I didn’t put down the weapon; not immediately.
‘My name is Tanner Mirabel,’ I said. ‘I arrived from Sky’s Edge yesterday. I was looking for someone and wandered into the wrong part of the Mulch by mistake. I was captured by a man called Waverly and forced to take part in the Game.’
‘And you managed to escape, with a gun like that and a cable-car? Quite a trick for a newcomer, Tanner Mirabel.’ He spoke my name as if it were an oath.
‘I’m wearing Mendicant clothes,’ I said. ‘And as you’ll have noticed, my accent is that of someone from Sky’s Edge. I speak a little Canasian, if that’s easier for you.’
‘Norte is fine. We pigs aren’t as stupid as you all like to think.’ He paused. ‘Your accent got you that gun? Quite an accent, in that case.’
‘People helped me,’ I said. I was about to mention Zebra by name, then thought better of it. ‘Not everyone in the Canopy agrees with the Game.’
‘That’s true,’ the man said. ‘But they’re still Canopy, and they still piss on us.’
‘He could have been helped,’ another voice said, a woman’s this time. Looking into the gloom, I saw a taller, female-looking pig approach the man, carefully picking her way through the detritus of my arrival, her expression unrevealing, as if she did this every day. She reached out and took his elbow. ‘I’ve heard of such people. Sabs, they call themselves. Saboteurs. What does he look like, Lorant?’
The first pig — Lorant — snatched off the goggles and offered them to the woman. She was strangely pretty, human hair framing her snouted, doll-like face in greasy curtains. She pushed the goggles to her eyes for a moment, nodding. ‘He doesn’t look Canopy. He’s human, for a start — as their God intended. Except for his eyes, although maybe that’s a trick of the light.’
‘It’s no trick,’ Lorant said. ‘He can see us without goggles. I noticed that when you arrived. His gaze locked onto you.’ He retrieved the goggles from the female pig and said, in my direction, ‘Perhaps some of what you have told us is true, Tanner Mirabel. Not all of it though, I’d wager.’
You would not lose your bet, I thought, almost mouthing the words. ‘I don’t intend you any harm,’ I said, and then made a grand show of placing the weapon down on the bamboo, reasonably sure I could reach for it if the pig made a move towards me with the cleaver. ‘I’m in a lot of trouble and the Canopy people will return to finish me off before very long. I’m not sure I haven’t made enemies of the saboteurs as well, since I stole from them.’ I gambled that admitting theft from the Canopy would not harm me in Lorant’s eyes, but might actually do my cause some good. ‘There’s something else, too. I don’t know anything about people like you — good or otherwise.’
‘But you know that we’re pigs.’
‘It’s hard to miss, isn’t it?’
‘Like our kitchen. You didn’t miss that either, did you?’
‘I’ll pay for it,’ I said. ‘I have currency, as well.’ I reached into the voluminous pockets of Vadim’s coat, dredging a wad from the depths. ‘This isn’t much,’ I said. ‘But it might cover some of your costs.’
‘Except this isn’t our property,’ Lorant said, studying my outstretched hand. He would have to step forward if he wished to accept it, and at the moment neither of us was prepared to commit to that level of trust. ‘The man who owns this kitchen is away visiting his brother’s shrine in the Monument to the Eighty. He won’t be back until sundown. He’s not a man disposed to leniency or forgiveness. And then I will have to trouble him with news of the damage you have done, and he will naturally turn his anger on me.’
I offered him half of another wad, cutting deep into the reserves I had taken from Zebra. ‘Maybe this will ease your troubles, Lorant. That’s another ninety or hundred Ferris marks. Anything more, I might begin to suspect you were fleecing me.’
He might have smiled at that point; I could not be sure. ‘I can’t shelter you, Tanner Mirabel. Too dangerous.’
‘What he means,’ the other pig said, ‘is that there will be an implant in your head. The Canopy people will know where you are, even now. And if you have angered them, that puts all of us in danger.’
‘I know about the implant,’ I said. ‘And that’s what I need you to help me with.’
‘Help you get it out?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I know someone who can do that for me. Her name is Madame Dominika. But I’ve no idea how to get to her. Could you take me there?’
‘Do you have any idea where that would be?’
‘Grand Central Station,’ I said.
The pig looked around the wreckage of the kitchen. ‘Well, I don’t suppose I am going to be doing a great deal of cooking today, Tanner Mirabel.’
They were refugees from the Rust Belt.
Before that, they’d been refugees from somewhere else — the cold, cometary fringes of another solar system. But the cook and his wife — I couldn’t think of them as just pigs any more — had no real idea how the first of their kind had ever got there, just theories and myths. The one that sounded the most likely was that they were distant, abandoned descendants of a centuries-old programme in genetic engineering. Pigs’ organs had once been used for human transplant surgery — there were more similarities than differences between the two species — and it seemed likely that the pigs had been an experiment to make the animal donors even more humanlike by blending human genes into their own DNA. Perhaps it had gone much further than anyone had intended, so that a spectrum of genes had accidentally transferred intelligence to the pigs. Or perhaps that had been the idea all along, with the pigs an aborted attempt at producing a servile race with none of the nasty drawbacks of machines.
At some point, the pigs must have been abandoned; left out in deep space to fend for themselves. Perhaps it was just too much bother to systematically hunt them down and kill them, or perhaps the pigs themselves had broken free of the labs and established their own secretive colonies. By then, Lorant said, they were more than one species anyway, each having a different mix of human and pig genes, and there were groups of pigs which lacked the ability to form words, even though they had all the right neural mechanisms in place. I remembered the pigs I’d met before being rescued by Zebra; how the first of them had made grunting sounds at me which had almost seemed like an attempt at language. Perhaps the attempt had been a lot closer than I’d imagined.
‘I met some of your kind,’ I said. ‘Yesterday.’
‘You can call us pigs, you know. We aren’t bothered. It’s what we are.’
‘Well, these pigs appeared to be trying to kill me.’
I told Lorant what had happened, sketching in the broad details without explaining exactly what I had been doing trying to get to the Canopy in the first place. He listened intently as I spoke, then began to shake his head, slowly and sadly.
‘I don’t think they really wanted you, Tanner Mirabel. I think they probably wanted the people coming after you. They would have recognised that you were being chased. They were probably trying to persuade you to come with them, to shelter.’
I thought back to what had happened, and though I wasn’t totally convinced, I did begin to wonder if things had really happened the way Lorant said.
‘I shot one of them,’ I said. ‘Not fatally, but the leg would have needed surgery.’
‘Well, don’t feel too bad about it. They probably weren’t little angels, you know. We get a lot of problems around here with gangs of young pigs, raising hell and causing damage.’