Chasm City

TWELVE

“What did you mean by that?”

“By what, Tanner?”

“That little throwaway remark about the Glitter Band not existing. Are you planning on just leaving it hanging there enigmatically?”

Quirrenbach and I were working our way through the bowels of the Strelnikov to Vadim’s hideaway, my progress made all the harder because I had my suitcase with me. We were alone; I’d locked Vadim in my quarters once he had revealed the location of his berth. I assumed that if we searched his quarters we’d find whatever he had stolen from the other passengers. I had already helped myself to his coat and had no immediate plans to return it to him.

“Let’s just say there have been some changes, Tanner.” Quirrenbach was wriggling awkwardly behind me, like a dog chasing something down a hole.

“I didn’t hear about anything.”

“You wouldn’t have. The changes happened recently, when you were on your way here. Occupational hazard of interstellar travel, I’m afraid.”

“One of several,” I said, thinking of my bruised face. “Well, what kind of changes?”

“Rather drastic ones, I’m afraid.” He paused, his breathing coming in hard, sawlike rasps. “Look, I’m sorry to shatter all your perceptions in one go, but you’d better start dealing with the fact that Yellowstone isn’t anything like the world it used to be. And that, Tanner, is something of an understatement.”

I thought back to what Amelia had said about where I would find Reivich. “Is Chasm City still there?”

“Yes… yes. Nothing that drastic. It’s still there; still inhabited; still reasonably prosperous by the standards of this system.”

“A statement you’re about to qualify, I suspect.” I looked ahead and saw that the crawlway was widening out into a cylindrical corridor with oval doors spaced along one side. It was still dark and claustrophobic, the whole experience feeling unpleasantly familiar.

“Regrettably… yes,” Quirrenbach said. “The city’s become very different. It’s almost unrecognisable, and I gather much the same goes for the Glitter Band. There used to be ten thousand habitats in it, thrown around Yellowstone like—and here I’m going to indulge in some shameless mixing of metaphors—a garland of fabulously rare and artfully cut gems, each burning with its own hard radiance.” Quirrenbach stopped and wheezed for a moment before continuing, “Now there are perhaps a hundred or so which still hold enough pressure to support life. The rest are derelict, vacuum-filled husks, silent and dead as driftwood, attended by vast and lethal shoals of orbital debris. They call it the Rust Belt.”

When that had sunk in, I said, “What was it? A war? Did someone insult someone else’s taste in habitat design?”

“No, it wasn’t any war. Though it might have been better if it had been. You can always claw back from a war, after all. They’re not as bad as they’re cracked up to be, wars…”

“Quirrenbach…” My patience was wearing thin.

“It was a plague,” he said hastily. “A very bad one, but a plague nonetheless. But before you start asking deep questions, remember that I know scarcely any more details than you do—I only just arrived here as well, you realise.”

“You’re a lot better informed than I am.” I passed two doors and arrived at a third, comparing the number with the key Vadim had given me. “How did a plague manage to do so much damage?”

“It wasn’t just a plague. I mean, not in the usual sense. It was more… fecund, I suppose. Imaginative. Artistic. Quite deviously so, at times. Um, have we arrived?”

“I think this is his cabin, yes.”

“Careful, Tanner. There might be traps or something.”

“I doubt it; Vadim didn’t look like the kind to indulge in any kind of longterm planning. You need a developed frontal cortex for that.”

I slipped Vadim’s pass into the lock, gratified when the door opened. Feeble, muck-encrusted lights stammered on as I pushed through, revealing a cylindrical berth three or four times as large as the place I’d been assigned. Quirrenbach followed me and stationed himself at one of end of the cabin, like a man not quite ready to descend into a sewer.

I couldn’t blame him for not wanting to come much further in.

The place had the smell of months of accumulated bodily emissions, a greasy film of dead skin cells glued to every yellowing plastic surface. Pornographic holograms on the walls had come alive at our arrival, twelve naked women contorting themselves into anatomically unlikely postures. They’d begun talking as well; a dozen subtly different contraltos offering an enthusiastic appraisal of Vadim’s sexual prowess. I thought of him bound and gagged back in my quarters, oblivious to this flattery. The women never stopped talking, but after a while their gestures and imprecations became repetitive enough to ignore.

“I think, on balance, this is probably the right room,” Quirrenbach said.

I nodded. “Not going to win any awards, is it?”

“Oh, I don’t know—some of the stains are quite interestingly arranged. It’s just a pity he went in for the smeared-excrement look—it’s just so last century.” He pulled aside a little sliding hatch at his end—touching it only with the very tips of his fingers—revealing a grubby, micrometeorite-crazed porthole. “Still, he had a room with a view. Not entirely sure it was worth it, though.”

I looked at the view myself for a few moments. We could see part of the ship’s hull, strobed now and again in stuttering flashes of bright violet. Even though we were under way, the Strelnikov had a squad of workers outside the whole time welding things back together.

“Well, let’s not spend any longer here than strictly necessary. I’ll search this end; you start at yours, and we’ll see if we turn up anything useful.”

“Good idea,” Quirrenbach said.

I began my search; the room—panelled wall-to-wall with recessed lockers—must once have been a storage compartment. There was too much to go through methodically, but I filled my briefcase and the deep pockets of Vadim’s coat with anything that looked even remotely valuable. I scooped up handfuls of jewellery, data-monocles, miniature holo-cameras and translator brooches; exactly the kinds of thing I’d have expected Vadim to steal from the Strelnikov’s slightly more wealthy passengers. I had to hunt to find a watch—space travellers tended not to take them when they were crossing between systems. In the end I found one that had been calibrated for Yellowstone time, its face a series of concentric dials, around which tiny emerald planets ticked to mark the time.

I slipped it on my wrist, the watch pleasantly hefty.

“You can’t just steal his possessions,” Quirrenbach said meekly.

“Vadim’s welcome to file a complaint.”

“That’s not the point. What you’re doing isn’t any better than…”

“Look,” I said, “do you seriously imagine he bought any of this stuff? It’s all stolen; probably from passengers who aren’t aboard any more.”

“Nonetheless, some of it might have been stolen recently. We should be making every effort to return these goods to their rightful owners. Don’t you agree with me?”

“On some distant theoretical level, just possibly.” I continued my search. “But there’s no way we’ll ever know who those owners were. I didn’t notice anybody coming forward in the commons. Anyway—what does it matter to you?”

“It’s called retaining the vestigial trace of a conscience, Tanner.”

“After that thug nearly killed you?”

“The principle still applies.”

“Well—if you think it’ll help you sleep at night—you’re very welcome to leave me alone while I search his belongings. Come to think of it, did I actually ask you to follow me here?”

“Not as such, no…” His face contorted in an agony of indecision as he glanced through the contents of one opened drawer, pulling out a sock which he studied sadly for some moments. “Damn you, Tanner. I hope you’re right about his lack of influence.”

“Oh, I don’t think we need worry ourselves about that.”

“You’re quite certain?”

“I’ve a reasonable grasp of lowlife, believe me.”

“Yes, well… I suppose you could be right. For the sake of argument.” Slowly at first, but with increasing enthusiasm, Quirrenbach started trousering Vadim’s booty indiscriminately, wads of Stoner currency, mainly. I reached over and pocketed two bundles of cash before Quirrenbach made it all vanish.

“Thanks. They’ll do nicely.”

“I was about to pass some to you.”

“Of course you were.” I flicked through the notes. “Is this stuff still worth anything?”

“Yes,” he said, thoughtfully. “In the Canopy, anyway. I’ve no idea what passes for currency in the Mulch, but I doubt that it can hurt, can it?”

I helped myself to some more. “Better safe than sorry, that’s my philosophy.”

I continued searching—digging through more of the same junk and jewellery—until I found what looked like an experiential playback device. It was slimmer and sleeker than anything I’d ever seen on Sky’s Edge, cleverly engineered so that in its collapsed form it was no larger than a Bible.

I found a vacant pocket and slipped the unit home, along with a cache of experientials which I assumed might have some value in their own right.

“This plague we were talking about…” I said.

“Yes?”

“I don’t understand how it did so much damage.”

“That’s because it wasn’t a biological one—I mean, not in the way we’d usually understand such things.” He paused and stopped what he was doing. “Machines, that’s what it went for. Made almost all machines above a certain complexity level stop working, or start working in ways they were never meant to.”

I shrugged. “That doesn’t sound that bad.”

“Not if the machines are merely robots and environmental systems, like the ones in this ship. But this was Yellowstone. Most of the machines were microscopic devices inside human beings, already intimately linked to mind and flesh. What happened to the Glitter Band was just symptomatic of something far more horrific happening on the human scale, in the same way that—say—the lights going out all over Europe in the late fourteenth century was indicative of the arrival of the Black Death.”

“I’ll need to know more.”

“Then query the system in your room. Or Vadim’s, for that matter.”

“Or you could just tell me now.”

He shook his head. “No, Tanner. Because I know very little more than you. Remember, we both came in at the same time. On different ships, yes—but we were both crossing interstellar space when this happened. I’ve had little more time to adjust to it than you’ve had.”

Quietly and calmly, I said, “Where was it you came from?”

“Grand Teton.”

His world was another of the original Amerikano colonies, like Yellowstone, Yosemite, Glacier and two or three others I couldn’t remember. They’d all been settled by robots four centuries ago; self-replicating machines carrying the templates necessary to construct living humans upon their arrival. None of those colonies had been successful, all of them failing after one or two subsequent generations. A few rare lineages might still be able to trace themselves back to the original Amerikano settlers, but the majority of people living on those worlds were descended from later colonisation waves, arriving by lighthugger. Most were Demarchist states, like Yellowstone.

Sky’s Edge, of course, was another case entirely. It was the only world that had ever been settled by generation ship.

There were some mistakes you didn’t make twice.

“I hear Grand Teton’s one of the nicer places to live,” I said.

“Yes. And I suppose you’re wondering what brought me here.”

“No, actually. Not really my business.”

He slowed in his rummaging through Vadim’s loot. I could see that my lack of curiosity was not something to which he was accustomed. I continued my investigations, silently counting the seconds before he broke his silence.

“I’m an artist,” Quirrenbach said. “Actually, a composer. I’m working on a symphony cycle; my life’s work. That’s what brings me here.”

“Music?”

“Yes, music—though that contemptible little word barely encapsulates what I have in mind. My next symphony will be a work inspired by nothing less than Chasm City.” He smiled. “It was going to be a glorious, uplifting piece, celebrating the city in all its Belle Epoque splendour; a composition teeming with vitality and energy. Now, I think, it will have to be a darker piece entirely; Shostakovichian in its solemnity; a work weighed down by the crushing realisation that history’s wheel has finally turned and crushed our mortal dreams to dust. A plague symphony.”

“And that’s what you’ve come all this way for? To scribble down a few notes?”

“To scribble down a few notes, yes. And why not? Someone, after all, has to do it.”

“But it’ll take you decades to get back home.”

“A fact that has, surprisingly, impinged on my consciousness before you so kindly pointed it out. But my journey here is a mere prelude, occupying a span of time that will become inconsequential when set against the several centuries that I confidently expect to elapse before the work nears completion. I myself will probably age the better part of a century in that time—the equivalent of two or three whole working lives of any of the great composers. I shall be visiting dozens of systems, of course—and adding others to my itinerary as they become significant. There will almost certainly be more wars, more plagues, more dark ages. And times of miracle and wonder, of course. All of which will be grist to the mill of my great work. And when it is polished, and when I am not utterly disgusted and disillusioned with it, I will very probably find myself in my twilight years. I simply won’t have time to keep abreast of the latest longevity techniques, you see; not while I’m pouring my energies into my work. I’ll just have to take whatever’s easily available and hope I live to finish my magnum opus. Then, when I have tidied up the work, and achieved some form of reconciliation between the crude scribblings I have set down now and the undoubtedly masterful and fluid work I will be producing at the end of my life, I will take a ship back to Grand Teton—assuming it still exists—where I will announce the great work’s premiere. The premiere itself won’t be for another fifty or so years afterwards, depending on the extent of human space at that time. That will give time for word to reach even the most distant colonies, and for people to begin converging on Grand Teton for the performance. I will sleep while the venue is constructed—I already have something suitably lavish in mind—and an orchestra worthy of the event is assembled, or bred, or cloned—whichever the case may be. And when that fifty years is done, I will rise from slumber, step into the limelight, conduct my work and, in what little time remains to me, bask in a fame the like of which no living composer has ever or will ever know. The names of the great composers will be reduced to mere footnote entries; barely flickering embryo stars set against the gemlike brilliance of my own stellar conflagration. My name will ring down the centuries like a single undying chord.”

There was a long silence before I responded.

“Well, you’ve got to have something to aim for, I suppose.”

“I suppose you must think me monstrously vain.”

“I don’t think the thought ever crossed my mind, Quirrenbach.” While I was speaking I touched something at the back of one of the drawers. I’d been hoping to locate a weapon of some sort—something with a little more punch than the clockwork gun—but Vadim appeared to have managed without one. Still, I felt I had something. “This is interesting.”

“What have you found?”

I pulled out a matte-black metal box the size of a cigar case, opening it to reveal six scarlet vials tucked into pouches. Set into the same case was something like an ornate steel hypodermic, with a gunlike handle, marked with a delicately painted bas-relief cobra.

“I don’t know. Any thoughts?”

“Not exactly, no…” He examined the cache of vials with what looked like genuine curiosity. “But I’ll tell you one thing. It doesn’t look legal, whatever it is.”

“More or less what I was thinking.”

As I reached to take back the cache, Quirrenbach said, “Why are you so interested in it?”

I remembered the syringe which had slipped from the pocket of the monk in Amelia’s cave. There was no way to tell for sure, but the substance I had seen in that syringe—admittedly in the dim light of the cave—looked much like the chemical in Vadim’s cache. I remembered, too, what Amelia had told me when I had asked her about the syringe: that it was something the monk should not have had in Idlewild. Some kind of narcotic, then—and perhaps prohibited not just in the Mendicant hospice but across the whole system.

“I’m assuming this might open some doors for me.”

“It might open a lot more than that,” Quirrenbach said. “The very gates of hell, for a start. I’ve remembered something. Something I heard up in the parking swarm. Concerning some very nasty substances doing the rounds.” He nodded at the row of scarlet vials. “One of which is something they call Dream Fuel.”

“And this might be it?”

“I don’t know, but it’s exactly the kind of thing I would expect our dear friend Vadim to be trading in.”

“Where would he have got it from?”

“I didn’t say I was an expert, Tanner. All I know is that it has some unpleasant side-effects and whatever authorities there are in this system don’t exactly encourage its use—or the possession of it, for that matter.”

“It must have some uses, though.”

“Yes—but exactly what they do with it, I don’t know. That device is a wedding gun, incidentally.”

He must have seen the blank look on my face.

“It was a local custom for a husband and wife to exchange, in some fashion, actual neural material cultured from each other’s brains. They used that thing—the wedding gun—to implant the stuff into each other.”

“They don’t do that anymore?”

“Not since the plague, I think.” He looked rueful. “Actually, come to think of it, there are lots of things they don’t do since the plague.”

When Quirrenbach had gone with his gains—back to ponder the next instalment in his symphony cycle, I hoped—I crossed over to Vadim’s network console. For the first time since departure I had weight again, as the Strelnikov executed a thrust burn, minutely adjusting its fall towards the Rust Belt. From somewhere else I heard low, saurian moans of structural protest, and couldn’t help wondering if I’d picked the one voyage which would end with the ship’s hull finally giving up the ghost. Presently, however, the groans and creaks subsided into the ship’s normal sonic background and I was able to concentrate on the matter at hand.

The console looked ancient, like something children would have laughed at in a museum. There was a flat screen surrounded by controls embossed with finger-worn icons, above an alphanumeric keyboard. I didn’t know what the state of the art around Yellowstone was, but this wasn’t it even by Sky’s Edge standards.

It would have to do.

I found the key which turned the console on, the screen stammering through a series of warm-up messages and adverts before displaying a complex tree of options. Shipboard data services. Realtime networks—the web of data streams within a light-second or so of the Strelnikov, so that normal conversations were possible. Deep system networks, with typical timelags ranging from seconds to tens of hours, depending on the complexity of the enquiry. There was no explicit possibility to access networks with response times longer than that, which made sense: any enquiry sent out to the system’s Kuiper Belt habitats would have returned a reply long after the sender had left the slowboat at journey’s end.

I entered the option for the deep system networks, waiting a few seconds while the screen busied itself with more advertising material. A tree of sub-menus appeared. News of arriving and departing starships, including an entry for the Orvieto. The Yellowstone system was still a busy interstellar hub, which also made a kind of sense. If the plague had struck in the last decade or so, many ships would have already been on their way here. It would take decades for news of the plague to spread out into the main volume of human-settled space.

I skimmed through the options.

The deep system networks carried comms traffic to and from the habitats in orbit around the system’s gas giants: typically mining stations and outposts for the more reclusive factions. There were Conjoiner nests, Skyjack enclaves and semi-automated military or experimental facilities. I searched in vain for any reference to the plague. Occasionally there was talk of containment procedures, or crisis management, but for the most part it looked as if the plague—or its consequences—had become so fundamental an aspect of life that there was seldom any need to refer to the thing itself.

The local networks told me a little more. Once or twice, at least, I found references to the crisis by name, and learned that they had given it a specific and chilling name: the Melding Plague. But most of the messages assumed total familiarity with the basic facts of the plague itself. There were references to Hermetics, and the Canopy, and the Mulch, and sometimes to something called the Game, but none of these terms were elaborated upon.

I had heard of the Canopy, though. That was where Amelia had said I’d stand a good chance of finding Reivich. It was a district of Chasm City.

But had she told me less than I had imagined?

I put the console into send mode and composed a query concerning the plague; a request for general information for newcomers. I couldn’t believe I was the first to want this information before being plunged into the thick of the Rust Belt, but it was also entirely possible that no one would bother replying to me, or that no kind of automated handling system was functioning now.

I sent my query, then stared at the console for a few seconds. The screen stared back at me, unchanging.

Nothing came.

Disappointed and still no closer to the truth, I went to the pockets of the coat I had taken from Vadim and pulled out the neatly stowed playback kit. The device almost assembled itself, the slim black parts sliding home with the pleasing precision of rifle components. The result was a skeletal black helmet, nubbed with field-generators and input ports, ornamented with luminous green and red cobras. A pair of stereoscopic eyepieces folded down from the helmet’s front, their rims formed from material that automatically conformed to the skin around the eye. A pair of earplugs functioned similarly, and there were even noseplugs for olfactory input.

I hefted the helmet, then placed it on my head.

The helmet gripped my scalp firmly, like a torture vice. The little eyepieces moved into position, glueing themselves around my sockets. Inside each was a high-resolution imaging system which was currently showing exactly the view I’d have seen had I not been wearing the helmet, except for a slight and probably deliberate graininess. To do much better I would have needed neural implants and a more sophisticated playback system, something that could interrogate and adjust brain signals with the finesse of a military trawl.

I opened my briefcase.

Inside, I found the cache of experientials I’d carried from Sky’s Edge, still wrapped in clear plastic. I removed the plastic and examined the six pen-like sticks, but there was nothing written on them to give any clue as to what they contained. Were they simply commodities to be traded, or did the sticks contain messages to me from my pre-amnesiac self?

There was a port in the brow of the helmet into which one inserted the metallic tip of the experiential, so that it stuck out like a thin horn. I took the first of my six and pushed it home.

A menu popped into existence ahead of me, giving options for entering the simulation at various points and with various artistic settings. I accepted the defaults and plunged into the experiential at random, making my choices with hand gestures. The helmet generated a low-level electric field which my body modified, enabling the system to read any large-scale movements.

Vadim’s room greyed out smoothly, a hiss of white-noise in my ears. The noise faded to near-silence, quieter than it had ever been aboard the slowboat. The grey lightened, shapes and colours emerging like phantoms out of fog.

I was in a jungle clearing, shooting enemy soldiers.

I was stripped to the waist, over-muscled, even for a soldier, paint daubed across my chest, with an old model of particle-beam rifle gripped in one hand, while my other hand held a smaller, slug-firing machine-gun. I’d handled similar weapons myself and I knew that it was physically impossible to fire either singlehandedly, let alone held out nearly at arm’s length. Both weapons chugged away as I doused them at an unending stream of enemy soldiers, who seemed perfectly willing to run screaming towards me from the bush, even though any one of them could have picked me off from cover with a single well-aimed shot. I was screaming as well. Maybe it was the effort of having to hold both those guns.

It was laughable, but I didn’t doubt that there’d be a market for something like it. There was a market for that kind of thing on Sky’s Edge, after all—and we already had a real war.

I tried the next one.

This time I was sitting inside a skeletally framed single-seat wheeler, racing it across a mud flat with a dozen or so other wheelers trying to sneak past me on either side. I’d entered this one with the experiential set to interactive, so I was able to steer the wheeler and throttle its turbine up and down. I played it for a few minutes, keeping ahead of the pack, until I badly misjudged the angle of a sandbank and lost control. Another car slammed into mine and there was an instant of painless carnage before I was back at the starting line again, gunning my engine. Difficult to tell how this one would sell. They might lap it up as a unique Sky’s Edge product, or they might find the whole thing irredeemably quaint.

I continued through the remaining four experientials, but the results were just as disappointing. Two of them were fictionalised episodes from my planet’s past: one a melodrama about Sky Hauss-mann’s life aboard the Santiago —really the last thing I needed—while the other was a love story set during the time of Sky’s imprisonment, trial and execution, but in which Sky was only very a minor background character. The other two experientials were adventures, both of which involved snake-hunting, though whoever had scripted them had only a passing knowledge of hamadryad biology.

I’d expected more: some kind of specific message from my past. Although I remembered a great deal more now than I’d done upon first waking in Idlewild, there were still aspects of my past that were unclear; things that refused to snap into focus. I could have lived with these absences if I’d been stalking Reivich in familiar territory, but even my knowledge of the city ahead of me was inaccurate.

I turned to the cache of experientials I had taken from Vadim. They were all blank except for a tiny silver motif near the top of each. I wasn’t going to learn anything about myself, but I’d at least learn a little more about what passed for entertainment in Chasm City. I slipped one of them in.

It was a mistake.

I was expecting pornography, or mindless violence—something from the extremes of human experience, but still recognisable as such. What I got was so strange that at first it was difficult to articulate what I was experiencing and I began to wonder if there was some compatibility problem between the experientials and the helmet, so that the wrong parts of my brain were being stimulated. But they’d all come from the same source: Vadim’s room.

This was how it was meant to be.

It was dark, dank, squalid, and there was a feeling of terrible, crushing claustrophobia—an emotion so intense that it was like my skull was slowly squeezing my brain. My body was all wrong: elongated and limbless, pale and soft and infinitely vulnerable. I couldn’t guess how that sensation was engendered, unless the device was stimulating some ancient part of the brain which remembered what it was like to ooze or swim rather than walk. And yet I was not actually alone, and nor was the darkness as absolute as it had originally seemed. My body occupied a warm, humid hollow inside a space which had been cored out with labyrinthine black tunnels and chambers. And there were others with me; other pale, elongated presences. I couldn’t see them—they must have been in adjacent chambers—but I could taste their proximity, ingest the souplike chemical flow of their emotions and thoughts. And in some sense they were me as well, detached avatars of myself. They moved and quivered at my bidding, and I sensed what they sensed.

The claustrophobia was total and crushing, but it was also reassuring. Beyond the hard, rocklike volume in which we were caged was an absolute void from which my thoughts flinched. That emptiness was worse than the claustrophobia, and what made it worse still was the fact that it was not truly empty; that the void held terrible, silent, infinitely patient enemies.

Who were coming closer.

I felt a convulsion of fear so absolute that I screamed and removed the helmet. For a moment I floated in Vadim’s cabin, breathing hard, wondering just what I’d experienced. The feeling of immense claustrophobia, combined with even worse agoraphobia, took long seconds to abate, like the after-chime of an awful bell.

My hands trembling—although I was beginning to regain some control—I removed the experiential and examined it more closely, this time paying proper attention to the little motif near the top of the stick.

It looked a lot like a maggot.

I watched our approach to the Rust Belt through the observation window in Vadim’s cabin.

I knew something of what lay ahead now. Shortly after I’d tried the disturbing experiential—while I was still reeling from its effects, in fact—the console had chimed, announcing the arrival of a response to my earlier query. I was surprised; in my experience such things usually happened instantaneously or not at all, and the delay served only to emphasise how disrupted the system’s data networks must have been.

The message, it turned out, was a standard-issue document, rather than a personally composed reply. An automated mechanism must have decided that it would answer most of my questions; an assumption that turned out to be reasonably accurate.

I started reading.

The document was long, but I quickly read the thing in its entirety, then reread it carefully, picking out the salient points which might assist me in the hunt for Reivich. I’d already been forewarned about the scale of the plague’s effects, so the document’s revelations were perhaps not as shocking to me as they would have been to someone freshly defrosted. But it was still chilling to see it anatomised in such a coolly detached manner, and it was easy to imagine how unsettling it must have been to someone who had come to Yellowstone in search of riches rather than blood. The Mendicants had clearly elected not to spring this news on their slush puppies too quickly, and doubtless if I’d stayed in Idlewild a little longer they would have begun to break it to me gently. But perhaps the document was right: there were some truths it was best to deal with as quickly as possible, no matter how repugnant that truth might have been.

I wondered how long it would take me to adjust to it, or if I’d be one of the unfortunate few who never quite made the transition.

Perhaps, I thought, they were actually the sane ones.

Through the window the larger Rust Belt habitats had begun to assume definite shapes, rather than just being indistinct orbiting flecks. I tried to imagine what it would have looked like seven years ago, in the last days before the plague.

There’d been ten thousand habitats in the Glitter Band, each as opulent and faceted as a chandelier, each distinguished from its neighbours by some wild architectural flourish that had far less to do with the practicalities of structural design than it had with aesthetics and prestige. They’d circled Yellowstone in low orbit, almost nose-to-tail, each vast and stately construct maintaining polite distance from those ahead and behind it with tiny puffs of correcting thrust. A constant flow of commerce had shuffled between the habitats along narrow traffic lanes, so that from a distance the habitats themselves looked as if they were entwined in tinsel-like filaments of light. Depending on the ever-shifting spectrum of allegiances and feuds, the habitats either communicated with each other via looms of quantum-encrypted laser light, or maintained sullen silences. Such silences were not at all unusual, for there were profound rivalries even amongst the constituents of what was technically the very model of a unified Demarchist society.

Amongst ten thousand habitats, there was every human specialisation imaginable: every expertise, every ideology, every perversion. The Demarchists permitted everything, even experimentation in political models which chafed against their underlying paradigm of absolute non-hierarchical democracy. Provided those experiments remained experiments, they were tolerated; even actively encouraged. Only the development and stockpiling of armaments was forbidden, unless they were to be used artistically. And it was here in the Glitter Band that the system’s most illustrious clan, the Sylveste family, had performed much of the work that had brought them eventual fame. Calvin Sylveste had attempted the first neural downloads since the Transenlightenment in the Band. Dan Sylveste had collated all known information on the Shrouders here; work that eventually led to his own fateful expedition to Lascaille’s Shroud.

But that was the deep past now. History had turned the glory of the Glitter Band into… this.

When the Melding Plague had hit, the Glitter Band had stayed intact for far longer than Chasm City, for most of the Band’s habitats already had effective quarantine protocols. Some were so secretive and self-sufficient that no one had entered them in decades anyway.

But they were not, ultimately, immune.

It took only one habitat to fall to the plague. Within days most of the people aboard died, and most of their habitat’s self-replicating systems began to go haywire in ways that seemed nastily purposeful. The habitat’s ecosystem collapsed fatally. Uncontrolled, the habitat drifted out of its orbital slot like a chunk of carved iceberg. Ordinarily the chances of a collision would have been small… but the Glitter Band was already congested to within a hairsbreadth of disaster.

The first rule of collisions between two orbital bodies was that they were very rare indeed… until one happened. Then the shards of the destroyed bodies would splinter off in different directions, significantly increasing the likelihood of another impact. It would not be such a long wait until the next collision. And when it happened again, the number of shards increased once more… such that the next collision was a practical certainty…

Within weeks, most of the habitats in the Glitter Band had been fatally holed by collisional debris… and even when those impact fragments were not in themselves sufficient to kill all aboard, they also tended to be contaminated by traces of the plague originating from the first habitat to fall. They became orbiting hulks, as dark and dead as driftwood. By the end of the year, barely two hundred habitats had remained intact: principally the oldest and sturdiest structures, sheathed in rock and ice against radiation storms. With batteries of anti-collision lasers emplaced around their skins, they had managed to fend off most of the large chunks.

That was six years ago. In the intervening time, Quirrenbach told me, the Rust Belt had been stabilised, with most of the debris mopped up and conglomerated into hazardous lumps which had been sent spinning into the boiling face of Epsilon Eridani. Now at least the Belt was not growing any more fragmented. The hulks, for the most part, were kept in check by periodic nudges from robot tugs. Only a handful had been successfully repressurised and settled, although there were predictable rumours of all manner of sinister factions squatting furtively amongst the ruins.

This much I had learned from the nets. Seeing the ruins for the first time was something else entirely. Yellowstone was an ochre immensity blocking half the sky, now tangibly a world like the one I’d left, rather than a pale two-dimensional disk against the stars. As the Strelnikov swooped towards the habitat where it would dock, the silhouettes of other, ravaged ones crossed the face of Yellowstone. They were gnarled, gutted, pocked and cratered with the evidence of titanic collisions. I tried to hold in my head the numbers of dead the Rust Belt represented: although many of the habitats had been in the process of being evacuated when they were struck, it couldn’t have been easy to remove a million people at such short notice.

Our habitat was shaped like a fat cigar, spun about its long axis for gravity in the same manner as Idlewild. Sister Amelia had told me that the place where we were headed was called Carousel New Vancouver. It was carapaced in ice, mostly dirty-grey in hue, but occasionally patched with acres of bright new ice to repair what I assumed were recent impact points. It was spinning silently, throwing off a dozen lazy coils of steam from its skin like the arms of a spiral galaxy. A huge spacecraft was attached to the rim, shaped like a manta-ray and with scores of tiny windows around the edges of its wings. But the Strelnikov arced in towards one tip of the cigar, a triad of jaws opening to admit it. We nosed into a chamber walled in a maze of intestinal pipes and fuel tanks. I saw a few other shuttles clamped in parking bays: two sleek atmosphere cutters like bottle-green arrowheads and a couple of vessels which looked like cousins to the slowboat, all blunt angularity and exposed engine components. Spacesuited figures were swarming around all the ships, carrying umbilical lines and repair kits. A few robots were toiling away on hull-repair tasks, but for the most part the work was being done by humans or bio-engineered animals.

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 across. 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 woodwind, 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 conversationalist.”

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 Vadim 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.