No one gets here without an invitation.
We had to be treated like the honoured guests that we were.
‘I called ahead, of course,’ Quirrenbach said, while we waited in the airlock for our documents to be processed. ‘Reivich knows we’re here.’
‘I hope you warned him about Tanner.’
‘I did what I could,’ he said.
‘What does that mean?’
‘It means Tanner’s definitely here. Reivich won’t have turned him away.’
I was sweating as it was; worried that my fake identity would not be enough to get me into Refuge. But now the sweat on my brow turned into droplets of ice. ‘What in hell’s name is he playing at?’
‘Reivich must feel that he and Tanner still have some business to attend to. He’ll have invited him.’
‘He’s insane. Tanner might kill him just for kicks, even if his real argument’s with me. Don’t forget my own imperative was to complete a mission; to keep my word that I’d track down Reivich. I don’t know whether that impulse came from Tanner or Cahuella. But I wouldn’t like to stake my life on it.’
‘Keep your voice down,’ Quirrenbach said. ‘Those robots will have sprayed listening devices over every square angstrom of this room. You’re not here for a spot of quiet bloodshed, remember.’
‘Strictly tourism,’ I said, grimacing.
The armoured outer door reopened, rust flakes chipping in free-fall from its hinges.
A third-tier official came in, not even armed this time, nor clad in muscular armour. He wore a look of pained evasiveness, homing in on me like a heat-seeking slug. ‘Mister Haussmann? I’m sorry to inconvenience you, but we’re experiencing an administrative problem in processing your application for entry into Refuge.’
‘Really?’ I said, trying to sound remotely surprised. I could hardly complain: Sky Haussmann had got me out of Yellowstone’s atmosphere, which was all that could be reasonably expected of him.
‘I’m sure it’s nothing serious,’ the official said, sincerity chiselled into his face. ‘We frequently experience conflict between our records and those of the rest of the system; it’s to be expected after the recent unpleasantness.’
Recent unpleasantness. He was talking about the plague.
‘I’m sure the matter can be resolved with a slightly more thorough examination, a few physiological cross-checks; nothing too complicated.’
I bridled. ‘What kind of physiological cross-check, exactly?’
‘A retinal scan, that kind of thing.’ The official was snapping his fingers at something or someone beyond our view. Almost immediately another robot entered the airlock, a dove-grey sphere politely devoid of any nasty weapons, bearing the Mixmaster sigil.
‘I’m not submitting to a retinal scan,’ I said, as reasonably as I could. I knew it wouldn’t take a machine to spot the oddity of my eyes. A human barely had to glance at me in the right light to see there was something strange about the way I looked back at them.
My remark had the same effect on the official as a slap across the cheek, causing an almost tangible blanching. ‘I’m sure we can come to some kind of arrangement…’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I very much doubt that, I’m afraid.’
‘Then I’m afraid—’
Quirrenbach stepped between us. ‘Let me handle this,’ he mouthed, before speaking aloud to the man. ‘Excuse my colleague; he’s a little nervous around officialdom. There’s been an honest mistake, as I’m sure you appreciate. Will you accept the word of Argent Reivich?’
The man looked flustered. ‘Of course… provided I have his guarantees… and that it’s in person…’
He hadn’t needed to ask who Argent Reivich was, I noticed.
Quirrenbach snapped his fingers at me. ‘Stay here; I’ll square things with him. It shouldn’t take more than half an hour.’
‘You’re going to ask Reivich to sign me in?’
‘Yeah,’ Quirrenbach said, without a hint of humour. ‘Ironic, isn’t it.’
I didn’t have to wait long.
Reivich appeared on a screen in the holding pen where the Refuge officials held those pending a decision on entry. It was not too much of a shock to see his face, since I had already met Voronoff, who looked exactly the same. But there was something unique about the real Reivich; some essence Voronoff had not succeeded in capturing. It was nothing I could quite place. I suppose it was just the difference between someone playing a game — however earnestly — and someone whose intentions are deadly serious.
‘This is quite a turn-up,’ Reivich said. He looked pale but healthy, a white tunic with a high collarless neck his only visible item of clothing. He was backdropped by a mural of interlocking algebraic symbols, denoting part of the mathematic theory of Transmigration. ‘You asking me for entry, and me agreeing to it.’
‘You let Tanner in,’ I said. ‘Are you sure that was wise?’
‘No, but I’m sure it’ll prove interesting. Assuming he’s who you say he is, and you’re who you say you are.’
‘One or both of us might want to kill you.’
‘Do you?’
It was an admirable question; straight to the point. I gave him the dignity of appearing to think it over before answering. ‘No, Argent. I did once, but that was before I knew who I was. Finding out you’re not who you think you are does rather change one’s priorities.’
‘If you’re Cahuella, then my men killed your wife.’ His voice was thin and reedy, like a child’s. ‘I’d have thought you were even more keen to have me killed.’
‘Tanner killed Cahuella’s wife,’ I said. ‘The fact that he thought he was going to save her doesn’t really alter things.’
‘Are you Cahuella or not, in that case?’
‘I might have been, once. Now Cahuella doesn’t exist.’ I looked hard into the screen. ‘And frankly, I don’t think anyone’s going to mourn him, are they?’
Reivich pursed his lips distastefully. ‘Cahuella’s weapons butchered my family,’ he said. ‘He sold arms which murdered my loved ones. For that I could gladly have tortured him.’
‘If you’d killed Gitta, that would have been more torture than you could ever have inflicted on him with knives and electrodes.’
‘Would it? Did he really love her that much?’
I examined my memories, in the hope of answering him. In the end all I could offer was, ‘I don’t know. He was a man capable of a lot of things. All I do know is that Tanner loved her at least as much as Cahuella.’
‘But Gitta did die. What did that do to Cahuella?’
‘It made him very hateful,’ I said, thinking back to the white room, which still lingered slightly beyond recall, like a nightmare not quite brought to mind after waking. ‘But he took that hatred out on Tanner.’
‘Tanner lived though, didn’t he?’
‘Some part of him,’ I said. ‘Not necessarily any part we’d call human.’
Reivich was silent for a minute, the difficulty of our meeting obviously weighing hard on him. Finally he said, ‘Gitta. She was the only innocent in any of this, wasn’t she? The only one who didn’t deserve any of it.’
There was no arguing with that.
The hollow interior of Refuge was locked in perpetual gloom, like a city in blackout. Unlike the gloom of Chasm City, this was deliberate; a state of affairs willed into being by the groups which claimed tenancy here. There was nothing resembling a native ecology. The interior was unpressurised apart from trace gases, and every square inch of the walls was occupied by sealed, windowless structures, linked by an intestinal tangle of transit tubes. The dimly glowing tubes were the only source of illumination, which wasn’t saying much — and if it had not been for the enhanced biology of my eyes, I doubted that I’d have been able to see anything at all.