Chasm City rs-2

by Alastair Reynolds

  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 underlying 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 dea
th, 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.”

  “That’s always the way with disasters,” I said.

  “What?”

  “They’re never bad news for everyone. Something nasty always rises to the top.”

  As we descended further I thought about cover stories and camouflage. I hadn’t given much thought to either, but—weapons and logistics aside—that was the way I usually operated, preferring to adapt to my surroundings as I found them, rather than to plan things in advance. But what about Reivich? He couldn’t have known about the plague, which meant that any plans he’d formulated would have been in disarray as soon as he learned what had happened. But there was a vital difference: Reivich was an aristocrat, and they had webs of influence which reached between worlds, often based on familial ties which reached back centuries. It was possible—likely, even — that Reivich had connections amongst Chasm City’s elite.

  Those connections would have been useful to him even if he hadn’t managed to contact them before his arrival. But they’d have been even more useful if he’d been able to signal them while he was on his way here, forewarning them. A lighthugger moved at nearly the speed of light, but it had to speed up and slow down at either end of its journey. A radio signal from Sky’s Edge—sent just before the Orvieto’s departure—would have reached Yellowstone a year or two in advance of the ship itself, giving his allies that much time to prepare for his arrival.

  Or perhaps he had no allies. Or they existed, but the message had never got through, lost in the confusion that was the system’s communications net and condemned to bounce endlessly between malfunctioning network nodes. Or perhaps there just hadn’t been time to arrange for a message to be sent at all, or it hadn’t crossed his mind.

  I’d have liked to have drawn comfort from any of those possibilities, but the one thing I never counted on was having luck on my side.

  It was generally simpler that way.

  I looked out the window again, seeing Chasm City for the first time as the clouds parted, and thought: he’s down there, somewhere… waiting and knowing. But even then the city was too large to take in, and I felt a crushing sense of the enormity of the task that lay ahead of me. Give up now, I thought; it’s impossible. You’ll never find him.

  But then I remembered Gitta.

  The city nestled within a wide, jagged crater wall, sixty kilometres from side to side, and nearly two kilometres high at its tallest point. When the first explorers arrived here, they had sought shelter from Yellowstone’s winds within the crater, building flimsy, air-filled structures that would have survived five minutes in the true badlands. But they’d also been lured by the chasm itself: the deep, sheer-sided, mist-enshrouded gully at the geometric centre of the crater.

  The chasm belched perpetual warm gas, one of the outlets for the tectonic energy pumped into the core during the encounter with the gas giant. The gas was still poisonous, but much richer in free oxygen, water vapour and other trace gases than any comparable outgassing anywhere on Yellowstone’s surface. The gas still needed to be filtered through machinery before it could be breathed, but that process was much simpler than it would have been elsewhere, and the scalding heat could be used to drive immense steam turbines, supplying as much energy as any burgeoning colony could use. The city had sprawled across the entire level surface of the crater, surrounding the chasm at its heart and spilling some way into its depths. Structures were perched on perilous ledges hundreds of metres below the chasm’s lip, connected by elevators and walkways.

  Most of the city, however, lay under a vast toroidal dome, encircling the chasm. Quirrenbach told me the locals called it the Mosquito Net. Technically, it was actually eighteen individual domes, but because they were merged it was hard to tell where one ended and another began. The surface hadn’t been cleaned in seven years and was now stained in filthy, near-opaque shades of brown and yellow. It was largely accidental that some areas of the dome remained clean enough to reveal the city beneath them. From the behemoth, it looked almost normal: a phenomenal mass of immensely tall buildings compressed into festering urban density, like a glimpse into the innards of a fantastically complex machine. But there was something queasily wrong about those buildings; something sick about their shapes, contorted into forms no sane architect would have chosen. Above ground, they branched and rebranched, merging into a single bronchial mass. Except for a sprinkling of lights at their upper and lower extremities—strewn through the bronchial mass like lanterns—the buildings were dark and dead-looking.

  “Well, you know what this means,” I said.

  “What?”

  “They weren’t kidding. It wasn’t a hoax.”

  “No,” Quirrenbach said. “They most certainly weren’t. I also foolishly allowed myself to entertain that possibility; thinking that even after what had become of the Rust Belt, even after the evidence I had seen with my own eyes, the city itself might be intact, a reclusive hermit hoarding its riches away from the curious.”

  “But there’s still a city,” I said. “There are still people down there; still some kind of society.”

  “Just not quite the one we were expecting.”

  We skimmed low over the dome. The structure was a sagging geodesic drapery of latticed metal and structural diamond stretching for kilometres, as far into the brown caul of the atmosphere as it was possible to see. Tiny teams of suited repair workers were dotted across the dome like ants, their labours revealed by the intermittent sparks of welding torches. Here and there I saw gouts of grey vapour streaming from cracks in the dome, internal air freezing as it hit Yellowstone’s atmosphere, high above the crater’s thermal trap. The buildings below reached almost to the underside of the dome itself, groping up like arthritic fingers. Black strands stretched between those painfully swollen and crooked digits; for all the world like the last tracery of gloves which had rotted almost away. Lights were clumped near the tips of those fingers, reaching in long meandering filaments along the thickest webs which bridged them. Now that we were closer I saw that there was a finer tracery altogether, the buildings enveloped in a convoluted tangle of fine dark filaments as if delirious spiders had tried to fashion webs between them. What they had produced was an incoherent mass of dangling threads, lights moving through it along drunken trajectories.

  I remembered what the welcome message aboard the Strelnikov had told me about the Melding Plague. The transformations had been extraordinarily rapid—so rapid, in fact, that the shifting buildings had killed a great many people in ways far cruder than the plague itself would have done. The buildings had been engineered to repair themselves and reshape themselves according to architectural whims imposed by democratic will—the populace having only to wish a building to alter its shape in sufficient numbers for the building to obey—but the changes wrought by the plague had been uncontrolled and sudden, more like a series of abrupt seismic shifts. That was the hidden danger of a city so Utopian in its fluidity that it could be reshaped time and again, frozen and melted and refrozen like an ice-sculpture. No one had told the city that there were people living within it, who might be crushed once it began to shape itself. Many of the dead were still down there, entombed in the monstrous structures which now filled the city.

  Then Chasm City was no longer beneath us, but the toothed edge of the crater wall; the behemoth slicing expertly through a notch in the rim which looked only just wide enough to accomm
odate it.

  Ahead I could see a huddle of armoured structures near one edge of a butterscotch-coloured lake. The behemoth lowered itself towards the lake, the scream of its thrusters audible now as it fought to hold itself at this altitude against its natural tendency to float upwards.

  “Disembarkation time,” Quirrenbach said. He got up from his seat, indicating a general flow of people across the lobby.

  “Where are they all going?”

  “To the drop capsules.”

  I followed him across the lobby, where a dozen sets of spiral stairs led to the disembarkation level, a whole deck below. People were waiting by glass airlocks to board teardrop-shaped capsules, dozens of them which were slowly being pushed forward along guideways. At the front, the capsules slid down a short ramp which was jutting from the behemoth’s belly, before falling the rest of the distance—two or three hundred metres—and splashing into the lake.

  “You mean this thing doesn’t actually land?”

  “Good heavens, no.” Quirrenbach smiled at me. “They wouldn’t risk landing. Not these days.”

  Our drop capsule slid from the behemoth’s belly. There were four of us in it: Quirrenbach, myself and two other passengers. The other two were engaged in an animated conversation about a local celebrity called Voronoff, but they spoke Norte with such a strong local accent that I could only follow about one word in three. They were completely unfazed by the experience of dropping from the behemoth; even when we plunged deep into the lake and appeared in some danger of not bobbing to the surface. But then we did, and because the drop capsule’s skin was glassy, I could see other capsules bobbing around us.