Chasm City rs-2

by Alastair Reynolds

  I tried to feel betrayal, but nothing came. It wasn’t as if I’d been honest with Zebra myself, after all.

  “Actually,” I said, looking at Zebra’s face again, and thinking how easily she’d changed herself, “there is another possibility.”

  “Which is?”

  “That the man I saw wasn’t Reivich at all.” And then I put down the empty coffee cup and stood up.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Out.”

  We cabled to Escher Heights.

  The car nudged down, its retractable legs kissing the rain-slick ground of the ledge. There was more traffic now than when I had last visited the place—it was daytime, after all—and the costumes and anatomies of the strollers were fractionally less ostentatious, as if I was seeing a different cross-section of Canopy society, the more reserved citizens who eschewed nights of delirious pleasure-fulfilment. But they were still extreme by any standards I had defined before arriving here, and while there was no one whose proportions deviated radically from the basic adult human norm, within that boundary every possible permutation was on display. Once you got beyond the obvious cases of outlandish skin pigmentation and body hair, it was not always possible to tell what was hereditary and what was the work of Mixmasters or their shadier kin.

  “I hope there’s a point to this excursion,” Zebra said as we disembarked. “In case you’ve forgotten, there are two people following you. You say they might be working for Reivich, but don’t forget Waverly had his friends as well.”

  “Would Waverly’s friends be arriving from offworld?”

  “Probably not. Unless they were just posing as offworlders, like Quirrenbach.” She closed the door of the car behind her and the vehicle immediately took itself off on some other errand. “He might have come back with reinforcements. It would make sense for him to try and pick up the trail in Dominika’s, if that’s where you lost Quirrenbach in the first place. Wouldn’t it?”

  “It would make perfect sense,” I said, hoping that I had kept the edge from my voice.

  We walked to the rim of the landing ledge, to one of the pedestalmounted telescopes. The railing which encircled the ledge was chesthigh, but the telescopes all had little plinths at their bases, which meant that one was standing further from the ground, the drop all the more vertiginous. I cupped the end of the telescope to my eyes and panned around an arc of the city, struggling with the focus wheel until I realised that nothing would ever be in focus when there was so much murk in the air. Compressed by perspective, the tangle of the Canopy looked ever more complex and vegetative, like a cross-section through densely veined tissue. Reivich was out there, I knew, somewhere in that tangle; a single corpuscle caught in the pulmonary flow of the city.

  “See anything?” Zebra asked.

  “Nothing yet.”

  “You sound tense, Tanner.”

  “Wouldn’t you be tense, in my position?” I slammed the scope round on its pedestal. “I’ve been sent here to kill someone who probably doesn’t deserve it, and my only justification for it is some absurd adherence to a code of honour no one here understands or even respects. The man I’ve been sent to kill might be taunting me. Two other people might be trying to kill me. I’ve got one or two problems with my memories. And on top of that one of the people I thought I could trust has been lying to me all along.”

  “I don’t follow,” Zebra said, but it was obvious from the tone of her voice that she did; more than sufficiently. She did not necessarily understand, but she did follow.

  “You aren’t who you say you are, Zebra.”

  The wind whipped at us, almost snatching her answer away. “What?”

  “You’re working for Reivich, aren’t you?”

  She shook her head angrily, almost laughing at the ludicrousness of the assertion, but she overdid it. I was not the world’s best liar, but neither was Zebra. The two of us should have started a self-help group.

  “You’re mad, Tanner. I always thought you were a little on the edge, but now I know. You’re over it. Way over.”

  “The night you found me,” I said, “you were working for him even then, from the very first moment we met. The sabotage story was a cover—a pretty good one, I have to say, but a cover nonetheless.” I stepped down from the plinth, suddenly feeling vulnerable, as if a particularly strong gust might cast me over for the long fall down to the Mulch. “Maybe I really was kidnapped by Gameplayers. But you already had your eye on me before then. I’d assumed I’d shaken the tail Reivich put on me—Quirrenbach—but there must have been someone else, keeping more distance so they weren’t so obvious. But you lost me until Waverly put the hunt implant in my skull. Then you had a way of tracking me again. How am I doing so far?”

  “Insane, Tanner.” But there was no conviction in her words.

  “Do you want to know how I realised? Apart from all the little details which just didn’t add up?”

  “Astonish me.”

  “You shouldn’t have mentioned Quirrenbach. I never said his name. In fact, I was very careful not to, just in case you made a slip and it came out. Seems my luck was in.”

  “You bastard.” She said it sweetly, so that—to anyone watching us from a distance—it might have been a term of affection, the kind lovers give themselves. “You sly bastard, Tanner.”

  I smiled. “You could have used an excuse if you’d wanted. You could have said that Dominika mentioned his name when you asked who I’d been travelling with. I was half expecting you to do that, and I’m not quite sure I know how I’d have reacted. But it’s all moot now, isn’t it? Now we know just who you are.”

  “What were the little details, out of curiosity?”

  “Professional pride?”

  “Something like that.”

  “You made it far too easy for me, Zebra. You left your vehicle active so I could steal it. You left your weapon where I could find it, and enough money to make a difference. You wanted me to do it, didn’t you? You wanted me to steal those things, because then you’d know for sure who I was. That I’d come to kill Reivich.”

  She shrugged. “Is that all?”

  “Not really, no.” I drew Vadim’s coat tighter around myself. “It didn’t escape my attention that we made love the first time we met, despite the fact that you barely knew me. It was good too, for what it’s worth.”

  “Oh, don’t flatter me. Or yourself, for that matter.”

  “But the second time, although you seemed relieved, I wouldn’t say you were particularly happy to see me. And I didn’t feel anything sexual pass between us at all. At least not from you. It took me a while to work out why, but I think I understand now. The first time you needed intimacy, because you were hoping it would lead me into saying something incriminating. So you invited me to sleep with you.”

  “There’s such a thing as free will, Tanner. You didn’t have to go along with me, unless you want to admit your brain is ruled by your dick. And I didn’t get the impression you regretted any of that.”

  “Probably because I didn’t. I’d have been too tired if you had made any overtures the second time—but that was never on the cards, was it? You knew all you needed to by then. And the first time was strictly professional. You slept with me for information.”

  “Which I didn’t get.”

  “No, but that hardly mattered. You got it later, when I skipped with your gun and car.”

  “It’s a real sob story, isn’t it?”

  “Not from where I’m standing.” I glanced over the edge. “From where I’m standing it’s a story that might just end with you taking a very long fall, Zebra. You know I’ve come a long way to kill Reivich. Did it occur to you that I might not have too many qualms about killing anyone who tries to stop me?”

  “There’s a gun in your pocket. Use it if it’ll make you feel any better.”

  I reached for the gun to check it was still there, then kept my hand in my pocket. “I could kill you now.”

  To her credit, she mana
ged not to flinch. “Without taking your hand out of your pocket?”

  “You’re welcome to try me.” It felt like a charade; like a scripted piece we had fallen into rehearsing. It also felt like we had no choice but to follow the script to its conclusion, whatever that happened to be.

  “Do you really think you could hit me like that?”

  “It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve killed someone firing from this angle.” But, I thought, it would be the first time I had meant to do it. After all, I had not intended to kill Gitta. I was also unsure I really wanted to kill Zebra.

  Had not meant to kill Gitta…

  I’d been trying not to think about it, but like a maze with only one exit, my thoughts always meandered back to that one moment. Now, after long repression, they welled up and exploded like a gang of rowdy gatecrashers. I had not remembered it before now. Gitta had died, yes, but I had comfortably avoided thinking too closely about the manner of her death. She had died in the attack—so what else was there to think about? Nothing.

  Except the simple fact that I had killed her.

  This is what I remembered.

  Gitta awoke first. She was the first to hear the attackers as they swept past the cordon, concealed in the strobe-lighting of the electrical storm. Her yelps of fear woke me, her naked body tensing against me. I saw three of them: three silhouetted shapes cast against the fabric of the tent, like grotesqueries in a shadow theatre. When each pulse of lightning flashed, they were somewhere else—sometimes one of them, sometimes two, sometimes all three. I could hear screaming—recognising in the timbre of each exclamation one of our own people. The screams were very short and concentrated, like trumpet blasts.

  Ionisation-trails scythed through the tent and the force of the storm reached through the gashes like a creature of rain and wind. I cupped my hand across Gitta’s mouth and felt under my pillow for the gun I had placed there before retiring, satisfied when my hand detected its cool presence and found its contoured grip.

  I slipped from the bunk. No more than a second or two had passed since I had first become consciously aware of the attack.

  “Tanner?” I called, hardly able to hear my own voice against the storm’s threnody. “Tanner, where the hell are you?”

  I left Gitta under the thin caul of a blanket, shivering despite the heat and humidity.

  “Tanner?”

  My night-vision began to come online, the interior details of the ruined tent creeping into greyish clarity. It was a good modification; worth what it had cost to obtain from the Ultras. Dieterling had persuaded me to have it, after having the same mod himself. The gene splice led to a layer of reflective material—an organic substance called tapetum—being laid down behind my retinae. The tapetum reflected light back, maximising absorption. It even shifted the wavelength of the reflected light, fluorescing at the optimum sensitivity of the retinae. The Ultras had said the only drawback of the splice—if you could call it a drawback—would be that my eyes would seem to flash back at anyone who shone a bright light in my face.

  Eyeshine, they called it.

  But I rather liked the idea of that. Long before anyone saw my eyeshine, I would have already seen them.

  The splice went deeper than that, of course. They had packed my retinae with gene-tinkered rods with a photon-detection efficiency close to optimal, thanks to modified forms of the basic photosensitive chromoprotein pigments; a simple matter of tweaking a few genes on the X chromosome. I had a gene normally inherited only by women which allowed me to differentiate nuances of the colour red I had never imagined before. I even had a cluster of snake-derived cells, pits spaced around the rim of my corneas, which were capable of registering near infrared and ultraviolet, and which had grown neuronal connections back into my optic centre so that I processed the information as a visual overlay on my normal field of view, the way snakes do. But I had yet to activate the snake vision. Like all my faculties, it could be activated and suppressed by tailored retroviruses, triggering brief, controlled cancers which erected or dismantled the necessary cellular structures in a matter of days. I needed time, though, to learn the proper use of each faculty. First, enhanced night-vision. Then, later, colours beyond normal sight.

  I pushed through the partition which divided the tent, into Tanner’s part, where our chess table was still set up; still displaying the checkmate I had won against him, as I always did.

  Tanner—naked but for a pair of khaki shorts—was kneeling down at the side of his bunk, like a man tying his shoes or examining a blister on his foot.

  “Tanner?”

  He looked up toward me, his hands engulfed in something black. A moan drifted from his mouth, and as my vision sharpened I saw why. He had very little foot below the ankle, and what remained looked more like charcoal than human flesh, just as liable to shatter into black shards at the merest touch.

  Now I recognised the stink of incinerated human meat.

  He stopped moaning, quite suddenly, as if a subroutine in his mind had judged the gesture inessential to his immediate survival, cancelling the pain. And then he spoke, with ridiculous calm and accuracy.

  “I’m hurt, quite badly, as you can probably see. I don’t think I’m going to be much use to you.” And then: “What’s wrong with your eyes?”

  A figure stepped through a gash in one wall. His night-vision goggles hung around his neck and the flashlight rigged to his gun played across us, coming to rest on my face. His chameleoflage stammered towards compatibility with the interior.

  I blasted his guts open.

  “There’s nothing wrong with my eyes,” I said when the afterimage of my weapon discharge had dissolved to a thumb-shaped pink bruise in my visual field. I stepped over the corpse of the attacker, carefully refraining from placing my unshod foot in the spreading entrails. I walked over to the rifle rack, pulled down a huge but currently superfluous bosonic beam weapon—too heavy to be used against enemy this close—and tossed it onto Tanner’s bunk. “Nothing wrong with my eyes at all. Now use that as a crutch and start earning your pay. We’ll get you a new foot if we get out of it, so just think of it as a temporary loss.”

  Tanner looked from his wound to the gun and then back to the wound, as if weighing one against the other.

  Then I moved.

  I put my weight on the stock of the boser-rifle and tried to put the pain into some sealed compartment at the back of my head. My foot was ruined, but what Cahuella said was right. I could live without it—the blast had done a very professional job of cauterisation—and if I managed to survive the attack, obtaining a new foot would be a matter of a few weeks’ discomfort. In terms of mortality, I had sustained worse injuries when I was regular soldier fighting against the NCs. But my mind didn’t see it that way. What it saw was that part of me was simply not there any more, and it did not quite know how to process that absence.

  Light—hard and blue and artificial—impaled the tent. Two of the enemy—I had counted three before the dead one shot me—were still out there. Our tent was big enough that it might look as if we were a larger force than we really were, so the other two might be laying down a suppressing fire before moving in to mop up anyone they had not already taken out.

  I made my way over to the body, my vision darkening at the edges, as if seen through a tube of foreboding clouds. I knelt down until I could reach the dead man, unclipping his torch and taking his night-vision goggles. Cahuella had shot him blind, in near total darkness, and while the shot was a fraction low for my tastes, it had done the job. I remembered how, only a few hours earlier, I had watched him pump shots into the night, as if there was something there only he could see.

  “They did something to you and Dieterling,” I said, clenching my teeth as I spoke and hoping that I was comprehensible. “The Ultras…”

  “It’s nothing to them,” he said, his broad frame turning towards me like a wall. “They all have it. They live in nearly total darkness on their ships, so that they can bathe in the glories
in the universe more easily, when they’ve left sunlight behind. Are you going to live, Tanner?”

  “If any of us do.” I snapped the night-vision goggles over my eyes and saw the room brighten in hues of choleric green. “There wasn’t much blood loss, but I can’t do anything about shock. That’s bound to set in soon, and then I’m not going to be very much use to you.”

  “Get yourself a gun, something useful at close range. We’ll go and see what damage we can do.”

  “Where’s Dieterling?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he’s dead.”

  Automatically, barely having to think about it, I tugged a compact pistol from the rack, flicking its ammo-cell to readiness and hearing the shrill whine as its condensers charged up.

  Gitta screamed from the next partition.

  Cahuella pushed through ahead of me and then stopped dead just beyond the drape. I nearly knocked him over, the stock of the boser-rifle scuffling against the floor as I tried to approximate walking. I had no need for the goggles now, since the room was already lit by the tent’s glowlamp, which Gitta must have ignited. She was standing up in the middle of the space, clutching a dun-coloured blanket around her.

  One of the attackers stood behind her, one hand drawing her head back by a clump of scalp-hair, the other holding a wickedly serrated knife to the convex whiteness of her throat.

  She made no scream now. The only sounds she allowed herself were small and snatched, like someone choking.

  The man holding her had removed his helmet. He was not Reivich, just some mildly competent thug who might have fought with or against me during the war, or against both sides. His face was lined and his black hair was tied back in a topknot, like a Samurai. He was not exactly grinning—the situation was too tense for that—but there was something in his expression which suggested he was enjoying it.