Chasm City

THIRTEEN

If there was any kind of law enforcement operating in New Vancouver’s plumbing-filled interstices, it was subtle to the point of invisibility. Vadim and his accomplice stumbled away from the scene unquestioned. I lingered, almost honour-bound to explain myself—but nothing happened. The table where Quirrenbach and I had been sipping coffee only minutes earlier was in a deplorable state now, but what was I supposed to do? Leave a tip for the cleaning servitor that would doubtless amble round shortly, so dimwitted that it would probably clean up the pools of blood, aqueous and vitreous humours with the same mindless efficiency as it tackled the coffee stains?

No one stopped me leaving.

I slipped into a washroom to slap some cold water on my face and clean the blood from my fist. Inside, I forced slow and deliberate calm. The room was empty, furnished with a long row of lavatories, the doors of which were marked with complicated diagrams to show how they were meant to be used.

I poked and prodded my chest until I’d satisfied myself that nothing was more than bruised, then completed the rest of my walk to the departure area. The behemoth—the manta-shaped spacecraft—was attached like a lamprey to the rotating skin of the habitat. Up close, the thing looked a lot less smooth and aerodynamic than it had from a distance. The hull was pitted and scarred, with streaks of sooty black discoloration.

Two streams of humanity were being fed aboard the ship from opposing sides. My stream was a shuffling, dun-coloured slurry of despondency: people trudging down the spiralling access tunnel as if to the gallows. The other stream looked only slightly more enthusiastic, but through the transparent connecting tube I saw people attended by servitors, bizarrely enhanced pets, even people shaped towards animal forms themselves. The palanquins of hermetics glided amongst them: dark, upright boxes like metronomes.

There was a commotion behind me; someone pushing past.

“Tanner!” he said, in a hoarse stage-whisper. “You made it too! When you disappeared, I was worried that more of Vadim’s thugs had found you!”

“He’s pushing in,” I heard someone mutter behind me. “Did you see that? I’ve a good mind to…”

I turned back, locking eyes with the person I instinctively knew had been speaking. “He’s with me. If you’ve got a problem with it, you deal with me. Otherwise, shut up and stand in line.”

Quirrenbach slipped in to the line next to me. “Thanks…”

“All right. Just keep your voice down, and don’t mention Vadim again.”

“So you think he really might have friends all over the place?”

“I don’t know. But I could do without any kind of trouble for a while.”

“I can imagine, especially after…” He blanched. “I don’t even want to think about what happened back there.”

“Then don’t. With any luck, you’ll never have to.”

The line pushed forward, completing the final spiral into the top of the behemoth. Inside it was vast and tastefully lit, like the lobby of a particularly grand hotel. The walkway made several more loops before it reached the floor. People were wandering around with drinks in their hands, their luggage scooting ahead of them or being handled by monkeys. Sloping windows arced away in either direction, roughly defining the edge of one of the manta’s wings. The interior of the behemoth must have been almost completely hollow, but I couldn’t see more than a tenth of it from where I was standing.

Scattered here and there were clusters of seats—sometimes grouped for conversation, sometimes surrounding a dribbling fountain or a clump of exotic foliage. Now and then the rectilinear shape of a palanquin slid across the floor like a chess piece.

I moved towards an unoccupied pair of seats overlooking one of the window panels. I was tired enough to want to doze quietly, but I didn’t dare close my eyes. What if there hadn’t been an earlier behemoth departure and Reivich was somewhere inside the spacecraft even now?

“Preoccupied, Tanner?” said Quirrenbach, sliding into the seat next to mine. “You have that look about you.”

“Are you sure this is the best place to get a good view?”

“Excellent point, Tanner; excellent point. But if I’m not sitting next to you, how am I going to hear about Sky?” He began to fiddle with his briefcase. “Now there’s plenty of time for you to tell me all the rest.”

“You nearly get killed, and all you can think about is that madman?”

“You don’t understand. I’m thinking now—what about a symphony for Sky?” Then he pointed a finger at me, like a gun. “No. Not a symphony: a mass; a vast choral work, epic in its scope… studiedly archaic in structure… consecutive fifths and false relations, with a brooding Sanctus… a threnody for lost innocence; an anthem to the crime and the glory of Schuyler Haussmann…”

“There isn’t any glory, Quirrenbach. Only crime.”

“I won’t know until you tell me the rest, will I?”

There was a series of thumps and shudders as the behemoth was unplugged from its connecting point on the habitat. Through the windows I could see the habitat falling away very quickly, accompanied by a moment of dizziness. But almost before the moment had begun to register physically, the habitat came swooping past again, its skin rushing by the great windows. Then only space. I looked around, but people were still walking unaffected around the lobby.

“Shouldn’t we be in free-fall?”

“Not in a behemoth,” Quirrenbach said. “The instant she detached from NV, she fell away on a tangent to the habitat’s surface, like a sling-shot. But that only lasted for an instant before she ramped up her thrusters to one-gee. Then she had to curve slightly to avoid ramming into the habitat on the way past. That’s the only really tricky part of the journey, I understand—the only time where there’s really any likelihood of your drinks going for a ride. But the pilot seemed to know what it was doing.”

“It?”

“They use genetically engineered cetaceans to fly these things, I think. Whales or porpoises, wired permanently into the behemoth’s nervous system. But don’t worry. They’ve never killed anyone. It’ll feel as smooth as this most of the way down. She just lowers herself down into the atmosphere, very gently and slowly. A behemoth’s like a huge rigid airship, once it gets into any kind of air density. By the time she gets near the surface, she’s got so much positive buoyancy that she actually has to use her thrusters to hold herself down. It’s a lot like swimming, I think.” Quirrenbach clicked his fingers at a servitor which was passing. “Drinks, I think. What can I offer you, Tanner?”

I looked out the window: Yellowstone’s horizon was rising vertically, so that the planet looked like a sheer yellow wall.

“I don’t know. What do they drink around here?”

Yellowstone’s horizon tilted slowly back towards horizontal as the behemoth cancelled out the orbital velocity it had matched with the carousel. The process was smooth and uneventful, but it must have been planned meticulously so that when we finally came to a halt relative to the planet we were hovering precisely over Chasm City, rather than thousands of kilometres away.

By then, although we were thousands of kilometres above the surface, Yellowstone’s gravity was still almost as strong as it would have been on the ground. We might as well have been sitting atop a very tall mountain; one that protruded beyond the atmosphere. Slowly, however—with the unhurried calm which had characterised the whole journey so far—the behemoth began to descend.

Quirrenbach and I watched the view in silence.

Yellowstone was a heavier sibling to Sol’s Titan; a fully-fledged world rather than a moon. Chaotic and poisonous chemistries of nitrogen, methane and ammonia produced an atmosphere daubed with every imaginable shade of yellow; ochre, orange, tan, whorled into beautiful cyclonic spirals, curlicued and filigreed as if by the most delicate brushwork. Over most of its surface Yellowstone was exquisitely cold, lashed by ferocious winds, flash floods and electrical storms. The planet’s orbit around Epsilon Eridani had been disturbed in the distant past by a close encounter with Tangerine Dream, the system’s massive gas giant, and even though that event must have taken place hundreds of millions years ago, Yellowstone’s crust was still relaxing from the tectonic stress of the encounter, bleeding energy back to the surface. There was some speculation that Marco’s Eye—the planet’s solitary moon—had even been captured from the gas giant; a history that would explain the odd cratering on one side of the moon.

Yellowstone was not a hospitable place, but humans had come nonetheless. I tried to imagine what it must have been like at the height of the Belle Epoque; descending into Yellowstone’s atmosphere and knowing that beneath those golden cloud layers lay cities as fabulous as dream, Chasm City the mightiest of them all. The glory had lasted more than two hundred years… and even in its terminal years, there had been nothing to suggest it was not capable of lasting centuries more. There’d been no decadent decline; no failure of nerve. But then the plague had come. All those hues of yellow became hues of sickness; hues of vomit and bile and infection; the world’s febrile skies masking the diseased cities strewn across its surface like chancres.

Still, I thought, sipping the drink Quirrenbach had bought me, it had been good while it lasted.

The behemoth didn’t cut its way into the atmosphere; it submerged itself, descending so slowly that there was barely any friction on its hull. The sky above stopped being pure black and began to assume faint hints of purple and then ochre. Now and then our weight fluctuated—presumably as the behemoth hit a pressure cell which it couldn’t quite squeeze past—but never by more than ten or fifteen per cent.

“It’s still beautiful,” he said. “Don’t you think?”

He was right. We could see the surface occasionally now, when some chaotic squall or shift in the underlying atmospheric chemistry opened a temporary rent in the yellow cloud layers. Shimmering lakes of frozen ammonia; psychotic badlands of wind-carved geology; broken spires and mile-high arches like the half-buried bones of titanic animals. There were forms of single-celled organism down there, I knew—staining the surface in great, lustrous purple and emerald monolayers or veining deep rock strata—but they existed in such glacial time that it was hard to think of them as living at all. Here and there were small domed outposts, but nothing one would think of as cities. Yellowstone had only a handful of settlements even a tenth the size of Chasm City now; nothing equalling it. Even the second largest city, Ferrisville, was a township compared to the capital.

“Nice place to visit,” I said, not needing to complete the old saying.

“Yes… you’re probably right,” Quirrenbach said. “Once I’ve soaked up enough of the ambience to fuel my composition, and earned enough to pay for a hop out of here… I doubt very much that I will linger.”

“How are you going to make money?”

“There’s always work for composers. All you need to do is find some rich benefactor who fancies sponsoring a great work of art. They feel like they’re achieving some small measure of immortality themselves.”

“And what if they’re already immortal, or postmortal, or whatever it is they call themselves?”

“Even the postmortal can’t be certain they aren’t going to die at some point, so the instinct to leave a dent on history is still strong. Besides which, there are many people in Chasm City who used to be postmortal, but who now have to deal with the imminent prospect of death, the way some of us always have.”

“My heart bleeds.”

“Quite… well, let us just say that for a good many people death is now back on the agenda in a way it hasn’t been for several centuries.”

“Even so, what if there aren’t any rich benefactors amongst them?”

“Oh, there are. You’ve seen those palanquins. There are still rich people in Chasm City, even though there isn’t much of what you’d call an economic infrastructure. But you can be sure there are pockets of wealth and influence, and I’m willing to wager that a few people are wealthier and more influential than they were before.”

“That’s always the way with disasters,” I said.

“What?”

“They’re never bad news for everyone. Something nasty always rises to the top.”

As we descended further I thought about cover stories and camouflage. I hadn’t given much thought to either, but—weapons and logistics aside—that was the way I usually operated, preferring to adapt to my surroundings as I found them, rather than to plan things in advance. But what about Reivich? He couldn’t have known about the plague, which meant that any plans he’d formulated would have been in disarray as soon as he learned what had happened. But there was a vital difference: Reivich was an aristocrat, and they had webs of influence which reached between worlds, often based on familial ties which reached back centuries. It was possible—likely, even — that Reivich had connections amongst Chasm City’s elite.

Those connections would have been useful to him even if he hadn’t managed to contact them before his arrival. But they’d have been even more useful if he’d been able to signal them while he was on his way here, forewarning them. A lighthugger moved at nearly the speed of light, but it had to speed up and slow down at either end of its journey. A radio signal from Sky’s Edge—sent just before the Orvieto’s departure—would have reached Yellowstone a year or two in advance of the ship itself, giving his allies that much time to prepare for his arrival.

Or perhaps he had no allies. Or they existed, but the message had never got through, lost in the confusion that was the system’s communications net and condemned to bounce endlessly between malfunctioning network nodes. Or perhaps there just hadn’t been time to arrange for a message to be sent at all, or it hadn’t crossed his mind.

I’d have liked to have drawn comfort from any of those possibilities, but the one thing I never counted on was having luck on my side.

It was generally simpler that way.

I looked out the window again, seeing Chasm City for the first time as the clouds parted, and thought: he’s down there, somewhere… waiting and knowing. But even then the city was too large to take in, and I felt a crushing sense of the enormity of the task that lay ahead of me. Give up now, I thought; it’s impossible. You’ll never find him.

But then I remembered Gitta.

The city nestled within a wide, jagged crater wall, sixty kilometres from side to side, and nearly two kilometres high at its tallest point. When the first explorers arrived here, they had sought shelter from Yellowstone’s winds within the crater, building flimsy, air-filled structures that would have survived five minutes in the true badlands. But they’d also been lured by the chasm itself: the deep, sheer-sided, mist-enshrouded gully at the geometric centre of the crater.

The chasm belched perpetual warm gas, one of the outlets for the tectonic energy pumped into the core during the encounter with the gas giant. The gas was still poisonous, but much richer in free oxygen, water vapour and other trace gases than any comparable outgassing anywhere on Yellowstone’s surface. The gas still needed to be filtered through machinery before it could be breathed, but that process was much simpler than it would have been elsewhere, and the scalding heat could be used to drive immense steam turbines, supplying as much energy as any burgeoning colony could use. The city had sprawled across the entire level surface of the crater, surrounding the chasm at its heart and spilling some way into its depths. Structures were perched on perilous ledges hundreds of metres below the chasm’s lip, connected by elevators and walkways.

Most of the city, however, lay under a vast toroidal dome, encircling the chasm. Quirrenbach told me the locals called it the Mosquito Net. Technically, it was actually eighteen individual domes, but because they were merged it was hard to tell where one ended and another began. The surface hadn’t been cleaned in seven years and was now stained in filthy, near-opaque shades of brown and yellow. It was largely accidental that some areas of the dome remained clean enough to reveal the city beneath them. From the behemoth, it looked almost normal: a phenomenal mass of immensely tall buildings compressed into festering urban density, like a glimpse into the innards of a fantastically complex machine. But there was something queasily wrong about those buildings; something sick about their shapes, contorted into forms no sane architect would have chosen. Above ground, they branched and rebranched, merging into a single bronchial mass. Except for a sprinkling of lights at their upper and lower extremities—strewn through the bronchial mass like lanterns—the buildings were dark and dead-looking.

“Well, you know what this means,” I said.

“What?”

“They weren’t kidding. It wasn’t a hoax.”

“No,” Quirrenbach said. “They most certainly weren’t. I also foolishly allowed myself to entertain that possibility; thinking that even after what had become of the Rust Belt, even after the evidence I had seen with my own eyes, the city itself might be intact, a reclusive hermit hoarding its riches away from the curious.”

“But there’s still a city,” I said. “There are still people down there; still some kind of society.”

“Just not quite the one we were expecting.”

We skimmed low over the dome. The structure was a sagging geodesic drapery of latticed metal and structural diamond stretching for kilometres, as far into the brown caul of the atmosphere as it was possible to see. Tiny teams of suited repair workers were dotted across the dome like ants, their labours revealed by the intermittent sparks of welding torches. Here and there I saw gouts of grey vapour streaming from cracks in the dome, internal air freezing as it hit Yellowstone’s atmosphere, high above the crater’s thermal trap. The buildings below reached almost to the underside of the dome itself, groping up like arthritic fingers. Black strands stretched between those painfully swollen and crooked digits; for all the world like the last tracery of gloves which had rotted almost away. Lights were clumped near the tips of those fingers, reaching in long meandering filaments along the thickest webs which bridged them. Now that we were closer I saw that there was a finer tracery altogether, the buildings enveloped in a convoluted tangle of fine dark filaments as if delirious spiders had tried to fashion webs between them. What they had produced was an incoherent mass of dangling threads, lights moving through it along drunken trajectories.

I remembered what the welcome message aboard the Strelnikov had told me about the Melding Plague. The transformations had been extraordinarily rapid—so rapid, in fact, that the shifting buildings had killed a great many people in ways far cruder than the plague itself would have done. The buildings had been engineered to repair themselves and reshape themselves according to architectural whims imposed by democratic will—the populace having only to wish a building to alter its shape in sufficient numbers for the building to obey—but the changes wrought by the plague had been uncontrolled and sudden, more like a series of abrupt seismic shifts. That was the hidden danger of a city so Utopian in its fluidity that it could be reshaped time and again, frozen and melted and refrozen like an ice-sculpture. No one had told the city that there were people living within it, who might be crushed once it began to shape itself. Many of the dead were still down there, entombed in the monstrous structures which now filled the city.

Then Chasm City was no longer beneath us, but the toothed edge of the crater wall; the behemoth slicing expertly through a notch in the rim which looked only just wide enough to accommodate it.

Ahead I could see a huddle of armoured structures near one edge of a butterscotch-coloured lake. The behemoth lowered itself towards the lake, the scream of its thrusters audible now as it fought to hold itself at this altitude against its natural tendency to float upwards.

“Disembarkation time,” Quirrenbach said. He got up from his seat, indicating a general flow of people across the lobby.

“Where are they all going?”

“To the drop capsules.”

I followed him across the lobby, where a dozen sets of spiral stairs led to the disembarkation level, a whole deck below. People were waiting by glass airlocks to board teardrop-shaped capsules, dozens of them which were slowly being pushed forward along guideways. At the front, the capsules slid down a short ramp which was jutting from the behemoth’s belly, before falling the rest of the distance—two or three hundred metres—and splashing into the lake.

“You mean this thing doesn’t actually land?”

“Good heavens, no.” Quirrenbach smiled at me. “They wouldn’t risk landing. Not these days.”

Our drop capsule slid from the behemoth’s belly. There were four of us in it: Quirrenbach, myself and two other passengers. The other two were engaged in an animated conversation about a local celebrity called Voronoff, but they spoke Norte with such a strong local accent that I could only follow about one word in three. They were completely unfazed by the experience of dropping from the behemoth; even when we plunged deep into the lake and appeared in some danger of not bobbing to the surface. But then we did, and because the drop capsule’s skin was glassy, I could see other capsules bobbing around us.

Two giant machines strode across the lake to receive us. They were tripods, rising high above us on skeletal, pistonned mechanical legs. With cranelike appendages they began to collect the floating capsules and deposit each in a collecting net stowed beneath the body of each tripod. I could see a driver perched at the top of each machine, tiny inside a pressurised cabin, working levers furiously.

The machines walked to the lake’s edge and emptied their catches onto a moving belt which fed into one of the buildings I’d seen from the behemoth.

Inside, we were passed into a pressurised reception chamber where the pods were removed from the belt and opened by bored-looking workers. Empty pods were shuttling around to an embarkation area similar to the one aboard the behemoth, where passengers waited with luggage. I presumed they’d be carried out to the middle of the lake by the tripods, which would then loft each pod high enough up for the behemoth to grab it.

Quirrenbach and I left our pod and followed the flow of passengers from the reception chamber through a warren of cold, dim tunnels. The air tasted stale, as if each breath had already been through a few lungs before it reached my own. But it was breathable, and the gravity not noticeably heavier than in the Rust Belt habitat.

“I don’t know quite what I was expecting,” I said. “But this wasn’t it. No welcoming signs; no visible security; nothing. It makes me wonder what the immigration and customs section will be like.”

“You don’t have to wonder,” Quirrenbach said. “You’ve just left it.”

I thought about the diamond gun I’d given Amelia, secure in the knowledge that there was no way I would be able to take it with me to Chasm City.

“That was it?”

“Think about it. You’d find it exceedingly difficult to bring anything into Chasm City which wasn’t already there. There’s no point checking for weapons—they’ve got enough of them already, so what difference would one more make? They’d be far more likely to confiscate whatever you had and offer you part-exchange on an upgrade. And there’s no point screening for diseases. Too complicated, and you’re far more likely to catch something than bring something into the city. A few nice foreign germs might actually do us some good.”

“Us?”

“Them. Slip of the tongue.”

We passed into a well-lit area with wide windows overlooking the lake. The behemoth was being loaded with capsules, the dorsal surface of the manta-like machine still bright with the thrusters it had to burn to hold this position. Each pod was sterilised by being passed through a ring of purple flame before being accepted into the behemoth’s belly. Maybe the city didn’t care what came into it, but the outside universe certainly seemed to care what left it.

“I suppose you have some idea how we get to the city from here?”

“There’s really only one way, I gather, and that’s the Chasm City Zephyr.”

Quirrenbach and I brushed past a palanquin, moving slowly down the next connecting tunnel. The upright box was patterned in bas-relief black, showing scenes from the city’s vainglorious past. I risked a glance back as we overtook the slow-moving machine and my gaze met the fearful eyes of the hermetic sitting within: face pale behind thick green glass.

There were walking servitors carrying luggage, but there was something primitive about them. They were not sleek intelligence machines, but clunking, error-prone robots with about as much sentience as a dog. There were no genuinely clever machines left now, outside of the orbital enclaves where such things were still possible. But even the crude servitors that remained were obviously valued: signs of residual wealth.

And then there were the wealthy themselves, those travelling without the sanctuary of palanquins. I presumed none of these people had implants of any great complexity; certainly nothing that might be susceptible to plague spore. They moved nervously, in hurried packs, surrounding themselves with servitors.

Ahead the tunnel widened into an underground cavern, dimly lit by hundreds of flickering lamps burning in sconces. There was a steady warm breeze blowing through it, carrying a stench of machine oil.

And something enormous and bestial waited in the cavern.

It rode four sets of double rails arranged around it at intervals of ninety degrees: one set below the machine, one above and one on either side. The rails themselves were supported by a framework of skeletal braces, though at either end of the cavern they vanished into circular tunnels where they were anchored to the walls themselves. I couldn’t help but think of the trains in the Santiago which had featured in one of Sky’s dreams, braced within a similar set of rails—even though those rails had only been guidance ways for induction fields.

This wasn’t like that.

The train itself was constructed with a four-way symmetry. At the centre was a cylindrical core tipped with a bullet-shaped prow and a single Cyclopean headlight. Jutting from this core were four separate double rows of enormous iron wheels, each of which contained twelve axles and was locked onto one of the pairs of rail lines. Three pairs of huge cylinders were interspersed along each set of twelve main wheels, each connected to four sets of wheels by a bewildering arrangement of gleaming pistons and thigh-thick greased articulated cranks. A mass of pipe-runs snaked all around the machine; whatever symmetry or elegance of design it might have had was ruined by what appeared to be randomly placed exhaust outlets, all of which were belching steam up towards the cavern’s ceiling. The machine hissed like a dragon whose patience was wearing fatally thin. It seemed worryingly alive.

Behind was a string of passenger cars built around the same fourfold symmetry, engaging with the same rails.

“That’s the… ?”

“… Chasm City Zephyr,” Quirrenbach said. “Quite a beast, isn’t she?”

“You’re telling me that thing actually goes somewhere?”

“It wouldn’t make much sense if it didn’t.” I gave him a look so he continued, “I heard that they used to have magnetic levitation trains running into Chasm City and out to the other colonies. They had vacuum tunnels for them. But they must have stopped working properly after the plague.”

“And they thought replacing them with this was a good idea?”

“They didn’t have much choice. I don’t think anyone needs to get anywhere very quickly nowadays, so it doesn’t matter that the trains can’t run at the supersonic speeds they used to attain. A couple of hundred kilometres per hour is more than sufficient, even for journeys out to the other settlements.”

Quirrenbach started walking towards the back of the train where ramps led up to the passenger cars.

“Why steam?”

“Because there aren’t any fossil fuels on Yellowstone. Some nuclear generators still work, but, by and large, the chasm itself is about the only useful energy source around here. That’s why a lot of the city runs on steam pressure these days.”

“I still don’t buy it, Quirrenbach. You don’t jump back six hundred years just because you can’t use nanotechnology any more.”

“Maybe you do. After the plague hit, it affected a lot more than you’d think. Almost all manufacturing had been done by nano for centuries. Materials production; shaping—it all suddenly got a lot cruder. Even things which didn’t use nano themselves had been built by nano; designed with incredibly fine tolerances. None of that stuff could be duplicated any more. It wasn’t just a question of making do with things which were slightly less sophisticated. They had to go right back before they reached any kind of plateau from which they could begin rebuilding. That meant working with crudely forged metals and metalworking techniques. And remember that a lot of the data relating to these things had been lost as well. They were fumbling around in the blind. It was like someone from the twenty-first century trying to work out how to make a mediaeval sword without knowing anything about metallurgy. Knowing that something was primitive didn’t necessarily mean it was any easier to rediscover.”

Quirrenbach paused to catch his breath, standing beneath a clattering destination board. It showed departures to Chasm City, Ferrisville, Loreanville, New Europa and beyond, but only about one train a day was leaving to anywhere other than Chasm City.

“So they did the best they could,” Quirrenbach said. “Some technology had survived the plague, of course. That’s why you’ll still see relics, even here—servitors, vehicles—but they tend to be owned by the rich. They’ve got all the nuclear generators, and the few antimatter power-plants left in the city. Down in the Mulch it’ll be a different story, I think. It’ll be dangerous, too.”

While he talked I looked at the destination board. It would have made my job a lot easier if Reivich had taken a train to one of the smaller settlements, where he would have been both conspicuous and trapped, but I thought the chances were good that he’d have taken the first train to Chasm City.

Quirrenbach and I paid our fares and boarded the train. The carriages strung behind the locomotive looked much older than the rest of it, and therefore much more modern, salvaged from the old levitating train and mounted on wheels. The doors irised shut, and then the whole procession clanked into motion, creeping forward at a walking pace and then gathering speed laboriously. There was an intermittent squeal of slipping wheels, and then the ride became smoother, steam billowing past us. The train threaded its way through one of the narrow-bored tunnels faced with an enormous irising door, and then we passed through a further series of pressure locks, until we must have been moving through near-vacuum.

The ride became ghostly quiet.

The passenger compartment was as cramped as a prison transport, and the passengers seemed subdued to the point of somnolence, like drugged prisoners being carried to a detention centre. Screens had dropped down from the ceiling and were now cycling through adverts, but they referred to products and services which were very unlikely to have survived the plague. Near one end I could see a huddle of palanquins, grouped together like a collection of coffins in an undertaker’s backroom.

“The first thing we’ve got to do is get these implants out,” Quirrenbach said, leaning conspiratorially towards me. “I can’t bear the idea of the things still sitting in my head now.”

“We should be able to find someone who’ll do it quickly,” I said.

“And safely, too—the one’s not much good without the other.”

I smiled. “I think it’s probably a little late to worry about safely, don’t you?”

Quirrenbach pursed his lips.

The screen next to us was showing an advert for a particularly sleek-looking flying machine, something like one of our volantors, except it seemed to have been made out of insect parts. But then the screen flashed with static and a geisha-like woman appeared on it instead.

“Welcome aboard the Chasm City Zephyr.” The woman’s face resembled a china doll with painted lips and rosy cheeks. She wore an absurdly elaborate silver outfit which curved up behind her head. “We are currently transiting the Trans-Caldera Tunnel and will be arriving at Grand Central Station in eight minutes. We hope you will enjoy your journey with us and that your time in Chasm City will be both pleasant and prosperous. In the meantime, in anticipation of our arrival, we invite you to share some of our city’s highlights.”

“This’ll be interesting,” Quirrenbach said.

The windows of the train carriage flickered and became holographic displays, no longer showing the rushing walls, but an impressive vista of the city, just as if the train had tunnelled through seven years of history. The train was threading between dreamlike structures, rising vertiginously on either side like mountains sculpted out of solid opal or obsidian. Below us was a series of stepped levels, landscaped with beautiful gardens and lakes, entwined with walkways and civic transit tubes. They dwindled into a haze of blue depth, riven by plunging abysses full of neon light, immense tiered plazas and rockfaces. The air was thick with a constant swarm of colourful aerial vehicles, some of which were shaped like exotic dragonflies or hummingbirds. Passenger dirigibles nosed indolently through the swarms; scores of tiny revellers peered over the railed edges of their gondolas. Above them, the largest buildings loomed like geometric clouds. The sky was a pure electric blue woven with the fine, regular matrix of the dome.

And all around the city marched into terrible distance, wonder upon wonder receding as far as the eye could see. It was only sixty kilometres, but it could have been infinity. There appeared to be enough marvels in Chasm City to last a lifetime. Even a modern one.

But no one had told the simulation about the plague. I had to remind myself that we were still rushing through the tunnel under the crater wall; that in fact we had yet to arrive in the city itself.

“I can see why they called it a Belle Epoque,” I said.

Quirrenbach nodded. “They had it all. And you know the worst of it? They damn well knew it. Unlike any other golden age in history… they knew they were living through it.”

“It must have made them pretty insufferable.”

“Well, they certainly paid for it.”

It was round about then that we burst into what passed for daylight in Chasm City. The train must have crossed under the crater rim and passed through the boundary of the dome. It was racing through a suspended tube just like the one which had been suggested by the hologram, but this tube was covered in dirt which only gave way fleetingly; just enough to show that we were passing through what looked like a series of densely packed slums. The holographic recording was still playing, so that the old city was superimposed on the new one like a faint ghost. Ahead, the tube curved round and vanished into a tiered cylindrical building from which other tubes radiated, threading out across the city. The train was slowing as we approached the tiered building.

Grand Central Station, Chasm City.

As we entered the building, the holographic mirage faded, taking with it the last faint memory of the Belle Epoque. Yet for all its glory, only Quirrenbach and I seemed to have taken much notice of the hologram. The other passengers stood silent, scrutinising the scorched and littered floor.

“Still think you can make it here?” I asked Quirrenbach. “After what you’ve seen now?”

He gave the question a lot of thought before answering.

“Who’s to say I won’t? Maybe there are more opportunities now than ever before. Maybe it’s just a question of adaptation. One thing’s for sure, though.”

“What’s that?”

“Whatever music I write here, it isn’t going to cheer anyone up.”

Grand Central Station was as humid as deep Peninsula jungle, just as starved of light as the forest floor. Sweltering, I removed Vadim’s coat and bundled it under one arm.

“We’ve got to get these implants out,” Quirrenbach said yet again, tugging at my sleeve.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “It hadn’t slipped my mind.”

The roof was supported by fluted pillars which rose up like hamadryad trees before thrusting their fingers through the roof into the brown gloom beyond. In between these pillars was a densely packed bazaar: a motley city of tents and stalls, through which passed only the narrowest and most twisting of passageways. Stalls had been built or piled above each other, so that some of the passageways became backbreakingly low, lamplit tunnels through which people were forced to stoop like hunchbacks. There were several dozen vendors and many hundreds of people, very few of whom were accompanied by servitors. There were exotic pets on leashes; genetically enhanced servants; caged birds and snakes. A few hermetics had made the error of trying to force their way through the bazaar rather than finding a route around it, and now their palanquins were mired, harried by traders and tricksters.

“Well?” I said. “Do we risk it, or find a way around?”

Quirrenbach clutched his briefcase closer to his chest. “Much against my better judgement, I think we should risk it. I have a hunch—merely a hunch, mind—that we may be pointed towards the services we both so urgently require.”

“It might be a mistake.”

“And it probably won’t be the first of the day, either. I’m somewhat on the ravenous side, anyway. There’s bound to be something edible around here—and it might not be immediately toxic.” We pushed our way into the bazaar. Quirrenbach and I had taken barely a dozen steps before we had attracted a mob of optimistic kids and surly beggars. “Do I have affluent and gullible written in conspicuous neon letters on my forehead?” Quirrenbach said. “It’s our clothes,” I said, pushing another urchin back into the throng. “I recognised yours as being Mendicant-made, and I wasn’t even paying you much attention.”

“I don’t see why that should make much difference.”

“Because it means we’re from outside,” I said. “Beyond the system. Who else would be wearing Mendicant clothing? That automatically guarantees a certain prosperity, or at least the possibility of it.”

Quirrenbach clutched his luggage to his chest with renewed protectiveness. We pushed our way deeper into the bazaar until we found a stall selling something which looked edible. In Hospice Idlewild they’d treated my gut flora for Yellowstone compatibility, but it had been a fairly broad-spectrum treatment, not guaranteed to be any use against anything specific. Now was my chance to test exactly how non-specific it had been.

What we bought were hot, greasy pastries filled with some unidentifiable, semi-cooked meat. It was heavily spiced, probably to disguise the meat’s underlying rancidity. But I had eaten less appetising rations on Sky’s Edge and found it more or less palatable. Quirrenbach wolfed down his, then bought another, and finished that one off with equal recklessness.

“Hey, you,” said a voice. “Implants, out?”

A kid tugged the hem of Quirrenbach’s Mendicant jacket, dragging him deeper into the bazaar. The kid’s clothes would be graduating to raghood in a week or two, but were now lingering on the edge of dilapidation.

“Implants, out,” the kid said again. “You new here, you no need implants, misters. Madame Dominika, she get them out, good price, fast, not much blood or pain. You too, big guy.”

The kid had hooked his fingers around my belt and was dragging me as well.

“It’s, um, not necessary,” Quirrenbach said, pointlessly.

“You new here, got Mendicant suits, need implants out now, before they go wacko. You know what that mean, misters? Big scream, head explode, brain everywhere, get real mess on clothes… you not want that, I think.”

“No, thank you very much.”

Another kid had appeared, tugging at Quirrenbach’s other sleeve. “Hey, mister, don’t listen to Tom—come and see Doctor Jackal! He only kill one in twenty! Lowest mortality rate in Grand Central! Don’t go wacko; see the Jackal!”

“Yeah, and get free permanent brain damage,” said Dominika’s kid. “Don’t listen; ev’ryone know Dominika best in Chasm City!”

I said, “Why are you hesitating? Isn’t this exactly what you were hoping to find?”

“Yes!” Quirrenbach hissed. “But not like this! Not in some filthy damned tent! I was anticipating a reasonably sterile and well-equipped clinic. In fact I know there are better places we can use, Tanner, just trust me on this…”

I shrugged, allowing Tom to haul me along. “Maybe a tent is as good as it gets, Quirrenbach.”

“No! It can’t be. There must be…” He looked at me helplessly, willing me to take control and drag him away, but I simply smiled and nodded towards the tent: a blue and white box with a slightly cambered roof, guylines attached to iron pins driven into the floor.

“In you go,” I said, inviting Quirrenbach to step ahead of me. We were in an ante-room to the tent’s main chamber, just us and the kid. Tom, I saw now, had a kind of elfin beauty; gender indeterminate beneath tattered clothes, the face was framed by curtains of lank black hair. The kid’s name could have been Thomas or Thomasina, but I decided it was probably the former. Tom swayed in time to sitar music emanating from a little malachite box which rested on a table set with perfumed candles.

“This isn’t too bad,” I said. “I mean, there’s no actual blood anywhere. No actual brain tissue lying around.”

“No,” Quirrenbach said, suddenly making a decision. “Not here; not how. I’m leaving, Tanner. You can stay or follow me; it’s entirely up to you.”

I spoke to him as quietly as I could manage: “What Tom says is true. You need to have your implants out now, if the Mendicants didn’t already do it for you.”

He reached up and rasped a hand across his scalp stubble. “Maybe they were just trying to scare up business with those stories.”

“Perhaps—but do you really want to take that risk? The hardware’s just going to be sitting in your head like a time-bomb. Might as well have it out. You can always have it put back in again, after all.”

“By a woman in a tent who calls herself Madame Dominika? I’d rather take my chances with a rusty penknife and a mirror.”

“Whatever. Just so long as you do it before you go wacko.”

The kid was already dragging Quirrenbach through the partition into the room beyond. “Talking of money, Tanner—neither of us are exactly flush. We don’t know we can afford Dominika’s services, do we?”

“That’s a very good point.” I grabbed Tom by the collar, hauling him gently back into the ante-room. “My friend and I need to sell some goods in a hurry, unless your Madame Dominika is given to charity.” When that remark had no effect on Tom, I opened my suitcase and showed him some of what was inside. “Sell, for cash. Where?”

That seemed to work. “Green and silver tent, “cross market. Say Dominika sent you, you no get major sting.”

“Hey, wait a minute.” Quirrenbach was halfway through the gash now. I could see into the main room, where a phenomenally bulky woman sat behind a long couch, consulting her fingernails, medical equipment suspended over the couch on articulated booms, metal glinting in candlelight.

“What?”

“Why should I be the guinea pig? I thought you said you needed to have your implants removed as well.”

“You’re right. And I’ll be back shortly. I just need to convert some of my possessions into cash. Tom said I could do it in the bazaar.”

His face turned from incomprehension to fury.

“But you can’t go now! I thought we were in this together! Travelling companions! Don’t betray a friendship almost before it’s begun, Tanner…”

“Hey, calm down. I’m not betraying anything. By the time she’s finished with you, I’ll have got enough cash together.” I clicked a finger towards the fat woman. “Dominika!”

Languidly, she turned to face me, her lips forming a silent interrogative.

“How long will it take with him?”

“One hour,” she answered. “Dominika real quick.”

I nodded. “That’s more than enough time, Quirrenbach. Just sit back and let her do her job.”

He looked into Dominika’s face and seemed to calm slightly.

“Really? You will be back?”

“Of course. I’m not stepping into the city with implants still in my head. What do you think I am, insane? But I do need money.”

“What are you planning to sell?”

“Some of my own goods. Some of the stuff I lifted from our mutual friend Vadim. There’s got to be a market for that kind of thing or he wouldn’t have been hoarding it.”

Dominika was trying to pull him onto her couch, but Quirrenbach was still managing to stay on his feet. I remembered how he had impulsively changed his mind when we began looting Vadim’s quarters—at first resisting the theft, then throwing himself enthusiastically into the process. I saw a similar sea-change now.

“Dammit,” he murmured, shaking his head. He looked at me curiously, then cracked open his own case, riffling through sheet music until he reached a set of compartments below it. He fished out some of the experientials he had taken from Vadim. “I’m no good at bartering anyway. Take these and get a good price on them, Tanner. I’m assuming they’ll cover the cost of this.”

“You trust me to do that?”

He looked at me through squinted eyes. “Just get a good price.”

I took the items and placed them amongst my own.

Behind him, the bulky woman hovered across the room like an unmoored dirigible, her feet skimming inches from the ground. She was cradled in a black metal harness, attached to one wall by a complexly-jointed pneumatic arm, hissing steam as it articulated and flexed. Rolls of fat disguised the indeterminate region where her head and torso merged. Her hands were spread out as if she was drying recently painted fingernails. Each fingertip vanished into—or possibly became —a kind of thimble. Each thimble was tipped with something medical and specialised.

“No; him first,” she said, extending a little finger in my direction, its thimble adorned with what looked like a tiny sterile harpoon.

“Thank you, Dominika,” I said. “But you’d best attend to Quirrenbach first.”

“You come back?”

“Yes—once I’ve acquired some finance.”

I smiled and left the tent, hearing the sound of drills whining up to speed.