‘Assuming I was, how would I get there? Are there routes through the buildings, old access shafts not sealed by the plague?’ I figured this was the kind of street knowledge the kid would know backwards.
‘You no wanna take inside route, mister. Plenty dangerous. Special when hunt coming down.’
‘Hunt?’
‘This place no good at night, mister.’
I looked around at the gloom. ‘How would you ever be able to tell? No; don’t answer that. Just tell me how I’d get up there.’ I waited for an answer, and when it showed no sign of arriving I decided to recast my question. ‘Do Canopy people ever come down to the Mulch?’
‘Sometime. Special during hunt.’
Progress, I thought, even though it was like pulling a tooth. ‘And how do they get here? I’ve seen what look like flying vehicles, what we used to call volantors, but I can’t imagine anyone could fly through the Canopy without hitting some of those webs.’
‘We call them volantor too. Only rich got ’em — difficult to fix, keep flying. No good in some part of city, either. Most Canopy kid, they come down in cable-car now.’
‘Cable-car?’
For a moment a look of helpfulness crossed his face, and I realised he was desperately trying to please me. It was just that my enquiries were so far outside of his usual parameters that it was causing him physical pain.
‘Those web, those cable? Hang between building?’
‘Can you show me a cable-car? I’d like to see one.’
‘It not safe, mister.’
‘Well, nor am I.’
I sugared the question with another bill, then settled back into the seat as we sped on through the soft interior rain, through the Mulch.
Eventually Juan slowed and turned round to me. ‘There. Cable-car. Them often come down here. Want we go closer?’
At first I wasn’t sure what he meant. Parked diagonally across the shattered roadbed was one of the sleek private vehicles I’d seen in and around the concourse. One door was folded open from the side, like the wing of a gull, with two greatcoated individuals standing in the rain next to it, faces lost under wide-brimmed hats.
I looked at them, wondering what I was going to do next.
‘Hey mister, I already ask you, you want we go closer?’
One of the two people by the cable-car lit a cigarette and for a moment I saw the fire chase the shadows from his face — it was aristocratic, with a nobility I had not seen since arriving on the planet. His eyes were concealed behind complex goggles which emphasised the exaggerated sharpness of his cheekbones. His friend was a woman, her slender gloved hand holding a pair of toylike binoculars to her eyes. Pivoting on her knifelike heels, she scanned the street, until her gaze swept over me. I watched her flinch as it happened, though she tried to control it.
‘They nervous,’ Juan breathed. ‘Mostly, Mulch and Canopy keep far apart.’
‘Any particular reason?’
‘Yeah, one good one.’ Now he was whispering so quietly I could barely hear him above the relentless hiss of the rain. ‘Mulch get too close, Mulch vanish.’
‘Vanish?’
He drew his finger across his throat, but discreetly. ‘Canopy like games, mister. They bored. Immortal people, they all bored. So they play games. Trouble is, not everyone get asked they wanna take part.’
‘Like the hunt you mentioned?’
He nodded. ‘But no talk it now.’
‘All right. Stop here then, Juan, if you’d be so good.’
The rickshaw lost what little forward momentum it had had, the primate showing agitation in every ridge of his back muscles. I observed the reactions on the faces of the two Canopy dwellers — trying to look cool, and almost achieving it.
I stepped out of the rickshaw, my feet squelching as they made acquaintance with the sodden roadbed. ‘Mister,’ said Juan. ‘You be careful now. I ain’t earned a fare home yet.’
‘Don’t go anywhere,’ I said, then thought better of it. ‘Listen, if this makes you nervous, leave and return in five minutes.’
This obviously struck him as excellent advice. The woman with the binoculars returned them to her exuberantly patterned greatcoat, while the goggled man reached up and made what was obviously a delicate readjustment of his optics. I walked calmly in their direction, paying more attention to their vehicle. It was a glossy black lozenge, resting on three retractable wheels. Through a tinted forward window I glimpsed upholstered seats facing complicated manual controls. What appeared to be three rotor blades were furled on the roof. But as I examined the mounting more closely, I saw that this wasn’t any kind of helicopter. The blades were not attached to the body of the vehicle by a rotating axle, but vanished into three circular holes in a domelike hump which rose seamlessly from the hull itself. And, now that I looked closer, I saw that the blades were not really blades at all, but telescopic arms, each tipped with a scythelike hook.
That was all the time I had for sightseeing.
‘Don’t come any closer,’ the woman said. She backed up her words, spoken in flawless Canasian, by flourishing a tiny weapon, little larger than a brooch.
‘He’s unarmed,’ the man said, loud enough for me to hear, intentionally, it seemed.
‘I don’t mean you any harm.’ I spread my arms — slowly. ‘These are Mendicant clothes. I’ve just arrived on the planet. I wanted to know about reaching the Canopy.’
‘The Canopy?’ the man said, as if this was vastly amusing.
‘That’s what they all want,’ the woman said. The weapon had not budged, and her grip on it was so steady that I wondered if it contained tiny gyroscopes, or some kind of biofeedback device which acted on the muscles in her wrist. ‘Why should we talk to you?’
‘Because I’m harmless — unarmed, as your partner observed — and curious, and it might amuse you.’
‘You’ve no idea what amuses us.’
‘No, I probably don’t, but, as I said — I’m curious. I’m a man of means—’ the remark sounded ridiculous as soon I had spoken it, but I soldiered on ‘—and I’ve had the misfortune to arrive in the Mulch with no contacts in the Canopy.’
‘You speak Canasian reasonably well,’ the man observed, lowering his hand from his goggles. ‘Most Mulch can barely manage an insult in anything other than their native tongue.’ He threw away what remained of his cigarette.
‘But with an accent,’ the woman said. ‘I don’t place it — it’s offworld, but nothing I’m familiar with.’
‘I’m from Sky’s Edge. You may have met people from other parts of the planet who speak differently. It’s been settled long enough for linguistic drift.’
‘So had Yellowstone,’ said the man, feigning no real interest in this line of debate. ‘But most of us still live in Chasm City. Here, the only linguistic drift is vertical.’ He laughed, as if the remark were more than just a statement of fact.
I wiped rain from my eyes, warm and viscous. ‘The driver said the only way to reach the Canopy was by cable-car.’
‘An accurate statement, but that doesn’t mean we can help you.’ The man removed his hat, revealing long blond hair tied back.
His companion added, ‘We have no reason to trust you. A Mulch could have stolen Mendicant clothes and learned a few words of Canasian. No sane person would arrive here without already establishing ties with Canopy.’
I took a calculated risk. ‘I’ve got some Dream Fuel. Does that interest you?’
‘Oh yes, and how in hell’s name did a Mulch get hold of Dream Fuel?’
‘It’s a long story.’ But I reached into Vadim’s coat and removed the cache of Dream Fuel vials. ‘You’ll have to take my word that is the genuine article, of course.’
‘I’m not in the habit of taking anyone’s word on anything,’ the man said. ‘Pass me one of those vials.’