genuinely old. Perhaps the old were too infirm to risk a trip to the bazaar, but I also recalled what Orcagna had said about the state of longevity treatments on other worlds. It was entirely possible that some of the people I saw here were two or three centuries old; burdened with memories which reached back to Marco Ferris and the Amerikano era. They must have lived through great strangenesses… but I doubted that any of them had witnessed anything stranger than the recent transfiguration of their city, or the collapse of a society whose longevity and opulence must have seemed unassailable. No wonder so many of the people I saw looked so sad, as if knowing that — no matter how things might improve from day to day — the old times would never come again. Seeing that all-pervasive melancholia, it was impossible not to feel some empathy.
I started navigating my way back to Dominika’s tent, then wondered why I was bothering.
There were questions I wanted to ask Dominika, but they could equally well be directed to one of her rivals. I might need to talk to them all eventually. The only thing that connected me to Dominika was Quirrenbach… and even if I had begun to tolerate his presence, I’d known all along that I would have to ditch him eventually. I could walk away now, leave the terminus completely, and the chances were that we’d never meet again.
I pushed through until I reached the far side of the bazaar.
Where the furthest wall should have been was only an opening through which the lower levels of the city could be seen, behind a perpetual screen of dirty rain sluicing from the side of the terminus. A haphazard line of rickshaws waited: upright boxes balanced between two wide wheels. Some of the rickshaws were powered, coupled behind steam-engines or chugging methane-powered motors. Their drivers lounged indolently, awaiting fares. Others were propelled by pedal-power, and several looked to have been converted from old palanquins. Behind the row of rickshaws there were other, sleeker vehicles: a pair of flying machines much like the volantors I knew from Sky’s Edge, crouched down on skids, and a trio of craft which looked like helicopters with their rotors folded for stowage. A squad of workers eased a palanquin into one of them, tipping it at an undignified angle to get it through the entrance door. I wondered if I was witnessing a kidnapping or a taxi pick-up.
Although I might have been able to afford one of the volantors, the rickshaws looked the most immediately promising. At the very least I could get a flavour of this part of the city, even if I had no specific destination in mind.
I started walking, cutting through the crowds, my gaze fixed resolutely ahead.
Then, when not quite halfway there, I stopped, turned around and returned to Dominika’s.
‘Is Mister Quirrenbach finished yet?’ I asked Tom. Tom had been shimmying to the sitar music, apparently surprised to find someone entering Dominika’s tent without being coerced.
‘Mister, he no ready — ten minutes. You got money?’
I had no idea how much Quirrenbach’s excisions were going to cost him, but I figured the money he had recovered on the Grand Teton experientials might just cover it. I separated the bills from my own, laying them down on the table.
‘No enough, mister. Madame Dominika, she want one more.’ Grudgingly I unpeeled one of my own lower- denomination bills and added it to Quirrenbach’s pile. ‘That’d better be good,’ I said. ‘Mister Quirrenbach’s a friend of mine, so if I find out you’re going to ask him for more money when he comes out, I’ll be back.’
‘Is good, mister. Is good.’
I watched as the kid scurried through the partition into the room beyond, briefly glimpsing the hovering form of Dominika and the long couch on which she did her business. Quirrenbach was prone on it, stripped to the waist, with his head enfolded in a loom of delicate-looking probes. His hair had been shaved completely. Dominika was making odd gestures with her fingers, like a puppeteer working invisibly fine strings. In sympathy, the little probes were dancing around Quirrenbach’s cranium. There was no blood, nor even any obvious puncture marks on his skin.
Maybe Dominika was better than she looked.
‘Okay,’ I said when Tom re-emerged. ‘I have a favour to ask of you, and it’s worth one of these.’ I showed him the smallest denomination I had. ‘And don’t say I’m insulting you, because you don’t know what it is I’m about to ask.’
‘Say it, big guy.’
I gestured towards the rickshaws. ‘Do those things cover the whole city?’
‘Most of Mulch.’
‘Mulch is the district we’re in?’ No answer was forthcoming, so I just left the tent with him following me.
‘I need to get from here — wherever here is — to a specific district of the city. I don’t know how far it is, but I don’t want to be cheated. I’m sure you can arrange that for me, can’t you? Especially as I know where you live.’
‘Get good price, you no worry.’ Then a thought must have trickled through his skull. ‘No wait for friend?’
‘No — I’m afraid I have business elsewhere, as does Mister Quirrenbach. We won’t be meeting again for a while.’
I sincerely hoped it was the truth.
Some kind of hairy primate provided the motive power for most of the rickshaws, a human gene splice resetting the necessary homeoboxes so that his legs grew longer and straighter than the simian norm. In unintelligibly rapid Canasian, Tom negotiated with another kid. They could almost have been interchangeable, except that the new kid had shorter hair and might have been a year older. Tom introduced him to me as Juan; something in their relationship suggested they were old business partners. Juan shook my hand and escorted me to the nearest vehicle. Edgily now, I glanced back, hoping Quirrenbach was still out cold. I didn’t want to have to justify myself to him if he came round soon enough to have Tom tell him I was about to get a ride out of the terminus. There were some pills that could not be sugared, and being dumped by someone you imagined was your newfound travelling companion was one of them.
Still, perhaps he could work the agony of rejection into one of his forthcoming Meisterwerks.
‘Where to, mister?’
It was Juan speaking now, with the same accent as Tom. It was some kind of post-plague argot, I guessed; a pidgin of Russish, Canasian, Norte and a dozen other languages known here during the Belle Epoque. ‘Take me to the Canopy,’ I said. ‘You know where that is, don’t you?’
‘Sure,’ he said. ‘I know where Canopy is, just like I know where Mulch is. You think I’m idiot, like Tom?’
‘You can take me there, then.’
‘No, mister. I no can take you there.’
I began to unpeel another bill, before realising that our communicational difficulties stemmed from something more basic than insufficient funds, and that the problem was almost certainly on my side.
‘Is the Canopy a district of the city?’
This was met by a long-suffering nod. ‘You new here, huh?’
‘Yes, I’m new. So why don’t you do me a favour and explain just why taking me to the Canopy is beyond your means?’
The bill I had half unpeeled vanished from my grip, and then Juan offered me the rear seat of the rickshaw as if it were a throne finished in plush velvet. ‘I show you, man. But I no take you there, you understand? For that you need more than rickshaw.’
He hopped in next to me, then leaned forward and whispered something in the driver’s ear. The primate began to pedal, grunting in what was probably profound indignation at the outcome to which his genetic heritage had been shaped.
The bio-engineering of animals, I later learned, had been one of the few boom industries since the plague, exploiting a niche that had opened up once machines of any great sophistication began to fail.
Like Quirrenbach had said not long ago, nothing that happened was ever completely bad for everyone.
So it was with the plague.
The missing wall provided an entrance and exit point for the volantors (and, I presumed, the other flying craft), but rickshaws entered and left the parking area by means of a sloping, concrete-lined tunnel. The dank walls and ceiling dripped thick mucosal fluids. It was at least cooler, and the noise of the terminus quickly faded, replaced only by the soft creaking of the cogs and chains which transmitted the ape’s cycling motion to the wheels.
‘You new here,’ Juan said. ‘Not from Ferrisville, or even Rust Belt. Not even from rest of system.’
Was I so obtrusively ignorant that even a kid could see it?
