Chasm City

FORTY

“You may have let me down in the end,” I said, mouthing a silent message to Norquinco, who was far beyond any means of hearing me, “but I can’t deny that you did an exemplary job.”

Clown smiled at that.

“Armesto, Omdurman? I hope you’re watching this. I hope you can see what I am about to do. I want it to be clear. Crystal clear. Do you understand?”

Armesto’s voice came though after the timelag, as if halfway to the nearest quasar. It was faint because the other ships had sloughed all non-essential communications arrays: hundreds of tonnes of redundant hardware.

“You’ve burned all your bridges, son. There’s nothing left for you to do now, Sky. Not unless you manage to persuade any more of your viables to cross the River Styx.”

I smiled at the classical reference. “You still don’t seriously think I murdered some of those dead, do you?”

“No more than I think you murdered Balcazar.” Armesto was silent for a few moments; silence broken only by static; cracks and pops of interstellar noise. “Make of it what you want, Haussmann…”

My bridge officers looked awkwardly at him when Armesto mentioned the old man, but none of them were going to do more than that. Most of them must have already had their suspicions. They were all loyal to me now; I had bought their loyalty, promoting nonachievers to positions of prominence in the crew hierarchy, just as dear Norquinco had tried to blackmail me into doing. They were weak, for the most part, but that did not concern me. With the layers of automation Norquinco had bypassed, I could practically run the Santiago myself.

Perhaps it would come to that soon.

“You’ve forgotten something,” I said, enjoying the moment.

Armesto must have been confident that nothing had been forgotten, beginning to think that the chase was winnable.

How wrong he was.

“I don’t think I have.”

“He’s right,” came the voice of Omdurman on the Baghdad, similarly faint. “You’ve used up all your options, Haussmann. You don’t have another edge.”

“Except this one,” I said.

I tapped commands into my seat command console. Felt, subliminally, the hidden layers of ship subsystems bend to my will. On the main screen, looking along the spine, was a view very similar to the one I had seen when I had detached the sixteen rings of the dead.

But it was different now.

Rings were leaving all along the spine, around all six faces. There was still a harmony to it—I was too much of a perfectionist for anything else—but it was no longer an ordered line of rings. Now, every other ring amongst the eighty remaining was detaching. Forty rings broke away from the spine of the Santiago…

“Dear God,” said Armesto, when he must have seen what was happening. “Dear God, Haussmann… No! You can’t do that!”

“Too late,” I said. “I’m already doing it.”

“Those are living people!”

I smiled. “Not any more.”

And then I turned my attention back to the view, before the glory of what I had done had passed. Truly, it was beautiful to watch. Cruel, too—I admitted that. But what was beauty without a little cruelty at its heart?

Now I knew I’d win.

We took the Zephyr to the behemoth terminal, the train hauled by the same huge, dragonlike locomotive that had brought Quirrenbach and me into the city only a few days earlier.

Using what little reserves of currency I had left, I bought a fake identity from one of the marketeers, a name and a cursory credit-history just about robust enough to get me off the planet and—if I was lucky—into Refuge. I had come in as Tanner Mirabel, but I did not dare try and use that name again. Normally it would have been a matter of reflex for me to pull a false name out of the air and slip into that disguise, but now something made me hesitate when selecting my new identity.

In the end, when the marketeer was about to lose his patience, I said, “Make me Schuyler Haussmann.”

The name meant almost nothing to him, not even the surname worthy of comment. I said the name to myself a few times, becoming sufficiently familiar with it that I would act with the right start of recognition if my name came over a public address system, or if someone whispered it across a crowded room. Afterwards, we booked ourselves onto the next available behemoth making the haul up from Yellowstone.

“I’m coming, of course,” Quirrenbach said. “If you’re serious about protecting Reivich, I’m the only way you’re going to get anywhere near him.”

“What if I’m not serious?”

“You mean what if you might still be planning to kill him?”

I nodded. “You’ve got to admit, it’s still a possibility.”

Quirrenbach shrugged. “Then I’ll simply do what I was always meant to do. Take you out at the earliest opportunity. Of course, my reading of the situation is that it won’t come to that—but don’t imagine for a moment that I wouldn’t do it.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it.”

Zebra said, “You need me, of course. I’m also a line to Reivich, even if I was never as close to him as Quirrenbach.”

“It might be dangerous, Zebra.”

“What, and visiting Gideon wasn’t?”

“Fair point. And I’ll admit I’m grateful for any help I can get.”

“Then you’ll want me as well,” Chanterelle said. “After all, I’m the only one of us here who really knows how to hunt someone down.”

“Your gaming skills aren’t in question,” I said. “But it won’t be like a hunt. If I know Tanner—and I’m afraid I may know him as well as he knows himself—he won’t be following any rulebook.”

“Then we’ll just have to play dirty before he does, won’t we.”

For the first time in ages I laughed a laugh that wasn’t totally insincere.

“I’m sure we can rise to the occasion.”

Quirrenbach, Zebra, Chanterelle and I lifted an hour later; the behemoth making one arcing swoop over Chasm City before lofting itself into the lowering clouds, twisted like phantasms by the collision between Yellowstone’s relentless winds and the belching updraft of the chasm itself. I looked down and the city looked tiny and toylike, the Mulch and the Canopy hardly separated at all, compressed into one tangled and intricate urban layer.

“Are you all right?” Zebra said to me, returning to our table with drinks.

I turned away from the window. “Why?”

“Because you almost look like you miss the place.”

When the journey was almost over; when the success of what I had planned was becoming apparent—when, openly, they were beginning to talk of me as a hero—I visited my two prisoners.

In all the years, no one had ever located the chamber deep inside Santiago, though some—Constanza in particular—had come close to guessing that it must exist. But the chamber drew only parsimoniously from the ship’s power and life-support systems grid, and even Constanza’s undoubted skill and persistence had not been sufficient to bring its location to light. Which was good, for although the situation was less critical now, there had been long years in which the chamber’s discovery would have ruined me. Now, however, my situation was secure; I had enough allies to weather minor scandals, and I had dealt effectively with most of those who stood against me.

Technically, of course, there were three prisoners, although Sleek did not really fit into the latter category. His presence had merely been useful to me, and—irrespective of how he viewed it—I did not view his incarceration as a genuine punishment. As ever upon my arrival he flexed within his tank, but lately he only moved sluggishly, his small dark eye only dimly registering my presence. I wondered how much of his earlier life he remembered, confined in a tank that was oceanically vast compared to the one where he had been for the last fifty years.

“We’re nearly there, aren’t we?”

I turned around, surprised after all this time to hear the croak of Constanza’s voice.

“Very nearly,” I answered. “I’ve just seen Journey’s End with my own eyes, you know—as a fully formed world, not just a bright star. It’s really quite wonderful to see it, Constanza.”

“How long has it been?” She tried to look at me, straining against her constraints. She was tied to a stretcher which had been cranked to an angle of forty-five degrees. “Since I brought you here? I don’t know—four, five months?” I shrugged, as if the matter had barely occupied my thoughts. “It doesn’t really matter, does it?”

“What did you tell the rest of the crew, Sky?”

I smiled. “I didn’t need to tell them anything. I made it look as if you’d committed suicide by jumping out of one of the airlocks. No need to provide a body that way. I just let the others draw their own conclusions.”

“They’ll figure out what happened one day.”

“Oh, I doubt it. I’ve given them a world, Constanza. They want to canonise me, not crucify me. I don’t see that changing for a very long time.”

She had always been problematic, of course. I had discredited her after the Caleuche incident, bringing to light a trail of faked evidence which placed her in the same conspiratorial frame as Captain Ramirez. That was the end of her career in security. She had been lucky to avoid execution or imprisonment, especially in the desperate days that had followed the detachment of the sleeper modules. But Constanza had never ceased to give me cause for concern, even when she had been demoted to menial work. The crew as a whole were willing to accept that the detachment had been a desperate but necessary act; a conclusion I pushed them towards, via propaganda and lies concerning the other ships’ intentions. I did not even think of it as a crime myself. Constanza thought otherwise, and spent her last years of liberty trying to unravel the labyrinth of misinformation I had recently woven around myself. She was always probing into the Caleuche incident; protesting that Ramirez had been innocent, and she insisted on wild speculation about the manner in which Old Man Balcazar had really died; that his two medics had been wrongfully executed. At times, she even raised doubts about the way Titus Haussmann had died.

Finally, I decided I had to silence her. Faking her suicide required only a little preparation, as did bringing her to the torture chamber unseen by anyone else. She had spent most of that time drugged and restrained, of course, but I had allowed her little windows of lucidity now and again.

It was good to have someone to talk to.

“Why did you keep him alive for so long?” Constanza said.

I looked at her, marvelling at how aged she had become. I remembered when we had both stood against the glass of the large dolphin tank; near-equals.

“The Chimeric? I knew he’d come in useful, that’s all.”

“To torture?”

“No. Oh, I saw that he was punished for what he’d done, but that was only the start of it. Here. Why don’t you take a better look at him, Constanza?” I adjusted the angle of her stretcher, until she faced the infiltrator. He was completely mine now, and did not require restraining at all.

Nonetheless—for my peace of mind—I kept him chained to the wall.

“He looks like you,” Constanza said wonderingly.

“He has twenty additional facial muscles,” I said, with paternal pride. “They can pull the flesh of his skin into any configuration he wants, and hold it there. And he hasn’t aged much since I brought him here. I think he can still pass for me.” I rubbed my face, feeling the rough texture of the cosmetics I wore to offset my unnatural youthfulness. “And he’ll do anything—anything—that I ask of him. Won’t you, Sky?”

“Yes,” the Chimeric answered.

“What are you planning? To use him as a decoy?”

“If it comes to that,” I said. “Which, frankly, I doubt.”

“But he only has one arm. They’ll never mistake him for you.”

I wheeled Constanza back into the position she had been in upon my arrival. “That’s not an insurmountable problem, believe me.” I paused and produced a huge, long-needled syringe from the kit of medical instruments I kept next to the God-Box, the device I had used to smash and remake the infiltrator’s mind.

Constanza saw the syringe. “That’s for me, isn’t it?”

“No,” I said, moving over to the dolphin tank. “It’s for Sleek. Dear old Sleek, who has served me so loyally over the years.”

“You’re going to kill him?”

“Oh, I’m sure he’d regard it as a mercy by now.” I unlatched the top of his tank, wrinkling my nose at the appalling smell of the brackish water in which he lay. Sleek flexed again, and I put a calming hand across his dorsal region. His skin, once as smooth and glossy as polished stone, was now like concrete.

I injected him, pushing the needle through an inch of fat. He moved again, almost thrashing, and then became stiller. I looked at his eye, but it looked as expressionless as ever.

“He’s dead, I think.”

“I thought you’d come to kill me,” Constanza said, unable to keep the nervous relief from her voice.

I smiled. “With a syringe like that? You must be joking. No; this one’s for you.”

I picked up another one; smaller this time.

Journey’s End, I thought, gripping the support strut in the Santiago’s free-fall observation blister. It was an apt name. The world hung below me now, like a green paper lantern lit by a dimming candle. Swan, 61 Cygni-A, was not a bright sun, and even though the world was in a tight orbit around the dwarf, daylight here was not the same thing that Clown had shown me in pictures of Earth. It was a sullen, paltry kind of illumination. The star’s spectrum was acutely red, even though it still looked white to the naked eye. But none of this was surprising. Even before the Flotilla had left home, a century and a half earlier, they had known how much energy the world would receive in its orbit.

Deep in Santiago’s cargo hold, too light to have ever been worth sacrificing, was a thing of diaphanous beauty. Teams were preparing it even now. They had extracted it from the starship, anchored it to an orbital transfer tug and towed it beyond the planet’s gravitational field, out to the Lagrange point between Journey’s End and Swan. There, stationed by minute adjustments of ion-thrust, the thing would float for centuries. That at least was the plan.

I looked away from the limb of the planet, towards interstellar space. The other two ships, the Brazilia and the Baghdad, were still out there. Current estimates placed their arrival three months in the future, but there was an inevitable margin of error.

No matter.

The first wave of shuttle flights had already made several return trips to and from the surface, and many transponder-equipped cargo packages had already been dropped, ready to be found in a few months’ time. A shuttle was descending now, its deltoid shape dark against a tongue of equatorial landmass which the geography section was calling the Peninsula. Doubtless, I thought, they would come up with something less literal given a few more weeks. Five more flights would be all it took to get all the remaining colonists down to the surface. Another five would suffice to transport all the crew and the heavy equipment which could not be dropped via cargo packages. The Santiago would remain in orbit, a skeletal hulk denuded of anything remotely useful.

The shuttle’s thrusters fired briefly, kicking it onto an atmospheric insertion course. I watched it dwindle until it was out of sight. A few minutes later, near the horizon, I thought I saw the glint of re-entry fire as it touched air. It would not be long before it was on the ground. A preliminary landing camp had already been established, near the southern tip of the Peninsula. Nueva Santiago, we were thinking of calling it—but again, it was early days.

And now Swan’s Pupil was opening.

It was too far away to see, of course, but the angstrom-thin plastic structure was being unfurled at the Lagrange point.

The placement was almost perfect.

A torch beam seemed to fall on the sombre world below, casting an ellipsoidal region of brightness. The beam moved, hunting—reshaping. When they had adjusted it properly, it would double the solar illumination falling on the Peninsula region.

There was life down there, I knew. I wondered how it would adjust to the change in ambient light, and found it hard to stir up much enthusiasm.

My communications bracelet chimed. I glanced down, wondering who amongst my crew would have the nerve to interrupt this moment of triumph. But the bracelet merely informed me that there was a recorded message waiting for me in my quarters. Annoyed—but nonetheless curious—I pushed myself out of the observation blister, through a gasket of locks and transfer wheels, until I reached the main, spinning part of our great ship. Now that I was in a gravitational zone, I walked freely, calmly, not allowing the faintest hint of doubt to show on my face. Now and then crew and senior officers passed me, saluting; sometimes even offering to shake my hand. The general mood was one of utter jubilation. We had crossed interstellar space and arrived safely at a new world, and I had brought us here before our rivals.

I stopped and talked with some of them—it was vital to cement alliances, for troubled times lay ahead—but all the while my mind was on the recorded message, wondering what it could mean.

I soon found out.

“I assume by now you’ve killed me,” Constanza said. “Or at the very least made me disappear for good. No; don’t say a word—this isn’t an interactive recording, and I won’t take very much of your precious time.” I was looking at her face on the screen in my quarters: a face that looked fractionally younger than the last time I had seen her. She continued, “I recorded this some time ago, as you’ve probably gathered. I downloaded it into the Santiago’s data network and had to intervene once every six months to prevent it being delivered to you. I knew that I was an increasingly sharp thorn in your side, and thought the chances were good that you would find a way of getting rid of me before too long.”

I smiled despite myself, remembering how she had demanded to know how long I had held her prisoner.

“Well done, Constanza.”

“I’ve ensured that a copy will reach a number of senior officers and crew, Sky. Of course, I don’t really expect that I will be taken seriously. You’ll have certainly doctored the facts surrounding my disappearance. That doesn’t matter; it’s enough that I’ve sown a seed of doubt. You’ll still have your allies and admirers, Sky, but don’t be surprised if not everyone is prepared to follow your leadership with blind obedience.”

“Is that all?” I said.

“There’s one final thing,” she said, almost as if she had expected me to speak at that point. “Over the years, I’ve amassed a great deal of evidence against you, Sky. Much of it is circumstantial; much of it open to different shades of interpretation, but it’s a life’s work and I’d hate to see it go to waste. So—before I recorded this message—I took what I had and concealed it in a small, hard-to-find place.” She paused.

“Have we reached orbit around Journey’s End yet, Sky? If so, there’s little point trying to find the materials. By now they’re almost certainly on the surface.”

“No.”

Constanza smiled. “You can hide, Sky, but I’ll always be there, haunting you. No matter how much you try and bury the past; no matter how effectively you remake yourself as a hero… that package will always be there, waiting to be found.”

Later, much later, I stumbled through the jungle. Running was difficult for me, but that had very little do with my age. The hard part was keeping my balance with only one arm, my body always forgetting that necessary asymmetry. I had lost the arm in the very earliest days of the settlement. It had been a dreadful accident, even though the pain of it was only an abstract memory now. My arm had been incinerated; burned to a crisp black stump when I held it in front of the wide muzzle of a fusion torch.

Of course, it hadn’t been an accident at all.

I had known for years that I might have to do it, but had kept delaying it until we were down on the planet. I had to lose the arm in such a way that no medical intervention could save it, which ruled out a neat, painless severing operation. Equally, I had to be able to survive the loss of it.

I had been hospitalised for three months after the accident, but I had pulled through. And then I had began to resume my duties, word escaping around the planet—and out to my enemies—of what had happened. Gradually it had settled into the mass consciousness that I only had one arm. Years had passed and the fact had become so obvious that it was barely mentioned any more. And no one had ever suspected that losing the arm was just a tiny detail in a greater plan; a precaution set in place years or decades before it might become useful. Well, now the time had come when I could be thankful for that forethought. I was a fugitive now, even as I approached my eightieth birthday.

Things had gone well enough in the early years of the colony. Constanza’s message from the grave had taken the shine off for a while, but before very long the people’s need for a hero had over-ridden any nagging doubts they might have had about my suitability for the role. I had lost some sympathisers, but gained the general goodwill of the mob, a trade-off I considered acceptable. Constanza’s hidden package had never come to light, and as time passed I began to suspect that it had never existed; that the whole thing had been a psychological weapon designed to unnerve me.

Those early days were heady times. The three months’ good grace which I had given the Santiago had been enough time for us to establish a network of small surface camps. We had three well-fortified main settlements by the time the other starships braked into orbit above them. Nueva Valparaiso, near the equator (it would make a fine site for a space elevator one day, I thought) was the latest. Others would follow. It had been a good start, and it had seemed unthinkable then that the people—with a few loyal exceptions—would turn so viciously against me.

Yet they had.

I could see something ahead, through the dense-packed rainforest foliage. A light. Definitely artificial, I thought—perhaps the allies I was supposed to be meeting. I hoped that was the case anyway. I did not have many allies now. The few left in the orthodox power structure had managed to break me out of custody before the trial, but they had not been able to assist me in reaching sanctuary. Very probably those friends would be shot for their treason. So be it. They had made the necessary sacrifice. I had expected nothing less.

At first it had not even been a war.

The Brazilia and the Baghdad had arrived in orbit, confronted by the skeletal hulk of the old Santiago. For long months nothing had happened, the two allied ships maintaining a chill observational silence. Then they had launched a pair of shuttles on trajectories which would bring them down in the Peninsula’s northern latitudes. I had wished I could have saved a speck of antimatter in the old ship, just to fire up its engine for a moment, and to douse the shuttles with that killing lance. But I had never learned the trick of shutting down an antimatter reservoir.

The shuttles had come down, then made further flights back up to orbit, ferrying down sleepers.

More long months of waiting.

And then the attacks had begun: skirmish squads moving down from the north, striking against the Santiago’s nascent settlements. So what that there were barely three thousand people on the whole planet. It was enough for a small war… and it had been quiet at first, giving both sides time to dig in, consolidate… breed.

Not really a war at all.

But my own side were still trying to have me executed for war crimes. It was not that they were interested in peace with the enemy—too much had happened for that—but they certainly blamed me for bringing about the whole situation. They would kill me and then return to the fray.

Ungrateful sons of bitches. They had twisted everything now. They had even changed the name of the planet, as a kind of joke. Not Journey’s End any more.

Sky’s Edge.

Because of the edge I had given them to be the first to arrive.

I hated it. I knew what they meant by it: a sick acknowledgement of the necessary crime; a reminder of what had brought them here.

But the name was sticking.

Now I paused; not merely to catch my breath. I had never really liked the jungle. There were rumours of things in it—large things which slithered. But no one I trusted had ever seen one. Just stories then—that was all.

Just stories.

But I was still lost. The light I had seen earlier was gone now. It might have been obstructed by a thick patch of trees… or perhaps I’d imagined it all along. I looked around me. It was very dark, and everything looked the same. The sky was blackening overhead—61 Cygni-B, normally the brightest star in the sky apart from Swan, was below the horizon—and the jungle would soon just be a darkening extension of that blackness.

Perhaps I was going to die here.

But then I thought I saw movement far ahead, a milky shape which I at first assumed was the same patch of light I’d seen earlier. But this milky shape was much closer—approaching me, in fact. It was man-shaped and it was stepping towards me through the overgrowth. It shone, as if imbued with its own inner luminosity.

I smiled. I recognised the shape now. I shouldn’t have been afraid. I should have remembered that I was never truly alone; that my guide would always appear to show me the way forward. “You didn’t think I’d forget you, did you?” Clown said. “Come on. It’s not far now.”

Clown led me on.

It had not been my imagination; not completely. There was a light ahead, gleaming through the trees like spectral fog. My allies…

By the time I reached them Clown was no longer with me. He had faded away like a retinal burn. That was the last time I ever saw him—but he had done well to bring me this far. He had been the only trusted friend of my life, even though I knew that he was just a psychological figment, a subconscious entity projected into daylight, born from memories of the tutelary persona I had known in the nursery aboard the Santiago.

What did that matter?

“Captain Haussmann!” called my friends through the trees. “You made it! We were beginning to think the others hadn’t managed…”

“Oh, they played their parts well,” I said. “I imagine they’ve been arrested by now—if they haven’t already been shot.”

“That’s the odd thing, sir. We are hearing reports of arrests—and they’re saying they’ve recaptured you.”

“That wouldn’t make any sense, would it?”

But it would, I thought—if the man they thought they had recaptured only looked like me; if the man only looked like me because buried beneath the supple skin of his face was an armature of twenty additional muscles which allowed him to mimic almost anyone. He would talk and act like me too, as he had been conditioned over years to do so; trained to think of me as his God; his only desire to obey me selflessly. And the missing arm? Well, that was a dead giveaway, wasn’t it? The man they had arrested looked like Sky Haussmann and was missing an arm as well.

There couldn’t be any doubt that they had recaptured me. There’d be a trial, of sorts, during which the prisoner might appear incoherent—but what more would they expect from an eighty-year-old man? He was probably going senile. The best thing would be to make some kind of example of him; something as public as possible. Something no one was going to forget in a hurry, even if it bordered on the inhumane. A crucifixion might fit the bill.

“This way, sir.”

There was a vehicle waiting in the pool of light, a tracked surface rover. They bundled me aboard it and then we sped through the forest trail. We drove through night for what felt like hours, always further and further away from anything resembling civilisation.

Eventually they brought me to a large clearing.

“Is this it?” I said.

They nodded in unison. I knew the plan by then, of course. The climate was against me now. It was not a time for heroes—they preferred to redefine them as war criminals. My allies had sheltered me until now, but they had not been able to stop my arrest. It had been all they could do to spring me from the makeshift detention centre in Nueva Iquique. Now that my double had been recaptured, I would have to disappear for a little while.

Here in the jungle they had devised a means to protect me for good; no matter how the fortunes of my allies in the main settlements waxed and waned. They had buried a fully-functioning sleeper berth here, with the power supply to keep it working for many decades. They thought there was a risk involved in using it, but they also thought I was really eighty years old. I figured the risk was a lot less than they imagined. By the time I was ready to wake up—I’d give it a century at the very least—my helpers would have access to much better technology. It wouldn’t be a problem to revive me. It probably wouldn’t even be a problem to repair my arm.

All I had to do was sleep until the right time. I would be tended across the decades by my allies—just as I had tended the sleepers who rode the Santiago.

But with infinitely more devotion.

They hitched the surface rover to something buried beneath overgrowth—a metal hook—and then pulled the vehicle forward, dragging aside a camouflaged door set into the clearing’s floor, revealing steps sinking down into a well-lit, clinically clean chamber.

Helped by two of my people, I was escorted down the stairs, until I reached the waiting sleeper-casket. It had been refurbished since it had carried someone from Sol system, and it would suit my needs excellently.

“We’d best get you under as soon as possible,” said my aide.

I smiled and nodded at the man, and then allowed him to slip a hypodermic into my arm.

Sleep came quickly. The last thing I remembered, just before it closed over me, was that when I woke up I would need a new name. Something that no one would ever connect to Sky Haussmann—but which, nonetheless, would provide me with some tangible link to the past. Something that only I knew the meaning of.

I thought back to the Caleuche, remembering what Norquinco had told me about the ghost ship. And I thought about the poor, psychotic dolphins aboard the Santiago; of Sleek in particular; of the way his hard, leathery body had thrashed as I pushed poison into him. There had been a dolphin with the ghost ship, too, but for a moment I couldn’t remember its name, or even be certain that Norquinco had told me. I would find out when I woke, I thought.

Find out and use that name.