Chasm City rs-2

by Alastair Reynolds

  “Not everyone else had to abandon immortality, though.”

  “No, of course not…” She paused, as if to collect her thoughts. “The hermetics, you’ll have seen them—well, they still have all the machines inside them, constantly correcting cell damage. But the price they pay for it is they can’t move freely in the city. Once they leave their palanquins they have to restrict themselves to a few environments guaranteed to be free of residual plague spore, and even then there’s a small risk.”

  I looked at Zebra, trying to judge her. “But you’re not a hermetic. Are you no longer immortal?”

  “No, Tanner… it’s nowhere near as simple as that.”

  “Then what?”

  “After the plague, some of us found a new technique. It enabled us to keep the machines inside ourselves—most of them, anyway—and still walk unprotected in the city. It’s a kind of medication; a drug. It does many things, and no one know how it works, but it seems to barrier our machines against the plague, or weaken the efficacy of any plague spore which enter our bodies.”

  “This medication… what is it like?”

  “You don’t want to know, Tanner.”

  “Suppose I were interested in immortality as well?”

  “Are you?”

  “It’s a hypothetical viewpoint, that’s all.”

  “I thought so.” Zebra nodded sagely. “Where you come from, immortality’s something of a pointless luxury, isn’t it?”

  “For those not descended from the momios, yes.”

  “Momios?”

  “That was what we called the sleepers on the Santiago —they were immortal. The crew weren’t.”

  “We? You talk as if you were actually there.”

  “Slip of the tongue. The point is, there’s not much point being immortal if you’re not going to survive more than ten years without getting shot or blown up in a skirmish. Besides, the price the Ultras are charging, nobody could afford it even if they wanted it.”

  “And would you have wanted it, Tanner Mirabel?” Then she kissed me, and pulled back to lock eyes with me, much as Gitta had in my dream. “I intend to make love to you, Tanner. Do you find that shocking? You shouldn’t. You’re an attractive man. You’re different. You don’t play our games—don’t even understand them—though I imagine you’d play them reasonably well if you wished. I don’t know what to make of you.”

  “I have the same problem,” I said. “My past is a foreign country.”

  “Nice line, except it isn’t remotely original.”

  “Sorry.”

  “But in a way, it’s true, isn’t it? Waverly told me that when he ran a trawl on you he didn’t come up with anything clear-cut. He said it was like trying to put together a broken vase. No; that’s not quite what he said, either. He said it was almost like trying to put together two, or even three, broken vases, and not knowing which piece belonged where.”

  “Revival amnesia,” I said.

  “Well, perhaps. The confusion looked a little more profound than that, Waverly said… but let’s not talk about him.”

  “Fine. But you still haven’t told me about this medication.”

  “Why are you so interested?”

  “Because I think I might have already encountered it. It’s Dream Fuel, isn’t it? It’s what your sister was investigating when she was killed for her troubles.”

  She took her time answering. “That coat… it’s not yours, is it?”

  “No, I obtained it from a benefactor. What has that got to do with anything?”

  “It made me think you might be trying to trick me. But you really don’t know much about Dream Fuel, do you?”

  “Until a couple of days ago I’d never heard of it.”

  “Then there’s something you should probably know,” Zebra said. “I injected you with a small quantity of Fuel last night.”

  “What?”

  “It wasn’t much, I assure you. I probably should have asked you, but you were injured and tired and I knew there was very little risk.” Then she showed me the small bronze wedding-gun she had used, one full vial of Fuel in her cache. “Fuel protects those of us who still have machines inside our bodies, but it also has general healing properties. That’s why I gave it to you. I’ll need to get some more.”

  “Will that be easy?”

  She gave me a half-smile and then shook her head. “Not as easy as it used to be. Unless you happen to have a hotline to Gideon.”

  I was about to ask her what she had meant by the remark about the coat, but now she had distracted me. I didn’t think I had heard that name before.

  “Gideon?”

  “He’s a crime lord. No one knows much about him, what he looks like, where he lives. Except he’s got absolute control of Dream Fuel distribution across the city and the people who work for him are very serious about their work.”

  “And now they’re limiting the supply? Just when everyone’s become addicted to it? Maybe I should have a word with Gideon.”

  “Don’t get any more involved than you have to, Tanner. Gideon is extremely bad news.”

  “You sound as if you’re speaking from experience.”

  “I am.” Zebra walked to the window and ran a hand over the glass. “I told you about Mavra already, Tanner. My sister, the one who used to love this view?” I nodded, remembering the conversation we’d had shortly after arriving here. “I also told you she was dead. Well, Gideon’s people were the people my sister got involved with.”

  “They killed her?”

  “I’ll never know for sure, but that’s what I think. Mavra believed they were strangling us, withholding the one substance the city needs. Dream Fuel’s dangerous stuff, Tanner—there isn’t enough of it to go around, and yet for most of us it’s the most precious substance imaginable. It’s not just the kind of thing people kill for; it’s the kind of thing people fight wars for.”

  “So she wanted to persuade Gideon to open up the supply?”

  “Nothing so naive; Mavra was nothing if not a pragmatist. She knew Gideon wasn’t going to let it go that easily. But if she could find out how the stuff was being manufactured—even what the stuff was—she could pass on that knowledge to other people so that they could synthesise it for themselves. At the very least she’d have broken the monopoly.”

  “I admire her for trying. She must have known it might get her killed.”

  “Yes. She was like that. She wouldn’t give up a hunt.” Zebra paused. “I always promised her that if anything happened, I’d…”

  “Pick up where she left off?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Maybe it isn’t too late. When all this blows over…” I touched my head. “Maybe I’ll help you find Gideon.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “You helped me, Zebra. It would be the least I could do.” And, I thought, because Mavra sounded a lot like me. Perhaps she had come close to finding what she was looking for. If so, those who remembered her—and I counted myself as one now—owed it to her to carry on her work. There was something else, too.

  Something about Gideon, and who he reminded me of—sitting, spiderlike, at the dark centre of a web of absolute control, imagining himself invulnerable. I thought again of Cahuella, and what had passed through my mind in sleep. “The Dream Fuel you gave me. Is that why I had such strange dreams?”

  “It does that, sometimes. Especially if it’s your first dose. It’s working its way through your brain, tinkering with neural connections. That’s why they call it Dream Fuel. But that’s only half of it.”

  “Does that make me immortal now?”

  Zebra let the smoke-coloured gown fall away from her and I pulled her to me, looking into her face.

  “For today, yes.”

  I woke before Zebra, dressing in the Mendicant clothes which she had washed, and quietly paced her rooms until I found the things I was looking for. My hand lingered over the huge weapon she had rescued me with, which she had just left lying in
the annexe to her apartment as casually as a walking stick. The plasma-rifle would have been a useful piece of artillery on Sky’s Edge; using it inside a city seemed almost obscene. On the other hand, so did dying.

  I hefted the weapon. I hadn’t ever handled anything exactly like it, but the controls were placed intuitively and the readouts showed familiar status variables. It was a very delicate weapon and I didn’t rate its chances of surviving very long if it came into contact with a trace of the plague. But that was no reason to leave it lying around, almost inviting me to steal it.

  “Careless, Zebra,” I said. “Very careless indeed.”

  I thought back to the night before; how the main thing on her mind must have been tending to my injury. It was perhaps understandable that she had dumped the gun at the door and then forgotten to do anything about it, but it was still negligent. I put the gun down again, quietly.

  She was still asleep when I went back into the room. I had to move carefully, trying to avoid causing the furniture to move any more than necessary in case the faint noise and motion woke her up. I found her greatcoat and rummaged through the pockets.

  Currency—plenty of it.

  And a set of fully charged ammo-cells for the plasma-rifle. I stuffed the money and the cells into the pockets of the coat I’d stolen from Vadim—the one Zebra had found so interesting—and then dithered about whether to leave a note or not. In the end I found a pen and paper—after the plague, old-fashioned writing materials must have come back into vogue—scrawling something to the effect that I was grateful for what she had done, but I was not the kind of man who could wait two days knowing I was being hunted, even though she had offered a kind of sanctuary.

  On my way out I picked up the plasma-rifle.

  Her cable-car was parked where she had left it, in a niche adjacent to her complex of rooms. Again, she had been hasty—the vehicle was powered, and its control panel was still aglow and awaiting instructions.

  I had watched her work the controls and judged that the action of driving was semi-automatic—the driver did not have to choose which cables to employ, just used the joysticks and throttle controls to point the vehicle in a particular direction and set the speed. The cable-car’s internal processors did the rest, selecting the cables which allowed the desired route to be achieved or approximated with something approaching optimal efficiency. If the driver tried to point the car into a part of the Canopy where there were no cables, the car would presumably reject the command, or pick a roundabout route which achieved the same ends.

  Still maybe there was more skill to operating a cable-car than I’d imagined, because the ride began sickeningly, like a small boat pitching in a squall. Yet somehow I managed to keep the vehicle moving forward, descending through the latticelike enclosure of the Canopy, even though I had no idea where I was going. I had a destination in mind—a very specific one, in fact—but the night’s activity had completely erased my sense of direction, and I had no idea where Zebra’s apartment lay, except that it was near the chasm. At least now it was daytime, with the morning sun climbing up the side of the Mosquito Net, and I could see far across the city, beginning to recognise certain characteristically deformed buildings that I must have seen yesterday, from other angles and elevations. There was a building which looked uncannily like a human hand, grasping from the sky, its fingers elongating into tendrils which quickly merged with others, from adjacent structures. Here was another, which resembled an oak tree, and others which expanded into a froth of shattered bubbles, like the face of someone stricken by an awful pestilence.

  I pushed the car downwards, the Canopy rising above me like an oddly textured cloud deck, into the unoccupied hinterland which separated Canopy from Mulch. The ride became rougher, now — fewer purchase points for the cable-car, and longer, sickening slides as it descended down single strands.

  By now, I imagined Zebra would have noticed my absence. A few moments would suffice for her to verify the loss of her weapon, currency and car—but then what would she do? If the Game was pervasive in Canopy society, then Zebra and her allies could hardly report my theft. Zebra would have to explain what I had been doing in her place, and then Waverly would be implicated, and the two of them would be revealed as saboteurs.

  The Mulch rose into view below me, all twisted roads and floods and barnacled slums. There were fires sending smoke trails into the air and lights there now; at least I had hit an inhabited district. I could even see people outside, and rickshaws and animals, and if I had opened the car’s door, I imagined I would have smelled whatever it was they were cooking or burning in those fires.

  The car lurched and began to fall.

  There had been sickening moments before, but this one seemed to last longer. And now an alarm was shrieking in the cockpit. Then something like normal motion resumed again, although it was noticeably bumpier and the vehicle’s rate of descent was swifter than seemed prudent. What had happened? Had the cable snapped, or had the car simply run out of handholds for an instant, plummeting before it found another line?

  Finally I looked at the console and I saw a pulsing schematic of the cable-car, with a red box flashing around the area of damage.

  One of the arms was gone.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Someone was attacking me.

  Trusting the vehicle to find its own way down as quickly and as safely as possible, I retrieved Zebra’s plasma-rifle, steadying myself as the pitch rocked and swayed, my concentration not aided by the shrill insistence of the alarm. I moved back onto the rear bay, past the passenger seat where I’d lain the previous evening. Bracing myself, I knelt and opened the side door, watching it gull open. Then I leaned across and opened its counterpart on the other side, and pushed myself out as far as I could, into the wind, the ground still several hundred metres below me. I risked a quick glance up at the arm assembly, observing the cauterised stump where one of the arms had been shot clean off with some kind of beam weapon.

  Then I looked up and back along my route of descent. Two other cable-cars were following me, about two hundred metres higher up and the same distance behind me. A black figure was leaning from the closest car, shouldering something which—even as I watched—flashed a light too intense for words. A line of pink ionised-air slammed past me like a piston, ozone hitting my nose almost before the thunderclap of the collapsing vacuum-tunnel sheared open by the beam weapon.

  I looked down. We had lost another hundred metres, but it was still too high for my tastes. I wondered how the vehicle would manage with only one arm.

  I flicked on Zebra’s rifle, praying that the weapon was not equipped with a user-recognition facility. If it was, she’d disabled it. Sensing that I was bringing the weapon to shoulder level, the sight adjusted itself to bring its retinal-projection systems into line with my eyes. I felt the weapon shiver as gyroscopes and accumulators came online, making it seem as if some magic energy coursed through it. Reserve ammo-cells weighing down my pockets like lead ballast, I waited for the retinal aiming system to adjust to my eyes so I could get off a shot. For a moment the system was confused, perhaps because it was configured for Zebra’s own peculiarly dark and equine eyes and was having trouble adjusting to my own. The retinal graphics kept springing up, almost focusing—and then crashing in a morass of indecipherable error symbols.

  Another line of pink air ripped past me, then another, gouging a silver scratch in the side of the cable-car. The stench of hot metal and plastic filled the cabin for an instant.

  “Shit,” I said. The retinal system was down, but it wasn’t as if my target was halfway to the horizon, or that I was trying for pinpoint precision. I just wanted to shoot the bastards out of the sky, and if the act ended up being rather messy and involving more than the usual amount of collateral damage, so be it.

  I squeezed off a shot, feeling the beam-recoil nudge my shoulder.

  My own beam-trail knifed backward, just missing the closest car. That was good. I had intended to just miss, on my
first shot. I drew some return fire, throwing myself back into the cabin while the shot lanced past. Now I was forcing my opponent to spread his fire, forcing him to choose between disabling my vehicle and taking me out. I leaned out, shouldered the weapon in one quick fluid movement, something almost beneath conscious thought, and this time I wasn’t planning on missing.

  I fired.

  Because I was aiming for the front of the closest vehicle, I had an easier, more vulnerable target than my opponent. I watched the lead cable-car blow apart in a grey cloud of fused innards. The driver must have died instantly, I assumed, but the gunner had fallen out of the car during the first instant of the explosion. I watched the black-clad figure plummet towards the Mulch, weapon dropping alongside, and then heard nothing as the person hit the ground amidst a confusion of stalls and lashed-together dwelling places.

  Something felt wrong. I could feel it coming; unravelling into mind. Another Haussmann episode. I fought it; tried desperately to anchor myself to the present, but it was already as if a second, faint layer of reality was trying to settle over me.

  “Go to hell,” I said.

  The other car loitered, continuing its descent for a moment, then turning around with a quick and elegant exchange of cable-arms. I watched it rise to the Canopy, and then—for the first time since I had become aware of the attack—realised that the siren was still shrieking in the cabin. Except that now it had gained a new level of urgency.

  I placed the weapon down, then navigated the bucking car to the control chair. I could feel the Haussmann episode clawing its way to the front of my head, like a seizure on the point of happening.

  The ground was coming up too fast. We were almost dropping, I realised—probably just skimming down a single strand of cable. People, rickshaws and animals were fleeing the area below, although with no real agreement on where it was I was likely to touch down. I got into the chair and worked the controls, largely randomly, hoping that there was something I could do which would level off the rate of descent. And then the ground was so close I could read the expressions on the Mulch people below and none of them looked overjoyed at my arrival.