Chasm City rs-2

by Alastair Reynolds

  Tanner ran towards me, his footfalls racing into the echoless gloom. Tears clouding my eyesight, I picked up the gun with my other hand and tried to aim it at him.

  I squeezed off a shot, feeling the delicate recoil of the gun. The blur of the projectile glistened past Tanner, missing him by inches. I re-aimed and squeezed the trigger again.

  The gun did nothing.

  Tanner crashed into me, kicking the useless weapon away for good measure. Forcing me to the ground, kneeling over me like a victor, he wrestled with me while I tried to stab him with the edge of the knife projecting from my palm.

  Tanner caught my wrist above my impaled hand and smiled for a second. He’d won now. He knew it. It was just a question of removing the blade from my palm and turning it against myself.

  Out of the corner of my vision I saw Reivich’s slumped corpse, his mouth agape, his few teeth catching the golden glow of the chamber.

  I remembered him tapping his teeth.

  And finally remembered the other thing Cahuella had bought from the Ultras; the transformation that went deeper than vision; the hunter’s aid he had never mentioned to Tanner Mirabel.

  What use is it to hunt in the night, if you can’t kill what you catch?

  I opened my jaw wide; wider than strict human anatomy allowed. I seemed to find a muscle inside myself that I had not known was there before; a muscle anchored high in the roof of my mouth. Something cracked in my jaw, painlessly.

  With my good arm I cradled Tanner’s head, turning his face to mine while he struggled with the knife, thinking it would do him some good.

  He looked into my mouth, and must have seen it then.

  “You’re dead,” I said. “It wasn’t just snake-vision I bought from them, you see.”

  I felt my venom glands activate, pumping poison along the microfine channels bored through my articulated fangs.

  And drew Tanner to me, like the final embrace of a long-lost brother.

  And bit deep into his neck.

  EPILOGUE

  For a long time I just stood looking out the window.

  The woman who was sitting in my office must have thought I’d forgotten she was there. I could see her face reflected in the floor-to-ceiling glass, still waiting for an answer to the question she had just asked. I hadn’t forgotten her or her question. I was just wondering how something that had once seemed so strange could now seem so familiar.

  The city hadn’t changed much since my arrival.

  It had to be me, then.

  The window was spattered by rain falling from the Mosquito Net, hard diagonal slashes of it. They said it never really stopped raining in Chasm City, and maybe that was true, but it missed the nuances that rain was capable of. Sometimes it came down straight and soft like a cool mist, alpine clean. Sometimes, when the steam dams around the chasm opened and sent pressure changes squalling across the city, it came at you sideways, lashing and acid-tongued, like defoliant.

  “Mister Mirabel…” she said.

  I turned back from the window. “I’m sorry. I got caught up in the view. Where were we?”

  “You were telling me about Sky Haussmann, how you think he…”

  She had heard most of what I was willing to tell anyone by then; how I believed Sky had emerged from hiding and remade a new life for himself as Cahuella. I suppose it was odd that I was speaking of these things at all—much less to a prospective recruit—but I’d liked her and she’d been more than usually willing to listen to me. We had finished a few pisco sours—she was from Sky’s Edge as well—and the time had slipped by.

  “Well?” I asked, interrupting her. “How much of it are you prepared to believe?”

  “I’m not sure, Mister Mirabel. How would you have found all this out, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “I met Gitta,” I said. “And she told me something which makes me think Constanza was telling the truth.”

  “You think Gitta found out who Cahuella was, before anyone else?”

  “Yes. There’s a good chance she stumbled on Constanza’s evidence, and that led her to Cahuella, even though it was at least two centuries since Sky had supposedly been executed.”

  “And when she found him?”

  “She was expecting a monster, but that wasn’t quite what she got. He wasn’t the same man Constanza had known. Gitta tried to hate him, I think, but couldn’t.”

  “What do you think made her certain she’d found him?”

  “His name, I think. He took it from the legend of the Caleuche, the ghost ship. Cahuella was its dolphin; a link to his past he couldn’t quite sever.”

  “Well, it’s certainly an interesting theory.”

  I shrugged. “Probably no more than that. You’ll hear stranger stories if you spend any time here, believe me.”

  She was a recent arrival to Yellowstone; like me a soldier, but one who had been sent here not on some errand but because of a clerical error.

  “How long have you been here, Mister Mirabel?”

  “Six years,” I said.

  I looked to the picture window. The view across the city had not changed greatly since I had returned from Refuge. The thicket of the Canopy stretched away like a section through someone’s lung: a convoluted black tangle against the brown backdrop of the Mosquito Net. They were talking about cleaning it next year.

  “That’s a long time, six years.”

  “Not for me.”

  Saying that, I thought about the time when I had come round in Refuge. I must have slipped beneath consciousness through the blood I had lost from the wound Tanner had inflicted on me, even though I had barely felt it at the time. My clothes had been slit open, a turquoise medicinal salve applied to the suture-like gash where his knife had passed through. I was lying on a couch, with one of the slender servitors eyeing me.

  I was a mass of bruises, and each breath hurt. My mouth felt strange, as if it no longer belonged to me.

  “Tanner?”

  It was Amelia’s voice. She moved into focus next to me, her face angelic, just as she had looked on the day of my revival in the Mendicant habitat.

  “That isn’t my name,” I said, startled when my voice came out perfectly normally, apart from a slight rasp of fatigue. My mouth did not feel like it should be capable of anything as subtle as language.

  “So I gather,” Amelia said. “But it’s the only one I know you by, so it will have to suffice for now.”

  I was too weak to argue, and not even sure I wanted to.

  “You saved me,” I said. “I owe you a debt of thanks.”

  “You seemed to save yourself,” she said. The room was much smaller than the one where Reivich had died, but it was illuminated in the same shade of autumnal gold and the walls were chiselled with the same intricate mathematics that I had seen elsewhere in Refuge. The light played on the snowflake she wore around her neck. “What happened to you, Tanner? What happened to make you capable of killing a man in that way?”

  Her question sounded accusatory, except for the tone in which it was delivered. She was not blaming me, I realised. Amelia appeared to recognise that I was not necessarily responsible for the horrors of my own past, any more than a waking man is responsible for the atrocities he commits in his sleep.

  “The man I was,” I said, “was a hunter.”

  “The man you were talking about? The man called Cahuella?”

  I nodded. “He had snake genes inserted into his eyes, amongst other tricks. He wanted to be able to hunt any creature in the dark on equal terms. I thought that was as far as it went. I was wrong about that.”

  “But you didn’t know?”

  “Not until it was time. Reivich knew, though. He knew Cahuella had venom glands, and the means to deliver the venom into a host. The Ultras must have told him.”

  “And he tried to tell you?”

  I moved my head up and down on the pillow. “Maybe he wanted one of us to live more than the other. I just hope he made the right choice.”

 
“Of course he did,” Zebra said.

  I turned around—painfully—to see her standing on the other side of the bed. “Reivich told the truth, then,” I said. “About the gun. You were only put to sleep.”

  “He wasn’t a bad person,” Zebra said. “He wouldn’t have wanted anyone harmed except the man who killed his family.”

  “But I’m still alive. Does that mean he failed?”

  She shook her head slowly. She looked radiant in the golden light, and I realised that I wanted her intensely, no matter how we had betrayed each other or what lay in the future; no matter that I did not even have a name by which she could call me. “I think he got what he wanted, in the end. Most of it, anyway.”

  There was something in her voice which told me she was not telling me everything she knew. “What do you mean by that?”

  “I don’t suppose anyone’s told you,” Zebra said. “But Reivich lied to all of us.”

  “About what?”

  “His scan.” She looked towards the ceiling, the lines of her face defined in golden highlights. Her skin stripes were still faintly visible. “It was a failure. It was done too hastily. He wasn’t captured.”

  I went through the motions of registering disbelief, even though I could tell Zebra was telling the truth.

  “But it can’t have failed. I spoke to the copy after he’d been scanned.”

  “You thought you did. Apparently it was just a beta-level simulation, a mockup of Reivich programmed to mimic his responses and make you think the scan had been successful.”

  “Why, though? Why did he feel the need to pretend it had worked?”

  “I think it was for Tanner’s benefit,” she said. “Reivich wanted Tanner to think everything had been in vain; that even killing Reivich’s physical body was a meaningless gesture.”

  “Except it wasn’t,” I said.

  “No. Reivich would have died anyway, sooner or later—but it was really Tanner that did it.”

  “And he knew, didn’t he? The whole time we were with Reivich, he knew he was going to die, and the scan had failed.”

  “Does that mean he won?” Zebra said. “Or did he lose everything?”

  I reached out and took her hand and squeezed it. “It doesn’t matter now. None of it matters now. Tanner, Cahuella, Reivich—they’re all dead.”

  “All of them?”

  “All of them that really matters.”

  And then I looked up into the sourceless gold light, for what seemed like an eternity, until Zebra and Amelia left me alone. I was tired; the kind of absolute weariness that feels too much a burden to escape through sleep. Sleep did come, though, eventually. And with it dreams. I had hoped it would be otherwise, but with dreaming came the white room, and the pristine horror of what had happened there; what had happened to me; what I had inflicted on myself.

  Later—much later—I returned to Chasm City. It was a long journey back, and it was interrupted by a stopover at the Mendicant habitat, where I returned Amelia to her duties. She had taken it all remarkably well, and when I offered to help her in some way—not really knowing how I could—she deflected all such intentions and asked only that I make a donation to the Ice Mendicants when I was able to.

  I promised her I would. It was a promise I held to.

  Quirrenbach, Zebra and I arranged a meeting with Voronoff upon our return to the Canopy.

  “It’s about the Game,” I said. “We’re proposing a major restructure of the whole operation.”

  “Why do you imagine it could interest me?” Voronoff yawned.

  “Hear us out,” Quirrenbach said, and started to explain the framework the three of us had worked out since our time in Refuge. It was complex, and for a while we did not seem to be getting through to Voronoff. But gradually comprehension dawned.

  He listened to what we had to say.

  And finally he said that he liked our ideas. That maybe it could be made to work.

  We proposed a new form of the hunt; something we would call Shadowplay. In essence it would be similar to the old, underground Game which the city had spawned since the plague. But in every detail it would be radically different, not the least of which would be legality. We would take the Game into the limelight, establish sponsorship rules and a framework which guaranteed coverage and commentary to whoever wanted the vicarious thrill of a manhunt. Our chasers would be more than just rich kids looking for a night’s quick thrill. They’d be hand-trained experts; hunter-assassins. We’d school them in professionalism and construct elaborate personae around them, cults of personality which would elevate the Game to the status of art. We would recruit from the best existing players, of course. Chanterelle Sammartini had already agreed to be our first employee. I had no doubts that she would fit the role perfectly.

  But we would change more than just the hunters.

  No victims this time. The hunted would be volunteers. It sounded insane, but this was the part Voronoff quickly warmed to.

  There would be no prize for the survivors other than survival itself. But with it would come immense prestige. We would have all the volunteers we needed: drawn from the vast pool of bored, affluent near-immortals who filled the Canopy. In the revised form of the Game, they would have finally found a way to inject a controlled edge into their lives. They’d sign contracts with us, detailing the terms of a particular contest: the duration, the permitted range of play and the types of weapon allowed by the assassin. All they would need to do was stay alive until the contract expired. They would be famous and envied. Others would follow, anxious to do a little better: a longer contract; more challenging terms of play.

  We would use tracking implants, of course—but they would not function in the same way as the device Waverly had installed in my skull, and which Dominika had so kindly removed at short notice. Assassin and hunted would carry matched pairs, and they would be primed to activate and transmit only when within a certain range of each other—again, covered by the terms of the contract. Both parties would know when that happened—a ringing tone in the skull, or something similar. And in that final hour of the chase, media would be allowed to descend for the first time, witnessing the end—however it played out.

  Voronoff joined us, eventually. He was our first customer.

  We called our company Omega Point; soon there were others, and we welcomed the competition. Within a year of operation, we had pushed the memory of the old hunt into oblivion. It was not a part of the city’s history that anyone wanted enshrined. And that was the way it happened.

  At first, we were careful to allow our clients to survive the terms of their contracts, for the most part. Our assassins would lose their trail at the critical moment or misfire whatever single-shot weapon had been specified in the contract. It was a way of building up an initial client list, so that our name would spread more rapidly.

  Once that began to happen, we got serious. Now it was for real; now they really did have to fight to stay alive for the duration.

  And the majority managed it. The odds on being killed during a game of Shadowplay fluctuated somewhere around thirty per cent—safe enough so that players were not actively discouraged from participation, no matter how bored—but with enough of an edge to make survival, winning, some-thing to be prized.

  Omega Point became very rich indeed. Within two years of my arrival in Chasm City I counted myself amongst the hundred wealthiest individuals—corporeal or otherwise—in the whole Yellow-stone system.

  But I never forgot the pledge I had made to myself, during the long journey up to Refuge.

  That if I survived, I would change everything.

  With Shadowplay, I had started. But it was not enough. I had to alter the city totally. I had to destroy the system that had allowed me to flourish; to unbalance the unspoken equilibrium between Mulch and Canopy. I began by recruiting my newest hunters from the Mulch itself. There was no real risk to myself in doing this, for the Mulchers were as adept at the art as anyone I’d find in Canopy—and just as
receptive to the training methods I advocated.

  Just as the game had made me rich, I made my best players wealthy beyond their dreams. And watched as some of that wealth seeped back into the Mulch.

  It was a small start. It might take years—decades, even—before there was a noticeable change to the hierarchy in Chasm City. But I knew it would happen. I had promised myself that it would. And though I had broken promises in the past, I was never going to do it again.

  After a while, I began to call myself Tanner again. I knew it was a lie; that I had no right to that name; that I had stolen memories and then life itself from the man who really was Tanner Mirabel.

  But what did any of that matter?

  I thought of myself as the custodian of his memories; all that he had been. He had not exactly been a good man, not by any reasonable definition of the word. He had been callous and violent, and he had approached the arts of science and murder with the studied distance of a geometer. Yet he had never been truly evil, and in the moment which effectively sealed his life—when he shot Gitta—he had been trying to do something good.

  What had happened to him afterwards; what had happened to turn him into a monster—none of that mattered. It did not tarnish what Tanner had been before.

  It was, I thought, as good a name as any. And there would never be a day when it felt like any name but my own.

  I decided not to fight it.

  I realised that I had slipped into another reverie. The woman in my office was waiting for me to say something.

  “Well, do I get the job or not?”

  Yes, she probably did, but there would be other candidates to see before I made my final decision. I stood up and shook her small, lethal hand. “You’re certainly near the top of the list. And even if you don’t get the position we’ve discussed, there’s another reason I might want to keep your name on file.”

  “Yes?”

  I thought about Gideon; still imprisoned down there after all these years. I had vowed that I would go down into the chasm again—if only to kill him—but the time had never been right. I knew he was still alive, since Dream Fuel was still reaching the city, albeit in tiny, sought-after quantities. There was still a perverse trade to be had in selling his terrors, distilled into a format humans could just assimilate. But he must surely be close to death now, and there could not be very much time left before my vow would become meaningless.