customers anywhere near it. I presumed her body was still alive, still suspended above the couch where she worked her acts of neural exorcism; still gilded by snakes. Word of her death must surely have spread far into the Mulch by now, but the sheer illegality of it — cutting against all the unspoken laws of who could and could not be touched — still served to enforce a zone of exclusion around the tent.
‘I don’t think anyone would blame him,’ I said. ‘Because what I did to him…’
The white room returned — except this time I shared the perspective of the crouched man; felt his nakedness and his excruciating fear; a fear that opened up rifts of emotion he’d never imagined before, like a man glimpsing hallucinogenic new colours.
Tanner’s perspective.
The creature stirred in the alcove, uncoiling itself with languid patience, as if — in some simple loop of its tiny brain — it understood that its prey was not going anywhere in a hurry.
The juvenile was not a large hamadryad; it must have been birthed from its tree-mother in the last five years, judging by the roseate hue of its photovoltaic hood, furled around its head like the wings of a resting bat. They lost that colour as they neared maturity, since it was only fully grown hamadryads which were long enough to reach the tree-tops and unfurl their hoods. If the creature was allowed to grow, in a year or two the roseate shade would darken to a spangled black: a dark quilt studded with the iridophore-like photovoltaic cells.
The coiled thing lowered itself to the floor, like a bundle of stiff rope tossed from a ship to the quayside. For a moment it rested, its photovoltaic hood opening and closing softly and slowly, like the gills of a fish. It was very large indeed, now that he could see it more closely.
He had seen hamadryads dozens of times in the wild, but never closely, and never in their entirety; only a glimpse between trees from a safe distance. Even though he had never been near one without possessing a weapon which could easily kill it, there had never been an encounter which was not without a little fear. He understood. It was natural, really: the human fear of snakes, a phobia written into the genes by millions of years of prudent evolution. The hamadryad was not a snake, and its ancestors did not remotely resemble anything which had ever lived on Earth. But it looked like a snake; it moved like a snake. That was all that mattered.
He screamed.
FORTY
‘You may have let me down in the end,’ I said, mouthing a silent message to Norquinco, who was far beyond any means of hearing me, ‘but I can’t deny that you did an exemplary job.’
Clown smiled at that.
‘Armesto, Omdurman? I hope you’re watching this. I hope you can see what I am about to do. I want it to be clear. Crystal clear. Do you understand?’
Armesto’s voice came though after the timelag, as if halfway to the nearest quasar. It was faint because the other ships had sloughed all non-essential communications arrays: hundreds of tonnes of redundant hardware.
‘You’ve burned all your bridges, son. There’s nothing left for you to do now, Sky. Not unless you manage to persuade any more of your viables to cross the River Styx.’
I smiled at the classical reference. ‘You still don’t seriously think I murdered some of those dead, do you?’
‘No more than I think you murdered Balcazar.’ Armesto was silent for a few moments; silence broken only by static; cracks and pops of interstellar noise. ‘Make of it what you want, Haussmann…’
My bridge officers looked awkwardly at him when Armesto mentioned the old man, but none of them were going to do more than that. Most of them must have already had their suspicions. They were all loyal to me now; I had bought their loyalty, promoting non-achievers to positions of prominence in the crew hierarchy, just as dear Norquinco had tried to blackmail me into doing. They were weak, for the most part, but that did not concern me. With the layers of automation Norquinco had bypassed, I could practically run the Santiago myself.
Perhaps it would come to that soon.
‘You’ve forgotten something,’ I said, enjoying the moment.
Armesto must have been confident that nothing had been forgotten, beginning to think that the chase was winnable.
How wrong he was.
‘I don’t think I have.’
‘He’s right,’ came the voice of Omdurman on the Baghdad, similarly faint. ‘You’ve used up all your options, Haussmann. You don’t have another edge.’
‘Except this one,’ I said.
I tapped commands into my seat command console. Felt, subliminally, the hidden layers of ship subsystems bend to my will. On the main screen, looking along the spine, was a view very similar to the one I had seen when I had detached the sixteen rings of the dead.
But it was different now.
Rings were leaving all along the spine, around all six faces. There was still a harmony to it — I was too much of a perfectionist for anything else — but it was no longer an ordered line of rings. Now, every other ring amongst the eighty remaining was detaching. Forty rings broke away from the spine of the Santiago…
‘Dear God,’ said Armesto, when he must have seen what was happening. ‘Dear God, Haussmann… No! You can’t do that!’
‘Too late,’ I said. ‘I’m already doing it.’
‘Those are living people!’
I smiled. ‘Not any more.’
And then I turned my attention back to the view, before the glory of what I had done had passed. Truly, it was beautiful to watch. Cruel, too — I admitted that. But what was beauty without a little cruelty at its heart?
Now I knew I’d win.
We took the Zephyr to the behemoth terminal, the train hauled by the same huge, dragonlike locomotive that had brought Quirrenbach and me into the city only a few days earlier.
Using what little reserves of currency I had left, I bought a fake identity from one of the marketeers, a name and a cursory credit-history just about robust enough to get me off the planet and — if I was lucky — into Refuge. I had come in as Tanner Mirabel, but I did not dare try and use that name again. Normally it would have been a matter of reflex for me to pull a false name out of the air and slip into that disguise, but now something made me hesitate when selecting my new identity.
In the end, when the marketeer was about to lose his patience, I said, ‘Make me Schuyler Haussmann.’
The name meant almost nothing to him, not even the surname worthy of comment. I said the name to myself a few times, becoming sufficiently familiar with it that I would act with the right start of recognition if my name came over a public address system, or if someone whispered it across a crowded room. Afterwards, we booked ourselves onto the next available behemoth making the haul up from Yellowstone.
‘I’m coming, of course,’ Quirrenbach said. ‘If you’re serious about protecting Reivich, I’m the only way you’re going to get anywhere near him.’
‘What if I’m not serious?’
‘You mean what if you might still be planning to kill him?’
I nodded. ‘You’ve got to admit, it’s still a possibility.’
Quirrenbach shrugged. ‘Then I’ll simply do what I was always meant to do. Take you out at the earliest opportunity. Of course, my reading of the situation is that it won’t come to that — but don’t imagine for a moment that I wouldn’t do it.’
‘I wouldn’t dream of it.’
Zebra said, ‘You need me, of course. I’m also a line to Reivich, even if I was never as close to him as Quirrenbach.’
‘It might be dangerous, Zebra.’
‘What, and visiting Gideon wasn’t?’
