‘A bit of both, probably. But you are fascinating, Tanner. Worse than that, you’re a puzzle I’ve only half solved.’
‘Half already? You’d better slow down. I’m not as unfathomable as you think. Scratch the surface and you might be surprised at how little lies beneath. I’m just—’
What was I going to tell her — just a soldier, just a man keeping his word? Just a fool who did not even know when it was time to break it?
I stood up, conspicuously removing my hand from the gun pocket. ‘I could use your help, Chanterelle, that’s all. But there’s not much more to me than meets the eye. If you want to show me something of this place, I’d be grateful. But you can walk away now.’
‘Do you have any money, Tanner?’
‘A little. Nothing that would amount to much here, I’m afraid.’
‘Show me what you have.’
I pulled out a fistful of greasy Ferris notes, laying them in their sad entirety on the table. ‘What does that buy me, another cup of tea if I’m lucky?’
‘I don’t know. It’s enough to buy you another set of clothes, which I think you could use if you want to blend in at least approximately.’
‘Do I look that out of place?’
‘You look so out of place, Tanner, you might be in serious danger of starting a fashion. But somehow I don’t think that’s quite what you had in mind.’
‘Not really, no.’
‘I don’t know Escher Heights well enough to recommend the best, but I saw some boutiques on the way in which we should be able to outfit you.’
‘I’d like to look at that tank first, if you don’t mind.’
‘Oh, I know what that is. That’s Methuselah. I’d forgotten they kept him here.’
I knew the name, vaguely, and I had the impression it had already been half-remembered once this evening. But Chanterelle was leading me away. ‘We can come back later, when you don’t stand out so much.’
I sighed and put up my hands in surrender. ‘You can show me the rest of Escher Heights as well.’
‘Why not. The night’s still young, after all.’
Chanterelle made some calls while we walked to a nearby boutique, chasing up her friends and establishing that they were all alive and safe in the Canopy, but she did not leave a message for any of them, and then never mentioned them again. That, I supposed, was how it went: many of the people I saw in Escher Heights would be cognisant of the Game, and might even follow it avidly, but none would admit it to themselves, beyond the private parlours where the sport’s existence was acknowledged and celebrated.
The boutique was staffed by two gloss-black bipedal servitors, far more sophisticated than any I had seen in the city so far. They kept oozing insincere compliments, even when I knew that I looked like a gorilla which had accidentally broken into a theatrical supplier’s. With Chanterelle’s guidance, I settled on a combination which wouldn’t offend or bankrupt me. The trousers and jacket were of similar cut to the Mendicant clothes I now gratefully discarded, but were cut from fabrics which were wildly ostentatious by comparison, all dancing metallic threads in coruscant golds and silvers. I felt conspicuous, but when we left the boutique — Vadim’s coat billowing raffishly behind me — people gave me no more than a fleeting glance, rather than the studied suspicion I’d elicited before.
‘So,’ Chanterelle said, ‘are you going to tell me where you’re from?’
‘What have you worked out for yourself?’
‘Well, you’re not from around here. Not from Yellowstone; almost certainly not from the Rust Belt; probably not from any other enclave in the system.’
‘I’m from Sky’s Edge,’ I said. ‘I came in on the Orvieto. Actually, I assumed you’d have figured out that much from my Mendicant clothes.’
‘I did, except the coat confused me.’
‘This old thing? It was donated to me by an old friend in the Rust Belt.’
‘Sorry, but no one donates a coat like that.’ Chanterelle fingered one of the lustrous, rough-cut patches which had been quilted over it. ‘You have no idea what this signifies, have you?’
‘All right; I stole it. From someone who had stolen it himself, I expect. A man who had worse coming to him.’
‘That’s fractionally more plausible. But when I first saw it, it made me wonder. And then when you mentioned Dream Fuel…’ She had lowered her voice to speak the last two words, barely breathing them.
‘Sorry, you’ve lost me completely. What does Dream Fuel have to do with a coat like this?’
But even as I said it I remembered how Zebra had hinted at the same connection. ‘More than you seem to realise, Tanner. You asked questions about Dream Fuel which made you look like an outsider, and yet you were wearing the kind of coat which said you were part of the distribution system; a supplier.’
‘You weren’t telling me everything you knew about Dream Fuel then, were you?’
‘Almost everything. But the coat made me wonder if you were trying to trick me, so I was careful what I said.’
‘So now tell me what else you know. How big is the supply? I’ve seen people inject themselves with a few cubic centimetres at a time, with maybe a hundred or so ccs in reserve. I’m guessing use of Dream Fuel’s restricted to a relatively small number of people; probably you and your élite, risk-taking friends and not many others. A few thousand regular users across the city, at the very maximum?’
‘Probably not far off the mark.’
‘Which would imply a regular supply, across the city, of — what? A few hundred ccs per user per year? Maybe a million ccs per year across the whole city? That isn’t much, really — a cubic metre or so of Dream Fuel.’
‘I don’t know.’ Chanterelle looked uncomfortable discussing what was obviously an addiction. ‘That seems about right. All I know is the stuff’s harder to get hold of than it used to be a year or two ago. Most of us have had to ration our use; three or four spikes a week at the most.’
‘And no one else has tried manufacturing it?’
‘Yes, of course. There’s always someone trying to sell fake Dream Fuel. But it’s not just a question of quality. It’s either Fuel or it isn’t.’
I nodded, but I didn’t really understand. ‘It’s obviously a seller’s market. Gideon must be the only person who has access to the right manufacturing process, or whatever it is. You postmortals need it badly; without it you’re dead meat. That means Gideon can keep the price as high as he likes, within reason. What I don’t see is why he’d restrict the supply.’
‘He’s raised the price, don’t you worry.’
‘Which might simply be because he can’t sell as much of it as he used to, because there’s a bottleneck in the manufacturing chain; maybe a problem with getting the raw materials or something.’ Chanterelle shrugged, so I continued, ‘All right, then. Explain what the coat means, will you?’
‘The man who donated you that coat was a supplier, Tanner. That’s what those patches on your coat mean. Its original owner must have had a connection to Gideon.’
I thought back to when Quirrenbach and I had searched Vadim’s cabin, reminding myself now that Quirrenbach and Vadim had been secret accomplices. ‘He had Dream Fuel,’ I said. ‘But this was up in the Rust Belt. He can’t have been that close to the supply.’
No, I added to myself, but what about his friend? Perhaps Vadim and Quirrenbach had worked together in more ways than one: Quirrenbach was the real supplier and Vadim merely his distributor in the Rust Belt.
I already wanted to speak to Quirrenbach again. Now I’d have more than one thing to ask him about.