Galactic North

by Alastair Reynolds

  “You’re right: I need to keep better informed.” At that moment the news scrolls onto his monocle: his specialists have cross-matched samples from the animal against archived hamadryad genetic material, finding no significant points of deviation. “Well, Captain,” he says agreeably, “it looks as if we have closure on this one. You must be in quite a hurry to get back into safe space, away from the Rust Belt.”

  “We’ve other business to attend to before we have that luxury,” Shallice tells him. “You’re not our only client around Yellowstone.” The Ultra’s eyes narrow to calculating slits. “As a matter of fact, we have another hamadryad to deliver.” Before Grafenwalder responds, the Ultra raises a servo-assisted hand. “Not a fully grown sample like your own. A much less mature animal. Yours will still be unique in that sense.”

  Anger rises in Grafenwalder like a hot, boiling tide. “But it won’t be the only hamadryad around Yellowstone, will it?”

  “The other one will probably die. It will certainly not grow any larger.”

  “You misled me, Captain. You promised exclusivity.”

  “I did no such thing. I merely said that no one else would be offered an adult.”

  Grafenwalder knows Ultras too well to doubt that Shallice is telling the truth. They may be unscrupulous, but they usually stay within the strict letter of a contract.

  “This other collector . . . you wouldn’t mind telling me who it is, would you?”

  “That would be a violation of confidentiality.”

  “Come now, Captain—if someone else gets their hands on a hamadryad, they’re hardly going to keep it a secret. At least not within the Circle.”

  Shallice weighs this point for several long moments, his alloy ribs flexing with each laboured breath. “The collector ’s name is Ursula Goodglass. She owns a habitat in the low belt. Doubtless you know the name.”

  “Yes,” Grafenwalder says. “Vaguely. She’s been nosing around the Circle for some time, but I wouldn’t call her a full member just yet. Her collection’s nothing to speak of, by all accounts.”

  “Perhaps that will change when she has her hamadryad.”

  “Not when the Circle learns there’s a bigger one here. Did you let her think she’d be getting something unique as well, Captain?”

  Shallice makes a sniffing sound. “The contract was watertight. ”

  On the video feed, the animal is being coaxed deeper into its pen. Now and then it rears up to strike against its tormentors, moving with deceptive speed.

  “Let’s not play games, Captain. How much is she paying you for her sample?”

  “Ten thousand.”

  “Then I’ll pay you fifteen not to hand it over, on top of what I’m already paying you.”

  “Out of the question. We have an arrangement with Goodglass.”

  “You’ll tell a little white lie. Say it didn’t thaw out properly, or that something went wrong afterwards.”

  Shallice thinks this over, his hatchet-head cocking this way and that inside the metal chassis of the exoskeleton. “She might ask to see the corpse—”

  “I absolutely insist on it. I want her to know what she nearly got her hands on.”

  “A deception will place us at considerable risk. Fifteen would not be sufficient. Twenty, on the other hand—”

  “Eighteen, Captain, and that’s as high as I go. If you walk out of here without accepting the deal, I’ll contact Goodglass and tell her you were at least giving it the time of day.”

  “Eighteen it is, then,” Shallice says, after a suitable pause. “You drive a hard bargain, Mister Grafenwalder. You would make a good Ultra.”

  Grafenwalder shrugs off the insult and reaches out a hand to Captain Shallice. When his fingers close around the Ultra’s, it’s like shaking hands with a cadaver.

  “I’d love to say it’s been a pleasure doing business.”

  Later, he watches their shuttle depart his habitat and thread its way through the debris-infested Rust Belt, moving furtively between the major debris-swept orbits. He wonders what the Ultras make of the old place, given the changes that have afflicted it since their last trip through the system.

  Good while it lasted, as people tend to say these days.

  Oddly, though, Grafenwalder prefers things the way they are now. All things told, he came out well. Neither his body nor his habitat had depended on nanomachines, so it was only the secondary effects of the plague that were of concern to him. The area in which he had invested his energies prior to the crisis—the upgrading of habitat security systems—now proves astonishingly lucrative amongst the handful of clients able to afford his services. In lawless times, people always want higher walls.

  There’s something else, though. Ever since the plague hit, Grafenwalder has slept easier at night. He’s at a loss to explain why, but the catastrophe—as bad as it undoubtedly was for Yellowstone and its environs—seems to have triggered some seismic shift in his own peace of mind. He remembers being anxious before; now—most of the time, at least—he only has the memory of anxiety.

  At last his radar loses track of the Ultra shuttle, and it’s only then that he realises his error. He should have asked to see the other hamadryad before paying the captain to kill it. Not because he thinks it might not ever have existed—he’s reasonably sure it did—but because he has no evidence at all that it wasn’t already dead.

  He permits himself a bittersweet smile. Next time, he won’t make that kind of mistake. And at least he has his hamadryad.

  Grafenwalder walks alone through his bestiary. It’s night, by the twenty-six-hour cycle of Yellowstone standard time, and the exhibits are mostly dimmed. The railed walkway that he follows glows a subdued red, winding between, under and over the vast cages, tanks and pits. Many of the creatures are asleep, but some stir or uncoil at his approach, while others never sleep. Things study his passage with dim, resentful intelligence: just enough to know that he is their captor. Occasionally something throws itself at its restraints, clanging against cage bars or shuddering against hardened glass. Things spit and lash. There are distressing calls; laughable attempts at vocalisation.

  Not all of the animals are animals, technically speaking. About half the exhibits in the bestiary are creatures like the hamadryad: alien organisms that evolved on the handful of known life-sustaining worlds beyond the First System. There are slime-scrapers from Grand Teton; screech-mats from Fand; more than a dozen different organisms from the jungles of Sky’s Edge, including the hamadryad itself.

  But the other half of the collection is more problematic. It’s the half that could get him into serious trouble if the agents of the law came calling. It’s where he keeps the real monsters: the things that might once have been human. There is the specimen he once bought from some other Ultras: a former crewman, apparently, who had been transformed far beyond the usual Ultra norms. Major areas of brain function had been trowelled out and replaced with crude neural modules, until the only remaining instinct was a slathering urge to mutilate and kill. His limbs are viciously specialised weapons, his bone growth modified to produce horns and armoured plaques. Grafenwalder can only guess that the man was meant to be some kind of berserker, to be used in acts of piracy where energy weapons might be unwise. Eventually he must have become unmanageable. Now it amuses Grafenwalder to provoke the man into futile killing frenzies.

  Then there is the hyperpig variant his contacts located for him in the bowels of Chasm City: one of a kind, apparently; a rare genetic deviation from the standard breed. The woman’s right side is perfectly human, but her left side is all pig. Brain function lies somewhere between animal and human. She sometimes tries to talk to him, but the compromised layout of her jaw renders her attempts at speech as frenzied, unintelligible grunts. At other times neural implants leave her docile, easily controlled. On the rare occasions when he has guests, Grafenwalder has her serve dinner. She shuffles in presenting her human side, then turns to reveal her true ancestry. Grafenwalder treasures his guests’ re
actions with a thin, observant smile.

  Then there is the psychotic dolphin that lives in near-permanent darkness, its body showing evidence of crude cybernetic tampering. Its origin is unclear, its age even more so, but the animal’s endless, all-consuming rage is beyond question. Grafenwalder has dropped sensors into the animal’s scarred cortex, hooked into a visual display system. The slightest external stimulus becomes amplified into a kaleidoscopic light show, like the Devil’s own firework display. Circuits drop the visual patterns back into the dolphin’s mind. As an after-dinner treat, Grafenwalder encourages his guests to torment the dolphin into ever more furious cycles of anger.

  There are many other exhibits; almost too many for Grafenwalder to remember. Not all are of interest to him now, and there are some that he has not visited for many years. His keepers take care of the creatures’ needs, only bothering him when something needs specialised or expensive medical intervention and his permission must be sought. Perhaps the hamadryad will turn out to be another of those waning fancies, although he thinks it unlikely.

  But there is one holding pen that remains unoccupied. He’s walking over it now, hands on either side of the railed bridge that spans the empty abyss. It is a deep, ceramic-lined tank that will eventually be filled with cold water under many atmospheres of pressure. At the bottom of the tank is a rocky surface that is designed to be punctuated by thermal hotspots, gushing noxious gases. When it is activated, the environment in the tank will form a close match to conditions inside the ice-shrouded ocean of Europa, the little moon of Jupiter in the First System.

  But first Grafenwalder needs an occupant for the tank. That’s the fundamental problem. He knows what he has in mind, but finding one of the elusive creatures is proving trickier than he expected. There are even some who doubt that the Denizens ever existed; let alone that he might find a surviving specimen now, in another system and nearly two hundred years after their supposed heyday. Yet there are enough shards of encouragement to keep him hopeful. He has subtle feelers out, and every now and then one of them twitches with a nugget of information. His trusted contacts know that he is looking for one, and that he will pay very well upon delivery. And deep inside himself he knows that the Denizens were real, that they lived and breathed and that it is not absurd that one may have survived into the present era.

  He must have one. Although he would never admit it, he would gladly trade the rest of his bestiary for that one exhibit. And even as he acknowledges that truth within himself, he still cannot say why the creature matters so much.

  Orbiting the inner fringe of the Rust Belt, backdropped by the choleric face of Yellowstone itself, Goodglass’s habitat is a wrinkled walnut of unprepossessing dimensions. Grafenwalder’s shuttle docks at a polar berthing nub, where a dozen similar vehicles are already clamped. He recognises more than half of them as belonging to collectors of his acquaintance.

  After running some cursory security checks, a silverback gorilla escorts him deeper into the miniature world. The habitat is a cored-out asteroid, excavated by fusion torches and stuffed with a warren of pressurised domiciles wrapped around a modest central airspace. A spinney of free-fall trees keeps the self-regulating ecosystem ticking over, with only a minimal dependence on plague-vulnerable machinery. There are no servitors anywhere, only adapted animals like the silverback. The air smells mulchy, saturated with microscopic green organisms. Grafenwalder sneezes into his handkerchief and makes a mental note to have his lungs swapped out and filtered when he returns home.

  Goodglass offers cocktails to her assembled guests. They’re standing in an antechamber to her bestiary, in a part of the habitat that has been spun for gravity. The polished floor is a matrix of black and white tiles, each of which has been inlaid with a luminous red fragment of a much larger picture. As the guests stand around, the tiles slowly shift and reorient themselves.

  Grafenwalder goes with the flow, letting the tiles slide him from encounter to encounter. He makes small talk with the other collectors, filing gossip and rumour. All the while he’s checking out his host, measuring her against his expectations. Ursula Goodglass is a small woman of baseline-human appearance, devoid of any obvious biomodi fications. She wears a one-piece purple-black outfit with flared sleeves, rising to a stiff-necked collar upon which her hairless head sits like a rare egg. She possesses an attractively impish face with a turned-up nose. He could like her, if he didn’t already detest her.

  Presently, as he knew they must, the tiles bring them together. He bows his head and takes her black-gloved hand.

  “It’s good of you to come, Mister Grafenwalder,” she says. “I know how busy you are, and I wasn’t really expecting you to be able to find the time.”

  “Carl, please,” he says, oozing charm. “And don’t imagine I’d have been able to stay away. Your invitation sounded intriguing. It’s so much more difficult to turn up anything new these days, the way things have gone. I can’t imagine what it is you have for us.”

  “I just hope you won’t be disappointed.”

  “I won’t,” he says, with heavy emphasis. “Of that I’m sure.”

  “I want you to understand,” she begins, before glancing away nervously, “it’s not that I’m trying to compete with you, or upstage you. I’ve too much respect for you for that.”

  “Oh, don’t worry. A little healthy rivalry never hurt anyone. What good is a collection unless there’s another one to lend it contrast?”

  She smiles uncertainly, measuring him as much as he is measuring her. He can feel the pressure of her scrutiny: cool and steady as a refrigeration laser.

  Fine lines crisscross her skull: snow-white sutures that remind him of the fracture patterns in the ice of Europa, even though he has never visited First System. The scars are evidence of emergency surgery performed in the heat of the Melding Plague, when it became necessary for the rich to rid themselves of their neural implants. Now Goodglass wears them as a symbol of former status.

  “I’d like you to meet my husband,” she says as a palanquin glides up to them across the shifting tiled floor. Grafenwalder blinks back surprise: he’d noticed the palanquin before, but had assumed it belonged to one of the other guests. “Edric, this is Carl,” she says.

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you,” the palanquin answers, the piping voice issuing from a speaker grille set halfway up the front of the armoured cabinet. The palanquin has the shape of a slender, flat-topped pyramid, its bronze sides flanged by cooling ribs and sensor studs. An oval window set into the front, just above the speaker grille, is too dark to afford more than a vague impression of Edric Goodglass. “I hope this encumbrance doesn’t make you ill at ease, Mister Grafenwalder,” the occupant tells him.

  “Hardly,” he says. “I’ve used palanquins myself, for business in Chasm City. They tell me my blood has been scrubbed of machines, but you can’t ever be too careful.”

  “In my case I never leave my palanquin,” Edric says. “I still carry all the bodily machines I had at the time of the plague. It would only take a tiny residual trace to kill me.”

  Grafenwalder swirls his drink, stepping nimbly from one moving tile to another. “It must be intolerable.”

  “It’s my own fault. I was too slow when it counted. When the plague hit, I hesitated. I should have had the surgery fast and dirty, the way my wife did. She was braver than I; less convinced it was all about to blow over. Now I can’t even risk the surgery. I’d have to leave the palanquin before they opened me up, and that alone would expose me to unacceptable risk.”

  “But surely the top hospitals—”

  “None will give me the cast-iron guarantee I require. Until one of them can state categorically that there is a zero risk of plague infection, I will remain in this thing.”

  “You might be in for a long wait.”

  “If I’ve learned anything from Ursula, it’s the value of patience. She’s the very model of it.”

  Grafenwalder shoots a sidelong glance at Ursula Goodglass,
wondering what their marriage must be like. Clearly sex isn’t in the cards, but he doubts that it was ever the main interest in their lives. Games, especially those of prestige and subterfuge, are amongst the chief entertainments of the Rust Belt moneyed.

  “Well, I suppose I shouldn’t keep people waiting any longer,” the woman says. She drops her empty glass to the floor, where it vanishes into one of the black tiles as if it had met no resistance, and then claps her hands three times. “Ladies and gentlemen,” she begins, voice raised an octave higher than when they had been speaking, “thank you very much for coming here today. Some of you have visited before; some of you are newcomers to my habitat. Some of you will know a little about me, some of you next to nothing. I do not believe that any of us would say that we are close friends. All of us in the Circle have one thing in common, though: we collect. It is what we live for; what makes us who we are. My own bestiary is modest by the standards of some, but I am nonetheless immensely proud of my latest acquisition. There is nothing else like it in this system; nor is there likely to be for a very long time. Please join me now—I believe I have something you are going to find very, very interesting.”

  With that, a pair of thick metal doors open in one wall of the room, hissing wide on curved pistons. Goodglass and her husband lead the way, with the rest of the party trailing behind. Grafenwalder chooses to remain close by the couple, feigning curiosity.

  She can’t just show off the hamadryad. First they have to endure a short but tedious tour of the rest of her bestiary, or at least that part of it she plans to show them today. None of it is of the slightest interest to Grafenwalder, and even the other guests merely feign polite interest. By turns, though, they arrive at the main event. The party gathers on a railed ledge high above a darkened pit. Grafenwalder knows what’s coming, but keeps his expression blankly expectant. Goodglass makes a little speech, dropping hints about the type of specimen she’s obtained, how difficult it’s been to capture and transport it, alluding once or twice to its planet of origin: clue enough for those in the know. Pricking his ears, Grafenwalder makes out speculative whispers from his fellow collectors. One or two are ahead of Goodglass.