‘About what, exactly?’
She sighed, obviously wishing our conversation had never taken this tack. ‘There’s a substance…’
‘Dream Fuel?’
‘You’ve encountered it, then?’
‘I’ve seen it being used, but that’s about the extent of my knowledge. Sybilline used it in my presence, but I didn’t notice any change in her behaviour before or afterwards. What is it, exactly?’
‘It’s complicated, Tanner. Mavra had only pieced together a few parts of the story before they got her.’
‘It’s a drug of some sort, obviously.’
‘It’s a lot more than a drug. Look, can we talk about something else? It hasn’t been easy for me to deal with her being gone, and this is just opening up old wounds.’
I nodded, willing to let it lie for now. ‘You were close, weren’t you?’
‘Yes,’ she said, as if I’d picked up on some profound secret in their relationship. ‘And Mavra loved it here. She said it had the best view anywhere in the city, apart from the stalk. But when she was around we could never have afforded to eat in that place.’
‘You haven’t done too badly. If you like heights.’
‘You don’t, Tanner?’
‘I guess it takes some getting used to.’
Her apartment, ensconced in one of the major branches, was a complex of intestinally twisted rooms and corridors; more like an animal’s sett than anything a human would choose for use. The rooms were in one of the narrower branches, suspended two kilometres above the Mulch, with lower levels of the Canopy hanging below, linked to ours by vertical threads, strands and hollowed-out trunks.
She led me into what might have been her living room.
It was like entering an internal organ in some huge, walk-through model of the human anatomy. The walls, floor and ceiling were all softly rounded into each other. Level surfaces had been created by cutting into the fabric of the building, but they had to be stepped on different levels, connected by ramps and stairs. The surfaces of the walls and ceiling were rigid, but uneasily organic in nature; veined or patterned with irregular platelets. In one wall was what looked like a piece of expensive, in-situ sculpture: a tableau of three roughly hewn people who had been depicted forcing their way out of the wall, clawing to escape from it like swimmers trying to outswim the wall of a tsunami wave. Most of their bodies were hidden; all you could see was half a face or the end of a limb, but the effect was forceful enough.
‘You have pretty unique taste in art, Zebra,’ I said. ‘I think that would give me nightmares.’
‘It’s not art, Tanner.’
‘Those were real people?’
‘Still are, by some definitions. Not alive, but not exactly dead either. More like fossils, but with the fossil structure so intricate that you can almost map neurons. I’m not the only one with them, and no one really wants to cut them away in case someone thinks of a way to get them back the way they were. So we live with them. No one used to want to share a room with them, once, but now I hear it’s quite the chic thing to have a few of them in your apartment. There’s even a man in the Canopy who makes fake ones, for the truly desperate.’
‘But these are real?’
‘Credit me with some taste, Tanner. Now, I think you need to sit down for a moment. No; stay where you are.’
She snapped her fingers at her couch.
The larger items of Zebra’s furniture were autonomous, responding to our presence like nervous pets. The couch perambulated from its station, neatly stepping down to our level. In contrast to the Mulch, where nothing much more advanced than steam power could be relied upon, there were obviously still machines of reasonable sophistication in the Canopy. Zebra’s rooms were full of them; not just furniture, but servitors ranging from mice-sized drones to large ceiling-tracked units, as well as fist-sized fliers. You had only to reach for something and it would scuttle helpfully closer to your hand. The machines must have been crude compared to what had existed before the plague, but I still felt like I’d wandered into a room animated by poltergeists.
‘That’s right; sit down,’ Zebra said, easing my transition onto her couch. ‘And just lie still. I’ll be back in a moment.’
‘Believe me, I’m not going anywhere in a hurry.’
She disappeared from the room, and I lolled in and out of consciousness, for all that I was unwilling to surrender myself to sleep so easily. No more Sky dreams. When Zebra returned she had removed her coat, and she carried two glasses of something hot and herbal. I let it run down my throat, and while I couldn’t say it actively improved the way I felt, it was an improvement on the gallons of Mulch rainwater which I had already consumed.
Zebra had not returned alone: gliding behind her had come one of her larger ceiling-tracked servitors, a multi-limbed white cylinder with an ovoid glowing green face alive with flickering medical readouts. The machine descended until it could bring its sensors into play on my leg, chirruping and projecting status graphics as it diagnosed the severity of the wound.
‘Well? Do I live or die?’
‘You’re lucky,’ Zebra said. ‘The gun she used against you? It was a low-yield laser; a duelling weapon. It’s not designed to do any real harm unless it touches vital organs, and the beam’s finely collimated, so the surrounding tissue damage is pretty minimal.’
‘You could have fooled me.’
‘Well, I never said it wouldn’t hurt like hell. But you’ll live, Tanner.’
‘Nonetheless,’ I said, grimacing as the machine probed the entry wound with minimal gentleness, ‘I don’t think I’ll be able to walk on it.’
‘You won’t have to. At least not until tomorrow. The machine can heal you while you sleep.’
‘I’m not sure I feel like sleeping.’
‘Why — have you got a problem with it?’
‘It might surprise you, but yes, actually I have.’ She looked at me blankly, so I decided there was no harm in telling her about the indoctrinal virus. ‘They could have cleaned it out in Hospice Idlewild, but I didn’t want to wait. So now I get a quick trip into Sky Haussmann’s head every time I fall asleep.’ I showed her the scab of blood in the middle of my palm.
‘A man with a wound, come to our mean streets to right some wrongs?’
‘I’ve come to finish some business, that’s all. But you’ll understand the idea of sleeping doesn’t exactly fill me with overwhelming enthusiasm. Sky Haussmann’s head isn’t a pleasant place to spend any great length of time.’
‘I don’t know much about him. It would be ancient history even if it wasn’t another planet as well.’
‘It doesn’t feel like ancient history to me. It feels like he’s slowly worming his way into me, like a voice that keeps getting louder and louder in my head. I met a man who had the virus before I did — in fact, he probably gave it to me. He was pretty far gone. He had to surround himself with Sky Haussmann iconography or he started shaking.’
‘That doesn’t have to happen here,’ Zebra said. ‘Has the indoctrinal virus been around for a few years?’
‘It depends on the strain, but the viruses themselves are an old invention.’
‘Then you might be in luck. If the virus showed up in Yellowstone’s medical databases before the plague hit, the servitor will know about it. It might even be able to synthesise a cure.’
‘The Mendicants thought it would take a few days to take effect.’
‘They were probably being over-cautious. A day, perhaps two — that should be all the time it takes to flush it out. If the robot knows about it.’ Zebra patted the white machine. ‘But it will do its best. Now will you think about sleeping?’
I had to find Reivich, I told myself. That meant not wasting any time at my disposal; not a single hour. I had already wasted half a night since arriving in Chasm City. But it would take more than another couple of hours to track him down, I knew. Days, perhaps. I would only last that time if I allowed my recent injuries some time to heal. It would be sweet irony if I dropped dead of fatigue just as I was about to kill Reivich. For him, anyway. I wouldn’t be laughing.