Despite all that has happened, we hope your stay here will be a pleasant one. For your information we have compiled this note to explain some of the key events in our recent history. It is intended that this information will ease your transition into a culture which may be markedly different from the one you were expecting to find when you embarked at your point of origin. It is important that you realise that others have come before you . . .
The document was long, but I quickly read the thing in its entirety, then reread it carefully, picking out the salient points which might assist me in the hunt for Reivich. I'd already been forewarned about the scale of the plague's effects, so the document's revelations were perhaps not as shocking to me as they would have been to someone freshly defrosted. But it was still chilling to see it anatomised in such a coolly detached manner, and it was easy to imagine how unsettling it must have been to someone who had come to Yellowstone in search of riches rather than blood. The Mendicants had clearly elected not to spring this news on their slush puppies too quickly, and doubtless if I'd stayed in Idlewild a little longer they would have begun to break it to me gently. But perhaps the document was right: there were some truths it was best to deal with as quickly as possible, no matter how repugnant that truth might have been.
I wondered how long it would take me to adjust to it, or if I'd be one of the unfortunate few who never quite made the transition.
Perhaps, I thought, they were actually the sane ones.
Through the window the larger Rust Belt habitats had begun to assume definite shapes, rather than just being indistinct orbiting flecks. I tried to imagine what it would have looked like seven years ago, in the last days before the plague.
There'd been ten thousand habitats in the Glitter Band, each as opulent and faceted as a chandelier, each distinguished from its neighbours by some wild architectural flourish that had far less to do with the practicalities of structural design than it had with aesthetics and prestige. They'd circled Yellowstone in low orbit, almost nose-to-tail, each vast and stately construct maintaining polite distance from those ahead and behind it with tiny puffs of correcting thrust. A constant flow of commerce had shuffled between the habitats along narrow traffic lanes, so that from a distance the habitats themselves looked as if they were entwined in tinsel-like filaments of light. Depending on the ever-shifting spectrum of allegiances and feuds, the habitats either communicated with each other via looms of quantum-encrypted laser light, or maintained sullen silences. Such silences were not at all unusual, for there were profound rivalries even amongst the constituents of what was technically the very model of a unified Demarchist society.
Amongst ten thousand habitats, there was every human specialisation imaginable: every expertise, every ideology, every perversion. The Demarchists permitted everything, even experimentation in political models which chafed against their underlying paradigm of absolute non-hierarchical democracy. Provided those experiments remained experiments, they were tolerated; even actively encouraged. Only the development and stockpiling of armaments was forbidden, unless they were to be used artistically. And it was here in the Glitter Band that the system's most illustrious clan, the Sylveste family, had performed much of the work that had brought them eventual fame. Calvin Sylveste had attempted the first neural downloads since the Transenlightenment in the Band. Dan Sylveste had collated all known information on the Shrouders here; work that eventually led to his own fateful expedition to Lascaille's Shroud.
But that was the deep past now. History had turned the glory of the Glitter Band into . . . this .
When the Melding Plague had hit, the Glitter Band had stayed intact for far longer than Chasm City, for most of the Band's habitats already had effective quarantine protocols. Some were so secretive and self-sufficient that no one had entered them in decades anyway.
But they were not, ultimately, immune.
It took only one habitat to fall to the plague. Within days most of the people aboard died, and most of their habitat's self-replicating systems began to go haywire in ways that seemed nastily purposeful. The habitat's ecosystem collapsed fatally. Uncontrolled, the habitat drifted out of its orbital slot like a chunk of calved iceberg. Ordinarily the chances of a collision would have been small . . . but the Glitter Band was already congested to within a hairsbreadth of disaster.
The first rule of collisions between two orbital bodies was that they were very rare indeed . . . until one happened. Then the shards of the destroyed bodies would splinter off in different directions, significantly increasing the likelihood of another impact. It would not be such a long wait until the next collision. And when it happened again, the number of shards increased once more . . . such that the next collision was a practical certainty . . .
Within weeks, most of the habitats in the Glitter Band had been fatally holed by collisional debris . . . and even when those impact fragments were not in themselves sufficient to kill all aboard, they also tended to be contaminated by traces of the plague originating from the first habitat to fall. They became orbiting hulks, as dark and dead as driftwood. By the end of the year, barely two hundred habitats had remained intact: principally the oldest and sturdiest structures, sheathed in rock and ice against radiation storms. With batteries of anti-collision lasers emplaced around their skins, they had managed to fend off most of the large chunks.
That was six years ago. In the intervening time, Quirrenbach told me, the Rust Belt had been stabilised, with most of the debris mopped up and conglomerated into hazardous lumps which had been sent spinning into the boiling face of Epsilon Eridani. Now at least the Belt was not growing any more fragmented. The hulks, for the most part, were kept in check by periodic nudges from robot tugs. Only a handful had been successfully repressurised and settled, although there were predictable rumours of all manner of sinister factions squatting furtively amongst the ruins.
This much I had learned from the nets. Seeing the ruins for the first time was something else entirely. Yellowstone was an ochre immensity blocking half the sky, now tangibly a world like the one I'd left, rather than a pale two-dimensional disk against the stars. As the Strelnikov swooped towards the habitat where it would dock, the silhouettes of other, ravaged ones crossed the face of Yellowstone. They were gnarled, gutted, pocked and cratered with the evidence of titanic collisions. I tried to hold in my head the numbers of dead the Rust Belt represented: although many of the habitats had been in the process of being evacuated when they were struck, it couldn't have been easy to remove a million people at such short notice.
Our habitat was shaped like a fat cigar, spun about its long axis for gravity in the same manner as Idlewild. Sister Amelia had told me that the place where we were headed was called Carousel New Vancouver. It was carapaced in ice, mostly dirty-grey in hue, but occasionally patched with acres of bright new ice to repair what I assumed were recent impact points. It was spinning silently, throwing off a dozen lazy coils of steam from its skin like the arms of a spiral galaxy. A huge spacecraft was attached to the rim, shaped like a mantaray and with scores of tiny windows around the edges of its wings. But the Strelnikov arced in towards one tip of the cigar, a triad of jaws opening to admit it. We nosed into a chamber walled in a maze of intestinal pipes and fuel tanks. I saw a few other shuttles clamped in parking bays: two sleek atmosphere cutters like bottle-green arrowheads and a couple of vessels which looked like cousins to the slowboat, all blunt angularity and exposed engine components. Space-suited figures were swarming around all the ships, carrying umbilical lines and repair kits. A few robots were toiling away on hull-repair tasks, but for the most part the work was being done by humans or bio-engineered animals.
I couldn't help remembering my earlier fears about this system. I'd expected to be entering a culture several centuries ahead of my own in nearly every respect, a peasant stumbling through kaleidoscopic wonders. Instead, I was looking at a scene which could easily have belonged to my own world's past . . . even something out of the era of the F
lotilla's launch.
We docked with a bump. I gathered my belongings-including the things I had appropriated from Vadim-and set about worming my way upship to the exit.
"Goodbye, I suppose," Quirrenbach said, amongst the general throng of people waiting to filter through into New Vancouver.
"Yes." If he was expecting any other kind of response, he was out of luck.
"I-um-went back to check on Vadim."
"A piece of dirt like that can take care of himself, you know. We probably should have thrown him out the airlock while we had the chance." I forced a smile. "Still, as he said, he was part of the local colour. I'd hate to deprive anyone of a unique cultural experience."
"Are you staying here long? In NV, I mean?"
It took me a moment to realise he was talking about New Vancouver.
"No."
"Taking the first behemoth down to the surface, then?"
"Very probably." I looked over his shoulder to where the crowd was pushing through the exit. Through another window I could see a part of the Strelnikov 's hull plating which had broken loose during the docking sequence and was now being nudged and epoxied back into place.
"Yes; get down as quickly as possible, that's my intention as well." Quirrenbach patted the briefcase he clutched to his chest like a tabard. "The sooner I can get to work on my plague symphony the better, I think."
"I'm sure it'll be a resounding success."
"Thanks. And you? If I'm not being too nosy? Any particular plans for when you get down there?"
"One or two, yes."
Doubtless he would have kept grilling me-getting nowhere-but there was a release of pressure in the jam of people ahead of us, opening up a little gap through which I inserted myself. In a few moments I was out of Quirrenbach's conversational range.
Inside, New Vancouver was nothing like Hospice Idlewild. There was no artificial sun, no single air-filled volume. Instead, the entire structure was a densely packed honeycomb of much smaller enclosed spaces, squeezed together like components in an antique radio. I didn't think there was any hope of Reivich still being in the habitat. There were at least three departures to Chasm City per day, and I was fairly sure he'd have been on the first available flight down.
Still, I stayed vigilant.
Amelia's estimate had been unerringly accurate: the Stoner funds I had brought with me would just cover my trip to Chasm City. I had already spent half on the Strelnikov ; what remained was just enough to pay for the descent. True, I had harvested some money from Vadim, but when I examined the cash properly it only amounted to about as much as the change left from my own funds. His victims, newcomers obviously, had not carried much local cash with them.
I checked the time.
Vadim's watch had concentric dials for both local twenty-six-hour Yellowstone time and twenty-four-hour system time. I had a couple of hours before my flight down. I planned to kill the time walking around NV, looking for local information sources, but I quickly found that large areas of the habitat were not accessible to anyone who had arrived via anything as lowly as the Strelnikov . People who had come in via high-burn shuttles were segregated from scum like us by armoured glass walls. I found somewhere to sit down and drink a cup of bad coffee (the one universal commodity, it seemed) and watched the two immiscible streams of humanity flow past. The place where I was sitting was a dingy thoroughfare, seats and tables jostling for space with metre-thick industrial pipes which ran from floor to ceiling like hamadryad trees. Smaller pipes branched off the main arteries, curving through the air like rusty intestines. They throbbed unnervingly, as if titanic pressures were only just being contained by thin metal and crumbling rivets. Some effort had been made to gentrify the surroundings by weaving foliage around the pipes, but the attempt had been distinctly halfhearted.
Not everyone shuffling through this area looked poor, but almost everyone looked as if they wished they were elsewhere. I recognised a few faces from the slowboat, and perhaps one or two from Hospice Idlewild, but I had certainly not seen the majority of the people before. I doubted that all of them were from beyond the Epsilon Eridani system; it was just as likely that NV was a gateway for in-system travellers. I even saw some Ultras, strutting around flaunting their chimeric modifications, but there were just as many on the other side of the glass.
I remembered dealing with their kind: Captain Orcagna's crew aboard the Orvieto ; the woman with the hole in her gut who had been sent to meet us. Thinking of the way Reivich had known about our ambush, I wondered if-ultimately-we hadn't all been betrayed by Orcagna. Perhaps Orcagna had even arranged my revival amnesia, to slow me down in my hunt.
Or perhaps I was just being paranoid.
Beyond the glass, I saw something even stranger than the black-clad, cyborg wraiths who crewed the lighthuggers: things like upright boxes, gliding with sinister grace amongst the crowds. The other people seemed oblivious to the boxes-almost unaware of them, except that they stepped carefully aside as the boxes moved amongst them. I sipped my coffee and noticed that some of the boxes had clumsy mechanical arms attached to their fronts-but most did not-and that almost all of the boxes had dark windows set into their fronts.
"They're palanquins, I think."
I sighed, recognising the voice of Quirrenbach, who was easing himself into the seat next to me.
"Good. Finished your symphony yet?"
He did a good job of pretending not to hear me. "I heard about them, those palanquins. The people inside them are called hermetics. They're the ones who've still got implants and don't want to get rid of them. The boxes are like little travelling microcosms. Do you think it's really that dangerous still?"
I put down my coffee cup testily. "What would I know?"
"Sorry, Tanner . . . just trying to make conversation." He glared at the vacant seats around me. "It's not like you were overburdened with companionship, is it?"
"Maybe I wasn't desperate for any."
"Oh, come on." He snapped his fingers, bringing the grimy, coffee-dispensing servitor over to our table. "We're both in this together, Tanner. I promise I won't follow you around once we get to Chasm City, but until then, would it really hurt to be a little civil to me? You never know, I might even be able to help you. I may not know much about this place, but I do appear to know fractionally more than you."
"Fractionally's the word."
He got himself a coffee from the machine and offered me a refill. I declined, but with what I hoped was grudging politeness.
"God, this is foul," he said, after a trial sip.
"At least we're in agreement on something." I made a stab at humour. "I think I know what's in those pipes now, anyway."
"Those pipes?" Quirrenbach looked around us. "Oh, I see. No; those are steam pipes, Tanner. Very important, too."
"Steam?"
"They use their own ice to keep NV from over-heating. Someone on the Strelnikov told me: they pump the ice down from the outer skin as kind of slush, then run it all around the habitat, through all the gaps between the main habitation areas-we're in one of those gaps now-and then the slush soaks up all the excess heat and gradually melts and then boils, until you've got pipes full of superheated steam. Then they blast the steam back into space."
I thought of the geysers I had seen on the surface of NV on the approach.
"That's pretty wasteful."
"They didn't always use ice. They used to have huge radiators, like moths' wings, a hundred kilometres across. But they lost them when the Glitter Band broke up. Bringing in the ice was an emergency measure. Now they've got to have a steady supply or this whole habitat becomes one big meat oven. They get it from Marco's Eye, the moon. There're craters near the poles in perpetual shadow. They could've used methane ice from Yellowstone, too, but there's no way to get it here cheaply enough."
"You know a lot."
He beamed, patting the briefcase in his lap. "Details, Tanner. Details. You can't write a symphony about a place unless you know it intimately
. I've already got plans for my first movement, you know. Very sombre at first, desolate woodwind, shading into something with stronger rhythmic impetus." He sketched a finger through the air as if tracing the topography of an invisible landscape. " Adagio-allegro energico. That'll be the destruction of the Glitter Band. You know, I almost think it deserves a whole symphony in its own right . . . what do you think?"
"I don't know, Quirrenbach. Music's not really my forte."
"You're an educated man though, aren't you? You speak with economy, but there's no little thought behind your words. Who was it who said that a wise man speaks when he has something to say, but a fool speaks because he must?"
"I don't know, but he probably wasn't a great conversationalist."
I looked at my watch-it felt like my own now-wishing the green gems would instantly whirl into the relative positions which would signify departure time for the surface. They hadn't visibly shifted since the last time I looked.
"What did you used to do on Sky's Edge, Tanner?"
"I was a soldier."
"Ah, but that's nothing really unusual, is it?"
Out of boredom-and the knowledge that nothing would be lost by doing so-I elaborated upon my answer. "The war worked its way into our lives. It was nothing you could hide from. Even where I was born."
"Which was?"
"Nueva Iquique. It was a sleepy coastal town a long way from the main centres of battle. But everyone knew someone who had been killed by the other side. Everyone had some theoretical reason for hating them."
"Did you hate the enemy?"
"Not really. The propaganda was designed to make you hate them . . . but if you stopped and thought about it, it was obvious they would be telling their own people much the same lies about us. Of course, some of it was probably true. Equally, one didn't need much imagination to suspect that we'd committed some atrocities of our own."
"Did the war really go all the way back to what happened on the Flotilla?"
"Ultimately, yes."
"Then it was less about ideology than territory, isn't that true?"
Chasm City Page 21