Chasm City rs-2

by Alastair Reynolds

  “You’d better not do it again,” said the woman who had just stepped into my field of vision. I recognised her, of course—and her companion, who hoved into view on my right, pushing a cigarette to his lips. “You’re getting sloppy, Waverly. This man must have thought you were planning to kill him.”

  “That wasn’t the idea?” I said, finding that I sounded nowhere near as slurred as I had been expecting.

  Waverly shook his head gravely. “Not at all. I was doing my best to save your life, Mister Mirabel.”

  “You’ve got a pretty funny way of going about it.”

  “I had to act quickly. You were about to be ambushed by a group of pigs. Do you know about pigs, Mister Mirabel? You probably don’t want to. They’re one of the less salubrious immigrant groups we’ve had to deal with since the fall of the Glitter Band. They had arranged a tripwire across the roadway connected to a crossbow. Normally they don’t stalk anyone until later in the evening, but they must have been hungry tonight.”

  “What did you shoot me with?”

  “Like I said, a stun beam. Quite a humane weapon, really. The laser beam is only a precursor—it establishes an ionised path through the air, down which a paralysing electrical flux can be discharged.”

  “It’s still painful.”

  “I know, I know.” He raised his hands defensively. “I’ve taken a few hits myself. I’m afraid I had it calibrated to stun a pig, rather than a human. But perhaps it was for the best. You’d have resisted me if I hadn’t put you under so comprehensively, I suspect.”

  “Why did you save me, anyway?”

  He looked put out. “It was the decent thing to do, I’d have thought.”

  Now the woman spoke. “At first I misjudged you, Mister Mirabel. You put me on edge and I didn’t trust you completely.”

  “All I did was ask for some advice.”

  “I know—the fault’s all mine. But we’re all so nervous these days. After we’d left, I felt bad about it and told Waverly to keep an eye on you. Which is what he did.”

  “An eye, yes, Sybilline,” Waverly said.

  “And where would here happen to be?” I said.

  “Show him, Waverly. He must want to stretch his legs by now.”

  I’d half expected to have been secured to the chair, but I was free to move. Waverly offered me a supporting arm while I tested the usefulness of my legs. The muscle in the leg where the beam had touched still felt like jelly, but it was just about able to support me. I stepped past the woman, descending the series of level surfaces until I’d reached the lowest part of the room. At that end there was a pair of double doors which opened onto the night air. Waverly led me out onto a sloping balcony, bounded by a metal railing. Warm air slapped against my face.

  I looked back. The balcony surrounded the building where I had awoken, rising up on either side of it. But the building wasn’t really a building.

  It was the gondola of an airship, tipped up at an angle. Above us, the craft’s gasbag was a dark mass pinned between branches of the Canopy. The airship must have been trapped here when the plague hit, caught like a balloon in a tree. The gasbag was so impermeable that it was still fully inflated, seven years after the plague. But it was crimped and distorted by the pressure of the branches which had formed around it, and I couldn’t help wondering how strong it really was—and what would happen to the gondola if the bag was punctured.

  “It must have happened really fast,” I said, having visions of the airship trying to steer itself out of the path of the malforming building.

  “Not that quickly,” Waverly said, as if I’d said something deeply foolish. “This was a sightseeing airship—there were dozens of them, back in the old days. When the trouble came, no one was much interested in sightseeing anymore. They left the airship moored here while the building grew around it, but it still took a day or so for the branches to trap it completely.”

  “And now you live in it?”

  “Well, not exactly. It isn’t all that safe, really. That’s why we don’t have to worry too much about anyone else paying us any attention.”

  Behind, the door swung open again and the woman emerged. “An unorthodox place to wake you, I admit.” She joined Waverly next to the railing, leaning bravely over the edge. It must have been an easy kilometre to the ground. “But it does have its uses, discretion being one of them. Now then, Mister Mirabel. I expect you are in need of some good food and hospitality—am I right?”

  I nodded, thinking that if I stayed with these people, they might provide a means for me to enter the Canopy proper. That was the rational argument for agreeing. The other part was born out of sheer relief and gratitude and the fact that I was as tired and hungry as she probably imagined.

  “I don’t want to impose.”

  “Nonsense. I did you a great disservice in the Mulch, and then Waverly rather compounded the error with his ham-fisted stun setting—didn’t you, Waverly? Well, we’ll say no more of it—provided you do us the honour of providing you with a little food and rest.” The woman took something black out of a pocket, folding it open and elongating an aerial before speaking into it. “Darling? We’re ready now. We’ll meet at the high end of the gondola.”

  She snapped the telephone shut and pushed it back into her pocket.

  We walked around the side of the gondola, using the railing to haul our way up the slope without slipping. At the highest point the railing had been cut away so that there was nothing between me and the ground except a lot of air. Waverly and Sybilline—if that was her name—could have easily pushed me over the edge had either of them meant me any harm, especially in my generally disorientated state. More than that, they’d had plenty of opportunities to do it before I woke up.

  “Here he comes,” Waverly said, pointing under the sagging curve of the gasbag. I watched a cable-car descend into view. It looked a lot like the one I’d first seen Sybilline in, but I wasn’t pretending to be an expert just yet. The car’s arms grasped threads entangled around the gasbag, tugging the blimp out of shape, but managing not to puncture it. The car came close, its door opening and a ramp extending out to bridge the gap to the gondola.

  “After you, Tanner,” Sybilline said.

  I crossed the bridge. It was only a step of a metre or so, but there was no protection on either side and it took an effort of nerve to make the crossing. Sybilline and Waverly followed me blithely. Living in the Canopy must have given everyone an inhuman head for heights.

  There were four seats in the rear compartment and a windowed partition between us and the driver. Before the window was closed, I saw that the driver was the high-cheekboned, grey-eyed man who had been with Sybilline earlier.

  “Where are you taking me?” I said.

  “To eat? Where else?” Sybilline placed a hand on my forearm, trustingly. “The best place in the city, Tanner. Certainly the place with the best view.”

  A night-time flight across Chasm City. With only the lights to trace the geometry of the city, it was almost possible to pretend that the plague hadn’t happened. The shapes of the buildings were lost in the darkness, except where the upper branches were picked out by tentacles and star-streams of glowing windows, or the neon scribbles of advertisements whose meaning I couldn’t fathom, spelt in the cryptic ideograms of Canasian. Now and then we would pass one of the older buildings that hadn’t been affected by the plague, standing stiff and regular amongst the changed ones. More often than not those buildings were still damaged, even if they hadn’t been caused to physically mutate. Other adjacent structures had thrust limbs through their neighbours, or undermined their foundations. Some had wrapped themselves around other buildings like strangler vines. There had been fires, explosions and riots during the days of the plague, and very little had emerged from those times completely unscathed.

  “You see that one?” Sybilline said, drawing my attention to a pyramid-shape which was more or less intact. It was a very low structure, almost lost in the Mulch, but it was pic
ked out by search-lights arcing down from above. “That’s the Monument to the Eighty. I assume you know the story?”

  “Not in any detail.”

  “It was a long time ago. This man tried to scan people into computers, but the technology wasn’t mature. They were killed by the scanning process, which was bad enough, but then the simulations started to go wrong. There were eighty of them, including the man himself. When it was all over, when most of them had failed, their families had that monument built. But it’s seen better days now.”

  “Like the whole city,” Waverly said.

  We continued across town. Travelling by cable-car took a little getting used to, as my stomach was discovering. When the car was passing through a place where there were many threads, the ride was almost as smooth and level as a volantor. But as soon as the threads started to thin out—as the car traversed the parts of the Canopy where there were no major branches, for instance—the trajectory became a lot less crowlike and a lot more gibbonlike: wide, stomach-churning arcs punctuated by jolts of upwards thrust. It should have felt very natural, given that the human brain was supposed to have evolved for exactly this kind of arboreal living.

  But that was a few too many million years ago for me.

  Eventually the cable-car’s sickening arcs took us down towards ground level. I remembered Quirrenbach telling me the locals referred to the city’s great merged dome as the Mosquito Net, and here it reached down until it touched the ground near the chasm’s rim. In this inner perimeter region the vertical stratification of the city was less pronounced. There was an intermingling of Canopy and Mulch, an indeterminate zone where the Mulch reached up to brush the underneath of the dome, and places where the Canopy forced itself underground, into armoured plazas where the wealthy could walk unmolested.

  It was into one of those enclaves that Sybilline’s driver took us, dropping the cable-car’s undercarriage and steering the craft onto a landing deck where other cars were parked. The edge of the dome was a sloping stained-brown wall leaning over us like a breaking wave. Through the parts which were still more or less transparent, the huge wide maw of the chasm was visible; the city on the other side of it only a distant forest of twinkling lights.

  “I’ve called ahead and booked us a table at the stalk,” said the man with the iron-grey eyes, stepping out of the car’s driving compartment. “Word is Voronoff’s going to be eating there tonight, so the place is pretty packed.”

  “I’m pleased,” Sybilline said. “You can always rely on Voronoff to add a little gloss to the evening.” Casually she opened a compartment in the side of the car and pulled out a black purse, opening it to reveal little vials of Dream Fuel and one of the ornate wedding-guns I’d seen aboard the Strelnikov.

  She tugged down her collar and pressed the gun against her neck, gritting her teeth as she shunted a cubic centimetre of the dark red fluid into her bloodstream. Then she passed the gun to her partner, who injected himself before returning the baroquely ornamented instrument to Sybilline.

  “Tanner?” she said. “Do you want a spike?”

  “I’ll pass,” I said.

  “Fine.” She folded the kit away in the compartment as if what had taken place was of no particular consequence.

  We left the car and walked across the landing deck to a sloping ramp which led down into a brightly lit plaza. It was a lot less squalid than any part of the city I’d seen so far: clean, cool and packed with wealthy-looking people, palanquins, servitors and bio-engineered animals. Music pulsed from the walls, which were tuned to show city scenes from before the plague. A strange, spindly robot made its way down the thoroughfare, towering over people on its bladelike legs. It was made entirely out of sharp, gleaming surfaces, like a collection of enchanted swords.

  “That’s one of Sequard’s automata,” said the man with the iron-grey eyes. “He used to work in the Glitter Band, one of the leading figures in the Gluonist Movement. Now he makes these things. They’re very dangerous, so watch out.”

  We stepped gingerly around the machine, avoiding the slow arcs of its lethal limbs. “I don’t think I caught your name,” I said to the man.

  He looked at me oddly, as if I’d just asked him his shoe-size.

  “Fischetti.”

  We made our way down the thoroughfare, bypassing another automaton much like the first one, except this robot had distinct red stains on some of its limbs. Then we passed over a series of ornamental ponds where plump gold and silver koi were mouthing near the surface. I tried to work out where we were. We’d landed near the chasm and had been walking all the time towards it, but it had appeared much closer to begin with.

  Finally the thoroughfare widened out into a huge domed chamber, large enough for the hundred or so dining tables it must have contained. The place was nearly full. I even saw a few palanquins parked around one table which had been neatly set out for diners, but I couldn’t see how they were going to eat. A series of steps led down to the chamber’s glass floor, and then we were escorted to a vacant table at the edge of the room, next to one of the huge windows set into the chamber’s midnight blue dome. An astonishingly intricate chandelier hung from the dome’s apex.

  “Like I said, best view in Chasm City,” Sybilline said.

  I could see where we were now. The restaurant was at one end of a stalk which emerged from the side of the chasm, fifty or sixty metres from the top. The stalk must have been a kilometre long, as thin and brittle-looking as a sliver of blown glass. It was supported at the chasm end by a bracket of filigreed crystal; the effect of which was to make the rest of it look even more perilous.

  Sybilline passed me a menu. “Choose what you like, Tanner—or let me choose for you, if you aren’t familiar with our cuisine. I won’t let you leave here without a good meal.”

  I looked at the prices, wondering if my eye was adding a zero or two to each figure. “I can’t pay for this.”

  “No one’s asking you to. This is one we all owe you.”

  I made some choices, consulted with Sybilline and then sat back and waited for the food. I felt out of place, of course—but then again, I was hungry, and by staying with these people I’d learn a lot more about Canopy life. Luckily I wasn’t required to make smalltalk. Sybilline and Fischetti were talking about other people, occasionally spotting someone across the room whom they pointed out discreetly. Waverly butted in now and again with an observation, but at no point was my opinion solicited except out of occasional politeness.

  I looked around the room, sizing up the clientele. Even the people who had reshaped their bodies and faces looked beautiful, like charismatic actors wearing animal costumes. Sometimes it was just the colour of their skin that they had changed, but in others their whole physiology had been shifted towards some lean animal ideal. I saw a man with elaborate striped spines radiating from his forehead, sitting next to a woman whose enlarged eyes were periodically veiled behind iridescent lids patterned like moth’s wings. There was an otherwise normal-looking man whose mouth opened to reveal a forked black tongue which he stuck out at every opportunity, as if tasting the air. There was a slender, nearly-naked woman covered in black and white stripes. She caught my eye for an instant and I suspect she would have held her gaze had I not looked away.

  Instead I looked down into the steaming depths of the chasm beneath us, my sense of vertigo slowly abating. Though it was night-time, there was a ghostly reflected glow of the city all around us. We were a kilometre out from one wall, but the chasm was easily fifteen or twenty kilometres wide, the other side appearing just as distant as it had from the landing deck. The walls were mostly sheer, except for occasional narrow natural ledges where rock had fallen away from the sides. Sometimes there were buildings set into the ledges, connected to the higher levels by elevator tubes or enclosed walkways. There was no sign of the bottom of the chasm; the walls rose from a placid white cloud layer which hid the lower depths completely. Pipes stretched down into the mist, reaching towards the atmospheric p
rocessing machinery which I knew to be down there. The hidden machines supplied Chasm City with power, air and water, and were robust enough to have continued functioning even after the plague had hit.

  I could see luminous things flying down in the depths, tiny bright triangles of colour. “Gliders,” Sybilline said, watching my gaze. “It’s an old sport. I used to do it, but the thermals are insane near the walls. And the amount of breathing gear you have to wear…” She shook her head. “The worst thing is the mist, though. You get a speed buzz from flying just above the mist level, but as soon as you drop into it, you lose all sense of direction. If you’re lucky, you head upwards and you make clear air before you run into the wall. If you’re not, you think down is up and you head into higher and higher pressure until you cook yourself alive. Or you get to add some interesting new coloration to the side of the chasm.”

  “Radar doesn’t work in the mist?”

  “It does—but that wouldn’t make it any fun, would it?”

  The food came. I ate cautiously, not wanting to make an exhibition of myself. It was good, too. Sybilline said the best food was still grown in orbit and shipped down by behemoth. That explained the extra zeroes after almost every item.

  “Look,” Waverly said, when we were on the final course. “That’s Voronoff, isn’t it?”

  He was pointing discreetly across the room to where a man had just stood up from one of the tables.

  “Yes,” Fischetti said, with a smile of self-congratulation. “I knew he’d be here somewhere.”

  I looked at the man they were talking about. He was probably one of the least ostentatious people in the room, a small, immaculate-looking man with neatly curled black hair and the pleasingly neutral face of a mime artist.

  “Who is he?” I said. “I’ve heard of him, but I’m not sure where.”

  “Voronoff’s a celebrity,” Sybilline said. She was touching my arm again, divulging another confidence. “He’s a hero to some of us. He’s one of the oldest postmortals. He’s done everything; mastered every game.”