Chasm City

  “I don’t really remember,” I said.

  And it was almost the truth.

  I recalled looking down on Tanner, imprisoned within that ceilingless white enclosure. I remembered the way he slowly became aware of his predicament; aware that he was not alone. That something else shared the space with him.

  “Tell me what you remember,” Reivich said, turning to Tanner.

  His voice was as flat and devoid of emotion as Reivich’s synthetic tones. “I remember being eaten alive. It’s not something you forget in a hurry, believe me.”

  And I remembered how the hamadryad had died almost instantly, killed by the alien poisons which every human carried; a fatal clash of metabolisms. The creature had spasmed and curled like a loose firehose.

  “We slit it open,” I said. “Removed Tanner from its throat. He wasn’t breathing. But his heart was still beating.”

  “You could have ended it there and then,” Reivich said. “A knife to the heart, and it would have been over. But you had to take one more thing from him, didn’t you?”

  “I needed his identity. His memories, particularly. So I had him kept alive on a cuirass while a trawl was prepared.”

  “Why?” Reivich said.

  “To chase you. I knew by then that you’d left the planet; that you’d soon be aboard a lighthugger making the run to Yellowstone. I’d punished Tanner. Now I had to do the same to you, for Gitta’s sake. But I needed to become Tanner to do it.”

  “You could have become anyone on the planet.”

  “His skills suited me. And I had him to hand.” I paused. “It was never meant to be permanent. I suppressed my own identity just long enough to get aboard the ship. Tanner’s memories were meant to fade gradually. They’d remain as a residue—as they do now—but distinct from my own.”

  “And your other secrets?”

  “My eyes? That was something I had to hide. It worked, too. But now they’ve returned to their altered state. Maybe that was how I meant it to happen.”

  “You still don’t remember all of it,” Reivich said, smiling horribly. “There was more to it, you know. More than just the eyes.”

  “How would you know?”

  He raised a hand, tapping what remained of his teeth in an odd gesture of knowing. “You forget. I’d already persuaded the Ultras to betray you to me. Finding out the rest of what they did to you was simple enough.” He smiled again. “I had to know who I was dealing with, you see. What you were capable of.”

  “And now you know?”

  “I think you’re a man who might surprise even himself, Cahuella. Except you claim you’re not him, of course.”

  “I hate him as much as you do,” I said. “I’ve seen things from Tanner’s perspective. I know what he did to him. He isn’t me.”

  “So you share sympathies with Tanner?”

  I shook my head. “The Tanner I know died in a pit. It doesn’t matter that something survived. It isn’t him. It’s just a monster Cahuella made.”

  Tanner sneered. “You think you can kill me?”

  “I wouldn’t have come here if I didn’t.”

  Tanner moved forward quickly, approaching the chair. He was going to kill Reivich; I knew it. But Reivich was ahead of him; he had the gun out and drawn before Tanner had taken more than two paces. “Now, now,” he said. “What’s the point of you two settling your differences if you do it without an audience?”

  I remembered Amelia, somewhere in the shadows. I wondered what she made of all this.

  Tanner took a step back, raising his empty gloved palms. “I suppose you’re wondering how I survived,” he said, to me.

  “It had crossed my mind.”

  “You should never have left me alive, even if I was only kept that way by the cuirass.” He shook his head pitifully. “You couldn’t do it; not after the snake failed you. So you told one of your men to do it for you, while you got the hell away from the Reptile House.”

  What he said was true, although it was only in his telling that my memories crystallised into surety. “I headed south,” I said. “Towards a camp occupied by NC defectors. They had surgeons with them. I knew they’d be able to suppress the work the Ultras had done on me, camouflage my genes and make me look like Tanner. I always intended to return to the Reptile House before leaving the planet.”

  “But you never got the chance,” Reivich said. “The NCs reached the Reptile House while you were away with Dieterling. They killed most of your people, except for Tanner, for whom they had a grudging respect. They brought him back to consciousness.”

  “Bad mistake,” Tanner said. “Even without a foot, I took their weapons and killed them all.”

  I remembered none of that, not even faintly. Of course not—those events had happened after Tanner had been trawled; after I had stolen his memories.

  “What happened next?” I asked.

  “I had a month to get aboard the lighthugger, before it left orbit.” Tanner angled himself down and scratched his ankle under his greatcoat. “I wasn’t far behind. I got my foot fixed and came after you. I killed Dieterling, you know—how else do you think I got so close to him? Walked up to him in the wheeler and popped him.” He made the gesture, as if he was re-enacting the murder.

  It was a classic piece of misdirection.

  When Tanner rose to his full height, he did so in a movement swift and fluid. A knife arced from his hand, executing a faultlessly computed trajectory across the room. His aim was perfect—he’d even allowed for the coriolis drift caused by Refuge’s lazy rotation.

  The knife buried itself in the back of Reivich’s head.

  A digital moan came from the life-support module; an artificially stable note which kept up even when Reivich’s head tilted lifelessly forward on his chest. The gun slipped from his hand and clattered on the floor. I made a move for it, knowing this was probably my only chance to achieve at least parity with Tanner.

  But he was faster. He sent me flying, my spine cracking against the floor in a fall which blasted the air out of my lungs. Tanner’s foot kicked the gun by accident, sending it skittering into the twilight between the pool of golden light and the shadows encompassing it.

  Tanner reached for the knife and retrieved it from Reivich’s skull, monomolecular blade shimmering with prismatic patterns, like a skein of oil on water.

  He won’t risk throwing the knife, I thought. If he missed, he’d lose his only weapon . . .

  “You’re finished, Cahuella. This is where it ends.”

  He had the knife in one hand, balanced gingerly in his gloved palm. With the other hand he reached around the front of Reivich’s face and snapped the optical feeds from his eye sockets, each line trailing ropy filaments of congealing blood.

  “It ended for you a long time ago,” I said, stepping forward into his radius of attack. He swept the knife through the air, the blade scything silver arcs, parting the air so surgically that its passage was totally silent.

  “Then what does that make you?” Tanner pushed Reivich’s body out of the chair, the thin, quilt-shrouded figure falling to the floor like a bag of dried wood.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But I’m nothing like you.”

  I tried to time the angle of his swipes with the knife, trying to focus on those specific Tanner memories which would serve me now; what he knew about combat in close quarters.

  It was impossible. There was no way I could get an edge on him—and he had the advantage that he didn’t have to fight to retrieve those memories. They came unbidden, deep as reflex.

  I lunged, hoping to twist his free arm, to unbalance him before he could bring the blade to bear.

  My timing was off.

  I didn’t feel the cut itself; only the cold which seeped in after it. I dared not look down, but in my peripheral vision I could see the gash in my chest, right through my clothing. It was not nearly deep enough to kill me—not even down to the ribs—but that was only luck on my part. Next time, he would have me. I was sure o
f it.

  “Tanner!”

  It was not my voice. It was Amelia, calling from the shade. I saw her, half lost in darkness, reaching out to me.

  Of course. To her I was still Tanner. She had no other name for me.

  She had Reivich’s gun.

  “Throw it to me!” I shouted.

  She threw it. The gun slammed into the floor, then skidded for metres, chips of its jewelled husk flaking off.

  I spun from Tanner and ran for the gun.

  I fell to my knees, sliding until I was within reach of the gun. My hand closed on the grip.

  Tanner’s knife flew through the air and slammed into my hand. I dropped the gun, yelling in pain, seeing the point of the knife jutting from my palm like the sail of a yacht.

  Tanner ran towards me, his footfalls racing into the echo-less gloom. Tears clouding my eyesight, I picked up the gun with my other hand and tried to aim it at him.

  I squeezed off a shot, feeling the delicate recoil of the gun. The blur of the projectile glistened past Tanner, missing him by inches. I re-aimed and squeezed the trigger again.

  The gun did nothing.

  Tanner crashed into me, kicking the useless weapon away for good measure. Forcing me to the ground, kneeling over me like a victor, he wrestled with me while I tried to stab him with the edge of the knife projecting from my palm.

  Tanner caught my wrist above my impaled hand and smiled for a second. He’d won now. He knew it. It was just a question of removing the blade from my palm and turning it against myself.

  Out of the corner of my vision I saw Reivich’s slumped corpse, his mouth agape, his few teeth catching the golden glow of the chamber.

  I remembered him tapping his teeth.

  And finally remembered the other thing Cahuella had bought from the Ultras; the transformation that went deeper than vision; the hunter’s aid he had never mentioned to Tanner Mirabel.

  What use is it to hunt in the night, if you can’t kill what you catch?

  I opened my jaw wide; wider than strict human anatomy allowed. I seemed to find a muscle inside myself that I had not known was there before; a muscle anchored high in the roof of my mouth. Something cracked in my jaw, painlessly.

  With my good arm I cradled Tanner’s head, turning his face to mine while he struggled with the knife, thinking it would do him some good.

  He looked into my mouth, and must have seen it then.

  “You’re dead,” I said. “It wasn’t just snake-vision I bought from them, you see.”

  I felt my venom glands activate, pumping poison along the microfine channels bored through my articulated fangs.

  And drew Tanner to me, like the final embrace of a long-lost brother.

  And bit deep into his neck.

  EPILOGUE

  For a long time I just stood looking out the window.

  The woman who was sitting in my office must have thought I’d forgotten she was there. I could see her face reflected in the floor-to-ceiling glass, still waiting for an answer to the question she had just asked. I hadn’t forgotten her or her question. I was just wondering how something that had once seemed so strange could now seem so familiar.

  The city hadn’t changed much since my arrival.

  It had to be me, then.

  The window was spattered by rain falling from the Mosquito Net, hard diagonal slashes of it. They said it never really stopped raining in Chasm City, and maybe that was true, but it missed the nuances that rain was capable of. Sometimes it came down straight and soft like a cool mist, alpine clean. Sometimes, when the steam dams around the chasm opened and sent pressure changes squalling across the city, it came at you sideways, lashing and acid-tongued, like defoliant.

  “Mister Mirabel . . .” she said.

  I turned back from the window. “I’m sorry. I got caught up in the view. Where were we?”

  “You were telling me about Sky Haussmann, how you think he . . .”

  She had heard most of what I was willing to tell anyone by then; how I believed Sky had emerged from hiding and remade a new life for himself as Cahuella. I suppose it was odd that I was speaking of these things at all—much less to a prospective recruit—but I’d liked her and she’d been more than usually willing to listen to me. We had finished a few pisco sours—she was from Sky’s Edge as well—and the time had slipped by.

  “Well?” I asked, interrupting her. “How much of it are you prepared to believe?”

  “I’m not sure, Mister Mirabel. How would you have found all this out, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “I met Gitta,” I said. “And she told me something which makes me think Constanza was telling the truth.”

  “You think Gitta found out who Cahuella was, before anyone else?”

  “Yes. There’s a good chance she stumbled on Constanza’s evidence, and that led her to Cahuella, even though it was at least two centuries since Sky had supposedly been executed.”

  “And when she found him?”

  “She was expecting a monster, but that wasn’t quite what she got. He wasn’t the same man Constanza had known. Gitta tried to hate him, I think, but couldn’t.”

  “What do you think made her certain she’d found him?”

  “His name, I think. He took it from the legend of the Caleuche, the ghost ship. Cahuella was its dolphin; a link to his past he couldn’t quite sever.”

  “Well, it’s certainly an interesting theory.”

  I shrugged. “Probably no more than that. You’ll hear stranger stories if you spend any time here, believe me.”

  She was a recent arrival to Yellowstone; like me a soldier, but one who had been sent here not on some errand but because of a clerical error.

  “How long have you been here, Mister Mirabel?”

  “Six years,” I said.

  I looked to the picture window. The view across the city had not changed greatly since I had returned from Refuge. The thicket of the Canopy stretched away like a section through someone’s lung: a convoluted black tangle against the brown backdrop of the Mosquito Net. They were talking about cleaning it next year.

  “That’s a long time, six years.”

  “Not for me.”

  Saying that, I thought about the time when I had come round in Refuge. I must have slipped beneath consciousness through the blood I had lost from the wound Tanner had inflicted on me, even though I had barely felt it at the time. My clothes had been slit open, a turquoise medicinal salve applied to the suture-like gash where his knife had passed through. I was lying on a couch, with one of the slender servitors eyeing me.

  I was a mass of bruises, and each breath hurt. My mouth felt strange, as if it no longer belonged to me.

  “Tanner?”

  It was Amelia’s voice. She moved into focus next to me, her face angelic, just as she had looked on the day of my revival in the Mendicant habitat.

  “That isn’t my name,” I said, startled when my voice came out perfectly normally, apart from a slight rasp of fatigue. My mouth did not feel like it should be capable of anything as subtle as language.

  “So I gather,” Amelia said. “But it’s the only one I know you by, so it will have to suffice for now.”

  I was too weak to argue, and not even sure I wanted to.

  “You saved me,” I said. “I owe you a debt of thanks.”

  “You seemed to save yourself,” she said. The room was much smaller than the one where Reivich had died, but it was illuminated in the same shade of autumnal gold and the walls were chiselled with the same intricate mathematics that I had seen elsewhere in Refuge. The light played on the snowflake she wore around her neck. “What happened to you, Tanner? What happened to make you capable of killing a man in that way?”

  Her question sounded accusatory, except for the tone in which it was delivered. She was not blaming me, I realised. Amelia appeared to recognise that I was not necessarily responsible for the horrors of my own past, any more than a waking man is responsible for the atrocities he commits i
n his sleep.

  “The man I was,” I said, “was a hunter.”

  “The man you were talking about? The man called Cahuella?”

  I nodded. “He had snake genes inserted into his eyes, amongst other tricks. He wanted to be able to hunt any creature in the dark on equal terms. I thought that was as far as it went. I was wrong about that.”

  “But you didn’t know?”

  “Not until it was time. Reivich knew, though. He knew Cahuella had venom glands, and the means to deliver the venom into a host. The Ultras must have told him.”

  “And he tried to tell you?”

  I moved my head up and down on the pillow. “Maybe he wanted one of us to live more than the other. I just hope he made the right choice.”

  “Of course he did,” Zebra said.

  I turned around—painfully—to see her standing on the other side of the bed. “Reivich told the truth, then,” I said. “About the gun. You were only put to sleep.”

  “He wasn’t a bad person,” Zebra said. “He wouldn’t have wanted anyone harmed except the man who killed his family.”

  “But I’m still alive. Does that mean he failed?”

  She shook her head slowly. She looked radiant in the golden light, and I realised that I wanted her intensely, no matter how we had betrayed each other or what lay in the future; no matter that I did not even have a name by which she could call me. “I think he got what he wanted, in the end. Most of it, anyway.”

  There was something in her voice which told me she was not telling me everything she knew. “What do you mean by that?”

  “I don’t suppose anyone’s told you,” Zebra said. “But Reivich lied to all of us.”

  “About what?”

  “His scan.” She looked towards the ceiling, the lines of her face defined in golden highlights. Her skin stripes were still faintly visible. “It was a failure. It was done too hastily. He wasn’t captured.”

  I went through the motions of registering disbelief, even though I could tell Zebra was telling the truth.

  “But it can’t have failed. I spoke to the copy after he’d been scanned.”

  “You thought you did. Apparently it was just a beta-level simulation, a mockup of Reivich programmed to mimic his responses and make you think the scan had been successful.”