“My hand?”
“You have a wound in your palm. It’s symptomatic of infection by one of the Haussmann family of indoctrinal viruses.” She paused. “We picked up the virus in your blood, once we looked for it. The virus inserts itself into your DNA and generates the new neural structures.”
There was little point in bluffing now. “I’m surprised you recognised it for what it was.”
“We’ve seen it enough times over the years,” Duscha said. “It infects a small fraction of every batch of slush . . . every group of sleepers we get from Sky’s Edge. At first, of course, we were mystified. We knew something about the Haussmann cults—needless to say, we don’t approve of the way they’ve appropriated the iconography of our own belief system—but it took us a long time to realise there was a viral infection mechanism, and that the people we were seeing were victims rather than cultists.”
“It’s a blessed nuisance,” Amelia said. “But we can help you, Tanner. I take it you’ve been dreaming about Sky Haussmann?”
I nodded, but said nothing.
“Well, we can flush out the virus,” Duscha said. “It’s a weak strain, and it will run its course with time, but we can speed up the process if you wish.”
“If I wish? I’m surprised you haven’t flushed it out already.”
“Goodness, we’d never do that. After all, you might have willingly chosen infection. We’d have no right to remove it in that case.” Duscha patted the robot, which retracted its screen and clicked its way outside again, moving like a delicate metal crab. “But if you want it removed, we can administer the flushing therapy immediately.”
“How long will it take to work?”
“Five or six days. We like to monitor the progress, naturally—sometimes it needs a little fine-tuning.”
“Then it’ll have to work its way out, I’m afraid.”
“On your own head be it,” Duscha said, tutting. She stood up from the bedside and left in a huff, her robot following obediently.
“Tanner, I . . .” Amelia began.
“I don’t want to talk about it, all right?”
“I had to tell her.”
“I know, and I’m not angry about that. I just don’t want you to try and talk me out of leaving, understand?”
She said nothing, but the point was well made.
Afterwards I spent half an hour with her on some more exercises. We worked almost in silence, giving me plenty of time to think about what Duscha had shown me. I’d remembered Red Hand Vasquez by then and his assurance that he was no longer infectious. He was the most likely source of the virus, but I couldn’t rule out having picked it up by sheer bad luck when I was in the bridge, in the vicinity of so many Haussmann cultists.
But Duscha had said it was a mild strain. Maybe she was right. So far, all I had to show for it was the stigma and the two nocturnal dreams I’d had. I wasn’t seeing Sky Haussmann in broad daylight, or having waking dreams about him. I didn’t feel any lingering obsession with Sky, or any hint of one; no desire to surround myself with paraphernalia relating to his life and times; no sense of religious awe at the mere thought of him. He was just what he’d always been: a figure from history, a man who had done a terrible thing and been terribly punished for it, but who could not be easily forgotten because he’d also given us the gift of a world. There were older historical figures who had mixed reputations, their deeds painted in equally murky shades of grey. I wasn’t about to start worshipping Haussmann just because his life was rerunning itself when I slept. I was stronger than that.
“I don’t understand why you’re in so much of a hurry to leave us,” Amelia said while we took a break, pushing a wet strand of hair away from her brow. “It took you fifteen years to get here—what’s a few more weeks?”
“I guess I’m just not the patient type, Amelia.” She looked at me sceptically, so I tried to offer some justification. “Look, those fifteen years never happened for me—it seems like only yesterday that I was waiting to board the ship.”
“The point still applies. Your arriving a week or two later will make blessedly little difference.”
But it would, I thought. It would make all the difference in the world—but there was no way Amelia could know the whole truth. All I could do was act as casually as possible when I answered her.
“Actually . . . there is a good reason for me to leave as soon as possible. It won’t have shown in your records, but I’ve remembered that I was travelling with another man who must already have been revived.”
“That’s possible, I suppose, if the other man was put aboard the ship earlier than you.”
“That’s what I was thinking. In fact, he might not have passed through the Hospice at all, if there were no complications. His name is Reivich.”
She seemed surprised, but not suspiciously so. “I remember a man with that name. He did come through here. Argent Reivich, wasn’t it?”
I smiled. “Yes; that’s him.”
EIGHT
Argent Reivich.
There must have been a time when the name meant nothing to me, but it was hard to believe now. For too long the name—his name; his continued existence—had been the defining fact of my universe. I well remembered when I’d first heard it, however. It was the night at the Reptile House I taught Gitta how to handle a gun. I thought back to that time as I showed Amelia how to defend herself against Brother Alexei.
Cahuella’s palace on Sky’s Edge was a long, low H-shaped building surrounded by overgrown jungle on all sides. Rising from the roof of the palace was another H-shaped storey, but slightly smaller in all its dimensions, so that it was surrounded on all sides by a flat, walled terrace. From the vantage point of the terrace, the hundred metres or so of cleared land surrounding the Reptile House were not visible at all unless you stood at the wall and looked over the edge. The jungle, rising high and dark, seemed to be on the point of inundating the terrace’s wall like a thick green tide. At night the jungle was a black immensity drained of any colour, filled with the alien sounds of a thousand native lifeforms. There was no other human settlement of any kind for hundreds of kilometres in any direction.
The night I taught Gitta was unusually clear, the sky flecked with stars from tree-top to zenith. Sky’s Edge had no large moons, and the few bright habitats which orbited the planet were below the horizon, but the terrace was lit by scores of torches, burning in the mouths of golden hamadryad statues set on stone pedestals along the wall. Cahuella had an obsession with hunting. His ambition was to catch himself a near-adult hamadryad, rather than the single immature specimen he’d managed to bag the previous year and which now lived deep below the Reptile House.
I hadn’t long been in his employment on that hunting trip, and that was the first time I had seen his wife. Once or twice she had handled one of Cahuella’s hunting rifles, but with no sign that she had ever touched a weapon before that trip. Cahuella had asked me to give her a few impromptu shooting lessons while we were in-country, which I had, and while she had improved, it was clear that Gitta was never going to be any kind of expert shot. It hardly mattered; she had no interest in hunting and while she had endured the trip with quiet stoicism, she could not share Cahuella’s primal enthusiasm for killing.
Soon even Cahuella realised that he was wasting his time trying to turn Gitta into another hunter. But he still wanted her to know how to use a gun—something smaller now, for the purposes of self-defence.
“Why?” I said. “You hire people like me so people like Gitta won’t have to worry about their own safety.”
We had been alone at the time, down in one of the empty vivarium chambers. “Because I’ve got enemies, Tanner. You’re good, and the men under you are good as well—but they’re not infallible. A single assassin could still break through our defences.”
“Yes,” I said. “But anyone that good would also be good enough to take out either of you without you even knowing it was about to happen.”
“Someone as
good as you, Tanner?”
I thought about the defences I had arranged around and within the Reptile House. “No,” I answered. “They’d need to be a hell of a lot better than me, Cahuella.”
“And are there people like that out there?”
“There’s always someone better than you. It’s just a question of whether anyone’s prepared to pay them for their services.”
He rested a hand on one of the empty amphibian cases. “Then she needs this more than ever. A chance at self-defence is better than none at all.”
I had to concede there was a kind of logic there. “I’ll show her, then . . . if you insist.”
“Why are you so reluctant?”
“Guns are dangerous things.”
Cahuella smiled in the wan yellow light spilling from the tubes set into the empty cases.
“That’s the idea, I think.”
We began soon after. Gitta was a perfectly willing student, but nowhere near as quick as Amelia. It was nothing to do with her intelligence; just a fundamental deficit in her motor skills; a basic weakness in hand-to-eye coordination which would never have manifested itself had not Cahuella insisted on this tuition. Which was not to say that she was beyond hope, but what Amelia could have mastered in an hour, it took Gitta all day to just stumble through at the most basic level of competence. Had she been a trainee soldier back in my old unit, I would never have been forced through this rigmarole. It would have been someone else’s problem to find a task better suited to her skills—intelligence-gathering, or something.
But Cahuella wanted Gitta to know how to use a gun.
So I followed orders. I had no problem with this. It was up to Cahuella how he used me. And spending time with Gitta was not exactly the most onerous of tasks. Cahuella’s wife was a lovely woman: a striking high-cheekboned beauty of Northern ancestry, lithe and lissom, with a dancer’s musculature. I had never touched her until this shooting lesson, had hardly had good cause to speak to her, though I had fantasised often enough.
Now, whenever I had to straighten her posture by applying gentle pressure to her arm or her shoulders or the small of her back, I felt my heart race ridiculously. When I spoke, I tried to keep my voice as soft and calm as I felt the situation demanded, but to my ears what came out sounded strained and adolescent. If Gitta noticed anything in my behaviour, she gave no sign of it. Her attention was focused tightly on the lesson at hand.
I had installed a radio-frequency field-generator around this part of the terrace which addressed a processor in the anti-flash goggles Gitta wore. It was standard military training equipment; part of the vast cache of stolen or blackmarket equipment Cahuella had hoarded over the years. Ghosts would appear in the goggles, mapped into Gitta’s field of view as if they were moving around the terrace. Not all of the ghosts would be hostile, but Gitta would have only a fraction of a second to decide for herself who needed shooting.
It was a joke, really. Only a very skilled assassin would stand any chance of getting inside the Reptile House to begin with, and anyone that good would never give Gitta those precious moments to make her mind up.
But Gitta wasn’t doing too badly by her fifth lesson. She was at least pointing and firing the gun at the right targets ninety per cent of the time, a margin of error I could live with for now, hoping that I would never have the misfortune to be the one victim in ten who was not planning to kill her.
But she was still not taking down her targets with any kind of efficiency. We were using live projectile ammo since the beam-weapons we had access to were just too bulky and heavy for self-defence. For the sake of safety, I could have arranged matters so that the gun would only fire when either Gitta or myself was out of the line of fire, not to mention any of Cahuella’s valuable hamadryad statues. But I felt that the instants when the gun was disabled would have rendered the session too inauthentic to be much use. Instead, I’d loaded the gun with smart ammo, each slug holding a buried processor addressed by the same training field which spoke to Gitta’s goggles. The processor controlled tiny spurts of gas which would shove the bullet off-course if the trajectory was deemed dangerous. If the required deflection angle was too sharp, the bullet would self-destruct into a speeding cloud of hot metal vapour—not exactly harmless, but a lot better than a small-calibre slug if it happened to be headed straight for your face.
“How am I doing?” Gitta asked, when we had to reload the gun.
“Your target acquisition’s improving. You still need to aim lower—go for the chest rather than the head.”
“Why the chest? My husband said you could kill a man with a single shot to the head, Tanner.”
“I’ve had more practice than you.”
“But it’s true, though—what they say about you? That when you shot someone, you . . .”
I finished it for her. “Took out specific areas of brain function, yeah. You shouldn’t believe everything they tell you, Gitta. I could probably put a slug into one hemisphere rather than the other, but beyond that . . .”
“Still, it isn’t a bad reputation to live with.”
“I suppose not, no. But that’s all it is.”
“If it was my husband they were saying that about, he’d milk it for all it was worth.” She cast a wary eye back to the upper storey of the house. “But you always try and play it down. That makes it seem more likely to me, Tanner.”
“I try and play it down because I don’t want you to think I’m something I’m not.”
She looked at me. “I don’t think there’s any danger of that, Tanner. I think I know exactly who you are. A man with a good conscience who happens to work for someone who doesn’t sleep quite so well at night.”
“My conscience isn’t exactly pristine, believe me.”
“You should see Cahuella’s.” She locked eyes with me for a few moments; I broke it and looked down at the gun. Gitta raised her voice an octave. “Oh; speak of the devil.”
“Talking about me again?” He was stepping onto the terrace from the upper storey of the building. Something glinted in his hand: a glass of pisco sour. “Well, I can’t blame you for that, can I? So. How are the lessons coming along?”
“I think we’re making reasonable progress,” I said.
“Oh, don’t believe a word he says,” Gitta said. “I’m absy mal, and Tanner’s too polite to say so.”
“Nothing worthwhile’s ever easy,” I answered. To Cahuella, I said, “Gitta can fire a gun now and discriminate between friend and foe most of the time. There isn’t anything magical about it, though she’s worked hard to achieve what she has and deserves credit. But if you want more than that, it might not be so easy.”
“She can always keep learning. You’re the master teacher, after all.” He nodded down at the gun, into which I’d just slipped a fresh clip. “Hey. Show her that trick you do.”
“Which one would that be?” I said, trying to keep my temper under control. Normally Cahuella knew better than to label my painfully acquired skills as tricks.
Cahuella took a sip of his drink. “You know the one I mean.”
“Fine; I’ll take a guess.”
I reprogrammed the gun so that the bullets would no longer be deflected if they were on hazardous trajectories. If he wanted a trick, he was going to get one—whether it cost him or not.
Normally when I shot a small weapon, I adopted the classic marksman’s stance: legs slightly spread for balance, gun’s grip held in one hand, supported by the other hand from beneath; arms outstretched at eye-level, locked against recoil if the gun fired slugs rather than energy. Now I held the gun sin glehanded at waist-height, like an oldtime quick-draw gun-fighter with a six-shooter. I was looking down on the gun, not sighting along it. But I had practised this position so thoroughly that I knew exactly where the bullet would go.
I squeezed the trigger and put a slug into one of his hamadryad statues.
Then walked to inspect the damage.
The statue’s gold had flowed like butter unde
r the impact of the bullet, but it had flowed with beautiful symmetry around the entrance point, like a yellow lotus. And I had placed the shot with beautiful symmetry as well—mathematically centred on the hamadryad’s brow; between the eyes if the creature’s eyes had not been situated inside its jaw.
“Very good,” Cahuella said. “I think. Have you any idea what that snake cost?”
“Less than you pay me for my services,” I said, programming the gun back into safe mode before I forgot.
He looked at the ruined statue for a moment before shaking his head, chuckling. “You’re probably right. And I guess you’ve still got the edge, right, Tanner?” He clicked his fingers at his wife. “Okay; end of lesson, Gitta. Tanner and I need to talk about something—that’s why I came out here.”
“But we’ve only just begun.”
“There’ll be other times. You wouldn’t want to learn everything right away, would you?”
No; I thought—I hoped that never happened, because then I would have no reason to be around her. The thought was dangerous—was I seriously thinking about trying something on with her, while Cahuella was no further away than another room in the Reptile House? Crazy too, because until tonight nothing Gitta had done had indicated any kind of reciprocal attraction towards me. But some of the things she’d said had made me wonder. Maybe she was just getting lonely, out here in the jungle.
Dieterling came out behind Cahuella and escorted Gitta back into the building, while another man dismantled the field generator. Cahuella and I walked away towards the wall around the terrace. The air was warm and clammy, with no hint of a breeze. During the day it could be almost unbearably humid; nothing like Nuevo Iquique’s balmy coastal climate where I had spent my childhood. Cahuella’s tall, broad-shouldered frame was wrapped in a black kimono patterned with interlocked dolphins, his feet bare against the terrace’s chevroned tiles. His face was broad, with what always struck me as a touch of petulance around the lips. It was the look of a man who would never accept defeat gracefully. His thick black hair was permanently slicked back from his brow; brilliant grooves like beaten gold in the light from the hamadryad flames. He fingered the damaged statue, then bent down to pick up a few shards of gold from the floor. The shards were leaf-thin, like the foil which illuminators once used to decorate sacred texts. He rubbed them sadly between his fingers, then tried to place the gold back into the statue’s wound. The snake was depicted curling around its tree, in its last phase of motility before the arboreal fusion-phase.