‘Why do they do it, though? Doesn’t potential immortality make your lives all the more precious?’
‘Yes, but that doesn’t mean we still don’t need to be reminded of death now and then. What’s the point of beating an old enemy if you deny yourself the thrill of ever remembering what it was like in the first place? Victory loses its meaning without the memory of what you’ve vanquished.’
‘But you could die.’
She looked up from the menu. ‘All the more reason not to cock up your timing, then.’
Voronoff was nearing the end of his fall. I could barely see him now.
‘He’s picking up tension now,’ Fischetti said. ‘Beginning to slow down. See how beautifully he’s timed it?’
The line was stretched almost to its limit, now starting to arrest Voronoff’s fall. But his timing was as good as his admirers had evidently been expecting. He disappeared for three or four seconds, vanishing into the whiteness before the coil began to contract, hauling him back upwards towards us.
‘Textbook,’ Sybilline said.
There was more applause, but in contrast to before, this time it was wildly enthusiastic. People began to hammer their cutlery in appreciation of Voronoff’s fall. ‘You know what?’ Waverly said. ‘Now that he’s mastered mist-jumping, he’ll get bored and try something else even more insanely dangerous. You mark my words.’
‘There goes the other one,’ Sybilline said, as the last jumper stepped from the balcony. ‘Timing looks good - better than the woman’s, anyway. You’d have thought he’d have the decency to let Voronoff come back up first, wouldn’t you?’
‘How will he get back up?’ I said.
‘He’ll haul himself up. There’s some kind of motorised winch in his harness.’
I watched the last jumper plummet into the depths. To my untrained eye the jump looked at least as good as Voronoff’s - the thermals didn’t seem to be steering the man towards the sides, and his posture as he dropped looked amazingly balletic. The crowd had quietened down now and were watching the fall intently.
‘Well, he’s no amateur,’ Fischetti said.
‘He just copied Voronoff’s timing,’ Sybilline said. ‘I was watching the way the vortex affected the gliders.’
‘You can’t blame him for that. You don’t get marks for originality, you know.’
He dropped further still, his harness a glowing green dot receding towards the mist. ‘Wait,’ Waverly said, pointing to the uncoiling line on the balcony. ‘He should have run out of line by now, shouldn’t he?’
‘Voronoff had by this point,’ Sybilline agreed.
‘Silly fool’s given himself too much,’ Fischetti said. He took a sip from his wine glass and studied the depths with renewed interest. ‘It’s reached the limit now, but it’s much too late.’
He was right. By the time the glowing green dot reached the level of the mist, it was falling almost as quickly as ever. The screen showed a last side-on view of him vanishing into the whiteness, and then there was only the taut filament of his line. Seconds passed - first the three or four that Voronoff had taken before emerging, and then ten . . . and then twenty. By thirty seconds people were beginning to get a little uncomfortable. Obviously they had seen this sort of thing happen before and had some idea of what to expect.
Nearly a minute passed before the man emerged.
I’d already been told what happened to glider pilots who went too deep, but I hadn’t imagined it could be that bad. But the man had gone very far into the mist. The pressure and temperature had been too much for the flimsy protection of his suit. He had died: boiled alive within a few seconds. The camera lingered on his corpse, lovingly mapping the horror of what had happened to him. I felt revolted and looked away from the image. I’d seen some bad things during my years as a soldier, but never while sitting at a table digesting a large and luxurious meal.
Sybilline shrugged. ‘Well, he should have used a shorter line.’
Afterwards we walked back across the stalk to the landing deck where Sybilline’s cable-car was still waiting.
‘Well, Tanner, where can we take you?’ she said.
I wasn’t exactly enjoying their company, I had to admit. It had begun badly and though I was grateful for the sight-seeing trip to the stalk, the cold way they had responded to the deaths of the mist-jumpers had left me wondering whether I wouldn’t have been better off with the pigs they had mentioned.
But I couldn’t throw away a chance like this. ‘I take it you’re heading back to the Canopy at some point?’
She looked pleased. ‘If you want to come with us, it’s absolutely no problem. In fact, I insist on it.’
‘Well, don’t feel any obligation. You’ve been generous enough as it is. But if it won’t inconvenience you . . .’
‘Not at all. Get in the car.’
The vehicle opened before me, Fischetti getting in the driver’s compartment and the rest of us in the back. We lofted; the cable-car’s motion began to feel familiar, if not actually comfortable. The ground dropped away quickly; we reached the interstices of the Canopy and settled into a semi-regular rhythm as the car picked its route along one of the main cable ways.
That was when I started to think I really should have taken my chances with the pigs.
‘Well, Tanner - did you enjoy your meal?’ Sybilline asked.
‘Like you said, it’s a hell of a view.’
‘Good. You needed the energy. Or at least you will need it.’ Deftly, she reached into a compartment set into the car’s plush and pulled out a nasty little gun. ‘Well, to state the obvious, this is a weapon and I’m pointing it at you.’
‘Ten out of ten for observation.’ I looked at the gun. It appeared to be made out of jade and was embossed with red demons. It had a small, dark maw and she was holding it very steadily.
‘The point being,’ Sybilline continued, ‘that you shouldn’t think of doing anything untoward.’
‘If you wanted to kill me, you could have done it dozens of times already.’
‘Yes. But there’s just one flaw in your thinking. We do want to kill you. Just not in any old manner.’
I should have felt immediate fear as soon as she pulled out the gun, but there’d been a delay of a few seconds while my mind assimilated the situation and decided it was probably just as bad as it appeared.
‘What are you going to do to me?’
Sybilline nodded at Waverly. ‘Can you do it here?’
‘I’ve got the tools, but I’d far rather do it back at the airship.’ Waverly nodded at her. ‘You can keep that gun pointed until then, can’t you?’
I asked what they were going to do to me again, but all of a sudden no one seemed very interested in what I had to say. I’d walked into big trouble, that much was obvious. Waverly’s story of shooting me to protect me from the pigs hadn’t ever sounded more than halfway convincing, but who had I been to argue? I’d kept telling myself that if they had wanted me dead . . .
Nice line. But like Sybilline had said, there was a certain flaw in my thinking . . .
It didn’t take very long to reach the trapped airship. As we swung up towards it I had an excellent view of the imprisoned craft, suspended precariously high above the city. There were no Canopy lights anywhere near it, no signs of habitation in the branches that supported it. I remembered what they had said about it being nice and discreet.
We landed. By then Waverly had found a gun as well, and when I stepped onto the connecting ramp which led to the gondola, Fischetti was covering me with a third. About the only thing I could have done was jump over the side.
But I wasn’t that desperate. Not yet.
Inside the gondola, I was escorted back to the chair where I had woken up only a couple of hours earlier. This time Waverly strapped me into the seat.
‘Well, get on with it,’ Sybilline said, standing with her hip to one side with the gun held in one hand like a chic cigarette holder. ‘It isn’t brain surgery, you know.’
She laughed.
Waverly spent the next few minutes circumnavigating my chair, emitting odd grunts which might have indicated distaste. Now and then he touched my scalp, examining it with gentle fingers. Then, seemingly satisfied, he retrieved some equipment from somewhere behind me. Whatever it was looked medical.
‘What are you going to do?’ I asked, trying again to get a response out of them. ‘You won’t get far by torturing me, if that’s what you’ve got in mind.’
‘You think I’m going to torture you?’ Waverly had one of the medical devices in his hand now, an intricate probe-like thing fashioned from chrome and inset with blinking status lights. ‘It would amuse me, I admit. I’m a colossal sadist. But aside from my own self-gratification, it would serve no purpose. We’ve trawled your memories, so we know all that you’d tell us under pain.’
‘You’re bluffing.’
‘No, we’re not. Did we have to ask you your name? No, we didn’t. But we knew you were called Tanner Mirabel, didn’t we?’
‘You know I’m telling the truth, in that case. I have nothing to offer you.’
He leaned closer to me, his lens clicking and whirring as it absorbed visual data across an unguessable spread of the spectrum. ‘We don’t really know what to know, Mister Mirabel. Assuming that’s really your name. It’s all so very foggy in there, you see. Confused memory traces - whole swathes of your past which we just can’t access. You’ll understand that this does not put us in the best possible frame of mind to trust you. I mean, you accept that this is a reasonable response, don’t you?’
‘I’ve only just been revived.’
‘Ah, yes - and the Ice Mendicants normally do such a marvellous job, don’t they? But in your case not even their artistry could restore the whole.’
‘Are you working for Reivich?’
‘I doubt it. I’ve never heard of him.’ He glanced at Sybilline, as if seeking her opinion on the matter. She did her best to mask it, but I saw the way she pulled the facial equivalent of a shrug; a momentary widening of the eyes as if to say that she hadn’t heard of Reivich either.
It looked genuine, too.
‘All right,’ Waverly said. ‘I think I can do this nice and cleanly. It helps that there aren’t any other implants in his head to get in the way.’
‘Just do it,’ Sybilline said. ‘We haven’t got all damned night.’
He held the surgical device against the side of my skull, so that I could feel its cold pressure against my skin. I heard a click as he pulled a trigger—
SEVENTEEN
The head of security stood before his prisoner, studying him as a sculptor might study a roughly hewn work in progress; satisfied with the effort that had already taken place, but acutely aware of all the labour that lay ahead. Much remained to be done, but he promised himself that there would be no errors.
Sky Haussmann and the saboteur were almost alone. The torture room was in a distant and largely forgotten annexe of the ship, accessible only by one of the train routes which everyone else assumed was disused. Sky had outfitted the room and its surrounding chambers himself, equipping it with pressure and heat by tapping into the ship’s lymphatic system of supply lines. In principle, a detailed audit of power/air consumption might have revealed the room’s existence, but, as a possible security issue, the matter would only have been referred to Sky himself. It had never happened; he doubted that it ever would.
The prisoner was splayed before him on one wall, anchored there and surrounded by machines. Neural lines plunged into the man’s skull, interfacing with the control implants buried in his brain. Those implants were exceedingly crude, even by Chimeric standards, but they did their job. They were mainly webbed into the regions of the temporal lobe associated with deep religious experience. Epileptics had long reported feelings of divinity when intense electrical activity flickered across those regions; all the implants did was subject the saboteur to mild and controllable versions of the same religious impulses. It was probably how his old masters had controlled him, and how he had been able to give himself up so selflessly to their suicidal cause.
Now Sky controlled him via the same devotional channels.
‘Do you know, no one ever mentions you these days,’ Sky said.
The saboteur offered him bloodshot crescent eyes beneath heavy lids. ‘What?’
‘It’s as if the rest of the ship has decided to quietly forget that you ever existed. How exactly does it feel, to have been erased from the public record?’
‘You remember me.’
‘Yes.’ Sky nodded towards the pale aerodynamic shape which floated at the other end of the room, cased in armoured green glass. ‘And so does he. But that’s not saying much, is it? To be remembered only by your tormentors?’
‘It’s better than nothing.’
‘They suspect, of course.’ He thought of Constanza, the only serious thorn in his side. ‘Or at least they used to, when they gave the matter any thought. After all, you did kill my father. I’d be perfectly within my moral rights to torture you, wouldn’t I?’
‘I didn’t kill . . .’
‘Oh, but you did.’ Sky smiled. He was standing at the lashed-up control panel which allowed him to talk to the saboteur’s implants, idly fingering the chunky black knobs and glass-panelled analogue dials. He had built the machine himself, scavenging its components from across the ship, and had given it the name God-Box. That was what it was, ultimately: an instrument for placing God inside the killer’s head. In the early days he had used it solely to inflict pain, but - once he had smashed the infiltrator’s personality - he had begun to reconstruct it towards his own ideal, via controlled doses of neural ecstasy. At the moment only the tiniest trace of current was dribbling into the man’s temporal lobe, and in this null state his feelings towards Sky bordered on agnosticism rather than awe.
‘I don’t remember what I did,’ the man said.
‘No, I don’t suppose you do. Shall I remind you?’
The saboteur shook his head. ‘Perhaps I did kill your father. But someone must have given me the means to do so. Someone must have cut my restraints and left that knife by my bed.’
‘It was a scalpel, an infinitely finer thing.’
‘You’d know, of course.’
Sky turned one of the black knobs a couple of notches higher, watching as the analogue dials quivered. ‘Why would I have given you the means to kill my own father? I’d have had to be insane.’
‘He was dying anyway. You hated him for what he had done to you.’
‘And how would you know?’
‘You told me, Sky.’
That, of course, was entirely possible. It was amusing to push the man to the desperate, bowel-loosening edge of total fear, and to then relent. He could do that with the machine if he wished, or just by unwrapping some surgical tools and showing them to the prisoner.
‘He didn’t do anything to me to make me hate him.’
‘No? That’s not what you said before. You were the son of immortals, after all. If Titus hadn’t meddled - hadn’t stolen you from them - you’d still be sleeping with the other passengers.’ In his subtly archaic accent he continued, ‘Instead you’ll spend years of your life in this miserable place, growing older, risking death each day, never knowing for sure if you’ll make it to Journey’s End. What if Titus was wrong, too? What if you aren’t immortal? It’ll be years before you can be certain.’
Sky turned the knob higher. ‘Do you think I look my age?’
‘No . . .’ He watched the saboteur’s lower lip tremble with the first unmistakable signs of ecstasy. ‘But that could just be good genes.’
‘I’ll take my chances.’ He pushed the current higher. ‘I could have tortured you, you know.’
‘Ahh . . . I know. Oh God, I know.’
‘But I chose not to. Are you feeling a reasonably intense religious experience now?’
‘Yes. I feel I’m in the presence of something . . . something . . . ahhh. Jesu
s. I can’t talk now.’ The man’s face rippled in an inhuman manner. There were twenty additional facial muscles anchored to his skull, capable of dramatically altering his appearance when the need arose. Sky assumed that he had transformed his face to slip aboard the ship in place of the man who should have had his sleeper berth. Now he mirrored Sky, the artificial muscles twitching involuntarily to this new configuration. ‘It’s too beautiful.’
‘Are you seeing bright lights yet?’
‘I can’t talk.’
Sky turned the knob up another few notches, until it was near the end of its range. The analogue dials were nearly all full-over. But not quite, and because they were logarithmically calibrated, that last twitch could mean the difference between a feeling of intense spirituality and a full-on vision of heaven and hell. He had never taken the prisoner to that plateau yet, and he was not entirely sure he wanted to risk it.
He stepped away from the machine and approached the saboteur. Behind him Sleek quivered in his tank, waves of anticipation running up and down the dolphin’s body. The man was drooling, losing basic muscular control. His face had melted now, the muscles sagging hopelessly. Sky took the man’s head in his hands and forced him to look at his own face. He could almost feel a tingling in his fingers from the current worming into the man’s skull. For a moment they locked eyes, pupil to pupil, but it was too much for the saboteur. It must be like seeing God, he thought; not necessarily the most pleasant of experiences even if it was drenched in awe.
‘Listen to me,’ he whispered. ‘No; don’t try to speak. Just listen. I could have killed you, but I didn’t. I chose to spare you. I chose to show mercy. Do you know what that makes me? Merciful. I want you to remember that, but I also want you to remember something else. I can be jealous as well, and vengeful.’
Just then Sky’s bracelet chimed. It was the one he had inherited from his father upon assuming command of security. He swore softly, allowed the prisoner’s head to loll, and then took the call. He was careful to keep his back to the prisoner.
The Revelation Space Collection Page 98