‘I guess you don’t get many tourists these days.’
‘Not since bad time, no.’
‘What was it like to live through?’
‘I dunno mister; I just two.’
Of course. It was seven years ago. From a child’s perspective, that really was most of a lifetime ago. Juan, and Tom, and the other street children would barely be able to remember what life was like in Chasm City prior to the plague. Those few years of limitless wealth and possibility would be blurred with the soft-focus simplicity of infancy. All they knew, all they truly remembered, was the city as it now was: vast and dark and again filled with possibility — except now it was the possibility that lay in danger and crime and lawlessness; a city for thieves and beggars and those who could live by their wits rather than their credit ratings.
It was just a shock to find myself in one.
We passed other rickshaws returning to the concourse, slick sides glossy with rain. Only a few of them carried passengers, hunched sullenly down in raincoats, looking as if they would rather have been anywhere else in the universe than Chasm City. I could relate to that. I was tired, I was hot, sweat pooling under my clothes, and my skin itched and crawled for want of a wash. I was acutely conscious of my own body odour.
What the hell was I doing here?
I had a chased a man across more than fifteen light-years, into a city which had become a sick perversion of itself. The man I was chasing was not even truly bad — even I could see that. I hated Reivich for what he had done, but he had acted much as I would have done in the same circumstances. He was an aristocrat, not a man of arms, but in another life — if the history of our planet had followed another course — he and I might even have been friends. Certainly I had respect for him now, even if it was a respect born out of the way he had acted completely beyond my expectations when he destroyed the bridge at Nueva Valparaiso. Such casual brutality was to be admired. Any man that I misjudged that badly had my respect.
And yet, for all that, I knew I’d have no qualms about killing him.
‘I think,’ Juan said, ‘you need history lesson, mister.’
What I had managed to learn aboard the Strelnikov had not been very much, but it was all the history I felt that I had an appetite for right now. ‘If you’re thinking I don’t know about the plague…’
The tunnel was growing lighter ahead. Not much, but enough to indicate that we were about to enter the city proper. The light which suffused it had the same caramel-brown texture I’d seen from the behemoth: the colour of already murky light filtered through yet more murk.
‘Plague hit, make building go wacko,’ said Juan.
‘That much they told me.’
‘They no tell you enough, mister.’ His syntax was rudimentary, but I suspected it was an improvement on anything the rickshaw driver was capable of. ‘Them building change, real fast.’ He made expansive hand gestures. ‘Many folk get die, get squashed or end up in wall.’
‘That doesn’t sound too nice.’
‘I show you people in wall, mister. You no make joke no more. You shit own pants.’ We swerved to avoid another rickshaw, scraping against us. ‘But listen — them building, they change fastest up at top, right?’
‘I don’t follow.’
‘Them building like tree. Got big lot of root, stick in ground, right?’
‘Constructional feedlines, is that it? Leeching raw materials from the bedrock for repair and regrowth?’
‘Yeah. What I say. Like big tree. But like big tree in other way, too. Always grow up top. Unnerstan’?’ More hand gestures, as if he were shaping the outline of a mushroom cloud.
Perhaps I did understand. ‘You’re saying the growth systems were concentrated in the upper parts of the structures?’
‘Yeah.’
I nodded. ‘Of course. Those structures were designed to dismantle themselves as well as grow higher. Either way, you’d always want to add or remove material from the top. So the nerve centre of the self-replicating machinery would always rise with the structure. The lower levels would need fewer systems; just the bare minimum to keep them ticking over and for repairing damage and wear, and for periodic redesigns.’
It was hard to tell if Juan’s smile was one of congratulation — that I had worked this out for myself — or sympathy that it had taken me as long as it had.
‘Plague get to top first, carried by root. Start making top of building go wacko first. Lower down, stay same as before. By time plague got there, people cut root, starve building. No change any more.’
‘But by then the upper parts had already changed beyond recognition.’ I shook my head. ‘It must have been a terrible time.’
‘No shit, mister.’
We plunged into daylight, and I finally understood what Juan meant.
FIFTEEN
We were at the lowest level of Chasm City, far below the rim of the caldera. The street on which we ran crossed a black lake on pontoons. Rain was falling softly from the sky — from the dome, in fact, many kilometres above our heads. All around us, vast buildings rose from the flood, sides slab-sided and immense. They were all I could see in any direction, until — forestlike — they merged into a distant, detailless wall, like a bank of smog. They were encrusted — at least for the first six or seven storeys — in a barnacle-like accretion of ramshackle dwellings and markets, lashed together and interlinked with flimsy walkways and rope-ladders. Fires burned in the slums, and the air was even more pungent than in the concourse. But it was fractionally cooler, and because there was a constant breeze, it felt less stifling.
‘What’s this place called?’ I said.
‘This Mulch,’ said Juan. ‘Everything down here, street level, this Mulch.’
I understood then that the Mulch was less a district of the city than a stratification. It included perhaps the first six or seven storeys which rose above the flooded parts. It was a carpet of slum from which the great forest of the city rose.
Looking up, craning my neck to peer around the rickshaw’s roof, I saw the slab-sided structures ram skywards, perspective forcing them together at least a kilometre above my head. For most of that height, their geometries must have been much as their architects had intended: rectilinear, with parallel rows of windows, now dark, the edifices marred only by the occasional haphazard extrusion or limpetlike excresence. Up higher, though, the picture changed sickeningly. Although no two buildings had mutated in quite the same manner, there was something common to their shape-changing, a kind of uniform pathology which a surgeon might have recognised and diagnosed as stemming from the same cause. Some of the buildings split in two halfway up their length, while others bulged with unseemly obesity. Some sprouted tiny avatars of themselves, like the elbowed towers and oubliettes of fairytale castles. Higher, these structural growths bifurcated and bifurcated again, interpenetrating and linking like bronchioli, or some weird variant of brain coral, until what they formed was a kind of horizontal raft of fused branches, suspended a kilometre or two from the ground. I had seen it before, of course, from the sky, but the meaning of it — and its sheer, city-spanning scale — was only now apparent from this vantage point.
Canopy.
‘Now you see why I no take you there, mister.’
‘I’m beginning to. It covers the whole city, right?’
Juan nodded. ‘Just like Mulch, only higher.’
The one thing that had not been really obvious from the behemoth was that the Canopy’s dense entanglement of madly deformed buildings was confined to a relatively shallow vertical stratum; the Canopy was a kind of suspended ecology and below it was another world — another city — entirely. The complexity of it was obvious now. There were whole communities floating within it; sealed structures embedded in the Canopy like birds’ nests, each as large as a palace. Fine as gossamer, a mass of weblike strands filled the spaces between the larger branches, dangling down almost to street level. It was difficult to tell if they had come with the mutations, or had been some intentional human addition.
