‘A man with a wound, come to our mean streets to right some wrongs?’
‘I’ve come to finish some business, that’s all. But you’ll understand the idea of sleeping doesn’t exactly fill me with overwhelming enthusiasm. Sky Haussmann’s head isn’t a pleasant place to spend any great length of time.’
‘I don’t know much about him. It would be ancient history even if it wasn’t another planet as well.’
‘It doesn’t feel like ancient history to me. It feels like he’s slowly worming his way into me, like a voice that keeps getting louder and louder in my head. I met a man who had the virus before I did — in fact, he probably gave it to me. He was pretty far gone. He had to surround himself with Sky Haussmann iconography or he started shaking.’
‘That doesn’t have to happen here,’ Zebra said. ‘Has the indoctrinal virus been around for a few years?’
‘It depends on the strain, but the viruses themselves are an old invention.’
‘Then you might be in luck. If the virus showed up in Yellowstone’s medical databases before the plague hit, the servitor will know about it. It might even be able to synthesise a cure.’
‘The Mendicants thought it would take a few days to take effect.’
‘They were probably being over-cautious. A day, perhaps two — that should be all the time it takes to flush it out. If the robot knows about it.’ Zebra patted the white machine. ‘But it will do its best. Now will you think about sleeping?’
I had to find Reivich, I told myself. That meant not wasting any time at my disposal; not a single hour. I had already wasted half a night since arriving in Chasm City. But it would take more than another couple of hours to track him down, I knew. Days, perhaps. I would only last that time if I allowed my recent injuries some time to heal. It would be sweet irony if I dropped dead of fatigue just as I was about to kill Reivich. For him, anyway. I wouldn’t be laughing.
‘I’ll think about it,’ I said.
The odd thing was, after all that I had told Zebra, this time I didn’t dream about Sky Haussmann at all.
I dreamed about Gitta.
She’d always been there in my thoughts, ever since waking in Idlewild. Just thinking about her beauty — and the fact that she was dead — was like a mental whiplash; a crack of pain against which my senses never seemed to dull. I could hear the way she spoke; smell her as if she were standing next to me, listening intently while I gave her one of the lessons Cahuella had insisted upon. I don’t think there had been a minute since I’d arrived around Yellowstone when Gitta had left me completely. When I saw another woman’s face, I measured her against Gitta — even if that measurement took place on a barely conscious level. I knew with a heartfelt certainty that she was dead, and although I could not absolve myself of all responsibility for her death, it was Reivich that had really killed her.
And yet, I had given very little thought to the events leading up to her death, and almost none to her death itself.
Now they came crashing in.
I didn’t dream it like this, of course. The episodes from Sky Haussmann’s life might have played through my head in a neatly linear fashion — even if some of the events in those episodes contradicted what I thought I knew about him — but my own dreams were as disorganised and illogical as anyone’s. So while I dreamed about the journey up the Peninsula, and the ambush that had ended with Gitta’s death, it wasn’t with the clarity of the Haussmann episodes. But afterwards, when I woke, it was as if the act of dreaming had unlocked a whole raft of memories which I had barely realised were missing. In the morning, I was able to think in detail about all that had happened.
The last thing I’d remembered in any depth was when Cahuella and I had been taken aboard the Ultra ship, where Captain Orcagna had warned us against Reivich’s planned attack on the Reptile House. Reivich, the captain said, was moving south down through the jungle. They were tracking him via the emissions from the heavy armaments his party was carrying.
It was good that Cahuella had completed his dealings with the Ultras as soon as he had. He had taken a significant risk in visiting the orbiting ship even then, but only a week afterwards it would have been nearly impossible. The bounty on him had increased enough that some of the neutral observer factions had declared that they would intercept any vessel known to be carrying Cahuella, shooting it down if arrest was not an option. If less had been at stake, the Ultras might have ignored that kind of threat, but now they had made their presence officially known and were engaged in sensitive trade negotiations with those self-same factions. Cahuella was effectively confined to the surface — and a steadily diminishing area of it at that.
But Orcagna had stayed true to his word. He was still feeding us information on Reivich’s position as he moved south towards the Reptile House, at the fuzzy accuracy which Cahuella had requested.
Our plan was simple enough. There were very few routes through the jungle north of the Reptile House, and Reivich had already committed himself to one of the major trails. There was a point on the trail where the jungle had encroached badly, and it was there that we would lay our ambush.
‘We’ll make an expedition of it,’ Cahuella had said, as he and I pored over a map table in the basement of the Reptile House. ‘That’s prime hamadryad country, Tanner. We’ve never been there before — never had the opportunity. Now Reivich is giving it to us on a plate.’
‘You’ve already got a hamadryad.’
‘A juve.’ He said it contemptuously, as if the animal were almost not worth having. I had to smile, remembering how triumphant he’d been at its capture. To capture any size of hamadryad alive was quite an achievement, but now he had set his sights higher. He was the classic hunter, incapable of being sated. There was always a bigger kill out there to taunt him, and he always deluded himself that after that one there would be yet another, as yet undreamt of.
He stabbed the map again. ‘I want an adult. A near-adult, I should say.’
‘No one’s ever caught a near-adult hamadryad alive.’
‘Then I’ll have to be the first, won’t I?’
‘Leave it,’ I said. ‘We’ve enough of a hunt on our hands with Reivich. We can always use this trip to scope the terrain and go back in a few months with a full hunting expedition. We don’t even have a vehicle that could carry a dead near-adult, let alone a live one.’
‘I’ve been thinking about it,’ he said. ‘And doing some preliminary work on the problem. C’mon, let me show you something, Tanner.’
I had a horrible sinking feeling.
We walked through connecting corridors into another part of the Reptile House’s basement levels. Down in the basement vivaria there were hundreds of large display cases, equipped with humidifiers and temperature control for the comfort of reptilian guests. Most of the creatures that would have filled these exhibits moved in conditions of low light, along the forest floor. The cases would have held realistic habitats for them, stocked with exactly the right kinds of flora. The largest was a series of stepped rock-pools into which a pair of boa constrictors would have been introduced, but the embryos had been damaged years earlier.
By any strict definition, there were no creatures on Sky’s Edge that were exactly reptilian. Reptiles, even on Earth, were only one possible evolutionary outcome from a vast range of possibilities.
The largest invertebrates on Earth had been squid, but on Sky’s Edge, invertebrate forms had invaded land as well. No one really knew why life had gone down this road, but the best guess was that some catastrophic event had made the oceans shrink to perhaps half their previous area, exposing vast new areas of dry ground. Life on the ocean fringes had been given a huge incentive to adapt to land. The backbone had just never been invented, and through slow, fumbling, mindless ingenuity, evolution had managed to do without it. Life on Sky’s Edge was genuinely spineless. The largest animals — the hamadryads — maintained structural rigidity through the pressure of circulatory fluids alone, pumped by hundreds of hearts spread throughout the creature’s volume.
But they were cold-blooded, regulating their body temperatures by their surroundings. There had never been a winter on Sky’s Edge; nothing to select for mammal-like creatures. It was that cold-bloodedness which was most evocative of the reptilian. It meant that Sky’s Edge animals moved slowly, feeding infrequently, and lived to great ages. The largest of them, the hamadryads, did not even die in any familiar sense. They simply changed.
The connecting corridor opened out into the largest of the basement chambers, where we kept the juvenile.
