Chasm City

by Alastair Reynolds

  "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 th
at 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."

  Chapter Six

  TEN YEARS old, he moved with his father across the curved, polished floor of the freight bay, their booted feet squeaking on the high-gloss surface, the two of them suspended above their own dark reflections; a man and a boy forever walking up what looked to the eye like an ever-steepening hill, but which always felt perfectly level.

  "We're going outside, aren't we?" Sky said.

  Titus looked down at his son. "Why do you assume that?"

  "You wouldn't have brought me here otherwise."

  Titus said nothing, but the point could not be denied. Sky had never been in the freight bay before; not even during one of Constanza's illicit trips into the Santiago 's forbidden territory. Sky remembered the time she had taken him to see the dolphins, and the punishment that had ensued, and how that punishment had been eclipsed by the ordeal that had followed: the flash of light and the period he had spent trapped alone and cold in the utter darkness of the nursery. It seemed so long ago now, but there were still things about that day that he did not fully understand now; things he had never persuaded his father to speak about. It was more than his father's recalcitrance; more than simply Titus's grief at the death of Sky's mother. The censorship by omission-it was more subtle than a simple refusal to discuss the incident-extended to every adult Sky had spoken to. No one would speak of that day when the whole ship had turned dark and cold, yet to Sky the events were still clearly fixed in his memory.

  After what felt like days-and now that he thought about it, it probably had been days-the adults had made the main lights come on again. He noticed when the air-circulators began to work-a faint background ambience which he had never really noticed until it had ceased. In all that time, his father told him later, they had been breathing unrecirculated air; slowly turning staler and staler as the hundred and fifty waking humans dumped more and more carbon dioxide back into their atmosphere. In a few more days it would have started causing serious problems, but now the air became fresher and the ship slowly warmed back up to the point where it was possible to move along the corridors without shivering. Various secondary systems that had been unavailable during the blackout were brought hesitantly back online. The trains which ferried equipment and technicians up and down the spine began to run again. The ship's information nets, which had been silent, could now be queried. The food improved, but Sky had hardly noticed that they had been eating emergency rations during the blackout.

  Yet still none of the adults would discuss exactly what had happened.

  Eventually, when something like normal shipboard life had returned, Sky managed to sneak back into the nursery. The room was lit, but to his surprise everything looked more or less as he had left it: Clown frozen in that strange shape he had assumed after the flash. Sky had crept closer to examine the distorted form of his friend. He could see now that all Clown had ever been was a pattern in the tiny coloured squares that covered the nursery's walls, floor and ceiling. Clown had been a kind of moving picture that only made sense-only looked right -when seen from precisely Sky's point of view. Clown had appeared to be physically present in the room-not simply drawn on the wall-because his feet and legs had been drawn on the floor as well, but with a perspective distorted such that it looked perfectly real from where Sky happened to be. The room must have mapped Sky and his direction of gaze. Had he been able to shift his viewpoint fast enough, faster than the room could recompute Clown's image, he would perhaps have seen through that trick of perspective. But Clown was always much faster than Sky. For three years, he had never doubted that Clown was real, even if Clown could never touch or be touched by anything.

  His parents had abdicated responsibility to an illusion.

  Now, however-in a mood of eager forgiveness-he pushed such thoughts from his mind, awed by the sheer size of the freight bay and the prospect of what lay ahead. What made the place all the larger was the fact that the two of them were quite alone, surrounded only by a puddle of moving light. The rest of the chamber was suggested rather than clearly seen; its dimensions hinted at by the dark, looming shapes of cargo containers and their associated handling machines receding along curved lines into blackness. Parked here and there were various spacecraft; some little more than single-person tugs or broomsticks designed for flying immediately outside the ship, while others were fully pressurised taxi craft, built for crossing to the other Flotilla craft. The taxis could enter an atmosphere in an emergency, but they were not designed to make the return trip to space. The delta-winged landers which would make multiple journeys down to the surface of Journey's End were too large to store inside the Santiago ; they were attached instead to the outside of the ship and there was almost no way to see them unless you worked on one of the external work crews, as his mother had done before her death.

  Titus halted near one of the small shuttles. "Yes," he said, "we're going outside. I think it's time you saw things the way they really are."

  "What things?"

  But by way of answer Titus only elevated the cuff of his uniform and spoke quietly into his bracelet. "Enable excursion vehicle 15."

  There was no hesitation; no querying of his authority. The taxi answered him instantly, lights flicking on across its wedge-shaped hull, its cockpit door craning open on smooth pistons and the pallet on which it was mounted rotating to bring the door closer and align the vehicle with its departure track. Steam started to vent from ports spaced along the vehicle's side and Sky could hear the growing whine of turbines somewhere inside the machine's angular hull. A few seconds ago the thing had been a piece of sleek, dead metal, but now there were awesome energies at its disposal; barely contained.

  He hesitated at the door, until his father beckoned that he lead.

  "After you, Sky. Go forward and take the seat on the left of the instrument column. Don't touch anything while you're about it."

  Sky hopped into the spacecraft, feeling the floor vibrating beneath his feet. The taxi was considerably more cramped inside than it had looked-the hull was thickly plated and armoured-and he had to duck and dive to reach the forward seats, brushing his head against a gristle-like tangle of internal pipework. He found his seat and fiddled with the blue-steel buckle until he had it tight across his chest. In front of him was a cool turquoise-green display-constantly changing numbers and intricate diagrams-beneath a curved, gold-tinted window. To his left was a control column inset with neat levers and switches and a single black joystick.

  His father settled into the rightmost seat. The door had closed on them now and suddenly it was quieter, save for the continuous rasp of the taxi's air-circulation. His father touched the green display with his finger, making it change, studying the results with narrow-eyed concentration.

  "Word of advice, Sky. Never trust these damned things to tell you that they're safe. Make sure for yourself."

  "You don't trust machines to tell you for yourself?"

  "I used to, once." His father eased the joystick forward and the taxi commenced gliding along its departure track, sliding past the parked ranks of other vehicles. "But machines aren't infallible. We used to kid ourselves that they were because it was the only way to stay sane in a place like this, where we depend on them for our every breath. Unfortunately, it was never true."

  "What happened to change your mind?"

  "You'll see, shortly."

  Sky spoke into his own bracelet-it offered a limited subset of the capabilities of his father's unit-and asked the ship to connect him to Constanza. "You'll never guess where I'm calling from," he said when her face had appeared, tiny and bright. "I'm going outside."

  "With Titus?"

  "Yes, my father's here."

  Constanza was thirteen now, although-like Sky-she was often taken to be older
. In neither case had the assumption much to do with their looks, for while Constanza at least looked no older than her true age, Sky looked substantially younger than his: small and pale and difficult to imagine being afflicted by adolescence in anything like the near future. But both were still intellectually precocious; Constanza was now working more or less fulltime within Titus's security organisation. As was naturally the case aboard a ship with such a small living crew, her duties generally had little to do with enforcement of rules and much more to do with the overseeing of intricate safety procedures and the studying and simulating of operational scenarios. And while it was demanding work-the Santiago was a phenomenally complex thing to understand as a single entity-it was almost certainly work that had never required Constanza to leave the confines of the ship. Since she had begun working for his father, their friendship had become more tenuous-she had responsibilities Sky lacked, and moved in the adult world-but now he was about to do something that could not help but impress her; something that would elevate him in her eyes.

  He waited for her answer, but when it came it was not quite what he had been expecting. "I'm sorry for you, Sky. I know it won't be easy, but you have to see it, I think."

  "What are you talking about?"

  "What Titus is about to show you." She paused. "I've always known, Sky. Ever since it happened, the day we got back from the dolphins. But it was never something it was right to talk about. When you come back inside, you can talk to me about it, if you want."

  He seethed; the way she spoke was less like a friend than what he imagined a condescending older sister might be like. And now his father compounded it by placing a comforting hand on his forearm. "She's right, Sky. I wondered if I should forewarn you, then in the end decided not to-but what Constanza has said is true. It won't be pleasant, but the truth seldom is. And I think you're ready for it now."