Zebra said, ‘And it worked?’
In my mind’s eye I watched Gitta fall to the floor, not via the knifeblade, but through Tanner’s errant shot. ‘The man lived,’ I said, after a few moments. ‘Tanner’s knowledge of anatomy was faultless. It came from being a professional killer, you see. They teach assassins which organs they need to hit to ensure a kill. But the knowledge can just as easily be inverted; to find the safest route for a beam to take through a body.’
‘You make it all sound so surgical,’ Chanterelle said.
‘That’s just what it was.’
I told them the Mixmaster’s scan had found a healed, elongated wound running through my body, consistent with a beam weapon entering my back and exiting my abdomen, at a positive angle. The wound had shown up on his scan like the dissipating vapour trail of an aircraft.
‘But that means…’ Zebra started to say.
‘Shall I spell it out for you? It means I’m the man Tanner Mirabel was working for. Cahuella.’
‘This gets worse,’ Quirrenbach said.
‘Hear him out,’ Zebra said. ‘I was there when we visited the Mixmaster, remember. He isn’t making all of this up.’
I turned to Chanterelle. ‘You saw the genetic changes which had been worked on my eyes. Cahuella had that done to himself; it was work he paid the Ultras to perform on him. Hunting was a hobby of his.’
But there was more to it than that, wasn’t there? Cahuella wanted to be able to see at night because he hated darkness, hated the memory of being small and alone and forgotten, waiting in the nursery.
‘You’re still talking of Cahuella like he’s some third person,’ Zebra said. ‘Why? Aren’t you sure that you’re him?’
I shook my head, remembering kneeling in the rain; every absolute blasted away. That sense of total dislocation was still there, but in the intervening time I’d contained it; built a scaffold around it, a structure — however rickety — which would at least allow me to function in the present.
‘Circumstantially, yes. But if I have his memories, they’re fragmented — no more clear than Tanner’s.’
‘Let’s get this straight,’ said Quirrenbach. ‘You haven’t got a fucking clue who you are, is that it?’
‘No,’ I said, admiring my own calm. ‘I’m Cahuella. I’m completely sure of it now.’
‘Tanner wants you dead?’ Zebra said, as we left Chanterelle’s car at the perimeter of the station concourse. ‘Even though you and he used to be close?’
Images of a white room — of a man crouched naked on its floor — flashed across my mind’s eye like glimpses in a strobe light, gaining tiny increments of clarity with each repetition.
‘Something very bad happened,’ I said. ‘The man I am — Cahuella — did something very bad to Tanner. I’m not sure I blame Tanner for wanting revenge.’
‘I don’t blame him, or you, or whoever it was,’ Chanterelle said. ‘Not if you — Tanner — shot him.’
She frowned, but I couldn’t blame her for that. Keeping track of these shifting layers of identity and memory was like holding the weave of a complex tapestry in mind.
‘Tanner missed,’ I said. ‘His shot was meant to save Cahuella’s wife, but he ended up killing her instead. I think it may have been the first and last mistake of his career. Not bad, when you think about it. And everything he did was in the heat of the moment.’
‘You sound like you don’t really blame him for coming after you,’ Zebra said.
Our group trooped into the concourse, which was noticeably busier than when we had last been here, only a few hours before. Nothing resembling officialdom had yet claimed Dominika’s tent, although there were also no customers anywhere near it. I presumed her body was still alive, still suspended above the couch where she worked her acts of neural exorcism; still gilded by snakes. Word of her death must surely have spread far into the Mulch by now, but the sheer illegality of it — cutting against all the unspoken laws of who could and could not be touched — still served to enforce a zone of exclusion around the tent.
‘I don’t think anyone would blame him,’ I said. ‘Because what I did to him…’
The white room returned — except this time I shared the perspective of the crouched man; felt his nakedness and his excruciating fear; a fear that opened up rifts of emotion he’d never imagined before, like a man glimpsing hallucinogenic new colours.
Tanner’s perspective.
The creature stirred in the alcove, uncoiling itself with languid patience, as if — in some simple loop of its tiny brain — it understood that its prey was not going anywhere in a hurry.
The juvenile was not a large hamadryad; it must have been birthed from its tree-mother in the last five years, judging by the roseate hue of its photovoltaic hood, furled around its head like the wings of a resting bat. They lost that colour as they neared maturity, since it was only fully grown hamadryads which were long enough to reach the tree-tops and unfurl their hoods. If the creature was allowed to grow, in a year or two the roseate shade would darken to a spangled black: a dark quilt studded with the iridophore-like photovoltaic cells.
The coiled thing lowered itself to the floor, like a bundle of stiff rope tossed from a ship to the quayside. For a moment it rested, its photovoltaic hood opening and closing softly and slowly, like the gills of a fish. It was very large indeed, now that he could see it more closely.
He had seen hamadryads dozens of times in the wild, but never closely, and never in their entirety; only a glimpse between trees from a safe distance. Even though he had never been near one without possessing a weapon which could easily kill it, there had never been an encounter which was not without a little fear. He understood. It was natural, really: the human fear of snakes, a phobia written into the genes by millions of years of prudent evolution. The hamadryad was not a snake, and its ancestors did not remotely resemble anything which had ever lived on Earth. But it looked like a snake; it moved like a snake. That was all that mattered.
He screamed.
FORTY
‘You may have let me down in the end,’ I said, mouthing a silent message to Norquinco, who was far beyond any means of hearing me, ‘but I can’t deny that you did an exemplary job.’
Clown smiled at that.
‘Armesto, Omdurman? I hope you’re watching this. I hope you can see what I am about to do. I want it to be clear. Crystal clear. Do you understand?’
Armesto’s voice came though after the timelag, as if halfway to the nearest quasar. It was faint because the other ships had sloughed all non-essential communications arrays: hundreds of tonnes of redundant hardware.
‘You’ve burned all your bridges, son. There’s nothing left for you to do now, Sky. Not unless you manage to persuade any more of your viables to cross the River Styx.’
I smiled at the classical reference. ‘You still don’t seriously think I murdered some of those dead, do you?’
‘No more than I think you murdered Balcazar.’ Armesto was silent for a few moments; silence broken only by static; cracks and pops of interstellar noise. ‘Make of it what you want, Haussmann…’
My bridge officers looked awkwardly at him when Armesto mentioned the old man, but none of them were going to do more than that. Most of them must have already had their suspicions. They were all loyal to me now; I had bought their loyalty, promoting non-achievers to positions of prominence in the crew hierarchy, just as dear Norquinco had tried to blackmail me into doing. They were weak, for the most part, but that did not concern me. With the layers of automation Norquinco had bypassed, I could practically run the Santiago myself.
Perhaps it would come to that soon.