Chasm City

by Alastair Reynolds

  "I've a reasonably good idea."

  "Then either cough up or get out of the premises." Next to him, the youth started convulsing in his seat. "Hey, what is that shit?"

  "Does that helmet have enough spatial resolution to stimulate the pleasure and pain centres?" I said.

  "What if it does?" He leaned over and slapped the convulsing youth hard on the head, knocking the playback helmet flying. Drooling, still convulsing, the youth subsided into his seat, his eyes glazed over.

  "Then he probably shouldn't have accessed it at random," I said. "My guess is he just hit an NC interrogation session. Have you ever had your fingers removed?"

  The eyeglass man chuckled. "Nasty. Very nasty. But there's a market for that kind of shit-just like there is for the black stuff."

  Now was as good a time as any to see what the quality of Vadim's merchandise was like. I handed over one of the black experientials, one of those embossed with a tiny silver maggot motif. "Is this what you mean?"

  He looked sceptical at first, until he had examined the experiential more closely. To the trained eye, there were presumably all manner of subliminal indicators to distinguish the genuine article from substandard fakes.

  "It's a good quality bootleg if it's a bootleg, which means it's worth something whatever's on it. Hey, shit-for-brains. Try this." He knelt down, picked up the battered playback helmet and jammed it onto the youth's head, then prepared to insert the experiential. The youth was just beginning to perk up when he saw the experiential, at which point he pawed the air, trying to stop the man pressing it into the helmet.

  "Get that maggot shit away from me . . ."

  "Hey," the man said. "I was just going to give you a flash, dickface." He tucked the experiential away in his coat.

  "Why don't you try it yourself?" I said.

  "Same damn reason he doesn't want that shit anywhere near his skull. It's not nice."

  "Nor's an NC interrogation session."

  "That's a trip to the cake shop by comparison. That's just pain ." He patted his breast pocket delicately. "What's on this could be about nine million times less pleasant."

  "You mean it's not always the same?"

  "Of course not, or there wouldn't be an element of risk. And the way these ones work, it's never exactly the same trip twice. Sometimes it's just maggots, sometimes you are the maggots . . . sometimes it's much, much worse . . ." Suddenly he looked cheerful. "But, hey, there's a market for it, so who am I to argue?"

  "Why would people want to experience something like that?" I asked.

  He grinned at the youth. "Hey, what is this, fucking philosophy hour? How am I supposed to know? This is human nature we're talking about here; it's already deeply fucking perverted."

  "Tell me about it," I said.

  At the centre of the concourse, rising above the bazaar like a minaret, was an ornately encrusted tower surmounted by a four-faced clock set to Chasm City time. The clock had recently struck the seventeenth hour of the twenty-six in Yellowstone's day, animated spacesuited figurines emerging beneath the dial to enact what might have been a complex quasi-religious ritual. I checked the time on Vadim's watch-my own watch, I forced myself to think, since I had now liberated it twice-and found that the two were in passable agreement. If Dominika's estimate had been accurate, she would still be busy with Quirrenbach.

  The hermetics had passed through now, along with most of the obviously rich, but there were still many people who wore the slightly stunned look of the recently impoverished. Perhaps they had been only moderately wealthy seven years ago; not sufficiently well-connected to barrier themselves against the plague. I doubted that there had been anyone truly poor in Chasm City back then, but there were always degrees of affluence. For all the heat, the people wore heavy, dark clothes, often ballasted with jewellery. The women were often gloved and hatted, perspiring under wide-brimmed fedoras, veils or chadors. The men wore heavy greatcoats with upturned collars, faces shadowed under Panama hats or shapeless berets. Many had little glass boxes around their necks, containing what looked like religious relics, but which were actually implants, extracted from their hosts and now carried as symbols of former wealth. Though there was a spectrum of apparent ages, I saw no one who looked genuinely old. Perhaps the old were too infirm to risk a trip to the bazaar, but I also recalled what Orcagna had said about the state of longevity treatments on other worlds. It was entirely possible that some of the people I saw here were two or three centuries old; burdened with memories which reached back to Marco Ferris and the Amerikano era. They must have lived through great strangenesses . . . but I doubted that any of them had witnessed anything stranger than the recent transfiguration of their city, or the collapse of a society whose longevity and opulence must have seemed unassailable. No wonder so many of the people I saw looked so sad, as if knowing that-no matter how things might improve from day to day-the old times would never come again. Seeing that all-pervasive melancholia, it was impossible not to feel some empathy.

  I started navigating my way back to Dominika's tent, then wondered why I was bothering.

  There were questions I wanted to ask Dominika, but they could equally well be directed to one of her rivals. I might need to talk to them all eventually. The only thing that connected me to Dominika was Quirrenbach . . . and even if I had begun to tolerate his presence, I'd known all along that I would have to ditch him eventually. I could walk away now, leave the terminus completely, and the chances were that we'd never meet again.

  I pushed through until I reached the far side of the bazaar.

  Where the furthest wall should have been was only an opening through which the lower levels of the city could be seen, behind a perpetual screen of dirty rain sluicing from the side of the terminus. A haphazard line of rickshaws waited: upright boxes balanced between two wide wheels. Some of the rickshaws were powered, coupled behind steam-engines or chugging methane-powered motors. Their drivers lounged indolently, awaiting fares. Others were propelled by pedal-power, and several looked to have been converted from old palanquins. Behind the row of rickshaws there were other, sleeker vehicles: a pair of flying machines much like the volantors I knew from Sky's Edge, crouched down on skids, and a trio of craft which looked like helicopters with their rotors folded for stowage. A squad of workers eased a palanquin into one of them, tipping it at an undignified angle to get it through the entrance door. I wondered if I was witnessing a kidnapping or a taxi pick-up.

  Although I might have been able to afford one of the volantors, the rickshaws looked the most immediately promising. At the very least I could get a flavour of this part of the city, even if I had no specific destination in mind.

  I started walking, cutting through the crowds, my gaze fixed resolutely ahead.

  Then, when not quite halfway there, I stopped, turned around and returned to Dominika's.

  "Is Mister Quirrenbach finished yet?" I asked Tom. Tom had been shimmying to the sitar music, apparently surprised to find someone entering Dominika's tent without being coerced.

  "Mister, he no ready-ten minutes. You got money?"

  I had no idea how much Quirrenbach's excisions were going to cost him, but I figured the money he had recovered on the Grand Teton experientials might just cover it. I separated the bills from my own, laying them down on the table.

  "No enough, mister. Madame Dominika, she want one more."

  Grudgingly I unpeeled one of my own lower-denomination bills and added it to Quirrenbach's pile. "That'd better be good," I said. "Mister Quirrenbach's a friend of mine, so if I find out you're going to ask him for more money when he comes out, I'll be back."

  "Is good, mister. Is good."

  I watched as the kid scurried through the partition into the room beyond, briefly glimpsing the hovering form of Dominika and the long couch on which she did her business. Quirrenbach was prone on it, stripped to the waist, with his head enfolded in a loom of delicate-looking probes. His hair had been shaved completely. Dominika was making odd g
estures with her fingers, like a puppeteer working invisibly fine strings. In sympathy, the little probes were dancing around Quirrenbach's cranium. There was no blood, nor even any obvious puncture marks on his skin.

  Maybe Dominika was better than she looked.

  "Okay," I said when Tom re-emerged. "I have a favour to ask of you, and it's worth one of these." I showed him the smallest denomination I had. "And don't say I'm insulting you, because you don't know what it is I'm about to ask."

  "Say it, big guy."

  I gestured towards the rickshaws. "Do those things cover the whole city?"

  "Most of Mulch."

  "Mulch is the district we're in?" No answer was forthcoming, so I just left the tent with him following me.

  "I need to get from here-wherever here is-to a specific district of the city. I don't know how far it is, but I don't want to be cheated. I'm sure you can arrange that for me, can't you? Especially as I know where you live."

  "Get good price, you no worry." Then a thought must have trickled through his skull. "No wait for friend?"

  "No-I'm afraid I have business elsewhere, as does Mister Quirrenbach. We won't be meeting again for a while."

  I sincerely hoped it was the truth.

  Some kind of hairy primate provided the motive power for most of the rickshaws, a human gene splice resetting the necessary homeoboxes so that his legs grew longer and straighter than the simian norm. In unintelligibly rapid Canasian, Tom negotiated with another kid. They could almost have been interchangeable, except that the new kid had shorter hair and might have been a year older. Tom introduced him to me as Juan; something in their relationship suggested they were old business partners. Juan shook my hand and escorted me to the nearest vehicle. Edgily now, I glanced back, hoping Quirrenbach was still out cold. I didn't want to have to justify myself to him if he came round soon enough to have Tom tell him I was about to get a ride out of the terminus. There were some pills that could not be sugared, and being dumped by someone you imagined was your newfound travelling companion was one of them.

  Still, perhaps he could work the agony of rejection into one of his forthcoming Meisterwerks .

  "Where to, mister?"

  It was Juan speaking now, with the same accent as Tom. It was some kind of post-plague argot, I guessed; a pidgin of Russish, Canasian, Norte and a dozen other languages known here during the Belle Epoque . "Take me to the Canopy," I said. "You know where that is, don't you?"

  "Sure," he said. "I know where Canopy is, just like I know where Mulch is. You think I'm idiot, like Tom?"

  "You can take me there, then."

  "No, mister. I no can take you there."

  I began to unpeel another bill, before realising that our communicational difficulties stemmed from something more basic than insufficient funds, and that the problem was almost certainly on my side.

  "Is the Canopy a district of the city?"

  This was met by a long-suffering nod. "You new here, huh?"

  "Yes, I'm new. So why don't you do me a favour and explain just why taking me to the Canopy is beyond your means?"

  The bill I had half unpeeled vanished from my grip, and then Juan offered me the rear seat of the rickshaw as if it were a throne finished in plush velvet. "I show you, man. But I no take you there, you understand? For that you need more than rickshaw."

  He hopped in next to me, then leant forward and whispered something in the driver's ear. The primate began to pedal, grunting in what was probably profound indignation at the outcome to which his genetic heritage had been shaped.

  The bio-engineering of animals, I later learned, had been one of the few boom industries since the plague, exploiting a niche that had opened up once machines of any great sophistication began to fail.

  Like Quirrenbach had said not long ago, nothing that happened was ever completely bad for everyone.

  So it was with the plague.

  The missing wall provided an entrance and exit point for the volantors (and, I presumed, the other flying craft), but rickshaws entered and left the parking area by means of a sloping, concrete-lined tunnel. The dank walls and ceiling dripped thick mucosal fluids. It was at least cooler, and the noise of the terminus quickly faded, replaced only by the soft creaking of the cogs and chains which transmitted the ape's cycling motion to the wheels.

  "You new here," Juan said. "Not from Ferrisville, or even Rust Belt. Not even from rest of system."

  Was I so obtrusively ignorant that even a kid could see it?

  "I guess you don't get many tourists these days."

  "Not since bad time, no."

  "What was it like to live through?"

  "I dunno mister; I just two."

  Of course. It was seven years ago. From a child's perspective, that really was most of a lifetime ago. Juan, and Tom, and the other street children would barely be able to remember what life was like in Chasm City prior to the plague. Those few years of limitless wealth and possibility would be blurred with the soft-focus simplicity of infancy. All they knew, all they truly remembered, was the city as it now was: vast and dark and again filled with possibility-except now it was the possibility that lay in danger and crime and lawlessness; a city for thieves and beggars and those who could live by their wits rather than their credit ratings.

  It was just a shock to find myself in one.

  We passed other rickshaws returning to the concourse, slick sides glossy with rain. Only a few of them carried passengers, hunched sullenly down in raincoats, looking as if they would rather have been anywhere else in the universe than Chasm City. I could relate to that. I was tired, I was hot, sweat pooling under my clothes, and my skin itched and crawled for want of a wash. I was acutely conscious of my own body odour.

  What the hell was I doing here?

  I had a chased a man across more than fifteen light-years, into a city which had become a sick perversion of itself. The man I was chasing was not even truly bad-even I could see that. I hated Reivich for what he had done, but he had acted much as I would have done in the same circumstances. He was an aristocrat, not a man of arms, but in another life-if the history of our planet had followed another course-he and I might even have been friends. Certainly I had respect for him now, even if it was a respect born out of the way he had acted completely beyond my expectations when he destroyed the bridge at Nueva Valparaiso. Such casual brutality was to be admired. Any man that I misjudged that badly had my respect.

  And yet, for all that, I knew I'd have no qualms about killing him.

  "I think," Juan said, "you need history lesson, mister."

  What I had managed to learn aboard the Strelnikov had not been very much, but it was all the history I felt that I had an appetite for right now. "If you're thinking I don't know about the plague . . ."

  The tunnel was growing lighter ahead. Not much, but enough to indicate that we were about to enter the city proper. The light which suffused it had the same caramel-brown texture I'd seen from the behemoth: the colour of already murky light filtered through yet more murk.

  "Plague hit, make building go wacko," said Juan.

  "That much they told me."

  "They no tell you enough, mister." His syntax was rudimentary, but I suspected it was an improvement on anything the rickshaw driver was capable of. "Them building change, real fast." He made expansive hand gestures. "Many folk get die, get squashed or end up in wall."

  "That doesn't sound too nice."

  "I show you people in wall, mister. You no make joke no more. You shit own pants." We swerved to avoid another rickshaw, scraping against us. "But listen-them building, they change fastest up at top, right?"

  "I don't follow."

  "Them building like tree. Got big lot of root, stick in ground, right?"

  "Constructional feedlines, is that it? Leeching raw materials from the bedrock for repair and regrowth?"

  "Yeah. What I say. Like big tree. But like big tree in other way, too. Always grow up top. Unnerstan'?" More hand gestures, as if h
e were shaping the outline of a mushroom cloud.

  Perhaps I did understand. "You're saying the growth systems were concentrated in the upper parts of the structures?"

  "Yeah."

  I nodded. "Of course. Those structures were designed to dismantle themselves as well as grow higher. Either way, you'd always want to add or remove material from the top. So the nerve centre of the self-replicating machinery would always rise with the structure. The lower levels would need fewer systems; just the bare minimum to keep them ticking over and for repairing damage and wear, and for periodic redesigns."

  It was hard to tell if Juan's smile was one of congratulation-that I had worked this out for myself-or sympathy that it had taken me as long as it had.

  "Plague get to top first, carried by root. Start making top of building go wacko first. Lower down, stay same as before. By time plague got there, people cut root, starve building. No change any more."

  "But by then the upper parts had already changed beyond recognition." I shook my head. "It must have been a terrible time."

  "No shit, mister."

  We plunged into daylight, and I finally understood what Juan meant.

  Chapter Fifteen

  WE WERE at the lowest level of Chasm City, far below the rim of the caldera. The street on which we ran crossed a black lake on pontoons. Rain was falling softly from the sky-from the dome, in fact, many kilometres above our heads. All around us, vast buildings rose from the flood, sides slab-sided and immense. They were all I could see in any direction, until-forestlike-they merged into a distant, detailless wall, like a bank of smog. They were encrusted-at least for the first six or seven storeys-in a barnacle-like accretion of ramshackle dwellings and markets, lashed together and interlinked with flimsy walkways and rope-ladders. Fires burned in the slums, and the air was even more pungent than in the concourse. But it was fractionally cooler, and because there was a constant breeze, it felt less stifling.

  "What's this place called?" I said.

  "This Mulch," said Juan. "Everything down here, street level, this Mulch."