A loyal servant, in other words.
A reminding ping from the taxi’s console. The Santiago was looming large now, though it was still hard to see with the cabin’s interior lights on. Balcazar was snoring and drooling at the same time, a silvery stream of saliva adorning one of his epaulettes like a subtle new indication of rank.
“Kill him,” Clown said. “Go on; kill him. There’s still time.”
Clown was not really present in the taxi—Sky knew that—but he was here in some sense, his high, quavery voice seeming to come not from within Sky’s skull, but from some distance behind it.
“I don’t want to kill him,” Sky said, adding a silent “yet” for his own benefit.
“You know you do really. He’s in the way. He’s always been in the way. He’s a sick old man. You would really be doing him a favour by killing him now.” Clown’s voice softened. “Look at him. He’s sleeping like a little baby. I expect he’s having a happy dream about his boyhood.”
“You can’t know that.”
“I’m Clown. Clown knows everything.”
A soft metallic voice on the console warned Sky that they were about to enter the prohibited sphere around his own ship. The taxi would shortly be seized by the automated traffic vectoring system and guided to its berth.
“I’ve never killed anyone before,” Sky said.
“But you’ve often thought of it, haven’t you?”
There was no point arguing with that. Sky fantasised about killing people all the time. He thought of ways to do it to his enemies—people who had slighted him, or whom he suspected of speaking about him behind his back. Some people, it seemed to him, should be killed for no other reason than that they were weak or trustful. Aboard a ship like the Santiago, there was every opportunity to commit murder, but very little chance of doing it in a way which would avoid detection. Nonetheless Sky’s fertile imagination had brooded on this problem long enough to have thought up a dozen plausible strategies for reducing the numbers of his enemies.
But until Clown had spoken to him now, it had been enough to entertain the fantasies. Playing those gruesome little deaths over and over in his mind, slowly embroidering them, had been sufficient reward for him. Clown was right though: what was the point of drafting elaborate blueprints in painstaking detail if one at some point did not begin the business of building?
He looked at Balcazar again. So peaceful, as Clown had said.
So peaceful.
And so vulnerable.
TWENTY-THREE
It could have been worse.
I could have hit the ground without hitting the Mulch first, without first punching through two layers of festering, skeletally framed dwellings and stalls. When the car came to a stop, it was pitched nose-down in semi-darkness; faint lights and fires burned around me. I could hear raised voices, but they sounded more excited and angry than hurt, and I dared to hope that no one had been crushed by my arrival. After a few seconds I eased myself from the seat, quickly appraising my condition. I found nothing obviously broken, although everything that could have been broken was at least bruised. Then I climbed back up the length of the car, hearing the voices approach, and agitated scrabbling sounds which might have curious children picking through the wreckage, or the noises of disturbed rats. I grabbed the weapon, checking I still had the currency I had taken from Zebra, then left the vehicle, stepping onto a precarious bamboo platform which had been neatly punctured by the car’s nose.
“Can you hear me?” I called, into the darkness, certain someone could. “I’m not your enemy. I’m not from the Canopy. These are Mendicant clothes; I’m an offworlder. I need your help very urgently. The Canopy people are trying to kill me.”
I said it in Norte. It would carry a lot more conviction than if I’d spoken Canasian, the language of the Chasm City aristocracy.
“Put down the weapon, then, and start explaining how you came by it.” It was a man’s voice, accented differently from the Canopy dwellers I had met. His words were imprecise, as if there was something wrong with his palette. He spoke Norte, too, but it sounded faltering, or perhaps over-precise, without the ritual elisions which come from true familiarity. He continued, “You arrived in a cable-car, as well. That will also require explanation.”
I could see the man now, standing on the edge of the bamboo platform. But he wasn’t a man at all.
I was looking at a pig.
He was small and pale-skinned, and he stood on his hind legs with the same awkward ease that I remembered from the other pigs. Goggles occluded his eyes, held in place by strands of leather tied around the back of his head. He wore a red pon cho. In one trotter-fingered hand he held a cleaver with the kind of casual dexterity which suggested he used it professionally, and had long since ceased to be intimidated by its sharpness.
I didn’t put down the weapon; not immediately.
“My name is Tanner Mirabel,” I said. “I arrived from Sky’s Edge yesterday. I was looking for someone and wandered into the wrong part of the Mulch by mistake. I was captured by a man called Waverly and forced to take part in the Game.”
“And you managed to escape, with a gun like that and a cable-car? Quite a trick for a newcomer, Tanner Mirabel.” He spoke my name as if it were an oath.
“I’m wearing Mendicant clothes,” I said. “And as you’ll have noticed, my accent is that of someone from Sky’s Edge. I speak a little Canasian, if that’s easier for you.”
“Norte is fine. We pigs aren’t as stupid as you all like to think.” He paused. “Your accent got you that gun? Quite an accent, in that case.”
“People helped me,” I said. I was about to mention Zebra by name, then thought better of it. “Not everyone in the Canopy agrees with the Game.”
“That’s true,” the man said. “But they’re still Canopy, and they still piss on us.”
“He could have been helped,” another voice said, a woman’s this time. Looking into the gloom, I saw a taller, female-looking pig approach the man, carefully picking her way through the detritus of my arrival, her expression unre vealing, as if she did this every day. She reached out and took his elbow. “I’ve heard of such people. Sabs, they call themselves. Saboteurs. What does he look like, Lorant?”
The first pig—Lorant—snatched off the goggles and offered them to the woman. She was strangely pretty, human hair framing her snouted, doll-like face in greasy curtains. She pushed the goggles to her eyes for a moment, nodding. “He doesn’t look Canopy. He’s human, for a start—as their God intended. Except for his eyes, although maybe that’s a trick of the light.”
“It’s no trick,” Lorant said. “He can see us without goggles. I noticed that when you arrived. His gaze locked onto you.” He retrieved the goggles from the female pig and said, in my direction, “Perhaps some of what you have told us is true, Tanner Mirabel. Not all of it though, I’d wager.”
You would not lose your bet, I thought, almost mouthing the words. “I don’t intend you any harm,” I said, and then made a grand show of placing the weapon down on the bamboo, reasonably sure I could reach for it if the pig made a move towards me with the cleaver. “I’m in a lot of trouble and the Canopy people will return to finish me off before very long. I’m not sure I haven’t made enemies of the saboteurs as well, since I stole from them.” I gambled that admitting theft from the Canopy would not harm me in Lorant’s eyes, but might actually do my cause some good. “There’s something else, too. I don’t know anything about people like you—good or otherwise.”
“But you know that we’re pigs.”
“It’s hard to miss, isn’t it?”
“Like our kitchen. You didn’t miss that either, did you?”
“I’ll pay for it,” I said. “I have currency, as well.” I reached into the voluminous pockets of Vadim’s coat, dredging a wad from the depths. “This isn’t much,” I said. “But it might cover some of your costs.”
“Except this isn’t our property,” Lorant said, studying my ou
tstretched hand. He would have to step forward if he wished to accept it, and at the moment neither of us was prepared to commit to that level of trust. “The man who owns this kitchen is away visiting his brother’s shrine in the Monument to the Eighty. He won’t be back until sundown. He’s not a man disposed to leniency or forgiveness. And then I will have to trouble him with news of the damage you have done, and he will naturally turn his anger on me.”
I offered him half of another wad, cutting deep into the reserves I had taken from Zebra. “Maybe this will ease your troubles, Lorant. That’s another ninety or hundred Ferris marks. Anything more, I might begin to suspect you were fleecing me.”
He might have smiled at that point; I could not be sure. “I can’t shelter you, Tanner Mirabel. Too dangerous.”
“What he means,” the other pig said, “is that there will be an implant in your head. The Canopy people will know where you are, even now. And if you have angered them, that puts all of us in danger.”
“I know about the implant,” I said. “And that’s what I need you to help me with.”
“Help you get it out?”
“No,” I said. “I know someone who can do that for me. Her name is Madame Dominika. But I’ve no idea how to get to her. Could you take me there?”
“Do you have any idea where that would be?”
“Grand Central Station,” I said.
The pig looked around the wreckage of the kitchen. “Well, I don’t suppose I am going to be doing a great deal of cooking today, Tanner Mirabel.”
They were refugees from the Rust Belt.
Before that, they’d been refugees from somewhere else—the cold, cometary fringes of another solar system. But the cook and his wife—I couldn’t think of them as just pigs any more—had no real idea how the first of their kind had ever got there, just theories and myths. The one that sounded the most likely was that they were distant, abandoned descendants of a centuries-old programme in genetic engineering. Pigs’ organs had once been used for human transplant surgery—there were more similarities than differences between the two species—and it seemed likely that the pigs had been an experiment to make the animal donors even more humanlike by blending human genes into their own DNA. Perhaps it had gone much further than anyone had intended, so that a spectrum of genes had accidentally transferred intelligence to the pigs. Or perhaps that had been the idea all along, with the pigs an aborted attempt at producing a servile race with none of the nasty drawbacks of machines.
At some point, the pigs must have been abandoned; left out in deep space to fend for themselves. Perhaps it was just too much bother to systematically hunt them down and kill them, or perhaps the pigs themselves had broken free of the labs and established their own secretive colonies. By then, Lorant said, they were more than one species anyway, each having a different mix of human and pig genes, and there were groups of pigs which lacked the ability to form words, even though they had all the right neural mechanisms in place. I remembered the pigs I’d met before being rescued by Zebra; how the first of them had made grunting sounds at me which had almost seemed like an attempt at language. Perhaps the attempt had been a lot closer than I’d imagined.
“I met some of your kind,” I said. “Yesterday.”
“You can call us pigs, you know. We aren’t bothered. It’s what we are.”
“Well, these pigs appeared to be trying to kill me.”
I told Lorant what had happened, sketching in the broad details without explaining exactly what I had been doing trying to get to the Canopy in the first place. He listened intently as I spoke, then began to shake his head, slowly and sadly.
“I don’t think they really wanted you, Tanner Mirabel. I think they probably wanted the people coming after you. They would have recognised that you were being chased. They were probably trying to persuade you to come with them, to shelter.”
I thought back to what had happened, and though I wasn’t totally convinced, I did begin to wonder if things had really happened the way Lorant said.
“I shot one of them,” I said. “Not fatally, but the leg would have needed surgery.”
“Well, don’t feel too bad about it. They probably weren’t little angels, you know. We get a lot of problems around here with gangs of young pigs, raising hell and causing damage.”
I surveyed the damage I had caused. “I suppose the last thing you needed was me.”
“It can all be mended, I dare say. But I think I will help you on your way before you do any more damage, Tanner Mirabel.”
I smiled. “That would probably be for the best, Lorant.”
After they had come down from the Rust Belt, Lorant and his wife had found themselves in the employment of a man who must have been amongst the richer individuals in the Mulch. They had their own ground-vehicle: a methane-driven tricycle with enormous balloon-wheels. The superstructure of the vehicle was a mish-mash of plastic and metal and bamboo, shrouded by rain sheets and parasols; it looked to be on the point of falling to pieces if I so much as breathed in its general direction.
“You don’t have to look so disgusted,” Lorant’s wife said. “It goes. And I don’t think you’re exactly in a position to complain.”
“Never a truer word was said.”
But it worked, tolerably, and the balloon-wheels did a passable job of smoothing out the imperfections in the roadbed. Once Lorant had agreed to my terms, I managed to persuade him to detour to the place where the wreckage of the other cable-car had come down. By the time we got there a large crowd had assembled, and I then had to persuade Lorant to wait while I pushed through to the middle. There, in what remained of the front of the cable-car, I found Waverly, dead, his chest impaled on a piece of Mulch bamboo, just like one of the deadfalls I had rigged for Reivich. His face was a mass of blood, and might have been unrecognisable except for the blood-filled crater where his monocle had been. It must have been surgically attached.
“Who did this?”
“Harvested,” said a stooped woman next to me, spitting the word through the gaps in her tooth. “That’s good optics, that is. Get a good price for that, they will.”
I resisted any burning curiosity to find out who “they” were.
I walked back to Lorant’s tricycle, feeling that in some way part of my own conscience had been ripped out, no less brutally than Waverly’s eyepiece.
“Well,” Lorant said, while I climbed back into the tricycle. “What is it you took from him?”
“You think I went back for a trophy?”
He shrugged, as if the matter were of no importance. But as we moved off, I had to ask myself just why I had gone back, if it was not for the reason he had thought.
The journey to Grand Central Station took an hour, though it seemed to me that much of this time was spent doubling back on our route to avoid areas of the Mulch which were either feared or impassable. It was possible that we only travelled three or four kilometres from the place where I had been attacked by Waverly’s people. Nonetheless, none of the landmarks I had made out from Zebra’s apartment were visible here—or if they were, I was seeing them from unrecognisable angles. My earlier sense of having found my feet—the sense that I had begun to assemble a mental map of the city—evaporated like a ridiculous dream. It would happen eventually, of course, if I spent enough time working on it. But not today; not tomorrow, and maybe not for weeks to come. And I didn’t plan on staying that long.
When we finally arrived at Grand Central Station, it was as if less than a heartbeat had elapsed since I was last there, desperately trying to detach myself from Quirrenbach. It was much earlier in the day now—not even noon, as far as I could tell by the angle of the sun on the Net—but no sense of that penetrated the station’s gloomy interior. I thanked Lorant for bringing me this far, and asked him if he would allow me to buy him a meal in addition to what I had already paid him, but he declined, refusing to get out of the driving seat of his trike. With goggles and fedora on and his clothes drawn up tightly
around his face, he looked completely human, but I guess the illusion would have been harder to sustain indoors. Pigs, it appeared, were not universally loved and there were whole swathes of the Mulch which were out of bounds to them.
We shook hands—and trotters—anyway, and then he drove away into the Mulch.
TWENTY-FOUR
My first port of call was the broker’s tent, where I sold Zebra’s weapon at what was probably an extortionate mark-down on its true value. I could hardly complain; I was less interested in cash than in losing the weapon before it could be traced to me. The broker asked if it was hot, but I could see there was no real interest in his eyes. The rifle was far too cumbersome and conspicuous for an operation like the Reivich job. The only place you could walk into with a piece of hardware like that and not raise eyebrows would be a convention of heavy-artillery fetishists.
Madame Dominika, I was gratified to see, was still open for business. This time I didn’t need to be dragged there, but walked in willingly, my coat pockets swinging with the ammo-cells I had forgotten to sell.
“She no open for business,” said Tom, the kid who had originally hassled Quirrenbach and myself.
I palmed a few notes and slapped them on the table before Tom’s goggle-eyed face. “She is now,” I said, and pushed on through to the tent’s inner chamber.
It was dark, but it took only a second or two for the room’s interior to snap into view, as if someone had turned on a very faint grey lantern. Dominika was sleeping on her operating couch, her generous anatomy shrouded in a garment which might have begun life as a parachute.