‘Then he probably shouldn’t have accessed it at random,’ I said. ‘My guess is he just hit an NC interrogation session. Have you ever had your fingers removed?’
The eyeglass man chuckled. ‘Nasty. Very nasty. But there’s a market for that kind of shit — just like there is for the black stuff.’
Now was as good a time as any to see what the quality of Vadim’s merchandise was like. I handed over one of the black experientials, one of those embossed with a tiny silver maggot motif. ‘Is this what you mean?’
He looked sceptical at first, until he had examined the experiential more closely. To the trained eye, there were presumably all manner of subliminal indicators to distinguish the genuine article from sub-standard fakes.
‘It’s a good quality bootleg if it’s a bootleg, which means it’s worth something whatever’s on it. Hey, shit-for-brains. Try this.’ He knelt down, picked up the battered playback helmet and jammed it onto the youth’s head, then prepared to insert the experiential. The youth was just beginning to perk up when he saw the experiential, at which point he pawed the air, trying to stop the man pressing it into the helmet.
‘Get that maggot shit away from me…’
‘Hey,’ the man said. ‘I was just going to give you a flash, dick-face. ’ He tucked the experiential away in his coat.
‘Why don’t you try it yourself?’ I said.
‘Same damn reason he doesn’t want that shit anywhere near his skull. It’s not nice.’
‘Nor’s an NC interrogation session.’
‘That’s a trip to the cake shop by comparison. That’s just pain.’ He patted his breast pocket delicately. ‘What’s on this could be about nine million times less pleasant.’
‘You mean it’s not always the same?’
‘Of course not, or there wouldn’t be an element of risk. And the way these ones work, it’s never exactly the same trip twice. Sometimes it’s just maggots, sometimes you are the maggots… sometimes it’s much, much worse…’ Suddenly he looked cheerful. ‘But, hey, there’s a market for it, so who am I to argue?’
‘Why would people want to experience something like that?’ I asked.
He grinned at the youth. ‘Hey, what is this, fucking philosophy hour? How am I supposed to know? This is human nature we’re talking about here; it’s already deeply fucking perverted.’
‘Tell me about it,’ I said.
At the centre of the concourse, rising above the bazaar like a minaret, was an ornately encrusted tower surmounted by a four-faced clock set to Chasm City time. The clock had recently struck the seventeenth hour of the twenty-six in Yellowstone’s day, animated spacesuited figurines emerging beneath the dial to enact what might have been a complex quasi-religious ritual. I checked the time on Vadim’s watch — my own watch, I forced myself to think, since I had now liberated it twice — and found that the two were in passable agreement. If Dominika’s estimate had been accurate, she would still be busy with Quirrenbach.
The hermetics had passed through now, along with most of the obviously rich, but there were still many people who wore the slightly stunned look of the recently impoverished. Perhaps they had been only moderately wealthy seven years ago; not sufficiently well-connected to barrier themselves against the plague. I doubted that there had been anyone truly poor in Chasm City back then, but there were always degrees of affluence. For all the heat, the people wore heavy, dark clothes, often ballasted with jewellery. The women were often gloved and hatted, perspiring under wide-brimmed fedoras, veils or chadors. The men wore heavy greatcoats with upturned collars, faces shadowed under Panama hats or shapeless berets. Many had little glass boxes around their necks, containing what looked like religious relics, but which were actually implants, extracted from their hosts and now carried as symbols of former wealth. Though there was a spectrum of apparent ages, I saw no one who looked genuinely old. Perhaps the old were too infirm to risk a trip to the bazaar, but I also recalled what Orcagna had said about the state of longevity treatments on other worlds. It was entirely possible that some of the people I saw here were two or three centuries old; burdened with memories which reached back to Marco Ferris and the Amerikano era. They must have lived through great strangenesses… but I doubted that any of them had witnessed anything stranger than the recent transfiguration of their city, or the collapse of a society whose longevity and opulence must have seemed unassailable. No wonder so many of the people I saw looked so sad, as if knowing that — no matter how things might improve from day to day — the old times would never come again. Seeing that all-pervasive melancholia, it was impossible not to feel some empathy.
I started navigating my way back to Dominika’s tent, then wondered why I was bothering.
There were questions I wanted to ask Dominika, but they could equally well be directed to one of her rivals. I might need to talk to them all eventually. The only thing that connected me to Dominika was Quirrenbach… and even if I had begun to tolerate his presence, I’d known all along that I would have to ditch him eventually. I could walk away now, leave the terminus completely, and the chances were that we’d never meet again.
I pushed through until I reached the far side of the bazaar.
Where the furthest wall should have been was only an opening through which the lower levels of the city could be seen, behind a perpetual screen of dirty rain sluicing from the side of the terminus. A haphazard line of rickshaws waited: upright boxes balanced between two wide wheels. Some of the rickshaws were powered, coupled behind steam-engines or chugging methane-powered motors. Their drivers lounged indolently, awaiting fares. Others were propelled by pedal-power, and several looked to have been converted from old palanquins. Behind the row of rickshaws there were other, sleeker vehicles: a pair of flying machines much like the volantors I knew from Sky’s Edge, crouched down on skids, and a trio of craft which looked like helicopters with their rotors folded for stowage. A squad of workers eased a palanquin into one of them, tipping it at an undignified angle to get it through the entrance door. I wondered if I was witnessing a kidnapping or a taxi pick-up.
Although I might have been able to afford one of the volantors, the rickshaws looked the most immediately promising. At the very least I could get a flavour of this part of the city, even if I had no specific destination in mind.
I started walking, cutting through the crowds, my gaze fixed resolutely ahead.
Then, when not quite halfway there, I stopped, turned around and returned to Dominika’s.
‘Is Mister Quirrenbach finished yet?’ I asked Tom. Tom had been shimmying to the sitar music, apparently surprised to find someone entering Dominika’s tent without being coerced.
‘Mister, he no ready — ten minutes. You got money?’
I had no idea how much Quirrenbach’s excisions were going to cost him, but I figured the money he had recovered on the Grand Teton experientials might just cover it. I separated the bills from my own, laying them down on the table.
‘No enough, mister. Madame Dominika, she want one more.’ Grudgingly I unpeeled one of my own lower-denomination bills and added it to Quirrenbach’s pile. ‘That’d better be good,’ I said. ‘Mister Quirrenbach’s a friend of mine, so if I find out you’re going to ask him for more money when he comes out, I’ll be back.’
‘Is good, mister. Is good.’
I watched as the kid scurried through the partition into the room beyond, briefly glimpsing the hovering form of Dominika and the long couch on which she did her business. Quirrenbach was prone on it, stripped to the waist, with his head enfolded in a loom of delicate-looking probes. His hair had been shaved completely. Dominika was making odd gestures with her fingers, like a puppeteer working invisibly fine strings. In sympathy, the little probes were dancing around Quirrenbach’s cranium. There was no blood, nor even any obvious puncture marks on his skin.