Chasm City

by Alastair Reynolds

  "I don't know, or care. It all happened a long time ago, Quirrenbach."

  "Do you know much about Sky Haussmann? I hear that there are people on your planet who still worship him."

  "I know a thing or two about Sky Haussmann, yes."

  Quirrenbach looked interested. I could almost hear the mental note-taking for a new symphony. "Part of your common cultural upbringing, you mean?"

  "Not entirely, no." Knowing that I would lose nothing by showing him, I allowed Quirrenbach to see the wound in the centre of my palm. "It's a mark. It means the Church of Sky got to me. They infected me with an indoctrinal virus. It makes me dream about Sky Haussmann even when I don't particularly want to. I didn't ask for it and it'll take a while to work its way out of my system, but until then I have to live with the bastard. I get a dose of Sky every time I close my eyes."

  "That's awful," he said, doing a poor job of not sounding fascinated. "But I presume once you're awake, you're reasonably . . ."

  "Sane? Yes, totally."

  "I want to know more about him," Quirrenbach said. "You don't mind talking, do you?"

  Near us, one of the elephantine pipes began leaking steam in a shrill, scalding exhalation.

  "I don't think we'll be together much longer."

  He looked crestfallen. "Really?"

  "I'm sorry, Quirrenbach . . . I work best alone, you know." I groped for a way to make my rejection sound less negative. "And you'll need time alone, too, to work on your symphonies . . ."

  "Yes, yes-later. But for now? There's a lot we have to deal with, Tanner. I'm still worried by the plague. Do you really think it's risky here?"

  "Well, they say there are still traces of it around. Do you have implants, Quirrenbach?" He looked blank, so I continued, "Sister Amelia-the woman who looked after me in the Hospice-told me that they sometimes removed implants from immigrants, but I didn't understand what she meant at the time."

  "Damn," he said. "I should have had them removed in the parking swarm, I knew it. But I hesitated-didn't like the looks of anyone who was prepared to do it. And now I'll have to find some blood-spattered butcher in Chasm City to do it."

  "I'm sure there'll be plenty of people willing to help with that. I'd need to speak to the same people myself, as it happens."

  The stocky little man scratched at the stubble across his scalp. "Oh, you too? Then it really does make sense for us to travel together, doesn't it."

  I was about to answer-to try and wheedle my way out of his company-when an arm locked itself around my throat.

  I was pulled backwards, out of my seat, hitting the ground painfully. The breath exited my lungs like a flock of startled birds. I floundered on the edge of consciousness, too winded to move, although every instinct screamed that moving might be my best course of action.

  But Vadim was already leaning over me, his knee pressed across my ribcage.

  "You didn't expect to see Vadim again, did you, Meera-Bell? I think you are sorry you did not kill Vadim now."

  "I haven't . . ." I tried to complete the sentence, but there was no air left in my lungs. Vadim examined his fingernails, doing a good impression of boredom. My peripheral vision was turning dark, but I could see Quirrenbach standing to one side with his arms pinned behind him, another figure holding him hostage. Beyond that, an indifferent blur of passers-by. No one was paying the slightest attention to Vadim's ambush.

  He released the pressure on me. I caught my breath.

  "You have not what?" Vadim said. "Go on, say it. I am all ears."

  "You owe me a debt of gratitude that I didn't kill you, Vadim. And you know it, too. But scum like you aren't worth the bother."

  He feigned a smile and reapplied the weight on my chest. I was beginning to have my doubts about Vadim. Now that I saw he had an accomplice-the man pinning down Quirrenbach-his story about a wider network of associates began to look a little more likely.

  "Scum, is it? I see you were not above cleaning my watch, nasty little thief that you are." He fiddled with the strap on my wrist, wriggling the watch off with a grin of triumph. Vadim held it up to one of his eyes, for all the world like a horologist studying some fabulous movement. "No scratches, I hope . . ."

  "You're welcome to it. It wasn't really me."

  Vadim slipped the watch back over his hand, turning his wrist this way and that to inspect his reclaimed prize. "Good. Anything else you would like to declare?"

  "Something, yes."

  Because I had not tried to push him off me with my other arm, he had ignored it completely. I had not even removed my hand from the pocket in which I had slipped it as I fell back from the chair. Vadim might have contacts, but he was still no more of a professional than when we had tussled on the slowboat.

  Now I removed my arm. The movement was quick, fluid, like a striking hamadryad. It was nothing Vadim was prepared for.

  In my fist I held one of his black experientials. He played his part perfectly-his gaze shifting minutely as my arm came up, just enough to bring his nearest eye into my reach. The eye was opened in surprise; an easy target, almost as if Vadim was complicit in what I was about to do to him.

  I pushed the experiential into his eye.

  I remembered wondering if his one good eye had in fact been glass, but as the experiential's white haft sunk in, I saw that it had only seemed glassy.

  Vadim fell back off me and started screaming, blood jetting from his eye like a dying red sliver of sunset. He was flailing around insanely, not wanting to reach up and confront the foreign thing parked in his eye-socket.

  "Shit!" the other man said, while I scrambled to my feet. Quirrenbach wrestled with him for an instant, and then he was free, and running.

  Moaning, Vadim was bent double over our table. The other man was holding him, whispering frantically in his ear. He appeared to be saying it was time the both of them left.

  I had a message of my own for him.

  "I know it hurts like hell, but there's something you need to know, Vadim. I could have driven that thing straight into your brain. It wouldn't have been any harder for me. You know what that means, don't you?"

  Eyeless now, his face a mask of blood, he still managed to turn towards me.

  ". . . what?"

  "It means that's another one you owe me, Vadim."

  Then I carefully removed the watch from his wrist and replaced it on my own.

  Chapter Thirteen

  IF THERE was any kind of law enforcement operating in New Vancouver's plumbing-filled interstices, it was subtle to the point of invisibility. Vadim and his accomplice stumbled away from the scene unquestioned. I lingered, almost honour-bound to explain myself-but nothing happened. The table where Quirrenbach and I had been sipping coffee only minutes earlier was in a deplorable state now, but what was I supposed to do? Leave a tip for the cleaning servitor that would doubtless amble round shortly, so dim-witted that it would probably clean up the pools of blood, aqueous and vitreous humours with the same mindless efficiency as it tackled the coffee stains?

  No one stopped me leaving.

  I slipped into a washroom to slap some cold water on my face and clean the blood from my fist. Inside, I forced slow and deliberate calm. The room was empty, furnished with a long row of lavatories, the doors of which were marked with complicated diagrams to show how they were meant to be used.

  I poked and prodded my chest until I'd satisfied myself that nothing was more than bruised, then completed the rest of my walk to the departure area. The behemoth-the manta-shaped spacecraft-was attached like a lamprey to the rotating skin of the habitat. Up close, the thing looked a lot less smooth and aerodynamic than it had from a distance. The hull was pitted and scarred, with streaks of sooty black discoloration.

  Two streams of humanity were being fed aboard the ship from opposing sides. My stream was a shuffling, dun-coloured slurry of despondency: people trudging down the spiralling access tunnel as if to the gallows. The other stream looked only slightly more enthusiastic, but
through the transparent connecting tube I saw people attended by servitors, bizarrely enhanced pets, even people shaped towards animal forms themselves. The palanquins of hermetics glided amongst them: dark, upright boxes like metronomes.

  There was a commotion behind me; someone pushing past.

  "Tanner!" he said, in a hoarse stage-whisper. "You made it too! When you disappeared, I was worried that more of Vadim's thugs had found you!"

  "He's pushing in," I heard someone mutter behind me. "Did you see that? I've a good mind to . . ."

  I turned back, locking eyes with the person I instinctively knew had been speaking. "He's with me. If you've got a problem with it, you deal with me. Otherwise, shut up and stand in line."

  Quirrenbach slipped in to the line next to me. "Thanks . . ."

  "All right. Just keep your voice down, and don't mention Vadim again."

  "So you think he really might have friends all over the place?"

  "I don't know. But I could do without any kind of trouble for a while."

  "I can imagine, especially after . . ." He blanched. "I don't even want to think about what happened back there."

  "Then don't. With any luck, you'll never have to."

  The line pushed forward, completing the final spiral into the top of the behemoth. Inside it was vast and tastefully lit, like the lobby of a particularly grand hotel. The walkway made several more loops before it reached the floor. People were wandering around with drinks in their hands, their luggage scooting ahead of them or being handled by monkeys. Sloping windows arced away in either direction, roughly defining the edge of one of the manta's wings. The interior of the behemoth must have been almost completely hollow, but I couldn't see more than a tenth of it from where I was standing.

  Scattered here and there were clusters of seats-sometimes grouped for conversation, sometimes surrounding a dribbling fountain or a clump of exotic foliage. Now and then the rectilinear shape of a palanquin slid across the floor like a chess piece.

  I moved towards an unoccupied pair of seats overlooking one of the window panels. I was tired enough to want to doze quietly, but I didn't dare close my eyes. What if there hadn't been an earlier behemoth departure and Reivich was somewhere inside the spacecraft even now?

  "Preoccupied, Tanner?" said Quirrenbach, sliding into the seat next to mine. "You have that look about you."

  "Are you sure this is the best place to get a good view?"

  "Excellent point, Tanner; excellent point. But if I'm not sitting next to you, how am I going to hear about Sky?" He began to fiddle with his briefcase. "Now there's plenty of time for you to tell me all the rest."

  "You nearly get killed, and all you can think about is that madman?"

  "You don't understand. I'm thinking now-what about a symphony for Sky?" Then he pointed a finger at me, like a gun. "No. Not a symphony: a mass; a vast choral work, epic in its scope . . . studiedly archaic in structure . . . consecutive fifths and false relations, with a brooding Sanctus . . . a threnody for lost innocence; an anthem to the crime and the glory of Schuyler Haussmann . . ."

  "There isn't any glory, Quirrenbach. Only crime."

  "I won't know until you tell me the rest, will I?"

  There was a series of thumps and shudders as the behemoth was unplugged from its connecting point on the habitat. Through the windows I could see the habitat falling away very quickly, accompanied by a moment of dizziness. But almost before the moment had begun to register physically, the habitat came swooping past again, its skin rushing by the great windows. Then only space. I looked around, but people were still walking unaffected around the lobby.

  "Shouldn't we be in free-fall?"

  "Not in a behemoth," Quirrenbach said. "The instant she detached from NV, she fell away on a tangent to the habitat's surface, like a sling-shot. But that only lasted for an instant before she ramped up her thrusters to one-gee. Then she had to curve slightly to avoid ramming into the habitat on the way past. That's the only really tricky part of the journey, I understand-the only time where there's really any likelihood of your drinks going for a ride. But the pilot seemed to know what it was doing."

  "It?"

  "They use genetically engineered cetaceans to fly these things, I think. Whales or porpoises, wired permanently into the behemoth's nervous system. But don't worry. They've never killed anyone. It'll feel as smooth as this most of the way down. She just lowers herself down into the atmosphere, very gently and slowly. A behemoth's like a huge rigid airship, once it gets into any kind of air density. By the time she gets near the surface, she's got so much positive buoyancy that she actually has to use her thrusters to hold herself down . It's a lot like swimming, I think." Quirrenbach clicked his fingers at a servitor which was passing. "Drinks, I think. What can I offer you, Tanner?"

  I looked out the window: Yellowstone's horizon was rising vertically, so that the planet looked like a sheer yellow wall.

  "I don't know. What do they drink around here?"

  Yellowstone's horizon tilted slowly back towards horizontal as the behemoth cancelled out the orbital velocity it had matched with the carousel. The process was smooth and uneventful, but it must have been planned meticulously so that when we finally came to a halt relative to the planet we were hovering precisely over Chasm City, rather than thousands of kilometres away.

  By then, although we were thousands of kilometres above the surface, Yellowstone's gravity was still almost as strong as it would have been on the ground. We might as well have been sitting atop a very tall mountain; one that protruded beyond the atmosphere. Slowly, however-with the unhurried calm which had characterised the whole journey so far-the behemoth began to descend.

  Quirrenbach and I watched the view in silence.

  Yellowstone was a heavier sibling to Sol's Titan; a fully-fledged world rather than a moon. Chaotic and poisonous chemistries of nitrogen, methane and ammonia produced an atmosphere daubed with every imaginable shade of yellow; ochre, orange, tan, whorled into beautiful cyclonic spirals, curlicued and filigreed as if by the most delicate brushwork. Over most of its surface Yellowstone was exquisitely cold, lashed by ferocious winds, flash floods and electrical storms. The planet's orbit around Epsilon Eridani had been disturbed in the distant past by a close encounter with Tangerine Dream, the system's massive gas giant, and even though that event must have taken place hundreds of millions years ago, Yellowstone's crust was still relaxing from the tectonic stress of the encounter, bleeding energy back to the surface. There was some speculation that Marco's Eye-the planet's solitary moon-had even been captured from the gas giant; a history that would explain the odd cratering on one side of the moon.

  Yellowstone was not a hospitable place, but humans had come nonetheless. I tried to imagine what it must have been like at the height of the Belle Epoque ; descending into Yellowstone's atmosphere and knowing that beneath those golden cloud layers lay cities as fabulous as dream, Chasm City the mightiest of them all. The glory had lasted more than two hundred years . . . and even in its terminal years, there had been nothing to suggest it was not capable of lasting centuries more. There'd been no decadent decline; no failure of nerve. But then the plague had come. All those hues of yellow became hues of sickness; hues of vomit and bile and infection; the world's febrile skies masking the diseased cities strewn across its surface like chancres.

  Still, I thought, sipping the drink Quirrenbach had bought me, it had been good while it lasted.

  The behemoth didn't cut its way into the atmosphere; it submerged itself, descending so slowly that there was barely any friction on its hull. The sky above stopped being pure black and began to assume faint hints of purple and then ochre. Now and then our weight fluctuated-presumably as the behemoth hit a pressure cell which it couldn't quite squeeze past-but never by more than ten or fifteen per cent.

  "It's still beautiful," he said. "Don't you think?"

  He was right. We could see the surface occasionally now, when some chaotic squall or shift in the un
derlying atmospheric chemistry opened a temporary rent in the yellow cloud layers. Shimmering lakes of frozen ammonia; psychotic badlands of wind-carved geology; broken spires and mile-high arches like the half-buried bones of titanic animals. There were forms of single-celled organism down there, I knew-staining the surface in great, lustrous purple and emerald monolayers or veining deep rock strata-but they existed in such glacial time that it was hard to think of them as living at all. Here and there were small domed outposts, but nothing one would think of as cities. Yellowstone had only a handful of settlements even a tenth the size of Chasm City now; nothing equalling it. Even the second largest city, Ferrisville, was a township compared to the capital.

  "Nice place to visit," I said, not needing to complete the old saying.

  "Yes . . . you're probably right," Quirrenbach said. "Once I've soaked up enough of the ambience to fuel my composition, and earned enough to pay for a hop out of here . . . I doubt very much that I will linger."

  "How are you going to make money?"

  "There's always work for composers. All you need to do is find some rich benefactor who fancies sponsoring a great work of art. They feel like they're achieving some small measure of immortality themselves."

  "And what if they're already immortal, or postmortal, or whatever it is they call themselves?"

  "Even the postmortal can't be certain they aren't going to die at some point, so the instinct to leave a dent on history is still strong. Besides which, there are many people in Chasm City who used to be postmortal, but who now have to deal with the imminent prospect of death, the way some of us always have."

  "My heart bleeds."

  "Quite . . . well, let us just say that for a good many people death is now back on the agenda in a way it hasn't been for several centuries."

  "Even so, what if there aren't any rich benefactors amongst them?"

  "Oh, there are. You've seen those palanquins. There are still rich people in Chasm City, even though there isn't much of what you'd call an economic infrastructure. But you can be sure there are pockets of wealth and influence, and I'm willing to wager that a few people are wealthier and more influential than they were before."