‘I’d like to know who or what Sun Stealer was,’ he said, drawing her attention to those words, etched in Cyrillic on the coffin. ‘Does that mean anything to you? Within the terms of his psychosis, I mean. What did it mean to Nagorny?’
‘I haven’t the faintest.’
‘Let me hazard a guess, anyway. I’d say that in Nagorny’s imagination Sun Stealer represented somebody in his day-to-day experience, and I see two obvious possibilities.’
‘Himself or me,’ Volyova said, knowing that Sajaki was not to be easily distracted. ‘Yes, yes, that much is obvious… but this doesn’t in any way help us.’
‘You’re quite sure he never mentioned this Sun Stealer?’
‘I would remember a thing like that.’
Which was quite true. And of course she did remember: he had written those words on the wall in her quarters, in his own blood. The expression meant nothing to her, but that did not mean she was in any sense unfamiliar with it. Towards the unpleasant termination of their professional relationship, Nagorny had spoken of little else. His dreams were thick with Sun Stealer, and — like all paranoiacs — he saw evidence of Sun Stealer’s malignant work in the most humdrum of daily annoyances. When one of the ship’s lights failed unaccountably or a lift directed him to the wrong level, this was Sun Stealer’s doing. It was never a simple malfunction, but always evidence of the deliberate machinations of a behind-the-scenes entity only Nagorny could detect. Volyova had stupidly ignored the signs. She had hoped — in fact come as close to praying as was possible for her — that his phantom would return to the netherworld of his unconscious. But Sun Stealer had stayed with Nagorny; witness the coffin on the floor.
Yes… she would remember a thing like that.
‘I’m sure you would,’ Sajaki said, knowingly. Then he returned his attention to the engravings. ‘I think first we should make a copy of these marks,’ he said. ‘They may help us, but this damned Braille effect isn’t easy to make out with the eye. What do you think these are?’ He moved his palm across a kind of radial pattern. ‘Birds’ wings? Or rays of sunlight shining from above? They look more like birds’ wings to me. Now why would he have bird wings on his mind? And what kind of language is this meant to be?’
Volyova looked, but the crawling complexity of the coffin was too much to take in. It was not that she was uninterested — not at all. But what she wanted was the thing to herself, and Sajaki as far away from it as possible. There was too much evidence here of the canyon depths to which Nagorny’s mind had plummeted.
‘I think it merits more study,’ she said carefully. ‘You said “first”. What do you intend to do after we make a copy of it?’
‘I would have thought that was obvious.’
‘Destroy the damned thing,’ she surmised.
Sajaki smiled. ‘Either that or give it to Sudjic. But personally I’d settle for destroying it. Coffins aren’t good things to have on a ship, you know. Especially home-made ones.’
The stairs went up for ever. After a while — already in the two hundreds — Khouri lost count. But just when her knees felt as if they were going to buckle, the staircase came to an abrupt end, presenting her with a long white corridor whose sides were a series of recessed arches. The effect was like standing in a portico under moonlight. She walked along the corridor’s echoey length until she arrived at the double doors which ended it. They were festooned with organic black scrollwork, inset with faintly tinted glass. A lavender light poured through them from the room beyond.
Evidently she had arrived.
It was entirely possible that this was a trap of some kind, and that to enter the room beyond would be a form of suicide. But turning back was not an option either — Manoukhian, for all his charm, had made that abundantly clear. So Khouri grasped the handle and let herself in. Something in the air made her nose tickle pleasantly, a blossomy perfume negating the sterility of the rest of the house. The smell made Khouri feel unwashed, although it was only a few hours since Ng had woken her and told her to go and kill Taraschi. In the meantime she had accumulated a month’s worth of dirt from the Chasm City rain, suffused with her own sweat and fear.
‘I see Manoukhian managed to get you here in one piece,’ said a woman’s voice.
‘Me or him?’
‘Both, dear girl,’ the invisible speaker said. ‘Your reputations are equally formidable.’
Behind her the double doors clicked shut. Khouri began to take in her surroundings; difficult in the strange pink light of the room. The enclosure was kettle-shaped, with two eyelike shuttered windows set into one concave wall.
‘Welcome to my place of residence,’ the voice said. ‘Make yourself at home, won’t you.’
Khouri walked to the shuttered windows. To one side of the windows sat a pair of reefersleep caskets, gleaming like chromed silverfish. One of the units was sealed and running, while the other was open; a chrysalis ready to enfold the butterfly.
‘Where am I?’
The shutters whisked open.
‘Where you always were,’ the Mademoiselle said.
She was looking out across Chasm City. But it was from a higher vantage point than she had ever known. She was actually above the Mosquito Net, perhaps fifty metres from its stained surface. The city lay below the Net like a fantastically spiny sea-creature preserved in formaldehyde. She had no idea where she was; except that this had to be one of the tallest buildings; one that she had probably assumed was uninhabited.
The Mademoiselle said: ‘I call this place the Chateau des Corbeaux; the House of Ravens; by virtue of its blackness. You’ve undoubtedly seen it.’
‘What do you want?’ Khouri said, finally.
‘I want you to do a job for me.’
‘All this for that? I mean, you had to kidnap me at gunpoint just to ask me to do a job? Couldn’t you go through the usual channels?’
‘It isn’t the usual sort of job.’
Khouri nodded towards the open reefersleep unit. ‘Where does that come into it?’
‘Don’t tell me it alarms you. You came to our world in one, after all.’
‘I just asked what it meant.’
‘All in good time. Turn around, will you?’
Khouri heard a slight bustle of machinery behind her, like the sound of a filing cabinet opening.
A hermetic’s palanquin had entered the room. Or had it been here all along, concealed by some artifice? It was as dark and angular as a metronome, lacking ornamentation, and with a roughly welded black exterior. It had no appendages or obvious sensors, and the tiny viewing monocle set into its front was as dark as a shark’s eye.
‘You are doubtless already familiar with my kind,’ said the voice emanating from the palanquin. ‘Do not be disturbed.’
‘I’m not,’ Khouri said.
But she was lying. There was something disturbing about this box; a quality she had never experienced in the presence of Ng or the other hermetics she had known. Perhaps it was the austerity of the palanquin, or the sense — entirely subliminal — that the box was seldom unoccupied. None of this was helped by the smallness of the viewing window, or the feeling that there was something monstrous behind that dark opacity.
‘I can’t answer all your questions now,’ the Mademoiselle said. ‘But obviously I didn’t bring you here just to see my predicament. Here. Perhaps this will assist matters.’
A figure grew to solidity next to the palanquin, imaged by the room itself.
It was a woman, of course — young, but paradoxically clothed in the kind of finery which no one had worn on Yellowstone since the plague; enrobed in swirling entoptics. The woman’s black hair was raked back from a noble forehead, held in a clasp inwoven with lights. Her electric-blue gown left her shoulders bare, cut away in a daring décolletage. Where it reached the floor it blurred into nothingness.
‘This is how I was,’ the figure spoke. ‘Before the foulness.’
‘Can’t you still be like that?’
‘The risk of leaving enc
losure is too great — even in the hermetic sanctuaries. I distrust their precautions.’
‘Why have you brought me here?’
‘Didn’t Manoukhian explain things fully?’
‘Not exactly, no. Other than explaining how it wouldn’t be good for my health not to go along with him.’
‘How indelicate of him. But not inaccurate, it must be admitted.’ A smile upset the pale composure of the woman’s face. ‘What do you suppose were my reasons for bringing you here?’
Khouri knew that, whatever else had happened, she had seen too much to return to normal life in the city.
‘I’m a professional assassin. Manoukhian saw me at work and told me I was as good as my reputation. Now — maybe I’m jumping to conclusions here — but it occurs to me you might want someone killed.’
‘Yes, very good.’ The figure nodded. ‘But did Manoukhian tell you this would not be the same as your usual contracts?’
‘He mentioned an important difference, yes.’
‘And would this trouble you?’ The Mademoiselle studied her intensely. ‘It’s an interesting point, isn’t it? I’m well aware that your usual targets consent to be assassinated before you go after them. But they do so in the knowledge that they will probably evade you and live to boast about it. When you do catch them, I doubt that many of them go gently.’
She thought of Taraschi. ‘Usually not, no. Usually they’re begging me not to do it, trying to bribe me, that kind of thing.’
‘And?’
Khouri shrugged. ‘I kill them anyway.’
‘The attitude of a true professional. You were a soldier, Khouri?’
‘Once.’ She did not really want to think about that now. ‘How much do you know about what happened to me?’
‘Enough. That your husband was a soldier as well — a man named Fazil — and that you fought together on Sky’s Edge. And then something happened. A clerical error. You were put aboard a ship destined for Yellowstone. No one realised the error until you woke up here, twenty years later. Too late by then to return to the Edge — even if you knew Fazil was still alive. He would be forty years older by the time you got back.’
‘Now you know why becoming an assassin didn’t exactly give me any sleepless nights.’
‘No; I can imagine how you felt. That you owed the universe no favours — nor anyone living in it.’
Khouri swallowed. ‘But you don’t need an ex-soldier for a job like this. You don’t even need me: I don’t know who you want to take out, but there are better people around than me. I mean, I’m technically good — I only miss one shot in twenty. But I know people who only miss one in fifty.’
‘You suit my needs in another manner. I need someone who is more than willing to leave the city.’ The figure nodded towards the open reefersleep casket. ‘And by that, I mean a long journey.’
‘Out of the system?’
‘Yes.’ Her voice was patient and matronly, as if the rudiments of this conversation had been rehearsed dozens of times. ‘Specifically, a distance of twenty light-years. That’s how far away Resurgam is.’
‘I can’t say I’ve heard of it.’
‘I would be troubled if you had.’ The Mademoiselle extended her left hand, and a little globe sprang into existence a few inches above her palm. The world was deathly grey — there were no oceans, rivers or greenery. Only a skein of atmosphere — visible as a fine arc near the horizon — and a pair of dirty-white icecaps suggested this was anything other than some airless moon. ‘It’s not even one of the newer colonies — not what we’d call a colony, anyway. There are only a few tiny research outposts on the whole planet. Until recently Resurgam has been of no significance whatsoever. But all that has changed.’ The Mademoiselle paused, seeming to collect her thoughts, perhaps debating how much to reveal at this stage. ‘Someone has arrived on Resurgam — a man called Sylveste.’
‘That’s not a very common name.’
‘Then you are aware of his clan’s standing in Yellowstone. Good. That simplifies matters enormously. You will have no difficulty finding him.’
‘There’s more to it than just finding him, isn’t there?’
‘Oh yes,’ the Mademoiselle said. Then she snatched at the globe with her hand, crushing it between her fingers, rivulets of dust pouring between them. ‘Very much more.’
FOUR
Carousel New Brazilia, Yellowstone, Epsilon Eridani, 2546
Volyova disembarked from the lighthugger’s shuttle and followed Triumvir Hegazi down the exit tunnel. Via twisting gaskets, the tunnel led them into the weightless hub of a spherical transit lounge at the heart of the carousel.
Every fractured strain of humanity was there; a bewildering free-floating riot of colour, like tropical fish in a feeding frenzy. Ultras, Skyjacks, Conjoiners, Demarchists, local traders, intrasystem passengers, freeloaders, mechanics, all following what seemed to be completely random trajectories, but never quite colliding, no matter how perilously close they came. Some — where their bodyplans allowed it — had diaphanous wings sewn under their sleeves, or attached directly to the skin. The less adventurous made do with slim thrust-packs, or allowed themselves to be pulled along by tiny rented tugs. Personal servitors flew through the throng, carrying baggage and folded spacesuits, while liveried, winged capuchin monkeys foraged for litter, tucking what they found into marsupial pouches under their chests. Chinese music tinkled pervasively through the air, sounding to Volyova’s untutored ear like windchimes stirred by a breeze with a particular taste for dissonance. Yellowstone, thousands of kilometres below, was an ominous yellow-brown backdrop to all this activity.
Volyova and Hegazi reached the far side of the transit sphere and moved through a matter-permeable membrane into a customs area. It was another free-fall sphere, wall festooned with autonomic weapons which tracked each arrival. Transparent bubbles filled the central volume, each three metres wide and split open along an equatorial bisector. Sensing the newcomers, two bubbles drifted through the airspace and clamped themselves around them.
A small servitor hung inside Volyova’s bubble, shaped like a Japanese Kabuto helmet, with various sensors and readout devices projecting from beneath the rim. She felt a neural tingle as the thing trawled her, like someone daintily rearranging flowers in her head.
‘I detect residual Russish linguistic structures but determine that Modern Norte is your standard tongue. Will this suffice for bureaucratic processing?’
‘It’ll do,’ Volyova said, miffed that the thing had detected the rustiness of her native language.
‘Then I shall continue in Norte. Apart from reefersleep mediation systems, I detect no cerebral implants or exosomatic perceptual modification devices. Do you require the loan of an implant before the continuation of this interview?’
‘Just give me screen and a face.’
‘Very well.’
A face resolved beneath the rim. The face was female and white, with just a hint of Mongolism, hair as short as Volyova’s own. She guessed that Hegazi’s interviewer would appear male, moustached, dark-skinned and heavily chimeric, just like the man himself.
‘State your identity,’ the woman said.
Volyova introduced herself.
‘You last visited this system in… let me see.’ The face looked down for a moment. ‘Eighty-five years ago; ‘461. Am I correct?’
Against her best instincts, Volyova leaned nearer the screen. ‘Of course you’re correct. You’re a gamma-level simulation. Now dispense with the theatrics and just get on with it. I’ve wares to trade and every second you detain me is a second more we have to pay to park our ship around your useless dog-turd of a planet.’
‘Truculence noted,’ the woman said, seeming to jot a remark in a notebook just out of sight. ‘For your information, Yellowstone records are incomplete in many areas owing to the data corruption of the plague. When I asked you the question I did so because I wanted to confirm an unverified record.’ She paused. ‘And by the way; my name is Va
vilov. I’m sitting with a rancid cup of coffee and my last cigarette in a draughty office eight hours into a ten-hour shift. My boss will assume I was dozing if I don’t turn back ten people today and so far I’ve only notched up five. With two hours to go I’m looking at ways to fill my quota, so please, think very carefully before your next outburst.’ The woman took a drag and blew the smoke in Volyova’s direction. ‘Now. Shall we continue?’
‘I’m sorry, I thought —’ Volyova trailed off. ‘Your people don’t use simulations for this kind of work?’
‘We used to,’ Vavilov said, with a long-suffering sigh. ‘But the trouble with simulations is that they put up with far too much shit.’
From the carousel’s hub Volyova and Hegazi rode a house-sized elevator down one of the wheel’s four radial spokes, their weight mounting until they reached the circumference. Gravity there was Yellowstone normal, not perceptibly different to the standard Earth gravity adopted by Ultras.
Carousel New Brazilia orbited Yellowstone every four hours, in an orbit which meandered to avoid the ‘Rust Belt’ — the debris rings which had come into existence since the plague. It had a wheel configuration: one of the commonest carousel designs. This one was ten kilometres in diameter and eleven hundred metres wide, all human activity wound on the thirty-kilometre strip around the wheel. It was sufficient size for a scattering of towns, small hamlets and bonsai landscape features, even a few carefully horticultured forests, with azure snowcapped mountains carved into the rising valley sides of the strip to give the illusion of distance. The curved roof around the concave part of the wheel was transparent, rising half a kilometre above the strip. Metal rails were fretted across its surface, from which hung billowing artificial clouds, choreographed by computer. Apart from simulating planetary weather, the clouds served to break up the upsetting perspectives of the curved world. Volyova supposed they were realistic, but having never seen real clouds with her own eyes, at least not from below, she could not be wholly sure.
They had emerged from the elevator onto a terrace above the carousel’s main community, a collision of buildings piled between stepped valley sides. Rimtown, they called it. It was an eyesore of architectural styles reflecting the succession of different tenants which the carousel had enjoyed throughout its history. A line of rickshaws waited at ground level, the driver of the closest quenching his thirst from a can of banana juice which sat in a holder rigged to the taxi’s handlebars. Hegazi passed the driver a piece of paper marked with their destination. The driver held it closely to his black, close-set eyes, then grunted acknowledgement. Soon they were trundling through the traffic, electric and pedal vehicles barging recklessly around each other, pedestrians diving bravely between openings in the seemingly random flow. At least half the people Volyova saw were Ultranauts, evidenced by their tendency towards paleness, spindly build, flaunted body augmentations, swathes of black leather and acres of glinting jewellery, tattoos and trade-trophies. None of the Ultras she saw were extreme chimerics, with the possible exception of Hegazi, who probably qualified as one of the half-dozen most augmented people in the carousel. But the majority wore their hair in the customary Ultra manner, fashioned in thick braids to indicate the number of reefersleep stretches they had done, and many of them had their clothes slashed to expose their prosthetic parts. Looking at these specimens, Volyova had to remind herself that she was part of the same culture.
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