where the upper branches were picked out by tentacles and star-streams of glowing windows, or the neon scribbles of advertisements whose meaning I couldn’t fathom, spelt in the cryptic ideograms of Canasian. Now and then we would pass one of the older buildings that hadn’t been affected by the plague, standing stiff and regular amongst the changed ones. More often than not those buildings were still damaged, even if they hadn’t been caused to physically mutate. Other adjacent structures had thrust limbs through their neighbours, or undermined their foundations. Some had wrapped themselves around other buildings like strangler vines. There had been fires, explosions and riots during the days of the plague, and very little had emerged from those times completely unscathed.
‘You see that one?’ Sybilline said, drawing my attention to a pyramid-shape which was more or less intact. It was a very low structure, almost lost in the Mulch, but it was picked out by searchlights arcing down from above. ‘That’s the Monument to the Eighty. I assume you know the story?’
‘Not in any detail.’
‘It was a long time ago. This man tried to scan people into computers, but the technology wasn’t mature. They were killed by the scanning process, which was bad enough, but then the simulations started to go wrong. There were eighty of them, including the man himself. When it was all over, when most of them had failed, their families had that monument built. But it’s seen better days now.’
‘Like the whole city,’ Waverly said.
We continued across town. Travelling by cable-car took a little getting used to, as my stomach was discovering. When the car was passing through a place where there were many threads, the ride was almost as smooth and level as a volantor. But as soon as the threads started to thin out — as the car traversed the parts of the Canopy where there were no major branches, for instance — the trajectory became a lot less crowlike and a lot more gibbonlike: wide, stomach-churning arcs punctuated by jolts of upwards thrust. It should have felt very natural, given that the human brain was supposed to have evolved for exactly this kind of arboreal living.
But that was a few too many million years ago for me.
Eventually the cable-car’s sickening arcs took us down towards ground level. I remembered Quirrenbach telling me the locals referred to the city’s great merged dome as the Mosquito Net, and here it reached down until it touched the ground near the chasm’s rim. In this inner perimeter region the vertical stratification of the city was less pronounced. There was an intermingling of Canopy and Mulch, an indeterminate zone where the Mulch reached up to brush the underneath of the dome, and places where the Canopy forced itself underground, into armoured plazas where the wealthy could walk unmolested.
It was into one of those enclaves that Sybilline’s driver took us, dropping the cable-car’s undercarriage and steering the craft onto a landing deck where other cars were parked. The edge of the dome was a sloping stained- brown wall leaning over us like a breaking wave. Through the parts which were still more or less transparent, the huge wide maw of the chasm was visible; the city on the other side of it only a distant forest of twinkling lights.
‘I’ve called ahead and booked us a table at the stalk,’ said the man with the iron-grey eyes, stepping out of the car’s driving compartment. ‘Word is Voronoff’s going to be eating there tonight, so the place is pretty packed.’
‘I’m pleased,’ Sybilline said. ‘You can always rely on Voronoff to add a little gloss to the evening.’ Casually she opened a compartment in the side of the car and pulled out a black purse, opening it to reveal little vials of Dream Fuel and one of the ornate wedding-guns I’d seen aboard the Strelnikov.
She tugged down her collar and pressed the gun against her neck, gritting her teeth as she shunted a cubic centimetre of the dark red fluid into her bloodstream. Then she passed the gun to her partner, who injected himself before returning the baroquely ornamented instrument to Sybilline.
‘Tanner?’ she said. ‘Do you want a spike?’
‘I’ll pass,’ I said.
‘Fine.’ She folded the kit away in the compartment as if what had taken place was of no particular consequence.
We left the car and walked across the landing deck to a sloping ramp which led down into a brightly lit plaza. It was a lot less squalid than any part of the city I’d seen so far: clean, cool and packed with wealthy-looking people, palanquins, servitors and bio-engineered animals. Music pulsed from the walls, which were tuned to show city scenes from before the plague. A strange, spindly robot made its way down the thoroughfare, towering over people on its bladelike legs. It was made entirely out of sharp, gleaming surfaces, like a collection of enchanted swords.
‘That’s one of Sequard’s automata,’ said the man with the iron-grey eyes. ‘He used to work in the Glitter Band, one of the leading figures in the Gluonist Movement. Now he makes these things. They’re very dangerous, so watch out.’
We stepped gingerly around the machine, avoiding the slow arcs of its lethal limbs. ‘I don’t think I caught your name,’ I said to the man.
He looked at me oddly, as if I’d just asked him his shoe-size.
‘Fischetti.’
We made our way down the thoroughfare, bypassing another automaton much like the first one, except this robot had distinct red stains on some of its limbs. Then we passed over a series of ornamental ponds where plump gold and silver koi were mouthing near the surface. I tried to work out where we were. We’d landed near the chasm and had been walking all the time towards it, but it had appeared much closer to begin with.
Finally the thoroughfare widened out into a huge domed chamber, large enough for the hundred or so dining tables it must have contained. The place was nearly full. I even saw a few palanquins parked around one table which had been neatly set out for diners, but I couldn’t see how they were going to eat. A series of steps led down to the chamber’s glass floor, and then we were escorted to a vacant table at the edge of the room, next to one of the huge windows set into the chamber’s midnight blue dome. An astonishingly intricate chandelier hung from the dome’s apex.
‘Like I said, best view in Chasm City,’ Sybilline said.
I could see where we were now. The restaurant was at one end of a stalk which emerged from the side of the chasm, fifty or sixty metres from the top. The stalk must have been a kilometre long, as thin and brittle-looking as a sliver of blown glass. It was supported at the chasm end by a bracket of filigreed crystal; the effect of which was to make the rest of it look even more perilous.
Sybilline passed me a menu. ‘Choose what you like, Tanner — or let me choose for you, if you aren’t familiar with our cuisine. I won’t let you leave here without a good meal.’
I looked at the prices, wondering if my eye was adding a zero or two to each figure. ‘I can’t pay for this.’
‘No one’s asking you to. This is one we all owe you.’
I made some choices, consulted with Sybilline and then sat back and waited for the food. I felt out of place, of course — but then again, I was hungry, and by staying with these people I’d learn a lot more about Canopy life. Luckily I wasn’t required to make smalltalk. Sybilline and Fischetti were talking about other people, occasionally spotting someone across the room whom they pointed out discreetly. Waverly butted in now and again with an observation, but at no point was my opinion solicited except out of occasional politeness.
I looked around the room, sizing up the clientele. Even the people who had reshaped their bodies and faces looked beautiful, like charismatic actors wearing animal costumes. Sometimes it was just the colour of their skin that they had changed, but in others their whole physiology had been shifted towards some lean animal ideal. I saw a man with elaborate striped spines radiating from his forehead, sitting next to a woman whose enlarged eyes were periodically veiled behind iridescent lids patterned like moth’s wings. There was an otherwise normal-looking man whose mouth opened to reveal a forked black tongue which he stuck out at every opportunity, as if tasting the air. There was a slender, nearly-naked woman covered in black and white stripes. She caught my eye for an instant and I suspect she would have held her gaze had I not looked away.
Instead I looked down into the steaming depths of the chasm beneath us, my sense of vertigo slowly abating. Though it was night-time, there was a ghostly reflected glow of the city all around us. We were a kilometre out from one wall, but the chasm was easily fifteen or twenty kilometres wide, the other side appearing just as distant as it had from the landing deck. The walls were mostly sheer, except for occasional narrow natural ledges where rock had fallen away from the sides. Sometimes there were buildings set into the ledges, connected to the
