Chasm City

  I could see luminous things flying down in the depths, tiny bright triangles of colour. “Gliders,” Sybilline said, watching my gaze. “It’s an old sport. I used to do it, but the thermals are insane near the walls. And the amount of breathing gear you have to wear . . .” She shook her head. “The worst thing is the mist, though. You get a speed buzz from flying just above the mist level, but as soon as you drop into it, you lose all sense of direction. If you’re lucky, you head upwards and you make clear air before you run into the wall. If you’re not, you think down is up and you head into higher and higher pressure until you cook yourself alive. Or you get to add some interesting new coloration to the side of the chasm.”

  “Radar doesn’t work in the mist?”

  “It does—but that wouldn’t make it any fun, would it?”

  The food came. I ate cautiously, not wanting to make an exhibition of myself. It was good, too. Sybilline said the best food was still grown in orbit and shipped down by behemoth. That explained the extra zeroes after almost every item.

  “Look,” Waverly said, when we were on the final course. “That’s Voronoff, isn’t it?”

  He was pointing discreetly across the room to where a man had just stood up from one of the tables.

  “Yes,” Fischetti said, with a smile of self-congratulation. “I knew he’d be here somewhere.”

  I looked at the man they were talking about. He was probably one of the least ostentatious people in the room, a small, immaculate-looking man with neatly curled black hair and the pleasingly neutral face of a mime artist.

  “Who is he?” I said. “I’ve heard of him, but I’m not sure where.”

  “Voronoff’s a celebrity,” Sybilline said. She was touching my arm again, divulging another confidence. “He’s a hero to some of us. He’s one of the oldest post-mortals. He’s done everything; mastered every game.”

  “He’s some kind of game player?”

  “More than that,” Waverly said. “He’s into every extreme situation you can imagine. He makes the rules; the rest of us just follow.”

  “I hear he’s got something planned for tonight,” said Fischetti.

  Sybilline clapped her hands together. “A mist jump?”

  “I think our luck could be in. Why else would he come here to eat? He must be bored shitless of the view.”

  Voronoff was walking away from his table, accompanied by a man and a women who had been sitting with him. Everyone in the room was watching them now, sensing that something was about to happen. Even the palanquins had turned.

  I watched the three of them leave the room, but the air of anticipation remained. After a few minutes I understood why: Voronoff and the others had appeared on a ring-shaped balcony around the outside of the restaurant, encircling its dome. They were wearing protective clothes and masks, their faces almost hidden.

  “Are they going to fly gliders?” I said.

  “No,” Sybilline answered. “That’s entirely passé as far as Voronoff’s concerned. A mist jump’s something much, much more dangerous.”

  Now they were fitting glowing harnesses around their waists. I strained to get a better view. Each harness was attached to a coiled line of rope, the other end of which was anchored to the side of the dome. By now half the diners had crowded over to this side of the restaurant for a better view.

  “You see that coil?” Sybilline said. “It’s up to each jumper to calculate the length and elasticity of their line. Then they have to time the moment that they jump, based on their knowledge of the thermals in the chasm. See how they’re paying close attention to what the gliders are doing, down below?”

  That was when the woman jumped over the edge. She must have decided that the moment was right for her leap.

  Through the floor I watched her drop, dwindling to a tiny human speck as she fell towards the mist. The coil was almost invisibly thin as she dragged it behind her.

  “What’s the idea?” I said.

  “It’s supposed to be pretty exciting,” Fischetti said. “But the real trick is to fall enough to enter the mist; to disappear completely from view. But you don’t want to fall too much. And even if you calculate the right length of line, you can still get creamed by thermals.”

  “She’s misjudged,” Sybilline said. “Oh, silly girl. She’s getting sucked closer and closer to that outcrop.”

  I watched the glowing dot of the falling woman ram against the side of the chasm. There was a moment of stunned silence in the restaurant, as if the unspeakable had happened. I was expecting the silence to be broken by a cries of horror and pity. Instead there was a polite round of applause and some muted sounds of commiseration.

  “I could have told her that was going to happen,” Sybilline said.

  “Who was she?” Fischetti said.

  “I don’t know, Olivia something or other.” Sybilline picked up the menu again and began scanning the desserts.

  “Careful, you’ll miss the next one. I think it’s going to be Voronoff . . . yes!” Fischetti hammered the table as his hero stepped off the balcony and dropped gracefully towards the mist. “See how cool he was? That’s class, that is.”

  Voronoff fell like an expert swimmer, his line as straight and true as if he were plunging through vacuum. It was all a matter of timing, I could see: he’d waited for the exact moment when the thermals would behave the way he wanted, working with him rather than against him. As he fell deeper it was almost as if they were nudging him helpfully away from the chasm walls. A screen in the middle of the room was relaying a side-on image of Voronoff, captured by what must have been a flying camera chasing him down the chasm. Other diners were following his trajectory with opera glasses, telescopic monocles and elegant lorgnette binoculars.

  “Is there a point to this?” I said.

  “Risk,” Sybilline said. “And the thrill of doing something new and dangerous. If there’s one thing the plague’s given us, it’s that: the opportunity to test ourselves; to stare death in the face. Biological immortality won’t help you much if you’ve just hit a rockface at two hundred kilometres per hour.”

  “Why do they do it, though? Doesn’t potential immortality make your lives all the more precious?”

  “Yes, but that doesn’t mean we still don’t need to be reminded of death now and then. What’s the point of beating an old enemy if you deny yourself the thrill of ever remembering what it was like in the first place? Victory loses its meaning without the memory of what you’ve vanquished.”

  “But you could die.”

  She looked up from the menu. “All the more reason not to cock up your timing, then.”

  Voronoff was nearing the end of his fall. I could barely see him now.

  “He’s picking up tension now,” Fischetti said. “Beginning to slow down. See how beautifully he’s timed it?”

  The line was stretched almost to its limit, now starting to arrest Voronoff’s fall. But his timing was as good as his admirers had evidently been expecting. He disappeared for three or four seconds, vanishing into the whiteness before the coil began to contract, hauling him back upwards towards us.

  “Textbook,” Sybillene said.

  There was more applause, but in contrast to before, this time it was wildly enthusiastic. People began to hammer their cutlery in appreciation of Voronoff’s fall. “You know what?” Waverly said. “Now that he’s mastered mist-jumping, he’ll get bored and try something else even more insanely dangerous. You mark my words.”

  “There goes the other one,” Sybillene said, as the last jumper stepped from the balcony. “Timing looks good—better than the woman’s, anyway. You’d have thought he’d have the decency to let Voronoff come back up first, wouldn’t you?”

  “How will he get back up?” I said.

  “He’ll haul himself up. There’s some kind of motorised winch in his harness.”

  I watched the last jumper plummet into the depths. To my untrained eye the jump looked at least as good as Voronoff’s—the thermals didn?
??t seem to be steering the man towards the sides, and his posture as he dropped looked amazingly balletic. The crowd had quietened down now and were watching the fall intently.

  “Well, he’s no amateur,” Fischetti said.

  “He just copied Voronoff’s timing,” Sybillene said. “I was watching the way the vortex affected the gliders.”

  “You can’t blame him for that. You don’t get marks for originality, you know.”

  He dropped further still, his harness a glowing green dot receding towards the mist. “Wait,” Waverly said, pointing to the uncoiling line on the balcony. “He should have run out of line by now, shouldn’t he?”

  “Voronoff had by this point,” Sybillene agreed.

  “Silly fool’s given himself too much,” Fischetti said. He took a sip from his wine glass and studied the depths with renewed interest. “It’s reached the limit now, but it’s much too late.”

  He was right. By the time the glowing green dot reached the level of the mist, it was falling almost as quickly as ever. The screen showed a last side-on view of him vanishing into the whiteness, and then there was only the taut filament of his line. Seconds passed—first the three or four that Voronoff had taken before emerging, and then ten . . . and then twenty. By thirty seconds people were beginning to get a little uncomfortable. Obviously they had seen this sort of thing happen before and had some idea of what to expect.

  Nearly a minute passed before the man emerged.

  I’d already been told what happened to glider pilots who went too deep, but I hadn’t imagined it could be that bad. But the man had gone very far into the mist. The pressure and temperature had been too much for the flimsy protection of his suit. He had died: boiled alive within a few seconds. The camera lingered on his corpse, lovingly mapping the horror of what had happened to him. I felt revolted and looked away from the image. I’d seen some bad things during my years as a soldier, but never while sitting at a table digesting a large and luxurious meal.

  Sybilline shrugged. “Well, he should have used a shorter line.”

  Afterwards we walked back across the stalk to the landing deck where Sybilline’s cable-car was still waiting.

  “Well, Tanner, where can we take you?” she said.

  I wasn’t exactly enjoying their company, I had to admit. It had begun badly and though I was grateful for the sight-seeing trip to the stalk, the cold way they had responded to the deaths of the mist-jumpers had left me wondering whether I wouldn’t have been better off with the pigs they had mentioned.

  But I couldn’t throw away a chance like this. “I take it you’re heading back to the Canopy at some point?”

  She looked pleased. “If you want to come with us, it’s absolutely no problem. In fact, I insist on it.”

  “Well, don’t feel any obligation. You’ve been generous enough as it is. But if it won’t inconvenience you . . .”

  “Not at all. Get in the car.”

  The vehicle opened before me, Fischetti getting in the driver’s compartment and the rest of us in the back. We lofted; the cable-car’s motion began to feel familiar, if not actually comfortable. The ground dropped away quickly; we reached the interstices of the Canopy and settled into a semi-regular rhythm as the car picked its route along one of the main cable ways.

  That was when I started to think I really should have taken my chances with the pigs.

  “Well, Tanner—did you enjoy your meal?” Sybilline asked.

  “Like you said, it’s a hell of a view.”

  “Good. You needed the energy. Or at least you will need it.” Deftly, she reached into a compartment set into the car’s plush and pulled out a nasty little gun. “Well, to state the obvious, this is a weapon and I’m pointing it at you.”

  “Ten out of ten for observation.” I looked at the gun. It appeared to be made out of jade and was embossed with red demons. It had a small, dark maw and she was holding it very steadily.

  “The point being,” Sybilline continued, “that you shouldn’t think of doing anything untoward.”

  “If you wanted to kill me, you could have done it dozens of times already.”

  “Yes. But there’s just one flaw in your thinking. We do want to kill you. Just not in any old manner.”

  I should have felt immediate fear as soon as she pulled out the gun, but there’d been a delay of a few seconds while my mind assimilated the situation and decided it was probably just as bad as it appeared.

  “What are you going to do to me?”

  Sybilline nodded at Waverly. “Can you do it here?”

  “I’ve got the tools, but I’d far rather do it back at the airship.” Waverly nodded at her. “You can keep that gun pointed until then, can’t you?”

  I asked what they were going to do to me again, but all of a sudden no one seemed very interested in what I had to say. I’d walked into big trouble, that much was obvious. Waverly’s story of shooting me to protect me from the pigs hadn’t ever sounded more than halfway convincing, but who had I been to argue? I’d kept telling myself that if they had wanted me dead . . .

  Nice line. But like Sybilline had said, there was a certain flaw in my thinking . . .

  It didn’t take very long to reach the trapped airship. As we swung up towards it I had an excellent view of the imprisoned craft, suspended precariously high above the city. There were no Canopy lights anywhere near it, no signs of habitation in the branches that supported it. I remembered what they had said about it being nice and discreet.

  We landed. By then Waverly had found a gun as well, and when I stepped onto the connecting ramp which led to the gondola, Fischetti was covering me with a third. About the only thing I could have done was jump over the side.

  But I wasn’t that desperate. Not yet.

  Inside the gondola, I was escorted back to the chair where I had woken up only a couple of hours earlier. This time Waverly strapped me into the seat.

  “Well, get on with it,” Sybilline said, standing with her hip to one side with the gun held in one hand like a chic cigarette holder. “It isn’t brain surgery, you know.”

  She laughed.

  Waverly spent the next few minutes circumnavigating my chair, emitting odd grunts which might have indicated distaste. Now and then he touched my scalp, examining it with gentle fingers. Then, seemingly satisfied, he retrieved some equipment from somewhere behind me. Whatever it was looked medical.

  “What are you going to do?” I asked, trying again to get a response out of them. “You won’t get far by torturing me, if that’s what you’ve got in mind.”

  “You think I’m going to torture you?” Waverly had one of the medical devices in his hand now, an intricate probe-like thing fashioned from chrome and inset with blinking status lights. “It would amuse me, I admit. I’m a colossal sadist. But aside from my own self-gratification, it would serve no purpose. We’ve trawled your memories, so we know all that you’d tell us under pain.”

  “You’re bluffing.”

  “No, we’re not. Did we have to ask you your name? No, we didn’t. But we knew you were called Tanner Mirabel, didn’t we?”

  “You know I’m telling the truth, in that case. I have nothing to offer you.”

  He leant closer to me, his lens clicking and whirring as it absorbed visual data across an unguessable spread of the spectrum. “We don’t really know what to know, Mister Mirabel. Assuming that’s really your name. It’s all so very foggy in there, you see. Confused memory traces—whole swathes of your past which we just can’t access. You’ll understand that this does not put us in the best possible frame of mind to trust you. I mean, you accept that this is a reasonable response, don’t you?”

  “I’ve only just been revived.”

  “Ah, yes—and the Ice Mendicants normally do such a mar vellous job, don’t they? But in your case not even their artistry could restore the whole.”

  “Are you working for Reivich?”

  “I doubt it. I’ve never heard of him.” He glanced at Sybil
line, as if seeking her opinion on the matter. She did her best to mask it, but I saw the way she pulled the facial equivalent of a shrug; a momentary widening of the eyes as if to say that she hadn’t heard of Reivich either.

  It looked genuine, too.

  “All right,” Waverly said. “I think I can do this nice and cleanly. It helps that there aren’t any other implants in his head to get in the way.”

  “Just do it,” Sybilline said. “We haven’t got all damned night.”

  He held the surgical device against the side of my skull, so that I could feel its cold pressure against my skin. I heard a click as he pulled a trigger—

  SEVENTEEN

  The head of security stood before his prisoner, studying him as a sculptor might study a roughly hewn work in progress; satisfied with the effort that had already taken place, but acutely aware of all the labour that lay ahead. Much remained to be done, but he promised himself that there would be no errors.

  Sky Haussmann and the saboteur were almost alone. The torture room was in a distant and largely forgotten annex of the ship, accessible only by one of the train routes which everyone else assumed was disused. Sky had outfitted the room and its surrounding chambers himself, equipping it with pressure and heat by tapping into the ship’s lymphatic system of supply lines. In principle, a detailed audit of power/air consumption might have revealed the room’s existence, but, as a possible security issue, the matter would only have been referred to Sky himself. It had never happened; he doubted that it ever would.