"I'm an artist," Quirrenbach said. "Actually, a composer. I'm working on a symphony cycle; my life's work. That's what brings me here."
"Music?"
"Yes, music-though that contemptible little word barely encapsulates what I have in mind. My next symphony will be a work inspired by nothing less than Chasm City." He smiled. "It was going to be a glorious, uplifting piece, celebrating the city in all its Belle Epoque splendour; a composition teeming with vitality and energy. Now, I think, it will have to be a darker piece entirely; Shostakovichian in its solemnity; a work weighed down by the crushing realisation that history's wheel has finally turned and crushed our mortal dreams to dust. A plague symphony."
"And that's what you've come all this way for? To scribble down a few notes?"
"To scribble down a few notes, yes. And why not? Someone, after all, has to do it."
"But it'll take you decades to get back home."
"A fact that has, surprisingly, impinged on my consciousness before you so kindly pointed it out. But my journey here is a mere prelude, occupying a span of time that will become inconsequential when set against the several centuries that I confidently expect to elapse before the work nears completion. I myself will probably age the better part of a century in that time-the equivalent of two or three whole working lives of any of the great composers. I shall be visiting dozens of systems, of course-and adding others to my itinerary as they become significant. There will almost certainly be more wars, more plagues, more dark ages. And times of miracle and wonder, of course. All of which will be grist to the mill of my great work. And when it is polished, and when I am not utterly disgusted and disillusioned with it, I will very probably find myself in my twilight years. I simply won't have time to keep abreast of the latest longevity techniques, you see; not while I'm pouring my energies into my work. I'll just have to take whatever's easily available and hope I live to finish my magnum opus. Then, when I have tidied up the work, and achieved some form of reconciliation between the crude scribblings I have set down now and the undoubtedly masterful and fluid work I will be producing at the end of my life, I will take a ship back to Grand Teton-assuming it still exists-where I will announce the great work's premier. The premier itself won't be for another fifty or so years afterwards, depending on the extent of human space at that time. That will give time for word to reach even the most distant colonies, and for people to begin converging on Grand Teton for the performance. I will sleep while the venue is constructed-I already have something suitably lavish in mind-and an orchestra worthy of the event is assembled, or bred, or cloned-whichever the case may be. And when that fifty years is done, I will rise from slumber, step into the limelight, conduct my work and, in what little time remains to me, bask in a fame the like of which no living composer has ever or will ever know. The names of the great composers will be reduced to mere footnote entries; barely flickering embryo stars set against the gemlike brilliance of my own stellar conflagration. My name will ring down the centuries like a single undying chord."
There was a long silence before I responded.
"Well, you've got to have something to aim for, I suppose."
"I suppose you must think me monstrously vain."
"I don't think the thought ever crossed my mind, Quirrenbach." While I was speaking I touched something at the back of one of the drawers. I'd been hoping to locate a weapon of some sort-something with a little more punch than the clockwork gun-but Vadim appeared to have managed without one. Still, I felt I had something. "This is interesting."
"What have you found?"
I pulled out a matte-black metal box the size of a cigar case, opening it to reveal six scarlet vials tucked into pouches. Set into the same case was something like an ornate steel hypodermic, with a gunlike handle, marked with a delicately painted bas-relief cobra.
"I don't know. Any thoughts?"
"Not exactly, no . . ." He examined the cache of vials with what looked like genuine curiosity. "But I'll tell you one thing. It doesn't look legal, whatever it is."
"More or less what I was thinking."
As I reached to take back the cache, Quirrenbach said, "Why are you so interested in it?"
I remembered the syringe which had slipped from the pocket of the monk in Amelia's cave. There was no way to tell for sure, but the substance I had seen in that syringe-admittedly in the dim light of the cave-looked much like the chemical in Vadim's cache. I remembered, too, what Amelia had told me when I had asked her about the syringe: that it was something the monk should not have had in Idlewild. Some kind of narcotic, then-and perhaps prohibited not just in the Mendicant hospice but across the whole system.
"I'm assuming this might open some doors for me."
"It might open a lot more than that," Quirrenbach said. "The very gates of hell, for a start. I've remembered something. Something I heard up in the parking swarm. Concerning some very nasty substances doing the rounds." He nodded at the row of scarlet vials. "One of which is something they call Dream Fuel."
"And this might be it?"
"I don't know, but it's exactly the kind of thing I would expect our dear friend Vadim to be trading in."
"Where would he have got it from?"
"I didn't say I was an expert, Tanner. All I know is that it has some unpleasant side-effects and whatever authorities there are in this system don't exactly encourage its use-or the possession of it, for that matter."
"It must have some uses, though."
"Yes-but exactly what they do with it, I don't know. That device is a wedding gun, incidentally."
He must have seen the blank look on my face.
"It was a local custom for a husband and wife to exchange, in some fashion, actual neural material cultured from each other's brains. They used that thing-the wedding gun-to implant the stuff into each other."
"They don't do that anymore?"
"Not since the plague, I think." He looked rueful. "Actually, come to think of it, there are lots of things they don't do since the plague."
When Quirrenbach had gone with his gains-back to ponder the next instalment in his symphony cycle, I hoped-I crossed over to Vadim's network console. For the first time since departure I had weight again, as the Strelnikov executed a thrust burn, minutely adjusting its fall towards the Rust Belt. From somewhere else I heard low, saurian moans of structural protest, and couldn't help wondering if I'd picked the one voyage which would end with the ship's hull finally giving up the ghost. Presently, however, the groans and creaks subsided into the ship's normal sonic background and I was able to concentrate on the matter at hand.
The console looked ancient, like something children would have laughed at in a museum. There was a flat screen surrounded by controls embossed with finger-worn icons, above an alphanumeric keyboard. I didn't know what the state of the art around Yellowstone was, but this wasn't even it by Sky's Edge standards.
It would have to do.
I found the key which turned the console on, the screen stammering through a series of warm-up messages and adverts before displaying a complex tree of options. Shipboard data services. Realtime networks-the web of data streams within a light-second or so of the Strelnikov , so that normal conversations were possible. Deep system networks, with typical timelags ranging from seconds to tens of hours, depending on the complexity of the enquiry. There was no explicit possibility to access networks with response times longer than that, which made sense: any enquiry sent out to the system's Kuiper Belt habitats would have returned a reply long after the sender had left the slowboat at journey's end.
I entered the option for the deep system networks, waiting a few seconds while the screen busied itself with more advertising material. A tree of submenus appeared. News of arriving and departing starships, including an entry for the Orvieto . The Yellowstone system was still a busy interstellar hub, which also made a kind of sense. If the plague had struck in the last decade or so, many ships would have already been on their way here. It would take
decades for news of the plague to spread out into the main volume of human-settled space.
I skimmed through the options.
The deep system networks carried comms traffic to and from the habitats in orbit around the system's gas giants: typically mining stations and outposts for the more reclusive factions. There were Conjoiner nests, Skyjack enclaves and semi-automated military or experimental facilities. I searched in vain for any reference to the plague. Occasionally there was talk of containment procedures, or crisis management, but for the most part it looked as if the plague-or its consequences-had become so fundamental an aspect of life that there was seldom any need to refer to the thing itself.
The local networks told me a little more. Once or twice, at least, I found references to the crisis by name, and learned that they had given it a specific and chilling name: the Melding Plague . But most of the messages assumed total familiarity with the basic facts of the plague itself. There were references to Hermetics, and the Canopy, and the Mulch, and sometimes to something called the Game, but none of these terms were elaborated upon.
I had heard of the Canopy, though. That was where Amelia had said I'd stand a good chance of finding Reivich. It was a district of Chasm City.
But had she told me less than I had imagined?
I put the console into send mode and composed a query concerning the plague; a request for general information for newcomers. I couldn't believe I was the first to want this information before being plunged into the thick of the Rust Belt, but it was also entirely possible that no one would bother replying to me, or that no kind of automated handling system was functioning now.
I sent my query, then stared at the console for a few seconds. The screen stared back at me, unchanging.
Nothing came.
Disappointed and still no closer to the truth, I went to the pockets of the coat I had taken from Vadim and pulled out the neatly stowed playback kit. The device almost assembled itself, the slim black parts sliding home with the pleasing precision of rifle components. The result was a skeletal black helmet, nubbed with field-generators and input ports, ornamented with luminous green and red cobras. A pair of stereoscopic eyepieces folded down from the helmet's front, their rims formed from material that automatically conformed to the skin around the eye. A pair of earplugs functioned similarly, and there were even noseplugs for olfactory input.
I hefted the helmet, then placed it on my head.
The helmet gripped my scalp firmly, like a torture vice. The little eyepieces moved into position, glueing themselves around my sockets. Inside each was a high-resolution imaging system which was currently showing exactly the view I'd have seen had I not been wearing the helmet, except for a slight and probably deliberate graininess. To do much better I would have needed neural implants and a more sophisticated playback system, something that could interrogate and adjust brain signals with the finesse of a military trawl.
I opened my briefcase.
Inside, I found the cache of experientials I'd carried from Sky's Edge, still wrapped in clear plastic. I removed the plastic and examined the six pen-like sticks, but there was nothing written on them to give any clue as to what they contained. Were they simply commodities to be traded, or did the sticks contain messages to me from my pre-amnesiac self?
There was a port in the brow of the helmet into which one inserted the metallic tip of the experiential, so that it stuck out like a thin horn. I took the first of my six and pushed it home.
A menu popped into existence ahead of me, giving options for entering the simulation at various points and with various artistic settings. I accepted the defaults and plunged into the experiential at random, making my choices with hand gestures. The helmet generated a low-level electric field which my body modified, enabling the system to read any large-scale movements.
Vadim's room greyed out smoothly, a hiss of white-noise in my ears. The noise faded to near-silence, quieter than it had ever been aboard the slowboat. The grey lightened, shapes and colours emerging like phantoms out of fog.
I was in a jungle clearing, shooting enemy soldiers.
I was stripped to the waist, over-muscled, even for a soldier, paint daubed across my chest, with an old model of particle-beam rifle gripped in one hand, while my other hand held a smaller, slug-firing machine-gun. I'd handled similar weapons myself and I knew that it was physically impossible to fire either singlehandedly, let alone held out nearly at arm's length. Both weapons chugged away as I doused them at an unending stream of enemy soldiers, who seemed perfectly willing to run screaming towards me from the bush, even though any one of them could have picked me off from cover with a single well-aimed shot. I was screaming as well. Maybe it was the effort of having to hold both those guns.
It was laughable, but I didn't doubt that there'd be a market for something like it. There was a market for that kind of thing on Sky's Edge, after all-and we already had a real war.
I tried the next one.
This time I was sitting inside a skeletally framed single-seat wheeler, racing it across a mud flat with a dozen or so other wheelers trying to sneak past me on either side. I'd entered this one with the experiential set to interactive, so I was able to steer the wheeler and throttle its turbine up and down. I played it for a few minutes, keeping ahead of the pack, until I badly misjudged the angle of a sandbank and lost control. Another car slammed into mine and there was an instant of painless carnage before I was back at the starting line again, gunning my engine. Difficult to tell how this one would sell. They might lap it up as a unique Sky's Edge product, or they might find the whole thing irredeemably quaint.
I continued through the remaining four experientials, but the results were just as disappointing. Two of them were fictionalised episodes from my planet's past: one a melodrama about Sky Haussmann's life aboard the Santiago -really the last thing I needed-while the other was a love story set during the time of Sky's imprisonment, trial and execution, but in which Sky was only very a minor background character. The other two experientials were adventures, both of which involved snake-hunting, though whoever had scripted them had only a passing knowledge of hamadryad biology.
I'd expected more: some kind of specific message from my past. Although I remembered a great deal more now than I'd done upon first waking in Idlewild, there were still aspects of my past that were unclear; things that refused to snap into focus. I could have lived with these absences if I'd been stalking Reivich in familiar territory, but even my knowledge of the city ahead of me was inaccurate.
I turned to the cache of experientials I had taken from Vadim. They were all blank except for a tiny silver motif near the top of each. I wasn't going to learn anything about myself, but I'd at least learn a little more about what passed for entertainment in Chasm City. I slipped one of them in.
It was a mistake.
I was expecting pornography, or mindless violence-something from the extremes of human experience, but still recognisable as such. What I got was so strange that at first it was difficult to articulate what I was experiencing and I began to wonder if there was some compatibility problem between the experientials and the helmet, so that the wrong parts of my brain were being stimulated. But they'd all come from the same source: Vadim's room.
This was how it was meant to be.
It was dark, dank, squalid, and there was a feeling of terrible, crushing claustrophobia-an emotion so intense that it was like my skull was slowly squeezing my brain. My body was all wrong: elongated and limbless, pale and soft and infinitely vulnerable. I couldn't guess how that sensation was engendered, unless the device was stimulating some ancient part of the brain which remembered what it was like to ooze or swim rather than walk. And yet I was not actually alone, and nor was the darkness as absolute as it had originally seemed. My body occupied a warm, humid hollow inside a space which had been cored out with labyrinthine black tunnels and chambers. And there were others with me; other pale, elongated presences. I couldn't see them-they must
have been in adjacent chambers-but I could taste their proximity, ingest the souplike chemical flow of their emotions and thoughts. And in some sense they were me as well, detached avatars of myself. They moved and quivered at my bidding, and I sensed what they sensed.
The claustrophobia was total and crushing, but it was also reassuring. Beyond the hard, rocklike volume in which we were caged was an absolute void from which my thoughts flinched. That emptiness was worse than the claustrophia, and what made it worse still was the fact that it was not truly empty; that the void held terrible, silent, infinitely patient enemies.
Who were coming closer.
I felt a convulsion of fear so absolute that I screamed and removed the helmet. For a moment I floated in Vadim's cabin, breathing hard, wondering just what I'd experienced. The feeling of immense claustrophobia, combined with even worse agoraphobia, took long seconds to abate, like the after-chime of an awful bell.
My hands trembling-although I was beginning to regain some control-I removed the experiential and examined it more closely, this time paying proper attention to the little motif near the top of the stick.
It looked a lot like a maggot.
I watched our approach to the Rust Belt through the observation window in Vadim's cabin.
I knew something of what lay ahead now. Shortly after I'd tried the disturbing experiential-while I was still reeling from its effects, in fact-the console had chimed, announcing the arrival of a response to my earlier query. I was surprised; in my experience such things usually happened instantaneously or not at all, and the delay served only to emphasise how disrupted the system's data networks must have been.
The message, it turned out, was a standard-issue document, rather than a personally composed reply. An automated mechanism must have decided that it would answer most of my questions; an assumption that turned out to be reasonably accurate.
I started reading.
Dear Newcomer
Welcome to the Epsilon Eridani system.
Chasm City Page 20