Up Against It - M. J. Locke [42]
“Your foresight?”
“Yes, sometimes the Nameless grants me foreknowledge.” He hesitated, and smiled. “In fact, I’ve foreseen something about you.”
Annoyed. She was definitely annoyed. “Indeed.”
“Yes. The Nameless has a purpose for you. I’ve dreamt it. Ze has touched you, hasn’t Ze?”
She stared. Harbaugh watched her with a growing look of satisfaction. Panic lurched in her gut. Mote density had diminished on this side of the memorial, away from the crowds, but mites—cameras—gleamed in the crannies all around. “You’re delusional,” she said in a flat tone, and walked away, barely avoiding launching herself into the air. She ducked into the trees, hands trembling and heart racing.
Get a grip, Navio. The cameras are live.
Rather than head for the nearest lifts—to do so, she would have to pass not only Learned Harbaugh but everybody else in the clearing, and she was not up for small talk—she climbed up into a nearby tree, and swung through the forest as fast and hard as she could—foot-to-hand-to-hand-to-foot, following the trail markers down, level after level, terrace after terrace, down toward the Rim.
She breathed. Sweat flew off her—muscles strained and flexed in her arms, legs, buttocks, and back—the scent of grass pollens and animal scat, of flower and sap and mold, filled her nostrils; twig and bark scoured her hand and foot palms, leaf and blossom kissed her skin, her palms and soles slapped bark and shook branches, startling birds and squirrels into the air. Down, down, across, down, across, down—dizzy from the twisting of the Coriolis pull, riding it rather than fighting it. The acceleration pulled ever harder at her, and only her long tenure in space enabled her to correct for the sideways drag.
She grew calmer. It was ridiculous to let herself be affected like this. It was a coincidence. Those types were always seeing things … hearing things … channeling spirits in the machines. It would have been more surprising if he had not “seen” something to do with her. Briefly, angrily, she considered a new rule: compulsory denial of employment to anyone who espoused quackery.
She discarded it as quickly. In the first place, she would never get it past the cluster Council. And it was unfair, really. They weren’t all that nutty. And perhaps she was. She laughed. I heard a Voice; what the hell. As long as it wasn’t telling me to open my faceplate in a vacuum. Or someone else’s, she thought more soberly, recalling Kovak.
Finally the gravitation got to be too much for her. She swung over into a nearby level, and dropped to the ground to trudge down the last stretch of hill and trail. Near the exit elevator, she crept over the rocks, limbs trembling, to a stream and scooped up a mouthful of water. As she straightened, wiping away the icy wet that dribbled down her chin, pushing with her arms against the gravity that tried to pin her to the rock, she spotted a family of otters splashing and dunking each other, just upstream.
Jane took a few moments to watch them, crouched among the rocks like the curious ape she was. Her heart labored in the heavy acceleration, her hip joints ached, and her knees and back twinged. The past few days she had neglected her workout. Antiaging treatments only went so far. She should spend more time in high-gee areas.
While the otters played among the water-splashed rocks, Jane stretched out on a flat rock to warm herself, and stared up through the canopy of leaves and vines, palms cushioning her head, and took in the water’s melodic trickling, the scent of moss and leaf on the breezes that lifted her hair and cooled her sweat. She had climbed down through Nowie Spoke’s terraced descent. Kukuyoshi’s roof lay far overhead, near Zekeston’s hub: she could see its silver-grey curves, a kilometer up.
It was as deep a living sky as she had seen since she had left Earth so long ago. Light from hidden sunlamps filtered down through the layers of growth, casting a green glow over the world. Who’d have believed there could be so many shades of green?