I took a calculated risk. ‘I’ve got some Dream Fuel. Does that interest you?’
‘Oh yes, and how in hell’s name did a Mulch get hold of Dream Fuel?’
‘It’s a long story.’ But I reached into Vadim’s coat and removed the cache of Dream Fuel vials. ‘You’ll have to take my word that is the genuine article, of course.’
‘I’m not in the habit of taking anyone’s word on anything,’ the man said. ‘Pass me one of those vials.’
Another calculated risk. The man might run off with the one, but that would still leave me with the others.
‘I’ll throw you one. How does that sound?’
The man took a few steps towards me. ‘Do it, then.’
I tossed him the vial. He caught it deftly and then vanished into the vehicle. The woman remained outside, still covering me with the little gun. A few moments passed, then the man emerged from the vehicle again, not bothering to don his hat. He held up the vial. ‘This . . . seems to be the genuine article.’
‘What did you do?’
‘Shone a light through it, of course.’ He looked at me as if I was stupid. ‘Dream Fuel has a unique absorption spectrum.’
‘Good. Now that you know it’s real, throw the vial back to me and we’ll negotiate terms.’
The man made a throwing gesture, but pulled at the last moment, holding the vial in front of him tauntingly. ‘No . . . let’s not be hasty, shall we? You have more of these, you say? Dream Fuel’s in short supply these days. At least the good stuff. You must have stumbled on quite a haul.’ He paused. ‘I’ve done you a favour, which we’ll think of as fair payment for this vial. I’ve asked that another cable-car meet you here shortly. You’d better not have been lying about your means.’ He removed his goggles, revealing iron-grey eyes of extraordinary cruelty.
‘I’m grateful,’ I said. ‘But what would it matter if I had been lying?’
‘That’s an odd question.’ The woman made her weapon vanish, like a well-rehearsed conjuring trick. Perhaps it had sprung back into a sleeve-holster.
‘I told you, I’m curious.’
‘There is no law here,’ she said. ‘A kind of law, in the Canopy - but only that which suits us; that which conveniences us, like the playground law of children. But we’re not in the Canopy now. Down here, anything goes. And we have very little patience with those who deceive us.’
‘That’s all right,’ I said. ‘I’m not a patient man myself.’
They both climbed into their vehicle, momentarily leaving the doors splayed open. ‘Perhaps we’ll see you in the Canopy,’ the man said, and then smiled at me. It was not the kind of smile one relished. It was the kind of smile I had seen on snakes in the vivaria at the Reptile House.
The doors clammed down and their vehicle came to life with a subliminal hum.
The three telescopic arms on the roof of the cable-car swung outwards and upwards, and then continued extending outwards at blinding speed, doubling, tripling, quadrupling their length. They were reaching skywards. I looked up, shielding my eyes against the perpetual embalming rain. The rickshaw driver had pointed out that the cables spanning the gnarled structures of the Canopy occasionally draped down to the level of the Mulch, like hanging vines, but I hadn’t paid enough attention to his remark. Now I saw the significance of it as one of the car’s arms snagged the lowest line with its hooked claw. The other two arms extended even further, out to perhaps ten times their original length, until they found their own draping lines and made purchase.
And then - smoothly, as if it were lifting on thrusters - the cable-car pulled itself aloft, accelerating all the time. The nearest arm released its grip on the cable, contracted and jerked, stabbing upwards with the speed of a chameleon’s tongue, until it had locked around another cable. And while that happened, the car rose further still, and then another arm switched cables, and another, until the car was hundreds of metres above me and dwindling. Still the motion was eerily smooth, even though the vehicle always seemed to be on the point of missing its purchase altogether and plummeting back towards the Mulch.
‘Hey, mister. You still here.’
At some point during the vehicle’s ascent, the rickshaw had returned. I had expected the driver to do what seemed sensible and return to the concourse, more or less in profit. But Juan had kept his word, and would probably have been insulted if I registered any surprise.
‘Did you honestly think I wouldn’t be?’
‘When Canopy come down, you never know. Hey, why you stand in rain?’
‘Because I’m not returning with you.’ He had barely had time to register disapointment - although the expression which had begun to form on his face suggested that I’d cast grave aspersions on his entire lineage - when I offered him a generous cancellation fee. ‘It’s more than you’d have earned carrying me.’
He looked at the two seven-Ferris bills, glumly. ‘Mister, you no wanna stay here. This nowhere; not good part of Mulch.’
‘I don’t doubt it,’ I said, coming to terms with the idea that even somewhere as misbegotten and miserable as the Mulch had its good and bad neighbourhoods. Then I said, ‘The Canopy people said they’d send down a cable-car for me. It’s possible they were lying, of course, but I imagine I’ll find out sooner or later. And if they weren’t, I’m just going to have to find my way up the inside of one of these buildings.’
‘This not good, mister. Canopy, they never do favour.’
I decided not to mention the Dream Fuel. ‘They were probably not willing to rule out the possibility I was who I claimed. What if I was as powerful as I said I was? They wouldn’t want to make an enemy of me.’
Juan shrugged, as if my point was a faint theoretical possibility, but no more than that. ‘Mister, I go now. No hurry stay here, you not coming.’
‘That’s all right,’ I said. ‘I understand. And I’m sorry I asked you to wait.’
That was the end of our relationship, Juan shaking his head but accepting that there was no way to persuade me otherwise. And then he went, the rickshaw clattering away into the distance, leaving me alone in the rain - genuinely alone, this time. The kid was not just around the corner, and I had lost - or more accurately got rid of - the closest thing I had yet found in Chasm City to an ally. It was an odd feeling, but I knew that what I had done was necessary.
I waited.
Time passed, perhaps half an hour, long enough for me to become aware of the city darkening. As Epsilon Eridani sunk beneath the horizon, its light, already turned sepia by the dome, became the colour of ancient blood. What light reached me now had to pass through the tangle of intervening buildings, an ordeal which seemed to sap it of any real enthusiasm for the task of illumination. The towers around me grew dark, until they really did look like enormous trees, and the tangled limbs of the Canopy, lit up with habitation, were like branches hung with lanterns and fairy-lights. It was both nightmarish and beautiful.
Finally one of those dangling lights detached itself like a falling star leaving the firmament, growing in intensity as it neared me. As my eyes readjusted to the night, I saw that the light was a descending cable-car, and that it was headed for the place where I stood.
Oblivious to the rain, I watched transfixed as the vehicle slowed and lowered itself almost to street level, the tensioning and detensioning cables singing above me. The vehicle’s single headlight panned across the rainswept road, heightening every crack in the surface, and then swept towards me.
Not far from my feet, something made the puddled water jump comically upwards.
And then I heard a gunshot.
I did what any ex-soldier would do under those circumstances: not stop to consider the situation, or determine the type and calibre of weapon being used against me, or the location of the shooter - or even pause to establish that I was really the target, and not just a hapless intercessionary.
I ran, very quickly, towards the shadowed base of the nearest building. I resisted the perfectly sensible flight r
eflex which told me to throw my suitcase away, knowing that without it, I would quickly sink into the anonymity of the Mulch. If I lost it, I might as well offer myself up to be shot.
The gunfire chased me.
I could tell from the way each shot landed a metre or so behind my heels that the person shooting at me was not lacking in skill. It would not have taxed them to kill me - they would have needed only to advance their line of fire fractionally, and I recognised that their marksmanship was more than sufficient. Instead, it suited them to play with me. They were in no hurry to execute me with a shot in the back, though it could have been achieved at any point.
I reached the building, my feet submerged in water. The structure was slab-sided; no little indentations or crannies in which I could secrete myself. The gunfire halted, but the ellipse of the spotlight remained steady, the shaft of harsh blue light making curtains of the rain between me and the cable-car.
A figure emerged from the darkness, clad in a greatcoat. At first I thought it was either the man or the woman I had spoken to earlier, but when the man emerged into the spotlight, I realised I hadn’t seen his face before. He was bald, with a jaw of almost cartoon squareness, and one of his eyes was lost behind a pulsing monocle.
‘Stand perfectly still,’ he said, ‘and you won’t be harmed.’ And his coat flapped apart to reveal a weapon, bulkier than the toy gun which the Canopy woman had carried, somehow more serious in intent. The gun consisted of a handled black rectangle, tipped with a quartet of dark nozzles. His knuckles were white around the grip, his forefinger caressing the trigger.
He fired from hip-height; something buzzed out of the gun towards me, like a laser beam. It connected with the side of the building with a fizzle of sparks. I started running, but his aim was surer the second time. I felt a stabbing pain in my thigh, and then suddenly I was no longer running. Suddenly I was doing nothing except screaming.
And then even screaming became too hard.
The medics had done very well, but no one could be expected to work miracles. The monitoring machines crowding around his father’s bed attested to that, voicing a slow and solemn liturgy of biological decline.
It was six months since the sleeper had awakened and injured Sky’s father, and it was to everyone’s credit that they had kept Titus Haussmann and his assailant alive until now. But with medical supplies and expertise stretched to breaking point, there had never really been any realistic prospect of nursing both of them back to health.
The recent series of disputes between the ships had certainly not assisted matters. The troubles had intensified a few weeks after the sleeper had awoken, when a spy had been discovered aboard the Brazilia. The security organisation had traced the agent back to the Baghdad, but the Baghdad’s administration had declared that the spy had never been born on their ship at all and had probably originated on the Santiago or the Palestine all along. Other individuals had been fingered as possible agents, and there had been cries of wrongful imprisonment and violations of Flotilla law. Normal relations had chilled to a frosty four-way standoff, and now there was almost no trade between the ships; no human traffic except for despondent diplomatic missions which always ended in failure and recrimination.
Against this backdrop, the requests for more medical supplies and knowledge to help nurse Sky’s father had been shrugged aside. It was not, they said, as if the other ships did not have crises of their own. And as head of security, Titus was not beyond suspicion of having instigated the spying incident in the first place.
Sorry, they had said. We’d like to help, we really would . . .
Now his father struggled to speak.
‘Schuyler . . .’ he said, his lips like a rip in parchment. ‘Schuyler? Is that you?’
‘I’m here, Dad. I never went away.’ He sat down on the bedside stool and studied the grey, grimacing shell that bore so little resemblance to the father he had known before the stabbing. This was not the Titus Haussmann who had been feared and loved in equal measure across the ship, and grudgingly respected throughout the Flotilla. This was not the man who had rescued him from the nursery during the blackout, nor the man who had taken his hand and escorted him to the taxi and out beyond the ship for the very first time, showing him the wonder and terror of his infinitely lonely home. This was not the caudillo who had gone into the berth ahead of his team, knowing full well that he might be walking into extreme danger. This was a faint impression of that man, like a rubbing taken off a statue. The features were there, and the proportions were accurate, but there was no depth. Rather than solidity, there was just a paper-thin layer.
‘Sky, about the prisoner.’ His father struggled to raise his head from the pillow. ‘Is he still alive?’
‘Just barely,’ Sky said. He had forced his way into the security team after his father had been injured. ‘Frankly, I don’t expect him to last much longer. His wounds were a lot worse than yours.’
‘But you managed to talk to him, anyway?’
‘We’ve got this and that out of him, yes.’ Sky sighed inwardly. He had told his father this much already, but either Titus was losing his memory or he wanted to hear it again.
‘What exactly did he tell you?’
‘Nothing we couldn’t have guessed for ourselves. We’re still not clear who put him aboard the ship, but it was almost certainly one of the factions they expected to cause some sort of trouble.’
His father raised a finger. ‘That weapon of his; the machinery built into his arm . . .’
‘Not as unusual as you’d think. There were apparently a lot of his kind around towards the end of the war. We were lucky they didn’t build a nuclear device into his arm - although that would have been a lot harder to hide, of course.’
‘Had he ever been human?’
‘We’ll probably never know. Some of his kind were engineered in labs. Others were adapted from prisoners or volunteers. They had brain surgery and psycho-conditioning so that they could be used as weapons of war by any interested power. They were like robots, except they were constructed largely of flesh and blood and had a limited capacity to empathise with other people, where and when it suited their operational needs. They could blend in quite convincingly, crack jokes and share in smalltalk, until they reached their target, at which point they’d flip back into mindless killer mode. Some of them had weapons grafted into them for specific jobs.’
‘There was a lot of metal in that forearm.’
‘Yes.’ Sky saw the point his father was making. ‘Too much for him to have made his way aboard without someone turning a blind eye. Which only proves that there was a conspiracy, which we as good as knew anyway.’
‘We found the only one, though.’
‘Yes.’ In the days after the attack, the other sleeping passengers had all been scanned for buried weaponry - the process had been difficult and dangerous - but nothing had been found. ‘Which shows how confident they must have been.’
‘Sky . . . did he say anything about why he did it, or why they made him do it?’
Sky raised an eyebrow. This line of questioning, admittedly, was new. His father had concentrated only on specifics before.
‘Well, he did mention something.’
‘Go on.’
‘It didn’t seem to make an awful lot of sense to me.’
‘Perhaps not, but I’d still like to hear it.’
‘He talked about a faction which had discovered something. He wouldn’t say who or what they were, or where they were based.’
His father’s voice was very weak now, but he still managed to ask, ‘And what exactly was it that they had discovered?’
‘Something ridiculous.’
‘Tell me what it was, Sky.’ His father paused. Sensing his thirst, Sky had the room’s robot administer a glass of water to the cracked gash of his lips.
‘He said there had been a breakthrough just before the Flotilla left the solar system - a scientific technique, in fact, which had been perfected towards the end
of the war.’
‘And this was?’
‘Human immortality.’ Sky said the words carefully, as if they were imbued with magic potency and ought not be uttered casually. ‘He said that the faction had combined various procedures and lines of research pursued during the century, bringing them together to create a viable therapeutic treatment. They succeeded where others had failed, or had their work suppressed for political reasons. What they came up with was complicated, and it wasn’t simply a pill you took once and then forgot about.’
‘Go on,’ Titus said.
‘It was a whole phalanx of different techniques, some of them genetic, some of them chemical, some of them dependent on invisibly small machines. The whole thing was fantastically delicate and difficult to administer, and the treament needed to be applied regularly - but it was something that was capable of working, if done properly.’
‘And what did you think?’
‘I thought it was absurd, of course. Oh, I don’t deny that something like that might have been possible - but if there’d been that kind of breakthrough, wouldn’t everyone have known about it?’
‘Not necessarily. It was the end of a war, after all. The ordinary lines of communication were broken.’
‘Then you’re saying the faction might really have existed?’
‘Yes, I believe it did.’ His father paused, gathering his energies. ‘In fact, I know it did. I suspect most of what the Chimeric told you was true. The technique wasn’t magic - there were some diseases it couldn’t beat - but it was much better than anything evolution had given us. At best it would extend your lifespan to about one hundred and eighty years; two hundred in extreme cases - those were extrapolations, of course - but that didn’t matter; all that did was that you’d get a chance at staying alive until something better came along.’
He slumped back into his pillow, exhausted.
‘Who knew?’
The Revelation Space Collection Page 95