He nodded at the row of scarlet vials. ‘One of which is something they call Dream Fuel.’
‘And this might be it?’
‘I don’t know, but it’s exactly the kind of thing I would expect our dear friend Vadim to be trading in.’
‘Where would he have got it from?’
‘I didn’t say I was an expert, Tanner. All I know is that it has some unpleasant side-effects and whatever authorities there are in this system don’t exactly encourage its use — or the possession of it, for that matter.’
‘It must have some uses, though.’
‘Yes — but exactly what they do with it, I don’t know. That device is a wedding gun, incidentally.’
He must have seen the blank look on my face.
‘It was a local custom for a husband and wife to exchange, in some fashion, actual neural material cultured from each other’s brains. They used that thing — the wedding gun — to implant the stuff into each other.’
‘They don’t do that anymore?’
‘Not since the plague, I think.’ He looked rueful. ‘Actually, come to think of it, there are lots of things they don’t do since the plague.’
When Quirrenbach had gone with his gains — back to ponder the next instalment in his symphony cycle, I hoped — I crossed over to Vadim’s network console. For the first time since departure I had weight again, as the Strelnikov executed a thrust burn, minutely adjusting its fall towards the Rust Belt. From somewhere else I heard low, saurian moans of structural protest, and couldn’t help wondering if I’d picked the one voyage which would end with the ship’s hull finally giving up the ghost. Presently, however, the groans and creaks subsided into the ship’s normal sonic background and I was able to concentrate on the matter at hand.
The console looked ancient, like something children would have laughed at in a museum. There was a flat screen surrounded by controls embossed with finger-worn icons, above an alphanumeric keyboard. I didn’t know what the state of the art around Yellowstone was, but this wasn’t it even by Sky’s Edge standards.
It would have to do.
I found the key which turned the console on, the screen stammering through a series of warm-up messages and adverts before displaying a complex tree of options. Shipboard data services. Realtime networks — the web of data streams within a light-second or so of the Strelnikov, so that normal conversations were possible. Deep system networks, with typical timelags ranging from seconds to tens of hours, depending on the complexity of the enquiry. There was no explicit possibility to access networks with response times longer than that, which made sense: any enquiry sent out to the system’s Kuiper Belt habitats would have returned a reply long after the sender had left the slowboat at journey’s end.
I entered the option for the deep system networks, waiting a few seconds while the screen busied itself with more advertising material. A tree of sub-menus appeared. News of arriving and departing starships, including an entry for the Orvieto. The Yellowstone system was still a busy interstellar hub, which also made a kind of sense. If the plague had struck in the last decade or so, many ships would have already been on their way here. It would take decades for news of the plague to spread out into the main volume of human-settled space.
I skimmed through the options.
The deep system networks carried comms traffic to and from the habitats in orbit around the system’s gas giants: typically mining stations and outposts for the more reclusive factions. There were Conjoiner nests, Skyjack enclaves and semi-automated military or experimental facilities. I searched in vain for any reference to the plague. Occasionally there was talk of containment procedures, or crisis management, but for the most part it looked as if the plague — or its consequences — had become so fundamental an aspect of life that there was seldom any need to refer to the thing itself.
The local networks told me a little more. Once or twice, at least, I found references to the crisis by name, and learned that they had given it a specific and chilling name: the Melding Plague. But most of the messages assumed total familiarity with the basic facts of the plague itself. There were references to Hermetics, and the Canopy, and the Mulch, and sometimes to something called the Game, but none of these terms were elaborated upon.
I had heard of the Canopy, though. That was where Amelia had said I’d stand a good chance of finding Reivich. It was a district of Chasm City.
But had she told me less than I had imagined?
I put the console into send mode and composed a query concerning the plague; a request for general information for newcomers. I couldn’t believe I was the first to want this information before being plunged into the thick of the Rust Belt, but it was also entirely possible that no one would bother replying to me, or that no kind of automated handling system was functioning now.
I sent my query, then stared at the console for a few seconds. The screen stared back at me, unchanging.
Nothing came.
Disappointed and still no closer to the truth, I went to the pockets of the coat I had taken from Vadim and pulled out the neatly stowed playback kit. The device almost assembled itself, the slim black parts sliding home with the pleasing precision of rifle components. The result was a skeletal black helmet, nubbed with field- generators and input ports, ornamented with luminous green and red cobras. A pair of stereoscopic eyepieces folded down from the helmet’s front, their rims formed from material that automatically conformed to the skin around the eye. A pair of earplugs functioned similarly, and there were even noseplugs for olfactory input.
I hefted the helmet, then placed it on my head.
The helmet gripped my scalp firmly, like a torture vice. The little eyepieces moved into position, glueing themselves around my sockets. Inside each was a high-resolution imaging system which was currently showing exactly the view I’d have seen had I not been wearing the helmet, except for a slight and probably deliberate graininess. To do much better I would have needed neural implants and a more sophisticated playback system, something that could interrogate and adjust brain signals with the finesse of a military trawl.
I opened my briefcase.
Inside, I found the cache of experientials I’d carried from Sky’s Edge, still wrapped in clear plastic. I removed the plastic and examined the six pen-like sticks, but there was nothing written on them to give any clue as to what they contained. Were they simply commodities to be traded, or did the sticks contain messages to me from my pre-amnesiac self?
There was a port in the brow of the helmet into which one inserted the metallic tip of the experiential, so that it stuck out like a thin horn. I took the first of my six and pushed it home.
A menu popped into existence ahead of me, giving options for entering the simulation at various points and with various artistic settings. I accepted the defaults and plunged into the experiential at random, making my choices with hand gestures. The helmet generated a low-level electric field which my body modified, enabling the system to read any large-scale movements.
Vadim’s room greyed out smoothly, a hiss of white-noise in my ears. The noise faded to near-silence, quieter than it had ever been aboard the slowboat. The grey lightened, shapes and colours emerging like phantoms out of fog.
I was in a jungle clearing, shooting enemy soldiers.
I was stripped to the waist, over-muscled, even for a soldier, paint daubed across my chest, with an old model of particle-beam rifle gripped in one hand, while my other hand held a smaller, slug-firing machine-gun. I’d handled similar weapons myself and I knew that it was physically impossible to fire either singlehandedly, let alone held out nearly at arm’s length. Both weapons chugged away as I doused them at an unending stream of enemy soldiers, who seemed perfectly willing to run screaming towards me from the bush, even though any one of them could have picked me off from cover with a single well-aimed shot. I was screaming as well. Maybe it was the effort of having to hold both those guns.
It was laughable, but I didn’t doubt that there’d be a market for something like it. There was a market for that kind of thing on Sky’s Edge, after all — and we already had a real war.
I tried the next one.
This time I was sitting inside a skeletally framed single-seat wheeler, racing it across a mud flat with a dozen or so other wheelers trying to sneak past me on either side. I’d entered this one with the experiential set to interactive, so I was able to steer the wheeler and throttle its turbine up and down. I played it for a few minutes,
