STAY OUT OF THE FOREST

1560 4D

Rashua and Naudi met me at the door, tears in their eyes. We did a poor show. None of us wanted to play or sing, and the small crowd was no help at all, murmuring and laughing over the music we struggled to produce. At the end, I wrapped myself in the cape and followed Drasstar back to Thringe‘s place.

“She gave me a gift,” I whispered to him as we finished a small meal of fruit. The lights let down into soft shadows.

“Yah?” He sat down amid the front-room cushions, arranging them for sleep.

I breathed, “I don’t know what it was. Can’t we get these things off?” I held up my wrist with the metal band.

He shook his head.

We lay side by side, staring up at the dim, smooth stone ceiling, no words. Finally my eyes closed, and our breathing faded.

The sensation of a door opening in my head made me open my eyes. A vast empty sky arched above me. I stood on a rocky place, and my eyes reached out for a focus, settling at last on something impossibly far away. I reeled, and a hand reached out to steady me. I turned. Thringe, in her stripes, held my arm.

“You’ve never been out here, have you?” she asked me.

“No! Thringe! You’re dead!” I threw my arms around her, and our hug was so tight we almost melted together. She drew back her head and looked me eye to eye.

“I’m not Thringe. I’m just one of her afternames. This is where she spent a lot of her life.”

“This is just a dream.”

“No.”

“Innerspace?”

“Yes.”

As I watched, the rocky place shifted, and I stood now on level ground in a tree-lined avenue through a dark-green forest of monster trees. “Is this her place inside?” I had never seen trees except in holo displays.

“Oh yes. Stay out of the forest. It will hurt you. You are looking for something here?” She smiled.

“I don’t know. What is here?”

“All of the past of Thringe is here now. Her memory, her life. Look around.” The Thringe-figure put her hands by her sides, and shot straight into the sky, vanishing with a brief spark of yellow light.

Was it a dream, or innerspace? I began to walk along the edge of the avenue, toward a light coming from beyond the forest. The dark-gray trunks of the trees carried inscribed verses, thousands of them, black twisting interwoven letters lapscripted into the smooth bark like coll scars. I couldn’t read the script.

Something moved among the trees. I stopped and stared into the darkness. A soft orange light gleamed and flickered, and was gone, diving in among mounding, tangled roots. I moved off the avenue to stand by the nearest tree, my hand on its big trunk. The bark was hard and smooth, shadowy gray. Here and there among the scarrings of verses, faces smiled and frowned, and one of them spoke to me.

“You want something.” Dry, rasping voice, faint fixed smile, gray-brown face.

“Yes. I want Thringe.” Words from my heart.

“Come in and follow the light.” Now a whisper. The face faded into the bark.

The flicker of orange guttered in the darkness, only a few steps away. I stepped in between two gigantic tree trunks, one hand on each. The light rose up to my eye level and wandered off away from me, now blinking red, orange, red. I followed, stepping high over the piled roots.

As I clambered along, the trees seemed closer. I tried to squeeze between two of them, and got stuck. I tried to back out. No go. The light moved further away and went out.

“I can’t move,” I said to the trees.

Under my feet, the roots shifted. Something dry and snakelike climbed up my legs, fastening to me as tightly as if I were an old post. Tendrils, like a strangler fig.

I shouted, “Help!”

No sound came back. Tendrils continued their climb, branching and spreading, encasing me in a skin-tight cage. I fought to breathe. The movement stopped. The voice spoke again, soft, breathy. “You want Thringe? You are Thringe.”

“No! I’m Lejina.”

“You are Thringe. We have missed you. Here is your medicine.”

My mouth fell open, out of my control. A stem like a neck bending over my face split open, and a flood of warm salty fluid poured from it, spraying straight into my throat. Choking, I spat it out. It was blood.

I screamed. My voice sent great swashes of silver anjive ultrasound flying out into the darkness. The tendrils, heavy now, began pulling my limbs irresistibly apart, and pain shot through all my joints. The blood kept coming. I began to drown.

“Lejina.” A soft voice behind me. I didn’t recognize it. “Lejina. Close your mouth.”

I tried to clamp my jaw shut, but it wouldn’t obey me. The blood reached down my throat.

“Lejina, close your mouth!”

At last, with a cough, I turned my head slightly and got my mouth shut. The inrush of blood stopped. Gagging and coughing, I retched and shook inside my wood-cage. I panted in the darkness, still held in place, until I could ask, “Who are you?”

“Do you remember ‘shain haili four'?” The voice was male, soft, urgent. The three strange words wreathed themselves, glowing, before my eyes, became insects, and flew away.

“Jeddin? What happened to me?”

“You’re in Thringe‘s innerspace nightmares. You have to will yourself out.”

“Can’t you help me?” The wood around me was as solid as stone.

“You can do it yourself. I can’t. Your mind is generating all this. You connected with Thringe‘s fear, and this is what it makes.”

“How can her fear still be here if she’s dead?” I tested my prison. Still no go.

“Dead doesn’t mean the same thing here.” Now Jeddin came to where I could see him in the gloom. He touched my hand. “Why did you come here?”

“I missed her. And I have to find out what the location code means. Look, this is a dream, and I’m dreaming it, right?”

“No. This is andro innerspace, where we go for comfort and company and play. Thringe‘s space is damaged. We don’t come to this part of it at all. You see why?” His fingers stroked a tendril wrapping my right arm.

“Yes. You mean I can’t wake up?”

“You can die here, if you aren’t careful. Now you have to learn how innerspace works, just the way any andro does when she’s growing in the vats. Try to make something change with your mind.”

I made a little beetle with long wings and a red-lighted tail. It flew up into the tree branches shadowing over Jeddin and me, its lamp leaving a fading scarlet trail.

“Good! Try the wood now.”

Little by little, the stems and tendrils encasing me fell away. I stood free with Jeddin in the shadows. I took a deep breath and started to cry. He took me in his arms and held me until I stopped. “You’re good at this, too,” he said.

“How did you know I was here?” I asked him. After the cold wood, his body warmed me.

“She told me she was going to give you the second kiss. It gave you the viruses that started the innerspace neural growth in your brain. I knew you’d end up here, so I checked for you every so often.”

Together we left the trees and returned to the avenue. “Stay with me,” I said.

“No. This is your task, and you can do it. I have some andros waiting.” He snapped a finger, grinned, said, “I’m vapor,” and vanished in a hot purple spark.

The words of the payment location code came to me, and I murmured them: “Twelve Four Hundred Anxiety Bedrock.” As the words came out, they fell from my mouth to the avenue and began to crawl away, now a many-legged wisp of milky bones with a fragile spine. I followed the creature as it made its way to the foot of one of the trees. It began to climb, its weak claws scrabbling for a hold on the smooth bark. I carefully supported it as it reached an inscription and stopped, its antennae framing a phrase I could read: Durgin Crevasse 453, Passage 47, ten steps, ceiling crack. As I read the phrase again to myself, the word-creature crumbled into sand, and the phrase, like the face before it, faded into the bark. I turned, walked, and found the innerspace doorway out.