Was I so obtrusively ignorant that even a kid could see it?
‘I guess you don’t get many tourists these days.’
‘Not since bad time, no.’
‘What was it like to live through?’
‘I dunno mister; I just two.’
Of course. It was seven years ago. From a child’s perspective, that really was most of a lifetime ago. Juan, and Tom, and the other street children would barely be able to remember what life was like in Chasm City prior to the plague. Those few years of limitless wealth and possibility would be blurred with the soft-focus simplicity of infancy. All they knew, all they truly remembered, was the city as it now was: vast and dark and again filled with possibility - except now it was the possibility that lay in danger and crime and lawlessness; a city for thieves and beggars and those who could live by their wits rather than their credit ratings.
It was just a shock to find myself in one.
We passed other rickshaws returning to the concourse, slick sides glossy with rain. Only a few of them carried passengers, hunched sullenly down in raincoats, looking as if they would rather have been anywhere else in the universe than Chasm City. I could relate to that. I was tired, I was hot, sweat pooling under my clothes, and my skin itched and crawled for want of a wash. I was acutely conscious of my own body odour.
What the hell was I doing here?
I had a chased a man across more than fifteen light-years, into a city which had become a sick perversion of itself. The man I was chasing was not even truly bad - even I could see that. I hated Reivich for what he had done, but he had acted much as I would have done in the same circumstances. He was an aristocrat, not a man of arms, but in another life - if the history of our planet had followed another course - he and I might even have been friends. Certainly I had respect for him now, even if it was a respect born out of the way he had acted completely beyond my expectations when he destroyed the bridge at Nueva Valparaiso. Such casual brutality was to be admired. Any man that I misjudged that badly had my respect.
And yet, for all that, I knew I’d have no qualms about killing him.
‘I think,’ Juan said, ‘you need history lesson, mister.’
What I had managed to learn aboard the Strelnikov had not been very much, but it was all the history I felt that I had an appetite for right now. ‘If you’re thinking I don’t know about the plague . . .’
The tunnel was growing lighter ahead. Not much, but enough to indicate that we were about to enter the city proper. The light which suffused it had the same caramel-brown texture I’d seen from the behemoth: the colour of already murky light filtered through yet more murk.
‘Plague hit, make building go wacko,’ said Juan.
‘That much they told me.’
‘They no tell you enough, mister.’ His syntax was rudimentary, but I suspected it was an improvement on anything the rickshaw driver was capable of. ‘Them building change, real fast.’ He made expansive hand gestures. ‘Many folk get die, get squashed or end up in wall.’
‘That doesn’t sound too nice.’
‘I show you people in wall, mister. You no make joke no more. You shit own pants.’ We swerved to avoid another rickshaw, scraping against us. ‘But listen - them building, they change fastest up at top, right?’
‘I don’t follow.’
‘Them building like tree. Got big lot of root, stick in ground, right?’
‘Constructional feedlines, is that it? Leeching raw materials from the bedrock for repair and regrowth?’
‘Yeah. What I say. Like big tree. But like big tree in other way, too. Always grow up top. Unnerstan’?’ More hand gestures, as if he were shaping the outline of a mushroom cloud.
Perhaps I did understand. ‘You’re saying the growth systems were concentrated in the upper parts of the structures?’
‘Yeah.’
I nodded. ‘Of course. Those structures were designed to dismantle themselves as well as grow higher. Either way, you’d always want to add or remove material from the top. So the nerve centre of the self-replicating machinery would always rise with the structure. The lower levels would need fewer systems; just the bare minimum to keep them ticking over and for repairing damage and wear, and for periodic redesigns.’
It was hard to tell if Juan’s smile was one of congratulation - that I had worked this out for myself - or sympathy that it had taken me as long as it had.
‘Plague get to top first, carried by root. Start making top of building go wacko first. Lower down, stay same as before. By time plague got there, people cut root, starve building. No change any more.’
‘But by then the upper parts had already changed beyond recognition.’ I shook my head. ‘It must have been a terrible time.’
‘No shit, mister.’
We plunged into daylight, and I finally understood what Juan meant.
FIFTEEN
We were at the lowest level of Chasm City, far below the rim of the caldera. The street on which we ran crossed a black lake on pontoons. Rain was falling softly from the sky - from the dome, in fact, many kilometres above our heads. All around us, vast buildings rose from the flood, sides slab-sided and immense. They were all I could see in any direction, until - forestlike - they merged into a distant, detailless wall, like a bank of smog. They were encrusted - at least for the first six or seven storeys - in a barnacle-like accretion of ramshackle dwellings and markets, lashed together and interlinked with flimsy walkways and rope-ladders. Fires burned in the slums, and the air was even more pungent than in the concourse. But it was fractionally cooler, and because there was a constant breeze, it felt less stifling.
‘What’s this place called?’ I said.
‘This Mulch,’ said Juan. ‘Everything down here, street level, this Mulch.’
I understood then that the Mulch was less a district of the city than a stratification. It included perhaps the first six or seven storeys which rose above the flooded parts. It was a carpet of slum from which the great forest of the city rose.
Looking up, craning my neck to peer around the rickshaw’s roof, I saw the slab-sided structures ram skywards, perspective forcing them together at least a kilometre above my head. For most of that height, their geometries must have been much as their architects had intended: rectilinear, with parallel rows of windows, now dark, the edifices marred only by the occasional haphazard extrusion or limpetlike excresence. Up higher, though, the picture changed sickeningly. Although no two buildings had mutated in quite the same manner, there was something common to their shape-changing, a kind of uniform pathology which a surgeon might have recognised and diagnosed as stemming from the same cause. Some of the buildings split in two halfway up their length, while others bulged with unseemly obesity. Some sprouted tiny avatars of themselves, like the elbowed towers and oubliettes of fairytale castles. Higher, these structural growths bifurcated and bifurcated again, interpenetrating and linking like bronchioli, or some weird variant of brain coral, until what they formed was a kind of horizontal raft of fused branches, suspended a kilometre or two from the ground. I had seen it before, of course, from the sky, but the meaning of it - and its sheer, city-spanning scale - was only now apparent from this vantage point.
Canopy.
‘Now you see why I no take you there, mister.’
‘I’m beginning to. It covers the whole city, right?’
Juan nodded. ‘Just like Mulch, only higher.’
The one thing that had not been really obvious from the behemoth was that the Canopy’s dense entanglement of madly deformed buildings was confined to a relatively shallow vertical stratum; the Canopy was a kind of suspended ecology and below it was another world - another city - entirely. The complexity of it was obvious now. There were whole communities floating within it; sealed structures embedded in the Canopy like birds’ nests, each as large as a palace. Fine as gossamer, a mass of weblike strands filled the spaces between the larger branches, dangling down almost to street level. It was difficul
t to tell if they had come with the mutations, or had been some intentional human addition.
The effect was as if the Canopy had been cobwebbed by monstrous insects, invisible spiders larger than houses.
‘Who lives there?’ I knew it wasn’t a completely stupid question, since I had already seen lights burning in the branches; evidence that, no matter how distorted the geometries of those sick dead husks of buildings, they had been claimed for human habitation.
‘No one you wanna know, mister.’ Juan chewed on his statement before adding, ‘Or no one who wanna know you. That no insult, either.’
‘None taken, but please answer my question.’
Juan was a long time responding, during which time our rickshaw continued to navigate the roots of the giant structures, wheels jumping over water-filled cracks in the road. The rain hadn’t stopped of course, but when I pushed my head beyond the awning, what I felt was warm and soft; hardly a hardship at all. I wondered if it ever ended, or whether the pattern of condensation on the dome was diurnal; if it were all happening according to some schedule. I had the impression, though, that very little that happened in Chasm City was under anyone’s direct control.
‘Them rich people,’ the kid said. ‘Real rich - not small-time rich like Madame Dominika.’ He knuckled his bony head. ‘Don’t need Dominika, either.’
‘You mean there are enclaves in the Canopy where the plague never reached?’
‘No, plague reach everywhere. But in Canopy, them clean it out, after building stop changing. Some rich, they stay in orbit. Some never leave CC, or come down after shit hit fan. Some get deported.’
‘Why would anyone come here after the plague, if they didn’t have to? Even if parts of the Canopy are safe from residual traces of the Melding Plague, I can’t see why anyone would choose to live there rather than stay in the remaining habitats of the Rust Belt.’
‘Them get deported no have big choice,’ said the kid.
‘No; I can understand that. But why would anyone else come here?’
‘Because them think thing got to get better, and them wanna be here when it happen. Plenty way to make money, when thing get better - but only few people gonna get serious rich. Plenty way to make money now, too - less p’lice here than upside.’
‘You’re saying there are no rules here, are there? Nothing that can’t be bought? I’d imagine that must have been tempting, after the strictures of Demarchy.’
‘Mister, you talk funny.’
My next question was obvious. ‘How do I get there? To the Canopy, I mean?’
‘You not already there, you don’t.’
‘You’re saying I’m not rich enough, is that it?’
‘Rich not enough,’ the kid said. ‘Need connection. Gotta be tight with Canopy, or you ain’t nobody.’
‘Assuming I was, how would I get there? Are there routes through the buildings, old access shafts not sealed by the plague?’ I figured this was the kind of street knowledge the kid would know backwards.
‘You no wanna take inside route, mister. Plenty dangerous. Special when hunt coming down.’
‘Hunt?’
‘This place no good at night, mister.’
I looked around at the gloom. ‘How would you ever be able to tell? No; don’t answer that. Just tell me how I’d get up there.’ I waited for an answer, and when it showed no sign of arriving I decided to recast my question. ‘Do Canopy people ever come down to the Mulch?’
‘Sometime. Special during hunt.’
Progress, I thought, even though it was like pulling a tooth. ‘And how do they get here? I’ve seen what look like flying vehicles, what we used to call volantors, but I can’t imagine anyone could fly through the Canopy without hitting some of those webs.’
‘We call them volantor too. Only rich got ’em - difficult to fix, keep flying. No good in some part of city, either. Most Canopy kid, they come down in cable-car now.’
‘Cable-car?’
For a moment a look of helpfulness crossed his face, and I realised he was desperately trying to please me. It was just that my enquiries were so far outside of his usual parameters that it was causing him physical pain.
‘Those web, those cable? Hang between building?’
‘Can you show me a cable-car? I’d like to see one.’
‘It not safe, mister.’
‘Well, nor am I.’
I sugared the question with another bill, then settled back into the seat as we sped on through the soft interior rain, through the Mulch.
Eventually Juan slowed and turned round to me. ‘There. Cable-car. Them often come down here. Want we go closer?’
At first I wasn’t sure what he meant. Parked diagonally across the shattered roadbed was one of the sleek private vehicles I’d seen in and around the concourse. One door was folded open from the side, like the wing of a gull, with two greatcoated individuals standing in the rain next to it, faces lost under wide-brimmed hats.
I looked at them, wondering what I was going to do next.
‘Hey mister, I already ask you, you want we go closer?’
One of the two people by the cable-car lit a cigarette and for a moment I saw the fire chase the shadows from his face - it was aristocratic, with a nobility I had not seen since arriving on the planet. His eyes were concealed behind complex goggles which emphasised the exaggerated sharpness of his cheekbones. His friend was a woman, her slender gloved hand holding a pair of toylike binoculars to her eyes. Pivoting on her knifelike heels, she scanned the street, until her gaze swept over me. I watched her flinch as it happened, though she tried to control it.
‘They nervous,’ Juan breathed. ‘Mostly, Mulch and Canopy keep far apart.’
‘Any particular reason?’
‘Yeah, one good one.’ Now he was whispering so quietly I could barely hear him above the relentless hiss of the rain. ‘Mulch get too close, Mulch vanish.’
‘Vanish?’
He drew his finger across his throat, but discreetly. ‘Canopy like games, mister. They bored. Immortal people, they all bored. So they play games. Trouble is, not everyone get asked they wanna take part.’
‘Like the hunt you mentioned?’
He nodded. ‘But no talk it now.’
‘All right. Stop here then, Juan, if you’d be so good.’
The rickshaw lost what little forward momentum it had had, the primate showing agitation in every ridge of his back muscles. I observed the reactions on the faces of the two Canopy dwellers - trying to look cool, and almost achieving it.
I stepped out of the rickshaw, my feet squelching as they made acquaintance with the sodden roadbed. ‘Mister,’ said Juan. ‘You be careful now. I ain’t earned a fare home yet.’
‘Don’t go anywhere,’ I said, then thought better of it. ‘Listen, if this makes you nervous, leave and return in five minutes.’
This obviously struck him as excellent advice. The woman with the binoculars returned them to her exuberantly patterned greatcoat, while the goggled man reached up and made what was obviously a delicate readjustment of his optics. I walked calmly in their direction, paying more attention to their vehicle. It was a glossy black lozenge, resting on three retractable wheels. Through a tinted forward window I glimpsed upholstered seats facing complicated manual controls. What appeared to be three rotor blades were furled on the roof. But as I examined the mounting more closely, I saw that this wasn’t any kind of helicopter. The blades were not attached to the body of the vehicle by a rotating axle, but vanished into three circular holes in a domelike hump which rose seamlessly from the hull itself. And, now that I looked closer, I saw that the blades were not really blades at all, but telescopic arms, each tipped with a scythelike hook.
That was all the time I had for sightseeing.
‘Don’t come any closer,’ the woman said. She backed up her words, spoken in flawless Canasian, by flourishing a tiny weapon, little larger than a brooch.
‘He’s unarmed,’ the man said, loud enough for
me to hear, intentionally, it seemed.
‘I don’t mean you any harm.’ I spread my arms - slowly. ‘These are Mendicant clothes. I’ve just arrived on the planet. I wanted to know about reaching the Canopy.’
‘The Canopy?’ the man said, as if this was vastly amusing.
‘That’s what they all want,’ the woman said. The weapon had not budged, and her grip on it was so steady that I wondered if it contained tiny gyroscopes, or some kind of biofeedback device which acted on the muscles in her wrist. ‘Why should we talk to you?’
‘Because I’m harmless - unarmed, as your partner observed - and curious, and it might amuse you.’
‘You’ve no idea what amuses us.’
‘No, I probably don’t, but, as I said - I’m curious. I’m a man of means—’ the remark sounded ridiculous as soon I had spoken it, but I soldiered on ‘—and I’ve had the misfortune to arrive in the Mulch with no contacts in the Canopy.’
‘You speak Canasian reasonably well,’ the man observed, lowering his hand from his goggles. ‘Most Mulch can barely manage an insult in anything other than their native tongue.’ He threw away what remained of his cigarette.
‘But with an accent,’ the woman said. ‘I don’t place it - it’s offworld, but nothing I’m familiar with.’
‘I’m from Sky’s Edge. You may have met people from other parts of the planet who speak differently. It’s been settled long enough for linguistic drift.’
‘So had Yellowstone,’ said the man, feigning no real interest in this line of debate. ‘But most of us still live in Chasm City. Here, the only linguistic drift is vertical.’ He laughed, as if the remark were more than just a statement of fact.
I wiped rain from my eyes, warm and viscous. ‘The driver said the only way to reach the Canopy was by cable-car.’
‘An accurate statement, but that doesn’t mean we can help you.’ The man removed his hat, revealing long blond hair tied back.
His companion added, ‘We have no reason to trust you. A Mulch could have stolen Mendicant clothes and learned a few words of Canasian. No sane person would arrive here without already establishing ties with Canopy.’
The Revelation Space Collection Page 94