The Revelation Space Collection (113 page)

‘He’ll be in Chasm City,’ Amelia said, as if the utterance itself was a heresy; as if the place was the vilest pit of degradation imaginable. ‘That’s our largest settlement; the oldest one.’

‘Yes; I’ve already heard of Chasm City. Can you narrow it down slightly?’ I did my best not to sound sarcastic. ‘A district would help.’

‘I can’t really help you very much - he didn’t tell us exactly where he was going. But you could start in the Canopy, I suppose.’

‘The Canopy?’

‘I’ve never been there. But they say you can’t miss it.’

I discharged myself the day after.

I wasn’t under any illusion that I was totally well, but I knew that if I waited any longer the chances of my picking up Reivich’s trail again would dwindle to zero. And while some parts of my memory had still not come back into absolutely sharp focus, there was enough there to function with; enough to let me get on with the job in hand.

I went back into the chalet to gather my things - the documents, the clothes they had given me and the pieces of the diamond gun - and once again found my attention drawn to the alcove in the wall which had so disturbed me upon waking. I’d managed to sleep in the chalet since then, and while I wouldn’t have described my dreams as restful, the images and thoughts that had raced through them were of Sky Haussmann. The blood on my sheets each morning testified to that. But when I woke, there was still something about the alcove that chilled me, and which was as irrational as ever. I thought of what Duscha had told me about the indoctrinal virus, and wondered if there was anything in my infection which could cause such a baseless phobia - the virally generated structures linking to the wrong brain centres, perhaps. But at the same time I wondered if the two things might not be connected at all.

Afterwards, Amelia met me and walked with me up the long, meandering trail which led to heaven, climbing higher and higher towards one of the habitat’s conic end-points. The gradient was so mild that walking was barely an effort, but there was a feeling of euphoric relief as my weight diminished and each step seemed to send me a little higher and further.

When we had walked in silence for ten or fifteen minutes, I said, ‘Is it true what you hinted at earlier, Amelia? That you were once one of us?’

‘A passenger, you mean? Yes, but I was just a child when it happened - I barely knew how to speak. The ship which brought us in had been damaged, and they’d lost most of the identifying records for their sleepers. They’d been picking up passengers in more than one system, too, so there was no real way to tell where I’d ever come from.’

‘You mean you don’t know what world you were born on?’

‘Oh, I can make a few guesses - not that it interests me greatly these days.’ The path steepened momentarily, and Amelia suddenly bounded ahead of me to take the rise. ‘This is my world now, Tanner. It’s a blessedly small place, but it isn’t a bad one, I think. Who else can say that they’ve seen all their world has to offer?’

‘That must make it very boring.’

‘Not at all. Things always change.’ She pointed across the curve of the habitat. ‘That waterfall wasn’t always there. Oh, and there was a little hamlet down there once, where we’ve made a lake now. It’s like that all the time. We keep having to change these paths to stop erosion - every year it’s like I have to remember the place anew. We have seasons, and years when our crops don’t grow as well as in other years. Some years we get a glut, too, God willing. And there’s always something to explore. We get new people coming through all the time, of course - and some of them do join the Order.’ She lowered her voice. ‘Thankfully, they’re not all like Brother Alexei.’

‘There’s always one bad apple.’

‘I know. And I shouldn’t say this . . . but after what you’ve taught me, I’m almost hoping Alexei tries it on again.’

I understood how she must have felt. ‘I doubt that he will, but I wouldn’t want to be in his shoes if he does.’

‘I’ll be gentle with him, don’t worry.’

There was an uncomfortable silence, during which we scaled the last slope towards the end of the cone. My weight had probably dropped to a tenth of what it had been in the chalet, but walking was still possible - it just felt like the ground was receding beneath each footfall. Ahead, discreetly veiled by a copse of trees which had grown haphazardly in the low gravity, was an armoured door leading out of the chamber.

‘You’re serious about leaving, aren’t you?’ Amelia said.

‘The sooner I get to Chasm City the better.’

‘It won’t be all that you’re expecting, Tanner. I wish you’d stay with us a little longer, just so that we could bring you up to speed . . .’ She trailed off, evidently realising that I was not going to be persuaded.

‘Don’t worry about me; I’ll catch up on my history.’ I smiled at her; hating myself at the same time for the way I had been forced to lie to her, but knowing there was no other way. ‘Thank you for your kindness, Amelia.’

‘It was my pleasure, Tanner.’

‘Actually . . .’ I looked around to see if anyone was observing us, but we were alone. ‘There’s something I’d be happy if you were to accept from me.’ I reached into the pocket of my trousers and pulled out the fully assembled clockwork gun. ‘It’s probably best if you don’t ask why I was carrying this, Amelia. It won’t do me much good to carry it any further, I think.’

‘I don’t think I should take that from you, Tanner.’

I pushed it into her palm. ‘Then confiscate it.’

‘I should, I suppose. Does it work?’

I nodded; there was no need to go into details. ‘It will do you some good if you ever get into real trouble.’

She slipped the gun away. ‘I’m confiscating it, that’s all.’

‘I understand.’

She reached out and shook my hand. ‘God go with you, Tanner. I hope you find your friend.’

I turned away before she could see my face.

NINE

I stepped through the armoured door.

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

‘Mister Mirabel? We heard you were leaving. This way, please.’

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

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

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

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

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

The view beyond was worth it, though.

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

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

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

‘They’re still unloading?’ I said.

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

‘I bet it depresses you, seeing all those slush puppies coming through.’

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

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

‘I’m going down in that thing?’

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

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

‘Me too. Why don’t I check.’

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

‘What was all that about?’ I asked, my voice moronically slurred.

‘A leaving present from Brother Alexei,’ said the first Mendicant. ‘Nothing too serious, Mister Mirabel. Just a reminder not to interfere in our business ever again.’

I spat out a crimson sphere of blood, observing the way it retained its globular shape as it crossed from one side of the elevator to the other.

‘You won’t be getting a donation,’ I said.

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

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

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