Chasm City

TWENTY-NINE

He was doing his rounds of the sleepers.

Sky and Norquinco were far along one of the train tunnels that stretched along the ship’s spine, their feet clanging against catwalked flooring. Occasionally strings of robot freight pods clattered past along the track, ferrying supplies to and from the small band of technicians who lived at the far end of the ship, studying the engines night and day like worshipping acolytes. Here came one now, its orange hazard lights flashing as it rumbled towards them. The train almost filled the corridor. Sky and Norquinco stepped into a recess while the shipment went past. Sky noticed Norquinco slipping something into a shirt pocket, a piece of paper covered with what looked like a series of numbers partially crossed-out.

“Come on,” Sky said. “I want to make it to node three before the next shipment comes along.”

“No problem,” the other man said. “The next one isn’t due for… seventeen minutes.”

Sky looked at him oddly. “You know that?”

“Of course. They do run to a timetable, Sky.”

“Of course; I knew that. I just couldn’t see why anyone in their right mind would actually memorise the times.”

They walked on in silence to the next node. This far from the main living areas, the ship was uncommonly quiet, with hardly any sound of air-pumps or any of the other chugging systems of lifesupport. The sleepers, for all that they needed constant cybernetic supervision, drew very little power from the ship’s grid. The momios” refrigeration systems did not have to work hard, for the sleepers had been deliberately situated close to naked space; slumbering only metres from the absolute chill of interstellar vacuum. Sky wore a thermal suit, his breath blasting out in white gouts with each exhalation. Periodically he lifted the hood over his head until he felt warm again. Norquinco, by contrast, kept his hood permanently up.

It was a long time since he’d had any contact with Norquinco. They had barely spoken since Balcazar’s death, after which Sky had spent time establishing himself in a position of considerable seniority within the crew. From head of security he had moved to overall third-in-command, and now second-in-command, with only Ramirez standing between him and absolute control of the Santiago. Constanza was still problematic, of course, even though he had relegated her to a minor role in security—but he would not allow her to upset his plans. In the new regime, Captain was an extremely precarious position. A state of cold war existed between all the ships; internal shipboard politics were a web of paranoia in which errors of judgement were punished mercilessly. It would take only one carefully engineered scandal to oust Ramirez; murdering him would begin to look just a little too suspicious. Sky had something in mind; a scandal that would remove Ramirez and provide a convenient cover for his own plans.

They reached the node and descended to one of the six sleeper modules situated at that point on the spine. Each module held ten berths, and accessing each berth was itself an awkward process, so it wasn’t possible to visit more than a small fraction of the momios in a single day. Yet throughout his climb to second-in-command, Sky had never allowed himself to spend too much time away from the sleepers.

The task of visiting them all, checking on their progress, had, however, become easier with each year. Now and then one of the sleeper berths failed, ensuring that the momio could never be revived. Sky had mapped the dead laboriously, noting clusters which might signify some rogue support system. But by and large the deaths were distributed randomly along the spine. It was all that could be expected from such ancient machinery, both delicate and highly experimental at the time the Flotilla had departed. Messages from back home suggested that they had made great improvements in cryonics technology—advances which would have made these sleeper caskets look scarcely more civilised than Egyptian sarcophagi. But that didn’t help anyone on the Flotilla. It was far too risky to try to improve the existing berths.

Sky and Norquinco crawled through the hull until they reached the first sleeper module. They emerged into one of the ten berths spaced around its circumference. Sensing them, pressure had flooded into the chamber, lights warmed and status displays came alive, but it remained deathly cold.

“This one’s dead, Sky…”

“I know.” Norquinco had not visited many of the sleepers before; this was the first time Sky had felt it necessary to have him along. “I marked this one down as a failure on one of my earlier inspections.”

The casket’s warning icons were pulsing all the shades of hell, to no avail. The glass cover remained hermetic, and Sky had to peer close to satisfy himself that the sleeper really was dead, and not about to become the victim of malfunctioning readouts. But there was no arguing with the mummified form he glimpsed within. He glanced at the sleeper’s nameplate, checked it against his list and was satisfied that his judgement before had been wise.

Sky left the chamber, Norquinco following him, and they moved along to the next.

Similar story. Another dead passenger, killed by a similar error. No point even thinking about keeping this one thawed. There was unlikely to be a single intact cell anywhere in her body.

“What a waste,” Norquinco said.

“I don’t know,” Sky said. “Maybe some good can come of these deaths. Norquinco, I’ve brought you here for a reason. I want you to listen carefully and be very certain that nothing I say goes beyond these walls. Understand?”

“I wondered why you wanted to meet me again. It’s been a few years, Sky.”

Sky nodded. “Yes, and there’ve been a lot of changes. I’ve kept my eye on you, though. I’ve watched you find a niche for your skills, and I’ve seen how good you are at your job. The same goes for Gomez—but I’ve already spoken to him.”

“What is this all about, Sky?”

“Two things, really. I’ll come to the most urgent in a moment. First of all I want to ask you about something technical. What do you know about these modules?”

“What I need to know, no more and no less. There are ninety-six of them spaced along the spine, ten sleepers to each.”

“Yes. And a lot of those sleepers are dead now.”

“I don’t follow, Sky.”

“They’re dead mass. Not just the sleepers, but all the useless machinery which is no longer being used to support them. Add it up and it’s a sizeable fraction of the ship’s total mass.”

“I still don’t follow.”

Sky sighed, wondering why nothing was ever as clear to other people as it was to him. “We don’t need that mass any more. Right now it doesn’t hurt us, but as soon as we start slowing down, it’ll prevent us braking as fast as we’d like. Shall I spell it out? That means if we want to come to a stop around 61 Cygni-A, we have to start slowing down sooner than we’d otherwise need to. On the other hand, if we could detach the modules we don’t need now, we’d be able to slow down harder and faster. That would give us a lead on the other ships. We could reach the planet months ahead of anyone else; time to pick the best landing sites and establish surface settlements.”

Norquinco thought about it. “That won’t be easy, Sky. There are, um, safeguards. The modules aren’t meant to be detached until we reach orbit around Journey’s End.”

“I’m well aware of that. That’s why I’m asking you.”

“Ah. I, um, see.”

“Those safeguards must be electronic. That means they can eventually be bypassed, given time. You still have years in which to do it—I won’t want to detach the modules until the absolute last moment before we begin slowing down.”

“Why wait until then?”

“You still don’t get it, do you? This is cold war, Norquinco. We have to keep the element of surprise.” He stared hard at the man, knowing that if he decided he could not trust Norquinco, he would soon have to kill him. But he was gambling that the problem itself would entice Norquinco.

“Yes,” he said. “I mean, yes, technically, I could hack those safeguards. It would be difficult—monumentally difficult—but I could do it. And it would take years. Perhaps a decade. To do the work covertly, it would have to be carried out under the camouflage of the six-monthly total system audits… that’s the only time when those deeplayer functions are even glimpsed, let alone accessed.” His mind was racing ahead now, Sky saw. “And I’m not even on the squad that runs those audits.”

“Why not? You’re clever enough, aren’t you?”

“They say I’m not a ‘team player’. If they were all like me, those audits wouldn’t take half as long as they do.”

“I can see how they’d have difficulty adjusting to your ethos,” Sky said. “That’s the problem with genius, Norquinco. It’s seldom appreciated.”

Norquinco nodded, foolishly imagining that their relationship had finally traversed that hazy line between mutual usefulness and genuine friendship. “A prophet is without honour, et cetera. You’re right, Sky.”

“I know,” Sky said. “I’m always right.”

He opened his computer slate, shuffling through layers of data until he found the abstracted map of the sleepers. It looked like a strange species of cactus rendered in neon: a spiny, many-branched plant. The living were marked with red icons; the dead with black. For years now, Sky had been segregating the living from the dead, until several sleeper modules were filled only with dead momios. It was very tricky work because it required moving the living while they were still frozen, uncoupling their caskets and transporting them by train from one part of the spine to another while they were kept cool on reserve power. Sometimes you ended up with another dead momio.

It was all part of the plan. When the time came, and with Norquinco’s assistance, Sky would be ready.

But there was another matter he wanted to talk to Norquinco about.

“You said there was something else, Sky.”

“Yes. There is. Do you remember, Norquinco, when we were much younger? Before my father died? You and I and Gomez spoke about something. We called it the sixth ship, but you had another name for it.” Norquinco looked at him suspiciously, as if certain that there must be a trap. “You mean the, um, Caleuche?”

Sky nodded. “Yes, exactly that. Remind me—what was the story behind that name again?”

Norquinco filled in more details about the myth than Sky remembered from the first time. It was as if Norquinco had done some research of his own. But when he had finished, having told Sky about the dolphin that accompanied the ghost ship, he said, “It doesn’t exist, Sky. It was just a story we liked to tell each other.”

“No. That’s what I thought, but it was real. Is real, in fact.” Sky looked at him carefully, studying the effect his words had on Norquinco. “My father told me. Security have always known that it exists. They know a thing or two about it, too. It’s about half a light second behind us, and it’s about the same size and shape as the Santiago. It’s another Flotilla ship, Norquinco.”

“Why have you waited until now to tell me, Sky?”

“Because until now I haven’t had the means to do anything about it. Now, though… I do have the means. I want to go there, Norquinco—take a small expedition to her. But it has to be conducted in absolute secrecy. The strategic value of that ship is beyond imagining. There’ll be supplies on her. Components. Machines. Drugs. Everything we’ve had to make do without for decades. More than that, though, she’ll have antimatter on her, and she’ll probably have a functioning propulsion system. That’s why I want Gomez along. But I’ll need you as well. I don’t expect to find anyone alive on her, but we’ll have to get into her; warm her systems and bypass her security.”

Norquinco looked at him wonderingly. “I can do that, Sky.”

“Good. I knew you wouldn’t let me down.”

He told Norquinco that they would leave for the ghost ship as soon as he could arrange to take a shuttle without anyone suspecting his real intention—a problem that in itself would require some careful planning. They would be gone for several days, too, and no one must notice that either. But the risk, he thought, would be worth it. That ship was sitting behind them like a lure, inviting them to plunder the riches that lay aboard her. Only Sky even knew for sure that the ghost ship existed.

“You know,” Clown murmured, with him again, “it would be a crime to ignore it.”

When Sky had left me—the episode, as usual, had occupied only an instant of actual time—I reached into my pocket for the gun, wondering as I did about the phallic significance of that gesture. Then I shrugged and did the only thing which seemed reasonable, which was to walk towards the light, and the entrance which fed back into the particular neighbourhood of the Canopy where I had been deposited.

I entered the plaza-like interior, trying to put a cocky swagger into my stride, as if by feedback it might make me feel more confident. The place was just as bustling as Escher Heights, even though it was now well beyond midnight. But the architecture was like nothing I had seen. It had been hinted at in the place where Waverly worked me over, and the geometries which passed for domestic in Zebra’s rooms. But here, that curvilinear juxtaposition of mismatched topologies, stomachlike tubes and doughy walls and ceilings had been pushed to a mind-wrenching extreme.

I wandered around for an hour, studying the faces and occasionally sitting down near a koi pond (they were ubiquitous), just letting recent events jostle around in my mind. I kept hoping that one of the patterns would strike me as being somehow more truthful than the rest, and that I’d then know what was happening, and what my own part in it all was. But the patterns were halfhearted and incomplete, shards missing and troubling asymmetries spoiling their veracity. Maybe a more intelligent man than I might have seen something, but I was too tired to search for any artfully concealed subtleties. All I knew was the surface events. I’d been sent here to kill a man and, despite all the odds, I had found myself standing only a few metres from him, before I was even properly searching for him. I ought to have felt elated, even though I had failed to put the moment to proper use. But what I felt instead was a queasy sense of wrongness, as if I had drawn four aces in the first hand of a poker game.

The kind of luck which felt like the prelude to ill fortune.

I reached into my pocket, feeling the wad of money I still had. There was less than I’d begun the night with—the clothes and the consultation with the Mixmaster hadn’t come cheap—but I wasn’t out of cash just yet. I retraced my steps back towards the ledge where Chanterelle had left me, debating what to do next; knowing only that I wanted to speak to Zebra again.

As I prepared to leave the plaza, a swarm of brightly attired socialites emerged from the night, attended by pets, servitors and floatcams, looking for all the world like a procession of mediaeval saints served by cherubim and seraphim. A pair of baroquely ornamented bronze palanquins followed, both no larger than a child’s coffin, with a more austere model trailing some distance behind: a hard-edged grey box with a tiny grilled window set into the front. It had no manipulators and I could hear its motors labouring, leaving a greasy trail behind it.

I had a plan, but not much of one. I’d mingle with the party and try and find out if any of them knew Zebra. From there, I could work out a way of getting to her, even if it meant forcing one of them to take me there by cable-car.

The party halted, and I watched as a man with a head like a crescent moon removed a cachet of Dream Fuel vials from a pocket. He did it carefully, trying to make sure general passers-by wouldn’t see what he had, but not attempting to hide the Fuel from the rest of the party.

I melted into the shadows, satisfied that no one had noticed me until then.

The other members of the party clustered around the man and I saw the gleam of wedding-guns and less ceremonial syringes, both men and women in the party tugging down collars to plunge steel into skin. The two child-sized palanquins remained with the group, but the plainer one was circling the party, and I saw one or two of the people in the group eye it nervously, even as they waited to spike themselves with Fuel.

The grey palanquin wasn’t part of the group.

I’d just come to that conclusion when it halted, the front of the palanquin wheezing open, belching vapour from its hinges, and a man almost stumbling out. Someone in the party screamed and pointed at him, and in an instant the party as a whole had fallen back; even the miniature palanquins raced away from the man.

There was something terribly wrong with him.

Down one half of his naked body he was deceptively normal; as cruelly handsome and young as any in the party he’d approached. But the other half of him was submerged in a glistening growth that locked him rigid, countless branching filaments of silver-grey piercing his flesh, radiating outwards for tens of centimetres until they became only an indistinct grey haze. As he shuffled forward, the haze of filaments made a constant, barely audible tinkling noise as tiny shards detached themselves like seeds.

The man tried to speak, but what came out of his lopsided mouth was only an appalling moan.

“Burn him!” someone in the party shouted. “For God’s sake, burn him!”

“The brigade are on their way already,” someone else said.

The man with the moon-shaped head stepped a little closer to the plague victim, brandishing a single, nearly-exhausted vial.

“Is this what you want?”

The plague victim moaned something, still stumbling closer. He must have risked it, I thought, retaining his implants while not taking the proper precautions to protect himself. Perhaps he’d chosen a cheap palanquin that lacked the hermetic security of a more expensive model. Or perhaps he’d only taken to the device after the plague had reached him, hoping that the spread would be slower if he were barriered from further exposure.

“Here. Take this and leave us all alone, quickly. The brigade won’t take long to get here.”

The moon-faced man threw him the vial; the plague victim lunged forward to try and grab it with his good arm. He missed, and the vial shattered on the ground, leaking its reserve of Fuel.

But the plague victim fell forwards anyway; hitting the ground so that his face almost touched the small scarlet puddle. The impact raised a grey cloud of shattered extrusions from his body, but I couldn’t tell if the moan he emitted at that point was pleasure or pain. With his good arm, he clawed a few drops of Fuel towards his mouth, while the party looked on with horror and fascination, maintaining their distance but capturing the incident on camera. The spectacle had attracted a few other people by then, and they all studied the man as if his contortions and moans were simply a bizarre piece of performance art.

“He’s an extreme case,” someone said. “I’ve never seen that degree of asymmetry. Do you think we’re far enough away from him?”

“You’ll find out eventually.”

The man was still thrashing stiffly on the ground when the brigade arrived from inside the plaza. They couldn’t have had far to travel. It was a detachment of armoured technicians, propelling a cumbersome machine which resembled an extremely large, open-fronted palanquin, marked with bas-relief biohazard symbols. Oblivious to their presence, the plague victim kept clawing at the Fuel even as they pushed the humming machine over him and lowered a door over its front. The technicians moved with clinical speed, communicating with precise hand gestures and whispers as their machine thumped and hummed. The party watched wordlessly; no sign now of the Dream Fuel or the devices they’d been using to administer it. Then the technicians propelled their machine backwards, leaving only polished ground behind, one of them sweeping the area with something that looked like a cross between a broom and a mine-detector. After a few sweeps he gave a thumbs-up signal to his colleagues and followed them back into the plaza, behind the still-humming machine.

The party lingered, but the incident had obviously taken the shine off their immediate plans for the night. Before very long they’d all vanished into a pair of private cable-cars, and I’d had no chance to insinuate myself.

But I noticed something on the ground, near where the moon-faced man had been standing. At first I thought it was another vial of Dream Fuel, but as I moved closer—before anyone else saw it—I realised that it was an experiential. It had probably fallen out of his pocket when he retrieved his cachet of Fuel.

I knelt down and picked it up. It was slim and black, and the only marking on it was a tiny silver maggot near the top.

With Vadim, I’d found a similar set of experientials at the same time that I’d found his supply of Dream Fuel.

“Tanner Mirabel?”

The voice held only the slightest hint of curiosity.

I looked around, because the voice had come from behind me. The man who’d spoken was dressed in a dark coat, making the minimum necessary concession to Canopy fashion. His face was unsmiling and grey, like an undertaker on a bad day. There was also a martial tautness to his posture, evidenced in the way the muscles in his neck were rigidly defined.

Not a man to be trifled with, whoever he was.

He spoke softly, hardly moving his lips now that he had my complete attention. “I am a professional security specialist,” he said. “I am armed with a neurotoxic weapon which can kill you in under three seconds, silently, and without drawing the slightest attention to myself. You would not even have time to blink in my direction.”

“Well, enough pleasantries,” I said.

“You recognise that I am a professional,” the man said, nodding to emphasise his words. “Like you, I have been trained to kill in the most efficient manner possible. I hope that gives us some common ground and that we can now discuss matters reasonably.”

“I don’t know who you are or what you want.”

“You don’t have to know who I am. Even if I told you, I’d be forced to lie, and what would be the point of that?”

“Fair point.”

“Good. In which case, my name’s Pransky. As for the other matter, that’s easier. I’m here to escort you to someone who wants to meet you.”

“What if I don’t want to be escorted?”

“That’s entirely your choice.” He still spoke calmly and quietly, like a young monk reciting his breviary. “But you will have to satisfy yourself that you can absorb a dose of tetrodotoxin of sufficient potency to kill twenty people. Of course, it’s entirely possible that your membrane bio-chemistry is unlike that of any other living human being—or advanced vertebrate, for that matter.” He smiled, flashing a row of brilliant white teeth. “But you’ll have to be the judge of that, I’m afraid.”

“I probably wouldn’t want to run that risk.”

“Sensible fellow.”

Pransky beckoned with an open palm that I should walk on, past the kidney-shaped koi-pond which was the focal point of this annexe of the building.

“Before you get too cocky,” I said, standing my ground, “you might like to know that I’m also armed.”

“I do know,” he said. “I could tell you the specification of your weapon now, if you wanted me to. I could also tell you the probability of one of your ice-slugs managing to kill me before I inject you with the toxin, and I don’t think you’d be very impressed by the odds. Failing that, I could tell you that your gun is currently in your right pocket and your hand isn’t, which does rather limit its usefulness. Shall we proceed?”

I started moving. “You’re working for Reivich, aren’t you?”

For the first time something in his face told me he wasn’t in total control of the situation. “Never heard of him,” he said, irritated. And I allowed myself a smile. It wasn’t much of a victory, but it was better than nothing. Of course, Pransky could have been lying. But had he wanted to, I was sure he could have concealed it more effectively. But I’d caught him off guard.

Inside the plaza, there was a vacant silver palanquin waiting for me. Pransky waited until no one was paying us any attention, then had the palanquin clam open, revealing a plush red seat.

“You’ll never guess what I’m about to ask,” Pransky said.

I got into the machine, easing myself into the seat. After the door had closed I experimented with some of the controls set into the interior, but none of them did anything. Then, in deathly silence, the palanquin started moving. I looked through the little green window and watched the plaza glide by, Pransky walking slightly ahead of me.

Then I started feeling drowsy.

Zebra looked me over, a long and cool appraisal such as I might have expended on a new rifle. Her expression was difficult to judge. All the theories I’d concocted had depended on her either looking very pleased or very annoyed to be reacquainted with me.

Instead she just looked worried.

“What the hell’s going on?” I said. “If you don’t mind my asking.”

She stood legs akimbo, shaking her head slowly as she answered me, “You’ve got one hell of a nerve to ask me what I’m doing, after all you did to me.”

“Right now I’d say we’re even.”

“Where’d you find him, and what was he doing?” she asked Pransky.

“Hanging around,” the man said. “Attracting too much attention.”

“I was trying to get to you,” I said to Zebra.

Pransky gestured towards one of the markedly utilitarian chairs which served for furniture in the room to which I had been brought. “Have a seat, Mirabel. You’re not going anywhere in a hurry.”

“I’m surprised you were in any rush to meet me again,” Zebra said. “After all, you didn’t exactly overstay your welcome last time.”

My gaze tracked over Pransky, trying to place him in this and figure out how much he knew.

“I left a note,” I said, plaintively. “And I called you back to apologise.”

“And the fact that you thought I might know where a Game was going down was sheer coincidence.”

I shrugged, exploring the parameter space of discomforts offered by the stiffly unyielding seat. “Who else was I going to call?”

“You piece of shit, Mirabel. I don’t know why I’m doing this, you know. You don’t deserve it at all.”

Zebra still looked like Zebra, unless you focused on the specifics. She had muted her skin-tone now, so that the stripes were little more than rushlike grey blades folded around the contours of her face, delineations that vanished altogether in a certain light. The frill of rigid black hair had become a blonde bob, trimmed in a blunt fringe across her forehead. Her clothes were unostentatious and she wore a coat of similar cut to my own, one which reached past her stiletto-booted ankles and trailed into a pool of dark fabric around her feet. The only thing it lacked was the matrix of rough patches which adorned Vadim’s original.

“I never pretended to deserve anything,” I said. “Although I do think the one thing I might deserve is an explanation. Can we take it as read that you and I almost met earlier this evening, except that there was a substantial bulk of fish between us, name of Methuselah?”

“I was standing behind you,” Zebra said. “If you saw me, you saw my reflection. It’s not my fault you didn’t turn around.”

“You could have said something.”

“You were hardly excessively loquacious yourself, Tanner.”

“All right; can we start at the beginning?” I looked at Pransky, soliciting his permission as much as Zebra’s. “How about I tell you what I think, and we take it from there?”

“Sounds eminently reasonable to me,” said the little security expert.

I drew in a deep breath, aware that I was committing myself further than at any point since my arrival. But here, now, it had to be done. “You’re working for Reivich,” I said. “Both of you.”

Pransky looked at Zebra. “He mentioned that name earlier. I don’t know who he means.”

“It’s all right,” Zebra said. “I do.”

I nodded, feeling a paradoxical sense of relief, resignation, I supposed. It didn’t greatly comfort me to find out that Zebra was working for the man I had been sent to assassinate—most especially now that she had captured me. But there was also a defeatist pleasure in seeing one particular mystery cleared up.

“Reivich must have contacted you as soon as he got here,” I said. “You’re—what—some kind of freelancer? A security specialist in your own right, like Pransky here? It would make sense. You knew how to handle a weapon, and you were a step ahead of Waverly’s people when they were hunting me down. The whole hunt sabotage story was just a screen. For all I know you play it every night with the best of them. There. How am I doing?”

“It’s fascinating stuff,” Zebra said. “Please continue.”

“You were detailed by Reivich to find me. He had a suspicion someone had been sent from Sky’s Edge, so it was just a matter of putting your ears to the ground and listening. The musician was part of the operation as well—the front man who trailed me down from the Mendicant habitat.”

“Who’s the musician?” Pransky said. “First Reivich, now the musician. Do these people actually exist?”

“Shut up,” Zebra said. “And let Tanner continue.”

“The musician was good,” I said. “But I’m not sure whether I gave him enough to go on; whether I allowed him to establish beyond any doubt that I was the man he wanted, and not just some innocent immigrant.” I looked towards Zebra for confirmation, but since none was forthcoming, I continued, “Maybe all the musician could tell Reivich was that I was still a possibility. So you kept tabs on me. Somehow you had contacts in the hunt movement—maybe connections with a group of genuine saboteurs, for all I know. And via Waverly, you found out I’d been recruited as a victim.”

“What is he talking about?” Pransky said.

“The truth, unfortunately,” Zebra said, dispensing a withering look towards the security specialist, who was probably her subordinate, her understudy or dogsbody. “At least regarding the hunt. Tanner wandered into the wrong part of the Mulch and got himself captured. He put up a good fight, too, but they might have killed him if I hadn’t made it in time.”

“She had to save me,” I said. “There wasn’t anything noble about it, though. Zebra only wanted information. If I died, no one would be able to establish whether or not I’d really been the man sent to kill Reivich. That would put Reivich in an uncomfortable situation; he wouldn’t be able to relax for the rest of his life. There’d always be the danger that the real assassin was closing in. A lot of sleepless nights. That’s how it went, wasn’t it Zebra?”

“It might,” she said. “If I happened to be colluding in your own delusions.”

“Then why did you save me, if it wasn’t to keep me alive and find out if I was really the man?”

“For the same reasons I told you. Because I hate the hunt, and I wanted to help you live.” She shook her head, almost apologetically. “Sorry, Tanner. Much as I’d love to help you with your particular paranoid construct, it doesn’t go any deeper than that. I’m who I said I was, and I acted for the reasons I said. And I’d be grateful if you restricted discussion of the sabs to an absolute minimum, even in Pransky’s esteemed company.”

“But you just told me—him—you know who Reivich is.”

“I do, now. But I didn’t then. Shall we continue? Maybe you ought to hear my side of things.”

“I can’t wait.”

Zebra inhaled, looking interestedly around the doughlike acreage of the ceiling before her gaze snapped back to me. I had a feeling what she was about to say was not unrehearsed.

“I rescued you from Waverly’s hunt clique,” Zebra said. “Don’t fool yourself into imagining that you might have made it out alive yourself, Tanner. You’re good—that’s obvious—but no one’s that good.”

“Maybe you just don’t know me well enough.”

“I’m not sure I want to. May I continue?”

“I’m all ears.”

“You stole things from me. Not just clothes and money, but a weapon you shouldn’t have known how to use. I won’t even mention the cable-car. You could have stayed where you were until the implant stopped transmitting, but for some reason you thought you’d be safer on your own.”

I shrugged. “I’m still alive, aren’t I?”

“For the moment,” Zebra conceded. “But Waverly isn’t, and he was one of the few allies we had at the core of the movement. I know you killed him, Tanner—the trail you left was so hot you might as well have sprinkled plutonium wherever you went.” She strolled around the room, the stiletto heels of her boots clicking against the floor like a pair of matched metronomes. “That was un-fortunate, you know.”

“Waverly just got in the way. It’s not like the sadistic bastard was on my Christmas list.”

“Why didn’t you wait?”

“I had other business to attend to.”

“Reivich, right? I expect you’re dying to know where I got that name from, and how I know what it means to you.”

“I think you were in the process of telling me.”

“After you ditched my car,” Zebra said. “You showed up in Grand Central Station. It’s where you called me from.”

“Go on.”

“I was curious, Tanner. By then I already knew Waverly was dead, and that didn’t make sense. You should have been the dead man—even with the gun you stole from me. So I began to wonder just who it was I’d been sheltering. I had to find out.” She stopped pacing; the clicking of her heels abated. “It wasn’t difficult. You were inordinately interested in finding out where the night’s Game was going to happen. So I told you. If you were there, I thought I’d be there myself.”

I thought back to what seemed like hundreds of hours earlier, but was in fact only the evening of the long night in which I was still immersed. “You were there, when I caught Chanterelle?”

“It wasn’t what I was expecting.”

Of course not—how could it have been? I said, “Then what about Reivich? How does he come into it?”

“Via a mutual acquaintance of ours by the name of Dominika.” Zebra smiled, knowing she had surprised me with that.

“You went to Dominika?”

“It made sense. I had Pransky tail you to Escher Heights while I went to the bazaar and talked to the old woman. I knew you’d had the device removed, you see. And since you’d been at the bazaar earlier in the day, Dominika was bound to know who’d done the operation, if it wasn’t her. Which of course it was, which simplified matters enormously.”

“Is there anyone in Chasm City she hasn’t deceived?”

“Possibly, somewhere, but only as an extreme theoretical possibility. Actually, Dominika is a rather pure expression of our city’s driving paradigm, which is that there is nothing and no one who can’t be bought, given the right price.”

“What did she tell you?”

“Only that you are a very interesting man, Tanner, and that you had a particular interest in locating a gentleman named Argent Reivich. A man who happened to have arrived in Escher Heights only a few days earlier. Now, isn’t that a coincidence, given that Pransky just happens to have followed you to that part of the Canopy?”

The svelte little security man felt it was his time to take over the narrative. “I tailed you for most of the night, Tanner. You really began to hit it off with Chanterelle Sammartini, didn’t you? Who’d have thought it—you and her.” He shook his head, as if some basic physical law of the universe had been violated. “But you wandered around like old friends. I even saw you at the palanquin races.”

“How tiresomely romantic,” Zebra drawled, without interrupting Pransky’s flow.

“I called Taryn and had her meet me,” the man said. “Then we followed the two of you—discreetly, of course. You visited a boutique and came out looking a new man—or at least not quite your old self. Then you went to the Mixmaster. Now he was a tougher nut to crack. He wouldn’t tell me what you wanted in there and I’m awfully keen to find out.”

“Just a check-up,” I said.

“Well, maybe.” Pransky knitted together his long and elegant fingers and then made knuckle-popping sounds. “Perhaps it doesn’t matter. It’s certainly hard to see how it could relate to what happened next.”

I tried to sound interested. “Which was?”

“That you nearly killed someone,” Zebra said, silencing her associate with a soundless cuff of the air. “I saw you, Tanner. I was on the point of approaching you and asking you what you were doing and then suddenly you were taking a gun out of your pocket. I couldn’t see your face, but I’d been following you long enough to know it was you. I watched you move with the gun in your hand; smoothly and calmly, as if this was all you’d ever been born to do.” She paused. “And then you put the gun away, and no one else had been paying enough attention to you to notice what you’d done. I watched you look around, but it was obvious that whoever it was you’d seen was gone—if he’d ever been there. It was Reivich, wasn’t it?”

“You seem to know so much, you tell me.”

“I think you came here to kill him,” Zebra said. “Why, I don’t know. Reivich is an old family in the Canopy, but they don’t have as many enemies as some. Yet it makes sense. That would explain why you were so desperate to get into the Canopy that you’d wander into a hunt. And why you were so reluctant to stay in the safety of my home. It was because you were scared of losing Reivich’s trail. Tell me I’m right, Tanner.”

“Would there be any point denying it?”

“Not a great deal, no, but you’re welcome to try.”

She was right. Just as I had unburdened myself to Chanterelle earlier in the night, I did the same for Zebra. But it felt less intimate. Perhaps it was the fact that Pransky was standing there absorbing it all. Or the feeling that the two of them actually knew more about me than they had said, and that very little of what I was telling them was news. I told them that Reivich was someone from my homeworld, not a genuinely bad man, but one who had done something very bad out of foolishness or weakness, and had to be punished for that with no less severity than if he had been born a snarling knife-twisting psychopath.

When I had finished—when Zebra and Pransky had grilled me to exhaustion, examining every facet of my story as if looking for a flaw they knew must be present—there was one last question, and it was mine.

“Why have you brought me here, Zebra?”

Hands on hips, her elbows jutting from the black enclosure of her coat, she said, “Why do you think?”

“Curiosity, I suppose. But that’s not enough.”

“You’re in danger, Tanner. I’m doing you a favour.”

“I’ve been in danger since I came here. That’s nothing new to me.”

“I mean real danger,” Pransky said. “You’re in too deep. You’ve attracted too much attention.”

“He’s right,” Zebra said. “Dominika was the weak link. She may have alerted half the city by now. Reivich almost certainly knows you’re here, and he probably knows you nearly killed him tonight.”

“That’s what I don’t understand,” I said. “If he’s already been warned of my presence, why the hell was he making himself such an easy target? If I’d been a fraction faster I’d have killed him.”

“Maybe the meeting was a coincidence,” Pransky said.

Zebra looked at him scornfully. “In a city this big? No; Tanner’s right. That meeting happened because Reivich arranged for it to happen. And there’s something else, too. Look at me, Tanner. Notice anything different?”

“You changed your appearance.”

“Yes. And it isn’t the hardest thing to do, believe me. Reivich could have done the same—nothing drastic; just enough to ensure that he wasn’t immediately recognisable in a public place. A few hours under the knife at most. Even a halfway competent bloodcutter could have done it.”

“Then that doesn’t make any sense,” I said. “It’s like he was taunting me. Like he wanted me to kill him.”

“Maybe he did,” Zebra said.

There had been moments when I thought I might never see the outside of that room; that it was where Pransky and Zebra had brought me to die.

Pransky was clearly a professional, and Zebra was no stranger to death herself, given her affiliation with the sabotage movement.

Yet they didn’t kill me.

We took a cable-car to Zebra’s place, Pransky going off on some other errand. “Who is he?” I asked, once we were alone. “Some kind of hired help?”

“Private intelligence,” Zebra said, discarding her coat in a black puddle. “It’s all the rage these days. There are rivalries in the Canopy—feuds and quiet wars, sometimes between families, and sometimes within.”

“You thought he could help trace me.”

“Seems I wasn’t wrong.”

“I still don’t know why, Zebra.” Once again I looked beyond the room, towards the maw of the chasm which was like the rim of a volcano around which a city festered, on the eve of its own destruction. There was some dawnlight on the horizon. “Unless you think you can use me in some way—in which case I’m afraid you’re wrong. I’m not interested in any Canopy power games you might be involved in. I’m only here to do one thing.”

“To kill a seemingly innocent man.”

“It’s a cruel universe. Do you mind if I sit down?” I helped myself to a seat before she had answered me, the mobile furniture shuffling into place beneath me like an obsequious servant. “I’m still a soldier at heart and it’s my job not to question these things. The instant I start doing that is the instant I stop doing my job properly.”

Zebra, all angularity and knifelike edges, folded herself into the sumptuousness of the seat opposite me, retracting her knees beneath her chin.

“Someone’s after you, Tanner. That’s why I had to find you. It’s dangerous for you to stay here. You have to get out of the city.”

“It’s nothing I didn’t expect. Reivich will have hired all the help he can get his hands on.”

“Local help?”

It was an odd question. “Yes, I suppose. You wouldn’t hire someone who didn’t already know the city.”

“Whoever’s after you isn’t local, Tanner.”

I tensed in the seat, causing its buried musculature to generate massaging ripples. “What do you know?”

“Not very much, except that Dominika said someone had been trying to find you. A man and a woman. They acted like they’d never been here before. Like offworlders. And they were very interested in finding you.”

“A man already did,” I said, thinking of Quirrenbach. “He followed me down from orbit, posing as an offworlder. I lost him in Dominika’s. It’s possible he returned with reinforcements.” Vadim, perhaps. But it would be quite a trick to mistake Vadim for a woman.

“Is he dangerous?”

“Anyone who lies for a living is dangerous.”

Zebra summoned one of her ceiling-tracked servitors, having the machine bring us a tray laden with carafes of varying size and colour. Zebra poured me a goblet of wine and I let it wash away some of the accumulated taste of the city, dull some of the roaring in my mind.

“I’m very tired,” I said. “You offered me sanctuary here a day ago, Zebra. Can I accept that offer now, if only until daybreak?”

She looked at me over the smoked rim of her glass. It was already daybreak, but she knew what I meant. “After all you’ve done, you think I’ll keep an offer like that open?”

“I’m an optimist,” I said, with what I hoped was the appropriate tone of utter resignation.

Then I took another sip of wine and began to realise how exhausted I really was.