she hadn’t been able
to find out anything.

She talked to Sadia about it at lunch one day, but Sadia had mostly shrugged and told her that’s the way it was, and what
did she want to go wandering around for anyway? There wasn’t anywhere better than Offshoot.

“What do you think you know about it?” asked Chena, leaning across the table. “You’ve never been anywhere.”

“Dad took me and Shond to Stem once,” she said, poking at her bowl of vegetable stew. “There’s a market, and we watched the
dirigibles fly over that big lake.” For a minute, Chena thought she was going to say something else, but Sadia just scowled
at her food. “Nothing to it.”

Chena straightened up and watched Sadia dig a piece of potato out of the stew and pop it into her mouth. “You were there once,
you couldn’t have seen everything. There’s supposed to be a theater too.”

Sadia gave her a you’re-joking look. “It’s all the same people running the place. You think they’re going to let anybody have
anything good?”

Which, Chena had to admit, made a certain amount of sense, but it still wasn’t the whole story.

Whatever that story was, though, Sadia wasn’t telling. So Chena guessed she’d just have to see for herself.

From her pieced-together map, it looked like Stem was about one hundred kilometers away from Offshoot. Chena had a decent
idea of how long a kilometer was. Athena had been three kilometers from tip to tip and she had been able to run up a whole
arm and back down again since she was eight.

On top of that, it turned out that riding was easier than walking. The railbike didn’t look much like the bicycles she’d seen
in the rig games, or even the ones that were used to turn the compost drums. It had two wheels, all right, but they were clamped
to the rail. A weird outrigger kind of extension clamped to a second rail to the right of the bike. But if you sat on the
seat, held on to the handlebars, and pedaled, it went much faster than she could ever run. It practically flew down the ravines
that had been cut by small streams flowing down toward the river. The movement pressed a fresh wind against her face, so she
felt cool, at least in the beginning, even though the day was warm and still.

Better than that, Chena felt free. She could almost pretend she could go anywhere, that the rails weren’t lined with fence
posts and that the whole world really was opening up around her.

When Teal had heard about Chena’s trip, she, of course, had wanted to come. She’d followed Chena around in the miniature library,
with its two terminals that didn’t even have any input jacks, begging Chena to let her come along. When Teal finally hit the
tears and the I-don’t-get-to-do-anything! stage, Chena was afraid Mom was going to give in. But Mom cut the scene short by
saying that while Chena was “gallivanting around the world,” she and Teal would have a special day together scrounging stuff
for the new house.

They had a house now. Mom had been able to get an advance on her salary to make the rent. The place was dark and had roots
coming through the roof, they were still sleeping on the floor, and they had to take baths in a big copper pot, but it was
all theirs. They got to learn how to cook on the woodstove and do all kinds of things that did not involve shit, compost,
or cleaning up after other people. Now that Mom was making money and paying at least something into the village fund, they
only had to put in three hours a day on shift instead of six. When they got enough together so Chena and Teal could go to
school, they’d only have to put in two hours.

Chena had really known Teal was over her snit when Teal rolled up close to her in the dark and whispered in her ear, “You’re
really going to look for spies, right? Because the poisoners are trying to divert messages from Dad.”

They hadn’t shared a Dad story in weeks. Teal had been too pouty. Relief had rushed through Chena. She’d have her day.

“Right. Stem is a bigger town,” Chena had whispered back. “They’re bound to have more information there about what’s going
on. I need to scope the place out. See who we can trust there.”

“I’m starting a record of who comes and goes from other towns,” said Teal eagerly. “There’s this kid on my shift, Michio,
he talks about the boat schedules all the time. I think it’s like a game with him. I could talk to him.” Then she added quickly,
“But I wouldn’t tell him why I wanted to know.”

“That’s a go plan,” said Chena. “But mostly you’ve got to keep an eye on Mom while I’m gone. Let me know if there’s anybody
sneaking around watching her or anything like that.”

“Because Dad’s got enemies,” added Teal solemnly. “Which means we’ve got enemies, and the spies may be watching Mom to see
if they can find him through her.”

“Right.” Chena nodded, even though Teal couldn’t see her in the dark. “So, we’ve got to look out for her, okay?”

“Okay.”

Teal had curled up and gone straight to sleep then, but Chena had lain awake for a while, thinking about the stories they
told about their father, and the spy game. Sometimes she wondered if it was a good idea.

I mean, if he was coming back, he’d be back by now, wouldn’t he? If he was coming back, Mom wouldn’t even have left Athena.

Unless we’re right… unless the stories are true.

Or unless Dad had just run out on them. Chena had squirmed under her blanket, making Teal stir sleepily like an echo of the
restless movement. Sadia and Shond’s mom had left them. She just got onto a boat one day, Sadia said, and she didn’t come
back. Sadia wouldn’t talk about what happened to their dad.

She wondered if Teal ever thought about that, if Dad had just left them, because he’d gotten tired of them, or he didn’t like
being poor anymore, or they were just too much of a hassle to stay with when he could have been out flying around with the
Authority. They never talked about it, and Chena realized she didn’t really want to. She wanted to tell the stories and believe
he was coming home, even when she knew he wasn’t.

Chena pushed down hard now on the pedals, trying to put some distance between herself and that idea. Ahead of her, the light
made a white wall with just a thin screen of trees in front of it. Another half dozen pedal strokes, and she broke free of
the forest into the full sunlight.

In front of her stretched a sea of pale blond grass undulating gently toward a misty blue horizon. A riot of birdsong replaced
the rush of wind in the branches. Chena gasped and forgot to pedal for a moment. Her bike glided to a gentle halt.

Birds clung to every stem of grass, all of them singing, chattering, or calling. The noise was deafening. They were all different
colors, from browns and blacks to vivid reds, blues, and golds, and even one little one that was deep purple. Even the butterflies
fluttering between the grass stems didn’t come in more colors.

Then in the distance something big and brown leapt out of the tall grass. All the birds launched themselves into the air in
a great black cloud, blotting out the sky. Chena’s heart hammered in her chest, but startled fear rapidly turned to astonishment,
and then awe. It was a long moment before she was able to tear her gaze away from the tattered cloud of birds and look for
the big thing that had caused the mass exodus. Images of wolves and dinosaurs from the games flashed briefly through her mind,
and she felt glad of the fence posts for one split second. But whatever it had been, it was as gone as the birds.

Eventually Chena remembered what she was supposed to be doing and applied her feet to the bike pedals again.

After a while, this new part of the world became even more monotonous than the forest. She couldn’t see past the thick growth
of the grass on either side. The long and steep hills were fun to glide down, but they were a pain to pedal up. The sun’s
heat was smothering and she was almost out of water. But she kept on going. If her estimates were even close to right, using
one of the turnaround points and heading back would make for a longer ride before she got back to people than if she just
kept going. She glanced at her comptroller: 11:24. She’d been riding for four hours.

She hadn’t ever expected to see the wrist computer again, let alone have her shift supervisor give it to her. But, as she
was showing up for her shift, this time to start emptying “night soil,” which was as disgusting as Sadia had predicted, that
week’s guy-with-a-scanner had handed her a paper-wrapped bundle the size of her fist.

“I was told this was yours,” he said as he handed it over.

Chena unfolded the paper and saw her comptroller lying inside. Written neatly on the paper itself were the words,
Thank you for the loan, station girl. Come back for your tea.

Chena had stuffed the paper in her pocket, strapped the comptroller back on her wrist, and tried not to think about it. Part
of Mom’s month of perfect behavior included having nothing at all to do with Nan Elle, ever again. Regan the cop had not been
able to turn up anything against her, or at least nothing that he could prove to get the village court to act against her
rather than the guy they’d pinned the murder on in the first place. That was not enough to clear her in Mom’s eyes, though.
Somehow Chena didn’t think anything would ever be enough.

Chena was panting by the time her bike crested the highest ridge. At the top, the grass was only knee-high and she could finally
see all around her. The river to her left spread out wide, brown, and slow. The forest was a curving shadow behind her. In
front of her waited the end of the world—a ragged semicircle of land that dropped off into a lake of blue and silver that
stretched out until Chena could not tell water from sky. A tree-crowned promontory thrust out into the water, allowing her
to see the rippling red cliffs that lined the shore.

The rails did not lead to the cliffs, however. They wound the long way down to a curving beach and a cluster of sand dunes.

She couldn’t see the actual town from here, but she didn’t expect to. It was probably as well hidden in the dunes as Offshoot
was in the trees.

Chena kicked off the rail and let the bike cruise down the slope.

“Hhhheeeeee-yaaaaah!” she cried, giddy with success and gathering speed.

Momentum carried her straight through the dunes. She caught glimpses of windows and saw boardwalks crowded with people. Chena
waved, although no one was looking at her.

The rail ended in an open-sided depot exactly like the one she’d left in Offshoot. She parked her bike in line with eight
or ten others and ran her hand through the scanner on the wood and wire gate. When she did, the lock on the gate clicked opened
and let her out into the dune town and onto its busy boardwalks.

The familiar press of bodies and competing conversations enveloped her and Chena felt herself grinning. This was more like
it. More like the station, more like a real place. Except during shift change, Off-shoot mostly felt empty.

Stem, though, was alive. People stood on the walkways and watched the boats out on the water. They stood on jetties, dangling
fishing lines off the side or working around the dirigibles, cages of silver wire and glittering aerogel, that sat on the
water waiting to take off. They stepped aside for each other, nodding and saluting as they did. Both men and women wore robes
and skirts painted with bright patterns you’d never see in the woods. Chena wondered if these people had to work for their
village like they did in Offshoot, or if they all got out of it somehow. Then she wondered how she could find out.