I almost made it.
Sybilline saw me first, shrieking in either delight or fury. She raised a hand and her little gun appeared in it, springing from the sleeve-holster I had guessed she was wearing. Almost simultaneously, a flash of muzzle-fire whitened the chamber, the pain of its brilliance lancing into my eyes.
Her first shot shattered the staircase below me, the entire structure crashing down like a spiral snowstorm. She had to duck to avoid the debris, and then she got off another shot. I was halfway through the ceiling, halfway into whatever lay beyond, reaching out with my hands for some kind of purchase. Then I felt her shot gnaw into my thigh, soft at first, and then causing pain to blossom like a flower opening at dawn.
I dropped the crossbow. It tumbled down the flight of stairs onto the landing, where I saw a pig snatch it from the darkness with a snort of triumph.
Fischetti raised his own weapon, got off another shot, and that took care of what remained of the staircase. If his aim had been any better - or if I had been any slower - his shot might also have taken care of my leg.
But instead, holding the agony at bay, I slithered onto the ceiling and lay very still. I had no idea what kind of weapon the woman had used; whether my wound had been caused by a projectile or a pulse of light or plasma, nor could I know how severe the wound was. I was probably bleeding, but my clothes were so sodden, and the surface on which I was lying was so damp, that I couldn’t tell where blood ended and rain began. And for a moment that was unimportant. I’d escaped them, if only for the time it would take them to find a way up to this level of the building. They had blueprints of the structure, so it would not take long, then, if a route existed at all.
‘Get up, if you’re able.’
The voice was calm and unfamiliar, and it came not from below, but from a little above me.
‘Come now; there isn’t much time. Ah, wait. I don’t expect you can see me. Is this better?’
And suddenly it was all I could do to screw my eyes shut against the sudden glare. A woman stood over me, dressed like the other Canopy players in all the sombre shades of black: dark, extravagantly heeled boots which reached to her thighs, jet-black greatcoat which skirted the ground and rose behind her neck to encircle her head, which was itself englobed in a helmet which was more black openwork than anything solid, like a gauze, with goggles like the faceted eyes of insects covering half her face. What I could see of her face, in all this, was so pale it was literally white, like a sketch that had never been tinted. A diagonal black tattoo traced each cheekbone, tapering towards her lips, which were the darkest red imaginable, like cochineal.
In one hand she held a huge rifle, its scorched energy-discharge muzzle pointed at my head. But it did not appear that she was aiming the rifle at me.
Her other hand, gloved in black, was reaching out to me.
‘I said you’d better move, Mirabel. Unless you’re planning to die here.’
She knew the building, or at least this part of it. We didn’t have far to go. That was good, because locomotion was no longer my strong point. I could just about move along if I allowed one wall to take most of my weight, freeing the injured leg, but it was neither rapid nor elegant, and I knew I would not be able to sustain it for more than a few dozen metres before blood loss or shock or fatigue took their debt.
She took me up one flight - intact, this time - and then we emerged into the night air. It was a measure of how squalid the last few minutes had been that the air hit my lungs as something cooling and fresh and clean. But I felt myself on the verge of unconsciousness, and still had no real idea what was happening. Even when she showed me a small cable-car, parked in a kind of rubble-strewn cave in the building’s side, I could not quite adjust my perceptions to accept that I was being rescued.
‘Why are you doing this?’ I asked.
‘Because the Game stinks,’ she said, pausing to mouth a subvocal command at the vehicle, causing it to jerk to life and slink towards us, retracted grapples finding purchase points amongst the dangling debris which covered the cave’s ceiling. ‘The Gamers think they have the tacit support of the entire Canopy, but they don’t. Maybe once, when it wasn’t quite so barbaric - but not now.’
I fell into the vehicle’s interior, sprawling across the rear seat. Now I could see that my Mendicant trousers were covered in blood, like rust. But the bleeding seemed to have stopped, and while I felt light-headed, it hadn’t got any worse in the last few minutes.
While she lowered herself into the pilot’s seat and brought the controls online, I said, ‘There was a time when this wasn’t barbaric? ’
‘Once, yes - immediately after the plague.’ Her gloved hands took hold of a pair of matched brass joysticks and pushed them forward and I felt the cable-car glide out of the cave with rapid whisking sounds of its arms. ‘The victims used to be criminals; Mulch they caught invading the Canopy or committing crimes against their own sort; murderers or rapists or looters.’
‘That makes it all right, then.’
‘I’m not condoning it. Not at all. But at least there was some kind of moral equilibrium. These people were scum. And they were chased by scum.’
‘And now?’
‘You’re talkative, Mirabel. Most people who’ve taken a shot like that don’t want to do anything except scream.’ As she spoke, we left the cave, and for a moment I felt sickening free-fall as the cable-car dropped, before finding a nearby cable and correcting its descent. Then we were rising. ‘In answer to your question,’ she said, ‘there started to be a problem finding suitable victims. So the organisers began to get a little less - how shall I put it? Discriminatory? ’
‘I understand,’ I said. ‘I understand, because all I did was wander into the wrong part of the Mulch by mistake. Who are you, by the way? And where are you taking me?’
She reached up one hand and removed the gauzy helmet and faceted goggles, so that, when she turned around to face me, I could see her properly. ‘I’m Taryn,’ she said. ‘But my friends in the sabotage movement call me Zebra.’
I realised I’d seen her earlier that night, amongst the clientèle at the stalk. She had seemed beautiful and exotic then, but she was even more so now. Perhaps it helped that I was lying down in pain having just been shot, fevered with the adrenalin which came from unexpected survival. Beautiful and very strange - and, in the right light, perhaps barely human at all. Her skin was either chalk-white or hard-edged black. The stripes covered her forehead and cheekbones, and from what I remembered seeing in the stalk, a large fraction of the rest of her. Black stripes curved from the edges of her eyes, like flamboyant mascara applied with maniacal precision. Her hair was a stiff black crest which probably ran all the way down her back.
‘I don’t think I’ve met anyone like you before, Zebra.’
‘It’s nothing,’ she said. ‘Some of my friends think I’m rather conservative; rather unadventurous. You’re not Mulch, are you, Mister Mirabel?’
‘You know my name, what else do you know about me?’
‘Not as much as I’d like to.’ She took her hand from the controls, having set the machine into some kind of autopilot mode, allowing it to pick its own trajectory through the interstices of the Canopy.
‘Shouldn’t you be driving this thing?’
‘It’s safe, Tanner, believe me. The control system of a cable-car is quite intelligent - almost as smart as the machines we had before the plague. But it’s best not to spend too much time down in the Mulch with a machine like this.’
‘About my earlier question . . .’
‘We know you arrived in the city wearing Ice Mendicant clothes and that someone called Tanner Mirabel is known to the Mendicants. ’ I was about to ask Zebra how she knew this much, but she was already continuing, ‘What we don’t know is whether or not this is all a carefully constructed identity to suit some other purpose. Why did you allow yourself to be captured, Tanner?’
‘I was curious,’ I said, feeling like a repetitious refrain in
a third-rate symphony - maybe one of Quirrenbach’s early efforts. ‘I didn’t know much about the social stratification in Yellowstone. I wanted to reach the Canopy, and I didn’t know how to go about it without threatening anyone.’
‘That’s understandable. There isn’t any way.’
‘How did you find any of this out?’
‘Through Waverly.’ She looked at me carefully, squinting deep black eyes, causing the stripes on one side of her face to bunch together. ‘I don’t know if he introduced himself, but Waverly was the man who shot you with the stun beam.’
‘You know him?’
She nodded. ‘He’s one of ours - or at least, he has sympathies with us, and we have means of ensuring his compliance. He likes to indulge certain tastes.’
‘He told me he was a sadist, but I thought it was part of the banter.’
‘It wasn’t, believe me.’
I winced as a wave of pain raced up my leg. ‘How do you know my name?’
‘Waverly passed it to us. Before that, we’d never even heard of Tanner Mirabel. But once we had a name, we could backtrack and confirm your movements. He didn’t get much, though. Either he was lying - which I don’t rule out; it’s not like I particularly trust the one-eyed bastard - or else your memories really are confused.’
‘I had revival amnesia. That’s why I spent time with the Mendicants. ’
‘Waverly seemed to think it went deeper than that. That you might have had something to hide. Is that possible, Tanner? If I’m going to help you, it might help if I trusted you.’
‘I’m who you think I am,’ I said, which seemed to be all I could manage just then. The odd thing was, I wasn’t quite sure I believed myself.
Something strange happened then: a hard, sharp discontinuity in my thoughts. I was still conscious; still aware of myself sitting in Zebra’s cable-car; still aware that we were moving through Chasm City at night and that she had rescued me from Sybilline’s little hunting party. I was conscious of the pain in my leg - even though it had abated to a dull throb of highly concentrated discomfort by then.
And yet a chunk of Sky Haussmann’s life had just revealed itself to me.
The previous episodes had come during unconsciousness, like orchestrated dreams, but this one had exploded, fully-formed, into my mind. The effect was disturbing and disconcerting, interrupting the normal flow of my thoughts like an EMP burst playing momentary havoc with a computer system.
The episode, mercifully, was not a long one. Sky was still with Balcazar (Christ, I thought - I was even remembering the names of the supporting characters); still ferrying him across space to the meeting - the conclave - aboard the other ship, the Palestine.
What had happened last time? That was it - Balcazar had told Sky about the sixth ship being real; the ghost ship.
The one Norquinco had called the Caleuche.
By the time he had turned the revelation over in his head, examining it from every angle, they were almost there. The Palestine loomed huge, looking very much like the Santiago - all the ships of the Flotilla were built to more or less the same design - but without quite the same degree of discoloration around her rotating hull. She had been much further away from the Islamabad when she went up, the flash of energy weakened by the inverse square law of radiative propagation until it was barely a warm breeze, rather than the killing flux which had burned the shadow of his mother onto the skin of his own ship. They had their problems, of course. There had been viral outbreaks, psychoses, putsches, and as many sleepers had died aboard that ship as aboard the Santiago. He thought of her burdened with her own dead; cold corpses strung along her spine like rotten fruit.
A harsh voice said, ‘Diplomatic flight TG5, transfer command to Palestine docking network.’
Sky did as he was asked; there was a jolt as the larger ship hijacked the shuttle’s avionics and slotted it onto an approach course, with what felt like minimal concern for the comfort of its human occupants. Projected onto the cockpit window, the approach corridor floated in space, edged in skeletal orange neon. The stellar backdrop began to cartwheel; they were moving in the same rotational frame as the Palestine now, sliding towards an open parking bay. Suited figures in unfamiliar uniforms floated there to greet them, aiming weapons with something that was not quite diplomatic cordiality.
He turned to Balcazar as the taxi found a berth. ‘Sir? We’re nearly there.’
‘What, oh? Damn you, Titus . . . I was sleeping!’
Sky wondered how his father had felt about the old man. He wondered if Titus had ever considered killing the Captain.
It would not, he thought, present insurmountable difficulties.
NINETEEN
‘Tanner? Snap out of it. I don’t want you falling unconscious on me.’
We were approaching a building now - if you could call it that. It looked more like an enchanted tree, huge and gnarled branches pocked with haphazard windows, and cable-car landing decks set amongst the limbs. Cableway threads reached through the interstices of the major branches, and Zebra guided us in fearlessly, as if she had navigated this approach thousands of times. I looked down, through vertiginous layers of branches, the firelights of the Mulch twinkling sickeningly far below.
Zebra’s apartment in the Canopy was near the middle of the city, on the edge of the chasm, near the inner dome boundary which surrounded the great belching hole in Yellowstone’s crust. We had travelled some way around the chasm and from the landing deck I could see the tiny, jewelled sliver of the stalk projecting out for one horizontal kilometre, far below us and around the great curve of the chasm’s edge. I looked down into the chasm but I couldn’t see any sign of the luminous gliders, or any other mist-jumpers taking the great fall.
‘Do you live here alone?’ I asked when she had led me into her rooms, striking what I hoped was the right note of polite curiosity.
‘Now I do, yes.’ The answer was quick, almost glib. But she continued speaking. ‘I used to share this place with my sister, Mavra.’
‘And Mavra left?’
‘Mavra got killed.’ She left that remark hanging there long enough to have its effect. ‘She got too close to the wrong people.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, fishing for something to say. ‘Were these people hunters, like Sybilline?’
‘Not exactly, no. She was curious about something she shouldn’t have been, and she asked the wrong kinds of questions of the wrong people, but it wasn’t directly to do with the hunt.’
‘What, then?’
‘Why are you so interested in knowing?’
‘I’m not exactly an angel, Zebra, but I don’t like the idea of someone dying just because they were curious.’
‘Then you’d better be careful you don’t ask the wrong kinds of question yourself.’
‘About what, exactly?’
She sighed, obviously wishing our conversation had never taken this tack. ‘There’s a substance . . .’
‘Dream Fuel?’
‘You’ve encountered it, then?’
‘I’ve seen it being used, but that’s about the extent of my knowledge. Sybilline used it in my presence, but I didn’t notice any change in her behaviour before or afterwards. What is it, exactly?’
‘It’s complicated, Tanner. Mavra had only pieced together a few parts of the story before they got her.’
‘It’s a drug of some sort, obviously.’
‘It’s a lot more than a drug. Look, can we talk about something else? It hasn’t been easy for me to deal with her being gone, and this is just opening up old wounds.’
I nodded, willing to let it lie for now. ‘You were close, weren’t you?’
‘Yes,’ she said, as if I’d picked up on some profound secret in their relationship. ‘And Mavra loved it here. She said it had the best view anywhere in the city, apart from the stalk. But when she was around we could never have afforded to eat in that place.’
‘You haven’t done too badly. If you like heights.’
&n
bsp; ‘You don’t, Tanner?’
‘I guess it takes some getting used to.’
Her apartment, ensconced in one of the major branches, was a complex of intestinally twisted rooms and corridors; more like an animal’s sett than anything a human would choose for use. The rooms were in one of the narrower branches, suspended two kilometres above the Mulch, with lower levels of the Canopy hanging below, linked to ours by vertical threads, strands and hollowed-out trunks.
She led me into what might have been her living room.
It was like entering an internal organ in some huge, walk-through model of the human anatomy. The walls, floor and ceiling were all softly rounded into each other. Level surfaces had been created by cutting into the fabric of the building, but they had to be stepped on different levels, connected by ramps and stairs. The surfaces of the walls and ceiling were rigid, but uneasily organic in nature; veined or patterned with irregular platelets. In one wall was what looked like a piece of expensive, in-situ sculpture: a tableau of three roughly hewn people who had been depicted forcing their way out of the wall, clawing to escape from it like swimmers trying to outswim the wall of a tsunami wave. Most of their bodies were hidden; all you could see was half a face or the end of a limb, but the effect was forceful enough.
‘You have pretty unique taste in art, Zebra,’ I said. ‘I think that would give me nightmares.’
‘It’s not art, Tanner.’
‘Those were real people?’
‘Still are, by some definitions. Not alive, but not exactly dead either. More like fossils, but with the fossil structure so intricate that you can almost map neurons. I’m not the only one with them, and no one really wants to cut them away in case someone thinks of a way to get them back the way they were. So we live with them. No one used to want to share a room with them, once, but now I hear it’s quite the chic thing to have a few of them in your apartment. There’s even a man in the Canopy who makes fake ones, for the truly desperate.’
The Revelation Space Collection Page 101