The Tropic of Eternity

by Tom Toner

  Corphuso sat in the burned stubble at the edge of the meadowland, the ash still warm and smoking under his bare feet. From the position of the wooded hill, looming high behind him, he knew himself to be a good deal further along the road. Not long before, he’d passed the grotesque, sun-petrified corpse of some climbing animal, its withered prehensile feet still gripping the trunk of a tree.

  He’d found an encampment of gaudy tents, strange conical dwellings fluttering with flags and ribbons that appeared to be rather larger on the inside than their outsides suggested. The place was completely empty, though everywhere he found suggestions that the camp had been recently—and hastily—vacated, as if whoever was here had seen him coming. Entering the camp had also marked the first time since Corphuso’s death that he’d managed to get a proper look at his reflection, stumbling across a still pool in the blackened ruins of the meadow. After a moment spent turning his head back and forth, rubbing angrily at patches of dirt that stubbornly refused to disappear, he made the connection. The dark patches on one side of his face were not soot or mud or anything he could wipe away: they were shadows. He tilted his face towards the sun, observing that the patches of shade remained where they were, as if painted on. And that wasn’t all; when Corphuso looked more closely at his face, he saw with a start that it was slightly squashed to the side. He sat back, astounded: the face he wore here was not his natural face, but the face Aaron remembered. A soul was an afterimage—the fading remnant of a brief, bright energy; the Long-Life had clearly last seen Corphuso side-on and in dim light, and that, the Vulgar supposed, was how his afterimage would look, perhaps for all eternity.

  This morning, finding some sheets of rough plant-fibre paper and lustrous green ink stored in one of the tents, he chose a spot at the edge of the meadow to sketch out his unified theory of this place. It had been brewing since his arrival here, and now he thought he’d cracked it.

  He found a lump of charred wood and laid the paper atop it, weighting its corners with warm stones. “Death is a mirror,” he said to himself. “Death, life, existence.” He hesitated. “A kaleidoscope, all worlds lying side by side, reflected.”

  His hand, trembling a little as he gathered his thoughts, sketched out a careful circle. A circle, to contain infinity. He hesitated, scribbling in Unified in the margin. Not a circle, a ball. So far, so obvious, he thought. But then he placed a dot of pure green at its centre, the great gravitational Ur-force that appeared to govern all existence. Oblivion, he wrote slowly beside it, then lifted the pen—a whittled nib of bramble stem—shaking away its dribble of ink, trying to remember what he had known in the before. Corphuso licked his lips, returning the nib to the page.

  Where is time? he wrote carefully, returning to the margin to answer his own question. It is like ups and downs, a construct of our minds, only necessary so that we may make sense of things.

  Four quick strokes and he had divided the circle into eight equal segments, each bisecting the dot of Oblivion at the centre, like a cake cut into meagre portions. The beam of a soul, he wrote beside one of the shaky lines, understanding that to make the diagram realistic he would have had to bisect the circle into an almost infinite array of segments, one for every creature that had ever lived and died. “Ten will do,” he said to himself, sucking on the tasty green ink before using the nib to follow the beam’s journey down to the dot at the centre. Originating in Oblivion.

  “All natural processes,” he said aloud, “from the minute to the cosmic, must mirror one another.” And with that, he drew a series of quick angles, like saw teeth, halfway up from the core of the circle, sectioning off each segment like the spars of a spider’s web. The plane of existence, he wrote beside one of the angled lines. The geometry of the dimensions, upon which the beams of our souls spread like light through a prism, emerging from a thicker medium.

  He looked critically at the diagram, adding a smaller circle just within the outer shell, high above the blades. Existence, he wrote in the outer band. And beneath its line: sleep.

  His pen shifted to the outer ring, the stratosphere of the circle. Barrier. Impermeable membrane. Outer dimensions. His pen hesitated. Breakable only with colossal energies? He imagined it suddenly as a puzzle of nested shells, each ball containing the next, their contents the same: this diagram.

  Corphuso’s pen retreated from the page, hovering above it as his eye moved back to the circle’s interior. “Souls trapped by the ultra-gravity of Oblivion,” he muttered, “sliding back down in death, into the denser layers . . .”

  One more circle, closer to Oblivion, so that the whole thing resembled an absurdly complicated bullseye. Subduction zone, he scribbled. The soul falls to this place, all impurities burned away, perhaps to rise again after an aeon has passed. There was a word for that, he thought. Not a word found in any Prism tongue, but perhaps in the Amaranthines’ Unified. He smiled as he remembered. Reincarnation. Corphuso frowned, mulling over the implications of the word, and added a question mark beside it for good measure.

  “And we poor souls have conjoined with the Long-Life’s,” he whispered, “slipping beneath the surface of the prismic blade, to the underworld below.”

  He put the pen down and glanced back towards the impossibly distant hill. Up, and he would be nearer his old layer, a place of knowledge and memory. The place where Aaron fed. Down—he looked past the tents to the path, observing its snaking progress through the continent of unbroken meadow—and he would know the truth of it all.

  The Vulgar Empire had never possessed microscopes, but Corphuso recognised in the image on his page something that he recalled from his old Amaranthine books, something ground into the fabric of his memory. A cell. It looked like an animal’s cell.

  Life, he wrote in larger letters above the circle. Then put the pen down. The diagram of life.

  Corphuso picked up the pen again, chewing on the inky end. He had forgotten his old past so comprehensively that he didn’t even know what he was. Only languages, abstract concepts and vocabulary learned by rote, remained in his empty head. But he remembered one thing from his passing between the layers; he remembered the intense pain and heartbreak that was the Long-Life’s existence, and atop it all the newer, fresher coat of rage.

  The warm wind stirred Corphuso’s hair as he gazed vacantly out into the meadow. There was another, someone who must have come through as well. For some inexplicable reason, that other person had been favoured over him. The hairs on Corphuso’s skin stood on end, a sudden jealousy boiling in his blood. That other person did not deserve his status here; he knew nothing of the Long-Life’s heartbreak. Cor-phuso gritted his teeth, a sneer appearing on his strange, distorted face. He would show the Long-Life how worthy he was.

  ASCENT

  The pale, darting shape rose, Aaron’s quickened thoughts returning once more to the face he’d seen in the crowd. The Melius.

  Gliese dwindled behind him as he considered the prospect. A soul, returning from the depths again, even while its reflection remained. He had looked, of course, for some reflection, but it was a fool’s hope.

  Aaron stared ahead, the galaxy magnifying before him, and dimpled the fabric of his fins, flying at superluminal speeds beyond sight and sound.

  OUTSKIRTS

  Billyup made his bandy-legged way into the outskirts of town. He’d stashed the Babbo up a tree, nice and safe, and now felt a long-absent clarity returning to his thoughts. All around him, the first bloodfruit of the year were just about budding, the brown fields suddenly dappled with crimson spots. As he walked, the stuff left a pink blush of colour on his cloak.

  He’d been here before. People like him followed the same migrations, year in, year out, wandering the beaten paths of the world. There were Awgers here, in the woods and fields; all he had to do was find one, separate it from the crowd and bash its matted head in. Then it was a small matter of leaving the Babbo in the crook of its dead arm and fading into the dark, never to be hunted again. Billyup smiled lopsidedly at the
thought.

  But first things first—there was silk to be spent.

  He passed tree-lined boundary walls, heels split and blistered, the last of his possessions clinking in his pockets. Melius children peered over the walls at him. Someone threw a stone, missing. He turned his lidless yellow eyes on them and they disappeared.

  He followed the stony track into town, kicking up dust. There was a place where he could get a good meal, one of the few you didn’t need to pass a test to enter. He saw it, a peeling red door faded pink by the sun, and ambled around the back. Chattering birds had made a twig-and-rush city in the eaves, outgrowing their space and spreading to the next house. A pot-bellied Melius trimmed it back with shears, apologising to them as he snipped.

  They let him in after a couple of raps, hardly looking at him. The hot darkness inside was suffused with smells. Billyup slopped drool across the floor as he shuffled in, eyes running over the dim, caged creatures, counting out his silk. He found a corner to shrug off his coat and went, quite naked, to take his bowl.

  “What do you want? Brawn?”

  He nodded, offering the bowl, which was already soaked with his drool, and watched it being filled up.

  “Sauce?”

  “Yes,” he replied. “And bloodfruit.” The cook ladled more on.

  Billyup cast his gaze along the counter, gesturing with the bowl at some bottles. “And that,” he grumbled. “Some o’ that.”

  He took a table where it was darkest, sitting on the hard floor with his back to the other presences in the room. Wheezing cackles and whispers surrounded his table like drifting smoke, fading as he tucked noisily in, juices running down his chops. Billyup took a swig from the bottle, feeling it sting the back of his throat, and twisted slightly to peer into the room, spying Demian and Cursed folk. His eyes settled on a sickly Awger near the door, apparently alone. Billyup’s attention returned to his bottle, and he chugged it patiently until he was numb and woozy and he heard the only other Awger getting up to leave.

  He staggered up, taking the empty bottle with him, and ducked through the door back into daylight, remembering his coat only after he’d gone a few paces into the street. The chamber exploded with laughter as he crept back in to retrieve it. Stepping into the light again, he had to squint, spotting the distant Awger making its way through the field.

  Billyup staggered after it, catching slowly up, the neck of the bottle slippery in his hand, ready. The Awger turned and noticed him at last, feral eyes wide. Billyup swung, missing the Awger’s head, then swung again, clipping his own elbow in the process and snarling with pain. The Awger yelped and stumbled down a slope, ducking beneath the smoke-misted eaves of a stand of trees.

  Billyup followed, the bottle shaking in his grip, stopping only as he saw them all gazing up at him from the hollow. Half a dozen Awgers, camped beneath the trees.

  He dropped the bottle and ran.

  WATERWAYS

  Sotiris’s eyes flew open. Warm, sticky darkness enveloped him. Cloud, lit by stars, hardly moved overhead. The moon shimmered, ghostly and shrouded.

  He had fallen asleep by the side of a canal, and across its moonlit water he saw the raft again, slowing this time. The large nocturnal eyes of the mammals that piloted it were shining in his direction.

  He sat up, drawing his feet away from the water’s edge.

  “Eoos!” one of the mammals called, its wide eyes apparently curious.

  “Hello!” the other cried, and Sotiris sat up. What he’d just heard was not a word he recognised, and yet he understood it perfectly. What was more, he thought he knew precisely how to answer.

  He called back, waving, and the raft drifted over the water towards him. The small vessel was loaded with odds and ends: ornaments and cloth and strange objects Sotiris hadn’t encountered before. When it bumped up against the brambly shore, Sotiris could see that it also contained a little sunken section, a living quarters of sorts, just beneath the deck. The canal was clearly deeper than he’d realised.

  Sotiris stood and looked at them. In the moonlight, their pelts were speckled with spots of ermine-white. Their sharp little ears pricked when he began to try to speak, but they interjected.

  “Come aboard,” the smaller of the two said in a high-pitched voice, motioning hurriedly to the deck of the raft. “There’s room for one more.”

  “Yes,” said the other, “we saw you walking.”

  “Where are you going?” he asked, his voice so unused to speaking that he could barely manage a croak.

  “The same place you are,” said the first. “Down.”

  He nodded cautiously. He supposed that was precisely where he was going.

  The smaller creature helped him aboard. Its black finger pads were warm and clammy. “We have seen animals like you around here before, but they are rare.”

  “Humans?” he asked, surprised.

  The thing shrugged expressively. “Whatever. New people. They who also met with the master and were brought here.”

  Sotiris sat on the deck behind them, gingerly making space among the bric-a-brac, his legs pulled up under his knees. They cast off again, pushing away from the bank with an oar, the warm wind snapping out the sail and carrying them surprisingly quickly off down the canal. The bramble-choked bank began to roll smoothly by.

  The canal ran in a pattern of interconnected zigzags, Sotiris knew that much. “Won’t it take longer this way?” he asked.

  The larger creature scoffed. “Of course not. We’ve been there and back again already.”

  Sotiris sat up. “You’ve been to the deep part? To the end?”

  “Or the middle,” supplied the small one.

  He stared, frustrated. “And? What’s it like?”

  Large leered at him. “That’s where he keeps his queen.” “His lovey-dovey,” said Small.

  Sotiris looked down into the dark water, slow mind working, memories somehow rising from its surface; had there not always been a sadness in Aaron’s countenance? He saw it now, in the recollection of their meetings. And that was the answer, to all of this. He smiled.

  Aaron had been in love.

  “You’re trying to find your lovey, too,” said Small, giving Sotiris a decidedly human wink.

  “Who made these?” he asked, hardly hearing the creature and looking out again at the waterways. “Your people?”

  The mammals glanced at one another. “Yes, our kind,” said Large. “We needed a quicker way to travel and trade. It has not escaped you that the meadow grows year by year.”

  He nodded at the apparent question, conscious that they never asked anything directly, assuming something until corrected. “How can I pay you for this journey?”

  They cackled. It was a mean, hiccoughing sound, not at all like human laughter. “No payment,” said Small, its grin revealing teeth like fork tines. “But we always accept news, from the outside.”

  Sotiris frowned. “News,” he repeated. “I don’t think I’ll be much use to you there.”

  They seemed to accept that. “It is an odd soul that remembers much, especially this far below.”

  He caught one of the many flitting insects and crushed it in his hand, inspecting his palm as he licked it clean. “What would happen if I died down here? Where would I go?”

  “To the deep dark bottom,” said Large. “Never to climb out again.”

  Sotiris gazed off into the middle distance, wondering. “Because the meadow grows.”

  They both shrugged this time, and he watched them carefully, evaluating. If news was the currency here, they didn’t seem too desperate to have it. His attention was abruptly distracted by the sight of dark folk sitting, some distance apart from each other, along the canal’s bank. They were dangling lines of wire or hair from their fingers and staring raptly into the water. Sotiris hadn’t yet seen a . . . He paused as he tried to remember the form, the word, until the memory rose from the water: a fish, only the bugs that teemed on the surface, paddling along with oar-shaped legs.


  “So all these insects must go to the deep dark bottom?”

  Small shook his head dismissively. “They are memories.”

  The long day passed on the cool canal, the meadows unchanging. Again, Sotiris thought he saw the smoke of flames in the distance. Then, just before sundown, he looked and noticed the tree containing the gaunt, mummified corpse, off in the distance. He opened his mouth to say something, astonished at how slow their progress must have been, then snapped it shut. Something, some relic of his guile back on the outside, told him to keep quiet.

  When night came, they bumped the raft along the bank again and threw out a rope, knotting it to a thick stand of bramble. The raft drifted with the flow until the rope stretched tight, turning so that they were facing back the way they’d come. Sotiris caught another glimpse of the impossibly distant forest on its hill, realising that this whole slope of meadow was the inside edge of a huge bowl, so huge that he was only just beginning to make out its true shape.

  He arranged the junk until he was comfortable and lay back, watching the improbable stars glow in the sky. The mammals nodded wordlessly to him, bidding him goodnight, and descended the wooden stair to their bunks in the hull, a light kindling within. He waited until they had closed the hatch, sealing off their conversation, before relaxing. He would have liked to sleep—for in this deeper part, none of his Amaranthine abilities appeared to work, least of all the power to remain awake for unnatural periods—but he knew he must keep watch until the morning. Sotiris was conscious that he hadn’t asked their names, but then neither had they asked his. Perhaps they didn’t have names.

  He woke blearily, not a thought in his head beside the sensation of fingers locked tight around his neck. Sotiris gasped and struggled, not having any clue where he was, even who he was, only the ingrained need to survive acting on his behalf. He thrashed, twisting to one side and knocking into a pile of rubbish, feeling hands grab his ankles, and hurled the strangler to one side. The thing squeaked and splashed into the water beside the raft. Sotiris reached out blindly, found the rope and dragged the raft towards the bank. He felt it thump and drift, the creature screaming and thrashing against the side of the hull. He sat up, pulling harder on the rope in the darkness until the raft had covered the splashing creature, sealing it underwater, its frantic scrabbling audible through the hull.