‘I don’t know how I’ve managed without your brilliant shards of wit, Mirabel,’ Quirrenbach said, with a long-suffering sigh. ‘And, incidentally — not that you care — the symphony happens to be coming along rather splendidly, thank you.’
‘That wasn’t a cover?’
‘Ask me about it in a hundred years.’
‘If we’re going to talk about people who hesitate to kill others,’ Voronoff said, ‘you might crop up in the discussion, Mirabel. You could have dropped me when we first met around Methuselah. I’m rather puzzled that you didn’t at least try. And don’t say there was a fish in the way. You may be many things, Mirabel, but sentimental isn’t one of them.’
He was right: I had hesitated, much as I preferred not to admit it to myself. In another life — at least on another world — I would have dropped Reivich (or Voronoff) almost before I had mentally acknowledged their presence. There would have been no ethical debates about the value of an immortal fish.
‘Maybe I knew you weren’t the right man,’ I said.
‘Then again, maybe you just didn’t have the nerve.’ It was dark, but I caught the quick flash of Quirrenbach’s grin. ‘I know your background, Mirabel. We all do. You were pretty good, once, back on Sky’s Edge. Trouble was, you just didn’t know when to pack it in.’
‘If I’m so washed up, why the special attention?’
‘Because you’re a fly,’ Voronoff said. ‘Sometimes they need swatting.’
The vehicle readied itself as we approached, a door opening in one side like a drooling tongue, plush steps set into its inner surface. A pair of heavies shadowed the door, packing indecently large weapons. Any lingering thoughts I had entertained of resistance vanished at that point. They were professionals. I had a feeling they wouldn’t even allow me the dignity of jumping over the side; that if I tried it they would put a pair of slugs in my spine on the way down.
‘Where are we going?’ I asked, not sure if I really wanted to know the answer, or if I could even expect an honest reply.
‘Space,’ Quirrenbach said. ‘For a meeting with Mister Reivich.’
‘Space?’
‘Sorry to disappoint you, Mirabel. But Reivich isn’t in Chasm City at all. You’ve been chasing shadows.’
THIRTY-THREE
I looked at Zebra. She looked at me. Neither of us said anything.
The vehicle into which the heavies escorted us had the reek of newness, leather trim sweating sumptuousness. There was an isolated rear compartment with six seats and a moundlike central table, with soft muzak filling the air and elegant neon designs worked into the ceiling. Voronoff and one of the heavies sat opposite us, weapons still at readiness. Quirrenbach and the other man entered the front compartment, visible only as smoky shadows through the partition.
The car rose very smoothly, with a soft snicking from the roof arms, like someone crocheting at great speed.
‘What did he mean, space?’ I asked.
‘A place called Refuge. One of the high orbital carousels,’ Voronoff said. ‘Not that it makes any real difference to you. I mean, it’s not as if you’re just tagging along for the ride, is it?’
Someone had mentioned Refuge since my arrival in the city, but I could not quite place the reference.
‘What happens when we get there?’
‘That’s for Mister Reivich to know and you to find out. You might call it negotiation. But don’t expect to take too many bargaining chips to the table, Mirabel. From what I hear, you’re all cleaned out.’
‘I’ve still got a few surprises up my sleeve.’ But I sounded about as convincing as a drunk tramp boasting of his sexual prowess. Through the side windows I watched the hovering crystalline mass of Escher Heights recede, and — not inconsequentially — I saw the other car, the vehicle which did not belong to Zebra, unfurl its arms to maximum extension and commence following us at a polite distance.
‘What now?’ I asked, ignoring the heavy. ‘Your game’s up, Voronoff. You’re going to have to find a new mode of pleasure.’
‘It isn’t about pleasure, you idiot. It’s about pain.’ He leaned forward, imposing his bulk across the table. He looked like Reivich, but his body language and manner of speaking was all wrong. There was no hint of a Sky’s Edge accent and his physicality would have been alien to Reivich’s aristocracy. ‘It’s about pain,’ he repeated. ‘Because pain is what it keeps away. Do you understand?’
‘Not really, but go ahead.’
‘You don’t usually think of boredom as something similar to pain. That’s because you’ve only been exposed to it in relatively small doses. You don’t know its true colour. The difference between the boredom you know and the boredom I know is like the difference between touching snow and putting your hand in a vat of liquid nitrogen.’
‘Boredom isn’t a stimulus, Voronoff.’
‘I’m less sure,’ he said. ‘There is, after all, a part of the human brain which is responsible for the sensation we call boredom. You can’t argue with that. And it must logically be made active by some external stimulus, just like the brain centre for taste or sound.’ He raised a hand. ‘I anticipate your next point. That’s one of my talents, you see — anticipation. You might say it’s symptomatic of my condition. I’m a neural net which is so well adapted to its input that it hasn’t evolved in years. But to return to the point in hand. You were doubtless going to say that boredom is an absence of stimulus, not the presence of a particular one. I say there is no difference; that the glass is both half empty and half full. You hear silence between notes; I hear music. You see a pattern of black on white; I see a pattern of white on black. More than that, in fact — I see both.’ He grinned again, like a maniac who had been chained in a dungeon for years and was now having a meaningful conversation with his own shadow. ‘I see everything. You can’t help it when you reach my — what shall I call it? — depth of experience?’
‘You’re quite mad, aren’t you?’
‘I’ve been mad,’ Voronoff said, apparently not taking it as an insult. ‘I’ve been through madness and come out the other side. Now being mad would bore me as much as sanity.’
I knew he was not mad, of course — at least not screamingly insane. If he had been, he would have been no use to Reivich as a lure. Voronoff had to have some residual grasp on reality. His mental state was almost certainly unlike anything I had ever experienced — and I had certainly known boredom — but it would be lethal to assume he was in anything other than absolute control of his faculties.
‘You could end it all,’ I said, helpfully. ‘Suicide can’t be the hardest thing to arrange in a city like this.’
‘People do,’ Zebra said. ‘People like Voronoff. They don’t call it suicide, of course. But they suddenly take an unhealthy interest in activities with a very low survival-probability, like diving into the gas giant or saying hello to the Shrouders.’
‘Why not, Voronoff?’ And then it was my turn to smile. ‘No, wait. You almost did it, didn’t you? Posing as Reivich. You were hoping I’d kill you, weren’t you? A way out of the pain with something approaching dignity. The wise old immortal gunned down by the out-of-town thug, just because he happened to take on the persona of a murderous fugitive?’
‘With no bullets? That’d be a trick worth dying to see, Mirabel.’
‘Good point.’
‘Except,’ Zebra said, ‘you realised you liked it too much.’
Voronoff looked at her with ill-concealed venom. ‘Liked what too much, Taryn?’
‘Being hunted. It actually eased the pain, didn’t it?’