Chasm City

  “No,” I admitted. “And that makes me feel a lot happier, you know.”

  “What does?”

  “Knowing that there’s always some poor bastard worse off than me.”

  “Hmm,” she said, with a note of disapproval. “I’m not sure that’s quite the attitude one should be having, Tanner. On the other hand, I don’t think it’s going to be very long before you’re as right as rain. Not very long at all. Now, why don’t you return to the house? You’ll find some clothes there that will fit you. And it’s not that we’re prudish or anything here at the hospice, but you’ll catch your death like that.”

  “It wasn’t intentional, believe me.”

  I wondered what she’d make of my chances for a swift recovery if I told her that I’d had to run out of the house because I was terrified by an architectural feature.

  “No, of course it wasn’t,” she said. “But do try the clothes on—and if they aren’t to your liking, we can always alter them. I’ll be along shortly to see how you’re doing.”

  “Thank you. Who are you, by the way?”

  “Me? Oh, no one in particular, I’m afraid. A very small cog in a blessedly large machine, one might say. Sister Amelia.”

  Then I hadn’t misheard her when she called the place a hospice. “And where exactly are we, Sister Amelia?”

  “Oh, that’s easy. You’re in Hospice Idlewild, under the care of the Holy Order of Ice Mendicants. What some people like to call Hotel Amnesia.”

  It still didn’t mean anything to me. I’d never heard of either Hotel Amnesia or the place’s more formal name—let alone the Holy Order of Ice Mendicants.

  I walked back into the chalet, the robot following me at a polite distance. I slowed as I approached the door back into the house. It was stupid, but though I’d been able to dismiss my fears almost as soon as I was outside, they now came back with almost the same force. I looked at the alcove. It seemed to me to be imbued with deep evil; as if there were something waiting coiled in there, observing me with malignant intent.

  “Just get dressed and get out of here,” I said to myself, aloud and in Castellano. “When Amelia comes, tell her you need some kind of neurological once-over. She’ll understand. This sort of thing must happen all the time.”

  I inspected the clothes that were waiting for me in a cupboard. Nothing too fancy, and nothing at all that I recognised. They were simple and had a handmade feel to them: a black V-neck jersey and baggy, pocketless trousers, a pair of soft shoes; adequate for padding round the clearing, but not much else. The clothes fitted me perfectly, but even that made them feel wrong, as if it was not something I was used to.

  I rummaged deeper in the cupboard, hoping to find something more personal, but it was empty apart from the clothes. At a loss, I sat on the bed and stared sullenly at the textured stucco of the wall, until my gaze passed over the little alcove. After years of being frozen, my brain chemistry must have been struggling back towards some kind of equilibrium, and in the meantime I was getting a taste of what psychotic fear must feel like. I felt a strong temptation to just curl up and block the world from my senses. What kept me from losing it completely was the quiet knowledge that I had been in worse situations—confronted hazards that were just as terrifying as anything my psychotic mind could imprint on an empty alcove—and that I had survived. It hardly mattered that at the moment I couldn’t bring any specific incidents to mind. It was enough to know that they had happened, and that if I failed now, I would be betraying a buried part of me which remained fully sane, and perhaps remembered everything.

  I didn’t have long to wait before Amelia arrived.

  She was out of breath and flushed when she entered the house, as if she’d climbed quickly up from the bottom of the valley or cleft I’d seen after I’d awakened. But she was smiling, as if she had enjoyed the exertion for its own sake. She wore a black wimpled vestment, a chained snowflake hanging from her neck. Dusty boots poked out from beneath the hem of her vestment.

  “How are the clothes?” she said, placing her hand atop the robot’s ovoid head. It might have been to steady herself, but it also looked like a show of affection towards the machine.

  “They fit me very well, thanks.”

  “You’re quite sure of that? It’s no trouble at all to change them, Tanner. You’d just have to whip them off, and well . . . we could have them altered in no time.” She smiled.

  “They’re fine,” I said, studying her face properly. She was very pale; much more so than anyone I had ever seen before. Her eyes almost lacked pigment; her eyebrows were so fine that they looked like they’d been brushed in by an expert cal ligrapher.

  “Oh, good,” she said, as if not completely convinced. “Do you remember anything more?”

  “I seem to remember where I’ve come from. Which is a start, I suppose.”

  “Just try not to force things. Duscha—Duscha’s our neural specialist—she said you’d soon begin to remember, but you shouldn’t worry if it takes a little while.”

  Amelia sat down on the end of the bed where I’d been asleep only a few minutes ago. I had turned the blanket over to hide the speckles of blood from my palm. For some reason I felt ashamed of what had happened and wanted to do my best to make sure Amelia didn’t see the wound in my palm.

  “I think it might take more than a little while, to be honest.”

  “But you do remember that Ultras brought you here. That’s more than a lot of them do, as I said. And you remember where you came from?”

  “Sky’s Edge, I think.”

  “Yes. The 61 Cygni-A system.”

  I nodded. “Except we always called our sun Swan. It’s a lot less of a mouthful.”

  “Yes; I’ve heard others say that as well. I really should remember these details, but we get people through from so many different places here. I’m all a muddle at times, honestly, trying to keep track of where’s where and what’s what.”

  “I’d agree with you, except I’m still not sure where we are. I won’t be sure until my memory comes back, but I’m not sure I’ve ever heard of the, whatever you said you were . . .”

  “Ice Mendicants.”

  “Well, it doesn’t ring any kind of a bell.”

  “That’s understandable. I don’t think the Order has any presence in the Sky’s Edge system. We exist only where there’s substantial traffic in and out of a given system.”

  I wanted to ask her which system this happened to be, but I assumed she’d get round to that detail in good time.

  “I think you’re going to have to tell me a little bit more, Amelia.”

  “I don’t mind. You’ll just have to excuse me if this comes out a bit like a prepared speech. I’m afraid you’re not the first one I’ve had to explain all this to—and you won’t be the last, either.”

  She told me that as an Order, the Mendicants were about a century and a half old—dating from the middle of the twenty-fourth century. That was around the time that interstellar flight broke out of the exclusive control of governments and superpowers and became almost commonplace. By then the Ultras were beginning to emerge as a separate human faction—not just flying ships, but living their entire lives aboard them, stretched out by the effects of time-dilation beyond anything that constituted a normal human lifespan. They continued to carry fare-paying passengers from system to system, but they were not above cutting corners in the quality of the service they offered. Sometimes they promised to take people somewhere and flew to another system entirely, stranding their passengers years of flight-time away from where they wanted to be. Sometimes their reefersleep technology was so old or poorly maintained that their passengers woke massively aged upon arrival, or with their minds completely erased.

  It was into this customer care void that the Ice Mendicants came, establishing chapters in dozens of systems and offering help to those sleepers whose revival had not gone as smoothly as might have been wished. It was not just starship passengers they tended to, for much of their w
ork concerned people who had been asleep in cryocrypts for decades, skipping through economic recessions or periods of political turmoil. Often those people would waken with their savings wiped out, their personal possessions sequestered and their memories damaged.

  “Well,” I said, “I guess now you’re going to tell me the catch.”

  “There’s one thing you need to understand from the outset,” Amelia said. “There is no catch. We care for you until you’re well enough to leave. If you want to leave sooner than that, we won’t stop you—and if you want to stay longer, we can always use an extra pair of hands in the fields. Once you’ve left the Hospice, you won’t owe us anything or hear from us again, unless you wish it.”

  “How do you make something like this pay, in that, case?”

  “Oh, we manage. A lot of our clients do make voluntary donations once they’re healed—but there’s no expectation on our part that they will. Our running costs are remarkably low, and we’ve never been in hock to anyone for the construction of Idlewild.”

  “A habitat like this couldn’t have come cheap, Amelia.” Everything cost something; even matter that had been shaped by droves of mindless, breeding robots.

  “It was a lot cheaper than you’d think, even if we had to accept some compromises in the basic design.”

  “The spindle shape? I wondered about that.”

  “I’ll show you when you’re a bit better. Then you’ll understand.” She paused and had the robot dispense some water into a little glass. “Drink this. You must be parched. I imagine you want to know a little more about yourself. How you got here and where here is, for instance.”

  I took the glass and drank gratefully. The water had a foreign taste to it, but it wasn’t unpleasant.

  “I’m not in the Sky’s Edge system, obviously. And this must be near one of the main centres of traffic, or you wouldn’t have built the place in the first place.”

  “Yes. We’re in the Yellowstone system—around Epsilon Eridani.” She seemed to observe my reaction. “You don’t seem too surprised.”

  “I knew it had to be somewhere like that. What I don’t remember is what made me come here.”

  “That’ll come back. You’re fortunate, in a way. Some of our clients are perfectly well, but they’re just too poor to afford immigration into the system proper. We allow them to earn a small wage here until they can at least afford the cost of a ship to take them to the Rust Belt. Or we arrange for them to spend a period in indentured servitude for some other organisation—quicker, but usually a lot less pleasant. But you won’t have to do either, Tanner. You seem to be a man of reasonable means, judging by the funds you arrived with. And mystery, too. It may not mean very much to you, but you were quite a hero when you left Sky’s Edge.”

  “I was?”

  “Yes. There was an accident, and you were implicated in the saving of more than a few lives.”

  “I don’t remember, I’m afraid.”

  “Not even Nueva Valparaiso? That’s where it happened.”

  It did, faintly, mean something—like a half-familiar reference stirring memories of a book or play experienced years earlier. But the plot and principal protagonists—not to mention the outcome—remained resolutely unclear. I was staring into fog.

  “I’m afraid it’s still not there. Tell me how I got here, anyway. What was the name of the ship?”

  “The Orvieto. She would have left your system about fifteen years ago.”

  “I must have had a good reason for wanting to be on her. Was I travelling alone?”

  “As near as we can tell, yes. We’re still processing her cargo. There were twenty thousand sleepers aboard her, and only a quarter of them have been warmed yet. There’s no great hurry, when you think about it. If you’re going to spend fifteen years crossing space, a few weeks’ delay at either end isn’t worth worrying about.”

  It was odd, but though I couldn’t put my finger on it, I did feel that there was something that needed to be done urgently. The feeling it reminded me of was waking from a dream, the details of which I didn’t recall, but which nonetheless put me on edge for hours afterwards.

  “So tell me what you know about Tanner Mirabel.”

  “Nowhere near as much as we’d like. But that in itself shouldn’t alarm you. Your world is at war, Tanner—has been for centuries. Records are hardly less confused than our own, and the Ultras aren’t particularly interested in who they carry, provided they pay.”

  The name felt comfortable, like an old glove. A good combination, too. Tanner was a worker’s name; hard and to the point; someone who got things done. Mirabel, by contrast, had faint aristocratic pretensions.

  It was a name I could live with.

  “Why are your own records confused? Don’t tell me you had a war here as well?”

  “No,” Amelia said, guardedly. “No; it was something quite different to that. Something quite different indeed. Why? For a moment you almost sounded pleased.”

  “Perhaps I used to be a soldier,” I said.

  “Escaping with the spoils of war, after committing some unspeakable atrocity?”

  “Do I look like someone capable of atrocities?”

  She smiled, but there was a decided lack of humour in her expression. “You wouldn’t credit it, Tanner, but we get all sorts through here. You could be anything or anyone, and looks would have very little to do with it.” Then she opened her mouth slightly. “Wait. There’s no mirror in the house, is there? Have you seen yourself since you woke?”

  I shook my head.

  “Then follow me. A little walk will do you the power of good.”

  We left the chalet and followed an ambling path into the valley, Amelia’s robot scooting ahead of us like an excited puppy. She was at ease with the machine, but the robot left me feeling intimidated; the way I would have felt if she had walked around with a poisonous snake. I recalled my reaction when the robot had first appeared: an involuntary reaching for a weapon. Not just a theatrical gesture, but an action which felt well-rehearsed. I could almost feel the heft of the gun I lacked, the precise shape of its grip under my palm, a lattice of ballistics expertise lurking just below consciousness.

  I knew guns, and I didn’t like robots.

  “Tell me more about my arrival,” I said.

  “As I said, the ship which brought you here was the Orvieto ,” Amelia said. She’s in-system, of course, since she’s still being unloaded. I’ll show her to you, if you like.”

  “I thought you were going to show me a mirror.”

  “Two birds with one stone, Tanner.”

  The path descended deeper, winding down into a dark, shadowed cleft overhung with a canopy of tangled greenery. This must have been the small valley I had seen below the chalet.

  Amelia was right: it had taken me years to reach this place, so a few days spent regaining my memory was an inconsequential burden. But the last thing I felt was patient. Something had been straining at me ever since I had awakened; the feeling that there was something I had to do; something so urgent that even now, a few hours could make all the difference between success and failure.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “Somewhere secret. Somewhere I shouldn’t really take you, but I can’t resist. You won’t tell, will you?”

  “Now I’m intrigued.”

  The shadowed cleft took us to the valley floor; to a point maximally distant from the axis of Hotel Amnesia. We were at the rim where the two conic ends of the habitat were joined to each other. It was here that gravity was highest, and I felt the extra effort required to move around.

  Amelia’s robot came to a halt ahead of us, pivoting around to present its blank ovoid face to us.

  “What’s up with it?”

  “It won’t go any further. Programming won’t allow it.” The machine was blocking our path, so Amelia took a step off the trail, wading into knee-high grass. “It won’t want us to pass for our own safety, but on the other hand, it won’t actively st
op us if we make an effort to go around it. Will you, good boy?”

  I stepped gingerly past the robot.

  “You said something about me being a hero.”

  “You saved five lives when the bridge at Nueva Valparaiso came down. The fall of the bridge was all over the news nets, even here.”

  As she spoke, I felt like I was being reminded of something told to me before; that I was always only an instant away from remembering it all myself. The bridge had been severed some way up its length by a nuclear explosion, causing the thread below the cut to fall back to ground while the part above the cut whiplashed lethally. The official explanation was that a rogue missile had been responsible; some aspirant military faction’s test firing which had gone badly awry and shimmied through the protective screen of anti-missiles around the bridge, but—though I couldn’t easily explain it—I had the insistent feeling that there was more to it than that; that my being on the bridge at the same time was not just ill fortune.

  “What exactly happened?”

  “The car you were in was above the cut. It came to a halt on the thread, and would have been safe there except that there was another car racing up from below. You realised that and persuaded the people with you that their only hope of surviving was to jump into space.”

  “Doesn’t sound like much of an alternative, even with suits on.”

  “No, it didn’t—but you knew they’d still stand a chance of surviving. You were quite a long way above the top atmosphere. You had more than eleven minutes to fall before you hit it.”

  “Great. What good is an extra eleven minutes if you’re going to die anyway?”

  “Another eleven minutes of God-given life, Tanner. And it also happened to be enough time for rescue ships to pick you up. They had to skim the atmosphere to grab you all, but they got everyone in the end—even the man who had already died.”

  I shrugged. “I was probably only thinking of my own self-preservation.”

  “Perhaps—but only a real hero would even admit to thinking that way. That’s why I think you might really be Tanner Mirabel.”