‘We’ve other business to attend to before we have that luxury,’ Shallice tells him. ‘You’re not our only client around Yellowstone. ’ The Ultra’s eyes narrow to calculating slits. ‘As a matter of fact, we have another hamadryad to deliver.’ Before Grafenwalder responds, the Ultra raises a servo-assisted hand. ‘Not a fully grown sample like your own. A much less mature animal. Yours will still be unique in that sense.’
Anger rises in Grafenwalder like a hot, boiling tide. ‘But it won’t be the only hamadryad around Yellowstone, will it?’
‘The other one will probably die. It will certainly not grow any larger.’
‘You misled me, Captain. You promised exclusivity.’
‘I did no such thing. I merely said that no one else would be offered an adult.’
Grafenwalder knows Ultras too well to doubt that Shallice is telling the truth. They may be unscrupulous, but they usually stay within the strict letter of a contract.
‘This other collector… you wouldn’t mind telling me who it is, would you?’
‘That would be a violation of confidentiality.’
‘Come now, Captain — if someone else gets their hands on a hamadryad, they’re hardly going to keep it a secret. At least not within the Circle.’
Shallice weighs this point for several long moments, his alloy ribs flexing with each laboured breath. ‘The collector’s name is Ursula Goodglass. She owns a habitat in the low belt. Doubtless you know the name.’
‘Yes,’ Grafenwalder says. ‘Vaguely. She’s been nosing around the Circle for some time, but I wouldn’t call her a full member just yet. Her collection’s nothing to speak of, by all accounts.’
‘Perhaps that will change when she has her hamadryad.’
‘Not when the Circle learns there’s a bigger one here. Did you let her think she’d be getting something unique as well, Captain?’
Shallice makes a sniffing sound. ‘The contract was watertight.’
On the video feed, the animal is being coaxed deeper into its pen. Now and then it rears up to strike against its tormentors, moving with deceptive speed.
‘Let’s not play games, Captain. How much is she paying you for her sample?’
‘Ten thousand.’
‘Then I’ll pay you fifteen not to hand it over, on top of what I’m already paying you.’
‘Out of the question. We have an arrangement with Goodglass.’
‘You’ll tell a little white lie. Say it didn’t thaw out properly, or that something went wrong afterwards.’
Shallice thinks this over, his hatchet-head cocking this way and that inside the metal chassis of the exoskeleton. ‘She might ask to see the corpse—’
‘I absolutely insist on it. I want her to know what she nearly got her hands on.’
‘A deception will place us at considerable risk. Fifteen would not be sufficient. Twenty, on the other hand—’
‘Eighteen, Captain, and that’s as high as I go. If you walk out of here without accepting the deal, I’ll contact Goodglass and tell her you were at least giving it the time of day.’
‘Eighteen it is, then,’ Shallice says, after a suitable pause. ‘You drive a hard bargain, Mister Grafenwalder. You would make a good Ultra.’
Grafenwalder shrugs off the insult and reaches out a hand to Captain Shallice. When his fingers close around the Ultra’s, it’s like shaking hands with a cadaver.
‘I’d love to say it’s been a pleasure doing business.’
Later, he watches their shuttle depart his habitat and thread its way through the debris-infested Rust Belt, moving furtively between the major debris-swept orbits. He wonders what the Ultras make of the old place, given the changes that have afflicted it since their last trip through the system.
Good while it lasted, as people tend to say these days.
Oddly, though, Grafenwalder prefers things the way they are now. All things told, he came out well. Neither his body nor his habitat had depended on nanomachines, so it was only the secondary effects of the plague that were of concern to him. The area in which he had invested his energies prior to the crisis — the upgrading of habitat security systems — now proves astonishingly lucrative amongst the handful of clients able to afford his services. In lawless times, people always want higher walls.
There’s something else, though. Ever since the plague hit, Grafenwalder has slept easier at night. He’s at a loss to explain why, but the catastrophe — as bad as it undoubtedly was for Yellowstone and its environs — seems to have triggered some seismic shift in his own peace of mind. He remembers being anxious before; now — most of the time, at least — he only has the memory of anxiety.
At last his radar loses track of the Ultra shuttle, and it’s only then that he realises his error. He should have asked to see the other hamadryad before paying the captain to kill it. Not because he thinks it might not ever have existed — he’s reasonably sure it did — but because he has no evidence at all that it wasn’t already dead.
He permits himself a bittersweet smile. Next time, he won’t make that kind of mistake. And at least he has his hamadryad.
Grafenwalder walks alone through his bestiary. It’s night, by the twenty-six-hour cycle of Yellowstone standard time, and the exhibits are mostly dimmed. The railed walkway that he follows glows a subdued red, winding between, under and over the vast cages, tanks and pits. Many of the creatures are asleep, but some stir or uncoil at his approach, while others never sleep. Things study his passage with dim, resentful intelligence: just enough to know that he is their captor. Occasionally something throws itself at its restraints, clanging against cage bars or shuddering against hardened glass. Things spit and lash. There are distressing calls; laughable attempts at vocalisation.
Not all of the animals are animals, technically speaking. About half the exhibits in the bestiary are creatures like the hamadryad: alien organisms that evolved on the handful of known life-sustaining worlds beyond the First System. There are slime-scrapers from Grand Teton; screech-mats from Fand; more than a dozen different organisms from the jungles of Sky’s Edge, including the hamadryad itself.
But the other half of the collection is more problematic. It’s the half that could get him into serious trouble if the agents of the law came calling. It’s where he keeps the real monsters: the things that might once have been human. There is the specimen he once bought from some other Ultras: a former crewman, apparently, who had been transformed far beyond the usual Ultra norms. Major areas of brain function had been trowelled out and replaced with crude neural modules, until the only remaining instinct was a slathering urge to mutilate and kill. His limbs are viciously specialised weapons, his bone growth modified to produce horns and armoured plaques. Grafenwalder can only guess that the man was meant to be some kind of berserker, to be used in acts of piracy where energy weapons might be unwise. Eventually he must have become unmanageable. Now it amuses Grafenwalder to provoke the man into futile killing frenzies.
Then there is the hyperpig variant his contacts located for him in the bowels of Chasm City: one of a kind, apparently; a rare genetic deviation from the standard breed. The woman’s right side is perfectly human, but her left side is all pig. Brain function lies somewhere between animal and human. She sometimes tries to talk to him, but the compromised layout of her jaw renders her attempts at speech as frenzied, unintelligible grunts. At other times, neural implants leave her docile, easily controlled. On the rare occasions when he has guests, Grafenwalder has her serve dinner. She shuffles in presenting her human side, then turns to reveal her true ancestry. Grafenwalder treasures his guests’ reactions with a thin, observant smile.