‘What?’
‘It wasn’t much, I assure you. I probably should have asked you, but you were injured and tired and I knew there was very little risk.’ Then she showed me the small bronze wedding-gun she had used, one full vial of Fuel in her cache. ‘Fuel protects those of us who still have machines inside our bodies, but it also has general healing properties. That’s why I gave it to you. I’ll need to get some more.’
‘Will that be easy?’
She gave me a half-smile and then shook her head. ‘Not as easy as it used to be. Unless you happen to have a hotline to Gideon.’
I was about to ask her what she had meant by the remark about the coat, but now she had distracted me. I didn’t think I had heard that name before.
‘Gideon?’
‘He’s a crime lord. No one knows much about him, what he looks like, where he lives. Except he’s got absolute control of Dream Fuel distribution across the city and the people who work for him are very serious about their work.’
‘And now they’re limiting the supply? Just when everyone’s become addicted to it? Maybe I should have a word with Gideon.’
‘Don’t get any more involved than you have to, Tanner. Gideon is extremely bad news.’
‘You sound as if you’re speaking from experience.’
‘I am.’ Zebra walked to the window and ran a hand over the glass. ‘I told you about Mavra already, Tanner. My sister, the one who used to love this view?’ I nodded, remembering the conversation we’d had shortly after arriving here. ‘I also told you she was dead. Well, Gideon’s people were the people my sister got involved with.’
‘They killed her?’
‘I’ll never know for sure, but that’s what I think. Mavra believed they were strangling us, withholding the one substance the city needs. Dream Fuel’s dangerous stuff, Tanner - there isn’t enough of it to go around, and yet for most of us it’s the most precious substance imaginable. It’s not just the kind of thing people kill for; it’s the kind of thing people fight wars for.’
‘So she wanted to persuade Gideon to open up the supply?’
‘Nothing so naïve; Mavra was nothing if not a pragmatist. She knew Gideon wasn’t going to let it go that easily. But if she could find out how the stuff was being manufactured - even what the stuff was - she could pass on that knowledge to other people so that they could synthesise it for themselves. At the very least she’d have broken the monopoly.’
‘I admire her for trying. She must have known it might get her killed.’
‘Yes. She was like that. She wouldn’t give up a hunt.’ Zebra paused. ‘I always promised her that if anything happened, I’d ...’
‘Pick up where she left off?’
‘Something like that.’
‘Maybe it isn’t too late. When all this blows over . . .’ I touched my head. ‘Maybe I’ll help you find Gideon.’
‘Why would you do that?’
‘You helped me, Zebra. It would be the least I could do.’ And, I thought, because Mavra sounded a lot like me. Perhaps she had come close to finding what she was looking for. If so, those who remembered her - and I counted myself as one now - owed it to her to carry on her work. There was something else, too.
Something about Gideon, and who he reminded me of - sitting, spiderlike, at the dark centre of a web of absolute control, imagining himself invulnerable. I thought again of Cahuella, and what had passed through my mind in sleep. ‘The Dream Fuel you gave me. Is that why I had such strange dreams?’
‘It does that, sometimes. Especially if it’s your first dose. It’s working its way through your brain, tinkering with neural connections. That’s why they call it Dream Fuel. But that’s only half of it.’
‘Does that make me immortal now?’
Zebra let the smoke-coloured gown fall away from her and I pulled her to me, looking into her face.
‘For today, yes.’
I woke before Zebra, dressing in the Mendicant clothes which she had washed, and quietly paced her rooms until I found the things I was looking for. My hand lingered over the huge weapon she had rescued me with, which she had just left lying in the annexe to her apartment as casually as a walking stick. The plasma-rifle would have been a useful piece of artillery on Sky’s Edge; using it inside a city seemed almost obscene. On the other hand, so did dying.
I hefted the weapon. I hadn’t ever handled anything exactly like it, but the controls were placed intuitively and the readouts showed familiar status variables. It was a very delicate weapon and I didn’t rate its chances of surviving very long if it came into contact with a trace of the plague. But that was no reason to leave it lying around, almost inviting me to steal it.
‘Careless, Zebra,’ I said. ‘Very careless indeed.’
I thought back to the night before; how the main thing on her mind must have been tending to my injury. It was perhaps understandable that she had dumped the gun at the door and then forgotten to do anything about it, but it was still negligent. I put the gun down again, quietly.
She was still asleep when I went back into the room. I had to move carefully, trying to avoid causing the furniture to move any more than necessary in case the faint noise and motion woke her up. I found her greatcoat and rummaged through the pockets.
Currency - plenty of it.
And a set of fully charged ammo-cells for the plasma-rifle. I stuffed the money and the cells into the pockets of the coat I’d stolen from Vadim - the one Zebra had found so interesting - and then dithered about whether to leave a note or not. In the end I found a pen and paper - after the plague, old-fashioned writing materials must have come back into vogue - scrawling something to the effect that I was grateful for what she had done, but I was not the kind of man who could wait two days knowing I was being hunted, even though she had offered a kind of sanctuary.
On my way out I picked up the plasma-rifle.
Her cable-car was parked where she had left it, in a niche adjacent to her complex of rooms. Again, she had been hasty - the vehicle was powered, and its control panel was still aglow and awaiting instructions.
I had watched her work the controls and judged that the action of driving was semi-automatic - the driver did not have to choose which cables to employ, just used the joysticks and throttle controls to point the vehicle in a particular direction and set the speed. The cable-car’s internal processors did the rest, selecting the cables which allowed the desired route to be achieved or approximated with something approaching optimal efficiency. If the driver tried to point the car into a part of the Canopy where there were no cables, the car would presumably reject the command, or pick a roundabout route which achieved the same ends.
Still maybe there was more skill to operating a cable-car than I’d imagined, because the ride began sickeningly, like a small boat pitching in a squall. Yet somehow I managed to keep the vehicle moving forward, descending through the latticelike enclosure of the Canopy, even though I had no idea where I was going. I had a destination in mind - a very specific one, in fact - but the night’s activity had completely erased my sense of direction, and I had no idea where Zebra’s apartment lay, except that it was near the chasm. At least now it was daytime, with the morning sun climbing up the side of the Mosquito Net, and I could see far across the city, beginning to recognise certain characteristically deformed buildings that I must have seen yesterday, from other angles and elevations. There was a building which looked uncannily like a human hand, grasping from the sky, its fingers elongating into tendrils which quickly merged with others, from adjacent structures. Here was another, which resembled an oak tree, and others which expanded into a froth of shattered bubbles, like the face of someone stricken by an awful pestilence.
I pushed the car downwards, the Canopy rising above me like an oddly textured cloud deck, into the unoccupied hinterland which separated Canopy from Mulch. The ride became rougher, now - fewer purchase points for the cable-car, and longer, sickening slides as it descended down single strands.<
br />
By now, I imagined Zebra would have noticed my absence. A few moments would suffice for her to verify the loss of her weapon, currency and car - but then what would she do? If the Game was pervasive in Canopy society, then Zebra and her allies could hardly report my theft. Zebra would have to explain what I had been doing in her place, and then Waverly would be implicated, and the two of them would be revealed as saboteurs.
The Mulch rose into view below me, all twisted roads and floods and barnacled slums. There were fires sending smoke trails into the air and lights there now; at least I had hit an inhabited district. I could even see people outside, and rickshaws and animals, and if I had opened the car’s door, I imagined I would have smelled whatever it was they were cooking or burning in those fires.
The car lurched and began to fall.
There had been sickening moments before, but this one seemed to last longer. And now an alarm was shrieking in the cockpit. Then something like normal motion resumed again, although it was noticeably bumpier and the vehicle’s rate of descent was swifter than seemed prudent. What had happened? Had the cable snapped, or had the car simply run out of handholds for an instant, plummeting before it found another line?
Finally I looked at the console and I saw a pulsing schematic of the cable-car, with a red box flashing around the area of damage.
One of the arms was gone.
TWENTY-TWO
Someone was attacking me.
Trusting the vehicle to find its own way down as quickly and as safely as possible, I retrieved Zebra’s plasma-rifle, steadying myself as the pitch rocked and swayed, my concentration not aided by the shrill insistence of the alarm. I moved back onto the rear bay, past the passenger seat where I’d lain the previous evening. Bracing myself, I knelt and opened the side door, watching it gull open. Then I leaned across and opened its counterpart on the other side, and pushed myself out as far as I could, into the wind, the ground still several hundred metres below me. I risked a quick glance up at the arm assembly, observing the cauterised stump where one of the arms had been shot clean off with some kind of beam weapon.
Then I looked up and back along my route of descent. Two other cable-cars were following me, about two hundred metres higher up and the same distance behind me. A black figure was leaning from the closest car, shouldering something which - even as I watched - flashed a light too intense for words. A line of pink ionised-air slammed past me like a piston, ozone hitting my nose almost before the thunderclap of the collapsing vacuum-tunnel sheared open by the beam weapon.
I looked down. We had lost another hundred metres, but it was still too high for my tastes. I wondered how the vehicle would manage with only one arm.
I flicked on Zebra’s rifle, praying that the weapon was not equipped with a user-recognition facility. If it was, she’d disabled it. Sensing that I was bringing the weapon to shoulder level, the sight adjusted itself to bring its retinal-projection systems into line with my eyes. I felt the weapon shiver as gyroscopes and accumulators came online, making it seem as if some magic energy coursed through it. Reserve ammo-cells weighing down my pockets like lead ballast, I waited for the retinal aiming system to adjust to my eyes so I could get off a shot. For a moment the system was confused, perhaps because it was configured for Zebra’s own peculiarly dark and equine eyes and was having trouble adjusting to my own. The retinal graphics kept springing up, almost focusing - and then crashing in a morass of indecipherable error symbols.
Another line of pink air ripped past me, then another, gouging a silver scratch in the side of the cable-car. The stench of hot metal and plastic filled the cabin for an instant.
‘Shit,’ I said. The retinal system was down, but it wasn’t as if my target was halfway to the horizon, or that I was trying for pinpoint precision. I just wanted to shoot the bastards out of the sky, and if the act ended up being rather messy and involving more than the usual amount of collateral damage, so be it.
I squeezed off a shot, feeling the beam-recoil nudge my shoulder.
My own beam-trail knifed backward, just missing the closest car. That was good. I had intended to just miss, on my first shot. I drew some return fire, throwing myself back into the cabin while the shot lanced past. Now I was forcing my opponent to spread his fire, forcing him to choose between disabling my vehicle and taking me out. I leaned out, shouldered the weapon in one quick fluid movement, something almost beneath conscious thought, and this time I wasn’t planning on missing.
I fired.
Because I was aiming for the front of the closest vehicle, I had an easier, more vulnerable target than my opponent. I watched the lead cable-car blow apart in a grey cloud of fused innards. The driver must have died instantly, I assumed, but the gunner had fallen out of the car during the first instant of the explosion. I watched the black-clad figure plummet towards the Mulch, weapon dropping alongside, and then heard nothing as the person hit the ground amidst a confusion of stalls and lashed-together dwelling places.
Something felt wrong. I could feel it coming; unravelling into mind. Another Haussmann episode. I fought it; tried desperately to anchor myself to the present, but it was already as if a second, faint layer of reality was trying to settle over me.
‘Go to hell,’ I said.
The other car loitered, continuing its descent for a moment, then turning around with a quick and elegant exchange of cable-arms. I watched it rise to the Canopy, and then - for the first time since I had become aware of the attack - realised that the siren was still shrieking in the cabin. Except that now it had gained a new level of urgency.
I placed the weapon down, then navigated the bucking car to the control chair. I could feel the Haussmann episode clawing its way to the front of my head, like a seizure on the point of happening.
The ground was coming up too fast. We were almost dropping, I realised - probably just skimming down a single strand of cable. People, rickshaws and animals were fleeing the area below, although with no real agreement on where it was I was likely to touch down. I got into the chair and worked the controls, largely randomly, hoping that there was something I could do which would level off the rate of descent. And then the ground was so close I could read the expressions on the Mulch people below and none of them looked overjoyed at my arrival.
And then I hit the Mulch.
The conclave room was deep inside the Palestine; sealed from the rest of the ship by massive bulkhead doors which had been decorated in ornate metal scrollwork, festooning like alloy vines. Inside was a massive rectangular table surrounded by twenty high-backed seats, less than a dozen of which were occupied. The matter of the messages from home was one of utmost security, and it was considered normal that the other vessels had sent only two or three delegates apiece. They sat around the table now, their stiffly suited figures reflected in the table’s polished mahogany surface, so dark and mirrorlike that it resembled a slab of perfectly still moonlit water. Rising from the centre of the table was a projection apparatus which was cycling through the technical schematics contained in the first message, skeletal graphics of dazzling complexity flashing into existence.
Sky sat next to Balcazar, listening to the faint labours of the old man’s medical tabard.
‘. . . and this modification would appear to give us more elaborate control of the confinement bottle topology than we yet have,’ said the Palestine’s senior propulsion theorist, freezing one of the schematics. ‘Coupled with the other things we’ve seen, it should give us a steeper deceleration profile . . . not to mention the ability to throttle back the flow without experiencing magnetic blow-back. That would let us turn off an anti-matter engine while there’s still fuel in the reservoir - and restart it later - something we can’t do with the current design.’
‘Could we make those mods, even if we trusted them?’ asked Omdurman, the Baghdad’s commanding officer. He wore a glossily black tunic flashed with grey and white sigils of rank. Coupled with the paleness of his skin and the deep black of his hair
and beard, he was a study in monochrome.
‘In principle, yes.’ Beneath a sheen of perspiration, the propulsion tech’s face was impassive. ‘But I’ll be honest with you. We’d be making large-scale alterations within centimetres of the confinement bottle, which has to keep functioning perfectly the whole time we’re working. We can’t shunt the anti-matter somewhere else until we’re done. One wrong move and you won’t need so many seats at the next conclave.’
‘Damn the next conclave,’ murmured Balcazar.
Sky sighed and dug a finger between the damp edge of his collar and the skin of his neck. It was unpleasantly warm in the conclave room, almost soporifically so. Nothing felt right on this ship. There was an aura of strangeness aboard the Palestine that Sky had not been expecting; one that was heightened all the more by the things that were not strange at all. The ship’s layout and design had been instantly familiar, so that as soon as the Captain and he were escorted from their shuttle, he felt he knew exactly where he was. Though they were diplomatic visitors rather than prisoners, they were under constant armed guard, but had that supervision been lax enough for him to vanish into the ship, he was certain he would have been able to find his way to any part of it unaided and perhaps even unseen, exploiting his own knowledge of the Santiago’s blind spots and short-cuts, all of which were probably replicated on the Palestine. But in nearly every respect other than basic topology, the ship was subtly different, as if he had awakened into a world almost but not quite correct in the most mundane of details. The décor was different, signs and markings in unfamiliar script and language, with slogans and murals painted where the Santiago had blank walling. The crew wore different uniforms, flashed with sigils of rank he could not quite interpret, and when they spoke amongst themselves he understood almost nothing they said. They had different equipment and they saluted each other aggressively at every opportunity. Their body language was like a tune being played slightly offkey. The internal temperature felt warmer than on his own ship, and more humid - and there was a constant smell, as of cooking, wherever they went. It was not actually unpleasant, but it served to reinforce the feelings of foreignness he felt. It might have been his imagination, too, but even the gravity felt heavier, his footsteps hammering hard against the flooring. Perhaps they had upped their spin rate slightly so that when they arrived at Journey’s End they would have an advantage over the other colonists. Perhaps they had done it just to make everyone uncomfortable during the conclave, and turned up the heating while they were at it. Or perhaps he was imagining it.
The Revelation Space Collection Page 108