‘Shouldn’t you be driving this thing?’
‘It’s safe, Tanner, believe me. The control system of a cable-car is quite intelligent — almost as smart as the machines we had before the plague. But it’s best not to spend too much time down in the Mulch with a machine like this.’
‘About my earlier question…’
‘We know you arrived in the city wearing Ice Mendicant clothes and that someone called Tanner Mirabel is known to the Mendicants. ’ I was about to ask Zebra how she knew this much, but she was already continuing, ‘What we don’t know is whether or not this is all a carefully constructed identity to suit some other purpose. Why did you allow yourself to be captured, Tanner?’
‘I was curious,’ I said, feeling like a repetitious refrain in a third-rate symphony — maybe one of Quirrenbach’s early efforts. ‘I didn’t know much about the social stratification in Yellowstone. I wanted to reach the Canopy, and I didn’t know how to go about it without threatening anyone.’
‘That’s understandable. There isn’t any way.’
‘How did you find any of this out?’
‘Through Waverly.’ She looked at me carefully, squinting deep black eyes, causing the stripes on one side of her face to bunch together. ‘I don’t know if he introduced himself, but Waverly was the man who shot you with the stun beam.’
‘You know him?’
She nodded. ‘He’s one of ours — or at least, he has sympathies with us, and we have means of ensuring his compliance. He likes to indulge certain tastes.’
‘He told me he was a sadist, but I thought it was part of the banter.’
‘It wasn’t, believe me.’
I winced as a wave of pain raced up my leg. ‘How do you know my name?’
‘Waverly passed it to us. Before that, we’d never even heard of Tanner Mirabel. But once we had a name, we could backtrack and confirm your movements. He didn’t get much, though. Either he was lying — which I don’t rule out; it’s not like I particularly trust the one-eyed bastard — or else your memories really are confused.’
‘I had revival amnesia. That’s why I spent time with the Mendicants. ’
‘Waverly seemed to think it went deeper than that. That you might have had something to hide. Is that possible, Tanner? If I’m going to help you, it might help if I trusted you.’
‘I’m who you think I am,’ I said, which seemed to be all I could manage just then. The odd thing was, I wasn’t quite sure I believed myself.
Something strange happened then: a hard, sharp discontinuity in my thoughts. I was still conscious; still aware of myself sitting in Zebra’s cable-car; still aware that we were moving through Chasm City at night and that she had rescued me from Sybilline’s little hunting party. I was conscious of the pain in my leg — even though it had abated to a dull throb of highly concentrated discomfort by then.
And yet a chunk of Sky Haussmann’s life had just revealed itself to me.
The previous episodes had come during unconsciousness, like orchestrated dreams, but this one had exploded, fully-formed, into my mind. The effect was disturbing and disconcerting, interrupting the normal flow of my thoughts like an EMP burst playing momentary havoc with a computer system.
The episode, mercifully, was not a long one. Sky was still with Balcazar (Christ, I thought — I was even remembering the names of the supporting characters); still ferrying him across space to the meeting — the conclave — aboard the other ship, the Palestine.
What had happened last time? That was it — Balcazar had told Sky about the sixth ship being real; the ghost ship.
The one Norquinco had called the Caleuche.
By the time he had turned the revelation over in his head, examining it from every angle, they were almost there. The Palestine loomed huge, looking very much like the Santiago — all the ships of the Flotilla were built to more or less the same design — but without quite the same degree of discoloration around her rotating hull. She had been much further away from the Islamabad when she went up, the flash of energy weakened by the inverse square law of radiative propagation until it was barely a warm breeze, rather than the killing flux which had burned the shadow of his mother onto the skin of his own ship. They had their problems, of course. There had been viral outbreaks, psychoses, putsches, and as many sleepers had died aboard that ship as aboard the Santiago. He thought of her burdened with her own dead; cold corpses strung along her spine like rotten fruit.
A harsh voice said, ‘Diplomatic flight TG5, transfer command to Palestine docking network.’
Sky did as he was asked; there was a jolt as the larger ship hijacked the shuttle’s avionics and slotted it onto an approach course, with what felt like minimal concern for the comfort of its human occupants. Projected onto the cockpit window, the approach corridor floated in space, edged in skeletal orange neon. The stellar backdrop began to cartwheel; they were moving in the same rotational frame as the Palestine now, sliding towards an open parking bay. Suited figures in unfamiliar uniforms floated there to greet them, aiming weapons with something that was not quite diplomatic cordiality.
He turned to Balcazar as the taxi found a berth. ‘Sir? We’re nearly there.’
‘What, oh? Damn you, Titus… I was sleeping!’
Sky wondered how his father had felt about the old man. He wondered if Titus had ever considered killing the Captain.
It would not, he thought, present insurmountable difficulties.
NINETEEN
‘Tanner? Snap out of it. I don’t want you falling unconscious on me.’
We were approaching a building now — if you could call it that. It looked more like an enchanted tree, huge and gnarled branches pocked with haphazard windows, and cable-car landing decks set amongst the limbs. Cableway threads reached through the interstices of the major branches, and Zebra guided us in fearlessly, as if she had navigated this approach thousands of times. I looked down, through vertiginous layers of branches, the firelights of the Mulch twinkling sickeningly far below.
Zebra’s apartment in the Canopy was near the middle of the city, on the edge of the chasm, near the inner dome boundary which surrounded the great belching hole in Yellowstone’s crust. We had travelled some way around the chasm and from the landing deck I could see the tiny, jewelled sliver of the stalk projecting out for one horizontal kilometre, far below us and around the great curve of the chasm’s edge. I looked down into the chasm but I couldn’t see any sign of the luminous gliders, or any other mist-jumpers taking the great fall.
‘Do you live here alone?’ I asked when she had led me into her rooms, striking what I hoped was the right note of polite curiosity.
‘Now I do, yes.’ The answer was quick, almost glib. But she continued speaking. ‘I used to share this place with my sister, Mavra.’
‘And Mavra left?’
‘Mavra got killed.’ She left that remark hanging there long enough to have its effect. ‘She got too close to the wrong people.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, fishing for something to say. ‘Were these people hunters, like Sybilline?’
‘Not exactly, no. She was curious about something she shouldn’t have been, and she asked the wrong kinds of questions of the wrong people, but it wasn’t directly to do with the hunt.’
‘What, then?’
‘Why are you so interested in knowing?’
‘I’m not exactly an angel, Zebra, but I don’t like the idea of someone dying just because they were curious.’
‘Then you’d better be careful you don’t ask the wrong kinds of question yourself.’