The Revelation Space Collection

by Alastair Reynolds

  ‘I never pretended to deserve anything,’ I said. ‘Although I do think the one thing I might deserve is an explanation. Can we take it as read that you and I almost met earlier this evening, except that there was a substantial bulk of fish between us, name of Methuselah?’

  ‘I was standing behind you,’ Zebra said. ‘If you saw me, you saw my reflection. It’s not my fault you didn’t turn around.’

  ‘You could have said something.’

  ‘You were hardly excessively loquacious yourself, Tanner.’

  ‘All right; can we start at the beginning?’ I looked at Pransky, soliciting his permission as much as Zebra’s. ‘How about I tell you what I think, and we take it from there?’

  ‘Sounds eminently reasonable to me,’ said the little security expert.

  I drew in a deep breath, aware that I was comitting myself further than at any point since my arrival. But here, now, it had to be done. ‘You’re working for Reivich,’ I said. ‘Both of you.’

  Pransky looked at Zebra. ‘He mentioned that name earlier. I don’t know who he means.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ Zebra said. ‘I do.’

  I nodded, feeling a paradoxical sense of relief, resignation, I supposed. It didn’t greatly comfort me to find out that Zebra was working for the man I had been sent to assassinate - most especially now that she had captured me. But there was also a defeatist pleasure in seeing one particular mystery cleared up.

  ‘Reivich must have contacted you as soon as he got here,’ I said. ‘You’re - what - some kind of freelancer? A security specialist in your own right, like Pransky here? It would make sense. You knew how to handle a weapon, and you were a step ahead of Waverly’s people when they were hunting me down. The whole hunt sabotage story was just a screen. For all I know you play it every night with the best of them. There. How am I doing?’

  ‘It’s fascinating stuff,’ Zebra said. ‘Please continue.’

  ‘You were detailed by Reivich to find me. He had a suspicion someone had been sent from Sky’s Edge, so it was just a matter of putting your ears to the ground and listening. The musician was part of the operation as well - the front man who trailed me down from the Mendicant habitat.’

  ‘Who’s the musician?’ Pransky said. ‘First Reivich, now the musician. Do these people actually exist?’

  ‘Shut up,’ Zebra said. ‘And let Tanner continue.’

  ‘The musician was good,’ I said. ‘But I’m not sure whether I gave him enough to go on; whether I allowed him to establish beyond any doubt that I was the man he wanted, and not just some innocent immigrant.’ I looked towards Zebra for confirmation, but since none was forthcoming, I continued, ‘Maybe all the musician could tell Reivich was that I was still a possibility. So you kept tabs on me. Somehow you had contacts in the hunt movement - maybe connections with a group of genuine saboteurs, for all I know. And via Waverly, you found out I’d been recuited as a victim.’

  ‘What is he talking about?’ Pransky said.

  ‘The truth, unfortunately,’ Zebra said, dispensing a withering look towards the security specialist, who was probably her subordinate, her understudy or dogsbody. ‘At least regarding the hunt. Tanner wandered into the wrong part of the Mulch and got himself captured. He put up a good fight, too, but they might have killed him if I hadn’t made it in time.’

  ‘She had to save me,’ I said. ‘There wasn’t anything noble about it, though. Zebra only wanted information. If I died, no one would be able to establish whether or not I’d really been the man sent to kill Reivich. That would put Reivich in an uncomfortable situation; he wouldn’t be able to relax for the rest of his life. There’d always be the danger that the real assassin was closing in. A lot of sleepless nights. That’s how it went, wasn’t it, Zebra?’

  ‘It might,’ she said. ‘If I happened to be colluding in your own delusions.’

  ‘Then why did you save me, if it wasn’t to keep me alive and find out if I was really the man?’

  ‘For the same reasons I told you. Because I hate the hunt, and I wanted to help you live.’ She shook her head, almost apologetically. ‘Sorry, Tanner. Much as I’d love to help you with your particular paranoid construct, it doesn’t go any deeper than that. I’m who I said I was, and I acted for the reasons I said. And I’d be grateful if you restricted discussion of the sabs to an absolute minimum, even in Pransky’s esteemed company.’

  ‘But you just told me - him - you know who Reivich is.’

  ‘I do, now. But I didn’t then. Shall we continue? Maybe you ought to hear my side of things.’

  ‘I can’t wait.’

  Zebra inhaled, looking interestedly around the doughlike acreage of the ceiling before her gaze snapped back to me. I had a feeling what she was about to say was not unrehearsed.

  ‘I rescued you from Waverly’s hunt clique,’ Zebra said. ‘Don’t fool yourself into imagining that you might have made it out alive yourself, Tanner. You’re good - that’s obvious - but no one’s that good.’

  ‘Maybe you just don’t know me well enough.’

  ‘I’m not sure I want to. May I continue?’

  ‘I’m all ears.’

  ‘You stole things from me. Not just clothes and money, but a weapon you shouldn’t have known how to use. I won’t even mention the cable-car. You could have stayed where you were until the implant stopped transmitting, but for some reason you thought you’d be safer on your own.’

  I shrugged. ‘I’m still alive, aren’t I?’

  ‘For the moment,’ Zebra conceded. ‘But Waverly isn’t, and he was one of the few allies we had at the core of the movement. I know you killed him, Tanner - the trail you left was so hot you might as well have sprinkled plutonium wherever you went.’ She strolled around the room, the stiletto heels of her boots clicking against the floor like a pair of matched metronomes. ‘That was unfortunate, you know.’

  ‘Waverly just got in the way. It’s not like the sadistic bastard was on my Christmas list.’

  ‘Why didn’t you wait?’

  ‘I had other business to attend to.’

  ‘Reivich, right? I expect you’re dying to know where I got that name from, and how I know what it means to you.’

  ‘I think you were in the process of telling me.’

  ‘After you ditched my car,’ Zebra said. ‘You showed up in Grand Central Station. It’s where you called me from.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I was curious, Tanner. By then I already knew Waverly was dead, and that didn’t make sense. You should have been the dead man - even with the gun you stole from me. So I began to wonder just who it was I’d been sheltering. I had to find out.’ She stopped pacing; the clicking of her heels abated. ‘It wasn’t difficult. You were inordinately interested in finding out where the night’s Game was going to happen. So I told you. If you were there, I thought I’d be there myself.’

  I thought back to what seemed like hundreds of hours earlier, but was in fact only the evening of the long night in which I was still immersed. ‘You were there, when I caught Chanterelle?’

  ‘It wasn’t what I was expecting.’

  Of course not - how could it have been? I said, ‘Then what about Reivich? How does he come into it?’

  ‘Via a mutual acquaintance of ours by the name of Dominika.’ Zebra smiled, knowing she had surprised me with that.

  ‘You went to Dominika?’

  ‘It made sense. I had Pransky tail you to Escher Heights while I went to the bazaar and talked to the old woman. I knew you’d had the device removed, you see. And since you’d been at the bazaar earlier in the day, Dominika was bound to know who’d done the operation, if it wasn’t her. Which of course it was, which simplified matters enormously.’

  ‘Is there anyone in Chasm City she hasn’t deceived?’

  ‘Possibly, somewhere, but only as an extreme theoretical possibility. Actually, Dominika is a rather pure expression of our city’s driving paradigm, which is that there is nothing and no one who c
an’t be bought, given the right price.’

  ‘What did she tell you?’

  ‘Only that you are a very interesting man, Tanner, and that you had a particular interest in locating a gentleman named Argent Reivich. A man who happened to have arrived in Escher Heights only a few days earlier. Now, isn’t that a coincidence, given that Pransky just happens to have followed you to that part of the Canopy?’

  The svelte little security man felt it was his time to take over the narrative. ‘I tailed you for most of the night, Tanner. You really began to hit it off with Chanterelle Sammartini, didn’t you? Who’d have thought it - you and her.’ He shook his head, as if some basic physical law of the universe had been violated. ‘But you wandered around like old friends. I even saw you at the palanquin races.’

  ‘How tiresomely romantic,’ Zebra drawled, without interrupting Pransky’s flow.

  ‘I called Taryn and had her meet me,’ the man said. ‘Then we followed the two of you - discreetly, of course. You visited a boutique and came out looking a new man - or at least not quite your old self. Then you went to the Mixmaster. Now he was a tougher nut to crack. He wouldn’t tell me what you wanted in there and I’m awfully keen to find out.’

  ‘Just a check-up,’ I said.

  ‘Well, maybe.’ Pransky knitted together his long and elegant fingers and then made knuckle-popping sounds. ‘Perhaps it doesn’t matter. It’s certainly hard to see how it could relate to what happened next.’

  I tried to sound interested. ‘Which was?’

  ‘That you nearly killed someone,’ Zebra said, silencing her associate with a soundless cuff of the air. ‘I saw you, Tanner. I was on the point of approaching you and asking you what you were doing and then suddenly you were taking a gun out of your pocket. I couldn’t see your face, but I’d been following you long enough to know it was you. I watched you move with the gun in your hand; smoothly and calmly, as if this was all you’d ever been born to do.’ She paused. ‘And then you put the gun away, and no one else had been paying enough attention to you to notice what you’d done. I watched you look around, but it was obvious that whoever it was you’d seen was gone - if he’d ever been there. It was Reivich, wasn’t it?’

  ‘You seem to know so much, you tell me.’

  ‘I think you came here to kill him,’ Zebra said. ‘Why, I don’t know. Reivich is an old family in the Canopy, but they don’t have as many enemies as some. Yet it makes sense. That would explain why you were so desperate to get into the Canopy that you’d wander into a hunt. And why you were so reluctant to stay in the safety of my home. It was because you were scared of losing Reivich’s trail. Tell me I’m right, Tanner.’

  ‘Would there be any point denying it?’

  ‘Not a great deal, no, but you’re welcome to try.’

  She was right. Just as I had unburdened myself to Chanterelle earlier in the night, I did the same for Zebra. But it felt less intimate. Perhaps it was the fact that Pransky was standing there absorbing it all. Or the feeling that the two of them actually knew more about me than they had said, and that very little of what I was telling them was news. I told them that Reivich was someone from my homeworld, not a genuinely bad man, but one who had done something very bad out of foolishness or weakness, and had to be punished for that with no less severity than if he had been born a snarling knife-twisting psychopath.

  When I had finished - when Zebra and Pransky had grilled me to exhaustion, examining every facet of my story as if looking for a flaw they knew must be present - there was one last question, and it was mine.

  ‘Why have you brought me here, Zebra?’

  Hands on hips, her elbows jutting from the black enclosure of her coat, she said, ‘Why do you think?’

  ‘Curiosity, I suppose. But that’s not enough.’

  ‘You’re in danger, Tanner. I’m doing you a favour.’

  ‘I’ve been in danger since I came here. That’s nothing new to me.’

  ‘I mean real danger,’ Pransky said. ‘You’re in too deep. You’ve attracted too much attention.’

  ‘He’s right,’ Zebra said. ‘Dominika was the weak link. She may have alerted half the city by now. Reivich almost certainly knows you’re here, and he probably knows you nearly killed him tonight.’

  ‘That’s what I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘If he’s already been warned of my presence, why the hell was he making himself such an easy target? If I’d been a fraction faster I’d have killed him.’

  ‘Maybe the meeting was a coincidence,’ Pransky said.

  Zebra looked at him scornfully. ‘In a city this big? No; Tanner’s right. That meeting happened because Reivich arranged for it to happen. And there’s something else, too. Look at me, Tanner. Notice anything different?’

  ‘You changed your appearance.’

  ‘Yes. And it isn’t the hardest thing to do, believe me. Reivich could have done the same - nothing drastic; just enough to ensure that he wasn’t immediately recognisable in a public place. A few hours under the knife at most. Even a halfway competent bloodcutter could have done it.’

  ‘Then that doesn’t make any sense,’ I said. ‘It’s like he was taunting me. Like he wanted me to kill him.’

  ‘Maybe he did,’ Zebra said.

  There had been moments when I thought I might never see the outside of that room; that it was where Pransky and Zebra had brought me to die.

  Pransky was clearly a professional, and Zebra was no stranger to death herself, given her affiliation with the sabotage movement.

  Yet they didn’t kill me.

  We took a cable-car to Zebra’s place, Pransky going off on some other errand. ‘Who is he?’ I asked, once we were alone. ‘Some kind of hired help?’

  ‘Private intelligence,’ Zebra said, discarding her coat in a black puddle. ‘It’s all the rage these days. There are rivalries in the Canopy - feuds and quiet wars, sometimes between families, and sometimes within.’

  ‘You thought he could help trace me.’

  ‘Seems I wasn’t wrong.’

  ‘I still don’t know why, Zebra.’ Once again I looked beyond the room, towards the maw of the chasm which was like the rim of a volcano around which a city festered, on the eve of its own destruction. There was some dawnlight on the horizon. ‘Unless you think you can use me in some way - in which case I’m afraid you’re wrong. I’m not interested in any Canopy power games you might be involved in. I’m only here to do one thing.’

  ‘To kill a seemingly innocent man.’

  ‘It’s a cruel universe. Do you mind if I sit down?’ I helped myself to a seat before she had answered me, the mobile furniture shuffling into place beneath me like an obsequious servant. ‘I’m still a soldier at heart and it’s my job not to question these things. The instant I start doing that is the instant I stop doing my job properly.’

  Zebra, all angularity and knifelike edges, folded herself into the sumptuousness of the seat opposite me, retracting her knees beneath her chin.

  ‘Someone’s after you, Tanner. That’s why I had to find you. It’s dangerous for you to stay here. You have to get out of the city.’

  ‘It’s nothing I didn’t expect. Reivich will have hired all the help he can get his hands on.’

  ‘Local help?’

  It was an odd question. ‘Yes, I suppose. You wouldn’t hire someone who didn’t already know the city.’

  ‘Whoever’s after you isn’t local, Tanner.’

  I tensed in the seat, causing its buried musculature to generate massaging ripples. ‘What do you know?’

  ‘Not very much, except that Dominika said someone had been trying to find you. A man and a woman. They acted like they’d never been here before. Like offworlders. And they were very interested in finding you.’

  ‘A man already did,’ I said, thinking of Quirrenbach. ‘He followed me down from orbit, posing as an offworlder. I lost him in Dominika’s. It’s possible he returned with reinforcements.’ Vadim, perhaps. But it would be quite a trick to
mistake Vadim for a woman.

  ‘Is he dangerous?’

  ‘Anyone who lies for a living is dangerous.’

  Zebra summoned one of her ceiling-tracked servitors, having the machine bring us a tray laden with carafes of varying size and colour. Zebra poured me a goblet of wine and I let it wash away some of the accumulated taste of the city, dull some of the roaring in my mind.

  ‘I’m very tired,’ I said. ‘You offered me sanctuary here a day ago, Zebra. Can I accept that offer now, if only until daybreak?’

  She looked at me over the smoked rim of her glass. It was already daybreak, but she knew what I meant. ‘After all you’ve done, you think I’ll keep an offer like that open?’

  ‘I’m an optimist,’ I said, with what I hoped was the appropriate tone of utter resignation.

  Then I took another sip of wine and began to realise how exhausted I really was.

  THIRTY

  The expedition to the ghost ship almost never left the Santiago. Sky and his two associates, Norquinco and Gomez, had made it as far as the cargo bay when Constanza appeared out of the shadows.

  She looked much older now, Sky thought, prematurely aged compared to himself. It was hard to believe that the two of them had once been near-equals; children exploring the same dark and labyrinthine wonderland. Now the shadows etched themselves unflatteringly into her face, emphasising the wrinkles and folds of her habitual expression.

  ‘Do you mind if I ask where you’re planning to go?’ Constanza said, standing between them and the shuttle that they had gone to great trouble to make ready. ‘I’m not aware that anyone was supposed to be leaving the Santiago.’

  ‘I’m afraid you weren’t in the loop on this one,’ Sky said.