We passed through another series of production labs, and then were led into a rough-walled office where a wizened old man lay — or sat, it wasn’t immediately clear — before an enormous, battered metal desk. The man was in a kind of wheelchair: a brutish, black, armoured contraption which was simmering gently, steam whispering out of leaking valves. Feedlines reached from the chair back into the wall. Presumably it could be decoupled from them when he needed to move around, gliding on the skeletal, curved-spoke wheels from which his chair was suspended.
The man’s body was hard to make out under its layers of aluminised blanketing. Two exquisitely bony arms emerged, the left placed across his thigh, the right toying with the army of black control levers and buttons set into one arm of the chair.
‘Hello,’ Zebra said. ‘You must be the man.’
He looked at each of us in turn. The man’s face was skin draped over bone, worn almost parchment-thin in places, so that he had a strangely translucent quality to him. But there was still an aura of handsomeness to him, and his eyes, when they finally looked in my direction, were like two piercing chips of interstellar ice. His jaw was strong, set almost contemptuously. His lips quivered as if he were on the verge of replying.
Instead, his right hand moved across the array of controls, depressing levers and pushing buttons with a dexterity that surprised me. His fingers, though they were thin, looked as strong and dangerous as the talons of a vulture.
He lifted his hand from the levers. Something started happening inside the chair, a rapid noisy clatter of mechanical switches. When the clatter stopped the chair began to speak, synthesising his words with a series of chime-like whistles which — if you concentrated — could be understood.
‘Self-evidently. What can I do for you?’
I stared at him in wonder. I had been assuming that Gideon would be many things, but I had never imagined anything like this.
‘You can fix us the drinks Ratko promised,’ I said.
The man nodded — the movement was economical, to say the least — and Ratko went to a cupboard set into a rocky niche in one corner of the office. He came back with two glasses of water. I drank mine in one gulp. It didn’t taste too bad, considering it had probably been steam only a little while earlier. Ratko offered something to Zebra and she accepted with clear misgivings, thirst obviously suppressing concerns that we might be poisoned. I put the empty glass down on his battered metal desk.
‘You’re not quite what I was expecting, Gideon.’
Quirrenbach nudged me. ‘This isn’t Gideon, Tanner. This is, well…’ and then he trailed off before adding weakly, ‘The man, like I said.’
The man punched a new set of orders into the chair. There was more clattering — it went on for about fifteen seconds — before the voice began to pipe out again, ‘No, I’m not Gideon. But you’ve probably heard of me. I made this place.’
‘What,’ said Zebra. ‘This maze of tunnels?’
‘No,’ he said, after another pause while the chair processed the words. ‘No. Not this maze of tunnels. This whole city. This whole planet.’ He had programmed a pause at that point. ‘I am Marco Ferris.’
I remembered what Quirrenbach had just told me about the man having an unusual belief system. Well, this certainly fitted the bill. But I couldn’t help but feel some sneaking empathy with the man in the steam-driven wheelchair.
After all, I wasn’t exactly sure who I was any more.
‘Well, Marco,’ I said. ‘Answer a question for me. Are you running this place, or is Gideon in charge? In fact, does Gideon even exist?’
The chair cluttered and clacked. ‘Oh, I am definitely running this place, Mister…’ He dismissed my name with a minute wave of his other hand; too much trouble to stop mid-sentence and query me. ‘But Gideon is here. Gideon has always been here. Without Gideon, I would not be here.’
‘Well, why don’t you take us to see him?’ Zebra said.
‘Because there is no need. Because no one gets to see Gideon without excellent reason. You do all your business through me, so why involve Gideon? Gideon is just the supplier. He doesn’t know anything.’
‘We’d still like a word with him,’ I said.
‘I’m sorry. Not possible. Not possible at all.’ He backed the chair away from the desk, the huge curved-spoke wheels rumbling on the floor.
‘I still want to see Gideon.’
‘Hey,’ said Ratko, stepping forward to interpose between myself and the man who thought he was Marco Ferris. ‘You heard the man, didn’t you?’
Ratko moved, but he was an amateur. I dropped him, leaving him moaning on the floor with a fractured forearm. I motioned to Zebra to lean down and help herself to the gun Ratko had been about to pull. Now we were both armed. I pulled out my own weapon, while Zebra aimed the other gun at Ferris, or whoever the man really was.
‘Here’s the deal,’ I said. ‘Take me to Gideon. Or take me to Gideon weeping in agony. How does that sound?’
He pushed and tugged at another set of controls, causing the chair to unplug itself from its steam feedlines. I suppose there could have been weapons set into the chair, but I didn’t think they would be fast enough to do him much good.
‘This way,’ Ferris said, after another, briefer period of clattering.
He took us along more tunnels, spiralling downwards again. The chair propelled itself along with a series of rapid puffs, Ferris steering it expertly through narrow chicanes of rock. I wondered about him. Quirrenbach — and perhaps Zebra — appeared to accept that he was delusional. But then if he wasn’t who he claimed, who was he?
‘Tell me how you got here,’ I said. ‘And tell me what it has to do with Gideon.’
More clattering. ‘That’s a long story. Luckily it’s one I’ve often been asked to recount. That’s why I have this pre-programmed statement ready.’
The chair clattered some more and then the voice recommenced: ‘I was born on Yellowstone, created in a steel womb and raised by robots. That was before we could transport living people from star to star. You had to be grown from a frozen egg cell; coaxed to life by robots that had already arrived.’ Ferris had been one of the Amerikanos; that much I knew already. That period was such a long time ago — before even Sky Haussmann’s time — that, in my mind at least, it had begun to blend into a general historical background of sailing ships, conquistadors, concentration camps and black plagues.
‘We found the chasm,’ Ferris told me. ‘That was the odd thing. No one had seen it from Earth’s system, even with the best instruments. It was too small a feature. But as soon as we started exploring our world, there it was. A deep hole in the planet’s crust, belching heat and a mixture of gases we could begin to process for air.
‘It made very little sense, geologically. Oh, I’ve seen the theories — how Yellowstone must have been tidally stressed by an encounter with the gas giant in the distant past, and how all that heat energy in her core has to percolate to the surface, escaping through vents like the chasm. And perhaps there’s some truth in that, though it can’t be the whole story. It doesn’t explain the strangeness of the chasm; why the gases are so different to the rest of the atmosphere: warmer, wetter, several degrees less toxic. It was almost like a calling card. That, in fact, is exactly what it was. I should know. I went down into it to see what was at the bottom.’
He had gone in with one of the atmospheric explorers, spiralling deeper and deeper into the chasm until he was well below the mist layer. Radar kept him from smashing into the sides, but it was still hazardous, and at some point his single-seat craft had suffered a power lapse, causing it to sink even deeper. Eventually he had bottomed out, thirty kilometres beneath the surface. His ship had landed on a layer of lightly packed rubble which filled the entire floor of the chasm. Automated repair processes had kicked in, but it would take tens of hours before the ship could carry him back up to the surface.