Mary Rosenblum (14 page)

A lot.

He needed to figure out what was going on here before they shifted this rock wrong.

WAKING IN HER FIRST CLASS RECLINER ON THE NORTH American Alliance’s climber, Ahni winced at her stomach’s instant protest. On day five, they had passed from Earth’s gravitational tyranny to the sense that gravity wasn’t such a tyrant after all. Two young children traveling from Toronto with their parents, had spent the last day entertaining all with their hands-on exploration of their diminishing weight and its limits. Smiling in spite of bruises, they made everyone smile.

Ahni tried to enjoy their antics, but her anxiety over what awaited her on NYUp oppressed her. Her mother had commanded herr to return, then pleaded. Not once would she admit that she had known Xai was alive when Ahni gave her the news. That was a lie and it made Ahni wonder what other lies hid here.

It would be dangerous to face her brother, but by now, he must know that she had not revealed his presence to their father. He would be curious and curiosity had always been his weakness. With luck, he would reveal glimpse of the larger picture she knew lay behind these small lies.

Her mother had, at least, ceased calling her. Through a crack in the privacy curtain which enclosed her First Class recliner, Ahni cught a glimpse of the two children, Donya and Kelly, swinging down the aisle between the curtained recliners, Tarzan-like, from handhold to handhold, pursued by the resigned attendant who probbably looked forward with longing to the arrival of the climber. Ahni checked the screen on the arm of her seat. Less than an hour to arrrival. She stretched, wrinkled her nose, wanting a long soak in the hotel in comforting gravity. And she wanted to see Dane againn–needed to talk to talk to him,
wanted
to see him. Revelation there. She smiled in spite of her worries.

“Hey, we’re gonna land soon.” A face thlust through the currtains, interrupting her thoughts.

Nine-year-old Donya grinned at her, the natural mix of North Mrican, Mediterranean, and Spanish genes a perfect blend in her oval face. “Kelly already has his spot staked out. And I know they’re not real windows, don’t you tell me, too.” She made a face.

“A window is something you look at to see the outside,” Ahni said gravely. “I call them windows.”

“Well, they
are
just a digital image,” the girl stated with a child’s solemn attention to getting the details right. “But I suppose your definition is broad enough so that you may call them windows.”

“It is. I was careful to make it so.” Ahni laughed and released the webbing that kept her safely in her seat. Gingerly she pulled herrself to the aisle sliding the curtain back along its guide rail, one hand on the hand grip. She noticed that Donya had already mastered the art of flying. She couldn’t match Koi, but she learned a whole lot faster than the adult passengers with their less-fluid inner ears who pulled themselves laboriously around the climber or clutched white knuckled at hand grips, their eyes glassy with anti-nausea drugs. They would appreciate that Level One gravity on the platforms.

“I looked at the welcome vid in the climber’s library.” Donya grabbed the guide rail to keep herself from flying past Ahni. “They have a really cool park. It’s in the center of the orbital and there’s no gravity, and people play all kinds of games there and race and - I can’t wait.” She ran out of breath finally.

Ahni spared a glance for Donya parents who belonged to the glassy-eyed white-knuckled set. “You’ll be living up here for a while, right?” Ahni joined her at one of the big “windows.” “So you’ll have plenty of time to find friends to go with you to the park.”

“You’re right.
They
won’t want to go.” She gave her parents a disappointed look and shrugged. “I wish it was going to be longer. I want to get good in no-gravity, shave my head, and get a lightfiber tatoo. Or do you have to be born up here to do that?”

“I think it’s just fashion.” Ahni smiled, thinking she and Koi would hit it off. “I never heard there was a law.”

“The Administrator has a tattoo. He’s quite dark and it looks really cool. We met him last year when Father brought us up here to see. Mama didn’t want to come up here to stay, but Father said it would

‘round out our life experience’ - one of those things parents say, you know? And I’m glad. I didn’t want to spend the winter in Montreal. Snow! Brr!” She shivered. “I miss Ankara but this will be so much more fun!”

Ahni smiled. The vid camera had shifted its view and now they seemed to be passing close to the matte black cannister that was NYUp, although the terminus of the Elevator was actually some distance away.

“Oh, look at the lights!” Donya crowed. She tried to bounce up and down and Ahni caught her as she rocketed away from the window, hauled her back.

Gripping the handhold beneath the window, she looked briefly up at Ahni. “I know you’re going to be very very busy up there, but if you don’t have anything to do sometime, and you want to go to the park–”

“I’ll call you.” Ahni smiled at her, distracted from her worry. This girl, child of an upperclass family who moved in global circles, had had no casual childhood, school, friends to hang around with. “I really will,”

she assured Donya, who had put on a polite face that Ahni guessed was her response to adult lies.

THE FIRST CLASS section disembarked at the terminus, hauling themselves directly from their cabins to the shuttles that would take them to their destination with only the barest nod from Security. Most of them were headed for NYUp, although a few scattered to other shuttles. Donya kept up a bright commentary all the way, while her brother kept his eyes fixed on the vidscreens offering various views of the looming platform with its forest of solar arrays, telescopes, radar dishes, and all the other devices that cluttered its skin. The parents were clearly holding on to their stomachs.

Ahni finally saw the last of the irrepressible Donya in the Arrival Hall, as they passed through the First Class aisles and out into the plaza. Tired from her forced inactivity, the cramped sleeping space of the recliner, and her restless worries about Xai, Ahni followed the lavender arrows that lighted beneath her feet, leading her to her hotel

It wasn’t far from tlle Arrival Hall, so she didn’t bother to hire a cart, even though she had reclaimed her large suitcase and now lugged it along with her small bag slung over one shoulder. In the sub-Earth gravity, it wasn’t a particularly heavy load. But before she had passed more than a Tai Pei block down the busy corridor leaving from the Arrival Hall, she hesitated.

It … felt different here.

Normally, once she had the feel of a place, whether it was the family compound, the streets of Tai Pei, or a strange hotel, the emotional static from the people around her faded into a blur like white noise. Only the unexpected or extreme emotional spike stabbed her attention. So this time, barely two weeks away from the corridors, she should have felt at home.

She didn’t. A simmering–anger–tainted the air like the smell of burning wires. It wasn’t like this last time.

A uniformed woman carrying a static cleaning wand stepped around her with a flash irritation that startled Ahni as much as a slap would have done. The woman gave her a direct stare as she stalked past.

How rude. Ahni walked on, resolving to drop into Pause in her room and consider this change in mood up here. The sour tinge of anger in the air nagged at her as she followed the lavender arrow down the thickly carpeted aisle. The arrow led her left, then right, then vanished beneath the feet of a doorman with the muscular look of a gym rat and red hair braided into neat cornrows. He glanced at a wrist mounted link and leaped to take her bags, his wide amer-mix face fixed in a smile. “Welcome, Ms. Huang. Nice of you to stay with us this trip.” He hoisted the big bag as if it was filled with feathers. “I’ll show you your room. Is there anything you’d like? A massage? It helps after all those hours in one of those climber recliners. I think they were designed by chiropractors hungry for business.” Chatting on glibly, leaving just enough pause to allow herr to answer, but not so much that it was obvious that she wasn’t answering, he escorted her through the doorway.

It led to a small square plaza. Ahni stopped still, startled by the vista of blue sky and puffy clouds overhead. A trio of birds winged across it, vanishing into a belt of trees beyond green lawn and a distant brook. Beneath her feet, grass carpet so real that she stifled the urge to lean down and touch it enticed her to that distant stream.

“Pretty realistic isn’t it?” Her guide laughed. “It helps the visitors who have claustrophobia problems.”

”No kidding.” Ahni laughed, too. Yes, it was a ceiling, not endless sky, and you could just make out the line where the grass carpet met the rolling lawn of the virtual landscape. Nice projection, she thought.

Very dimensional. Top of the line software and hardware both. Rustic white fences – real ones – kept patrons from walking into the walls.

“This is your suite.” He led her across the “grass” to a door in what seemed to be a neat row of small cottages. More projections. With a flourish he palmed the lock and threw the door open. ”Now I’ve opened it, it won’t respond to my hand anymore. If you’ll just stand here a second,” he indicated a faintly darker circle in the carpet, “the vitals scanner will record you and then the room will take your personal security from there.”

Ahni stepped onto the dark carpet and imagined that she could feel the Security program recording her bioelectric field, her image, body temp, muscle synergy. It would now recognize her without further ID.

The room itself was of typical Hong Kong or Tai Pei size, she decided, small for American or European hotels. A single room, the sofa converted to a bed. A table and two luxurious chairs took up the rest of the floor. Drawers and a closet lined one wall, entertainment screen and holodesk the other. A refreshment panel and the door to a private bathroom filled the other wall. An enormous vase of white lilies and pink orchids stood on the single, small table.

”The controls.” With a flourish, the man touched a watercolor of a grassy valley and it shimmered into a control screen. ”There’s a separate one in the bathroom for the functions there. Window –” He touched the screen and instantly the entertainment wall vanished, showing her blackness and the scattered diamond dust of a million stars

Ahni stilled an urge to grab for something solid, as if she might be sucked out into that freezing, beautiful void. “Nice,” she said dryly. “How often do you have to get out the defib?”

The doorman chuckled. This was clearly his private perk, his little test of his visitors. “Good reaction,” he murmured.

Ahni merely scanned the control panel. “Everything else looks pretty routine. I think I can find my way around the bathroom, thanks.” She slipped a cash card out of her pocket, handed it to him. The LCD

displayed the amount on the front.

“Thank you, ma’am.” He grinned. “If there’s anything you want–”

“Did the hotel provide the flowers?”

He looked at them as if he had just noticed them, eyebrow rising. “I don’t think so, ma’am. Doesn’t look like our usual supplier. I could try to find out.”

“Please do.” She smiled at him.

He bowed his head to her. “Right away, ma’am.”

Ahni closed the door behind him. Quite the step up from the little cheapie hotel on the main corridor she had booked last trip. Cautiously, Ahni walked over to the table, circled it, staring at the flowers. Her assiduous doorman had placed her bags on a wide shelf in the closet, leaving the sliding doors open. She retrieved a small handheld security scanner from it, checked the flowers. No contact toxins, explosives, hardware of any sort. Just flowers. No card. Xai?

She leaned close. The scent of the lilies pervaded, but a delicate trace of rotting meat threaded the flowery sweetness. This particular species of orchid depended on carrion flies for pollination. Bemused she straightened. Sweetness and rot. A comment? Warning? She touched one creamy lily petal, its flesh crisp and fresh beneth her fingertip. Grown here? In Dane’s kingdom? She turned her back on them, touched open her suitcase and surveyed the contents Fan had helped her pack. Time to go make herself available. And to watch her back. She smiled, mirthlessly.

SHE DRESSED IN the “orbital chic” she had seen in the corriidors, loose and elegant. Out in the corridors, she sauntered along, looking as curious and mildly bored as the genuine tourists she had noted.

The main corridors here were wide, crammed with shallow shop fronts, vendor carts, and strolling tourists. Ahni pretended interest in the same styles and designers you could get for the same price on Earth. That undercurrent of anger nagged at her. She shook her head at the skinny little androgyne, intricately tattooed with light, who offered her faceted pieces of polished gemmstones set in hairfine wire.

Then she looked twice, because he … she … reminded her of Koi. Ahni bought a skewer of fresh fruit chunks from a native-boned girl with wise eyes in a gamine face. For all her nonchalance, Ahni kept her awareness honed, searching for an echo of Xai. She needed to contact Dane, too. Her surge of anticipation was–revelatory. Maybe he could see a pattern in Xai’s actions.

She entered a shop selling spider silk clothing, fingering the delicate tissues of gold, soft green, peacock blue, and rich crimson that hung on the racks or draped artistically about surrealistic mannequins seemingly carved from ice. The shopkeeper, a round-face mixedeuro with blonde hair and fair northern skin, followed her, her manner a perfect blend of helpful and polite, her eagerness hummming behind her careful unobtrusiveness. “I like this color.” Ahni selected a fitted blouse with short, loose sleeves in a soft green and gold flower pattern that made her think of the axle garden.

“It suits your skin tones. Visiting from China?” The woman led her to a mirror and a shimmering privacy curtain instantly surrrounded them in the tiny shop. “Do try it on.” The shopkeeper withdrew to the other side of the privacy curtain. “This style flatters your figure.”