The Revelation Space Collection (164 page)

Too much time and distance, Sky thought, the words playing in his head like a mantra. So much boiled down to that, in the end.

And what it also meant was that the ships of the Flotilla became less and less accountable to any other parties save themselves; that it became easier to collectively suppress the truth of whatever had happened to the Caleuche.

Sky’s grandfather - or rather, Titus Haussmann’s father - must have known exactly what had happened. He had probably imparted some of that truth to Titus, but perhaps not all of it. It might also have been the case that by the time Titus’s father had died even he had not been entirely sure what had happened. Sky could only guess at the depth of Old Man Balcazar’s knowledge, as well. The Captain had evidently believed that the sixth ship existed, but he had seemed unwilling or unable to speculate as to its origin. There were, in Sky’s opinion, two likely scenarios. In the first, there had been some dispute between the ships which had culminated in an attack on the Caleuche. It could even have extended to the use of the harbourmakers; the landscaping nuclear weapons. Balcazar had revealed little other than that the ship was dark. Very probably the radar echo matched the profile of a Flotilla vessel, but there could still have been crippling damage. Afterwards, the other ships might have been so shamed by their actions that they had chosen to blank them from the historical record. One generation would have to live with the shame, but not the one that followed.

The other idea, and the one Sky favoured, was less dramatic but perhaps even more shaming. What if something had gone terribly wrong with the Caleuche - a plague aboard her, say - and the other ships had chosen to offer no assistance? Worse things had happened in history, and who could blame the others for fearing contamination themselves?

Shameful, perhaps. But also perfectly understandable.

What it also meant was that they would have to be very careful. He would assume nothing except that every situation was potentially lethal. Equally, he would accept the risks involved because the prize was so great. He thought of the antimatter which she had to be carrying, still dormant in her penning reservoir, waiting for the day when it should have been used to slow her down. That day might still come, but not in the way her designers had ever anticipated.

Or, for that matter, any of the other ships.

Within a few hours they had escaped the main body of the Flotilla. Once a radar beam from the Brazilia lingered over them, like the fingers of a blind person probing an unfamiliar object. The moment was tense, and while they were being scrutinised Sky wondered if this had not, after all, been a fatal misjudgement. But the beam moved on and never returned. If the Brazilia had assumed anything it must have accepted that the radar echo signified only a chunk of receding debris; some useless, irrepairable machine jettisoned into the void.

After that they were alone.

It was tempting to fire up the thrusters, but Sky kept his nerve and maintained the drift for the twenty-four hours he had promised. No transmissions came from the Santiago, satisfying him that their absence had not yet become problematic. Had it not been for the company of Norquinco and Gomez, he would have been more alone now - further from human company - than at any point in his life. How terrifying this isolation would once have been to the small boy who had been so terrified of the dark when he had been trapped in the nursery. Almost unthinkable, to have willingly drifted this far from home.

Now, though, it was for a purpose.

He waited until the exact second, then turned on the engines again. The flame burned a deep lilac: clean and pure against the stars. He was careful to avoid shining the thrust beam directly back towards the Flotilla, but there was no way he could hide it completely. It hardly mattered; they had the edge now, and whatever the other ships chose to do, Sky would reach the Caleuche first. It would give him, he thought, a small foretaste of what the greater victory would be like, when he brought the Santiago to Journey’s End ahead of the others. It was as well to remember that everything he did now was only part of that larger plan.

But there was a difference, of course. Journey’s End was definitely out there; definitely a world which he knew to be real. He still had only Balcazar’s word that the Caleuche existed at all.

Sky turned on the long-range phased-array radar and - much like the Brazilia had done - extended a hand gropingly into the darkness.

If it was out there, he would find it.

‘Can’t you just leave him alone?’ Zebra said.

‘No. Even if I was ready to forgive him - which I’m not - I still have to know why he taunted me the way he did; what he was hoping to get out of it.’

We were in Zebra’s apartment. It was late morning; the cloud cover over the city was sparse, the sun was high and the place looked melancholy rather than Satanic; even the more warped buildings assumed a certain dignity, like patients who’d learned to live with gross deformity.

Which did nothing to make me feel any less disturbed; convinced more than ever that there was something fundamentally wrong with my memories. The Haussmann episodes hadn’t stopped, yet the bleeding from my hand had become much less severe than it had been at the start of the infection cycle. It was almost as if the indoctrinal virus had catalysed the unlocking of memories which were already present; memories at stark odds with the official version of events on the Santiago. The virus might have been close to burning itself out, but the other Haussmann memories were coming on more strongly than ever, my association with Sky becoming more complete. Originally it had been like watching a play; now it was like playing him; hearing his thoughts; feeling the acrid taste of his hatred.

But that wasn’t all of it. The dream I’d had the afternoon before, of looking down on the injured man in the white enclosure, had troubled me more than I could easily explain at the time, but now, having had time to think about it, I thought I knew why.

The injured man could only have been me.

And yet my viewpoint had been that of Cahuella, looking down into the hamadryad pit at the Reptile House. I could have put that down to tiredness, but it hadn’t been the only time I’d seen the world through his eyes. In the last few days there’d been odd snatches of memory and dream where I’d been more intimate with Gitta than I thought had ever been the case; instants when I felt I could bring to mind every hidden curve and pore of her body; instants when I imagined tracing my hand across the hollow of her back or the swell of her buttocks; instants when I thought I knew the taste of her. But there was something else about Gitta, too - something my thoughts couldn’t or wouldn’t home in on; something too painful.

All I knew was that it had something to do with the way she’d died.

‘Listen,’ Zebra said, refilling my coffee cup, ‘could it just be that Reivich has a death wish?’

I tried to focus on the here and now. ‘I could have satisfied that for him on Sky’s Edge.’

‘Well, a specific type of death wish, then. Something that has to be satisfied here.’

She looked lovely, her fading stripes permitting the natural geometry of her face to show more clearly, like a statue deprived of gaudy paint. But sitting face to face with each other over breakfast was as close as we had come since Pransky had brought us together. We hadn’t shared a bed, and it was not just because I’d been inhumanly tired. Zebra hadn’t invited it, and nothing in the way she behaved or dressed had suggested that our relationship had ever been anything other than coolly professional. It was as if in changing her exterior markings she had also shed an entire mode of behaviour. I felt no real loss, not just because I was still fatigued and incapable of focusing my thoughts on anything as simple and devoid of conspiracy as physical intimacy, but also because I sensed her earlier actions had somehow been part of an act.

I tried to feel betrayal, but nothing came. It wasn’t as if I’d been honest with Zebra myself, after all.

‘Actually,’ I said, looking at Zebra’s face again, and thinking how easily she’d changed herself, ‘there is another possibility.’

‘Which is?’

‘That the man I saw wasn’t Reivich at all.’ And then I put down the empty coffee cup and stood up.

‘Where are you going?’

‘Out.’

We cabled to Escher Heights.

The car nudged down, its retractable legs kissing the rain-slick ground of the ledge. There was more traffic now than when I had last visited the place - it was daytime, after all - and the costumes and anatomies of the strollers were fractionally less ostentatious, as if I was seeing a different cross-section of Canopy society, the more reserved citizens who eschewed nights of delirious pleasure-fulfilment. But they were still extreme by any standards I had defined before arriving here, and while there was no one whose proportions deviated radically from the basic adult human norm, within that boundary every possible permutation was on display. Once you got beyond the obvious cases of outlandish skin pigmentation and body hair, it was not always possible to tell what was hereditary and what was the work of Mixmasters or their shadier kin.

‘I hope there’s a point to this excursion,’ Zebra said as we disembarked. ‘In case you’ve forgotten, there are two people following you. You say they might be working for Reivich, but don’t forget Waverly had his friends as well.’

‘Would Waverly’s friends be arriving from offworld?’

‘Probably not. Unless they were just posing as offworlders, like Quirrenbach.’ She closed the door of the car behind her and the vehicle immediately took itself off on some other errand. ‘He might have come back with reinforcements. It would make sense for him to try and pick up the trail in Dominika’s, if that’s where you lost Quirrenbach in the first place. Wouldn’t it?’

‘It would make perfect sense,’ I said, hoping that I had kept the edge from my voice.

We walked to the rim of the landing ledge, to one of the pedestal-mounted telescopes. The railing which encircled the ledge was chest-high, but the telescopes all had little plinths at their bases, which meant that one was standing further from the ground, the drop all the more vertiginous. I cupped the end of the telescope to my eyes and panned around an arc of the city, struggling with the focus wheel until I realised that nothing would ever be in focus when there was so much murk in the air. Compressed by perspective, the tangle of the Canopy looked ever more complex and vegetative, like a cross-section through densely veined tissue. Reivich was out there, I knew, somewhere in that tangle; a single corpuscle caught in the pulmonary flow of the city.

‘See anything?’ Zebra asked.

‘Nothing yet.’

‘You sound tense, Tanner.’

‘Wouldn’t you be tense, in my position?’ I slammed the scope round on its pedestal. ‘I’ve been sent here to kill someone who probably doesn’t deserve it, and my only justification for it is some absurd adherence to a code of honour no one here understands or even respects. The man I’ve been sent to kill might be taunting me. Two other people might be trying to kill me. I’ve got one or two problems with my memories. And on top of that one of the people I thought I could trust has been lying to me all along.’

‘I don’t follow,’ Zebra said, but it was obvious from the tone of her voice that she did; more than sufficiently. She did not necessarily understand, but she did follow.

‘You aren’t who you say you are, Zebra.’

The wind whipped at us, almost snatching her answer away. ‘What?’

‘You’re working for Reivich, aren’t you?’

She shook her head angrily, almost laughing at the ludicrous-ness of the assertion, but she overdid it. I was not the world’s best liar, but neither was Zebra. The two of us should have started a self-help group.

‘You’re mad, Tanner. I always thought you were a little on the edge, but now I know. You’re over it. Way over.’

‘The night you found me,’ I said, ‘you were working for him even then, from the very first moment we met. The sabotage story was a cover - a pretty good one, I have to say, but a cover nonetheless.’ I stepped down from the plinth, suddenly feeling vulnerable, as if a particularly strong gust might cast me over for the long fall down to the Mulch. ‘Maybe I really was kidnapped by Gameplayers. But you already had your eye on me before then. I’d assumed I’d shaken the tail Reivich put on me - Quirrenbach - but there must have been someone else, keeping more distance so they weren’t so obvious. But you lost me until Waverly put the hunt implant in my skull. Then you had a way of tracking me again. How am I doing so far?’

‘Insane, Tanner.’ But there was no conviction in her words.

‘Do you want to know how I realised? Apart from all the little details which just didn’t add up?’

‘Astonish me.’

‘You shouldn’t have mentioned Quirrenbach. I never said his name. In fact, I was very careful not to, just in case you made a slip and it came out. Seems my luck was in.’

‘You bastard.’ She said it sweetly, so that - to anyone watching us from a distance - it might have been a term of affection, the kind lovers give themselves. ‘You sly bastard, Tanner.’

I smiled. ‘You could have used an excuse if you’d wanted. You could have said that Dominika mentioned his name when you asked who I’d been travelling with. I was half expecting you to do that, and I’m not quite sure I know how I’d have reacted. But it’s all moot now, isn’t it? Now we know just who you are.’