So why did I find it difficult to answer Chanterelle? Why did my tongue stumble on the obvious, and something else come to mind? Something that made me doubt that Cahuella had died?
Finally I said, ‘It never came to that. But I had to live with my shame. I guess that was a kind of punishment in its own right.’
‘But it didn’t have to have happened that way; not from Reivich’s perspective.’
We were passing through a part of the Canopy now that resembled a solid map of the alveoli in a lung: endlessly branching globules, bridged by dark filaments of what might have been coagulated blood.
‘How could it have been otherwise?’ I said.
‘Maybe Reivich spared you because with you it wasn’t personal. He knew that you were just an employee and that his argument wasn’t with you but with Cahuella.’
‘Nice idea.’
‘And just possibly the right one. Has it occurred to you that you don’t have to kill this man at all, and that you might owe him your life?’
I was beginning to tire of this particular line of debate.
‘No, it hadn’t — for the pure and simple reason that it’s completely irrelevant. I don’t care what Reivich thought of me when he decided to let me live — whether it was intended as a punishment or an act of mercy. It doesn’t matter at all. What matters is that he did kill Gitta, and that I swore to Cahuella that I’d avenge her death.’
‘Avenge her death.’ She smiled humourlessly. ‘It’s all so conveniently mediaeval, isn’t it? Feudal honour and bonds of trust. Oaths of fealty and vengeance. Have you checked the calendar recently, Tanner?’
‘Don’t even pretend to understand any of this, Chanterelle.’
She shook her head vehemently. ‘If I did, I’d start worrying about my sanity. What in hell’s name have you come here for — to satisfy some ridiculous promise, an eye for an eye?’
‘Now you put it like that, I don’t see it as being particularly laughable.’
‘No, it’s not remotely laughable, Tanner. It’s tragic.’
‘To you, maybe.’
‘To anyone with an angstrom of detachment. Do you realise how much time will have passed by the time you get back to Sky’s Edge?’
‘Don’t treat me like a child, Chanterelle.’
‘Answer my damned question.’
I sighed, wondering how I had let things get so far out of control. Had our friendship just been an anomaly; an excursion away from the natural state of things?
‘At least three decades,’ I replied, as if the time I was expressing was of no consequence at all, like a matter of weeks. ‘And before you ask, I’m well aware of how much could change in that time. But not the important things. They’ve already changed, and much as I wish they would, they won’t change back. Gitta’s dead. Dieterling’s dead. Mirabel’s dead.’
‘What?’
‘I said Cahuella’s dead.’
‘No, you didn’t. You said Mirabel’s dead.’
I watched the city slide by outside, my mind buzzing, wondering what kind of state my head must be in for a slip of the tongue like that. That wasn’t the kind of mistake you could easily ascribe to fatigue. The Haussmann virus was clearly having a worse effect on me than I’d dared assume: it had gone beyond simply infecting my waking hours with shards of Sky’s life and times and was beginning to interfere with my most basic assumptions about my own identity, undermining my perception of self. And yet… even that was a comforting assumption. The Mendicants had told me their therapy would burn out the virus before too long… yet the Sky episodes were becoming more insistent. And why would the Haussmann virus bother making me confuse events that had happened in my own past, rather than Sky’s? Why did it care if I confused Mirabel with myself?
No. Not Mirabel. Cahuella.
Disturbed — not wanting to remember the dream I’d had, of the time when I’d been looking down on the man in the white room with the missing foot — I tried to recapture the thread of the conversation.
‘All I’m saying is…’
‘What?’
‘All I’m saying is, that when I get back, I’m not expecting to find what I left. But it won’t be any worse. The people who mattered to me were already dead.’
The Haussmann virus was really screwing me up.
I was starting to see Sky as myself and Tanner Mirabel was increasingly becoming… what? A detached third person, not really me at all?
I remembered my confusion at Zebra’s, after I had been playing the chess game over in my mind, time and time again. How sometimes I appeared to win and sometimes I appeared to lose.
But it had always been the same game.
That must have been the start of it. The slip of the tongue just meant that the process had taken a step beyond my dreams, just like the Haussmann virus.
Disturbed, I tried to recapture the thread of the conversation.
‘All I’m saying is, when I get back, I’m not expecting to find what I left. But it won’t be any worse. The people who mattered to me were dead before I left.’
‘I think it’s about satisfaction,’ she said. ‘Like in the old experientials, where the nobleman throws down his glove and says he demands satisfaction. That’s how you function. I thought it was absurd at first, when I used to indulge in those experientials. I thought it was too comical to even be part of history. But I was wrong. It wasn’t just part of history. It was still alive and well, reincarnated in Tanner Mirabel.’ She had replaced her cat’s-eye mask now, an act which served to focus attention onto the sneer of her mouth, a mouth I suddenly wanted to kiss, even though I knew the moment — if it had ever existed — was gone for ever. ‘Tanner demands satisfaction. And he’s going to go to any lengths to get it. No matter how absurd. No matter how stupid or pointless, or how much of a prick he ends up making himself look.’
‘Please don’t insult me, Chanterelle. Not for what I believe in.’
‘It’s got nothing to do with belief, you pompous oaf. It’s just stupid male pride.’ Her eyes narrowed to slits and her voice took on a new vindictiveness which I still managed to find attractive, from some quiet retreat where I observed our argument like a neutral spectator. ‘Tell me one thing, Tanner. One little thing which in all of this you haven’t explained.’
‘Only the best for you, little rich girl.’
‘Oh, very incisive. Don’t give up the day job for the cut and thrust of debate, Tanner — your rapier wit might be too much for all of us.’
‘You were about to ask me a question.’
‘It’s about this boss of yours — Cahuella. He felt this urge to hunt for Reivich himself, when he learned that Reivich was moving south towards the — what did you call it? The Reptile House?’
‘Go on,’ I said, testily.
‘So why didn’t Cahuella feel he had to end the job? Surely the fact that Reivich killed Gitta would have made it even more of a personal thing for Cahuella. Even more a case of — dare I say it — demanding satisfaction?’
‘Get on with it.’
‘I’m wondering why I’m talking to you, and not Cahuella. Why didn’t Cahuella come here?’
I found it hard to answer, at least not to my own satisfaction. Cahuella had been a hard man, but he had never been a soldier. There were skills which I had learned on a level below recall, which Cahuella simply lacked — and would have taken half a lifetime to gain. He knew weapons, but he did not really know war. His understanding of tactics and strategy was strictly theoretical — he played the game well, and understood the subtleties buried in its rules — but he had never been thrown into the dirt by the concussion of a shell, or seen a part of himself lying beyond reach on the ground, quivering like a beached jellyfish. Experiences like that did not necessarily improve one — but they certainly changed one. But would any of those deficits have handicapped him? This was not war, after all. And I had hardly come well equipped for it myself. It was a sobering thought, but I found it hard to entirely dismiss the idea that Cahuella might have already succeeded by now.