Terminal World

by Alastair Reynolds

  ‘Who the fuck?’

  ‘Quillon.’

  ‘My favourite monster.’ Fray paused. Bar sounds in the background: rowdy laughter, the chinking of glass, a television or wireless turned up loud, the time-bell of a boxing match. ‘Kind of early, aren’t we? I don’t have the sewing kit with me right now.’

  ‘I’m in trouble. We need to talk in person.’

  ‘Where are you calling from?’

  ‘A delicatessen, on my way home.’ Quillon cupped one hand around his mouth, conscious of the shopkeeper eyeing him from the front of the store. The man had wanted Quillon to use the public booth down the road, rather than the private one tucked away at the back of the store. ‘They’re on to me,’ he said.

  ‘You think, or you know?’

  ‘Something happened today. That’s all I can tell you right now.’

  ‘All right,’ Fray said after long seconds. ‘One thing I know: you’re not the kind to jump at shadows unless there’s good reason. Forget about going home. You think you can make it up here without being followed?’

  ‘I’ll do my best.’

  ‘Stay vigilant, stay alert, but try to act perfectly normal and relaxed at the same time.’

  ‘That’s a good trick, Fray.’

  ‘You could do this once. Start getting back into the groove.’

  Fray hung up. Quillon stood with the telephone still pressed against his ear, struck by the feeling that he had set something in motion that could not be stopped. Fray was an avalanche waiting to happen. It only took a tiny nudge to set him off, but from that point on the only option open to him was to gather momentum, rumbling and roaring towards some cataclysmic, landscape-altering event.

  Quillon replaced the handset, walked to the front of the store and threw a handful of coins onto the counter.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said.

  ‘Cheer up,’ the shopkeeper said, scratching at the roll of fat under his chin. ‘Might never happen.’

  He took the car off the slot, parked it at the kerb and reached over to the passenger seat for his bag. It had travelled with him all the way from the morgue. The bag was finished in black leather, scuffed to a fleshy brown at the edges. It had a black leather handle, a label marked Doctor M. Quillon. It was secured by a gold clasp and opened like a concertina, disclosing an assortment of padded pockets and receptacles. He locked the car and adjusted his hat. Fifth was a bad neighbourhood and it was getting late. He wondered if he’d see the car again.

  The Pink Peacock was easily missed. It lay at the end of a blind alley that terminated in the rising black wall of Spearpoint’s underlying fabric, a cliff that soared into the heavens, rising ever higher until it jogged back to form the next shelf. Bracketed on one side by a fleapit hotel and on the other by the derelict offices of a failed taxi business, there was little to identify the nature of the premises. A metal fixture marked where the peppermint-green neon illumination used to hang, until Malkin gave up having it repaired. Metal bars fenced the outside windows, the glass so grimed by dirt and cigarette smoke that it was difficult to tell if the lights were on inside. Posters and graffiti covered the walls in layers of archaeological thickness.

  Quillon walked to the end of the alley and knocked on the door. It opened a crack, a fan of pink-red light spilling across the asphalt.

  ‘Here to see Fray.’

  ‘You’re the cutter?’

  Quillon nodded, though the dismissive term repulsed him. The doorman - it wasn’t the usual one - grunted and let him in. Inside, the sudden humidity fogged over Quillon’s small, round, blue-tinted spectacles. He took them off and rubbed the flat lenses on his sleeve before slipping the glasses back onto the narrow ridge of his nose. The lights were turned down, but that was the way Malkin and most of his customers preferred it.

  Malkin himself was behind the bar, polishing glasses while he kept one eye on the fight that was still playing out on the television. He was rake-thin and mean-looking, with cryptic tattoos on his forearms, all smudged purples and liver-reds. They looked like they’d been done with a piece of scrap metal and a bottle of low-grade transmission oil. Malkin wore a yellowing vest and a towel draped around his shoulders, the vest showing off his scrawny, leathery-skinned neck with the thin circumferential scar where - Quillon could only assume - Malkin had survived being garrotted. Certainly there had been some damage to his larynx, because when he opened his mouth all he could produce was a croaking noise, a sustained guttural rasp that forced his clients to lean in close when they wanted to understand.

  ‘That time of year again?’ Malkin asked. ‘Must be getting punchy, because I could have sworn it wasn’t long since your last visit. When was it, June, June Prime?’

  ‘August. And that’s not why I’ve come.’

  ‘Always welcome to drop by, you know that.’ Malkin reached for a bottle behind the bar. ‘Your usual?’

  ‘No ice.’

  Malkin poured out a measure of Red Eye. ‘How’s life down in the morgue, anyway? Cut open anything interesting lately?’

  ‘This and that.’

  Malkin put the bottle back on the shelf. ‘You know, we could always use a man with a steady hand on the blade. A man who knows his way around anatomy, so to speak. What to cut and what not to cut, if you get my drift. What you can live with for a few hours and what you can’t.’

  ‘I’m sure you and Fray know more than enough on that score already.’

  ‘Well, maybe. But Fray’s not the man he used to be, and my problem is I like to make them squeal. Sometimes I go too far too fast, you know?’ Malkin looked as if he was expecting sympathy, for being too enthusiastic with his interrogation and torture methods. ‘You, though, you’ve got the necessary restraint. All I’m saying - and I know I speak for Fray in this matter - there’s always potential employment here, if work dries up in the morgue.’

  ‘Thanks for the offer. Work’s not very likely to dry up in a hurry, though.’

  ‘I take your point. It being a morgue and all.’

  ‘Anyway, I’m not looking for a new line of work.’ Quillon took a sip of the Red Eye. It was sharp and he felt it trickle down his throat in fiery rivulets. Alcohol had no significant effect on the angel nervous system, even given his modified physiology. But the taste wasn’t unpleasant, and it helped him fit in with the bar’s other customers, insofar as any were bothering to pay attention to the thin man in a coat talking to the thin man behind the bar.

  ‘You in trouble?’ Malkin asked.

  ‘I’ve never been out of it.’

  ‘I mean, something other than whatever shit it was brought you into Fray’s sphere of influence.’ Malkin fixed him with his small, pale yellow eyes. They were the exact colour of urine drops on the rim of a toilet. ‘Which, incidentally, I have never seen fit to pry about.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  ‘Just like it’s never occurred to me to pry about what exactly happens each time you come up here and go into that back room.’

  ‘That’s also good.’

  Malkin was part of Fray’s organisation, but to the best of Quillon’s knowledge he did not know the truth of Quillon’s identity. Fray, Quillon believed, had never told a living soul what he knew.

  ‘Well, he’s in the back. Usual haunt.’

  Quillon reached for change, but Malkin shook his head. ‘On the house tonight. The least we can do, you choose to pay us a visit.’

  Fray could normally be found in a small room set back from the rest of the bar, entered by a narrow stoop-under archway. The windowless nook was only just big enough to accommodate the table and chairs around it. With its narrow entrance, there was a claustrophobic sense of entrapment about the place. Today Fray nursed a cigarette and a half-empty shot glass, and according to his usual custom was sitting alone. There was something in his demeanour, some subtle, hard-to-articulate quality of expression and posture that caused people to orbit away from him. He was a big man, black-skinned, almost too big for the chair he was sitting in. His hai
r had been black when they first met, but in nine years it had turned first to grey and then to a brilliant pure white.

  ‘Starting to think I’d imagined that phone call,’ Fray said, his voice a low, threatening rumble. He blinked and twitched. ‘Uptown traffic’s a bitch, right?’

  ‘I made it, didn’t I?’

  ‘So take a seat. Look like you plan on spending more than five seconds in my presence.’

  Quillon eased into a chair opposite the bottled force that was Fray. ‘Thanks for agreeing to see me.’ He took off his hat and placed it on a wall hook. Fray sucked on the cigarette, the orange tip the only bright thing in the gloom of his favoured nook. His hand shook terribly, as if there was a hook in it and someone was jerking an invisible string.

  ‘I took the liberty of calling Meroka. She’s on her way.’

  ‘Who’s Meroka?’

  ‘One of my extraction specialists. You’ll like her.’

  ‘Who said anything about “extraction”?’

  ‘I did. And we’re doing it. Pieces are already falling into place.’

  ‘Aren’t we jumping the gun a little here?’

  ‘You told me enough on the telephone.’ Fray sipped from his own drink. ‘Joining the dots, that’s one of my specialities. I joined the dots where you were concerned, didn’t I?’

  ‘That was your job back then,’ Quillon said. ‘Before you hung up your badge.’

  ‘Worst mistake I ever made. Other than not turning you in.’

  ‘Do you want to know what happened or not?’ Without waiting for an answer, Quillon told him about the angel and their conversation during the examination and autopsy. ‘Then I called you. I drove by my apartment - I know you told me not to go home, but I didn’t stop or slow down - and then I came here.’

  ‘Told you not to do that, Cutter.’

  ‘No one saw me.’

  ‘You hope. Did you notice anyone there who shouldn’t have been?’

  ‘Only a van from the Boundary Commission, badly disguised as a vehicle from Hygiene and Works. I assume that didn’t have anything to do with the mess I’m in.’

  ‘Right now I wouldn’t assume anything. It isn’t just the local administration getting twitchy. They’re stockpiling pharms all over the city. You probably heard about that.’

  ‘There’ve been some shortages in drug deliveries,’ Quillon said, thinking back to the morgue’s dwindling inventory. ‘I just assumed there was a problem in the supply chain.’

  ‘There isn’t. This is coordinated and deliberate, and it smells of someone being very scared indeed. Word is it goes all the way up and all the way down. That includes the Celestial Levels, in case you weren’t paying attention. A big shift, a major realignment, would hurt the angels just as badly as it hurts us. So yes, it could all be tied in.’ Fray gave him a grin that was somewhere between pitying and sympathetic. ‘Hate to break it to you, but you’re a loose end. Could be someone’s decided to tidy you up before the big one hits.’

  ‘Judging by what the angel said, they had more in mind than just tidying me up.’

  ‘Getting at those buried memories, in the hope that you know something vital about the infiltration process? Doesn’t that strike you as a long shot?’

  ‘Maybe I do know something. It isn’t beyond the bounds of possibility.’

  ‘The angel give you any idea about how long you need to lie low?’

  ‘Not really. He said something about a change in Celestial Levels, some kind of coup. If it works, I can return. If it doesn’t, it’s always going to be dangerous for me here - and dangerous for anyone who tries to shelter me.’

  ‘This coup - are we talking about something imminent?’

  ‘Could be months away for all I know. But however long it takes, that’s how long I’ll have to keep out of Spearpoint. It isn’t just about protecting my own neck, either. If I’m valuable, then I’m valuable to the people who sent the angel down as well.’

  ‘Whose motives we don’t know for sure.’

  ‘They gave me the weapon, Fray. That suggests they have my best interests in mind.’

  ‘This weapon you still haven’t shown me.’

  ‘I’ve got it with me.’ Quillon took another sip of the Red Eye. ‘You mentioned your extraction specialist. That was news to me. Whenever we talked about this, it was always you who was going to get me out of Spearpoint.’

  Fray leaned back in his chair. ‘Maybe it’s escaped your attention, but I’m getting a little ragged around the edges lately. The drugs aren’t doing it for me any more, not unless I dial up the dosage.’

  ‘Looks to me as if you’ve dialled it up about as far as it’ll go,’ Quillon said. The decline since their last meeting was worse than he had expected.

  Fray accepted this diagnosis with a powerful, twitch-like shrug. He scratched a finger under his right eye. ‘There’s no way I can go deeper than Steamville, much less survive beyond Spearpoint. I’ll see you to the station, but from then on you’ll be in Meroka’s hands. You don’t have to worry about her. She has her quirks, but she gets the job done. Already more than a dozen successful extractions under her belt.’

  ‘Out of how many attempts?’

  ‘Oh, please. What matters is that she can do this, and she’s ready and waiting. You’ll take the train. Now - you going to show me what the angel gave you?’

  ‘Is it safe here?’

  ‘Provided you don’t think it’ll blow up on us.’

  Quillon lifted the medical bag onto the table and sprung open the gold clasp. ‘I suppose if the angel meant to hurt me, he had ample opportunity in the morgue. But that’s only my theory.’

  ‘We’ll roll with it for now.’

  The bag yawned open. Quillon reached into it and dug to the bottom. He pulled out a heavy bandaged object, like a severed hand wrapped in linen. Quillon let the linen unroll across the table, revealing that it contained eight smaller packages, each individually wrapped. ‘This is how it came out of him, in pieces.’

  ‘What do you mean, “out of him”?’

  ‘The pieces were surgically implanted. I noticed bruising and swelling as soon as I saw him on the table. That was the only way to do it. If the angel had come down bearing some obvious item of advanced technology, it would have been separated by the clean-up crew and sent up to the Bureau boys before I ever got a look at it.’

  ‘Proves they were serious about getting it to you, at least. It wasn’t just an afterthought.’

  ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  ‘There’s a problem, though. Why send down something that isn’t going to work? Nothing from the Celestial Levels functions down here. You know that as well as anyone.’

  ‘I don’t think the angels would have gone to so much trouble if they knew it would be a futile gesture.’

  Quillon unwrapped the pieces one by one, placing them on the bare table with the wrapping beneath them. The linen had been white before, but now it was soaked through with pink and yellow discoloration. None of the components was any larger than the palm of Quillon’s hand, and each was still covered in a thin slime of blood and tissue.

  Fray tapped a finger in the air, pointing at the objects and mouthing silently. ‘Sure you didn’t miss anything?’

  ‘He told me precisely where to cut and how many parts I’d find. This is all we have.’

  Fray took one of the larger parts, smeared off most of the residue onto the edge of the linen and held it up to his eyes with a trembling hand. Like the other pieces, it was made of a hard, matte-silver metal.

  ‘Expecting it to be heavier.’

  ‘Everything they make is light,’ Quillon said. ‘They’re light. They’ve got very good at it.’

  ‘How long did it take before you stopped saying “we”, Cutter?’

  ‘Protective camouflage. It doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten who or what I am.’

  Quillon retrieved a fresh sheet of linen from the medical bag and set about cleaning up the other seven parts. Fray watched wit
h an expression of quiet fascination, as if he was studying the opening moves of a high-stakes card game. One by one, Quillon put the cleaned parts back down on the table.

  ‘Anything leaping out at you?’ Fray asked.

  ‘I don’t know where to start.’ Quillon sifted through the parts, fingering each in turn. The angel hadn’t given him any detailed instructions on what to do with the pieces. It wasn’t even clear that the angel had known the exact nature of the weapon it had been carrying. Eight pieces, which will fit together. That was all he had been told.

  Fray jabbed a finger. ‘That piece looks like it might go with that one.’

  Quillon picked up a kind of elongated pipe, ribbed with lateral flanges, and decided - provisionally - that it might be a barrel or focusing device. There was another piece, a thicker cylinder with an open end, which appeared to slot into place on one end of the barrel. He slid the pieces together and felt a tiny, microscopic click - too precise to be accidental.

  ‘Good call.’

  ‘Anything started ticking yet?’ Fray asked.

  Quillon said nothing. He tried pulling the pieces back apart, but they were fixed solidly together. He couldn’t even see a visible join where one piece fitted over the other. It was as if the parts had fused seamlessly.

  He picked up the other pieces in turn, searching for something that would mate in a clear fashion with the component he had already assembled. There was nothing obvious, but during his examination he spotted two other pieces that appeared to fit together. As carefully as he dared he pushed them together, and felt the same tiny click as the parts engaged. He had made something like a pistol grip, but scaled for a small, delicate hand.

  ‘Wild stab in the dark here, Cutter, but I think it might possibly be a gun.’

  ‘I’m not fond of guns.’

  ‘I am,’ said a new voice. ‘Especially when they’re shiny. Guess this is the new package, right?’

  Quillon turned around from the table as the woman entered the nook. She was short enough not to need to duck under the low arch. Her clothes were utilitarian and drab: shapeless trousers, heavy toe-capped boots that might have belonged to a welder, a dark olive coat that was several sizes too big. She had a nondescript, melt-into-the-crowd face and very short hair, mostly dark but flecked with grey at the temples. He guessed her age at somewhere between fifteen and twenty.