The Revelation Space Collection (149 page)

I offered him half of another wad, cutting deep into the reserves I had taken from Zebra. ‘Maybe this will ease your troubles, Lorant. That’s another ninety or hundred Ferris marks. Anything more, I might begin to suspect you were fleecing me.’

He might have smiled at that point; I could not be sure. ‘I can’t shelter you, Tanner Mirabel. Too dangerous.’

‘What he means,’ the other pig said, ‘is that there will be an implant in your head. The Canopy people will know where you are, even now. And if you have angered them, that puts all of us in danger.’

‘I know about the implant,’ I said. ‘And that’s what I need you to help me with.’

‘Help you get it out?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I know someone who can do that for me. Her name is Madame Dominika. But I’ve no idea how to get to her. Could you take me there?’

‘Do you have any idea where that would be?’

‘Grand Central Station,’ I said.

The pig looked around the wreckage of the kitchen. ‘Well, I don’t suppose I am going to be doing a great deal of cooking today, Tanner Mirabel.’

They were refugees from the Rust Belt.

Before that, they’d been refugees from somewhere else - the cold, cometary fringes of another solar system. But the cook and his wife - I couldn’t think of them as just pigs any more - had no real idea how the first of their kind had ever got there, just theories and myths. The one that sounded the most likely was that they were distant, abandoned descendants of a centuries-old programme in genetic engineering. Pigs’ organs had once been used for human transplant surgery - there were more similarities than differences between the two species - and it seemed likely that the pigs had been an experiment to make the animal donors even more humanlike by blending human genes into their own DNA. Perhaps it had gone much further than anyone had intended, so that a spectrum of genes had accidentally transferred intelligence to the pigs. Or perhaps that had been the idea all along, with the pigs an aborted attempt at producing a servile race with none of the nasty drawbacks of machines.

At some point, the pigs must have been abandoned; left out in deep space to fend for themselves. Perhaps it was just too much bother to systematically hunt them down and kill them, or perhaps the pigs themselves had broken free of the labs and established their own secretive colonies. By then, Lorant said, they were more than one species anyway, each having a different mix of human and pig genes, and there were groups of pigs which lacked the ability to form words, even though they had all the right neural mechanisms in place. I remembered the pigs I’d met before being rescued by Zebra; how the first of them had made grunting sounds at me which had almost seemed like an attempt at language. Perhaps the attempt had been a lot closer than I’d imagined.

‘I met some of your kind,’ I said. ‘Yesterday.’

‘You can call us pigs, you know. We aren’t bothered. It’s what we are.’

‘Well, these pigs appeared to be trying to kill me.’

I told Lorant what had happened, sketching in the broad details without explaining exactly what I had been doing trying to get to the Canopy in the first place. He listened intently as I spoke, then began to shake his head, slowly and sadly.

‘I don’t think they really wanted you, Tanner Mirabel. I think they probably wanted the people coming after you. They would have recognised that you were being chased. They were probably trying to persuade you to come with them, to shelter.’

I thought back to what had happened, and though I wasn’t totally convinced, I did begin to wonder if things had really happened the way Lorant said.

‘I shot one of them,’ I said. ‘Not fatally, but the leg would have needed surgery.’

‘Well, don’t feel too bad about it. They probably weren’t little angels, you know. We get a lot of problems around here with gangs of young pigs, raising hell and causing damage.’

I surveyed the damage I had caused. ‘I suppose the last thing you needed was me.’

‘It can all be mended, I dare say. But I think I will help you on your way before you do any more damage, Tanner Mirabel.’

I smiled. ‘That would probably be for the best, Lorant.’

After they had come down from the Rust Belt, Lorant and his wife had found themselves in the employment of a man who must have been amongst the richer individuals in the Mulch. They had their own ground-vehicle: a methane-driven tricycle with enormous balloon-wheels. The superstructure of the vehicle was a mish-mash of plastic and metal and bamboo, shrouded by rain sheets and parasols; it looked to be on the point of falling to pieces if I so much as breathed in its general direction.

‘You don’t have to look so disgusted,’ Lorant’s wife said. ‘It goes. And I don’t think you’re exactly in a position to complain.’

‘Never a truer word was said.’

But it worked, tolerably, and the balloon-wheels did a passable job of smoothing out the imperfections in the roadbed. Once Lorant had agreed to my terms, I managed to persuade him to detour to the place where the wreckage of the other cable-car had come down. By the time we got there a large crowd had assembled, and I then had to persuade Lorant to wait while I pushed through to the middle. There, in what remained of the front of the cable-car, I found Waverly, dead, his chest impaled on a piece of Mulch bamboo, just like one of the deadfalls I had rigged for Reivich. His face was a mass of blood, and might have been unrecognisable except for the blood-filled crater where his monocle had been. It must have been surgically attached.

‘Who did this?’

‘Harvested,’ said a stooped woman next to me, spitting the word through the gaps in her tooth. ‘That’s good optics, that is. Get a good price for that, they will.’

I resisted any burning curiosity to find out who ‘they’ were.

I walked back to Lorant’s tricycle, feeling that in some way part of my own conscience had been ripped out, no less brutally than Waverly’s eyepiece.

‘Well,’ Lorant said, while I climbed back into the tricycle. ‘What is it you took from him?’

‘You think I went back for a trophy?’

He shrugged, as if the matter were of no importance. But as we moved off, I had to ask myself just why I had gone back, if it was not for the reason he had thought.

The journey to Grand Central Station took an hour, though it seemed to me that much of this time was spent doubling back on our route to avoid areas of the Mulch which were either feared or impassable. It was possible that we only travelled three or four kilometres from the place where I had been attacked by Waverly’s people. Nonetheless, none of the landmarks I had made out from Zebra’s apartment were visible here - or if they were, I was seeing them from unrecognisable angles. My earlier sense of having found my feet - the sense that I had begun to assemble a mental map of the city - evaporated like a ridiculous dream. It would happen eventually, of course, if I spent enough time working on it. But not today; not tomorrow, and maybe not for weeks to come. And I didn’t plan on staying that long.

When we finally arrived at Grand Central Station, it was as if less than a heartbeat had elapsed since I was last there, desperately trying to detach myself from Quirrenbach. It was much earlier in the day now - not even noon, as far as I could tell by the angle of the sun on the Net - but no sense of that penetrated the station’s gloomy interior. I thanked Lorant for bringing me this far, and asked him if he would allow me to buy him a meal in addition to what I had already paid him, but he declined, refusing to get out of the driving seat of his trike. With goggles and fedora on and his clothes drawn up tightly around his face, he looked completely human, but I guess the illusion would have been harder to sustain indoors. Pigs, it appeared, were not universally loved and there were whole swathes of the Mulch which were out of bounds to them.

We shook hands - and trotters - anyway, and then he drove away into the Mulch.

TWENTY-FOUR

My first port of call was the broker’s tent, where I sold Zebra’s weapon at what was probably an extortionate mark-down on its true value. I could hardly complain; I was less interested in cash than in losing the weapon before it could be traced to me. The broker asked if it was hot, but I could see there was no real interest in his eyes. The rifle was far too cumbersome and conspicuous for an operation like the Reivich job. The only place you could walk into with a piece of hardware like that and not raise eyebrows would be a convention of heavy-artillery fetishists.

Madame Dominika, I was gratified to see, was still open for business. This time I didn’t need to be dragged there, but walked in willingly, my coat pockets swinging with the ammo-cells I had forgotten to sell.

‘She no open for business,’ said Tom, the kid who had originally hassled Quirrenbach and myself.

I palmed a few notes and slapped them on the table before Tom’s goggle-eyed face. ‘She is now,’ I said, and pushed on through to the tent’s inner chamber.

It was dark, but it took only a second or two for the room’s interior to snap into view, as if someone had turned on a very faint grey lantern. Dominika was sleeping on her operating couch, her generous anatomy shrouded in a garment which might have begun life as a parachute.

‘Wake up,’ I said, not too loudly. ‘You’ve got a customer.’

Her eyes opened slowly, like cracks in swelling pastry. ‘What is this, you got no respect?’ The words came out quickly, but she sounded too lethargic to register real alarm. ‘You ain’t come barging in here.’

‘My money seemed to cut some ice with your assistant.’ I dredged up another note and flashed it in front of her face. ‘How does this look to you?’

‘I don’t know, I can’t see nothing. What wrong with your eyes? Why they like that?’

‘There’s nothing wrong with my eyes,’ I said, and then wondered how convincing I sounded to her. After all, Lorant had said something similar. And it was a long time since I had experienced any difficulty seeing in the dark.

I extinguished that line of thought - unsettling as it was - and kept up the pressure on Dominika. ‘I need you to do a job for me, and to answer a few questions. That’s not asking too much, is it?’

She propelled her bulk from the couch, fitting her lower reaches into the steam-powered harness which waited by her side. I heard a hiss of leaking pressure as it took her bulk. Then Dominika moved away from the bed with all the grace of a barge.

‘What kind job, what kind questions.’

‘There’s an implant I need removing. Then I need to ask some questions about a friend of mine.’

‘Maybe I ask you questions about friend too.’ I had no idea what she meant by that, but before I could ask, she had turned on the tent’s interior light, exposing her waiting instruments, clustered around the couch which I now saw was spattered with faint rusty scabs of dried blood of varying vintage and hue. ‘But that cost too. Show me implant.’ I did, and after examining it for a few moments, her sharp thimbled fingers digging into the side of my head, she seemed satisfied. ‘Like Game implant, but you still alive.’

Evidently that meant it could not possibly be a Game implant, and for a moment there was no faulting her logic. After all, how many of the hunted ever stood a chance of making it back to Madame Dominika and having the trace removed from their skulls?

‘Can you remove it?’

‘If neural connections shallow, no problem.’ Saying this, she guided me to the couch and swung a viewing device in front of her eyes, chewing her lower lip as she peered into my skull. ‘No. Neural connections shallow; barely reach cortex. Good news for you. But look like Game implant. How it get there? Mendicants?’ Then she shook her head, the rolls of flesh around her neck oscillating like counterweights. ‘No, not Mendicants, unless you lie to me yesterday, when you say you no have implants. And this insertion wound new. Not even day old.’

‘Just get the damned thing out,’ I said. ‘Or else I walk out of here with the money I’ve already given the kid.’

‘That you can do, but you no find better than Dominika. That not threat, that promise.’

‘Then do it,’ I said.

‘First you ask question,’ she said, levitating around the couch to prep her other instruments, swapping her thimbles with impressive dexterity. She carried a pouch of them somewhere down in the infolded complexity of her waist, finding those she wanted by touch alone, without cutting or pricking her fingers in the process.

‘I have a friend called Reivich,’ I said. ‘He arrived a day or two ahead of me and we’ve lost touch. Revival amnesia, the Mendicants said. They could tell me he was in the Canopy, but no more than that.’

‘And?’

‘I think there was a good chance he sought your services.’ Or could not avoid them, I thought. ‘He would have had implants that needed removing, like Mister Quirrenbach, the other gentleman I travelled with.’ Then I described Reivich to her, aiming for the kind of vaguely correct level of recall which would imply friendship rather than an assassin’s physiometric target profile. ‘It’s very important that we get in contact, and so far I haven’t succeeded.’

‘What make you think I know this man?’

‘I don’t know - how much do you think it would take? Another hundred? Would that jog your memory?’

‘Dominika’s memory, it not so fast this time of morning.’

‘Two hundred then. Now is Mister Reivich springing to mind?’ I watched as a look of theatrical recollection appeared on her face. I had to hand it to her, she did it with style. ‘Oh, good. I’m so glad.’ If only she knew exactly how much.