A crime of love.
Of course, Titus could have accomplished none of this without help, but only a handful of his closest friends had ever known the truth, and they had all been good associates who had never again spoken of the matter. They were all dead now, Titus said.
That was why it was so necessary that he tell Sky now.
"You understand?" Titus asked. "When I always told you you were precious . . . ? That was the literal truth. You were the only immortal amongst us. That was why I raised you in isolation at first; why you spent so much time alone, in the nursery, away from the other children. Partly I wanted to shield you from infections-you were no less vulnerable than the other children, and you're no less vulnerable now, as an adult. Mainly it was so that I could know for myself. I had to study your developmental curve. It's slower for those who have had the treatment, Sky, and it keeps on flattening as you get older. You're twenty now, but you could pass for a tall young man barely into his teens. By the time you're thirty or forty, people will speak of you as someone with uncommonly youthful looks. But they won't begin to guess the truth-not until you're much, much older."
"I'm immortal?"
"Yes. It changes everything, doesn't it."
Sky Haussmann rather had to admit that it did.
Later, when his father had fallen into one of the abyssal dreamless sleeps that was like an inevitable foreshadowing of his death, Sky visited the saboteur. The Chimeric prisoner lay on exactly the same kind of bed as his father, attended by machines, but there the similarities ended. The machines were observing the man, but he was strong enough not to need their direct assistance. Too strong, in fact-even after they had dug a magazine-load of slugs out of him. He was attached to the bed with plastic bonds, a broad hoop across his waist and legs, two smaller hoops anchoring his upper arms. He could move one forearm enough to touch his face, while the other arm, of course, had ended only in the weapon he had used to stab Titus. Even the weapon was gone now, the cyborg's forearm ending in a neatly sewn stump. They had searched him for other kinds of weapon, but he carried no other concealed devices, except for the implants his masters had used to shape him to their goals.
In a way, the faction that had sent the infiltrator had been spectacularly unimaginative, Sky thought. They had placed too much emphasis on him being able to sabotage the ship, when a nice, easily transferred virus would have been just as effective. It might not have directly harmed the sleepers, but their chances of making it anywhere without a living crew would have been vanishingly small.
Which was not to say that the Chimeric might not still have its uses.
It was strange, infinitely so, to know that one was suddenly immortal. Sky did not concern himself with trifling matters of definition. It was true enough that he was not invulnerable, but with care and forethought he could minimise the risks to himself.
He took a step back from the killer's bed. They thought they had the better of the saboteur, but one could never be entirely sure. Even though the monitors said the man was in a sleep at least as deep as his father's, it paid not to take chances. They were engineered to deceive, these things. They could do inhuman tricks with their heartrate and neural activity. That one unbound forearm could have grabbed Sky by the throat and squeezed him until he died, or pulled him so close that the man could have eaten his face off.
Sky found a medical kit on the wall. He flipped it open, studied the neatly racked implements inside and then pulled out a scalpel, glistening with blue sterility in the room's subdued lighting. He turned it this way and that, admiring the way the blade vanished as he turned it edge on.
It was a fine weapon, he thought; a thing of excellence.
With it he moved towards the saboteur.
Chapter Sixteen
"HE'S COMING round," a voice said, crystallising my sluggish thoughts towards consciousness.
One of the things you learnt as a soldier-at least on Sky's Edge-was that not everyone who shot you necessarily wanted to kill you. At least not immediately. There were reasons for this, not all of them to do with the usual mechanics of hostage-taking. Memories could be trawled from captured soldiers without the crudities of torture-all it required was the kind of neural-imaging technology which Ultras could supply, at a price, and for there to be something worth learning in the first place. Intelligence, in other words-the kind of operational knowledge which soldiers must know if they are to have any value at all.
But it had never happened to me. I had been shot at, and hit, but on all the occasions when it happened, no one had been intending that I live, for even the relatively short length of time that it would take to winnow my memories. I had never been captured by the enemy, and so had never had the dubious pleasure of waking to find myself in anything other than safe hands.
Now, though, I was learning exactly how it felt.
"Mister Mirabel? Are you awake?" Someone wiped something soft and cold across my face. I opened my eyes and squinted against light, which was painfully bright after my period of unconsciousness.
"Where am I?"
"Somewhere safe."
I looked around blearily. I was in a chair at the high end of a long sloping room. On either side of me the fluted metal walls angled downwards, as if I were descending an escalator down a gently angled tunnel. The walls were punctured by oval windows, but I couldn't see much except darkness ribboned with long chains of tangled fairy-lights. I was high above the surface of the city, then almost certainly in some part of the Canopy. The floor consisted of a series of horizontal surfaces which descended towards the low end of the room, which must have been fifteen metres away and two or three metres below me. They looked like they'd been added on afterwards, as if the room's slope was not quite intentional.
I wasn't alone, of course.
The square-jawed man with the monocle was standing next to me, one hand toying with his chin, as if he needed to keep reminding himself of its magnificant rectilinearity. In his other hand was a limp flannel, the means by which I had been so gently assisted towards consciousness.
"I've got to hand it to you," the man said. "I miscalculated the dose in that stun beam. It would have killed some people, and I expected you to be out cold for a good few hours more." Then he placed a hand on my shoulder. "But you're fine, I think. A pretty strong fellow. You'll have to accept my apologies-it won't happen again, I assure you."
"You'd better not do it again," said the woman who had just stepped into my field of vision. I recognised her, of course-and her companion, who hoved into view on my right, pushing a cigarette to his lips. "You're getting sloppy, Waverly. This man must have thought you were planning to kill him."
"That wasn't the idea?" I said, finding that I sounded nowhere near as slurred as I had been expecting.
Waverly shook his head gravely. "Not at all. I was doing my best to save your life, Mister Mirabel."
"You've got a pretty funny way of going about it."
"I had to act quickly. You were about to be ambushed by a group of pigs. Do you know about pigs, Mister Mirabel? You probably don't want to. They're one of the less salubrious immigrant groups we've had to deal with since the fall of the Glitter Band. They had arranged a tripwire across the roadway connected to a crossbow. Normally they don't stalk anyone until later in the evening, but they must have been hungry tonight."
"What did you shoot me with?"
"Like I said, a stun beam. Quite a humane weapon, really. The laser beam is only a precursor-it establishes an ionised path through the air, down which a paralysing electrical flux can be discharged."
"It's still painful."
"I know, I know." He raised his hands defensively. "I've taken a few hits myself. I'm afraid I had it calibrated to stun a pig, rather than a human. But perhaps it was for the best. You'd have resisted me if I hadn't put you under so comprehensively, I suspect."
"Why did you save me, anyway?"
He looked put out. "It was the decent thing to do, I'd have thought."
> Now the woman spoke. "At first I misjudged you, Mister Mirabel. You put me on edge and I didn't trust you completely."
"All I did was ask for some advice."
"I know-the fault's all mine. But we're all so nervous these days. After we'd left, I felt bad about it and told Waverly to keep an eye on you. Which is what he did."
" Aneye, yes, Sybilline," Waverly said.
"And where would here happen to be?" I said.
"Show him, Waverly. He must want to stretch his legs by now."
I'd half expected to have been secured to the chair, but I was free to move. Waverly offered me a supporting arm while I tested the usefulness of my legs. The muscle in the leg where the beam had touched still felt like jelly, but it was just about able to support me. I stepped past the woman, descending the series of level surfaces until I'd reached the lowest part of the room. At that end there was a pair of double doors which opened onto the night air. Waverly led me out onto a sloping balcony, bounded by a metal railing. Warm air slapped against my face.
I looked back. The balcony surrounded the building where I had awoken, rising up on either side of it. But the building wasn't really a building.
It was the gondola of an airship, tipped up at an angle. Above us, the craft's gasbag was a dark mass pinned between branches of the Canopy. The airship must have been trapped here when the plague hit, caught like a balloon in a tree. The gasbag was so impermeable that it was still fully inflated, seven years after the plague. But it was crimped and distorted by the pressure of the branches which had formed around it, and I couldn't help wondering how strong it really was-and what would happen to the gondola if the bag was punctured.
"It must have happened really fast," I said, having visions of the airship trying to steer itself out of the path of the malforming building.
"Not that quickly," Waverly said, as if I'd said something deeply foolish. "This was a sightseeing airship-there were dozens of them, back in the old days. When the trouble came, no one was much interested in sightseeing anymore. They left the airship moored here while the building grew around it, but it still took a day or so for the branches to trap it completely."
"And now you live in it?"
"Well, not exactly. It isn't all that safe, really. That's why we don't have to worry too much about anyone else paying us any attention."
Behind, the door swung open again and the woman emerged. "An unorthodox place to wake you, I admit." She joined Waverly next to the railing, leaning bravely over the edge. It must have been an easy kilometre to the ground. "But it does have its uses, discretion being one of them. Now then, Mister Mirabel. I expect you are in need of some good food and hospitality-am I right?"
I nodded, thinking that if I stayed with these people, they might provide a means for me to enter the Canopy proper. That was the rational argument for agreeing. The other part was born out of sheer relief and gratitude and the fact that I was as tired and hungry as she probably imagined.
"I don't want to impose."
"Nonsense. I did you a great disservice in the Mulch, and then Waverly rather compounded the error with his hamfisted stun setting-didn't you, Waverly? Well, we'll say no more of it-provided you do us the honour of providing you with a little food and rest." The woman took something black out of a pocket, folding it open and elongating an aerial before speaking into it. "Darling? We're ready now. We'll meet at the high end of the gondola."
She snapped the telephone shut and pushed it back into her pocket.
We walked around the side of the gondola, using the railing to haul our way up the slope without slipping. At the highest point the railing had been cut away so that there was nothing between me and the ground except a lot of air. Waverly and Sybilline-if that was her name-could have easily pushed me over the edge had either of them meant me any harm, especially in my generally disorientated state. More than that, they'd had plenty of opportunities to do it before I woke up.
"Here he comes," Waverly said, pointing under the sagging curve of the gasbag. I watched a cable-car descend into view. It looked a lot like the one I'd first seen Sybilline in, but I wasn't pretending to be an expert just yet. The car's arms grasped threads entangled around the gasbag, tugging the blimp out of shape, but managing not to puncture it. The car came close, its door opening and a ramp extending out to bridge the gap to the gondola.
"After you, Tanner," Sybilline said.
I crossed the bridge. It was only a step of a metre or so, but there was no protection on either side and it took an effort of nerve to make the crossing. Sybilline and Waverly followed me blithely. Living in the Canopy must have given everyone an inhuman head for heights.
There were four seats in the rear compartment and a windowed partition between us and the driver. Before the window was closed, I saw that the driver was the high-cheekboned, grey-eyed man who had been with Sybilline earlier.
"Where are you taking me?" I said.
"To eat? Where else?" Sybilline placed a hand on my forearm, trustingly. "The best place in the city, Tanner. Certainly the place with the best view."
A night-time flight across Chasm City. With only the lights to trace the geometry of the city, it was almost possible to pretend that the plague hadn't happened. The shapes of the buildings were lost in the darkness, except where the upper branches were picked out by tentacles and star-streams of glowing windows, or the neon scribbles of advertisements whose meaning I couldn't fathom, spelt in the cryptic ideograms of Canasian. Now and then we would pass one of the older buildings that hadn't been affected by the plague, standing stiff and regular amongst the changed ones. More often than not those buildings were still damaged, even if they hadn't been caused to physically mutate. Other adjacent structures had thrust limbs through their neighbours, or undermined their foundations. Some had wrapped themselves around other buildings like strangler vines. There had been fires, explosions and riots during the days of the plague, and very little had emerged from those times completely unscathed.
"You see that one?" Sybilline said, drawing my attention to a pyramid-shape which was more or less intact. It was a very low structure, almost lost in the Mulch, but it was picked out by searchlights arcing down from above. "That's the Monument to the Eighty. I assume you know the story?"
"Not in any detail."
"It was a long time ago. This man tried to scan people into computers, but the technology wasn't mature. They were killed by the scanning process, which was bad enough, but then the simulations started to go wrong. There were eighty of them, including the man himself. When it was all over, when most of them had failed, their families had that monument built. But it's seen better days now."
"Like the whole city," Waverly said.
We continued across town. Travelling by cable-car took a little getting used to, as my stomach was discovering. When the car was passing through a place where there were many threads, the ride was almost as smooth and level as a volantor. But as soon as the threads started to thin out-as the car traversed the parts of the Canopy where there were no major branches, for instance-the trajectory became a lot less crowlike and a lot more gibbonlike: wide, stomach-churning arcs punctuated by jolts of upwards thrust. It should have felt very natural, given that the human brain was supposed to have evolved for exactly this kind of arboreal living.
But that was a few too many million years ago for me.
Eventually the cable-car's sickening arcs took us down towards ground level. I remembered Quirrenbach telling me the locals referred to the city's great merged dome as the Mosquito Net, and here it reached down until it touched the ground near the chasm's rim. In this inner perimeter region the vertical stratification of the city was less pronounced. There was an intermingling of Canopy and Mulch, an indeterminate zone where the Mulch reached up to brush the underneath of the dome, and places where the Canopy forced itself underground, into armoured plazas where the wealthy could walk unmolested.
It was into one of those enclaves that Sybilline's driv
er took us, dropping the cable-car's undercarriage and steering the craft onto a landing deck where other cars were parked. The edge of the dome was a sloping stained-brown wall leaning over us like a breaking wave. Through the parts which were still more or less transparent, the huge wide maw of the chasm was visible; the city on the other side of it only a distant forest of twinkling lights.
"I've called ahead and booked us a table at the stalk," said the man with the iron-grey eyes, stepping out of the car's driving compartment. "Word is Voronoff's going to be eating there tonight, so the place is pretty packed."
"I'm pleased," Sybilline said. "You can always rely on Voronoff to add a little gloss to the evening." Casually she opened a compartment in the side of the car and pulled out a black purse, opening it to reveal little vials of Dream Fuel and one of the ornate wedding-guns I'd seen aboard the Strelnikov .
She tugged down her collar and pressed the gun against her neck, gritting her teeth as she shunted a cubic centimetre of the dark red fluid into her bloodstream. Then she passed the gun to her partner, who injected himself before returning the baroquely ornamented instrument to Sybilline.
"Tanner?" she said. "Do you want a spike?"
"I'll pass," I said.
"Fine." She folded the kit away in the compartment as if what had taken place was of no particular consequence.
We left the car and walked across the landing deck to a sloping ramp which led down into a brightly lit plaza. It was a lot less squalid than any part of the city I'd seen so far: clean, cool and packed with wealthy-looking people, palanquins, servitors and bio-engineered animals. Music pulsed from the walls, which were tuned to show city scenes from before the plague. A strange, spindly robot made its way down the thoroughfare, towering over people on its bladelike legs. It was made entirely out of sharp, gleaming surfaces, like a collection of enchanted swords.
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