Chasm City

  “Well?” I said. “Do we risk it, or find a way around?”

  Quirrenbach clutched his briefcase closer to his chest. “Much against my better judgement, I think we should risk it. I have a hunch—merely a hunch, mind—that we may be pointed towards the services we both so urgently require.”

  “It might be a mistake.”

  “And it probably won’t be the first of the day, either. I’m somewhat on the ravenous side, anyway. There’s bound to be something edible around here—and it might not be immediately toxic.”

  We pushed our way into the bazaar. Quirrenbach and I had taken barely a dozen steps before we had attracted a mob of optimistic kids and surly beggars.

  “Do I have affluent and gullible written in conspicuous neon letters on my forehead?” Quirrenbach said.

  “It’s our clothes,” I said, pushing another urchin back into the throng. “I recognised yours as being Mendicant-made, and I wasn’t even paying you much attention.”

  “I don’t see why that should make much difference.”

  “Because it means we’re from outside,” I said. “Beyond the system. Who else would be wearing Mendicant clothing? That automatically guarantees a certain prosperity, or at least the possibility of it.”

  Quirrenbach clutched his luggage to his chest with renewed protectiveness. We pushed our way deeper into the bazaar until we found a stall selling something which looked edible. In Hospice Idlewild they’d treated my gut flora for Yellowstone compatibility, but it had been a fairly broad-spectrum treatment, not guaranteed to be any use against anything specific. Now was my chance to test exactly how non-specific it had been.

  What we bought were hot, greasy pastries filled with some unidentifiable, semi-cooked meat. It was heavily spiced, probably to disguise the meat’s underlying rancidity. But I had eaten less appetising rations on Sky’s Edge and found it more or less palatable. Quirrenbach wolfed down his, then bought another, and finished that one off with equal recklessness.

  “Hey, you,” said a voice. “Implants, out?”

  A kid tugged the hem of Quirrenbach’s Mendicant jacket, dragging him deeper into the bazaar. The kid’s clothes would be graduating to raghood in a week or two, but were now lingering on the edge of dilapidation.

  “Implants, out,” the kid said again. “You new here, you no need implants, misters. Madame Dominika, she get them out, good price, fast, not much blood or pain. You too, big guy.”

  The kid had hooked his fingers around my belt and was dragging me as well.

  “It’s, um, not necessary,” Quirrenbach said, pointlessly.

  “You new here, got Mendicant suits, need implants out now, before they go wacko. You know what that mean, misters? Big scream, head explode, brain everywhere, get real mess on clothes . . . you not want that, I think.”

  “No, thank you very much.”

  Another kid had appeared, tugging at Quirrenbach’s other sleeve. “Hey, mister, don’t listen to Tom—come and see Doctor Jackal! He only kill one in twenty! Lowest mortality rate in Grand Central! Don’t go wacko; see the jackal!”

  “Yeah, and get free permanent brain damage,” said Dominika’s kid. “Don’t listen; ev’ryone know Dominika best in Chasm City!”

  I said, “Why are you hesitating? Isn’t this exactly what you were hoping to find?”

  “Yes!” Quirrenbach hissed. “But not like this! Not in some filthy damned tent! I was anticipating a reasonably sterile and well-equipped clinic. In fact I know there are better places we can use, Tanner, just trust me on this . . .”

  I shrugged, allowing Tom to haul me along. “Maybe a tent is as good as it gets, Quirrenbach.

  “No! It can’t be. There must be . . .” He looked at me helplessly, willing me to take control and drag him away, but I simply smiled and nodded towards the tent: a blue and white box with a slightly cambered roof, guylines attached to iron pins driven into the floor.

  “In you go,” I said, inviting Quirrenbach to step ahead of me. We were in an ante-room to the tent’s main chamber, just us and the kid. Tom, I saw now, had a kind of elfin beauty; gender indeterminate beneath tattered clothes, the face was framed by curtains of lank black hair. The kid’s name could have been Thomas or Thomasina, but I decided it was probably the former. Tom swayed in time to sitar music emanating from a little malachite box which rested on a table set with perfumed candles.

  “This isn’t too bad,” I said. “I mean, there’s no actual blood anywhere. No actual brain tissue lying around.”

  “No,” Quirrenbach said, suddenly making a decision. “Not here; not how. I’m leaving, Tanner. You can stay or follow me; it’s entirely up to you.”

  I spoke to him as quietly as I could manage: “What Tom says is true. You need to have your implants out now, if the Mendicants didn’t already do it for you.”

  He reached up and rasped a hand across his scalp stubble. “Maybe they were just trying to scare up business with those stories.”

  “Perhaps—but do you really want to take that risk? The hardware’s just going to be sitting in your head like a time-bomb. Might as well have it out. You can always have it put back in again, after all.”

  “By a woman in a tent who calls herself Madame Dominika? I’d rather take my chances with a rusty penknife and a mirror.”

  “Whatever. Just so long as you do it before you go wacko.”

  The kid was already dragging Quirrenbach through the partition into the room beyond. “Talking of money, Tanner—neither of us are exactly flush. We don’t know we can afford Dominika’s services, do we?”

  “That’s a very good point.” I grabbed Tom by the collar, hauling him gently back into the ante-room. “My friend and I need to sell some goods in a hurry, unless your Madame Dominika is given to charity.” When that remark had no effect on Tom, I opened my suitcase and showed him some of what was inside. “Sell, for cash. Where?”

  That seemed to work. “Green and silver tent, ’cross market. Say Dominika sent you, you no get major sting.”

  “Hey, wait a minute.” Quirrenbach was halfway through the gash now. I could see into the main room, where a phenomenally bulky woman sat behind a long couch, consulting her fingernails, medical equipment suspended over the couch on articulated booms, metal glinting in candlelight.

  “What?”

  “Why should I be the guinea pig? I thought you said you needed to have your implants removed as well.”

  “You’re right. And I’ll be back shortly. I just need to convert some of my possessions into cash. Tom said I could do it in the bazaar.”

  His face turned from incomprehension to fury.

  “But you can’t go now! I thought we were in this together! Travelling companions! Don’t betray a friendship almost before it’s begun, Tanner . . .”

  “Hey, calm down. I’m not betraying anything. By the time she’s finished with you, I’ll have got enough cash together.” I clicked a finger towards the fat woman. “Dominika!”

  Languidly, she turned to face me, her lips forming a silent interrogative.

  “How long will it take with him?”

  “One hour,” she answered. “Dominika real quick.”

  I nodded. “That’s more than enough time, Quirrenbach. Just sit back and let her do her job.”

  He looked into Dominika’s face and seemed to calm slightly.

  “Really? You will be back?”

  “Of course. I’m not stepping into the city with implants still in my head. What do you think I am, insane? But I do need money.”

  “What are you planning to sell?”

  “Some of my own goods. Some of the stuff I lifted from our mutual friend Vadim. There’s got to be a market for that kind of thing or he wouldn’t have been hoarding it.”

  Dominika was trying to pull him onto her couch, but Quirrenbach was still managing to stay on his feet. I remembered how he had impulsively changed his mind when we began looting Vadim’s quarters—at first resisting the theft, then throwing himself en
thusiastically into the process. I saw a similar sea-change now.

  “Dammit,” he murmured, shaking his head. He looked at me curiously, then cracked open his own case, riffling through sheet music until he reached a set of compartments below it. He fished out some of the experientials he had taken from Vadim. “I’m no good at bartering anyway. Take these and get a good price on them, Tanner. I’m assuming they’ll cover the cost of this.”

  “You trust me to do that?”

  He looked at me through squinted eyes. “Just get a good price.”

  I took the items and placed them amongst my own.

  Behind him, the bulky woman hovered across the room like an unmoored dirigible, her feet skimming inches from the ground. She was cradled in a black metal harness, attached to one wall by a complexly-jointed pneumatic arm, hissing steam as it articulated and flexed. Rolls of fat disguised the indeterminate region where her head and torso merged. Her hands were spread out as if she was drying recently painted fingernails. Each fingertip vanished into—or possibly became —a kind of thimble. Each thimble was tipped with something medical and specialised.

  “No; him first,” she said, extending a little finger in my direction, its thimble adorned with what looked like a tiny sterile harpoon.

  “Thank you, Dominika,” I said. “But you’d best attend to Quirrenbach first.”

  “You come back?”

  “Yes—once I’ve acquired some finance.”

  I smiled and left the tent, hearing the sound of drills whining up to speed.

  FOURTEEN

  The man who looked through my belongings had a whirring and clicking eyeglass strapped to his head. His hairless scalp was quilted with fine scars, like a broken vase that had been inexpertly mended. He examined everything I showed him with tweezers, holding the items up to his eyeglass in the manner of an aged lepidopterist. Next to him, smoking a handmade cigarette, was a youth wearing the same kind of helmet I’d taken from Vadim.

  “I can use some of this shit,” the man with the eyeglass said. “Probably. You say it’s all real, huh? All factual?”

  “The military episodes were trawled from soldiers’ memories after the combat situations in question, as part of the normal intelligence-gathering process.”

  “Yeah? And how’d they fall into your hands?”

  Without waiting for an answer, he reached under the table, pulled out a little tin sealed with an elastic band and counted out a few dozen bills of the local currency. As I had noticed before, the bills seemed to have been printed in strange denominations—thirteens, fours, twenty-sevens, threes.

  “It’s none of your damned business where I got them from,” I said.

  “No, but that doesn’t stop me asking.” He pursed his lips. “Anything else, now that you’re wasting my time?”

  I allowed him to examine the experientials I’d taken from Quirrenbach, watching as his lip curled first into contempt and then disgust.

  “Well?”

  “Now you’re insulting me, and I don’t like it.”

  “If the items are worthless,” I said, “just tell me and I’ll leave.”

  “The items aren’t worthless,” he said, after examining them again. “Fact is, they’re exactly the kind of the thing I might have bought, a month or two ago. Grand Teton’s popular. People can’t get enough of those slime-tower formations.”

  “So what’s the problem?”

  “This shit has already hit the market, that’s what. These experientials are already out there, depreciating. These must be—what? Third- or fourth-generation bootlegs? Real cheap-ass crap.”

  He still tore off a few more bills, but nowhere near as much as he’d paid for my own experientials.

  “Anything else up your sleeve?”

  I shrugged. “Depends what you’re after, doesn’t it.”

  “Use your imagination.” He passed one of the military experientials to his sidekick. The youth’s chin was fuzzed by the first tentative wisps of a beard. He ejected the experiential he was running at the time and slipped mine in instead, without once lifting the goggles from his eyes. “Anything black. Matte-black. You know what I mean, don’t you?”

  “I’ve a reasonably good idea.”

  “Then either cough up or get out of the premises.” Next to him, the youth started convulsing in his seat. “Hey, what is that shit?”

  “Does that helmet have enough spatial resolution to stimulate the pleasure and pain centres?” I said.

  “What if it does?” He leaned over and slapped the convulsing youth hard on the head, knocking the playback helmet flying. Drooling, still convulsing, the youth subsided into his seat, his eyes glazed over.

  “Then he probably shouldn’t have accessed it at random,” I said. “My guess is he just hit an NC interrogation session. Have you ever had your fingers removed?”

  The eyeglass man chuckled. “Nasty. Very nasty. But there’s a market for that kind of shit—just like there is for the black stuff.”

  Now was as good a time as any to see what the quality of Vadim’s merchandise was like. I handed over one of the black experientials, one of those embossed with a tiny silver maggot motif. “Is this what you mean?”

  He looked sceptical at first, until he had examined the experiential more closely. To the trained eye, there were presumably all manner of subliminal indicators to distinguish the genuine article from sub-standard fakes.

  “It’s a good quality bootleg if it’s a bootleg, which means it’s worth something whatever’s on it. Hey, shit-for-brains. Try this.” He knelt down, picked up the battered playback helmet and jammed it onto the youth’s head, then prepared to insert the experiential. The youth was just beginning to perk up when he saw the experiential, at which point he pawed the air, trying to stop the man pressing it into the helmet.

  “Get that maggot shit away from me . . .”

  “Hey,” the man said. “I was just going to give you a flash, dickface.” He tucked the experiential away in his coat.

  “Why don’t you try it yourself?” I said.

  “Same damn reason he doesn’t want that shit anywhere near his skull. It’s not nice.”

  “Nor’s an NC interrogation session.”

  “That’s a trip to the cake shop by comparison. That’s just pain.” He patted his breast pocket delicately. “What’s on this could be about nine million times less pleasant.”

  “You mean it’s not always the same?”

  “Of course not, or there wouldn’t be an element of risk. And the way these ones work, it’s never exactly the same trip twice. Sometimes it’s just maggots, sometimes you are the maggots . . . sometimes it’s much, much worse . . .” Suddenly he looked cheerful. “But, hey, there’s a market for it, so who am I to argue?”

  “Why would people want to experience something like that?” I asked.

  He grinned at the youth. “Hey, what is this, fucking philosophy hour? How am I supposed to know? This is human nature we’re talking about here; it’s already deeply fucking perverted.”

  “Tell me about it,” I said.

  At the centre of the concourse, rising above the bazaar like a minaret, was an ornately encrusted tower surmounted by a four-faced clock set to Chasm City time. The clock had recently struck the seventeenth hour of the twenty-six in Yellowstone’s day, animated spacesuited figurines emerging beneath the dial to enact what might have been a complex quasi-religious ritual. I checked the time on Vadim’s watch—my own watch, I forced myself to think, since I had now liberated it twice—and found that the two were in passable agreement. If Dominika’s estimate had been accurate, she would still be busy with Quirrenbach.

  The hermetics had passed through now, along with most of the obviously rich, but there were still many people who wore the slightly stunned look of the recently impoverished. Perhaps they had been only moderately wealthy seven years ago; not sufficiently well-connected to barrier themselves against the plague. I doubted that there had been anyone truly poor in Chasm City
back then, but there were always degrees of affluence. For all the heat, the people wore heavy, dark clothes, often ballasted with jewellery. The women were often gloved and hatted, perspiring under wide-brimmed fedoras, veils or chadors. The men wore heavy greatcoats with upturned collars, faces shadowed under Panama hats or shapeless berets. Many had little glass boxes around their necks, containing what looked like religious relics, but which were actually implants, extracted from their hosts and now carried as symbols of former wealth. Though there was a spectrum of apparent ages, I saw no one who looked genuinely old. Perhaps the old were too infirm to risk a trip to the bazaar, but I also recalled what Orcagna had said about the state of longevity treatments on other worlds. It was entirely possible that some of the people I saw here were two or three centuries old; burdened with memories which reached back to Marco Ferris and the Amerikano era. They must have lived through great strange nesses . . . but I doubted that any of them had witnessed anything stranger than the recent transfiguration of their city, or the collapse of a society whose longevity and opulence must have seemed unassailable. No wonder so many of the people I saw looked so sad, as if knowing that—no matter how things might improve from day to day—the old times would never come again. Seeing that all-pervasive melancholia, it was impossible not to feel some empathy.

  I started navigating my way back to Dominika’s tent, then wondered why I was bothering.

  There were questions I wanted to ask Dominika, but they could equally well be directed to one of her rivals. I might need to talk to them all eventually. The only thing that connected me to Dominika was Quirrenbach . . . and even if I had begun to tolerate his presence, I’d known all along that I would have to ditch him eventually. I could walk away now, leave the terminus completely, and the chances were that we’d never meet again.

  I pushed through until I reached the far side of the bazaar.

  Where the furthest wall should have been was only an opening through which the lower levels of the city could be seen, behind a perpetual screen of dirty rain sluicing from the side of the terminus. A haphazard line of rickshaws waited: upright boxes balanced between two wide wheels. Some of the rickshaws were powered, coupled behind steam-engines or chugging methane-powered motors. Their drivers lounged indolently, awaiting fares. Others were propelled by pedal-power, and several looked to have been converted from old palanquins. Behind the row of rickshaws there were other, sleeker vehicles: a pair of flying machines much like the volantors I knew from Sky’s Edge, crouched down on skids, and a trio of craft which looked like helicopters with their rotors folded for stowage. A squad of workers eased a palanquin into one of them, tipping it at an undignified angle to get it through the entrance door. I wondered if I was witnessing a kidnapping or a taxi pick-up.