A River Called Time

by Courttia Newland

  ‘Then why shut me down in the Circle?’

  He kept his voice light, at low volume, back resting against glass, muscles warmed by lamp glow. It was also wise to take precautions against being overheard, in case former protocols had been reformed overnight.

  ‘When you get the plans, we also need to identify where the people who write those articles live and persuade them to stop. One way or another.’

  ‘I can do that.’ Markriss watched, alert for the next question.

  ‘How long?’

  Shrugging, toeing a stray chocolate wrapper. ‘Let me see. I’m not certain for sure; I’ll know when I’ve made the jump.’

  ‘Good. Just let me know as soon as you can. And keep this between us, OK? Don’t even tell Chile. They’re all over the Quarter. I wouldn’t even speak too much in temple until we find how many bugs we’ve got. I put Vy on it. He found eight or so in Chambers, which means he probably missed even more.’

  ‘Got you.’

  Ayizan passed him the splint. It was hot, smouldering. Markriss put it to his lips, inhaling, eyes on the barricade. The masked Corps were like the corrupted auras of vengeful spirits—the most negative aspects of the plane, only more dangerous.

  ‘What should we do about residents using sleepers and medis? Sylvan wasn’t the only addict. It’s rife.’

  ‘I know.’ Ayizan examined the end of one lock, let it fall. ‘We can’t force them to stay offline. They’re unable to keep disconnected, even when they see the consequences. Those machines have a greater hold than we thought.’

  ‘Yes, and they’re stupid.’

  ‘Misguided, I’d say.’ Ayizan grinned, his boyish expression filled with genuine humour. ‘But you’re always more honest than me.’

  A few quick puffs, before he passed the splint back. Ayizan’s eyebrows raised in thanks.

  ‘Let them. Either we’ll win by example, or we won’t. If we try to impose our beliefs, they could turn. We’ll lose.’

  ‘Right.’

  Ayizan spat at his feet repeatedly. The Corps bristled, masks angled their way. Drones rose higher, the buzzing angrier, mini camera snouts pointed at them, whirring.

  ‘What you doing?’

  ‘Bit of tobacco.’

  ‘Yeah, well, don’t make your shit rolling get us killed.’

  They swapped glances, laughing.

  ‘Oh, on that note I’ve been thinking. We should be wary about giving residents unequivocal cross-pantheon support. Sending condolences is one thing. We must, of course, particularly when they’re Outsiders. What you did, attending ceremonies, taking part in rituals . . .’ Grumbling, a fitful shake of the head. ‘I’m not sure. Not sure at all.’

  ‘You just said we can’t force people to choose our ways.’

  ‘We can’t. But we shouldn’t encourage them not to. It’s double standard.’

  Markriss leant his head back against the glass, warming his skull. It felt good. Without over-thinking, he closed his eyes. Luxuriated in the freedom of not having to care for a moment, almost as good as the comforting vibration at the curve of his head.

  ‘Double standard is telling people we’re different from the Authority because we respect all forms of worship while we stifle the traditions of others. That’s not right to me, or what I teach.’

  He waited out the silence, hearing a rustle of movement, guessing he was being regarded when he felt channelled focus, a new quality of warmth from that direction. In quiet streets, a continual buzz of drones, the bark of dogs, and laboured hum of the e-lamp, the window sang a gentle vibration like mantra. Markriss sighed, hardly making a sound. Felt the motion of everything, organic to mechanical, Corps to fruit fly, at his nerve tips. Breathed them in.

  ‘I hear you, brother. Don’t entirely agree, but I hear you.’

  He opened his eyes.‘I hear you too, brother. Truth.’

  They touched fists, held them in place. Slight pain, rubbing flesh and bone beneath. Solidity. Ayizan let go first, dropping his splint with a free hand, crushing tobacco-filled paper against paving slabs with a foot, exposing tarred guts. Drone engines lifted higher in pitch as three machines gained height on their sibling formation, swinging left to right as if from string until they maintained that new position, cameras trained on the men. So they faced them, knowing they’d lost that particular battle, expressions set in mute defiance. Their only resistance a singular, wordless protest, watching the watchers.

  4

  To the sea-green notebook, thin yet vast with potential. He twisted the small key to open his wooden safety box, retrieved the pages, and sat beneath the window on their worn sofa, using candles to re-read his own words, squinting at untidy recollection, edging closer to light, humming snatches of ancient songs. A slight pause to think, muttering half-decipherable meanings as he listened for answers. There were other, more worn notebooks charting previous explorations, seven going back to his first Circle meetings, fresh with ideas of how they might help people like themselves. While important and vastly educational, only the notes he’d written over the last few months truly captured his advances, tracking the precise details of how he coupled his studies, teachings and everyday practice into opening the internal sequences of his body. This revealed methods that could lead to actual change for the poorest Inner City residents, perhaps even those who came after.

  Chile worked on the other side of the room, reading through a leaning pile of texts, writing her own notes. They’d undergone morning transmutations together, separating afterwards to concentrate on their own efforts. Every so often, there was a hesitant knock on the door. She’d rise to greet a resident who’d come searching for advice, herbal remedies, or for general help. They would go ‘out’ into the garden, Chile pulling the door to, whispering until they were far enough to speak normally, voices rising and falling beyond the window. Markriss barely listened. He read his own memories, drank tea, made further notes. On occasion he looked over at their sleeper, thinking of Harman Wallace, their creator. The scientist’s name had been on his mind ever since he’d called it to Chile. Professor Wallace would have read many of the published texts and written on transcendental states. If he had produced any books besides his account of the events that led to his suicide, it would be wise to read them. He scratched the thought onto his page.

  His own explorations—‘Notes on Mental Transmutation’—consisted of thoughts on his intentions before every meditation, and journal entries made after, including a coded outline of each mission objective, heavy with jargon, abstract enough so they couldn’t be deciphered if found. Over a year of entries were written in that particular journal, short and nondescript, nothing dramatic. They began to pick up six months ago, when he’d made his first real discovery, and it was his last four entries that held the most promise. Yet Markriss went back to the beginning, flipping worn, smudged pages, moving from notebook to textbooks and back, attempting to decipher patterns that might lead him to remember what happened during his most recent transmutation: why the only remnants of the journey, a waking dream, gave him the nightmare vision of killing a man he would probably trade his life for.

  Mundane entries from those first pages, yellow and broken at the spine, made him smile. Often he was unable to remember writing the words, due to being in trance, he believed. An example:

  Is it possible to touch the physical body while in astral form? I don’t think so. I’ve tried many times but the urge to reconnect with the physical body is too strong to resist, perhaps because of the close range. It feels like the tug of two magnets placed close together, a kind of undeniable, invisible force. Whenever I’ve tried, the tug gets stronger and next thing I know I’m looking at my own ceiling, annoyed with myself for making the attempt.

  He had no recollection of having those thoughts, writing them down, or even making the attempt to touch his physical body while in astral form. And yet it made perfect sense that he would try. Textbooks taught that the ability to achieve higher planes of existence made all thi
ngs possible, and to inhabit the astral body as an adept, someone who’d mastered higher energies, meant that the spirit being could live pretty much as their physical form. But to touch your own living body with yourself? He wasn’t sure if the sensation would be satisfying, or if he would even remember the feeling if he had. Maybe it was something he’d achieved during his last transmutation. Did it account for his lack of memory? He wasn’t even sure he’d want to know.

  Another:

  I just fell asleep and had an unconscious transmutation which led me to discover this: ascensions made on the stomach cause the senses to reverse—up becomes down, and down becomes up. Sight is the most reliable means of finding your true direction. So I should remember not to ascend with my eyes closed

  Smiling, he turned pages.

  Those in the zone who’d practised longest—‘Circle Adepts’ they called themselves, shortened to ‘the Circle’ without discussion—believed that conscious meditation unaided by sleeper programs brought greater awareness of the upper planes. They encouraged Quarter residents to keep offline and meditate organically, to forego the restraints of enforced pod simulation. Without them, people were free to discover the realms of the unknown. Truths led to freedom, or, as Markriss often taught, ‘Truth is Freedom’. Direct, on-the-ground revolution was useless. Physical battles with the Authority and Corps soldiers only caused bloodshed and death; the abundance of Zone uprisings proved this. In their aftermath, the poorest resident still inhabited the Quarter, did low-paid menial jobs, and, barring a chosen few, remained poor. In the abandoned depths of the secondary school that was to become their temple, the original five members of the Circle—Ayizan, Chile, Markriss, Temujin and Vyasa—agreed on a more covert form of resistance. Enlightenment would lead to emancipation, should they choose the Way. They would study mental transmutation and learn to divorce the spiritual from the actual on higher planes of existence, in order to teach what they discovered to the masses and affect momentous revolution on their physical plane.

  He flipped further pages, finding grouped passages where his thoughts began moving towards more serious intent than simple, regular, daily practice allowed:

  It’s interesting that, as well as ascending, I can stay on the level of Geb and explore the world of the physical plane. I see my own allocation, the streets outside. I can even visit the Temple of the astral plane. When I ask the others, they say they can’t stop themselves rising. Whereas I seem able to rise, stay on the lower planes and move at will? If I can explore the environment I see every day, could I perhaps go on to others I don’t? The upper levels? Places my physical form wouldn’t allow? And if I can do it, could I teach it? Exciting thoughts.

  He read the passage three times at least, pen tapping against his upper lip. Scratched an asterisk in the margins. Visualised thoughts fused with intention should have meant their mission statement was easily achieved. There had been no problems before. And yet he’d missed something. A glitch. Perhaps due to the Rogue, maybe the machines.

  He skipped ahead to the portion of the book inhabited by blank, empty pages. Wrote: ‘Maybe the machines???’ But how was that possible when he’d been offline? Perhaps the presence of online users in the zone affected the ether. Although the sleeper ban was largely successful among Outsiders, in practice there were always those who slipped into old ways, informed by the habits of several past generations. The ability to go offline and transmute without the aid of pods was an isolated, relatively new phenomenon. Even Markriss had only begun the practice since his arrival in the Ark.

  The trouble with encouraging people to disconnect on a regular basis wasn’t confined to the disruption of sleep patterns. It amounted to a disruption of their daily lives. No household tech, much less environmental, worked neurally for users anywhere in Dinium without the conduit of sleepers. This was a greater part of what the Outsiders were up against in teaching machine abstinence. To go offline in the modern world meant having no access to online facilities of any kind. Offline homes ran manually if the user desired, but so did travel, work, recreation, or anything else the user might access in the cities, Outer or Inner. A large portion of technology was confined to the neural network. To use those services, you had to be online. Going offline wasn’t against the law, although it was possible that residents who did were flagged up as people the Authority, and therefore the Corps, took greater interest in. While it was believed that the linking of offline residents with Outsider activity hadn’t yet been made, most thought logic would be followed to its obvious conclusion soon enough.

  Sleepers had always given Markriss a strange, intuitive fear, especially after his brother wested. His mother, unable to cope with the surplus duties that came with raising a son alone, trusted the machines implicitly, even after everything that happened. She’d insisted Markriss use his pod on a regular basis, especially during the day. He believed her obstinacy came from a desire to keep him out of her way, sedated by comfortable dreams. Willow’s preferred method was drinking whole bottles of whisky or rum, and so in the beginning it had been easy to feign online connection, pretend to be unconscious for a short while and slip out onto the streets of Outer City searching for Ayizan, called Nesta in those days, and his road team.

  One morning of early pink sky, after a night spent burning pi, drinking and hanging out on the estate with young women who would have horrified his mother had she met them, Markriss came home to find Willow awake, waiting. Entering his room, locks shifted all over the house, the clank of metal connecting an ever-repeating echo until every one was closed. Willow said nothing, staring at Markriss in silence, unwashed hair lank and matted. He smelt her musk from where he stood. Like clogged gutters, dry earth.

  Willow left him, a sour look set in his direction, alone in growing light. That night and each following, window and door locks slammed to a close with metallic finality the very moment he arrived from school until the next morning, fully dressed in the shirt and tie of his uniform. With brute strength greater than her size, Willow wrestled him into the pod night after painful night, slamming the lid shut before he could escape, engaging the gamut of pod-simulation programs until the day Markriss was old and big enough to make his way and left home to find better purpose on the streets.

  Over time, he formed his own theory as to why pods killed. Both Ninka and Sylvan Mistry’s bodies corpsed when the machines were turned offline in the midst of simulations. In Sylvan’s case, this was caused by a power cut. In his brother’s, Markriss didn’t know; the systems just failed. He was only sure of this: when simulations were disrupted in the middle of a program, the astral body became lost in the higher planes, trapped and untethered, with their corporeal form stranded on Geb, left to become husks, objects of flesh and bone, no elemental substance to guide them. The human body could only function without the spirit for a short time. Any longer, and the organs keeping the body alive—heart, liver, kidneys, lungs—were starved of ethereal instruction, and broke down. Markriss, writing this in his early notes, gave the process a name: corpsing. Yet he wasn’t the term’s originator. He’d been told it by his younger brother, encountered six months before on the higher planes.

  Back a few pages to 14 April 2020. He lay back, arm resting against his forehead.

  Good news. Brilliant news. I don’t think I’ve been this happy since I was selected for the Ark. This is way, way better, and hopefully it has a much happier ending. Today’s transmutation pretty much started off as standard. I readied myself with a grounding, which I allowed for a bit longer than usual, as it felt like the natural thing to do. I quickly fell into trance without incident. C was beside me; she had fallen into trance way sooner. On my ascendance, I found I entered a mirror plane perfectly matching my own. My double pod, my window sofa, my political posters. I was in my own room, C sleeping beside me, her ka nowhere to be seen. Where is her ka? I asked the empty room. Except it wasn’t empty at all, I knew that. A presence made me tingle; my nerves could feel it.

  I moved a
round the allocation, but couldn’t find it until I went into the kitchenette. I’m not sure why he was there, but then he always did love food, so maybe that was just the most familiar place to turn to. There was a shifting substance there, invisible on the inside, its outline easy to see in the dark. A man, riffling through things he found in the fridge. He’d brought an apple out to examine the blush, the stem, I couldn’t tell which, and he was looking at the thing as if he’d found gold. I didn’t recognise him at first—how would I, he had no discernible features, and even if he did I had no recollection of how he’d look because he’d never grown old enough for me to see him as a man? Of course, we were on the astral plane, and on the plane connections with other beings work using the whole of your senses and neural mechanisms, not simply sight or memory. So I entered the kitchenette and looked at the man, and he looked at me and we both began to smile, because we knew. We each knew who the other was.

  He was Ninka. My brother, though not my brother of the physical realm at the time of his death. Not five years old, with baby teeth and arms like magician’s balloons. The Ninka of the age he would be if he’d lived. He’d grown taller than me, and he was thin rather than the pudgy little kid I knew. Yet the way his head was held when he looked at me was the same, like he took me as the older brother I always wanted to be.

  Right then I made another discovery. On the plane you can cry, just like Geb.

  He closed the notebook, rough-swiping his eyes. A quick look out of the window ensured Chile wasn’t coming back for her notes, or herbs, or a bookmark. His brother’s westing remained difficult to revisit, even after so many moons. The silence of a space that once contained thundering footsteps, pealing laughter. As he’d learned so often during spiritual practice, answers were never laid at your door. They occurred when you let them reach you.