“I want to show you something,” said Joni, and pulled him gently toward the outbuilding. Seb could smell coffee. Good coffee.
Inside, a heavy iron vice was fixed to the edge of a large workbench. On the wooden surface, there were a couple of notebook pages with measurements and diagrams scribbled on them. Coffee mug rings were everywhere, but they looked like they had been placed carefully, making some kind of intricate pattern.
Joni saw Seb looking. “You need to squint, Dad.”
Seb stepped back and duly squinted, smiling automatically when he heard the word “Dad.” He wondered if he would ever get used to hearing it, or loving it. He guessed not.
At first, the hundreds of dark rings still looked just like they had been arranged in arbitrary sequences, just as someone might doodle while thinking. Then, as Seb allowed his vision to blur slightly, they suddenly coalesced, forming an unmistakable shape. The worktop now clearly displayed a pair of eyes, one of which was winking at him.
“Oh,” said Seb softly.
Joni smiled at him and brushed some sawdust from the surface onto the floor.
“We didn’t see it for a long time, Mum and I. Kate still won’t come in here, not since Uncle John—.” Her voice tailed off, and she swallowed hard. Seb took half a step toward her, then stopped, unsure. How is a new father supposed to behave when his baby girl is nearly seventeen years old? Where was that section in the books on parenting?
Joni, now looking up at the rows of clean, oiled tools hanging in place on the wall, had either failed to notice Seb’s awkwardness or was pretending she had. Either way, he was grateful.
Pieces of driftwood and detritus rescued from the sea were piled up in one corner. Joni picked up what looked like the iron ring from a barrel and turned it in her hands as she spoke.
“This was his workshop. He loved to work with his hands. He always had a project on the go. Did you know that Uncle John made a lot of the furniture in the Keep?”
Seb shook his head.
“He taught himself. Said he wanted to do something good, something productive, however small. He repaired everything, and if he couldn’t repair something, he’d drag it down here and make it into something new.”
Seb had only known his brother for a few weeks before, well, before—
Before you let yourself forget who you were. Before you let yourself get pulled away from here like a dog running to his master’s whistle.
Seb shook his head. No point beating himself up over what was done, and he knew the choice to leave Earth had never really been his.
So you say. But look what you’ve come back to.
His brother was dead. John had lived most of his life trapped in a mind ravaged by a cancerous tumor. He’d been no more than a terrified, passive observer to the horrors committed by the sick, diseased personality that controlled his brain and body. Then, only weeks after Seb had freed him from the torment he had suffered for decades, Seb had disappeared. And now, the only link to a family Seb had never known was gone. John had died protecting Joni. John had been a father to her when her real father didn’t even know she existed.
Seb saw that Joni was crying. He felt a strange tightening of the skin on his cheeks and placed his fingers just under his own eyes, finding water drying there. Then a drop of moisture trickled down until it touched the pad of his forefinger and he realized he was crying, too. He blinked deliberately and watched Joni’s face smudge into abstraction for a moment until his vision cleared.
Tears?
Seb didn’t want to think too hard about what was going on.
Emotions, Sebby, that’s what going on. But you don’t have emotions anymore, right? Not now. You’ve changed.
Seb took another small step toward Joni. How could she look so much like Mee, yet be so completely and utterly herself? A rush of feelings arose which he couldn’t identify, let alone begin to name. Well, that wasn’t quite true. There was one feeling he could name: awe. He looked at this human being that could only exist because Sebastian Varden had met Meera Patel. He looked, and he felt that sense of awe snatch him up and shake him, showing him how every moment could be simultaneously mundane and unimaginably vast, full of riches.
No good fooling yourself you’re just some guy, Sebby. We’re way past that. You took on the powers of a god. You coulda said no.
When he had sabotaged and reengineered the Unmaking Engine, he had chosen to relinquish every last particle of his original body, allowing himself to fully become a T’hn’uuth, a World Walker. It had been a one-way ticket. There had been no real choice as far as he could see. On the one hand, the future of humanity. On the other, your typical damaged, flawed, scared individual, clinging on to the last scraps of what made him human.
Before then. You made the decision way before then. Remember?
Seb remembered. Of course he remembered. It wasn’t a moment anyone was likely to forget. The moment everything ended, and everything began. The offer of life from the glowing alien figure who had saved him from suicide.
Yeah, but he gave you a choice.
The choice between life and death.
Still a choice, buddy.
That day in the Los Angeles hills, he had said his goodbyes. The goodbyes he could bring himself to say, that was. Death had chosen him months before. He had just finally accepted the fact and decided he would decide the when and where of it.
When Billy Joe had appeared, when he had taken Seb’s hands and brought him back from the brink, he had paused before giving Seb the power that would not only restore him but set in motion changes that could never be undone. He had paused. He had waited. Waited for Seb’s answer. Yes or no. Seb had known saying yes would have consequences, he had known it would mean walking a path no human had ever walked. In that frozen moment, he had known there could be no turning back.
You coulda said no.
Seb felt a smaller hand on his, gently pulling his fingers away from his face. He looked down at Joni.
“It’s okay to cry, you know,” she said. “It’s good to cry.”
She buried her face in his chest and wrapped her arms around him. Seb put one arm around his daughter’s shoulders. Slowly, he brought his other hand up to her head and gently stroked her hair. As well as hearing her sobs, he could feel them in his chest as he held her. After a few seconds, he realized he was sobbing too.
They stood that way for nearly ten minutes, a father and his daughter. Then Joni slowly disentangled herself and wiped her face with a tissue before blowing her nose loudly. She reached into her pocket and pulled out a clean tissue, offering it to Seb. Even as she held it out to him, his tears disappeared, his puffy eyes instantly losing their red tinge and returning to normal.
“Oh. I forgot,” said Joni, putting the tissue away. “That’s going to take some getting used to, you know.”
Seb smiled. “Says the girl who can revisit her own timeline and try again.”
Joni grinned. “Yeah, I have to admit that’s pretty cool.” She took down two tin mugs from hooks above the coffee pot.
“Milk? Sugar?”
“Neither, thanks.”
Joni poured two black coffees and handed one to Seb.
“Mum’s still a tea drinker. Uncle John said you were a coffee snob, too. He liked it when Mum talked about you. The times she wanted to talk about you, that is. He found out more about the ways you were similar, even though you’d never known each other. He liked that.”
Seb sipped his coffee. It was as good as it smelled.
“Your mum didn’t always like to talk about me?”
Joni chewed her lower lip before replying. Seb watched, fascinated. He found everything about her fascinating. He hoped that feeling would never get old.
“Mum had to find a way to deal with it. With you being gone. She always thought you’d be back, but she thought it would be days - weeks, maybe. No longer than a month. She said it had happened before. By the time I was old enough to understand, she didn’t like to talk
about you too much. Sometimes, she let herself think you were never coming back. For a few years, she believed it. They were bad times. When she was like that, it was easier not to mention you, not to risk Mum going—”
Joni paused for a few seconds.
“You okay?”
“Fine. It’s just, well—”
She stopped again and Seb was aware of how little he knew about his daughter’s life up to now, how much catching up there was to do. And how much he could never catch up on, however hard he tried.
“Mum had some bad times, but I should let her tell you about that. If she wants to.”
Seb nodded, but didn’t speak.
“When I was twelve, she told me about the Rozzers, about what you did. I’d grown up pretending you were the king of the fairies. When I found out who you really were, what you’d really done, it was even better than I’d imagined.”
Seb shook his head, not wanting to speak.
“Although…” Joni smiled at him, one eyebrow slightly raised. The expression was so like Mee that Seb felt the customary grip of time loosen suddenly, the ground shifting under his feet.
“Although what?” he said.
“Well, I’d probably keep quiet about the fact that you’re personally responsible for Year Zero. Not everybody’s entirely happy about the end of Manna use.”
On her visits to the cottage, Joni had told him about the effect of Year Zero. Seb had watched documentaries and news stories, scanned over a decade-and-a-half of media, both traditional and social, piecing together the story of the years he had missed. There were tales of hope and horror, selfishness and self-sacrifice. As usual, humanity had displayed its ability to fuck things up, but there were inspiring stories buried in amongst the fucked-upedness.
He realized his train of thought had taken on more than a hint of Mee’s colorful vocabulary. So when he heard her voice, it took a few seconds to register that it wasn’t part of his internal dialog.
“Oi, Varden, you said ten o’clock. It’s five past. You’ve already kept me waiting seventeen years, I’m expecting a little more consideration from now on.”
Seb looked over at the doorway. Mee had one hand on her hip, the other holding a spliff, blue smoke curling from its end. He looked at the face of the only woman he’d ever loved. He knew she looked older. The lines around the eyes and mouth, the backs of her hands, a softening around her belly and hips. But, if anything, she looked more beautiful than ever. He said nothing, but she saw the look on his face and blushed before looking away. She turned and started to walk back to the main building.
“Come on, you two, before my tea goes cold. And Seb?” She waved the spliff in the air but didn’t wait for an answer. “I hope you’ve brought the sodding Gucci Egg, or whatever you call that arsing thing. Can’t believe you let Joni see it before you showed me. You better rethink your priorities if you want to get back into my pants.”
“Mum!” protested Joni, going bright red. She looked at Seb, and they both burst out laughing, before following Mee to the Keep.
4
Years, months or weeks previously…
Seb opened his eyes. There was no light at all. Pitch black didn’t even begin to do justice to how dark the darkness was. It was as if a completely dark room had been placed inside a dungeon buried hundreds of feet beneath the ground. At night. In midwinter.
In fact, although Seb had felt something akin to the physical sensation of opening his eyes, no such thing had actually happened. As he looked around him into the utter blackness, he became slowly aware that he had no eyes to open, no head to turn, no face, no body. All he had was awareness. And a memory. A specific memory.
The memory was this: he was standing on a beach, his head tilted a little, looking beyond the rolling sea toward the pinpricks of stars in the clear night sky. As he gazed upward, it was as if someone was slowly turning down the volume of the scene. The roar of the sea—the most prominent sound—became a hum, a murmur, then nothing. The wind in the trees behind him dropped away and was replaced by the kind of silence Seb had only experienced before on pre-dawn hikes in the mountains.
Along with the silence came a feeling of being enclosed. He started to look around but found he couldn’t do it. His physical body seemed beyond his control. There was a moment of confusion as Seb experimented, trying to turn his head, wriggle his fingers or shrug his shoulders. It was as if his body had petrified, like an ancient tree. He felt planted on the rocky beach, solid, permanent. His awareness, his center, was contracting to a diamond-hard core buried deep within his mind. His physical body seemed distant and unimportant.
While this was going on, the scene became light, the day dawning far more quickly than usual. Within a few minutes, it faded again toward darkness. Then the process repeated, faster this time. Soon, day and night cycled so quickly it was as if someone was flicking a light switch on and off.
Once, Seb thought he saw Mee’s face looking up at him, but it flashed by so quickly he wondered if he had just imagined it.
Without warning, one of the micro-days turned to night, and everything froze. Seb felt his awareness, this tiny, tightly-packed core of everything he was, suddenly become utterly still, his thoughts disappearing into nothingness just as the daylight had.
A moment passed. It might have been less than a second or more than a week. As there were no external physical stimuli, no sense of his own body, no breath, no thoughts, Seb had no way of measuring time. Although the absence of thought was something he associated with the deepest part of his practice of contemplation, this was utterly different. It was a moment of preparation, of energy building. The fraction of a second before the shot-putter heaves the ball away, the high diver leaps into the unknown, or the fighter unleashes his best punch. Everything came to a standstill. The world stopped turning. Seb finally lost his last shred of awareness; his sense of self.
Then, with an explosion of energy encapsulated in a nanosecond, everything came to life, everything happened. He was a flat stone skimmed across the surface of galaxies, a javelin hurled at the perfect angle, a ball-bearing nestling in the leather strap of a catapult stretched nearly to breaking point, finally released and sent spinning toward a distant target.
At the same time as this frenetic burst of activity, there was a concurrent sense of intricate folding together, a patient and gentle coaxing so that the universe might allow the otherwise impossible to occur.
Next, the gap between here and there, between then and now, between thought and action.
Then, nothing. Nothing but a sense of awareness and the deep darkness, far from home.
Seb accepted his lack of a recognizable body without fear. He swiveled non-existent eyeballs in sockets that weren’t there and looked down at hands he knew he wouldn’t be able to see.
It was too disorientating. Seb decided he did want to see his hands. Even as the thought came to him, he saw a change in the darkness, a shading of deep gray lightening as it took on some definition, becoming first an outline, then semi-solid versions of his hands. He opened and closed his fists a few times.
I must have eyes, then, if I can see my hands. Although…maybe not. The actual business of interpreting reality goes on in the brain. Seb knew that what he thought of as seeing was, more accurately, his brain telling his consciousness a story based on the visual stimuli currently on offer. He knew the human brain was capable of filling in the blanks in a picture. If it could do that, it was also capable, surely, of giving him the illusion of hands, eyes, arms, a body. He was assuming his brain was present. But knowing his brain was no longer human, instead a sophisticated simulacrum made up of nanotechnology faithfully duplicating his every neuron, synapse, and connection, made him pause and question even that. The nature of consciousness was still a matter of intense debate among scientists, not all of whom believed it necessarily resided in the brain. As he mentally reassembled his body, his limbs becoming visible the moment he pictured them, Seb wondered what those scientists would
make of this. His consciousness was undeniable, but a physical brain might not be involved.
Once his “body” was back, he calmly assessed the situation. A small part of him still registered how ludicrous this calmness was. He inferred that he had—somehow—just traversed an unimaginable distance. He had arrived at a place to which he had not consciously chosen to travel. He could be in danger. And yet the human instincts of fight or flight in this completely unknown place were entirely absent.
It was still dark.
Seb knew he had left the Earth. He had Walked. But, unlike previous occasions, there had been no clear sense of a destination when his journey began.
And this doesn’t feel like the times when I was grabbed by the Rozzers.
Seb grinned as he tried to imagine the fun Mee would have had with that last thought. He felt the physical sensation of skin tightening at the corners of his mouth. Now that he had accepted the idea of a body, every nuance seemed normal and natural.
He had felt a distant call those last few weeks at Innisfarne. An invitation—no, a summons—that could not be ignored. His awareness of this summons had grown more and more palpable. Eventually, the call had consumed him. He no longer knew who, or what, he was, and the call felt familiar, as if a family member was trying to get hold of him. As an orphan, the urge to respond to that feeling had been particularly strong.
He looked at his body again, the only thing visible in the gloom. He knew it wasn’t real. Whatever real was. He thought for a moment, then imagined a mountain, the base of which was covered in trees. A large lake completed the initial picture. As Seb thought it, it happened. The mountain appeared gradually, like an old-fashioned photograph in a darkroom, its bulk solidifying and gaining definition with every passing second. The trees grew like stop motion animation, densely packed at the foot of the mountain, and thinning higher up. Seb turned from the mountain and looked to his left. A lake appeared, mist clinging to the water. Between the lake and the first line of trees stood a small wooden cabin, smoke curling from a chimney on its dark roof.
The World Walker Series Box Set Page 97
