His father smiled. ‘Who else? The wealthy. Those whom the war had been kind to. Those in the right places, or those who knew the right people.’
The next question was obvious and chilling. The Flotilla had been launched while the war was still in its end stages. Many of those who had obtained sleeper berths, in fact, had been seeking to escape what they saw as a ruined and dangerous system just waiting to slip into another fullscale bloodbath. But competition for those spaces had been immense, and although they had supposedly been allocated on the basis of merit, there must have been means for those with sufficient influence to get aboard. If Sky had ever doubted that, the presence of the saboteur proved it. Someone, somewhere, had pulled strings to get the Chimeric aboard.
‘All right. What about the sleepers? How many of them knew about the immortality breakthrough?’
‘All of them, Sky.’
He looked at his father lying there, wondering how close to death the man really was. He should have recovered from the stab wounds - the damage had not really been that great - but complications had set in: trivial infections which nonetheless lingered and spread. Once, the Flotilla’s medicine could have saved him, could have got him up on his feet in a matter of days with no more than a little discomfort. But now there was essentially nothing that could be done except to assist his own healing processes. And they were slowly losing the battle.
He thought of what Titus Haussmann had just said. ‘How many of them actually had the treatment, then?’
‘The same answer.’
‘All of them?’ He shook his head, almost not believing it. ‘All the sleepers we carry?’
‘Yes. With a few unimportant exceptions - those who chose not to undergo it, on ethical or medical grounds, for instance. But most of them did take the cure, shortly before coming aboard.’ His father paused again. ‘It’s the single biggest secret of my life, Sky. I’ve always known this - ever since my father told me, anyway. I didn’t find it any easier to take, believe me.’
‘How could you keep a secret like that?’
His father managed the faintest of shrugs. ‘It was part of my job.’
‘Don’t say that. It doesn’t excuse you. They betrayed us, didn’t they?’
‘That depends. Admittedly, they didn’t bestow their secret on the crew. But that was a form of kindness, I think.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Imagine if we’d been immortal. We’d have had to endure a century and a half of imprisonment aboard this thing. It would have driven us slowly mad. That was what they feared. Better to let the crew live out a normal lifespan, and then have another generation take over the reins.’
‘You call that kindness?’
‘Why not? Most of us don’t know any better, Sky. Oh, we serve the sleepers, but because we know that not all of them will wake up safely when we reach Journey’s End, it isn’t easy to feel too envious. And we have ourselves to look after, too. We run the ship for the sleepers, but also for ourselves.’
‘Yes. Very equitable. Knowing that they kept the secret of immortality from us does alter the relationship a smidgeon, you have to admit.’
‘Perhaps. That’s why I was always so careful to keep the secret from anyone else.’
‘But you just told me.’
‘You wanted to know if there was any truth to the saboteur’s story, didn’t you? Well, now you know.’ His father’s face grew momentarily serene, as if a great burden had been lifted from him. Sky thought for an instant that his father had slipped away from him, but shortly afterwards his eyes moved and he licked his lips to speak again. It was still an immense effort to talk at all. ‘And there was another reason, too . . . this is very hard, Sky. I’m not sure I’m doing the right thing by telling you.’
‘Why not let me be the judge of that.’
‘Very well. You may as well hear it now. I almost told you on countless other occasions, but never quite had the courage of my convictions. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, as they say.’
‘What little knowledge would that be, exactly?’
‘About your own status.’ He asked for more water before speaking again. Sky thought of the water in that glass; the molecules which were slipping between his father’s lips. Every drop of water on the ship was ultimately recycled, to be drunk again and again. In interstellar space there could be no wastage. At some point, months or years from now, Sky would drink some of the same water that was now bringing relief to his father.
‘My status?’
‘I’m afraid you’re not my son.’ He looked at him hard, as if waiting for Sky to crack under the revelation. ‘There, I’ve said it. No going back now. You’ll have to hear the rest of it.’
Maybe he was losing it faster than the machines had indicated, Sky thought. Slipping swiftly down into the lightless trench of dementia, his bloodstream poisoned, his brain grasping for oxygen.
‘I am your son.’
‘No. No; you’re not. I should know, Sky. I pulled you out of that sleeper berth.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘You were one of them - one of our momios; one of our sleepers.’
Sky nodded, accepting this truth instantly. On some level he knew that the normal reaction would have been disbelief, perhaps even anger, but he felt none of that; only a deep and calming sense of rightness.
‘How old was I?’
‘Barely a child, only a few days old when you were frozen. There were only a few others as young as you.’
He listened to his father - not his father - as he explained that Lucretia Haussmann - the woman Sky thought of as his mother - had given birth to a baby aboard the ship, but that the child, a boy, had died within hours. Distraught, Titus had kept the truth from Lucretia for hours, then days, stretching his ingenuity to the limit while she was kept as sedated as possible. Titus feared the truth would kill her if she found out; maybe not physically, but he worried that it would crush her spirit. She was one of the most loved women on the ship. Her loss would affect them all: a poison that might sour the general mood of the crew. They were a tiny community, after all. They all knew each other. The loss of a child would be a dreadful thing to bear.
So Titus conceived a terrible plan, one he would regret almost as soon as he had brought it to fruition. But by then it was much too late.
He stole a child from the sleepers. Children, it turned out, were far more tolerant of revival than adults - it was something to do with the ratio of body volume to surface - and there had been no serious problems in warming the selected child. He had picked one of the young ones, one that would pass as his dead son. He did not have to be too meticulous. Lucretia had not seen her own baby long enough to tell that any deception had taken place.
He put the dead child in its place, cooled the berth down again and then asked for forgiveness. By the time the dead child was discovered, he would be long dead himself. It would be a dreadful thing for the parents to wake to, but at least they would also be waking to a new world, with time enough to try for another child. It would not be the same for them as it would have been for Lucretia. And if it was . . . well, without this crime, things might deteriorate on the ship to the point where it never reached its destination. That was an extreme case, but it was not beyond the bounds of possibility. He had to believe that. Had to believe that in some way what he had done was for the greater good of them all.
A crime of love.
Of course, Titus could have accomplished none of this without help, but only a handful of his closest friends had ever known the truth, and they had all been good associates who had never again spoken of the matter. They were all dead now, Titus said.
That was why it was so necessary that he tell Sky now.
‘You understand?’ Titus asked. ‘When I always told you you were precious . . . ? That was the literal truth. You were the only immortal amongst us. That was why I raised you in isolation at first; why you spent so much time alone, in the nursery, away from the other child
ren. Partly I wanted to shield you from infections - you were no less vulnerable than the other children, and you’re no less vulnerable now, as an adult. Mainly it was so that I could know for myself. I had to study your developmental curve. It’s slower for those who have had the treatment, Sky, and it keeps on flattening as you get older. You’re twenty now, but you could pass for a tall young man barely into his teens. By the time you’re thirty or forty, people will speak of you as someone with uncommonly youthful looks. But they won’t begin to guess the truth - not until you’re much, much older.’
‘I’m immortal?’
‘Yes. It changes everything, doesn’t it.’
Sky Haussmann rather had to admit that it did.
Later, when his father had fallen into one of the abyssal dreamless sleeps that was like an inevitable foreshadowing of his death, Sky visited the saboteur. The Chimeric prisoner lay on exactly the same kind of bed as his father, attended by machines, but there the similarities ended. The machines were observing the man, but he was strong enough not to need their direct assistance. Too strong, in fact - even after they had dug a magazine-load of slugs out of him. He was attached to the bed with plastic bonds, a broad hoop across his waist and legs, two smaller hoops anchoring his upper arms. He could move one forearm enough to touch his face, while the other arm, of course, had ended only in the weapon he had used to stab Titus. Even the weapon was gone now, the cyborg’s forearm ending in a neatly sewn stump. They had searched him for other kinds of weapon, but he carried no other concealed devices, except for the implants his masters had used to shape him to their goals.
In a way, the faction that had sent the infiltrator had been spectacularly unimaginative, Sky thought. They had placed too much emphasis on him being able to sabotage the ship, when a nice, easily transferred virus would have been just as effective. It might not have directly harmed the sleepers, but their chances of making it anywhere without a living crew would have been vanishingly small.
Which was not to say that the Chimeric might not still have its uses.
It was strange, infinitely so, to know that one was suddenly immortal. Sky did not concern himself with trifling matters of definition. It was true enough that he was not invulnerable, but with care and forethought he could minimise the risks to himself.
He took a step back from the killer’s bed. They thought they had the better of the saboteur, but one could never be entirely sure. Even though the monitors said the man was in a sleep at least as deep as his father’s, it paid not to take chances. They were engineered to deceive, these things. They could do inhuman tricks with their heartrate and neural activity. That one unbound forearm could have grabbed Sky by the throat and squeezed him until he died, or pulled him so close that the man could have eaten his face off.
Sky found a medical kit on the wall. He flipped it open, studied the neatly racked implements inside and then pulled out a scalpel, glistening with blue sterility in the room’s subdued lighting. He turned it this way and that, admiring the way the blade vanished as he turned it edge on.
It was a fine weapon, he thought; a thing of excellence.
With it he moved towards the saboteur.
SIXTEEN
‘He’s coming round,’ a voice said, crystallising my sluggish thoughts towards consciousness.
One of the things you learned as a soldier - at least on Sky’s Edge - was that not everyone who shot you necessarily wanted to kill you. At least not immediately. There were reasons for this, not all of them to do with the usual mechanics of hostage-taking. Memories could be trawled from captured soldiers without the crudities of torture - all it required was the kind of neural-imaging technology which Ultras could supply, at a price, and for there to be something worth learning in the first place. Intelligence, in other words - the kind of operational knowledge which soldiers must know if they are to have any value at all.
But it had never happened to me. I had been shot at, and hit, but on all the occasions when it happened, no one had been intending that I live, for even the relatively short length of time that it would take to winnow my memories. I had never been captured by the enemy, and so had never had the dubious pleasure of waking to find myself in anything other than safe hands.
Now, though, I was learning exactly how it felt.
‘Mister Mirabel? Are you awake?’ Someone wiped something soft and cold across my face. I opened my eyes and squinted against light, which was painfully bright after my period of unconsciousness.
‘Where am I?’
‘Somewhere safe.’
I looked around blearily. I was in a chair at the high end of a long sloping room. On either side of me the fluted metal walls angled downwards, as if I were descending an escalator down a gently angled tunnel. The walls were punctured by oval windows, but I couldn’t see much except darkness ribboned with long chains of tangled fairy-lights. I was high above the surface of the city, then almost certainly in some part of the Canopy. The floor consisted of a series of horizontal surfaces which descended towards the low end of the room, which must have been fifteen metres away and two or three metres below me. They looked like they’d been added on afterwards, as if the room’s slope was not quite intentional.
I wasn’t alone, of course.
The square-jawed man with the monocle was standing next to me, one hand toying with his chin, as if he needed to keep reminding himself of its magnificant rectilinearity. In his other hand was a limp flannel, the means by which I had been so gently assisted towards consciousness.
‘I’ve got to hand it to you,’ the man said. ‘I miscalculated the dose in that stun beam. It would have killed some people, and I expected you to be out cold for a good few hours more.’ Then he placed a hand on my shoulder. ‘But you’re fine, I think. A pretty strong fellow. You’ll have to accept my apologies - it won’t happen again, I assure you.’
‘You’d better not do it again,’ said the woman who had just stepped into my field of vision. I recognised her, of course - and her companion, who hove into view on my right, pushing a cigarette to his lips. ‘You’re getting sloppy, Waverly. This man must have thought you were planning to kill him.’
‘That wasn’t the idea?’ I said, finding that I sounded nowhere near as slurred as I had been expecting.
Waverly shook his head gravely. ‘Not at all. I was doing my best to save your life, Mister Mirabel.’
‘You’ve got a pretty funny way of going about it.’
‘I had to act quickly. You were about to be ambushed by a group of pigs. Do you know about pigs, Mister Mirabel? You probably don’t want to. They’re one of the less salubrious immigrant groups we’ve had to deal with since the fall of the Glitter Band. They had arranged a tripwire across the roadway connected to a crossbow. Normally they don’t stalk anyone until later in the evening, but they must have been hungry tonight.’
‘What did you shoot me with?’
‘Like I said, a stun beam. Quite a humane weapon, really. The laser beam is only a precursor - it establishes an ionised path through the air, down which a paralysing electrical flux can be discharged.’
‘It’s still painful.’
‘I know, I know.’ He raised his hands defensively. ‘I’ve taken a few hits myself. I’m afraid I had it calibrated to stun a pig, rather than a human. But perhaps it was for the best. You’d have resisted me if I hadn’t put you under so comprehensively, I suspect.’
‘Why did you save me, anyway?’
He looked put out. ‘It was the decent thing to do, I’d have thought.’
Now the woman spoke. ‘At first I misjudged you, Mister Mirabel. You put me on edge and I didn’t trust you completely.’
‘All I did was ask for some advice.’
‘I know - the fault’s all mine. But we’re all so nervous these days. After we’d left, I felt bad about it and told Waverly to keep an eye on you. Which is what he did.’
‘An eye, yes, Sybilline,’ Waverly said.
‘And where would here h
appen to be?’ I said.
‘Show him, Waverly. He must want to stretch his legs by now.’
I’d half expected to have been secured to the chair, but I was free to move. Waverly offered me a supporting arm while I tested the usefulness of my legs. The muscle in the leg where the beam had touched still felt like jelly, but it was just about able to support me. I stepped past the woman, descending the series of level surfaces until I’d reached the lowest part of the room. At that end there was a pair of double doors which opened onto the night air. Waverly led me out onto a sloping balcony, bounded by a metal railing. Warm air slapped against my face.
I looked back. The balcony surrounded the building where I had awoken, rising up on either side of it. But the building wasn’t really a building.
It was the gondola of an airship, tipped up at an angle. Above us, the craft’s gasbag was a dark mass pinned between branches of the Canopy. The airship must have been trapped here when the plague hit, caught like a balloon in a tree. The gasbag was so impermeable that it was still fully inflated, seven years after the plague. But it was crimped and distorted by the pressure of the branches which had formed around it, and I couldn’t help wondering how strong it really was - and what would happen to the gondola if the bag was punctured.
‘It must have happened really fast,’ I said, having visions of the airship trying to steer itself out of the path of the malforming building.
‘Not that quickly,’ Waverly said, as if I’d said something deeply foolish. ‘This was a sightseeing airship - there were dozens of them, back in the old days. When the trouble came, no one was much interested in sightseeing anymore. They left the airship moored here while the building grew around it, but it still took a day or so for the branches to trap it completely.’
‘And now you live in it?’
‘Well, not exactly. It isn’t all that safe, really. That’s why we don’t have to worry too much about anyone else paying us any attention.’
Behind, the door swung open again and the woman emerged. ‘An unorthodox place to wake you, I admit.’ She joined Waverly next to the railing, leaning bravely over the edge. It must have been an easy kilometre to the ground. ‘But it does have its uses, discretion being one of them. Now then, Mister Mirabel. I expect you are in need of some good food and hospitality - am I right?’
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