Then Chasm City was no longer beneath us, but the toothed edge of the crater wall; the behemoth slicing expertly through a notch in the rim which looked only just wide enough to accommodate it.
Ahead I could see a huddle of armoured structures near one edge of a butterscotch-coloured lake. The behemoth lowered itself towards the lake, the scream of its thrusters audible now as it fought to hold itself at this altitude against its natural tendency to float upwards.
“Disembarkation time,” Quirrenbach said. He got up from his seat, indicating a general flow of people across the lobby.
“Where are they all going?”
“To the drop capsules.”
I followed him across the lobby, where a dozen sets of spiral stairs led to the disembarkation level, a whole deck below. People were waiting by glass airlocks to board teardrop-shaped capsules, dozens of them which were slowly being pushed forward along guideways. At the front, the capsules slid down a short ramp which was jutting from the behemoth’s belly, before falling the rest of the distance—two or three hundred metres—and splashing into the lake.
“You mean this thing doesn’t actually land?”
“Good heavens, no.” Quirrenbach smiled at me. “They wouldn’t risk landing. Not these days.”
Our drop capsule slid from the behemoth’s belly. There were four of us in it: Quirrenbach, myself and two other passengers. The other two were engaged in an animated conversation about a local celebrity called Voronoff, but they spoke Norte with such a strong local accent that I could only follow about one word in three. They were completely unfazed by the experience of dropping from the behemoth; even when we plunged deep into the lake and appeared in some danger of not bobbing to the surface. But then we did, and because the drop capsule’s skin was glassy, I could see other capsules bobbing around us.
Two giant machines strode across the lake to receive us. They were tripods, rising high above us on skeletal, pistonned mechanical legs. With cranelike appendages they began to collect the floating capsules and deposit each in a collecting net stowed beneath the body of each tripod. I could see a driver perched at the top of each machine, tiny inside a pressurised cabin, working levers furiously.
The machines walked to the lake’s edge and emptied their catches onto a moving belt which fed into one of the buildings I’d seen from the behemoth.
Inside, we were passed into a pressurised reception chamber where the pods were removed from the belt and opened by bored-looking workers. Empty pods were shuttling around to an embarkation area similar to the one aboard the behemoth, where passengers waited with luggage. I presumed they’d be carried out to the middle of the lake by the tripods, which would then loft each pod high enough up for the behemoth to grab it.
Quirrenbach and I left our pod and followed the flow of passengers from the reception chamber through a warren of cold, dim tunnels. The air tasted stale, as if each breath had already been through a few lungs before it reached my own. But it was breathable, and the gravity not noticeably heavier than in the Rust Belt habitat.
“I don’t know quite what I was expecting,” I said. “But this wasn’t it. No welcoming signs; no visible security; nothing. It makes me wonder what the immigration and customs section will be like.”
“You don’t have to wonder,” Quirrenbach said. “You’ve just left it.”
I thought about the diamond gun I’d given Amelia, secure in the knowledge that there was no way I would be able to take it with me to Chasm City.
“That was it?”
“Think about it. You’d find it exceedingly difficult to bring anything into Chasm City which wasn’t already there. There’s no point checking for weapons—they’ve got enough of them already, so what difference would one more make? They’d be far more likely to confiscate whatever you had and offer you part-exchange on an upgrade. And there’s no point screening for diseases. Too complicated, and you’re far more likely to catch something than bring something into the city. A few nice foreign germs might actually do us some good.”
“Us?”
“Them. Slip of the tongue.”
We passed into a well-lit area with wide windows overlooking the lake. The behemoth was being loaded with capsules, the dorsal surface of the manta-like machine still bright with the thrusters it had to burn to hold this position. Each pod was sterilised by being passed through a ring of purple flame before being accepted into the behemoth’s belly. Maybe the city didn’t care what came into it, but the outside universe certainly seemed to care what left it.
“I suppose you have some idea how we get to the city from here?”
“There’s really only one way, I gather, and that’s the Chasm City Zephyr.”
Quirrenbach and I brushed past a palanquin, moving slowly down the next connecting tunnel. The upright box was patterned in bas-relief black, showing scenes from the city’s vainglorious past. I risked a glance back as we overtook the slow-moving machine and my gaze met the fearful eyes of the hermetic sitting within: face pale behind thick green glass.
There were walking servitors carrying luggage, but there was something primitive about them. They were not sleek intelligence machines, but clunking, error-prone robots with about as much sentience as a dog. There were no genuinely clever machines left now, outside of the orbital enclaves where such things were still possible. But even the crude servitors that remained were obviously valued: signs of residual wealth.
And then there were the wealthy themselves, those travelling without the sanctuary of palanquins. I presumed none of these people had implants of any great complexity; certainly nothing that might be susceptible to plague spore. They moved nervously, in hurried packs, surrounding themselves with servitors.
Ahead the tunnel widened into an underground cavern, dimly lit by hundreds of flickering lamps burning in sconces. There was a steady warm breeze blowing through it, carrying a stench of machine oil.
And something enormous and bestial waited in the cavern.
It rode four sets of double rails arranged around it at intervals of ninety degrees: one set below the machine, one above and one on either side. The rails themselves were supported by a framework of skeletal braces, though at either end of the cavern they vanished into circular tunnels where they were anchored to the walls themselves. I couldn’t help but think of the trains in the Santiago which had featured in one of Sky’s dreams, braced within a similar set of rails—even though those rails had only been guidance ways for induction fields.
This wasn’t like that.
The train itself was constructed with a four-way symmetry. At the centre was a cylindrical core tipped with a bullet-shaped prow and a single Cyclopean headlight. Jutting from this core were four separate double rows of enormous iron wheels, each of which contained twelve axles and was locked onto one of the pairs of rail lines. Three pairs of huge cylinders were interspersed along each set of twelve main wheels, each connected to four sets of wheels by a bewildering arrangement of gleaming pistons and thigh-thick greased articulated cranks. A mass of pipe-runs snaked all around the machine; whatever symmetry or elegance of design it might have had was ruined by what appeared to be randomly placed exhaust outlets, all of which were belching steam up towards the cavern’s ceiling. The machine hissed like a dragon whose patience was wearing fatally thin. It seemed worryingly alive.
Behind was a string of passenger cars built around the same four-fold symmetry, engaging with the same rails.
“That’s the . . . ?”
“. . . Chasm City Zephyr,” Quirrenbach said. “Quite a beast, isn’t she?”
“You’re telling me that thing actually goes somewhere?”
“It wouldn’t make much sense if it didn’t.” I gave him a look so he continued, “I heard that they used to have magnetic levitation trains running into Chasm City and out to the other colonies. They had vacuum tunnels for them. But they must have stopped working properly after the plague.”
“And they thought replacing them wit
h this was a good idea?”
“They didn’t have much choice. I don’t think anyone needs to get anywhere very quickly nowadays, so it doesn’t matter that the trains can’t run at the supersonic speeds they used to attain. A couple of hundred kilometres per hour is more than sufficient, even for journeys out to the other settlements.”
Quirrenbach started walking towards the back of the train where ramps led up to the passenger cars.
“Why steam?”
“Because there aren’t any fossil fuels on Yellowstone. Some nuclear generators still work, but, by and large, the chasm itself is about the only useful energy source around here. That’s why a lot of the city runs on steam pressure these days.”
“I still don’t buy it, Quirrenbach. You don’t jump back six hundred years just because you can’t use nanotechnology any more.”
“Maybe you do. After the plague hit, it affected a lot more than you’d think. Almost all manufacturing had been done by nano for centuries. Materials production; shaping—it all suddenly got a lot cruder. Even things which didn’t use nano themselves had been built by nano; designed with incredibly fine tolerances. None of that stuff could be duplicated any more. It wasn’t just a question of making do with things which were slightly less sophisticated. They had to go right back before they reached any kind of plateau from which they could begin rebuilding. That meant working with crudely forged metals and metalworking techniques. And remember that a lot of the data relating to these things had been lost as well. They were fumbling around in the blind. It was like someone from the twenty-first century trying to work out how to make a mediaeval sword without knowing anything about metallurgy. Knowing that something was primitive didn’t necessarily mean it was any easier to rediscover.”
Quirrenbach paused to catch his breath, standing beneath a clattering destination board. It showed departures to Chasm City, Ferrisville, Loreanville, New Europa and beyond, but only about one train a day was leaving to anywhere other than Chasm City.
“So they did the best they could,” Quirrenbach said. “Some technology had survived the plague, of course. That’s why you’ll still see relics, even here—servitors, vehicles—but they tend to be owned by the rich. They’ve got all the nuclear generators, and the few antimatter power-plants left in the city. Down in the Mulch it’ll be a different story, I think. It’ll be dangerous, too.”
While he talked I looked at the destination board. It would have made my job a lot easier if Reivich had taken a train to one of the smaller settlements, where he would have been both conspicuous and trapped, but I thought the chances were good that he’d have taken the first train to Chasm City.
Quirrenbach and I paid our fares and boarded the train. The carriages strung behind the locomotive looked much older than the rest of it, and therefore much more modern, salvaged from the old levitating train and mounted on wheels. The doors irised shut, and then the whole procession clanked into motion, creeping forward at a walking pace and then gathering speed laboriously. There was an intermittent squeal of slipping wheels, and then the ride became smoother, steam billowing past us. The train threaded its way through one of the narrow-bored tunnels faced with an enormous irising door, and then we passed through a further series of pressure locks, until we must have been moving through near-vacuum.
The ride became ghostly quiet.
The passenger compartment was as cramped as a prison transport, and the passengers seemed subdued to the point of somnolence, like drugged prisoners being carried to a detention centre. Screens had dropped down from the ceiling and were now cycling through adverts, but they referred to products and services which were very unlikely to have survived the plague. Near one end I could see a huddle of palanquins, grouped together like a collection of coffins in an undertaker’s backroom.
“The first thing we’ve got to do is get these implants out,” Quirrenbach said, leaning conspiratorially towards me. “I can’t bear the idea of the things still sitting in my head now.”
“We should be able to find someone who’ll do it quickly,” I said.
“And safely, too—the one’s not much good without the other.”
I smiled. “I think it’s probably a little late to worry about safely, don’t you?”
Quirrenbach pursed his lips.
The screen next to us was showing an advert for a particularly sleek-looking flying machine, something like one of our volantors, except it seemed to have been made out of insect parts. But then the screen flashed with static and a geisha-like woman appeared on it instead.
“Welcome aboard the Chasm City Zephyr.” The woman’s face resembled a china doll with painted lips and rosy cheeks. She wore an absurdly elaborate silver outfit which curved up behind her head. “We are currently transiting the Trans-Caldera Tunnel and will be arriving at Grand Central Station in eight minutes. We hope you will enjoy your journey with us and that your time in Chasm City will be both pleasant and prosperous. In the meantime, in anticipation of our arrival, we invite you to share some of our city’s highlights.”
“This’ll be interesting,” Quirrenbach said.
The windows of the train carriage flickered and became holographic displays, no longer showing the rushing walls, but an impressive vista of the city, just as if the train had tunnelled through seven years of history. The train was threading between dreamlike structures, rising vertiginously on either side like mountains sculpted out of solid opal or obsidian. Below us was a series of stepped levels, landscaped with beautiful gardens and lakes, entwined with walkways and civic transit tubes. They dwindled into a haze of blue depth, riven by plunging abysses full of neon light, immense tiered plazas and rockfaces. The air was thick with a constant swarm of colourful aerial vehicles, some of which were shaped like exotic dragonflies or hummingbirds. Passenger dirigibles nosed indolently through the swarms; scores of tiny revellers peered over the railed edges of their gondolas. Above them, the largest buildings loomed like geometric clouds. The sky was a pure electric blue woven with the fine, regular matrix of the dome.
And all around the city marched into terrible distance, wonder upon wonder receding as far as the eye could see. It was only sixty kilometres, but it could have been infinity. There appeared to be enough marvels in Chasm City to last a lifetime. Even a modern one.
But no one had told the simulation about the plague. I had to remind myself that we were still rushing through the tunnel under the crater wall; that in fact we had yet to arrive in the city itself.
“I can see why they called it a Belle Epoque,” I said.
Quirrenbach nodded. “They had it all. And you know the worst of it? They damn well knew it. Unlike any other golden age in history . . . they knew they were living through it.”
“It must have made them pretty insufferable.”
“Well, they certainly paid for it.”
It was round about then that we burst into what passed for daylight in Chasm City. The train must have crossed under the crater rim and passed through the boundary of the dome. It was racing through a suspended tube just like the one which had been suggested by the hologram, but this tube was covered in dirt which only gave way fleetingly; just enough to show that we were passing through what looked like a series of densely packed slums. The holographic recording was still playing, so that the old city was superimposed on the new one like a faint ghost. Ahead, the tube curved round and vanished into a tiered cylindrical building from which other tubes radiated, threading out across the city. The train was slowing as we approached the tiered building.
Grand Central Station, Chasm City.
As we entered the building, the holographic mirage faded, taking with it the last faint memory of the Belle Epoque. Yet for all its glory, only Quirrenbach and I seemed to have taken much notice of the hologram. The other passengers stood silent, scrutinising the scorched and littered floor.
“Still think you can make it here?” I asked Quirrenbach. “After what you’ve seen now?”
He ga
ve the question a lot of thought before answering.
“Who’s to say I won’t? Maybe there are more opportunities now than ever before. Maybe it’s just a question of adaptation. One thing’s for sure, though.”
“What’s that?”
“Whatever music I write here, it isn’t going to cheer anyone up.”
Grand Central Station was as humid as deep Peninsula jungle, just as starved of light as the forest floor. Sweltering, I removed Vadim’s coat and bundled it under one arm.
“We’ve got to get these implants out,” Quirrenbach said yet again, tugging at my sleeve.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “It hadn’t slipped my mind.”
The roof was supported by fluted pillars which rose up like hamadryad trees before thrusting their fingers through the roof into the brown gloom beyond. In between these pillars was a densely packed bazaar: a motley city of tents and stalls, through which passed only the narrowest and most twisting of passageways. Stalls had been built or piled above each other, so that some of the passageways became backbreakingly low, lamplit tunnels through which people were forced to stoop like hunchbacks. There were several dozen vendors and many hundreds of people, very few of whom were accompanied by servitors. There were exotic pets on leashes; genetically enhanced servants; caged birds and snakes. A few hermetics had made the error of trying to force their way through the bazaar rather than finding a route around it, and now their palanquins were mired, harried by traders and tricksters.