I couldn’t help remembering my earlier fears about this system. I’d expected to be entering a culture several centuries ahead of my own in nearly every respect, a peasant stumbling through kaleidoscopic wonders. Instead, I was looking at a scene which could easily have belonged to my own world’s past . . . even something out of the era of the Flotilla’s launch.
We docked with a bump. I gathered my belongings—including the things I had appropriated from Vadim—and set about worming my way upship to the exit.
“Goodbye, I suppose,” Quirrenbach said, amongst the general throng of people waiting to filter through into New Vancouver.
“Yes.” If he was expecting any other kind of response, he was out of luck.
“I—um—went back to check on Vadim.”
“A piece of dirt like that can take care of himself, you know. We probably should have thrown him out the airlock while we had the chance.” I forced a smile. “Still, as he said, he was part of the local colour. I’d hate to deprive anyone of a unique cultural experience.”
“Are you staying here long? In NV, I mean?”
It took me a moment to realise he was talking about New Vancouver.
“No.”
“Taking the first behemoth down to the surface, then?”
“Very probably.” I looked over his shoulder to where the crowd was pushing through the exit. Through another window I could see a part of the Strelnikov’s hull plating which had broken loose during the docking sequence and was now being nudged and epoxied back into place.
“Yes; get down as quickly as possible, that’s my intention as well.” Quirrenbach patted the briefcase he clutched to his chest like a tabard. “The sooner I can get to work on my plague symphony the better, I think.”
“I’m sure it’ll be a resounding success.”
“Thanks. And you? If I’m not being too nosy? Any particular plans for when you get down there?”
“One or two, yes.”
Doubtless he would have kept grilling me—getting nowhere—but there was a release of pressure in the jam of people ahead of us, opening up a little gap through which I inserted myself. In a few moments I was out of Quirrenbach’s conversational range.
Inside, New Vancouver was nothing like Hospice Idlewild. There was no artificial sun, no single air-filled volume. Instead, the entire structure was a densely packed honeycomb of much smaller enclosed spaces, squeezed together like components in an antique radio. I didn’t think there was any hope of Reivich still being in the habitat. There were at least three departures to Chasm City per day, and I was fairly sure he’d have been on the first available flight down.
Still, I stayed vigilant.
Amelia’s estimate had been unerringly accurate: the Stoner funds I had brought with me would just cover my trip to Chasm City. I had already spent half on the Strelnikov; what remained was just enough to pay for the descent. True, I had harvested some money from Vadim, but when I examined the cash properly it only amounted to about as much as the change left from my own funds. His victims, newcomers obviously, had not carried much local cash with them.
I checked the time.
Vadim’s watch had concentric dials for both local twenty-six-hour Yellowstone time and twenty-four-hour system time. I had a couple of hours before my flight down. I planned to kill the time walking around NV, looking for local information sources, but I quickly found that large areas of the habitat were not accessible to anyone who had arrived via anything as lowly as the Strelnikov. People who had come in via high-burn shuttles were segregated from scum like us by armoured glass walls. I found somewhere to sit down and drink a cup of bad coffee (the one universal commodity, it seemed) and watched the two immiscible streams of humanity flow past. The place where I was sitting was a dingy thoroughfare, seats and tables jostling for space with metre-thick industrial pipes which ran from floor to ceiling like hamadryad trees. Smaller pipes branched off the main arteries, curving through the air like rusty intestines. They throbbed unnervingly, as if titanic pressures were only just being contained by thin metal and crumbling rivets. Some effort had been made to gentrify the surroundings by weaving foliage around the pipes, but the attempt had been distinctly halfhearted.
Not everyone shuffling through this area looked poor, but almost everyone looked as if they wished they were elsewhere. I recognised a few faces from the slowboat, and perhaps one or two from Hospice Idlewild, but I had certainly not seen the majority of the people before. I doubted that all of them were from beyond the Epsilon Eridani system; it was just as likely that NV was a gateway for in-system travellers. I even saw some Ultras, strutting around flaunting their chimeric modifications, but there were just as many on the other side of the glass.
I remembered dealing with their kind: Captain Orcagna’s crew aboard the Orvieto; the woman with the hole in her gut who had been sent to meet us. Thinking of the way Reivich had known about our ambush, I wondered if—ultimately—we hadn’t all been betrayed by Orcagna. Perhaps Orcagna had even arranged my revival amnesia, to slow me down in my hunt.
Or perhaps I was just being paranoid.
Beyond the glass, I saw something even stranger than the black-clad, cyborg wraiths who crewed the lighthuggers: things like upright boxes, gliding with sinister grace amongst the crowds. The other people seemed oblivious to the boxes—almost unaware of them, except that they stepped carefully aside as the boxes moved amongst them. I sipped my coffee and noticed that some of the boxes had clumsy mechanical arms attached to their fronts—but most did not—and that almost all of the boxes had dark windows set into their fronts.
“They’re palanquins, I think.”
I sighed, recognising the voice of Quirrenbach, who was easing himself into the seat next to me.
“Good. Finished your symphony yet?”
He did a good job of pretending not to hear me. “I heard about them, those palanquins. The people inside them are called hermetics. They’re the ones who’ve still got implants and don’t want to get rid of them. The boxes are like little travelling microcosms. Do you think it’s really that dangerous still?”
I put down my coffee cup testily. “What would I know?”
“Sorry, Tanner . . . just trying to make conversation.” He glared at the vacant seats around me. “It’s not like you were overburdened with companionship, is it?”
“Maybe I wasn’t desperate for any.”
“Oh, come on.” He snapped his fingers, bringing the grimy, coffee-dispensing servitor over to our table. “We’re both in this together, Tanner. I promise I won’t follow you around once we get to Chasm City, but until then, would it really hurt to be a little civil to me? You never know, I might even be able to help you. I may not know much about this place, but I do appear to know fractionally more than you.”
“Fractionally’s the word.”
He got himself a coffee from the machine and offered me a refill. I declined, but with what I hoped was grudging politeness.
“God, this is foul,” he said, after a trial sip.
“At least we’re in agreement on something.” I made a stab at humour. “I think I know what’s in those pipes now, anyway.”
“Those pipes?” Quirrenbach looked around us. “Oh, I see. No; those are steam pipes, Tanner. Very important, too.”
“Steam?”
“They use their own ice to keep NV from over-heating. Someone on the Strelnikov told me: they pump the ice down from the outer skin as kind of slush, then run it all around the habitat, through all the gaps between the main habitation areas—we’re in one of those gaps now—and then the slush soaks up all the excess heat and gradually melts and then boils, until you’ve got pipes full of superheated steam. Then they blast the steam back into space.”
I thought of the geysers I had seen on the surface of NV on the approach.
“That’s pretty wasteful.”
“They didn’t always use ice. They used to have huge radiators, like moths’ wings, a hundred kilometres acro
ss. But they lost them when the Glitter Band broke up. Bringing in the ice was an emergency measure. Now they’ve got to have a steady supply or this whole habitat becomes one big meat oven. They get it from Marco’s Eye, the moon. There’re craters near the poles in perpetual shadow. They could’ve used methane ice from Yellowstone, too, but there’s no way to get it here cheaply enough.”
“You know a lot.”
He beamed, patting the briefcase in his lap. “Details, Tanner. Details. You can’t write a symphony about a place unless you know it intimately. I’ve already got plans for my first movement, you know. Very sombre at first, desolate wood-wind, shading into something with stronger rhythmic impetus.” He sketched a finger through the air as if tracing the topography of an invisible landscape. “Adagio—allegro energico. That’ll be the destruction of the Glitter Band. You know, I almost think it deserves a whole symphony in its own right . . . what do you think?”
“I don’t know, Quirrenbach. Music’s not really my forte.”
“You’re an educated man though, aren’t you? You speak with economy, but there’s no little thought behind your words. Who was it who said that a wise man speaks when he has something to say, but a fool speaks because he must?”
“I don’t know, but he probably wasn’t a great conversation alist.”
I looked at my watch—it felt like my own now—wishing the green gems would instantly whirl into the relative positions which would signify departure time for the surface. They hadn’t visibly shifted since the last time I looked.
“What did you used to do on Sky’s Edge, Tanner?”
“I was a soldier.”
“Ah, but that’s nothing really unusual, is it?”
Out of boredom—and the knowledge that nothing would be lost by doing so—I elaborated upon my answer. “The war worked its way into our lives. It was nothing you could hide from. Even where I was born.”
“Which was?”
“Nueva Iquique. It was a sleepy coastal town a long way from the main centres of battle. But everyone knew someone who had been killed by the other side. Everyone had some theoretical reason for hating them.”
“Did you hate the enemy?”
“Not really. The propaganda was designed to make you hate them . . . but if you stopped and thought about it, it was obvious they would be telling their own people much the same lies about us. Of course, some of it was probably true. Equally, one didn’t need much imagination to suspect that we’d committed some atrocities of our own.”
“Did the war really go all the way back to what happened on the Flotilla?”
“Ultimately, yes.”
“Then it was less about ideology than territory, isn’t that true?”
“I don’t know, or care. It all happened a long time ago, Quirrenbach.”
“Do you know much about Sky Haussmann? I hear that there are people on your planet who still worship him.”
“I know a thing or two about Sky Haussmann, yes.”
Quirrenbach looked interested. I could almost hear the mental note-taking for a new symphony. “Part of your common cultural upbringing, you mean?”
“Not entirely, no.” Knowing that I would lose nothing by showing him, I allowed Quirrenbach to see the wound in the centre of my palm. “It’s a mark. It means the Church of Sky got to me. They infected me with an indoctrinal virus. It makes me dream about Sky Haussmann even when I don’t particularly want to. I didn’t ask for it and it’ll take a while to work its way out of my system, but until then I have to live with the bastard. I get a dose of Sky every time I close my eyes.”
“That’s awful,” he said, doing a poor job of not sounding fascinated. “But I presume once you’re awake, you’re reasonably . . .”
“Sane? Yes, totally.”
“I want to know more about him,” Quirrenbach said. “You don’t mind talking, do you?”
Near us, one of the elephantine pipes began leaking steam in a shrill, scalding exhalation.
“I don’t think we’ll be together much longer.”
He looked crestfallen. “Really?”
“I’m sorry, Quirrenbach . . . I work best alone, you know.” I groped for a way to make my rejection sound less negative. “And you’ll need time alone, too, to work on your symphonies . . .”
“Yes, yes—later. But for now? There’s a lot we have to deal with, Tanner. I’m still worried by the plague. Do you really think it’s risky here?”
“Well, they say there are still traces of it around. Do you have implants, Quirrenbach?” He looked blank, so I continued, “Sister Amelia—the woman who looked after me in the Hospice—told me that they sometimes removed implants from immigrants, but I didn’t understand what she meant at the time.”
“Damn,” he said. “I should have had them removed in the parking swarm, I knew it. But I hesitated—didn’t like the looks of anyone who was prepared to do it. And now I’ll have to find some blood-spattered butcher in Chasm City to do it.”
“I’m sure there’ll be plenty of people willing to help with that. I’d need to speak to the same people myself, as it happens.”
The stocky little man scratched at the stubble across his scalp. “Oh, you too? Then it really does make sense for us to travel together, doesn’t it.”
I was about to answer—to try and wheedle my way out of his company—when an arm locked itself around my throat.
I was pulled backwards, out of my seat, hitting the ground painfully. The breath exited my lungs like a flock of startled birds. I floundered on the edge of consciousness, too winded to move, although every instinct screamed that moving might be my best course of action.
But Vadim was already leaning over me, his knee pressed across my ribcage.
“You didn’t expect to see Vadim again, did you, Meera-Bell? I think you are sorry you did not kill Vadim now.”
“I haven’t . . .” I tried to complete the sentence, but there was no air left in my lungs. Vadim examined his fingernails, doing a good impression of boredom. My peripheral vision was turning dark, but I could see Quirrenbach standing to one side with his arms pinned behind him, another figure holding him hostage. Beyond that, an indifferent blur of passers-by. No one was paying the slightest attention to Vadim’s ambush.
He released the pressure on me. I caught my breath.
“You have not what?” Vadim said. “Go on, say it. I am all ears.”
“You owe me a debt of gratitude that I didn’t kill you, Vadim. And you know it, too. But scum like you aren’t worth the bother.”
He feigned a smile and reapplied the weight on my chest. I was beginning to have my doubts about Vadim. Now that I saw he had an accomplice—the man pinning down Quirrenbach—his story about a wider network of associates began to look a little more likely.
“Scum, is it? I see you were not above cleaning my watch, nasty little thief that you are.” He fiddled with the strap on my wrist, wriggling the watch off with a grin of triumph. Vadim held it up to one of his eyes, for all the world like a horologist studying some fabulous movement. “No scratches, I hope . . .”
“You’re welcome to it. It wasn’t really me.”
Vadim slipped the watch back over his hand, turning his wrist this way and that to inspect his reclaimed prize. “Good. Anything else you would like to declare?”
“Something, yes.”
Because I had not tried to push him off me with my other arm, he had ignored it completely. I had not even removed my hand from the pocket in which I had slipped it as I fell back from the chair. Vadim might have contacts, but he was still no more of a professional than when we had tussled on the slowboat.
Now I removed my arm. The movement was quick, fluid, like a striking hamadryad. It was nothing Vadim was prepared for.
In my fist I held one of his black experientials. He played his part perfectly—his gaze shifting minutely as my arm came up, just enough to bring his nearest eye into my reach. The eye was opened in surprise; an easy target, almost as if Vadi
m was complicit in what I was about to do to him.
I pushed the experiential into his eye.
I remembered wondering if his one good eye had in fact been glass, but as the experiential’s white haft sunk in, I saw that it had only seemed glassy.
Vadim fell back off me and started screaming, blood jetting from his eye like a dying red sliver of sunset. He was flailing around insanely, not wanting to reach up and confront the foreign thing parked in his eye-socket.
“Shit!” the other man said, while I scrambled to my feet. Quirrenbach wrestled with him for an instant, and then he was free, and running.
Moaning, Vadim was bent double over our table. The other man was holding him, whispering frantically in his ear. He appeared to be saying it was time the both of them left.
I had a message of my own for him.
“I know it hurts like hell, but there’s something you need to know, Vadim. I could have driven that thing straight into your brain. It wouldn’t have been any harder for me. You know what that means, don’t you?”
Eyeless now, his face a mask of blood, he still managed to turn towards me.
“. . . what?”
“It means that’s another one you owe me, Vadim.”
Then I carefully removed the watch from his wrist and replaced it on my own.
THIRTEEN
If there was any kind of law enforcement operating in New Vancouver’s plumbing-filled interstices, it was subtle to the point of invisibility. Vadim and his accomplice stumbled away from the scene unquestioned. I lingered, almost honour-bound to explain myself—but nothing happened. The table where Quirrenbach and I had been sipping coffee only minutes earlier was in a deplorable state now, but what was I supposed to do? Leave a tip for the cleaning servitor that would doubtless amble round shortly, so dim-witted that it would probably clean up the pools of blood, aqueous and vitreous humours with the same mindless efficiency as it tackled the coffee stains?
No one stopped me leaving.