Chasm City

FIFTEEN

We were at the lowest level of Chasm City, far below the rim of the caldera. The street on which we ran crossed a black lake on pontoons. Rain was falling softly from the sky—from the dome, in fact, many kilometres above our heads. All around us, vast buildings rose from the flood, sides slab-sided and immense. They were all I could see in any direction, until—forestlike—they merged into a distant, detailless wall, like a bank of smog. They were encrusted—at least for the first six or seven storeys—in a barnacle-like accretion of ramshackle dwellings and markets, lashed together and interlinked with flimsy walkways and rope-ladders. Fires burned in the slums, and the air was even more pungent than in the concourse. But it was fractionally cooler, and because there was a constant breeze, it felt less stifling.

“What’s this place called?” I said.

“This Mulch,” said Juan. “Everything down here, street level, this Mulch.”

I understood then that the Mulch was less a district of the city than a stratification. It included perhaps the first six or seven storeys which rose above the flooded parts. It was a carpet of slum from which the great forest of the city rose.

Looking up, craning my neck to peer around the rickshaw’s roof, I saw the slab-sided structures ram skywards, perspective forcing them together at least a kilometre above my head. For most of that height, their geometries must have been much as their architects had intended: rectilinear, with parallel rows of windows, now dark, the edifices marred only by the occasional haphazard extrusion or limpet-like excresence. Up higher, though, the picture changed sickeningly. Although no two buildings had mutated in quite the same manner, there was something common to their shape-changing, a kind of uniform pathology which a surgeon might have recognised and diagnosed as stemming from the same cause. Some of the buildings split in two halfway up their length, while others bulged with unseemly obesity. Some sprouted tiny avatars of themselves, like the elbowed towers and oubliettes of fairytale castles. Higher, these structural growths bifurcated and bifurcated again, interpenetrating and linking like bronchioli, or some weird variant of brain coral, until what they formed was a kind of horizontal raft of fused branches, suspended a kilometre or two from the ground. I had seen it before, of course, from the sky, but the meaning of it—and its sheer, city-spanning scale—was only now apparent from this vantage point.

Canopy.

“Now you see why I no take you there, mister.”

“I’m beginning to. It covers the whole city, right?”

Juan nodded. “Just like Mulch, only higher.”

The one thing that had not been really obvious from the behemoth was that the Canopy’s dense entanglement of madly deformed buildings was confined to a relatively shallow vertical stratum; the Canopy was a kind of suspended ecology and below it was another world—another city—entirely. The complexity of it was obvious now. There were whole communities floating within it; sealed structures embedded in the Canopy like birds’ nests, each as large as a palace. Fine as gossamer, a mass of weblike strands filled the spaces between the larger branches, dangling down almost to street level. It was difficult to tell if they had come with the mutations, or had been some intentional human addition.

The effect was as if the Canopy had been cobwebbed by monstrous insects, invisible spiders larger than houses.

“Who lives there?” I knew it wasn’t a completely stupid question, since I had already seen lights burning in the branches; evidence that, no matter how distorted the geometries of those sick dead husks of buildings, they had been claimed for human habitation.

“No one you wanna know, mister.” Juan chewed on his statement before adding, “Or no one who wanna know you. That no insult, either.”

“None taken, but please answer my question.”

Juan was a long time responding, during which time our rickshaw continued to navigate the roots of the giant structures, wheels jumping over water-filled cracks in the road. The rain hadn’t stopped of course, but when I pushed my head beyond the awning, what I felt was warm and soft; hardly a hardship at all. I wondered if it ever ended, or whether the pattern of condensation on the dome was diurnal; if it were all happening according to some schedule. I had the impression, though, that very little that happened in Chasm City was under anyone’s direct control.

“Them rich people,” the kid said. “Real rich—not small-time rich like Madame Dominika.” He knuckled his bony head. “Don’t need Dominika, either.”

“You mean there are enclaves in the Canopy where the plague never reached?”

“No, plague reach everywhere. But in Canopy, them clean it out, after building stop changing. Some rich, they stay in orbit. Some never leave CC, or come down after shit hit fan. Some get deported.”

“Why would anyone come here after the plague, if they didn’t have to? Even if parts of the Canopy are safe from residual traces of the Melding Plague, I can’t see why anyone would choose to live there rather than stay in the remaining habitats of the Rust Belt.”

“Them get deported no have big choice,” said the kid.

“No; I can understand that. But why would anyone else come here?”

“Because them think thing got to get better, and them wanna be here when it happen. Plenty way to make money, when thing get better—but only few people gonna get serious rich. Plenty way to make money now, too—less p’lice here than upside.”

“You’re saying there are no rules here, are there? Nothing that can’t be bought? I’d imagine that must have been tempting, after the strictures of Demarchy.”

“Mister, you talk funny.”

My next question was obvious. “How do I get there? To the Canopy, I mean?”

“You not already there, you don’t.”

“You’re saying I’m not rich enough, is that it?”

“Rich not enough,” the kid said. “Need connection. Gotta be tight with Canopy, or you ain’t nobody.”

“Assuming I was, how would I get there? Are there routes through the buildings, old access shafts not sealed by the plague?” I figured this was the kind of street knowledge the kid would know backwards.

“You no wanna take inside route, mister. Plenty dangerous. Special when hunt coming down.”

“Hunt?”

“This place no good at night, mister.”

I looked around at the gloom. “How would you ever be able to tell? No; don’t answer that. Just tell me how I’d get up there.” I waited for an answer, and when it showed no sign of arriving I decided to recast my question. “Do Canopy people ever come down to the Mulch?”

“Sometime. Special during hunt.”

Progress, I thought, even though it was like pulling a tooth. “And how do they get here? I’ve seen what look like flying vehicles, what we used to call volantors, but I can’t imagine anyone could fly through the Canopy without hitting some of those webs.”

“We call them volantor too. Only rich got “em—difficult to fix, keep flying. No good in some part of city, either. Most Canopy kid, they come down in cable-car now.”

“Cable-car?”

For a moment a look of helpfulness crossed his face, and I realised he was desperately trying to please me. It was just that my enquiries were so far outside of his usual parameters that it was causing him physical pain.

“Those web, those cable? Hang between building?”

“Can you show me a cable-car? I’d like to see one.”

“It not safe, mister.”

“Well, nor am I.”

I sugared the question with another bill, then settled back into the seat as we sped on through the soft interior rain, through the Mulch.

Eventually Juan slowed and turned round to me. “There. Cable-car. Them often come down here. Want we go closer?”

At first I wasn’t sure what he meant. Parked diagonally across the shattered roadbed was one of the sleek private vehicles I’d seen in and around the concourse. One door was folded open from the side, like the wing of a gull, with two greatcoated individuals standing in the rain next to it, faces lost under wide-brimmed hats.

I looked at them, wondering what I was going to do next.

“Hey mister, I already ask you, you want we go closer?”

One of the two people by the cable-car lit a cigarette and for a moment I saw the fire chase the shadows from his face—it was aristocratic, with a nobility I had not seen since arriving on the planet. His eyes were concealed behind complex goggles which emphasised the exaggerated sharpness of his cheekbones. His friend was a woman, her slender gloved hand holding a pair of toylike binoculars to her eyes. Pivoting on her knifelike heels, she scanned the street, until her gaze swept over me. I watched her flinch as it happened, though she tried to control it.

“They nervous,” Juan breathed. “Mostly, Mulch and Canopy keep far apart.”

“Any particular reason?”

“Yeah, one good one.” Now he was whispering so quietly I could barely hear him above the relentless hiss of the rain. “Mulch get too close, Mulch vanish.”

“Vanish?”

He drew his finger across his throat, but discreetly. “Canopy like games, mister. They bored. Immortal people, they all bored. So they play games. Trouble is, not everyone get asked they wanna take part.”

“Like the hunt you mentioned?”

He nodded. “But no talk it now.”

“All right. Stop here then, Juan, if you’d be so good.”

The rickshaw lost what little forward momentum it had had, the primate showing agitation in every ridge of his back muscles. I observed the reactions on the faces of the two Canopy dwellers—trying to look cool, and almost achieving it. I stepped out of the rickshaw, my feet squelching as they made acquaintance with the sodden roadbed. “Mister,” said Juan. “You be careful now. I ain’t earned a fare home yet.”

“Don’t go anywhere,” I said, then thought better of it. “Listen, if this makes you nervous, leave and return in five minutes.”

This obviously struck him as excellent advice. The woman with the binoculars returned them to her exuberantly patterned greatcoat, while the goggled man reached up and made what was obviously a delicate readjustment of his optics. I walked calmly in their direction, paying more attention to their vehicle. It was a glossy black lozenge, resting on three retractable wheels. Through a tinted forward window I glimpsed upholstered seats facing complicated manual controls. What appeared to be three rotor blades were furled on the roof. But as I examined the mounting more closely, I saw that this wasn’t any kind of helicopter. The blades were not attached to the body of the vehicle by a rotating axle, but vanished into three circular holes in a domelike hump which rose seamlessly from the hull itself. And, now that I looked closer, I saw that the blades were not really blades at all, but telescopic arms, each tipped with a scythelike hook.

That was all the time I had for sightseeing. “Don’t come any closer,” the woman said. She backed up her words, spoken in flawless Canasian, by flourishing a tiny weapon, little larger than a brooch. “He’s unarmed,” the man said, loud enough for me to hear, intentionally, it seemed.

“I don’t mean you any harm.” I spread my arms—slowly. “These are Mendicant clothes. I’ve just arrived on the planet. I wanted to know about reaching the Canopy.”

“The Canopy?” the man said, as if this was vastly amusing.

“That’s what they all want,” the woman said. The weapon had not budged, and her grip on it was so steady that I wondered if it contained tiny gyroscopes, or some kind of biofeedback device which acted on the muscles in her wrist. “Why should we talk to you?”

“Because I’m harmless—unarmed, as your partner observed—and curious, and it might amuse you.”

“You’ve no idea what amuses us.”

“No, I probably don’t, but, as I said—I’m curious. I’m a man of means—” the remark sounded ridiculous as soon I had spoken it, but I soldiered on “—and I’ve had the misfortune to arrive in the Mulch with no contacts in the Canopy.”

“You speak Canasian reasonably well,” the man observed, lowering his hand from his goggles. “Most Mulch can barely manage an insult in anything other than their native tongue.” He threw away what remained of his cigarette.

“But with an accent,” the woman said. “I don’t place it—it’s offworld, but nothing I’m familiar with.”

“I’m from Sky’s Edge. You may have met people from other parts of the planet who speak differently. It’s been settled long enough for linguistic drift.”

“So had Yellowstone,” said the man, feigning no real interest in this line of debate. “But most of us still live in Chasm City. Here, the only linguistic drift is vertical.” He laughed, as if the remark were more than just a statement of fact.

I wiped rain from my eyes, warm and viscous. “The driver said the only way to reach the Canopy was by cable-car.”

“An accurate statement, but that doesn’t mean we can help you.” The man removed his hat, revealing long blond hair tied back.

His companion added, “We have no reason to trust you. A Mulch could have stolen Mendicant clothes and learned a few words of Canasian. No sane person would arrive here without already establishing ties with Canopy.”

I took a calculated risk. “I’ve got some Dream Fuel. Does that interest you?”

“Oh yes, and how in hell’s name did a Mulch get hold of Dream Fuel?”

“It’s a long story.” But I reached into Vadim’s coat and removed the cache of Dream Fuel vials. “You’ll have to take my word that is the genuine article, of course.”

“I’m not in the habit of taking anyone’s word on anything,” the man said. “Pass me one of those vials.”

Another calculated risk. The man might run off with the one, but that would still leave me with the others.

“I’ll throw you one. How does that sound?”

The man took a few steps towards me. “Do it, then.”

I tossed him the vial. He caught it deftly and then vanished into the vehicle. The woman remained outside, still covering me with the little gun. A few moments passed, then the man emerged from the vehicle again, not bothering to don his hat. He held up the vial. “This… seems to be the genuine article.”

“What did you do?”

“Shone a light through it, of course.” He looked at me as if I was stupid. “Dream Fuel has a unique absorption spectrum.”

“Good. Now that you know it’s real, throw the vial back to me and we’ll negotiate terms.”

The man made a throwing gesture, but pulled at the last moment, holding the vial in front of him tauntingly. “No… let’s not be hasty, shall we? You have more of these, you say? Dream Fuel’s in short supply these days. At least the good stuff. You must have stumbled on quite a haul.” He paused. “I’ve done you a favour, which we’ll think of as fair payment for this vial. I’ve asked that another cable-car meet you here shortly. You’d better not have been lying about your means.” He removed his goggles, revealing iron-grey eyes of extraordinary cruelty.

“I’m grateful,” I said. “But what would it matter if I had been lying?”

“That’s an odd question.” The woman made her weapon vanish, like a well-rehearsed conjuring trick. Perhaps it had sprung back into a sleeve-holster.

“I told you, I’m curious.”

“There is no law here,” she said. “A kind of law, in the Canopy—but only that which suits us; that which conveniences us, like the playground law of children. But we’re not in the Canopy now. Down here, anything goes. And we have very little patience with those who deceive us.”

“That’s all right,” I said. “I’m not a patient man myself.”

They both climbed into their vehicle, momentarily leaving the doors splayed open. “Perhaps we’ll see you in the Canopy,” the man said, and then smiled at me. It was not the kind of smile one relished. It was the kind of smile I had seen on snakes in the vivaria at the Reptile House.

The doors clammed down and their vehicle came to life with a subliminal hum.

The three telescopic arms on the roof of the cable-car swung outwards and upwards, and then continued extending outwards at blinding speed, doubling, tripling, quadrupling their length. They were reaching skywards. I looked up, shielding my eyes against the perpetual embalming rain. The rickshaw driver had pointed out that the cables spanning the gnarled structures of the Canopy occasionally draped down to the level of the Mulch, like hanging vines, but I hadn’t paid enough attention to his remark. Now I saw the significance of it as one of the car’s arms snagged the lowest line with its hooked claw. The other two arms extended even further, out to perhaps ten times their original length, until they found their own draping lines and made purchase.

And then—smoothly, as if it were lifting on thrusters—the cable-car pulled itself aloft, accelerating all the time. The nearest arm released its grip on the cable, contracted and jerked, stabbing upwards with the speed of a chameleon’s tongue, until it had locked around another cable. And while that happened, the car rose further still, and then another arm switched cables, and another, until the car was hundreds of metres above me and dwindling. Still the motion was eerily smooth, even though the vehicle always seemed to be on the point of missing its purchase altogether and plummeting back towards the Mulch.

“Hey, mister. You still here.”

At some point during the vehicle’s ascent, the rickshaw had returned. I had expected the driver to do what seemed sensible and return to the concourse, more or less in profit. But Juan had kept his word, and would probably have been insulted if I registered any surprise.

“Did you honestly think I wouldn’t be?”

“When Canopy come down, you never know. Hey, why you stand in rain?”

“Because I’m not returning with you.” He had barely had time to register disappointment—although the expression which had begun to form on his face suggested that I’d cast grave aspersions on his entire lineage—when I offered him a generous cancellation fee. “It’s more than you’d have earned carrying me.”

He looked at the two seven-Ferris bills, glumly. “Mister, you no wanna stay here. This nowhere; not good part of Mulch.”

“I don’t doubt it,” I said, coming to terms with the idea that even somewhere as misbegotten and miserable as the Mulch had its good and bad neighbourhoods. Then I said, “The Canopy people said they’d send down a cable-car for me. It’s possible they were lying, of course, but I imagine I’ll find out sooner or later. And if they weren’t, I’m just going to have to find my way up the inside of one of these buildings.”

“This not good, mister. Canopy, they never do favour.”

I decided not to mention the Dream Fuel. “They were probably not willing to rule out the possibility I was who I claimed. What if I was as powerful as I said I was? They wouldn’t want to make an enemy of me.”

Juan shrugged, as if my point was a faint theoretical possibility, but no more than that. “Mister, I go now. No hurry stay here, you not coming.”

“That’s all right,” I said. “I understand. And I’m sorry I asked you to wait.”

That was the end of our relationship, Juan shaking his head but accepting that there was no way to persuade me otherwise. And then he went, the rickshaw clattering away into the distance, leaving me alone in the rain—genuinely alone, this time. The kid was not just around the corner, and I had lost—or more accurately got rid of—the closest thing I had yet found in Chasm City to an ally. It was an odd feeling, but I knew that what I had done was necessary.

I waited.

Time passed, perhaps half an hour, long enough for me to become aware of the city darkening. As Epsilon Eridani sunk beneath the horizon, its light, already turned sepia by the dome, became the colour of ancient blood. What light reached me now had to pass through the tangle of intervening buildings, an ordeal which seemed to sap it of any real enthusiasm for the task of illumination. The towers around me grew dark, until they really did look like enormous trees, and the tangled limbs of the Canopy, lit up with habitation, were like branches hung with lanterns and fairy-lights. It was both nightmarish and beautiful.

Finally one of those dangling lights detached itself like a falling star leaving the firmament, growing in intensity as it neared me. As my eyes readjusted to the night, I saw that the light was a descending cable-car, and that it was headed for the place where I stood.

Oblivious to the rain, I watched transfixed as the vehicle slowed and lowered itself almost to street level, the tensioning and detensioning cables singing above me. The vehicle’s single headlight panned across the rainswept road, heightening every crack in the surface, and then swept towards me.

Not far from my feet, something made the puddled water jump comically upwards.

And then I heard a gunshot.

I did what any ex-soldier would do under those circumstances: not stop to consider the situation, or determine the type and calibre of weapon being used against me, or the location of the shooter—or even pause to establish that I was really the target, and not just a hapless intercessionary.

I ran, very quickly, towards the shadowed base of the nearest building. I resisted the perfectly sensible flight reflex which told me to throw my suitcase away, knowing that without it, I would quickly sink into the anonymity of the Mulch. If I lost it, I might as well offer myself up to be shot.

The gunfire chased me.

I could tell from the way each shot landed a metre or so behind my heels that the person shooting at me was not lacking in skill. It would not have taxed them to kill me—they would have needed only to advance their line of fire fractionally, and I recognised that their marksmanship was more than sufficient. Instead, it suited them to play with me. They were in no hurry to execute me with a shot in the back, though it could have been achieved at any point.

I reached the building, my feet submerged in water. The structure was slab-sided; no little indentations or crannies in which I could secrete myself. The gunfire halted, but the ellipse of the spotlight remained steady, the shaft of harsh blue light making curtains of the rain between me and the cable-car.

A figure emerged from the darkness, clad in a greatcoat. At first I thought it was either the man or the woman I had spoken to earlier, but when the man emerged into the spotlight, I realised I hadn’t seen his face before. He was bald, with a jaw of almost cartoon squareness, and one of his eyes was lost behind a pulsing monocle.

“Stand perfectly still,” he said, “and you won’t be harmed.” And his coat flapped apart to reveal a weapon, bulkier than the toy gun which the Canopy woman had carried, somehow more serious in intent. The gun consisted of a handled black rectangle, tipped with a quartet of dark nozzles. His knuckles were white around the grip, his forefinger caressing the trigger.

He fired from hip-height; something buzzed out of the gun towards me, like a laser beam. It connected with the side of the building with a fizzle of sparks. I started running, but his aim was surer the second time. I felt a stabbing pain in my thigh, and then suddenly I was no longer running. Suddenly I was doing nothing except screaming.

And then even screaming became too hard.

The medics had done very well, but no one could be expected to work miracles. The monitoring machines crowding around his father’s bed attested to that, voicing a slow and solemn liturgy of biological decline.

It was six months since the sleeper had awakened and injured Sky’s father, and it was to everyone’s credit that they had kept Titus Haussmann and his assailant alive until now. But with medical supplies and expertise stretched to breaking point, there had never really been any realistic prospect of nursing both of them back to health.

The recent series of disputes between the ships had certainly not assisted matters. The troubles had intensified a few weeks after the sleeper had awoken, when a spy had been discovered aboard the Brazilia. The security organisation had traced the agent back to the Baghdad, but the Baghdad’s administration had declared that the spy had never been born on their ship at all and had probably originated on the Santiago or the Palestine all along. Other individuals had been fingered as possible agents, and there had been cries of wrongful imprisonment and violations of Flotilla law. Normal relations had chilled to a frosty four-way standoff, and now there was almost no trade between the ships; no human traffic except for despondent diplomatic missions which always ended in failure and recrimination.

Against this backdrop, the requests for more medical supplies and knowledge to help nurse Sky’s father had been shrugged aside. It was not, they said, as if the other ships did not have crises of their own. And as head of security, Titus was not beyond suspicion of having instigated the spying incident in the first place.

Sorry, they had said. We’d like to help, we really would…

Now his father struggled to speak.

“Schuyler…” he said, his lips like a rip in parchment. “Schuyler? Is that you?”

“I’m here, Dad. I never went away.” He sat down on the bedside stool and studied the grey, grimacing shell that bore so little resemblance to the father he had known before the stabbing. This was not the Titus Haussmann who had been feared and loved in equal measure across the ship, and grudgingly respected throughout the Flotilla. This was not the man who had rescued him from the nursery during the blackout, nor the man who had taken his hand and escorted him to the taxi and out beyond the ship for the very first time, showing him the wonder and terror of his infinitely lonely home. This was not the caudillo who had gone into the berth ahead of his team, knowing full well that he might be walking into extreme danger. This was a faint impression of that man, like a rubbing taken off a statue. The features were there, and the proportions were accurate, but there was no depth. Rather than solidity, there was just a paper-thin layer.

“Sky, about the prisoner.” His father struggled to raise his head from the pillow. “Is he still alive?”

“Just barely,” Sky said. He had forced his way into the security team after his father had been injured. “Frankly, I don’t expect him to last much longer. His wounds were a lot worse than yours.”

“But you managed to talk to him, anyway?”

“We’ve got this and that out of him, yes.” Sky sighed inwardly. He had told his father this much already, but either Titus was losing his memory or he wanted to hear it again.

“What exactly did he tell you?”

“Nothing we couldn’t have guessed for ourselves. We’re still not clear who put him aboard the ship, but it was almost certainly one of the factions they expected to cause some sort of trouble.”

His father raised a finger. “That weapon of his; the machinery built into his arm…”

“Not as unusual as you’d think. There were apparently a lot of his kind around towards the end of the war. We were lucky they didn’t build a nuclear device into his arm—although that would have been a lot harder to hide, of course.”

“Had he ever been human?”

“We’ll probably never know. Some of his kind were engineered in labs. Others were adapted from prisoners or volunteers. They had brain surgery and psycho-conditioning so that they could be used as weapons of war by any interested power. They were like robots, except they were constructed largely of flesh and blood and had a limited capacity to empathise with other people, where and when it suited their operational needs. They could blend in quite convincingly, crack jokes and share in smalltalk, until they reached their target, at which point they’d flip back into mindless killer mode. Some of them had weapons grafted into them for specific jobs.”

“There was a lot of metal in that forearm.”

“Yes.” Sky saw the point his father was making. “Too much for him to have made his way aboard without someone turning a blind eye. Which only proves that there was a conspiracy, which we as good as knew anyway.”

“We found the only one, though.”

“Yes.” In the days after the attack, the other sleeping passengers had all been scanned for buried weaponry—the process had been difficult and dangerous—but nothing had been found. “Which shows how confident they must have been.”

“Sky… did he say anything about why he did it, or why they made him do it?”

Sky raised an eyebrow. This line of questioning, admittedly, was new. His father had concentrated only on specifics before.

“Well, he did mention something.”

“Go on.”

“It didn’t seem to make an awful lot of sense to me.”

“Perhaps not, but I’d still like to hear it.”

“He talked about a faction which had discovered something. He wouldn’t say who or what they were, or where they were based.”

His father’s voice was very weak now, but he still managed to ask, “And what exactly was it that they had discovered?”

“Something ridiculous.”

“Tell me what it was, Sky.” His father paused. Sensing his thirst, Sky had the room’s robot administer a glass of water to the cracked gash of his lips.

“He said there had been a breakthrough just before the Flotilla left the solar system—a scientific technique, in fact, which had been perfected towards the end of the war.”

“And this was?”

“Human immortality.” Sky said the words carefully, as if they were imbued with magic potency and ought not be uttered casually. “He said that the faction had combined various procedures and lines of research pursued during the century, bringing them together to create a viable therapeutic treatment. They succeeded where others had failed, or had their work suppressed for political reasons. What they came up with was complicated, and it wasn’t simply a pill you took once and then forgot about.”

“Go on,” Titus said.

“It was a whole phalanx of different techniques, some of them genetic, some of them chemical, some of them dependent on invisibly small machines. The whole thing was fantastically delicate and difficult to administer, and the treatment needed to be applied regularly—but it was something that was capable of working, if done properly.”

“And what did you think?”

“I thought it was absurd, of course. Oh, I don’t deny that something like that might have been possible—but if there’d been that kind of breakthrough, wouldn’t everyone have known about it?”

“Not necessarily. It was the end of a war, after all. The ordinary lines of communication were broken.”

“Then you’re saying the faction might really have existed?”

“Yes, I believe it did.” His father paused, gathering his energies. “In fact, I know it did. I suspect most of what the Chimeric told you was true. The technique wasn’t magic—there were some diseases it couldn’t beat—but it was much better than anything evolution had given us. At best it would extend your lifespan to about one hundred and eighty years; two hundred in extreme cases—those were extrapolations, of course—but that didn’t matter; all that did was that you’d get a chance at staying alive until something better came along.”

He slumped back into his pillow, exhausted.

“Who knew?”

His father smiled. “Who else? The wealthy. Those whom the war had been kind to. Those in the right places, or those who knew the right people.”

The next question was obvious and chilling. The Flotilla had been launched while the war was still in its end stages. Many of those who had obtained sleeper berths, in fact, had been seeking to escape what they saw as a ruined and dangerous system just waiting to slip into another fullscale bloodbath. But competition for those spaces had been immense, and although they had supposedly been allocated on the basis of merit, there must have been means for those with sufficient influence to get aboard. If Sky had ever doubted that, the presence of the saboteur proved it. Someone, somewhere, had pulled strings to get the Chimeric aboard.

“All right. What about the sleepers? How many of them knew about the immortality breakthrough?”

“All of them, Sky.”

He looked at his father lying there, wondering how close to death the man really was. He should have recovered from the stab wounds—the damage had not really been that great—but complications had set in: trivial infections which nonetheless lingered and spread. Once, the Flotilla’s medicine could have saved him, could have got him up on his feet in a matter of days with no more than a little discomfort. But now there was essentially nothing that could be done except to assist his own healing processes. And they were slowly losing the battle.

He thought of what Titus Haussmann had just said. “How many of them actually had the treatment, then?”

“The same answer.”

“All of them?” He shook his head, almost not believing it. “All the sleepers we carry?”

“Yes. With a few unimportant exceptions—those who chose not to undergo it, on ethical or medical grounds, for instance. But most of them did take the cure, shortly before coming aboard.” His father paused again. “It’s the single biggest secret of my life, Sky. I’ve always known this—ever since my father told me, anyway. I didn’t find it any easier to take, believe me.”

“How could you keep a secret like that?”

His father managed the faintest of shrugs. “It was part of my job.”

“Don’t say that. It doesn’t excuse you. They betrayed us, didn’t they?”

“That depends. Admittedly, they didn’t bestow their secret on the crew. But that was a form of kindness, I think.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Imagine if we’d been immortal. We’d have had to endure a century and a half of imprisonment aboard this thing. It would have driven us slowly mad. That was what they feared. Better to let the crew live out a normal lifespan, and then have another generation take over the reins.”

“You call that kindness?”

“Why not? Most of us don’t know any better, Sky. Oh, we serve the sleepers, but because we know that not all of them will wake up safely when we reach Journey’s End, it isn’t easy to feel too envious. And we have ourselves to look after, too. We run the ship for the sleepers, but also for ourselves.”

“Yes. Very equitable. Knowing that they kept the secret of immortality from us does alter the relationship a smidgeon, you have to admit.”

“Perhaps. That’s why I was always so careful to keep the secret from anyone else.”

“But you just told me.”

“You wanted to know if there was any truth to the saboteur’s story, didn’t you? Well, now you know.” His father’s face grew momentarily serene, as if a great burden had been lifted from him. Sky thought for an instant that his father had slipped away from him, but shortly afterwards his eyes moved and he licked his lips to speak again. It was still an immense effort to talk at all. “And there was another reason, too… this is very hard, Sky. I’m not sure I’m doing the right thing by telling you.”

“Why not let me be the judge of that.”

“Very well. You may as well hear it now. I almost told you on countless other occasions, but never quite had the courage of my convictions. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, as they say.”

“What little knowledge would that be, exactly?”

“About your own status.” He asked for more water before speaking again. Sky thought of the water in that glass; the molecules which were slipping between his father’s lips. Every drop of water on the ship was ultimately recycled, to be drunk again and again. In interstellar space there could be no wastage. At some point, months or years from now, Sky would drink some of the same water that was now bringing relief to his father.

“My status?”

“I’m afraid you’re not my son.” He looked at him hard, as if waiting for Sky to crack under the revelation. “There, I’ve said it. No going back now. You’ll have to hear the rest of it.”

Maybe he was losing it faster than the machines had indicated, Sky thought. Slipping swiftly down into the lightless trench of dementia, his bloodstream poisoned, his brain grasping for oxygen.

“I am your son.”

“No. No; you’re not. I should know, Sky. I pulled you out of that sleeper berth.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You were one of them—one of our momios; one of our sleepers.”

Sky nodded, accepting this truth instantly. On some level he knew that the normal reaction would have been disbelief, perhaps even anger, but he felt none of that; only a deep and calming sense of rightness.

“How old was I?”

“Barely a child, only a few days old when you were frozen. There were only a few others as young as you.”

He listened to his father—not his father—as he explained that Lucretia Haussmann—the woman Sky thought of as his mother—had given birth to a baby aboard the ship, but that the child, a boy, had died within hours. Distraught, Titus had kept the truth from Lucretia for hours, then days, stretching his ingenuity to the limit while she was kept as sedated as possible. Titus feared the truth would kill her if she found out; maybe not physically, but he worried that it would crush her spirit. She was one of the most loved women on the ship. Her loss would affect them all: a poison that might sour the general mood of the crew. They were a tiny community, after all. They all knew each other. The loss of a child would be a dreadful thing to bear.

So Titus conceived a terrible plan, one he would regret almost as soon as he had brought it to fruition. But by then it was much too late.

He stole a child from the sleepers. Children, it turned out, were far more tolerant of revival than adults—it was something to do with the ratio of body volume to surface—and there had been no serious problems in warming the selected child. He had picked one of the young ones, one that would pass as his dead son. He did not have to be too meticulous. Lucretia had not seen her own baby long enough to tell that any deception had taken place.

He put the dead child in its place, cooled the berth down again and then asked for forgiveness. By the time the dead child was discovered, he would be long dead himself. It would be a dreadful thing for the parents to wake to, but at least they would also be waking to a new world, with time enough to try for another child. It would not be the same for them as it would have been for Lucretia. And if it was… well, without this crime, things might deteriorate on the ship to the point where it never reached its destination. That was an extreme case, but it was not beyond the bounds of possibility. He had to believe that. Had to believe that in some way what he had done was for the greater good of them all.

A crime of love.

Of course, Titus could have accomplished none of this without help, but only a handful of his closest friends had ever known the truth, and they had all been good associates who had never again spoken of the matter. They were all dead now, Titus said.

That was why it was so necessary that he tell Sky now.

“You understand?” Titus asked. “When I always told you you were precious…? That was the literal truth. You were the only immortal amongst us. That was why I raised you in isolation at first; why you spent so much time alone, in the nursery, away from the other children. Partly I wanted to shield you from infections—you were no less vulnerable than the other children, and you’re no less vulnerable now, as an adult. Mainly it was so that I could know for myself. I had to study your developmental curve. It’s slower for those who have had the treatment, Sky, and it keeps on flattening as you get older. You’re twenty now, but you could pass for a tall young man barely into his teens. By the time you’re thirty or forty, people will speak of you as someone with uncommonly youthful looks. But they won’t begin to guess the truth—not until you’re much, much older.”

“I’m immortal?”

“Yes. It changes everything, doesn’t it.”

Sky Haussmann rather had to admit that it did.

Later, when his father had fallen into one of the abyssal dreamless sleeps that was like an inevitable foreshadowing of his death, Sky visited the saboteur. The Chimeric prisoner lay on exactly the same kind of bed as his father, attended by machines, but there the similarities ended. The machines were observing the man, but he was strong enough not to need their direct assistance. Too strong, in fact—even after they had dug a magazine-load of slugs out of him. He was attached to the bed with plastic bonds, a broad hoop across his waist and legs, two smaller hoops anchoring his upper arms. He could move one forearm enough to touch his face, while the other arm, of course, had ended only in the weapon he had used to stab Titus. Even the weapon was gone now, the cyborg’s forearm ending in a neatly sewn stump. They had searched him for other kinds of weapon, but he carried no other concealed devices, except for the implants his masters had used to shape him to their goals.

In a way, the faction that had sent the infiltrator had been spectacularly unimaginative, Sky thought. They had placed too much emphasis on him being able to sabotage the ship, when a nice, easily transferred virus would have been just as effective. It might not have directly harmed the sleepers, but their chances of making it anywhere without a living crew would have been vanishingly small.

Which was not to say that the Chimeric might not still have its uses.

It was strange, infinitely so, to know that one was suddenly immortal. Sky did not concern himself with trifling matters of definition. It was true enough that he was not invulnerable, but with care and forethought he could minimise the risks to himself.

He took a step back from the killer’s bed. They thought they had the better of the saboteur, but one could never be entirely sure. Even though the monitors said the man was in a sleep at least as deep as his father’s, it paid not to take chances. They were engineered to deceive, these things. They could do inhuman tricks with their heartrate and neural activity. That one unbound forearm could have grabbed Sky by the throat and squeezed him until he died, or pulled him so close that the man could have eaten his face off.

Sky found a medical kit on the wall. He flipped it open, studied the neatly racked implements inside and then pulled out a scalpel, glistening with blue sterility in the room’s subdued lighting. He turned it this way and that, admiring the way the blade vanished as he turned it edge on.

It was a fine weapon, he thought; a thing of excellence.

With it he moved towards the saboteur.