Although I might have been able to afford one of the volantors, the rickshaws looked the most immediately promising. At the very least I could get a flavour of this part of the city, even if I had no specific destination in mind.
I started walking, cutting through the crowds, my gaze fixed resolutely ahead.
Then, when not quite halfway there, I stopped, turned around and returned to Dominika’s.
“Is Mister Quirrenbach finished yet?” I asked Tom. Tom had been shimmying to the sitar music, apparently surprised to find someone entering Dominika’s tent without being coerced.
“Mister, he no ready—ten minutes. You got money?”
I had no idea how much Quirrenbach’s excisions were going to cost him, but I figured the money he had recovered on the Grand Teton experientials might just cover it. I separated the bills from my own, laying them down on the table.
“No enough, mister. Madame Dominika, she want one more.”
Grudgingly I unpeeled one of my own lower-denomination bills and added it to Quirrenbach’s pile. “That’d better be good,” I said. “Mister Quirrenbach’s a friend of mine, so if I find out you’re going to ask him for more money when he comes out, I’ll be back.”
“Is good, mister. Is good.”
I watched as the kid scurried through the partition into the room beyond, briefly glimpsing the hovering form of Dominika and the long couch on which she did her business. Quirrenbach was prone on it, stripped to the waist, with his head enfolded in a loom of delicate-looking probes. His hair had been shaved completely. Dominika was making odd gestures with her fingers, like a puppeteer working invisibly fine strings. In sympathy, the little probes were dancing around Quirrenbach’s cranium. There was no blood, nor even any obvious puncture marks on his skin.
Maybe Dominika was better than she looked.
“Okay,” I said when Tom re-emerged. “I have a favour to ask of you, and it’s worth one of these.” I showed him the smallest denomination I had. “And don’t say I’m insulting you, because you don’t know what it is I’m about to ask.”
“Say it, big guy.”
I gestured towards the rickshaws. “Do those things cover the whole city?”
“Most of Mulch.”
“Mulch is the district we’re in?” No answer was forthcoming, so I just left the tent with him following me.
“I need to get from here—wherever here is—to a specific district of the city. I don’t know how far it is, but I don’t want to be cheated. I’m sure you can arrange that for me, can’t you? Especially as I know where you live.”
“Get good price, you no worry.” Then a thought must have trickled through his skull. “No wait for friend?”
“No—I’m afraid I have business elsewhere, as does Mister Quirrenbach. We won’t be meeting again for a while.”
I sincerely hoped it was the truth.
Some kind of hairy primate provided the motive power for most of the rickshaws, a human gene splice resetting the necessary homeoboxes so that his legs grew longer and straighter than the simian norm. In unintelligibly rapid Canasian, Tom negotiated with another kid. They could almost have been interchangeable, except that the new kid had shorter hair and might have been a year older. Tom introduced him to me as Juan; something in their relationship suggested they were old business partners. Juan shook my hand and escorted me to the nearest vehicle. Edgily now, I glanced back, hoping Quirrenbach was still out cold. I didn’t want to have to justify myself to him if he came round soon enough to have Tom tell him I was about to get a ride out of the terminus. There were some pills that could not be sugared, and being dumped by someone you imagined was your newfound travelling companion was one of them.
Still, perhaps he could work the agony of rejection into one of his forthcoming Meisterwerks.
“Where to, mister?”
It was Juan speaking now, with the same accent as Tom. It was some kind of post-plague argot, I guessed; a pidgin of Russish, Canasian, Norte and a dozen other languages known here during the Belle Epoque. “Take me to the Canopy,” I said. “You know where that is, don’t you?”
“Sure,” he said. “I know where Canopy is, just like I know where Mulch is. You think I’m idiot, like Tom?”
“You can take me there, then.”
“No, mister. I no can take you there.”
I began to unpeel another bill, before realising that our communicational difficulties stemmed from something more basic than insufficient funds, and that the problem was almost certainly on my side.
“Is the Canopy a district of the city?”
This was met by a long-suffering nod. “You new here, huh?”
“Yes, I’m new. So why don’t you do me a favour and explain just why taking me to the Canopy is beyond your means?”
The bill I had half unpeeled vanished from my grip, and then Juan offered me the rear seat of the rickshaw as if it were a throne finished in plush velvet. “I show you, man. But I no take you there, you understand? For that you need more than rickshaw.”
He hopped in next to me, then leant forward and whispered something in the driver’s ear. The primate began to pedal, grunting in what was probably profound indignation at the outcome to which his genetic heritage had been shaped.
The bio-engineering of animals, I later learned, had been one of the few boom industries since the plague, exploiting a niche that had opened up once machines of any great sophistication began to fail.
Like Quirrenbach had said not long ago, nothing that happened was ever completely bad for everyone.
So it was with the plague.
The missing wall provided an entrance and exit point for the volantors (and, I presumed, the other flying craft), but rickshaws entered and left the parking area by means of a sloping, concrete-lined tunnel. The dank walls and ceiling dripped thick mucosal fluids. It was at least cooler, and the noise of the terminus quickly faded, replaced only by the soft creaking of the cogs and chains which transmitted the ape’s cycling motion to the wheels.
“You new here,” Juan said. “Not from Ferrisville, or even Rust Belt. Not even from rest of system.”
Was I so obtrusively ignorant that even a kid could see it?
“I guess you don’t get many tourists these days.”
“Not since bad time, no.”
“What was it like to live through?”
“I dunno mister; I just two.”
Of course. It was seven years ago. From a child’s perspective, that really was most of a lifetime ago. Juan, and Tom, and the other street children would barely be able to remember what life was like in Chasm City prior to the plague. Those few years of limitless wealth and possibility would be blurred with the soft-focus simplicity of infancy. All they knew, all they truly remembered, was the city as it now was: vast and dark and again filled with possibility—except now it was the possibility that lay in danger and crime and lawlessness; a city for thieves and beggars and those who could live by their wits rather than their credit ratings.
It was just a shock to find myself in one.
We passed other rickshaws returning to the concourse, slick sides glossy with rain. Only a few of them carried passengers, hunched sullenly down in raincoats, looking as if they would rather have been anywhere else in the universe than Chasm City. I could relate to that. I was tired, I was hot, sweat pooling under my clothes, and my skin itched and crawled for want of a wash. I was acutely conscious of my own body odour.
What the hell was I doing here?
I had a chased a man across more than fifteen light-years, into a city which had become a sick perversion of itself. The man I was chasing was not even truly bad—even I could see that. I hated Reivich for what he had done, but he had acted much as I would have done in the same circumstances. He was an aristocrat, not a man of arms, but in another life—if the history of our planet had followed another course—he and I might even have been friends. Certainly I had respect for him now, even if it was a respect born out of the
way he had acted completely beyond my expectations when he destroyed the bridge at Nueva Valparaiso. Such casual brutality was to be admired. Any man that I misjudged that badly had my respect.
And yet, for all that, I knew I’d have no qualms about killing him.
“I think,” Juan said, “you need history lesson, mister.”
What I had managed to learn aboard the Strelnikov had not been very much, but it was all the history I felt that I had an appetite for right now. “If you’re thinking I don’t know about the plague . . .”
The tunnel was growing lighter ahead. Not much, but enough to indicate that we were about to enter the city proper. The light which suffused it had the same caramel-brown texture I’d seen from the behemoth: the colour of already murky light filtered through yet more murk.
“Plague hit, make building go wacko,” said Juan.
“That much they told me.”
“They no tell you enough, mister.” His syntax was rudimentary, but I suspected it was an improvement on anything the rickshaw driver was capable of. “Them building change, real fast.” He made expansive hand gestures. “Many folk get die, get squashed or end up in wall.”
“That doesn’t sound too nice.”
“I show you people in wall, mister. You no make joke no more. You shit own pants.” We swerved to avoid another rickshaw, scraping against us. “But listen—them building, they change fastest up at top, right?”
“I don’t follow.”
“Them building like tree. Got big lot of root, stick in ground, right?”
“Constructional feedlines, is that it? Leeching raw materials from the bedrock for repair and regrowth?”
“Yeah. What I say. Like big tree. But like big tree in other way, too. Always grow up top. Unnerstan’?” More hand gestures, as if he were shaping the outline of a mushroom cloud.
Perhaps I did understand. “You’re saying the growth systems were concentrated in the upper parts of the structures?”
“Yeah.”
I nodded. “Of course. Those structures were designed to dismantle themselves as well as grow higher. Either way, you’d always want to add or remove material from the top. So the nerve centre of the self-replicating machinery would always rise with the structure. The lower levels would need fewer systems; just the bare minimum to keep them ticking over and for repairing damage and wear, and for periodic redesigns.”
It was hard to tell if Juan’s smile was one of congratulation—that I had worked this out for myself—or sympathy that it had taken me as long as it had.
“Plague get to top first, carried by root. Start making top of building go wacko first. Lower down, stay same as before. By time plague got there, people cut root, starve building. No change any more.”
“But by then the upper parts had already changed beyond recognition.” I shook my head. “It must have been a terrible time.”
“No shit, mister.”
We plunged into daylight, and I finally understood what Juan meant.
FIFTEEN
We were at the lowest level of Chasm City, far below the rim of the caldera. The street on which we ran crossed a black lake on pontoons. Rain was falling softly from the sky—from the dome, in fact, many kilometres above our heads. All around us, vast buildings rose from the flood, sides slab-sided and immense. They were all I could see in any direction, until—forestlike—they merged into a distant, detailless wall, like a bank of smog. They were encrusted—at least for the first six or seven storeys—in a barnacle-like accretion of ramshackle dwellings and markets, lashed together and interlinked with flimsy walkways and rope-ladders. Fires burned in the slums, and the air was even more pungent than in the concourse. But it was fractionally cooler, and because there was a constant breeze, it felt less stifling.
“What’s this place called?” I said.
“This Mulch,” said Juan. “Everything down here, street level, this Mulch.”
I understood then that the Mulch was less a district of the city than a stratification. It included perhaps the first six or seven storeys which rose above the flooded parts. It was a carpet of slum from which the great forest of the city rose.
Looking up, craning my neck to peer around the rickshaw’s roof, I saw the slab-sided structures ram skywards, perspective forcing them together at least a kilometre above my head. For most of that height, their geometries must have been much as their architects had intended: rectilinear, with parallel rows of windows, now dark, the edifices marred only by the occasional haphazard extrusion or limpetlike excresence. Up higher, though, the picture changed sickeningly. Although no two buildings had mutated in quite the same manner, there was something common to their shape-changing, a kind of uniform pathology which a surgeon might have recognised and diagnosed as stemming from the same cause. Some of the buildings split in two halfway up their length, while others bulged with unseemly obesity. Some sprouted tiny avatars of themselves, like the elbowed towers and oubliettes of fairytale castles. Higher, these structural growths bifurcated and bifurcated again, interpenetrating and linking like bronchioli, or some weird variant of brain coral, until what they formed was a kind of horizontal raft of fused branches, suspended a kilometre or two from the ground. I had seen it before, of course, from the sky, but the meaning of it—and its sheer, city-spanning scale—was only now apparent from this vantage point.
Canopy.
“Now you see why I no take you there, mister.”
“I’m beginning to. It covers the whole city, right?”
Juan nodded. “Just like Mulch, only higher.”
The one thing that had not been really obvious from the behemoth was that the Canopy’s dense entanglement of madly deformed buildings was confined to a relatively shallow vertical stratum; the Canopy was a kind of suspended ecology and below it was another world—another city—entirely. The complexity of it was obvious now. There were whole communities floating within it; sealed structures embedded in the Canopy like birds’ nests, each as large as a palace. Fine as gossamer, a mass of weblike strands filled the spaces between the larger branches, dangling down almost to street level. It was difficult to tell if they had come with the mutations, or had been some intentional human addition.
The effect was as if the Canopy had been cobwebbed by monstrous insects, invisible spiders larger than houses.
“Who lives there?” I knew it wasn’t a completely stupid question, since I had already seen lights burning in the branches; evidence that, no matter how distorted the geometries of those sick dead husks of buildings, they had been claimed for human habitation.
“No one you wanna know, mister.” Juan chewed on his statement before adding, “Or no one who wanna know you. That no insult, either.”
“None taken, but please answer my question.”
Juan was a long time responding, during which time our rickshaw continued to navigate the roots of the giant structures, wheels jumping over water-filled cracks in the road. The rain hadn’t stopped of course, but when I pushed my head beyond the awning, what I felt was warm and soft; hardly a hardship at all. I wondered if it ever ended, or whether the pattern of condensation on the dome was diurnal; if it were all happening according to some schedule. I had the impression, though, that very little that happened in Chasm City was under anyone’s direct control.
“Them rich people,” the kid said. “Real rich—not small-time rich like Madame Dominika.” He knuckled his bony head. “Don’t need Dominika, either.”
“You mean there are enclaves in the Canopy where the plague never reached?”
“No, plague reach everywhere. But in Canopy, them clean it out, after building stop changing. Some rich, they stay in orbit. Some never leave CC, or come down after shit hit fan. Some get deported.”
“Why would anyone come here after the plague, if they didn’t have to? Even if parts of the Canopy are safe from residual traces of the Melding Plague, I can’t see why anyone would choose to live there rather than stay in the remaining habitats of
the Rust Belt.”
“Them get deported no have big choice,” said the kid.
“No; I can understand that. But why would anyone else come here?”
“Because them think thing got to get better, and them wanna be here when it happen. Plenty way to make money, when thing get better—but only few people gonna get serious rich. Plenty way to make money now, too—less p’lice here than upside.”
“You’re saying there are no rules here, are there? Nothing that can’t be bought? I’d imagine that must have been tempting, after the strictures of Demarchy.”
“Mister, you talk funny.”
My next question was obvious. “How do I get there? To the Canopy, I mean?”
“You not already there, you don’t.”
“You’re saying I’m not rich enough, is that it?”
“Rich not enough,” the kid said. “Need connection. Gotta be tight with Canopy, or you ain’t nobody.”
“Assuming I was, how would I get there? Are there routes through the buildings, old access shafts not sealed by the plague?” I figured this was the kind of street knowledge the kid would know backwards.
“You no wanna take inside route, mister. Plenty dangerous. Special when hunt coming down.”