"Sure, I get it." Parker gave her a puzzled look. "Is that going to matter?"
"It might." Gretchen made a face at the pilot, annoyed he didn't share her interest.
"Well, let me know when it does, right?" Parker began unpacking his sleepbag and personal effects. Anderssen looked around to see if Maggie was interested, but the Hesht was already arranging a nest of communications equipment and blankets and coils of cable and other, unidentifiable tools around her. As promised, the technician had already mounted a camera in the open window, pointing across the sprawling city at the hill.
Feeling stymied, Gretchen zipped up her jacket and leaned on the windowsill, watching the cityscape below. Why didn't I take that post-doc position at the Ney Arkham institute? Why?
The sun was low in the sky, almost vanished into the layer of smog hanging over the city, and the air at the thirty-third floor level was getting chilly. The hill holding the monastery of the mandire was still glowing with the light of sunset, while the darkened neighborhoods at its feet were beginning to sparkle with lights. From a height, the city didn't look as dangerous and dirty and crowded as it had felt in the heat of the afternoon.
Anderssen stood at the window for a long time, watching the city slip steadily into night. Then her stomach growled and she shivered, turning away.
"We should get some food."
"Hrrr…yes. I should go hunting." Maggie looked up from her equipment, most of which was now humming and chirping to itself. One of the v-panes showed an infrared view of the massif. Figures could be seen coming and going along the narrow staircases.
Parker turned from the open window, flicking the stub of a tabac out into the empty air. "I can go, kitty-cat. I know what we all like – assuming I can identify the basic food groups in the street vendors' stalls. But grease, bread and meat should be about the same everywhere."
The Hesht shook her head as she draped a stained and mended rain-cloak around her shoulders. "Not wise, cub. I'm beginning to get the smell of these scaled-runners-underfoot. Humans are not welcome in Takshila. Didn't you hear them hissing and lashing their tails when we were walking from the station?"
"Yes," Gretchen said, kneeling by her own pile of gear. "This dialect's not working so well with the translator in my earbug though…could you make out what they were saying?"
Magdalena's tail twitched from side to side. "Distrust – envy – fear – hatred, they all smell the same, even if the pelt is different and one clan says 'hhrrruukh' when the other says 'hhrrruuch.' I will go out – they have not seen my kind before – I'll be no more an oddity than a stray Hikkikit going to market."
"A Hiki-what?" Parker glared at the Hesht. "I think you're making up the names of things now. That is supposed to be what humans do for a living!"
Magdalena bared her incisors and hissed dismissively at the pilot. "Read the guidebook – there are more races on Jagan than the Jehanan. I will return soon."
"Wait, wait, wait…" Parker found his own jacket and goggles. "I'm coming with you. I'm almost out of my delicious 'bitter leaves' and we're not going through that whole 'me-having-no-smokes' business again. Look, I'll wear my potato hat – no one will be able to tell I'm human!"
"Maggie -" Gretchen raised a quieting hand. "Let him go. Comm me when you're back and I'll open the door so you don't have to lug the key around."
Gretchen slowed to a halt, feeling sweat trickle down her back, and looked up at the ribbon of dirty brown sky visible overhead. She clicked her teeth, turning on the comm built into her earbug and goggles. "Magdalena, I'm lost again. Can you tell me where I am?"
For a moment, there was only the spitting hiss of static – something in the local environment threw out an inordinate amount of interference on the bands used by their work radios – and then Anderssen could quite clearly hear Parker coughing violently. A wicked chainsaw-starting sound drowned him out and then Magdalena's voice was filling her ears.
"Kit kit kit…always getting lost on the way home from the watering hole…ah…you're not on scope here either. Can you see a landmark?"
"No…ifI could, I'd know where I…what is wrong with Parker? He sounds like he needs new lungs again."
Maggie laughed. "He…he is trying to smoke the local leaves. They are very strong, I think! Stronger than Parker – he is lying on the floor now. Hrrrr! What a funny color he is!"
"Great," Gretchen muttered under her breath. "Check his medband – but if he has a seizure, there's no doctor."
There was momentary silence on the channel. Anderssen moved into a doorway, finding even a little sun too much in the all-encompassing humidity. Lucky it's so cool up here in the hill country, she thought miserably. Not like Parus, where it's really hot.
The streets of Takshila came in two flavors – wide, curving and lined with broad-leafed trees, apparently part of the citywide network of ring-roads radiating around the seventeen hills, and narrow and twisty. While getting from the apartment tower to the monastery hill itself seemed simple enough from thirty-three stories up, the lack of aerocars meant Gretchen had to use her own two feet for the day's business.
The close, hot air put Gretchen on edge. The impassive, alien faces of the Jehanan did not make her feel welcome. The tension on the main streets was bad enough – today, she could feel hostility sharp in the air – but the side lanes were claustrophobic. There were doors – but they were all closed and locked and seemed very solidly built. In her experience, that meant a district where the fall of night meant footpads and murder and thievery. By day, it all gave her a stifling impression of being a rat in a maze – with no cheese in sight.
"Parker will live," Magdalena's voice boomed in her ear, making Anderssen jump. "Good there is no carpet here for claw-sharpening, or it would be ruined. These fierce leaves have wrestled our smelly cub to the ground and pinned his ears right back."
"Can you find me?" Gretchen tried to keep her voice calm. No gang of murderous locals had come along in the past five minutes, but a twitchy feeling between her shoulder blades was convincing her they would very soon now. She could hear noise ahead – bouncing back and forth off of the buildings – and it sounded like lots of people. Lots of angry people. The thought of continuing down this narrowing lane filled her with dread.
There was muttering and the clicking sound of Magdalena's claws on her comp panels. "No. Your locator signal keeps hopping in and out of its hole. If you get to a clearing, or a sunny rock exposed to the sky…"
Anderssen took a steadying breath and her fingers drifted to the medband on her wrist. She could feel her heart speeding up. Right. Time to retrace my steps – if I could remember which way I'd come! Stupid machines, why do they…Her thoughts became still for an instant. Wait. Remember…how do you unravel a knot you can't untie? You close your eyes. Let your fingers – or your feet – find the way.
Then doubt assailed her. Why should her feet, mended workboots and all, know their own way back to the apartment building? Because Green Hummingbird would say you'd left a shadow on the world while you were walking and if you were quiet, quiet as a desert mouse, you could catch hold of that shadow and follow it home.
The jarring sound of a clanging gong joined the angry, buzzing noise filling the air in the alley. Gretchen thought she could hear the trampling of hundreds of huge clawed feet on cobblestones. The sway of flickering, scaled tails. She knew how that felt, to have a long counter-balancing tail, to have stiff three-clawed feet digging in the sand as she ran.