Terminal World

by Alastair Reynolds

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

  ‘Take a stab.’

  ‘Perhaps you’re going to kill me, or reveal my nature to Meroka, or turn me in to the authorities, or keep me hostage until you’re able to hand me over to the angels.’

  ‘And get on Fray’s bad side? He could end me, if I betrayed him. He’s been good to me, I can’t deny that. Even if he is a stupid, unimaginative fuck who wouldn’t recognise an opportunity to better himself if it landed on his skull.’

  ‘He’s been good to me,’ Quillon said.

  ‘Then we’re in the same boat. Both hiding from something, both owing Fray. There are few things I’d rather do right now than reach across this table and strangle you. But as the old saying goes, the enemy of my enemy—’

  ‘Is my friend. But there’s something you need to understand. We’re not all monsters. I made enemies precisely because I refused to countenance an evil deed.’

  Tulwar looked towards the back room, where Meroka was still busy sorting through the munitions stockpile. ‘What kind of deed?’

  ‘There was an experimental programme. The stated intention was to modify angels so that we could live under conditions similar to those in Neon Heights. The theory was that we could engineer in resilience to a future zone shift, so that we wouldn’t all have to die if the boundary moved catastrophically.’

  ‘So the angels are nervous as well.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘The big one. I’m sure you’ve noticed the signs - everyone getting more jittery by the day.’

  ‘It might not happen for a hundred years, or a thousand.’

  ‘Some folks think otherwise. Your angel programme suggests that at least a few in the Celestial Levels have grounds for concern.’

  Quillon leaned forwards, lowering his voice even as he spoke more urgently. ‘That’s the point, though: the programme’s stated objectives were a sham. We were sent to Neon Heights to test our ability to survive inside a different zone, with only the simplest of medicines to assist us. Obviously, those conditions couldn’t be simulated in the Levels: it had to be done covertly. I understood that, just as I understood that we had to maintain maximum secrecy at all times. But there was more to it than just a proof of concept. The ultimate purpose of the programme was to prepare an occupying force, a division of zone-tolerant angels able to storm and conquer large tracts of Spearpoint. There were four members of the infiltration party. Two of us didn’t know anything about that ultimate purpose. When one of us found out ... the other two had no choice but to silence her. But she’d already shared her fears with me. They’d have silenced me eventually. I chose not to give them the chance. I killed them, using medicine. That’s why I’m hiding now.’

  ‘At least you were built for the terrain,’ Tulwar said.

  ‘It’s been easier for me than it has for you. But there’s one thing you need to understand. When they sent me down to Neon Heights they equipped me to live there undetected. They suppressed my real memories and gave me the ghost memories of someone who had been born and raised in the Heights. I’ve been wearing that mask for nine years, long enough that it feels like a part of me. I still care about the Celestial Levels. But I also care about Neon Heights, and for that matter the rest of Spearpoint. If something big is coming, then the last thing we should be doing is fostering more divisions between our different enclaves.’

  ‘And if I kill you, or turn you in, that’s what I’ll be doing?’

  ‘All I know is that the knowledge I carry - the knowledge I’m told I carry - could be a force for good, as well as evil. I really don’t care about my own life. But I do care about Spearpoint, and if my continued survival benefits it, then I have a moral obligation to keep myself alive.’

  ‘This woman they killed - the one who got too close to the truth. She wasn’t just a colleague, was she?’

  ‘No,’ Quillon said. ‘She wasn’t.’

  ‘She have a name?’

  ‘Aruval. That was her cover. I don’t remember her real name.’

  ‘I lost someone special once. To angels, as well. I don’t know if that means I ought to empathise with you or hate you even more.’

  ‘I can’t help you there,’ Quillon said.

  Tulwar leaned back, only the wheezing chuff of his life-support system filling the silence. He bent over to inspect one of the dials in his belly. ‘Need to put some more fuel in shortly. Needle’s starting to drop.’

  ‘Does that mean you’ve made a decision?’

  Meroka came back in through the door, her coat hanging visibly heavier about her frame. Quillon imagined every pocket crammed with instruments of bloody death and dismemberment. Somehow he didn’t think she had lingered overly long on the watches.

  ‘What decision?’ she asked.

  ‘About when to leave,’ Tulwar said breezily. ‘I was just telling the good doctor how we get the wood for the furnace, and what we send back down in the empty hoppers.’

  ‘Right,’ Meroka said. She dropped five or six clockwork watches on the table. ‘So we’re taking the meat wagon again. I can’t tell you how fucking delighted I am about that.’

  The funicular had little in common with the swift electric commuter services that connected Neon Heights’ different levels. At the top end, in Steamville, stood a wood-fired stationary steam engine. This in turn drove a giant horizontal winding wheel, connected to a haulage rope long enough to reach all the way down to the Horsetown terminus, half a league beneath the Steamville end of the operation and as far out again in horizontal terms. Even though the cars never went down the slope empty - there was always something to send down to Horsetown - it was never quite enough to balance the weight of the ascending cars. The enterprise, one of a dozen or so similar funiculars dotted around Spearpoint’s base, was slow, unreliable and prone to appalling, limb-shattering accidents. But it was still the most efficient means of moving goods - and occasionally people - between Steamville and Horsetown.

  Once Tulwar’s contact had delivered them to the upper terminus, there was bribery to be done before Meroka and Quillon found themselves shivering in one of the dozen cars of a downbound corpse consignment. It was an insulated wooden cabin mounted on the steeply angled chassis of a funicular carriage, with hatched compartments in the roof where ice was shovelled in to keep the corpses from warming up. The dead were bunked on horizontal racks, covered with thin white sheets.

  Tulwar had found them extra coats and scarves - the Red Dragon Bathhouse had a well-stocked supply of lost clothing - but it did not take long for the cold to penetrate. The actual descent would only last a few minutes, but there was at least half an hour’s wait at either end, while the procession of cars was slowly drawn forwards to be loaded and unloaded. Quillon struggled with his gloves, trying to sort through his medical bag to find the right type of antizonals for the crossing ahead of them, a dose that could be safely taken on top of the pills they had already ingested. He was off the chart now, in prescribing terms. The best he could do was navigate a course between his own instincts and Meroka’s previous experiences in making this journey. ‘Just dose me up,’ she kept saying.

  He doled out the extra pills with icy fingertips, having removed his gloves to open the vial.

  ‘Take these for now,’ he said, palming two pills.

  ‘That all?’

  ‘Too much would be as dangerous as too little. I don’t even know what kind of cumulative damage your nervous system has already sustained.’

  ‘Damage is already done, Cutter.’

  ‘Nonetheless, we don’t want to do any more harm on top of that. You know what Fray’s like. For all I know, you’re only one miscalculated dose from ending up exactly like him.’

  Meroka took the pills with sullen bad grace, but at least resisted the urge to augment them with her own drugs. The cabin lurched into motion, descending in near silence save for the occasional creak and squeal of strained rope or metal on metal. They sat opposite each other, on the lowest level of the plank
ed racks where the bodies were stored. Quillon and Meroka were sharing the carriage with corpses making their final downward journey after Ascension Day. Those who didn’t adhere to the custom tended to refer to practitioners as ghost-riders, pre-corpses or, less charitably, angel-meat.

  While advanced medical services were unavailable to most citizens of Spearpoint by dint of the fact that they lived in the wrong zone, there was one exception. Those who were sufficiently close to death that they had little to lose could submit to being scanned, and perhaps even healed, in the Celestial Levels. To do so they would have to leave their own zone and travel as rapidly as possible through Spearpoint’s intervening enclaves, until they reached the domain of the angels. Most citizens could only hope to undertake such a journey alone, having saved for it over many years. If the sudden onset of massive maladaptive trauma hadn’t killed them by the time they arrived, then they stood a chance of having their minds preserved after death, in the imperishable, massively redundant data-stores of the Celestial Levels. In most instances something could be recovered, and in a few cases the accumulated damage - perhaps even the underlying illness that had necessitated the journey in the first place - could be made good. Nonetheless, less than one in a hundred souls who travelled to the Celestial Levels ever came back down alive. For the majority, Ascension Day was a one-way trip - unless coming back down as a corpse counted.

  Quillon put the gloves back on and tucked his hands under his armpits. His breath was a jet of white vapour. Ice crystals had already started to form on Meroka’s eyebrows. He had made no allowance for how the cold would affect their metabolisms, impeding or accelerating the uptake of the antizonals. Nothing could be done now; it would have been sheer guesswork even if it had occurred to him to take the cold into consideration. He checked his clockwork watches and found that they were beginning to read different times. How much of that was due to the imminent transition, and how much to the watches being of cheap manufacture, he couldn’t guess.

  ‘Might I ask something?’ he said, as much to keep his teeth from chattering as from a desire for information. ‘Back in the bathhouse, Madame Bistoury - that was her name, I think - mentioned something about you not always being the way you are now. And then what Tulwar said about the Good Book, and that tongue of yours—’

  ‘Two different things, Cutter.’

  ‘Would you care to enlighten me? We’re going to be together a little longer, and yet I barely know the first thing about you.’

  ‘Seems to be working out fine for us.’

  ‘I’m still entitled to my curiosity. I’ve read about certain kinds of long-term neurological trauma: brain damage associated with repeated zone crossings and the use of high-strength antizonals. In certain cases this damage can manifest as impairments or idiosyncrasies of the speech centre. There are instances of people becoming ... profane after suffering brain injuries. Often distressingly so. Is that what happened to you?’

  ‘Congratulations,’ she said sourly. ‘You’ve hit the nail on the fucking head.’

  ‘You needn’t feel any shame about it.’

  ‘Who said anything about shame?’

  ‘I’m sorry. I just presumed that it must occasionally lead to situations of social awkwardness. But what you have is a medical problem, no more or less. It may even be treatable, with the right therapies.’

  ‘Thanks. I’ll be sure to look them up.’

  ‘And the other matter - the Testament?’

  ‘Never mind the other fucking matter.’

  The transition came, arriving more quickly than it had when they crossed the no-man’s-land between Neon Heights and Steamville. The carriage kept descending at a steady rate, carrying them smoothly through the boundary. Meroka’s eyes met his own, acknowledging the moment when it came. He was cold already, but when the transition passed through his body, the cosmic chill of it made the carriage seem cosily warm by comparison. That fierce, sucking cold lingered in his bones for minutes. Then he began to feel, if not better, then at least no worse than he had any right to expect. His heart was racing a little, he was perspiring excessively (despite the temperature in the carriage) and his surroundings were wheeling around him. But all such unpleasantnesses were nothing more than the anticipated residual effects of zone sickness. Had the pills not cushioned the brunt of the transition, he would be bent double and vomiting. He had, he knew, judged the dose more or less correctly.

  ‘Is it always this bad?’ he asked Meroka, when at last the wheeling sensation had begun to abate, and it seemed safe to open his eyes.

  ‘Only the first hundred times. Then it gets easier.’

  Quillon’s first thought, when they had bribed the relevant parties into allowing them to leave the transhipment dock unmolested, was that there was nothing about Horsetown that he had not already seen in Steamville, half a league up Spearpoint’s rising thread. The warehouses and clerical offices bordering the funicular terminus were, at least to Quillon’s eyes, architecturally and functionally similar to those at the upper terminus. The lamps burned wood resin rather than gas, the illumination more sparsely distributed and more subdued in its effects, but he was still surprised by how fundamentally civilised and well ordered the community seemed. Looking down from Neon Heights at night, Horsetown had been little more than a black margin bordering Spearpoint’s footslopes, a place that appeared to have no nocturnal existence at all. He saw now how inaccurate that impression had been, and felt a small, visceral tingle of shifting preconceptions.

  But when his eyes had begun to adjust to the oil lamps, the darkness between the buildings beginning to yield its secrets, he only had to glance up and have the wild, shimmering glare of Neon Heights brand colours onto his retina. It was, he realised, why the citizens of Horsetown favoured wide-brimmed hats, even at night. They didn’t want to keep looking up, didn’t want to be permanently reminded of a place of swift machines and electric marvels; a place only a few would ever know, and even then only when they passed through it on Ascension Day.

  Beyond the transhipment dock, Quillon slowly revised his initial impressions. Only a handful of buildings were made of anything other than wood, with brick reserved for civic and corporate structures of obvious importance. Nearly everything else had the ramshackle look of having been rebuilt many times, with new structures perched on the sagging, tumbledown remnants of the old. Streets and thoroughfares were ludicrously narrow, even allowing for the fact that the only form of motive power lay in horses. Nowhere were the buildings taller than four or five storeys high, but the manner in which they sagged in over the streets, with opposing buildings almost meeting overhead, occasioned more vertigo in Quillon than he had ever felt when staring up at one of Neon Heights’ fifty-storey blocks. Like lovers pushing out their tongues to kiss, the buildings were linked by covered walkways of unsettling flimsiness. Walls were criss-crossed with black-painted timbers, buff-white rendering smeared between them. Every horizontal surface was white with pigeon droppings. Between the gaps in the buildings lay the utter emptiness of the great plains stretching away from Spearpoint’s base, a blackness only relieved - or in some way intensified - by the dim lights of tiny, huddled communities scattered across the land all the way to the horizon. Meroka and Quillon were near Spearpoint’s base now; the winding spiral of the ledge met the ground less than half a turn from their present position.

  The smell was the worst. It hit him almost as soon as he cleared the ordered precincts of the transhipment area. It came in stately, fugal waves, like a symphony. Beneath everything was a permanent sewer stink, impossible to separate into its human and animal components. Above that, and only fractionally more tolerable, was the heavy chemical reek of the various industries associated with the production of animal by-products, the abattoirs, the smoking plants, the glue factories and tanneries. And with every frigid breath he sucked into his lungs, Quillon tasted woodsmoke. He was still wearing two layers of coats, and grateful for them.

  ‘You thought it was going to g
et warmer, closer to the ground,’ Meroka said as he drew the collar higher around his face. ‘Maybe that’s how it used to be.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘Been getting colder beyond Spearpoint for years. Only reason you don’t feel it in Neon Heights is you’ve got the heat coming off all those levels below you, warming up the air, giving the angels some thermals to play with. Down here, though? Ain’t no more levels to go. This is what it’s going to be like from now on. And we’re the lucky ones, sitting on the equator like we do. Further north, further south? Gets cold enough to freeze a witch’s tits.’

  What if the Earth really was turning colder? Quillon wondered. And what if no one in the warm, lit levels of Spearpoint had been bothering to pay attention?

  There would be no possibility of renting horses until morning. Besides, Meroka had said they would need all their energy for the day’s ride, and that this would be their last chance for a decent night’s sleep before they left Spearpoint. She found them a room above a gaming house, not too far from the rental stables she normally used. There were two metal-framed beds with thin sheets, a draughty window and something scuttling around in the overhead floorboards, rushing back and forth as if it had a long list of errands to do. None of that mattered. Meroka washed her hands and face at the rusty old basin in one corner of the room, removed her coat, then lay down on the bed and fell into immediate sleep. Quillon extinguished the oil lamp and removed his own coat, spectacles and hat. Exhaustion closed on him like a velvet vice.