Time pressed too hard for her to give herself a day off to recover, so she masked injury with drugs and hoped to get the dosage and the mixture right. If she had to wipe any recordings because of distorted body reactions, those images would be lost forever.
Chandra intended never to repeat an experience. She could reMve them on recording, if she felt like it, but she wanted every bit of reality to be new.
The nerve clusters that ridged her face felt hot and swollen.
She left the sunlight behind. Inside the forest, the light possessed more dimensions. The trail led through cool green shadows. To her left, dusty gold light hung suspended in a shaft that passed through a rare break in the cover. In every direction, great tree trunks stretched a hundred meters high. Chandra stepped off the path, though she was not supposed to, and spread her arms against a tree she could not begin to span. Three people might have reached halfway around it.
Moss covered the bark. She rubbed her cheek against it.
Its softness astonished her. She compared the feel to feathers, to fur, but neither description acknowledged the gentle green irregularity. She looked up. Every branch bore a coat of moss that looked like it had dripped on, then begun to solidify.
The ends of the branches, the new year's growth of intense green needles, had begun to outdistance the relentless creep
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of the moss. When the branch stopped growing for the season, the moss would catch up. The cycle would continue, another turn.
Some other artist would have watched the tree long enough to detect the growth of the moss. With a few hours' observation, Chandra could have stored enough images for fractal extrapolation. But she had no interest in electronic manipulation of the images she collected. She edited when she wanted to—she despised no-cut purists—but her aim was to collect as many images as she could, as accurately as she could, to preserve every sensation and impression. She-rose and walked farther, deeper into the jungly forest.
The sounds of vehicles faded. The tourists passed beyond her hearing while she stood out of sight off the trail. More people would soon follow. She wanted and needed solitude.
Not even the Institute had been able to persuade the park service to close the park and the highway for a few hours while she made her recordings. It had been difficult enough to get an entry reservation out of turn. Ordinary people, tourists, signed up two years in advance.
Knowing she would be ejected, perhaps arrested and prosecuted, if anyone detected her presence off the trail, Chandra moved on.
She passed into a different silence than she had ever experienced. It was a cool, damp quiet, far from total. A stream, rushing steep from pool to pool, created a transparent wash of background. The electronic Doppler of a passing mosquito added a bright sharp line. An invisible bird warbled an intermittent curtain of sound. Chandra sat on the bank of the stream and let the smell and sight and sound and feel of the rain forest permeate her body. She gathered in the foaming rush of negative ions. The whole world smelled green.
At the top of the slope, the waterfall split. One rivulet splashed into a bubbling, swirling cauldron of water whitened by the agitation. The other spilled over a curved stone and ran smoothly into a still, clear pool. When she leaned over, her translucent gray eyes peered back at her.
Chandra stripped off her clothes. Naked, she climbed down the bank and slowly thrust herself into the frigid water. The numbing coldness crept up her gnarled feet and along her nerve-streaked legs. The flowing water rose into her pubic
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hair, lifting it as if with a static charge. She never hesitated when the icy stream touched her powerfully sensitive clitoris. She gasped and sank in deeper. Her nipples were always erect from the extra nerves; now they throbbed and ached as the water caressed her. Her toes dug in among the round, smooth stones.
She let the chill seep into her till all pleasure faded. She shivered uncontrollably, as if the glacier upstream had taken over her whole body. She turned and clambered awkwardly onto the bank. too numb to feel stones or roots, almost too numb to grab them and haul herself from the water.
The stream made a narrow break between the trees. A bit of sunlight crept in through the leaves. Chandra crawled to it and collapsed, exhausted and trembling and elated by what she had captured. As she sprawled in the sunlight, trying to regain the full use of her body, she could not resist replaying the stream's sensations.
When the playback ended and her experiential body rejoined her physical form. she shuddered with the shock of the change from intolerably cold to nearly warm again.
As she rested, seeking the strength to rise and continue, she stretched out to touch everything within her reach. The range of softnesses in the forest amazed her: the green and feathery softness of the moss, the crisp softness of a liny-leafed vascular plant growing amidst the moss, the unresisting plasticity of a circle of slime mold. The top of a fungal shelf felt like damp velvet- A slug glistened out from beneath a fallen branch. It was slick as wet silk, but it left behind a sticky, insoluble secretion on her ridged fingers.
A mosquito landed on her arm. She watched it dispassionately. Unlike a fly, it wasted no time with careful grooming.
It set itself among the fine dark hairs and plunged its proboscis into her skin. She submitted to the thin, keen pain. She had read that the insect would bite, drink, and neutralize its own hemolytic enzymes before it withdrew.
The mosquito had read different texts. It filled itself with Chandra's blood and whined away; then Chandra watched the itchy lump of the mosquito bite swell and darken. She concentrated on the unpleasant sensation.
When she had added the bite to her store, she realized that the cold of the stream had brought back the ache of her mus-
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cles. She quickly disconnected the recording, grabbed up her clothes and fumbled through her pockets, took another pill, and waited for the soreness to dissipate. She reconnected and got dressed as if nothing had happened.
Chandra climbed the stream bank and entered the trees again. Ferns grew in clumps and clusters, but the ground level was surprisingly clear. She had to make her way around an occasional enormous fallen tree. Whenever a tree tell, it opened a passage for sunlight and encouraged new growth.
Saplings sprouted on the logs, then grew to full-sized trees, reaching around and to the ground with long gnarled roots. Sometimes the nurse log rotted away completely, leavmg a colonnade of six or eight trees rising on roots like bowlegs.
Disconnected from the web, Chandra passed through the forest in ignorance of the names of most of the plants. She wanted to make a record of perceptions uncolored by previous knowledge. Anyone who wanted to use her piece as a study tape could do so by hooking into the web and requesting an information hypertext link. Chandra thought that would be like using a Rembrandt as a color chart.
Ahead, the sun streamed through a break in the upper story of the forest, illuminating a cluster of large, flat leaves that glowed gold-green. Light shimmered over the thick silver hairs covering their stalks. Chandra walked toward the plant, concentrating on its color, on the way the leaves spread themselves to the light, each parallel to all the others, as if the bush were arranged and lighted by some alien attention.
The silvery covering on the stems consisted not of soft hairs, but of sharp, wicked thorns. Chandra touched one with the nerve-thick pad of her forefinger. Like the mosquito, the thorn pierced her skin. The pain of the stab burst into acid agony, and she had to exert her will to keep from snatching her hand away. Her blood welled in a glistening drop around the thorn, spilled thick and warm down her finger, and pooled in her palm.