Dawn seemed an eternity away, and when finally pinkish daylight oozed over the now cloudless seaward horizon, I had already hallucinated its coming a dozen times. Somehow I got us back to the Reptile House.
But it would have been better for everyone if I had never made it.
THIRTY-NINE
We stopped at three snake sellers before we found one who knew who we were talking about: a stranger—evidently offworld—who had bought enough snakes for the keeper to be able to shut up shop for the rest of the day. That had been yesterday: the man had obviously planned Dominika’s murder long before her actual execution.
The man, the snake seller said, looked a lot like me. Not precisely, but the resemblance was strong if you squinted, and we both spoke with a similar accent, even though the man was far less loquacious.
Of course we spoke similarly. We were not just from the same planet. We were from the same Peninsula.
“What about the woman who was with him?” I asked.
He had not mentioned a woman, but there was something in the way he fingered the extremities of his waxed moustache which told me I was right to ask.
“Now you’re beginning to take up my time,” he said.
“Is there anyone or anything in this city which can’t be bought?” I said, slipping him a note.
“Yeah,” the man said, laughing quietly. “But I’m not it.”
“What about the woman?” I asked, eyeing a caged snake the colour of spearmint. “Describe her.”
“Don’t have to, do I? Don’t they all look the same?”
“Don’t who all look the same?”
He laughed, louder this time, as if he found my ignorance hysterical. “The Mendicants, of course. Seen one, seem “em all.”
I looked at him in horror.
I had made a call to the Mendicants the day after I arrived in Chasm City. I was trying to reach Sister Amelia; to ask her what—if anything—she knew about Quirrenbach. I had not been able to get through to her; had instead spoken to Brother Alexei and his black eye. But I had been told that she was as interested in seeking me as I was her. The remark had not meant much at the time. But now it detonated in my skull like a starshell.
Sister Amelia was the woman with Tanner.
Zebra’s contacts had not even hinted that the woman was from the Mendicant order. The snake seller, on the other hand, was sure. Maybe I was wrong in assuming that the other woman was always Amelia. But I thought otherwise. I figured she had to be slipping in and out of disguise; either deliberately, or because she just wasn’t thorough enough in maintaining whatever new identity she had concocted.
What was her part in this?
I had trusted her implicitly after my revival. I had allowed her to help my mind heal after the identity-shattering processes of reefersleep. And in the whole time I had spent in the Mendicant habitat, nothing she had done had given any hint that my trust was anything other than well-placed.
But how much did she trust me?
Tanner—the real Tanner—might have come through Hospice Idlewild after me. He must have come through on the same ship from Sky’s Edge, his revival delayed a little after my own, just as my own had been delayed a little after that of Reivich. But I had already used the name Tanner Mirabel, which meant that Tanner had to be travelling under an identity other than his own. Unless he wanted to sound screamingly insane, his mind pulverised by adverse reefersleep trauma, he would not have advertised his real name too quickly. Better to keep up the lie and let the Mendicants think he was someone else.
It was getting confusing. Even I was getting confused. I tried not to think how this must look to Zebra, Chanterelle and the others.
I was not Tanner Mirabel.
I was… something else. Something hideous and reptilian and ancient which my mind recoiled from, but which I could not really continue to ignore. When Amelia and the other Mendicants had revived me, I had been travelling under Tanner’s name and I also carried what appeared to be his memories, skills and—more importantly—the knowledge of his immediate mission. I had never thought to question any of it; everything had seemed correct. Everything had seemed to fit in place.
But all of it had been false.
We were still talking to the snake seller when Zebra’s phone chimed again, a noise almost lost in the ceaseless susurration of rain and the hissing of caged reptiles. She took the phone from her jacket, staring at it suspiciously without actually answering it.
“It’s coming in on your name, Pransky,” Zebra said. “But you’re the only person who knows that number, and you’re standing right next to me.”
“I think you should be very careful before answering that call,” I said. “If it’s from who I think it is.”
Zebra cuffed the phone open; Pandora opening the lid of her box, fearful of what might lie within. Speckles of rain dimpled the screen, like a parade of tiny glass beetles. Zebra lifted the phone to her face and said something quietly.
Someone answered her. She said something back—her tone uncertain—and then turned her face to mine.
“You were right, Tanner. It’s for you.”
I took the phone from her, wondering how something so innocent could contain so much evil. Then I looked into a face which was very much like my own.
“Tanner,” I said quietly.
There was an appreciable delay before the man answered, amusement in his voice. “Are you asking or telling?”
“Very funny.”
“I’ve got something to tell you, you know.” The voice was faint, backdropped by sounds of machinery. “I don’t know if you’ve quite put the pieces together yet.”
“I’m beginning to.”
Another delay. Tanner was in space, I realised—somewhere near Yellowstone, but appreciable fractions of a light-second away from low-orbit; probably out near the belt of habitats where the Mendicants held tenancy. “Good. I won’t insult you by using your real name; not just yet. But this much I will tell you.”
I felt myself stiffen.
“I’ve come to do what Tanner Mirabel does, which is to complete something he started. I’ve come to kill you—just as you came to kill Reivich. Symmetric, don’t you think?”
“If you’re in space then you’re already going in the wrong direction. I know you were here before. I found your calling card with Dominika.”
“Nice touch with the snakes, wasn’t it? Or haven’t you quite figured that part out yet?”
“I’m doing my best.”
“I’d love to chat, I really would.” The face smiled. “And maybe we’ll still get the chance.”
I knew it was bait, but I fell for it anyway. “Where are you?”
“On my way to an engagement with someone dear to your heart.”
“Reivich,” Quirrenbach said quietly, and I nodded, remembering how Quirrenbach had claimed to be taking us into space—for a meeting with Reivich—before Chanterelle rescued us.
One of the high carousels, he had said. A place called Refuge.
“Reivich doesn’t figure in this,” I said. “He’s an accessory; nothing more. This is only about you and me. We don’t have to make it any more than it already is.”
“Quite a change of tune from a man who was intent on killing Reivich up to only a few hours ago,” Tanner said.
“Maybe I’m not the man I thought I was. But why do you have to go after Reivich?”
“Because he’s an innocent.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means he’ll bring you to me.” Tanner’s smile flashed on the screen, daring me to find fault with his logic. “I’m right, aren’t I? You came here to kill him, but you’d rather save him than have me do the job for you.”
I had no idea how I felt, in all truth. Tanner was forcing me to confront questions I had skirted around until now while I dealt with the schism in my memories. But that schism had opened into a cleft which had ripped my past from me and left something poisonous in its place. If I was Cahuella—a
nd everything now pointed to that—then I hated myself to the core.
But I could not hate Tanner any less. He had killed Gitta.
No: we killed her.
The thought—the crushing logic of it—hit home. We shared memories now, whole intermingled strands of past. Tanner’s memories were not truly mine, but now that I’d carried them in my head, I could never be entirely free of their influence. He had killed Gitta; now I carried the memory of having done it myself; the memory of having killed the most precious entity in my universe. But it was worse; far worse than that. Tanner’s crimes were nothing compared to those that I’d suppressed; buried in the memories I had hidden beneath Tanner’s, but which were now upwelling into my consciousness. I still felt like Tanner; still felt that his past was the right one, but I’d glimpsed enough of the truth to know that this was only an illusion which would grow less and less convincing with time; that it was Cahuella’s past and memories which really belonged in this body. And even that was not the end of it, for Cahuella himself was only a kind of shell, overlaying an even deeper set of memories.
I didn’t want to think about that, but I could see the way things were headed.
I had stolen Tanner’s memories; made myself think—temporarily—that I was really him. Then—as I began to shrug aside this disguise—began to suffer the effects of the indoctrinal virus, cata-lysing the release of even deeper layers of memory; glimpses into my hidden history; one that went back centuries.
Back to Sky Haussmann.
Something gave in me as the full realisation of what I was sunk in. My knees buckled; I dropped to the rain-slicked ground and felt the urge to vomit. I had dropped the phone; now it lay beside me, upended so that I could still see Tanner’s face, his expression quizzical.
“Something the matter?” he asked.
I spoke into the phone.
“Amelia,” I said, at first barely a whisper, then repeating her name more audibly. “She’s with you, isn’t she? You tricked her.”
“Let’s just say she’s been very useful to me.”
“She doesn’t know what you mean to do, does she?”
Tanner seemed to find this amusing. “She’s a very trusting soul. She had her doubts about you, you know. Apparently, after you’d discharged yourself from the Mendicants, she became aware of certain irregularities in your genetic code—evidence of what she naturally thought was congenital illnesses. She tried to contact you, but you were already becoming a very slippery customer.” Tanner smiled again. “By then I’d revived and recovered my faculties. I remembered who I was and why I was on that flight from Sky’s Edge. That I was after you, because you’d stolen my identity and memories. Of course, I didn’t let Amelia know any of that. I just told her that you and I were broth-ers and that you were just a little confused. A little harmless deception. You can’t blame me for it.”
No; that was true enough. I had also lied to Amelia; hoping that she’d give me a lead on Reivich.
“Let her go,” I said. “She’s nothing to you.”
“Oh, but she’s much more than that. She’s another reason to bring you here. Another reason why we should meet, Cahuella.”
His face was frozen for a moment, then the link terminated, leaving us standing in the rain. I passed the phone back to Zebra.
“What about the other injury?” she asked, as we scudded back across the city in her car. “You said Tanner had lost a foot, and now there was no evidence of that ever happening. But that wasn’t the only thing you had the Mixmaster look for.” She shook her head. “You know, I want to keep calling you Tanner. It isn’t easy, you know—talking to someone who denies their own name.”
“Believe me, it isn’t easy from my side of the conversation, either.”
“Tell us about the other injury, then.”
I drew in breath. This was the hardest part of all. “Tanner shot someone once. A man who he was working for. A man called Cahuella.”
“Nice of him,” Chanterelle said.
“No; it wasn’t like that. Tanner was actually doing this man a favour when he shot him. It was a hostage situation. Tanner had to fire a weapon through the man to…” My voice gained a crack, “to kill one of the gunmen, who had Cahuella’s wife at knifepoint. It wasn’t going to kill Cahuella. Tanner knew that with the angle of the beam, it wouldn’t seriously injure the man.”
“And?”
“Tanner made the shot.”
Zebra said, “And it worked?”
In my mind’s eye I watched Gitta fall to the floor, not via the knifeblade, but through Tanner’s errant shot. “The man lived,” I said, after a few moments. “Tanner’s knowledge of anatomy was faultless. It came from being a professional killer, you see. They teach assassins which organs they need to hit to ensure a kill. But the knowledge can just as easily be inverted; to find the safest route for a beam to take through a body.”
“You make it all sound so surgical,” Chanterelle said.
“That’s just what it was.”
I told them the Mixmaster’s scan had found a healed, elongated wound running through my body, consistent with a beam weapon entering my back and exiting my abdomen, at a positive angle. The wound had shown up on his scan like the dissipating vapour trail of an aircraft.
“But that means…” Zebra started to say.
“Shall I spell it out for you? It means I’m the man Tanner Mirabel was working for. Cahuella.”
“This gets worse,” Quirrenbach said.
“Hear him out,” Zebra said. “I was there when we visited the Mixmaster, remember. He isn’t making all of this up.”
I turned to Chanterelle. “You saw the genetic changes which had been worked on my eyes. Cahuella had that done to himself; it was work he paid the Ultras to perform on him. Hunting was a hobby of his.”
But there was more to it than that, wasn’t there? Cahuella wanted to be able to see at night because he hated darkness, hated the memory of being small and alone and forgotten, waiting in the nursery.
“You’re still talking of Cahuella like he’s some third person,” Zebra said. “Why. Aren’t you sure that you’re him?”
I shook my head, remembering kneeling in the rain; every absolute blasted away. That sense of total dislocation was still there, but in the intervening time I’d contained it; built a scaffold around it, a structure—however rickety—which would at least allow me to function in the present.
“Circumstantially, yes. But if I have his memories, they’re fragmented—no more clear than Tanner’s.”
“Let’s get this straight,” said Quirrenbach. “You haven’t got a fucking clue who you are, is that it?”
“No,” I said, admiring my own calm. “I’m Cahuella. I’m completely sure of it now.”
“Tanner wants you dead?” Zebra said, as we left Chanterelle’s car at the perimeter of the station concourse. “Even though you and he used to be close?”
Images of a white room—of a man crouched naked on its floor—flashed across my mind’s eye like glimpses in a strobe light, gaining tiny increments of clarity with each repetition.
“Something very bad happened,” I said. “The man I am—Cahuella—did something very bad to Tanner. I’m not sure I blame Tanner for wanting revenge.”
“I don’t blame him, or you, or whoever it was,” Chanterelle said. “Not if you—Tanner—shot him.”
She frowned, but I couldn’t blame her for that. Keeping track of these shifting layers of identity and memory was like holding the weave of a complex tapestry in mind.
“Tanner missed,” I said. “His shot was meant to save Cahuella’s wife, but he ended up killing her instead. I think it may have been the first and last mistake of his career. Not bad, when you think about it. And everything he did was in the heat of the moment.”
“You sound like you don’t really blame him for coming after you,” Zebra said.
Our group trooped into the concourse, which was noticeably busier than when we had last been here, o
nly a few hours before. Nothing resembling officialdom had yet claimed Dominika’s tent, although there were also no customers anywhere near it. I presumed her body was still alive, still suspended above the couch where she worked her acts of neural exorcism; still gilded by snakes. Word of her death must surely have spread far into the Mulch by now, but the sheer illegality of it—cutting against all the unspoken laws of who could and could not be touched—still served to enforce a zone of exclusion around the tent.
“I don’t think anyone would blame him,” I said. “Because what I did to him…”
The white room returned—except this time I shared the perspective of the crouched man; felt his nakedness and his excruciating fear; a fear that opened up rifts of emotion he’d never imagined before, like a man glimpsing hallucinogenic new colours.
Tanner’s perspective.
The creature stirred in the alcove, uncoiling itself with languid patience, as if—in some simple loop of its tiny brain—it understood that its prey was not going anywhere in a hurry.
The juvenile was not a large hamadryad; it must have been birthed from its tree-mother in the last five years, judging by the roseate hue of its photovoltaic hood, furled around its head like the wings of a resting bat. They lost that colour as they neared maturity, since it was only fully grown hamadryads which were long enough to reach the tree-tops and unfurl their hoods. If the creature was allowed to grow, in a year or two the roseate shade would darken to a spangled black: a dark quilt studded with the iridophore-like photovoltaic cells.
The coiled thing lowered itself to the floor, like a bundle of stiff rope tossed from a ship to the quayside. For a moment it rested, its photovoltaic hood opening and closing softly and slowly, like the gills of a fish. It was very large indeed, now that he could see it more closely.
He had seen hamadryads dozens of times in the wild, but never closely, and never in their entirety; only a glimpse between trees from a safe distance. Even though he had never been near one without possessing a weapon which could easily kill it, there had never been an encounter which was not without a little fear. He understood. It was natural, really: the human fear of snakes, a phobia written into the genes by millions of years of prudent evolution. The hamadryad was not a snake, and its ancestors did not remotely resemble anything which had ever lived on Earth. But it looked like a snake; it moved like a snake. That was all that mattered.
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