Revenger 9780575090569

by Alastair Reynolds

  ‘The Cap’n?’

  ‘I don’t want to think we let him down. Not after all the bad things that already happened to him.’ I paused, wondering if she was going to pick up the thread I’d very obviously left dangling. But Prozor wasn’t making things easier than they needed to be. ‘I mean about his daughter, and how he lost her. We never really went over it, did we?’

  ‘We could talk about this some other time, Fura.’

  ‘There might not be another time. We’re all that’s left of his crew, aren’t we? If the truth dies with us . . .’

  ‘With me, you mean.’

  ‘I just want to know, Prozor. I was a part of it, wasn’t I? He even started telling me about her himself. He talked as if she was dead, but Cazaray said she’d been taken, and when Bosa attacked she told Rack his daughter was still alive.’

  Prozor leaned in closer to me that she only needed to whisper, and even then I could see it was causing her pain. Then again, she must have realised I had a bone between my teeth and I wasn’t going to let it go.

  ‘She may as well have been dead to him.’

  ‘But not enough that he was willing to hurt Bosa’s ship too badly. Oh, I know our coil-guns were cooked pretty badly. But Rack wouldn’t have taken out the Nightjammer, even if he’d had the chance, would he? He couldn’t put his daughter out of his mind, not while there was a chance of seeing her again. What would’ve happened to her, Proz? What would Bosa have done to Illyria?’

  ‘Illyria wasn’t ever cut out to read the bones – that wasn’t her aptitude. But she was good with numbers, mathematics, navigation. Took that from her mother, they say. Bosa must have seen the cut of her and knew she could be shaped to fit into the Nightjammer’s crew.’

  ‘Shaped?’

  ‘Turned loyal to Bosa. With drugs and psychology to begin with, and surgery if the drugs and psychology didn’t work fast enough.’ Prozor gave me a warning look. ‘I don’t mean clever surgery. Just drillin’ and cuttin’ out the parts of someone that make ’em difficult, if you know what I mean. Whisk a stick through someone’s grey, you can turn ’em pliant as you care.’

  I had a shuddery little thought of someone spooning hot butter into porridge, then giving it a good stir.

  ‘You think Bosa turned Illyria, then.’

  ‘Turned her, or burned her. Either way, Rack wasn’t getting to see her again.’

  ‘Then why the crossbow?’

  ‘Which crossbow?’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about it ever since left the Monetta, Proz. You mentioned it once, then never brought it up again. The crossbow I found with Rack, the one that killed him. You said it was one of ours, not Bosa’s. And the way he was left with it, his hands still on the crossbow, holding it in his own mouth . . .’

  ‘Where are you drivin’ with this?’

  ‘She didn’t kill him, did she? That wasn’t Bosa’s doing. Not directly. But whatever she said to him or showed him, it was enough for Rack to put that crossbow into his mouth and drive a bolt through his own brain.’

  ‘He’d just lost his crew.’

  ‘It was more than that. He learned something about Illyria, didn’t he? Something he couldn’t stand to live with. But he must have already known she’d either be turned or dead, and I can’t think of much worse than that.’ The tram lurched to a halt and I had to reach for a pillar to stop myself toppling. ‘Except one thing.’

  ‘This is our stop,’ Prozor said.

  We jostled our way off the tram, me vowing to pick up the conversation as soon as I could. The stubbled man, still on the tram, saw this as his chance to have a valiant final say, muttering something about ugly women sticking together, but he’d reckoned without Prozor. Even as the tram started up again, she pounced back in and swung a punch at the man, catching him neatly on the bristled jowls. He sprawled backwards into his fellow travellers. Prozor hopped back off, dusting her hands even as the man succumbed to a barrage of fists and feet from the other passengers.

  ‘Hasper Quell runs this place,’ she said, leading me across the street towards the shabby, shadowed entrance of a bar that was so down at heel it couldn’t even stretch to a name. ‘He used to crew, before he got an ion burn across the eyes. Quell’s bar is safe enough for his friends, but I’d still hang on to those quoins.’

  ‘I will. But what about Illyria, Proz? If there’s something you know, or suspect, I’d like to know it.’

  ‘I need a drink,’ she said, as if that settled everything.

  We went into the bar. Steps took us down into even deeper, smokier gloom. At last we reached a windowless basement, with a pink variety of lightvine crawling over the walls, winding its way around flickerbox screens tuned to various channels being broadcast across the Congregation. Tables were scattered around the floor, with patrons showing all the states of drunkenness from barely alive to almost sober. Some had their bleary pink eyes fixed on the flickerboxes; others were playing games or just staring into their drinks.

  ‘Sit down while I see if Hasper’s around. Pick a bright corner so you don’t glow so much.’

  I found an empty table while Prozor went to the serving hatch in the wall. I settled my hands in front of me, my fingers linked. It wasn’t the gloomiest corner of the room but the glowy was still shining through, crawling under my skin like some strange alien calligraphy. I shouldn’t have been too surprised by that. The man had noticed it in the tram, and that had almost been in daylight. Here it seemed to outshine even the pink lightvine in the walls. And it itched.

  I wanted to keep the marks of my ordeal. I had the resolve now. But I wondered how long it would last.

  Up on the flickerbox screens – those that were not too fuzzy to make out, for the signals had to travel a long way to reach us – serious-looking men and women were talking about numbers and graphs. They kept showing pictures of quoins, and of banks, and every now and then the picture would cut to a Crawly, representing some bank or group of banks, or even a Clacker or a Hardshell, because they were running more and more financial services as well. Sometimes they spoke for themselves, managing our language as best they could, but most times they had a cove speaking for them.

  Since leaving Mazarile I’d been dwelling on things that I’d never dwelled on before. Rackamore had put doubts and questions into my head and now they were circling and breeding, like fish in an aquarium. I kept thinking about the Crawlies, and what they were really good for. But not just them – all the aliens. And not just the aliens that were here now, doing business with the worlds, but all the aliens that had come and gone through the Congregation in the Occupations before us, and what they’d been up to as well. And I thought about the quoins and how rum it was that some people or aliens living before us had been kind enough to leave all this money littered around the worlds and baubles, just waiting to be dug up and used again.

  And I had a thought that wouldn’t ever have crossed my mind on Mazarile, and that seemed strange and dangerous even now, in Trevenza Reach.

  What if it’s not even money?

  Prozor came back with the drinks. But she didn’t set them down on the table. ‘Hasper’s in the back room. He says for us to join him. It’ll be quieter and you won’t have so many eyes on you.’

  ‘I don’t mind the eyes.’

  ‘I do.’

  Prozor knew the way so I followed her. We went through a blank door to the right of the serving hatch, down a low, stooping corridor, then through another door into a cosy sort of room with no windows and just one flickerbox. A man was pouring himself a drink when we arrived. He was standing up with his back to us, so I didn’t get a look at his face until Prozor and I were sitting down, taking places in the comfortable padded chairs that ran around three of the walls. It wasn’t the man that caught my eye when I came through the door, though. It was the Crawly sitting in one of the chairs. Crawlies being the shape they are, sittin
g down the way we do isn’t really an option. But the chair had been cut or upholstered to suit the alien so that it could tuck its abdomen or tail or whatever they call it down into a hole in the back of the chair, with its legs and forelimbs jutting out in front like a dog begging for a treat. The Crawly had a gown on, or something like a gown, open at the front so the limbs could jut out, but tied under the neck, and with most of the head lost under a big drooping hood. The only part of its face I could see was a bunch of whiskery appendages that were moving all the while, twitching in and out and jerking from side to side. Crawlies could see and hear but I’d read that their mouth parts picked up a lot of information from molecules floating in the lungstuff, tasting our chemistry and knowing what kind of mood we were in almost before we did. The oddest thing, though, was what the Crawly was doing. It had a glass in one of its claws, a tall one stuffed with ice and different colours of fluid, and it was drinking through a straw, making a rude sucking and gurgling noise as if no one had taught it manners.

  ‘This is Mr Clinker,’ said the man who was standing up, turning around with his own drink. ‘Mr Clinker, this is Prozor and her friend from the Monetta. What was your name again, I’m sorry?’

  ‘I’m Fura,’ I said. ‘Fura Ness.’

  ‘Then it’s Prozor and Fura, Mr Clinker. And I’m Hasper, of course,’ he said, looking at me, ‘but I’m sure you worked that out for yourself.’

  He was a big, powerful-looking man, dressed quite well, but in clothes that looked a size too small for his frame, so that the seams were straining and the hems didn’t quite reach where they should have done. He had black hair that was stiffened up, so that he looked like a cove being held upside down, with a shock of white at the front. His eyes were the oddest part of him, though. They were something mechanical, like two chimneys pushed into his sockets, jutting out further from his face than his nose.

  ‘Can you see with those?’ I asked, deciding that bluntness was the best tack.

  ‘See with them, Fura, and see better than my old lamps ever could. It’s Crawly medicine. They can do things we still can’t, on any of the worlds. They’ve got some odd ideas about what looks pretty, it’s true, but I’d sooner be ugly than blind.’

  ‘I don’t think you’re ugly,’ I said. ‘Just strange.’

  ‘Mr Clinker was just dropping in to check on my eyes. He put them in for me. People forget that there’s more to the Crawlies than handling money. They do all sorts of things for us, and never with any complaint. Don’t you, Mr Clinker?’

  We’ve all seen Crawlies speak on flickerboxes, but unless you’ve been in the same room as one you don’t really get a proper sense of how rum it is when they make our language. They haven’t got lungs or a throat or anything like that, so the only way they can make noises is by rubbing all those whiskery bits against each other, which sounds like someone shuffling papers or scuffing their heels, but the queer part is that you begin to hear words in that rustly, scrapy chaos, and then the words start making sentences, and you’re being spoken to by a creature that wasn’t born around the Old Sun.

  ‘We do what we may, Hasper.’ The Crawly took another slurp from its drink. ‘It is little enough.’

  ‘Are you some sort of doctor?’ I asked.

  ‘Asking about the glowy, are you?’ Hasper Quell said.

  ‘No, I wasn’t. There are doctors in the worlds that can sort out the glowy, if sorting it out was what I wanted. I was thinking of something else, something that monkey medicine can’t fix – at least not the doctors on Mazarile.’

  The Crawly asked, ‘What is the nature of the ailment?’

  ‘A problem with a heart. A man’s heart. Is that the sort of thing you know to repair?’

  ‘That would depend on the nature of the problem.’

  I hefted the bag. ‘If I paid for you – or another Crawly doctor – to go to Mazarile and examine someone, would you do that?’

  ‘That would depend on the payment.’

  Prozor raised a hand as I made to open the bag. But Quell waved down her objection.

  ‘Show Mr Clinker what you’ve got. He won’t run off with it.’

  I spilled my earnings onto the little low table between the chairs. ‘Go on, then. Tell me if there’s enough there.’

  The Crawly bent forward in its chair, tilting so that it could bring its forelimbs onto the table and start piecing through the quoins. Then it bent down even more so that its hood drooped forward and I could only see the tips of its mouth parts whisking in and out, kissing and tasting the quoins in a way that made me feel a bit like I wanted to lose my breakfast. It shuffled through the money, trying one bit after another.

  ‘Well?’ Hasper asked. ‘Put the girl out of her misery. Is there or isn’t there?’

  ‘This would suffice for an initial examination,’ the Crawly said, holding up the most valuable quoin of the lot. ‘Any further costs would need to be addressed once the nature of the ailment was established.’

  Prozor whispered: ‘That’s half your money down the swallower before you even know they can do a thing.’

  ‘I was going to take it home eventually whatever happened.’

  ‘But you would still need to pay for your passage somewhere else, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘If I sign up with a crew, I’ll be earning from the outset and I won’t need to pay for passage.’

  ‘You won’t have much choice where you go, either.’

  I still couldn’t tear my eyes off what the Crawly was doing to the quoins, how it was fondling and licking them. ‘A down-payment, then,’ it said. ‘If you need more time to consider the full amount.’

  ‘Fond of your father in Mazarile, are you?’ Hasper Quell asked me.

  ‘I didn’t say anything about my father.’

  ‘You didn’t need to.’

  The Crawly put down the quoins and lifted up its hooded head to face the door we’d come in by. Everything went slow then. That’s what people always say when something like this happens, but that doesn’t make it any less true. I saw one leg coming through the door, then another, and on top of those long thin legs was a long thin body, with a black coat flapping back from it, and on top of the body was a head and face I’d hoped never to see in Trevenza Reach.

  Vidin Quindar had taken off his hat as he stooped down the corridor, and now he threw it onto one of the vacant chairs and sat himself down next to the Crawly. He threw a companionable arm around Mr Clinker’s cloak, around what would have been shoulders if aliens had shoulders. ‘That your handiwork again, you sneaky devils?’ Quindar was looking up at the flickerbox, still flickering away on the wall. It was showing the same financial news as the ones in the main room. ‘Black Shatterday, that’s what they’re callin’ it,’ he said, cocking me an eye. ‘The worst bank run in decades – worse than the one what forced your mummy and daddy to leave their old world and come to shoddy old Mazarile, before you was hatched. But you’ll be all right, Miss Ness. Coves like you always floats to the top, in the end.’

  ‘I didn’t know,’ Prozor said to me, and I nodded because after all that had passed between us, I knew she’d never be so low as to set this up.

  ‘No, but Hasper did,’ Quindar said. ‘Let’s clear the lungstuff, shall we, so we all know who is and isn’t to blame? I knew you’d be showing up on Trevenza Reach one of these days. Your father put down the money to send me here, and after that all I had to do was watch out for the ships. I also knew Prozor was with you, and it didn’t take much diggin’ to find out that Quell’s place was likely to be on your itinerary. So I had a chinwag with Hasper here, put some pegs on the place, and here I am – just in the nick of time, it seems.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘To stop you wasting good money on this bag of feelers.’ He uncurled his arm from the Crawly. ‘No need, you see. We can get you home and let you hand over those quoins to your father first-
hand, and let ’im decide what to do with it.’

  Prozor looked at Quell. ‘You’ve done me some favours, Hasper, and I’ve done you some. But if I see you after this day, on this world or any other, I’ll slice you open with a yardknife.’

  ‘It wasn’t anything personal, Proz. And where’s the harm? No one’s been hurt, have they? I was just asked to facilitate this meeting, and here we are. Show them the legalities, Vidin, like you showed me.’

  Quindar reached into his coat. ‘Easy,’ he said, smiling at Prozor. ‘It’s only papers. We all likes papers. Papers make the worlds turn, ain’t it?’ He drew out a bundle of documents, spread them flat on the table. I didn’t need to lean in to see what mattered. Near the top was the name and address of a Hadramaw legal firm that I knew my father had used in the past. Beneath that came paragraphs and paragraphs of slowly shrinking text. Quindar tapped a dirty nail against the documents. ‘Nothing fishy about any of this, so don’t go getting your collectives in a twist. It’s all above board. It just says that I, Vidin Quindar Esquire, is assigned the right to act as temporary guardian for one Arafura Ness, daughter of etcetera and etcetera, until such time as she’s safe and sound back in her own bed in Mazarile.’ He gave me a crooked, broken-toothed smile, as if this was all a big treat. ‘I gets to shepherd you home, is the gist of it.’

  ‘And if she doesn’t want to go home?’ Prozor asked.

  ‘What she wants and what she gets is two different things, Proz. When she came on your ship, she wasn’t of age to make her own mind up about such things. But that older sister of hers, she pulled a slippery one on her dear old dad. Adrana made herself the legal guardian, and got Arafura to agree to it.’ He touched his nose in a gesture of respect. ‘Clever cove, she was. Slippery as the best of ’em. After that, there wasn’t anything Mr Ness could do about it. That’s all void now, though. Adrana’s – and old Vidin needs to beg your forgiveness here, Fura – but Adrana’s dead and gone. She can’t be dischargin’ her familial responsibilities from beyond the grave, can she?’