‘We’ve seen it enough times over the years,’ Duscha said. ‘It infects a small fraction of every batch of slush… every group of sleepers we get from Sky’s Edge. At first, of course, we were mystified. We knew something about the Haussmann cults — needless to say, we don’t approve of the way they’ve appropriated the iconography of our own belief system — but it took us a long time to realise there was a viral infection mechanism, and that the people we were seeing were victims rather than cultists.’
‘It’s a blessed nuisance,’ Amelia said. ‘But we can help you, Tanner. I take it you’ve been dreaming about Sky Haussmann?’
I nodded, but said nothing.
‘Well, we can flush out the virus,’ Duscha said. ‘It’s a weak strain, and it will run its course with time, but we can speed up the process if you wish.’
‘If I wish? I’m surprised you haven’t flushed it out already.’
‘Goodness, we’d never do that. After all, you might have willingly chosen infection. We’d have no right to remove it in that case.’ Duscha patted the robot, which retracted its screen and clicked its way outside again, moving like a delicate metal crab. ‘But if you want it removed, we can administer the flushing therapy immediately.’
‘How long will it take to work?’
‘Five or six days. We like to monitor the progress, naturally — sometimes it needs a little fine-tuning.’
‘Then it’ll have to work its way out, I’m afraid.’
‘On your own head be it,’ Duscha said, tutting. She stood up from the bedside and left in a huff, her robot following obediently.
‘Tanner, I…’ Amelia began.
‘I don’t want to talk about it, all right?’
‘I had to tell her.’
‘I know, and I’m not angry about that. I just don’t want you to try and talk me out of leaving, understand?’
She said nothing, but the point was well made.
Afterwards I spent half an hour with her on some more exercises. We worked almost in silence, giving me plenty of time to think about what Duscha had shown me. I’d remembered Red Hand Vasquez by then and his assurance that he was no longer infectious. He was the most likely source of the virus, but I couldn’t rule out having picked it up by sheer bad luck when I was in the bridge, in the vicinity of so many Haussmann cultists.
But Duscha had said it was a mild strain. Maybe she was right. So far, all I had to show for it was the stigma and the two nocturnal dreams I’d had. I wasn’t seeing Sky Haussmann in broad daylight, or having waking dreams about him. I didn’t feel any lingering obsession with Sky, or any hint of one; no desire to surround myself with paraphernalia relating to his life and times; no sense of religious awe at the mere thought of him. He was just what he’d always been: a figure from history, a man who had done a terrible thing and been terribly punished for it, but who could not be easily forgotten because he’d also given us the gift of a world. There were older historical figures who had mixed reputations, their deeds painted in equally murky shades of grey. I wasn’t about to start worshipping Haussmann just because his life was rerunning itself when I slept. I was stronger than that.
‘I don’t understand why you’re in so much of a hurry to leave us,’ Amelia said while we took a break, pushing a wet strand of hair away from her brow. ‘It took you fifteen years to get here — what’s a few more weeks?’
‘I guess I’m just not the patient type, Amelia.’ She looked at me sceptically, so I tried to offer some justification. ‘Look, those fifteen years never happened for me — it seems like only yesterday that I was waiting to board the ship.’
‘The point still applies. Your arriving a week or two later will make blessedly little difference.’
But it would, I thought. It would make all the difference in the world — but there was no way Amelia could know the whole truth. All I could do was act as casually as possible when I answered her.
‘Actually… there is a good reason for me to leave as soon as possible. It won’t have shown in your records, but I’ve remembered that I was travelling with another man who must already have been revived.’
‘That’s possible, I suppose, if the other man was put aboard the ship earlier than you.’
‘That’s what I was thinking. In fact, he might not have passed through the Hospice at all, if there were no complications. His name is Reivich.’
She seemed surprised, but not suspiciously so. ‘I remember a man with that name. He did come through here. Argent Reivich, wasn’t it?’
I smiled. ‘Yes; that’s him.’
EIGHT
Argent Reivich.
There must have been a time when the name meant nothing to me, but it was hard to believe now. For too long the name — his name; his continued existence — had been the defining fact of my universe. I well remembered when I’d first heard it, however. It was the night at the Reptile House I taught Gitta how to handle a gun. I thought back to that time as I showed Amelia how to defend herself against Brother Alexei.
Cahuella’s palace on Sky’s Edge was a long, low H-shaped building surrounded by overgrown jungle on all sides. Rising from the roof of the palace was another H-shaped storey, but slightly smaller in all its dimensions, so that it was surrounded on all sides by a flat, walled terrace. From the vantage point of the terrace, the hundred metres or so of cleared land surrounding the Reptile House were not visible at all unless you stood at the wall and looked over the edge. The jungle, rising high and dark, seemed to be on the point of inundating the terrace’s wall like a thick green tide. At night the jungle was a black immensity drained of any colour, filled with the alien sounds of a thousand native lifeforms. There was no other human settlement of any kind for hundreds of kilometres in any direction.
The night I taught Gitta was unusually clear, the sky flecked with stars from tree-top to zenith. Sky’s Edge had no large moons, and the few bright habitats which orbited the planet were below the horizon, but the terrace was lit by scores of torches, burning in the mouths of golden hamadryad statues set on stone pedestals along the wall. Cahuella had an obsession with hunting. His ambition was to catch himself a near-adult hamadryad, rather than the single immature specimen he’d managed to bag the previous year and which now lived deep below the Reptile House.
I hadn’t long been in his employment on that hunting trip, and that was the first time I had seen his wife. Once or twice she had handled one of Cahuella’s hunting rifles, but with no sign that she had ever touched a weapon before that trip. Cahuella had asked me to give her a few impromptu shooting lessons while we were in- country, which I had, and while she had improved, it was clear that Gitta was never going to be any kind of expert shot. It hardly mattered; she had no interest in hunting and while she had endured the trip with quiet stoicism, she could not share Cahuella’s primal enthusiasm for killing.
Soon even Cahuella realised that he was wasting his time trying to turn Gitta into another hunter. But he still wanted her to know how to use a gun — something smaller now, for the purposes of self-defence.
‘Why?’ I said. ‘You hire people like me so people like Gitta won’t have to worry about their own safety.’
We had been alone at the time, down in one of the empty vivarium chambers. ‘Because I’ve got enemies, Tanner. You’re good, and the men under you are good as well — but they’re not infallible. A single assassin could still break through our defences.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But anyone that good would also be good enough to take out either of you without you even knowing it was about to happen.’
‘Someone as good as you, Tanner?’
I thought about the defences I had arranged around and within the Reptile House. ‘No,’ I answered. ‘They’d need to be a hell of a lot better than me, Cahuella.’
‘And are there people like that out there?’
‘There’s always someone better than you. It’s just a question of whether anyone’s prepared to pay them for their services.’
He rested a hand on one of the empty amphibian cases. ‘Then she needs this more than ever. A chance at
