Chasm City rs-2

by Alastair Reynolds

  I thought about giving Chanterelle the sanitised version of my story—before realising that there was no sanitised version. So I explained about my soldiering days, and how I had fallen into Cahuella’s orbit. I told her that Cahuella was a man of both power and cruelty, but not genuinely evil since he was also a man of trust and loyalty. It was not hard to respect him and to want to earn his respect in return. I suppose there was something very primitive about the relationship between Cahuella and me: he was a man who desired excellence in everything around him—in his surroundings; in the accoutrements he collected; in the way he chose his sexual partners, like Gitta. He also desired excellence in his employees. I considered myself a fine soldier, bodyguard, liege, man-at-arms, assassin; whatever label suited. But only in Cahuella could I measure my excellence against any kind of absolute.

  “A bad man, but not a monster?” Chanterelle said. “And that was enough reason for you to work for him?”

  “He also paid pretty well,” I said.

  “Mercenary bastard.”

  “There was something else, too. I was valuable to him because I had experience. He wasn’t willing to risk losing that wisdom by placing me in situations of undue danger. So a lot of the work I did for him was purely advisory—I hardly ever had to carry a weapon. We had real bodyguards for that; younger, fitter, stupider versions of myself.”

  “And how did the man you saw in Escher Heights come into it?”

  “The man’s name is Argent Reivich,” I said. “He used to live on Sky’s Edge. The family name’s rather well established there.”

  “It’s also an old name in the Canopy.”

  “I’m not surprised. If Reivich already had connections here, that would explain why he managed to infiltrate the Canopy so quickly, when I was still getting soaked down in the Mulch.”

  “You’re getting ahead of yourself. What brought Reivich here? And you, for that matter?”

  I told her how Cahuella’s weapons had fallen into the wrong hands, and how those wrong hands had used them against Reivich’s family. How Reivich had traced the arms back to my employer, and his determination to exact revenge.

  “That’s rather honourable of him, don’t you think?”

  “I have no quarrel with Reivich about that,” I said. “But if I’d done it, I’d have made sure everyone died. That was his one mistake; the one I can’t forgive him for.”

  “You can’t forgive him for leaving you alive?”

  “It wasn’t an act of mercy, Chanterelle. Quite the opposite. The bastard wanted me to suffer for failing Cahuella.”

  “Sorry, but the logic’s just a little too tortuous for me.”

  “He killed Cahuella’s wife—the woman I should have been protecting. Then he left Cahuella, Dieterling and me alive. Dieterling was lucky—he looked dead. But Reivich deliberately left Cahuella and me alive. He wanted Cahuella to punish me for letting Gitta die.”

  “Did he?”

  “Did he what?”

  She sounded like she was about to lose patience with me. “Did Cahuella do anything to you afterwards?”

  The question seemed simple enough to answer. No, obviously, he hadn’t—because Cahuella had died afterwards. His injuries had eventually killed him, even though they hadn’t appeared particularly life-threatening at the time.

  So why did I find it difficult to answer Chanterelle? Why did my tongue stumble on the obvious, and something else come to mind? Something that made me doubt that Cahuella had died?

  Finally I said, “It never came to that. But I had to live with my shame. I guess that was a kind of punishment in its own right.”

  “But it didn’t have to have happened that way; not from Reivich’s perspective.”

  We were passing through a part of the Canopy now that resembled a solid map of the alveoli in a lung: endlessly branching globules, bridged by dark filaments of what might have been coagulated blood.

  “How could it have been otherwise?” I said.

  “Maybe Reivich spared you because with you it wasn’t personal. He knew that you were just an employee and that his argument wasn’t with you but with Cahuella.”

  “Nice idea.”

  “And just possibly the right one. Has it occurred to you that you don’t have to kill this man at all, and that you might owe him your life?”

  I was beginning to tire of this particular line of debate.

  “No, it hadn’t—for the pure and simple reason that it’s completely irrelevant. I don’t care what Reivich thought of me when he decided to let me live—whether it was intended as a punishment or an act of mercy. It doesn’t matter at all. What matters is that he did kill Gitta, and that I swore to Cahuella that I’d avenge her death.”

  “Avenge her death.” She smiled humourlessly. “It’s all so conveniently mediaeval, isn’t it? Feudal honour and bonds of trust. Oaths of fealty and vengeance. Have you checked the calendar recently, Tanner?”

  “Don’t even pretend to understand any of this, Chanterelle.”

  She shook her head vehemently. “If I did, I’d start worrying about my sanity. What in hell’s name have you come here for—to satisfy some ridiculous promise, an eye for an eye?”

  “Now you put it like that, I don’t see it as being particularly laughable.”

  “No, it’s not remotely laughable, Tanner. It’s tragic.”

  “To you, maybe.”

  “To anyone with an angstrom of detachment. Do you realise how much time will have passed by the time you get back to Sky’s Edge?”

  “Don’t treat me like a child, Chanterelle.”

  “Answer my damned question.”

  I sighed, wondering how I had let things get so far out of control. Had our friendship just been an anomaly; an excursion away from the natural state of things?

  “At least three decades,” I replied, as if the time I was expressing was of no consequence at all, like a matter of weeks. “And before you ask, I’m well aware of how much could change in that time. But not the important things. They’ve already changed, and much as I wish they would, they won’t change back. Gitta’s dead. Dieterling’s dead. Mirabel’s dead.”

  “What?”

  “I said Cahuella’s dead.”

  “No, you didn’t. You said Mirabel’s dead.”

  I watched the city slide by outside, my mind buzzing, wondering what kind of state my head must be in for a slip of the tongue like that. That wasn’t the kind of mistake you could easily ascribe to fatigue. The Haussmann virus was clearly having a worse effect on me than I’d dared assume: it had gone beyond simply infecting my waking hours with shards of Sky’s life and times and was beginning to interfere with my most basic assumptions about my own identity, undermining my perception of self. And yet… even that was a comforting assumption. The Mendicants had told me their therapy would burn out the virus before too long… yet the Sky episodes were becoming more insistent. And why would the Haussmann virus bother making me confuse events that had happened in my own past, rather than Sky’s? Why did it care if I confused Mirabel with myself?

  No. Not Mirabel. Cahuella.

  Disturbed—not wanting to remember the dream I’d had, of the time when I’d been looking down on the man in the white room with the missing foot—I tried to recapture the thread of the conversation.

  “All I’m saying is…”

  “What?”

  “All I’m saying is, that when I get back, I’m not expecting to find what I left. But it won’t be any worse. The people who mattered to me were already dead.”

  The Haussmann virus was really screwing me up.

  I was starting to see Sky as myself and Tanner Mirabel was increasingly becoming… what? A detached third person, not really me at all?

  I remembered my confusion at Zebra’s, after I had been playing the chess game over in my mind, time and time again. How sometimes I appeared to win and sometimes I appeared to lose.

  But it had always been the same game.

  That must have
been the start of it. The slip of the tongue just meant that the process had taken a step beyond my dreams, just like the Haussmann virus.

  Disturbed, I tried to recapture the thread of the conversation.

  “All I’m saying is, when I get back, I’m not expecting to find what I left. But it won’t be any worse. The people who mattered to me were dead before I left.”

  “I think it’s about satisfaction,” she said. “Like in the old experientials, where the nobleman throws down his glove and says he demands satisfaction. That’s how you function. I thought it was absurd at first, when I used to indulge in those experientials. I thought it was too comical to even be part of history. But I was wrong. It wasn’t just part of history. It was still alive and well, reincarnated in Tanner Mirabel.” She had replaced her cat’s-eye mask now, an act which served to focus attention onto the sneer of her mouth, a mouth I suddenly wanted to kiss, even though I knew the moment—if it had ever existed—was gone for ever. “Tanner demands satisfaction. And he’s going to go to any lengths to get it. No matter how absurd. No matter how stupid or pointless, or how much of a prick he ends up making himself look.”

  “Please don’t insult me, Chanterelle. Not for what I believe in.”

  “It’s got nothing to do with belief, you pompous oaf. It’s just stupid male pride.” Her eyes narrowed to slits and her voice took on a new vindictiveness which I still managed to find attractive, from some quiet retreat where I observed our argument like a neutral spectator. “Tell me one thing, Tanner. One little thing which in all of this you haven’t explained.”

  “Only the best for you, little rich girl.”

  “Oh, very incisive. Don’t give up the day job for the cut and thrust of debate, Tanner—your rapier wit might be too much for all of us.”

  “You were about to ask me a question.”

  “It’s about this boss of yours—Cahuella. He felt this urge to hunt for Reivich himself, when he learned that Reivich was moving south towards the—what did you call it? The Reptile House?”

  “Go on,” I said, testily.

  “So why didn’t Cahuella feel he had to end the job? Surely the fact that Reivich killed Gitta would have made it even more of a personal thing for Cahuella. Even more a case of—dare I say it — demanding satisfaction?”

  “Get on with it.”

  “I’m wondering why I’m talking to you, and not Cahuella. Why didn’t Cahuella come here?”

  I found it hard to answer, at least not to my own satisfaction. Cahuella had been a hard man, but he had never been a soldier. There were skills which I had learned on a level below recall, which Cahuella simply lacked—and would have taken half a lifetime to gain. He knew weapons, but he did not really know war. His understanding of tactics and strategy was strictly theoretical—he played the game well, and understood the subtleties buried in its rules—but he had never been thrown into the dirt by the concussion of a shell, or seen a part of himself lying beyond reach on the ground, quivering like a beached jellyfish. Experiences like that did not necessarily improve one — but they certainly changed one. But would any of those deficits have handicapped him? This was not war, after all. And I had hardly come well equipped for it myself. It was a sobering thought, but I found it hard to entirely dismiss the idea that Cahuella might have already succeeded by now.

  So why had I come here, rather than him?

  “He would have found it difficult to get off the planet,” I said. “He was a war criminal. His freedom of movement was restricted.”

  “He’d have found a way round it,” Chanterelle said.

  The troubling thing was, I thought she was right. And it was the last thing in the world I wanted to think about.

  “It’s been nice knowing you, Tanner. I think.”

  “Chanterelle, don’t—”

  As the door of the cable-car sealed us from each other, I saw her shake her head, expressionless behind that mask of cattish indifference. Her cable-car lofted, hauling itself away with a series of whisking noises, underpinned by the musical creaking as the cables stressed and released like catgut.

  At least she had resisted the temptation to dump me in the Mulch.

  But she had dumped me in a part of the Canopy I had no knowledge of. What exactly had I been expecting? I suppose, somewhere at the back of my mind was the thought that we might have ended up sharing a bed by the end of the evening. Given that we had commenced our affair by pointing weapons at each other and trading threats, it would certainly have been an unanticipated coda. She was beautiful enough as well—less exotic than Zebra; perhaps less sure of herself—a trait which undoubtedly brought out the protector in me. She would have laughed in my face at that—stupid male pride—and of course she would have been correct. But so what. I liked her, and if I needed justification for that attraction, it hardly mattered how irrational it was.

  “Damn you, Chanterelle,” I said, without very much conviction.

  She had left me on a landing ledge, similar to the touchdown point outside Escher Heights, but significantly less busy—Chanterelle’s car had been the only one here, and now that was gone. A muted rain was descending, like a constant moist exhalation from some great dragon poised over the Canopy.

  I walked to the edge, feeling Sky come down with the rain.

  TWENTY-NINE

  He was doing his rounds of the sleepers.

  Sky and Norquinco were far along one of the train tunnels that stretched along the ship’s spine, their feet clanging against catwalked flooring. Occasionally strings of robot freight pods clattered past along the track, ferrying supplies to and from the small band of technicians who lived at the far end of the ship, studying the engines night and day like worshipping acolytes. Here came one now, its orange hazard lights flashing as it rumbled towards them. The train almost filled the corridor. Sky and Norquinco stepped into a recess while the shipment went past. Sky noticed Norquinco slipping something into a shirt pocket, a piece of paper covered with what looked like a series of numbers partially crossed-out.

  “Come on,” Sky said. “I want to make it to node three before the next shipment comes along.”

  “No problem,” the other man said. “The next one isn’t due for… seventeen minutes.”

  Sky looked at him oddly. “You know that?”

  “Of course. They do run to a timetable, Sky.”

  “Of course; I knew that. I just couldn’t see why anyone in their right mind would actually memorise the times.”

  They walked on in silence to the next node. This far from the main living areas, the ship was uncommonly quiet, with hardly any sound of air-pumps or any of the other chugging systems of lifesupport. The sleepers, for all that they needed constant cybernetic supervision, drew very little power from the ship’s grid. The momios” refrigeration systems did not have to work hard, for the sleepers had been deliberately situated close to naked space; slumbering only metres from the absolute chill of interstellar vacuum. Sky wore a thermal suit, his breath blasting out in white gouts with each exhalation. Periodically he lifted the hood over his head until he felt warm again. Norquinco, by contrast, kept his hood permanently up.

  It was a long time since he’d had any contact with Norquinco. They had barely spoken since Balcazar’s death, after which Sky had spent time establishing himself in a position of considerable seniority within the crew. From head of security he had moved to overall third-in-command, and now second-in-command, with only Ramirez standing between him and absolute control of the Santiago. Constanza was still problematic, of course, even though he had relegated her to a minor role in security—but he would not allow her to upset his plans. In the new regime, Captain was an extremely precarious position. A state of cold war existed between all the ships; internal shipboard politics were a web of paranoia in which errors of judgement were punished mercilessly. It would take only one carefully engineered scandal to oust Ramirez; murdering him would begin to look just a little too suspicious. Sky had something in mind; a scandal
that would remove Ramirez and provide a convenient cover for his own plans.

  They reached the node and descended to one of the six sleeper modules situated at that point on the spine. Each module held ten berths, and accessing each berth was itself an awkward process, so it wasn’t possible to visit more than a small fraction of the momios in a single day. Yet throughout his climb to second-in-command, Sky had never allowed himself to spend too much time away from the sleepers.

  The task of visiting them all, checking on their progress, had, however, become easier with each year. Now and then one of the sleeper berths failed, ensuring that the momio could never be revived. Sky had mapped the dead laboriously, noting clusters which might signify some rogue support system. But by and large the deaths were distributed randomly along the spine. It was all that could be expected from such ancient machinery, both delicate and highly experimental at the time the Flotilla had departed. Messages from back home suggested that they had made great improvements in cryonics technology—advances which would have made these sleeper caskets look scarcely more civilised than Egyptian sarcophagi. But that didn’t help anyone on the Flotilla. It was far too risky to try to improve the existing berths.

  Sky and Norquinco crawled through the hull until they reached the first sleeper module. They emerged into one of the ten berths spaced around its circumference. Sensing them, pressure had flooded into the chamber, lights warmed and status displays came alive, but it remained deathly cold.

  “This one’s dead, Sky…”

  “I know.” Norquinco had not visited many of the sleepers before; this was the first time Sky had felt it necessary to have him along. “I marked this one down as a failure on one of my earlier inspections.”

  The casket’s warning icons were pulsing all the shades of hell, to no avail. The glass cover remained hermetic, and Sky had to peer close to satisfy himself that the sleeper really was dead, and not about to become the victim of malfunctioning readouts. But there was no arguing with the mummified form he glimpsed within. He glanced at the sleeper’s nameplate, checked it against his list and was satisfied that his judgement before had been wise.