The place had the smell of months of accumulated bodily emissions, a greasy film of dead skin cells glued to every yellowing plastic surface. Pornographic holograms on the walls had come alive at our arrival, twelve naked women contorting themselves into anatomically unlikely postures. They’d begun talking as well; a dozen subtly different contraltos offering an enthusiastic appraisal of Vadim’s sexual prowess. I thought of him bound and gagged back in my quarters, oblivious to this flattery. The women never stopped talking, but after a while their gestures and imprecations became repetitive enough to ignore.
“I think, on balance, this is probably the right room,” Quirrenbach said.
I nodded. “Not going to win any awards, is it?”
“Oh, I don’t know—some of the stains are quite interestingly arranged. It’s just a pity he went in for the smeared-excrement look—it’s just so last century.” He pulled aside a little sliding hatch at his end—touching it only with the very tips of his fingers—revealing a grubby, micrometeorite-crazed porthole. “Still, he had a room with a view. Not entirely sure it was worth it, though.”
I looked at the view myself for a few moments. We could see part of the ship’s hull, strobed now and again in stuttering flashes of bright violet. Even though we were under way, the Strelnikov had a squad of workers outside the whole time welding things back together.
“Well, let’s not spend any longer here than strictly necessary. I’ll search this end; you start at yours, and we’ll see if we turn up anything useful.”
“Good idea,” Quirrenbach said.
I began my search; the room—panelled wall-to-wall with recessed lockers—must once have been a storage compartment. There was too much to go through methodically, but I filled my briefcase and the deep pockets of Vadim’s coat with anything that looked even remotely valuable. I scooped up handfuls of jewellery, data-monocles, miniature holo-cameras and translator brooches; exactly the kinds of thing I’d have expected Vadim to steal from the Strelnikov’s slightly more wealthy passengers. I had to hunt to find a watch—space travellers tended not to take them when they were crossing between systems. In the end I found one that had been calibrated for Yellowstone time, its face a series of concentric dials, around which tiny emerald planets ticked to mark the time.
I slipped it on my wrist, the watch pleasantly hefty.
“You can’t just steal his possessions,” Quirrenbach said meekly.
“Vadim’s welcome to file a complaint.”
“That’s not the point. What you’re doing isn’t any better than…”
“Look,” I said, “do you seriously imagine he bought any of this stuff? It’s all stolen; probably from passengers who aren’t aboard any more.”
“Nonetheless, some of it might have been stolen recently. We should be making every effort to return these goods to their rightful owners. Don’t you agree with me?”
“On some distant theoretical level, just possibly.” I continued my search. “But there’s no way we’ll ever know who those owners were. I didn’t notice anybody coming forward in the commons. Anyway—what does it matter to you?”
“It’s called retaining the vestigial trace of a conscience, Tanner.”
“After that thug nearly killed you?”
“The principle still applies.”
“Well—if you think it’ll help you sleep at night—you’re very welcome to leave me alone while I search his belongings. Come to think of it, did I actually ask you to follow me here?”
“Not as such, no…” His face contorted in an agony of indecision as he glanced through the contents of one opened drawer, pulling out a sock which he studied sadly for some moments. “Damn you, Tanner. I hope you’re right about his lack of influence.”
“Oh, I don’t think we need worry ourselves about that.”
“You’re quite certain?”
“I’ve a reasonable grasp of lowlife, believe me.”
“Yes, well… I suppose you could be right. For the sake of argument.” Slowly at first, but with increasing enthusiasm, Quirrenbach started trousering Vadim’s booty indiscriminately, wads of Stoner currency, mainly. I reached over and pocketed two bundles of cash before Quirrenbach made it all vanish.
“Thanks. They’ll do nicely.”
“I was about to pass some to you.”
“Of course you were.” I flicked through the notes. “Is this stuff still worth anything?”
“Yes,” he said, thoughtfully. “In the Canopy, anyway. I’ve no idea what passes for currency in the Mulch, but I doubt that it can hurt, can it?”
I helped myself to some more. “Better safe than sorry, that’s my philosophy.”
I continued searching—digging through more of the same junk and jewellery—until I found what looked like an experiential playback device. It was slimmer and sleeker than anything I’d ever seen on Sky’s Edge, cleverly engineered so that in its collapsed form it was no larger than a Bible.
I found a vacant pocket and slipped the unit home, along with a cache of experientials which I assumed might have some value in their own right.
“This plague we were talking about…” I said.
“Yes?”
“I don’t understand how it did so much damage.”
“That’s because it wasn’t a biological one—I mean, not in the way we’d usually understand such things.” He paused and stopped what he was doing. “Machines, that’s what it went for. Made almost all machines above a certain complexity level stop working, or start working in ways they were never meant to.”
I shrugged. “That doesn’t sound that bad.”
“Not if the machines are merely robots and environmental systems, like the ones in this ship. But this was Yellowstone. Most of the machines were microscopic devices inside human beings, already intimately linked to mind and flesh. What happened to the Glitter Band was just symptomatic of something far more horrific happening on the human scale, in the same way that—say—the lights going out all over Europe in the late fourteenth century was indicative of the arrival of the Black Death.”
“I’ll need to know more.”
“Then query the system in your room. Or Vadim’s, for that matter.”
“Or you could just tell me now.”
He shook his head. “No, Tanner. Because I know very little more than you. Remember, we both came in at the same time. On different ships, yes—but we were both crossing interstellar space when this happened. I’ve had little more time to adjust to it than you’ve had.”
Quietly and calmly, I said, “Where was it you came from?”
“Grand Teton.”
His world was another of the original Amerikano colonies, like Yellowstone, Yosemite, Glacier and two or three others I couldn’t remember. They’d all been settled by robots four centuries ago; self-replicating machines carrying the templates necessary to construct living humans upon their arrival. None of those colonies had been successful, all of them failing after one or two subsequent generations. A few rare lineages might still be able to trace themselves back to the original Amerikano settlers, but the majority of people living on those worlds were descended from later colonisation waves, arriving by lighthugger. Most were Demarchist states, like Yellowstone.
Sky’s Edge, of course, was another case entirely. It was the only world that had ever been settled by generation ship.
There were some mistakes you didn’t make twice.
“I hear Grand Teton’s one of the nicer places to live,” I said.
“Yes. And I suppose you’re wondering what brought me here.”
“No, actually. Not really my business.”
He slowed in his rummaging through Vadim’s loot. I could see that my lack of curiosity was not something to which he was accustomed. I continued my investigations, silently counting the seconds before he broke his silence.
“I’m an artist,” Quirrenbach said. “Actually, a composer. I’m working on a symphony cycle; my life’s work. That’s what brings me here
.”
“Music?”
“Yes, music—though that contemptible little word barely encapsulates what I have in mind. My next symphony will be a work inspired by nothing less than Chasm City.” He smiled. “It was going to be a glorious, uplifting piece, celebrating the city in all its Belle Epoque splendour; a composition teeming with vitality and energy. Now, I think, it will have to be a darker piece entirely; Shostakovichian in its solemnity; a work weighed down by the crushing realisation that history’s wheel has finally turned and crushed our mortal dreams to dust. A plague symphony.”
“And that’s what you’ve come all this way for? To scribble down a few notes?”
“To scribble down a few notes, yes. And why not? Someone, after all, has to do it.”
“But it’ll take you decades to get back home.”
“A fact that has, surprisingly, impinged on my consciousness before you so kindly pointed it out. But my journey here is a mere prelude, occupying a span of time that will become inconsequential when set against the several centuries that I confidently expect to elapse before the work nears completion. I myself will probably age the better part of a century in that time—the equivalent of two or three whole working lives of any of the great composers. I shall be visiting dozens of systems, of course—and adding others to my itinerary as they become significant. There will almost certainly be more wars, more plagues, more dark ages. And times of miracle and wonder, of course. All of which will be grist to the mill of my great work. And when it is polished, and when I am not utterly disgusted and disillusioned with it, I will very probably find myself in my twilight years. I simply won’t have time to keep abreast of the latest longevity techniques, you see; not while I’m pouring my energies into my work. I’ll just have to take whatever’s easily available and hope I live to finish my magnum opus. Then, when I have tidied up the work, and achieved some form of reconciliation between the crude scribblings I have set down now and the undoubtedly masterful and fluid work I will be producing at the end of my life, I will take a ship back to Grand Teton—assuming it still exists—where I will announce the great work’s premiere. The premiere itself won’t be for another fifty or so years afterwards, depending on the extent of human space at that time. That will give time for word to reach even the most distant colonies, and for people to begin converging on Grand Teton for the performance. I will sleep while the venue is constructed—I already have something suitably lavish in mind—and an orchestra worthy of the event is assembled, or bred, or cloned—whichever the case may be. And when that fifty years is done, I will rise from slumber, step into the limelight, conduct my work and, in what little time remains to me, bask in a fame the like of which no living composer has ever or will ever know. The names of the great composers will be reduced to mere footnote entries; barely flickering embryo stars set against the gemlike brilliance of my own stellar conflagration. My name will ring down the centuries like a single undying chord.”
There was a long silence before I responded.
“Well, you’ve got to have something to aim for, I suppose.”
“I suppose you must think me monstrously vain.”
“I don’t think the thought ever crossed my mind, Quirrenbach.” While I was speaking I touched something at the back of one of the drawers. I’d been hoping to locate a weapon of some sort—something with a little more punch than the clockwork gun—but Vadim appeared to have managed without one. Still, I felt I had something. “This is interesting.”
“What have you found?”
I pulled out a matte-black metal box the size of a cigar case, opening it to reveal six scarlet vials tucked into pouches. Set into the same case was something like an ornate steel hypodermic, with a gunlike handle, marked with a delicately painted bas-relief cobra.
“I don’t know. Any thoughts?”
“Not exactly, no…” He examined the cache of vials with what looked like genuine curiosity. “But I’ll tell you one thing. It doesn’t look legal, whatever it is.”
“More or less what I was thinking.”
As I reached to take back the cache, Quirrenbach said, “Why are you so interested in it?”
I remembered the syringe which had slipped from the pocket of the monk in Amelia’s cave. There was no way to tell for sure, but the substance I had seen in that syringe—admittedly in the dim light of the cave—looked much like the chemical in Vadim’s cache. I remembered, too, what Amelia had told me when I had asked her about the syringe: that it was something the monk should not have had in Idlewild. Some kind of narcotic, then—and perhaps prohibited not just in the Mendicant hospice but across the whole system.
“I’m assuming this might open some doors for me.”
“It might open a lot more than that,” Quirrenbach said. “The very gates of hell, for a start. I’ve remembered something. Something I heard up in the parking swarm. Concerning some very nasty substances doing the rounds.” He nodded at the row of scarlet vials. “One of which is something they call Dream Fuel.”
“And this might be it?”
“I don’t know, but it’s exactly the kind of thing I would expect our dear friend Vadim to be trading in.”
“Where would he have got it from?”
“I didn’t say I was an expert, Tanner. All I know is that it has some unpleasant side-effects and whatever authorities there are in this system don’t exactly encourage its use—or the possession of it, for that matter.”
“It must have some uses, though.”
“Yes—but exactly what they do with it, I don’t know. That device is a wedding gun, incidentally.”
He must have seen the blank look on my face.
“It was a local custom for a husband and wife to exchange, in some fashion, actual neural material cultured from each other’s brains. They used that thing—the wedding gun—to implant the stuff into each other.”
“They don’t do that anymore?”
“Not since the plague, I think.” He looked rueful. “Actually, come to think of it, there are lots of things they don’t do since the plague.”
* * *
When Quirrenbach had gone with his gains—back to ponder the next instalment in his symphony cycle, I hoped—I crossed over to Vadim’s network console. For the first time since departure I had weight again, as the Strelnikov executed a thrust burn, minutely adjusting its fall towards the Rust Belt. From somewhere else I heard low, saurian moans of structural protest, and couldn’t help wondering if I’d picked the one voyage which would end with the ship’s hull finally giving up the ghost. Presently, however, the groans and creaks subsided into the ship’s normal sonic background and I was able to concentrate on the matter at hand.
The console looked ancient, like something children would have laughed at in a museum. There was a flat screen surrounded by controls embossed with finger-worn icons, above an alphanumeric keyboard. I didn’t know what the state of the art around Yellowstone was, but this wasn’t it even by Sky’s Edge standards.
It would have to do.
I found the key which turned the console on, the screen stammering through a series of warm-up messages and adverts before displaying a complex tree of options. Shipboard data services. Realtime networks—the web of data streams within a light-second or so of the Strelnikov, so that normal conversations were possible. Deep system networks, with typical timelags ranging from seconds to tens of hours, depending on the complexity of the enquiry. There was no explicit possibility to access networks with response times longer than that, which made sense: any enquiry sent out to the system’s Kuiper Belt habitats would have returned a reply long after the sender had left the slowboat at journey’s end.
I entered the option for the deep system networks, waiting a few seconds while the screen busied itself with more advertising material. A tree of sub-menus appeared. News of arriving and departing starships, including an entry for the Orvieto. The Yellowstone system was still a busy interstellar hub, which also made a kind of sense. If the
plague had struck in the last decade or so, many ships would have already been on their way here. It would take decades for news of the plague to spread out into the main volume of human-settled space.
I skimmed through the options.
The deep system networks carried comms traffic to and from the habitats in orbit around the system’s gas giants: typically mining stations and outposts for the more reclusive factions. There were Conjoiner nests, Skyjack enclaves and semi-automated military or experimental facilities. I searched in vain for any reference to the plague. Occasionally there was talk of containment procedures, or crisis management, but for the most part it looked as if the plague—or its consequences—had become so fundamental an aspect of life that there was seldom any need to refer to the thing itself.
The local networks told me a little more. Once or twice, at least, I found references to the crisis by name, and learned that they had given it a specific and chilling name: the Melding Plague. But most of the messages assumed total familiarity with the basic facts of the plague itself. There were references to Hermetics, and the Canopy, and the Mulch, and sometimes to something called the Game, but none of these terms were elaborated upon.
I had heard of the Canopy, though. That was where Amelia had said I’d stand a good chance of finding Reivich. It was a district of Chasm City.
But had she told me less than I had imagined?
I put the console into send mode and composed a query concerning the plague; a request for general information for newcomers. I couldn’t believe I was the first to want this information before being plunged into the thick of the Rust Belt, but it was also entirely possible that no one would bother replying to me, or that no kind of automated handling system was functioning now.
I sent my query, then stared at the console for a few seconds. The screen stared back at me, unchanging.
Nothing came.
Disappointed and still no closer to the truth, I went to the pockets of the coat I had taken from Vadim and pulled out the neatly stowed playback kit. The device almost assembled itself, the slim black parts sliding home with the pleasing precision of rifle components. The result was a skeletal black helmet, nubbed with field-generators and input ports, ornamented with luminous green and red cobras. A pair of stereoscopic eyepieces folded down from the helmet’s front, their rims formed from material that automatically conformed to the skin around the eye. A pair of earplugs functioned similarly, and there were even noseplugs for olfactory input.
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