Chasm City rs-2

by Alastair Reynolds

  “Do you live here alone?” I asked when she had led me into her rooms, striking what I hoped was the right note of polite curiosity.

  “Now I do, yes.” The answer was quick, almost glib. But she continued speaking. “I used to share this place with my sister, Mavra.”

  “And Mavra left?”

  “Mavra got killed.” She left that remark hanging there long enough to have its effect. “She got too close to the wrong people.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, fishing for something to say. “Were these people hunters, like Sybilline?”

  “Not exactly, no. She was curious about something she shouldn’t have been, and she asked the wrong kinds of questions of the wrong people, but it wasn’t directly to do with the hunt.”

  “What, then?”

  “Why are you so interested in knowing?”

  “I’m not exactly an angel, Zebra, but I don’t like the idea of someone dying just because they were curious.”

  “Then you’d better be careful you don’t ask the wrong kinds of question yourself.”

  “About what, exactly?”

  She sighed, obviously wishing our conversation had never taken this tack. “There’s a substance…”

  “Dream Fuel?”

  “You’ve encountered it, then?”

  “I’ve seen it being used, but that’s about the extent of my knowledge. Sybilline used it in my presence, but I didn’t notice any change in her behaviour before or afterwards. What is it, exactly?”

  “It’s complicated, Tanner. Mavra had only pieced together a few parts of the story before they got her.”

  “It’s a drug of some sort, obviously.”

  “It’s a lot more than a drug. Look, can we talk about something else? It hasn’t been easy for me to deal with her being gone, and this is just opening up old wounds.”

  I nodded, willing to let it lie for now. “You were close, weren’t you?”

  “Yes,” she said, as if I’d picked up on some profound secret in their relationship. “And Mavra loved it here. She said it had the best view anywhere in the city, apart from the stalk. But when she was around we could never have afforded to eat in that place.”

  “You haven’t done too badly. If you like heights.”

  “You don’t, Tanner?”

  “I guess it takes some getting used to.”

  Her apartment, ensconced in one of the major branches, was a complex of intestinally twisted rooms and corridors; more like an animal’s stet than anything a human would choose for use. The rooms were in one of the narrower branches, suspended two kilometres above the Mulch, with lower levels of the Canopy hanging below, linked to ours by vertical threads, strands and hollowed-out trunks.

  She led me into what might have been her living room.

  It was like entering an internal organ in some huge, walk-through model of the human anatomy. The walls, floor and ceiling were all softly rounded into each other. Level surfaces had been created by cutting into the fabric of the building, but they had to be stepped on different levels, connected by ramps and stairs. The surfaces of the walls and ceiling were rigid, but uneasily organic in nature; veined or patterned with irregular platelets. In one wall was what looked like a piece of expensive, in-situ sculpture: a tableau of three roughly hewn people who had been depicted forcing their way out of the wall, clawing to escape from it like swimmers trying to outswim the wall of a tsunami wave. Most of their bodies were hidden; all you could see was half a face or the end of a limb, but the effect was forceful enough.

  “You have pretty unique taste in art, Zebra,” I said. “I think that would give me nightmares.”

  “It’s not art, Tanner.”

  “Those were real people?”

  “Still are, by some definitions. Not alive, but not exactly dead either. More like fossils, but with the fossil structure so intricate that you can almost map neurons. I’m not the only one with them, and no one really wants to cut them away in case someone thinks of a way to get them back the way they were. So we live with them. No one used to want to share a room with them, once, but now I hear it’s quite the chic thing to have a few of them in your apartment. There’s even a man in the Canopy who makes fake ones, for the truly desperate.”

  “But these are real?”

  “Credit me with some taste, Tanner. Now, I think you need to sit down for a moment. No; stay where you are.”

  She snapped her fingers at her couch.

  The larger items of Zebra’s furniture were autonomous, responding to our presence like nervous pets. The couch perambulated from its station, neatly stepping down to our level. In contrast to the Mulch, where nothing much more advanced than steam power could be relied upon, there were obviously still machines of reasonable sophistication in the Canopy. Zebra’s rooms were full of them; not just furniture, but servitors ranging from mice-sized drones to large ceiling-tracked units, as well as fist-sized fliers. You had only to reach for something and it would scuttle helpfully closer to your hand. The machines must have been crude compared to what had existed before the plague, but I still felt like I’d wandered into a room animated by poltergeists.

  “That’s right; sit down,” Zebra said, easing my transition onto her couch. “And just lie still. I’ll be back in a moment.”

  “Believe me, I’m not going anywhere in a hurry.”

  She disappeared from the room, and I lolled in and out of consciousness, for all that I was unwilling to surrender myself to sleep so easily. No more Sky dreams. When Zebra returned she had removed her coat, and she carried two glasses of something hot and herbal. I let it run down my throat, and while I couldn’t say it actively improved the way I felt, it was an improvement on the gallons of Mulch rainwater which I had already consumed.

  Zebra had not returned alone: gliding behind her had come one of her larger ceiling-tracked servitors, a multi-limbed white cylinder with an ovoid glowing green face alive with flickering medical readouts. The machine descended until it could bring its sensors into play on my leg, chirruping and projecting status graphics as it diagnosed the severity of the wound.

  “Well? Do I live or die?”

  “You’re lucky,” Zebra said. “The gun she used against you? It was a low-yield laser; a duelling weapon. It’s not designed to do any real harm unless it touches vital organs, and the beam’s finely collimated, so the surrounding tissue damage is pretty minimal.”

  “You could have fooled me.”

  “Well, I never said it wouldn’t hurt like hell. But you’ll live, Tanner.”

  “Nonetheless,” I said, grimacing as the machine probed the entry wound with minimal gentleness, “I don’t think I’ll be able to walk on it.”

  “You won’t have to. At least not until tomorrow. The machine can heal you while you sleep.”

  “I’m not sure I feel like sleeping.”

  “Why—have you got a problem with it?”

  “It might surprise you, but yes, actually I have.” She looked at me blankly, so I decided there was no harm in telling her about the indoctrinal virus. “They could have cleaned it out in Hospice Idlewild, but I didn’t want to wait. So now I get a quick trip into Sky Haussmann’s head every time I fall asleep.” I showed her the scab of blood in the middle of my palm.

  “A man with a wound, come to our mean streets to right some wrongs?”

  “I’ve come to finish some business, that’s all. But you’ll understand the idea of sleeping doesn’t exactly fill me with overwhelming enthusiasm. Sky Haussmann’s head isn’t a pleasant place to spend any great length of time.”

  “I don’t know much about him. It would be ancient history even if it wasn’t another planet as well.”

  “It doesn’t feel like ancient history to me. It feels like he’s slowly worming his way into me, like a voice that keeps getting louder and louder in my head. I met a man who had the virus before I did — in fact, he probably gave it to me. He was pretty far gone. He had to surround himself with Sky Haussmann iconography
or he started shaking.”

  “That doesn’t have to happen here,” Zebra said. “Has the indoctrinal virus been around for a few years?”

  “It depends on the strain, but the viruses themselves are an old invention.”

  “Then you might be in luck. If the virus showed up in Yellowstone’s medical databases before the plague hit, the servitor will know about it. It might even be able to synthesise a cure.”

  “The Mendicants thought it would take a few days to take effect.”

  “They were probably being over-cautious. A day, perhaps two—that should be all the time it takes to flush it out. If the robot knows about it.” Zebra patted the white machine. “But it will do its best. Now will you think about sleeping?”

  I had to find Reivich, I told myself. That meant not wasting any time at my disposal; not a single hour. I had already wasted half a night since arriving in Chasm City. But it would take more than another couple of hours to track him down, I knew. Days, perhaps. I would only last that time if I allowed my recent injuries some time to heal. It would be sweet irony if I dropped dead of fatigue just as I was about to kill Reivich. For him, anyway. I wouldn’t be laughing.

  “I’ll think about it,” I said.

  The odd thing was, after all that I had told Zebra, this time I didn’t dream about Sky Haussmann at all.

  I dreamed about Gitta.

  She’d always been there in my thoughts, ever since waking in Idlewild. Just thinking about her beauty—and the fact that she was dead—was like a mental whiplash; a crack of pain against which my senses never seemed to dull. I could hear the way she spoke; smell her as if she were standing next to me, listening intently while I gave her one of the lessons Cahuella had insisted upon. I don’t think there had been a minute since I’d arrived around Yellowstone when Gitta had left me completely. When I saw another woman’s face, I measured her against Gitta—even if that measurement took place on a barely conscious level. I knew with a heartfelt certainty that she was dead, and although I could not absolve myself of all responsibility for her death, it was Reivich that had really killed her.

  And yet, I had given very little thought to the events leading up to her death, and almost none to her death itself.

  Now they came crashing in.

  I didn’t dream it like this, of course. The episodes from Sky Haussmann’s life might have played through my head in a neatly linear fashion—even if some of the events in those episodes contra-dicted what I thought I knew about him—but my own dreams were as disorganised and illogical as anyone’s. So while I dreamed about the journey up the Peninsula, and the ambush that had ended with Gitta’s death, it wasn’t with the clarity of the Haussmann episodes. But afterwards, when I woke, it was as if the act of dreaming had unlocked a whole raft of memories which I had barely realised were missing. In the morning, I was able to think in detail about all that had happened.

  The last thing I’d remembered in any depth was when Cahuella and I had been taken aboard the Ultra ship, where Captain Orcagna had warned us against Reivich’s planned attack on the Reptile House. Reivich, the captain said, was moving south down through the jungle. They were tracking him via the emissions from the heavy armaments his party was carrying.

  It was good that Cahuella had completed his dealings with the Ultras as soon as he had. He had taken a significant risk in visiting the orbiting ship even then, but only a week afterwards it would have been nearly impossible. The bounty on him had increased enough that some of the neutral observer factions had declared that they would intercept any vessel known to be carrying Cahuella, shooting it down if arrest was not an option. If less had been at stake, the Ultras might have ignored that kind of threat, but now they had made their presence officially known and were engaged in sensitive trade negotiations with those selfsame factions. Cahuella was effectively confined to the surface—and a steadily diminishing area of it at that.

  But Orcagna had stayed true to his word. He was still feeding us information on Reivich’s position as he moved south towards the Reptile House, at the fuzzy accuracy which Cahuella had requested.

  Our plan was simple enough. There were very few routes through the jungle north of the Reptile House, and Reivich had already committed himself to one of the major trails. There was a point on the trail where the jungle had encroached badly, and it was there that we would lay our ambush.

  “We’ll make an expedition of it,” Cahuella had said, as he and I pored over a map table in the basement of the Reptile House. “That’s prime hamadryad country, Tanner. We’ve never been there before—never had the opportunity. Now Reivich is giving it to us on a plate.”

  “You’ve already got a hamadryad.”

  “A juve.” He said it contemptuously, as if the animal were almost not worth having. I had to smile, remembering how triumphant he’d been at its capture. To capture any size of hamadryad alive was quite an achievement, but now he had set his sights higher. He was the classic hunter, incapable of being sated. There was always a bigger kill out there to taunt him, and he always deluded himself that after that one there would be yet another, as yet undreamt of.

  He stabbed the map again. “I want an adult. A near-adult, I should say.”

  “No one’s ever caught a near-adult hamadryad alive.”

  “Then I’ll have to be the first, won’t I?”

  “Leave it,” I said, “We’ve enough of a hunt on our hands with Reivich. We can always use this trip to scope the terrain and go back in a few months with a full hunting expedition. We don’t even have a vehicle that could carry a dead near-adult, let alone a live one.”

  “I’ve been thinking about it,” he said. “And doing some preliminary work on the problem. C’mon, let me show you something, Tanner.”

  I had a horrible sinking feeling.

  We walked through connecting corridors into another part of the Reptile House’s basement levels. Down in the basement vivaria there were hundreds of large display cases, equipped with humidifiers and temperature control for the comfort of reptilian guests. Most of the creatures that would have filled these exhibits moved in conditions of low light, along the forest floor. The cases would have held realistic habitats for them, stocked with exactly the right kinds of flora. The largest was a series of stepped rockpools into which a pair of boa constrictors would have been introduced, but the embryos had been damaged years earlier.

  By any strict definition, there were no creatures on Sky’s Edge that were exactly reptilian. Reptiles, even on Earth, were only one possible evolutionary outcome from a vast range of possibilities.

  The largest invertebrates on Earth had been squid, but on Sky’s Edge, invertebrate forms had invaded land as well. No one really knew why life had gone down this road, but the best guess was that some catastrophic event had made the oceans shrink to perhaps half their previous area, exposing vast new areas of dry ground. Life on the ocean fringes had been given a huge incentive to adapt to land. The backbone had just never been invented, and through slow, fumbling, mindless ingenuity, evolution had managed to do without it. Life on Sky’s Edge was genuinely spineless. The largest animals—the hamadryads—maintained structural rigidity through the pressure of circulatory fluids alone, pumped by hundreds of hearts spread throughout the creature’s volume.

  But they were cold-blooded, regulating their body temperatures by their surroundings. There had never been a winter on Sky’s Edge; nothing to select for mammal-like creatures. It was that cold-bloodedness which was most evocative of the reptilian. It meant that Sky’s Edge animals moved slowly, feeding infrequently, and lived to great ages. The largest of them, the hamadryads, did not even die in any familiar sense. They simply changed.

  The connecting corridor opened out into the largest of the basement chambers, where we kept the juvenile. Originally this area had been intended for a family of crocodiles, but they were on ice for now. The entire display area which they had been assigned was just barely large enough for the young hamadryad. Fortuna
tely, it had not grown perceptibly bigger in its time in captivity, but we would certainly have to build a huge new chamber if Cahuella was serious about bagging a near-adult.

  It was some months since I had seen the juvenile. Frankly, it did not interest me greatly. Eventually it dawned on one that the creature did not actually do very much. Its appetite was negligible once it had fed. Typically, it would curl up and enter a state not far from death. Hamadryads had no real predators so they could afford to digest their food and conserve energy in peace.

  Now we overlooked the deep white-walled pit which had been originally intended for the crocs. Rodriguez, one of my men, was leaning over the side, sweeping the bottom with a ten-metre-long broom. That was how far below us the floor was, surrounded by sheer walls in white ceramic. Sometimes Rodriguez had to go into the pit to fix something, a task I never greatly envied him, even when the juvenile was on the other side of a barrier. There were just some places in life where it was best not to be, and a snake pit was one of them. Rodriguez grinned at me beneath his moustache, hauling the broom out and racking it on the wall behind him, along with an array of similarly long-handled tools: claws, anaesthetic harpoons, electrical prods and such like.

  “How was your trip to Santiago?” I said. He had been down there on business for us, exploring new lines of trade.

  “Glad to be back, Tanner. The place is full of aristocratic arseholes. They talk about indicting the likes of us for war crimes and at the same time they hope the war never ends because it adds some colour to their miserable rich lives.”

  “Some of us they already have indicted,” Cahuella said.

  Rodriguez picked leaves from the broom’s bristles. “Yeah, I heard. Still, this year’s war criminal is next year’s saviour of the people, right? Besides—we all know guns don’t kill people, do they?”

  “No, it’s the small metal projectiles that generally do the killing,” Cahuella said, smiling. He fingered the cattle-prod lovingly, perhaps remembering the time he had used it to shepherd the juvenile into its transport cage. “How is my baby, anyway?”