Chasm City

NINETEEN

“Tanner? Snap out of it. I don’t want you falling unconscious on me.”

We were approaching a building now—if you could call it that. It looked more like an enchanted tree, huge and gnarled branches pocked with haphazard windows, and cable-car landing decks set amongst the limbs. Cableway threads reached through the interstices of the major branches, and Zebra guided us in fearlessly, as if she had navigated this approach thousands of times. I looked down, through vertiginous layers of branches, the firelights of the Mulch twinkling sickeningly far below.

Zebra’s apartment in the Canopy was near the middle of the city, on the edge of the chasm, near the inner dome boundary which surrounded the great belching hole in Yellowstone’s crust. We had travelled some way around the chasm and from the landing deck I could see the tiny, jewelled sliver of the stalk projecting out for one horizontal kilometre, far below us and around the great curve of the chasm’s edge. I looked down into the chasm but I couldn’t see any sign of the luminous gliders, or any other mist-jumpers taking the great fall.

“Do you live here alone?” I asked when she had led me into her rooms, striking what I hoped was the right note of polite curiosity.

“Now I do, yes.” The answer was quick, almost glib. But she continued speaking. “I used to share this place with my sister, Mavra.”

“And Mavra left?”

“Mavra got killed.” She left that remark hanging there long enough to have its effect. “She got too close to the wrong people.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, fishing for something to say. “Were these people hunters, like Sybilline?”

“Not exactly, no. She was curious about something she shouldn’t have been, and she asked the wrong kinds of questions of the wrong people, but it wasn’t directly to do with the hunt.”

“What, then?”

“Why are you so interested in knowing?”

“I’m not exactly an angel, Zebra, but I don’t like the idea of someone dying just because they were curious.”

“Then you’d better be careful you don’t ask the wrong kinds of question yourself.”

“About what, exactly?”

She sighed, obviously wishing our conversation had never taken this tack. “There’s a substance…”

“Dream Fuel?”

“You’ve encountered it, then?”

“I’ve seen it being used, but that’s about the extent of my knowledge. Sybilline used it in my presence, but I didn’t notice any change in her behaviour before or afterwards. What is it, exactly?”

“It’s complicated, Tanner. Mavra had only pieced together a few parts of the story before they got her.”

“It’s a drug of some sort, obviously.”

“It’s a lot more than a drug. Look, can we talk about something else? It hasn’t been easy for me to deal with her being gone, and this is just opening up old wounds.”

I nodded, willing to let it lie for now. “You were close, weren’t you?”

“Yes,” she said, as if I’d picked up on some profound secret in their relationship. “And Mavra loved it here. She said it had the best view anywhere in the city, apart from the stalk. But when she was around we could never have afforded to eat in that place.”

“You haven’t done too badly. If you like heights.”

“You don’t, Tanner?”

“I guess it takes some getting used to.”

Her apartment, ensconced in one of the major branches, was a complex of intestinally twisted rooms and corridors; more like an animal’s stet than anything a human would choose for use. The rooms were in one of the narrower branches, suspended two kilometres above the Mulch, with lower levels of the Canopy hanging below, linked to ours by vertical threads, strands and hollowed-out trunks.

She led me into what might have been her living room.

It was like entering an internal organ in some huge, walk-through model of the human anatomy. The walls, floor and ceiling were all softly rounded into each other. Level surfaces had been created by cutting into the fabric of the building, but they had to be stepped on different levels, connected by ramps and stairs. The surfaces of the walls and ceiling were rigid, but uneasily organic in nature; veined or patterned with irregular platelets. In one wall was what looked like a piece of expensive, in-situ sculpture: a tableau of three roughly hewn people who had been depicted forcing their way out of the wall, clawing to escape from it like swimmers trying to outswim the wall of a tsunami wave. Most of their bodies were hidden; all you could see was half a face or the end of a limb, but the effect was forceful enough.

“You have pretty unique taste in art, Zebra,” I said. “I think that would give me nightmares.”

“It’s not art, Tanner.”

“Those were real people?”

“Still are, by some definitions. Not alive, but not exactly dead either. More like fossils, but with the fossil structure so intricate that you can almost map neurons. I’m not the only one with them, and no one really wants to cut them away in case someone thinks of a way to get them back the way they were. So we live with them. No one used to want to share a room with them, once, but now I hear it’s quite the chic thing to have a few of them in your apartment. There’s even a man in the Canopy who makes fake ones, for the truly desperate.”

“But these are real?”

“Credit me with some taste, Tanner. Now, I think you need to sit down for a moment. No; stay where you are.”

She snapped her fingers at her couch.

The larger items of Zebra’s furniture were autonomous, responding to our presence like nervous pets. The couch perambulated from its station, neatly stepping down to our level. In contrast to the Mulch, where nothing much more advanced than steam power could be relied upon, there were obviously still machines of reasonable sophistication in the Canopy. Zebra’s rooms were full of them; not just furniture, but servitors ranging from mice-sized drones to large ceiling-tracked units, as well as fist-sized fliers. You had only to reach for something and it would scuttle helpfully closer to your hand. The machines must have been crude compared to what had existed before the plague, but I still felt like I’d wandered into a room animated by poltergeists.

“That’s right; sit down,” Zebra said, easing my transition onto her couch. “And just lie still. I’ll be back in a moment.”

“Believe me, I’m not going anywhere in a hurry.”

She disappeared from the room, and I lolled in and out of consciousness, for all that I was unwilling to surrender myself to sleep so easily. No more Sky dreams. When Zebra returned she had removed her coat, and she carried two glasses of something hot and herbal. I let it run down my throat, and while I couldn’t say it actively improved the way I felt, it was an improvement on the gallons of Mulch rainwater which I had already consumed.

Zebra had not returned alone: gliding behind her had come one of her larger ceiling-tracked servitors, a multi-limbed white cylinder with an ovoid glowing green face alive with flickering medical readouts. The machine descended until it could bring its sensors into play on my leg, chirruping and projecting status graphics as it diagnosed the severity of the wound.

“Well? Do I live or die?”

“You’re lucky,” Zebra said. “The gun she used against you? It was a low-yield laser; a duelling weapon. It’s not designed to do any real harm unless it touches vital organs, and the beam’s finely collimated, so the surrounding tissue damage is pretty minimal.”

“You could have fooled me.”

“Well, I never said it wouldn’t hurt like hell. But you’ll live, Tanner.”

“Nonetheless,” I said, grimacing as the machine probed the entry wound with minimal gentleness, “I don’t think I’ll be able to walk on it.”

“You won’t have to. At least not until tomorrow. The machine can heal you while you sleep.”

“I’m not sure I feel like sleeping.”

“Why—have you got a problem with it?”

“It might surprise you, but yes, actually I have.” She looked at me blankly, so I decided there was no harm in telling her about the indoctrinal virus. “They could have cleaned it out in Hospice Idlewild, but I didn’t want to wait. So now I get a quick trip into Sky Haussmann’s head every time I fall asleep.” I showed her the scab of blood in the middle of my palm.

“A man with a wound, come to our mean streets to right some wrongs?”

“I’ve come to finish some business, that’s all. But you’ll understand the idea of sleeping doesn’t exactly fill me with overwhelming enthusiasm. Sky Haussmann’s head isn’t a pleasant place to spend any great length of time.”

“I don’t know much about him. It would be ancient history even if it wasn’t another planet as well.”

“It doesn’t feel like ancient history to me. It feels like he’s slowly worming his way into me, like a voice that keeps getting louder and louder in my head. I met a man who had the virus before I did — in fact, he probably gave it to me. He was pretty far gone. He had to surround himself with Sky Haussmann iconography or he started shaking.”

“That doesn’t have to happen here,” Zebra said. “Has the indoctrinal virus been around for a few years?”

“It depends on the strain, but the viruses themselves are an old invention.”

“Then you might be in luck. If the virus showed up in Yellowstone’s medical databases before the plague hit, the servitor will know about it. It might even be able to synthesise a cure.”

“The Mendicants thought it would take a few days to take effect.”

“They were probably being over-cautious. A day, perhaps two—that should be all the time it takes to flush it out. If the robot knows about it.” Zebra patted the white machine. “But it will do its best. Now will you think about sleeping?”

I had to find Reivich, I told myself. That meant not wasting any time at my disposal; not a single hour. I had already wasted half a night since arriving in Chasm City. But it would take more than another couple of hours to track him down, I knew. Days, perhaps. I would only last that time if I allowed my recent injuries some time to heal. It would be sweet irony if I dropped dead of fatigue just as I was about to kill Reivich. For him, anyway. I wouldn’t be laughing.

“I’ll think about it,” I said.

The odd thing was, after all that I had told Zebra, this time I didn’t dream about Sky Haussmann at all.

I dreamed about Gitta.

She’d always been there in my thoughts, ever since waking in Idlewild. Just thinking about her beauty—and the fact that she was dead—was like a mental whiplash; a crack of pain against which my senses never seemed to dull. I could hear the way she spoke; smell her as if she were standing next to me, listening intently while I gave her one of the lessons Cahuella had insisted upon. I don’t think there had been a minute since I’d arrived around Yellowstone when Gitta had left me completely. When I saw another woman’s face, I measured her against Gitta—even if that measurement took place on a barely conscious level. I knew with a heartfelt certainty that she was dead, and although I could not absolve myself of all responsibility for her death, it was Reivich that had really killed her.

And yet, I had given very little thought to the events leading up to her death, and almost none to her death itself.

Now they came crashing in.

I didn’t dream it like this, of course. The episodes from Sky Haussmann’s life might have played through my head in a neatly linear fashion—even if some of the events in those episodes contra-dicted what I thought I knew about him—but my own dreams were as disorganised and illogical as anyone’s. So while I dreamed about the journey up the Peninsula, and the ambush that had ended with Gitta’s death, it wasn’t with the clarity of the Haussmann episodes. But afterwards, when I woke, it was as if the act of dreaming had unlocked a whole raft of memories which I had barely realised were missing. In the morning, I was able to think in detail about all that had happened.

The last thing I’d remembered in any depth was when Cahuella and I had been taken aboard the Ultra ship, where Captain Orcagna had warned us against Reivich’s planned attack on the Reptile House. Reivich, the captain said, was moving south down through the jungle. They were tracking him via the emissions from the heavy armaments his party was carrying.

It was good that Cahuella had completed his dealings with the Ultras as soon as he had. He had taken a significant risk in visiting the orbiting ship even then, but only a week afterwards it would have been nearly impossible. The bounty on him had increased enough that some of the neutral observer factions had declared that they would intercept any vessel known to be carrying Cahuella, shooting it down if arrest was not an option. If less had been at stake, the Ultras might have ignored that kind of threat, but now they had made their presence officially known and were engaged in sensitive trade negotiations with those selfsame factions. Cahuella was effectively confined to the surface—and a steadily diminishing area of it at that.

But Orcagna had stayed true to his word. He was still feeding us information on Reivich’s position as he moved south towards the Reptile House, at the fuzzy accuracy which Cahuella had requested.

Our plan was simple enough. There were very few routes through the jungle north of the Reptile House, and Reivich had already committed himself to one of the major trails. There was a point on the trail where the jungle had encroached badly, and it was there that we would lay our ambush.

“We’ll make an expedition of it,” Cahuella had said, as he and I pored over a map table in the basement of the Reptile House. “That’s prime hamadryad country, Tanner. We’ve never been there before—never had the opportunity. Now Reivich is giving it to us on a plate.”

“You’ve already got a hamadryad.”

“A juve.” He said it contemptuously, as if the animal were almost not worth having. I had to smile, remembering how triumphant he’d been at its capture. To capture any size of hamadryad alive was quite an achievement, but now he had set his sights higher. He was the classic hunter, incapable of being sated. There was always a bigger kill out there to taunt him, and he always deluded himself that after that one there would be yet another, as yet undreamt of.

He stabbed the map again. “I want an adult. A near-adult, I should say.”

“No one’s ever caught a near-adult hamadryad alive.”

“Then I’ll have to be the first, won’t I?”

“Leave it,” I said, “We’ve enough of a hunt on our hands with Reivich. We can always use this trip to scope the terrain and go back in a few months with a full hunting expedition. We don’t even have a vehicle that could carry a dead near-adult, let alone a live one.”

“I’ve been thinking about it,” he said. “And doing some preliminary work on the problem. C’mon, let me show you something, Tanner.”

I had a horrible sinking feeling.

We walked through connecting corridors into another part of the Reptile House’s basement levels. Down in the basement vivaria there were hundreds of large display cases, equipped with humidifiers and temperature control for the comfort of reptilian guests. Most of the creatures that would have filled these exhibits moved in conditions of low light, along the forest floor. The cases would have held realistic habitats for them, stocked with exactly the right kinds of flora. The largest was a series of stepped rockpools into which a pair of boa constrictors would have been introduced, but the embryos had been damaged years earlier.

By any strict definition, there were no creatures on Sky’s Edge that were exactly reptilian. Reptiles, even on Earth, were only one possible evolutionary outcome from a vast range of possibilities.

The largest invertebrates on Earth had been squid, but on Sky’s Edge, invertebrate forms had invaded land as well. No one really knew why life had gone down this road, but the best guess was that some catastrophic event had made the oceans shrink to perhaps half their previous area, exposing vast new areas of dry ground. Life on the ocean fringes had been given a huge incentive to adapt to land. The backbone had just never been invented, and through slow, fumbling, mindless ingenuity, evolution had managed to do without it. Life on Sky’s Edge was genuinely spineless. The largest animals—the hamadryads—maintained structural rigidity through the pressure of circulatory fluids alone, pumped by hundreds of hearts spread throughout the creature’s volume.

But they were cold-blooded, regulating their body temperatures by their surroundings. There had never been a winter on Sky’s Edge; nothing to select for mammal-like creatures. It was that cold-bloodedness which was most evocative of the reptilian. It meant that Sky’s Edge animals moved slowly, feeding infrequently, and lived to great ages. The largest of them, the hamadryads, did not even die in any familiar sense. They simply changed.

The connecting corridor opened out into the largest of the basement chambers, where we kept the juvenile. Originally this area had been intended for a family of crocodiles, but they were on ice for now. The entire display area which they had been assigned was just barely large enough for the young hamadryad. Fortunately, it had not grown perceptibly bigger in its time in captivity, but we would certainly have to build a huge new chamber if Cahuella was serious about bagging a near-adult.

It was some months since I had seen the juvenile. Frankly, it did not interest me greatly. Eventually it dawned on one that the creature did not actually do very much. Its appetite was negligible once it had fed. Typically, it would curl up and enter a state not far from death. Hamadryads had no real predators so they could afford to digest their food and conserve energy in peace.

Now we overlooked the deep white-walled pit which had been originally intended for the crocs. Rodriguez, one of my men, was leaning over the side, sweeping the bottom with a ten-metre-long broom. That was how far below us the floor was, surrounded by sheer walls in white ceramic. Sometimes Rodriguez had to go into the pit to fix something, a task I never greatly envied him, even when the juvenile was on the other side of a barrier. There were just some places in life where it was best not to be, and a snake pit was one of them. Rodriguez grinned at me beneath his moustache, hauling the broom out and racking it on the wall behind him, along with an array of similarly long-handled tools: claws, anaesthetic harpoons, electrical prods and such like.

“How was your trip to Santiago?” I said. He had been down there on business for us, exploring new lines of trade.

“Glad to be back, Tanner. The place is full of aristocratic arseholes. They talk about indicting the likes of us for war crimes and at the same time they hope the war never ends because it adds some colour to their miserable rich lives.”

“Some of us they already have indicted,” Cahuella said.

Rodriguez picked leaves from the broom’s bristles. “Yeah, I heard. Still, this year’s war criminal is next year’s saviour of the people, right? Besides—we all know guns don’t kill people, do they?”

“No, it’s the small metal projectiles that generally do the killing,” Cahuella said, smiling. He fingered the cattle-prod lovingly, perhaps remembering the time he had used it to shepherd the juvenile into its transport cage. “How is my baby, anyway?”

“I’m a little worried about that skin infection. Do these things moult?”

“I don’t think anyone knows. We’ll probably be the first to find out if they do.” Cahuella leaned over the wall—it was waist height—and looked down into the pit. It looked unfinished. Here and there were a few sparse attempts at vegetation, but we had quickly discovered that the hamadryad behaviour appeared to have very little to do with its surroundings. It breathed and smelled prey and occasionally ate. Otherwise it just lay coiled like the hawser of a vast maritime ship.

Even Cahuella had become bored with it after a while—after all, it was just a juvenile: he would be dead long before it grew to anything near its adult size.

The hamadryad wasn’t visible. I leaned over the edge, but it was obviously nowhere in the pit itself. There was an alcove, cool and dark, set into the wall beneath us; that was where the thing could usually be found when it was sleeping.

“She’s asleep,” Rodriguez said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Come back in a month and maybe it’ll have moved.”

“No,” Cahuella said. “Take a look at this.”

There was a white metal box set on our side of the wall; I hadn’t noticed it before. He flipped open a lid on the box and removed something like a walkie-talkie: a control pad with an aerial and a matrix of controls set into it.

“You’re not serious, are you?”

Cahuella stood with his legs slightly apart, the control unit in one hand. With his other hand he jabbed hesitantly at the matrix of buttons, as if not quite certain of the sequence he should be entering. But whatever he did had some effect: I heard the unmistakable dry slithering of the uncoiling snake below us. It was a sound like a sheet of tarpaulin being dragged over concrete.

“What’s happening?”

“Have a guess.” He was enjoying himself, leaning over the edge and watching the creature emerge from its hideaway.

The hamadryad might well have been a juvenile, but it was still as large as any I wanted to be this close to. The snakelike body was twelve metres long, as thick as my torso for most of that length. It moved like a snake, of course: there was really only one way for a long, limbless predator to move, especially one that weighed more than a tonne. The body was textureless, almost bloodlessly pale, for the creature was adjusting its skin coloration to match the white walls of the chamber. They had no predators, but they were masters of ambush.

The head was eyeless. No one was exactly sure how the snakes managed that trick of camouflaging themselves when they were blind, but there must have been optical organs distributed around the skin, purely to serve the coloration function and not wired into the higher nervous system at all. Not that they were truly blind, either, for the hamadryad did have a set of eyes, with remarkable acuity, spaced apart for binocular vision. But the eyes were set inside the upper roof of its jaw, analogous to the heat sensors in the mouth of a venomous snake. It was only when the animal opened its mouth to strike that it saw anything of the world. By then a host of other senses—infra-red and smell, mainly—would have ensured that it had locked onto likely prey. The jaw-mounted eyes were only there to guide the final moments of the attack. It sounded deeply alien, but I had heard of a mutation in frogs which caused the eyes to grow inside the mouth, with no serious impact on the frog’s wellbeing. It was also the case that terrestrial snakes functioned almost as well blind as sighted.

Now it stopped. It had emerged fully from the alcove, lightly coiled around itself.

“Well?” I said. “That’s a nice trick. Are you going to tell me how it’s done?”

“Mind control,” Cahuella said. “Doctor Vicuna and I drugged it and did a little neural experimentation.”

“The ghoul’s been here again?”

Vicuna was the resident veterinarian. He was also an ex-interrogation specialist with a past that was rumoured to harbour a number of war crimes involving medical experiments on prisoners.

“The ghoul is an expert in methods of neural regimentation. It was Vicuna who mapped the major control nodes of the hamadryad’s rather rudimentary central nervous system. Vicuna who developed the simple electrical-stimulation implants which we emplaced at strategic positions throughout what I rather charitably refer to as the creature’s brain.”

He told me they had experimented with these implants until they could coax a simple series of behaviour patterns out of the snake. There was nothing too subtle about it, either—the snake’s behaviour patterns were simple to begin with. A hamadryad, no matter how large it grew, was basically a hunting machine with a few quite simple subroutines. It was the same with the crocodiles, until we put them on ice. They were dangerous, but easy to work with once you understood how their minds worked. The same stimulus always gave the same result with crocs. The hamadryad’s routines were different—honed to life on Sky’s Edge—but not much more complex.

“All I did was hit the node that tells the snake it’s time to wake up and find some food,” Cahuella said. “It doesn’t really need to feed, of course—we fed it a live goat a week ago—but its little brain doesn’t remember that.”

“I’m impressed.” I was, but I was also uncomfortable. “What else can you get it to do?”

“This is a good one. Watch.”

He jabbed at a control and the hamadryad moved with whiplash speed towards the wall. The jaws opened at the last instant, the blunt head smacking into the ceramic tiles with tooth-shattering force.

The snake, stunned, retreated into a coil.

“Let me guess. You just made it think it had seen something worth eating.”

“It’s child’s play,” Rodriguez said, smiling at the demonstration. Evidently he had seen something of it before.

“Look,” Cahuella said. “I can even make it go back to its hole.”

I watched the snake gather itself and neatly insert itself into the alcove again, until the last of its thigh-thick coils had slipped from view.

“Any point to this?”

“Yeah, of course.” His look at me was one of acute disappointment, that I had not grasped this sooner. “A brain of a near-adult hamadryad isn’t any more complicated than this one. If we can catch ourselves a big one, we can drug it while we’re still out in the jungle. We know what tranquillisers work on snake biochemistry from our work on the juvenile. Once the thing’s out cold, Vicuna can climb up and implant the same hardware, rigged to another control unit like this one. Then all we’ve got to do is point the snake towards the Reptile House and tell it there’s food in front of its nose. It’ll slither all the way home.”

“Through a few hundred kilometres of jungle?”

“What’s to stop it? If the thing starts showing signs of malnutrition, we feed it. Otherwise, we just let the bastard slither—isn’t that right, Rodriguez?”

“He’s right, Tanner. We can follow it in our vehicles; protect it from any other hunters who might want to take a pot at it.”

Cahuella nodded. “And when it gets here we park it in a new snakepit and tell it to curl up and sleep for a while.”

I smiled, reaching for an obvious technical objection—and came back empty handed. It sounded insane, but when I tried to pick a hole in any single aspect of it, Cahuella’s plan was difficult to fault. We knew enough about the behaviour of near-adults to at least have a good idea where to begin hunting one, and we could increase our tranquilliser dosages accordingly, multiplying by the ratio of body volumes. We would also have to scale up our needles—they would need to be more like harpoons now, but again, that was within our capabilities. Somewhere in his cache of weapons, Cahuella was bound to have harpoon guns.

“We’ll still need to dig a new pit,” I said.

“Get your men working on it. They can have it ready by the time we get back.”

“Reivich is just a detail in all this, isn’t he? Even if Reivich turned back tomorrow, you’d still find an excuse to go up there and look for your adult.”

Cahuella sealed the control box away and leaned with his back to the wall, studying me critically. “No. What do you think I am, some kind of obsessive? If it meant that much to me, we’d have been up there already. I’m just saying it’d be stupid to waste an opportunity like this.”

“Two birds with one stone?”

“Two snakes,” he said, with careful emphasis on the last word. “One literally, one metaphorically.”

“You don’t really think of Reivich as a snake, do you? In my book he’s just a scared rich kid doing what he thinks is right.”

“What do you care what I think?”

“I think we need to be clear about what’s driving him. That way we understand him and can predict his actions.”

“What does it matter? We know where the kid’s going to be. We set the ambush and that’s that.”

Beneath us, the snake rearranged itself. “Do you hate him?”

“Reivich? No. I pity him. Sometimes I even think I might sympathise with him. If he was going up against anyone else because they’d killed his family—which, incidentally, I did not do—I might even wish him the best of luck.”

“Is he worth all this?”

“You got an alternative in mind, Tanner?”

“We could deter him. Hit first and take out a few of his men, just to demoralise him. Maybe even that wouldn’t be necessary. We could just set some kind of physical barrier—start a forest fire, or something. The monsoons won’t arrive for a few weeks. There must be a dozen other things we could do. The kid doesn’t necessarily have to die.”

“No; that’s where you’re wrong. No one goes up against me and lives. I don’t give a shit if they’ve just buried their whole family and their fucking pet dog. It’s a point I’m making, understand? If we don’t make it now, we’ll have to make it over and again in the future, every time some aristocrat cocksucker starts feeling lucky.”

I sighed, seeing that this was not an argument I was going to win. I had known it would come to this: that Cahuella would not be talked out of his hunting expedition. But I had felt some show of disagreement was necessary. I was senior enough in his employment that I was almost obliged to question his orders. It was part of what he paid me for: to play his conscience in the moments when he searched for his own and found only an abscessive hole where one had been.

“But it doesn’t have to be personal,” I said. “We can take out Reivich cleanly, without turning it into some kind of recriminatory bloodbath. You thought you were joking when you said I went for specific areas of brain function when I shot people in the head. But you weren’t. I can do that, if it suits the situation.” I thought of the soldiers on my own side I had been forced to assassinate; innocent men and women whose deaths served some inscrutable higher plan. Though it was no kind of absolution from the evil that I had perpetrated, I had always tried to take them out as quickly and painlessly as my expertise allowed. I felt — then—that Reivich deserved something of the same kindness.

Now, in Chasm City, I felt something else entirely.

“Don’t worry, Tanner. We’ll make it nice and quick on him. A real clinical job.”

“Good. I’ll be hand-picking my own team, of course… is Vicuna coming with us?”

“Of course.”

“Then we’ll need two tents. I’m not eating from the same table as the ghoul, no matter what tricks he’s learned to do with snakes.”

“There’ll be more than two tents, Tanner. Dieterling’ll be with us, of course—he knows snakes better than anyone—and I’m taking Gitta as well.”

“There’s something I want you to understand,” I said. “Just going up into the jungle carries some risk. The instant Gitta leaves the Reptile House, she’s automatically in greater danger than if she remained. We know some of our enemies keep a close watch on our movements, and we know there are things in the jungle that are best avoided.” I paused. “I’m not abdicating responsibility, but I want you to know I can’t guarantee anyone’s safety on this expedition. All I can do is my best—but my best might not be good enough.”

He patted me on the shoulder. “I’m sure your best will suffice, Tanner. You’ve never let me down before.”

“There’s always a first time,” I said.

Our small hunting convoy consisted of three armoured ground-effect vehicles. Cahuella, Gitta and I rode in the lead vehicle, along with Dieterling. He had his hands on the joystick, guiding us expertly along the overgrown trail. He knew the terrain and was also an expert on hamadryads. It hurt me to think he was dead as well now.

Behind, Vicuna and three other security people rode in the second vehicle: Letelier, Orsono and Schmidt; all with expertise in deep-country work. The third vehicle carried heavy weapons—amongst them the ghoul’s harpoon guns—together with ammunition, medical supplies, food and water rations and our deflated bubbletents. It was driven by one of Cahuella’s old trustees, while Rodriguez rode shotgun in the rear, sweeping the path in case anyone tried to attack us from behind.

On the dashboard was a map of the Peninsula divided into grid sections, with our current position marked by a pulsing blue dot. Several hundred kilometres to the north, but on what would even-tually become the same track as us, was a red pulse which moved a little south each day. That was Reivich’s squad; thinking they were moving covertly, but betrayed by the signatures of their weapons which Orcagna was tracking. They made about fifty or sixty kilometres a day, which was about as good a rate as anyone was capable of maintaining through the jungle. Our plan was to set up camp a day’s travel south of Reivich.

In the meantime, we were passing through the lower extent of the hamadryad range. You could see the excitement in Cahuella’s eyes as he peered deep into the jungle for a hint of large, slow movement. Near-adults moved so ponderously—and were so invulnerable to any kind of natural predation—that they had never evolved any flight response. The only thing that made a hamadryad move was hunger or the migratory imperative of their breeding cycle. Vicuna said they did not even have what we would think of as a survival instinct. They had no more need of one than a glacier did.

“There’s a ham tree,” Dieterling said, towards the end of the day. “Newly fused, by the look of it.” He pointed off to one side, into what looked like impenetrable gloom. My eyesight was good, but Dieterling’s was apparently superhuman.

“God…” Gitta said, slipping a pair of camouflaged image-amplifier goggles to her eyes. “It’s huge.”

“They’re not small animals,” her husband said. He was looking in the same direction as Dieterling, his eyes squinting intently at something. “You’re right. That tree must have had—what, eight or nine fusions?”

“At the very least,” Dieterling said. “The most recent fusion might still be in its transition state.”

“Still warm, you mean?” Cahuella said.

I could see the way his mind was working. Where there was a tree with recent growth layers, there might be near-adult hamadryads as well.

We decided to set up camp in the next clearing, a couple of hundred metres further down the trail. The drivers needed a rest after a day pushing through the trail, and the vehicles tended to accumulate minor damage which had to be put right before the next stage. We were in no haste to reach our ambush point and Cahuella liked to spend a few hours each night hunting around the camp’s perimeter before retiring.

I used a monofilament scythe to widen the clearing, then helped with the inflation of the bubbletents.

“I’m going into the jungle,” Cahuella said, tapping me on the shoulder. He wore his hunting jacket, a rifle slung over one shoulder. “I’ll be back in an hour or so.”

“Go easy with any near-adults you find,” I said, only half joking.

“This is just a fishing trip, Tanner.”

I reached over to the card table I had set up outside the tent, with some of our equipment on it. “Here. Don’t forget these, especially if you’re going to wander far.” I held up the image-amp goggles. He hesitated, then reached out and took the goggles, slipping them into a shirt pocket. “Thanks.”

He stepped away from the pool of light around the tents, unhitching the gun as he went. I finished the first tent, the one where Gitta and Cahuella were sleeping, and then went to find her to tell her it was ready. She was sitting in the cab of the vehicle, an expensive compad propped on her lap. She was thumbing through something indolently, skimming pages of what looked like poetry.

“Your tent’s done,” I said.

She closed the compad with something like relief and allowed me to lead her towards the tent’s opening. I had already checked the clearing for any lurking unpleasantnesses—the smaller, venomous cousins of hamadryads which we called dropwinders—but the place was safe. Still, Gitta moved hesitantly, afraid of putting her foot down on anything other than a brightly lit spot of ground, despite my reassurances.

“You look like you’re enjoying yourself,” I said.

“Is that sarcasm, Tanner? Do you expect me to enjoy this?”

“I told him it would be better for all of us if you stayed at the Reptile House.”

I unzipped the opening. Within was a pantry-sized airlock which kept the tent from deflating whenever someone came or went. We set up the three tents at the apexes of a triangle, linked together by pressurised corridors a few strides long. The tiny generator which fed the tents the air which kept them inflated was small and silent. Gitta stepped within and then said, “Is that what you think, Tanner—that this is no place for a woman? I thought attitudes like that died before they ever launched the Flotilla.”

“No…” I said, trying not to sound overly defensive. “That’s not what I think at all.” I moved to seal the outer door between us, so that she could enter the tent in her own privacy.

But she put a hand up and held mine from the zip. “What is it you think, then?”

“I think what’s going to happen here won’t be very pleasant.”

“An ambush, you mean? Funny; I’d never have guessed that for myself.”

I said something foolish. “Gitta, you have to realise, there are things you don’t know about Cahuella. Or me, for that matter. Things about the work we do. Things we have done. I think you will soon have a better idea about some of those things.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“I think you should be ready for it, that’s all.” I looked over my shoulder, towards the jungle where her husband had vanished. “I should get to work on the other tents, Gitta…”

When she answered her voice had an odd quality to it. “Yes, of course.” She was looking at me intently. Perhaps it was the way the light played on it, but her face seemed extraordinarily beautiful to me then; like something painted by Gauguin. I think it was in that instant that my intention to betray Cahuella crystallised. The thought of it must have always been there, but it had taken that instant of searing beauty to bring it to light. If the shadows had fallen slightly differently across her face, I wondered, would I still have made that decision?

“Tanner, you’re wrong, you know.”

“About what?”

“Cahuella. I know a lot more about him than you think. A lot more than anyone here thinks they do. I know he’s a violent man, and I know he’s done terrible things. Evil things. Things you wouldn’t even believe.”

“You’d be surprised,” I said.

“No; that’s precisely the point, I wouldn’t be. I’m not talking about the violent little deeds he’s committed since you’ve known him. They’re barely worthy of consideration compared to the things he did before. And unless you’re aware of those things, you really don’t know him at all.”

“If he’s so bad, why do you stay with him?”

“Because he isn’t the evil man he used to be.”

Something flashed between the trees; a stammer of blue-white light, followed a moment later by the report of a laser-rifle. Something dropped through foliage to the ground. I imagined Cahuella stepping forward until he had found his kill; probably a small snake.

“Some people would say that an evil man never really changes, Gitta.”

“Then they’d be wrong. It’s only our deeds that make us evil, Tanner; they’re what define us, nothing else, not our intentions or feelings. But what are a few bad deeds compared to a life, especially the kinds of lives we can live now?”

“Only some of us,” I said.

“Cahuella’s older than you think, Tanner. And the evil things he did were a long, long time ago, when he was much younger. They were what led me to him, eventually.” She paused, glancing towards the trees, but before I could ask her what she had meant by that, she was already speaking again. “But the man I found wasn’t an evil one. He was cruel, violent, dangerous, but he was also capable of giving love; of accepting love from another human being. He saw beauty in things; recognised evil in others. He wasn’t the man I’d expected to find, but someone better. Not perfect—not by a long stretch—but not a monster; not at all. I found that I couldn’t hate him as easily as I’d hoped.”

“You expected to hate him?”

“I expected to do a lot more than that. I expected to kill him, or bring him to justice. Instead…” Gitta paused again. There was another crack of blue light from the forest: the deadfall of another animal. “I found myself asking a question; one I’d never thought of before. How long would you have to live as a good man—doing good—before the sum of your good actions cancelled out something terrible you’d once done? Could any human life be long enough?”

“I don’t know,” I answered, truthfully. “But I do know one thing. Cahuella may be better than he used to be, but he’s still not anyone’s idea of citizen of the month, is he? If you define the way he is now as a man doing good, I’d hate to think what he was like before.”

“You would, yes,” Gitta said. “And I don’t think you could handle it, either.”

I bade her goodnight and returned to preparing the other tents.