There were two women and two men, and as they came closer I saw that their masks were a combination of theatrical decoration and practicality. The two women both wore cat masks: long tapering feline eyeslits packed with specialised lenses. Their gloves were clawed, and when their black, high-backed cloaks parted, I saw that their clothes were patterned in tiger stripes and leopard spots. Then I realised that they were not clothes at all, but furred synthetic skin, and that those clawed gloves were not gloves but unsheathed hands. One of the women grinned, flashing jewelled fangs, sharing a cruel joke with her friends. The men were not so ostentatiously transformed, their animal personae derived solely from their costumes. The nearest man had a bear’s head, his own face peering from under the bear’s upper jaw. His companion’s face sported two ugly, faceted insect eyes which constantly caught and refracted the light of the suspended Canopy.
I waited until they were twenty metres from my place of hiding, then made my move, sprinting across their path in a low, crablike crouch, convinced that none of them would get their weapons onto me in time. I was right, although they were better than I had thought they would be, scything the water behind my heels, but not quite reaching me until I had found shelter on the other side of the street.
“It’s not him,” I heard one of them say, probably one of the women. “He’s not meant to be here!”
“Whoever it was needs a good shooting, that’s all I know. Fan out; we’ll get the little shit.”
“I’m telling you, it isn’t him! He should be three blocks south—and even if it was him, why would he leave shelter?”
“We were about to find him, that’s why.”
“He was too fast. Mulch aren’t usually so fast.”
“So you’ve got a challenge. You complaining?”
I risked a view around the edge of my protective niche. A bolt of lightning had chosen that moment to strike; they were framed for me in complete clarity.
“I just saw him!” I heard the other woman shout, and now I heard the whine of an energy-discharge, followed by a burst of projectile weapons fire farting across the night.
“There’s something funny with his eyes,” the first woman said. “They were glowing in his face!”
“Now you’re getting spooked, Chanterelle.” It was the voice of one of the men, maybe the ursine one, very close now. I still held the mental image of them in my mind, burned into my memory, but I ran the image forward in my head, allowing them to walk to where I now knew they would be, like actors following stage instructions. Then I moved from my cover, squeezing off three shots, three precise squeaks from the gun, barely having to re-aim, since the view I saw agreed so well with the image in my head. I shot low, dropping three of the four with shots to the thigh, deliberately aiming wide with the last one, and then swung myself back behind the wall.
You don’t take a thigh shot and keep standing. Maybe it was my imagination, but I think I heard three separate splashes as they impacted with the water. It was rather hard to tell, since the other thing you seldom do after you’ve taken a thigh shot is remain silent. The wound I had taken the night before had been reasonably painless by comparison, executed with precision, by a duelling beam-weapon with a very narrow spread. Even so, I hadn’t exactly enjoyed the experience.
My gamble was that the three on the ground were essentially out of play, unable to aim their weapons even if they hadn’t dropped them out of reach. They might try to fire a few pot-shots in my general direction, but—like the woman who had, shot me in the leg—they were not using the kinds of weapon which forgave inaccuracy. As for the fourth, she figured in my plans, which was why she wasn’t currently emptying her soul into a puddle of warm rain.
I stepped out of cover, making sure my gun was conspicuous—no mean feat, given its size, and I began to wish I also had Zebra’s huge club of a rifle for moral support.
“S… stop,” the woman who was standing said. “Stop, or I’ll drop you.”
She was twelve to fifteen metres from me, her weapon still trained in roughly my direction: Miss Leopardskin with the spotted cat’s-eye mask, only now her saunter had lost most of its cattiness.
“Put down the toy,” I said. “Or I put it down for you.”
If she’d stopped to contemplate the wounds I’d inflicted on her whimpering friends, it might have occurred to her that I was a more than averagely good shot and therefore capable of doing exactly what I said. But evidently she wasn’t the contemplative type, because what she did was to minutely raise the angle of her gun, and I watched her supporting forearm tense as if in anticipation of the recoil from the shot.
So I fired first, and her gun went spinning out of her hand with a chime of ricocheting ice-slugs. She made a little canine yelp, hastily examining her hand to check that she still had all her fingers.
I was insulted. Who did she think I was, some kind of amateur?
“Good,” I said. “You’ve dropped it. How wise; it’ll save me putting a slug through your brachial nerve. Now step away from your piss-poor excuses for friends and start walking back towards the vehicle.”
“They’re hurt, you bastard.”
“Look on the bright side. They could be dead.” And they would be too, I thought, if they didn’t reach help in the reasonably imminent future. The water around them was already assuming an ominous cherry-coloured complexion, in what little light there remained. “Do what I told you,” I said. “Walk towards the cable-car and we’ll take it from there. You can call for help once we’re airborne. Of course, if they’re very lucky, someone from the Mulch may get to them first.”
“You piece of shit,” she said. “Whoever you are.”
Dodging my gun between the woman and her moaning friends, I trudged between the bodies, examining them out of the corner of my eye. “Hope none of them have implants,” I said. “Because I hear the Mulch people like to harvest, and I’m not sure they’re too particular about going through paperwork first.”
“You piece of shit.”
“Why are you so upset with me, just because I had the nerve to fight back?”
“You’re not the target,” she said. “I don’t know who you are, but you’re not the target.”
“Who are you, incidentally?” I tried to remember the one name I had heard the hunting quartet use. “Chanterelle? Is that your name? Very aristocratic. I bet your family was high in the Demarchy before the Belle Epoque went belly-up.”
“Don’t imagine you understand anything about me or my life.”
“As if I wanted to.” I leaned down and retrieved one of the rifles, inspecting its readout cartouches to ascertain that it was still functional. I felt edgy, even though I had the situation essentially under control. I had the feeling—indefinable, but present nonetheless—that another of their number had lurked behind the main party, was even now scoping me out through the sight of something high-powered and unsportingly accurate. But I tried not to let it show. “I’m afraid you were set up, Chanterelle. Here. Look at the side of my head. Can you see it? There’s a wound there, for an implant. But it never functioned properly.” I took a risk, assuming that Waverly would have done the work on the real victim before he died, or would have been replaced at short notice by an equally surly understudy. “You were tricked. The man was working for saboteurs. He wanted to lead you into a trap. So the implant was modified, so that the positional trace was no longer accurate.” I grinned cockily, though I had no idea whether such a thing was possible. “You thought I was blocks from here, so you weren’t expecting an ambush. You also weren’t expecting me to be armed, but—hey—some days you get the bear.” Then I glanced down at her ursine friend. “No, sorry—my mistake. Today I got the bear, didn’t I?”
The man thrashed in the water, his palms clenched around his thigh. He started to say something, but I kicked him quiet.
Chanterelle had almost reached the black wedge of the cable-car. A large part of my gamble depended on the vehicle being empty, but it was only now that
I felt reasonably sure that the risk had paid off and there was no one hiding inside.
“Get in,” I said. “And don’t try any funny tricks; I’m not known for my massive sense of humour.”
The car was sumptuously laid out, with four plush maroon seats, a glittering control panel and a well-appointed drinks cabinet ensconced in one wall, along with a rack of gleaming weapons and trophies. Keeping the gun aimed at the back of her neck, I had Chanterelle take us aloft.
“I presume you have a destination in mind,” she said.
“Yes, but for now I just want you to find a nice altitude and loiter. You can give me a tour of the city, if you like. It’s a wonderful night for it.”
“You’re right,” Chanterelle said. “You’re not known for your sense of humour. In fact you’re about as hilarious as the Melding Plague.” But after delivering this bon mot she grudgingly laid in a course and let the car do its swinging thing before turning around slowly to face me. “Who are you, really, and what do you want with me?”
“I’m who I said I was—someone brought into your little game to add some well-needed equality.”
Her hand moved quickly to the side of my head—evidence of either bravery or considerable stupidity, given the proximity of my gun to her skull, and my demonstrated eagerness to use it.
She rubbed the place where Dominika had excised the hunt implant.
“It’s not there,” Chanterelle said. “If it ever was.”
“Then Waverly lied to me as well.” I observed her face for an anomalous reaction, but my use of the man’s name did not seem to strike her as unreasonable. “He never put the device in at all.”
“Then who were we following?”
“How am I supposed to know? You don’t use the implants to track your prey, do you? Or is that some new refinement I wasn’t aware of?” As I spoke, the car made one of its intermittent sickening swoops, leaping between cables which were just a shade too far apart for comfort.
Chanterelle did not even flinch.
“Do you mind if I call for help for my friends?”
“Be my guest,” I said.
She sounded more nervous making the call than at any point since we had met. Instead Chanterelle spun a story about going down into the Mulch to film a documentary she was making, and how she and her friends had been waylaid by a gang of vicious juvenile pigs. She said this with such conviction that I almost believed it myself.
“I’m not going to harm you,” I said, wondering how plausible I sounded. “I just want some information from you—information of a very general nature, which it won’t hurt you to provide—and then I want you to take me somewhere in the Canopy.”
“I don’t trust you.”
“Of course you don’t. I know I wouldn’t. And I’m not asking you to. I’m not putting you in a situation in which your trust of me is even remotely relevant. I’m just pointing a gun to your head and giving you orders.” I licked my lips, thirsty and dry. “You either do what I say or you get to redecorate the interior of this car with your cranium. It’s not the hardest choice in the world, is it?”
“What do you want to know?”
“Tell me about the Game, Chanterelle. I’ve heard Waverly’s side of it, and what he said sounded very reasonable, but I want to be sure I’m getting the whole picture. You’re capable of that, aren’t you?”
As it was, Chanterelle was eloquent. Part of this I put down to the natural helpfulness which befalls anyone with a gun at their head. But a lot more of it, I thought, stemmed from the fact that Chanterelle rather liked the sound of her own voice. And I could not really fault her for that. It was a very nice voice and it came out of a very comely head.
Her family line was Sammartini, which I learned was one of the major clans in the pre-plague power-structure, a lineage which extended right back to the Amerikano era. Families who could trace their descents that far back were highly regarded; the closest thing to Royalty in the rarefied heights of Belle Epoque society.
Her family had connections with the most famous clan of all, the Sylvestes. I remembered Sybilline telling me about Calvin, the man who had resurrected the forgotten and discredited technologies of neural scanning which enabled the living to be translated—fatally, as it happened—into immortal computer simulations of themselves.
Of course, it hadn’t really bothered the Transmigrants that their bodies were destroyed in the course of the scanning. But when the simulations themselves started to fail, no one was quite so happy. There had been seventy-nine volunteers in the first wave of Transmigrants—eighty if you counted Calvin himself—and the majority of those simulations had stopped running long before the plague began to attack the logical substrates on which they were being computed. To commemorate the dead, they had built a vast and dejected Monument to the Eighty in the centre of the city, where shrines of the departed were tended by those relatives who remained corporeal. It was still there, after the plague had come.
The family of Chanterelle Sammartini were amongst the commemorated. “But we were lucky,” she said, almost chattily. “The Sammartini scans were amongst the five per cent which never failed, and because my grandmother and father already had children, our lineage persisted corporeally.”
I tried to get my head around this. Her family had bifurcated—one thread of it propagating in simulation, the other in what we laughingly called actuality. And to Chanterelle Sammartini this was no more or less usual than as if she had relatives who lived overseas, or in another part of the system. “Because there was no stigma,” she said, “our family sponsored further research, picking up where Calvin left off. Our ties with House Sylveste had always been close, and we had access to most of his research data. We made breakthroughs very quickly. Nonlethal modes of scanning.” Her tone of voice changed, querulously. “Why do you want to know this? If you’re not Mulch, you must be Canopy. In which case you already know what I’m telling you.”
“Why do you assume I’m not Mulch?”
“You’re clever, or at least not irredeemably stupid. That isn’t a compliment, incidentally. It’s simply an observation.”
Evidently the idea that I might be from beyond the system was so outside Chanterelle’s accepted norms that it did not even enter her head.
“Why don’t you just entertain me. Have you been scanned, Chanterelle?”
Now she really looked at me as if I was stupid. “Of course.”
“Interactive scans—what do you call them?”
“Alpha-level simulations.”
“So there’s a simulation of you running right now, somewhere in the city?”
“In orbit, idiot. The technology which facilitates the scans would never have survived the plague if it hadn’t been quarantined.”
“Of course, silly me.”
“I go up six or seven times a year for a refresh. It’s like a little holiday, visiting Refuge. That’s a habitat high above the Rust Belt, safe from any plague spore. And then I have the scan and my last two or three months of experience are assimilated by the simulation of me which is already running. I don’t think of her as a copy of me any more. She’s more like an older and wiser sister who knows everything which has ever happened to me—as if she’s been looking over my shoulder my whole life.”
“It must be very reassuring,” I said, “to know that even if you die, you won’t really be dying at all; just dispensing with one mode of existence. Except none of you even die physically, do you?”
“That might have been true before the plague. It isn’t now.”
I thought back to what Zebra had said. “What about you? You’re not a hermetic, obviously. Were you one of the immortals who were born with genes for extreme longevity?”
“Mine weren’t the worst you could inherit, if that’s what you mean.”
“But not the best, either,” I said. “Which means you were probably still reliant on machines in your blood and cells to keep correcting nature’s little mistakes. Am I right?”
“It doesn’t take a massive deductive leap.”
“And those machines? What happened to them after the plague?” I looked down as we passed over a suspended railway line, one of the quadrilaterally symmetric steam locomotives sliding through the night with a string of carriages behind it, bound for some remote district of the city. “Did you have them self-destruct, before plague spore reached them? I gather that’s what most of your kind had to do.”
“What business is it of yours?”
“I’m just wondering whether you’re a Dream Fuel user, that’s all.”
But Chanterelle did not answer me directly. “I was born in 2339. I’m one hundred and seventy-eight standard years old. I’ve seen wonders you can’t even imagine, terrors that would make you shrivel. I’ve played at being God, explored the parameters of that game, and then moved beyond it, like a child discarding a simplistic plaything. I’ve seen this city shift and change a thousand times, becoming ever more beautiful—ever more radiant—with each transformation, and I’ve seen it change into something vile and dark and poisonous, and I’ll still be here when it claws its way back to the light, whether that’s a century or a thousand years from now. Do you think I would discard immortality that easily, or confine myself to a ridiculous metal box like some cowering child?” Behind her cat’s-eye mask, her own vertically pupilled eyes flared ecstatically. “God, no. I’ve drunk from that fire, and it’s a thirst you never quench. Can you grasp the thrill that it is to walk in the Mulch, amidst so much strangeness, unprotected, knowing that the machines are still inside me? It’s a savage thrill; like firewalking or swimming with sharks.”
“Is that why you play the Game as well? Because it’s another savage thrill?”
“What do you think?”
“I think you used to be more bored than you remember. That’s why you play, isn’t it? That’s what I gathered from Waverly. By the time the plague hit, you and your friends had exhausted every legal experience society could offer you, every experience that could possibly be staged or simulated, every game or adventure or intellectual challenge.” I looked at her, daring her to contradict me. “But it was never enough, was it? You were never testing your own mortality. Never confronting it. You could leave the system, of course—plenty of danger and excitement and potential glory out there—but if you did that, you’d be leaving behind the support system of your friends; the culture in which you grew up.”
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