keeping ahead of the pack, until I badly misjudged the angle of a sandbank and lost control. Another car slammed into mine and there was an instant of painless carnage before I was back at the starting line again, gunning my engine. Difficult to tell how this one would sell. They might lap it up as a unique Sky’s Edge product, or they might find the whole thing irredeemably quaint.
I continued through the remaining four experientials, but the results were just as disappointing. Two of them were fictionalised episodes from my planet’s past: one a melodrama about Sky Haussmann’s life aboard the Santiago — really the last thing I needed — while the other was a love story set during the time of Sky’s imprisonment, trial and execution, but in which Sky was only very a minor background character. The other two experientials were adventures, both of which involved snake-hunting, though whoever had scripted them had only a passing knowledge of hamadryad biology.
I’d expected more: some kind of specific message from my past. Although I remembered a great deal more now than I’d done upon first waking in Idlewild, there were still aspects of my past that were unclear; things that refused to snap into focus. I could have lived with these absences if I’d been stalking Reivich in familiar territory, but even my knowledge of the city ahead of me was inaccurate.
I turned to the cache of experientials I had taken from Vadim. They were all blank except for a tiny silver motif near the top of each. I wasn’t going to learn anything about myself, but I’d at least learn a little more about what passed for entertainment in Chasm City. I slipped one of them in.
It was a mistake.
I was expecting pornography, or mindless violence — something from the extremes of human experience, but still recognisable as such. What I got was so strange that at first it was difficult to articulate what I was experiencing and I began to wonder if there was some compatibility problem between the experientials and the helmet, so that the wrong parts of my brain were being stimulated. But they’d all come from the same source: Vadim’s room.
This was how it was meant to be.
It was dark, dank, squalid, and there was a feeling of terrible, crushing claustrophobia — an emotion so intense that it was like my skull was slowly squeezing my brain. My body was all wrong: elongated and limbless, pale and soft and infinitely vulnerable. I couldn’t guess how that sensation was engendered, unless the device was stimulating some ancient part of the brain which remembered what it was like to ooze or swim rather than walk. And yet I was not actually alone, and nor was the darkness as absolute as it had originally seemed. My body occupied a warm, humid hollow inside a space which had been cored out with labyrinthine black tunnels and chambers. And there were others with me; other pale, elongated presences. I couldn’t see them — they must have been in adjacent chambers — but I could taste their proximity, ingest the souplike chemical flow of their emotions and thoughts. And in some sense they were me as well, detached avatars of myself. They moved and quivered at my bidding, and I sensed what they sensed.
The claustrophobia was total and crushing, but it was also reassuring. Beyond the hard, rocklike volume in which we were caged was an absolute void from which my thoughts flinched. That emptiness was worse than the claustrophobia, and what made it worse still was the fact that it was not truly empty; that the void held terrible, silent, infinitely patient enemies.
Who were coming closer.
I felt a convulsion of fear so absolute that I screamed and removed the helmet. For a moment I floated in Vadim’s cabin, breathing hard, wondering just what I’d experienced. The feeling of immense claustrophobia, combined with even worse agoraphobia, took long seconds to abate, like the after-chime of an awful bell.
My hands trembling — although I was beginning to regain some control — I removed the experiential and examined it more closely, this time paying proper attention to the little motif near the top of the stick.
It looked a lot like a maggot.
I watched our approach to the Rust Belt through the observation window in Vadim’s cabin.
I knew something of what lay ahead now. Shortly after I’d tried the disturbing experiential — while I was still reeling from its effects, in fact — the console had chimed, announcing the arrival of a response to my earlier query. I was surprised; in my experience such things usually happened instantaneously or not at all, and the delay served only to emphasise how disrupted the system’s data networks must have been.
The message, it turned out, was a standard-issue document, rather than a personally composed reply. An automated mechanism must have decided that it would answer most of my questions; an assumption that turned out to be reasonably accurate.
I started reading.
Dear Newcomer,
Welcome to the Epsilon Eridani system.
Despite all that has happened, we hope your stay here will be a pleasant one. For your information we have compiled this note to explain some of the key events in our recent history. It is intended that this information will ease your transition into a culture which may be markedly different from the one you were expecting to find when you embarked at your point of origin. It is important that you realise that others have come before you…
The document was long, but I quickly read the thing in its entirety, then reread it carefully, picking out the salient points which might assist me in the hunt for Reivich. I’d already been forewarned about the scale of the plague’s effects, so the document’s revelations were perhaps not as shocking to me as they would have been to someone freshly defrosted. But it was still chilling to see it anatomised in such a coolly detached manner, and it was easy to imagine how unsettling it must have been to someone who had come to Yellowstone in search of riches rather than blood. The Mendicants had clearly elected not to spring this news on their slush puppies too quickly, and doubtless if I’d stayed in Idlewild a little longer they would have begun to break it to me gently. But perhaps the document was right: there were some truths it was best to deal with as quickly as possible, no matter how repugnant that truth might have been.
I wondered how long it would take me to adjust to it, or if I’d be one of the unfortunate few who never quite made the transition.
Perhaps, I thought, they were actually the sane ones.
Through the window the larger Rust Belt habitats had begun to assume definite shapes, rather than just being indistinct orbiting flecks. I tried to imagine what it would have looked like seven years ago, in the last days before the plague.
There’d been ten thousand habitats in the Glitter Band, each as opulent and faceted as a chandelier, each distinguished from its neighbours by some wild architectural flourish that had far less to do with the practicalities of structural design than it had with aesthetics and prestige. They’d circled Yellowstone in low orbit, almost nose-to- tail, each vast and stately construct maintaining polite distance from those ahead and behind it with tiny puffs of correcting thrust. A constant flow of commerce had shuffled between the habitats along narrow traffic lanes, so that from a distance the habitats themselves looked as if they were entwined in tinsel-like filaments of light. Depending on the ever-shifting spectrum of allegiances and feuds, the habitats either communicated with each other via looms of quantum-encrypted laser light, or maintained sullen silences. Such silences were not at all unusual, for there were profound rivalries even amongst the constituents of what was technically the very model of a unified Demarchist society.
Amongst ten thousand habitats, there was every human specialisation imaginable: every expertise, every ideology, every perversion. The Demarchists permitted everything, even experimentation in political models which chafed against their underlying paradigm of absolute non-hierarchical democracy. Provided those experiments remained experiments, they were tolerated; even actively encouraged. Only the development and stockpiling of armaments was forbidden, unless they were to be used artistically. And it was here in the Glitter Band that the system’s most illustrious clan, the Sylveste family, had performed much of the work that had brought them eventual fame. Calvin Sylveste had attempted the first neural downloads since the Transenlightenment in the Band. Dan Sylveste had collated all known information on the Shrouders here; work that eventually led to his own fateful expedition to Lascaille’s Shroud.
But that was the deep past now. History had turned the glory of the Glitter Band into… this.
When the Melding Plague had hit, the Glitter Band had stayed intact for far longer than Chasm City, for most of the Band’s habitats already had effective quarantine protocols. Some were so secretive and self-sufficient that no one had entered them in decades anyway.
