Chasm City

NINE

I stepped through the armoured door.

Beyond lay a corridor walled in burnished steel, eradicating any lingering impression that Idlewild was a place, rather than an engineered human construct spinning in vacuum. Instead of the distant simmer of bonsai waterfalls, I heard the drone of circulation fans and power generators. The air had a medicinal smell it had lacked a moment earlier.

“Mister Mirabel? We heard you were leaving. This way, please.”

The first of the two Mendicants who waited for me gestured that I should follow him along the corridor. We walked along it with springy steps. At the end was an elevator which carried us the short vertical distance to the true axis of rotation of Idlewild, followed by the considerably longer horizontal distance to the true endpoint of the discarded hull which formed this half of the structure. We rode the elevator in silence, which was fine by me. I imagined the Mendicants had long since exhausted every possible conversation with the revived; that there was no answer I could give them to any question which they would not have heard a hundred times previously. But what if they had asked me what my business was, and what if I had answered truthfully?

“My business? I’m planning to kill someone, actually.”

It would have been worth it, I think, just to see their faces.

But they probably would have assumed I was just some delusional case who was discharging myself too soon.

Soon the elevator was threading its way along the inside of a glass-walled tube that ran along the outside of Idlewild. There was almost no gravity now, so we had to station ourselves by hooking limbs into padded staples sewn onto the elevator’s walling. The Mendicants did this with ease, quietly amused by my fumbling attempts to anchor myself.

The view beyond was worth it, though.

More clearly now, I could see the parking swarm Amelia had shown me two days earlier—the vast shoal of starships, each tiny barbed sliver a vessel almost as large as Idlewild, yet made to seem tiny by the size of the swarm itself. Now and then violet light edged the whole swarm for an instant, as one of the ships fired its hull thrusters to adjust its lazy orbit around the other ships; a matter of etiquette, sly positioning or an urgent collision-avoidance manoeuvre. There was something heartbreakingly beautiful about the lights of distant ships, I thought. It was something that touched both on human achievement and the vastness against which those achievements seemed so frail. It was the same thing whether the lights belonged to a caravel battling the swell on a stormy horizon or a diamond-hulled starship which had just sliced its way through interstellar space.

Between the swarm and Idlewild, I could see one or two brighter smudges which must have been the exhaust flames of shuttles in transit, or new starships arriving or departing. Closer, Idlewild’s hub—the tapering end of the cone—was a tangle of random docking ports, servicing bays, quarantine and medical areas. There were a dozen or so ships here, most of them tethered to the Hospice, but the majority looked like small servicing vessels—the kinds of craft the Mendicants would use if they needed to jet around the outside of their world to conduct repairs. There were only two large ships, both of which would have been minnows in comparison to one of the lighthuggers in the parking swarm.

The first was a sleek, shark-shaped ship which must have been designed for atmospheric travel. The black, light-sucking hull was offset with silver markings: Harpies and Nereids. I recognised it immediately as the shuttle which had taken me from the top of the Nueva Valparaiso bridge to the Orvieto, after we had been rescued. The shuttle was attached to Idlewild by a transparent umbilical, down which I could see a slow, steady stream of sleepers passing. They were still cold; still in reefersleep caskets, which were being pushed along by some kind of peristaltic compression wave of the umbilical. It looked uncomfortably as if the shuttle were laying eggs.

“They’re still unloading?” I said.

“A few more bays of the sleeper hold to clear, and then she’s done,” said the first Mendicant.

“I bet it depresses you, seeing all those slush puppies coming through.”

“Not at all,” the second one said, without much enthusiasm. “It’s God’s will, whatever happens.”

The second large ship—the one to which our elevator was headed—was very different from the shuttle. At first glance it looked just like a random pile of floating junk which had somehow agreed to drift together. It looked barely capable of keeping itself in one piece while stationary, let alone moving.

“I’m going down in that thing?”

“The good ship Strelnikov,” said the first Mendicant. “Cheer up. It’s a lot safer than it looks.”

“Or is it a lot less safe than it looks?” asked the other one. “I always forget, Brother.”

“Me too. Why don’t I check.”

He reached into his tunic for something. I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t the wooden cosh that he came out with. It looked to have been formed from the handle of a gardening tool, equipped with a leather strap at the narrow end and a few interesting scratches and stains at the other. The other Mendicant held me from behind while his friend gave me a few bruises to be going away with, concentrating his efforts on my face. There wasn’t much I could do about it—they had the advantage on me in zero gravity, and they were built more like wrestlers than monks. I don’t think the one with the cosh actually broke anything, but when he was done, my face felt like a large, overripe fruit. I could hardly see out of one eye and my mouth was swimming with blood and little chips of shattered enamel.

“What was all that about?” I asked, my voice moronically slurred. “A leaving present from Brother Alexei,” said the first Mendicant. “Nothing too serious, Mister Mirabel. Just a reminder not to interfere in our business ever again.” I spat out a crimson sphere of blood, observing the way it retained its globular shape as it crossed from one side of the elevator to the other. “You won’t be getting a donation,” I said.

They debated whether to rough me up some more, then decided that it would be best if I didn’t run the risk of any neurological damage. Maybe they were a little scared of Sister Duscha. I tried to show some gratitude, but my heart just wasn’t in it.

I got a good close look at the Strelnikov as the elevator approached it, and the view hadn’t got much better. The thing was roughly brick-shaped, about two hundred metres from end to end. Dozens of control, habitation and propulsion modules had been lashed together to make her, embedded in an intestinal explosion of snaking fuel lines and gizzard-like tanks. Here and there were what looked like the remains of hull plating; a few ragged-edged plates like the last traces of flesh on a maggot-ridden corpse. Parts of the ship appeared to have been glued back on, covered in cauls of glistening epoxy; other parts were still being welded back in place by repair teams deep inside the ship’s ill-defined surface. Gases were venting steadily from six or seven places, but no one seemed particularly bothered by that.

I told myself that the ship could have looked a lot worse and it still wouldn’t have mattered. The route down to the Glitter Band—the conglomeration of habitats in low orbit around Yellowstone—was a typical workhorse run. There were a dozen similar operations around Sky’s Edge. There was no need for any hefty acceleration at any point in the journey, which meant that, with modest maintenance, ships could ply the same routes for centuries on end, toiling up and down the gravity well until some final, fatal systems failure turned them into macabre pieces of drifting space sculpture. There were few essential overheads, so while such routes would always have a couple of prestigious operators running luxurious shuttles on high-burn trajectories, there would also be a series of steadily more ramshackle operations, each cutting more costs than the last. At the very bottom of the heap would be chemical-rocket or ion-drive scows making painfully slow transfers between different orbits—and while the slowboat I had been assigned wasn’t quite that bad, it was most definitely not at the luxury end of the scale.

But, slow as the ship was, it still represented the fastest route down to the Glitter Band. The high-burn shuttles made that run more swiftly, but no high-burners came anywhere near Idlewild. It didn’t take an economics theorist to understand why: most of Idlewild’s clients barely had the funds to cover their own revival, let alone an expensive shortcut to Chasm City. I’d first have had to travel to the parking swarm, and then negotiate a slot on a high-burner, with no guarantee that one was available until a later flight. Amelia had advised against that, saying that there were not nearly so many high-burners operating as before—before what, I didn’t have a chance to ask—and that the time-saving compared to getting straight on the slow shuttle would have been marginal at best.

Eventually the elevator reached the connecting passage to the Strelnikov, and my Mendicant friends bade me farewell. They were all smiles now, as if the bruises on my face were just another psychosomatic manifestation of the Haussmann virus and nothing they were responsible for.

“Best of luck, Mister Mirabel.” The Mendicant with the cosh gave me a cheery wave.

“Thanks. I’ll send a postcard. Or maybe I’ll come back and let you know how I got on.”

“That would be nice.”

I spat out a final coagulating globule. “Don’t count on it.”

A few other prospective immigrants were being manhandled aboard ahead of me, mumbling drowsily in unfamiliar languages. Inside, we were shunted through a disorientating maze of narrow crawlways until we reached a hub somewhere deep in the Strelnikov’s bowels. There we were assigned accommodation cubicles for the journey down to the Glitter Band.

By the time I got to mine I was weary and aching; feeling like an animal that had come off second best in a fight and had crawled back to its den to lick its wounds. I was glad of the privacy of the cubicle. It wasn’t fragrantly clean, but it wasn’t filthy either: just some yellowing hybrid of the two. There was no artificial gravity on the Strelnikov —for which I was grateful; it wouldn’t have been prudent to spin her or accelerate her too hard—so the cubicle came outfitted with a zero-gee bunk bed and various nourishment and sanitary facilities designed with the same lack of gravity in mind. There was a general network console which looked like it should have been lovingly preserved in a museum of cybernetics, and there were stained and faded warning notices stuck to every available surface appertaining to what could and couldn’t be done in the ship, and how to get out of it as quickly as possible if something went wrong. Periodically, a thick-accented voice came over a Tannoy system with announcements concerning delays to the departure, but eventually the voice said that we had cast off from Idlewild, engaged drive and were on our way down. The departure had been so soft I hadn’t noticed it.

I picked at the shards of tooth in my mouth, mapped the painful extremities of the bruises the Mendicants had given me, and gradually fell asleep.