‘How unfortunate for the poor fellow.’
Volyova understood. What the Captain had undergone — what the Captain was still in the process of undergoing — would make most people’s nightmares seem very tame phantasms indeed. Whether or not he experienced pain was a debatable point, but what was pain anyway, compared to the knowledge that one was being eaten alive — and transformed at the same time — by something inexpressibly alien?
‘I can’t guess what those nightmares were really like,’ Volyova said. ‘All I know is that for Nagorny — a man who already had enough horrors loose in his head for most of us — they were too much.’
‘So what did you do?’
‘I changed everything — the whole gunnery interface system, even the implants in his head. None of it worked. The nightmares continued.’
‘You’re certain they had something to do with the gunnery?’
‘I wanted to deny it at first, but there was a clear correlation with the sessions when I had him in the seat.’ She lit herself another cigarette, the orange tip the only remotely warm thing anywhere near the Captain. Finding a fresh packet of cigarettes had been one of the few joyful moments of recent weeks. ‘So I changed the system again, and still it didn’t work. If anything, he just got worse.’ She paused. ‘That was when I told Sajaki of my problems.’
‘And Sajaki’s response was?’
‘That I should discontinue the experiments, at least until we’d arrived around Yellowstone. Let Nagorny spend a few years in reefersleep, and see if that cured his psychosis. I was welcome to continue tinkering with the gunnery, but I wasn’t to put Nagorny in the seat again.’
‘Sounds like very reasonable advice to me. Which of course you disregarded.’
She nodded, paradoxically relieved that the Captain had guessed her crime, without her having to spell it out.
‘I woke a year ahead of the others,’ Volyova said. ‘To give me time to oversee the system and keep an eye on how you were doing. That was what I did for a few months, too. Until I decided to wake Nagorny as well.’
‘More experiments?’
‘Yes. Until a day ago.’ She sucked hard on the cigarette.
‘This is like drawing teeth, Ilia. What happened yesterday?’
‘Nagorny disappeared.’ There; she’d said it now. ‘He had a particularly bad episode and tried to attack me. I defended myself, but he escaped. He’s elsewhere in the ship. I have no idea where.’ The Captain pondered this for long moments. She could tell what he must be thinking. It was a big ship and there were whole regions of it through which nothing could be tracked, where sensors had stopped working. It would be even harder trying to find someone who was actively hiding.
‘You’re going to have to find him,’ the Captain said. ‘You can’t have him still at large when Sajaki and the others awaken.’
‘And then what?’
‘You’ll probably have to kill him. Do it cleanly, and you can put his body back in the reefersleep unit and then arrange for the unit to fail.’
‘Make it look like an accident, you mean?’
‘Yes.’ There was, as usual, absolutely no expression on the part of the Captain’s face she could see through the casket window. He was no more capable of altering his expression than a statue.
It was a good solution — one that, in her preoccupation with the nature of the problem, she had failed to devise herself. Until then, she had feared any confrontation with Nagorny because it might put her in the position of having to kill him. Such an outcome had seemed unacceptable — but as always, no outcome was unacceptable if you looked at it the right way.
‘Thank you, Captain,’ Volyova said. ‘You’ve been very helpful. Now — with your permission —I’m going to cool you again.’
‘You’ll be back again, won’t you? I do so enjoy our little conversations, Ilia.’
‘I wouldn’t miss them for the world,’ she said, and then told her bracelet to drop his brain temperature by fifty millikelvin; all it would take to send him to dreamless, thoughtless oblivion. Or so she hoped.
Volyova finished her cigarette in silence and then looked away from the Captain, along the dark curve of the corridor. Somewhere out there — somewhere else in the ship — Nagorny was waiting, bearing her what she knew to be the deepest of grudges. He was ill himself now; sick in the head.
Like a dog that had to be put down.
‘I think I know what it is,’ Sylveste said, when the last obstructing block of stone had been removed from the obelisk’s cladding, revealing the upper two metres of the object.
‘Well?’
‘It’s a map of the Pavonis system.’
‘Something tells me you’d already guessed that,’ Pascale said, squinting through her goggles at the complex motif, which resembled two slightly offset groups of concentric circles. Stereoscopically merged, they fell into one group which seemed to hang some distance above the obsidian. And they were planetary orbits; no doubt of that. The sun Delta Pavonis lay at the centre, marked with the appropriate Amarantin glyph — a very human-looking five-pointed star. Then came correctly sized orbits for all the major bodies in the system, with Resurgam marked with the Amarantin symbol for world. Any doubts that this was just a coincidental arrangement of circles was banished by the carefully marked moons of the major planets.
‘I had my suspicions,’ Sylveste said. He was fatigued, but the night’s work — and the risk — had surely been worthwhile. It had taken them much longer to unearth the second metre of the obelisk than the first, and at times the storm had seemed like a squadron of banshees, only ever a moment away from inflicting shrieking death. But — as had happened before, and would certainly happen again — the storm had never quite reached the fury that Cuvier had predicted. Now the worst of it was done, and though streaks of dust were still rippling in the sky like dark banners, pink dawnlight was beginning to chase away the night. It seemed they had survived after all.
‘But it doesn’t change anything,’ Pascale said. ‘We always knew they had astronomy; this just shows that at some point they discovered the heliocentric universe.’
‘It means more than that,’ Sylveste said, carefully. ‘Not all of these planets are visible to the naked eye, even allowing for Amarantin physiology.’
‘So they used telescopes.’
‘Not long ago you described them as stone-age aliens. Now you’re ready to accept that they knew how to make telescopes?’
He thought she might have smiled, but it was hard to tell when she wore the breather mask. Instead, she looked skywards. Something had crossed between the baulks; a bright deltoid moving under the dust.
‘I think someone’s here,’ she said.
They climbed the ladder quickly, out of breath when they reached the top. Though the wind had lessened from its peak of several hours earlier, it was still an ordeal to move around topside. The dig was in disarray, with floods and gravitometers toppled and broken, equipment strewn around.
The aircraft was hovering above them, veering to and fro as it scouted landing sites. Sylveste recognised it immediately as one of Cuvier’s; Mantell had nothing as large. Aircraft were in short supply on Resurgam: the only means of crossing distances more than a few hundred kilometres. All the aircraft in existence now had been manufactured during the early days of the colony by servitors working from local raw materials. But the constructional servitors had been destroyed or stolen during the mutiny, and consequently the artefacts they had left behind were of incalculable value to the colony. The aircraft regenerated themselves if they were involved in minor accidents, and never needed maintenance — but they could still be ruined by sabotage or recklessness. Over the years the colony had steadily depleted its supply of flying machines.
The deltoid hurt his eyes. The underside of the plane’s wing was sewn with thousands of heat elements which glowed white-hot, generating lift thermally. The contrast was too much for Calvin’s algorithms.
‘Who are they?’ one of his
students asked.
‘I wish I knew,’ Sylveste said. But the fact that this plane had originated in Cuvier entirely failed to cheer him. He watched it lower, casting actinic shadows across the ground before the heat elements slid down the spectrum and the plane settled onto skids. After a moment a ramp folded out and a cluster of figures trooped from the plane. His eyes snapped to infrared — he could see the figures clearly now, even as they moved away from the plane towards him. Clad in dark clothes, they wore breather masks, helmets and what looked like strap-on armour, flashed with the Administration insignia: the closest the colony came to a fully-fledged militia. And they were carrying things — long, evil-looking rifles held in double-grips, with a torch slung under each barrel.
‘This doesn’t look good,’ Pascale said, accurately.
The squad halted a few metres from them. ‘Doctor Sylveste?’ called a voice, attenuated by the wind, which was still considerable. ‘I’ve got some bad news, I’m afraid, sir.’
He had been expecting nothing else. ‘What is it?’
‘The other crawler, sir — the one that left earlier tonight?’
‘What about it?’
‘They never made it back to Mantell, sir. We found them. There’d been a landslide — dust had built up on the ridge. They didn’t have a chance, sir.’
‘Sluka?’
‘They’re all dead, sir.’ The Administration man’s heavy breather mask made him look like an elephantine god. ‘I’m sorry. It’s lucky not all of you tried to get back at the same time.’
‘It’s more than luck,’ Sylveste said.
‘Sir? There’s one other thing.’ The guard tightened his grip on his rifle, emphasising its presence rather than aiming it. ‘You’re under arrest, sir.’
K. C. Ng’s rasp of a voice filled the cable-car’s cockpit like a trapped wasp. ‘You developing a taste for it yet? Our fair city, I mean.’
‘What would you know?’ Khouri said. ‘I mean, when was the last time you set foot outside of that damned box, Case? It can’t have been in living memory.’
He was not with her, of course — there was nowhere near enough room for a palanquin aboard her cable-car. The car was necessarily small; nothing that would attract attention so close to the conclusion of a hunt. Parked on the roof, the vehicle had looked like a tailless helicopter which had partially furled its rotors. But rather than blades, the cable-car’s arms were slender telescopic appendages, each terminating in a hook as viciously curved as a sloth’s foreclaw.
Khouri had entered the car, and the door had slumped shut, barriering the rain and the low background noise of the city. She had stated her destination, which was the Monument to the Eighty, down in the deep Mulch. The car had paused momentarily, undoubtedly calculating the optimum route based on current traffic conditions and the generally shifting topology of the cableways which would carry it there. The process took a moment because the car’s computer brain was not especially smart.
Then Khouri had felt the car’s centre of gravity shift slightly. Through the upper window of the gullwing door, she had seen one of the car’s three arms extend to more than twice its previous length, until the clawed end was able to grasp one of the cables which overran the top of the building. Now one of the other arms found a similar grasping point on an adjacent cable, and with a sudden heave they were, in a manner, airborne. For a moment the car slid down the two cables to which it had attached itself, but after a few seconds the latter of the two cables had diverged too far for the car to reach. Smoothly, it released its grasp, but before it could fall the car’s third arm swooped out and grabbed another handy cable which happened to cross their approximate path. And then they slid for another second or so, and then fell again, and then rose again, and Khouri began to recognise a too-familiar feeling in her gut. What failed to assist matters was that the car’s pendulous progress felt arbitrary, as if it was just making up its trajectory as it proceeded, luckily finding cables when it needed them. To compensate, Khouri ran through breathing exercises, restlessly tightening each finger of her black leather gloves in sequence.
‘I admit,’ Case said, ‘that I haven’t exposed myself to the city’s native fragrances for some time now. But you shouldn’t knock it. The air isn’t quite as filthy as it seems. The purifiers were one of the few things still running after the plague.’
Now that the cable-car had lofted itself past the huddle of buildings which defined her neighbourhood, a much greater expanse of Chasm City was coming slowly into view. It was strange to think that this twisted forest of malformed structures had once been the most prosperous city in human history; the place from which — for nearly two centuries — a welter of artistic and scientific innovations had sprung. Now even the locals were admitting that the place had seen better days. With little in the way of irony they were calling it the City That Never Wakes Up, because so many thousands of its one-time rich were now frozen in cryocrypts, skipping centuries in the hope that this period was only an aberration in the city’s fortunes.
Chasm City’s border was the natural crater which hemmed the city, sixty kilometres from edge to edge. Within the crater the city was ring-shaped, encircling the central maw of the chasm itself. The city sheltered under eighteen domes which spanned the crater wall and reached inwards to the chasm’s rim. Linked at their edges, supported here and there by reinforcing towers, the domes resembled sagging drapery covering the furniture of the recently deceased. In local parlance it was the Mosquito Net, though there were at least a dozen other names, in as many languages. The domes were vital to the city’s existence. Yellowstone’s atmosphere — a cold, chaotic mix of nitrogen and methane, spiced with long-chain hydrocarbons — would have been instantly deadly. Fortunately the crater sheltered the city from the worst of the winds and liquid methane flash-floods, and the broth of hot gases belching from the chasm itself could be cracked for breathable air with relatively cheap and rugged atmospheric processing technology. There were a few other settlements elsewhere on Yellowstone, much smaller than Chasm City, and they all had to go to much more trouble to keep their biospheres running.
Sometimes, in her early days on Yellowstone, Khouri had asked a few of the locals why anyone had ever bothered settling the planet in the first place if it was so inhospitable. Sky’s Edge might have its wars, but at least you could live there without domes and atmosphere-cracking systems.
She had quickly learned not to expect anything resembling a consistent answer, if the question itself was not deemed an outsider’s impudence. Evidently, though, this much was clear: the chasm had drawn the first explorers and around them had accreted a permanent outpost, and then something like a frontier town. Lunatics, chancers and wild-eyed visionaries had come, driven by vague rumours of riches deep within the chasm. Some had gone home disillusioned. Some had died in the chasm’s hot, toxic depths. But a few had elected to stay because something about the nascent city’s perilous location actually appealed to them. Fast forward two hundred years and that huddle of structures had become… this.
The city stretched away infinitely in all directions, it seemed, a dense wood of gnarled interlaced buildings gradually lost in murk. The very oldest structures were still more or less intact: boxlike buildings which had retained their shapes during the plague because they had never contained any systems of self-repair or redesign. The modern structures, by contrast, now resembled odd, up-ended pieces of driftwood or wizened old trees in the last stages of rot. Once those skyscrapers had looked linear and symmetrical, until the plague made them grow madly, sprouting bulbous protrusions and tangled, leprous appendages. The buildings were all dead now, frozen into the shapes which seemed calculated to induce disquiet. Slums adhered to their sides, lower levels lost in a scaffolded maze of shanty towns and ramshackle bazaars, aglow with naked fires. Tiny figures were moving in the slums, walking or rickshawing to business along haphazard roadways laid down over old ruins. There were very few powered vehicles, and most of the contraptions Khouri saw
looked like they were steam-driven.
The slums never reached more than ten levels up the sides of the buildings before collapsing under their own weight, so for two or three hundred further metres the buildings rose smoothly, relatively unscathed by plague transformations. There was no evidence of occupation in these mid-city levels. It was only near the very tops that human presence again re-asserted itself: tiered structures perched like cranes’ nests among the branches of the malformed buildings. These new additions were aglow with conspicuous wealth and power; bright apartment windows and neon advertisements. Searchlights swept down from the eaves, sometimes picking out the tiny forms of other cable-cars, navigating between districts. The cable-cars picked their way through a network of fine branches, lacing the buildings like synaptic threads. The locals had a name for this high-level city-within-a-city: the Canopy.
It was never quite daytime, Khouri had noticed. She could never feel fully awake in this place, not while the city seemed caught in an eternal twilight gloom.
‘Case, when are they going to get around to scraping the muck off the Mosquito Net?’
Ng chuckled, a sound like gravel being stirred around in a bucket. ‘Never, probably. Unless someone figures a way of making some money out of it.’
‘Now who’s bad-mouthing the city?’
‘We can afford to. When we finish our business we can hightail it back to the carousels with all the other beautiful people.’
‘In their boxes. Sorry, Case, count me out of that particular party. The excitement might kill me.’ She could see the chasm now, since the car was skirting close to the sloping inner rim of the toroidal dome. The chasm was a deep gully in the bedrock, weathered sides curving lazily over from horizontal before plunging vertically down, veined by pipes which reached down into belching vapour, towards the atmospheric cracking station which supplied air and heat to the city. ‘Talking of which… being killed, I mean — what’s the deal with the weapon?’