Chasm City

FORTY-ONE

Refuge was a kilometre-long blackened spindle, unrelieved by exterior lights; visible only by the way it occluded background stars and the silvery spine of the Milky Way. Very few other ships were seen coming or going, and those that we saw were just as dark and anonymous as the habitat. As we vectored in, one end of the spindle opened out in four triangular segments, like the highly adapted jaw of an eyeless marine predator. Insignificant as plankton, we drifted in.

The berthing chamber was just large enough to take a ship like ours. Docking clamps folded out, followed by concertina-like transfer tunnels, mating with the airlocks spaced around the equatorial belt of the ship’s main sphere.

Tanner’s here, I thought. From the moment we stepped into Refuge, he might be on the point of killing me and anyone who got too close to our little vendetta.

It wasn’t something I was going to forget easily.

Refuge sent armed drones into the ship, gloss-black spheroids bristling with guns and sensors which swept us for concealed arms. Of course we’d brought none with us; not even Yellowstone’s security was sloppy enough for that. By the same token, I hoped that Tanner had also come in unarmed—but I wasn’t counting on it.

With Tanner, you didn’t count on anything.

The robots betrayed a level of technology appreciably more advanced than anything I’d encountered since my revival, with the possible exception of Zebra’s furniture. Presumably unaugmented humans were not considered a serious transmission risk, but it might have been the case that we would have been denied entry if one of us had been carrying a plague-susceptible implant. Human officials moved in once the robots had completed the preliminary work, carrying significantly less brutal-looking guns, weapons which they toted with an air of embarrassed apology. They were excessively polite and I began to understand why.

No one gets here without an invitation.

We had to be treated like the honoured guests that we were.

“I called ahead, of course,” Quirrenbach said, while we waited in the airlock for our documents to be processed. “Reivich knows we’re here.”

“I hope you warned him about Tanner.”

“I did what I could,” he said.

“What does that mean?”

“It means Tanner’s definitely here. Reivich won’t have turned him away.”

I was sweating as it was; worried that my fake identity would not be enough to get me into Refuge. But now the sweat on my brow turned into droplets of ice. “What in hell’s name is he playing at?”

“Reivich must feel that he and Tanner still have some business to attend to. He’ll have invited him.”

“He’s insane. Tanner might kill him just for kicks, even if his real argument’s with me. Don’t forget my own imperative was to complete a mission; to keep my word that I’d track down Reivich. I don’t know whether that impulse came from Tanner or Cahuella. But I wouldn’t like to stake my life on it.”

“Keep your voice down,” Quirrenbach said. “Those robots will have sprayed listening devices over every square angstrom of this room. You’re not here for a spot of quiet bloodshed, remember.”

“Strictly tourism,” I said, grimacing.

The armoured outer door reopened, rust flakes chipping in free-fall from its hinges.

A third-tier official came in, not even armed this time, nor clad in muscular armour. He wore a look of pained evasiveness, homing in on me like a heat-seeking slug. “Mister Haussmann? I’m sorry to inconvenience you, but we’re experiencing an administrative problem in processing your application for entry into Refuge.”

“Really?” I said, trying to sound remotely surprised. I could hardly complain: Sky Haussmann had got me out of Yellowstone’s atmosphere, which was all that could be reasonably expected of him.

“I’m sure it’s nothing serious,” the official said, sincerity chiselled into his face. “We frequently experience conflict between our records and those of the rest of the system; it’s to be expected after the recent unpleasantness.”

Recent unpleasantness. He was talking about the plague.

“I’m sure the matter can be resolved with a slightly more thorough examination, a few physiological cross-checks; nothing too complicated.”

I bridled. “What kind of physiological cross-check, exactly?”

“A retinal scan, that kind of thing.” The official was snapping his fingers at something or someone beyond our view. Almost immediately another robot entered the airlock, a dove-grey sphere politely devoid of any nasty weapons, bearing the Mixmaster sigil.

“I’m not submitting to a retinal scan,” I said, as reasonably as I could. I knew it wouldn’t take a machine to spot the oddity of my eyes. A human barely had to glance at me in the right light to see there was something strange about the way I looked back at them.

My remark had the same effect on the official as a slap across the cheek, causing an almost tangible blanching. “I’m sure we can come to some kind of arrangement…”

“No,” I said. “I very much doubt that, I’m afraid.”

“Then I’m afraid—”

Quirrenbach stepped between us. “Let me handle this,” he mouthed, before speaking aloud to the man. “Excuse my colleague; he’s a little nervous around officialdom. There’s been an honest mistake, as I’m sure you appreciate. Will you accept the word of Argent Reivich?”

The man looked flustered. “Of course… provided I have his guarantees… and that it’s in person…”

He hadn’t needed to ask who Argent Reivich was, I noticed.

Quirrenbach snapped his fingers at me. “Stay here; I’ll square things with him. It shouldn’t take more than half an hour.”

“You’re going to ask Reivich to sign me in?”

“Yeah,” Quirrenbach said, without a hint of humour. “Ironic, isn’t it.”

I didn’t have to wait long.

Reivich appeared on a screen in the holding pen where the Refuge officials held those pending a decision on entry. It was not too much of a shock to see his face, since I had already met Voronoff, who looked exactly the same. But there was something unique about the real Reivich; some essence Voronoff had not succeeded in capturing. It was nothing I could quite place. I suppose it was just the difference between someone playing a game—however earnestly—and someone whose intentions are deadly serious.

“This is quite a turn-up,” Reivich said. He looked pale but healthy, a white tunic with a high collarless neck his only visible item of clothing. He was backdropped by a mural of interlocking algebraic symbols, denoting part of the mathematic theory of Transmigration. “You asking me for entry, and me agreeing to it.”

“You let Tanner in,” I said. “Are you sure that was wise?”

“No, but I’m sure it’ll prove interesting. Assuming he’s who you say he is, and you’re who you say you are.”

“One or both of us might want to kill you.”

“Do you?”

It was an admirable question; straight to the point. I gave him the dignity of appearing to think it over before answering. “No, Argent. I did once, but that was before I knew who I was. Finding out you’re not who you think you are does rather change one’s priorities.”

“If you’re Cahuella, then my men killed your wife.” His voice was thin and reedy, like a child’s. “I’d have thought you were even more keen to have me killed.”

“Tanner killed Cahuella’s wife,” I said. “The fact that he thought he was going to save her doesn’t really alter things.”

“Are you Cahuella or not, in that case?”

“I might have been, once. Now Cahuella doesn’t exist.” I looked hard into the screen. “And frankly, I don’t think anyone’s going to mourn him, are they?”

Reivich pursed his lips distastefully. “Cahuella’s weapons butchered my family,” he said. “He sold arms which murdered my loved ones. For that I could gladly have tortured him.”

“If you’d killed Gitta, that would have been more torture than you could ever have inflicted on him with knives and electrodes.”

“Would it? Did he really love her that much?”

I examined my memories, in the hope of answering him. In the end all I could offer was, “I don’t know. He was a man capable of a lot of things. All I do know is that Tanner loved her at least as much as Cahuella.”

“But Gitta did die. What did that do to Cahuella?”

“It made him very hateful,” I said, thinking back to the white room, which still lingered slightly beyond recall, like a nightmare not quite brought to mind after waking. “But he took that hatred out on Tanner.”

“Tanner lived though, didn’t he?”

“Some part of him,” I said. “Not necessarily any part we’d call human.”

Reivich was silent for a minute, the difficulty of our meeting obviously weighing hard on him. Finally he said, “Gitta. She was the only innocent in any of this, wasn’t she? The only one who didn’t deserve any of it.”

There was no arguing with that.

The hollow interior of Refuge was locked in perpetual gloom, like a city in blackout. Unlike the gloom of Chasm City, this was deliberate; a state of affairs willed into being by the groups which claimed tenancy here. There was nothing resembling a native ecology. The interior was unpressurised apart from trace gases, and every square inch of the walls was occupied by sealed, windowless structures, linked by an intestinal tangle of transit tubes. The dimly glowing tubes were the only source of illumination, which wasn’t saying much—and if it had not been for the enhanced biology of my eyes, I doubted that I’d have been able to see anything at all.

Yet the place hummed with a sense of barely managed power; a constant subliminal rumble which transmitted itself into the bones. The balcony we stood on was sheeted over with airtight glass, but even so I had the feeling that I was standing in the corner of a vast, shadowy turbine room in which every generator was spinning at full tilt.

Reivich had given the authorisation for Refuge security to let me in, provided my party were escorted to him. I had misgivings about this—it was too much out of my control—but we had absolutely no choice but to comply with Reivich’s wishes. This was where the chase ended—on his territory. And by sleight of hand, it was no longer Reivich who was being chased.

It might have been Tanner.

Maybe it was me.

Refuge was sufficiently small that there was no real drawback in walking from point to point within its interior; a fact aided by the relatively weak artificial gravity which the habitat’s lazy spin imparted. We were led into one of the connecting tunnels: a three-metre-wide tube fashioned from thick smoky glass, with intermittent glass irises spaced along its length, dilating open and shut to allow us passage and to make abundantly clear the fact that we were being shepherded, like food passing along the gullet. The walk took us further along the main axis of the spindle, gravity rising as we descended from the endcap, but never reaching anything like one gee. The unlit structures of Refuge towered over us like canyon walls at night, and there was no sense whatsoever that anyone else inhabited the place. The truth was that the kind of clientele which Refuge serviced were the kind of people who demanded absolute discretion, even from others like themselves.

“Has Reivich been mapped yet?” I asked, realising that it was an obvious question which so far hadn’t occurred to me. “After all, that’s why he’s here.”

“Not yet,” Quirrenbach said. “There are all sorts of physiological tests which need to be made first, to ensure that the mapping is optimised—cell membrane chemistry, neurotransmitter properties, glial cell structure, blood-brain volume, that kind of thing. You only get one shot at it, you see.”

“Reivich’s going for the full destructive scan?”

“Something very close to it. It’s still the way to get the best resolution, they say.”

“Once he’s scanned, he won’t have to worry about an irritation like Tanner.”

“Not unless Tanner follows him.”

I laughed—before I realised that Quirrenbach wasn’t making a joke.

“Where do you think Tanner’s now?” Zebra said, walking to my left, her heels clicking on the floor, her elongated reflection like dancing scissors in the wall’s reflection.

“Somewhere Reivich has his eye on him,” I said. “Along with Amelia, I hope.”

“Is she really to be trusted?”

“She might be the only person who hasn’t betrayed one of us,” I said. “At least not intentionally. But I’m sure of one thing. Tanner’s stringing her along only until she ceases to be of use to him. Once that moment comes—and it might be soon—she’ll be in very great danger.”

Chanterelle said, “You came here to save her?”

For a moment I wanted to answer in the affirmative; to dredge up some tiny crumb of self-respect and pretend that I was a human being capable of something other than wickedness. And maybe it wouldn’t have been entirely untrue—maybe Amelia was a large part of the reason I’d come here, knowing it was everything that Tanner wanted. But she wasn’t the largest part, and the last thing I felt like doing was lying any more, least of all to myself.

“I came here to end what Cahuella started,” I said. “It’s as simple as that.”

The smoked-glass tunnel wound its way up again, towards the far endcap of Refuge, and then punched its way into the lightless side of one of the looming airtight structures. At the end of this particular stretch of tunnel was another iris, currently sealed. But this one was gloss-black, and it was impossible to see what lay beyond it.

I walked up to it and pressed my cheek against the unyielding metal, straining to hear something.

“Reivich?” I called. “We’re here! Open up!”

The door irised open, more ponderously than those we’d passed through earlier on.

Cool green light streamed through the opening arcs, bathing us in its insipidity. Suddenly the fact that I didn’t have a weapon—that none of us were armed—hit home. I might die in a second, I thought—and probably not even know it when it happened. I had allowed myself to be admitted into the lair of a man who had everything to fear from me, and no reason in the universe to trust me. Did that make Reivich or myself the bigger fool? I couldn’t begin to guess. All I knew was that I wanted to get out of Refuge as quickly as possible.

The door opened fully, revealing a bronze-walled antechamber, with vivid green lamps hanging from the ceiling. Bas-relief gold symbols scurried around the walls, iterating similar mathematical statements to those I had seen when I’d spoken to Reivich; the incantations which could shatter a mind into ones and zeros; pure number.

There was no doubt that he was here.

The door closed behind us and another irised ahead, revealing a much larger space, like the inside of a cathedral. The room was bathed in golden light, yet its extremities were so far away that they were lost in shadow. I could see the slight curvature of Refuge’s floor, an effect accentuated by the interlocking bronze and silver chevrons which patterned the floor.

The air smelled of incense.

A man sat in the distance, in the middle of a pool of brighter light shafting from a stained-glass window far above. He sat facing away from us, in a high-backed chair of ornate construction, wreathed in gold. A trio of slender bipedal servitors stood a few metres from the chair, presumably awaiting instructions. I studied the shape of his head, almost lost in shadow itself, and knew that I was standing behind Reivich.

I remembered when I thought I had seen him, near the immortal fish in Chasm City. How quickly I had reacted, slipping out my gun and chasing around the fish tank to confront and kill him. I was sure that I would have done so if Voronoff had not been a second faster than I.

Now I didn’t feel any pressing need to kill him.

A voice, like sandpaper rasping against sandpaper, said, “Turn me around so that I may face my guests, please.” The statement itself was a laboured thing, punctuated by wheezes and words less spoken than whispered.

One of the servitors stepped forward, treading with the inhuman silence of their kind, and swivelled Reivich around.

What faced us was not what I was expecting.

It was not possible…

Reivich looked like a corpse: a cadaver briefly animated by the application of electrical puppetry. He did not look like anything living. He did not look like anything which had a right to speak, or to be able to curve his mouth in the semblance of a smile.

He reminded me of a less healthy version of Marco Ferris. We could see only his head and the tips of his fingers. The rest of him was lost beneath a thick quilted blanket, from which trailed medical feedlines, curving around into a compact life-support module clamped to one arm of the chair, a smaller version of the cuirass which I had used to keep Gitta “alive” while I returned her body to the Reptile House. His head was little more than a skull around which skin had been draped; skin which was mottled black where it wasn’t already a shade of bruised purple. His eyesockets had been enucleated; fine cables trailed from the darkness between his lids, running into the same life-support module. There were only a few wisps of hair left on his crown, like the few trees which will always remain standing directly under an airblast. His jaw hung slackly open, his tongue a black slug filling his mouth.

He raised a hand. Apart from a few liver spots, it was that of a much younger man.

“I see you’re disturbed,” Reivich said.

I realised now that the voice didn’t come from him at all, but from the life-support module. It still sounded feeble. Presumably even the act of subvocalising was an effort to him.

“You did it,” Quirrenbach said, stepping closer to the man he still worked for. “You took the scan.”

“Either that or I didn’t get enough sleep last night,” Reivich said, his voice like wind. “On balance I’m inclined to think the former.”

“What happened?” I asked. “What went wrong?”

“Nothing went wrong.”

“You shouldn’t look like this,” Quirrenbach said. “You look like a man on the edge of death.”

“Perhaps because I am.”

“The scan failed?” Zebra said.

“No, Taryn, it didn’t. The scan was a complete success, I’m told. My neural structure was acquired flawlessly.”

It wouldn’t have been me.”

“I don’t suppose Tanner’s arrival had anything to do with it?” I asked.

Reivich seemed to find that amusing; the curve of his smile increasing minutely. Soon, I thought, we would all see the real smile beneath his face; the one written in bone. He could not have very long left now.

“Tanner made my choice rather easier,” Reivich said. “I won’t dignify him with any influence on my circumstances beyond that.”

“Where is he?” Chanterelle asked.

“He’s here,” the withered creature in the chair said. “He’s been here—in Refuge—for more than a day. We haven’t met yet, though.”

“You haven’t met?” I shook my head. “What the hell’s he been up to since he arrived, in that case? And what about the woman with him?”

“Tanner underestimated my influence here,” Reivich said. “Not just here in Refuge, but in the vicinity of Yellowstone as a whole. You did too, didn’t you?”

“Forget me. Let’s talk about Tanner. He’s a much more interesting subject.”

Reivich’s fingers caressed the edge of the quilt. One hand remained entirely concealed beneath it—assuming there was another hand. I tried to reconcile this apparition with the young aristocrat I had been following, but there was nothing they seemed to have in common. The machine even stripped Reivich of his Sky’s Edge accent.

“Tanner came to Refuge intending to kill me,” he said. “But his main reason for coming here was to draw you from the shadows.”

“You think I don’t know that?”

“I’m rather surprised you came, put it like that.”

“Tanner and I have unfinished business.”

“Such as?”

“I can’t let him kill you, even as an incidental detail. You don’t deserve it. You acted in revenge—stupidly, even—but not dishonourably.”

The head canted forward again, this time in mute acknowledgement of what I had just said. “If Cahuella hadn’t tried to ambush my squad, Gitta would never have died. And he deserved worse than he got.” The eyeless sockets lifted to me, as if some reflex demanded that he “look” in the direction of whoever he was addressing, even though his vision was undoubtedly being relayed from some hidden camera situated in the chair. Reivich said, “But of course, it’s you I’m talking to, isn’t it. Or do you still pretend otherwise?”

“I don’t pretend anything. I’m just not Cahuella. Not any more. Cahuella died the day he stole Tanner’s memories. What’s left is… someone else. Someone who didn’t exist before.”

An eyebrow raised above one of the enucleated sockets. “A better man?”

“Gitta asked me a question once. How long would you have to live; how much good would you need to do, to compensate for one act of pure evil you’d committed as a younger man? It struck me as an odd question at the time, but I understand now. She knew, I think. She knew exactly who Cahuella was; exactly what he’d done. Well, I don’t know the answer to that question, even now. But I think I’m going to find out.”

Reivich seemed unimpressed. “Is that the entirety of your unfinished business with Tanner?”

“No,” I said. “The woman with him. Amelia. She’s a Mendicant, no matter what disguise she’s travelling under. I believe Tanner will kill her the instant she ceases to be of use to him.”

“You came to save her, putting yourself in danger? How gallant.”

“Gallantry doesn’t come into it. It’s… human goodness.” The words sounded completely alien to me, but I wasn’t ashamed of speaking them. “Maybe this place could use a little more of it, don’t you think?”

“You’d kill him—the man whose memories you carry? Isn’t that a little close to suicide?”

“I’ll worry about the ethical problems when I’ve cleaned the blood up.”

“I admire your clarity of mind,” Reivich said. “It makes what’s about to happen all the more interesting.”

I tensed. “What are you talking about?”

“I told you Tanner was here, didn’t I? I meant here; literally here. I’ve had him entertained at my pleasure until you arrived.”

A rectangle of deeper shadow interrupted the gloom behind Reivich. From out of it stepped a man who looked very much like myself.