in her gut who had been sent to meet us. Thinking of the way Reivich had known about our ambush, I wondered if — ultimately — we hadn’t all been betrayed by Orcagna. Perhaps Orcagna had even arranged my revival amnesia, to slow me down in my hunt.
Or perhaps I was just being paranoid.
Beyond the glass, I saw something even stranger than the black-clad, cyborg wraiths who crewed the lighthuggers: things like upright boxes, gliding with sinister grace amongst the crowds. The other people seemed oblivious to the boxes — almost unaware of them, except that they stepped carefully aside as the boxes moved amongst them. I sipped my coffee and noticed that some of the boxes had clumsy mechanical arms attached to their fronts — but most did not — and that almost all of the boxes had dark windows set into their fronts.
‘They’re palanquins, I think.’
I sighed, recognising the voice of Quirrenbach, who was easing himself into the seat next to me.
‘Good. Finished your symphony yet?’
He did a good job of pretending not to hear me. ‘I heard about them, those palanquins. The people inside them are called hermetics. They’re the ones who’ve still got implants and don’t want to get rid of them. The boxes are like little travelling microcosms. Do you think it’s really that dangerous still?’
I put down my coffee cup testily. ‘What would I know?’
‘Sorry, Tanner… just trying to make conversation.’ He glared at the vacant seats around me. ‘It’s not like you were overburdened with companionship, is it?’
‘Maybe I wasn’t desperate for any.’
‘Oh, come on.’ He snapped his fingers, bringing the grimy, coffee-dispensing servitor over to our table. ‘We’re both in this together, Tanner. I promise I won’t follow you around once we get to Chasm City, but until then, would it really hurt to be a little civil to me? You never know, I might even be able to help you. I may not know much about this place, but I do appear to know fractionally more than you.’
‘Fractionally’s the word.’
He got himself a coffee from the machine and offered me a refill. I declined, but with what I hoped was grudging politeness.
‘God, this is foul,’ he said, after a trial sip.
‘At least we’re in agreement on something.’ I made a stab at humour. ‘I think I know what’s in those pipes now, anyway.’
‘Those pipes?’ Quirrenbach looked around us. ‘Oh, I see. No; those are steam pipes, Tanner. Very important, too.’
‘Steam?’
‘They use their own ice to keep NV from over-heating. Someone on the Strelnikov told me: they pump the ice down from the outer skin as kind of slush, then run it all around the habitat, through all the gaps between the main habitation areas — we’re in one of those gaps now — and then the slush soaks up all the excess heat and gradually melts and then boils, until you’ve got pipes full of superheated steam. Then they blast the steam back into space.’
I thought of the geysers I had seen on the surface of NV on the approach.
‘That’s pretty wasteful.’
‘They didn’t always use ice. They used to have huge radiators, like moths’ wings, a hundred kilometres across. But they lost them when the Glitter Band broke up. Bringing in the ice was an emergency measure. Now they’ve got to have a steady supply or this whole habitat becomes one big meat oven. They get it from Marco’s Eye, the moon. There’re craters near the poles in perpetual shadow. They could’ve used methane ice from Yellowstone, too, but there’s no way to get it here cheaply enough.’
‘You know a lot.’
He beamed, patting the briefcase in his lap. ‘Details, Tanner. Details. You can’t write a symphony about a place unless you know it intimately. I’ve already got plans for my first movement, you know. Very sombre at first, desolate woodwind, shading into something with stronger rhythmic impetus.’ He sketched a finger through the air as if tracing the topography of an invisible landscape. ‘Adagio — allegro energico. That’ll be the destruction of the Glitter Band. You know, I almost think it deserves a whole symphony in its own right… what do you think?’
‘I don’t know, Quirrenbach. Music’s not really my forte.’
‘You’re an educated man though, aren’t you? You speak with economy, but there’s no little thought behind your words. Who was it who said that a wise man speaks when he has something to say, but a fool speaks because he must?’
‘I don’t know, but he probably wasn’t a great conversationalist.’
I looked at my watch — it felt like my own now — wishing the green gems would instantly whirl into the relative positions which would signify departure time for the surface. They hadn’t visibly shifted since the last time I looked.
‘What did you used to do on Sky’s Edge, Tanner?’
‘I was a soldier.’
‘Ah, but that’s nothing really unusual, is it?’
Out of boredom — and the knowledge that nothing would be lost by doing so — I elaborated upon my answer. ‘The war worked its way into our lives. It was nothing you could hide from. Even where I was born.’
‘Which was?’
‘Nueva Iquique. It was a sleepy coastal town a long way from the main centres of battle. But everyone knew someone who had been killed by the other side. Everyone had some theoretical reason for hating them.’
‘Did you hate the enemy?’
‘Not really. The propaganda was designed to make you hate them… but if you stopped and thought about it, it was obvious they would be telling their own people much the same lies about us. Of course, some of it was probably true. Equally, one didn’t need much imagination to suspect that we’d committed some atrocities of our own.’
‘Did the war really go all the way back to what happened on the Flotilla?’
‘Ultimately, yes.’
‘Then it was less about ideology than territory, isn’t that true?’
‘I don’t know, or care. It all happened a long time ago, Quirrenbach. ’
‘Do you know much about Sky Haussmann? I hear that there are people on your planet who still worship him.’
‘I know a thing or two about Sky Haussmann, yes.’
Quirrenbach looked interested. I could almost hear the mental note-taking for a new symphony. ‘Part of your common cultural upbringing, you mean?’
‘Not entirely, no.’ Knowing that I would lose nothing by showing him, I allowed Quirrenbach to see the wound in the centre of my palm. ‘It’s a mark. It means the Church of Sky got to me. They infected me with an indoctrinal virus. It makes me dream about Sky Haussmann even when I don’t particularly want to. I didn’t ask for it and it’ll take a while to work its way out of my system, but until then I have to live with the bastard. I get a dose of Sky every time I close my eyes.’
‘That’s awful,’ he said, doing a poor job of not sounding fascinated. ‘But I presume once you’re awake, you’re reasonably…’
‘Sane? Yes, totally.’
‘I want to know more about him,’ Quirrenbach said. ‘You don’t mind talking, do you?’
Near us, one of the elephantine pipes began leaking steam in a shrill, scalding exhalation.
‘I don’t think we’ll be together much longer.’
He looked crestfallen. ‘Really?’
‘I’m sorry, Quirrenbach… I work best alone, you know.’ I groped for a way to make my rejection sound less negative. ‘And you’ll need time alone, too, to work on your symphonies…’
‘Yes, yes — later. But for now? There’s a lot we have to deal with, Tanner. I’m still worried by the plague. Do you really think it’s risky here?’
‘Well, they say there are still traces of it around. Do you have implants, Quirrenbach?’ He looked blank, so I continued, ‘Sister Amelia — the woman who looked after me in the Hospice — told me that they sometimes removed implants from immigrants, but I didn’t understand what she meant at the time.’
