Galactic North

  “Unfortunately,” she says, “my exhibit did not arrive intact. It suffered some physiological trauma during its journey here: cryogenic damage to its tissues and nervous system. But it is still alive. With some intervention, my experts have restored much of its basic functional repertoire. In all significant respects, it is still a living hamadryad: the first you will ever see.”

  She throws the lights, illuminating the creature in the pit. By then Grafenwalder has a bad taste in his mouth. The hamadryad is much smaller than his adult-phase example, but it isn’t dead. It’s moving: great propulsive waves sliding up and down its concertina body as it writhes and coils from one end of the pit to the other, thrashing like a severed electrical line.

  “It’s alive,” he says quietly.

  Goodglass looks at him sharply. “Were you expecting otherwise?”

  “It’s just that when you said how much difficulty you’d gone to—” But by then his words are drowned out by the demands of the other guests, all of whom have questions for Goodglass. Lysander Carroway starts applauding, encouraging the others to join in.

  Grafenwalder notches his hatred a little higher, even as he joins in the applause with effete little hand-claps.

  He steps back from the railing, giving Goodglass her moment in the sun. All the while, he studies the hamadryad, trying to figure out what must have happened. As much as he dislikes Ultras, he can’t believe that Captain Shallice would have cheated him so nakedly. That’s when Grafenwalder sees his angle, and knows he can come out of this even better than he was expecting.

  He lets the interested chat simmer down, then coughs just loudly enough to let everyone know he has something to contribute.

  “It’s very impressive,” he says. “For an intermediate-phase sample, at any rate.”

  Goodglass fixes him with narrowing eyes, dimly aware of what must be coming. Even the palanquin spins around, presenting its dark window to him.

  “You know of other samples, Carl?” Ursula asks.

  “One, anyway. But before we get into that . . . you mentioned shipping difficulties, didn’t you?”

  “Normal complications associated with reefersleep procedures as applied to nonterrestrial organisms,” she says.

  “What kind of complications?”

  “I told you already—tissue damage—”

  “Yes, but how extensive was it? When the animal was revived from reefersleep, in what way did it exhibit signs of having been injured? Were its movements impaired, its hunting patterns atypical?”

  “None of that,” she says.

  “Then you’re saying the animal was fine?”

  “No,” she says icily. “The animal was dead.”

  Grafenwalder twitches back his head in feigned confusion. “I know hamadryad biology is complex, but I didn’t know that they could be brought back from death.”

  “Reefersleep is a kind of death,” Goodglass says.

  “Well, yes. If you want to split hairs. Things are usually alive after they’ve been thawed, though: that’s more or less the point. But the hamadryad wasn’t alive, was it? It was dead. It’s still dead.”

  Lysander Carroway shakes her head emphatically. “It’s alive, Grafenwalder. Use your bloody eyes.”

  “It’s being puppeted,” Grafenwalder says. “Isn’t it, Ursula? That’s a dead animal with electrodes in it. You’re making it twitch like a frog’s leg.”

  Goodglass fights hard to keep her composure: he can see the pulse of a vein on the side of her skull. “I never actually said it was alive. I merely said it had the full behavioural repertoire of a living hamadryad.”

  “You said it was living.”

  Her husband answers for her. “They don’t have brains, Grafenwalder. They’re more like plants. It eats and shits. What more do you want?”

  Choosing his moment expertly, he offers a disappointed shrug. “I suppose it has a certain comedic value.”

  “Come now,” Michael Fayrfax says. “She’s shown us a hamadryad, more than most of us will ever see. What does it matter if it isn’t technically alive?”

  “I think it matters a lot,” Grafenwalder says. “That’s why I’ve gone to so much trouble to obtain a living specimen. Bigger than that, too. Mine’s adult-phase. They don’t come any larger.”

  “He’s bluffing,” Goodglass says. “If he had a hamadryad, he’d have shown it off already.”

  “I assure you I have one. I just wasn’t ready to exhibit it yet.”

  She still looks sceptical. “I don’t believe you. Why wait until now?”

  “I wanted to be sure the animal had settled down; that I’d ironed out any difficulties with its biology. Keeping one of those things alive is quite a challenge, especially when they’re adult-phase: the whole dietary pattern starts shifting.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “You can see it, if you want to.”

  The scepticism begins to crack, the fear that he might not be lying breaking through. “When?”

  “Whenever you like.” He turns to the other guests and extends his hands expansively. “All of you, of course. You know where I live. How about the day after tomorrow? I couldn’t possibly fake one by then, could I?”

  Grafenwalder is riding his shuttle back home from the Goodglass bestiary when he receives an incoming communication. It appears to be transmitting from within the Rust Belt, but the shuttle can’t pinpoint the origin of the signal any more precisely than that. For a moment Grafenwalder thinks it may be a threat from Goodglass, even though he credits her with fractionally more sense than that.

  But it’s not Goodglass’s face that fills his cabin wall when he answers the communication. It’s nobody he recognises. A man, with a cherubic moon-face and a thick lower lip, glossy with saliva, that sags to the right. He wears a panama hat over tight dark curls, and a finely patterned harlequin coat hangs over his heavy frame in billowing folds. A glass box dangles around his neck, rattling with the implants he must once have carried in his skull. He is backdropped by a sumptuously upholstered chair, rising high as a throne.

  “Mister Grafenwalder? My name is Rifugio. I don’t think our paths have crossed before.”

  “What do you want?”

  There’s barely any timelag. “I am a broker, Mister Grafenwalder: a wheeler-dealer, a fixer, a go-getter. When someone needs something—especially something that may require delicate extralegal manoeuvring—I’m the man to come to.”

  Grafenwalder moves to kill the communication. “You still haven’t told me what you want.”

  “It is not about what I want. It is about what you want. Specifically, a certain bio-engineered organism.” Rifugio scratches the tip of his bulbous nose. “You’ve been as discreet as matters will allow, I’ll grant you that—but you’ve still put out word concerning the thing you seek. Now that word has reached my ears, and, fortuitously, I happen to be the man who can help you.” Now Rifugio leans closer, the rim of his hat tipping across his brow, and lowers his voice. “I have one, and I am willing to sell it. At a price, of course—I must pay off my own informants and contacts. But knowing what you paid for the hamadryad, I am confident that you can afford twice as much to get the thing you want so badly.”

  “Maybe I don’t want one that much.”

  Rifugio leans back, looking nonplussed. “In that case . . . I won’t trouble you again. Good day to you, sir.”

  “Wait,” Grafenwalder says hastily. “I’m interested. But I need to know more.”

  “I wouldn’t expect otherwise. We’ll have to meet before we take matters any further, of course.”

  Grafenwalder doesn’t like it, but the man is right. “I’ll want a DNA sample.”

  “I’ll give you DNA and more: cell cultures, tissue scrapings—almost enough to make one for yourself. We’ll need to meet in person, of course: I wouldn’t trust material of such sensitivity to an intermediary.”

  “Of course not,” Grafenwalder says. “But we’ll meet on neutral ground. There’s a place I’ve
used before. How does Chasm City grab you?”

  Rifugio looks pleased. “Name the time and the place.”

  “I can squeeze you in tomorrow,” Grafenwalder says.

  He doesn’t care for Chasm City, at least not these days, but it’s a useful enough place to do business. Complex technology doesn’t work reliably, making every transaction cumbersome. But that has its benefits, too. Weapons that might just work in the Rust Belt can’t be trusted in CC. Eavesdropping and other forms of deception become risky. It’s best not to try anything too clever, and everyone knows that.

  The one thing Grafenwalder isn’t worried about is catching something. His palanquin is the best money can buy, and even if something did get through its ten centimetres of nano-secure hermetic armour, it would have a hard time finding anything in his body to touch and corrupt. The armour reassures him, though, and the privacy of the cabinet shields him from the awkwardness of a face-to-face encounter. As he makes his way through the city, following other palanquins along the winding path of an elevated private road through the high Canopy, he pages once more through the sparse information he has managed to piece together on Rifugio.

  Grafenwalder has the feeling that he’s trying to pin down a ghost. There is a broker named Rifugio, and judging by what he has already achieved, he would appear to have the necessary contacts to procure a Denizen. But it puzzles Grafenwalder that their paths haven’t intersected before. Granted, it’s a big, turbulent system, with a lot of scope for new players to emerge from hitherto obscurity. But Grafenwalder has been courting men like Rifugio for years. There should have been at least a blip on his radar before now.

  The palanquins duck and dive through the mad architecture of the Canopy. All around, buildings that were once cleanly geometric have been turned into the threatening forms of haunted trees, their grasping branches locking bony fingers high over the lower levels of the city. Epsilon Eridani is still above the horizon, but so little sunlight penetrates the smog-brown atmosphere or the muck-smeared panels of the latticework dome that it might as well be twilight. The lights are on all over the city, save for the seductive absence of the chasm itself. Dark threads dangle from the larger trunks of the Canopy, like cannon-blasted rigging. Brachiating cable cars swing through the tangle like drunk gibbons. Compared to the ordered habitats of the surviving Rust Belt, it’s a scene from hell. And yet people still live here. People still make lives for themselves; still fall in love and find somewhere they can think of as home. With a lurch of cognitive vertigo that he’s already experienced a few times too many, Grafenwalder remembers that there are people down there who have no memory of how things used to be.

  He knows it ought to horrify him that human beings could ever adapt to such a catastrophic downturn in their fortunes, even though people have been doing that kind of thing for most of history. Yet part of him feels a strange kinship with those survivors. He sleeps easier since the plague, and he doesn’t know why. It’s as if the crisis snapped shut part of his life that contained something threatening and loose, something that was in danger of reaching him.

  In an unsettling way, though, he feels that Rifugio’s call has reopened that closed book, just a crack. And that whatever was keeping him from sleep is stalking the edge of his imagination once more.

  They meet in private rooms in the outermost branch of a Canopy structure near Escher Heights. The building is dead now, incapable of further change, and its owner—a man named Ashley Chabrier, with whom Grafenwalder did business years ago—has cut through the floor, walls and ceilings of the reshaped husk and emplaced enormous glass panels, veined in the manner of insect wings and linked together by leathery fillets of the old growth. It affords a spectacular view, but even Grafenwalder has misgivings as he steers his palanquin across the reflectionless floor, with the fires of the Mulch burning two kilometres below. Even if he survived the fall, the Mulch inhabitants wouldn’t take kindly to the likes of him dropping in.

  Rifugio, contrary to Grafenwalder’s expectations, has not arrived by palanquin. He stands with his legs wide, his generous paunch supported by a levitating girdle, a pewter-coloured belt ringed by several dozen tiny and silent ducted fan thrusters. His slippered feet skim the glass with their up-curled toes. As he approaches Grafenwalder, he barely moves his legs.

  “I have brought what I promised,” Rifugio says, by way of greeting. He’s carrying a small malachite-green case, dangling from the pudgy fingers of his right hand.

  “Is it all right if I say the word ‘Denizen’ now?” Grafenwalder asks.

  “You just said it, so I think the answer has to be yes. You’re still suspicious, I see.”

  “I’ve every right to be suspicious. I’ve been looking for one of these things for longer than I care to remember.”

  “So I hear.”

  “There have been times when I have doubted that they exist now; times when I doubted that they ever existed.”

  “Yet you haven’t stopped searching. Those doubts never became all-consuming.” Rifugio is very close to the palanquin now. As a matter of routine, it deep-scans him for concealed weapons or listening devices. It finds nothing alarming. Even so, Grafenwalder flinches when the man suddenly lifts the case and pops the lid. “Here is what I have for you, Mister Grafenwalder: enough to silence those qualms of yours.”

  The case is lined with black foam. Glass vials reside in neat little partitions. The palanquin probes the case and detects only biological material: exactly what Rifugio promised. With his left hand, Rifugio digs out one of the vials and holds it up like a magic charm. Dark red fluid sloshes around inside.

  “Here. Take this and run an analysis on it. It’s Denizen blood, with Denizen DNA.”

  Grafenwalder hesitates for a moment, despite the assurances from his palanquin that it can deal with any mere biological trickery. Then he permits the machine to extend one of its manipulators, allowing Rifugio to pop the vial into its cushioned grasp. The machine withdraws the manipulator into its analyser alcove, set just beneath the frontal window. Part of the biological sample will be incinerated and passed through a gas chromatograph, where its isotopic spectrum will be compared against the data on Denizen blood Grafenwalder has already compiled. At the same time, the DNA will be amplified, speed-sequenced and cross-referenced against his best-guess for the Denizen genetic sequence. There’s no physical connection between the analyser and the interior of the palanquin, so Grafenwalder cannot come to harm. Even so, he wills the analyser to complete its duties as swiftly as possible.

  “Well, Mister Grafenwalder? Does it meet with your satisfaction?”

  The analyser starts graphing up its preliminary conclusions: the material looks genuine enough.

  Grafenwalder keeps the excitement from his voice. “I’d like to know where you found it. That would help me decide whether or not I believe you have the genuine article.”

  “The Denizen came into my possession via Ultras. They’d been keeping it as a pet, aboard their ship.”

  “Shallice’s men, by any chance?”

  “I obtained the Denizen from Captain Ritter, of the Number Theoretic. I’ve had no dealings with Shallice, although I know the name. As for Ritter—in so far as one can ever believe anything said by an Ultra—I was told that he acquired the Denizen during routine trade with another group of Ultras, in some other godforsaken system. Apparently the Denizen was kept aboard ship as a pet. The Ultras had little appreciation of its wider value.”

  “How did Ultras get hold of it in the first place?”

  “I have no idea. Perhaps only the Denizen can tell us the whole story.”

  “I’ll need better provenance than that.”

  “You may never get it. We’re talking about beings created in utmost secrecy two hundred years ago. Their very existence was doubted even then. The best you can hope for is a plausible sequence of events. Clearly, the Denizen must have left Europa’s ocean after Cadmus-Asterius and the other hanging cities fell. If it passed into the hands o
f starfarers—Ultras, Demarchists, Conjoiners, it doesn’t matter which—it would have had a means to leave the system, and spend much of the intervening time either frozen or at relativistic speed, or both. It need not have experienced anything like the full bore of those two hundred years. Its memories of Europa may be remarkably sharp.”

  “Have you asked it?”

  “It doesn’t speak. Not all of them were created with the gift of language, Mister Grafenwalder. They were engineered to work as underwater slaves: to take orders rather than to issue them. They had to be intelligent, but they didn’t need to answer back.”

  “Some of them had language.”

  “The early prototypes, and those that were designed to mediate with their human overseers. Most of them were dumb.”

  Grafenwalder allows the disappointment to wash over him, then bottles it away. He’d always hoped for a talker, but Rifugio is correct: it could never be guaranteed. And perhaps there is something in having one that won’t answer back, or plead. It’s going to be spending a lot of time in his tank, after all.

  “You’ll treat it with kindness, of course,” Rifugio continues. “I didn’t liberate it from the Ultras just so it can become someone else’s pet, to be tormented between now and kingdom come. You’ll treat it as the sentient being it is.”

  Grafenwalder sneers. “If you care so much, why not hand it over to the authorities?”

  “Because they’d kill it, and then go after anyone who knew of its existence. Demarchists made the Denizens in one of their darker moments. They’re more enlightened now—so they’d like us to think, anyway. They certainly wouldn’t want something like a living and breathing Denizen—a representative of a sentient slave race—popping out of history’s cupboard, not when they’re bending over backwards to score moral points over the Conjoiners.”

  “I’ll treat it fairly,” Grafenwalder says.

  At that moment the analyser announces that the blood composition and genetic material are both consistent with Denizen origin, to high statistical certainty. It’s not enough to prove that Rifugio has one, but it’s a large step in the right direction. Plenty of hoaxers have already fallen at this hurdle.