Maybe Dominika was better than she looked.
‘Okay,’ I said when Tom re-emerged. ‘I have a favour to ask of you, and it’s worth one of these.’ I showed him the smallest denomination I had. ‘And don’t say I’m insulting you, because you don’t know what it is I’m about to ask.’
‘Say it, big guy.’
I gestured towards the rickshaws. ‘Do those things cover the whole city?’
‘Most of Mulch.’
‘Mulch is the district we’re in?’ No answer was forthcoming, so I just left the tent with him following me.
‘I need to get from here — wherever here is — to a specific district of the city. I don’t know how far it is, but I don’t want to be cheated. I’m sure you can arrange that for me, can’t you? Especially as I know where you live.’
‘Get good price, you no worry.’ Then a thought must have trickled through his skull. ‘No wait for friend?’
‘No — I’m afraid I have business elsewhere, as does Mister Quirrenbach. We won’t be meeting again for a while.’
I sincerely hoped it was the truth.
Some kind of hairy primate provided the motive power for most of the rickshaws, a human gene splice resetting the necessary homeoboxes so that his legs grew longer and straighter than the simian norm. In unintelligibly rapid Canasian, Tom negotiated with another kid. They could almost have been interchangeable, except that the new kid had shorter hair and might have been a year older. Tom introduced him to me as Juan; something in their relationship suggested they were old business partners. Juan shook my hand and escorted me to the nearest vehicle. Edgily now, I glanced back, hoping Quirrenbach was still out cold. I didn’t want to have to justify myself to him if he came round soon enough to have Tom tell him I was about to get a ride out of the terminus. There were some pills that could not be sugared, and being dumped by someone you imagined was your newfound travelling companion was one of them.
Still, perhaps he could work the agony of rejection into one of his forthcoming Meisterwerks.
‘Where to, mister?’
It was Juan speaking now, with the same accent as Tom. It was some kind of post-plague argot, I guessed; a pidgin of Russish, Canasian, Norte and a dozen other languages known here during the Belle Epoque. ‘Take me to the Canopy,’ I said. ‘You know where that is, don’t you?’
‘Sure,’ he said. ‘I know where Canopy is, just like I know where Mulch is. You think I’m idiot, like Tom?’
‘You can take me there, then.’
‘No, mister. I no can take you there.’
I began to unpeel another bill, before realising that our communicational difficulties stemmed from something more basic than insufficient funds, and that the problem was almost certainly on my side.
‘Is the Canopy a district of the city?’
This was met by a long-suffering nod. ‘You new here, huh?’
‘Yes, I’m new. So why don’t you do me a favour and explain just why taking me to the Canopy is beyond your means?’
The bill I had half unpeeled vanished from my grip, and then Juan offered me the rear seat of the rickshaw as if it were a throne finished in plush velvet. ‘I show you, man. But I no take you there, you understand? For that you need more than rickshaw.’
He hopped in next to me, then leaned forward and whispered something in the driver’s ear. The primate began to pedal, grunting in what was probably profound indignation at the outcome to which his genetic heritage had been shaped.
The bio-engineering of animals, I later learned, had been one of the few boom industries since the plague, exploiting a niche that had opened up once machines of any great sophistication began to fail.
Like Quirrenbach had said not long ago, nothing that happened was ever completely bad for everyone.
So it was with the plague.
The missing wall provided an entrance and exit point for the volantors (and, I presumed, the other flying craft), but rickshaws entered and left the parking area by means of a sloping, concrete-lined tunnel. The dank walls and ceiling dripped thick mucosal fluids. It was at least cooler, and the noise of the terminus quickly faded, replaced only by the soft creaking of the cogs and chains which transmitted the ape’s cycling motion to the wheels.
‘You new here,’ Juan said. ‘Not from Ferrisville, or even Rust Belt. Not even from rest of system.’
Was I so obtrusively ignorant that even a kid could see it?
‘I guess you don’t get many tourists these days.’
‘Not since bad time, no.’
‘What was it like to live through?’
‘I dunno mister; I just two.’
Of course. It was seven years ago. From a child’s perspective, that really was most of a lifetime ago. Juan, and Tom, and the other street children would barely be able to remember what life was like in Chasm City prior to the plague. Those few years of limitless wealth and possibility would be blurred with the soft-focus simplicity of infancy. All they knew, all they truly remembered, was the city as it now was: vast and dark and again filled with possibility — except now it was the possibility that lay in danger and crime and lawlessness; a city for thieves and beggars and those who could live by their wits rather than their credit ratings.
It was just a shock to find myself in one.
We passed other rickshaws returning to the concourse, slick sides glossy with rain. Only a few of them carried passengers, hunched sullenly down in raincoats, looking as if they would rather have been anywhere else in the universe than Chasm City. I could relate to that. I was tired, I was hot, sweat pooling under my clothes, and my skin itched and crawled for want of a wash. I was acutely conscious of my own body odour.
What the hell was I doing here?
I had a chased a man across more than fifteen light-years, into a city which had become a sick perversion of itself. The man I was chasing was not even truly bad — even I could see that. I hated Reivich for what he had done, but he had acted much as I would have done in the same circumstances. He was an aristocrat, not a man of arms, but in another life — if the history of our planet had followed another course — he and I might even have been friends. Certainly I had respect for him now, even if it was a respect born out of the way he had acted completely beyond my expectations when he destroyed the bridge at Nueva Valparaiso. Such casual brutality was to be admired. Any man that I misjudged that badly had my respect.
And yet, for all that, I knew I’d have no qualms about killing him.
‘I think,’ Juan said, ‘you need history lesson, mister.’
What I had managed to learn aboard the Strelnikov had not been very much, but it was all the history I felt that I had an appetite for right now. ‘If you’re thinking I don’t know about the plague…’
The tunnel was growing lighter ahead. Not much, but enough to indicate that we were about to enter the city proper. The light which suffused it had the same caramel-brown texture I’d seen from the behemoth: the colour of already murky light filtered through yet more murk.
‘Plague hit, make building go wacko,’ said Juan.
‘That much they told me.’
‘They no tell you enough, mister.’ His syntax was rudimentary, but I suspected it was an improvement on anything the rickshaw driver was capable of. ‘Them building change, real fast.’ He made expansive hand gestures. ‘Many folk get die, get squashed or end up in wall.’
‘That doesn’t sound too nice.’
‘I show you people in wall, mister. You no make joke no more. You shit own pants.’ We swerved to avoid another rickshaw, scraping against us. ‘But listen — them building, they change fastest up at top, right?’