Chasm City

by Alastair Reynolds

  "It didn't exist before the plague," Zebra said.

  "Too much of a coincidence," I said. "Which makes me wonder if they might both have the same origin."

  "Don't flatter yourself that you're the first to have had that thought."

  "No, I wouldn't dream of it." I scraped sweat from my brow, already feeling like I'd been in a sauna for an hour. "But you have to admit the point is valid."

  "I wouldn't know. I don't profess any great interest in the matter."

  "Not even when the fate of the city might depend on it?"

  "Except it wouldn't, would it? A few thousand postmortals, ten at the most. Dream Fuel may be a precious substance to those who've acquired a dependence on it, but for the majority it's of no consequence whatsoever. Let them die; see if I care. In a few centuries everything that's happened here will be little more than a historical footnote. I, meanwhile, have considerably larger and more ambitious fish to fry." Quirrenbach adjusted some more controls, tapping a gauge here and there. "But then I'm an artist. All this is mere diversion. You, on the other hand . . . I confess I really don't understand you, Tanner. Yes, you may now have some obligation to Taryn, but your interest in Dream Fuel was apparent from the moment we searched Vadim's cabin. By your own admission you came here to murder Argent Reivich, not to sort out a minor supply shortage in our sordid little drugs industry."

  "Things became a little more complicated, that's all."

  "And?"

  "There's something about Dream Fuel, Quirrenbach. Something that makes me think I've seen it before."

  But there was a way in. Sky, Norquinco and Gomez located it by undocking and scouting around the ship for another thirty minutes, until they found the hole that Oliveira and Lago must have used to get inside. It was only a few tens of metres from where Oliveira's shuttle was parked; near the point where the spine connected to the rest of the ship. It was so small that Sky had missed it completely on the first pass, lost as it was amongst the blisterlike protuberances on the ship's ruined side.

  "I think we should go back," Gomez said.

  "We're going in."

  "Didn't you listen to a word of what Oliveira said to us? And doesn't it worry you in the slightest that this ship appears to be made of something strange? That it looks like a crude attempt at copying one of our ships?"

  "It worries me, yes. It also makes me even more determined to get inside."

  "Lago went inside as well."

  "Well, I guess we'll just have to keep a look-out for him, won't we?" Sky was ready now. He had not bothered removing his helmet since the last time he had gone through the airlock.

  "I also want to see what's inside," Norquinco said.

  "One of us at least should stay aboard the shuttle," Gomez said. "If the ship that swept us with the radar gets here in the next few hours, it would be good to have someone ready to do something about it."

  "Fine," said Sky. "You just volunteered for the job."

  "I didn't mean . . ."

  "I don't care what you meant. Just accept it. If Norquinco and I run into anything that needs your input, you'll be the first to know."

  They left the shuttle, using thruster harnesses to cross the short distance to the Caleuche 's hull. When they landed near the hole it was like touching down on a softly yielding mattress. They stood up, gripped to the ship by the adhesive soles of their shoes.

  There was an obvious and vital question that Sky had almost managed not to ask himself, but now it must be dealt with. There was no way in his experience that the hull of a ship could be transmuted to this sponge-like state. Metal simply did not do that by itself-even if it had been exposed to the glare of an antimatter explosion. No; whatever had happened here was far beyond his experience. It was as if the ghost ship's hull had been replaced, atom by atom, by some new and disturbingly pliant substance which replicated the old details in only the broadest terms. There was shape and texture and colour, but no function, like a crude cast of the original ship. Was he even standing on the Caleuche , or was that just another flawed assumption?

  Sky and Norquinco walked to the lip of the hole, poking the muzzles of their guns into the gloom. The lip was ragged and scorched with heat marks and had the puckered, wrinkled look of a half-closed mouth. A metre or two below the surface, however, the wall of the hole was lined with a thick, fibrous mass which glistened gently as their torchlight skittered across it. Sky thought he recognised that mass; it was a matrix of extruded diamond fibres embedded in epoxy, a quick-drying paste that could be used to repair hull punctures. Oliveira had probably located a weak spot on the Caleuche -he must have taken the time to make a density map before selecting this point-and had then used something to cut through, a laser torch or even the exhaust of his shuttle. Once he had bored the shaft, he had lined it with the spray-on sealant from his shuttle's emergency kit, presumably to prevent it collapsing shut.

  "We'll go in this way," Sky said. "Oliveira must have found the most promising entry point; there's no sense in duplicating his effort when we've so little time to spare."

  They checked that the inertial compasses built into their suits were functioning accurately, defining their current position as a zero point. The Caleuche was neither spinning nor tumbling, so the compasses would prevent them getting lost once they were inside, but even if the compasses proved unreliable, they would be able to retrace their way to the wound in the hull, deploying a line as they went.

  Sky halted in his thoughts, wondering why he had just thought of the hole in the hull as a wound?

  They went in, Sky first. The hole led into a rough-walled tunnel which cut straight into the hull, threading down for ten or twelve metres. Normally by this point-had the ship been the Santiago -they would have passed right through the hull's outer integument and would be passing through a series of narrow service cavities, squeezing between the multitude of data-lines, power cables and refrigerant pipes; perhaps even one of the train tunnels. There were, Sky knew, points where the hull was more or less solid for several metres, but he was reasonably sure this was not one of them.

  Now the sides of the shaft, or tunnel, or however he preferred to think of it, had become harder and more glossy-less like elephant hide and more like insect chitin. He shone his torch light ahead into the gloom, the beam sliding off the shining black surface. Then-just when it looked like it would end abruptly-the shaft jogged violently to the right. Fully suited, with the additional bulk of the thruster harness, it was an effort to squeeze round the bend-but at least the smooth-sided shaft would not snag his suit or rip away any vital component. He looked back and saw Norquinco following him, the other man's slightly larger bulk making the exercise even less easy.

  But now the shaft widened out, and after it intersected with another the going became even easier. Periodically Sky stopped and asked Norquinco to ensure that the line was spooling out properly and that the line was still taut, but the inertial compasses were still functioning properly, recording their movements relative to the entry point.

  He tried the radio. "Gomez? Can you read me?"

  "Loud and clear. What have you found?"

  "Nothing. Yet. But I think we can say with some confidence that this isn't the Caleuche . Norquinco and I must be twenty metres into the hull, and we're still moving through what feels like solid material."

  Gomez waited for a few moments before answering. "That doesn't make any sense."

  "No, not if we keep on assuming this is a ship like our own. I don't think it is. I think it's something else-something we definitely weren't expecting."

  "Do you think it came from home-that it's something they sent out after we left?"

  "No. They've only had a century, Gomez. I don't think that's enough time to come up with something like this." They slithered deeper. "It doesn't feel like anything human. It doesn't even feel like we're inside a machine."

  "But whatever it is, it just happens to look exactly like one of our own ships from the outside."

  "Y
es-until you get close. My guess is it altered its shape to mimic us; some kind of protective camouflage. Which worked, didn't it? Titus . . . my father . . . he always thought there was another Flotilla ship trailing us. That was disturbing, but it could be explained by some event which had happened in the past. If he'd known there was an alien ship following us, it would have changed everything."

  "What could he have done about it?"

  "I don't know. Alert the other ships, perhaps. He would have assumed it meant us harm."

  "Maybe he was right."

  "I don't know. It's been out here an awfully long time. It hasn't done much in all those years."

  Something happened then-a noise that they felt, rather than heard, like the sonorous clang of a very large bell. They were floating through vacuum so the reverberation must have been transmitted through the hull.

  "Gomez-what the hell was that?"

  His voice came through weakly. "I don't know-nothing happened here. But you're suddenly a lot fainter."

  After we had been descending for nearly two hours, I saw something below, far down the vertical pipeline.

  It was a faint golden glow, but it was coming closer.

  I thought about the episode I had just had. I could still taste Sky's fear as he entered the Caleuche ; hard and metallic like the taste of a bullet. It seemed very much like the fear I was feeling myself. We were both descending into darkness; both of us seeking answers-or rewards-but also knowing that we were placing ourselves in great danger, with very little idea of what lay ahead. The way the episode resonated with my present experience was chilling. Sky had gone beyond simply infecting my mind with images. Now he seemed to be steering me, shaping my actions to commemorate his own ancient deeds; like a puppeteer whose strings stretched across three centuries of history. I clenched my fist, expecting that the episode would have caused blood to gush from my hand.

  But my palm was perfectly dry.

  The inspection robot continued its clunking descent. Nothing that Quirrenbach had done lately had made the machine move any faster. It was unbearably hot now and I reckoned none of us would have survived more than three or four hours before dying of heat exhaustion.

  But it was getting lighter.

  I soon saw why. Below us, but coming closer now, was a section of pipeline walled in filthy glass. Quirrenbach made the machine rotate so that none of us were easily visible by the time the robot began to descend through the transparent section. I still had a good view of the dark chamber we were moving through, a cavernous room infested with looming curved machinery: huge stovelike pressure vessels connected by networks of shiny intestinal tubing and festooned with slender catwalks. Rows of mighty turbines stretched away across the floor like sleeping dinosaurs.

  We had reached the cracking station.

  I looked around, wondering at the silent vastness.

  "There doesn't seem to be anyone on duty," Zebra said.

  "Is this normal?" I asked.

  "Yes," Quirrenbach said. "This part of the operation more or less runs itself. But I'd hated to have picked the one day when there was someone on duty who noticed the three of us coming down."

  Many dozens of pipes, much like the one I was descending, reached to the ceiling, a wide circular sheet of glass spoked by dark metal supports, and then rammed through it. Beyond it was only a stained soot-grey fog, for the cracking station lay deep in the chasm and was usually covered by the mist. Only when the fog parted momentarily, cleaved open by the chaotic thermals which spiralled up the chasm's side, could I see the immense sheer walls of planetary rock rising above. Far, far above was the antenna-like extension of the stalk, where Sybilline had taken me to watch the mist jumpers. That had been only a couple of days ago, but it felt like an eternity.

  We were far beneath the city now.

  The inspection robot continued its descent. I had expected that we would stop somewhere near the floor of the cracking chamber, but Quirrenbach carried us slowly below the turbine floor, into darkness again. Perhaps there was another chamber to the cracking station, below the one we had passed through. I managed to cling to this idea for a while . . . until I knew that we had descended much too far for that to be the case.

  The pipe we were in reached completely through the cracking station.

  We were going deeper still. The pipe made a few jogging changes of direction, almost threading sideways at one point, and then we were descending again. It was so hot now that it was an effort to stay awake. My mouth was so dry that just thinking of drinking a glass of cold water was too much like mental torture. Somehow I stayed conscious, however-knowing I would need clarity of mind when I arrived wherever the robot was taking me.

  Another thirty or forty minutes, then I saw another light below me.

  It looked like journey's end.

  "You too. Norquinco-check the . . ." But even as he said it, Sky directed his torch back up the shaft they had come down, and he could see how the previously taut line was now beginning to drift, as if it had length to spare. It must have been severed somewhere further up the shaft.

  "Let's get out now," Norquinco said. "We haven't come very far-we can still find our, um, way back."

  "Through solid hull? That line didn't cut itself."

  "Gomez has cutting equipment on the shuttle. He can get us out if he knows where we are."

  Sky thought about it. Everything that Norquinco said was correct, and any right-thinking person would now be doing their utmost to get back to the surface. Part of him wanted to do that as well. But another, stronger part was even more determined to understand what this ship-if it was a ship-actually meant. It was alien; he felt utterly sure of that now-and that meant it was the first evidence of alien intelligence any human being had ever witnessed. And-staggering though the odds were-it had latched itself onto his Flotilla, finding the slow, frail arks in the immensity of space. Yet it had chosen not to contact them, instead shadowing them for decades.

  What would he find inside it? The supplies he had hoped to find aboard the Caleuche -even the unused antimatter-might be insignificant prizes compared to what really lay here, waiting to be exploited. Somehow or other this ship had matched velocities with the Flotilla, achieving eight per cent of lightspeed-and something made him certain that the alien ship had not found that in any way difficult; that achieving this speed had probably been trivially simple. Somewhere inside this worm-ridden solid black hull there had to be recognisable mechanisms which had pushed her up to her current speed, and which he might be able to exploit-not necessarily understand, he admitted that-but certainly exploit.

  And perhaps, much more than that.

  He had to go deeper. Anything less than that would be failure. "We're carrying on," he told Norquinco. "For another hour. We'll see what we find in that time, and we'll be careful not to get lost. We still have the inertial compasses, don't we?"

  "I don't like it, Sky."

  "Then think about what you might learn. Think of how this ship might work-its data networks; its protocols; the very paradigms underpinning her design. They might be exquisitely alien; as far beyond our modes of thinking as-I don't know-a strand of DNA is beyond a single-chain polymer. It would take a special kind of mind to even begin to grasp some of the principles which might be at play. A mind of unusual calibre. Don't tell me you aren't the slightest bit curious, Norquinco."

  "I hope you burn in hell, Sky Haussmann."

  "I'll take that as a yes."

  The inspection robot shunted itself into another branch of the pipe, just like the one where Quirrenbach had found it back on the surface. The hammering of the suction pads slowed, quietened and stopped, the maching ticking quietly to itself. We were in complete darkness and silence except for distant, thunder-like sounds of superheated steam roaring through remote parts of the pipe network. I touched the hot metal of the pipe with the tip of my finger and felt the faintest of tremors. I hoped that it didn't mean there was a wall of scalding, thousand-atmosphere steam slamming
towards us.

  "It's still not too late to turn back," Quirrenbach said.

  "Where's your sense of curiosity?" I said, feeling like Sky Haussmann goading Norquinco forwards.

  "About eight kilometres above us, I think."

  That was when someone slid back a panel on the side of the pipe and looked at all three of us as if we were a consignment of excrement someone had sent down from Chasm City.

  "I know you," the man said, nodding at Quirrenbach. Then he nodded once at me and once at Zebra. "I don't know you. And I certainly don't know you."

  "And I don't know you from shit," I said, getting my own word in before the man who had opened the pipe could get the edge over me. I was already heaving myself out of the robot, relishing the chance to stretch my legs for the first time in hours. "Now show me where I can get a drink."

  "Who are you?"

  "The man asking you for a fucking drink. What's wrong? Did someone seal up your ears with pig shit?"

  He seemed to get the message. I'd gambled that the man wouldn't be a major player in whatever operation was going on down here and that a large part of his job description would consist of taking abuse from visiting thugs a little higher up the food chain.

  "Hey, no offence, man."

  "Ratko, this is Tanner Mirabel," Quirrenbach said. "And this is . . . Zebra. I phoned through to say we were on our way down to see Gideon."

  "Yeah," I said. "And if you didn't get the message, that's your fucking problem, not mine."

  Quirrenbach appeared impressed enough to want to join in. "That's fucking right. And get the fucking man the . . . get the man the fucking drink he asked for." He wiped a sleeve across his parched lips. "And get me one too, Ratko, you, er, fucking little cocksucker."

  "Cocksucker? That's good, Quirrenbach. Really good." The man patted him on the back. "Keep on taking the assertiveness lessons-they're really paying off." Then he looked at me with what was almost an expression of sympathy, a professional-to-professional thing. "All right. Follow me."