Chasm City

by Alastair Reynolds

  "Well, I guess you've blown your chance."

  "I didn't have anything to do with it, Tanner."

  "But it happened on your turf, didn't it?"

  He was about to answer, and I was about to ask him what he had done with the body and what he intended to do about it when Vasquez's image dissolved into static. At the same instant there was a powerful flash that seemed to come from everywhere at once, bathing every surface in a sickly white radiance.

  It lasted for only a fraction of a second.

  It was enough, though. There was something unforgettable about that hard burst of tarnished light; something I had seen once before. Or was it more than once? For a moment I wondered: remembering carnations of white light blossoming against stellar blackness.

  Nuclear explosions.

  The elevator's illumination dimmed for a few seconds, and I felt my weight grow less and then return to normal.

  Someone had let off a nuke.

  The electromagnetic pulse must have swept over us, momentarily interfering with the elevator. I hadn't seen a nuke flash since my childhood, one of the war's small sanities being that for the most part it had stayed in the conventional realm. I couldn't estimate the burst yield without knowing how far away the flash had been, but the lack of a mushroom cloud suggested that the explosion had taken place well above the planet's surface. It didn't make much sense: a nuke deployment could only have been the prelude to a conventional assault, and this was the wrong season for it. Elevated bursts made even less sense-military communications networks were hardened against electromagnetic pulse warfare.

  An accident, perhaps?

  I thought about it for a few more seconds, then heard footsteps racing up the spiral staircase between the elevator's vertically stacked compartments. I saw one of the aristocrats I had just been dining with. I hadn't bothered remembering his name, but the man's levantine bone structure and golden-brown skin almost certainly identified him as a northerner. He was dressed opulently, his knee-length coat dripping shades of emerald and aquamarine. But he was agitated. Behind him, his foxlike wife paused on the last step, eyeing both of us warily.

  "Did you see that?" the man asked. "We came up here to get a better look; you've got the best view from here. It looked pretty big. It almost looked like a . . ."

  "A nuke?" I said. "I think it was." There were retinal ghosts, pink shapes etched across my vision.

  "Thank God it wasn't any closer."

  "Let me see what the public nets say," said the woman, glancing at a bracelet-shaped display device. It must have tapped into a less vulnerable data network than the one which Vasquez had been using, because she connected immediately. Images and text spilled across the device's discreet little screen.

  "Well?" said her husband. "Do they have any theories yet?"

  "I don't know, but . . ." She hesitated, her eyes lingering over something, then frowning. "No. That can't be true. It just can't be true."

  "What? What are they saying?"

  She looked to the man and then to me. "They're saying they've attacked the bridge. They're saying that the explosion's severed the thread."

  In the unreal moments that followed, the elevator continued to climb smoothly.

  "No," the man said, doing his best to sound calm, but not quite managing it. "They must be wrong. They've got to be wrong."

  "I hope to God they are," the woman said, her voice beginning to crack. "My last neural scan was six months ago . . ."

  "Damn six months," the man said. "I haven't been scanned this decade!"

  The woman breathed out hard. "Well, they absolutely have to be wrong. We're continuing to have this conversation, aren't we? We're not all screaming as we drop towards the planet." She looked at her bracelet again, frowning.

  "What does it say?" the man said.

  "Exactly what it said a moment ago."

  "It's a mistake, or a vicious lie, that's all."

  I debated how much it would be judicious to reveal at this point. I was more than just a bodyguard, of course. In my years of service to Cahuella there were few things on the planet which I had not studied-even if that study had usually been motivated by some military application. I didn't pretend to know much about the bridge, but I did know something about hyperdiamond, the artificial carbon alloptrope from which it was spun.

  "Actually," I said, "I think they could be right."

  "But nothing's changed!" the woman said.

  "I wouldn't necessarily expect it to." I was forcing calm myself, clicking back into the crisis-management state of mind my soldiering years had taught me. Somewhere in the back of my head was a shrill scream of private fear, but I did my best to ignore it for the moment. "Even if the bridge had been cut, how far below do you think that flash was? I'd say it was at least three thousand kilometres."

  "What the fuck has that got to do with it?"

  "A lot," I said, managing a gallows smile. "Think of the bridge as being like a rope-hanging all the way down from orbit, stretched out by its own weight."

  "I'm thinking about it, believe me."

  "Good. Now think about cutting the rope midway along its height. The part above the cut is still hanging from the orbital hub, but the part below will immediately begin falling to the ground."

  The man answered now. "We're perfectly safe, then? We're certainly above the cut." He looked upwards. "The thread's intact all the way between here and the orbital terminus. That means if we keep climbing, we'll make it, thank God."

  "I wouldn't start thanking Him just yet."

  He looked at me with a pained expression, as if I were spoiling some elaborate parlour game with needless objections.

  "What do you mean?"

  "I mean it doesn't mean we're safe. If you cut a long rope hanging under its own weight, the part above the cut's going to spring back."

  "Yes." He looked at me with threatening eyes, as if I was making my objections out of spite. "I understand that. But it obviously doesn't apply to us, since nothing's happened."

  "Yet," I said. "I never said the relaxation would happen instantly, all along the thread. Even if the thread's been cut below us, it'll take some time for the relaxation wave to climb all the way up to us."

  His question was fearful now.

  "How long?"

  I had no exact answer for them. "I don't know. Speed of sound in hyperdiamond isn't very different than in natural diamond-about fifteen kilometres a second, I think. If the cut was three thousand kilometres under us, the sound wave should hit us first-about two hundred seconds after the nuke flash. The relaxation wave should move slower than that, I think . . . but it will still reach us before we reach the summit."

  My timing was exquisite, for the sonic pulse arrived just as I had finished speaking, a hard and sudden jolt, as if the elevator had just hit a bump in its two-thousand-kilometre-per-hour ascent.

  "We're still safe, aren't we?" asked the wife, her voice only a knife-edge from hysteria. "If the cut is below us . . . Oh God, I wish we'd been backed-up more often."

  Her husband looked at her snidely. "It was you who told me those flights to the scanning clinic were too expensive to make a habit out of, darling."

  "But you didn't have to take me literally."

  I raised my voice, silencing them. "I still think we're in a lot of danger, I'm afraid. If the relaxation wave is just a longitudinal compression along the thread, there's a chance we'll ride it out safely. But if the thread starts picking up any kind of sideways motion, like a whip . . ."

  "What the fuck are you," the man asked, "some kind of engineer?"

  "No," I said. "Another kind of specialist entirely."

  More footfalls on the stairs now as the rest of the group came up. The jolt must have convinced them something was seriously wrong.

  "What's happening?" asked one of the southerners, a burly man a foot taller than anyone else in the elevator.

  "We're riding a severed thread," I answered. "There are spacesuits aboard this thing, aren
't there? I suggest we get into them as quickly as possible."

  The man looked at me as if I were insane. "We're still ascending! I don't give a damn what happened below us; we're fine. They built this thing to take a lot of crap."

  "Not this much," I said.

  By now the servitor had arrived as well, suspended from its ceiling rail. I asked it to show us to the suits. It should not have been necessary to ask, but this situation was so far beyond the servitor's experience that it had completely failed to detect any threat to its human charges. I wondered if the news of the severed thread had reached the orbital station. Almost certainly it had-and almost certainly there was nothing that could be done for the elevators still on the thread.

  Still, it was better to be on the upper part of the thread than the part below the severing point. I imagined a thousand-kilometre-high section below the cut. It would take several minutes for the top of the thread to smash into the planet below-in fact, for a long while it would seem to hang magically, like a rope trick. But it would still be falling, and there was nothing in the world that could stop it. A million tonnes of thread, slicing down into the atmosphere, laden with cars, some of them occupied. It would be a slow and quite terrifying way to die.

  Who could have done this?

  It was too much to believe that it didn't have something to do with my ascent. Reivich had tricked us in Nueva Valparaiso, and if it hadn't been for the bridge attack I would have still been trying to assimilate the fact of Miguel Dieterling's death. I couldn't imagine Red Hand Vasquez having anything to do with the explosion, even though I hadn't completely ruled him out of the frame for my friend's murder. Vasquez just didn't have the imagination to attempt something like this, let alone the means. And his cultist indoctrination would have made it very hard for him to even think of harming the bridge in any way. Yet someone appeared to be trying to kill me. Maybe they had put a bomb aboard one of the elevators rising below, thinking I was on it, or would be on one of those below the cut point-or maybe they had fired a missile and misjudged the point to aim for. It could have been Reivich, but only in the technical sense-he had friends with the right influence. But I'd never figured him as someone capable of an act of that ruthlessness: casually wiping out of existence a few hundred innocents just to ensure the death of one man.

  But maybe Reivich was learning.

  We followed the servitor to the emergency space suit lockers, each of which held one vacuum suit. They were of antique design by spacefaring standards, requiring the user to physically insert themselves in the garment rather than have it enfold around them. They all appeared to be one size too small, but I donned my suit quickly enough, with the dexterous ease with which one might slip on a suit of combat armour. I was careful to hide the clockwork gun in one of the suit's capacious utility pockets, where there should have been a signal flare.

  No one saw the gun.

  "This isn't necessary!" the southern aristocrat was saying. "We don't need to wear any damn-"

  "Listen," I said, "when the compression wave hits us-which it will do any second-we could be flung sideways with enough force to break every bone in your body. That's why you need to be wearing a suit. It'll offer some protection."

  Maybe not enough, I thought.

  The six of them fumbled with their suits with varying degrees of confidence. I helped the others, and after a minute or so they were ready, except for the huge aristocrat, who was still complaining about the fit of the suit, as if he had all the time in the world to worry about it. Troublingly, he began to eye the other suits in the closet, wondering perhaps if they were all truly of the same size.

  "You don't have time. Just get the thing sealed and worry about cuts and bruises later."

  Below, I imagined the vicious kink in the thread racing toward us, gobbling the kilometres as it climbed. By now it must have already passed the lower elevators. I wondered if it would be violent enough to fling the car off the thread.

  I was still thinking about it when it hit.

  It was much worse than I had imagined it would be. The elevator jerked to one side, the force of it slamming all seven of us against the inner wall. Someone broke a bone and started screaming, but almost immediately we were flung in the opposite direction, crashing against the clear arc of the picture window. The servitor broke loose from its ceiling rail and fell past us. Its hard steel body daggered into the glass, but though the glass fractured into a webwork of white lines, it managed not to break. Gravity fell as the elevator decelerated on the thread; some element in its induction motor had been damaged by the whiplash.

  The southern aristocrat's head was a vile red pulp, like an over-ripe fruit. As the whiplash oscillations died down, his body tumbled limply around the cabin. Someone else started screaming. They were all in a bad way. I might even have had injuries of my own, but for the moment adrenalin was whiting them out.

  The compression wave had passed. At some point, I knew, it would reach the end of the thread and be reflected back down again-but that might be hours from now, and it would not be so violent as before, its energies bled into heat.

  For a moment I dared to think that we might be safe.

  Then I thought about the elevators below us. They might have slowed down as well, or even been flung off the thread completely. Automatic safety systems may have come online-but there was no way to know for sure. And if the car below was still ascending at normal speed, it would run into us very soon indeed.

  I thought about it for a few moments before speaking, raising my voice above the moans of the injured. "I'm sorry," I said. "But there's something I've just thought of . . ."

  There was no time to explain. They'd just have to follow me or take the consequences of staying in the elevator. Not even time to get to the elevator's emergency airlock; it would take at least a minute to cycle all seven-or six now-of us through it. Besides, the further we could get away from the thread, the safer we'd be if there was a collision between the elevators.

  There was really only one option.

  I retrieved the clockwork gun from my suit pouch, gripping it clumsily in my gloved fingers. There was no way to aim it with any precision, but thankfully, none was called for. I merely pointed the gun in the general direction of the fracture pattern left on the glass by the falling servitor.

  Someone tried to stop me, not understanding that what I was doing might save their lives, but I was stronger; my finger pulled the trigger. In the gun, nano-scale clockwork unravelled, unleashing a ferocious pulse of stored molecular-binding energy. A haze of flèchettes ripped from the barrel, shattering the glass, creating a widening network of fractures. The window puckered outward, straining, and then broke into a billion white shards. The storm of air hurled all of us through the ragged opening, into space.

  I held onto the gun, clinging to it as if it were the only solid thing in the universe. I looked around frantically, trying to orientate myself relative to the others. The wind had knocked them all in different directions, like the fragments of a starshell, but though our trajectories were different, we were all falling downward.

  Below was only planet.

  My suit spun slowly, and I saw the elevator again, still attached to the thread, climbing away above me as I fell, growing smaller by the second. Then there was an almost subliminal flash of motion as the elevator which had been riding the thread below flashed by, still climbing at normal ascent speed, and an instant later an explosion almost as bright and quick as one of the nuke flashes.

  When the flash had gone, there was nothing left at all-not even thread.

  Chapter Four

  SKY HAUSSMANN was three when he saw the light.

  Years later, in adulthood, that day would be his first clear memory: the earliest that he could clearly anchor to a time and a place and know to be something from the real world, rather than some phantasm which had transgressed the hazy border between a child's reality and its dreams.

  He had been banished to the nursery by his pare
nts. He had disobeyed them by visiting the dolphinarium: the dark, dank, forbidden place in the belly of the great ship Santiago . But it was Constanza who had really led him astray; she who had taken him through the warren of train tunnels, walkways, ramps and stairwells to reach the place where the dolphins were hidden. Constanza was only two or three years older than Sky, but in his eyes she was almost fully grown; supremely wise in the ways of the adults. Everyone said Constanza was a genius; that one day-perhaps when the Flotilla was nearing the end of its long, slow crossing-she would become the Captain. It was said half in jest but half in seriousness as well. Sky wondered if she would make him her second-in-command when that day came, the two of them sitting together in the control room he had still never visited. It was not such a ridiculous idea: the adults also kept telling him that he was an unusually clever child as well; even Constanza was sometimes surprised at the things he came out with. But for all Constanza's cleverness, Sky would later remind himself, she was not infallible. She had known how to reach the dolphinarium without anyone seeing them, but she had not quite known how to get them back unseen.

  It had been worth it, though.

  "The grown-ups don't like them," Constanza had said, when they had reached the side of the tank which held the dolphins. "They'd rather they didn't exist at all."

  They stood on drainage grilles slick with spilled water. The tank was a high-sided glass enclosure bathed in sickly blue light, reaching away for tens of metres into the darkness of the hold. Sky peered into the gloom. The dolphins were purposeful grey shapes somewhere in the turquoise distance, their outlines constantly breaking up and reforming in the liquid play of light. They looked less like animals than things carved from soap; slippery and not quite real.

  Sky had pressed his hand against the glass. "Why don't they like them?"

  Constanza's reply was measured. "Something's not quite right with them, Sky. These aren't the same dolphins the ship had when it left Mercury. These are the grandchildren, or the great-grandchildren-I'm not sure which. They've never known anything except this tank, and nor have their parents."