Chasm City

by Alastair Reynolds

I waited.

  Time passed, perhaps half an hour, long enough for me to become aware of the city darkening. As Epsilon Eridani sunk beneath the horizon, its light, already turned sepia by the dome, became the colour of ancient blood. What light reached me now had to pass through the tangle of intervening buildings, an ordeal which seemed to sap it of any real enthusiasm for the task of illumination. The towers around me grew dark, until they really did look like enormous trees, and the tangled limbs of the Canopy, lit up with habitation, were like branches hung with lanterns and fairy-lights. It was both nightmarish and beautiful.

  Finally one of those dangling lights detached itself like a falling star leaving the firmament, growing in intensity as it neared me. As my eyes readjusted to the night, I saw that the light was a descending cable-car, and that it was headed for the place where I stood.

  Oblivious to the rain, I watched transfixed as the vehicle slowed and lowered itself almost to street level, the tensioning and detensioning cables singing above me. The vehicle's single headlight panned across the rainswept road, heightening every crack in the surface, and then swept towards me.

  Not far from my feet, something made the puddled water jump comically upwards.

  And then I heard a gunshot.

  I did what any ex-soldier would do under those circumstances: not stop to consider the situation, or determine the type and calibre of weapon being used against me, or the location of the shooter-or even pause to establish that I was really the target, and not just a hapless intercessionary.

  I ran, very quickly, towards the shadowed base of the nearest building. I resisted the perfectly sensible flight reflex which told me to throw my suitcase away, knowing that without it, I would quickly sink into the anonymity of the Mulch. If I lost it, I might as well offer myself up to be shot.

  The gunfire chased me.

  I could tell from the way each shot landed a metre or so behind my heels that the person shooting at me was not lacking in skill. It would not have taxed them to kill me-they would have needed only to advance their line of fire fractionally, and I recognised that their marksmanship was more than sufficient. Instead, it suited them to play with me. They were in no hurry to execute me with a shot in the back, though it could have been achieved at any point.

  I reached the building, my feet submerged in water. The structure was slab-sided; no little indentations or crannies in which I could secrete myself. The gunfire halted, but the ellipse of the spotlight remained steady, the shaft of harsh blue light making curtains of the rain between me and the cable-car.

  A figure emerged from the darkness, clad in a greatcoat. At first I thought it was either the man or the woman I had spoken to earlier, but when the man emerged into the spotlight, I realised I hadn't seen his face before. He was bald, with a jaw of almost cartoon squareness, and one of his eyes was lost behind a pulsing monocle.

  "Stand perfectly still," he said, "and you won't be harmed." And his coat flapped apart to reveal a weapon, bulkier than the toy gun which the Canopy woman had carried, somehow more serious in intent. The gun consisted of a handled black rectangle, tipped with a quartet of dark nozzles. His knuckles were white around the grip, his forefinger caressing the trigger.

  He fired from hip-height; something buzzed out of the gun towards me, like a laser beam. It connected with the side of the building with a fizzle of sparks. I started running, but his aim was surer the second time. I felt a stabbing pain in my thigh, and then suddenly I was no longer running. Suddenly I was doing nothing except screaming.

  And then even screaming became too hard.

  The medics had done very well, but no one could be expected to work miracles. The monitoring machines crowding around his father's bed attested to that, voicing a slow and solemn liturgy of biological decline.

  It was six months since the sleeper had awakened and injured Sky's father, and it was to everyone's credit that they had kept Titus Haussmann and his assailant alive until now. But with medical supplies and expertise stretched to breaking point, there had never really been any realistic prospect of nursing both of them back to health.

  The recent series of disputes between the ships had certainly not assisted matters. The troubles had intensified a few weeks after the sleeper had awoken, when a spy had been discovered aboard the Brazilia . The security organisation had traced the agent back to the Baghdad , but the Baghdad's administration had declared that the spy had never been born on their ship at all and had probably originated on the Santiago or the Palestine all along. Other individuals had been fingered as possible agents, and there had been cries of wrongful imprisonment and violations of Flotilla law. Normal relations had chilled to a frosty four-way standoff, and now there was almost no trade between the ships; no human traffic except for despondent diplomatic missions which always ended in failure and recrimination.

  Against this backdrop, the requests for more medical supplies and knowledge to help nurse Sky's father had been shrugged aside. It was not, they said, as if the other ships did not have crises of their own. And as head of security, Titus was not beyond suspicion of having instigated the spying incident in the first place.

  Sorry, they had said. We'd like to help, we really would . . .

  Now his father struggled to speak.

  "Schuyler . . ." he said, his lips like a rip in parchment. "Schuyler? Is that you?"

  "I'm here, Dad. I never went away." He sat down on the bedside stool and studied the grey, grimacing shell that bore so little resemblance to the father he had known before the stabbing. This was not the Titus Haussmann who had been feared and loved in equal measure across the ship, and grudgingly respected throughout the Flotilla. This was not the man who had rescued him from the nursery during the blackout, nor the man who had taken his hand and escorted him to the taxi and out beyond the ship for the very first time, showing him the wonder and terror of his infinitely lonely home. This was not the caudillo who had gone into the berth ahead of his team, knowing full well that he might be walking into extreme danger. This was a faint impression of that man, like a rubbing taken off a statue. The features were there, and the proportions were accurate, but there was no depth. Rather than solidity, there was just a paper-thin layer.

  "Sky, about the prisoner." His father struggled to raise his head from the pillow. "Is he still alive?"

  "Just barely," Sky said. He had forced his way into the security team after his father had been injured. "Frankly, I don't expect him to last much longer. His wounds were a lot worse than yours."

  "But you managed to talk to him, anyway?"

  "We've got this and that out of him, yes." Sky sighed inwardly. He had told his father this much already, but either Titus was losing his memory or he wanted to hear it again.

  "What exactly did he tell you?"

  "Nothing we couldn't have guessed for ourselves. We're still not clear who put him aboard the ship, but it was almost certainly one of the factions they expected to cause some sort of trouble."

  His father raised a finger. "That weapon of his; the machinery built into his arm . . ."

  "Not as unusual as you'd think. There were apparently a lot of his kind around towards the end of the war. We were lucky they didn't build a nuclear device into his arm-although that would have been a lot harder to hide, of course."

  "Had he ever been human?"

  "We'll probably never know. Some of his kind were engineered in labs. Others were adapted from prisoners or volunteers. They had brain surgery and psycho-conditioning so that they could be used as weapons of war by any interested power. They were like robots, except they were constructed largely of flesh and blood and had a limited capacity to empathise with other people, where and when it suited their operational needs. They could blend in quite convincingly, crack jokes and share in smalltalk, until they reached their target, at which point they'd flip back into mindless killer mode. Some of them had weapons grafted into them for specific jobs."

  "There was a lot of metal in that forearm."r />
  "Yes." Sky saw the point his father was making. "Too much for him to have made his way aboard without someone turning a blind eye. Which only proves that there was a conspiracy, which we as good as knew anyway."

  "We found the only one, though."

  "Yes." In the days after the attack, the other sleeping passengers had all been scanned for buried weaponry-the process had been difficult and dangerous-but nothing had been found. "Which shows how confident they must have been."

  "Sky . . . did he say anything about why he did it, or why they made him do it?"

  Sky raised an eyebrow. This line of questioning, admittedly, was new. His father had concentrated only on specifics before.

  "Well, he did mention something."

  "Go on."

  "It didn't seem to make an awful lot of sense to me."

  "Perhaps not, but I'd still like to hear it."

  "He talked about a faction which had discovered something. He wouldn't say who or what they were, or where they were based."

  His father's voice was very weak now, but he still managed to ask, "And what exactly was it that they had discovered?"

  "Something ridiculous."

  "Tell me what it was, Sky." His father paused. Sensing his thirst, Sky had the room's robot administer a glass of water to the cracked gash of his lips.

  "He said there had been a breakthrough just before the Flotilla left the solar system-a scientific technique, in fact, which had been perfected towards the end of the war."

  "And this was?"

  "Human immortality." Sky said the words carefully, as if they were imbued with magic potency and ought not be uttered casually. "He said that the faction had combined various procedures and lines of research pursued during the century, bringing them together to create a viable therapeutic treatment. They succeeded where others had failed, or had their work suppressed for political reasons. What they came up with was complicated, and it wasn't simply a pill you took once and then forgot about."

  "Go on," Titus said.

  "It was a whole phalanx of different techniques, some of them genetic, some of them chemical, some of them dependent on invisibly small machines. The whole thing was fantastically delicate and difficult to administer, and the treament needed to be applied regularly-but it was something that was capable of working, if done properly."

  "And what did you think?"

  "I thought it was absurd, of course. Oh, I don't deny that something like that might have been possible-but if there'd been that kind of breakthrough, wouldn't everyone have known about it?"

  "Not necessarily. It was the end of a war, after all. The ordinary lines of communication were broken."

  "Then you're saying the faction might really have existed?"

  "Yes, I believe it did." His father paused, gathering his energies. "In fact, I know it did. I suspect most of what the Chimeric told you was true. The technique wasn't magic-there were some diseases it couldn't beat-but it was much better than anything evolution had given us. At best it would extend your lifespan to about one hundred and eighty years; two hundred in exteme cases-those were extrapolations, of course-but that didn't matter; all that did was that you'd get a chance at staying alive until something better came along."

  He slumped back into his pillow, exhausted.

  "Who knew?"

  His father smiled. "Who else? The wealthy. Those whom the war had been kind to. Those in the right places, or those who knew the right people."

  The next question was obvious and chilling. The Flotilla had been launched while the war was still in its end stages. Many of those who had obtained sleeper berths, in fact, had been seeking to escape what they saw as a ruined and dangerous system just waiting to slip into another fullscale bloodbath. But competition for those spaces had been immense, and although they had supposedly been allocated on the basis of merit, there must have means for those with sufficient influence to get aboard. If Sky had ever doubted that, the presence of the saboteur proved it. Someone, somewhere, had pulled strings to get the Chimeric aboard.

  "All right. What about the sleepers? How many of them knew about the immortality breakthrough?"

  "All of them, Sky."

  He looked at his father lying there, wondering how close to death the man really was. He should have recovered from the stab wounds-the damage had not really been that great-but complications had set in: trivial infections which nonetheless lingered and spread. Once, the Flotilla's medicine could have saved him, could have got him up on his feet in a matter of days with no more than a little discomfort. But now there was essentially nothing that could be done except to assist his own healing processes. And they were slowly losing the battle.

  He thought of what Titus Haussmann had just said. "How many of them actually had the treatment, then?"

  "The same answer."

  "All of them?" He shook his head, almost not believing it. "All the sleepers we carry?"

  "Yes. With a few unimportant exceptions-those who chose not to undergo it, on ethical or medical grounds, for instance. But most of them did take the cure, shortly before coming aboard." His father paused again. "It's the single biggest secret of my life, Sky. I've always known this-ever since my father told me, anyway. I didn't find it any easier to take, believe me."

  "How could you keep a secret like that?"

  His father managed the faintest of shrugs. "It was part of my job."

  "Don't say that. It doesn't excuse you. They betrayed us, didn't they?"

  "That depends. Admittedly, they didn't bestow their secret on the crew. But that was a form of kindness, I think."

  "Why do you say that?"

  "Imagine if we'd been immortal. We'd have had to endure a century and a half of imprisonment aboard this thing. It would have driven us slowly mad. That was what they feared. Better to let the crew live out a normal lifespan, and then have another generation take over the reins."

  "You call that kindness?"

  "Why not? Most of us don't know any better, Sky. Oh, we serve the sleepers, but because we know that not all of them will wake up safely when we reach Journey's End, it isn't easy to feel too envious. And we have ourselves to look after, too. We run the ship for the sleepers, but also for ourselves."

  "Yes. Very equitable. Knowing that they kept the secret of immortality from us does alter the relationship a smidgeon, you have to admit."

  "Perhaps. That's why I was always so careful to keep the secret from anyone else."

  "But you just told me."

  "You wanted to know if there was any truth to the saboteur's story, didn't you? Well, now you know." His father's face grew momentarily serene, as if a great burden had been lifted from him. Sky thought for an instant that his father had slipped away from him, but shortly afterwards his eyes moved and he licked his lips to speak again. It was still an immense effort to talk at all. "And there was another reason, too . . . this is very hard, Sky. I'm not sure I'm doing the right thing by telling you."

  "Why not let me be the judge of that."

  "Very well. You may as well hear it now. I almost told you on countless other occasions, but never quite had the courage of my convictions. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, as they say."

  "What little knowledge would that be, exactly?"

  "About your own status." He asked for more water before speaking again. Sky thought of the water in that glass; the molecules which were slipping between his father's lips. Every drop of water on the ship was ultimately recycled, to be drunk again and again. In interstellar space there could be no wastage. At some point, months or years from now, Sky would drink some of the same water that was now bringing relief to his father.

  "My status?"

  "I'm afraid you're not my son." He looked at him hard, as if waiting for Sky to crack under the revelation. "There, I've said it. No going back now. You'll have to hear the rest of it."

  Maybe he was losing it faster than the machines had indicated, Sky thought. Slipping swiftly down into the lightl
ess trench of dementia, his bloodstream poisoned, his brain grasping for oxygen.

  "I am your son."

  "No. No; you're not. I should know, Sky. I pulled you out of that sleeper berth."

  "What are you talking about?"

  "You were one of them-one of our momios ; one of our sleepers."

  Sky nodded, accepting this truth instantly. On some level he knew that the normal reaction would have been disbelief, perhaps even anger, but he felt none of that; only a deep and calming sense of rightness.

  "How old was I?"

  "Barely a child, only a few days old when you were frozen. There were only a few others as young as you."

  He listened to his father- nothis father-as he explained that Lucretia Haussmann-the woman Sky thought of as his mother-had given birth to a baby aboard the ship, but that the child, a boy, had died within hours. Distraught, Titus had kept the truth from Lucretia for hours, then days, stretching his ingenuity to the limit while she was kept as sedated as possible. Titus feared the truth would kill her if she found out; maybe not physically, but he worried that it would crush her spirit. She was one of the most loved women on the ship. Her loss would affect them all: a poison that might sour the general mood of the crew. They were a tiny community, after all. They all knew each other. The loss of a child would be a dreadful thing to bear.

  So Titus conceived a terrible plan, one he would regret almost as soon as he had brought it to fruition. But by then it was much too late.

  He stole a child from the sleepers. Children, it turned out, were far more tolerant of revival than adults-it was something to do with the ratio of body volume to surface-and there had been no serious problems in warming the selected child. He had picked one of the young ones, one that would pass as his dead son. He did not have to be too meticulous. Lucretia had not seen her own baby long enough to tell that any deception had taken place.

  He put the dead child in its place, cooled the berth down again and then asked for forgiveness. By the time the dead child was discovered, he would be long dead himself. It would be a dreadful thing for the parents to wake to, but at least they would also be waking to a new world, with time enough to try for another child. It would not be the same for them as it would have been for Lucretia. And if it was . . . well, without this crime, things might deteriorate on the ship to the point where it never reached its destination. That was an extreme case, but it was not beyond the bounds of possibility. He had to believe that. Had to believe that in some way what he had done was for the greater good of them all.