Chasm City

TWENTY-ONE

Finally, I woke. For a long time, lying in the golden morning light which streamed into Zebra’s room, I replayed the dreams in my head, until at last I could put them to rest and start examining my injured leg.

Overnight the healer had worked wonders, utilising a medical science well in advance of anything we’d had on Sky’s Edge. The wound was now little more than a whitish star of new flesh, and what damage remained was mainly psychological—the refusal of my brain to accept that my leg was now fully capable of performing its intended role. I rose from the couch and took a few awkward, experimental steps, finally making my way over to the nearest window, navigating the stepped levels of the broken floor, furniture helpfully shuffling aside to ease my passage.

In the light of day, or what passed for day in Chasm City, the great hole at the city’s heart looked even closer, even more vertiginous. It was not difficult to imagine how it had lured the first explorers who had come to Yellowstone, whether birthed from robot wombs or riding the first, risky starships that had come afterwards. The blotch of warm atmosphere spilling from the chasm was visible from space when other atmospheric conditions were favourable.

Whether they had crossed land in crawlers or come skimming down through cloud layers, that first sight of the chasm could never have been anything but heart-stopping. Something had injured the planet thousands of centuries earlier, and this great open wound had still not healed. Some, it was said, had made the descent into the depths equipped only with fragile pressure suits, and had found treasures upon which empires might be founded. If so, they had been careful to keep those treasures to themselves. But it had not stopped others coming, other chancers and adventurers; around them had accreted the first hints of what would eventually become this city.

There was no universally accepted theory to explain the hole, although the surrounding caldera—in which Chasm City lay, sheltered from winds, and the predation of flash-floods and the encroachment of methane-ammonia glaciers—hinted at something fairly catastrophic, and recent, too, on the geologic timescale—recent enough not to have been erased by the processes of weathering and tectonic reshaping. Yellowstone had probably had a close encounter with its gas giant neighbour which had injected energy into the planet’s core, and the chasm was one of the means by which that energy was slowly being bled back towards space, but something must have opened this escape route in the first place. There were theories about tiny black holes slamming into the crust, or fragments of quark matter, but no one really knew what had happened. There were also rumours and fairytales: of alien digs beneath the crust, evidence that the chasm had in some sense been artefactual, if not necessarily deliberate. Perhaps those aliens had come here for the same reason that humans had, to tap the chasm for its energy and chemical resources. I could see very clearly the tentacular pipes which the city extended over the maw towards the bottom, reaching down like grasping fingers.

“Don’t pretend you’re not impressed,” Zebra said. “There are people who’d kill for a view like this. Come to think of it, I probably know people who have killed for a view like this.”

“That doesn’t really surprise me.”

Zebra had entered the room silently. At first glance she appeared to be naked, but then I saw that she was fully clothed, but in a gown of such translucence that it might as well have been made of smoke.

She carried my Mendicant clothes in her arms, washed and neatly folded.

I could see now that she was very thin. Beneath the blue-grey film of her gown black stripes covered her entire body, following the curves of her form, shadowing her genital region. The stripes simultaneously suppressed and emphasised the curves and angles of her body, so that she metamorphosed with each step she took towards me. Her hair ran in a stiff furrow down to the small of her back, ending above the striped swell of her buttocks. When she walked, she glided, like a ballet dancer, her small hooflike feet more for the purpose of anchoring her to the ground than supporting her weight. I could see now that had she chosen to play the Game, she would have made a hunter of considerable skill. She had, after all, hunted me—if only for the purposes of ruining her enemies’ entertainment.

“On the planet where I come from,” I said, “this would be considered provocative.”

“Well, this isn’t Sky’s Edge,” she said, placing my clothes on the couch. “It’s not even Yellowstone. In the Canopy, we do more or less what we please.” She ran the palms of her hands down her hips.

“Excuse me if this sounds rude, but were you born this way?”

“Not remotely. I haven’t always been female, for what it’s worth, and I doubt that I’ll stay this way for the rest of my life. I certainly won’t always be known as Zebra. Who’d choose to be pinned down by one body, one identity?”

“I don’t know,” I said, carefully, “but on Sky’s Edge it was beyond most people’s means to modify themselves in any way at all.”

“Yes. I gather you were all too busy killing each other.”

“That’s a fairly reductive summary of our history, but I don’t suppose it’s too far from the truth. How much do you know about it, anyway?” Not for the first time since she had entered the room, I was reminded of the troubling dream of Cahuella’s camp, and how Gitta had looked at me in the dream. Gitta and Zebra did not have a great deal in common, but in my confused state of waking, I found it easy to transfer some of Gitta’s attributes onto Zebra: her lithe build, her high cheekbones and dark hair. It was not that I did not find Zebra alluring in her own right. But she was stranger than any creature—human or otherwise—that I’d ever shared a room with.

“I know enough,” Zebra said. “Some of us here are quite interested in it, in a perverse way. We find it amusing and quaint and horrifying at the same time.”

I nodded at the people caught in the wall, the tableau that I’d imagined was a piece of artwork.

“I find what happened here fairly horrifying.”

“Oh, it was. But we lived through it, and those of us who survived never really knew the plague at its most ferocious.” She was standing close to me now, and I felt myself aroused by her for the first time. “Compared to the plague, war seems very alien. Our enemy was our city, our own bodies.”

I took one of her hands and held it in my own, pressing it against my chest. “Who are you, Zebra? And why do you really want to help me?”

“I thought we went through that last night.”

“I know, but…” There was no real conviction in my voice. “They’re still after me, aren’t they? The hunt won’t have ended just because you brought me to the Canopy.”

“You’re safe while you stay here. My rooms are electronically shielded, so they won’t be able to get a fix on your implant. Besides, the Canopy itself is out of bounds for the Game. The players don’t want to draw too much attention to themselves.”

“So I have to stay here for the rest of my life?”

“No, Tanner. Just another two days and then you’re safe.” She removed her hand from mine and used it to caress the side of my head, finding the bulge where the implant lay. “The thing Waverly put inside your head is wired to stop transmitting after fifty-two hours. That’s how they prefer to play.”

“Fifty-two hours? One of the little rules Waverly mentioned?”

Zebra nodded. “They experimented with different durations, of course.”

It was too long. My Reivich trail was cold enough as it was, but if I waited another two days, I wouldn’t stand a chance.

“Why do they play?” I said, wondering whether her answer would accord with what Juan, the rickshaw kid, had told me.

“They’re bored,” Zebra said. “Many of us here are postmortal. Even now, even with the plague, death is still only a remote worry for most of us. Maybe not as remote as it was seven years ago, but still not the animating force it must be to a mortal like yourself. That small, almost silent voice urging you to do something today because tomorrow might be too late… it just isn’t there for most of us. For two hundred years Yellowstone’s society hardly changed. Why create a great work of art tomorrow when you can plan an even better one for fifty years hence?”

“I understand,” I said. “Some of it, anyway. But it should be different now. Didn’t the plague make most of you mortal again? I thought it screwed around with your therapies; interfered with the machines in your cells?”

“Yes, it did. The medichines had to be instructed to dismantle themselves, turning to harmless dust, or they killed you. It didn’t stop there, either. Even genetic techniques were difficult to imple-ment, because they relied so heavily on medichines to mediate the DNA rescripting procedures. About the only people who didn’t have a problem were the ones who’d inherited extreme-longevity genes from their parents, but they were never a majority.”

“Not everyone else had to abandon immortality, though.”

“No, of course not…” She paused, as if to collect her thoughts. “The hermetics, you’ll have seen them—well, they still have all the machines inside them, constantly correcting cell damage. But the price they pay for it is they can’t move freely in the city. Once they leave their palanquins they have to restrict themselves to a few environments guaranteed to be free of residual plague spore, and even then there’s a small risk.”

I looked at Zebra, trying to judge her. “But you’re not a hermetic. Are you no longer immortal?”

“No, Tanner… it’s nowhere near as simple as that.”

“Then what?”

“After the plague, some of us found a new technique. It enabled us to keep the machines inside ourselves—most of them, anyway—and still walk unprotected in the city. It’s a kind of medication; a drug. It does many things, and no one know how it works, but it seems to barrier our machines against the plague, or weaken the efficacy of any plague spore which enter our bodies.”

“This medication… what is it like?”

“You don’t want to know, Tanner.”

“Suppose I were interested in immortality as well?”

“Are you?”

“It’s a hypothetical viewpoint, that’s all.”

“I thought so.” Zebra nodded sagely. “Where you come from, immortality’s something of a pointless luxury, isn’t it?”

“For those not descended from the momios, yes.”

“Momios?”

“That was what we called the sleepers on the Santiago —they were immortal. The crew weren’t.”

“We? You talk as if you were actually there.”

“Slip of the tongue. The point is, there’s not much point being immortal if you’re not going to survive more than ten years without getting shot or blown up in a skirmish. Besides, the price the Ultras are charging, nobody could afford it even if they wanted it.”

“And would you have wanted it, Tanner Mirabel?” Then she kissed me, and pulled back to lock eyes with me, much as Gitta had in my dream. “I intend to make love to you, Tanner. Do you find that shocking? You shouldn’t. You’re an attractive man. You’re different. You don’t play our games—don’t even understand them—though I imagine you’d play them reasonably well if you wished. I don’t know what to make of you.”

“I have the same problem,” I said. “My past is a foreign country.”

“Nice line, except it isn’t remotely original.”

“Sorry.”

“But in a way, it’s true, isn’t it? Waverly told me that when he ran a trawl on you he didn’t come up with anything clear-cut. He said it was like trying to put together a broken vase. No; that’s not quite what he said, either. He said it was almost like trying to put together two, or even three, broken vases, and not knowing which piece belonged where.”

“Revival amnesia,” I said.

“Well, perhaps. The confusion looked a little more profound than that, Waverly said… but let’s not talk about him.”

“Fine. But you still haven’t told me about this medication.”

“Why are you so interested?”

“Because I think I might have already encountered it. It’s Dream Fuel, isn’t it? It’s what your sister was investigating when she was killed for her troubles.”

She took her time answering. “That coat… it’s not yours, is it?”

“No, I obtained it from a benefactor. What has that got to do with anything?”

“It made me think you might be trying to trick me. But you really don’t know much about Dream Fuel, do you?”

“Until a couple of days ago I’d never heard of it.”

“Then there’s something you should probably know,” Zebra said. “I injected you with a small quantity of Fuel last night.”

“What?”

“It wasn’t much, I assure you. I probably should have asked you, but you were injured and tired and I knew there was very little risk.” Then she showed me the small bronze wedding-gun she had used, one full vial of Fuel in her cache. “Fuel protects those of us who still have machines inside our bodies, but it also has general healing properties. That’s why I gave it to you. I’ll need to get some more.”

“Will that be easy?”

She gave me a half-smile and then shook her head. “Not as easy as it used to be. Unless you happen to have a hotline to Gideon.”

I was about to ask her what she had meant by the remark about the coat, but now she had distracted me. I didn’t think I had heard that name before.

“Gideon?”

“He’s a crime lord. No one knows much about him, what he looks like, where he lives. Except he’s got absolute control of Dream Fuel distribution across the city and the people who work for him are very serious about their work.”

“And now they’re limiting the supply? Just when everyone’s become addicted to it? Maybe I should have a word with Gideon.”

“Don’t get any more involved than you have to, Tanner. Gideon is extremely bad news.”

“You sound as if you’re speaking from experience.”

“I am.” Zebra walked to the window and ran a hand over the glass. “I told you about Mavra already, Tanner. My sister, the one who used to love this view?” I nodded, remembering the conversation we’d had shortly after arriving here. “I also told you she was dead. Well, Gideon’s people were the people my sister got involved with.”

“They killed her?”

“I’ll never know for sure, but that’s what I think. Mavra believed they were strangling us, withholding the one substance the city needs. Dream Fuel’s dangerous stuff, Tanner—there isn’t enough of it to go around, and yet for most of us it’s the most precious substance imaginable. It’s not just the kind of thing people kill for; it’s the kind of thing people fight wars for.”

“So she wanted to persuade Gideon to open up the supply?”

“Nothing so naive; Mavra was nothing if not a pragmatist. She knew Gideon wasn’t going to let it go that easily. But if she could find out how the stuff was being manufactured—even what the stuff was—she could pass on that knowledge to other people so that they could synthesise it for themselves. At the very least she’d have broken the monopoly.”

“I admire her for trying. She must have known it might get her killed.”

“Yes. She was like that. She wouldn’t give up a hunt.” Zebra paused. “I always promised her that if anything happened, I’d…”

“Pick up where she left off?”

“Something like that.”

“Maybe it isn’t too late. When all this blows over…” I touched my head. “Maybe I’ll help you find Gideon.”

“Why would you do that?”

“You helped me, Zebra. It would be the least I could do.” And, I thought, because Mavra sounded a lot like me. Perhaps she had come close to finding what she was looking for. If so, those who remembered her—and I counted myself as one now—owed it to her to carry on her work. There was something else, too.

Something about Gideon, and who he reminded me of—sitting, spiderlike, at the dark centre of a web of absolute control, imagining himself invulnerable. I thought again of Cahuella, and what had passed through my mind in sleep. “The Dream Fuel you gave me. Is that why I had such strange dreams?”

“It does that, sometimes. Especially if it’s your first dose. It’s working its way through your brain, tinkering with neural connections. That’s why they call it Dream Fuel. But that’s only half of it.”

“Does that make me immortal now?”

Zebra let the smoke-coloured gown fall away from her and I pulled her to me, looking into her face.

“For today, yes.”

I woke before Zebra, dressing in the Mendicant clothes which she had washed, and quietly paced her rooms until I found the things I was looking for. My hand lingered over the huge weapon she had rescued me with, which she had just left lying in the annexe to her apartment as casually as a walking stick. The plasma-rifle would have been a useful piece of artillery on Sky’s Edge; using it inside a city seemed almost obscene. On the other hand, so did dying.

I hefted the weapon. I hadn’t ever handled anything exactly like it, but the controls were placed intuitively and the readouts showed familiar status variables. It was a very delicate weapon and I didn’t rate its chances of surviving very long if it came into contact with a trace of the plague. But that was no reason to leave it lying around, almost inviting me to steal it.

“Careless, Zebra,” I said. “Very careless indeed.”

I thought back to the night before; how the main thing on her mind must have been tending to my injury. It was perhaps understandable that she had dumped the gun at the door and then forgotten to do anything about it, but it was still negligent. I put the gun down again, quietly.

She was still asleep when I went back into the room. I had to move carefully, trying to avoid causing the furniture to move any more than necessary in case the faint noise and motion woke her up. I found her greatcoat and rummaged through the pockets.

Currency—plenty of it.

And a set of fully charged ammo-cells for the plasma-rifle. I stuffed the money and the cells into the pockets of the coat I’d stolen from Vadim—the one Zebra had found so interesting—and then dithered about whether to leave a note or not. In the end I found a pen and paper—after the plague, old-fashioned writing materials must have come back into vogue—scrawling something to the effect that I was grateful for what she had done, but I was not the kind of man who could wait two days knowing I was being hunted, even though she had offered a kind of sanctuary.

On my way out I picked up the plasma-rifle.

Her cable-car was parked where she had left it, in a niche adjacent to her complex of rooms. Again, she had been hasty—the vehicle was powered, and its control panel was still aglow and awaiting instructions.

I had watched her work the controls and judged that the action of driving was semi-automatic—the driver did not have to choose which cables to employ, just used the joysticks and throttle controls to point the vehicle in a particular direction and set the speed. The cable-car’s internal processors did the rest, selecting the cables which allowed the desired route to be achieved or approximated with something approaching optimal efficiency. If the driver tried to point the car into a part of the Canopy where there were no cables, the car would presumably reject the command, or pick a roundabout route which achieved the same ends.

Still maybe there was more skill to operating a cable-car than I’d imagined, because the ride began sickeningly, like a small boat pitching in a squall. Yet somehow I managed to keep the vehicle moving forward, descending through the latticelike enclosure of the Canopy, even though I had no idea where I was going. I had a destination in mind—a very specific one, in fact—but the night’s activity had completely erased my sense of direction, and I had no idea where Zebra’s apartment lay, except that it was near the chasm. At least now it was daytime, with the morning sun climbing up the side of the Mosquito Net, and I could see far across the city, beginning to recognise certain characteristically deformed buildings that I must have seen yesterday, from other angles and elevations. There was a building which looked uncannily like a human hand, grasping from the sky, its fingers elongating into tendrils which quickly merged with others, from adjacent structures. Here was another, which resembled an oak tree, and others which expanded into a froth of shattered bubbles, like the face of someone stricken by an awful pestilence.

I pushed the car downwards, the Canopy rising above me like an oddly textured cloud deck, into the unoccupied hinterland which separated Canopy from Mulch. The ride became rougher, now — fewer purchase points for the cable-car, and longer, sickening slides as it descended down single strands.

By now, I imagined Zebra would have noticed my absence. A few moments would suffice for her to verify the loss of her weapon, currency and car—but then what would she do? If the Game was pervasive in Canopy society, then Zebra and her allies could hardly report my theft. Zebra would have to explain what I had been doing in her place, and then Waverly would be implicated, and the two of them would be revealed as saboteurs.

The Mulch rose into view below me, all twisted roads and floods and barnacled slums. There were fires sending smoke trails into the air and lights there now; at least I had hit an inhabited district. I could even see people outside, and rickshaws and animals, and if I had opened the car’s door, I imagined I would have smelled whatever it was they were cooking or burning in those fires.

The car lurched and began to fall.

There had been sickening moments before, but this one seemed to last longer. And now an alarm was shrieking in the cockpit. Then something like normal motion resumed again, although it was noticeably bumpier and the vehicle’s rate of descent was swifter than seemed prudent. What had happened? Had the cable snapped, or had the car simply run out of handholds for an instant, plummeting before it found another line?

Finally I looked at the console and I saw a pulsing schematic of the cable-car, with a red box flashing around the area of damage.

One of the arms was gone.