Read Online The Revelation Space Collection by Alastair Reynolds - Free Book Online

few had elected to stay because something about the nascent city’s perilous location actually appealed to them. Fast forward two hundred years and that huddle of structures had become . . . this.
    The city stretched away infinitely in all directions, it seemed, a dense wood of gnarled interlaced buildings gradually lost in murk. The very oldest structures were still more or less intact: boxlike buildings which had retained their shapes during the plague because they had never contained any systems of self-repair or redesign. The modern structures, by contrast, now resembled odd, up-ended pieces of driftwood or wizened old trees in the last stages of rot. Once those skyscrapers had looked linear and symmetrical, until the plague made them grow madly, sprouting bulbous protrusions and tangled, leprous appendages. The buildings were all dead now, frozen into the shapes which seemed calculated to induce disquiet. Slums adhered to their sides, lower levels lost in a scaffolded maze of shanty towns and ramshackle bazaars, aglow with naked fires. Tiny figures were moving in the slums, walking or rickshawing to business along haphazard roadways laid down over old ruins. There were very few powered vehicles, and most of the contraptions Khouri saw looked like they were steam-driven.
    The slums never reached more than ten levels up the sides of the buildings before collapsing under their own weight, so for two or three hundred further metres the buildings rose smoothly, relatively unscathed by plague transformations. There was no evidence of occupation in these mid-city levels. It was only near the very tops that human presence again re-asserted itself: tiered structures perched like cranes’ nests among the branches of the malformed buildings. These new additions were aglow with conspicuous wealth and power; bright apartment windows and neon advertisements. Searchlights swept down from the eaves, sometimes picking out the tiny forms of other cable-cars, navigating between districts. The cable-cars picked their way through a network of fine branches, lacing the buildings like synaptic threads. The locals had a name for this high-level city-within-a-city: the Canopy.
    It was never quite daytime, Khouri had noticed. She could never feel fully awake in this place, not while the city seemed caught in an eternal twilight gloom.
    ‘Case, when are they going to get around to scraping the muck off the Mosquito Net?’
    Ng chuckled, a sound like gravel being stirred around in a bucket. ‘Never, probably. Unless someone figures a way of making some money out of it.’
    ‘Now who’s bad-mouthing the city?’
    ‘We can afford to. When we finish our business we can hightail it back to the carousels with all the other beautiful people.’
    ‘In their boxes. Sorry, Case, count me out of that particular party. The excitement might kill me.’ She could see the chasm now, since the car was skirting close to the sloping inner rim of the toroidal dome. The chasm was a deep gully in the bedrock, weathered sides curving lazily over from horizontal before plunging vertically down, veined by pipes which reached down into belching vapour, towards the atmospheric cracking station which supplied air and heat to the city. ‘Talking of which . . . being killed, I mean - what’s the deal with the weapon?’
    ‘Think you can handle it?’
    ‘You pay me to, I’ll handle it. But I’d like to know what I’m dealing with.’
    ‘If you have a problem with that you’d better talk to Taraschi.’
    ‘He specified this thing?’
    ‘In excruciating detail.’
    The car was over the Monument to the Eighty now. Khouri had never seen it from this precise angle. In truth, without the grandeur that it attained from street level, it looked weatherworn and sad. It was a tetrahedral pyramid, slatted so that it resembled a stepped temple, its lower levels barnacled in slums and reinforcements. Near the apex the marble cladding gave way to stained-glass windows, but