I watched the last jumper plummet into the depths. To my untrained eye the jump looked at least as good as Voronoff’s — the thermals didn’t seem to be steering the man towards the sides, and his posture as he dropped looked amazingly balletic. The crowd had quietened down now and were watching the fall intently.
‘Well, he’s no amateur,’ Fischetti said.
‘He just copied Voronoff’s timing,’ Sybilline said. ‘I was watching the way the vortex affected the gliders.’
‘You can’t blame him for that. You don’t get marks for originality, you know.’
He dropped further still, his harness a glowing green dot receding towards the mist. ‘Wait,’ Waverly said, pointing to the uncoiling line on the balcony. ‘He should have run out of line by now, shouldn’t he?’
‘Voronoff had by this point,’ Sybilline agreed.
‘Silly fool’s given himself too much,’ Fischetti said. He took a sip from his wine glass and studied the depths with renewed interest. ‘It’s reached the limit now, but it’s much too late.’
He was right. By the time the glowing green dot reached the level of the mist, it was falling almost as quickly as ever. The screen showed a last side-on view of him vanishing into the whiteness, and then there was only the taut filament of his line. Seconds passed — first the three or four that Voronoff had taken before emerging, and then ten… and then twenty. By thirty seconds people were beginning to get a little uncomfortable. Obviously they had seen this sort of thing happen before and had some idea of what to expect.
Nearly a minute passed before the man emerged.
I’d already been told what happened to glider pilots who went too deep, but I hadn’t imagined it could be that bad. But the man had gone very far into the mist. The pressure and temperature had been too much for the flimsy protection of his suit. He had died: boiled alive within a few seconds. The camera lingered on his corpse, lovingly mapping the horror of what had happened to him. I felt revolted and looked away from the image. I’d seen some bad things during my years as a soldier, but never while sitting at a table digesting a large and luxurious meal.
Sybilline shrugged. ‘Well, he should have used a shorter line.’
Afterwards we walked back across the stalk to the landing deck where Sybilline’s cable-car was still waiting.
‘Well, Tanner, where can we take you?’ she said.
I wasn’t exactly enjoying their company, I had to admit. It had begun badly and though I was grateful for the sight-seeing trip to the stalk, the cold way they had responded to the deaths of the mist-jumpers had left me wondering whether I wouldn’t have been better off with the pigs they had mentioned.
But I couldn’t throw away a chance like this. ‘I take it you’re heading back to the Canopy at some point?’
She looked pleased. ‘If you want to come with us, it’s absolutely no problem. In fact, I insist on it.’
‘Well, don’t feel any obligation. You’ve been generous enough as it is. But if it won’t inconvenience you…’
‘Not at all. Get in the car.’
The vehicle opened before me, Fischetti getting in the driver’s compartment and the rest of us in the back. We lofted; the cable-car’s motion began to feel familiar, if not actually comfortable. The ground dropped away quickly; we reached the interstices of the Canopy and settled into a semi-regular rhythm as the car picked its route along one of the main cable ways.
That was when I started to think I really should have taken my chances with the pigs.
‘Well, Tanner — did you enjoy your meal?’ Sybilline asked.
‘Like you said, it’s a hell of a view.’
‘Good. You needed the energy. Or at least you will need it.’ Deftly, she reached into a compartment set into the car’s plush and pulled out a nasty little gun. ‘Well, to state the obvious, this is a weapon and I’m pointing it at you.’
‘Ten out of ten for observation.’ I looked at the gun. It appeared to be made out of jade and was embossed with red demons. It had a small, dark maw and she was holding it very steadily.
‘The point being,’ Sybilline continued, ‘that you shouldn’t think of doing anything untoward.’
‘If you wanted to kill me, you could have done it dozens of times already.’
‘Yes. But there’s just one flaw in your thinking. We do want to kill you. Just not in any old manner.’
I should have felt immediate fear as soon as she pulled out the gun, but there’d been a delay of a few seconds while my mind assimilated the situation and decided it was probably just as bad as it appeared.
‘What are you going to do to me?’
Sybilline nodded at Waverly. ‘Can you do it here?’
‘I’ve got the tools, but I’d far rather do it back at the airship.’ Waverly nodded at her. ‘You can keep that gun pointed until then, can’t you?’
I asked what they were going to do to me again, but all of a sudden no one seemed very interested in what I had to say. I’d walked into big trouble, that much was obvious. Waverly’s story of shooting me to protect me from the pigs hadn’t ever sounded more than halfway convincing, but who had I been to argue? I’d kept telling myself that if they had wanted me dead…
Nice line. But like Sybilline had said, there was a certain flaw in my thinking…
It didn’t take very long to reach the trapped airship. As we swung up towards it I had an excellent view of the imprisoned craft, suspended precariously high above the city. There were no Canopy lights anywhere near it, no signs of habitation in the branches that supported it. I remembered what they had said about it being nice and discreet.
We landed. By then Waverly had found a gun as well, and when I stepped onto the connecting ramp which led to the gondola, Fischetti was covering me with a third. About the only thing I could have done was jump over the side.
But I wasn’t that desperate. Not yet.
Inside the gondola, I was escorted back to the chair where I had woken up only a couple of hours earlier. This time Waverly strapped me into the seat.
‘Well, get on with it,’ Sybilline said, standing with her hip to one side with the gun held in one hand like a chic cigarette holder. ‘It isn’t brain surgery, you know.’
She laughed.
Waverly spent the next few minutes circumnavigating my chair, emitting odd grunts which might have indicated distaste. Now and then he touched my scalp, examining it with gentle fingers. Then, seemingly satisfied, he retrieved some equipment from somewhere behind me. Whatever it was looked medical.
‘What are you going to do?’ I asked, trying again to get a response out of them. ‘You won’t get far by torturing me, if that’s what you’ve got in mind.’
‘You think I’m going to torture you?’ Waverly had one of the medical devices in his hand now, an intricate probe-like thing fashioned from chrome and inset with blinking status lights. ‘It would amuse me, I admit. I’m a colossal sadist. But aside from my own self-gratification, it would serve no purpose. We’ve trawled your memories, so we know all that you’d tell us under pain.’
‘You’re bluffing.’
‘No, we’re not. Did we have to ask you your name? No, we didn’t. But we knew you were called Tanner Mirabel, didn’t we?’
‘You know I’m telling the truth, in that case. I have nothing to offer you.’
He leaned closer to me, his lens clicking and whirring as it absorbed visual data across an unguessable spread of the spectrum. ‘We don’t really know what to know, Mister Mirabel. Assuming that’s really your name. It’s all so very foggy in there, you see. Confused memory traces — whole swathes of your past which we just can’t access. You’ll understand that this does not put us in the best possible frame of mind to trust you. I mean, you accept that this is a reasonable response, don’t you?’
‘I’ve only just been revived.’
‘Ah, yes — and the Ice Mendicants normally do such a marvellous job, don’t they? But in your case not even their artistry could restore the whole.’
‘Are you working for Reivich?’
