have been farther away, because I was able to wiggle a hyperlimb into the substance of four-space, negate some of my weight by bending world-lines, and drop lightly to the ground.
Or, not so lightly. In middrop, reality hiccuped. I was just a girl. Some maenad nearby must have done her Grendel-thing. I fell hard, and it hurt, but nothing seemed broken. I wiggled across the leaves and took up my fallen rifle.
The lyre-music got louder. The second siren was near and getting nearer. The shrill screams and yells of the maenads rose up and drowned and quenched the lyre-music.
A maenad came suddenly around the tree where I crouched. She had in hand a fourteen- foot length of iron pole. It looked like an I-beam ripped from the electrical transformer towers I had passed. She turned to face me: Less than a dozen feet separated us. There were worms and serpents woven in her hair. Adders raised their heads from her oozy locks and stared at me.
Her eyes were two pools of drugged insanity. She opened her mouth and screamed like a peacock.
No moralizing or hesitating this time. I chambered an anti-psychic round, brought up the weapon, and shot. She was leaping toward me, and she caught the shell in her mouth. Her head exploded.
Blood and brains flew everywhere. Instead of being grossed out, or horrified, I laughed aloud.
I am sorry I laughed. It makes me sound like some sort of sick, sick person. But I thought I was about to die. I was sure of it. And I was relieved. I was glad to be alive.
Her eyes, her eyes had frightened me so. Sometimes, at night, I can still see them.
More running through the trees.
I could hear the noise and earthquake-clamor of the advancing maenads to my left and right, and yellow smoke and dust hung over the treetops.
Then, a break in the trees. There was a narrow strip of grass, and then a cliff. I could see the texture of the trees far below, like green cumulus clouds. There was a line cutting through the trees. A highway? In the distance, in the horizon, a gray smudge was gathered around a long line of blue haze. The sea? I did not see how that could be Los Angeles-the terrain looked too green and hilly. On the other hand, I did not know what the city looked like from the landward side. I did not even know what planet this was.
I saw a group of maenads break free of the tree line about a hundred yards, maybe two hundred, to the left of me.
I stood still, hoping they would see the uniform and conclude I was an Amazon. But they were not fooled. On they came.
One of them laughed and simply jumped off the cliff to her death. The others screamed like falcons and ran toward me. Trees behind me swayed and toppled, and hundred-feet- tall cylinders of timber began raining over the cliffside. My armor stiffened once or twice as splinters as long as my forearm, shooting through the air at the speed of sound, bounced off the high-tech Amazonian fabric.
It knocked me sliding off the cliff. Before I fell, the last thing I did was chamber and shoot an anti-psychic round into the cliff face half a yard away from me.
The recoil tore the rifle out of my hands. But since the energy-pulse from the shell negated, for a moment, whatever it was the maenads were doing to me to compress me, I merely reached out with a tendril and organized the world-path of the falling rifle so that it jumped immediately back into my hand.
On wings of silver and red shining stuff, I soared down the cliff face. Reality blinked, and I was a falling girl. I shot again. I was a soaring four-dimensional angel-thing. Blink again: 3-D girl again, falling. Shot again: 4-D angel. Blink: 3-D. Shot: 4-D. You get the picture.
Twenty yards up from an inviting patch of grass, and I was out of that particular type of ammo. I had given Antiope my spare clips, after all. Blink: 3-D again. The girl falls.
The armor, which stiffened on impact to protect against rifle shots, also stiffened on impact when I fell. This meant no absorbing any shock with my legs, no clever tumbling, no rolling-just a bad, bad fall.
There was a terrible stabbing pain in my leg when I tried to stand, and I could not stand. And this was no mere 'surface' pain; I was no longer occupying a huge fourth-dimensional volume, with plenty of room to disperse shocks into. No, I was simply the little blond girl the maenads wanted me to be.
I suppose it should have been impossible to break a leg when encased in a perfectly rigid metal suit. But maybe one of the smart maenads had been inspired to believe I would break a leg when I fell. So here I was.
The maenads swarmed down the cliff like a troop of monkeys. One girl ran down the cliffside as if it were a flat surface, her personal gravity at right angles to the rest of the Earth.
Several of the girls flew. They did not fly like birds do; they did not move through the air like Victor levitating. No: They whirled through the air like autumn leaves in a gale, swirling high and low, pitching up and down, arms and legs spread wide, tangled hair- mops shedding grape-leaf.
The maenads landed around me like paratroopers. Some merely touched down like ballerinas stepping off an invisible carriage step. Some landed on their heads. One of them splattered into a wash of broken bones and wide-splashed blood, and gathered
