GRAFENWALDER’S BESTIARY
Grafenwalder’s attention is torn between the Ultra captain standing before him and the real-time video feed playing on his monocle. The feed shows the creature being unloaded from the Ultras’ shuttle into the special holding pen Grafenwalder has already prepared. The beetle-like forms of armoured keepers poke and prod the recalcitrant animal with ten-metre stun-rods. The huge serpentine form writhes and bellows, flashing its attack eyes each time it exposes the roof of its mouth.
“Must have been a difficult catch, Captain. Locating one is supposed to be difficult enough, let alone trapping and transporting—”
“The capture was handled by a third party,” Shallice informs him, with dry indifference. “I have no knowledge of the procedures involved, or of the particular difficulties encountered. ”
While the keepers pacify the animal, technicians snip tissue samples and hasten them into miniature bio-analysers. So far they’ve seen nothing that suggests it isn’t the real thing.
“I take it there were no problems with the freezing?”
“Freezing always carries a risk, especially when the underlying biology is nonterrestrial. We only guarantee that the animal appears to behave the same way now as when it was captured.”
Shallice is a typical Ultra: a cyborg human adapted for the extreme rigours of prolonged interstellar flight. His sleek red servo-powered exoskeleton is decorated with writhing green neon dragons. Cagelike metal ribs emerge from the Ultra’s waxy white sternum, smeared with vivid blue disinfectant where they puncture the skin. The Ultra’s limbs are blade-thin; his skull a squeezed hatchet capable of only a limited range of expression. He smells faintly of ammonia, breathes like a broken bellows and his voice is a buzzing, waspish approximation of human speech.
“Whoever that third party was, they must have been damned good.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Last I heard, no one has ever captured a live hamadryad. Not for very long, anyway.”
Shallice can’t hide his scorn. “Your news is old. There had been at least three successful captures before we left Sky’s Edge.” He pauses, fearing perhaps that he may have soured the deal. “Of course,” he continues, “this is a far larger hamadryad . . . an adult, almost ready for tree-fusion. The others were juveniles, and they did not continue to grow once they were in captivity.”
“You’re right: I need to keep better informed.” At that moment the news scrolls onto his monocle: his specialists have cross-matched samples from the animal against archived hamadryad genetic material, finding no significant points of deviation. “Well, Captain,” he says agreeably, “it looks as if we have closure on this one. You must be in quite a hurry to get back into safe space, away from the Rust Belt.”
“We’ve other business to attend to before we have that luxury,” Shallice tells him. “You’re not our only client around Yellowstone.” The Ultra’s eyes narrow to calculating slits. “As a matter of fact, we have another hamadryad to deliver.” Before Grafenwalder responds, the Ultra raises a servo-assisted hand. “Not a fully grown sample like your own. A much less mature animal. Yours will still be unique in that sense.”
Anger rises in Grafenwalder like a hot, boiling tide. “But it won’t be the only hamadryad around Yellowstone, will it?”
“The other one will probably die. It will certainly not grow any larger.”
“You misled me, Captain. You promised exclusivity.”
“I did no such thing. I merely said that no one else would be offered an adult.”
Grafenwalder knows Ultras too well to doubt that Shallice is telling the truth. They may be unscrupulous, but they usually stay within the strict letter of a contract.
“This other collector . . . you wouldn’t mind telling me who it is, would you?”
“That would be a violation of confidentiality.”
“Come now, Captain—if someone else gets their hands on a hamadryad, they’re hardly going to keep it a secret. At least not within the Circle.”
Shallice weighs this point for several long moments, his alloy ribs flexing with each laboured breath. “The collector ’s name is Ursula Goodglass. She owns a habitat in the low belt. Doubtless you know the name.”
“Yes,” Grafenwalder says. “Vaguely. She’s been nosing around the Circle for some time, but I wouldn’t call her a full member just yet. Her collection’s nothing to speak of, by all accounts.”
“Perhaps that will change when she has her hamadryad.”
“Not when the Circle learns there’s a bigger one here. Did you let her think she’d be getting something unique as well, Captain?”
Shallice makes a sniffing sound. “The contract was watertight. ”
On the video feed, the animal is being coaxed deeper into its pen. Now and then it rears up to strike against its tormentors, moving with deceptive speed.
“Let’s not play games, Captain. How much is she paying you for her sample?”
“Ten thousand.”
“Then I’ll pay you fifteen not to hand it over, on top of what I’m already paying you.”
“Out of the question. We have an arrangement with Goodglass.”
“You’ll tell a little white lie. Say it didn’t thaw out properly, or that something went wrong afterwards.”
Shallice thinks this over, his hatchet-head cocking this way and that inside the metal chassis of the exoskeleton. “She might ask to see the corpse—”
“I absolutely insist on it. I want her to know what she nearly got her hands on.”
“A deception will place us at considerable risk. Fifteen would not be sufficient. Twenty, on the other hand—”
“Eighteen, Captain, and that’s as high as I go. If you walk out of here without accepting the deal, I’ll contact Goodglass and tell her you were at least giving it the time of day.”
“Eighteen it is, then,” Shallice says, after a suitable pause. “You drive a hard bargain, Mister Grafenwalder. You would make a good Ultra.”
Grafenwalder shrugs off the insult and reaches out a hand to Captain Shallice. When his fingers close around the Ultra’s, it’s like shaking hands with a cadaver.
“I’d love to say it’s been a pleasure doing business.”
Later, he watches their shuttle depart his habitat and thread its way through the debris-infested Rust Belt, moving furtively between the major debris-swept orbits. He wonders what the Ultras make of the old place, given the changes that have afflicted it since their last trip through the system.
Good while it lasted, as people tend to say these days.
Oddly, though, Grafenwalder prefers things the way they are now. All things told, he came out well. Neither his body nor his habitat had depended on nanomachines, so it was only the secondary effects of the plague that were of concern to him. The area in which he had invested his energies prior to the crisis—the upgrading of habitat security systems—now proves astonishingly lucrative amongst the handful of clients able to afford his services. In lawless times, people always want higher walls.
There’s something else, though. Ever since the plague hit, Grafenwalder has slept easier at night. He’s at a loss to explain why, but the catastrophe—as bad as it undoubtedly was for Yellowstone and its environs—seems to have triggered some seismic shift in his own peace of mind. He remembers being anxious before; now—most of the time, at least—he only has the memory of anxiety.
At last his radar loses track of the Ultra shuttle, and it’s only then that he realises his error. He should have asked to see the other hamadryad before paying the captain to kill it. Not because he thinks it might not ever have existed—he’s reasonably sure it did—but because he has no evidence at all that it wasn’t already dead.
He permits himself a bittersweet smile. Next time, he won’t make that kind of mistake. And at least he has his hamadryad.
Grafenwalder walks alone through his bestiary. It’s night, by the twenty-six-hour cycle of Yellowstone standard time, and the exhibits are mostly dimmed. The railed walkway that he follows glows a subdued red, winding between, under and over the vast cages, tanks and pits. Many of the creatures are asleep, but some stir or uncoil at his approach, while others never sleep. Things study his passage with dim, resentful intelligence: just enough to know that he is their captor. Occasionally something throws itself at its restraints, clanging against cage bars or shuddering against hardened glass. Things spit and lash. There are distressing calls; laughable attempts at vocalisation.
Not all of the animals are animals, technically speaking. About half the exhibits in the bestiary are creatures like the hamadryad: alien organisms that evolved on the handful of known life-sustaining worlds beyond the First System. There are slime-scrapers from Grand Teton; screech-mats from Fand; more than a dozen different organisms from the jungles of Sky’s Edge, including the hamadryad itself.
But the other half of the collection is more problematic. It’s the half that could get him into serious trouble if the agents of the law came calling. It’s where he keeps the real monsters: the things that might once have been human. There is the specimen he once bought from some other Ultras: a former crewman, apparently, who had been transformed far beyond the usual Ultra norms. Major areas of brain function had been trowelled out and replaced with crude neural modules, until the only remaining instinct was a slathering urge to mutilate and kill. His limbs are viciously specialised weapons, his bone growth modified to produce horns and armoured plaques. Grafenwalder can only guess that the man was meant to be some kind of berserker, to be used in acts of piracy where energy weapons might be unwise. Eventually he must have become unmanageable. Now it amuses Grafenwalder to provoke the man into futile killing frenzies.
Then there is the hyperpig variant his contacts located for him in the bowels of Chasm City: one of a kind, apparently; a rare genetic deviation from the standard breed. The woman’s right side is perfectly human, but her left side is all pig. Brain function lies somewhere between animal and human. She sometimes tries to talk to him, but the compromised layout of her jaw renders her attempts at speech as frenzied, unintelligible grunts. At other times neural implants leave her docile, easily controlled. On the rare occasions when he has guests, Grafenwalder has her serve dinner. She shuffles in presenting her human side, then turns to reveal her true ancestry. Grafenwalder treasures his guests’ reactions with a thin, observant smile.
Then there is the psychotic dolphin that lives in near-permanent darkness, its body showing evidence of crude cybernetic tampering. Its origin is unclear, its age even more so, but the animal’s endless, all-consuming rage is beyond question. Grafenwalder has dropped sensors into the animal’s scarred cortex, hooked into a visual display system. The slightest external stimulus becomes amplified into a kaleidoscopic light show, like the Devil’s own firework display. Circuits drop the visual patterns back into the dolphin’s mind. As an after-dinner treat, Grafenwalder encourages his guests to torment the dolphin into ever more furious cycles of anger.
There are many other exhibits; almost too many for Grafenwalder to remember. Not all are of interest to him now, and there are some that he has not visited for many years. His keepers take care of the creatures’ needs, only bothering him when something needs specialised or expensive medical intervention and his permission must be sought. Perhaps the hamadryad will turn out to be another of those waning fancies, although he thinks it unlikely.
But there is one holding pen that remains unoccupied. He’s walking over it now, hands on either side of the railed bridge that spans the empty abyss. It is a deep, ceramic-lined tank that will eventually be filled with cold water under many atmospheres of pressure. At the bottom of the tank is a rocky surface that is designed to be punctuated by thermal hotspots, gushing noxious gases. When it is activated, the environment in the tank will form a close match to conditions inside the ice-shrouded ocean of Europa, the little moon of Jupiter in the First System.
But first Grafenwalder needs an occupant for the tank. That’s the fundamental problem. He knows what he has in mind, but finding one of the elusive creatures is proving trickier than he expected. There are even some who doubt that the Denizens ever existed; let alone that he might find a surviving specimen now, in another system and nearly two hundred years after their supposed heyday. Yet there are enough shards of encouragement to keep him hopeful. He has subtle feelers out, and every now and then one of them twitches with a nugget of information. His trusted contacts know that he is looking for one, and that he will pay very well upon delivery. And deep inside himself he knows that the Denizens were real, that they lived and breathed and that it is not absurd that one may have survived into the present era.
He must have one. Although he would never admit it, he would gladly trade the rest of his bestiary for that one exhibit. And even as he acknowledges that truth within himself, he still cannot say why the creature matters so much.
Orbiting the inner fringe of the Rust Belt, backdropped by the choleric face of Yellowstone itself, Goodglass’s habitat is a wrinkled walnut of unprepossessing dimensions. Grafenwalder’s shuttle docks at a polar berthing nub, where a dozen similar vehicles are already clamped. He recognises more than half of them as belonging to collectors of his acquaintance.
After running some cursory security checks, a silverback gorilla escorts him deeper into the miniature world. The habitat is a cored-out asteroid, excavated by fusion torches and stuffed with a warren of pressurised domiciles wrapped around a modest central airspace. A spinney of free-fall trees keeps the self-regulating ecosystem ticking over, with only a minimal dependence on plague-vulnerable machinery. There are no servitors anywhere, only adapted animals like the silverback. The air smells mulchy, saturated with microscopic green organisms. Grafenwalder sneezes into his handkerchief and makes a mental note to have his lungs swapped out and filtered when he returns home.
Goodglass offers cocktails to her assembled guests. They’re standing in an antechamber to her bestiary, in a part of the habitat that has been spun for gravity. The polished floor is a matrix of black and white tiles, each of which has been inlaid with a luminous red fragment of a much larger picture. As the guests stand around, the tiles slowly shift and reorient themselves.
Grafenwalder goes with the flow, letting the tiles slide him from encounter to encounter. He makes small talk with the other collectors, filing gossip and rumour. All the while he’s checking out his host, measuring her against his expectations. Ursula Goodglass is a small woman of baseline-human appearance, devoid of any obvious biomodi fications. She wears a one-piece purple-black outfit with flared sleeves, rising to a stiff-necked collar upon which her hairless head sits like a rare egg. She possesses an attractively impish face with a turned-up nose. He could like her, if he didn’t already detest her.
Presently, as he knew they must, the tiles bring them together. He bows his head and takes her black-gloved hand.
“It’s good of you to come, Mister Grafenwalder,” she says. “I know how busy you are, and I wasn’t really expecting you to be able to find the time.”
“Carl, please,” he says, oozing charm. “And don’t imagine I’d have been able to stay away. Your invitation sounded intriguing. It’s so much more difficult to turn up anything new these days, the way things have gone. I can’t imagine what it is you have for us.”
“I just hope you won’t be disappointed.”
“I won’t,” he says, with heavy emphasis. “Of that I’m sure.”
“I want you to understand,” she begins, before glancing away nervously, “it’s not that I’m trying to compete with you, or upstage you. I’ve too much respect for you for that.”
“Oh, don’t worry. A little healthy rivalry never hurt anyone. What good is a collection unless there’s another one to lend it contrast?”
She smiles uncertainly, measuring him as much as he is measuring her. He can feel the pressure of her scrutiny: cool and steady as a refrigeration laser.
Fine lines crisscross her skull: snow-white sutures that remind him of the fracture patterns in the ice of Europa, even though he has never visited First System. The scars are evidence of emergency surgery performed in the heat of the Melding Plague, when it became necessary for the rich to rid themselves of their neural implants. Now Goodglass wears them as a symbol of former status.
“I’d like you to meet my husband,” she says as a palanquin glides up to them across the shifting tiled floor. Grafenwalder blinks back surprise: he’d noticed the palanquin before, but had assumed it belonged to one of the other guests. “Edric, this is Carl,” she says.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” the palanquin answers, the piping voice issuing from a speaker grille set halfway up the front of the armoured cabinet. The palanquin has the shape of a slender, flat-topped pyramid, its bronze sides flanged by cooling ribs and sensor studs. An oval window set into the front, just above the speaker grille, is too dark to afford more than a vague impression of Edric Goodglass. “I hope this encumbrance doesn’t make you ill at ease, Mister Grafenwalder,” the occupant tells him.
“Hardly,” he says. “I’ve used palanquins myself, for business in Chasm City. They tell me my blood has been scrubbed of machines, but you can’t ever be too careful.”
“In my case I never leave my palanquin,” Edric says. “I still carry all the bodily machines I had at the time of the plague. It would only take a tiny residual trace to kill me.”
Grafenwalder swirls his drink, stepping nimbly from one moving tile to another. “It must be intolerable.”
“It’s my own fault. I was too slow when it counted. When the plague hit, I hesitated. I should have had the surgery fast and dirty, the way my wife did. She was braver than I; less convinced it was all about to blow over. Now I can’t even risk the surgery. I’d have to leave the palanquin before they opened me up, and that alone would expose me to unacceptable risk.”
“But surely the top hospitals—”
“None will give me the cast-iron guarantee I require. Until one of them can state categorically that there is a zero risk of plague infection, I will remain in this thing.”
“You might be in for a long wait.”
“If I’ve learned anything from Ursula, it’s the value of patience. She’s the very model of it.”
Grafenwalder shoots a sidelong glance at Ursula Goodglass, wondering what their marriage must be like. Clearly sex isn’t in the cards, but he doubts that it was ever the main interest in their lives. Games, especially those of prestige and subterfuge, are amongst the chief entertainments of the Rust Belt moneyed.
“Well, I suppose I shouldn’t keep people waiting any longer,” the woman says. She drops her empty glass to the floor, where it vanishes into one of the black tiles as if it had met no resistance, and then claps her hands three times. “Ladies and gentlemen,” she begins, voice raised an octave higher than when they had been speaking, “thank you very much for coming here today. Some of you have visited before; some of you are newcomers to my habitat. Some of you will know a little about me, some of you next to nothing. I do not believe that any of us would say that we are close friends. All of us in the Circle have one thing in common, though: we collect. It is what we live for; what makes us who we are. My own bestiary is modest by the standards of some, but I am nonetheless immensely proud of my latest acquisition. There is nothing else like it in this system; nor is there likely to be for a very long time. Please join me now—I believe I have something you are going to find very, very interesting.”
With that, a pair of thick metal doors open in one wall of the room, hissing wide on curved pistons. Goodglass and her husband lead the way, with the rest of the party trailing behind. Grafenwalder chooses to remain close by the couple, feigning curiosity.
She can’t just show off the hamadryad. First they have to endure a short but tedious tour of the rest of her bestiary, or at least that part of it she plans to show them today. None of it is of the slightest interest to Grafenwalder, and even the other guests merely feign polite interest. By turns, though, they arrive at the main event. The party gathers on a railed ledge high above a darkened pit. Grafenwalder knows what’s coming, but keeps his expression blankly expectant. Goodglass makes a little speech, dropping hints about the type of specimen she’s obtained, how difficult it’s been to capture and transport it, alluding once or twice to its planet of origin: clue enough for those in the know. Pricking his ears, Grafenwalder makes out speculative whispers from his fellow collectors. One or two are ahead of Goodglass.
“Unfortunately,” she says, “my exhibit did not arrive intact. It suffered some physiological trauma during its journey here: cryogenic damage to its tissues and nervous system. But it is still alive. With some intervention, my experts have restored much of its basic functional repertoire. In all significant respects, it is still a living hamadryad: the first you will ever see.”
She throws the lights, illuminating the creature in the pit. By then Grafenwalder has a bad taste in his mouth. The hamadryad is much smaller than his adult-phase example, but it isn’t dead. It’s moving: great propulsive waves sliding up and down its concertina body as it writhes and coils from one end of the pit to the other, thrashing like a severed electrical line.
“It’s alive,” he says quietly.
Goodglass looks at him sharply. “Were you expecting otherwise?”
“It’s just that when you said how much difficulty you’d gone to—” But by then his words are drowned out by the demands of the other guests, all of whom have questions for Goodglass. Lysander Carroway starts applauding, encouraging the others to join in.
Grafenwalder notches his hatred a little higher, even as he joins in the applause with effete little hand-claps.
He steps back from the railing, giving Goodglass her moment in the sun. All the while, he studies the hamadryad, trying to figure out what must have happened. As much as he dislikes Ultras, he can’t believe that Captain Shallice would have cheated him so nakedly. That’s when Grafenwalder sees his angle, and knows he can come out of this even better than he was expecting.
He lets the interested chat simmer down, then coughs just loudly enough to let everyone know he has something to contribute.
“It’s very impressive,” he says. “For an intermediate-phase sample, at any rate.”
Goodglass fixes him with narrowing eyes, dimly aware of what must be coming. Even the palanquin spins around, presenting its dark window to him.
“You know of other samples, Carl?” Ursula asks.
“One, anyway. But before we get into that . . . you mentioned shipping difficulties, didn’t you?”
“Normal complications associated with reefersleep procedures as applied to nonterrestrial organisms,” she says.
“What kind of complications?”
“I told you already—tissue damage—”
“Yes, but how extensive was it? When the animal was revived from reefersleep, in what way did it exhibit signs of having been injured? Were its movements impaired, its hunting patterns atypical?”
“None of that,” she says.
“Then you’re saying the animal was fine?”
“No,” she says icily. “The animal was dead.”
Grafenwalder twitches back his head in feigned confusion. “I know hamadryad biology is complex, but I didn’t know that they could be brought back from death.”
“Reefersleep is a kind of death,” Goodglass says.
“Well, yes. If you want to split hairs. Things are usually alive after they’ve been thawed, though: that’s more or less the point. But the hamadryad wasn’t alive, was it? It was dead. It’s still dead.”
Lysander Carroway shakes her head emphatically. “It’s alive, Grafenwalder. Use your bloody eyes.”
“It’s being puppeted,” Grafenwalder says. “Isn’t it, Ursula? That’s a dead animal with electrodes in it. You’re making it twitch like a frog’s leg.”
Goodglass fights hard to keep her composure: he can see the pulse of a vein on the side of her skull. “I never actually said it was alive. I merely said it had the full behavioural repertoire of a living hamadryad.”
“You said it was living.”
Her husband answers for her. “They don’t have brains, Grafenwalder. They’re more like plants. It eats and shits. What more do you want?”
Choosing his moment expertly, he offers a disappointed shrug. “I suppose it has a certain comedic value.”
“Come now,” Michael Fayrfax says. “She’s shown us a hamadryad, more than most of us will ever see. What does it matter if it isn’t technically alive?”
“I think it matters a lot,” Grafenwalder says. “That’s why I’ve gone to so much trouble to obtain a living specimen. Bigger than that, too. Mine’s adult-phase. They don’t come any larger.”
“He’s bluffing,” Goodglass says. “If he had a hamadryad, he’d have shown it off already.”
“I assure you I have one. I just wasn’t ready to exhibit it yet.”
She still looks sceptical. “I don’t believe you. Why wait until now?”
“I wanted to be sure the animal had settled down; that I’d ironed out any difficulties with its biology. Keeping one of those things alive is quite a challenge, especially when they’re adult-phase: the whole dietary pattern starts shifting.”
“You’re lying.”
“You can see it, if you want to.”
The scepticism begins to crack, the fear that he might not be lying breaking through. “When?”
“Whenever you like.” He turns to the other guests and extends his hands expansively. “All of you, of course. You know where I live. How about the day after tomorrow? I couldn’t possibly fake one by then, could I?”
Grafenwalder is riding his shuttle back home from the Goodglass bestiary when he receives an incoming communication. It appears to be transmitting from within the Rust Belt, but the shuttle can’t pinpoint the origin of the signal any more precisely than that. For a moment Grafenwalder thinks it may be a threat from Goodglass, even though he credits her with fractionally more sense than that.
But it’s not Goodglass’s face that fills his cabin wall when he answers the communication. It’s nobody he recognises. A man, with a cherubic moon-face and a thick lower lip, glossy with saliva, that sags to the right. He wears a panama hat over tight dark curls, and a finely patterned harlequin coat hangs over his heavy frame in billowing folds. A glass box dangles around his neck, rattling with the implants he must once have carried in his skull. He is backdropped by a sumptuously upholstered chair, rising high as a throne.
“Mister Grafenwalder? My name is Rifugio. I don’t think our paths have crossed before.”
“What do you want?”
There’s barely any timelag. “I am a broker, Mister Grafenwalder: a wheeler-dealer, a fixer, a go-getter. When someone needs something—especially something that may require delicate extralegal manoeuvring—I’m the man to come to.”
Grafenwalder moves to kill the communication. “You still haven’t told me what you want.”
“It is not about what I want. It is about what you want. Specifically, a certain bio-engineered organism.” Rifugio scratches the tip of his bulbous nose. “You’ve been as discreet as matters will allow, I’ll grant you that—but you’ve still put out word concerning the thing you seek. Now that word has reached my ears, and, fortuitously, I happen to be the man who can help you.” Now Rifugio leans closer, the rim of his hat tipping across his brow, and lowers his voice. “I have one, and I am willing to sell it. At a price, of course—I must pay off my own informants and contacts. But knowing what you paid for the hamadryad, I am confident that you can afford twice as much to get the thing you want so badly.”
“Maybe I don’t want one that much.”
Rifugio leans back, looking nonplussed. “In that case . . . I won’t trouble you again. Good day to you, sir.”
“Wait,” Grafenwalder says hastily. “I’m interested. But I need to know more.”
“I wouldn’t expect otherwise. We’ll have to meet before we take matters any further, of course.”
Grafenwalder doesn’t like it, but the man is right. “I’ll want a DNA sample.”
“I’ll give you DNA and more: cell cultures, tissue scrapings—almost enough to make one for yourself. We’ll need to meet in person, of course: I wouldn’t trust material of such sensitivity to an intermediary.”
“Of course not,” Grafenwalder says. “But we’ll meet on neutral ground. There’s a place I’ve used before. How does Chasm City grab you?”
Rifugio looks pleased. “Name the time and the place.”
“I can squeeze you in tomorrow,” Grafenwalder says.
He doesn’t care for Chasm City, at least not these days, but it’s a useful enough place to do business. Complex technology doesn’t work reliably, making every transaction cumbersome. But that has its benefits, too. Weapons that might just work in the Rust Belt can’t be trusted in CC. Eavesdropping and other forms of deception become risky. It’s best not to try anything too clever, and everyone knows that.
The one thing Grafenwalder isn’t worried about is catching something. His palanquin is the best money can buy, and even if something did get through its ten centimetres of nano-secure hermetic armour, it would have a hard time finding anything in his body to touch and corrupt. The armour reassures him, though, and the privacy of the cabinet shields him from the awkwardness of a face-to-face encounter. As he makes his way through the city, following other palanquins along the winding path of an elevated private road through the high Canopy, he pages once more through the sparse information he has managed to piece together on Rifugio.
Grafenwalder has the feeling that he’s trying to pin down a ghost. There is a broker named Rifugio, and judging by what he has already achieved, he would appear to have the necessary contacts to procure a Denizen. But it puzzles Grafenwalder that their paths haven’t intersected before. Granted, it’s a big, turbulent system, with a lot of scope for new players to emerge from hitherto obscurity. But Grafenwalder has been courting men like Rifugio for years. There should have been at least a blip on his radar before now.
The palanquins duck and dive through the mad architecture of the Canopy. All around, buildings that were once cleanly geometric have been turned into the threatening forms of haunted trees, their grasping branches locking bony fingers high over the lower levels of the city. Epsilon Eridani is still above the horizon, but so little sunlight penetrates the smog-brown atmosphere or the muck-smeared panels of the latticework dome that it might as well be twilight. The lights are on all over the city, save for the seductive absence of the chasm itself. Dark threads dangle from the larger trunks of the Canopy, like cannon-blasted rigging. Brachiating cable cars swing through the tangle like drunk gibbons. Compared to the ordered habitats of the surviving Rust Belt, it’s a scene from hell. And yet people still live here. People still make lives for themselves; still fall in love and find somewhere they can think of as home. With a lurch of cognitive vertigo that he’s already experienced a few times too many, Grafenwalder remembers that there are people down there who have no memory of how things used to be.
He knows it ought to horrify him that human beings could ever adapt to such a catastrophic downturn in their fortunes, even though people have been doing that kind of thing for most of history. Yet part of him feels a strange kinship with those survivors. He sleeps easier since the plague, and he doesn’t know why. It’s as if the crisis snapped shut part of his life that contained something threatening and loose, something that was in danger of reaching him.
In an unsettling way, though, he feels that Rifugio’s call has reopened that closed book, just a crack. And that whatever was keeping him from sleep is stalking the edge of his imagination once more.
They meet in private rooms in the outermost branch of a Canopy structure near Escher Heights. The building is dead now, incapable of further change, and its owner—a man named Ashley Chabrier, with whom Grafenwalder did business years ago—has cut through the floor, walls and ceilings of the reshaped husk and emplaced enormous glass panels, veined in the manner of insect wings and linked together by leathery fillets of the old growth. It affords a spectacular view, but even Grafenwalder has misgivings as he steers his palanquin across the reflectionless floor, with the fires of the Mulch burning two kilometres below. Even if he survived the fall, the Mulch inhabitants wouldn’t take kindly to the likes of him dropping in.
Rifugio, contrary to Grafenwalder’s expectations, has not arrived by palanquin. He stands with his legs wide, his generous paunch supported by a levitating girdle, a pewter-coloured belt ringed by several dozen tiny and silent ducted fan thrusters. His slippered feet skim the glass with their up-curled toes. As he approaches Grafenwalder, he barely moves his legs.
“I have brought what I promised,” Rifugio says, by way of greeting. He’s carrying a small malachite-green case, dangling from the pudgy fingers of his right hand.
“Is it all right if I say the word ‘Denizen’ now?” Grafenwalder asks.
“You just said it, so I think the answer has to be yes. You’re still suspicious, I see.”
“I’ve every right to be suspicious. I’ve been looking for one of these things for longer than I care to remember.”
“So I hear.”
“There have been times when I have doubted that they exist now; times when I doubted that they ever existed.”
“Yet you haven’t stopped searching. Those doubts never became all-consuming.” Rifugio is very close to the palanquin now. As a matter of routine, it deep-scans him for concealed weapons or listening devices. It finds nothing alarming. Even so, Grafenwalder flinches when the man suddenly lifts the case and pops the lid. “Here is what I have for you, Mister Grafenwalder: enough to silence those qualms of yours.”
The case is lined with black foam. Glass vials reside in neat little partitions. The palanquin probes the case and detects only biological material: exactly what Rifugio promised. With his left hand, Rifugio digs out one of the vials and holds it up like a magic charm. Dark red fluid sloshes around inside.
“Here. Take this and run an analysis on it. It’s Denizen blood, with Denizen DNA.”
Grafenwalder hesitates for a moment, despite the assurances from his palanquin that it can deal with any mere biological trickery. Then he permits the machine to extend one of its manipulators, allowing Rifugio to pop the vial into its cushioned grasp. The machine withdraws the manipulator into its analyser alcove, set just beneath the frontal window. Part of the biological sample will be incinerated and passed through a gas chromatograph, where its isotopic spectrum will be compared against the data on Denizen blood Grafenwalder has already compiled. At the same time, the DNA will be amplified, speed-sequenced and cross-referenced against his best-guess for the Denizen genetic sequence. There’s no physical connection between the analyser and the interior of the palanquin, so Grafenwalder cannot come to harm. Even so, he wills the analyser to complete its duties as swiftly as possible.
“Well, Mister Grafenwalder? Does it meet with your satisfaction?”
The analyser starts graphing up its preliminary conclusions: the material looks genuine enough.
Grafenwalder keeps the excitement from his voice. “I’d like to know where you found it. That would help me decide whether or not I believe you have the genuine article.”
“The Denizen came into my possession via Ultras. They’d been keeping it as a pet, aboard their ship.”
“Shallice’s men, by any chance?”
“I obtained the Denizen from Captain Ritter, of the Number Theoretic. I’ve had no dealings with Shallice, although I know the name. As for Ritter—in so far as one can ever believe anything said by an Ultra—I was told that he acquired the Denizen during routine trade with another group of Ultras, in some other godforsaken system. Apparently the Denizen was kept aboard ship as a pet. The Ultras had little appreciation of its wider value.”
“How did Ultras get hold of it in the first place?”
“I have no idea. Perhaps only the Denizen can tell us the whole story.”
“I’ll need better provenance than that.”
“You may never get it. We’re talking about beings created in utmost secrecy two hundred years ago. Their very existence was doubted even then. The best you can hope for is a plausible sequence of events. Clearly, the Denizen must have left Europa’s ocean after Cadmus-Asterius and the other hanging cities fell. If it passed into the hands of starfarers—Ultras, Demarchists, Conjoiners, it doesn’t matter which—it would have had a means to leave the system, and spend much of the intervening time either frozen or at relativistic speed, or both. It need not have experienced anything like the full bore of those two hundred years. Its memories of Europa may be remarkably sharp.”
“Have you asked it?”
“It doesn’t speak. Not all of them were created with the gift of language, Mister Grafenwalder. They were engineered to work as underwater slaves: to take orders rather than to issue them. They had to be intelligent, but they didn’t need to answer back.”
“Some of them had language.”
“The early prototypes, and those that were designed to mediate with their human overseers. Most of them were dumb.”
Grafenwalder allows the disappointment to wash over him, then bottles it away. He’d always hoped for a talker, but Rifugio is correct: it could never be guaranteed. And perhaps there is something in having one that won’t answer back, or plead. It’s going to be spending a lot of time in his tank, after all.
“You’ll treat it with kindness, of course,” Rifugio continues. “I didn’t liberate it from the Ultras just so it can become someone else’s pet, to be tormented between now and kingdom come. You’ll treat it as the sentient being it is.”
Grafenwalder sneers. “If you care so much, why not hand it over to the authorities?”
“Because they’d kill it, and then go after anyone who knew of its existence. Demarchists made the Denizens in one of their darker moments. They’re more enlightened now—so they’d like us to think, anyway. They certainly wouldn’t want something like a living and breathing Denizen—a representative of a sentient slave race—popping out of history’s cupboard, not when they’re bending over backwards to score moral points over the Conjoiners.”
“I’ll treat it fairly,” Grafenwalder says.
At that moment the analyser announces that the blood composition and genetic material are both consistent with Denizen origin, to high statistical certainty. It’s not enough to prove that Rifugio has one, but it’s a large step in the right direction. Plenty of hoaxers have already fallen at this hurdle.
“Well, Mister Grafenwalder? Have you reached a decision yet?”
“I want to see the other samples.”
Rifugio fingers another vial from the case. “Skin tissue. ”
“I don’t have the means to run a thorough analysis on skin—not here anyway. Give me what you have, and I’ll take it back with me.”
Rifugio looks pained. “I’d hoped that we might reach agreement here and now.”
“Then you hoped wrong. Unless you want to lower your price . . .”
“I’m afraid that part of the arrangement isn’t negotiable. However, I’m willing to let you take these samples away.” Rifugio snaps shut the lid. “As a further token of my goodwill, I’ll provide you with a moving image of the living Denizen. But I will expect a speedy decision in return.”
Grafenwalder’s palanquin takes the sealed case and stores it inside its bombproof cargo hatch. “You’ll get it. Don’t worry about that.”
“Take me at my word, Mister Grafenwalder. You’re not the only collector with an eye for one of these monsters.”
Grafenwalder spends most of the return trip viewing the thirty-second movie clip, over and over again. It’s not the first time he’s seen moving imagery of something purporting to be a Denizen, but no other clip has withstood close scrutiny. This one is darker and grainier than some of the others, the swimming humanoid shifting in and out of focus, but there’s something eerily naturalistic about it, something that convinces him that it could be real. The Denizen looks plausible: it’s a monster, undoubtedly, but that monstrosity is the end result of logical design factors. It swims with effortless ease, propelling itself with the merest flick of the long fluked tail it wears in place of legs. It has arms, terminating in humanoid hands engineered for tool-use. Its head, when it swims towards the camera, merges seamlessly with its torso. It has eyes, very human eyes at that, but no nose, and its mouth is a smiling horizontal gash crammed with an unnerving excess of needle-sharp teeth. Looking at that movie, Grafenwalder feels more certain than ever that the creatures were real, and that at least one has survived. And as he studies the endlessly repeating thirty-second clip, he feels the closed book of his past creak open even wider. A question forms in his mind that he would rather not answer.
What exactly is it that he wants with the Denizen?
Things go tolerably well the next day, until the guests are almost ready to leave. They’ve seen the adult-phase hamadryad and registered due shock and awe. Grafenwalder is careful to remind them that, in addition to its size, this is also a living specimen, not some rotting corpse coaxed into a parodic imitation of life. Even Ursula Goodglass, who has to endure this, registers stoic approval. “You were lucky,” she tells Grafenwalder through gritted teeth. “You could just as easily have ended up with a dead one.”
“But then I wouldn’t have tried to pretend it was alive,” he tells her.
It’s Goodglass who has the last laugh today, however. She saves it until the guests are almost back aboard their shuttles.
“Friends,” she says, “what I’m about to mention in no way compares with the spectacle of an adult-phase hamadryad, but I have recently come into possession of something that I think you might find suitably diverting.”
“Something we’ve already seen two days ago?” asks Lysander Carroway.
“No. I chose to keep it under wraps then, thinking my little hamadryad would be spectacle enough for one day. It’s never been seen in public before, at least not in its present state.”
“Put us out of our misery,” says Alain Couperin.
“Drop by and see it for yourself,” Goodglass says, with a teasing twinkle in her eye. “Any time you like. No need to make an appointment. But—please—employ maximum discretion. This is one exhibit that I really don’t want the authorities to know about.”
For a moment Grafenwalder wonders whether she has the Denizen. But surely Rifugio can’t have lost faith in the deal already, when they’ve barely opened negotiations.
But if not a Denizen—what?
He has to know, even if it means the indignity of another visit to her miserable little habitat.
When he arrives at the Goodglass residence, hers is the only shuttle docked at the polar nub. He’s a little uncomfortable with being the only guest, but Goodglass did say to drop in whenever he liked, and he has given her fair warning of his approach. He’s waited a week before taking the trip. Ten days would have been better, but after five he’d already started hearing that she has something special; something indisputably unique. In the meantime, he has run every conceivable test on the biological samples Rifugio gave him in Chasm City and received the same numbing result each time: Rifugio appears to be in possession of the genuine article. Yet Grafenwalder is still apprehensive about closing the deal.
Inside the habitat, he’s met by Goodglass and Edric, her palanquin-bound husband. The couple waste no time in escorting him to the new exhibit. Despite the indignities they have brought upon each other, it’s all smiles and strained politeness. No one so much as mentions hamadryads, dead or alive.
Grafenwalder isn’t quite sure what to expect, but he’s still surprised at the modest dimensions of the chamber Goodglass finally shows him. The walkway brings them level with the chamber’s floor, but there’s no armoured glass screen between them and the interior. Even with the lights dimmed, Grafenwalder can already make out an arrangement of tables, set in a U-formation like a series of laboratory benches. There are upright glassy things on the tables, but that’s as much as he can tell.
“I was expecting something alive,” he says quietly.
“It is alive,” she hisses back. “Or at least as alive as it ever was. Merely distributed. You’ll see in a moment.”
“I thought you said it was dangerous.”
“Potentially it would be, if it was ever put back together. ” She pauses and extends her hand across the gloomy threshold, as if beckoning to the nearest bench. Grafenwalder catches the bright red line on her hand where it has broken a previously invisible laser beam, sweeping up and down across the aperture. Quicker than an eyeblink, a heavy armoured shield slams down on the cell. “But that’s not to stop it getting out,” she says. “It’s to prevent anyone taking it and trying to put it back together. There are some who’d attempt it, just for the novelty.”
She pulls back her hand. After an interval, the shield whisks up into the ceiling.
“Whatever it is, you’re serious about it,” Grafenwalder says, intrigued despite himself.
“I have to be. You don’t take monsters lightly.”
She waves on the lights. The room brightens, but although he can now make out the benches and the equipment upon them, Grafenwalder is none the wiser.
“You’ll have to help me here,” he says.
“It’s all right. I wouldn’t know what to make of it either if I didn’t know what I was looking at.”
“My God,” he says wonderingly, as his eyes alight on one of the larger glass containers. “Isn’t that a brain?”
Goodglass nods. “What was once a human brain, yes. Before he—before it—started doing things to itself, throwing pieces of its humanity away like a child flinging toys from a sandpit. But what’s left of the brain is still alive, still conscious and still capable of sensory perception.” A mischievous smile appears on her face. “It knows we’re here, Carl. It’s aware of us. It’s listening to us, watching us, and wondering how it can escape and kill us.”
He allows himself to take in the grisly scene, now that its full implication is clearer. The brain is being kept alive in a liquid-filled vat, nourished by scarlet and green cables that ram into the grey-brown dough of the exposed cerebellum. A stump of spinal cord curls under the brain like an inverted question mark. It looks pickled and vinegary, cob-webbed with ancient growth and tiny filaments of spidery machinery. Next to the flask is a humming grey box whose multiple analog dials twitch with a suggestion of ongoing mental processes. But that’s not all. There are dozens of glass cases, linked to other boxes, and the boxes to each other, and each case holds something unspeakable. In one, an eye hangs suspended in a kind of artificial socket, equipped with little steering motors. The eye is looking straight at Grafenwalder, as is its lidless twin on another bench. Their optic nerves are knotted ropes of fatty white nerve tissue. In another flask floats a pair of lungs, hanging like a puffed-up kite. They expand and contract with a slow, wheezing rhythm.
“Who . . . ? What . . . ?” he says, barely whispering.
"Haven’t you guessed yet, Carl? Look over there. Look at the mask.”
He follows her direction. The mask sits at the end of the furthest table, on a black plinth. It’s less a mask than an entire skull, moulded in sleek silver metal. The face is handsome, in a streamlined, air-smoothed fashion, with an expression of calm amusement sculpted into the immobile lips and the blank silver surfaces that pass for eyes. It has strong cheekbones and a strong cleft chin. Between the lips is only a dark, grilled slot. The mask has a representation of human ears, and its crown is moulded with longitudinal silver waves, evoking hair that has been combed back and stiffened in place with lacquer.
Grafenwalder knows who the skull belongs to. There isn’t anyone alive around Yellowstone who wouldn’t recognise Dr. Trintignant. All that’s missing is Trintignant’s customary black Homburg.
But Trintignant shouldn’t be here. Trintignant shouldn’t be anywhere. He died years ago.
“This isn’t right,” he says. “You’ve been duped . . . sold a fake. This can’t be him.”
“It is. I have watertight provenance.”
“But Trintignant hasn’t been seen around Yellowstone for years . . . decades. He’s supposed to have died when Richard Swift—”
“I know about Richard Swift,” Ursula Goodglass informs him. “I met him once—or what was left of him after Trintignant had completed his business. I wanted Swift for an exhibit—I was prepared to pay him for his time—but he left the system again. They say he went back to that place—the same world where Trintignant supposedly killed himself.”
Grafenwalder thinks back to what he remembers of the scandal. It had been all over Yellowstone for a few weeks. “But Swift brought back Trintignant’s remains. The doctor had dismantled himself, left a suicide note.”
“That was his plan,” Goodglass says witheringly. “That was what he wanted us to think—that he’d ended his own life upon completing his finest work.”
“But he dismantled—”
“He took himself apart in a way that implied suicide. But it was a methodical dismantling. The parts were stored in a fashion that always allowed for their eventual reassembly. Trintignant was too vain not to want to stay alive and see what posterity made of his creations. But with the Yellowstone authorities closing in on him, staying in one piece wasn’t an option.”
“How did he end up here? Wouldn’t the authorities have been just as keen to get hold of his remains as his living self?”
“He always had allies. Sponsors, I suppose you might call them. People who’d covertly admired his work. There’s always a market for freaks, Carl—and even more of a market for freak-makers. His friends whisked him away, out of the hands of what little authority was left here upon his return. Since then he’s passed from collection to collection, like a bad penny. He seems to bring bad luck. Perhaps I’m tempting fate just by keeping him here; tempting it even more by bringing him to this state of partial reanimation.” She smiles tightly. “We will see. If my fortunes take a dip, I shall pass Trintignant on to the next willing victim.”
“You’re playing with fire.”
“Then you don’t approve? I’d have expected you to applaud my audacity, Carl.”
Grafenwalder, despite himself, speaks something close to the truth. “I’m impressed. More than you can imagine. But I’m also alarmed that he’s being kept here.”
“Alarmed. Why, exactly?”
“You’re a newcomer to this game, Ursula. I’ve seen a little of your habitat now, enough to know that your security arrangements aren’t exactly top of the line.”
“He’s in no danger of putting himself back together, Carl, unless you believe in telekinesis.”
“I’m worried about what would happen if his admirers learn of his whereabouts. Some of them won’t be content just to know he’s being kept alive in pieces. They’ll want to take him, put him all the way back together.”
“I don’t think anyone would be quite that foolish.”
“Then you don’t know people. People like us, Ursula. How many collectors have you shown him to already?”
She tilts her head, looking at him along her up-curved nose. “Less than a dozen, including yourself.”
“That’s already too many. I wouldn’t be surprised if word has already passed beyond the Circle. Don’t tell me you’ve shown him to Rossiter?”
“Rossiter was the second.”
“Then it’s probably already too late.” He sighs, as if taking a great burden upon himself. “We don’t have much time. We need to make immediate arrangements to transport his remains to my habitat. They’ll be a lot safer there.”
“Why would your place be any safer than mine?”
“I design security systems. It’s what I do for a living.”
She appears to consider it, for a moment at least. Then she shakes her head. “No. It won’t happen. He’s staying here. I see where you’re coming from now, Carl. You don’t actually care about my security arrangements at all. It probably wouldn’t even bother you if Doctor Trintignant did escape back into Stoner society. It’s highly unlikely that you’d have ended up one of his victims, after all. You’ve got money and influence. It’s those poor souls down in the Mulch who’d need to watch their backs. That’s where he’d go hunting for raw material. What you can’t stand is the thought that he might be mine, not yours. I’ve got something you haven’t, something unique, something you can’t ever have, and it’s going to eat you from inside like acid.”
“Suit yourself.”
“I will. I always have. You made a dreadful mistake when you humiliated me, Carl, assuming you didn’t have a hand in what had already happened to the hamadryad.”
“What are you saying? That I had something to do with the fact that Shallice stiffed you?”
He detects her hesitation. She comes perilously close to accusing him, but even here—even in this private cloister— there are limits that she knows better than to cross.
“But you were glad of it, weren’t you?” she presses.
“I had the superior specimen. That’s all that ever mattered to me.” With a renewed shudder of revulsion—and, he admits, something close to admiration—he turns again to survey the distributed remains of the notorious doctor. “You say he can hear us?”
“Every word.”
“You should kill him now. Take a hammer to his brain. Make sure he can never live again.”
“Would you like that, Carl?”
“It’s exactly what the authorities would do if they got hold of him.”
“They’d give him a trial first, one imagines.”
“He doesn’t deserve a trial. None of his victims had the benefit of justice.”
“What history conveniently forgets,” Goodglass says, “is that many of his so-called victims came to him willingly. He was not a monster to them, but the agent of the change they craved. He was the most brilliant transformative surgeon of our era. So what if society considered his creations obscene? So what if some of them regretted what they had freely asked him to do?”
“You’re defending him now.”
“Not defending him—just pointing out that nothing is ever that black and white. For years Trintignant was given tacit permission to continue his work. The authorities didn’t like him, but they accepted that he fulfilled a social need.”
Grafenwalder shakes his head—he’s seen and heard enough. “I thought you were exhibiting a monster, Ursula. Now it looks to me as if you’re sheltering a fugitive.”
“I’m not, I assure you. Just because I have a balanced view of Trintignant doesn’t mean I don’t despise him. Here: let me offer you a demonstration.” And with that Goodglass taps a command sequence into the air, disarming the security system. She is able to pass her hand through the laser-mesh without bringing down the armoured screen. “Walk over to the brain, Carl,” she commands. “It isn’t a trap.”
“I’d he happier if you walked with me.”
“If you like.”
He hesitates longer than he’d like, long enough for her to notice, then takes a step into the enclosure. Goodglass is only a pace behind him. The eyeballs swivel to track him, triangulating with the smoothness of motorised cameras. He moves next to the bubbling brain vat. Up close, the brain looks too small to have been the wellspring of so much evil.
“What am I supposed to look at?”
“Not look at—do. You can inflict pain on him, if you wish. There’s a button next to the brain. It sends an electrical current straight into his anterior cingulate cortex.”
“Isn’t he in pain already?”
“Not especially. He re-engineered himself to allow for this dismantling. There may be some existential trauma, but I don’t believe he’s in any great discomfort from one moment to the next.”
Grafenwalder’s hand moves of its own volition, until it hovers above the electrical stimulator. He can feel its magnetic pull, almost willing his hand to lower. He wonders why he feels such a primal urge to bring pain to the doctor. Trintignant never hurt him; never hurt anyone he knew. All that he knows of Trintignant’s crimes is second-hand, distorted and magnified by time and the human imagination. That the doctor was tolerated, even encouraged, cannot seriously be doubted. He filled the hole in Yellowstone society where a demon was meant to fit.
“What’s wrong, Carl? Qualms?”
“How do I know this won’t send a jolt directly to his pleasure centre?”
“Look at his spinal column. Watch it thrash.”
“Spines don’t thrash.”
“His does. Those little mechanisms—”
It’s all the encouragement he needs. He brings his hand down, holding the contact closed for a good five or six seconds. Under the brain, the stump of spinal matter twists and flexes like a rattlesnake’s tail. He can hear it scraping glass.
He raises his hand, watches the motion subside.
“See,” Goodglass says, “I knew you’d do it.”
Grafenwalder notices that there’s some kind of heavy medical tool next to the brain tank, a thing with a grip and a clawed alloy head. With his other hand he picks it up, testing its weight. The glass container looks invitingly fragile; the brain even more so.
“Be careful,” Goodglass says.
“I could kill him now, couldn’t I? Put an end to him, for ever.”
“Many would applaud you. But then you’d be providing him with a way out, an end to this existence. On the other hand, you could send another jolt of pain straight into his mind. What would you rather, Carl? Rid the world of Trintignant and spare him further pain, or let him suffer a little longer?”
He’s close to doing it; close to smashing the tool into the glass. As close as she is, Goodglass couldn’t stop him in time. And there would be something to be said for being the man who closed the book on Trintignant. But at the decisive instant something holds him back. Nothing that the doctor did has ever touched him personally, but he still feels a compulsion to join in his torment. And as the moment passes, he knows that he could never end the doctor’s life so cleanly, so mercifully, when pain is always an alternative.
Instead, he presses the button again, and holds it down longer this time. The spine thrashes impressively. Behind him, Ursula Goodglass applauds.
“Good for you, Carl. I knew you’d do the right thing.”
The next two weeks are an endurance. Grafenwalder must sit tight-lipped as excited rumours circulate concerning Ursula Goodglass’s new exhibit. No one mentions Trintignant by name—that would be the height of crass indiscretion— but even those who have not yet visited her habitat can begin to guess at the nature of her new prize. Even the most level-headed commentators are engaged in a feverish round of praise-giving, seeking to outdo each other in the showering of plaudits. Even though she has only been in the collecting business for a little while, she has pulled off an astonishing coup. Attention is so heated that, for a day or two, the Circle must fend off the unwanted interest of a pair of authority investigators, still on Trintignant’s trail. The bribes alone would pay for a new habitat.
Grafenwalder’s adult-phase hamadryad, meanwhile, brings no repeat visits. Now that it has lost its novelty value to the other collectors, Grafenwalder feels his own interest in it waning. He thinks of it less and less, and has increasingly little concern for its welfare. When his keepers inform him that the animal is suffering from a dietary complaint, he doesn’t even bother to visit it. Three days later, when they tell him that the hamadryad has died, all he can think about is the money he paid Captain Shallice. For an hour or so he toys with the idea of bringing the dead thing back to life with electrodes, the way Goodglass animated her specimen, but the idea that he might be seen to be playing second fiddle to her rises in him like yellow bile. He gives orders that the animal be ejected into space, and can’t even bring himself to watch it happen.
Six hours later, he contacts Rifugio.
“I was beginning to think I wouldn’t hear from you again, Mister Grafenwalder. If you’d left it much longer I wouldn’t have anything to sell you.”
Grafenwalder can hardly keep the excitement from his voice. “Then it’s still available? The terms still apply?”
“I’m a man of my word,” Rifugio answers. “The terms are the same. Does that mean we have a deal?”
“I’ll want additional guarantees. If the specimen turns out to be something other than claimed—”
“I’m selling it to you in good faith. Take it or leave it.”
He takes it, of course, as he had known he would before he placed the call. He’d have taken it even if Rifugio had doubled his asking price. A living, captive Denizen is the only thing that will take the shine off the Circle’s new fondness for Goodglass, and he must have it at all costs.
The arrangements for payment and handover are typically byzantine, as necessity demands. For all that he distrusts men like Rifugio, they must make a living as well, and protect themselves from the consequences of their activities. Grafenwalder, in turn, has his own stringent requirements. The shipping of the creature to Grafenwalder’s habitat must happen surreptitiously, and the flow of credit from one account to another must be untraceable. It is complicated, but by the same token both men have participated in many such dealings in the past, and the arrangements follow a certain well-rehearsed protocol. When the automated transport finally arrives, bearing its precious aquatic cargo, Grafenwalder is certain that nothing has gone amiss.
He has to fight past his own keepers to view the specimen for the first time. At first, he feels a flicker of mild disappointment: it’s a lot smaller than he was expecting, and it’s not just a trick of the light due to the glass walls of the holding tank. The Denizen isn’t much larger than a child.
But the disappointment doesn’t last long. In the flesh, the Denizen appears even more obviously real than the swimming creature in the movie clip. It’s sedated when it arrives, half its face and upper torso swallowed by a drug-administering breathing device. Rifugio’s consignment comes with detailed notes concerning the safe waking of the creature. First, Grafenwalder has it moved into the main viewing tank, now topped up with cold water under one hundred atmospheres of pressure. The water chemistry is now tuned to approximate conditions near one of the Europan thermal vents. He brings the creature to consciousness in utter darkness, and monitors its progress as it begins first to breathe for itself, and then to tentatively explore its surroundings. It swims lethargically at first, Grafenwalder viewing its moving body via heat-sensitive assassin’s goggles. By all accounts the Denizens have infrared sensitivity of their own, but the creature takes no heed of him, even when it passes very close to his vantage point.
After several minutes, the creature’s swimming becomes stronger. It must be adapting to the water, learning to breathe again. Grafenwalder watches the flick of its tail in mesmerised fascination. By now it has mapped the con fines of its new home, testing the armoured glass with delicate sweeps of its fingertips. It is intelligent enough to know that nothing will be gained by striking the glass.
Grafenwalder has the main lights brought up and shone into the tank. He slips the assassin’s goggles up onto his brow. The creature attempts to swim away from the glare, but the glare follows it remorselessly. Its eyes are lidless, so it can do little except screen its face with one delicately webbed hand. The wide gash of its mouth opens in alarm or anger, or both, revealing rows of sharp little teeth.
Grafenwalder’s voice booms into the water, relayed to the creature by floating microphones.
“I know you can hear me, and I know you can understand what I am saying to you. It is very important that you listen to what I am about to tell you.”
His voice appears to distress the creature as much as the bright light. With its other hand it tries to shield the whorl-like formation on the side of its head that is its ear. Grafenwalder doubts that it makes much difference. It must feel his voice in every cell of its body, ramming through it like a proclamation.
That was the effect he was going for.
“You are in no danger,” he says. “Nothing is going to happen to you, and nobody is going to hurt you. The people who would rather you were dead are not going to find you. You are in my care now, and I am going to make sure that you come to no harm. My name is Carl Grafenwalder, and I have been waiting a long time to meet you.”
The Denizen floats motionless, as if stunned by the force of his words. Perhaps that is exactly what has happened.
“From now on, this is going to be your home,” Grafenwalder continues. “I hope that you find the conditions satisfactory. I have done my best to simulate your place of birth, but I accept that there may be deficiencies. My experts will be striving to improve matters as best as they can, but for that they will need your assistance. We must all learn to communicate. I know you cannot speak, but I am sure we can make progress using sign language. Let us begin with something simple. I must know if you find your environment satisfactory in certain details: temperature, sulphur content, salinity, that kind of thing. You will need to answer my experts in the affirmative or negative. Nod your head if you understand me.”
Nothing happens. He judges that the Denizen is still conscious—he still catches the quick animation of its eyes behind the curtain of its hand—but it shows no indication of having understood him.
“I said nod your head. If that is too difficult for you, make some other visible movement.”
But still there’s nothing. He has the lights dimmed again, and slips the assassin’s goggles down over his eyes once more. After a few moments, the infrared smear of the Denizen lowers its arm and assumes an alert but restful posture. Now that it has reacted to the absence of light, he brings the glare back and observes the creature cower against the glare’s return.
“You prefer the darkness, don’t you? Well, I can make it dark again. All you have to do is show some sign that you understand me. Do that, and I’ll bring the darkness back again.”
The Denizen just floats there, watching him through the spread webbing of its upraised hand. Perhaps it has learned to tolerate the light better than before, for its gaze strikes him now as steadier, somehow more reproachful. Even if it doesn’t understand his words, it surely understands that it is his prisoner.
“I will lower the lights one more time.” He does so, then brings them back up, savagely, before the Denizen has had time to relish the darkness. This time he does get a reaction, but it’s not quite the one he was anticipating. The Denizen shoots forward, bulleting through the water with dismaying speed. Just when he thinks the creature is going to use its skull as a battering ram, the Denizen brakes with a reverse flick of its tail and brings its head and upper body hard against the glass, arms spread-eagled, face only a few centimetres from Grafenwalder’s own. Rationally, he knows that the glass is impervious—it’s designed to hold back the pressure of the Europan ocean—but there’s still a tiny part of his mind that can’t accept that, and insists on jerking him back from that grinning mouth, those hateful human eyes. The Denizen sees it, too: it doesn’t need language to know that it has scared him.
Grafenwalder regains his composure with an uneasy laugh, trying to sound as if it was all an act. The Denizen knows better, notching wide the dreadful smile of its mouth.
“Okay,” he says. “You frightened me. That’s good. That’s exactly what you’re meant to do. That’s exactly why I brought you here.”
The microphones in the tank pick up the Denizen’s derisive snort, pealing it in harsh metallic waves around the metal walls of the bestiary. Grafenwalder’s heart is still racing, but he’s beginning to see the positive side of the arrangement. Maybe the fact that the creature can’t talk is all for the best. There’s something truly chilling about that snort; something that wouldn’t come through at all if the specimen had language. There’s a mind in there; one sharp enough to use complex tools in the unforgiving environment of a cold black alien ocean. But that mind only has one narrow outlet for its rage.
It’s going to work, he thinks. If it has half the effect on the other collectors that it just had on him, Dr. Trintignant will soon be relegated to a nine-day wonder. All he needs to do now is make sure the damned thing is as real as it looks. Not that he has any significant doubts now. Rifugio already had bona fide DNA and tissue samples. Where did that material come from, if it wasn’t snipped from the last living Denizen?
He leaves the creature in darkness, letting it settle in. The next day, his keepers descend into the tank wearing armoured immersion suits. It takes two of them to immobilise the creature while the third takes a series of biopsy samples. With their powered suits, the men are in little danger from the Denizen. But they’re still impressed by the strength and quickness of the specimen; its balletic ease within water. It moves with the sleek, elemental ease of something for which water is not a hindrance, but its natural medium.
Grafenwalder tunes in to Circle gossip again, unsurprised to find that Dr. Trintignant is still wowing the other collectors. It still feels hurtful not to be the automatic centre of attention, but now at least he knows his rightful place will be restored. Ursula Goodglass got lucky with the dismantled doctor, but luck won’t get her very far in the long game.
Later that day, his experts report back with the first findings from the biopsies. At first, Grafenwalder is so convinced of the Denizen’s authenticity that he doesn’t hear what the experts, in their fumbling way, are trying to tell him.
The samples don’t match. The Denizen’s DNA isn’t the same as the DNA that Rifugio gave him, or the DNA that Grafenwalder already possesses. It’s the same story with the blood and tissue samples. The disagreement isn’t huge, and less sophisticated tests probably wouldn’t have detected any discrepancies. That’s no solace to Grafenwalder, though. His tests are as good as they come, and they leave no room for doubt. The creature in his care is not what Rifugio let him think he was going to be buying.
He tries to call the broker, but the contact details no longer work. Rifugio doesn’t get back to him.
So he’s been conned. But if the Denizen is a con, it’s an extraordinarily thorough one. He’s had the chance to examine it closely now, and he’s found no obvious signs of fakery. It’s no mean feat to engineer a biological gill that can sustain an organism with the energy demands of a large mammal. The faked Denizens he’s examined in the past began to die after only a few dozen hours of immersion. But this one shows every sign of thriving, of gaining strength and quickness.
Grafenwalder considers other possibilities. If the blood and tissue samples don’t agree, then maybe it’s because there’s more than one kind of Denizen. The Europan scientists engineered distinct castes with differing linguistic abilities, so perhaps there were other variants, with different blood and tissue structures. They were all prototypes, after all, right up to the moment they turned against the Demarchy. This Denizen might simply be from a different production batch.
But that doesn’t explain why Rifugio provided him with non-matching samples. If Rifugio had the creature, why didn’t he just take samples from it directly? Did Rifugio make a mistake, mixing samples from one specimen with another? If so, he must have had more than one Denizen in his care. In which case, the whole story about the Ultras keeping the Denizen as a pet was a lie . . . but a necessary one, if Rifugio wished Grafenwalder to think the creature was unique.
Grafenwalder mulls the possibilities. Rifugio’s disappearance provides damning confirmation that some kind of deception has taken place. But if that deception merely extends to the fact that the Denizen isn’t unique, Grafenwalder considers himself to have got off lightly. He still has a Denizen, and that’s infinitely better than none at all. He’ll find a way to trace and punish Rifugio in due course, but for now retribution isn’t his highest priority.
Instead, what he desires most is communication.
By nightfall, when the keepers have finished their work, he descends to the tank and brings the lights back on. Not harshly now, but enough to alert the Denizen to his presence; to wake it from whatever shallow approximation of sleep it appears to enjoy when resting.
Then—satisfied that he is alone—he talks.
“You can understand me,” he says, for the umpteenth time. “I know this because my keepers have identified a region in your brain that only lights up when you hear human speech. And it lights up most strongly when you hear Canasian, the language of the Demarchy.”
The creature watches him sullenly.
“It’s the language you were educated to understand, two hundred years ago. I know things have changed a little since then, but I don’t doubt that you can still make sense of these words.” And as he speaks Canasian, he feels—not for the first time—an odd, unexpected fluency. The words ought to feel awkward, but they flow off his tongue with mercurial ease, as if this is also the language he was born to speak.
Which is absurd.
“I want to know your story,” he says. “How you got here, where you came from, how many of you there are. I know now that Rifugio lied to me. He’ll pay for that eventually, but for now all that matters is what you can tell me. I need to know everything, right back to the moment you were born in Europa.”
But the Denizen, as ever, shows no external sign of having understood him.
Later, Grafenwalder has his keepers install a water-proofed symbol board in the tank. It’s an array of touchpads, each of which stands for a word in Canasian. As Grafenwalder speaks, the symbols light up in turn. The Denizen may reply by pressing the pads in sequence, which will be rendered back into speech on Grafenwalder’s side of the glass. Grafenwalder’s hoping that there’s something amiss with the Denizen’s language centre, some cognitive defect that can be short-circuited using the visual codes. If he can persuade the Denizen to press the “yes” or “no” pads in response to simple questions, he will consider that progress has been made.
Things don’t move as quickly as he’d hoped. The Denizen seems willing to cooperate, but it still doesn’t grasp the basics of language. Once it has understood that one of the pads symbolises food, it presses that one repeatedly, ignoring Grafenwalder’s attempts to get it to answer abstract questions.
Maybe it’s just stupid, he thinks. Maybe that’s why this batch was discontinued. But he doesn’t give up just yet. If the Denizen won’t communicate willingly, perhaps it needs persuasion. He has his keepers tinker with the ambient conditions, varying the water temperature and chemistry to make things uncomfortable. He withholds food and instructs the keepers to take further biopsies. It’s clear enough that the Denizen doesn’t enjoy the process.
Still the creature won’t talk, beyond issuing simple pleas for more food or warmer water. Grafenwalder feels his patience stretching. The keepers tell him that the Denizen is getting stronger, more difficult to subdue. Angrily, he accompanies them on their next trip into the tank. There are four men, all wearing power-assisted pressure armour, and now it takes three of them to pin the Denizen against one wall of the glass. When it breaks free momentarily, it gouges deep tooth marks in the flexible hide of Grafenwalder’s glove. Back outside the tank, he inspects the damage and wonders what those teeth would have done to naked flesh.
It’s fierce, he’ll give it that. It may not be unique; it may not be particularly intelligent; but he still doesn’t feel that all the money he gave Rifugio was wasted. Whatever the Denizen might be, it’s worthy of a place in the bestiary. And it’s his, not someone else’s.
He puts out the word that there is something new in his collection. Following Ursula Goodglass’s example, he tells the visitors to drop by whenever they like. There must be no suspicion that the Denizen is a stage-managed exhibit, something that can only perform to schedule.
It’s three days before anyone takes him up on his offer. Lysander Carroway and her husband are the first to arrive. Even then, Grafenwalder has the sense that the visit is regarded as a tiresome social duty. All that changes when they see the Denizen. He’s taken pains to stoke it up, denying it food and comfort for long hours. By the time he throws on the lights, the creature has become a focus of pure, mindless fury. It strives to kill the things on the other side of the glass, scratching claws and teeth against that impervious shield, to the point where it starts bleeding. His guests recoil, suitably impressed. After the study in motionless that was Dr. Trintignant, they are woefully unprepared for the murderous speed of the Europan organism.
“Yes, it is a Denizen,” he tells them, while his keepers tend to the creature’s injuries. “The last of its kind, I have it on good authority.”
“Where did you find it?”
He parrots the lie Rifugio has already told him. “You know what Ultras are like, with their pets. I don’t think they realised quite what they’d been tormenting all those years.”
“Can it speak to us? I heard that they could talk.”
“Not this one. The idea that most of them could talk is a fallacy, I’m afraid: they simply weren’t required to. As for the ones that did have language, they must have died over a hundred years ago.”
“Perhaps the ones that were clever enough to talk were also clever enough to stay away from Ultras,” muses Carroway. “After all, if you can talk, you can negotiate, make bargains. Especially if you know things that can hurt people. ”
“What would a Denizen know that could hurt anyone?” Grafenwalder asks scornfully.
“Who made it,” Carroway says. “That would be worth something to someone, wouldn’t it? In these times, more than ever.”
Grafenwalder shakes his head. “I don’t think so. Even the ones with language weren’t that clever. They were built to take orders and use tools. They weren’t capable of the kind of complex abstract thought necessary to plot and scheme.”
“How would you know?” Carroway asks. “It’s not as if you’ve ever met one.”
There’s no malice in her question, but by the time the Carroways depart he’s in a foul mood, barely masked by the niceties of Circle politesse. Why can’t they just accept that the Denizen is enough of a prize in its own right, without dwelling on what it can’t do? Isn’t a ravenous man-fish chimera enough of a draw for them now?
But the Carroways must have been sufficiently impressed to speak of his new addition, because the guests come thick and fast over the next week. By then they’ve heard that he has a Denizen, but most of them don’t quite believe it. Time and again he goes through the ritual of having them scared by the captive creature, only this time with a few additional flourishes. The glass is as secure as ever, but he’s had the tank lined with a false interior that cracks more easily. He’s also implanted a throat microphone under the skin of the Denizen, to better capture its blood-curdling vocalisations. Since the creature needed to be sedated for that, he also took the liberty of dropping an electrode into what his keepers think is the best guess for the creature’s pain centre. It’s a direct steal from what Goodglass did to Dr. Trintignant, but no one has to know that, and with the electrode he can stir the Denizen up to its full killing fury even if it’s just been fed.
It’s still too soon to call, but his monitoring of Circle gossip begins to suggest that interest in Trintignant is declining. He’s still jealous of Goodglass for that particular coup, but at last he feels that he has the upper hand again. The memory of Rifugio’s lies has all but faded. The story Grafenwalder tells, about how the Denizen came to him via the Ultras, is repeated so often that he almost begins to believe it himself. The act of telling one lie over and over again, until it concretises into something barely distinguishable from the truth, feels peculiarly familiar to him. When his keepers come to him again and report that a more detailed analysis of the Denizen DNA has thrown up statistical matches with the genome of a typical hyperpig, he blanks the information.
What they’re telling him is that the Denizen isn’t real; that it’s some form of genetic fake cooked up using a hyperpig in place of a human, with Denizen-like characteristics spliced in at the foetal stage. But he doesn’t want to hear that; not now that he’s back on top.
The last of the guests to visit are Ursula Goodglass and her husband. They’ve waited a lengthy, although not impolite, interval before favouring him with their presence. Once their shuttle has docked, Goodglass sweeps ahead of her husband’s palanquin, trying to put a brave face on the proceedings.
“I hear you have a Denizen, Carl. If so, you have my heartfelt congratulations. Nothing like that has been seen for a very long time.” She looks at him coquettishly. “It is a Denizen, isn’t it? We didn’t want to pay too much attention to the rumours, but when everyone started saying the same thing—”
“It is a Denizen,” he confirms gravely, as if the news is a terminal diagnosis. Which, in terms of Goodglass’s current standing in the Circle, it might as well be. “Would you like to see it?”
“Of course we’d like to see it!” her husband declares, his voice piping from the palanquin.
He takes them to the holding tank, darkened now, and issues assassin’s goggles to Ursula, assuming that her husband ’s palanquin has its own infrared system. Allowing the guests to see the floating form, albeit indistinctly, is all part of the theatre.
“It looks smaller than I was expecting,” Ursula Goodglass observes.
“They were small,” Grafenwalder says. “Designed to operate in cramped conditions. But don’t let that deceive you. It’s as strong as three men in amp-suits.”
“And you’re absolutely sure of its authenticity? You’ve run a full battery of tests?”
“There’s no doubt.” Rashly, he adds, “You can see the results, if you like.”
“There’s no need. I’m prepared to take your word for it. I know you wouldn’t take anything for granted, given how long you’ve been after one of these.”
Grafenwalder allows himself a microscopic frown. “I didn’t know you were aware of my interest in acquiring a Denizen.”
“It would be difficult not to know, Carl. You’ve put out feelers in all directions imaginable. Of course, you’ve been discreet about it—or as discreet as circumstances allow.” She smiles unconvincingly. “I’m glad for you, Carl. It must feel like the end of a great quest, to have this in your possession. ”
“Yes,” he said. “It does.”
The palanquin speaks. “What exactly was it about the Denizen that you found so captivating, if you don’t mind my asking?”
Grafenwalder shrugs, expecting the answer to roll glibly off his tongue. Instead, he has to force it out by an effort of will, as if there is a blockage in his thought processes. “Its uniqueness, I suppose, Edric.”
“But there are many unique things,” the palanquin says, its piping tone conveying mild puzzlement. “Why did you have to go to the extremes of locating a Denizen, a creature not even known ever to have existed? A creature whose authenticity cannot ever be confirmed with certainty?”
“Perhaps because it was so difficult. I like a challenge. Does it have to be any more complicated than that?”
“No, it doesn’t,” the palanquin answers. “I merely wondered if there might not have been a deeper motive, something less transparent.”
“I’m really not the man to ask. Why do any of us collect things?”
“Carl’s right, dear,” Ursula says, smiling tightly at the palanquin’s dark window. “One mustn’t enquire too deeply about these things. It isn’t seemly.”
“I demur,” her husband says, and reverses slightly back from the heavy glass wall before them.
Grafenwalder judges that the moment is right to bring up the lights and enrage the Denizen. He squeezes the actuator tucked into his pocket, dripping current into the creature’s brain. The lights pierce the tank, snaring the floating form. The Denizen snorts and powers itself towards the wall, its eyes wide with hatred despite the glare. It slams into the weakened inner layer and shatters the glass, making it seem as if the entire tank is about to lose integrity.
“We’re quite safe,” he says, anticipating that Goodglass will have flinched from the impact. But she hasn’t. She’s standing her ground, her expression serenely unmoved by the entire spectacle.
“You’re right,” she comments. “It’s quite a catch. But I wonder if it’s really as vicious as it appears.”
“Take my word. It’s much, much worse. It nearly bit through my glove when I was inside that tank, wearing full armour.”
“Perhaps it doesn’t like being kept here. It didn’t seem very happy when you turned the lights on.”
“It’s an exhibit, Ursula. It doesn’t have to like being here. It should be grateful just to be alive.”
She looks at him with sudden interest, as if he has said something profound. “Do you really think so, Carl?”
“Yes,” he says. “Absolutely.”
She returns her attention to the tank wall. The Denizen is still hovering there, anchored in place by the tips of its fingers and the fluke of its tail. The cracks in the shattered glass radiate away in all directions, making the Denizen look as if it is caught in a frozen star, or pinned to a snowflake.
Goodglass removes her glove and touches a hand to the smooth and unbroken glass on the outer surface of the tank, exactly where the Denizen has its own webbed hand. That’s when Grafenwalder notices the pale webs of skin between Ursula Goodglass’s fingers, visible now that she has taken off the glove. Their milky translucence is exactly the same as the webs between the Denizen’s. She presses her hand harder, squeezing until her palm is flat against the glass, and the Denizen echoes the movement.
The air feels as if it has frozen. The moment of contact seems to last minutes, hours, eternities. Grafenwalder stares in numb incomprehension, unable to process what he is seeing. When she moves her hand, skating it across the glass, the Denizen follows her like an expert mime.
She takes another step closer, bringing her face against the glass, laying her cheek flat against the cold surface. The Denizen presses itself against the shattered inner layer and mirrors her posture, bringing its own head against hers. The flesh of their faces appears to merge.
Goodglass pulls her face back from the glass, then smiles at the Denizen. It tries to emulate her expression, forcing its mouth wide. It’s not much of a smile—it’s more horrific than reassuring—but the deliberateness of the gesture is beyond doubt.
Finally Grafenwalder manages to say something. His own voice sounds wrong, as if it’s coming from another room.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m greeting it,” Ursula Goodglass says, snapping her attention away from the tank. “What on Earth did you think I was doing?”
“It’s a Denizen. It doesn’t know you. You can’t know it.”
“Oh, Carl,” she says, pityingly now. “Haven’t you got it yet? Really, I thought you’d have figured things out by now. Look at my hand again.”
“I don’t need to. I saw it.”
She pulls back her hand until she’s only touching the glass with a fingertip. “Then tell me what it reminds you of—or can’t you bring yourself to say it?”
“I’ve had enough,” he says. “I don’t know what kind of game you’re playing, but it isn’t true to the spirit of the Circle. I insist that you leave immediately.”
“But we’re not done yet,” Goodglass says.
“Fine. If you won’t go easily, I’ll have you escorted to your shuttle.”
“I’m afraid not, Carl. We’ve still business to attend to. You didn’t think it was going to be quite that easy, did you?”
“Leave now.”
“Or what? You’ll turn your household systems on us?” She looks apologetic. “They won’t work, I’m afraid. They’ve been disabled. From the moment our shuttle docked, it’s been working to introduce security countermeasures into your habitat.” Before he can get a word in, she says, “It was a mistake to invite us to view the adult-phase hamadryad. It gave us the perfect opportunity to snoop your arrangements, design a package of neutralising agents. Don’t go calling for your keepers, either. They’re all unconscious. The last time we visited, the palanquin deployed microscopic stun-capsules into every room it passed through. Upon our return, they were programmed to activate, releasing a fast-acting nerve toxin. Your keepers will be fine once they wake up, but that isn’t going to happen for a few hours yet.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“You don’t have to,” Goodglass says. “Call for help, see how far it gets you.”
He lifts the cuff of his sleeve and talks into his bracelet. “This is Grafenwalder. Get down to the bestiary now—the Denizen tank.”
But no one answers.
“I’m sorry, but no one’s coming. You’re on your own now, Carl. It’s just you, the Denizen and the two of us.”
After a minute goes by, he knows she isn’t bluffing. Goodglass has taken his habitat.
“What do you want from me?”
“It’s not so much a question of what I want from you, Carl, as what you want from me.”
“You’re not making much sense.”
“Ask yourself this: why did you want the Denizen so much? Was it because you just had to add another unique specimen to your collection? Or did the drive go deeper than that? Is it just possible that you created this entire bestiary as a decoy, to divert everyone—including yourself— from the true focus of your obsession?”
“You tell me, Ursula. You seem to know a lot about the collecting game.”
“I’m no collector,” she says curtly. “I detest you and your kind. That was just a cover, to get me close to you. I went to a lot of trouble, of course: the hamadryad, Trintignant . . . I know you had Shallice kill the hamadryad, by the way. That was what I expected you to do. Why else do you think I had Shallice mention my existence, if not to goad you? I needed you to take an interest in me, Carl. It worked spectacularly well.”
“You never interested me, Ursula. You irritated me, like a tick.”
“It had the same effect. It brought us together. It brought me here.”
“And the Denizen?” he asks, half-fearing her answer.
“The Denizen is a fake. I’m sure you’ve figured that out for yourself by now. A pretty good fake, I’ll admit—but it isn’t two hundred years old, and it’s never been anywhere near Europa.”
“What about the samples Rifugio gave me? Where did they come from?”
“From me,” Goodglass says.
“You’re insane.”
“No, Carl. Not insane. Just a Denizen.” And she shows him her webbed hand once more, extending it out towards him as if inviting him to kiss it. “I’m what you’ve been searching for all these years, the end of your quest. But this isn’t quite the way you imagined things playing out, is it? That you’d have had me under your nose all this time, and not known how close you were?”
“You can’t be a Denizen.”
“There is such a thing as surgery,” she says witheringly. “I had to wait until after the plague before having myself changed, which meant subjecting myself to cruder procedures than I might have wished. Fortunately, I had the services of a very good surgeon. He rewired my cardiovascular system for air-breathing. He gave me legs and a human face, and a voice box that works out of water.”
“And the hands?”
“I kept the hands. You’ve got to hold on to part of the past, no matter how much you might wish to bury it. I needed to remember where I’d come from, what I still had to do.”
“Which is?”
“To find you, and then punish you. You were there, Carl, back when we were made in Europa. A high-influence Demarchist in the Special Projects section of Cadmus-Asterius, the hanging city where we were spliced together and given life.”
“Nonsense. I’ve never been near Europa.”
“You were born there,” she assures him, “not long after Sandra Voi founded the place. You’ve scrubbed those memories, though. They’re too dangerous now. The Demarchists don’t want anyone finding out about their history of past mistakes, not when they’re trying to show how fine and upstanding they are compared to the beastly Conjoiners. Almost everyone connected with those dark days in Europa has been hunted down and silenced by now. Not you, though. You were ahead of the curve, already running by the time the cities fell. You hopped a ramliner to Yellowstone and started reinventing your past. Eidetic overlays to give you a false history, one so convincing that you believed it yourself. Except at night, in your loneliest hours. Then part of you knew that they were still out there, still looking for you.”
“They?”
“Not just the Demarchist silencers: they were the least of your worries. Money and power could keep them at bay. What really worried you was us, the Denizens.”
“If I made you, why would I fear you?”
“You didn’t make us, Carl. I said you were part of the project, but you weren’t working to bring us to life. You were working to suppress us; to make us fail. Petty internal rivalry: you couldn’t allow another colleague’s work to succeed. So you did everything you could to hurt us, to make us imperfect. You brought suffering into our world. You brought pain and infirmity and death, and then left us alone in that ocean.”
“Ridiculous.”
“Really, Carl? I’ve seen how easily you turn to spite. Just ask that dead hamadryad.”
“I had nothing to do with the Denizens.” But even as he says it, he can feel layers of false memory begin to peel back. What’s exposed has the raw candour of true experience. He remembers more of Europa than he has any right to: the bright plazas, the smells, the noises of Cadmus-Asterius. He remembers the reefer-sleep casket on the outbound ramliner, the casket that he thought was taking him to the safety of another system, another time. No wonder he’s slept easier since the Melding Plague. He must have imagined that the plague had severed the last of his ties with the past, making it impossible for anyone to catch up with him now.
He’d been wrong about that.
“You had to find a Denizen,” Goodglass says, “because then you’d know if any of them were still alive. Well, now you have your answer. How does it feel?”
He always knew that the marks on her skull were evidence of surgery. But that surgery had nothing to do with the removal of implants, and everything to do with her transformation from a Denizen. It would have cost her nothing to hide those marks, and yet she made no secret of them. It was, he sees now, part of a game he hadn’t even realised he was playing.
“Not the way I thought it would feel,” he says.
Goodglass nods understandingly. “I’m going to punish you now, Carl. But I’m not going to kill you.”
She’s playing with him, allowing him a glimmer of hope before crushing it for all eternity.
“Why not?” he asks.
“Because if you were dead, you wouldn’t make much of an exhibit. When we’re done here, I’m going to donate you to a suitable recipient.” Then she turns to the palanquin. “There’s something I should have told you. I lied about my husband. Edric was a good man: he cared for me, loved me, when he could have made his fortune from what I was. Unfortunately, he never got to see me like this. Edric died during the early months of the plague.”
Grafenwalder says nothing. He’s out of words, out of questions.
“You’re probably wondering who’s in the palanquin,” Goodglass says. “He’s going to come out now, for a little while. Not too long, because he can’t risk coming into contact with plague spores, not when so much of him is mechanical. But that won’t stop him doing his job. He’s always been a quick worker.”
With a hiss of escaping pressure, the entire front of the palanquin lifts up on shining pistons. The first thing Grafenwalder sees, the last thing before he starts screaming, is a silver hand clutching a black Homburg hat.
Then he sees the face.