I helped myself to some more. ‘Better safe than sorry, that’s my philosophy.’
I continued searching — digging through more of the same junk and jewellery — until I found what looked like an experiential playback device. It was slimmer and sleeker than anything I’d ever seen on Sky’s Edge, cleverly engineered so that in its collapsed form it was no larger than a Bible.
I found a vacant pocket and slipped the unit home, along with a cache of experientials which I assumed might have some value in their own right.
‘This plague we were talking about…’ I said.
‘Yes?’
‘I don’t understand how it did so much damage.’
‘That’s because it wasn’t a biological one — I mean, not in the way we’d usually understand such things.’ He paused and stopped what he was doing. ‘Machines, that’s what it went for. Made almost all machines above a certain complexity level stop working, or start working in ways they were never meant to.’
I shrugged. ‘That doesn’t sound that bad.’
‘Not if the machines are merely robots and environmental systems, like the ones in this ship. But this was Yellowstone. Most of the machines were microscopic devices inside human beings, already intimately linked to mind and flesh. What happened to the Glitter Band was just symptomatic of something far more horrific happening on the human scale, in the same way that — say — the lights going out all over Europe in the late fourteenth century was indicative of the arrival of the Black Death.’
‘I’ll need to know more.’
‘Then query the system in your room. Or Vadim’s, for that matter.’
‘Or you could just tell me now.’
He shook his head. ‘No, Tanner. Because I know very little more than you. Remember, we both came in at the same time. On different ships, yes — but we were both crossing interstellar space when this happened. I’ve had little more time to adjust to it than you’ve had.’
Quietly and calmly, I said, ‘Where was it you came from?’
‘Grand Teton.’
His world was another of the original Amerikano colonies, like Yellowstone, Yosemite, Glacier and two or three others I couldn’t remember. They’d all been settled by robots four centuries ago; self-replicating machines carrying the templates necessary to construct living humans upon their arrival. None of those colonies had been successful, all of them failing after one or two subsequent generations. A few rare lineages might still be able to trace themselves back to the original Amerikano settlers, but the majority of people living on those worlds were descended from later colonisation waves, arriving by lighthugger. Most were Demarchist states, like Yellowstone.
Sky’s Edge, of course, was another case entirely. It was the only world that had ever been settled by generation ship.
There were some mistakes you didn’t make twice.
‘I hear Grand Teton’s one of the nicer places to live,’ I said.
‘Yes. And I suppose you’re wondering what brought me here.’
‘No, actually. Not really my business.’
He slowed in his rummaging through Vadim’s loot. I could see that my lack of curiosity was not something to which he was accustomed. I continued my investigations, silently counting the seconds before he broke his silence.
‘I’m an artist,’ Quirrenbach said. ‘Actually, a composer. I’m working on a symphony cycle; my life’s work. That’s what brings me here.’
‘Music?’
‘Yes, music — though that contemptible little word barely encapsulates what I have in mind. My next symphony will be a work inspired by nothing less than Chasm City.’ He smiled. ‘It was going to be a glorious, uplifting piece, celebrating the city in all its Belle Epoque splendour; a composition teeming with vitality and energy. Now, I think, it will have to be a darker piece entirely; Shostakovichian in its solemnity; a work weighed down by the crushing realisation that history’s wheel has finally turned and crushed our mortal dreams to dust. A plague symphony.’
‘And that’s what you’ve come all this way for? To scribble down a few notes?’
‘To scribble down a few notes, yes. And why not? Someone, after all, has to do it.’
‘But it’ll take you decades to get back home.’
‘A fact that has, surprisingly, impinged on my consciousness before you so kindly pointed it out. But my journey here is a mere prelude, occupying a span of time that will become inconsequential when set against the several centuries that I confidently expect to elapse before the work nears completion. I myself will probably age the better part of a century in that time — the equivalent of two or three whole working lives of any of the great composers. I shall be visiting dozens of systems, of course — and adding others to my itinerary as they become significant. There will almost certainly be more wars, more plagues, more dark ages. And times of miracle and wonder, of course. All of which will be grist to the mill of my great work. And when it is polished, and when I am not utterly disgusted and disillusioned with it, I will very probably find myself in my twilight years. I simply won’t have time to keep abreast of the latest longevity techniques, you see; not while I’m pouring my energies into my work. I’ll just have to take whatever’s easily available and hope I live to finish my magnum opus. Then, when I have tidied up the work, and achieved some form of reconciliation between the crude scribblings I have set down now and the undoubtedly masterful and fluid work I will be producing at the end of my life, I will take a ship back to Grand Teton — assuming it still exists — where I will announce the great work’s premiere. The premiere itself won’t be for another fifty or so years afterwards, depending on the extent of human space at that time. That will give time for word to reach even the most distant colonies, and for people to begin converging on Grand Teton for the performance. I will sleep while the venue is constructed — I already have something suitably lavish in mind — and an orchestra worthy of the event is assembled, or bred, or cloned — whichever the case may be. And when that fifty years is done, I will rise from slumber, step into the limelight, conduct my work and, in what little time remains to me, bask in a fame the like of which no living composer has ever or will ever know. The names of the great composers will be reduced to mere footnote entries; barely flickering embryo stars set against the gemlike brilliance of my own stellar conflagration. My name will ring down the centuries like a single undying chord.’
There was a long silence before I responded.
‘Well, you’ve got to have something to aim for, I suppose.’
‘I suppose you must think me monstrously vain.’
‘I don’t think the thought ever crossed my mind, Quirrenbach.’ While I was speaking I touched something at the back of one of the drawers. I’d been hoping to locate a weapon of some sort — something with a little more punch than the clockwork gun — but Vadim appeared to have managed without one. Still, I felt I had something. ‘This is interesting.’
‘What have you found?’
I pulled out a matte-black metal box the size of a cigar case, opening it to reveal six scarlet vials tucked into pouches. Set into the same case was something like an ornate steel hypodermic, with a gunlike handle, marked with a delicately painted bas-relief cobra.
‘I don’t know. Any thoughts?’
‘Not exactly, no…’ He examined the cache of vials with what looked like genuine curiosity. ‘But I’ll tell you one thing. It doesn’t look legal, whatever it is.’
‘More or less what I was thinking.’
As I reached to take back the cache, Quirrenbach said, ‘Why are you so interested in it?’
I remembered the syringe which had slipped from the pocket of the monk in Amelia’s cave. There was no way to tell for sure, but the substance I had seen in that syringe — admittedly in the dim light of the cave — looked much like the chemical in Vadim’s cache. I remembered, too, what Amelia had told me when I had asked her about the syringe: that it was something the monk should not have had in Idlewild. Some kind of narcotic, then — and perhaps prohibited not just in the Mendicant hospice but across the whole system.
‘I’m assuming this might open some doors for me.’
‘It might open a lot more than that,’ Quirrenbach said. ‘The very gates of hell, for a start. I’ve remembered something. Something I heard up in the parking swarm. Concerning some very nasty substances doing the rounds.’
