work out how to dispose of the gun.’
I nodded.
‘You miss it so badly, I’ll buy you one for your birthday.’
He looked at me for a long moment, as if on the point of saying something more, then nodded and turned away from the thread. I watched him leave the chamber, exiting back into the shadowed gloom of the concourse. He began to adjust the coloration of his coat as he walked; his broad-backed figure shimmered as it receded.
I turned around myself, facing the elevator, waiting for my ride. And then slipped my hand into my pocket, resting it against the diamond-hard coolness of the gun.
THREE
‘Sir? Dinner will be served on the lower deck in fifteen minutes, if you intend to join the other passengers.’
I jumped, not having heard anyone’s footsteps on the staircase which led up to the observation deck. I’d assumed I was completely alone. All the other passengers had retired to their rooms immediately upon boarding — the journey just long enough to justify unpacking their luggage — but I had gone up onto the observation deck to watch our departure. I had a room, but nothing that I needed to unpack.
The ascent had begun with ghostly smoothness. At first it hardly seemed like we were moving at all. There had been no sound, no vibration; just an eerily smooth glide moving imperceptibly slowly, but which was always gaining speed. I had looked down, trying to see the cultists, but the angle of the view made it impossible to see more than a few stragglers, rather than the mass that must have been directly below. We had just been passing through the ceiling iris when the voice had startled me.
I turned around. A servitor had spoken to me, not a man. It had extensible arms and an excessively stylised head, but instead of legs or wheels, its torso tapered to a point below the machine’s waist, like a wasp’s thorax. It moved around on a rail attached to the ceiling, to which the robot was coupled via a curved spar protruding from its back.
‘Sir?’ It began again, this time in Norte. ‘Dinner will be served…’
‘No; I understood you first time.’ I thought about the risk involved in mixing with real aristocrats, then decided that it was probably less than that involved in remaining suspiciously aloof. At least if I sat down with them I could provide them with a fictitious persona which might pass muster, rather than allowing their imaginations free rein to sketch in whatever details they wished to impose on this uncommunicative stranger. Speaking Norte now — I needed the practice — I said, ‘I’ll join the others in a quarter of an hour. I’d like to watch the view for a little while.’
‘Very well, sir. I shall prepare a place for you at the table.’
The robot rotated around and glided silently out of the observation deck.
I looked back to the view.
I’m not sure quite what I was expecting at that point, but it couldn’t have been anything at all like the thing that confronted me. We had passed through the upper ceiling of the embarkation chamber, but the anchorpoint terminal was much taller than that, so that we were still ascending through the upper reaches of the building. And it was here, I realised, that the cultists had achieved the highest expression of their obsession with Sky Haussmann. After his crucifixion they had preserved the body, embalming it and then encasing it in something that had the grey-green lustre of lead, and they had mounted him here, on a great, upthrusting prow that extended inward from one interior wall until it almost touched the thread. It made Haussmann’s corpse look like the figurehead fixed beneath the bowsprit of a great sailing ship.
They had stripped him to the waist, spread his arms wide and fixed him to a cross-shaped alloy spar. His legs were bound together, but a nail had been driven through the wrist of his right hand (not the palm; that was a detail the stigma-inducing virus got wrong) and a much larger piece of metal had been rammed through the upper part of his severed left arm. These details, and the expression of numb agony on Haussmann’s face, had been rendered mercifully indistinct by the encasing process. But while it was not really possible to read his features, every nuance of his pain was written into the arc of his neck; the way his jaw was clenched as if in the throes of electrocution. They should have electrocuted him, I thought. It would have been kinder, no matter the crimes he had committed.
But that would have been too simple. They were not just executing a man who had done terrible things, but glorifying a man who had also given them a whole world. In crucifying him, they were showing their adoration as fervently as their hate.
It had been like that ever since.
The elevator tracked past Sky, coming within metres of him, and I felt myself flinching; wishing that we could be clear of him as quickly as possible. It was as if the vast space was an echo chamber, reverberating with endless pain.
My palm itched. I rubbed it against the hand-rail, closing my eyes until we were free of the anchorpoint terminal; rising through night.
‘More wine, Mr Mirabel?’ asked the foxlike wife of the aristocrat sitting opposite me.
‘No,’ I said, dabbing my lips politely with the napkin. ‘If you don’t mind, I’ll retire. I’d like to watch the view while we climb.’
‘That’s a shame,’ the woman said, pursing her own lips in a pout of disappointment.
‘Yes,’ said her husband. ‘We’ll miss your stories, Tanner.’
I smiled. In truth, I’d done little more than grimace my way through an hour of stilted smalltalk while we dined. I had salted the conversation with the odd anecdote now and then, but only to fill the awkward silences which fell across the table when one or other of the participants made what might, within the ever-shifting loom of aristocratic etiquette, be construed as an indelicate remark. More than once I had to resolve arguments between the northern and southern factions, and in the process of doing so I had become the group’s default speaker. My disguise must not have been absolutely convincing, for even the northeners seemed to realise that there was not automatically any affiliation between me and the southerners.
It hardly mattered, though. The disguise had convinced the woman in the ticket booth that I was an aristocrat, making her reveal more than she might have done otherwise. It had allowed me to blend in with these aristocrats, too — but sooner or later I would be able to discard it. I was not a wanted man, after all — just someone with a shady past and a few shady connections. There had been no harm in calling myself Tanner Mirabel, either — it was a lot safer than trying to come up with a convincing aristocrat lineage out of thin air. It was, thankfully, a neutral name that had no obvious connotations, aristocratic or otherwise. Unlike the rest of my dinner companions, I couldn’t trace my lineage back to the Flotilla’s arrival, and it was more than likely that the Mirabel name had arrived on Sky’s Edge half a century after that. In aristocrat terms I was posing as a parvenu lout — but no one would have been gauche enough to allude to that. They were all long-lived, tracing their lineages not just back to the Flotilla, but to the passenger manifest, with only one or two intervening generations — and it was perfectly natural to assume that I possessed the same augmented genes and access to the same therapeutic technologies.
But while the Mirabels probably had arrived on Sky’s Edge sometime after the Flotilla, they hadn’t brought any kind of germline longevity fix with them. Perhaps the first generation had lived a longer-than-normal human lifespan, but that advantage had not been passed to their offspring.
I didn’t have the money to buy it off the shelf, either. Cahuella had paid me adequately, but not so well that I could afford to be stung by the Ultras to that extent. And it almost didn’t matter. Only one in twenty of the planet’s population had the fix anyway. The rest of us were mired in a war, or scraping a living in the war’s interstices. The main problem was how to survive the next month, not the next century.
Which meant that the conversation took a decidedly awkward turn as soon as the subject matter turned to longevity techniques. I did my best to just sit back and let the words flow around me, but as soon as there was any kind of dispute I was pushed into the role of adjudicator. ‘Tanner will know,’ they said, turning to me to offer some definitive statement on whatever had provoked the stalemate.
