Epoque went belly-up.’
‘Don’t imagine you understand anything about me or my life.’
‘As if I wanted to.’ I leaned down and retrieved one of the rifles, inspecting its readout cartouches to ascertain that it was still functional. I felt edgy, even though I had the situation essentially under control. I had the feeling — indefinable, but present nonetheless — that another of their number had lurked behind the main party, was even now scoping me out through the sight of something high-powered and unsportingly accurate. But I tried not to let it show. ‘I’m afraid you were set up, Chanterelle. Here. Look at the side of my head. Can you see it? There’s a wound there, for an implant. But it never functioned properly.’ I took a risk, assuming that Waverly would have done the work on the real victim before he died, or would have been replaced at short notice by an equally surly understudy. ‘You were tricked. The man was working for saboteurs. He wanted to lead you into a trap. So the implant was modified, so that the positional trace was no longer accurate.’ I grinned cockily, though I had no idea whether such a thing was possible. ‘You thought I was blocks from here, so you weren’t expecting an ambush. You also weren’t expecting me to be armed, but — hey — some days you get the bear.’ Then I glanced down at her ursine friend. ‘No, sorry — my mistake. Today I got the bear, didn’t I?’
The man thrashed in the water, his palms clenched around his thigh. He started to say something, but I kicked him quiet.
Chanterelle had almost reached the black wedge of the cable-car. A large part of my gamble depended on the vehicle being empty, but it was only now that I felt reasonably sure that the risk had payed off and there was no one hiding inside.
‘Get in,’ I said. ‘And don’t try any funny tricks; I’m not known for my massive sense of humour.’
The car was sumptuously laid out, with four plush maroon seats, a glittering control panel and a well- appointed drinks cabinet ensconced in one wall, along with a rack of gleaming weapons and trophies. Keeping the gun aimed at the back of her neck, I had Chanterelle take us aloft.
‘I presume you have a destination in mind,’ she said.
‘Yes, but for now I just want you to find a nice altitude and loiter. You can give me a tour of the city, if you like. It’s a wonderful night for it.’
‘You’re right,’ Chanterelle said. ‘You’re not known for your sense of humour. In fact you’re about as hilarious as the Melding Plague.’ But after delivering this bon mot she grudgingly laid in a course and let the car do its swinging thing before turning around slowly to face me. ‘Who are you, really, and what do you want with me?’
‘I’m who I said I was — someone brought into your little game to add some well-needed equality.’
Her hand moved quickly to the side of my head — evidence of either bravery or considerable stupidity, given the proximity of my gun to her skull, and my demonstrated eagerness to use it.
She rubbed the place where Dominika had excised the hunt implant.
‘It’s not there,’ Chanterelle said. ‘If it ever was.’
‘Then Waverly lied to me as well.’ I observed her face for an anomalous reaction, but my use of the man’s name did not seem to strike her as unreasonable. ‘He never put the device in at all.’
‘Then who were we following?’
‘How am I supposed to know? You don’t use the implants to track your prey, do you? Or is that some new refinement I wasn’t aware of?’ As I spoke, the car made one of its intermittent sickening swoops, leaping between cables which were just a shade too far apart for comfort.
Chanterelle did not even flinch.
‘Do you mind if I call for help for my friends?’
‘Be my guest,’ I said.
She sounded more nervous making the call than at any point since we had met. Instead Chanterelle spun a story about going down into the Mulch to film a documentary she was making, and how she and her friends had been waylaid by a gang of vicious juvenile pigs. She said this with such conviction that I almost believed it myself.
‘I’m not going to harm you,’ I said, wondering how plausible I sounded. ‘I just want some information from you — information of a very general nature, which it won’t hurt you to provide — and then I want you to take me somewhere in the Canopy.’
‘I don’t trust you.’
‘Of course you don’t. I know I wouldn’t. And I’m not asking you to. I’m not putting you in a situation in which your trust of me is even remotely relevant. I’m just pointing a gun to your head and giving you orders.’ I licked my lips, thirsty and dry. ‘You either do what I say or you get to redecorate the interior of this car with your cranium. It’s not the hardest choice in the world, is it?’
‘What do you want to know?’
‘Tell me about the Game, Chanterelle. I’ve heard Waverly’s side of it, and what he said sounded very reasonable, but I want to be sure I’m getting the whole picture. You’re capable of that, aren’t you?’
As it was, Chanterelle was eloquent. Part of this I put down to the natural helpfulness which befalls anyone with a gun at their head. But a lot more of it, I thought, stemmed from the fact that Chanterelle rather liked the sound of her own voice. And I could not really fault her for that. It was a very nice voice and it came out of a very comely head.
Her family line was Sammartini, which I learned was one of the major clans in the pre-plague power- structure, a lineage which extended right back to the Amerikano era. Families who could trace their descents that far back were highly regarded; the closest thing to Royalty in the rarefield heights of Belle Epoque society.
Her family had connections with the most famous clan of all, the Sylvestes. I remembered Sybilline telling me about Calvin, the man who had resurrected the forgotten and discredited technologies of neural scanning which enabled the living to be translated — fatally, as it happened — into immortal computer simulations of themselves.
Of course, it hadn’t really bothered the Transmigrants that their bodies were destroyed in the course of the scanning. But when the simulations themselves started to fail, no one was quite so happy. There had been seventy-nine volunteers in the first wave of Transmigrants — eighty if you counted Calvin himself — and the majority of those simulations had stopped running long before the plague began to attack the logical substrates on which they were being computed. To commemorate the dead, they had built a vast and dejected Monument to the Eighty in the centre of the city, where shrines of the departed were tended by those relatives who remained corporeal. It was still there, after the plague had come.
The family of Chanterelle Sammartini were amongst the commemorated. ‘But we were lucky,’ she said, almost chattily. ‘The Sammartini scans were amongst the five per cent which never failed, and because my grandmother and father already had children, our lineage persisted corporeally.’
I tried to get my head around this. Her family had bifurcated — one thread of it propagating in simulation, the other in what we laughingly called actuality. And to Chanterelle Sammartini this was no more or less usual than as if she had relatives who lived overseas, or in another part of the system. ‘Because there was no stigma,’ she said, ‘our family sponsored further research, picking up where Calvin left off. Our ties with House Sylveste had always been close, and we had access to most of his research data. We made breakthroughs very quickly. Nonlethal modes of scanning.’ Her tone of voice changed, querulously. ‘Why do you want to know this? If you’re not Mulch, you must be Canopy. In which case you already know what I’m telling you.’
‘Why do you assume I’m not Mulch?’
‘You’re clever, or at least not irredeemably stupid. That isn’t a compliment, incidentally. It’s simply an observation.’
Evidently the idea that I might be from beyond the system was so outside Chanterelle’s accepted norms that it did not even enter her head.
‘Why don’t you just entertain me. Have you been scanned, Chanterelle?’
Now she really looked at me as if I was stupid. ‘Of course.’
‘Interactive scans — what do you call them?’
‘Alpha-level simulations.’
‘So there’s a simulation of you running right now, somewhere in the city?’
‘In orbit, idiot. The technology which facilitates the scans would never have survived the plague if it hadn’t been quarantined.’
‘Of course, silly me.’
