Chasm City

SEVEN

The next day Amelia brought my possessions to the chalet and then left me alone while I went through them. But as curious about them as I was, it was difficult to focus on the task. I was troubled by the fact that I’d dreamed about Sky Haussmann again: an unwilling observer to another incident in his life. The first dream about him that I clearly remembered must have happened to me during my revival; now I’d experienced another, and while there seemed to be a large gap in his life between them, they had clearly happened in chronological order. Like instalments.

And my palm had bled again, a hard new encrustation of dried blood over the wound. Spots of blood marred the sheet.

It didn’t take a massive leap of imagination to see that the two were connected. From somewhere I remembered that Haussmann had been crucified; that the mark in my palm signified his execution, and that I’d met another man with a similar wound in what seemed simultaneously like the recent and the infinitely remote past. I seemed to remember that the man had suffered the dreams as well, and hadn’t been an especially willing recipient of them either.

But maybe the things Amelia had brought me would explain the dreams. Trying to put Haussmann temporarily from mind, I focused on the task at hand. Everything I owned now—apart from any holdings back around Swan—lay in an unassuming briefcase which had come with me on the Orvieto.

There was some Sky’s Edge currency in large denomination Southlander bills; about half a million Australs. Amelia had told me it amounted to a reasonable fortune on Sky’s Edge—based on the information she had, anyway—though it had negligible value here in the Yellowstone system. Why had I brought it with me, then? The answer seemed obvious enough. Even allowing for inflation, the Sky’s Edge money would still be worth something thirty years after my departure, though perhaps only enough to buy a room for the night. The fact that I had carried the money with me suggested that I had planned on returning home some day.

So I wasn’t emigrating then. I’d come here on business.

To do something.

I had also brought experientials: pencil-sized data sticks crammed with recorded memories. They must have been what I was planning to sell on my revival. Unless you were an Ultra trader specialising in esoteric high-technologies, experientials were about the only way a rich individual could preserve some of their wealth while crossing interstellar space. A market always existed for them, no matter how advanced or primitive the buyer—provided, of course, that they had the basic technology to make use of the experientials. Yellowstone would be no problem in that regard. It had been the wellspring of all major technological and social advances across human space for the last two centuries.

The experientials had been sealed in clear plastic. Without playback equipment, there was no way I could tell what they contained.

What else?

Some money which felt truly unfamiliar to me: strangely textured banknotes with unfamiliar faces on them and surreal, random denominations.

I had asked Amelia what they were.

“That’s local money, Tanner. From Chasm City.” She pointed to a man on one side of each bill. “That’s Lorean Sylveste, I think. Or it could be Marco Ferris. It’s ancient history, anyway.”

“The money must have travelled from Yellowstone to Sky’s Edge and then back again—it’s at least thirty years old. Is it worth anything at all now?”

“Oh, a little. I’m no expert in these matters, of course, but I think this would be enough to get you to Chasm City. Not much more than that, though.”

“And how would I get to Chasm City?”

“It’s not difficult, even now. There’s a slowboat shuttle which makes the run down to New Vancouver, in orbit around Yellowstone. From there you’d need to buy a place on a behemoth, to get down to the surface. I think what you have should be enough, if you were prepared to abstain from some luxuries.”

“Such as?”

“Well, any guarantee of arriving safely, for a start.”

I smiled. “I’d better hope my luck’s in, then.”

“But you’re not planning on leaving us yet, are you Tanner?”

“No,” I answered. “Not just yet.”

There were two other things in the briefcase: a dark, flat envelope and another, fatter one. Amelia had left me alone by the time I tipped the flatter of the two onto the chalet’s bed. The contents spilled out; less in it than I had expected and nothing that seemed like a revelatory message from my past. If anything, the contents were designed to confuse me even more: a dozen passports and laminated ID cards for myself, all valid at the time I had boarded the ship, and all applicable to some part of Sky’s Edge and its surrounding space. Some were simply printed; others had computer systems embedded into them.

I suspected that most people could have managed with only one or two such documents, accepting that there were areas they could not legally enter—but from what I gathered from the documents’ small print, I would have been able to travel more or less freely, in and out of war zones and militia-controlled states, into the neutral zones and into the low-orbital space around the planet. They were the documents of someone who needed to get around without interference. There were some anomalies, though: what appeared to be trifling inconsistencies in the personal data in each document, places of birth and places I had visited. In some of the documents I was listed as having been a soldier in the Southland Militia, whereas in others I was affiliated to the Northern Coalition as a tactical specialist. Other documents failed to mention any soldiering history at all—listing me only as a personal security consultant or an agent for an import/export firm.

Suddenly the documents stopped being a confusing jumble and cohered into a clear indication of the kind of man I had been. I was someone who needed to be able to slip across borders like a ghost; a man of many guises and pasts—most of them probably fictitious. I sensed that I had been a man who lived dangerously; someone who probably made enemies the way most people made acquaintances. I guessed that it had seldom bothered me much. I was a man who could think about killing a pervert monk without breaking sweat, and then refrain from the act because the monk was not worth the tiny expenditure of energy it would have taken.

But there were three other things in the envelope, tucked at the back so that they had not fallen out at first. I pulled them out carefully, my fingers feeling the gloss surfaces of photographs.

The first picture showed a woman of striking, dark beauty, a nervous smile on her face, backdropped by what looked like the edge of a jungle clearing. The picture had been taken at night. Angling the picture to look past her, I could just see the back of another man examining a gun. It could almost have been me—but then who had taken the picture, and why did I have it with me?

“Gitta,” I said; without any effort I had remembered her name. “You’re Gitta, aren’t you?”

The second picture showed a man standing in what might once have been a road, but which was little more than a pot-holed trail, curtained on either side by jungle. The man was walking towards the person taking the picture, a huge black weapon slung over his shoulder. He wore a shirt and a bandolier, and though his build and age were more or less the same as mine, his face was not quite the same. Behind the man, there was what seemed to be a fallen tree blocking the road, except that the tree ended in a bloodied stump, and much of the road was covered in a thick impasto of gore.

“Dieterling,” I said, the name springing from somewhere. “Miguel Dieterling.”

And knew that he had been a good friend of mine who was dead now.

Then I looked at the third picture. There was no trace of the intimacy of the first about this image, or even the dubious triumph of the second, since the man did not seem to be aware that his picture had been taken. It was a flat-image, taken with a long lens. The man was moving quickly through a mall, the neon lights of stores blurred into hyphens by the panned exposure. The man was slightly blurred too, but sharp enough for recognition. Sharp enough for acquisition, I thought.

I remembered his name, too.

I picked up the heavier of the two envelopes and allowed it to empty itself on the bed. The sharp-edged, intricately shaped pieces that fell out of it seemed to invite me to fit them together. I could feel the thing squeezed into my palm, ready to be used. It would be difficult to see; pearly in colour, like opaque glass.

Or diamond.

“This is a blocking move,” I said to Amelia. “You’ve immobilised me now. I may be taller and stronger than you, but there’s nothing I can do at this point which won’t cause me a lot of pain.”

She looked at me expectantly. “What now?”

“Now you take the weapon from me.” I nodded down towards the little trowel we were using as an ersatz weapon. She removed it from my grip softly with her free hand, then flung it away as if it were poisoned.

“You’re letting go too easily.”

“No,” I said. “With the pressure you’re putting on that nerve, it’s all I could do not to drop it. It’s simple biomechanics, Amelia. I think you’ll find Alexei even easier to deal with.”

We were standing in the clearing before the chalet in what passed for late afternoon in Hospice Idlewild, the central filament of the sun turning from white to sullen orange. It was an odd kind of afternoon because the light always stayed overhead, imparting none of the flattering face-on glow and long shadows of a planetary sundown. But we were paying it little attention anyway. For the last two hours I had been showing Amelia some basic self-defence techniques. We had spent the first hour with Amelia trying to attack me, which meant touching any part of my body with the edge of the trowel. In all that time she had not succeeded once, even when I willed myself to let her through my defences. No matter how hard I gritted my teeth and said that this time I was going to let her win, it never happened. But at least it demonstrated something, which was that the right technique would almost always beat a clumsy assailant. She was getting closer, though, and things had improved when we reversed roles for the second hour. Now at least I was able to hold back, moving in slow enough for Amelia to learn the right blocking moves for each situation. She was a very good pupil; achieving in an hour what normally took two days. Her moves were not yet graceful—not yet hardwired into muscle memory—and she telegraphed her intentions, but neither of these defects would count much against an amateur like Brother Alexei.

“You could show me how to kill him, too, couldn’t you?” Amelia said, while we took a breather on the grass—or rather, while she caught her breath and I waited.

“Is that what you want?”

“No; of course not. I just want to make him stop.”

I looked across the curve of Idlewild to the tiny, dotlike figures toiling in the cultivation terraces on the far side, hurrying while there was still enough light to work in. “I don’t think he’ll come back,” I said. “Not after what happened in the cave. But if he does, you’ll have an edge on him—and I’m damn sure he won’t come back after that. I know his type, Amelia. He’ll just fixate on an easier target.”

She thought about that for a while, doubtless pitying whoever would have to go through the same thing she had. “I know it’s not the sort of thing we’re meant to say, but I hate that man. Can we go through these moves tomorrow again?”

“Of course. In fact, I insist on it. You’re still weak—although you’re well ahead of the curve.”

“Thanks. Tanner—do you mind if I ask how you know these things?”

I thought back to the documents I had found in the envelope. “I was a personal security consultant.”

“And?”

I smiled ruefully, wondering how much she knew about the contents of that envelope. “And some other things.”

“They told me you were a soldier.”

“Yes; I think I was. But then almost everyone alive on Sky’s Edge had some connection to the war. It wasn’t something you stayed out of easily. The attitude was, if you weren’t part of the solution, you were part of the problem. If you didn’t sign up for one side, you were considered by default to have sympathies with the other.” That was an over-simplification, of course, since it ignored the fact that the aristocratic rich could buy neutrality off the shelf like a new outfit—but for the average non-wealthy Peninsula citizen, it wasn’t so far from the truth.

“You seem to be remembering well now.”

“It’s beginning to come back. Having a look at my personal possessions certainly helped.”

She nodded encouragingly and I felt the tiniest stab of remorse at lying to her. The pictures had done very much more than just jog my memory, but for the moment I chose to maintain the illusion of partial amnesia. I just hoped Amelia was not shrewd enough to see through my subterfuge, but I would be careful not to underestimate the Mendicants in any of the moves that lay ahead.

I was, indeed, a soldier. But as I had also inferred from the slew of passports and ID documents in the envelope, soldiering was nowhere near the end of my talents, merely the core around which my other skills orbited. Not everything had come into absolutely sharp focus yet, but I knew a lot more than I had the day before.

I’d been born into a family at the low end of the aristocratic wealth scale: not actively poor but consciously struggling to maintain any facade of wealth. We’d lived in Nueva Iquique, on the south-eastern shore of the Peninsula. It was a fading settlement buffered from the war by a range of treacherous mountains; sleepy and dispassionate even in the war’s darkest years. Northeners would often sail down the coast and put into Nueva Iquique without fear of violence, even when we were technically enemies, and inter-marriage between Flotilla lines was not uncommon. I grew up able to read the enemy’s hybrid language with almost the same fluency I read ours. To me it seemed strange that our leaders inspired us to hate these people. Even the history books agreed that we’d been united when the ships left Mercury.

But then so much had happened.

As I grew older, I began to see that, while I had nothing against the genes or beliefs of those who were allied within the Northern Coalition, they were still our enemies. They’d committed their share of atrocities, just as we had. While I might not have despised the enemy, I still had a moral duty to bring the war to a conclusion as swiftly as possible by aiding our side in victory. So at the age of twenty-two I signed up for the Southland Militia. I wasn’t a natural soldier, but I learned quickly. You had to; especially if you were thrown into live combat only a few weeks after handling your first gun. I turned out to be a proficient marksman. Later, with proper training, I became an exceptional one—and it was my extreme good fortune that my unit happened to need a sniper.

I remembered my first kill—or multiple killing, as it turned out.

We were perched high in jungle-enshrouded hills, looking down at a clearing where NC troops were off-loading supplies from a ground-effect transport. With ruthless calm I lined up the gun, squinting into the sight, aligning the cross-hairs one at a time on each man in the unit. The rifle was loaded with subsonic micro-munitions; completely silent and with a programmed detonation delay of fifteen seconds. Time enough to put a gnat-sized slug in every man in the clearing—watching each reach up idly to scratch his neck at what he imagined was an insect bite. By the time the eighth and last man noticed something wrong, it was much too late to do anything about it.

The squad dropped to the dirt in eerie unison. Later, we descended from the hill and requisitioned the supplies for our own unit, stepping over corpses grotesquely bloated from internal explosions.

That was my first dreamlike taste of death.

Sometimes I wondered what would have happened if the delay had been set to less than fifteen seconds, so that the first man dropped before I’d finished putting slugs in the others. Would I have had the true sniper’s nerve—the cold will to carry on regardless? Or would the shock of what I was doing have rammed home so brutally that I would have dropped the gun in revulsion? But I always told myself that there was no point dwelling on what might have happened. All I did know was that after that first series of unreal executions, it was never a problem again.

Almost never.

It was in the nature of a sniper’s work that one almost never saw the enemy as anything other than an impersonal stick-figure; too far away to be humanised by either facial details or an expression of pain when the slug found its mark. I almost never needed to send another slug. For a time, I thought I’d found a safe niche where I could psychologically barrier myself from the worst that the war had to offer. I was valued by my unit, protected like a talisman. Although I never once did anything heroic, I became a hero by virtue of my technical skill at aiming a gun. If such a thing were possible in any kind of combat, I was happy. In fact, I knew it was possible: I’d seen men and women for whom the war was a capricious and spiteful lover; one who would always hurt them, but to whom—bruised and hungry—they would inevitably return. The greatest lie ever told was the one that said war made us universally miserable; that if the choice was truly ours, we would free ourselves of war forever. Maybe the human condition would have been something nobler if that were the case—but if war did not have a strange and dark allure, why did we always seem so unwilling to abandon it for peace? It went beyond anything as mundane as acclimatisation to the normality of war. I had known men and woman who boasted of sexual arousal after killing an enemy; addicted to the erotic potency of what they had done.

My happiness, though, was simpler: born out of the realisation that I’d found the luckiest of roles. I was doing what I rationalised as morally right, while at the same time being sheltered from the very real risk of death that usually accompanied front-line forces. I assumed it would continue like that; that eventually I would be decorated and that if I didn’t stay a sniper until the war’s end, it would be only because the army considered my skills too valuable to risk in the frontline. I suppose it was possible I might have been promoted to one of the covert assassination squads—certainly more hazardous—but as far as I could see it, the most likely outcome would be a training role in one of the boot camps, followed by early retirement and the smug assurance that I’d helped expedite the war’s conclusion—even if that conclusion never seemed any closer.

Of course, it didn’t happen like that.

One night our unit got ambushed. We were cut down by guerrillas of an NC Deep Incursion squad, and in minutes I learned the true meaning of what was euphemistically described as close-quarters combat. No line-of-sight particle-beam weapons now; no delayed-detonation nano-munitions. What close-quarters combat meant was something which would have been infinitely more recognisable to a soldier of a thousand years earlier: the screaming fury of human beings packed so close together that the only effective way to kill each other was with sharpened metal weapons: bayonets and daggers, or with hands around each other’s throats; fingers pressed into each other’s eye-sockets. The only way to survive was to disengage all higher brain-functions and regress to an animal state of mind.

So I did. And in doing so, I learned a deeper truth about war. She punished those who flirted with her by making them like herself. Once you opened the door to the animal, there was no shutting it.

I never stopped being an expert shot when the situation called for it, but I was never again purely a sniper. I pretended I had lost my edge; that I could no longer be trusted with the most critical kills. It was a plausible enough lie: snipers were insanely superstitious, and many did develop some psychosomatic block that stopped them functioning. I moved through different units, requesting operational transfers that each time took me closer to the front. I developed a proficiency with weapons that went far beyond mere marksmanship: a fluidity of ease like a preternaturally skilled musician who could pick up any instrument and make it sing. I volunteered for deep-insertion missions that put me behind enemy lines for weeks at a time, living off carefully measured field-rations (Sky’s Edge’s biosphere was superficially Earthlike—but down on the level of cell chemistry it was completely incompatible, containing almost no native flora which could be safely eaten without either providing zero nourishment or triggering a fatal anaphylactic reaction). During those long episodes of solitude I allowed the animal to emerge again, a feral mindstate of almost limitless patience and tolerance for discomfort.

I became a lone gunman, no longer receiving orders via the usual chain of command, but from mysterious and untraceable sources in the Militia hierarchy. My missions became stranger; their goals less fathomable. My targets shifted from the obvious—mid-ranking NC officers—to the seemingly random, but I never questioned that there was a logic behind the kills; that it was all part of some devious and painstakingly planned scheme. Even when, on more than one occasion, I was required to put slugs in certain targets who wore the same uniform as I did, I assumed they were spies, or potential traitors, or—and this was the least palatable of conclusions—just loyal men who had to die because in some way their living had conflicted with the scheme’s inscrutable progress.

I no longer even cared whether my actions served any kind of greater good. Eventually I stopped taking orders and began soliciting them—severing connections with the hierarchy, and taking contracts from whoever would pay me. I stopped being a soldier and became a mercenary.

Which was when I met Cahuella for the first time.

“My name is Sister Duscha,” said the older of the two Mendicants, a thin woman with an unsmiling demeanour. “You may have heard of me; I’m the Hospice’s neurological specialist. And I’m afraid, Tanner Mirabel, that there’s something quite seriously wrong with your mind.”

Duscha and Amelia were standing in the chalet’s doorway. Only half an hour earlier I’d told Amelia of my intention to leave Idlewild within the day. Now Amelia looked apologetic. “I’m very sorry, Tanner, but I had to tell her.”

“No need to apologise, Sister,” Duscha said, brushing imperiously past her subordinate. “Whether he likes it or not, you did precisely the right thing by informing me of his plans. Now then, Tanner Mirabel. Where shall we begin?”

“Wherever you like; I’m still leaving.”

One of the ovoid-headed robots trotted in behind Duscha, clicking across the floor. I made a move to get off the bed, but Duscha placed a firm hand on my thigh. “No; we’ll have none of that nonsense. You’re going nowhere for the time being.”

I looked at Amelia. “What was all that about being able to leave whenever I wanted?”

“Oh, you’re free to leave, Tanner…” But even as Amelia said it, she didn’t sound completely convincing.

“But he won’t want to, when he knows the facts,” Duscha said, lowering herself onto the bed. “Let me explain, shall I? When you were warmed, we made a very thorough medical examination of you, Tanner—focused especially on your brain. We suspected you were amnesiac, but we had to make sure there was no fundamental damage, or any implants that might warrant removal.”

“I don’t have any implants.”

“No, you don’t. But I’m afraid there is damage—of a sort.”

She clicked her fingers at the robot and had it trot closer to the bed. There was nothing on the bed now, but a minute earlier I had been in the process of assembling the clockwork gun, fitting the pieces together by a process of trial and error until I had the thing half-completed. When I had seen Amelia and Duscha striding across the lawn beyond the chalet, I had pushed the pieces under the pillow. I thought of it brooding there now, difficult to mistake for anything other than a weapon. They might have puzzled over the odd-shaped diamond pieces when they examined my belongings, but I doubted that they’d have realised what the pieces implied. Now there would have been very little doubt.

I said, “What sort of damage, Sister Duscha?”

“I can show you.”

The robot’s ovoid head popped up a screen, filling with a slowly rotating, lilac image of a skull, packed with ghostly structures like intricate clouds of milky ink. I didn’t recognise it as my own, of course, but I knew it had to be my skull that they were showing me.

Duscha sketched her fingers over the rotating mass. “These light spots are the problem, Tanner. Before you woke, I injected you with bromodeoxyuridine. It’s a chemical analogue for thymidine; one of the nucleic acids in DNA. The chemical supplants thymidine in new brain cells; acting as a marker for neurogenesis; the laying down of new brain cells. The light spots show where there’s a build-up of the marker—highlighting foci of recent cell growth.”

“I didn’t think brains grew new cells.”

“That’s a myth we buried five hundred years ago, Tanner—but in a sense you’re right; it’s still rather a rare process in higher mammals. But what you’re seeing in this scan is something a lot more vigorous: concentrated, specialised regions of recent—and continuing—neurogenesis. They’re functional neurons, organised into intricate structures and connected to your existing neurons. All very deliberate. You’ll notice how the light spots are situated near your perceptual centres? I’m afraid it’s very characteristic, Tanner—if we didn’t already know from your hand.”

“My hand?”

“You have a wound in your palm. It’s symptomatic of infection by one of the Haussmann family of indoctrinal viruses.” She paused. “We picked up the virus in your blood, once we looked for it. The virus inserts itself into your DNA and generates the new neural structures.”

There was little point in bluffing now. “I’m surprised you recognised it for what it was.”

“We’ve seen it enough times over the years,” Duscha said. “It infects a small fraction of every batch of slush… every group of sleepers we get from Sky’s Edge. At first, of course, we were mystified. We knew something about the Haussmann cults—needless to say, we don’t approve of the way they’ve appropriated the iconography of our own belief system—but it took us a long time to realise there was a viral infection mechanism, and that the people we were seeing were victims rather than cultists.”

“It’s a blessed nuisance,” Amelia said. “But we can help you, Tanner. I take it you’ve been dreaming about Sky Haussmann?”

I nodded, but said nothing.

“Well, we can flush out the virus,” Duscha said. “It’s a weak strain, and it will run its course with time, but we can speed up the process if you wish.”

“If I wish? I’m surprised you haven’t flushed it out already.”

“Goodness, we’d never do that. After all, you might have willingly chosen infection. We’d have no right to remove it in that case.” Duscha patted the robot, which retracted its screen and clicked its way outside again, moving like a delicate metal crab. “But if you want it removed, we can administer the flushing therapy immediately.”

“How long will it take to work?”

“Five or six days. We like to monitor the progress, naturally—sometimes it needs a little fine-tuning.”

“Then it’ll have to work its way out, I’m afraid.”

“On your own head be it,” Duscha said, tutting. She stood up from the bedside and left in a huff, her robot following obediently.

“Tanner, I…” Amelia began.

“I don’t want to talk about it, all right?”

“I had to tell her.”

“I know, and I’m not angry about that. I just don’t want you to try and talk me out of leaving, understand?”

She said nothing, but the point was well made.

Afterwards I spent half an hour with her on some more exercises. We worked almost in silence, giving me plenty of time to think about what Duscha had shown me. I’d remembered Red Hand Vasquez by then and his assurance that he was no longer infectious. He was the most likely source of the virus, but I couldn’t rule out having picked it up by sheer bad luck when I was in the bridge, in the vicinity of so many Haussmann cultists.

But Duscha had said it was a mild strain. Maybe she was right. So far, all I had to show for it was the stigma and the two nocturnal dreams I’d had. I wasn’t seeing Sky Haussmann in broad daylight, or having waking dreams about him. I didn’t feel any lingering obsession with Sky, or any hint of one; no desire to surround myself with paraphernalia relating to his life and times; no sense of religious awe at the mere thought of him. He was just what he’d always been: a figure from history, a man who had done a terrible thing and been terribly punished for it, but who could not be easily forgotten because he’d also given us the gift of a world. There were older historical figures who had mixed reputations, their deeds painted in equally murky shades of grey. I wasn’t about to start worshipping Haussmann just because his life was rerunning itself when I slept. I was stronger than that.

“I don’t understand why you’re in so much of a hurry to leave us,” Amelia said while we took a break, pushing a wet strand of hair away from her brow. “It took you fifteen years to get here—what’s a few more weeks?”

“I guess I’m just not the patient type, Amelia.” She looked at me sceptically, so I tried to offer some justification. “Look, those fifteen years never happened for me—it seems like only yesterday that I was waiting to board the ship.”

“The point still applies. Your arriving a week or two later will make blessedly little difference.”

But it would, I thought. It would make all the difference in the world—but there was no way Amelia could know the whole truth. All I could do was act as casually as possible when I answered her.

“Actually… there is a good reason for me to leave as soon as possible. It won’t have shown in your records, but I’ve remembered that I was travelling with another man who must already have been revived.”

“That’s possible, I suppose, if the other man was put aboard the ship earlier than you.”

“That’s what I was thinking. In fact, he might not have passed through the Hospice at all, if there were no complications. His name is Reivich.”

She seemed surprised, but not suspiciously so. “I remember a man with that name. He did come through here. Argent Reivich, wasn’t it?”

I smiled. “Yes; that’s him.”