something in his blood to keep it liquid. His metabolism is about as slow as it can get without stopping altogether. ’ Chanterelle touched the glass, her fingers leaving a frosty imprint against the chill. ‘He’s worshipped, though. The old venerate him. They think that by communing with him — by touching his glass — they ensure their own longevity.’
‘What about you, Chanterelle?’
She nodded. ‘I did once, Tanner. But like everything, it’s just a phase you grow out of.’
I gazed into that mirrorlike eye again, wondering what Methuselah had seen in all his years, and whether any of that data had percolated down to whatever passed for memory in a bloated old fish. I had read somewhere that goldfish had exceptionally short spans of recall; that they were incapable of remembering something for more than a few seconds.
I was sick of eyes for one day; even the unknowing, uncomprehending eyes of an immortal and venerated koi. So my gaze wandered momentarily down, beneath the sagging curve of Methuselah’s jaw, to the wavering bottle-green gloom which was the other side of the tank, where a dozen or so faces were crowded against the glass.
And saw Reivich.
It was impossible, but there he was; standing almost exactly opposite me on the other side of the tank, his face registering supreme calm, as if lost in the contemplation of the ancient animal between us. Methuselah stirred a fin — a movement indescribably languid — and the current caused the face of Reivich to swirl and distort. When the water calmed, I dared to imagine that what I would see would be only one of the locals who possessed the same set of genes for bland aristocratic hand-someness.
But when the water settled, I was still looking at Reivich.
He hadn’t seen me; though we were standing opposite each other, his gaze hadn’t yet intersected mine. I averted mine, while still holding him in peripheral vision, then reached in my pocket for the ice-slug gun, almost shocked to find that it was still there. I flicked off the safety.
Reivich still stood there, unreacting.
He was very close. Despite what I had said to Chanterelle earlier in the evening, I felt reasonably sure I could put a slug through him now, without removing the gun from the concealment of my coat. If I fired three slugs I could even allow for the distortion caused by the intervening water; bracketing my angle of fire. Would the slugs leave the gun with sufficient muzzle velocity to pass through two sheets of armoured glass and the water in between them? I couldn’t guess, and maybe it was academic anyway. From the angle at which I’d need to fire to take out Reivich, there was something else in the way.
I couldn’t simply kill Methuselah… could I?
Of course I could. It was just a question of pulling the trigger and putting the giant koi out of whatever extremely simplistic mental state it was currently in, certainly nothing sophisticated enough to be termed misery, I was sure. It would be a crime no more heinous than damaging some prized work of art.
The unseeing silver bowl of Methuselah’s eye drew my gaze.
There was no way I could do it.
‘Damn,’ I said.
‘What is it?’ Chanterelle said, almost blocking me as I pulled away from the side of the glass, reversing into the press of jostlers behind me, rubbernecking to get a glimpse of the fabled fish.
‘Someone I just saw. On the other side of Methuselah.’ I had the gun half out of the pocket now; it would only take an inadvertent glimpse for someone to see what I was about to do.
‘Tanner, are you insane?’
‘Very probably several kinds of insane,’ I said. ‘But I’m afraid it doesn’t change anything. I’m perfectly happy with my current delusional system.’ And then — approximating a leisured stroll — I started to walk around to the other side of the tank, the perspiration from my palm dampening the metal of the gun. I eased it fractionally from my pocket, hoping that the gesture looked casual, like someone extracting a cigar case, but freezing before the action was complete, as if something else had snared their attention.
I turned the corner.
Reivich was gone.
TWENTY-EIGHT
‘You were going to kill someone,’ Chanterelle said as her cable-car brachiated home, swinging through the lantern-bedecked brain coral growth of the Canopy with the Mulch hung below, dark except for a dappling of scattered fires.
‘What?’
‘You had your gun half out of your pocket like you meant to use it. Not the way you showed it to me — not as a threat — but like you weren’t going to say a word before you squeezed the trigger. Like you were just going to walk up, put a bullet through someone and walk away.’
‘There’d be little point lying, would there?’
‘You have to start talking to me, Tanner. You have to start telling me something. You said I wouldn’t like the truth because it would complicate things. Well, trust me — this is complicated enough. Are you ready to let some of that mask slip, or are we going to carry on this game?’
I was still playing the whole incident over in my head. The face had been that of Argent Reivich, and he had been standing only a few metres from me, in a public place.
Was it possible he had actually seen me all along, and was much cleverer than I had realised? If he’d recognised me, he could have left the area in the opposite direction while I walked around Methuselah. I’d been too fixated on the idea of him still standing up against the glass to pay enough attention to the people who had just left. So it was possible, yes. But in accepting that Reivich had been aware of my presence all along, I opened myself up to a far more unsettling set of questions. Why had he stayed there, if he had already seen me? And how had we met each other so easily? I hadn’t even been looking for him at that point; I was just getting the feel of the area before I began the real work of tightening the net. As if that was not enough, now that I reviewed the few moments which separated my discovery of Reivich from the moment when I realised he had left, I became aware that something else had happened. I had seen something or someone, but my mind had suppressed it, concentrating my attention on the imminent kill.
I had seen another face in the glass — another face that I knew, standing very close to Reivich.
She had erased the surface markings, but the underlying bone structure was reasonably intact, and her expression very familiar.
I had seen Zebra.
‘I’m still waiting,’ Chanterelle said. ‘There’s only so much of that meaningful frown I can take, you know.’
‘I’m sorry. It’s just—’ I found myself grinning. ‘I almost think you might like me for who I am.’
‘Don’t push your luck, Tanner. Only a couple of hours ago you were pointing a gun at me. Most relationships that start like that tend to go downhill.’
‘Ordinarily, I’d agree. But you also happened to be pointing a gun at me, and your gun was considerably larger than mine.’
‘Hmm, maybe.’ She sounded far from convinced. ‘But if we’re going to take it any further — and make of that what you will — you’d better start elaborating on that dark and mysterious past of yours. Even if there are things you don’t really want me to know.’
‘Oh, there are plenty of those, believe me.’
‘Then get them out into the open. By the time we get back to my place, I want to know why that man was going to die. And if I were you, I’d seriously try and persuade me that he deserves it — whoever it was. Otherwise you might begin to slip in my estimation.’
The car pitched and swayed, but I no longer found the motion really sickening.
‘He deserves to die,’ I said. ‘But I can’t say he’s a bad man. If I’d been in his place, I’d have done exactly what he did.’ Except done it professionally, I thought, and not left anyone alive afterwards.
