Cowl

by Neal Asher

  Glancing towards him, Saphothere explained, ‘Security system—but of an order of magnitude more efficient than the pathetic one that guarded Pig City.’ He dropped into a seat and rubbed his eyes. ‘Getting to that place was more difficult than destroying it. I hadn’t realized they had so much energy to squander.’

  Tack dropped against a wall the pack that had belonged to Coptic and Meelan. Saphothere, after already checking through its contents, had returned it to him with the injunction not to use any of the more complex devices it contained without instruction. Still eyeing the pack possessively, Tack took a seat on the other side of the table.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Tack began.

  Saphothere looked up. ‘Those enteledonts were from twenty million years in the future, and by establishing them as guards, the Umbrathane pushed their city far downslope. It has been difficult for me to bring us back to the main line. To reach here we travelled sideways in time.’ Saphothere was studying him carefully, perhaps waiting for questions his explanation would no doubt provoke from a linear mind.

  But Tack understood. ‘Where did they get their energy from?’ he asked instead. Saphothere nodded in approval. ‘They used fusion reactors dismounted from their spaceships, and perhaps some sort of parasitism on the wormhole. Easy enough, as energy is projected along it from New London all the time—it’s what our mantisals recharge from, mostly—and its available abundance in the ages between there and Sauros is the reason we were able to jump so accurately to here.’ Saphothere gestured at their surroundings. Then with a nasty smile he added, ‘Though such accurate time-shifting raises the danger of running into yourself, which would cause a short-circuit paradox—something you could only risk inside the temporal barriers of somewhere like Sauros.’

  Tack absorbed this for a moment then asked, ‘So the time tunnel, the wormhole, is a conduit for this energy … the energy you all use?’

  ‘You might say that. Better to say, though, that the time tunnel is the energy—it’s comprised of that.’

  Tack nodded slowly. He understood only a fraction of this now, but hoped to grasp more as his relationship with Saphothere progressed. He no longer felt desperate for immediate answers now he knew they would be forthcoming anyway.

  ‘You need food and rest now,’ Tack said, gesturing to the nearby stocks. ‘That’s food?’

  ‘It is, but I’ll have to show you how—’

  ‘I’ll learn,’ said Tack, standing up. And Saphothere was too tired himself to even be annoyed about the interruption. He rested his forehead on his arms, while Tack taught himself how to cook with the alien equipment. Finally he brought a lavish meal to the table, and they ate in silence, Saphothere growing visibly stronger with each mouthful he consumed. When they had finished, Saphothere got up and brought a bottle of amber liquid and two glasses to the table.

  ‘One of the better products of your time … well … quite near to your time. In the nineteenth century Sauros sat for a while in the sea underneath the Arctic ice cap. I managed to acquire five or six crates of this before our next shift. I don’t have much left now,’ he explained.

  Tack and Traveller proceeded to drink malt whisky—for Tack a first-ever experience.

  THE EMPEROR WAS PERSISTENT in his attempts at communicating, the watcher noted. He sat impatiently on the edge of his couch, rather than reclining on it like his subordinates did on theirs. But the words were becoming increasingly mangled in his mouth as the wine flowed, and Polly was unsurprisingly showing signs of confusion, despite the fact that the AI device she carried was obviously offering some sort of translation. Perhaps it could not explain to her why the Romans seemed both excited and scared upon hearing her name. The watcher herself ran a search through her own database and came to the conclusion that this was because of its similarity to ‘Apollyon’—the Greek name for the Lord of the Abyss, Satan.

  Then Polly said out loud, ‘So they think I’m some sort of demon now?’

  Demon, messenger, oracle … they don’t seem able to make up their minds, the watcher opined, noting the slave standing behind the girl, scribbling down her every utterance on a piece of parchment. Talking out loud to her AI companion, had probably been what had clinched it because it was quite obviously not an act.

  Now also sitting on the edge of her couch, the girl listened and responded as best she could when Claudius addressed her. Otherwise, her attention was inevitably focused on the platters of food the slaves kept bringing: fish served in a fragrant sauce, meats with sweet and crunchy coatings, dried figs and fresh apples. She even worked her way through a whole platter of oysters. Noting Claudius eating his way through a large plate of mushrooms, and then checking her database again, the watcher whispered to herself, Now that’s a preference he’ll come to regret.

  But there was little enough going on here, and tracking forward the watcher observed that guests not yet departed were falling asleep on their couches. Claudius himself was snoring like a malfunctioning chainsaw and soon four slaves came in to pick up his couch, and carry it out of the tent—the troop of Germanic guards falling in behind. Two female slaves entered silently, but shortly made it understood that Polly should accompany them. She was led off to another tent, lit by an oil lamp, and containing a bed covered with furs and silks. The girl imperiously waved away the slaves when they attempted to undress her and, taking off only her boots, collapsed and was instantly asleep.

  Enjoy it while you can.

  The watcher skipped over the night into the next day and observed the killing.

  ‘ABOUT TWO THOUSAND YEARS in your future,’ Saphothere replied to the question Tack would have liked to have asked him long ago. ‘After the Muslim jihad and the ensuing resource wars, after the nuclear winter that resulted from those wars, and after the fall of your whole civilization through your tendency to breed weak humans and strong plagues.’

  Tack dared to reach out for the bottle and topped up Saphothere’s then his own glass. ‘Weak humans, strong plagues?’

  Saphothere took up his glass and downed half its contents. ‘You were already witnessing it in your age: hospital superbugs, variant pneumonias, air-transmitted HIVs. Ignoring the fundamental facts of evolution, you used antibiotics in excess, by this artificial selection process thus producing bacteria resistant to antibiotics. And that is only one small example.’

  Much was already being said to that effect in his own time, Tack remembered, but there had seemed little genuine will to do anything about it. How could doctors refuse a dying man further treatment on the basis that this would eventually lead to the treatment itself becoming ineffective?

  ‘Weak humans?’ Tack nudged.

  Saphothere stared at him, a faint smile twisting his features. ‘Not something entirely applicable to yourself, but you and those of your kind were a persistent exception.’ He did not explain further, but went on, ‘The ordinary people of your time were coddled in the extreme with drugs and medical treatments, and in your soft, malformed societies the weak and the stupid were allowed, even encouraged, to breed indiscriminately. As the centuries passed, the human gene pool became weaker, while plagues became more common. The second Dark Age began with a neurovirus—for most of humanity a plague contracted in the womb. Like syphilis it ate away at the brain and claimed its victims by the time they reached their thirties. That sorry age lasted a thousand years, until the rise of the Umbrathane.’

  ‘The Umbrathane preceded you then?’

  Saphothere was now grinning openly in a way that could only be described as nasty. ‘Oh yes. They arose from a small interbred group who had managed to maintain a cerebral-programming technology that enabled them to live, individually, decades longer than anyone else on the planet. They spread out from their enclave and took control. Umbrathane: meaning those bringing the land out of shadow. But does any of this sound familiar to you?’

  Tack was at a loss to know why it should. This all occurred in a future he would never have reached in his natural lifespan. />
  ‘They came before you?’ Tack repeated, hiding his mounting irritation.

  ‘Before us, yet with us always. They bred the weakness out of the human race. The Nazis and the Stalinists of your own recent past were nothing in comparison to them: hundreds of millions of weaker beings were exterminated in their camps, and their own breeding programs lasted for centuries. They made the human race strong and succeeded in taking it out into the solar system—before fracturing into various sub-sects perpetually at each other’s throats.’

  ‘So when did the Heliothane come into being?’

  ‘There was a catastrophic war … millions killed on the surface of Mars, incinerated by sun mirrors originally used to heat the surface of that planet, but then turned into weapons by a sect which decided that the adaption of the human form to exist in those airless wilds was sacrilegious. Before we named ourselves Heliothane we controlled those mirrors, the giant energy dam in orbit between Io and Jupiter, and other energy resources in the solar system. We were engineers, on the whole, and finally became unable to countenance the destruction of our projects in these petty wars. Finally deciding to act, and with so many power sources at our disposal, we had outreached the Umbrathane technologically and industrially within a decade.’

  ‘And then?’

  Saphothere drained his glass, then refilled it. Tack’s glass was still full, for though he was enjoying the buzz from the alcohol, he had forgotten to drink while this story unfolded.

  ‘Those who did not escape, and did not accede to our solar empire, we exterminated,’ Saphothere explained.

  ‘And when did time travel come into this equation?’

  ‘During that war. For centuries it was known to be a possibility, but that huge energies would be required. One of our own people finally worked out how it could be done, so it was used by us in a limited fashion as a weapon—shifts of a few hours or days only, for we understood how huge a threat this technology could pose to our very existence. Had we gone back to attack the Umbrathane at the period they destroyed the Mars mirrors, we would also have shoved ourselves far down the probability slope. Near the end the one who had first worked out how to use the tech gave it to the Umbrathane and they and he fled into the past. To pursue them, we needed larger energy resources and so laboured on the great project. Two centuries from the destruction of the Mars mirrors, we completed the sun tap.’

  ‘Cowl, you’re talking about Cowl? This is why you could not kill him in his own past because to do that you would lose the whole technology he was responsible for.’

  Saphothere eyed him. ‘You’re not so stupid after all. Perhaps this whisky is loosening some of the knots in your brain. Now, have you worked out the origins of both the Umbrathane and the Heliothane?’

  Tack said, ‘The Heliothane are direct descendants of the Umbrathane—if not Umbrathane themselves with a slightly different name and a different agenda.’

  ‘That is correct. Now consider the original Umbrathane maintaining a cerebral-programming technology for a thousand years. Tell me, how many of your genetically engineered and programmable kind exist in your own time?’

  ‘Hundreds … but not thousands,’ Tack replied, getting an intimation of what Saphothere was telling him.

  ‘Perhaps only ten or so years on from when you were pursuing that girl, your own kind break their thraldom to U-gov and become able to choose their own programming. They then become an independent organization, selling their skills to the highest bidders in the wars that follow—as mercenaries. The Umbrathane are the descendants of your own kind, Tack. I am, too. Which is why, for so long in our own period, even though we knew about you being dragged along in the wake of that torbearer, we dared not touch you. But now we are more frightened of what Cowl is doing.’ Saphothere abruptly stood up, drained his glass, and slammed it upside down on the table. ‘Now I must sleep, and build up my own resources for what is to come. One long leap will bring us to Sauros. Then will come the easy journey through the tunnel, back along and beyond all this way we have recently come, to New London.’

  As Saphothere ensconced himself in one of the bunks, Tack drank another glass of whisky and tried to fathom all he had just been told. The whisky didn’t help though, so, after silently toasting Sauros and New London in whatever direction they lay, he headed for one of the bunks himself.

  THADUS KNEW THAT, IN the terms of the people here, he and Elone were untypically old. His hair was grey, yet he did not drool or fall over, and was not dying. Which was why, he supposed, the naked youth up in the oak tree behind them, had not fled and now watched them with fascination. The boy had also probably never seen clothing like this, or the devices they carried, unless in pictures found in the ruins below. Thadus raised his unclipped rifle sight to his eye and scanned the ancient city. He could see one or two cooking fires so some knowledge must survive, despite the fact that everyone here was moronic by the time they reached their twenties and did not live beyond their thirties.

  Elone blinked down her nictitating membranes to mirror her eyes. ‘The census figures from the satellite put the population in the region of three thousand.’

  ‘No sign of anyone developing resistance?’ Thadus asked.

  ‘None; the opposite, in fact. The population has been dropping steadily over the last thirty years. And what with the new enclave being built a hundred miles north of here …’

  Thadus snorted. It was, of course, sensible for those uninfected by the neurovirus, those umbrathants who just by living longer were becoming the rulers of the Umbrathane, to protect themselves from reinfection. He said, ‘I was just wondering if there were any who could be extracted before we cleanse.’ He stabbed his thumb over his shoulder towards the oak tree. ‘The boy there seems pretty well coordinated.’

  Elone turned and gazed up into the tree. ‘He’s about twelve years old and malnutrition has delayed his puberty.’

  ‘Alpha strain, then?’

  ‘Yes. The hormones produced in puberty trigger the more destructive stage of the virus. Right now only about a quarter of his brain has gone. After another ten years he’ll lose half of what’s remaining, before the virus starts targeting his autonomic nervous system and kills him.’ Elone frowned. ‘But you know all this.’

  Thadus turned to her. ‘And I want to hear it again and again. You’re the umbrathant on the ground, and if you’ve any doubts I want to hear them. Do you know how many places like this I’ve cleared out?’

  ‘You were working on the south coast.’

  ‘Damned right. Eight old cities all with populations similar to this one, all alpha strain. I know there’s no other answer, but I can still smell burning bodies.’

  Thinking about the past, Thadus realized his memories were not so clear as they had been. He checked the monitor inset into the muscle of his forearm and saw that in another five days his mental template would need to be uploaded again to replace memories and abilities lost to the neurovirus he himself carried. By this, and by the cocktail of drugs developed over the last century, he kept the destructive virus at bay. But these only delayed the inevitable and at best two years remained to him. But, then, he was tired and after this last extermination would be unemployed. The rulers in their enclaves would no longer have any use for him and certainly he would not be allowed to live amongst them.

  ‘What will you use here?’ Elone asked, surreptitiously checking her own monitor.

  Thadus tilted his head to the now audible sound of engines. ‘The perimeter’s closing in and any outside the ruins will run for home—that’s what they usually do. We then drop compound B, and do a ground survey while your people collect samples. But we don’t want too many delays. We drop incendiaries before evening.’ He looked beyond her and pointed. ‘There.’

  Further along the ridge to their right, overlooking the city, two individuals broke from cover. One was naked, the other wore rotting skins and carried a primitive spear. They bolted down the slope into low scrub before the buildings. Behind th
em a tree went over with a rushing crash and an armoured car emerged from the forest. All this activity became too much for the boy in the oak tree behind Thadus and Elone, and he scrambled to the ground. In one smooth motion Thadus clipped the sight back onto his rifle, aimed and acquired the boy as he scrambled past. Thadus then lowered the rifle.

  ‘See?’ he said. ‘They run for home.’

  In an unconscious gesture, he now pressed a finger to the comlink in his ear. ‘Dolure had to flame out a cave some were hiding in, but otherwise that’s all of them. The bomber’s on its way over.’

  Both he and Elone detached masks from their belts and donned them. All around the ancient city troops and Elone’s monitoring personnel were walking out of the surrounding forest, and other armoured cars were now driving into view. Then came a different engine sound as high up the tricopter bomber droned overhead and took up station above the city. There it shed its load like a sprinkling of black peppercorns. With his rifle sight back up against his eye, Thadus watched the gaseous detonations and the haze of compound B spreading between the buildings.

  He checked his watch, gave it ten minutes. ‘Let’s walk,’ he said.

  And as he and Elone did that, the Umbrathane perimeter also closed in on the city. It was only minutes later that they started seeing victims of the poison gas: family groups gathered around fires, some clothed in animal skins, others so far gone in cerebral breakdown that they had been unable even to maintain this primitive clothing; individuals who had run and been felled by the gas; older victims of the plague curled up in stinking cavities in the fallen masonry, where they had survived only if their kin remembered to feed them; others rotting in those same cavities. While Thadus walked with his rifle propped across his forearm, Elone went to rejoin her people—infected umbrathants like himself and his men—who were now spreading out to take tissue and blood samples. His own men checked for anyone alive, but in a desultory manner—Thadus had never found a survivor of the gas in all the cities he had cleansed.