Recollection of that detail struck me as odd. Had someone told it to me before?
‘Have you got that gun ready?’ Dieterling said. ‘You never know. We might walk round the corner and find the bastard tying his shoelaces.’
I patted the gun to reassure myself that it was still there, then said, ‘I don’t think it’s our day to be lucky, Miguel.’
We stepped through a door set into the concourse’s inner wall, the sound of chanting monks now quite unmistakably human; sustaining a note that was almost but not quite perfect.
For the first time since entering the anchorpoint terminal, we could see the thread. The embarkation area into which we’d stepped was a huge circular room encircled by a balcony on which we stood. The true floor was hundreds of metres below us, and the thread plunged from above, emerging through the ceiling via an irised entrance door, then stretching down towards the point where it was truly anchored and where servicing machinery lurked to refurbish and repair the elevators. It was somewhere down there that the sound of the chanting was coming from; voices carried higher by the odd acoustics of the place.
The bridge was a single thin thread of hyperdiamond stretching all the way from ground to synchronous orbit. For almost its entire length it was only five metres in diameter (and most of that was hollow), except for the very last kilometre which dropped into the terminal itself. The thread here was thirty metres wide, tapering subtly as it rose. The extra width served a purely psychological function: too many passengers had balked at taking the journey to orbit when they saw how slender the thread they would be riding really was, so the bridge owners made the visible portion in the terminal much wider than it needed to be.
Elevator cars arrived and departed every few minutes or so, ascending and descending on opposite sides of the column. Each was a sleek cylinder curved to grip nearly half the thread, attached magnetically. The cars were multi-storeyed, with separate levels for dining, recreation and sleeping. They were mostly empty, their passenger compartments unlit as they glided up or down. There were a handful of people in only every fifth or sixth car. The empty cars were symptomatic of the bridge’s economic woes, but not a great problem in themselves. The expense of running them was tiny compared with the cost of the bridge; they had no impact on the schedule of the inhabited cars, and from a distance they looked as full as the others, conveying an illusion of busy prosperity which the bridge owners had long given up hoping would one day approach reality, since the Church had assumed tenancy. And the monsoon season may have given the illusion that the war was in its dog days, but plans were already drawn for the new season’s campaigns: the pushes and incursions already simulated in the battle-planners’ wargame computers.
A dizzyingly unsupported tongue of glass reached from the balcony to a point just short of the thread, leaving enough space for an elevator to arrive. Some passengers were already waiting on the tongue with their belongings, including a group of well-dressed aristocrats. But no Reivich, and no one in the party who resembled any of Reivich’s associates. They were talking amongst themselves or watching news reports on screens which floated around the chamber like square, narrow-bodied tropical fish, flickering with market reports and celebrity interviews.
Near the base of the tongue was a booth where elevator tickets were being sold; a bored-looking woman was behind the desk.
‘Wait here,’ I said to Dieterling.
The woman looked up at me as I approached the desk. She wore a crumpled Bridge Authority uniform and had purple crescents under her eyes, which were themselves bloodshot and swollen.
‘Yes?’
‘I’m a friend of Argent Reivich. I need to contact him urgently.’
‘I’m afraid that isn’t possible.’
It was no more than I was expecting. ‘When did he leave?’
Her voice was nasal; the consonants indistinct. ‘I’m afraid I can’t give out that information.’
I nodded shrewdly. ‘But you don’t deny that he passed through the terminal.’
‘I’m afraid I…’
‘Look, give it a rest, will you?’ I softened the remark with what I hoped was an accommodating smile. ‘Sorry, it wasn’t my intention to sound rude, but this happens to be very urgent. I have something for him, you see — a valuable Reivich family heirloom. Is there any way I can speak to him while he’s still ascending, or am I going to have to wait until he reaches orbit?’
The woman hesitated. Almost any information she divulged at this point would have contravened protocol — but I must have seemed so honest, so genuinely distressed by my friend’s omission. And so clearly rich.
She glanced down at a display. ‘You’ll be able to place a message for him to contact you when he arrives at the orbital terminus.’ Implying that he hadn’t yet arrived; that he was still somewhere above me, ascending the thread.
‘I think perhaps I’d better just follow him,’ I said. ‘That way, there’ll be the minimum of delay when he reaches orbit. I can just deliver the relevant item and return.’
‘I suppose that would make sense, yes.’ She looked at me, perhaps sensing something in my manner that was not as it should have been, but not trusting her own instincts sufficiently to obstruct my progress. ‘But you’ll have to hurry. The next departure’s almost ready for boarding.’
I looked back to the point where the tongue extended out to the thread, seeing an empty elevator slide up from the servicing area.
‘You’d better issue me with a ticket then.’
‘You’ll be needing a return, I presume?’ The woman rubbed at her eyes. ‘That’ll be five hundred and fifty Australs.’
I opened my wallet and pinched out the money, printed in crisp Southlander bills. ‘Scandalous,’ I said. ‘The amount of energy it actually costs the Bridge Authority to carry me to orbit, it should be a tenth the price. But I suppose some of that gets skimmed off by the Church of Sky.’
‘I’m not saying that doesn’t happen, but you shouldn’t speak ill of the Church, sir. Not here.’
‘No; that was what I heard. But you’re not one of them, are you?’
‘No,’ she said, handing me the change in smaller bills. ‘I just work here.’
The cultists had taken over the bridge a decade or so back, after they had convinced themselves that this place was where Sky had been crucified. They had stormed the place one evening before anyone realised quite what was happening. Haussmann’s followers claimed to have rigged the whole terminal with booby-trapped canisters primed with their virus, threatening to discharge them if there was any attempt at an eviction. The virus would carry far enough on the wind to infect half the Peninsula, if there was as much of it in the bridge as the cultists said. They might have been bluffing, but no one was prepared to take the risk of the cult forcing itself on millions of bystanders. So they held the bridge, and allowed the Bridge Authority to continue running it, even if it meant that the staff had to be constantly inoculated against any trace contamination. Given the side-effects of the anti-viral therapy, it obviously wasn’t the most popular work on the Peninsula — especially as it meant listening to the endless chanting of the cultists.
She handed me the ticket.
‘I hope I make it to orbit in time,’ I said.
‘The last elevator only left an hour ago. If your friend was on that one…’ She paused, and I knew there was no if about it. ‘The chances are very good that he’ll still be in the orbital terminal when you arrive.’
‘Let’s just hope he’s grateful, after all this.’
She almost smiled, then seemed to give up halfway through. It was a lot of effort, after all.