‘Ah, but there is. My boss is very protective of his secrets. He’ll want to decide for himself what you get to know.’ Zebra leaned over him. ‘I can get this into your neck, I think, without getting you out of that suit.’
Clavain saw that there was no point in arguing. He closed his eyes and felt the cold tip of the hypodermic prick his skin. Zebra was good, no doubt about that. He felt a second flush of cold as the drug hit his bloodstream.
‘What does your boss want with me?’ he asked.
I don’t think he really knows yet,‘ Zebra said. ’He’s just curious. You can’t blame him for that, can you?‘
Clavain had already willed his implants to neutralise whatever agent Zebra had injected into him. There might be a slight loss of clarity as the medichines filtered his blood — he might even lapse into brief unconsciousness — but it would not last. Conjoiner medichines were good against any…
He was sitting upright in an elegant chair fashioned from scrolls of rough black iron. The chair was anchored to something tremendously solid and ancient. He was on planetary ground, no longer in Zebra’s ship. The blue-grey marble beneath the chair was fabulously veined, streaked and whorled like the gas flows in some impossibly gaudy interstellar nebula.
‘Good afternoon, Mr Clavain. How are you feeling now?’
It was not Zebra’s voice this time. Footsteps padded across the marble without haste. Clavain looked up, taking in more of his surroundings.
He had been brought to what appeared to be an immense conservatory or greenhouse. Between pillars of veined black marble were finely mullioned windows that reached tens of metres high before curving over to intersect above him. Trellised sheets climbed nearly to the apex of the structure, tangled with vivid green vines. Between the trellises were many large pots or banks of earth that held too many kinds of plant for Clavain to identify, beyond a few orange trees and what he thought was some kind of eucalyptus. Something like a willow loomed over his seat, its dangling vegetation forming a fine green curtain that effectively blocked his vision in a number of directions. Ladders and spiral staircases provided access to aerial walkways spanning and encircling the conservatory. Somewhere, out of Clavain’s field of view, water trickled constantly, as if from a miniature fountain. The air was cool and fresh rather than cold and thin.
The man who had spoken stepped softly before him. He was Clavain’s height and dressed in similarly dark clothes — Clavain had been divested of his spacesuit — though there the resemblance ended. The man’s apparent physiological age was two or three decades younger than Clavain’s, his slick backcombed black hair merely feathered by grey. He was muscular, but not to the point where it looked ridiculous. He wore narrow black trousers and a knee-length black gown cinched above his waist. His feet and chest were bare, and he stood before Clavain with his arms folded, looking down on him with an expression somewhere between amusement and mild disappointment.
‘I asked…’ the man began again.
‘You have obviously examined me,’ Clavain said. ‘What more can I tell you that you don’t already know?’
‘You seem displeased.’ The man spoke Canasian, but with a trace of stiffness.
‘I don’t know who you are or what you want, but you have no idea of the damage you have done.’
‘Damage?’ the man asked.
‘I was in the process of defecting to the Demarchists. But of course you know all that, don’t you?’
‘I’m not sure how much Zebra told you,’ the man said. ‘It’s true we know something about you, but not as much as we’d like to know. That’s why you’re here now, as our guest.’
‘Guest?’ Clavain snorted.
‘Well, that may be stretching the usual definition of the term, I admit. But I do not want you to consider yourself our prisoner. You are not. Nor are you our hostage. It is entirely possible that we will decide to release you very shortly. What harm will have been done then?’
‘Tell me who you are,’ Clavain said.
‘I will in a moment. But first, why don’t you come with me? I think you will find the view most rewarding. Zebra told me this wasn’t your first visit to Chasm City, but I am not sure you’ll have ever seen it from quite this perspective.’ The man leaned down and offered Clavain his hand. ‘Come, please. I assure you I will answer all of your questions.’
‘All of them?’
‘Most of them.’
Clavain pushed himself from the iron seat with the man’s assistance. He realised that he was still a little weak, now that he had to stand on his own, but he was able to walk without difficulty, his own bare feet cold against the marble. He remembered that he had removed his shoes before getting into the Demarchist spacesuit.
The man led him to one of the spiral staircases. ‘Can you manage this, Mr Clavain? It’s worth it. The windows are a little dusty below.’
Clavain followed the man up the rickety spiral staircase until they reached one of the aerial walkways. It wound its way through panes of trelliswork until Clavain lost all sense of direction. From the vantage point of his seat he had been aware only of indistinct shapes beyond the windows and a pale ochre light that suffused everything with its own melancholic glow, but now he saw the view more clearly. The man ushered him to a balustrade.
‘Behold, Mr Clavain: Chasm City. A place I have to come to know and, while not actually love, perhaps not to detest with quite the same missionary zeal as when I first arrived.’
‘You’re not from here?’ Clavain asked.
‘No. Like you I have travelled far and wide.’
The city crawled away in all directions, festering into a distant urban haze. There were not more than two dozen buildings taller than the one they were in, although some of those were very much taller, plunging into overlying cloud so that their tops were invisible. Clavain saw the dark, distant line of the encircling rim wall looming over the haze many tens of kilometres away. Chasm City was built inside a caldera which itself contained a gaping hole in Yellowstone’s crust. The city surrounded the great belching chasm, teetering on the edge, thrusting clawlike taplines down into the depths. Structures leaned shoulder to shoulder, intertwined and fused into deliriously strange shapes. The air was infested with aerial traffic, a constant shifting mass that made the eye struggle to stay in focus. It seemed quite impossible that there could be that many journeys to be made at any one time, that many vital errands and deputations. But Chasm City was vast. The aerial traffic represented a microscopic portion of the real human activity taking place beneath the spires and towers, even in wartime.
It had been different, once. The city had seen three approximate phases. The longest had been the Belle Époque, when the Demarchists and their presiding families had held absolute power. Back then the city had sweltered under the eighteen merged domes of the Mosquito Net. All the power and chemistry that the city needed had been drawn from the chasm itself. Within the domes, the Demarchists had pushed their mastery of matter and information to its logical conclusion. Their longevity experiments had given them biological immortality, while the regular downloading of neural patterns into computers had made even violent death no more than a nuisance. Their expertise with what some of them still quaintly termed ‘nanotechnology’ had enabled them to reshape their environments and bodies almost at will. They had become protean, a people for whom stasis of any kind was abhorrent.
The city’s second phase had come only a century ago, with the emergence of the Melding Plague. The plague had been very democratic, attacking people as eagerly as it attacked buildings. Belatedly, the Demarchists had realised that their Eden had always held a particularly vicious serpent. Until then the changes had been harnessed, but the plague ripped them from human control. Within a few months the city had been utterly transformed. Only a few hermetic enclaves existed where people could still walk around with machines in their bodies. The buildings contorted into mocking shapes, reminding the Demarchists of what they had lost. Technology had crashed back to
an almost pre-industrial state. Predatory factions stalked the city’s lawless depths.
Chasm City’s dark age lasted nearly forty years.
It was a matter of debate whether the city’s third state had already ended or was still continuing under different stewardship. In the immediate aftermath of the plague, the Demarchists had lost most of their former sources of wealth. Ultras took their trade elsewhere. A few high families struggled on, and there were always pockets of financial stability in the Rust Belt, but Chasm City itself was ripe for economic takeover. The Conjoiners, confined until then to a few remote niches throughout the system, had seen their moment.
It was not an invasion in the usual sense. They were too few in number, too militarily weak, and they had no wish to convert the populace to their mode of thinking. Instead they had bought out the city a chunk at a time, rebuilding it into something glittering and new. They tore down the eighteen merged domes. In the chasm they installed a vast item of bioengineered machinery called the Lilly, which vastly increased the efficiency of chemical conversion of the chasm’s native gases. Now the city lived in a pocket of warm breathable air, sustained by the Lilly’s slow exhalations. The Conjoiners had torn down many of the warped structures, replacing them with elegant bladelike towers that reached far above the breathable pocket, turning like yacht’s sails to minimise their wind profile. More resilient forms of nanotechnology were cautiously introduced back into the environment. Conjoiner medicines allowed longevity therapies to be pursued again. Sniffing prosperity, Ultras again made Yellowstone a key stopover on their trade intineraries. Around Yellowstone, resettlement of the Rust Belt proceeded apace.
It should have been a new Golden Age.
But the Demarchists, the city’s former masters, never adjusted to the role of historical has-beens. They chafed at their reduced status. For centuries they had been the Conjoiners’ only allies, but all that was about to end. They would go to war to win back what they had lost.
‘Can you see the chasm, Mr Clavain?’ His host pointed towards a dark elliptical smear almost lost beyond a profusion of spires and towers. They say the Lilly is dying now. The Conjoiners aren’t here to keep it alive, since they were evicted. The air quality is not what it was. There is even speculation that the city will have to be re-domed. But perhaps the Conjoiners will soon be able to reoccupy what was once theirs, eh?‘
‘It would be difficult to draw another conclusion,’ Clavain said.
‘I do not care who wins, I must admit. I was able to make a living before the Conjoiners came, and I have continued to do so in their absence. I did not know the city under the Demarchists, but I don’t doubt that I would have found a way to survive.’
‘Who are you?’
‘Where are we might be a better question. Look down, Mr Clavain.’
Clavain looked down. The building he was in was high, that much was obvious from the elevated view, but he had not quite grasped how very high it really was. It was as if he stood near the summit of an immensely tall and steep mountain, looking down at subsidiary peaks and shoulders many thousands of metres below, secondary summits which themselves towered over the majority of the surrounding buildings. The highest air-traffic corridor was far below; indeed, he saw that some of the traffic flowed through the building itself, diving through immense arches and portals. Below lay other traffic layers, then a gridlike haze of elevated roadways, and below that yet more space, and then a blurred suggestion of tiered parks and lakes, so far below that they resembled faded two-dimensional markings on a map.
The building was black and monumental in its architecture. He could not guess its true shape, but he had the impression that had he viewed it from some other part of Chasm City it would have resembled something black and dead and faintly foreboding, like a solitary tree that had been struck by lightning.
‘All right,’ Clavain said. ‘It’s a very nice view. Where are we?’
‘Chateau des Corbeaux, Mr Clavain. The House of Ravens. I trust you remember the name?’
Clavain nodded. ‘Skade came here.’
The man nodded. ‘So I gather.’
‘Then you had something to do with what happened to her, is that it?’
‘No, Mr Clavain, I did not. But my predecessor, the person who last inhabited this building, most certainly did.’ The man turned around and offered Clavain his right hand. ‘My name is H, Mr Clavain. At least, that is the name under which I currently choose to do business. Shall we do business?’
Before Clavain could respond, H had taken his hand and squeezed it. Clavain withdrew his hand, taken aback. He noticed that there was a tiny spot of red on his palm, like blood.
H took Clavain downstairs, back to the marbled floor. They walked past the fountain Clavain had heard earlier — it consisted of an eyeless golden snake belching a constant stream of water — and then took another long flight of marbled steps down to the floor immediately below.
‘What do you know about Skade?’ Clavain asked. He did not trust H, but saw no harm in asking a few questions.
‘Not as much as I would like,’ H said. ‘But I will tell you what I have learned, within certain limits. Skade was sent to Chasm City on an espionage operation for the Conjoiners, one that concerned this building. That’s correct, isn’t it?’
‘You tell me.’
‘Come now, Mr Clavain. As you will discover, we have very much more in common than you might imagine. There’s no need to be defensive.’
Clavain wanted to laugh. ‘I doubt that you and I have much in common at all, H.’
‘No?’
‘I am a four-hundred-year-old man who has probably seen more wars than you’ve seen sunsets.’
H’s eyes wrinkled in amusement. ‘Really?’
‘My perspective on things is bound to be just a tiny bit different from yours.’
‘I don’t doubt it. Would you follow me, Mr Clavain? I’d like to show you the former tenant.’
H led him along high-ceilinged black corridors lit only by the narrowest of windows. Clavain observed that H walked with the tiniest of limps, caused by a slight imbalance in length between one leg and the other that he managed to overcome most of the time. He seemed to have the whole immense building to himself, or at least this mansion-sized district of it, but perhaps that was an illusion fostered by the building’s sheer immensity. Clavain had already sensed that H controlled an organisation of some influence.
‘Start at the beginning,’ Clavain said. ‘How did you get mixed up in Skade’s business?’
‘Through a mutual interest, I suppose you’d say. I’ve been here on Yellowstone for a century, Mr Clavain. In that time I have cultivated certain interests — obsessions, you might almost call them.’
‘Such as?’
‘Redemption is one of them. I have what you might charitably refer to as a chequered past. I have done some very bad things in my time. But then again, who hasn’t?’ They halted at an arched doorway set into black marble. H made the door open and ushered Clavain into a windowless room that had the still, spectral atmosphere of a crypt.
‘Why would you be interested in redemption?’
To absolve myself, of course. To make some recompense. In the current era, even allowing for the present difficulties, one can live an inordinately long life. In past times a heinous crime marked one for life, or at least for the biblical three score years and ten. But we may live for centuries now. Should such a long life be sullied by a single unmeritorious act?‘
‘You said you’d done more than one bad thing.’
‘As indeed I have. I have signed my name to many nefarious deeds.’ H walked over to a roughly welded upright metal box in the middle of the room. ‘But the point is this: I do not see why my present self should be locked into patterns of behaviour merely because of something my much younger self did. I doubt that there is a single atom of my body shared by both of us, after all, and very few memories.’
‘A criminal past doesn’t give you a unique
moral perspective.’
‘No, it doesn’t. But there is such a thing as free will. There is no need for us to be puppets of our past.’ H paused and touched the box. It had, Clavain realised, the general dimensions and proportions of a palanquin, the kind of travelling machine that the hermetics still used.
H drew in a deep breath before speaking again. ‘A century ago I came to terms with what I had done, Mr Clavain. But there was a price to be paid for that reconciliation. I vowed to put right certain wrongs, many of which directly concerned Chasm City. They were difficult vows, and I am not one to take such things lightly. Unfortunately, I failed in the most important one of all.’
‘Which was?’
‘In a moment, Mr Clavain. First I want you to see what has become of her.’
‘Her?’
‘The Mademoiselle. She was the woman who lived here before I did, the woman who occupied this building at the time of Skade’s mission.’ H slid aside a black panel at head-height, revealing a tiny dark window set into the side of the box.
‘What was her real name?’ Clavain asked.
‘I don’t actually know,’ H told him. ‘Manoukhian may know a little more about her, I think — he used to be in her service, before he swapped allegiances. But I’ve never extracted the truth from him, and he’s much too useful, not to say fragile, to risk under a trawl.’
‘What do you know about her, then?’
‘Only that she was a very powerful influence in Chasm City for many years, without anyone realising it. She was the perfect dictator. Her control was so pervasive that no one noticed they were in her thrall. Her wealth, as estimated by the usual indices, was practically zero. She did not “own” anything in the usual sense. Yet she had webs of coercion that enabled her to achieve whatever she wanted silently, invisibly. When people acted out of what they imagined was pure self-interest, they were often following the Mademoiselle’s hidden script.’
‘You make her sound like a witch.’
‘Oh, I don’t think there was anything supernatural about her influence. It was just that she saw information flows with a clarity most people lack. She could see the precise point where pressure needed to be applied, the point where the butterfly had to flap its wings to cause a storm half a world away. That was her genius, Mr Clavain. An instinctive grasp of chaotic systems as applied to human psychosocial dynamics. Here, take a look.’