Chasm City

FIVE

I came crashing out of the dream of Sky Haussmann and for a moment thought I was still inside another dream, one whose central feature was a terrifying sense of loss and dislocation.

Then I realised it wasn’t a dream at all.

I was wide awake, but it felt as if half my mind was still sound asleep: the part that held memory and identity and any comforting sense of how I had ended up where I now found myself; any threadlike connection to the past. What past? I expected to look back and at some point to encounter sharp details—a name; a hint of who I was—but it was like trying to focus on grey fog.

Yet I could still name things; language was still there. I was lying on a hard bed under a thin brown, knitted blanket. I felt alert and rested—and at the same time completely helpless. I looked around and nothing clicked; there was not the slightest tinge of familiarity on any level. I held my hand in front of my face, studying the ridge-lines of veins on the back of it, and it looked only slightly less strange.

Yet I remembered the details of the dream well enough. It had been dazzlingly vivid; less the way a dream ought to be—incoherent, with shifting perspectives and haphazard logic—than a strictly linear slice of documentary. It was as if I had been there with Sky Haussmann; not seeing things from exactly his point of view, but following him like an obsessive phantom.

Something made me turn my hand over.

There was a neat rust-spot of dried blood in the middle of my palm, and when I examined the sheet beneath me, I saw more freckles of dried blood, where I must have been bleeding before I woke up.

Something almost solidified in the fog; a memory almost assuming definition.

I got out of the bed, naked, and looked around me. I was in a room with roughly shaped walls—not hewn from rock, but formed from something like dried clay, painted over with brilliant white stucco. There was a stool adjacent to the bed and a small cupboard, both made from a type of wood I didn’t recognise. There was no ornamentation anywhere except for a small brown vase set into an alcove in one wall.

I stared at the vase in horror.

There was something about it that filled me with terror; terror that I knew instantly to be irrational, but couldn’t do anything about. So maybe there is some neurological damage, I heard myself say—you’ve still got language, but there’s something deeply screwed up somewhere in your limbic system, or whatever part of the brain handles that old mammalian innovation called fear. But as I found the focus of my fear, I realised it wasn’t actually the vase at all.

It was the alcove.

There was something hiding in it: something terrible. And when I realised that, I snapped. My heart was racing. I had to get out of the room; had to get away from the thing that I knew made no sense, but which was still turning my blood to ice. There was an open doorway at one end of the room, leading “outside’—wherever that was.

I stumbled through it.

My feet touched grass; I was standing on a patch of moist, neatly cut lawn surrounded on two sides by overgrowth and rock. The chalet where I’d woken was behind me, set into a rising slope, with the overgrowth threatening to lap over it. But the slope simply kept on rising; assuming an ever-steepening angle—reaching vertical and then curving over again in a dizzying verdant arc, so that the foliage resembled Chinese spinach glued to the sides of a bowl. It was difficult to judge distance, but the world’s ceiling must have been about a kilometre over my head. On the fourth side, the ground dropped away a little before resuming its climb on the opposite side of a toylike valley. It rose and rose and met the ground which climbed behind me.

Beyond the overgrowth and rock on either side of me, I could just make out the distant ends of the world, blurred and blued by the haze of intervening air. At first glance, I seemed to be in a very long cylinder-shaped habitat, but that wasn’t the case: the sides met each other at either end, suggesting that the overall shape of the structure was that of a spindle: two cones placed back to back with my chalet somewhere near the point of maximum width.

I racked my memory for knowledge of habitat design and came up with nothing except the nagging sense that there was something out of the ordinary about this place.

There was a hot blue-white filament running the length of the habitat; some kind of enclosed plasma tube which must have been able to be dimmed and shaded to simulate sunset and darkness. The greenery was enlivened and counterpointed by small waterfalls and precipitous rockfaces, artfully arranged like details in a Japanese watercolour. On the far side of the world I saw tiered, ornamental gardens; a quilt of different cultivations like a matrix of pixels. Here and there, dotted like white pebbles, I saw other chalets and the occasional larger hamlet or dwelling. Stone roads meandered around the valley’s contours, linking chalets and communities. Those near the endpoints of the two cones were closer to the habitat’s spin axis and the illusion of gravity must have been weaker there. I wondered if the need for that had been a driving force in the habitat’s design.

Just as I was beginning to seriously wonder where I was, something crept out of the undergrowth, picking its way into the clearing via an elaborate set of articulated metal legs. My hand shaped itself around a nonexistent gun, as if, on some muscular level, it had expected to find one.

The machine came to a halt, ticking to itself. The spider legs supported a green ovoid body, featureless except for a single glowing blue snowflake motif.

I stepped backwards.

“Tanner Mirabel?”

The voice came from the machine, but there was something about it which told me the voice didn’t belong to the robot. It sounded human and female, and not entirely sure of itself.

“I don’t know.”

“Oh dear. My Castellano isn’t all it could be…” She had said the latter in Norte, but now she shifted to the language I’d spoken, sounding even more hesitant than before. “I hope you can understand me. I don’t get much practice in Castellano. I’m—um—hoping you recognise your name, Tanner. Tanner Mirabel, I should say. Um, Mister Mirabel, that is. Am I making any sense?”

“Yes,” I said. “But we can speak Norte if it makes it any easier on you. If you can put up with me being the rusty one.”

“You speak both very well, Tanner. You don’t mind if I call you Tanner, do you?”

“I’m afraid you could call me just about anything you liked.”

“Ah. Then there is some amnesia, am I correct in assuming that?”

“I’d say there’s more than a little, to be honest.”

I heard a sigh. “Well, that’s what we’re here for. That is indeed what we’re here for. Not that we wish it upon our clients, of course… but if, God forgive, they happen to have it, they’ve really come to the very best place. Not, of course, that they had much choice, though… Oh dear, I’m rambling, aren’t I? I always do this. You must feel confused enough without me wittering on. You see we weren’t expecting that you’d wake quite so soon. That’s why there isn’t anyone to meet you, you see.” There was another sigh, but this one was more businesslike; as if she was steeling herself to get to work. “Now then. You’re in no danger, Tanner, but it would be best if you stayed by the house for now, until someone arrives.”

“Why. What’s wrong with me?”

“Well, you’re completely naked, for a start.”

I nodded. “And you’re not just a robot, are you? Well, I’m sorry. I don’t usually do this.”

“There’s no need at all to apologise, Tanner. No need at all. It’s quite right and proper that you should be a little disorientated. You’ve been asleep for a great length of time, after all. Physically, you may have suffered no obvious ill effects… none at all that I can see, in fact…” She paused, then seemed to snap out of whatever reverie she was in. “But mentally, well… it’s only to be expected, really. This kind of transient memory loss is really much commoner than they would have us believe.”

“I’m glad you used the word “transient” there.”

“Well, usually.”

I smiled, wondered if that was an attempt at humour or just a crass statement of the statistics.

“Who would “they” be, while we’re at it?”

“Well, obviously, the people who brought you here. The Ultras.”

I knelt down and fingered the grass, crushing a blade until it left green pulp on my thumb. I sniffed the residue. If this was a simulation, it was an extraordinarily detailed one. Even battle-planners would have been impressed.

“Ultras?”

“You came here on their ship, Tanner. You were frozen for the journey. Now you have thaw amnesia.”

The phrase caused a fragment of my past to fall lopsidedly into place. Someone had spoken to me of thaw amnesia—either very recently or very long ago. It looked like both possibilities might be correct. The person had been the cyborg crewperson of a starship.

I tried to remember what they had told me, but it was like groping through the same grey fog as before, except this time I did have the sense that there were things within the fog; jagged shards of memory: brittle, petrified trees, reaching out stiff branches to reconnect with the present. Sooner or later I was going to stumble into a major thicket.

But for now all I remembered were reassurances; that I should have no qualms about whatever it was they were about to do to me; that thaw amnesia was a modern myth; very much rarer than I had been led to believe. Which must have been a slight distortion of the facts, at the very least. But then the truth—that shades of amnesia were almost normal—wouldn’t have been conducive to good business.

“I don’t think I was expecting this,” I said.

“Funnily enough, almost no one ever does. The hard cases are the ones who don’t even remember ever dealing with Ultras. You’re not that badly off, are you?”

“No,” I admitted. “And that makes me feel a lot happier, you know.”

“What does?”

“Knowing that there’s always some poor bastard worse off than me.”

“Hmm,” she said, with a note of disapproval. “I’m not sure that’s quite the attitude one should be having, Tanner. On the other hand, I don’t think it’s going to be very long before you’re as right as rain. Not very long at all. Now, why don’t you return to the house? You’ll find some clothes there that will fit you. And it’s not that we’re prudish or anything here at the hospice, but you’ll catch your death like that.”

“It wasn’t intentional, believe me.”

I wondered what she’d make of my chances for a swift recovery if I told her that I’d had to run out of the house because I was terrified by an architectural feature.

“No, of course it wasn’t,” she said. “But do try the clothes on—and if they aren’t to your liking, we can always alter them. I’ll be along shortly to see how you’re doing.”

“Thank you. Who are you, by the way?”

“Me? Oh, no one in particular, I’m afraid. A very small cog in a blessedly large machine, one might say. Sister Amelia.”

Then I hadn’t misheard her when she called the place a hospice. “And where exactly are we, Sister Amelia?”

“Oh, that’s easy. You’re in Hospice Idlewild, under the care of the Holy Order of Ice Mendicants. What some people like to call Hotel Amnesia.”

It still didn’t mean anything to me. I’d never heard of either Hotel Amnesia or the place’s more formal name—let alone the Holy Order of Ice Mendicants.

I walked back into the chalet, the robot following me at a polite distance. I slowed as I approached the door back into the house. It was stupid, but though I’d been able to dismiss my fears almost as soon as I was outside, they now came back with almost the same force. I looked at the alcove. It seemed to me to be imbued with deep evil; as if there were something waiting coiled in there, observing me with malignant intent.

“Just get dressed and get out of here,” I said to myself, aloud and in Castellano. “When Amelia comes, tell her you need some kind of neurological once-over. She’ll understand. This sort of thing must happen all the time.”

I inspected the clothes that were waiting for me in a cupboard. Nothing too fancy, and nothing at all that I recognised. They were simple and had a handmade feel to them: a black V-neck jersey and baggy, pocketless trousers, a pair of soft shoes; adequate for padding round the clearing, but not much else. The clothes fitted me perfectly, but even that made them feel wrong, as if it was not something I was used to.

I rummaged deeper in the cupboard, hoping to find something more personal, but it was empty apart from the clothes. At a loss, I sat on the bed and stared sullenly at the textured stucco of the wall, until my gaze passed over the little alcove. After years of being frozen, my brain chemistry must have been struggling back towards some kind of equilibrium, and in the meantime I was getting a taste of what psychotic fear must feel like. I felt a strong temptation to just curl up and block the world from my senses. What kept me from losing it completely was the quiet knowledge that I had been in worse situations—confronted hazards that were just as terrifying as anything my psychotic mind could imprint on an empty alcove—and that I had survived. It hardly mattered that at the moment I couldn’t bring any specific incidents to mind. It was enough to know that they had happened, and that if I failed now, I would be betraying a buried part of me which remained fully sane, and perhaps remembered everything.

I didn’t have long to wait before Amelia arrived.

She was out of breath and flushed when she entered the house, as if she’d climbed quickly up from the bottom of the valley or cleft I’d seen after I’d awakened. But she was smiling, as if she had enjoyed the exertion for its own sake. She wore a black wimpled vestment, a chained snowflake hanging from her neck. Dusty boots poked out from beneath the hem of her vestment.

“How are the clothes?” she said, placing her hand atop the robot’s ovoid head. It might have been to steady herself, but it also looked like a show of affection towards the machine.

“They fit me very well, thanks.”

“You’re quite sure of that? It’s no trouble at all to change them, Tanner. You’d just have to whip them off, and well… we could have them altered in no time.” She smiled.

“They’re fine,” I said, studying her face properly. She was very pale; much more so than anyone I had ever seen before. Her eyes almost lacked pigment; her eyebrows were so fine that they looked like they’d been brushed in by an expert calligrapher.

“Oh, good,” she said, as if not completely convinced. “Do you remember anything more?”

“I seem to remember where I’ve come from. Which is a start, I suppose.”

“Just try not to force things. Duscha—Duscha’s our neural specialist—she said you’d soon begin to remember, but you shouldn’t worry if it takes a little while.”

Amelia sat down on the end of the bed where I’d been asleep only a few minutes ago. I had turned the blanket over to hide the speckles of blood from my palm. For some reason I felt ashamed of what had happened and wanted to do my best to make sure Amelia didn’t see the wound in my palm.

“I think it might take more than a little while, to be honest.”

“But you do remember that Ultras brought you here. That’s more than a lot of them do, as I said. And you remember where you came from?”

“Sky’s Edge, I think.”

“Yes. The 61 Cygni-A system.”

I nodded. “Except we always called our sun Swan. It’s a lot less of a mouthful.”

“Yes; I’ve heard others say that as well. I really should remember these details, but we get people through from so many different places here. I’m all a muddle at times, honestly, trying to keep track of where’s where and what’s what.”

“I’d agree with you, except I’m still not sure where we are. I won’t be sure until my memory comes back, but I’m not sure I’ve ever heard of the, whatever you said you were…”

“Ice Mendicants.”

“Well, it doesn’t ring any kind of a bell.”

“That’s understandable. I don’t think the Order has any presence in the Sky’s Edge system. We exist only where there’s substantial traffic in and out of a given system.”

I wanted to ask her which system this happened to be, but I assumed she’d get round to that detail in good time.

“I think you’re going to have to tell me a little bit more, Amelia.”

“I don’t mind. You’ll just have to excuse me if this comes out a bit like a prepared speech. I’m afraid you’re not the first one I’ve had to explain all this to—and you won’t be the last, either.”

She told me that as an Order, the Mendicants were about a century and a half old—dating from the middle of the twenty-fourth century. That was around the time that interstellar flight broke out of the exclusive control of governments and superpowers and became almost commonplace. By then the Ultras were beginning to emerge as a separate human faction—not just flying ships, but living their entire lives aboard them, stretched out by the effects of time-dilation beyond anything that constituted a normal human lifespan. They continued to carry fare-paying passengers from system to system, but they were not above cutting corners in the quality of the service they offered. Sometimes they promised to take people somewhere and flew to another system entirely, stranding their passengers years of flight-time away from where they wanted to be. Sometimes their reefersleep technology was so old or poorly maintained that their passengers woke massively aged upon arrival, or with their minds completely erased.

It was into this customer care void that the Ice Mendicants came, establishing chapters in dozens of systems and offering help to those sleepers whose revival had not gone as smoothly as might have been wished. It was not just starship passengers they tended to, for much of their work concerned people who had been asleep in cryocrypts for decades, skipping through economic recessions or periods of political turmoil. Often those people would waken with their savings wiped out, their personal possessions sequestered and their memories damaged.

“Well,” I said, “I guess now you’re going to tell me the catch.”

“There’s one thing you need to understand from the outset,” Amelia said. “There is no catch. We care for you until you’re well enough to leave. If you want to leave sooner than that, we won’t stop you—and if you want to stay longer, we can always use an extra pair of hands in the fields. Once you’ve left the Hospice, you won’t owe us anything or hear from us again, unless you wish it.”

“How do you make something like this pay, in that case?”

“Oh, we manage. A lot of our clients do make voluntary donations once they’re healed—but there’s no expectation on our part that they will. Our running costs are remarkably low, and we’ve never been in hock to anyone for the construction of Idlewild.”

“A habitat like this couldn’t have come cheap, Amelia.” Everything cost something; even matter that had been shaped by droves of mindless, breeding robots.

“It was a lot cheaper than you’d think, even if we had to accept some compromises in the basic design.”

“The spindle shape? I wondered about that.”

“I’ll show you when you’re a bit better. Then you’ll understand.” She paused and had the robot dispense some water into a little glass. “Drink this. You must be parched. I imagine you want to know a little more about yourself. How you got here and where here is, for instance.”

I took the glass and drank gratefully. The water had a foreign taste to it, but it wasn’t unpleasant.

“I’m not in the Sky’s Edge system, obviously. And this must be near one of the main centres of traffic, or you wouldn’t have built the place in the first place.”

“Yes. We’re in the Yellowstone system—around Epsilon Eridani.” She seemed to observe my reaction. “You don’t seem too surprised.”

“I knew it had to be somewhere like that. What I don’t remember is what made me come here.”

“That’ll come back. You’re fortunate, in a way. Some of our clients are perfectly well, but they’re just too poor to afford immigration into the system proper. We allow them to earn a small wage here until they can at least afford the cost of a ship to take them to the Rust Belt. Or we arrange for them to spend a period in indentured servitude for some other organisation—quicker, but usually a lot less pleasant. But you won’t have to do either, Tanner. You seem to be a man of reasonable means, judging by the funds you arrived with. And mystery, too. It may not mean very much to you, but you were quite a hero when you left Sky’s Edge.”

“I was?”

“Yes. There was an accident, and you were implicated in the saving of more than a few lives.”

“I don’t remember, I’m afraid.”

“Not even Nueva Valparaiso? That’s where it happened.”

It did, faintly, mean something—like a half-familiar reference stirring memories of a book or play experienced years earlier. But the plot and principal protagonists—not to mention the outcome—remained resolutely unclear. I was staring into fog.

“I’m afraid it’s still not there. Tell me how I got here, anyway. What was the name of the ship?”

“The Orvieto. She would have left your system about fifteen years ago.”

“I must have had a good reason for wanting to be on her. Was I travelling alone?”

“As near as we can tell, yes. We’re still processing her cargo. There were twenty thousand sleepers aboard her, and only a quarter of them have been warmed yet. There’s no great hurry, when you think about it. If you’re going to spend fifteen years crossing space, a few weeks’ delay at either end isn’t worth worrying about.”

It was odd, but though I couldn’t put my finger on it, I did feel that there was something that needed to be done urgently. The feeling it reminded me of was waking from a dream, the details of which I didn’t recall, but which nonetheless put me on edge for hours afterwards.

“So tell me what you know about Tanner Mirabel.”

“Nowhere near as much as we’d like. But that in itself shouldn’t alarm you. Your world is at war, Tanner—has been for centuries. Records are hardly less confused than our own, and the Ultras aren’t particularly interested in who they carry, provided they pay.”

The name felt comfortable, like an old glove. A good combination, too. Tanner was a worker’s name; hard and to the point; someone who got things done. Mirabel, by contrast, had faint aristocratic pretensions.

It was a name I could live with.

“Why are your own records confused? Don’t tell me you had a war here as well?”

“No,” Amelia said, guardedly. “No; it was something quite different to that. Something quite different indeed. Why? For a moment you almost sounded pleased.”

“Perhaps I used to be a soldier,” I said.

“Escaping with the spoils of war, after committing some unspeakable atrocity?”

“Do I look like someone capable of atrocities?”

She smiled, but there was a decided lack of humour in her expression. “You wouldn’t credit it, Tanner, but we get all sorts through here. You could be anything or anyone, and looks would have very little to do with it.” Then she opened her mouth slightly. “Wait. There’s no mirror in the house, is there? Have you seen yourself since you woke?”

I shook my head.

“Then follow me. A little walk will do you the power of good.”

We left the chalet and followed an ambling path into the valley, Amelia’s robot scooting ahead of us like an excited puppy. She was at ease with the machine, but the robot left me feeling intimidated; the way I would have felt if she had walked around with a poisonous snake. I recalled my reaction when the robot had first appeared: an involuntary reaching for a weapon. Not just a theatrical gesture, but an action which felt well-rehearsed. I could almost feel the heft of the gun I lacked, the precise shape of its grip under my palm, a lattice of ballistics expertise lurking just below consciousness.

I knew guns, and I didn’t like robots.

“Tell me more about my arrival,” I said.

“As I said, the ship which brought you here was the Orvieto,” Amelia said. “She’s in-system, of course, since she’s still being unloaded. I’ll show her to you, if you like.”

“I thought you were going to show me a mirror.”

“Two birds with one stone, Tanner.”

The path descended deeper, winding down into a dark, shadowed cleft overhung with a canopy of tangled greenery. This must have been the small valley I had seen below the chalet.

Amelia was right: it had taken me years to reach this place, so a few days spent regaining my memory was an inconsequential burden. But the last thing I felt was patient. Something had been straining at me ever since I had awakened; the feeling that there was something I had to do; something so urgent that even now, a few hours could make all the difference between success and failure.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Somewhere secret. Somewhere I shouldn’t really take you, but I can’t resist. You won’t tell, will you?”

“Now I’m intrigued.”

The shadowed cleft took us to the valley floor; to a point maximally distant from the axis of Hotel Amnesia. We were at the rim where the two conic ends of the habitat were joined to each other. It was here that gravity was highest, and I felt the extra effort required to move around.

Amelia’s robot came to a halt ahead of us, pivoting around to present its blank ovoid face to us.

“What’s up with it?”

“It won’t go any further. Programming won’t allow it.” The machine was blocking our path, so Amelia took a step off the trail, wading into knee-high grass. “It won’t want us to pass for our own safety, but on the other hand, it won’t actively stop us if we make an effort to go around it. Will you, good boy?”

I stepped gingerly past the robot.

“You said something about me being a hero.”

“You saved five lives when the bridge at Nueva Valparaiso came down. The fall of the bridge was all over the news nets, even here.”

As she spoke, I felt like I was being reminded of something told to me before; that I was always only an instant away from remembering it all myself. The bridge had been severed some way up its length by a nuclear explosion, causing the thread below the cut to fall back to ground while the part above the cut whiplashed lethally. The official explanation was that a rogue missile had been responsible; some aspirant military faction’s test firing which had gone badly awry and shimmied through the protective screen of anti-missiles around the bridge, but—though I couldn’t easily explain it—I had the insistent feeling that there was more to it than that; that my being on the bridge at the same time was not just ill fortune.

“What exactly happened?”

“The car you were in was above the cut. It came to a halt on the thread, and would have been safe there except that there was another car racing up from below. You realised that and persuaded the people with you that their only hope of surviving was to jump into space.”

“Doesn’t sound like much of an alternative, even with suits on.”

“No, it didn’t—but you knew they’d still stand a chance of surviving. You were quite a long way above the top atmosphere. You had more than eleven minutes to fall before you hit it.”

“Great. What good is an extra eleven minutes if you’re going to die anyway?”

“Another eleven minutes of God-given life, Tanner. And it also happened to be enough time for rescue ships to pick you up. They had to skim the atmosphere to grab you all, but they got everyone in the end—even the man who had already died.”

I shrugged. “I was probably only thinking of my own self-preservation.”

“Perhaps—but only a real hero would even admit to thinking that way. That’s why I think you might really be Tanner Mirabel.”

“Hundreds of people must have died anyway,” I said. “Not much of a heroic effort, was it?”

“You did what you could.”

We continued in silence for a few more minutes, the track becoming increasingly overgrown and sketchy until the ground jogged downwards even more, below the level of the valley floor. The extra energy required to move around was sapping my strength.

I was leading now and for a moment Amelia lingered behind me, as if expecting someone else. Then she caught up with me and moved in front. Above, plants arched over, gradually closing off into a dark, verdant tunnel. We pushed on into what was not quite absolute darkness, Amelia more surefooted than I. When it became very dark she turned on a little penlight and poked its thin beam ahead of her, but I suspected the light was more for my benefit than hers. Something told me that she had come down here often enough to know every triphole in the flooring and how to step past it. Eventually, however, the torch became almost superfluous: there was a milky light ahead of us, periodically dimming then returning perhaps once every minute.

“What is this place?” I asked.

“An old construction tunnel, dating from when Idlewild was built. They filled in most of them, but they must have forgotten this one. I come down here a lot on my own when I need to think.”

“You’re showing quite some trust by bringing me down here, then.”

She looked back at me, her face almost lost in the gloom. “You’re not the only one I’ve brought down here. But I do trust you, Tanner. That’s the odd thing. And it’s got very little to do with your being a hero. You seem like a kind man. There’s an aura of calm about you.”

“They say the same thing about psychopaths.”

“Well, thank you for that pearl of wisdom.”

“Sorry. I’ll shut up now.”

We walked on in mutual silence for a few more minutes, but before very long the tunnel opened out into a cavelike chamber with an artificially flat floor. I took a cautious step onto its glossy surface, and then looked down. The floor was glass, and things were moving beneath it.

Stars. And worlds.

Once every rotation, a beautiful yellow-brown planet hove into view, accompanied by a much smaller reddish moon. Now I knew where the periodic light had come from.

“That’s Yellowstone,” Amelia said, pointing to the larger world. “The moon with the big chain of craters on it? That’s Marco’s Eye, named after Marco Ferris, the man who discovered the chasm on Yellowstone.”

Some impulse made me kneel down to get a better look.

“We’re pretty close to Yellowstone, then.”

“Yes. We’re at the trailing Lagrange point of the moon and the planet; the gravitational balance point sixty degrees behind Marco’s Eye in its orbit. This is where most of the big ships are parked.” She waited a moment. “Look; here they come now.”

A vast conglomeration of ships came into view: sleek and jewelled as ceremonial daggers. Each ship, sheathed in diamond and ice, was as large as a small city—three or four kilometres long—but rendered tiny by the sheer number and distance of them, like a shoal of brilliant tropical fish. They were clustered around another habitat, smaller ships docked around the habitat’s rim like sea-urchin spines. The whole ensemble must have been two or three hundred kilometres away. Already it was passing out of sight as the carousel spun, but there was time enough for Amelia to point out the ship which had brought me here.

“There. That one on the edge of the parking swarm is the Orvieto, I think.”

I thought of that ship slamming through the interstellar void, cruising just below light for nearly fifteen years, and for a moment I had a visceral grasp of the immensity of space which I had crossed from Sky’s Edge, compressed into a subjective instant of dreamless sleep.

“There’s no going back now, is there?” I said. “Even if one of those ships were going back to Sky’s Edge, and even if I had the means to get aboard, I wouldn’t be returning home. I’d be a hero from thirty years in the past—probably long forgotten. Someone born after me might have decided to classify me as a war criminal and order my execution the instant I was awakened.”

Amelia nodded slowly. “Most people never go home again, that’s true enough. Even if there isn’t a war, too much will have changed. But most people have already resigned themselves to that before they leave.”

“You’re saying I didn’t?”

“I don’t know, Tanner. You do seem different, that’s for sure.” Suddenly her tone of voice changed. “Ah, look! There’s one of the sloughed hulls!”

“One of the what?”

But I followed her gaze all the same. What I saw was an empty conic shell, looking as huge as one of the ships in the parking swarm, though it was hard to be sure. She said, “I don’t know much about those ships, Tanner, but I know that they’re almost alive, in some ways—capable of altering themselves, improving themselves over time, so that they never end up obsolete. Sometimes the changes are all inside, but sometimes they affect the whole shape of the ship—making it larger, for instance. Or sleeker, so it can go closer to the speed of light. Usually when they do that, it’s cheaper for the ship to discard its old diamond armour rather than tear it down and rebuild it piece by piece. They call it sloughing—it’s like a lizard shedding its skin.”

“Ah.” I understood. “And I presume they were prepared to sell that armour at a knock-down price?”

“They didn’t even sell it—just left the blessed thing lying in orbit, waiting to be rammed into by something. We took it over, stabilised its spin and lined it with rock tailings from Marco’s Eye. We had to wait a long time for another piece that matched, but eventually we had two shells we could join together to make Idlewild.”

“Cheap at the price.”

“Oh, it was still a lot of work. But the design works quite well for us. For a start, it takes a lot less air to fill a habitat of this shape than a cylindrical one of the same length. And as we get older and frailer and less able to take care of our duties near the point where the shells were married together, we can spend more and more time working in the low-gravity highlands, gradually approaching the endpoints—closer to heaven, as we say.”

“Not too close, I hope.”

“Oh, it’s not so bad up there.” Amelia smiled. “The old dears can look down on the rest of us, after all.”

There was a sound from behind us; soft footfalls. I tensed, and once again my hand seemed to twitch in expectation of a weapon. A figure, barely visible, stole into the cave. I saw Amelia tense.

For a moment the figure waited, its breathing the only sound. I said nothing, but waited patiently for the world to come around again and throw some light on the stranger.

He spoke. “Amelia, you know you shouldn’t come down here. It’s not allowed.”

“Brother Alexei,” she said. “You should know that I’m not alone.”

The echo of his laughter—false and histrionic—reflected from the cave walls. “That’s a good one, Amelia. I know you’re alone. I followed you, don’t you see? I saw that there was no one with you.”

“Except there is someone with me. You must have seen me when I held back. I thought you were following us, but I couldn’t be sure.”

I said nothing for a moment.

“You were never a very good liar, Amelia.”

“Perhaps not, but right now I’m telling the truth—aren’t I, Tanner?”

I spoke just as the light returned, revealing the man. I already knew him to be another Mendicant from the way Amelia had greeted him, but he was dressed differently from Amelia, in a simple hooded black cloak, sewn on its chest with the snowflake motif. His arms were crossed casually beneath the motif and his face bore an expression less of serenity than hunger. He looked the hungry sort, too: pale and cadaverous, his cheekbones and jaw etched with shadow.

“She’s telling the truth,” I said.

He took a step closer. “Let me get a better look at you, slush puppy.” His deepset eyes gleamed in the darkness, inspecting me. “Been awake long, have you?”

“Just a few hours.” I stood, allowing him to see what I was made of. He was taller than me, but we probably weighed about the same. “Not long, but long enough to know that I don’t like being called slush puppy. What’s that—slang amongst Ice Mendicants? You’re not as holy as you pretend, are you?”

Alexei smirked. “What would you know?”

I stepped towards him, my feet pressing against the glass, stars wheeling under them. I thought I had the picture now. “You like to bother Amelia, don’t you? That’s how you get your kicks—by following her down here. What do you do when you catch her alone, Alexei?”

“Something divine,” he said.

I could see why she had hesitated now, allowing Alexei to spy on her and conclude that she was alone. On this one occasion she must have wanted him to follow her because she knew I’d be there as well. How long had this been going on—and how long had she had to wait before reviving someone she thought she could trust?

“Be careful,” Amelia said. “This man is the hero of Nueva Valparaiso, Alexei. He saved lives there. He isn’t just some meek tourist.”

“What is he, then?”

“I don’t know,” I said, answering for her. But in the same breath I crossed the two metres that spaced me from Alexei, pressing him hard against the cave wall, locking an arm under his chin, applying just enough pressure to make him think I was choking him. The movement felt as effortless and fluid as a yawn.

“Stop…” he said. “Please… you’re hurting me.”

Something dropped from his hand: a sharp-edged cultivating tool. I kicked it across the floor.

“Silly boy, Alexei. If you’re going to arm yourself, don’t throw your weapon away.”

“You’re choking me!”

“If I was choking you, you wouldn’t be able to talk. You’d be unconscious about now.” But I released the pressure anyway, shoving him towards the tunnel. He tripped on something and hit the ground hard. Something rolled from his pocket; another makeshift weapon, I presumed.

“Please…”

“Listen to me, Alexei. That was just a warning. Next time we cross paths, you walk away with a broken arm, understand? I don’t want you here again.” I picked up the cultivating tool and threw it towards him. “Get back to your gardening, big boy.”

We watched him get up, mumble something under his breath then scuttle back into the darkness.

“How long has that been going on?”

“A few months.” Her voice was very quiet now. We watched Yellowstone and the swarm of parked ships rotate into view again before she continued, “What he said—what he implied—never happened. All he’s ever done is just scare me. But every time he goes a bit further. He frightens me, Tanner. I’m glad you were with me.”

“It was deliberate, wasn’t it? You were hoping he would try something today.”

“Then I was afraid you might kill him. You could have, couldn’t you? If you had wanted to.”

Now that she formed the question I had to ask it of myself as well. And I saw that killing him would have been easy for me; simply a technical modification of the restraint I had imposed. It wouldn’t have demanded any more effort; would hardly have impinged on the calm I had felt during the whole incident.

“He wouldn’t have been worth the effort,” I said, reaching over to pick up the thing which had slipped from his pocket. No weapon, I saw now—or at least nothing with which I was familiar.

It was more like a syringe, containing some fluid which could have been black or dark-red, but was most likely the latter.

“What’s this?”

“Something he shouldn’t have had in Idlewild. Give it to me, will you? I’ll have it destroyed.”

I passed the hypodermic device willingly; it was of no use to me. As she pocketed it with something close to revulsion, Amelia said, “Tanner, he’ll be back, when you’ve left us.”

“We’ll worry about that later—and I’m not going anywhere in a hurry, am I? Not with my memory in the state it is.” Trying to lighten the mood, I added, “You said something about showing me my face, earlier on.”

She answered hesitantly. “Yes, I did, didn’t I?” Then she fished out the little penlight she had used in the tunnel and instructed me to kneel down again, looking into the glass. When Yellowstone and its moon had gone by and the cave had become dark again, she shone the torch on my face. I looked at my reflection in the glass.

There was no shocking sense of unfamiliarity. How could there have been, when I had already traced the outline of my face with my fingers a dozen times since waking? I already sensed that my face would be blandly handsome, and that was the case. It was the face of a moderately successful actor or a motivationally suspect politician. A dark-haired man in his early forties—and, without quite knowing from where I had dredged this fact, I knew that on Sky’s Edge, that more or less meant exactly what it said; that I could not be drastically older than I seemed, for our methods of longevity extension lagged centuries behind the rest of humanity.

Another shard of memory clicking into place.

“Thank you,” I said, when I had seen enough for now. “I think that helped. I don’t think my amnesia’s going to last forever.”

“It almost never does.”

“Actually, I was being flippant. Are you saying there are people who never get their memories back?”

“Yes,” she said, with unconcealed sadness. “Mostly, they never function well enough to immigrate.”

“What happens to them, in that case?”

“They stay here. They learn to help us; to cultivate the terraces. Sometimes they even join the Order.”

“Poor souls.”

Amelia stood, beckoning me to follow her. “Oh, there are worse fates, Tanner. I should know.”