Chasm City

ELEVEN

I woke up shivering; trying to extricate myself from the coils of the Haussmann dream. The dream’s after-image was disturbingly vivid; I could still feel myself there with Sky, watching his wounded father being taken away. I examined my hand in the dim light of the sleeping cubicle, the blood at the centre of my right palm black and cloying like a spot of tar.

Sister Duscha had told me this was a mild strain, but I was obviously nowhere near getting over it on my own. There was no way I could have delayed chasing Reivich, but Duscha’s suggestion that I spend another week or so in Idlewild having the virus flushed out by professionals suddenly seemed infinitely preferable to weathering it on my own. And while the strain might have been weak compared to some, there was no guarantee that it had reached its worst.

Now I felt a familiar and not very welcome feeling: nausea. I wasn’t at all used to zero-gravity, and the Mendicants hadn’t given me drugs to make the trip any more bearable. I thought about it for a few minutes, debating whether it was worth leaving my cubicle, or whether I should just lie low and accept the discomfort until we reached the Glitter Band. Eventually my stomach won and I decided to make my way to the ship’s communal core. One of the instruction labels in the cabin told me I’d be able to buy something to kill the worst of the sickness.

Just getting to the commons was more adventure than I really needed. It was a wide, furnished and pressurised sphere somewhere near the front of the ship, where food, drugs and entertainment were available, but it was only accessible through a warren of claustrophobic one-way crawlways which snaked around and through the engine components. The instructions in my cubicle advised against tardiness during crawls through certain parts of the ship, leaving the reader to draw their own conclusions about the state of the internal nuclear shielding in those areas.

On my way there I thought about the dream.

There was something about it that bothered me, and I kept asking myself whether what had happened in it meshed with what I already knew about Sky Haussmann. I was no expert on the man (I hadn’t been, anyway) but there were certain basic facts about him which it was difficult to avoid if you had been brought up on Sky’s Edge. We all knew about the way he had become frightened of the dark after the blackout aboard the Santiago, when the other ship blew up, and we all knew about the way his mother had died in the same incident. Lucretia had been a good woman, by all accounts, well loved across the Flotilla. Titus, Sky’s father, was a man who was respected and feared but never truly hated. They called him the caudillo: the strong man. Everyone agreed that while Sky might have had an unusual upbringing, his parents could not really be blamed for the crimes that followed.

We all knew that Sky had not had many friends, but nonetheless we remembered the names of Norquinco and Gomez, and how they had been complicit—if not truly equal partners—in what had happened later. And we all knew that Titus had been gravely injured by a saboteur placed amongst the passengers. He had died a few months later, when the saboteur broke out of his restraints in the ship’s infirmary and murdered him while he was recuperating nearby.

But now I was puzzled. The dream had veered into an area which was unfamiliar to me. I didn’t remember anyone ever mentioning the rumour of another ship, a sinister ghost vessel trailing the Flotilla like the fabled Caleuche. Even the Caleuche’s name failed to ring any bells. What was happening? Was the indoctrinal virus just sufficiently detailed in its knowledge of Sky’s life that it was revealing my own prior ignorance of events, or had I been infected with an undocumented strain, one that contained hidden curlicues of story missing from most of the others? And were those embellishments historically accurate (but simply not well known), or sheer fiction: addendums put in there by bored cultists trying to spice up their own religion?

There was no way to know—yet. But it seemed I was going to have to sleep through further instalments of Haussmann’s life whether I liked it or not. Although I couldn’t say I exactly welcomed the dreams—or the way they seemed to smother any I might have been planning to have myself—at least now I would admit to some mild curiosity as to how they played out.

I crawled onwards, forcing the dreams from my mind, concentrated instead on the place to which the Strelnikov was ultimately headed.

The Glitter Band.

I had heard of it, even on Sky’s Edge. Who hadn’t? It was one of a few dozen places that were famous enough to be known about in other solar systems; places that had a certain allure even across light years. On scores of settled worlds, the Glitter Band was shorthand for a place of limitless bounty and luxury and personal freedom. It was everything that Chasm City was, but without the inescapable crush of gravity. It was where people jokingly talked of going when they made their fortunes, or married into the family with the right connections. There was nowhere in our own system that had anything like the same glamour. To many people the place might as well have been mythical, for all the likelihood of them ever getting there.

But the Glitter Band was real.

It was the string of ten thousand elegant, wealthy habitats which orbited Yellowstone: a beautiful concatenation of arcologies and carousels and cylinder-cities, like a halo of stardust thrown around the world. Although Chasm City was the ultimate repository for the system’s wealth, the city had a reputation for conservatism, rooted in its three-hundred-year history and immense sense of self-importance. The Glitter Band, by contrast, was constantly being reinvented, habitats shuffling in and out of formation, being dismantled and made anew. Subcultures blossomed like a thousand flowers before their proponents decided to try something else instead. Where art in Chasm City verged on the staid, almost anything was encouraged in the Glitter Band. One artist’s masterworks existed only in the tiniest instants when they could be sculpted out of quark-gluon plasma and held stable, their existence implied only by a subtle chain of inference. Another used shaped fission charges to create nuclear fireballs which assumed the brief likenesses of celebrities. Wild social experiments took place: voluntary tyrannies, in which thousands of people willingly submitted themselves to the control of dictatorial states so that they could be freed from having to make any moral choices in their own lives. There were whole habitats where people had had their higher brain functions disengaged, so that they could live like sheep under the care of machines. In others, they’d had their minds implanted into monkeys or dolphins: lost in intricate arboreal power struggles or sorrowful sonar fantasies. Elsewhere, groups of scientists who’d had their minds reshaped by Pattern Jugglers plunged deep into the metastructure of spacetime, concocting elaborate experiments which tinkered with the very fundamentals of existence. One day, it was said, they’d discover a technique for faster-than-light propulsion, passing the secret to their allies who would install the necessary gadgetry in their habitats. The first anyone else would know about it would be when half the Glitter Band suddenly winked out of existence.

The Glitter Band, in short, was a place where a reasonably curious human being could easily squander half a lifetime. But I didn’t think Reivich would spend much time there before making his way down to Yellowstone’s surface. He would want to lose himself in Chasm City as quickly as possible.

Either way, I wouldn’t be far behind him.

Still fighting nausea, I crawled into the commons and looked around at the dozen or so fellow passengers in the sphere. Although everyone was at liberty to float at whatever angle they liked (at the moment the slowboat’s engines were off), everyone had anchored themselves the same way up. I found a vacant wall strap, fed my elbow into it and surveyed my fellow slush puppies with what I knew would appear only casual interest. They were clustered into twos and threes, talking quietly while a spherical servitor moved through the air, impelled by tiny fans. The servitor moved from group to group, offering services which it dispensed from a compendium of hatches around its body. It reminded me of a hunter-seeker drone, silently selecting its next target.

“You needn’t look so nervous, friend,” someone said, in thick, slurred Russish. “It’s just robot.”

I was losing my edge. I’d been unaware of anyone sidling up to me. Languidly, I turned to look at the man who had spoken. I was confronted by a wall of meat blocking half the commons. His pink, raw-looking face was triangular, anchored to his torso by a neck thicker than my thigh. His hairline began only a centimetre or so above his eyebrows: long black hair lacquered back over the roughly hewn boulder that was his scalp. His wide, downcurved mouth was framed by a thick black moustache and a beard that was no more than a razor-thin line of hair tracing the enormous width of his jaw. He had his arms crossed in front of his chest like a Cossack dancer, hypertrophied muscles bulging through the fabric of his coat. It was a long quilted coat sewn with rough patches of stiff, glistening fabric which caught the light and refracted it back in a million spectral glints. His eyes stared through me rather than at me, and seemed not to be focused on quite the same thing, as if one were glass.

Trouble, I thought.

“Nobody’s nervous,” I said.

“Hey, talkative guy.” The man anchored himself to the wall next to me. “I just make conversation, da?”

“That’s good. Now go and make it somewhere else.”

“Why you so unfriendly? You not like Vadim, friend?”

“I was prepared to give you the benefit of the doubt,” I said, answering him in Norte, even though I could more or less get by in Russish. “But on balance… no, I don’t think I do. And until we’re better acquainted, I’m not your friend. Now go away and let me think.”

“I think about it.”

The servitor lingered near us. Oblivious to the increasing tension between us, its dumb processor soldiered on, addressing us as a pair of fellow travellers, asking what services we might require. Before the huge man could say anything, or even move, I told the servitor to supply me with a scopolamine-dextrose shot. It was the oldest and cheapest anti-nausea drug in the book. Like all the passengers I had established a shipboard credit account for the duration of the journey, although I was only half-certain I had the funds to cover the scop-dex. But the servitor obliged, a hatch popping open to reveal a disposable hypodermic.

I took the hypo, rolled up my sleeve and slammed the needle into a vein, just as if I was readying myself for a possible biological warfare attack.

“Hey, you do that like pro. No hesitation.” The man spoke with what sounded like genuine admiration, shifting to slow, slurred Norte. “What are you, doctor?”

I rolled my sleeve over the upwelling mark where the needle had gone in.

“Not quite. I work with sick people, though.”

“Yes?”

I nodded. “I’d be happy to give you a demonstration.”

“I am not sick.”

“Trust me, that’s never been a problem in the past.”

I wondered if he was getting the message just yet; that I was not his ideal choice for a conversation partner for the next day. I popped the used hypo back into the servitor, the scop-dex already beginning to blast my nausea into a fog of merely mild unpleasantness. There were almost certainly more effective treatments for space sickness—anti-agonists—but even if they had been available, I doubted that I had the funds to cover them.

“Tough guy,” the man said, nodding, an articulation for which his neck was not really engineered. “I like it. But how tough you really?”

“I don’t think it’s any of your business, but you’re welcome to try me.”

The servitor loitered near us for a few more moments before deciding to float to the next cluster. A few other people had just drifted into the commons, looking around with sickly expressions. It was ironic that after crossing so many light-years between stars, this little slowboat transfer was for many of us our first conscious taste of space travel.

He eyed me. I could almost hear the little gears working away in his skull, grinding laboriously. No doubt most of the people he approached were more easily intimidated than I was.

“Like I say, I am Vadim. Everyone calls me that. Just Vadim. I’m quite character —part of what you might call local colour. And you are?”

“Tanner,” I said. “Tanner Mirabel.”

He nodded slowly, wisely, as if my name meant something to him.

“That real name?”

“Yes.”

It was my real name, but I lost nothing by using it. There was no way Reivich could have learned my name yet, even though it was clear that he knew someone was following him. Cahuella kept a very tight lid on his operation, sheltering the identities of his employees. The best he could have managed was to weasel out of the Mendicants a list of everyone else who had been on the Orvieto —but that would still not have told him who amongst those people was the man who intended to kill him.

Vadim tried to inject a tone of comradely interest into his voice. “Where you come from, Meera-Bell?”

“You don’t need to know,” I said. “And please, Vadim—I was serious just now. I don’t want to talk to you, local colour or not.”

“But I have business proposition, Meera-Bell. One you should hear, I think.” He continued to stare through me with one eye. The other gazed obliquely past my shoulder, unfocused.

“I’m not interested in business, Vadim.”

“I think you should be.” He had lowered his voice now. “It is dangerous place where we are headed, Meera-Bell. Dangerous, dangerous place. Especially for newcomers.”

“What’s so dangerous about the Glitter Band?”

He smiled, then cancelled the smile. “Glitter Band… yes. That is really quite interesting. I am sure you’ll find it at odds with… expectations.” He paused, caressing his stubbled chin with one hand. “And we have not even mentioned Chasm City, nyet?”

“Danger’s a relative term, Vadim. I don’t know what it means here, but where I come from, it implies more than just the ever-present hazard of committing a social gaffe. Trust me, I think I can handle the Glitter Band. And Chasm City, for that matter.”

“You think you know about danger? I do not think you have first idea what you are walking into, Meera-Bell. I think you are very ignorant man.” He paused, toying with the rough fabric patches of his quilted coat, refraction patterns racing away under the pressure of his fingertips. “Which is why I am talking to you now, understand? I am being good Samaritan to you.”

I could see where this was heading. “You’re going to offer me protection, aren’t you?” Vadim winced. “Such crude term. Please, do not say it again. I would much rather we talk about benefits of mutual security agreement, Meera-Bell.” I nodded. “Let me speculate here, Vadim. You really are local, aren’t you? You haven’t come off a ship at all. My guess is you’re pretty much a permanent fixture on this slowboat—am I right?”

He grinned, quickly and nervously. “Let us just say I know my way around ship better than average recently defrosted slush puppy. And let us just say I have influential associates in neighbourhood of Yellowstone. Associates with muscle. People who can take care of newcomer, make sure he—or she—does not get into any trouble.”

“And if this newcomer were to decline your services, what would happen then? Would these self-same associates just possibly become the source of the same trouble?”

“Now you are being very cynical man.”

Now it was my turn to grin. “You know what, Vadim? I think you’re just a slimy little con-artist. This network of associates of yours doesn’t really exist, does it? Your influence extends about as far as the hull of this ship—and even then, it isn’t exactly all-pervasive, is it?”

He unfolded his colossal arms and then refolded them. “Watch your step, Meera-Bell—I am warning you.”

“No, I’m warning you, Vadim. I could have killed you already if I thought you were any more than an irritant. Go away and try your routine on someone else.” I nodded around the commons. “There are plenty of candidates. Better still, why don’t you crawl back to your smelly little cabin and work on your technique a bit? I really think you need to come up with something more convincing than the threat of violence in the Glitter Band, you know. Maybe if you were to offer fashion advice?”

“You really do not know, do you, Meera-Bell?”

“Know what?”

He looked at me pityingly, and for the tiniest of instants I wondered if I had fatally misjudged the situation. But then Vadim shook his head, unhooked himself from the commons wall and propelled himself across the sphere, his coat flapping behind him like a mirage. The slowboat had ramped up its thrust again now, so his trajectory was a lazy arc, bringing him expertly close to another solitary traveller who had just arrived: a short, overweight, balding man who looked pasty-faced and dejected.

I watched Vadim shake hands with the man, beginning to run through the same spiel he had tried out on me.

I almost wished him better luck.

The other passengers were an equal mixture of male and female, with an egalitarian blend of genetic types. I felt sure that two or three people were from Sky’s Edge, aristocrats by the look of them, but no one I was interested in. Bored, I tried to listen in on their conversation, but the acoustics of the commons blurred their words into a mush, from which only the occasional word emerged when one or other of the party raised their voice. I could still tell they were speaking Norte. Very few people on Sky’s Edge spoke Norte with great fluency, but almost everyone understood it to some extent: it was the only language which spanned all the factions, and was therefore used for diplomatic overtures and trade with external parties. In the south we spoke Castellano, the principal language of the Santiago, with of course some contamination from the other languages spoken in the Flotilla. In the north they spoke a shifting Creole of Hebrew, Farsi, Urdu, Punjabi and the old ancestor tongue of Norte called English, but mainly Portuguese and Arabic. Aristocrats tended to have a better grasp of Norte than the average citizen; fluency in it was a badge of sophistication. I had to speak it well for professional reasons—which is why I also spoke most of the northern tongues, as well as having a passable ability in Russish and Canasian.

Russish and Norte would almost certainly be understood in the Glitter Band and Chasm City, even if the mediation was done by machines, but the default tongue of the Demarchists who had refounded Yellowstone was Canasian, a slippery amalgam of Quebecois French and Cantonese. It was said that no one without a head full of linguistics processors ever really achieved genuine fluency in Canasian—the language was just too fundamentally strange, too much at odds with the hardwired constraints of human deep grammar.

I would have been worried, had the Demarchists not been such consummate traders. For more than two centuries Yellowstone had been the hub of the burgeoning interstellar trade network, feeding innovation out to nascent colonies, drinking it back in like a vampire when those colonies reached a basic level of technological maturity. It would be a commercial necessity for the Stoners to cope with dozens of other languages.

Of course, there would be dangers ahead. In that sense Vadim was entirely correct, but the dangers were not the kind to which he alluded. They would be subtle, arising from my own unfamiliarity with the nuances of a culture at least two centuries beyond my own. The outcome was less likely to be my own injury than the abject failure of my mission. That was enough of a danger to make me wary. But I did not need to buy a spurious assurance of protection from thugs like Vadim—whether he had his contacts or not.

Something caught my eye. It was Vadim again, and this time he was causing more of a commotion.

He was wrestling with the man who had just come into the commons, the two of them grappling with each other while remaining anchored to the commons wall. The other man looked like he was holding his own against Vadim, but there was something in Vadim’s movements—something languid to the point of boredom—which told me that Vadim was only letting the man think that he had the edge. The other passengers were doing a good job of ignoring the scuffle; grateful, perhaps, that the thug had selected someone else for his attention.

Abruptly, Vadim’s mood changed.

In an instant he had the newcomer pinned to the wall, in obvious pain, Vadim pushing his brow hard against the man’s terrified face. The man started to say something, but Vadim had his hand against the man’s mouth before more than a mumble emerged. Then what emerged was the man’s last meal, streaming vilely between Vadim’s fingers. Vadim recoiled in disgust and pushed himself away from the man. Then he secured himself with his clean arm and drove his fist into the man’s stomach, just below the ribcage. The man coughed hoarsely, his eyes bloodshot; he tried to catch his breath before Vadim delivered another blow.

But Vadim was done with him. He paused only to wipe his arm against the fabric walling of the commons, then unhooked himself, ready to kick off towards one of the exits.

I calculated my arc and kicked off first, savouring an instant of breezy free-fall before I impacted with the wall a metre from Vadim and his victim. For a moment Vadim looked at me in shock.

“Meera-Bell… I thought we concluded negotiations?”

I smiled.

“I just reopened them, Vadim.”

I had myself nicely anchored. With the same casual ease with which Vadim had struck the man, I struck Vadim, in more or less the same place. Vadim folded in on himself like a soggy origami figure, emitting a soft moan.

By now the rest of the people were less interested in minding their own business.

I addressed them. “I don’t know if any of you have been approached by this man yet, but I don’t think he’s the professional he’d like you to think. If you’ve bought protection from him, you’ve almost certainly wasted your money.”

Vadim managed a sentence. “You’re dead man, Meera-Bell.”

“Then I’ve very little to fear.” I looked at the other man. He had regained some of his colour now, wiping his sleeve across his mouth. “Are you all right? I didn’t see how the fight started.”

The man spoke Norte, but with a thick accent which it took me a moment to penetrate. He was a small man, with the compact build of a bulldog. The bulldog look didn’t stop at his physique, either. He had a pugnacious, permanently argumentative face, a flat nose and a scalp bristling sparsely with extremely short hairs.

He unrumpled his clothes. “Yes… I’m quite all right, thank you. The oaf started threatening me verbally, then started actually hurting me. At that point I was hoping someone would do something, but it was like I’d suddenly become part of the decor.”

“Yes, I noticed.” I looked around at the other passengers disparagingly. “You fought back, though.”

“Fat lot of good it did me.”

“I’m afraid Vadim here doesn’t look the type to recognise a valiant gesture when he sees one. Are you sure you’re all right?”

“I think so. A little nausea, that’s all.”

“Wait.”

I snapped my fingers at the servitor, hovering in cybernetic indecision some metres away. When it came closer I tried to buy another shot of scop-dex, but I had exhausted my shipboard funds.

“Thank you,” the man said, setting his jaw. “But I think I’ve sufficient funds in my own account.” He spoke to the machine in Canasian, too quickly and softly for me to follow, and a fresh hypo popped out for use.

I turned to Vadim while the other man fumbled the hypo into a vein. “Vadim; I’m going to be generous and let you leave now. But I don’t want to see you in this room again.”

He looked at me with his lips curled, flecks of vomit glued to his face like snowflakes.

“Is not over between you and me, Meera-Bell.”

He unhooked himself, paused and looked around at the other passengers, obviously trying to regain some margin of dignity before he departed. It was a pretty wasted effort, since I had something else planned for him.

Vadim tensed, ready to kick off.

“Wait,” I said. “You don’t think I’m going to let you leave before you pay back whatever you’ve stolen, do you?”

He hesitated, looking back at me. “I have not stolen anything from you.” Then to the other man. “Or you, Mister Quirrenbach…”

“Is that true?” I asked the man he’d just addressed.

Quirrenbach hesitated too, glancing at Vadim before answering. “Yes… yes. He hasn’t stolen anything from me. I didn’t speak to him until now.”

I raised my voice. “What about the rest of you? Did this bastard con you out of anything?”

Silence. It was more or less what I had expected. No one was going to be the first to admit that they had been duped by a small-time rat like Vadim, now that they had seen how pitiful he could become.

“See,” Vadim said, “there isn’t anyone, Meera-Bell.”

“Maybe not here,” I said. I reached out with my free hand and snagged the fabric of his coat. The rough quilted patches were as cool and dry as snakeskin. “But what about all the other passengers on the slowboat? Chances are you’ve already fleeced a few of them since we left Idlewild.”

“So what if I did?” he said, almost whispering. “It is none of your concern, is it?” Now his tone was changing by the second. He was squirming before me, shifting into something infinitely more pliant than when he had first entered the commons. “What do you want to stay out of this? What is it worth to you to back out and leave me alone?”

I had to laugh. “Are you actually trying to buy me off?”

“It’s always worth try.”

Something inside me snapped. I dragged Vadim back, slamming him against the wall so hard that he was winded again, and began to pummel him. The enveloping red haze of my anger washed over me like a warm, welcoming fog. I felt ribs shatter under my fists. Vadim tried to fight back, but I was faster, stronger, my fury more righteous.

“Stop!” said a voice, sounding like it came from halfway to infinity. “Stop it; he’s had enough!”

It was Quirrenbach, pulling me away from Vadim. A couple of other passengers had arced over to the scene of violence, studying the work I had inflicted on Vadim with horrified fascination. His face was a single ugly bruise, his mouth weeping shiny scarlet seeds of blood. I must have looked about the same when the Mendicants had finished with me.

“You want me to be lenient with him?” I said.

“You’ve already gone beyond leniency,” Quirrenbach said. “I don’t think you need to kill him. What if he’s telling the truth and he really does have friends?”

“He’s nothing,” I said. “He doesn’t have any more influence than you or I. Even if he did… this is the Glitter Band we’re headed to, not some lawless frontier settlement.”

Quirrenbach gave me the oddest of looks. “You’re serious, aren’t you? You really think we’re headed to the Glitter Band.”

“We’re not?”

“The Glitter Band doesn’t exist,” Quirrenbach said. “It hasn’t existed for years. We’re heading for something else entirely.”

From out of the bruise which was Vadim’s face came something unexpected: a gurgle which might have been him clearing his mouth of blood. Or it might just have been a chuckle of vindication.