There was something about it that bothered me, and I kept asking myself whether what had happened in it meshed with what I already knew about Sky Haussmann. I was no expert on the man (I hadn’t been, anyway) but there were certain basic facts about him which it was difficult to avoid if you had been brought up on Sky’s Edge. We all knew about the way he had become frightened of the dark after the blackout aboard the Santiago, when the other ship blew up, and we all knew about the way his mother had died in the same incident. Lucretia had been a good woman, by all accounts, well loved across the Flotilla. Titus, Sky’s father, was a man who was respected and feared but never truly hated. They called him the caudillo: the strong man. Everyone agreed that while Sky might have had an unusual upbringing, his parents could not really be blamed for the crimes that followed.
We all knew that Sky had not had many friends, but nonetheless we remembered the names of Norquinco and Gomez, and how they had been complicit — if not truly equal partners — in what had happened later. And we all knew that Titus had been gravely injured by a saboteur placed amongst the passengers. He had died a few months later, when the saboteur broke out of his restraints in the ship’s infirmary and murdered him while he was recuperating nearby.
But now I was puzzled. The dream had veered into an area which was unfamiliar to me. I didn’t remember anyone ever mentioning the rumour of another ship, a sinister ghost vessel trailing the Flotilla like the fabled Caleuche. Even the Caleuche’s name failed to ring any bells. What was happening? Was the indoctrinal virus just sufficiently detailed in its knowledge of Sky’s life that it was revealing my own prior ignorance of events, or had I been infected with an undocumented strain, one that contained hidden curlicues of story missing from most of the others? And were those embellishments historically accurate (but simply not well known), or sheer fiction: addendums put in there by bored cultists trying to spice up their own religion?
There was no way to know — yet. But it seemed I was going to have to sleep through further instalments of Haussmann’s life whether I liked it or not. Although I couldn’t say I exactly welcomed the dreams — or the way they seemed to smother any I might have been planning to have myself — at least now I would admit to some mild curiosity as to how they played out.
I crawled onwards, forcing the dreams from my mind, and concentrated instead on the place to which the Strelnikov was ultimately headed.
The Glitter Band.
I had heard of it, even on Sky’s Edge. Who hadn’t? It was one of a few dozen places that were famous enough to be known about in other solar systems; places that had a certain allure even across light years. On scores of settled worlds, the Glitter Band was shorthand for a place of limitless bounty and luxury and personal freedom. It was everything that Chasm City was, but without the inescapable crush of gravity. It was where people jokingly talked of going when they made their fortunes, or married into the family with the right connections. There was nowhere in our own system that had anything like the same glamour. To many people the place might as well have been mythical, for all the likelihood of them ever getting there.
But the Glitter Band was real.
It was the string of ten thousand elegant, wealthy habitats which orbited Yellowstone: a beautiful concatenation of arcologies and carousels and cylinder-cities, like a halo of stardust thrown around the world. Although Chasm City was the ultimate repository for the system’s wealth, the city had a reputation for conservatism, rooted in its three-hundred-year history and immense sense of self-importance. The Glitter Band, by contrast, was constantly being reinvented, habitats shuffling in and out of formation, being dismantled and made anew. Subcultures blossomed like a thousand flowers before their proponents decided to try something else instead. Where art in Chasm City verged on the staid, almost anything was encouraged in the Glitter Band. One artist’s masterworks existed only in the tiniest instants when they could be sculpted out of quark-gluon plasma and held stable, their existence implied only by a subtle chain of inference. Another used shaped fission charges to create nuclear fireballs which assumed the brief likenesses of celebrities. Wild social experiments took place: voluntary tyrannies, in which thousands of people willingly submitted themselves to the control of dictatorial states so that they could be freed from having to make any moral choices in their own lives. There were whole habitats where people had had their higher brain functions disengaged, so that they could live like sheep under the care of machines. In others, they’d had their minds implanted into monkeys or dolphins: lost in intricate arboreal power struggles or sorrowful sonar fantasies. Elsewhere, groups of scientists who’d had their minds reshaped by Pattern Jugglers plunged deep into the metastructure of space-time, concocting elaborate experiments which tinkered with the very fundamentals of existence. One day, it was said, they’d discover a technique for faster-than-light propulsion, passing the secret to their allies who would install the necessary gadgetry in their habitats. The first anyone else would know about it would be when half the Glitter Band suddenly winked out of existence.
The Glitter Band, in short, was a place where a reasonably curious human being could easily squander half a lifetime. But I didn’t think Reivich would spend much time there before making his way down to Yellowstone’s surface. He would want to lose himself in Chasm City as quickly as possible.
Either way, I wouldn’t be far behind him.
Still fighting nausea, I crawled into the commons and looked around at the dozen or so fellow passengers in the sphere. Although everyone was at liberty to float at whatever angle they liked (at the moment the slowboat’s engines were off), everyone had anchored themselves the same way up. I found a vacant wall strap, fed my elbow into it and surveyed my fellow slush puppies with what I knew would appear only casual interest. They were clustered into twos and threes, talking quietly while a spherical servitor moved through the air, impelled by tiny fans. The servitor moved from group to group, offering services which it dispensed from a compendium of hatches around its body. It reminded me of a hunter-seeker drone, silently selecting its next target.
‘You needn’t look so nervous, friend,’ someone said, in thick, slurred Russish. ‘It’s just robot.’
I was losing my edge. I’d been unaware of anyone sidling up to me. Languidly, I turned to look at the man who had spoken. I was confronted by a wall of meat blocking half the commons. His pink, raw-looking face was triangular, anchored to his torso by a neck thicker than my thigh. His hairline began only a centimetre or so above his eyebrows: long black hair lacquered back over the roughly hewn boulder that was his scalp. His wide, downcurved mouth was framed by a thick black moustache and a beard that was no more than a razor-thin line of hair tracing the enormous width of his jaw. He had his arms crossed in front of his chest like a Cossack dancer, hypertrophied muscles bulging through the fabric of his coat. It was a long quilted coat sewn with rough patches of stiff, glistening fabric which caught the light and refracted it back in a million spectral glints. His eyes stared through me rather than at me, and seemed not to be focused on quite the same thing, as if one were glass.
Trouble, I thought.
‘Nobody’s nervous,’ I said.
‘Hey, talkative guy.’ The man anchored himself to the wall next to me. ‘I just make conversation, da?’
‘That’s good. Now go and make it somewhere else.’
‘Why you so unfriendly? You not like Vadim, friend?’
‘I was prepared to give you the benefit of the doubt,’ I said, answering him in Norte, even though I could more or less get by in Russish. ‘But on balance… no, I don’t think I do. And until we’re better acquainted, I’m not your friend. Now go away and let me think.’