Cowl

18

Palleque:

As if he too would not sacrifice his life to that end, my brother Saphothere feels I too fanatically seek to avenge the death of our sister, Astolere. That I have become Cowl’s agent he attributes to Coptic and Meelan. But those two are not really accepted by the other Umbrathane. It is fortunate that my ostensible fanaticism prevents him from asking further questions. I was always Cowl’s agent, and have remained in communication with him. The destructive war between Umbra and Heliothane is an utter waste, and I considered the preterhuman the ideal candidate to rule us all. It was I who passed on the displacement technology to the Umbrathane, to enable them to escape Heliothane oppression, and much else have I done. Cowl was suspicious at first but, upon discovering that I supposedly did not know what had happened to my sister, concocted the story that she, along with the entire population of Callisto, is with him behind the Nodus. I was wrong: Cowl is too careless of human life to rule us. And at the least he must be made powerless—the very least.

When they got him ashore and Tacitus started work on getting the water out of his lungs, Polly stepped back, her hand dropping to her taser in its waterproof pouch at her hip, then sliding across to the sheath knife beside it. Tacitus did not notice this movement as the rescuee now coughed sea water and blood from his lungs and the Roman, as he had been taught, turned him into the recovery position.

‘It is surprising that this man is still alive,’ commented the Roman—in the Heliothane language they all now spoke after an instructive session connected to Aconite’s Pedagogue machine. Tacitus then grabbed hold of the man’s arm, putting a foot in his armpit then pulling and twisting, relocating his shoulder joint. The rescued man groaned, fell back into his prior position and curled up his legs.

‘His name is Tack. He is the man I told you about a while ago—the killer I dragged back with me for a few shifts,’ Polly told him.

Speaking out loud through a link established to Wasp shortly after Polly’s rescue, Nandru interjected, ‘And now things become clear. You recollect that a piece of your tor, in its still nascent stage, was left embedded in this U-gov bastard’s wrist?’

‘I still can’t see what’s worth saving here,’ said Polly.

‘Things have changed and we all know so much more,’ said Tacitus, looking up. ‘I would even save enemies of Rome, here and now, should they survive Cowl’s ungentle ministrations.’

‘You hear that, Polly?’ Nandru asked. ‘I hope so, because I’ve just informed Aconite that friend Tack here is still alive. Come on, you know U-gov assassins aren’t my favourite playmates, but I damned well want to hear what this one has to say for himself.’

Polly let her hand slip away from her knife, not exactly sure what emotion she was feeling. There was anger, yes, for earlier this man had been intent on killing her, but that anger was no longer a savage thing within her. Where, in the end, would she be now without Nandru and then this one? Rotting in her bedsit, and perhaps moving onto the needle like Marjae had, blowing U-gov officials in back alleys when not being screwed up against a wall, dropping her price as the goods became more shoddy. The more she thought about it, the more ambivalent her feelings became.

‘Come on, let’s get him onto Wasp,’ she decided abruptly.

For Polly only, Nandru said, Of course, I don’t think he’ll live that much longer if Cowl or the Umbrathane realize he’s still alive. And if they don’t know yet, they can find out soon enough.

Between them, Polly and Tacitus picked up Tack and dropped him into Wasp’s rear compartment. Studying him, Polly saw that his injuries were extensive. He certainly had a compound fracture of his ankle, for bone was sticking out of his flesh. Deep wounds in his chest were seeping blood, and the medscanner Tacitus had pressed against his neck showed his vital signs on the wane. But it was unlikely he would die irrecoverably because, even if his heart stopped, Wasp possessed the facility to plug into a person’s neck and keep an oxygenated haematic fluid circulating around the brain, which was all Aconite needed to maintain someone’s life—other repairs she could perform in her surgical facility.

They headed back towards their hostess’s home, glancing back occasionally to check for any activity apparent in Cowl’s citadel, but all remained quiet out on the sea as if, having spat out the indigestible remains of some meal, the place was now contemplating what to eat next. As they reached her home, Aconite and the others came out to meet them.

‘Another man,’ snorted Cheng-yi, before heading back inside.

Lostboy stared long and hard at Tack before something seemed to go click in his mind. He jerked his head up, pointing out to sea. ‘The beast.’ They all turned to look.

Polly had wondered at the earlier stillness and now realized why. The Umbrathane customarily ceased their constant maintenance of the citadel and fled to its interior safety chambers whenever Cowl summoned all the energy from the geological taps for the purpose of linking to the torbeast. Now, the very air around the citadel seemed full of distortions and hints of nightmarish shapes, where the beast encroached upon the real.

‘Coming after him?’ Ygrol asked, stabbing a thumb towards the unconscious Tack.

Aconite shook her head. ‘Cowl would not expend such energy. He’d just send Makali out here, or fire a missile direct from one of the citadel’s emplacements.’

From Wasp, Nandru said, ‘But not a coincidence, I’d warrant.’

‘Certainly not,’ Aconite replied. ‘Cowl is no doubt acting on information obtained from this newcomer.’ She was studying her palm screen. ‘Our friend here has been comprehensively mind-fucked.’

They carried Tack inside and laid him down on Aconite’s surgical table. Polly was the last to leave the room as Aconite began pulling her medical machines into place.

‘He’s the one I dragged back… the one who tried to kill me,’ she said.

‘So Nandru has informed me,’ Aconite replied. ‘Be assured, though, that this is not the same individual. The one who attacked you was a human automaton programmed by your controlling government. That automaton has since, unless I am mistaken, been reprogrammed by the Heliothane. And since then, again, has had his programs and much of his mind ripped apart by Cowl. I don’t know how much there will be left of him—he might be another Lostboy by the time I’ve finished.’

Polly gave a small nod and exited the room.

Its hunger was immense, but each time it fed it pushed itself even further down the probability slope, yet it knew that if it could somehow feed enough, things would change for it. Thinking, as it perpetually did, in five dimensions, it was aware that oblivion lay in both directions on this temporal line. Allowing its consciousness to fall into the past, it dropped back to its secondary inception—from when its consciousness had materialized in the Precambrian. Pushing into the future, it found long slow starvation in a world in which it was the only life form, resulting, at its death, in the truncation of that alternate in vorpal and thus temporal terms. Only here, holding its position in what it defined to itself as the now, where up-slope energy was being fed down to it, could it maintain temporal life. Now, and always now, the energy being fed to it was huge—and growing.

The Maker wanted something of it, as he always did, but the torbeast was never anything less than utterly grateful and adoring. Every time he wanted something, the opportunities given for feeding far outweighed any concomitant pain. On many occasions the beast had suffered loss of its mass through attacks from the enemy, but with side-branched feeders it hoovered up biomass from alternates further down the slope, and this, though not commensurate, satisfied sufficiently its endless urge to feed. But this time there was something different. The promise this time was of unrestrained feeding on the enemy, the life system of a whole alternate to denude, without consequence—billions of human lives and vast biomass, with which it could achieve… all.

Drawing on the energy font, the torbeast shoved its mass over those alternates it had previously denuded, and which had been the cause of its fall down the slope. It manifested thus in the skies of barren Earths—a glimpse of organic hell—then shifted on. On a world where the sea was occupied only by single-celled organisms, it flooded out around another energy font, drawing all of itself through as, over the span of millennia, the first font died.

The beast’s substance drew in from its secondary inception point, and in from that future of its own death. In a wave of living tissue, kilometres high, it flooded across a barren continent, ripping aside mountain chains and tearing up the plains before it. Storms dogged its progress, cloud formations boiling across the sky above it, and lightning walked across its flesh. Then, reaching the ocean surrounding the continent, this wave broke into a chaos of filter-feeding mouths like stalked whales, plunging into the waters and driving a second tsunami ahead. Spreading out into the oceans, it fed, sucking up biomass by the kilotonne, digesting lakes of organic slurry, driving on in a global apocalypse. Only the heat of volcanic vents diverted this progress, as did the steam explosion from a volcanic island chain now swamped by the wave. At the font its substance poured in slower then slower. Then, with a thunderclap that blew hurricanes across the beast’s heaving landscape, the flow ceased. But by then the torbeast had met itself on the other side of the planet, and it now wholly occupied this alternate Earth.

A grey-skinned woman stooped over him. He recognized her in some fragment of his mind. At the foot of the table he could see the fleshy squid-like tentacles extending from the carapace of an autosurgeon and he felt their wet touch on his leg. As the bioconstruct straightened his ankle, pain briefly laced together the elements of his sentience, and he found enough strength to yell out and jerk upright. A heavy three-fingered hand stilled his protest by the sight of it, even more than the pressure it exerted against his chest to push him back down.

‘You surprise me,’ she said.

He gazed at her disparate arms and couldn’t find any meaning in her words at first. Then something meshed in his mind and he understood.

‘Why?’ he grated. But the question was not directed at her. Why am I? Why is this? Why everything?

‘I see that your shut-off point is graded somewhat above that occasioned by your trauma. Deliberate but cruel augmentation I think.’

That meant nothing to him. He blinked and listened to the sound of a storm outside.

‘I’m Tack,’ he mouthed silently to himself, and wasn’t sure what that meant either.

His mind consisted of disconnected monads, now shaping themselves to each other and searching for connection. On some level he realized he was rebuilding himself, but not quite in the same way as before—like a demolished house rebuilt with the same bricks, a house would result but the individual bricks would not be in exactly the same positions. Foundations did remain, but Tack had memory of things that no longer controlled him, found voids, and sought structure. With all the rage and love of a living man he sought to be, and felt dread, and a terrible yearning.

‘There. The anaesthetic doesn’t work, but this will.’

Blackness interminable, filled with leviathan structures falling against each other and bonding. Then terrible thirst and a massive hand supporting his head to the cool rim of a glass against his lips. He drank cold water.

He’d earlier seen the girl Nandru Jurgens had used, and whom his Director of Operations had subsequently ordered him to kill, but that he discounted as hallucination. This grey-skinned woman, with her strange hands and penetrating golden eyes, he could not deny. He stared at her as she withdrew the glass, and operated some control to raise the backrest of the surgical table further, but then she moved away about her tasks amongst the esoteric machinery that surrounded him.

Now he observed his naked body. Pipes ran from his chest to a wheeled machine nearby, and fluids—dark, clear, bloody and translucent blue—ran through those pipes. He saw that the wounds in his chest were now just sealed lines and that the autosurgeon had withdrawn, leaving an organic-looking surgical boot enclosing his foot and ankle.

‘You’ve been unconscious for three days and I’ve repaired most of your internal injuries. The bone glue is very effective, but I wouldn’t advise any gymnastics just yet,’ the woman warned him, her back turned to him.

The voice was as calm and modulated as that of a professional killer, Tack thought. He wondered if it was this about her that bothered him, but, no, he hadn’t heard her voice before, had he? He realized then what was familiar about her. Though distorted, she had much of the physiognomy of another.

Cowl.

With a lurch of dread Tack instantly realized that Cowl must not see into his thoughts again. Now, Tack’s mind being in such different order, he realized that in his eagerness, Cowl had not delved deeply enough. The being had not heard the one called Thote saying, ‘Like the girl who passed through here fifty years ago, you’re just a piece of temporal detritus. In your case primed and filled with poison, then sent on its way.’ And Cowl had not felt Tack’s later puzzlement at why he had not been provided with weapons capable of a distance hit, nor why he had been so ill-prepared for a fight involving time travel.

The woman turned to him. ‘Can you now speak?’

‘I can.’

‘Good. Cowl’s mind-fuck doesn’t usually leave behind anything human, but it would appear that your mind, being so accustomed to programming and reprogramming, has retained its facility for self-organization. I suspect this is because he reamed you through your interface, thus leaving many natural, unconscious structures intact.’

‘What are you to Cowl?’ he asked.

‘I’m his sister.’

Tack scanned the room for suitable weapons. Though a traitor, she was still Heliothane, so she would be strong and fast. But it seemed imperative he escape, and to do so it would be necessary to kill her. Then suddenly he felt how utterly wrong it would be to try and kill this woman who had tended to him, and his thoughts fell into brief confusion, out of which he re-arose, sick with anger. His immediate reaction had been caused by remaining emotional outfall from his Heliothane programming, but he should not think like that. Now he knew that he had never been an assassin, that from the very moment Saphothere had found him he had been manipulated: his sum purpose that of a sacrificial goat. He owed the Heliothane nothing.

‘Don’t let that worry you.’

For a moment Tack thought she was reading his mind, then he got back on track. ‘Your brother nearly killed me, and tore my mind apart. So I shouldn’t worry?’

‘No, Tack. What he did to you was a response to the assault upon him. I will not define that as your attack, because we both know you had no choice in the matter. And, anyway, the result of Cowl’s violence, whether intended or not, is that you are now alive in a way that you never were before.’

It was true. Tack could now make choices, decisions, and with all that came a concomitant confusion. Perhaps he actually owed Cowl more than he did the Heliothane? But no, what good Cowl had done for him was by default, and to sway in that direction would be like holding out the hand of friendship to a crocodile. From the beginning of his life Tack had never been able to choose sides for himself, to choose anything really. But now he possessed free will, so had to ask himself which side he might choose, and if he should choose any side at all. Just for a second he wished for the easier road of external programming. Just for a second.

‘Does Cowl know about what you have done?’ he asked.

‘No, I don’t share my brother’s views, nor his hatred.’

‘Which side are you on—Heliothane or Umbra?’

‘My own, Tack.’

And there it was, and he made his choice.

Seeing this war from both perspectives, Tack realized, in the perspective now utterly his own, that he did not think anything could justify what Cowl had been doing—his negligent slaughter of the torbearers. And he was utterly aware that the information Cowl now possessed was precisely what the Heliothane wanted him to possess. However, Tack could not forgive the lies and the programming forced upon himself, nor the Heliothane’s ruthless extermination of the Umbrathane.

Asking himself which side he was on, he found his answer the same as Aconite’s: my own.

In interspace Saphothere murdered his mantisal by driving a tor thorn into its sensory juncture and breaking the thorn off. Shortly after this Meelan did the same, then also the third passenger, and they watched while the three thorns melded, then sprouted fibrous connections into the bioconstruct. By this means they subverted the process that would cause the tors they now wore to generate their own pseudo-shells and thus separate the three of them. Shifting back in time, they arrived in Silurian evening, unloaded their supplies and disembarked before the mantisal dematerialized. Then they made their camp in a shadowy clearing surrounded by tree ferns and arboreal gloom.

‘I feel as though I have killed a trusted pet,’ said Saphothere.

‘It was necessary,’ Meelan replied, as she watched the third member of their group move off with the collapsible water container.

‘I wonder how necessary. We are just a sideshow to the main event.’

‘Don’t get all maudlin on me, Saphothere. You know how important our sideshow really is. Cowl does not know the truth, which is why he has failed thus far to influence the future, but he could still send us all down the slope into oblivion upon learning that truth.’

‘Even without his pet?’

Meelan did not reply immediately as she had opened a rations pack and was stuffing her mouth with food. Eventually she said, ‘We know he has an energy source—he’s had three centuries behind the Nodus to prepare one—so he is still dangerous. We mustn’t forget that what he has made he can make again while he still lives.’

‘There is a second important—’ began the big man, returning with a filled water container, before his words were cut off by a cough. He started again, his voice grating, ‘There is another important aspect to our mission—access to tors.’

‘For “aspect” substitute “hope”,’ suggested Saphothere.

‘We have five to spare already,’ Meelan observed.

‘Of how many thousands that we’ll need?’ asked Saphothere.

‘Well, in that you are optimistic—you think so many will survive?’ Meelan asked.

‘Cowl will have a supply,’ said the third member.

‘See, more optimism,’ said Meelan.

The big man started to say something, but now broke into a longer fit of coughing.

‘That still bothering you?’ Saphothere asked.

The big man touched the gnarl of scar tissue starting at his throat and running up under his chin.

‘It bothers me,’ Coptic agreed.

The brightly coloured acanthostega, a small amphibian that had been feeding voraciously on the the bony-headed fish of the swamp, fled as fast as it could through mud and decaying tangles of vegetation, and into the nearby forest. The looming cliff, rising over all, cast a shadow into the amphibian’s small domain, and in its simple brain it sensed the danger of its extinction. Behind it, the swamp was boiling, and tonnes of reed mat were being sucked up as if by some vast combine harvester, fast disappearing into red slits that were giant maws. Then the same monstrous cliff reached the edge of the trees, and something began wrenching the forest giants from the ground, juggling them up into the air, where they, like the reed mat, were chomped down. Wriggling up the ramp of a decaying log, the acanthostega ignored swarming termites, disturbed from their abode by the shaking of the ground—creatures which otherwise would have made it a tasty meal. At the summit of the log, with only a headlong drop ahead of it, it froze, instinct promulgating this reaction now flight was no longer an option.

As the cliff advanced, things began pushing through the undergrowth all around. Not far from the amphibian, slimy lungfish were hauled from their shallow pool by snakelike extrusions of the same cliff—only these snakes were without eyes, possessing only mouths that were vertical slits lined with incurving teeth. One such snake was squirming along the forest floor towards the small amphibian, and in response, the acanthostega arched its back, more prominently to display its bright poisonous coloration. The slit mouth rose above it and opened, then abruptly snapped shut. Then the snake things withdrew from the forest and the devastation immediately ceased. The earth still shaking, the cliff began to withdraw. Now the amphibian, sensing that the danger had passed, moved downwards along the log and began lunching on the termites.

Eventually the acanthostega returned to its little swamp but there found only a muddy cavity. Its vision was not sufficient to see the utterly denuded landscape beyond, and its mind was not sufficiently sophisticated to comprehend such concepts as ‘luck’. It could not comprehend what vast beast had come to feed in its world, or how that feeding must necessarily be limited. That the beast had to cease before being forced back down an incomprehensible slope as a result of its destruction of this history.

‘I’m not so sure I’m glad to see you well.’

That came from Polly, the girl he had tried to add to his list of victims millions of years in the future. So she had not been a hallucination earlier and he was glad she was alive. Though all those others before her were most definitely dead. He had killed them. Made mute by what he was suddenly feeling, he moved on past her to one of the arched windows and gazed out into darkness, trying to blink the strange after-images there from his eyes. In a moment he realized these were no after-images; he really was seeing shimmering hints of nightmarish shapes, as of open mouths and snakelike bodies, beyond the rain-beaded window.

‘What is that out there?’ he eventually asked, his voice dead.

‘Something you caused.’

Tack surveyed the occupants of this strange room. That familiar voice had not come from the Roman soldier, the Chinese man, or the boy, for they were all over on the other side of him — the first two working on something inside the back of the boy’s head. Tack tried to take sights like that in his stride: the boy with the back of his head open like a hatch, and two men who should have no conception of such work, probing inside with various finely polished tools, discussing in low voices what they were doing. Perhaps the boy was an android or something. Nor did the voice issue from the Neanderthal, who was sitting carving circuit patterns into a club fashioned from the rib of a large animal. Tack’s attention then strayed to the wasp robot squatting beside the sofa Polly occupied.

The robot spoke again, ‘It is the incursion overspill from the torbeast—that always happens when Cowl summons it up from the bottom of the slope and establishes a communication link, but not normally intruding to this extent. Perhaps, Mr U-gov facilitator, you can explain exactly what fuck-up you have caused.’

Polly, sitting with arms crossed, flicked her gaze to Wasp, then brought it back to Tack. ‘You have to understand that Nandru may be even less glad to see you than I am.’

Tack stared at the robot, then looked at Polly, who pointed to the Muse 184 at her throat.

‘Nandru?’ he said, even more confused.

Polly just stared at him silently, a hint of a smile twisting her mouth.

‘The dead soldier uploaded to the device Polly wears—and which now speaks to you through Wasp,’ explained Aconite as she entered the room. ‘But however he speaks, his questions are still pertinent.’

Tack was not even sure he cared, for moment by moment he could still feel elements of his mind knitting together. All those missions for U-gov, all that facilitation … even the Heliothane reprogramming had not brought him to this level of consciousness.

‘So what have you caused here? Why is my brother reacting in this way?’ Aconite asked.

Tack swallowed dryly and tried to shove his mangled history away from himself. He considered not telling Aconite anything, but decided he did not owe his silence to those who had sent him to this time. No matter how he felt about Saphothere, the traveller had sent Tack on a suicide mission. Tack managed to admit, ‘Inside my mind… Cowl found a way to attack Sauros.’

‘Sauros?’ Aconite asked mildly, unsurprised.

Tack concentrated on the now, and found that by doing so he could control the horror growing between his ears. While the other three in the small group moved over, Tack told of Goron’s project, of the city and the wormhole, how it fed energy for accurate mantisal jumping, and how the Heliothane were pushing backwards in time finally to get to Cowl. He then repeated, verbatim, those particular segments of conversation that had been of such interest to Cowl, and had now caused this reaction. He did not tell them what Thote had said, however, or of his own thoughts about distance weapons and sacrificial goats. That was for himself.

After a long silence, Aconite said, ‘This Sauros is what you saw, Polly.’ She turned back to Tack. ‘I somehow doubt that either Goron or Saphothere would be so negligent, but it appears to me that this Palleque might not have been entirely in their employ.’ She looked thoughtful and bowed her head, supporting her chin on her heavier hand. Musingly she continued, ‘I can think of only two possibilities: if the information Cowl extracted from you is true, then Sauros will become vulnerable when it shifts, and the torbeast my brother is now summoning will kill everyone in it. Thereafter, it being impossible to shut down the wormhole without catastrophe, the beast will then push through to New London and to the Heliothane Dominion.’

‘They’ll be able to deal with it there, won’t they?’ asked Polly.

‘That I very much doubt,’ said Aconite. ‘It will kill billions and destroy New London, thus causing that catastrophic shutdown. Most likely resulting vacuum will then kill it, but it is tough and, should it survive to somehow reach Earth or the solar colonies, billions more will die.’

‘Option one don’t sound so good,’ said Nandru. ‘You got anything better?’

‘Maybe this is a trap. Perhaps, having lured the beast out fully, the Heliothane will use some sort of nuclear conflagration to destroy it. Even so, I don’t see how the destruction of Sauros can be avoided, followed by the consequent collapse of the tunnel, which in turn would result in the destruction of New London — so achieving the same result. This leads me to think that maybe option one is the only one—no Heliothane plot, just my brother winning this battle at least.’

To Tack the second option seemed the more likely, and he wondered why Aconite was so dismissive of it.

‘Why would that happen? Why would New London be destroyed?’ Polly asked.

Tack knew the answer to that one. Keeping under rigid self-control he said, ‘Remember I mentioned how interested Cowl was in what Saphothere said: “if the wormhole was independently collapsed, the energy surge would vaporize New London.” Sun tap and wormhole are inextricably linked, and the hole is drawing in so much energy that if it collapsed, that energy would have to go somewhere else. The life of New London, in such a case, would be numbered in seconds.’

‘Then what should we do?’ Polly asked.

‘Nothing,’ said Aconite, turning away. ‘It is not our concern.’

Watching her go, Tack could not fathom the hint of amusement in her expression, but he knew how absolutely she was wrong. What he hadn’t told her confirmed this for him, but he had no wish to tell her now. He hoped that the Heliothane succeeded in whatever plan they were pursuing, if only it resulted in the death of this damned Cowl. That would be repayment for what the being had done to Tack himself, would end the slaughter of the torbearers, and maybe even end the war. His silence, now, best served that purpose, and anyway he had no trust of any sibling-on-sibling conflict—getting involved on any side of that was the way to find yourself branded the enemy, and have them both at your throat.

But Tack’s most important concern had little to do with any of that. Turning to gaze back out into the storm he felt disparate memories still sliding together in his mind. Every mission he had carried out, though having its own limited emotional impact, had lost that impact each time he had been reprogrammed. With that framework now gone, however, all those mindless missions were coming together in his head and he was beginning to really feel. Past sins were coming back to haunt him.

A row of nacre pillars, stretching from horizon to horizon, the incursions opened across the Triassic landscape. From a forest of low ferns and stunted ginkgos, a herd of browsing prosauropods rose onto their hind legs and started hooting in alarm. The big male charged out from the main group and, thrashing its tail from side to side, tore up the ground with its huge and lethal foreclaws, which were usually enough to drive away all but the most persistent predator. But these intruders were nothing he knew, and he began to back off as they advanced across the landscape like whirlwinds. Eventually he turned and, with his tail high in the air, charged after the more prudent females of his herd. None of them were to know that they were trapped inside a ring of the pillars, a ring eight hundred kilometres in diameter.