I sighed and put up my hands in surrender. ‘You can show me the rest of Escher Heights as well.’
‘Why not. The night’s still young, after all.’
Chanterelle made some calls while we walked to a nearby boutique, chasing up her friends and establishing that they were all alive and safe in the Canopy, but she did not leave a message for any of them, and then never mentioned them again. That, I supposed, was how it went: many of the people I saw in Escher Heights would be cognisant of the Game, and might even follow it avidly, but none would admit it to themselves, beyond the private parlours where the sport’s existence was acknowledged and celebrated.
The boutique was staffed by two gloss-black bipedal servitors, far more sophisticated than any I had seen in the city so far. They kept oozing insincere compliments, even when I knew that I looked like a gorilla which had accidentally broken into a theatrical supplier’s. With Chanterelle’s guidance, I settled on a combination which wouldn’t offend or bankrupt me. The trousers and jacket were of similar cut to the Mendicant clothes I now gratefully discarded, but were cut from fabrics which were wildly ostentatious by comparison, all dancing metallic threads in coruscant golds and silvers. I felt conspicuous, but when we left the boutique — Vadim’s coat billowing raffishly behind me — people gave me no more than a fleeting glance, rather than the studied suspicion I’d elicited before.
‘So,’ Chanterelle said, ‘are you going to tell me where you’re from?’
‘What have you worked out for yourself?’
‘Well, you’re not from around here. Not from Yellowstone; almost certainly not from the Rust Belt; probably not from any other enclave in the system.’
‘I’m from Sky’s Edge,’ I said. ‘I came in on the Orvieto. Actually, I assumed you’d have figured out that much from my Mendicant clothes.’
‘I did, except the coat confused me.’
‘This old thing? It was donated to me by an old friend in the Rust Belt.’
‘Sorry, but no one donates a coat like that.’ Chanterelle fingered one of the lustrous, rough-cut patches which had been quilted over it. ‘You have no idea what this signifies, have you?’
‘All right; I stole it. From someone who had stolen it himself, I expect. A man who had worse coming to him.’
‘That’s fractionally more plausible. But when I first saw it, it made me wonder. And then when you mentioned Dream Fuel…’ She had lowered her voice to speak the last two words, barely breathing them.
‘Sorry, you’ve lost me completely. What does Dream Fuel have to do with a coat like this?’
But even as I said it I remembered how Zebra had hinted at the same connection. ‘More than you seem to realise, Tanner. You asked questions about Dream Fuel which made you look like an outsider, and yet you were wearing the kind of coat which said you were part of the distribution system; a supplier.’
‘You weren’t telling me everything you knew about Dream Fuel then, were you?’
‘Almost everything. But the coat made me wonder if you were trying to trick me, so I was careful what I said.’
‘So now tell me what else you know. How big is the supply? I’ve seen people inject themselves with a few cubic centimetres at a time, with maybe a hundred or so ccs in reserve. I’m guessing use of Dream Fuel’s restricted to a relatively small number of people; probably you and your elite, risk-taking friends and not many others. A few thousand regular users across the city, at the very maximum?’
‘Probably not far off the mark.’
‘Which would imply a regular supply, across the city, of — what? A few hundred ccs per user per year? Maybe a million ccs per year across the whole city? That isn’t much, really — a cubic metre or so of Dream Fuel.’
‘I don’t know.’ Chanterelle looked uncomfortable discussing what was obviously an addiction. ‘That seems about right. All I know is the stuff’s harder to get hold of than it used to be a year or two ago. Most of us have had to ration our use; three or four spikes a week at the most.’
‘And no one else has tried manufacturing it?’
‘Yes, of course. There’s always someone trying to sell fake Dream Fuel. But it’s not just a question of quality. It’s either Fuel or it isn’t.’
I nodded, but I didn’t really understand. ‘It’s obviously a seller’s market. Gideon must be the only person who has access to the right manufacturing process, or whatever it is. You postmortals need it badly; without it you’re dead meat. That means Gideon can keep the price as high as he likes, within reason. What I don’t see is why he’d restrict the supply.’
‘He’s raised the price, don’t you worry.’
‘Which might simply be because he can’t sell as much of it as he used to, because there’s a bottleneck in the manufacturing chain; maybe a problem with getting the raw materials or something.’ Chanterelle shrugged, so I continued, ‘All right, then. Explain what the coat means, will you?’
‘The man who donated you that coat was a supplier, Tanner. That’s what those patches on your coat mean. Its original owner must have had a connection to Gideon.’
I thought back to when Quirrenbach and I had searched Vadim’s cabin, reminding myself now that Quirrenbach and Vadim had been secret accomplices. ‘He had Dream Fuel,’ I said. ‘But this was up in the Rust Belt. He can’t have been that close to the supply.’
No, I added to myself, but what about his friend? Perhaps Vadim and Quirrenbach had worked together in more ways than one: Quirrenbach was the real supplier and Vadim merely his distributor in the Rust Belt.
I already wanted to speak to Quirrenbach again. Now I’d have more than one thing to ask him about.
‘Maybe your friend wasn’t that close to the supply,’ Chanterelle said. ‘But whatever the case, there’s something you need to understand. All the stories you hear about Gideon? About people vanishing because they ask the wrong questions?’
‘Yes?’ I asked.
‘They’re all true.’
Afterwards I let Chanterelle take me to the palanquin races. I thought there might be a chance that Reivich would show his face at an event like that, but although I searched the crowds of spectators, I never saw anyone who might have been him.
The circuit was a complicated, looping track that wormed its way through many levels, doubling under and over itself. Now and then it even extended beyond the building, suspended far above the Mulch. There were chicanes and obstacles and traps, and the parts which looped out into the night were not barriered, so there was nothing to stop a palanquin going over the edge if the occupant took the corner too sharply. There were ten or eleven palanquins per race, each travelling box elaborately ornamented, and there were stringent rules about what was and wasn’t permitted. Chanterelle said these rules were taken only semi-seriously, and it wasn’t unusual for someone to equip their palanquin with weapons to use against the other racers — projecting rams, for instance, to shove an opponent over the edge on one of the aerial bends.
The races had begun as a bet between two bored, palanquin-riding immortals, she said. But now almost anyone could take part. Half the palanquins were being ridden by people who had nothing to fear from the plague. Major fortunes were lost and won — but mainly lost — in the course of a night’s racing.
I suppose it was better than hunting.
‘Listen,’ Chanterelle said as we were leaving the races. ‘What do you know about the Mixmasters?’
‘Not too much,’ I said, giving as little away as possible. The name was vaguely familiar, but no more than that. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘You really don’t know, do you? That settles it, Tanner; you really aren’t from around here, as if there was any doubt.’
The Mixmasters predated the Melding Plague and were one of the system’s comparatively few old social orders which had weathered the blight more or less intact. Like the Mendicants, they were a self-supporting guild, and like the Mendicants, they concerned themselves with God. But there the similarity ended. The Mendicants — no matter what their other agendas happened to be — were there to serve and glorify their deity. The Mixmasters, on the other hand, wanted to become God.
And — by some definitions — they’d long ago succeeded.
