Cowl

10

Modification Status Report:

Some sensory additions will form in an aerogel grid on the exoskeleton, similar in function to the lateral line of a fish, but sensitive to a wide spectrum of radiation. The presence of this grid negates the need for eyes. This is fortunate, as the interfacing organs, which by necessity must remain close to the child’s brain, occupy much of its face and leave little room for much else. I have retained the mouth in position, along with those modifications required for the more efficient ingestion of food, but the nose and the eyes are gone. Also, it being the case that many of the interfacing organs are delicate, some sort of protection is obligatory. Serendipitously, I have discovered that only a small alteration to the gene controlling exoskeletal growth (this taken, along with the mouth modifications, from the genome of a scarabaeid beetle) causes growth of ‘wing cases’ over the face. Already, I think, I know what my child’s name will be.

He lay flat on the floor of his hut, his eyes rolled up into his head and his body rigid with ecstasy. The hut stank. The man stank. Polly grimaced down at him, then moved over to the duck skewered over the fire and tore off a leg. The two patches she had pressed against his chest, while running her hands up inside the stinking fur he wore, were taking him somewhere he had never been before. Wondering why she had chosen to do that rather than zap him with the taser, she supposed, after seeing the squalor he lived in, she had felt some pity for him.

As she sat eating, and washing down each mouthful with bitter sips from a wineskin, she could hear his woman still angrily moving about outside. He had yelled at her earlier when the woman had protested, whereupon the woman had glared at Polly with both hatred and fear. Polly realized she had to leave now before he came to and wondered what the hell had happened to him. Tossing the duck bone in the fire she reached out for the rest of it, tearing away its stringy flesh with her teeth. The remainder of two flat gritty loaves she shoved into her pockets, then looked around. But there was nothing else here she wanted—no more food anyway. With one last look at the prehistoric man she had sent into a drugged coma, Polly stepped out of the hut. The woman looked up from a quern on which she was grinding some sort of grain. She babbled something Polly did not understand. Polly reckoned her to be not much older than herself, but she appeared terribly worn, like Marjae near the end. Behind her two naked brats were squabbling in the mud. Polly strode past them all to reach the coracle moored on the island shore. The woman shouted a protest as Polly stepped into the small boat and pushed herself away with the paddle. She did not look back.

The sunset was red on the sky when Polly finally moored at another island and crawled ashore. She prepared herself a bed of thick reeds and slumped down on it gratefully. Even as cold as she felt, she was instantly asleep. Night passed in a seeming instant, and as she woke to the dawn chorus of waterfowl and frogs, and then the sound of a man bellowing and threatening. She sat up and he saw her at once and cursed as he waded towards her as fast as he could. There seemed no doubt about what he intended to do with his serrated spear. Polly turned aside, the webwork inside her responsive to the slightest nudge. But there was the suffocation to face.

Try hyperventilating.

‘What?’

Breathe quickly and deeply — more than you need to—until you’re dizzy.

Polly started doing just that. Soon she felt a buzzing through her limbs and became light-headed. As she stepped beyond the bellowing man’s furthest remembered ancestors, the swamp grew thin and it dissipated like fog, exposing a reality of infinite grey over a black sea. Terrible cold gripped her and it seemed as if the pressure of that was aiming to squeeze out her last breath. She was falling now, hurtling through that grey void—the sensation of speed more manifest than before. Briefly she glimpsed a silvery line on some impossible horizon. Surely it must end soon. But as the air bled out of her lungs she began to panic—the scale was going to carry her to the limit again, she was going to run out of breath. Her desperation to stop seemed to distort everything around her into glassy planes, vast curved surfaces, and lines of light. What she needed was down there, and she pulled herself into it. Gasping but elated, she stumbled across frost-hardened ground into the blast of a snowstorm.

Then something growled behind her.

‘Abutment three’ bore the shape of a huge crooked thumb projecting over one corner of the triangular entrance that filled the bottom of this vast chamber. Tack had no wish to look down into the tunnel again, since some effect of perspective seemed to try and pull his eyes out of his head. In the distance he could see a similar abutment overhanging each of the other two corners, and it was a distance—looming through the mist filling the chamber, they stood at least a kilometre apart. Standing back from the edge of the platform mounted on the side of this abutment, and over the rim of which Engineer and various members of his staff were now peering, Tack turned to Saphothere.

‘He told me about the shift back in time, but what was all that about spatial elasticity and the unnecessary squandering of energy?’ he asked.

Saphothere glanced at him. ‘At present the tunnel is one light year long, internally, and a decision must be made as to whether we maintain that physical length or extend it.’

‘But if they are going back a hundred million years, surely the tunnel needs to be extended?’

‘Distance,’ said Saphothere tersely, ‘when equated to time travel through interspace, is only a function of the energy you need to expend. The shorter the tunnel’s actual length, the greater the energy input required to maintain it. Had you sufficient energy you could open a doorway directly into the Precambrian, though you would probably put out the sun in doing it. Zero energy input would extend such a tunnel to infinity, attenuating it into non-existence. It’s quite simple really.’

Tack snorted and returned his attention to Engineer. He and the others had now finished their discussion and rejoined them.

‘It is now decided,’ said Engineer. ‘Take your mantisal through and inform Maxell that we shall maintain the tunnel at one light year. I feel that to extend now would be premature, and that we should wait for the shift into the Triassic’

‘Yes, Engineer,’ replied Saphothere, with a short bow. He turned, and almost immediately their mantisal appeared out of the hot humid air blowing across the platform.

‘And you, Tack,’ continued Engineer, ‘I look forward to seeing again when you return, though you will be much changed.’

Tack did not know what to make of that, so he just nodded and followed Saphothere into the mantisal. Soon they were drifting out from the platform, out over the triangular well below and all its gut-churning distortion. Then the mantisal dropped like a brick, straight down into it.

The falling sensation continued until the mantisal turned, so that rather than dropping downwards as if into a real well, they were now travelling along an immense triangular tunnel. It was only a change of perspective, as the weightless falling sensation continued, but enough for Tack to get a grip on, and so not lose the contents of his stomach. Also, as they progressed, he began to feel acceleration, noticing what appeared to be faults in the silver-grey walls of the tunnel fleeing past faster. All of this was numbing, and just watching it dropped Tack into a weary fugue. He dozed, losing it until Saphothere spoke to him again. Checking his watch, Tack saw that only minutes had passed.

‘Come over here.’

Tack pushed himself away from the side of the mantisal, drifting over to catch hold of a strut, then hauled himself down to a standing position next to Traveller. Saphothere withdrew his left hand from one of the two spheres.

‘Place your hand in there,’ he instructed.

Tack rested his palm against the surface, which felt glassy until he pushed into it, then it gave way and enclosed his hand in cold jelly. Immediately there came a prickling stinging as of numerous needles penetrating his flesh. A chill spread up his arm, across his back, then leapt up via his neck and into his skull. The mantisal suddenly appeared even more transparent than normally, and the tunnel itself changed. Now they were hanging in the flaw of a gem, in which they held their position against a waterfall of light. And beyond this, interspace was again visible—infinite grey underlined by the black roiling of that strange sea.

‘What’s it doing?’

‘Connecting… and feeding as well.’

‘Feeding?’ Tack repeated woodenly.

‘Mantisals draw energy from sources we provide for them within interspace, but that is not enough for a material creature. They separate out carbon from our exhaled breath and, in this manner’—Saphothere nodded towards Tack’s hand—‘directly absorb other essential chemicals.’ Now, do you feel the connection?’

After trying to dismiss from his mind the fact that he was somehow being eaten, Tack did sense something. The mantisal was tired and wanted to rest. It felt confined by the distortion of interspace around it, and was aware of that distortion in a way that—through it—Tack instinctively tried to grasp, but it defeated him. The flow of light now began to diminish, and the mantisal began sliding to the edge of the flaw.

‘Don’t let it stop. You must keep pushing it.’

Tack tried to put the construct under pressure, but just did not know how. Mentally pulling back in confusion, he found the alien mind sticking with him, sinking into him, becoming one of his parts. Now its weariness was his, its need to rest becoming his own. Then he knew, and from that part of himself which enabled him to persevere through a particularly tough fight-training session, he now found the will to drive the mantisal on. It began to slowly draw back to the centre of the flaw and the flow of light began to increase.

‘Your other hand,’ urged Saphothere, now seeming just a skeleton cloaked in shadow beside him—like an X-ray image. Tack watched Traveller withdraw his hand only so far that his fingertips still remained inside the eye, then inserted his own hand into its place. Upon doing this, he felt some strange species of feedback from the piece of tor embedded in the wrist of that hand, and saw it brighten under its enclosing bangle, glowing like a solid gold coin. From it, he felt resistance, as if from some infinite ribbon of elastic stretched into the far past. Only while feeling this did he realize that, in his head, time now equated to a distance, and that other elements of the mantisal’s perception were becoming comprehensible to him. He remembered undertaking a simple perceptual test that involved viewing a line drawing of a cube and switching it about in his head, so that what he perceived as the rear surface became the front and vice versa. Doing the same with what he was seeing now, he brought the tunnel back into existence for himself, while maintaining an awareness of how the mantisal perceived it… and much else.

As the compressed ages fled by, he realized that the flaw itself was rising from Earth’s gravity well, which in its turn was a trench cloven around—and within—the trench of the sun. And that they were falling towards the sun, for their destination did not lie on Earth. Reality now patterned around him in absolute surfaces twisted in impossible directions, spheres and lines of force, empty light and solid blackness, all multiplied to infinity down an endless slope. Glancing at Saphothere, who had now moved away from him, he saw just a man-shaped hole cut into midnight—but the traveller was also a sphere and a tube, both finite and infinite. Tack groped for understanding, something starting to tear in his head.

‘Start pulling yourself out now, else you’ll never return.’

Saphothere was beside him again: skeletal, terrifying, fingertips back in the eye.

Tack pulled away and absolute surfaces slid back into place to form the walls of the tunnel, shapes curving away into nothingness, and soon he once again perceived his surroundings in simple three dimensions.

‘Now, take out your right hand.’

‘But… I can do this…’

‘You have done enough for now. You’ve been standing here for two hours and for fifty million years.’

Tack withdrew one hand and Saphothere instantly thrust his own into place. Taking out his other hand, Tack looked at his watch and confirmed that two hours had indeed passed. Pushing himself back through the cavity of the mantisal, he felt weariness descending on him like a collapsing wall.

‘But one light year?’ he said, as he moved to his accustomed position in the mantisal.

‘Time and distance, Tack. Distance and time. You now know the answer: to fly the mantisal you had to build the blueprint of the logic in your mind.’

It was true. Inside himself Tack felt he had gained an utterly new slant on… everything. He thought about the tunnel and said, ‘It compresses the continuum and multiplies, by orders of magnitude, the distance the mantisal can normally travel. And, like the tunnel, the more energy the mantisal uses the shorter its journey. In how short a time, for us, could it traverse this tunnel?’

‘Less than an hour, its personal distance contracted to a few hundred kilometres,’ Saphothere replied. ‘But it would kill itself and its rider in the process.’

Tack nodded, too weary to ask anything further. Folding his arms and bowing his head, he closed his eyes and fell into a dream world, where Klein bottles endlessly filled themselves and hollow people built tesseract houses.

Being interface technician, Silleck commanded the respect of many and the distrust and horror of some. As she strode along the moving walkway towards the lift that would take her up into the control room of Sauros, she spotted other Heliothane surreptitiously noting her shaven head and the scars on her scalp from the penetration of vorpal nodes. But she was used to such attention and ignored it as she thought about the coming shift of the city. Goron had summoned her early because she was his most trusted interface technician, so that meant she would have an hour or more to scan through various vorpal sensors scattered throughout time and across alternates. It was perhaps the best part of her job—such voyeurism.

Reaching the lift shaft, she stepped on the platform and as it took her up she ran her hand over her scalp. Her head ached slightly, as it always did nowadays, for there was never enough time for the damage done by the penetrating glass fibres from the nodes to heal completely. Stepping off the platform, she noted that Goron had not yet returned from the abutment chamber. She nodded to Palleque—who always seemed to be here—then headed to the interface wall, seeing that already one of the other technicians was linked up.

The man stood with his head and shoulders enclosed in the vorpal sphere, which was also packed with translucent and transparent mechanisms. Through this distortion, nightmare hints were visible of his open skull and of glassy pipes and rods interfacing directly with raw exposed brain. From the back of this sphere, like a secondary spine, a mass of ribbed glass ducts followed the curve of his back down, before entering a light-flecked pedestal and then down into the floor. From this spine, vorpal struts spread out like the wing bones of a skate, to connect it to various mechanisms in the surrounding walls, ceiling, floor and adjacent connectware, so that the man seemed to hover at the centre of some strange mandala—the human flaw in an alien hyaline perfection.

Silleck headed to the middle of the three spheres located along the wall, beside the man, and ducked underneath to thrust her head up through the gelatinous material. As she pressed her back up against the glass support spine, she immediately felt her head and face grow numb. Her eyesight faded, as did her hearing. There was no pain, but she could feel the tugging as automatic systems opened her scalp, removed the screw-in plugs of false skull, and began to drive in the nodes of vorpal glass. She knew the fibres were growing in from the nodes when her vision began to flick back on as from a faulty monitor, and she began to hear the bellowing of some dinosaur. Soon she was seeing the standard view for which her equipment was set: from outside Sauros. Then the connection began to firm and that view feathered across time and she was seeing, and comprehending, Sauros over a period of hours, present and future. And if that was not enough, she began then to see up and down the probability slope, possible cities, a maybe landscape, might-have-been dinosaurs. Without the connectware and the buffering of the technology surrounding her, such sight would have driven her mad.

Eventually Silleck stabilized her connection and focused on the specific, as there was no use yet for her to have such an all-encompassing view—that would only be required during a city-shift or an attack. Scanning the near present and near future, she found little to interest her, so began to tune into the tachyon frequencies of the nearer vorpal sensors. Through one such, she observed a boy being pursued by a couple of early Cro-Magnon women. But because she had seen this all before she knew he would escape with the roasted squirrel he had snatched from their fire, would sleep under a thorn bush, then be shifted back through time by his tor, to somewhere beyond available sensors. Anyway, there had never been much interest in such individuals, for the boy was clearly from the time of the neurovirus and would not survive many more time-jumps. No, it was the view from the next sensor that most interested Silleck. The girl fascinated her, and Silleck had not yet had the free time to view everything that happened to her on this latest brief jump. The jump in itself was interesting because both ends of it were encompassed by the ten-thousand-year life of this particular sensor. Focusing her awareness, Silleck connected into the sensor near the end of its life and tracked back through time until she found what she wanted.

The girl, Polly, turned, groping inside her greatcoat for the automatic Silleck had seen her shoot at the juggler some hundreds of thousands of years in the future. Already the cold had begun penetrating her inadequate clothing, and her hand shook as she pointed the weapon into the haze of the blizzard. Adjusting the sensor, Silleck viewed the animal out there in infrared, and could hear the muffled thud of heavy paws, then a low growling. The girl pulled the trigger, then cursed herself and groped with shaking fingers for the safety catch. Out of the snowy blur a shape loomed: huge and shaggy, and with enormous, unlikely looking teeth. Polly squeezed off a shot, and in the half-light the muzzle-flash momentarily overloaded the image Silleck was viewing, so the technician did not see the snarling retreat of the beast. Polly now glanced behind herself, perhaps realizing for the first time that she stood on the edge of a cliff, over which the storm was blasting. Far below her lay an icy plain being crossed by a herd of woolly mammoths. Polly turned back, no doubt hearing the furtive approach of the beast that Silleck could clearly see. The creature had been big, and that shot, the technician realized, had only pissed it off.

‘Really, and there I was just thinking about finding a ski lodge,’ Polly said out loud.

It was this seemingly insane monologue that had first drawn Silleck’s attention in the woodland, where the girl had first met the juggler. It was only on further scanning that the technician realized Polly wore some kind of AI device that seemed rather advanced for the time the girl had come from.

Polly closed her eyes then, and Silleck observed the temporal web responding to the girl’s will, drawing her into interspace. She disappeared moments before the beast, a large bear, hurtled out of the storm, then came to a skidding stop by the precipice and looked about itself in confusion. That was as far as Silleck had got the last time she had looked through this sensor. Now she drew back down its time-line to the point of its arrival, after being fired into the past from New London. She then tracked uptime to the temporal signature of Polly’s arrival, some five thousand years later.

The girl materialized in mid air, the tor unable to adjust, during such a short forced jump, to ground level. She hit the ground and rolled, searching desperately for the weapon she had just dropped. It rested on an icy surface, underneath which were tangles of waterweed and small fish swimming sluggishly. After snatching up the gun, she looked around.

She stood upon the same cliff top as before, but there was no blizzard or huge animal, just rocks and dirt and the bare bones of a tree stripped of its bark by a constant icy blast—all below an anaemic sky. Polly buttoned up her coat and moved away from the edge of the precipice. Still cold, Silleck observed—the girl had managed to miss a brief interglacial period.

‘Yeah, yeah, you and my mother both,’ Polly said out loud.

The probe not being sophisticated enough to tune in to the other side of the conversation, Silleck contained her annoyance and continued to watch as Polly walked away from the cliff. Shortly she came to a scree slope descending to a stream that was mostly ice but in which some water still flowed. She stooped down beside it, cupped her hand to sample some. Moving along the stream’s course, she took some bread from her pocket and ate.

Boring, thought Silleck, phasing forward quickly as the girl followed the stream to a river that descended in occasional waterfalls down the mountainside—the moving water forming only a small percentage of it, the rest of it frozen into weird hyaline sculptures, like teeth, or many-fingered hands grasping the rocks. Soon she came in sight of the lower plain, where the river terminated in a wide pool. A bear had broken through the ice, and Polly watched it lunge into the water, then pull back without anything to show for its effort.

‘Is that the creature I saw before?’

Unheard, Silleck replied, No, but possibly a far distant ancestor.

Crouching, Polly continued to observe the hungry creature. She waited cautiously until it headed away and was well out of sight before making her way down towards the pool. Silleck adjusted the probe to X-ray and observed salmon skeletons swimming under the ice. The girl would be starving because of her tor’s parasitism, but Silleck could not see how she could possibly get herself a meal. Suddenly inspired, Polly groped in her bag, and took out some device and fired it into the water. Silleck linked into data storage in Sauros to identify that item as a early defensive taser, then wryly observed its effect. Jerking violently, two large salmon floated to the surface. Not even bothering to take her boots off, the girl waded in and scooped them onto the shore.

Well done, Silleck told her. Well done indeed.

‘Sure,’ said Polly to her AI companion, taking out a knife. ‘You never heard of sushi?’

As the girl feasted on raw salmon, Silleck heard Goron say, ‘We’re ready for the shift. Let’s have you all online,’ and reluctantly withdrew from that distant time.

The exit from the time tunnel was much like its entrance: possessing the triangular distortion that it was painful to look at and with huge abutments poised over its three corners. The mantisal rose into albescent space beside a tornado of rainbow heat haze which penetrated to the centre of the triangle. Only as they moved away from this did Tack notice distant walls and realize they were in some vast chamber. Eventually reaching one wall, they entered a passage, delving into a horizontal city composed of either buildings or machines, then into a long curving tunnel.

Tack decided that he definitely wasn’t in Kansas. They ascended into what must be vacuum and the close glare of the sun, between the giant buildings of a vast city complex that, as the mantisal rose, Tack now saw bordered the face of a gigantic disc.

‘How is it we can breathe?’ Tack asked, once he remembered to breathe again.

‘The mantisal generates oxygen as a waste product, after absorbing the carbon from the CO2 we exhale.’

That sort of answered Tack’s question, but not quite.

‘I mean… how come the air isn’t lost from inside here?’ He waved at the open spaces between the struts.

‘In simple terms: a force field, generated all around the inside of the mantisal, contains it—though a more correct description would be a temporal interface.’

‘Oh, that’s all right, then.’

Saphothere shot him a warning look, which Tack acknowledged with a shrug before returning his attention to the fantastic view.

Here were towers of such immensity that they could have contained the entire population of a major city from Tack’s own time; titanic engines—their purpose unknowable to him; and huge domes covering dense forests, parks, and in one case a sea in which leviathans swam and upon which ships rode. Tangles of covered walkways and transport tubes linked these structures, and various transports, some of them mantisals, swarmed about them. Above this city, perhaps unloading their cargoes, hovered enormous spaceships constructed of spheres bound together by quadrate dendritic forms. The centre of the disc was void except for a single immense dish, and nothing moved above that, for there space was distorted by the transit of lethal energies.

‘New London,’ Saphothere announced.

Tack could think of no sensible response.

The mantisal was now heading towards the edge of the disc. Apparently this environment was not harmful to it, for Saphothere seemed in no hurry to get it to any destination. Below them the city unrolled and just kept unrolling. Tack looked up towards the sun, which was surprisingly dim. He should not be able to look directly at it like this.

‘Do you see the sun tap?’ Saphothere asked.

Sun tap? The man had repeatedly referred to that, but Tack had never wondered what it might mean. Silhouetted against the face of the orb he noticed a rectilinear shape, minuscule in proportion, but then, to the sun, so was planet Earth.

‘How?’ Tack was at a loss.

‘It sits in the chromosphere, using more than half of the energy it generates to power the antigravity engines that hold it in place. Entering the same AG fields, the sun’s radiation accelerates and is focused into a microwave beam with which you could fry Earth in half a second.’ He nodded towards the distortion above the dish. ‘A fraction of that beam hits splitting stations, before reaching here, and is diverted to conversion stations spread throughout the solar system, which in turn provide the energy for our civilization.’

‘Conversion stations?’ Tack asked.

‘One such station, over Mars, converts microwave energy into the full spectrum of light—from infrared to ultraviolet—which serves as our replacement for the sun mirrors destroyed by the Umbrathane. It is the reason that planet is now no longer entirely red.’

Tack considered that. ‘You said just a fraction?’

‘Most of that beam hitting the dish here, is used to power the wormhole—the time tunnel. You have to understand that we originally built the tap specifically for that purpose, and that the greening of Mars became just a side benefit. Tap and wormhole are inextricably linked and neither, once created, can be turned off. There is, in fact, no physical means of turning off the sun tap as the antigravity fields that sustain its position also focus the beam—as I mentioned—but if you did, the wormhole would collapse catastrophically and Sauros would be obliterated by the feedback. Also, if the wormhole was independently collapsed, the energy surge would vaporize New London. The project was therefore a total commitment.’

They now became weightless inside the mantisal as it dropped past the outer rim of New London, and soon Tack observed that, just like a coin, the city had two sides. When the construct swung in towards the other side, Tack felt his stomach flip and bit down on a sudden nausea. Now he felt the pull of gravity from the second side as they descended towards a building on the very edge of a city, which sprawled across the entire underside of the disc. This structure was shaped like the rear half of a luxury liner, but standing on end so its stern was pointing into space. Except this would have been a liner that made Titanic look like a lifeboat. The mantisal now curved in towards the ‘deck’ side of the building, where other structures protruded at right angles. Tack saw that, like a silver foam, thousands of mantisals were already attached to these protrusions. Eventually they came in amidst them and descended onto a platform resembling a weird melding of a giant oyster shell and a helipad.

Withdrawing his hands from the mantisal’s eyes, Saphothere said, ‘You remember the mask in your pack? You’ll need it to get to the entrance, as it’s vacuum up here.’ He gestured to an oval door at the juncture of the landing platform with the main building. ‘You’ll have to run, though.’

Tack opened his pack and took out the mask. When Saphothere had originally explained its function to him, Tack had hoped he would never have to use it. It looked organic, like the sliced-off face of a huge green cricket, its interior glistening wet. As he pressed it against his face, its soft interior flowed around his features, moulding itself to him. For a moment he was blind, then a vision screen switched on, with complementary displays arrayed along the bottom. Breathing involved only slightly more effort than usual. Apparently the mask stored pure oxygen—after sucking it in from its surroundings—and, when being worn, released it.

‘Come on now,’ urged Saphothere, his own mask in place as he leapt out. Tack followed him, running for the door. Initially his skin felt frozen, then suddenly it was burning. He saw vapour rising off his clothes and dissipating. Saphothere, trotting along beside him, seemed completely at ease in this environment. As they reached the oval door, Tack glanced back to see the mantisal floating over to one side of the landing pad, where others of its kind were gathered. Grabbing the protruding handle, Saphothere pulled the door open and led the way into an oblate airlock chamber. As soon as he closed that door, air began blasting in, and after a moment they could remove their masks.

‘Now what?’ Tack asked.

Saphothere proceeded through the next door into a chaos of sound and colour. Tack could hardly take it all in: a vast chamber containing dwellings in all shapes and sizes suspended in gleaming orthogonal scaffolds; gardens and parks, some of them even running vertically; walkways ribboning through the air; transports of every kind hurtling all about the place; and Heliothane everywhere, thousands upon thousands of them. Glancing at Saphothere he saw the man was operating his palm computer.

‘You are too slow and too weak, so would get killed in here’ — he gestured to the surrounding mayhem—‘within minutes, probably by accident. This is not for you yet.’ So saying, Saphothere operated some other control on his computer. Tack felt the all-too-familiar sensation of a reprogramming link going in. He tried to object, but instead simply shut down. Everything started to grey out and the last thing he felt was Saphothere catching him as he fell.

Rain like a vertical sea hammered upon her and, slipping in the mud, Polly went down on her face. Her nostrils filled with the stench of decaying vegetation and in the darkness she could hear things hooting and screeching.

‘Yes, I know—not a good place to be,’ she said, then wished she hadn’t spoken when the animal noises fell silent.

Pushing herself upright, she looked around at the darkness and at huge trees looming behind curtains of rain.

‘You’ve got nothing to say?’ she asked him nervously, terrified she might now be genuinely alone.

Oh, always something to say. But at present I’m trying to use one of Muse’s military logistics programs to calculate your acceleration back through time.

‘You’ll be able to predict what era I’ll arrive in next?’ Polly subvocalized, sure she could hear baleful movements out there.

Well, I have some dates to work with… within vague limits. Thus far it would seem your acceleration is exponential, though what the exponent is it’s difficult to ascertain. All I do know is that if the increase continues at its present rate… a few jumps more and you’ll be going back millions of years at a time.

‘You’re not serious?’

Oh yeah, but, as I said, the parameters are vague. If you follow the curve I’m now trying to plot, you’ll end up off the graph—achieving a jump that is infinite. But then I might only be viewing part of that curve and who’s to say you’ll be following a curve anyway? Thing is, you are now learning to control the shifts, and Christ knows what other factors might come into play. The next one might easily be one year or one million years.

‘Oh, screw this,’ Polly said out loud and reached down inside herself to grasp hold of that webwork and bend it to her will. This time there was no transition over that previous black sea and she was immediately into that Euclidian space she could manipulate, if only in a small way. She gave it a few seconds only, then pulled herself out, dropping down on her back into soft leaf litter in a raucous daylit forest. She gasped in a lungful of cold morning air.

Of course, every time you do that, you just screw up my calculations further.

Polly did not know whether to laugh or cry.

Cheng-yi dragged himself out from under the mounded dead and looked around in disbelief. The attacking unit of the People’s Army had bayoneted the survivors and the wounded ponies, then looted the bodies. All that now remained of the largest robber band in Miyi county was butchered corpses strewn along the valley. That none of their attackers had dragged Cheng-yi out and searched him he put down to his being covered in blood and the plenitude of loot elsewhere. Climbing unsteadily to his feet, Cheng visually checked himself from head to foot. None of the blood appeared to be his own, which was miraculous considering he had been riding beside Lao when the machine gun opened up, and there was not much left of him that was identifiable. Cheng gave a little dance and shook his fists at the sky, then he looked round again, completely at a loss.

What little drug smuggling or gun running they had managed across the Himalayas since Mao’s revolution, would not be available to him alone. And also, since that revolution, pickings had been poor in the Xiang region—most of the thieving already done by Party officials. Cheng was damned if he was going to rejoin China’s current society: thankless toil and the grey and boring clothing did not appeal to him. One option remained: he would head towards the coast, for Kowloon and Hong Kong, and see how his fortunes would fare. Not for one moment, as he exchanged his clothing for the best available remaining on the corpses, and looted them of anything the soldiers had left, did he feel any grief. They hadn’t been a bad lot, but none of them had really appreciated his qualities and, anyway, his emotional spectrum encompassed only terror and lust. The former came into play again when, just as he was ready to set out, the monster came.

The huge and horrible thing fed on the dead. He saw it bow down over the body of a pony and suck it down with a crunching gulping. The human corpses it took down with less trouble. Crouched behind a rock, Cheng-yi sobbed with terror as he listened to the macabre feasting, then when the sounds ceased, he choked back his sobs and held his breath. Perhaps it was gone now? Perhaps it had never been there…

Cheng-yi looked up straight into the mouth of hell poised above him and screamed. The mouth turned away and, from the flank behind, one of the monster’s scales fell and thudded in the dust beside the Chinaman. He watched as the scale, at first leaflike, coiled up into a cylinder as if rapidly drying. Lust was Cheng’s next emotion, and he did not hesitate to grab the thing up and pull it up over his forearm. Then, the monster gone, he wondered what madness it was that had made him see such monstrous visions. But this was not his last.