manta’s wings. The interior of the behemoth must have been almost completely hollow, but I couldn’t see more than a tenth of it from where I was standing.
Scattered here and there were clusters of seats — sometimes grouped for conversation, sometimes surrounding a dribbling fountain or a clump of exotic foliage. Now and then the rectilinear shape of a palanquin slid across the floor like a chess piece.
I moved towards an unoccupied pair of seats overlooking one of the window panels. I was tired enough to want to doze quietly, but I didn’t dare close my eyes. What if there hadn’t been an earlier behemoth departure and Reivich was somewhere inside the spacecraft even now?
‘Preoccupied, Tanner?’ said Quirrenbach, sliding into the seat next to mine. ‘You have that look about you.’
‘Are you sure this is the best place to get a good view?’
‘Excellent point, Tanner; excellent point. But if I’m not sitting next to you, how am I going to hear about Sky?’ He began to fiddle with his briefcase. ‘Now there’s plenty of time for you to tell me all the rest.’
‘You nearly get killed, and all you can think about is that mad-man? ’
‘You don’t understand. I’m thinking now — what about a symphony for Sky?’ Then he pointed a finger at me, like a gun. ‘No. Not a symphony: a mass; a vast choral work, epic in its scope… studiedly archaic in structure… consecutive fifths and false relations, with a brooding Sanctus… a threnody for lost innocence; an anthem to the crime and the glory of Schuyler Haussmann…’
‘There isn’t any glory, Quirrenbach. Only crime.’
‘I won’t know until you tell me the rest, will I?’
There was a series of thumps and shudders as the behemoth was unplugged from its connecting point on the habitat. Through the windows I could see the habitat falling away very quickly, accompanied by a moment of dizziness. But almost before the moment had begun to register physically, the habitat came swooping past again, its skin rushing by the great windows. Then only space. I looked around, but people were still walking unaffected around the lobby.
‘Shouldn’t we be in free-fall?’
‘Not in a behemoth,’ Quirrenbach said. ‘The instant she detached from NV, she fell away on a tangent to the habitat’s surface, like a sling-shot. But that only lasted for an instant before she ramped up her thrusters to one- gee. Then she had to curve slightly to avoid ramming into the habitat on the way past. That’s the only really tricky part of the journey, I understand — the only time where there’s really any likelihood of your drinks going for a ride. But the pilot seemed to know what it was doing.’
‘It?’
‘They use genetically engineered cetaceans to fly these things, I think. Whales or porpoises, wired permanently into the behemoth’s nervous system. But don’t worry. They’ve never killed anyone. It’ll feel as smooth as this most of the way down. She just lowers herself down into the atmosphere, very gently and slowly. A behemoth’s like a huge rigid airship, once it gets into any kind of air density. By the time she gets near the surface, she’s got so much positive buoyancy that she actually has to use her thrusters to hold herself down. It’s a lot like swimming, I think.’ Quirrenbach clicked his fingers at a servitor which was passing. ‘Drinks, I think. What can I offer you, Tanner?’
I looked out the window: Yellowstone’s horizon was rising vertically, so that the planet looked like a sheer yellow wall.
‘I don’t know. What do they drink around here?’
Yellowstone’s horizon tilted slowly back towards horizontal as the behemoth cancelled out the orbital velocity it had matched with the carousel. The process was smooth and uneventful, but it must have been planned meticulously so that when we finally came to a halt relative to the planet we were hovering precisely over Chasm City, rather than thousands of kilometres away.
By then, although we were thousands of kilometres above the surface, Yellowstone’s gravity was still almost as strong as it would have been on the ground. We might as well have been sitting atop a very tall mountain; one that protruded beyond the atmosphere. Slowly, however — with the unhurried calm which had characterised the whole journey so far — the behemoth began to descend.
Quirrenbach and I watched the view in silence.
Yellowstone was a heavier sibling to Sol’s Titan; a fully-fledged world rather than a moon. Chaotic and poisonous chemistries of nitrogen, methane and ammonia produced an atmosphere daubed with every imaginable shade of yellow; ochre, orange, tan, whorled into beautiful cyclonic spirals, curlicued and filigreed as if by the most delicate brushwork. Over most of its surface Yellowstone was exquisitely cold, lashed by ferocious winds, flash floods and electrical storms. The planet’s orbit around Epsilon Eridani had been disturbed in the distant past by a close encounter with Tangerine Dream, the system’s massive gas giant, and even though that event must have taken place hundreds of millions years ago, Yellowstone’s crust was still relaxing from the tectonic stress of the encounter, bleeding energy back to the surface. There was some speculation that Marco’s Eye — the planet’s solitary moon — had even been captured from the gas giant; a history that would explain the odd cratering on one side of the moon.
Yellowstone was not a hospitable place, but humans had come nonetheless. I tried to imagine what it must have been like at the height of the Belle Epoque; descending into Yellowstone’s atmosphere and knowing that beneath those golden cloud layers lay cities as fabulous as dream, Chasm City the mightiest of them all. The glory had lasted more than two hundred years… and even in its terminal years, there had been nothing to suggest it was not capable of lasting centuries more. There’d been no decadent decline; no failure of nerve. But then the plague had come. All those hues of yellow became hues of sickness; hues of vomit and bile and infection; the world’s febrile skies masking the diseased cities strewn across its surface like chancres.
Still, I thought, sipping the drink Quirrenbach had bought me, it had been good while it lasted.
The behemoth didn’t cut its way into the atmosphere; it submerged itself, descending so slowly that there was barely any friction on its hull. The sky above stopped being pure black and began to assume faint hints of purple and then ochre. Now and then our weight fluctuated — presumably as the behemoth hit a pressure cell which it couldn’t quite squeeze past — but never by more than ten or fifteen per cent.
‘It’s still beautiful,’ he said. ‘Don’t you think?’
He was right. We could see the surface occasionally now, when some chaotic squall or shift in the underlying atmospheric chemistry opened a temporary rent in the yellow cloud layers. Shimmering lakes of frozen ammonia; psychotic badlands of wind-carved geology; broken spires and mile-high arches like the half-buried bones of titanic animals. There were forms of single-celled organism down there, I knew — staining the surface in great, lustrous purple and emerald monolayers or veining deep rock strata — but they existed in such glacial time that it was hard to think of them as living at all. Here and there were small domed outposts, but nothing one would think of as cities. Yellowstone had only a handful of settlements even a tenth the size of Chasm City now; nothing equalling it. Even the second largest city, Ferrisville, was a township compared to the capital.
‘Nice place to visit,’ I said, not needing to complete the old saying.
‘Yes… you’re probably right,’ Quirrenbach said. ‘Once I’ve soaked up enough of the ambience to fuel my composition, and earned enough to pay for a hop out of here… I doubt very much that I will linger.’
‘How are you going to make money?’
‘There’s always work for composers. All you need to do is find some rich benefactor who fancies sponsoring a great work of art. They feel like they’re achieving some small measure of immortality themselves.’
‘And what if they’re already immortal, or postmortal, or whatever it is they call themselves?’
‘Even the postmortal can’t be certain they aren’t going to die at some point, so the instinct to leave a dent on history is still strong. Besides which, there are many people in Chasm City who used to be postmortal, but who now have to deal with the imminent prospect of death, the way some of us always have.’
‘My heart bleeds.’
‘Quite… well, let us just say that for a good many people death is now back on the agenda in a way it hasn’t been for several centuries.’
‘Even so, what if there aren’t any rich benefactors amongst them?’
‘Oh, there are. You’ve seen those palanquins. There are still rich people in Chasm City, even though there isn’t much of what you’d call an economic infrastructure. But you can be sure there are pockets of wealth and
