Chasm City

FORTY-TWO

Once again I felt the spasm of need; the soldier’s instinct to reach for an instrument of death. But there was nothing to hand, and in any case, for all my bravado, I knew that the one thing that I would not be able to do would be to kill Tanner Mirabel in cold blood. It would be too much like shooting myself.

Sister Amelia of the Ice Mendicants came behind him, emerging from the darkness into the chamber’s glade of golden light. She was no longer dressed as a Mendicant—her clothes were functionally dowdy—but she was unmistakable. She wore a symbolic snowflake pendant around her neck.

Tanner stepped forward until he towered over Reivich’s seat. Dressed in a dark greatcoat which almost reached the floor, he was taller than I had been expecting—an inch or so above me—and deported himself differently: a swagger which was just one element of a bodily choreography we barely shared, for all our physical similarity. We did not exactly look like twins, but we could have been brothers, or the same man seen in different illumination, where the changed aspects of shadows subtly differentiated our characters. There was a cruel set to Tanner’s face which I thought I had never seen in my own, but maybe I had just not looked in the mirror at the right times.

Amelia was the first to speak. “What’s going on? I don’t understand.”

“Good question,” Tanner said, placing a gloved hand on the high, scrolled back of Reivich’s chair. “Very good question indeed.” Then he peered over the back of the chair until he was looking down into the sightless face of the man he had come to kill. “Any time you feel like answering that, you go ahead and do it, handsome.”

“You realise who I am, then?” Reivich said.

“Yeah. You went for the quick and dirty, obviously. Let me guess. Extensive neural, cellular and genetic trauma. The goons here probably buffered you with medichines, but that would have been like trying to shore up a collapsing building with drinking straws. I’d say—judging by the look of things—you’ve probably only got a few hours left, maybe not even that. Am I right?”

“Unerringly so,” Reivich said. “I hope that gives you some consolation.”

“Consolation for what?” Tanner was fingering Reivich’s head now, tracing it as one might trace the texture of an antique globe.

“You arrived too late to kill me.”

“I could make amends.”

“Very good. But what use would it be? You could crush this body of mine and I’d thank you for it with my dying breath. Everything that I am—everything I ever knew or felt—is preserved for eternity.”

Tanner stepped back. His tone was businesslike now. “The scan was successful?”

“Entirely. I’m running even as we speak, somewhere in Refuge’s vast distributed architecture of processors. Backup copies of me have already been transmitted to five other habitats even I can’t name. You could detonate a nuclear weapon in Refuge and it wouldn’t make a blind bit of difference.”

It was obvious now that the version of Reivich I had spoken to only an hour earlier had been the scanned copy. The two were playing a game together; co-conspirators. Reivich was right. Nothing that Tanner could do now would have any meaning. And maybe that did not matter to Tanner, since in drawing me here, he’d already achieved his primary aim.

“You’d die,” Tanner said. “You expect me to believe that doesn’t matter to you?”

“I don’t know what you believe. Frankly, Tanner, it’s of no real interest to me either way.”

“Who are you?” Amelia said, incomprehension flooding her face. I realised that even until now, he’d maintained her trust, concealing the true nature of his mission. “Why are you talking about killing?”

“Because it’s what we do,” I said. “We’ve both lied to you. The difference is I never had any plans to kill you.”

Tanner reached for her. But he was not quite fast enough; too keen to linger around Reivich. Amelia padded across the floor’s chevrons, bewilderment on her face. “Please tell me what’s going on!”

“No time,” I said. “You just have to trust us. I lied to you and I’m sorry—but I wasn’t myself when I did it.” Chanterelle said, “You’d better believe him. He risked his life to come here, and it was mainly to save you.”

“She’s telling the truth,” Zebra said.

I looked into Tanner’s eyes. He was still stationed behind Reivich’s chair. The three servitors stood inert, as if oblivious to all that was happening around them.

“There’s just one of you, Tanner,” I said. “I think your number’s finally up.” I turned to the others. “We can take him, if you let me lead. I’ve got his memories. I’ll anticipate every move he makes.”

Quirrenbach and Zebra flanked me, Chanterelle slightly to my rear, while Amelia retreated further behind us.

“Be careful,” I whispered. “He might have smuggled a weapon into Refuge, even if we didn’t.”

I took two steps closer to Reivich’s throne.

Something moved under the quilt. His other hand, unseen until now, emerged from darkness, clutching a tiny jewelled gun. He levelled it with impressive speed, all frailty gone in the instant of aiming, and squeezed off three shots. The projectiles slammed past me, leaving silver smears on my retina.

Quirrenbach, Zebra and Chanterelle dropped to the floor.

“Remove them,” Reivich croaked.

The servitors came to life, all three of them gliding silently past me like ghosts, before kneeling down to pick up the bodies. They carried them away from the light, like spirits returning to the dark of a forest, laden with trophies.

“You piece of shit,” I said.

“They’ll live,” Reivich said, returning his hand beneath the quilt. “They’re just tranquillised.”

“Why?”

“I was wondering the same thing myself,” Tanner said.

“They spoilt the symmetry. Now it’s just the two of you, don’t you see? The perfect conclusion to your hunt.” He tilted his skull towards me. “You must admit, the simplicity is appealing.”

“What is it you want?” Tanner said. “What I want is what I already have. The two of you in the same room. It’s been a while, hasn’t it?”

“Not long enough,” I said. “You know more than you admitted, don’t you?”

“Let’s just say that the intelligence I gained before leaving Sky’s Edge was intriguing, to say the least.”

“Maybe you know more than me,” I said.

Reivich poked the nozzle of the gun from under the quilt again, this time directing it back towards Tanner. His aim was no more than approximate, but it seemed to have the desired effect, causing Tanner to step away from the chair until we were equidistant from it. Then he said, “Why don’t the two of you tell me what you remember? Then I’ll fill in the gaps.” He nodded at Tanner. “You can start, I think.”

“Where would you like me to begin?”

“You can start with the death of Cahuella’s wife, since you brought it about.”

I felt a weird instinct to defend him. “He didn’t kill her deliberately, you shit. He was trying to save her life.”

“Does it matter?” Tanner said, contemptuously. “I just did what I had to do.”

“Unfortunately you missed,” Reivich said.

Tanner seemed not to hear. He was speaking now, recounting what he remembered. “Maybe I missed; maybe I didn’t. Maybe I knew I’d rather kill her than have her live without her being mine.”

“No,” I said. “That isn’t how it happened. You tried to save her…”

But I wondered if I really knew.

Tanner continued, “Afterwards, I knew Gitta was finished. I could save Cahuella, though. His injuries weren’t that bad. So I kept them both on life-support until I got back to the Reptile House.”

I nodded involuntarily, remembering the hellish length of the journey back through the jungle, suppressing the pain of my own severed foot. Except it never happened to me… it happened to Tanner, and I only knew about it from his memories…

“When I got back I was met by some of Cahuella’s other staff. They took the bodies from me and did what they could for Gitta, even though they knew it was pointless. Cahuella was in a coma for a few days, but he came round eventually. He didn’t remember too much of what had happened, though.”

I remembered waking after a long and dreamless sleep, choked by fever, consumed with the knowledge that I’d been impaled. And remembered not remembering what had happened. I called for Tanner, and was told that he was injured but alive. No one mentioned Gitta.

“Tanner came to see me,” I said, taking over the narrative. “I saw that he had lost a foot, and knew that something very bad had happened to us. But I hardly remembered anything, except that we had gone north to set up an ambush for Reivich’s party.”

“You asked for Gitta. You remembered she’d been with us.”

Fragments of that long-forgotten conversation were coming back to me now, as if recalled through layers of gauze.

“And you told me. Everything. You could have lied—made up some story which protected you; said that Reivich’s man had killed her—but you didn’t. You told it exactly as it happened.”

“What would have been the point?” Tanner said. “You’d have remembered it all eventually.”

“But you must have known.”

“Must have known what?” Reivich said.

“That I’d kill you for it.”

“Ah,” Reivich said, a soft phlegmatic chuckle emerging from his life-support module. “Now we’re almost there. The crux of it all.”

“I didn’t think you’d kill me,” Tanner said. “I thought you’d forgive me. I didn’t even think I’d need forgiveness.”

“Maybe you didn’t know me quite as well as you thought.”

“Maybe I didn’t.”

Reivich tapped his empty hand against the ornate armrest of his chair, his blackened nails clicking against the metalwork. “So you had him murdered,” he said, addressing me. “But in a manner tailored to your own obsessions.”

“I don’t really remember,” I said.

And it was almost the truth.

I recalled looking down on Tanner, imprisoned within that ceilingless white enclosure. I remembered the way he slowly became aware of his predicament; aware that he was not alone. That something else shared the space with him.

“Tell me what you remember,” Reivich said, turning to Tanner.

His voice was as flat and devoid of emotion as Reivich’s synthetic tones. “I remember being eaten alive. It’s not something you forget in a hurry, believe me.”

And I remembered how the hamadryad had died almost instantly, killed by the alien poisons which every human carried; a fatal clash of metabolisms. The creature had spasmed and curled like a loose firehose.

“We slit it open,” I said. “Removed Tanner from its throat. He wasn’t breathing. But his heart was still beating.”

“You could have ended it there and then,” Reivich said. “A knife to the heart, and it would have been over. But you had to take one more thing from him, didn’t you?”

“I needed his identity. His memories, particularly. So I had him kept alive on a cuirass while a trawl was prepared.”

“Why?” Reivich said.

“To chase you. I knew by then that you’d left the planet; that you’d soon be aboard a lighthugger making the run to Yellowstone. I’d punished Tanner. Now I had to do the same to you, for Gitta’s sake. But I needed to become Tanner to do it.”

“You could have become anyone on the planet.”

“His skills suited me. And I had him to hand.” I paused. “It was never meant to be permanent. I suppressed my own identity just long enough to get aboard the ship. Tanner’s memories were meant to fade gradually. They’d remain as a residue—as they do now—but distinct from my own.”

“And your other secrets?”

“My eyes? That was something I had to hide. It worked, too. But now they’ve returned to their altered state. Maybe that was how I meant it to happen.”

“You still don’t remember all of it,” Reivich said, smiling horribly. “There was more to it, you know. More than just the eyes.”

“How would you know?”

He raised a hand, tapping what remained of his teeth in an odd gesture of knowing. “You forget. I’d already persuaded the Ultras to betray you to me. Finding out the rest of what they did to you was simple enough.” He smiled again. “I had to know who I was dealing with, you see. What you were capable of.”

“And now you know?”

“I think you’re a man who might surprise even himself, Cahuella. Except you claim you’re not him, of course.”

“I hate him as much as you do,” I said. “I’ve seen things from Tanner’s perspective. I know what he did to him. He isn’t me.”

“So you share sympathies with Tanner?”

I shook my head. “The Tanner I know died in a pit. It doesn’t matter that something survived. It isn’t him. It’s just a monster Cahuella made.”

Tanner sneered. “You think you can kill me?”

“I wouldn’t have come here if I didn’t.”

Tanner moved forward quickly, approaching the chair. He was going to kill Reivich; I knew it. But Reivich was ahead of him; he had the gun out and drawn before Tanner had taken more than two paces. “Now, now,” he said. “What’s the point of you two settling your differences if you do it without an audience?”

I remembered Amelia, somewhere in the shadows. I wondered what she made of all this.

Tanner took a step back, raising his empty gloved palms. “I suppose you’re wondering how I survived,” he said, to me.

“It had crossed my mind.”

“You should never have left me alive, even if I was only kept that way by the cuirass.” He shook his head pitifully. “You couldn’t do it; not after the snake failed you. So you told one of your men to do it for you, while you got the hell away from the Reptile House.”

What he said was true, although it was only in his telling that my memories crystallised into surety. “I headed south,” I said. “Towards a camp occupied by NC defectors. They had surgeons with them. I knew they’d be able to suppress the work the Ultras had done on me, camouflage my genes and make me look like Tanner. I always intended to return to the Reptile House before leaving the planet.”

“But you never got the chance,” Reivich said. “The NCs reached the Reptile House while you were away with Dieterling. They killed most of your people, except for Tanner, for whom they had a grudging respect. They brought him back to consciousness.”

“Bad mistake,” Tanner said. “Even without a foot, I took their weapons and killed them all.”

I remembered none of that, not even faintly. Of course not —those events had happened after Tanner had been trawled; after I had stolen his memories.

“What happened next?” I asked.

“I had a month to get aboard the lighthugger, before it left orbit.” Tanner angled himself down and scratched his ankle under his greatcoat. “I wasn’t far behind. I got my foot fixed and came after you. I killed Dieterling, you know—how else do you think I got so close to him? Walked up to him in the wheeler and popped him.” He made the gesture, as if he was re-enacting the murder.

It was a classic piece of misdirection.

When Tanner rose to his full height, he did so in a movement swift and fluid. A knife arced from his hand, executing a faultlessly computed trajectory across the room. His aim was perfect—he’d even allowed for the coriolis drift caused by Refuge’s lazy rotation.

The knife buried itself in the back of Reivich’s head.

A digital moan came from the life-support module; an artificially stable note which kept up even when Reivich’s head tilted lifelessly forward on his chest. The gun slipped from his hand and clattered on the floor. I made a move for it, knowing this was probably my only chance to achieve at least parity with Tanner.

But he was faster. He sent me flying, my spine cracking against the floor in a fall which blasted the air out of my lungs. Tanner’s foot kicked the gun by accident, sending it skittering into the twilight between the pool of golden light and the shadows encompassing it.

Tanner reached for the knife and retrieved it from Reivich’s skull, monomolecular blade shimmering with prismatic patterns, like a skein of oil on water.

He won’t risk throwing the knife, I thought. If he missed, he’d lose his only weapon…

“You’re finished, Cahuella. This is where it ends.”

He had the knife in one hand, balanced gingerly in his gloved palm. With the other hand he reached around the front of Reivich’s face and snapped the optical feeds from his eye-sockets, each line trailing ropy filaments of congealing blood.

“It ended for you a long time ago,” I said, stepping forward into his radius of attack. He swept the knife through the air, the blade scything silver arcs, parting the air so surgically that its passage was totally silent.

“Then what does that make you?” Tanner pushed Reivich’s body out of the chair, the thin, quilt-shrouded figure falling to the floor like a bag of dried wood.

“I don’t know,” I said. “But I’m nothing like you.”

I tried to time the angle of his swipes with the knife, trying to focus on those specific Tanner memories which would serve me now; what he knew about combat in close quarters.

It was impossible. There was no way I could get an edge on him—and he had the advantage that he didn’t have to fight to retrieve those memories. They came unbidden, deep as reflex.

I lunged, hoping to twist his free arm, to unbalance him before he could bring the blade to bear.

My timing was off.

I didn’t feel the cut itself; only the cold which seeped in after it. I dared not look down, but in my peripheral vision I could see the gash in my chest, right through my clothing. It was not nearly deep enough to kill me—not even down to the ribs—but that was only luck on my part. Next time, he would have me. I was sure of it.

“Tanner!”

It was not my voice. It was Amelia, calling from the shade. I saw her, half lost in darkness, reaching out to me.

Of course. To her I was still Tanner. She had no other name for me.

She had Reivich’s gun.

“Throw it to me!” I shouted.

She threw it. The gun slammed into the floor, then skidded for metres, chips of its jewelled husk flaking off.

I spun from Tanner and ran for the gun.

I fell to my knees, sliding until I was within reach of the gun. My hand closed on the grip.

Tanner’s knife flew through the air and slammed into my hand. I dropped the gun, yelling in pain, seeing the point of the knife jutting from my palm like the sail of a yacht.

Tanner ran towards me, his footfalls racing into the echoless gloom. Tears clouding my eyesight, I picked up the gun with my other hand and tried to aim it at him.

I squeezed off a shot, feeling the delicate recoil of the gun. The blur of the projectile glistened past Tanner, missing him by inches. I re-aimed and squeezed the trigger again.

The gun did nothing.

Tanner crashed into me, kicking the useless weapon away for good measure. Forcing me to the ground, kneeling over me like a victor, he wrestled with me while I tried to stab him with the edge of the knife projecting from my palm.

Tanner caught my wrist above my impaled hand and smiled for a second. He’d won now. He knew it. It was just a question of removing the blade from my palm and turning it against myself.

Out of the corner of my vision I saw Reivich’s slumped corpse, his mouth agape, his few teeth catching the golden glow of the chamber.

I remembered him tapping his teeth.

And finally remembered the other thing Cahuella had bought from the Ultras; the transformation that went deeper than vision; the hunter’s aid he had never mentioned to Tanner Mirabel.

What use is it to hunt in the night, if you can’t kill what you catch?

I opened my jaw wide; wider than strict human anatomy allowed. I seemed to find a muscle inside myself that I had not known was there before; a muscle anchored high in the roof of my mouth. Something cracked in my jaw, painlessly.

With my good arm I cradled Tanner’s head, turning his face to mine while he struggled with the knife, thinking it would do him some good.

He looked into my mouth, and must have seen it then.

“You’re dead,” I said. “It wasn’t just snake-vision I bought from them, you see.”

I felt my venom glands activate, pumping poison along the microfine channels bored through my articulated fangs.

And drew Tanner to me, like the final embrace of a long-lost brother.

And bit deep into his neck.