I played a difficult game—difficult, because of the tactical contortions I forced myself through. I was a superior chess player to Cahuella, but he wasn’t very fond of losing. On the other hand, he was shrewd enough to guess if an opponent was not giving the game his all, so I had to satisfy his ego on both fronts. I played hard, forcing Cahuella into a corner, but incorporated a weakness into my position—something exceedingly subtle, but also potentially fatal. Then, just when it looked like I would put him in check, I arranged for my weakness to reveal itself, like the sudden opening of a hairline fracture. Sometimes, though, he failed to spot my weaknesses, and there was nothing to do but let him lose. The best I could do under those circumstances was contrive to make the margin of my own victory as narrow as possible.
“You’ve beaten me again, Tanner…”
“You played well, though. You have to allow me the occasional victory.”
Gitta appeared at her husband’s side and poured another centimetre of pisco into his glass.
“Tanner always plays well,” she said, eyeing me. “That’s why he’s a worthy opponent for you.”
I shrugged. “I do my best.”
Cahuella brushed the pieces from the table, as if in a tantrum, but his voice remained placid. “Another game?”
“Why not,” I said, knowing with weary certainty that this time I had to fail.
We finished the chess game. Cahuella and I finished a few drops of pisco, then reviewed our plan for the ambush, even though we had already been through it dozens of times and there was nothing we had left uncovered. But it was the kind of ritual we had to endure. Afterwards, we made one final check on the weapons, and then Cahuella took his and spoke quietly in my ear.
“I’m stepping outside for a moment, Tanner. I want some final practice. I’d rather not be disturbed until I’m done.”
“Reivich might see the flashes.”
“There’s bad weather coming in,” Cahuella said. “He’ll just assume it’s lightning.”
I nodded, insisted that I check the settings on the gun for him, then let him slip out into the night. Torchless, with the little miniature laser strapped diagonally across his back, he was quickly lost from sight. It was a dark night and I hoped he knew his way through the part of the jungle immediately surrounding the clearing. Like Dieterling, he was confident of his ability to see well enough in the dark.
A few minutes passed before I heard the pulse of his weapon: regular discharges every few seconds, followed by longer pauses which suggested he was checking his fire pattern or selecting new targets. Each pulse strobed the tree-tops with a sharp flash of light, disturbing wildlife from the canopy; black shadows which cut across the stars. Then I saw that something else—equally black, but far vaster—was obstructing a whole swathe of stars towards the west. It was a storm, as Cahuella had predicted, creeping in from the ocean, ready to engulf the Peninsula in monsoon. As if acknowledging my diagnosis, the night’s previously calm and warm air began to stir, a breeze toying with the tops of the trees. I returned to the tent, found a torch and began to follow the path Cahuella had taken, guided by the intermittent pulses of his gun, like a lighthouse beacon. The undergrowth became treacherous and it took me several minutes to find my way to the patch of ground—a small clearing—where he stood shooting. I doused my torch across his body, announcing my arrival.
Still squeezing off pulses, he said, “I told you not to disturb me, Tanner.”
“I know, but there’s a storm coming in. I was worried you wouldn’t notice until it began to rain, and then you might have trouble finding your way back to the camp.”
“I’m the one who told you there was a storm coming,” he said, not turning to face me, still engrossed in his target practice. I could barely see what he was shooting at; his laser pulses knifed into a void of darkness devoid of detail. But I noticed that the pulses followed each other very precisely, even after he adjusted his stance, or unshouldered the rifle to slip in another ammo-cell.
“It’s late, anyway. We should get some sleep. If Reivich is delayed it could be a long day tomorrow, and we’ll need to be sharp for it.”
“You’re right, of course,” he said, after due consideration. “I just want to make sure I can maim the bastard, if I choose.”
“Maim him? I thought we were setting him up for a clean kill.”
“What would be the point of that?”
I stepped toward him. “Killing him’s one thing. You can bet he wants to kill you, so there’s a kind of sense to it. But he hasn’t done anything to earn that kind of hatred, has he?”
He sighted along the gun and squeezed off a pulse. “Who said he has to, Tanner?”
Then he snapped the gun’s stock and sight into their stowage modes, slipping the gun on to his back, where it looked like a piece of frail rigging lashed to the side of a whale.
We walked in silence to the camp, the storm rising overhead like a cliff of obsidian, pregnant with lightning. The first drops of rain were falling through the tree-tops when we reached the camp. We checked the guns were protected from the elements, triggered our perimeter infringement detectors and then sealed ourselves into the tents. The rain began to drum against the fabric, like impatient fingers on a tabletop, and thunder roared somewhere to the south. But we were ready, and returned to our bunks to snatch what sleep we could before we had to rise to catch our man.
“Sleep well tonight,” Cahuella said, his head peering through the gash in my tent. “For tomorrow we fight.”
It was still dark. The storm was still raging. I woke and listened to the rain’s fusillade against the fabric of the bubbletent.
Something had troubled me enough to bring me from sleep. It happened, sometimes. My mind would work away at a problem, which had seemed clear-cut in daylight, until it found a catch. It was how I had filled in some of the more subtle security loopholes at the Reptile House; imagining myself as an intruder and then devising a way to penetrate some screen that I had imagined until then to be absolutely foolproof. That was what it felt like when I woke: that something unobvious had suddenly been revealed to me. And that I had been making a terrible error of assumption. But for a moment I could not quite recall the details of the dream; what had been vouchsafed to me by my own diligent subconscious processes.
And then I realised that we were being attacked.
“No…” I started to say.
But it was much too late for that.
One of the most pragmatic truths about war, and the way it affected us, was that many of the clichés were not very far removed from reality. War was about yawning chasms of inactivity, punctuated by brief, screaming interludes of action. And in those brief, screaming interludes, events happened both quickly and with dreamlike slowness, every instant burned into memory. That was how it was, especially during something as compressed and violent as an ambush.
There was no warning. Perhaps something had reached down into my dreams and alerted me, so that it was both the ambush and the realisation of my error that brought me from sleep, but by the time I awoke I had no conscious memory of what it was. A sound, perhaps, as they disabled the perimeter warning system—or maybe nothing more than a foot crunching through undergrowth, or the alarm call of a startled animal.
It made no difference.
There were three of them against the eight of us, and yet they cut us down with merciless ease. The three were dressed in chameleoflage armour, shape-shifting, texture-shifting, colour-shifting garments which enveloped them from head to foot: full-body suits like that were more advanced than the kinds the average militia had access to; technology which could only be bought through the Ultras. That had to be it, then—Reivich was also dealing with the lighthugger crew. And maybe he had paid them to deceive Cahuella, supplying false positional information. There was another possibility, too, which was what my sleeping mind had come up with.
Perhaps there were two Reivich parties, one moving south thirty kilometres north of here, with the h
eavy armaments which Orcagna was monitoring. I had assumed that was the only party. But what if there had been a second squad, moving ahead of them? Perhaps they had lighter armaments which could not be traced by the Ultras. The element of surprise would more than compensate for the deficiency in fire-power.
It had, too.
Their weapons were no more advanced or lethal than our own, but they used them with pinpoint accuracy, gunning down first the guards stationed outside the camp, before the guards had had a chance to aim their own weapons. But I was barely aware of this part of the attack; still struggling out of sleep, thinking at first that the light pulses and cracks of energy-discharge outside were only the dying spasms of the storm as it passed into the deep Peninsula. Then I heard the screams, and I began to realise what was happening.
By then, of course, it was far too late to do anything about it.
TWENTY-ONE
Finally, I woke. For a long time, lying in the golden morning light which streamed into Zebra’s room, I replayed the dreams in my head, until at last I could put them to rest and start examining my injured leg.
Overnight the healer had worked wonders, utilising a medical science well in advance of anything we’d had on Sky’s Edge. The wound was now little more than a whitish star of new flesh, and what damage remained was mainly psychological—the refusal of my brain to accept that my leg was now fully capable of performing its intended role. I rose from the couch and took a few awkward, experimental steps, finally making my way over to the nearest window, navigating the stepped levels of the broken floor, furniture helpfully shuffling aside to ease my passage.
In the light of day, or what passed for day in Chasm City, the great hole at the city’s heart looked even closer, even more vertiginous. It was not difficult to imagine how it had lured the first explorers who had come to Yellowstone, whether birthed from robot wombs or riding the first, risky starships that had come afterwards. The blotch of warm atmosphere spilling from the chasm was visible from space when other atmospheric conditions were favourable.
Whether they had crossed land in crawlers or come skimming down through cloud layers, that first sight of the chasm could never have been anything but heart-stopping. Something had injured the planet thousands of centuries earlier, and this great open wound had still not healed. Some, it was said, had made the descent into the depths equipped only with fragile pressure suits, and had found treasures upon which empires might be founded. If so, they had been careful to keep those treasures to themselves. But it had not stopped others coming, other chancers and adventurers; around them had accreted the first hints of what would eventually become this city.
There was no universally accepted theory to explain the hole, although the surrounding caldera—in which Chasm City lay, sheltered from winds, and the predation of flash-floods and the encroachment of methane-ammonia glaciers—hinted at something fairly catastrophic, and recent, too, on the geologic timescale—recent enough not to have been erased by the processes of weathering and tectonic reshaping. Yellowstone had probably had a close encounter with its gas giant neighbour which had injected energy into the planet’s core, and the chasm was one of the means by which that energy was slowly being bled back towards space, but something must have opened this escape route in the first place. There were theories about tiny black holes slamming into the crust, or fragments of quark matter, but no one really knew what had happened. There were also rumours and fairytales: of alien digs beneath the crust, evidence that the chasm had in some sense been artefactual, if not necessarily deliberate. Perhaps those aliens had come here for the same reason that humans had, to tap the chasm for its energy and chemical resources. I could see very clearly the tentacular pipes which the city extended over the maw towards the bottom, reaching down like grasping fingers.
“Don’t pretend you’re not impressed,” Zebra said. “There are people who’d kill for a view like this. Come to think of it, I probably know people who have killed for a view like this.”
“That doesn’t really surprise me.”
Zebra had entered the room silently. At first glance she appeared to be naked, but then I saw that she was fully clothed, but in a gown of such translucence that it might as well have been made of smoke.
She carried my Mendicant clothes in her arms, washed and neatly folded.
I could see now that she was very thin. Beneath the blue-grey film of her gown black stripes covered her entire body, following the curves of her form, shadowing her genital region. The stripes simultaneously suppressed and emphasised the curves and angles of her body, so that she metamorphosed with each step she took towards me. Her hair ran in a stiff furrow down to the small of her back, ending above the striped swell of her buttocks. When she walked, she glided, like a ballet dancer, her small hooflike feet more for the purpose of anchoring her to the ground than supporting her weight. I could see now that had she chosen to play the Game, she would have made a hunter of considerable skill. She had, after all, hunted me—if only for the purposes of ruining her enemies’ entertainment.
“On the planet where I come from,” I said, “this would be considered provocative.”
“Well, this isn’t Sky’s Edge,” she said, placing my clothes on the couch. “It’s not even Yellowstone. In the Canopy, we do more or less what we please.” She ran the palms of her hands down her hips.
“Excuse me if this sounds rude, but were you born this way?”
“Not remotely. I haven’t always been female, for what it’s worth, and I doubt that I’ll stay this way for the rest of my life. I certainly won’t always be known as Zebra. Who’d choose to be pinned down by one body, one identity?”
“I don’t know,” I said, carefully, “but on Sky’s Edge it was beyond most people’s means to modify themselves in any way at all.”
“Yes. I gather you were all too busy killing each other.”
“That’s a fairly reductive summary of our history, but I don’t suppose it’s too far from the truth. How much do you know about it, anyway?” Not for the first time since she had entered the room, I was reminded of the troubling dream of Cahuella’s camp, and how Gitta had looked at me in the dream. Gitta and Zebra did not have a great deal in common, but in my confused state of waking, I found it easy to transfer some of Gitta’s attributes onto Zebra: her lithe build, her high cheekbones and dark hair. It was not that I did not find Zebra alluring in her own right. But she was stranger than any creature—human or otherwise—that I’d ever shared a room with.
“I know enough,” Zebra said. “Some of us here are quite interested in it, in a perverse way. We find it amusing and quaint and horrifying at the same time.”
I nodded at the people caught in the wall, the tableau that I’d imagined was a piece of artwork.
“I find what happened here fairly horrifying.”
“Oh, it was. But we lived through it, and those of us who survived never really knew the plague at its most ferocious.” She was standing close to me now, and I felt myself aroused by her for the first time. “Compared to the plague, war seems very alien. Our enemy was our city, our own bodies.”
I took one of her hands and held it in my own, pressing it against my chest. “Who are you, Zebra? And why do you really want to help me?”
“I thought we went through that last night.”
“I know, but…” There was no real conviction in my voice. “They’re still after me, aren’t they? The hunt won’t have ended just because you brought me to the Canopy.”
“You’re safe while you stay here. My rooms are electronically shielded, so they won’t be able to get a fix on your implant. Besides, the Canopy itself is out of bounds for the Game. The players don’t want to draw too much attention to themselves.”
“So I have to stay here for the rest of my life?”
“No, Tanner. Just another two days and then you’re safe.” She removed her hand from mine and used it to caress the side of my head, finding the bulge where the implant lay. “The th
ing Waverly put inside your head is wired to stop transmitting after fifty-two hours. That’s how they prefer to play.”
“Fifty-two hours? One of the little rules Waverly mentioned?”
Zebra nodded. “They experimented with different durations, of course.”
It was too long. My Reivich trail was cold enough as it was, but if I waited another two days, I wouldn’t stand a chance.
“Why do they play?” I said, wondering whether her answer would accord with what Juan, the rickshaw kid, had told me.
“They’re bored,” Zebra said. “Many of us here are postmortal. Even now, even with the plague, death is still only a remote worry for most of us. Maybe not as remote as it was seven years ago, but still not the animating force it must be to a mortal like yourself. That small, almost silent voice urging you to do something today because tomorrow might be too late… it just isn’t there for most of us. For two hundred years Yellowstone’s society hardly changed. Why create a great work of art tomorrow when you can plan an even better one for fifty years hence?”
“I understand,” I said. “Some of it, anyway. But it should be different now. Didn’t the plague make most of you mortal again? I thought it screwed around with your therapies; interfered with the machines in your cells?”
“Yes, it did. The medichines had to be instructed to dismantle themselves, turning to harmless dust, or they killed you. It didn’t stop there, either. Even genetic techniques were difficult to imple-ment, because they relied so heavily on medichines to mediate the DNA rescripting procedures. About the only people who didn’t have a problem were the ones who’d inherited extreme-longevity genes from their parents, but they were never a majority.”
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