fluted metal walls angled downwards, as if I were descending an escalator down a gently angled tunnel. The walls were punctured by oval windows, but I couldn’t see much except darkness ribboned with long chains of tangled fairy-lights. I was high above the surface of the city, then almost certainly in some part of the Canopy. The floor consisted of a series of horizontal surfaces which descended towards the low end of the room, which must have been fifteen metres away and two or three metres below me. They looked like they’d been added on afterwards, as if the room’s slope was not quite intentional.
I wasn’t alone, of course.
The square-jawed man with the monocle was standing next to me, one hand toying with his chin, as if he needed to keep reminding himself of its magnificant rectilinearity. In his other hand was a limp flannel, the means by which I had been so gently assisted towards consciousness.
‘I’ve got to hand it to you,’ the man said. ‘I miscalculated the dose in that stun beam. It would have killed some people, and I expected you to be out cold for a good few hours more.’ Then he placed a hand on my shoulder. ‘But you’re fine, I think. A pretty strong fellow. You’ll have to accept my apologies — it won’t happen again, I assure you.’
‘You’d better not do it again,’ said the woman who had just stepped into my field of vision. I recognised her, of course — and her companion, who hove into view on my right, pushing a cigarette to his lips. ‘You’re getting sloppy, Waverly. This man must have thought you were planning to kill him.’
‘That wasn’t the idea?’ I said, finding that I sounded nowhere near as slurred as I had been expecting.
Waverly shook his head gravely. ‘Not at all. I was doing my best to save your life, Mister Mirabel.’
‘You’ve got a pretty funny way of going about it.’
‘I had to act quickly. You were about to be ambushed by a group of pigs. Do you know about pigs, Mister Mirabel? You probably don’t want to. They’re one of the less salubrious immigrant groups we’ve had to deal with since the fall of the Glitter Band. They had arranged a tripwire across the roadway connected to a crossbow. Normally they don’t stalk anyone until later in the evening, but they must have been hungry tonight.’
‘What did you shoot me with?’
‘Like I said, a stun beam. Quite a humane weapon, really. The laser beam is only a precursor — it establishes an ionised path through the air, down which a paralysing electrical flux can be discharged.’
‘It’s still painful.’
‘I know, I know.’ He raised his hands defensively. ‘I’ve taken a few hits myself. I’m afraid I had it calibrated to stun a pig, rather than a human. But perhaps it was for the best. You’d have resisted me if I hadn’t put you under so comprehensively, I suspect.’
‘Why did you save me, anyway?’
He looked put out. ‘It was the decent thing to do, I’d have thought.’
Now the woman spoke. ‘At first I misjudged you, Mister Mirabel. You put me on edge and I didn’t trust you completely.’
‘All I did was ask for some advice.’
‘I know — the fault’s all mine. But we’re all so nervous these days. After we’d left, I felt bad about it and told Waverly to keep an eye on you. Which is what he did.’
‘An eye, yes, Sybilline,’ Waverly said.
‘And where would here happen to be?’ I said.
‘Show him, Waverly. He must want to stretch his legs by now.’
I’d half expected to have been secured to the chair, but I was free to move. Waverly offered me a supporting arm while I tested the usefulness of my legs. The muscle in the leg where the beam had touched still felt like jelly, but it was just about able to support me. I stepped past the woman, descending the series of level surfaces until I’d reached the lowest part of the room. At that end there was a pair of double doors which opened onto the night air. Waverly led me out onto a sloping balcony, bounded by a metal railing. Warm air slapped against my face.
I looked back. The balcony surrounded the building where I had awoken, rising up on either side of it. But the building wasn’t really a building.
It was the gondola of an airship, tipped up at an angle. Above us, the craft’s gasbag was a dark mass pinned between branches of the Canopy. The airship must have been trapped here when the plague hit, caught like a balloon in a tree. The gasbag was so impermeable that it was still fully inflated, seven years after the plague. But it was crimped and distorted by the pressure of the branches which had formed around it, and I couldn’t help wondering how strong it really was — and what would happen to the gondola if the bag was punctured.
‘It must have happened really fast,’ I said, having visions of the airship trying to steer itself out of the path of the malforming building.
‘Not that quickly,’ Waverly said, as if I’d said something deeply foolish. ‘This was a sightseeing airship — there were dozens of them, back in the old days. When the trouble came, no one was much interested in sightseeing anymore. They left the airship moored here while the building grew around it, but it still took a day or so for the branches to trap it completely.’
‘And now you live in it?’
‘Well, not exactly. It isn’t all that safe, really. That’s why we don’t have to worry too much about anyone else paying us any attention.’
Behind, the door swung open again and the woman emerged. ‘An unorthodox place to wake you, I admit.’ She joined Waverly next to the railing, leaning bravely over the edge. It must have been an easy kilometre to the ground. ‘But it does have its uses, discretion being one of them. Now then, Mister Mirabel. I expect you are in need of some good food and hospitality — am I right?’
I nodded, thinking that if I stayed with these people, they might provide a means for me to enter the Canopy proper. That was the rational argument for agreeing. The other part was born out of sheer relief and gratitude and the fact that I was as tired and hungry as she probably imagined.
‘I don’t want to impose.’
‘Nonsense. I did you a great disservice in the Mulch, and then Waverly rather compounded the error with his ham-fisted stun setting — didn’t you, Waverly? Well, we’ll say no more of it — provided you do us the honour of providing you with a little food and rest.’ The woman took something black out of a pocket, folding it open and elongating an aerial before speaking into it. ‘Darling? We’re ready now. We’ll meet at the high end of the gondola.’
She snapped the telephone shut and pushed it back into her pocket.
We walked around the side of the gondola, using the railing to haul our way up the slope without slipping. At the highest point the railing had been cut away so that there was nothing between me and the ground except a lot of air. Waverly and Sybilline — if that was her name — could have easily pushed me over the edge had either of them meant me any harm, especially in my generally disorientated state. More than that, they’d had plenty of opportunities to do it before I woke up.
‘Here he comes,’ Waverly said, pointing under the sagging curve of the gasbag. I watched a cable-car descend into view. It looked a lot like the one I’d first seen Sybilline in, but I wasn’t pretending to be an expert just yet. The car’s arms grasped threads entangled around the gasbag, tugging the blimp out of shape, but managing not to puncture it. The car came close, its door opening and a ramp extending out to bridge the gap to the gondola.
‘After you, Tanner,’ Sybilline said.
I crossed the bridge. It was only a step of a metre or so, but there was no protection on either side and it took an effort of nerve to make the crossing. Sybilline and Waverly followed me blithely. Living in the Canopy must have given everyone an inhuman head for heights.
There were four seats in the rear compartment and a windowed partition between us and the driver. Before the window was closed, I saw that the driver was the high-cheekboned, grey-eyed man who had been with Sybilline earlier.
‘Where are you taking me?’ I said.
‘To eat? Where else?’ Sybilline placed a hand on my forearm, trustingly. ‘The best place in the city, Tanner. Certainly the place with the best view.’
A night-time flight across Chasm City. With only the lights to trace the geometry of the city, it was almost possible to pretend that the plague hadn’t happened. The shapes of the buildings were lost in the darkness, except
