Chasm City

by Alastair Reynolds

  "What did you just do?" Gomez said.

  Sky smiled. "Put something out of its misery."

  "I should have killed him," Zebra said, as the inspection robot neared the surface.

  "I know how it feels," I said. "But we probably wouldn't have been able to walk out if you had." She had aimed for his body, but it had never been very obvious where Ferris ended and his wheelchair began. Her shot had only damaged his support machinery. He had moaned, and when he'd tried to compose a sentence the inner workings of the chair had rattled and scraped before delivering a scrambled sequence of piped sounds. I suspected it would take a lot more than one ill-judged shot to kill a four-hundred-year-old man whose blood was almost certainly supersaturated with Dream Fuel.

  "So what good did that little jaunt do?" she asked.

  "I've been asking myself the same question," Quirrenbach said. "All we know now is a little more about the means of production. Gideon's still down there, and so's Ferris. Nothing's changed."

  "It will," I said.

  "Meaning what?"

  "That was just a scouting expedition. When all this is over, I'm going back there."

  "He'll be expecting us next time," Zebra said. "We won't be able to breeze in so easily."

  "We?" Quirrenbach said. "Then you're already committed to this return trip, Taryn?"

  "Yes. And do me a favour. Call me Zebra from now on, will you?"

  "I'd listen to her if I were you, Quirrenbach." I felt the inspection robot begin to tilt over back to the horizontal as we approached the chamber where I hoped Chanterelle would still be waiting. "And yes, we're going back, and no, it won't be so easy the second time."

  "What do you hope to achieve?"

  "As someone close to me once said, there's something down there that needs to be put out of its misery."

  "You'd kill Gideon, is that it?"

  "Rather than live with the idea of it suffering, yes."

  "But the Dream Fuel . . ."

  "The city will just have to learn to live without it. And whatever other services it owes to Gideon. You heard what Ferris said. The remains of Gideon's ship are still down there, still altering the chemistry of the gases in the chasm."

  "But Gideon isn't in the ship now," Zebra said. "You don't think he's still influencing it, do you?"

  "He'd better not be," Quirrenbach said. "If you killed him, and the chasm stopped supplying the city with the resources it needs . . . can you honestly imagine what would happen?"

  "Yes," I said. "And it would probably make the plague look like a minor inconvenience. But I'd still do it."

  Chanterelle was waiting for us when we arrived. She opened the exit hatch nervously, studying us for a fraction of a second before deciding that we were the ones who had gone down. She put aside her weapon and helped us out, each groaning at the relief of no longer being inside the pipe. The air in the chamber was far from fresh, but I gulped in exultant lungfuls.

  "Well?" Chanterelle said. "Was it worth it? Did you get close to Gideon?"

  "Close enough." I said.

  Just then something buried in Zebra's clothes began to chime, like a muffled bell. She handed me her gun and then fished out one of the clumsy, antique-looking phones which were the height of modernity in Chasm City.

  "Must have been trying to reach me the whole time we were coming up the tube," she said, flipping open the viewscreen.

  "Who is it?" I asked.

  "Pransky," Zebra said, pushing the phone against her ear, while I told Chanterelle that the man was a private investigator who was peripherally involved in all that had happened since my arrival. Zebra spoke to him in a low voice, one hand cupped round her mouth to muffle the conversation. I couldn't hear anything that Pransky was saying, and only a half of what Zebra said-but it was more than enough to get the gist of the conversation.

  Someone, presumably one of Pransky's contacts, had been murdered. Pransky was at the crime scene even as he spoke, and from the way Zebra was talking to him, he sounded agitated; like it was the last place in the world he wanted to be.

  "Have you . . ." She was probably about to ask him if he'd alerted the authorities, before realising that where Pransky was, there was no such thing as law; even less than in the Canopy.

  "No, wait. No one has to know about this until we get there. Stay tight." And with that, Zebra cuffed the phone shut, returning it to her pocket.

  "What's up?" I asked.

  "Someone's killed her," Zebra said.

  Chanterelle looked at her. "Killed who?"

  "The fat woman. Dominika. She's history."

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  "COULD IT have been Voronoff?" I asked as we approached Grand Central Station. We had left him at the station before going down to see Gideon, but killing Dominika didn't seem to fit in with what I knew about the man. Killing himself, perhaps, in an interesting and boredom-offsetting manner, but not a well-known figure like Dominika. "It doesn't seem like his style to me."

  "Not him, and not Reivich either," Quirrenbach said. "Though only you can know that for sure."

  "Reivich's no indiscriminate killer," I said.

  "Don't forget Dominika made enemies easily," Zebra said. "She wasn't exactly the best person in the city at keeping her mouth shut. Reivich could have killed her for talking about him."

  "Except we already know he isn't in the city," I said. "Reivich is in an orbital habitat called Refuge. That was true, wasn't it?"

  "To the best of my knowledge, Tanner, yes," Quirrenbach said.

  There was no sign of Voronoff, but that was hardly to be expected: when we'd let him go, I'd never seriously expected him to stay there. Nor had it mattered. Voronoff's role in the whole affair was incidental at best, and if I ever did need to speak to him again, his celebrity would make it easy enough to track him down.

  Dominika's tent looked exactly as I remembered it, squatting in the middle of the bazaar. The flaps were drawn, and there were no customers in the vicinity, but there was nothing to suggest that a murder had taken place here. There was no sign of her helper trying to drag anyone into the tent, but even that absence was not especially noticeable, since the bazaar itself was remarkably subdued today. There must not have been any arriving flights; no influx of willing customers for her neural excisions.

  Pransky was waiting just beyond the door, peering through a tiny gap in the material.

  "You took your time getting here." Then his funereal gaze assimilated Chanterelle, myself and Quirrenbach, and his eyes widened momentarily. "Well, well. A veritable hunting party."

  "Just let us in," Zebra said.

  Pransky held the door open and admitted us into the reception chamber where I had waited while Quirrenbach was on the slab.

  "I must warn you," he said softly. "Everything is exactly as I found it. You won't like what you're about to see."

  "Where's her kid?" I asked.

  "Her kid ?" he said, as if I had used some piece of obscure street argot.

  "Tom. Her helper. He can't be far away. He might have seen something. He might also be in danger."

  Pransky clicked his tongue. "I didn't see any 'kid'." There was more than enough to occupy my mind. Whoever did this was . . ." He trailed off, but I could imagine what his mind was dealing with.

  "It can't be local talent," Zebra said, in the silence which followed. "No one local would waste a resource like Dominika."

  "You said the people after me weren't local."

  "What people?" Chanterelle said.

  "A man and a woman," Zebra answered. "They paid a visit to Dominika, trying to trace Tanner. They definitely weren't from the city. An odd couple, as far as I can tell."

  I said, "You think they came back and killed Dominika?"

  "I'd say they're fairly near the top of possible suspects, Tanner. And you still have no idea who they might be?"

  I shrugged. "I'm a popular man, evidently."

  Pransky coughed. "Maybe we should, um . . ." He gestured with one grey hand t
owards the inner chamber of the tent.

  We stepped through, into the part of the tent where Dominika performed her operations.

  Dominika was floating on her back, half a metre above her surgical couch, suspended in that position by the steam-powered, articulated-boom suspended harness which encased her lower half. The harness's pneumatics were still hissing, gentle fingers of vapour rising towards the ceiling. Top-heavy, she had canted back to an angle where her hips floated higher than her shoulders. The head of someone thinner than Dominika would probably have lolled to one side, but the rolls of fat around her neck kept her face pointed at the ceiling, and her eyes were wide open, glazed white, her jaw hanging slackly open.

  Snakes covered her body.

  The largest of them were dead, draped across her girth like patterned scarves, their inanimate bodies reaching to the bed. There was no doubting that they were dead; they'd been slit along the belly with a knife, and their blood had painted ribbons on the couch. Smaller snakes were still alive, coiled across her belly, or the couch, although they hardly moved even when I approached them, which I did with exquisite caution.

  I thought of the snake sellers I had seen in the Mulch. That was where these animals had come from, purchased solely to provide detail to this tableau.

  "I told you you wouldn't like it," Pransky said, his voice cutting through the stunned silence of our party. "I've seen some sick things in my time, believe me, but this must be . . ."

  "There's a method to it," I said, softly. "It's not as sick as it seems."

  "You must be insane." Pransky had said it, but I had no doubt that the sentiment was felt by the others present. It was hard to blame them for that, but I knew what I was saying was right.

  "What do you mean?" Zebra asked. "A method-"

  "It's meant as a message," I said, moving around the levitating corpse so that I could get a better look at her face. "A kind of calling-card. A message to me, actually."

  I touched Dominika's face, the slight pressure of my hand making her head turn to one side, so that the others could see the neat wound bored into the middle of her forehead.

  "Because," I said, voicing what I knew to be the truth for the first time, "Tanner Mirabel did it."

  Somewhere near my sixtieth birthday-though I had long since ceased to mark the passage of time (what was the point, when you were immortal?) and had doctored ship's records to obscure the details of my own past-I knew that the time had come to make my move. The choice of time was not really mine, forced upon me by the mechanics of our crossing, but I could still let the moment pass if I wished, forgetting about the plans which had occupied my mind so thoroughly for half my life. My preparations had been meticulous, and had I chosen to abandon them, my plans would never have come to light. For a moment I allowed myself the bittersweet pleasure of balancing vastly opposed futures: one in which I was triumphant; one in which I submitted meekly to the greater good of the Flotilla, even if that meant hardship for my own people. And for the tiniest of moments I hesitated.

  "On my mark," said Old Man Armesto of the Brazilia .

  "Deceleration burn ignition in, twenty seconds."

  "Agreed," I said, from the vantage point of my command seat, poised high in the bridge. Two other voices echoed me with tiny timelags; the Captains of the Baghdad and the Palestine .

  Journey's End lay close ahead, its star the brighter of the 61 Cygni pair, a bloodshot lantern in the night. Against all the odds, against all the predictions, the Flotilla had crossed interstellar space successfully. The fact that one ship had been destroyed did not taint that victory in the slightest degree. The planners who had launched the fleet had always known that there would be losses. And those losses, of course, had not been confined solely to that ship. Many of the momio sleepers would never see their destination. But that, too, had not been unexpected.

  It was, in short, a triumph, however one looked at it.

  But the crossing was not yet finished; the Flotilla still at cruise velocity. Though only the tiniest of distances remained to be crossed, it was the most significant part of the journey. That, at least, was not something the planners had ever guessed. They had never predicted the depth of disharmony that would creep into the enterprise over time.

  "Ten seconds," said Armesto. "Good luck to all of us. Good luck and Godspeed. It'll be a damned close race now."

  Not as close as you think, I thought.

  The remaining seconds counted down, and then-not quite synchronously-three suns blazed in the night where an instant before there had been only stars. For the first time in a century and a half the engines of the Flotilla were burning again-wolfing down matter and antimatter and spewing out pure energy, beginning to whittle down the eight per cent of light velocity which the Flotilla still had.

  Had I chosen otherwise, I would have heard the great structural skeleton of the Santiago creak as the ship adjusted itself to the stress of deceleration. The burn itself would have been a low, distant rumble, felt rather than heard, but no less exhilarating for that. But I had made my decision; nothing had changed.

  "We have indications of clean burns across the board . . ." said the other Captain, before a note of hesitation entered his voice. " Santiago; we have no indication that you have initiated your burn . . . are you experiencing technical difficulties, Sky?"

  "No," I said, calmly and crisply. "No difficulties at this moment."

  "Then why haven't you initiated your burn!" It was less a question than a scream of indignation.

  "Because we're not going to." I smiled to myself; the cat was well and truly out of the bag. The crux point had been passed; one possible future selected and another discarded. "Sorry, Captain, but we've decided to stay in cruise mode a little longer."

  "That's madness!" I swore I could hear Armesto's spittle spraying against the microphone like surf. "We have intelligence, Haussmann-good intelligence. We know damn well that you haven't made any engine modifications that we haven't made as well. You have no means of reaching Journey's End ahead of us! You have to initiate burn now and follow the rest of us . . ."

  I toyed with the armrest of my seat. "Or what, exactly?"

  "Or we'll . . ."

  "Do nothing. We all know it's fatal to turn off those engines once they're burning antimatter." That was true. Any antimatter engine was ferociously unstable, designed to keep burning until it had exhausted all its reactant, supplied from the mag-netic-confinement reservoir. The whispering engine techs had a technical name for the particular magnetohydrodynamic instability which prevented the flow from being curtailed without leakage, but all that mattered was the consequence: the fuel for the deceleration phase had to be stored in a completely separate reservoir from that which had boosted the ship up to cruise speed. And now that the other three ships had initiated burn, they were more or less committed to it.

  By not following them, I had betrayed a terrible trust.

  "This is Zamudio of the Palestine ," said another voice. "We have stable flow here, green lights across the board . . . we're going to attempt a mid-burn shutdown before Haussmann falls too far ahead of us. We may never get as good a chance as this."

  "For God's sake, don't do it!" said Armesto. "Our own simulations say a shutdown has only a thirty per cent chance of . . ."

  "Our sims say it's better than that . . . marginally."

  "Hold on, please. We're sending you our technical data . . . don't make a move until you've seen it, Zamudio."

  They debated the matter for the next hour, tossing simulations back and forth, arguing about the interpretation. They thought that their conversations were private, of course, but my agents had long ago placed bugs on the other ships, just as I assumed they had bugged my own. I listened, quietly amused, as the arguments grew more frantic and rancorous. It was no small matter, to risk an antimatter detonation after a century and a half of travel. Under ordinary circumstances they would have extended their debate for months, perhaps even years, weighing the significance of e
very small gain against every possible death. But all the while they were slowing down, with the Santiago pulling triumphantly ahead of them, and every instant that they delayed made that distance worse.

  "We've talked enough," Zamudio said. "We're initiating shutdown."

  "Please, no," Armesto said. "At least let us think about it for a day, will you?"

  "And let that bastard creep ahead of us? Sorry, but we're already committed to a shutdown." Zamudio's voice became businesslike as he read status variables aloud. "Damping thrust in five seconds . . . bottle topology looks stable . . . constricting fuel flow . . . three . . . two . . . one . . ."

  What followed was only a howl of static. One of the new suns had suddenly turned nova, outshining its brethren. It was a white rose, edged in purple which shaded to black. I stared at it wordlessly, marvelling at the hellfire. A whole ship gone in an eyeblink, just the way Titus had told me the Islamabad had died. There was something cleansing about that white light . . . something bordering on the pious. I watched as it faded. A breath of hot ions slammed into my own ship, a ghost of what had been the Palestine , and for a moment the status displays across the bridge quavered and ran with static, but the ships of the Flotilla were now so far apart that the demise of one could not harm the others.

  When comms returned, I heard the voice of the other Captain speaking. "You bastard, Haussmann," Armesto said. "You did that."

  "Because I was cleverer than any of you?"

  "Because you lied to us, you piece of shit!" Now I recognised the voice of Omdurman. "Titus was worth a million of you, Haussmann . . . I knew your father. Compared to him you're just . . . nothing. Dirt. And you know what the worst of it is? You've killed your own people as well."

  "I don't think I'd be quite that stupid," I said.

  "Oh, don't count on it," Armesto said. "I told you our intelligence was good, Haussmann. We know your ship like our own."

  "We have intelligence too," Omdurman said. "You haven't got any damned tricks up your sleeve. You'll have to start slowing down or you'll overshoot our destination; come to dead-stop in interstellar space."