It was not steep, and opened into a broader fall of convoluted sand gullies choked with pine needles the size of telephone poles, and rocky screes that slid and shifted beneath her feet. Water had sculpted the sides into crazy formations that reminded her of hydraulic mining sites she’d seen once in California.
She was still descending, when a beetle-shaped body the size of an armchair emerged from a fold in the ground a short distance away. It was encased in shiny black plates that could have been forged by a medieval armorer, and rode on thick, jointed legs feathered with barbs and ugly bristles. Michelle froze involuntarily, but before she could register anything more, the creature had scurried away and disappeared again among the boulders.
If she had thought about such things, there would have been no reason for her to be shocked or surprised. But that was the problem: She hadn’t wanted to think about the obvious reason why Kevin and Taki called their adventure ground “Bug Park.” Instead, she had pushed it to the back of her mind in the illogical way that people do inconvenient truths, as if that might somehow change them.
Still keeping motionless, she directed her gaze slowly over the nearer surroundings. Other things were moving in dark caves of hanging roots; among sinuous growths looming all about her like thickets of twisted vines; watching from spaces underneath rocks and behind logs. She became acutely conscious suddenly of round, ominous-looking burrows that hadn’t been made by rabbits.
Wait; calm down; get a grip. This wasn’t really “real,” she reminded herself. At the same time, she found herself wondering what kind of nerve it would take to carry on if it were real. A genuine pang of doubt assailed her that she would have been up to it. Now she was beginning to grasp what Ohira had been getting at. Seeing it was the only way. No amount of talk could have rivaled this. She felt herself suck in a long breath, even though the mec had no mouth or lungs, sensed the others watching the screen but saying nothing, and resumed moving.
The slope became more open. Descending required no exertion, but loose particle-rocks dislodged under her feet caused her to slide and stumble. She tried picking up what she took to be a thorn to use as a staff. It looked impossibly heavy and unwieldy, but she remembered Bel lifting beams in the tiny house in Neurodyne’s Training Lab, and sure enough found that she could handle it easily. The thorn worked well, and soon the concrete block was high above her, looking, with its red-and-yellow flag, like a fortress built into a mountain face in a scene from a science fiction movie.
She came to an unearthly forest, where purple cables writhed among scaly trunks and leaning spires of grass. Then the forest was dwarfed in turn by an overhanging shoulder of some distant, leafy Everest. The ground became spongy, with white spears and curled pink tendrils thrusting up through a mat of fuzzy gravel poured over tangled, spring-like fibers. She entered shadow as leaves of a drooping plant blotted out the sun, hanging over her like rounded, lot-size lawns upended in some titanic earthquake. Each leaf carried its own tree of trunk and branching veins on its underside. The spaces between were thick with curved spines, which in reality must have been barely visible hairs, and pitted by circular depressions surrounding openings leading to the interior. In some places the holes exuded rust-colored growths—she guessed, some kind of parasite, spreading and joining into patches like seaweed on a beach.
Ahead of her now was a slope covered in shredded logs, suggesting the remains of a blasted forest. It rose to the base of a turreted castle of shattered wood, defended by pale crenelations of fungus looking like huge, fantastic corals beneath a fairytale sea. In places, the mound of earth and logs was moving. Michelle stopped and backed away warily.
Then a tearing, crunching sound made her look up. One of the leaves up over her head was missing a saw-edged piece the size of a door. As she looked, another portion of the leaf disappeared, and suddenly the face of a caterpillar—if the obscene globular shape that was virtually all mouth, with just points for eyes could be called a face—was staring down from the front end of an undulating green mass the length of a railroad car, studded with spikes and portholes. Michelle retreated farther, instinctively restraining herself from moving too suddenly, but at the same time unable to prevent her steps from quickening. She knew that she was seeing through a remote sensor, and she guessed that the monster was probably harmless in any case. . . . But her capacity for reasoned control was reaching its limit. Reflexes were taking over now. Finally she allowed herself to turn, and hastened in a new direction.