Whether they had crossed land in crawlers or come skimming down through cloud layers, that first sight of the chasm could never have been anything but heart-stopping. Something had injured the planet, thousands of centuries earlier, and this great open wound had still not healed. Some, it was said, had made the descent into the depths, equipped only with fragile pressure suits, and had found treasures upon which empires might be founded. If so, they had been careful to keep those treasures to themselves. But it had not stopped others coming, other chancers and adventurers; around them had accreted the first hints of what would eventually become this city.
There was no universally accepted theory to explain the hole, although the surrounding caldera — in which Chasm City lay, sheltered from winds, and the predation of flash-floods and the encroachment of methane-ammonia glaciers — hinted at something fairly catastrophic, and recent, too, on the geologic timescale — recent enough not to have been erased by the processes of weathering and tectonic reshaping. Yellowstone had probably had a close encounter with its gas giant neighbour which had injected energy into the planet’s core, and the chasm was one of the means by which that energy was slowly being bled back towards space, but something must have opened this escape route in the first place. There were theories about tiny black holes slamming into the crust, or fragments of quark matter, but no one really knew what had happened. There were also rumours and fairytales: of alien digs beneath the crust, evidence that the chasm had in some sense been artefactual, if not necessarily deliberate. Perhaps those aliens had come here for the same reason that humans had, to tap the chasm for its energy and chemical resources. I could see very clearly the tentacular pipes which the city extended over the maw towards the bottom, reaching down like grasping fingers.
‘Don’t pretend you’re not impressed,’ Zebra said. ‘There are people who’d kill for a view like this. Come to think of it, I probably know people who have killed for a view like this.’
‘That doesn’t really surprise me.’
Zebra had entered the room silently. At first glance she appeared to be naked, but then I saw that she was fully clothed, but in a gown of such translucence that it might as well have been made of smoke.
She carried my Mendicant clothes in her arms, washed and neatly folded.
I could see now that she was very thin. Beneath the blue-grey film of her gown black stripes covered her entire body, following the curves of her form, shadowing her genital region. The stripes simultaneously suppressed and emphasised the curves and angles of her body, so that she metamorphosed with each step she took towards me. Her hair ran in a stiff furrow down to the small of her back, ending above the striped swell of her buttocks. When she walked, she glided, like a ballet dancer, her small hooflike feet more for the purpose of anchoring her to the ground than supporting her weight. I could see now that had she chosen to play the Game, she would have made a hunter of considerable skill. She had, after all, hunted me — if only for the purposes of ruining her enemies’ entertainment.
‘On the planet where I come from,’ I said, ‘this would be considered provocative.’
‘Well, this isn’t Sky’s Edge,’ she said, placing my clothes on the couch. ‘It’s not even Yellowstone. In the Canopy, we do more or less what we please.’ She ran the palms of her hands down her hips.
‘Excuse me if this sounds rude, but were you born this way?’
‘Not remotely. I haven’t always been female, for what it’s worth, and I doubt that I’ll stay this way for the rest of my life. I certainly won’t always be known as Zebra. Who’d choose to be pinned down by one body, one identity?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, carefully, ‘but on Sky’s Edge it was beyond most people’s means to modify themselves in any way at all.’
‘Yes. I gather you were all too busy killing each other.’
‘That’s a fairly reductive summary of our history, but I don’t suppose it’s too far from the truth. How much do you know about it, anyway?’ Not for the first time since she had entered the room, I was reminded of the troubling dream of Cahuella’s camp, and how Gitta had looked at me in the dream. Gitta and Zebra did not have a great deal in common, but in my confused state of waking, I found it easy to transfer some of Gitta’s attributes onto Zebra: her lithe build, her high cheekbones and dark hair. It was not that I did not find Zebra alluring in her own right. But she was stranger than any creature — human or otherwise — that I’d ever shared a room with.
‘I know enough,’ Zebra said. ‘Some of us here are quite interested in it, in a perverse way. We find it amusing and quaint and horrifying at the same time.’
I nodded at the people caught in the wall, the tableau that I’d imagined was a piece of artwork.
‘I find what happened here fairly horrifying.’
‘Oh, it was. But we lived through it, and those of us who survived never really knew the plague at its most ferocious.’ She was standing close to me now, and I felt myself aroused by her for the first time. ‘Compared to the plague, war seems very alien. Our enemy was our city, our own bodies.’
I took one of her hands and held it in my own, pressing it against my chest. ‘Who are you, Zebra? And why do you really want to help me?’
‘I thought we went through that last night.’
‘I know, but…’ There was no real conviction in my voice. ‘They’re still after me, aren’t they? The hunt won’t have ended just because you brought me to the Canopy.’
‘You’re safe while you stay here. My rooms are electronically shielded, so they won’t be able to get a fix on your implant. Besides, the Canopy itself is out of bounds for the Game. The players don’t want to draw too much attention to themselves.’
‘So I have to stay here for the rest of my life?’
‘No, Tanner. Just another two days and then you’re safe.’ She removed her hand from mine and used it to caress the side of my head, finding the bulge where the implant lay. ‘The thing Waverly put inside your head is wired to stop transmitting after fifty-two hours. That’s how they prefer to play.’
‘Fifty-two hours? One of the little rules Waverly mentioned?’
Zebra nodded. ‘They experimented with different durations, of course.’
It was too long. My Reivich trail was cold enough as it was, but if I waited another two days, I wouldn’t stand a chance.
‘Why do they play?’ I said, wondering whether her answer would accord with what Juan, the rickshaw kid, had told me.
‘They’re bored,’ Zebra said. ‘Many of us here are postmortal. Even now, even with the plague, death is still only a remote worry for most of us. Maybe not as remote as it was seven years ago, but still not the animating force it must be to a mortal like yourself. That small, almost silent voice urging you to do something today because tomorrow might be too late… it just isn’t there for most of us. For two hundred years Yellowstone’s society hardly changed. Why create a great work of art tomorrow when you can plan an even better one for fifty years hence?’
‘I understand,’ I said. ‘Some of it, anyway. But it should be different now. Didn’t the plague make most of you mortal again? I thought it screwed around with your therapies; interfered with the machines in your cells?’
‘Yes, it did. The medichines had to be instructed to dismantle themselves, turning to harmless dust, or they killed you. It didn’t stop there, either. Even genetic techniques were difficult to implement, because they relied so heavily on medichines to mediate the DNA rescripting procedures. About the only people who didn’t have a problem were the ones who’d inherited extreme-longevity genes from their parents, but they were never a majority.’