It was a half-hour’s travel through the interstices, skirting the chasm in a long undulating arc. It was visible only as an absence, a circular black occlusion in the luminous sprawl of the Canopy. It was ringed in the lights of the undomed peripheral structures, like phosphorescent lures around the jaw of some monstrous benthic predator. The occasional ledged structure was visible deeper into the maw, down for a depth of a kilometre, and the city’s enormous taplines extended even deeper, sucking air, power and moisture, but they were hardly visible at all. Even at night, a constant dark exhalation rose from the maw.
‘There it is,’ Chanterelle said, eventually. ‘Escher Heights.’
‘I understand now,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘Why you don’t like it.’
For several square kilometres, with a vertical extent of several hundred metres, the forestlike tangle of the Canopy transmuted into something very different: a jumbled agglomeration of freakish crystalline shapes, like something magnified from a geology textbook, or a photomicrograph of a fantastically adapted virus. The colours were glorious, pinks and greens and blues picked out by the lanterns of dug-out rooms and tunnels and public spaces threading the crystals. Great layered sheets of greyish-gold, like muscovite, rose in tiers above the topmost layer of the Canopy. Brittle turquoise encrustations of tourmaline curled into spires; there were pinkish rods of quartz the size of mansions. Crystals threaded and interpenetrated one another, their complex geometries folding around each other in ways no mind could ever have purposefully intended. It almost hurt to look at Escher Heights.
‘It’s insane,’ I said.
‘Hollow, mostly,’ Chanterelle said. ‘Otherwise it could never hang so high. The parts which broke away were absorbed into the Mulch years ago.’ I looked down, under the looming, luminous crystalline mass, and saw what she meant: blocky, overly-geometric concentrations of Mulch, like a carpet of lichen, covering the shards of the fallen city.
‘Can you find somewhere public nearby where we can land?’
‘I’m doing it,’ Chanterelle said. ‘Although I don’t know what good it will do. You can hardly walk into a plaza with a gun at my head.’
‘Maybe people will assume we’re a living exhibit and leave us alone.’
‘Is that as far as your plan goes?’ She sounded disappointed in me.
‘No, actually. It goes a bit further than that. This coat, for instance, has very capacious pockets. I know I can conceal the gun in one without any difficulty, and I can keep it pointed at you without it looking as if I’m just exceptionally pleased to see you.’
‘You’re serious, aren’t you? You’re going to walk through the plaza with a gun at my back.’
‘It would look a little silly if I pointed it at your front. One of us would have to walk backwards, and that wouldn’t do. We might bump into one of your friends.’
TWENTY-SEVEN
We landed with the absolute minimum of ceremony.
Chanterelle’s cable-car had come to rest on a ledge of flat metal buttressed out from the side of Escher Heights, large enough to accommodate about a dozen other vehicles. Most of them were cable-cars, but there were a couple of stubby-winged volantors. Like all the other flying machines I had seen in the city, they had the sleek, hyper-adapted look which told me they had been built before the plague. It must have been difficult, flying them through the warped thicket the city had become, but perhaps the owners just enjoyed the challenge of flying through the tangle. Perhaps it was even a kind of high-risk sport.
People were coming and going from their vehicles, some of which were private and some of which carried the insignia of taxi firms. Other people were just standing around the edge of the landing pad, peering at the rest of the city through pedestal-mounted telescopes. Everyone, without exception, was outlandishly dressed, in billowing capes or overcoats, offset with studiedly bizarre headgear, patterned in a riot of colours and textures which made even the surrounding architecture look a little on the restrained side. People wore masks or hid behind shimmering veils or elegant fans and parasols. There were bio-engineered pets on leashes, creatures which conformed to no known taxonomy, like cats with lizard crests. And some of the pets were not even as strange as their owners. There were people who had become centaurs; fully quadrupedal. There were people who, while still basically conforming to the standard-issue human shape, had twisted and stretched it so far that they looked like avant garde statues. One woman had elongated her skull to such an extent that it resembled the horned beak of an exotic bird. Another man had transformed himself into one of the ancient mythic prototypes of an extraterrestrial, his body preposterously thin and elongated, his dark slitted eyes like almonds.
Chanterelle told me these kind of changes could be effected in days; weeks at the most. It was possible that someone who was sufficiently determined could reshape their body image a dozen times in a year; with the same frequency with which I thought about cutting my hair.
And I expected to find Reivich in such a place?
‘If I were you,’ Chanterelle said, ‘I wouldn’t stand around staring all day. I take it you don’t want people to realise you aren’t from around here?’
I felt the ice-slug gun in my pocket and hoped that she saw my arm tense as I found it. ‘Just walk on. When I want advice I’ll ask for it.’ Chanterelle continued wordlessly, but after a few steps I began to feel guilty at snapping at her so strongly. ‘I’m sorry; I realise you were trying to help.’
‘It’s in my interests,’ the woman said, out of the corner of her mouth, as if sharing an anecdote. ‘I don’t want you attracting so much attention that someone makes a move on you and I end up getting caught in the crossfire.’
‘Thanks for the concern.’
‘It’s self-preservation. How could I feel concerned for you when you’ve just hurt my friends and I don’t even know your name?’
‘Your friends will be okay,’ I said. ‘This time tomorrow they won’t even be limping, unless they choose to keep their injuries for show. And they’ll have a very good story to tell in hunt circles.’
‘What about your name, then?’
‘Call me Tanner,’ I said, and forced her on.
A warm, moist wind blew across us as we crossed the pad towards the arched entrance which led back into Escher Heights. A few palanquins darted ahead of us like moving tombstones. At least it had decided not to rain. Perhaps rain was less frequent in this part of the city, or perhaps we were sufficiently high to escape the worst of it. My clothes were still wet from standing in the Mulch, but in this respect Chanterelle looked no better than I.
The arch led into a brightly lit enclosure cool with perfumed air, the ceiling strung with lanterns and banners and slowly spinning circulators. The corridor followed a gentle curve to the right, crossing ornamental pools via stone bridges. For the second time since arriving in the city I saw koi gaping up at me.
‘What’s the big deal with the fish?’ I asked.
‘You shouldn’t talk about them like that. They mean a lot to us.’
‘But they’re just koi.’
‘Yes, and it was just koi that gave us immortality. Or the first steps towards it, anyway. They live a long time, koi. Even in the wild, they don’t really die of old age. They just get larger and larger until their hearts can’t cope. But it’s not the same as dying of old age.’
I heard Chanterelle murmur something which might have been ‘koi be blessed’ as she crossed the bridge, and allowed my own lips to echo the sentiment. I didn’t want to be seen or doing anything unusual.
The walls were crystalline, an endlessly repeating motif of bustling octagons, but at intermittent distances they had been hollowed out to admit little boutiques and parlours, offering services in florid scrawls of neon or pulsing holographic light. Canopy people were shopping or strolling, most of them couples who at least looked young, although there were very few children present, and those I saw might well have been neotenous adults in their latest body image, or even androform pets programmed with a few childlike phrases.
Chanterelle led me into a much larger chamber, a huge vaulted hall of crystalline magnificence, into which
