Kingdom of Cages (4 page)

But the new beginning was turning out to be as boring as used grease. That was Pandora out there.
Pandora.
The world where people walked around counting flowers, with chips in their heads to tell them what to do. Where they were
so busy with plants and animals, they didn’t even know know how to fix their own machinery and they had to get Athenians to
take care of everything for them, from replacement parts to satellite maintenance. Where they had beaten the Diversity Crisis
and all the babies were born healthy and alive. A thousand conflicting stories ran through Chena’s head. Nobody—well, nobody
Chena knew—knew that much about Pandora. There was no public access network between the station and the planet, and the planet
was forty-eight hours away at the bottom of the space cable. Forty-eight hours, after you got all the permits you needed,
if you could get them. All Chena herself knew came from a combination of half-forgotten history lessons, legends she and her
friends told each other, and snippets of rig games designed around the Conscience Rebellion that won Athena Station its semi-independence
four hundred years ago. The Pandorans were helpless and they were automatons. They were distrusted geniuses and miracle workers.
The whole world was a wilderness, and a garden.

And she couldn’t see any of it.

Eventually somebody came around and handed out some of the cakes that Chena and Teal had always called nutra-bricks. But even
they were more interesting than the talk Madra got up to give—about how welcome they all were to Offshoot, and how they would
be expected to give their share to village life, and on and on and on. Chena wasn’t sure if she actually fell asleep, but
she was counting the white hairs on the balding head of the man in front of her for a while.

My first time on a planet, and I can barely tell it from the station,
she remembered thinking.

Then, finally,
finally,
the dirigible settled down to the ground, they were herded out the door, and the world around them was dark, except for a
little path of lanterns leading up to a wooden dock, with an enclosed boat waiting on it. Inside, they all had to take seats
again, and a bunch of people had lined up on benches on either side of them and grabbed hold of these wooden levers sticking
out of the walls. They began pushing and pulling on the levers in time with the ticking of a big metronome at the back of
the boat.

Rowing. The were
rowing.
This boat had no engines!

But eventually even that novelty wore away into boredom. As hard as she tried, Chena couldn’t see a damn thing out the windows.
Teal and Mom fell asleep on each other’s shoulders, and Chena wished she could do the same. The boat’s rocking motion made
her queasy and she felt like she was alone in the whole dark world and nobody cared.

Then they were unloaded onto yet another lit path, in another dark world, and led into this big round room, assigned lockers,
and given bundles of pallets and blankets and told to go to sleep, that there’d be a general breakfast bell, and welcome to
Offshoot.

Welcome to Offshoot. When do we get to go home?
Chena thought now to the darkness that was the ceiling.

She’d thought they’d be in one of the domed cities. That was what Mom had said at first. She’d applied for a liaison and consulting
mechanic’s position. But that hadn’t been a go plan. Mom didn’t say why. She just told them they’d be heading for one of the
outside villages instead.

As she thought that over, Chena noticed the darkness was less dark. The world seemed to be turning gray at the edges.

Sun must be coming up,
she thought, sitting up and blinking. Weird. She’d been in rig games that showed dawn, and she thought she’d be ready for
it, but somehow she’d never guessed it would be so… gradual. She didn’t think it could start up without you noticing it.
It seemed like there should be a noise, a click, or a hum or a bell—something.

Which is completely stupid,
she told herself.
You’re a jungle girl now. No more caution buzzers, ever.

Then she realized something else. For the first time since they’d stepped aboard the space cable car, she wasn’t being watched
or led around or put someplace. She could actually get up and go somewhere if she wanted to.

She looked at her comptroller. It had defaulted to the time function: 4:20 glowed at her.

Chena made her decision. Carefully, she folded back her blankets. Teal didn’t stir. Neither did Mom. One of the anonymous
lumps that was a fellow immigrant snorted and shrugged, but that was it.

Now that her eyes had adjusted to the dimness, Chena found she could make her way easily between the clusters of pallets to
the room’s one doorway. The floor was cool under her feet but not cold, so she decided not to bother with finding her shoes.
A corridor led off to the right and a set of shallow stairs climbed to the left. Ahead of her opened another round room, also
full of sleeping bodies.

Chena opted for the stairs. They felt strangely uneven under her feet, as if they hadn’t been quite smoothed off. They were
cold enough that she wished for her socks, but she kept going.

The staircase rose in a spiral through a second story that was shrouded in darkness, and up past that to another low doorway.
Chena found the knob and tried to slide it sideways. It didn’t budge. Feeling foolish, she remembered to push.

A gust of damp wind, heavy with unfamiliar scents, caught Chena in the face and she shivered. She was outside. The rushing
water sound that was the wind in the tree branches filled the world. She could see the black trunks like gigantic support
girders against the gray background.

She almost turned back then, but her gaze dropped to the, what?— floor? roof?—that she stood on. It had been terraced and
covered in dirt, and then in grass. Shafts of pale silver light slanted through the trees and touched the plants. Chena sucked
in a breath before it could become a gasp. The roof was a garden. Flowers, closed tight for morning, grew out of beds of moss.
Ivy crept along the rooftop and twined up the saplings, and that was just the beginning. The glimmers of silver light the
forest permitted in highlighted more kinds of plants than she had known existed, just in this little space of a living rooftop.

It was alien to Chena, utterly and completely, but, even as she shivered in the unregulated wind, she found it beautiful.

Wrapping her arms around herself, Chena stepped out onto the roof. Damp, chilly grass cushioned her bare feet. She wandered
here and there, just to see what she could—the shades of green on the different plants, the cup of a flower, all the kinds
and shapes of leaves, the big rocks with their flecks of green and gray. Something touched her arm and Chena saw a bug with
iridescent wings and a bright green body hanging on to her. It rubbed its impossibly delicate forelegs together and took off
in the next heartbeat.

Beyond the edge of the roof waited a world of trees and rivers. The trees were so huge that any one of them could have been
hollowed out to make a station module. Sunlight became tangled in the girder-like branches high overhead, up where the leaves
made a shady mosaic that swayed in the wind. Here and there, a solid column of light made it down to the floor and lit up
a patch of plants with tightly closed buds or furled leaves. Reed-choked streams dissected the village and then joined together
to spill into the long brown river that snaked along the forest floor. More water fell in chortling cascades from the trees.
Chena’s gaze followed the waterfalls up and saw that there were houses in the trees too, lashed to the crooks of the mighty
branches. Entirely wooden, with living roofs, they looked like they had grown out of the gigantic trunks. Water cascaded down
from the heights, collecting briefly in a series of cisterns, only to spill over their edges and down into the streams.

Chena had always thought that forests would be silent places. In the rig games, they were hushed except for the occasional
call of a bird or growl of an animal. The games had left out the endless chatter of the water, and the great rushing of wind
through the branches, and the way those branches creaked, as if they hadn’t been tightened on properly and might fall off
at any moment.

Chena bit her lip nervously. She couldn’t help it. Creaks were bad noises. Creaks meant something was straining. Straining
things broke and spilled the air out into the vacuum. Her head knew things like that couldn’t happen on a planet, but her
gut didn’t yet.

Another gust of wind blew through her hair and tickled her nose. Chena sneezed, and one of the rocks straightened up.

Chena almost screamed. She stumbled backward, caught her foot on the edge of one of the terraces, and fell into what felt
like a mass of feathers and thorns. Someone cackled with laughter while she struggled to get to her feet again, wincing at
every snap and rustle underneath her.

When she was finally standing, Chena found she faced a stooped old woman who stepped out from behind a cluster of cablelike
plants that ran up a bunch of skinny poles. She was even smaller and shorter than Chena. Some kind of apron covered her clothes,
and its many pockets bulged with… something. In her hand, she carried a short curved knife.

Chena cleared her throat. “Good morning, Grandmother,” she said, saluting as politely as her mother had ever taught her, touching
forehead, heart, and lips.

“I don’t know you.” The woman frowned and shifted her grip on the knife.

“I just got here.” Chena stared at the knife as if she’d been hypnotized. “I was just looking around, is all.”

“Were you?” The woman stepped closer. Chena could smell her now, and she smelled green and moldy. “Where’d you get here from?”

“Athena Station.” Chena thought about taking a step back to get away from the smell, which now included sweat and some really
bad breath, but she was afraid she’d fall and wreck something worse. Still, there was that knife in the wrinkled fist.…

“You’re a station girl, and you came out here?” The old woman spoke the words like an accusation. “Alone?”

“Yes,” said Chena, her anger rising at the sneer the old woman put into the words “station girl.” “As if it’s anything to
you.”

“Huh,” grunted the woman. “Well, that’s different. All right, girl, I’ll tell you, it’s not a good idea to be wandering around
the roofs too late or too early. That’s the first thing.”

And because I so desperately begged for your advice…?
thought Chena sourly. She folded her arms. “What’s the second thing?”

She thought she saw a look of approval flicker across the old woman’s face. “The second is, I’m Nan Elle. If there’s something
you need to know, pass the word for me and maybe I’ll tell you.” Her mouth gaped in a smile, and Chena saw with a shock that
she didn’t have all her teeth. “Now get you downstairs, station girl. This isn’t your world until the sun’s all the way up.”

Chena stayed where she was for a long second, just to show she wasn’t afraid and that she wasn’t going to be ordered around
easily. But she saw that knife, and she saw how this woman came out of nowhere, and how the air was still more shadows than
light. With all these things in her head, Chena turned away. But as she headed for the door, she saw another staircase. This
one traveled down the side of the building. There was also a kind of catwalk leading straight off the roof and into the trees.
Chena looked back over her shoulder and saw that the old woman was still watching her.

Let her watch.
She walked right onto the catwalk. She thought she heard a raspy chuckle behind her, but that could have been the wind in
the leaves.

The walkway was made of wooden boards, polished to a high shine and tied together with fiber ropes. She felt a little dizzy
standing there. She could look over the edge and see the forest floor. This wasn’t even anything near as high as she could
go. There were buildings whose roofs brushed the leaves on the trees. She wanted to climb up there, to see who lived in them
and how they lived, and if they thought they were something.

Better not push it too far right now, Chena.

At least she could touch. Chena reached out her hand toward the wrinkled bark of the tree trunk beside her.

Pain ran up and down her arm.

“Ow!” she shouted, snatching her hand back. She stared from her fingertips to the tree. Then she saw the slim silver pillars
that lined the catwalk on both sides.

Gods below,
she thought, rubbing her hand.
It’s a shock fence.

Now that she saw them, she noticed the shock fence posts lining the paths in the village below too. Every path, every building,
was effectively cut off from the surrounding forest. No one could walk out there without suffering a serious shock or, depending
on how high the current was set, without dying.

All that alien beauty out there was completely out of reach.

Feeling cheated, Chena stuck to the lowest level, just walking and wondering about the slowly brightening world around her.
Did the waterfalls chattering around her shoulders serve any real purpose or were they just decoration? What were those four
silver rails stretching across the forest floor and into the woods? She could see the broad brown river winding between the
trees, down a slope from the village, but she couldn’t see any boats at the docks.

Suddenly Chena felt closed in. Except for the theoretical boats and mysterious rails, there really was no way out of here.
Maybe they really would have to wait for Dad to come get them. Maybe that would never happen.

Mom won’t make us stay here,
she told herself, her hand tightening on the catwalk railing.

The noise of running feet and hoarse calls made Chena look down. A pair of boys about her own age trotted out from between
the buildings, following one of the gravel paths. Mindful of the fence, Chena leaned over the railing and waved.

“Hey!” she called.

The boys paused and looked up. When they spotted Chena, they stared for a minute and then one of them slapped the other on
the shoulder and they took off running again.