Chasm City

by Alastair Reynolds

  "Tanner, where are you? Why did you leave?"

  "I . . ." I paused, on the verge of telling her I was near Grand Central Station, if that was not adequately obvious from the view behind me. "No, I'd better not. I think I trust you, Zebra, but you're too close to the Game. It's better if you don't know."

  "You think I'd betray you?"

  "No, although I wouldn't blame you if you did. But I can't risk anyone finding out via you."

  "Who's left to find out? You did a fairly comprehensive job on Waverly, I hear." Her striped face filled the screen, monochrome skin tone offset by the bloodshot pink of her eyes.

  "He played the Game from both sides. He must have known it would get him killed sooner or later."

  "He may have been a sadist, but he was one of us."

  "What was I supposed to do-smile nicely and ask them to desist?" A warm squall of harder rain lashed out of the sky, and I moved under the ledged side of a building for protection, cupping my hand over the phone, Zebra's image dancing like a reflection in water. "I had nothing personal against Waverly, in case you wondered. Nothing that a warm bullet wouldn't have fixed."

  "You didn't use a bullet, from what I heard."

  "He put me in a position where killing him was my only option. And I did it efficiently, in case you were wondering." I spared her the details of what I had found when I caught up with Waverly on the ground; it would not change anything to know he had been harvested by the Mulch.

  "You're quite capable of looking after yourself, aren't you? I began to wonder when I found you in that building. Mostly, they don't even make it that far. Certainly not if they've been shot. Who are you, Tanner Mirabel?"

  "Someone trying to survive," I said. "I'm sorry about what I took from you. You took care of me, and I'm grateful, and if I can find a way of repaying you for that and the things I took, I will."

  "You didn't have to go anywhere," Zebra said. "I said I'd offer you sanctuary until the Game was over."

  "I'm afraid I had business I had to attend to." It was a mistake; the last thing Zebra needed to know about was the business with Reivich, but now I had invited her to speculate about just what it would take to bring a man out of hiding.

  "The odd thing is," she said, "I almost believe you when you say you'll pay me back. I don't know why, but I think you're a man of your word, Tanner."

  "You're right," I said. "And I think one day it'll be the death of me."

  "What's that meant to mean?"

  "Never mind. Is there a hunt tonight, Zebra? I thought you might know, if anyone would."

  "There is," she said, after consideration. "But I don't see how it concerns you, Tanner. Haven't you learnt your lesson yet? You're lucky to be alive."

  I smiled. "I guess I'm just not sick enough of Chasm City yet."

  I returned the rented phone to its owner and considered my options. Zebra's face and the timbre of her voice lurked behind every conscious thought. Why had I called her? There had been no reason for it, except to apologise, and even that was pointless; a gesture more aimed at ameliorating my conscience than aiding the woman from whom I had stolen. I had been well aware how much my betrayal would hurt her, and well aware that I was not going to be able to pay her back at any point in the foreseeable future. Yet something had made me make that call, and when I tried to pare away my superficial motives to find what really lay below them, all I found was a mélange of emotions and impulses: her smell; the sound of her laugh, the curve of her hips and the way the stripes on her back had contorted and released when she rolled aside from me after our lovemaking. I did not like what I found, so I slammed the lid on those thoughts just as if I had opened a box of vipers . . .

  I walked back into the crowds of the bazaar, letting their noise oppress my thoughts into submission, concentrating instead on the now. I still had money; I was still a rich man by Mulch standards, no matter how little influence it counted for in the Canopy. Asking around and comparing prices, I found a room for rent, a few blocks across the Mulch, in what was apparently one of the less rundown districts.

  The room was shabby, even by Mulch standards. It was one cubic corner element in a teetering eight-storeyed encrustation of structures lashed around the footslopes of a major structure. On the other hand, it also looked very old and established, having gained its own parasitic layer of encrustations in the form of ladders, staircases, horizontal landings, drainage conduits, trellises and animal cages, so while the complex might not be the safest in the Mulch, it had obviously endured for some years and was unlikely to choose my arrival as a sign to start collapsing. I accessed my room via a series of ladder and landing traverses, my feet padding over rents in the wattlelike bamboo flooring, street level dizzyingly far below. The room was lit by gas lamps, although I noticed that other parts of the complex were furnished with electricity, served by constantly droning methane-powered generators somewhere below, machines which were locked in furious competition with the local street musicians, criers, muezzins, vendors and animals. But I soon stopped noticing the sounds, and when I drew the room's blinds, it became tolerably dark.

  The room contained no furniture except a bed, but that was all that I needed.

  I sat down on it and thought about all that had happened. I felt myself free of any Haussmann episodes for the time being and that allowed me to look back on those that I had experienced so far, with something bordering on cool, clinical detachment.

  There was something wrong about them.

  I'd come to kill Reivich and yet-almost accidentally-I was getting glimpses of something larger, something I didn't like the shape of. It wasn't just the Haussmann episodes, although they were a large part of it. Certainly they had begun normally enough. I hadn't exactly welcomed them, but given that I already knew roughly what form they were going to take, I thought I could ride them out.

  But it wasn't happening like that.

  The dreams-episodes now, since they had begun to invade daylight-were revealing a deeper history: additional crimes which no one even suspected Sky had committed. There was the question of the infiltrator's continued existence; the sixth ship-the fabled Caleuche -and the fact that Titus Haussmann had believed Sky to be one of the immortals. But Sky Haussman was dead, wasn't he? Hadn't I seen his crucified body in Nueva Valparaiso? Even if that body had been faked, it was a matter of public record that, in the dark days following the landing, he had been captured, imprisoned, tried, sentenced and executed, all in full view of the people.

  So why did I have my doubts that he was really dead?

  It's just the indoctrinal virus screwing with your head, I told myself.

  But Sky wasn't the only thing troubling me as I fell asleep.

  I was overlooking a rectangular room, as if the chamber were a dungeon or baiting pit, and I was standing on some balconied observation gallery. The room was blindingly white, walled and floored in shiny ceramic tiles, but strewn with large glossy green ferns and artfully arranged tree branches, creating a tableau of jungle vegetation. And there was a man on the floor.

  I thought I recognised the chamber.

  The man was curled up in a foetal position, naked, as if he had just been placed there and been allowed to wake. His skin was pallid and was covered in a sheen of sweat, like sugar glazing. Gradually he raised his head and opened his eyes, looking around, and tried slowly rising to his feet-tried, and then stumbled into another permutation of the huddle in which he had begun. He could not stand because one of his legs ended in a clean, bloodless stump just below the ankle, like the sewn-up end of a sausage. He tried again, and this time managed to reach a wall, hopping to get there, before balance deserted him. There was a look of inexpressible terror on his face. The man started shouting, and then his shouts became more frantic.

  I watched him shiver. And then something moved on the other side of the room, in a dark alcove situated in one of the white walls. Whatever it was moved slowly and silently, but the man was aware of its presence, and now his shouts bec
ame shrieks, like the squealing of a pig being slaughtered. The thing emerged from the alcove on the other side of the room, dropping in a bundle of dark coils, thick as a human thigh. It still moved languidly, hooded head rising to test the air, and yet more of it struggled from the alcove. By now the man's screams were punctuated by sharp silences as he drew breath, a contrast which only served to heighten the dread in the sounds he made. And I felt nothing, except a kind of expectancy, my heart tight in my chest, as the hamadryad moved towards the man, and there was nowhere he could run to.

  I woke, sweating.

  A while later I hit the streets. I had slept for most of the afternoon, and while I did not exactly feel refreshed-my mind, certainly, was in a worse state of turmoil than it had been before-I was at least not so crippled with tiredness. I moved through lazy Mulch traffic: pedestrians, rickshaws, steam and methane-driven contraptions; the occasional palanquin, volantor or cable-car passing through, though never lingering for very long. I noticed that I attracted less attention than when I had first entered the city. Unshaven, my eyes sunk into tired sockets, I was looking more like I belonged in the Mulch.

  The late afternoon vendors were setting up stalls, some of them already hanging lanterns in preparation for the coming dusk. A misshapen, maggot-like methane-filled dirigible navigated ponderously overhead, someone lashed to a gondola beneath it calling out slogans through a megaphone. Broken neon images flickered over a projection screen hanging beneath the gondola. I heard what sounded like a muezzin call across the Mulch, calling the faithful to prayer, or whatever observance they practised here. And then I saw a man with pendulous, jewel-studded ears whose mobile stall was hung with small wicker baskets holding snakes of every size and colour imaginable. When I watched him open a cage and prod one of the darker snakes, its coils shifting uneasily, I thought of the ceramic-white room in my dream which I now recognised as the pit where Cahuella kept the juvenile, and shivered, and wondered what any of it meant.

  Later, I bought a gun.

  Unlike the weapon I had stolen from Zebra, and then pawned, it was neither cumbersome nor conspicuous. It was a small pistol which I could comfortably slip into one of the pockets of the greatcoat. It was manufactured off-world. The gun fired ice-slugs: bullets of pure water-ice accelerated to supersonic speed by a captive jacket which was driven down the barrel by a sequenced ripple of magnetic fields. Ice-slugs did as much damage as metal or ceramic bullets, but when they shattered into the body, their fragments melted away invisibly. The main advantage in such a weapon was that it could be charged from any supply of reasonably pure water, although it worked best with the carefully pre-frozen cache of slugs in the weapon's manufacturer-supplied cryo-clip. It was also nearly impossible to trace the owner of such a gun if a crime had been committed, making it an ideal assassination tool. It didn't matter that the slugs had no autonomous target-seeking capacity, or that they would not penetrate some kinds of armour. Something as absurdly powerful as Zebra's rifle would make sense as an instrument of assassination only if I got an opportunity to kill Reivich from halfway across the city, which was very unlikely. It was never going to be the kind of kill where you sat in a window squinting through the telescopic sight of a high-powered rifle, waiting until the target intersected the crosshairs, his image wavering through kilometres of heat-haze. It was always going to be the kind where you walked into the same room and did it with a single bullet at close range, close enough to see the whites of his fear-dilated eyes.

  Evening fell over the Mulch. Apart from the streets in the area immediately around the bazaars, pedestrian traffic thinned out and the shadows cast by the towering roots of the Canopy began to assume an air of sullen menace.

  I got to work.

  The kid driving the rickshaw might have been the same one who had originally taken me into the Mulch, or his virtually interchangeable brother. He had the same aversion to my planned destination as well-unwilling to ferry me where I wanted to go until I sweetened the proposition with the promise of a generous tip. Even then he was reluctant, but we set off anyway, navigating through the darkening glade of the city at a pace which suggested he was more than eager to complete the journey and return home. Some of his nervousness rubbed off on me, because I found my hand wandering into the pocket of my coat to feel the comforting cold mass of the gun, reassuring as any talisman.

  "What you want, Mister? Ev'ryone know this no good part of Mulch, you better stay out of it, you smart."

  "That's what people keep telling me," I said. "So I suppose you'd better assume that I'm not as intelligent as I seem."

  "I no say that, Mister. You pay plenty fine; you plenty smart feller. I just give you good advice, is all."

  "Thanks, but my advice to you is to just drive and keep your eye on the road. Let me worry about the rest."

  It was a conversation killer, but I wasn't in much of a mood for idle banter. Instead I watched the darkening trunks of the buildings creep past, their deformities beginning to assume a weird normality, a strange sense that this was how all cities were meant to look, ultimately.

  There were parts of the Mulch relatively uncovered by Canopy, and parts where the density of the overlying structures could not have been any higher, so that the Mosquito Net itself was completely blocked out and when the sun was at its zenith, none of its light permeated to the ground. These were supposedly the worst areas of the Mulch: areas of permanent night where crime was the only law which mattered, and where the inhabitants played games which were no less bloody and cruel than those favoured by the people who lived overhead. I could not persuade the rickshaw kid to take me into the heart of the slum zone, so I settled for being dropped on the perimeter, pocketed hand wrapped around the slug-gun.

  I trudged through the ankle-deep rainwater for several minutes until I reached the side of a building which I recognised from the description Zebra had given me, and then crouched in a niche which offered some protection from the rain. Then I waited, and waited, while the last meagre traces of daylight vanished from the scene and all the shadows merged conspiratorially into one great city-hugging pall of gloomy grey.

  And then waited, and waited again.

  Night fell across Chasm City, the Canopy lighting up above me, the arms of the linked structures dimpled with light like the glowing tentacles of phosphorescent sea-creatures. I watched cable-cars move through the tangle, their motion like pebbles skipping waves as they swung from line to line. An hour passed and I readjusted my position dozens of times, never finding one that was comfortable for more than a few minutes, before cramps began to set in. I'd take out the gun and sight along it, and I allowed myself the luxury of wasting a slug, shooting at the side of the building across from me, anticipating the recoil and getting a feel for the weapon's accuracy or lack thereof. No one disturbed me, and I doubt that there was anyone close enough to hear the gun's high-pitched shots.

  Finally, however, they came.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  I WATCHED the car drop down two or three blocks away: sleek and black as polished coal, with five telescopic arms retracting on the roof. The side door cracked open and four people spilled out of it, cradling weapons which made my own little gun look like a bad joke. Zebra had told me there was a hunt going down tonight, though that was nothing unusual; hunts were the norm rather than the exception. But she had also-after considerable persuasion-revealed the likely site for the bloody revelry. There was a lot riding on it, the failure to kill me having ruined a perfectly good night's entertainment for the paying voyeurs who followed each chase.

  "I'll tell you where it is," she had said. "Only on the grounds that you use that information to keep away from it. Is that understood? I saved you once, Tanner Mirabel, but then you betrayed my trust. That hurt. It doesn't particularly dispose me towards helping you a second time."

  "You know what I'll do with that information, Zebra."

  "Yes, I suppose I do. At least you haven't lied to me, I'll give you that. You really are a
man of your word, aren't you?"

  "I'm not all that you think I am, Zebra." I felt I owed her that, if she had not already worked that part out for herself.

  She had told me the sector that had been cleared for the chase. The subject, she said, had already been acquired and equipped with an implant-sometimes they made several raids on a given night, and kept the victims asleep until a gaming slot arose.

  "Does anyone ever escape, Zebra?"

  "You did, Tanner."

  "No, I mean, really escape, without being helped by the sabs. Does that happen?"

  "Sometimes," she said. "Sometimes-maybe more often than you'd think. Not because the hunted manage to outwit the chasers, but because the organisers occasionally allow it. Otherwise, it would get boring, wouldn't it?"

  "Boring?"

  "There'd be no element of chance. The Canopy would always win."

  "That certainly wouldn't do," I said.

  I watched them creep through the rain now, guns swept ahead of them, their masked faces darting from side to side, examining every nook and cranny. The target must have been dropped in this zone a few minutes before, quietly, perhaps not even fully awake, like the naked man in the white-walled room, slowly coming to his senses to realise that he was sharing his confines with something unspeakable.

  There were two women and two men, and as they came closer I saw that their masks were a combination of theatrical decoration and practicality. The two women both wore cat masks: long tapering feline eyeslits packed with specialised lenses. Their gloves were clawed, and when their black, high-backed cloaks parted, I saw that their clothes were patterned in tiger stripes and leopard spots. Then I realised that they were not clothes at all, but furred synthetic skin, and that those clawed gloves were not gloves but unsheathed hands. One of the women grinned, flashing jewelled fangs, sharing a cruel joke with her friends. The men were not so ostentatiously transformed, their animal personae derived solely from their costumes. The nearest man had a bear's head, his own face peering from under the bear's upper jaw. His companion's face sported two ugly, faceted insect eyes which constantly caught and refracted the light of the suspended Canopy.