Chasm City

by Alastair Reynolds

  "I've never known anything except this ship."

  "But you're not a dolphin; you weren't expecting oceans to swim in." Constanza had paused because one of the animals was swimming towards them. It had left its companions at the far end of the tank, huddled around what looked like a set of television screens showing different pictures. Now that it emerged into the volume of clear water immediately beyond the glass, it assumed a presence it had lacked a moment earlier; suddenly it was a large, potentially dangerous thing of muscle and bone, rather than something bordering on translucence. Sky had seen photos of dolphins in the nursery, and there was something not quite right about this creature: a network of surgically fine lines encased its skull, and there were geometric bumps and ridges around its eyes; evidence of hard metal and ceramic things buried just below the dolphin's flesh.

  "Hello," Sky said, tapping the glass.

  "That's Sleek," Constanza said. "I think so, anyway. Sleek's one of the oldest ones."

  The dolphin looked at him, the sly curve of its jaw making the scrutiny appear both benign and demented. Then it whiplashed around so that it was face-on to him and Sky felt the glass reverberate with unheard vibration. Something formed in the water in front of Sleek, sketched in arcs of transient bubbles. At first the trails of bubbles were random-like an artist's preliminary brushstrokes-but then they became more structured and deliberate, Sleek's head jerking animatedly as if the creature was in the throes of electrocution. The display lasted for only a handful of seconds, but what the dolphin was shaping was unmistakably a face, rendered three-dimensionally. The form lacked any fine details, but Sky knew that it was more than just a suggestion that his subconscious was creating from a few random bubble-trails. It was too symmetric and well-proportioned for that. There was emotion there as well, though it was almost certainly horror or fear.

  Sleek, his work done, departed with a contemptuous flick of his tail.

  "They hate us as well," Constanza said. "But you can't really blame them for that, can you?"

  "Why did Sleek do that? How?"

  "There are machines in Sleek's melon-that bump between its eyes. They're implanted when they're babies. The melon's what they normally make sound with, but the machines let them focus the sound more precisely, so they can draw with bubbles. And there are little things in the water-microorganisms-which light up when the sound hits them. The people who made the dolphins wanted to be able to communicate with them."

  "You'd have thought the dolphins would be grateful."

  "Maybe they would be-if they didn't keep having to have operations. And if they had somewhere else to swim other than this horrible place."

  "Yes, but when we reach Journey's End . . ."

  Constanza looked at him with sad eyes. "It'll be too late, Sky. For these ones, anyway. They won't be alive then. We'll even be grown-up; our parents old or dead."

  The dolphin came back with another, slightly smaller companion and the two of them began to draw something in the water. It looked like a man being pulled apart by sharks, but Sky turned away before he could be certain.

  Constanza continued, "And they're too far gone anyway, Sky."

  Sky turned back to the tank. "I still like them. They're still beautiful. Even Sleek."

  "They're bad, Sky. Psychotic, that's the word my father uses." She said it with not-quite-convincing hesitation, as if slightly ashamed of her own fluency.

  "I don't care. I'll come back and see them again." He tapped the glass and spoke much louder. "I'll come back, Sleek. I like you."

  Constanza, though she was only slightly taller than him, patted Sky maternally on the shoulder. "It won't make any difference."

  "I'll still come."

  The promise, as much to himself as to Constanza, had been sincere. He did want to understand the dolphins, to communicate with them and in some way alleviate their misery. He imagined the bright, wide oceans of Journey's End-Clown, his friend in the nursery, had told him that there would be oceans-and imagined the dolphins suddenly freed from this dark, dismal place. He pictured them swimming with people; creating joyous sound-pictures in the water; the memory of the time aboard the Santiago fading like a claustrophobic dream.

  "C'mon," Constanza said. "We'd better be going, Sky."

  "You'll bring me back, won't you?"

  "Of course, if that's what you want."

  And they had left the dolphinarium and commenced the intricate return trip, the two of them working their way through the Santiago 's dark interstices; children trying to find their way through an enchanted forest. Once or twice they passed adults, but Constanza's demeanour was so confident that they were never questioned-not until they were well within the small part of the ship which Sky considered familiar territory.

  It was there that his father had found them.

  Titus Haussmann was a stern but kindly figure amongst the Santiago 's living; a man whose authority had been earned through respect rather than fear. He towered over the two of them, but Sky felt no real anger emanate from him; only relief.

  "Your mother's been worried sick," his father said. "Constanza-I'm deeply disappointed in you. I always had you down as the sensible one."

  "He only wanted to see the dolphins."

  "Oh, the dolphins, was it?" His father sounded surprised, as if this was not quite the answer he had been expecting. "I thought it was the dead that interested you, Sky-our beloved momios ."

  True enough, Sky thought-but one thing at a time.

  "And now you're sorry," his father continued. "Because they weren't what you were expecting, were they? I'm sorry, too. Sleek and the others are sick in the head. The kindest thing we could do would be to put them all to sleep, but they keep being allowed to raise young, and each generation's more . . ."

  "Psychotic," Sky said.

  ". . . yes." His father regarded him strangely. "More psychotic than the last. Well, now that your vocabulary's showing such tremendous growth, it would be a shame to stifle it, don't you think? A shame to deny you the potential to enlarge it?" He ruffled Sky's hair. "I'm talking about the nursery, young man. A spell in it, where you can't come into any harm."

  It was not that he hated the nursery, or even especially disliked it. But when he was banished there it could not help but feel like a punishment.

  "I want to see my mother."

  "Your mother's outside the ship, Sky, so there's no use running to her for a second opinion. And you know if you did she'd say exactly the same thing. You've disobeyed us and you need to be taught a lesson." He turned to Constanza, shaking his head. "As for you, young madam, I think it might be for the best if you and Sky were not to play together for a period of time, don't you think?"

  "We don't play," Constanza said with a scowl. "We talk, and explore."

  "Yes," Titus said, with a long-suffering sigh, "and visit parts of the ship you're expressly not allowed to go to. That, I'm afraid, can't go unpunished." He softened his voice now, as he always did when he was about to discuss something of genuine importance. "This ship is our home-our only real home-and we have to feel like we live here. That means feeling safe in the places where it's right to do so-and knowing where it isn't safe to go. Not because there are monsters or anything silly like that, but because there are dangers-adult dangers. Machinery and power systems. Robots and drop shafts. Believe me, I've seen what happens when people go into places they're not meant to go, and it usually isn't very pleasant."

  Sky did not doubt his father for an instant. As head of security aboard a ship which generally enjoyed political and social harmony, Titus Haussmann's duties usually concerned accidents and the very occasional suicide. And although Titus had always spared Sky the more intimate details of how it was possible to die aboard a ship like the Santiago , Sky's imagination had done all the rest.

  "I'm sorry," Constanza said.

  "Yes-I'm sure you are, but that doesn't change the fact that you took my son into forbidden territory. I'll be speaking to your parents, Constanza, and
I don't think they'll be best pleased. Now run along home, and perhaps in a week or two we'll review the situation. Very well?"

  She nodded, said nothing, and left along one of the curving corridors which radiated away from the intersection where Titus had cornered them. It was not really far to her parents' domicile-no part of the Santiago 's major habitation section was far from any other part-but the ship's designers had cunningly avoided making any route too direct, except for the emergency crawlways and the train lines which reached down the spine. The snaking general-use corridors gave the illusion that the ship was considerably larger than its true size, and two families could live almost next to each other and feel that they lived in entirely different districts.

  Titus escorted his son back to their dwelling. Sky was sorry that his mother was outside, for-despite what Titus had said-her punishments were generally a shade more lenient than those his father prescribed. He dared to hope that she was already back aboard ship, having returned from her shift early, the work on the hull completed ahead of schedule, and that she would be waiting for them when they reached the nursery. But there was no sign of her.

  "In," Titus said. "Clown will take care of you. I'll be back to let you out in two, possibly three hours."

  "I don't want to go in."

  "No-and if you did, it wouldn't be much of a punishment, would it?"

  The nursery door opened. Titus propelled his son into the room without stepping across the threshold himself.

  "Hello, Sky," said Clown, who was waiting for him.

  There were many toys in the nursery, and some of them were capable of holding limited conversations-even, fleetingly, giving the impression of true intelligence. Sky sensed that these toys were built for children of about his age, designed to mesh with a typical three-year-old's view of the world. In most cases, he had begun to find them simplistic and stupid not long after his second birthday. But Clown was different; not really a toy at all, although not quite a person either. Clown had been with Sky for as long as he remembered, confined to the nursery, but not always present even then. Clown could not touch things, or allow himself to be touched by Sky, and when Clown spoke, his voice did not come from quite the place where Clown stood-or seemed to be standing.

  Which was not to say that Clown was a figment of his imagination; without influence. Clown saw everything that happened in the nursery and was punctilious in telling Sky's parents when he had done something that required reprimanding. It was Clown who told his parents he had broken the rocking horse, that it had not been-as he had tried to make them think-the fault of one of the other smart toys. He had hated Clown for that betrayal, but not for long. Even Sky had understood that Clown was, apart from Constanza, the only real friend he had, and that there were some things Clown knew that were beyond even Constanza.

  "Hello," Sky said, mournfully.

  "You've been banished here, I see, for visiting the dolphins." Clown stood alone in the plain white room, the other toys concealed tidily away. "That wasn't the right thing to do, was it, Sky? I could have shown you dolphins."

  "Not the same ones. Not real ones. And you've shown them to me before."

  "Not like this. Watch!"

  And suddenly the two of them were standing up in a boat, out at sea, under a blue sky. All around them the waves were broken by cresting dolphins, their backs like wet pebbles in the sunlight. The illusion of being at sea was marred only by the narrow black windows which ran along one side of the room.

  In a story book, Sky had once found a picture of someone else like Clown, dressed in puffed-out, striped clothes with big white buttons, with a comical, permanently smiling face framed by bouffant orange hair under a soft, sagging striped hat. When he touched the picture in the book, the clown moved and did the same kinds of tricks and vaguely amusing things that his own Clown did. Sky remembered, dimly, a time when his response to the Clown's tricks had been to laugh and clap, as if there were nothing more that could be asked of the universe than to provide the antics of a clown.

  Now, subtly, even Clown had begun to bore him. He humoured Clown, but their relationship had undergone a profound sea-change which could never be entirely reversed. To Sky, Clown had become something to be understood; something to be dissected and parameterised. Clown, he now recognised, was something like the bubble-drawing the dolphin had made in the water: a projection carved from light rather than sound. They were not really in a boat, either. Under his feet, the room's floor felt as hard and flat as when his father had pushed him inside. Sky did not quite understand how the illusion was created, but it was perfectly realistic, the walls of the nursery nowhere to be seen.

  "The dolphins in the tank-Sleek and the others-had machines in them," Sky said. He might as well learn something while he was prisoner. "Why?"

  "To help them focus their sonar."

  "No. I don't mean what were the machines for. I mean, who had the idea to put them there in the first place?"

  "Ah. That would have been the Chimerics."

  "Who were they? Did they come with us?"

  "No, to answer your last question, though they very much wanted to." Clown's voice was slightly high-pitched and quavery-almost womanly-but never anything other than infinitely patient. "Remember, Sky, that when the Flotilla left Earth's system-left the orbit of Mercury, and flew into interstellar space-the Flotilla was leaving from a system that was still technically engaged in war. Oh, most of the hostilities had ceased by then, but the terms of ceasefire had still not been completely thrashed out, and everyone was still very much on a war footing; ready to return to the fray at a moment's notice. There were many factions who saw the closing stages of the war as their last chance to make a difference. Some of them, by this time, were little more than highly organised brigands. The Chimerics-or more precisely, the Chimeric faction that created the dolphins-were certainly one of those. The Chimerics in general had taken cyborgisation to new extremes, blending themselves and their animals with machines. This faction had pushed those limits even further, to the point where they were shunned even by the mainstream Chimerics."

  Sky listened and followed what Clown was telling him. Clown's judgement of Sky's cognitive skills was adept enough to prevent a lapse into incomprehensibility, while at the same time forcing Sky to concentrate intently on his every word. Sky was aware that not all three-year-olds could have understood what Clown was saying, but that did not concern him in the least.

  "And the dolphins?"

  "Engineered by them. For what purpose, we can't begin to guess. Perhaps to serve as aquatic infantry, in some planned invasion of Earth's oceans. Or perhaps they were simply an experiment which was never completed, interrupted by the war's decline. Whatever the case, a family of dolphins was captured from the Chimerics by agents of the Confederacion Sudamericana ."

  That, Sky well knew, was the organisation that had spearheaded the construction of the Flotilla. The Confederacion had remained studiously neutral for most of the war, concentrating on ambitions beyond the narrow confines of the solar system. After garnering a handful of allies, they had built and launched humankind's first serious attempt at crossing interstellar space.

  "We took Sleek and the others with us?"

  "Yes, thinking they'd come in useful at Journey's End. But removing the augmentation that the Chimerics had added was a lot harder than it looked. In the end it was easier to leave it in place. Then when the next generation of dolphins was born, it was found that they couldn't communicate with the adults properly unless they had the augmentation as well. So we copied it and implanted it in the young."

  "But they ended up psychotic."

  Clown registered the tiniest flicker of surprise, his answer not immediately forthcoming. Later Sky would learn that in those frozen moments Clown was seeking advice from one of his parents, or one of the other adults, about how best to respond.

  "Yes . . ." Clown said finally. "But that wasn't necessarily our fault."

  "What, not our fault to keep th
em down in the hold, with only a few cubic metres to swim around in?"

  "Believe me, the conditions we keep them in now are vastly preferable to the Chimerics' experimentation lab."

  "But the dolphins can't be expected to remember that, can they?"

  "They're happier, trust me."

  "How can you know?"

  "Because I'm Clown." The mask of his face, ever-smiling, pulled into a more agonised smile. "Clown always knows." Sky was about ask Clown exactly what he meant by that when there was a flash of light. It was very bright and sudden, but completely silent, and it had come from the window strip along one wall. When Sky blinked he could still see the after-image of the window: a hard-edged pink rectangle.

  "What happened?" he asked, still blinking.

  But there was something very wrong with Clown, and indeed, with the entire view. In the instant of the flash, Clown had become misshapen, stretched and malformed in all the wrong directions, painted across the walls, his expression frozen. The boat in which they had seemed to be standing curved away in sickeningly distorted perspective. It was as if the entire scene had been rendered in thick wet pain which someone had begun to stir with a stick.

  Clown had never allowed that to happen before.

  Worse still, the room's source of illumination-the glowing imagery on the walls-became dark, then black. There was no light save for the faintest milky glow from the high-set window. But even that faded after a while, leaving Sky alone in utter darkness.

  "Clown?" Sky said, at first quietly, and then with more insistence.

  No answer came. Sky began to feel something odd and unwelcome. It came from deep within him; a welling-up of fear and anxiety that had everything to do with a typical three-year-old's response to the situation and nothing to do with the gloss of adulthood and precocity which normally distanced Sky from other children of his age. He was suddenly a small child, alone in the dark, not understanding what was happening.

  He asked for Clown again, but there was desperation in his voice; a realisation that Clown would already have answered him if that were possible. No; Clown was gone; the bright nursery had become dark and-yes-cold, and he could hear nothing; not even the normal background noises of the Santiago .