“They nervous,” Juan breathed. “Mostly, Mulch and Canopy keep far apart.”
“Any particular reason?”
“Yeah, one good one.” Now he was whispering so quietly I could barely hear him above the relentless hiss of the rain. “Mulch get too close, Mulch vanish.”
“Vanish?”
He drew his finger across his throat, but discreetly. “Canopy like games, mister. They bored. Immortal people, they all bored. So they play games. Trouble is, not everyone get asked they wanna take part.”
“Like the hunt you mentioned?”
He nodded. “But no talk it now.”
“All right. Stop here then, Juan, if you’d be so good.”
The rickshaw lost what little forward momentum it had had, the primate showing agitation in every ridge of his back muscles. I observed the reactions on the faces of the two Canopy dwellers—trying to look cool, and almost achieving it. I stepped out of the rickshaw, my feet squelching as they made acquaintance with the sodden roadbed. “Mister,” said Juan. “You be careful now. I ain’t earned a fare home yet.”
“Don’t go anywhere,” I said, then thought better of it. “Listen, if this makes you nervous, leave and return in five minutes.”
This obviously struck him as excellent advice. The woman with the binoculars returned them to her exuberantly patterned greatcoat, while the goggled man reached up and made what was obviously a delicate readjustment of his optics. I walked calmly in their direction, paying more attention to their vehicle. It was a glossy black lozenge, resting on three retractable wheels. Through a tinted forward window I glimpsed upholstered seats facing complicated manual controls. What appeared to be three rotor blades were furled on the roof. But as I examined the mounting more closely, I saw that this wasn’t any kind of helicopter. The blades were not attached to the body of the vehicle by a rotating axle, but vanished into three circular holes in a domelike hump which rose seamlessly from the hull itself. And, now that I looked closer, I saw that the blades were not really blades at all, but telescopic arms, each tipped with a scythelike hook.
That was all the time I had for sightseeing. “Don’t come any closer,” the woman said. She backed up her words, spoken in flawless Canasian, by flourishing a tiny weapon, little larger than a brooch. “He’s unarmed,” the man said, loud enough for me to hear, intentionally, it seemed.
“I don’t mean you any harm.” I spread my arms—slowly. “These are Mendicant clothes. I’ve just arrived on the planet. I wanted to know about reaching the Canopy.”
“The Canopy?” the man said, as if this was vastly amusing.
“That’s what they all want,” the woman said. The weapon had not budged, and her grip on it was so steady that I wondered if it contained tiny gyroscopes, or some kind of biofeedback device which acted on the muscles in her wrist. “Why should we talk to you?”
“Because I’m harmless—unarmed, as your partner observed—and curious, and it might amuse you.”
“You’ve no idea what amuses us.”
“No, I probably don’t, but, as I said—I’m curious. I’m a man of means—” the remark sounded ridiculous as soon I had spoken it, but I soldiered on “—and I’ve had the misfortune to arrive in the Mulch with no contacts in the Canopy.”
“You speak Canasian reasonably well,” the man observed, lowering his hand from his goggles. “Most Mulch can barely manage an insult in anything other than their native tongue.” He threw away what remained of his cigarette.
“But with an accent,” the woman said. “I don’t place it—it’s offworld, but nothing I’m familiar with.”
“I’m from Sky’s Edge. You may have met people from other parts of the planet who speak differently. It’s been settled long enough for linguistic drift.”
“So had Yellowstone,” said the man, feigning no real interest in this line of debate. “But most of us still live in Chasm City. Here, the only linguistic drift is vertical.” He laughed, as if the remark were more than just a statement of fact.
I wiped rain from my eyes, warm and viscous. “The driver said the only way to reach the Canopy was by cable-car.”
“An accurate statement, but that doesn’t mean we can help you.” The man removed his hat, revealing long blond hair tied back.
His companion added, “We have no reason to trust you. A Mulch could have stolen Mendicant clothes and learned a few words of Canasian. No sane person would arrive here without already establishing ties with Canopy.”
I took a calculated risk. “I’ve got some Dream Fuel. Does that interest you?”
“Oh yes, and how in hell’s name did a Mulch get hold of Dream Fuel?”
“It’s a long story.” But I reached into Vadim’s coat and removed the cache of Dream Fuel vials. “You’ll have to take my word that is the genuine article, of course.”
“I’m not in the habit of taking anyone’s word on anything,” the man said. “Pass me one of those vials.”
Another calculated risk. The man might run off with the one, but that would still leave me with the others.
“I’ll throw you one. How does that sound?”
The man took a few steps towards me. “Do it, then.”
I tossed him the vial. He caught it deftly and then vanished into the vehicle. The woman remained outside, still covering me with the little gun. A few moments passed, then the man emerged from the vehicle again, not bothering to don his hat. He held up the vial. “This… seems to be the genuine article.”
“What did you do?”
“Shone a light through it, of course.” He looked at me as if I was stupid. “Dream Fuel has a unique absorption spectrum.”
“Good. Now that you know it’s real, throw the vial back to me and we’ll negotiate terms.”
The man made a throwing gesture, but pulled at the last moment, holding the vial in front of him tauntingly. “No… let’s not be hasty, shall we? You have more of these, you say? Dream Fuel’s in short supply these days. At least the good stuff. You must have stumbled on quite a haul.” He paused. “I’ve done you a favour, which we’ll think of as fair payment for this vial. I’ve asked that another cable-car meet you here shortly. You’d better not have been lying about your means.” He removed his goggles, revealing iron-grey eyes of extraordinary cruelty.
“I’m grateful,” I said. “But what would it matter if I had been lying?”
“That’s an odd question.” The woman made her weapon vanish, like a well-rehearsed conjuring trick. Perhaps it had sprung back into a sleeve-holster.
“I told you, I’m curious.”
“There is no law here,” she said. “A kind of law, in the Canopy—but only that which suits us; that which conveniences us, like the playground law of children. But we’re not in the Canopy now. Down here, anything goes. And we have very little patience with those who deceive us.”
“That’s all right,” I said. “I’m not a patient man myself.”
They both climbed into their vehicle, momentarily leaving the doors splayed open. “Perhaps we’ll see you in the Canopy,” the man said, and then smiled at me. It was not the kind of smile one relished. It was the kind of smile I had seen on snakes in the vivaria at the Reptile House.
The doors clammed down and their vehicle came to life with a subliminal hum.
The three telescopic arms on the roof of the cable-car swung outwards and upwards, and then continued extending outwards at blinding speed, doubling, tripling, quadrupling their length. They were reaching skywards. I looked up, shielding my eyes against the perpetual embalming rain. The rickshaw driver had pointed out that the cables spanning the gnarled structures of the Canopy occasionally draped down to the level of the Mulch, like hanging vines, but I hadn’t paid enough attention to his remark. Now I saw the significance of it as one of the car’s arms snagged the lowest line with its hooked claw. The other two arms extended even further, out to perhaps ten times their original length, until they found their own draping lines and made purchase.
And then—smoothly, as if it were lifting on thrusters—the cable-car pulled itself aloft, accelerating all the time. The nearest arm released its grip on the cable, contracted and jerked, stabbing upwards with the speed of a chameleon’s tongue, until it had locked around another cable. And while that happened, the car rose further still, and then another arm switched cables, and another, until the car was hundreds of metres above me and dwindling. Still the motion was eerily smooth, even though the vehicle always seemed to be on the point of missing its purchase altogether and plummeting back towards the Mulch.
“Hey, mister. You still here.”
At some point during the vehicle’s ascent, the rickshaw had returned. I had expected the driver to do what seemed sensible and return to the concourse, more or less in profit. But Juan had kept his word, and would probably have been insulted if I registered any surprise.
“Did you honestly think I wouldn’t be?”
“When Canopy come down, you never know. Hey, why you stand in rain?”
“Because I’m not returning with you.” He had barely had time to register disappointment—although the expression which had begun to form on his face suggested that I’d cast grave aspersions on his entire lineage—when I offered him a generous cancellation fee. “It’s more than you’d have earned carrying me.”
He looked at the two seven-Ferris bills, glumly. “Mister, you no wanna stay here. This nowhere; not good part of Mulch.”
“I don’t doubt it,” I said, coming to terms with the idea that even somewhere as misbegotten and miserable as the Mulch had its good and bad neighbourhoods. Then I said, “The Canopy people said they’d send down a cable-car for me. It’s possible they were lying, of course, but I imagine I’ll find out sooner or later. And if they weren’t, I’m just going to have to find my way up the inside of one of these buildings.”
“This not good, mister. Canopy, they never do favour.”
I decided not to mention the Dream Fuel. “They were probably not willing to rule out the possibility I was who I claimed. What if I was as powerful as I said I was? They wouldn’t want to make an enemy of me.”
Juan shrugged, as if my point was a faint theoretical possibility, but no more than that. “Mister, I go now. No hurry stay here, you not coming.”
“That’s all right,” I said. “I understand. And I’m sorry I asked you to wait.”
That was the end of our relationship, Juan shaking his head but accepting that there was no way to persuade me otherwise. And then he went, the rickshaw clattering away into the distance, leaving me alone in the rain—genuinely alone, this time. The kid was not just around the corner, and I had lost—or more accurately got rid of—the closest thing I had yet found in Chasm City to an ally. It was an odd feeling, but I knew that what I had done was necessary.
I waited.
Time passed, perhaps half an hour, long enough for me to become aware of the city darkening. As Epsilon Eridani sunk beneath the horizon, its light, already turned sepia by the dome, became the colour of ancient blood. What light reached me now had to pass through the tangle of intervening buildings, an ordeal which seemed to sap it of any real enthusiasm for the task of illumination. The towers around me grew dark, until they really did look like enormous trees, and the tangled limbs of the Canopy, lit up with habitation, were like branches hung with lanterns and fairy-lights. It was both nightmarish and beautiful.
Finally one of those dangling lights detached itself like a falling star leaving the firmament, growing in intensity as it neared me. As my eyes readjusted to the night, I saw that the light was a descending cable-car, and that it was headed for the place where I stood.
Oblivious to the rain, I watched transfixed as the vehicle slowed and lowered itself almost to street level, the tensioning and detensioning cables singing above me. The vehicle’s single headlight panned across the rainswept road, heightening every crack in the surface, and then swept towards me.
Not far from my feet, something made the puddled water jump comically upwards.
And then I heard a gunshot.
I did what any ex-soldier would do under those circumstances: not stop to consider the situation, or determine the type and calibre of weapon being used against me, or the location of the shooter—or even pause to establish that I was really the target, and not just a hapless intercessionary.
I ran, very quickly, towards the shadowed base of the nearest building. I resisted the perfectly sensible flight reflex which told me to throw my suitcase away, knowing that without it, I would quickly sink into the anonymity of the Mulch. If I lost it, I might as well offer myself up to be shot.
The gunfire chased me.
I could tell from the way each shot landed a metre or so behind my heels that the person shooting at me was not lacking in skill. It would not have taxed them to kill me—they would have needed only to advance their line of fire fractionally, and I recognised that their marksmanship was more than sufficient. Instead, it suited them to play with me. They were in no hurry to execute me with a shot in the back, though it could have been achieved at any point.
I reached the building, my feet submerged in water. The structure was slab-sided; no little indentations or crannies in which I could secrete myself. The gunfire halted, but the ellipse of the spotlight remained steady, the shaft of harsh blue light making curtains of the rain between me and the cable-car.
A figure emerged from the darkness, clad in a greatcoat. At first I thought it was either the man or the woman I had spoken to earlier, but when the man emerged into the spotlight, I realised I hadn’t seen his face before. He was bald, with a jaw of almost cartoon squareness, and one of his eyes was lost behind a pulsing monocle.
“Stand perfectly still,” he said, “and you won’t be harmed.” And his coat flapped apart to reveal a weapon, bulkier than the toy gun which the Canopy woman had carried, somehow more serious in intent. The gun consisted of a handled black rectangle, tipped with a quartet of dark nozzles. His knuckles were white around the grip, his forefinger caressing the trigger.
He fired from hip-height; something buzzed out of the gun towards me, like a laser beam. It connected with the side of the building with a fizzle of sparks. I started running, but his aim was surer the second time. I felt a stabbing pain in my thigh, and then suddenly I was no longer running. Suddenly I was doing nothing except screaming.
And then even screaming became too hard.
The medics had done very well, but no one could be expected to work miracles. The monitoring machines crowding around his father’s bed attested to that, voicing a slow and solemn liturgy of biological decline.
It was six months since the sleeper had awakened and injured Sky’s father, and it was to everyone’s credit that they had kept Titus Haussmann and his assailant alive until now. But with medical supplies and expertise stretched to breaking point, there had never really been any realistic prospect of nursing both of them back to health.
The recent series of disputes between the ships had certainly not assisted matters. The troubles had intensified a few weeks after the sleeper had awoken, when a spy had been discovered aboard the Brazilia. The security organisation had traced the agent back to the Baghdad, but the Baghdad’s administration had declared that the spy had never been born on their ship at all and had probably originated on the Santiago or the Palestine all along. Other individuals had been fingered as possible agents, and there had been cries of wrongful imprisonment and violations of Flotilla law. Normal relations had chilled to a frosty four-way standoff, and now there was almost no trade between the ships; no human traffic except for despondent diplomatic missions which always ended in failure and recrimination.
Against this backdrop, the requests for more medical supplies and knowledge to help nurse Sky’s father had been shrugged aside. It was not, they said, as if the other ships did not have crises of their own. And as head of security, Titus was not beyond suspicion of having instigated the spying incident in the first place.
Now his father struggled to speak.
“Schuyler…” he said, his lips like a rip in parchment. “Schuyler? Is that you?”
“I’m here, Dad. I never went away.” He sat down on the bedside stool and studied the grey, grimacing shell that bore so little resemblance to the father he had known before the stabbing. This was not the Titus Haussmann who had been feared and loved in equal measure across the ship, and grudgingly respected throughout the Flotilla. This was not the man who had rescued him from the nursery during the blackout, nor the man who had taken his hand and escorted him to the taxi and out beyond the ship for the very first time, showing him the wonder and terror of his infinitely lonely home. This was not the caudillo who had gone into the berth ahead of his team, knowing full well that he might be walking into extreme danger. This was a faint impression of that man, like a rubbing taken off a statue. The features were there, and the proportions were accurate, but there was no depth. Rather than solidity, there was just a paper-thin layer.
“Sky, about the prisoner.” His father struggled to raise his head from the pillow. “Is he still alive?”
“Just barely,” Sky said. He had forced his way into the security team after his father had been injured. “Frankly, I don’t expect him to last much longer. His wounds were a lot worse than yours.”
“But you managed to talk to him, anyway?”
“We’ve got this and that out of him, yes.” Sky sighed inwardly. He had told his father this much already, but either Titus was losing his memory or he wanted to hear it again.
“What exactly did he tell you?”
“Nothing we couldn’t have guessed for ourselves. We’re still not clear who put him aboard the ship, but it was almost certainly one of the factions they expected to cause some sort of trouble.”
His father raised a finger. “That weapon of his; the machinery built into his arm…”
“Not as unusual as you’d think. There were apparently a lot of his kind around towards the end of the war. We were lucky they didn’t build a nuclear device into his arm—although that would have been a lot harder to hide, of course.”
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