by Neal Asher
The man stood with his head and shoulders enclosed in the vorpal sphere, which was also packed with translucent and transparent mechanisms. Through this distortion, nightmare hints were visible of his open skull and of glassy pipes and rods interfacing directly with raw exposed brain. From the back of this sphere, like a secondary spine, a mass of ribbed glass ducts followed the curve of his back down, before entering a light-flecked pedestal and then down into the floor. From this spine, vorpal struts spread out like the wing bones of a skate, to connect it to various mechanisms in the surrounding walls, ceiling, floor and adjacent connectware, so that the man seemed to hover at the centre of some strange mandala—the human flaw in an alien hyaline perfection.
Silleck headed to the middle of the three spheres located along the wall, beside the man, and ducked underneath to thrust her head up through the gelatinous material. As she pressed her back up against the glass support spine, she immediately felt her head and face grow numb. Her eyesight faded, as did her hearing. There was no pain, but she could feel the tugging as automatic systems opened her scalp, removed the screw-in plugs of false skull, and began to drive in the nodes of vorpal glass. She knew the fibres were growing in from the nodes when her vision began to flick back on as from a faulty monitor, and she began to hear the bellowing of some dinosaur. Soon she was seeing the standard view for which her equipment was set: from outside Sauros. Then the connection began to firm and that view feathered across time and she was seeing, and comprehending, Sauros over a period of hours, present and future. And if that was not enough, she began then to see up and down the probability slope, possible cities, a maybe landscape, might-have-been dinosaurs. Without the connectware and the buffering of the technology surrounding her, such sight would have driven her mad.
Eventually Silleck stabilized her connection and focused on the specific, as there was no use yet for her to have such an all-encompassing view—that would only be required during a city-shift or an attack. Scanning the near present and near future, she found little to interest her, so began to tune into the tachyon frequencies of the nearer vorpal sensors. Through one such, she observed a boy being pursued by a couple of early Cro-Magnon women. But because she had seen this all before she knew he would escape with the roasted squirrel he had snatched from their fire, would sleep under a thorn bush, then be shifted back through time by his tor, to somewhere beyond available sensors. Anyway, there had never been much interest in such individuals, for the boy was clearly from the time of the neurovirus and would not survive many more time-jumps. No, it was the view from the next sensor that most interested Silleck. The girl fascinated her, and Silleck had not yet had the free time to view everything that happened to her on this latest brief jump. The jump in itself was interesting because both ends of it were encompassed by the ten-thousand-year life of this particular sensor. Focusing her awareness, Silleck connected into the sensor near the end of its life and tracked back through time until she found what she wanted.
The girl, Polly, turned, groping inside her greatcoat for the automatic Silleck had seen her shoot at the juggler some hundreds of thousands of years in the future. Already the cold had begun penetrating her inadequate clothing, and her hand shook as she pointed the weapon into the haze of the blizzard. Adjusting the sensor, Silleck viewed the animal out there in infrared, and could hear the muffled thud of heavy paws, then a low growling. The girl pulled the trigger, then cursed herself and groped with shaking fingers for the safety catch. Out of the snowy blur a shape loomed: huge and shaggy, and with enormous, unlikely looking teeth. Polly squeezed off a shot, and in the half-light the muzzle-flash momentarily overloaded the image Silleck was viewing, so the technician did not see the snarling retreat of the beast. Polly now glanced behind herself, perhaps realizing for the first time that she stood on the edge of a cliff, over which the storm was blasting. Far below her lay an icy plain being crossed by a herd of woolly mammoths. Polly turned back, no doubt hearing the furtive approach of the beast that Silleck could clearly see. The creature had been big, and that shot, the technician realized, had only pissed it off.
‘Really, and there I was just thinking about finding a ski lodge,’ Polly said out loud.
It was this seemingly insane monologue that had first drawn Silleck’s attention in the woodland, where the girl had first met the juggler. It was only on further scanning that the technician realized Polly wore some kind of AI device that seemed rather advanced for the time the girl had come from.
Polly closed her eyes then, and Silleck observed the temporal web responding to the girl’s will, drawing her into interspace. She disappeared moments before the beast, a large bear, hurtled out of the storm, then came to a skidding stop by the precipice and looked about itself in confusion. That was as far as Silleck had got the last time she had looked through this sensor. Now she drew back down its time-line to the point of its arrival, after being fired into the past from New London. She then tracked uptime to the temporal signature of Polly’s arrival, some five thousand years later.
The girl materialized in mid-air, the tor unable to adjust, during such a short forced jump, to ground level. She hit the ground and rolled, searching desperately for the weapon she had just dropped. It rested on an icy surface, underneath which were tangles of waterweed and small fish swimming sluggishly. After snatching up the gun, she looked around.
She stood upon the same cliff top as before, but there was no blizzard or huge animal, just rocks and dirt and the bare bones of a tree stripped of its bark by a constant icy blast—all below an anaemic sky. Polly buttoned up her coat and moved away from the edge of the precipice. Still cold, Silleck observed—the girl had managed to miss a brief interglacial period.
‘Yeah, yeah, you and my mother both,’ Polly said out loud.
The probe not being sophisticated enough to tune in to the other side of the conversation, Silleck contained her annoyance and continued to watch as Polly walked away from the cliff. Shortly she came to a scree slope descending to a stream that was mostly ice but in which some water still flowed. She stooped down beside it, cupped her hand to sample some. Moving along the stream’s course, she took some bread from her pocket and ate.
Boring, thought Silleck, phasing forward quickly as the girl followed the stream to a river that descended in occasional waterfalls down the mountainside—the moving water forming only a small percentage of it, the rest of it frozen into weird hyaline sculptures, like teeth, or many-fingered hands grasping the rocks. Soon she came in sight of the lower plain, where the river terminated in a wide pool. A bear had broken through the ice, and Polly watched it lunge into the water, then pull back without anything to show for its effort.
‘Is that the creature I saw before?’
Unheard, Silleck replied, No, but possibly a far distant ancestor.
Crouching, Polly continued to observe the hungry creature. She waited cautiously until it headed away and was well out of sight before making her way down towards the pool. Silleck adjusted the probe to X-ray and observed salmon skeletons swimming under the ice. The girl would be starving because of her tor’s parasitism, but Silleck could not see how she could possibly get herself a meal. Suddenly inspired, Polly groped in her bag, and took out some device and fired it into the water. Silleck linked into data storage in Sauros to identify that item as an early defensive taser, then wryly observed its effect. Jerking violently, two large salmon floated to the surface. Not even bothering to take her boots off, the girl waded in and scooped them onto the shore.
Well done, Silleck told her. Well done indeed.
‘Sure,’ said Polly to her AI companion, taking out a knife. ‘You never heard of sushi?’
As the girl feasted on raw salmon, Silleck heard Goron say, ‘We’re ready for the shift. Let’s have you all online,’ and reluctantly withdrew from that distant time.
THE EXIT FROM THE time tunnel was much like its entrance: possessing the triangular distortion that it was painful to look at and with huge abu
tments poised over its three corners. The mantisal rose into albescent space beside a tornado of rainbow heat haze which penetrated to the centre of the triangle. Only as they moved away from this did Tack notice distant walls and realize they were in some vast chamber. Eventually reaching one wall, they entered a passage, delving into a horizontal city composed of either buildings or machines, then into a long curving tunnel.
Tack decided that he definitely wasn’t in Kansas. They ascended into what must be vacuum and the close glare of the sun, between the giant buildings of a vast city complex that, as the mantisal rose, Tack now saw bordered the face of a gigantic disc.
‘How is it we can breathe?’ Tack asked, once he remembered to breathe again.
‘The mantisal generates oxygen as a waste product, after absorbing the carbon from the CO2 we exhale.’
That sort of answered Tack’s question, but not quite.
‘I mean … how come the air isn’t lost from inside here?’ He waved at the open spaces between the struts.
‘In simple terms: a force field, generated all around the inside of the mantisal, contains it—though a more correct description would be a temporal interface.’
‘Oh, that’s all right, then.’
Saphothere shot him a warning look, which Tack acknowledged with a shrug before returning his attention to the fantastic view.
Here were towers of such immensity that they could have contained the entire population of a major city from Tack’s own time; titanic engines—their purpose unknowable to him; and huge domes covering dense forests, parks, and in one case a sea in which leviathans swam and upon which ships rode. Tangles of covered walkways and transport tubes linked these structures, and various transports, some of them mantisals, swarmed about them. Above this city, perhaps unloading their cargoes, hovered enormous spaceships constructed of spheres bound together by quadrate dendritic forms. The centre of the disc was void except for a single immense dish, and nothing moved above that, for there space was distorted by the transit of lethal energies.
‘New London,’ Saphothere announced.
Tack could think of no sensible response.
The mantisal was now heading towards the edge of the disc. Apparently this environment was not harmful to it, for Saphothere seemed in no hurry to get it to any destination. Below them the city unrolled and just kept unrolling. Tack looked up towards the sun, which was surprisingly dim. He should not be able to look directly at it like this.
‘Do you see the sun tap?’ Saphothere asked.
Sun tap? The man had repeatedly referred to that, but Tack had never wondered what it might mean. Silhouetted against the face of the orb he noticed a rectilinear shape, minuscule in proportion, but then, to the sun, so was planet Earth.
‘How?’ Tack was at a loss.
‘It sits in the chromosphere, using more than half of the energy it generates to power the antigravity engines that hold it in place. Entering the same AG fields, the sun’s radiation accelerates and is focused into a microwave beam with which you could fry Earth in half a second.’ He nodded towards the distortion above the dish. ‘A fraction of that beam hits splitting stations, before reaching here, and is diverted to conversion stations spread throughout the solar system, which in turn provide the energy for our civilization.’
‘Conversion stations?’ Tack asked.
‘One such station, over Mars, converts microwave energy into the full spectrum of light—from infrared to ultraviolet—which serves as our replacement for the sun mirrors destroyed by the Umbrathane. It is the reason that planet is now no longer entirely red.’
Tack considered that. ‘You said just a fraction?’
‘Most of that beam hitting the dish here, is used to power the wormhole—the time tunnel. You have to understand that we originally built the tap specifically for that purpose, and that the greening of Mars became just a side benefit. Tap and wormhole are inextricably linked and neither, once created, can be turned off. There is, in fact, no physical means of turning off the sun tap as the antigravity fields that sustain its position also focus the beam—as I mentioned-but if you did, the wormhole would collapse catastrophically and Sauros would be obliterated by the feedback. Also, if the wormhole was independently collapsed, the energy surge would vaporize New London. The project was therefore a total commitment.’
They now became weightless inside the mantisal as it dropped past the outer rim of New London, and soon Tack observed that, just like a coin, the city had two sides. When the construct swung in towards the other side, Tack felt his stomach flip and bit down on a sudden nausea. Now he felt the pull of gravity from the second side as they descended towards a building on the very edge of a city, which sprawled across the entire underside of the disc. This structure was shaped like the rear half of a luxury liner, but standing on end so its stern was pointing into space. Except this would have been a liner that made Titanic look like a lifeboat. The mantisal now curved in towards the ‘deck’ side of the building, where other structures protruded at right angles. Tack saw that, like a silver foam, thousands of mantisals were already attached to these protrusions. Eventually they came in amidst them and descended onto a platform resembling a weird melding of a giant oyster shell and a helipad.
Withdrawing his hands from the mantisal’s eyes, Saphothere said, ‘You remember the mask in your pack? You’ll need it to get to the entrance, as it’s vacuum up here.’ He gestured to an oval door at the juncture of the landing platform with the main building. ‘You’ll have to run, though.’
Tack opened his pack and took out the mask. When Saphothere had originally explained its function to him, Tack had hoped he would never have to use it. It looked organic, like the sliced-off face of a huge green cricket, its interior glistening wet. As he pressed it against his face, its soft interior flowed around his features, moulding itself to him. For a moment he was blind, then a vision screen switched on, with complementary displays arrayed along the bottom. Breathing involved only slightly more effort than usual. Apparently the mask stored pure oxygen—after sucking it in from its surroundings—and, when being worn, released it.
‘Come on now,’ urged Saphothere, his own mask in place as he leapt out. Tack followed him, running for the door. Initially his skin felt frozen, then suddenly it was burning. He saw vapour rising off his clothes and dissipating. Saphothere, trotting along beside him, seemed completely at ease in this environment. As they reached the oval door, Tack glanced back to see the mantisal floating over to one side of the landing pad, where others of its kind were gathered. Grabbing the protruding handle, Saphothere pulled the door open and led the way into an oblate airlock chamber. As soon as he closed that door, air began blasting in, and after a moment they could remove their masks.
‘Now what?’ Tack asked.
Saphothere proceeded through the next door into a chaos of sound and colour. Tack could hardly take it all in: a vast chamber containing dwellings in all shapes and sizes suspended in gleaming orthogonal scaffolds; gardens and parks, some of them even running vertically; walkways ribboning through the air; transports of every kind hurtling all about the place; and Heliothane everywhere, thousands upon thousands of them. Glancing at Saphothere he saw the man was operating his palm computer.
‘You are too slow and too weak, so would get killed in here’—he gestured to the surrounding mayhem—‘within minutes, probably by accident. This is not for you yet.’ So saying, Saphothere operated some other control on his computer. Tack felt the all-too-familiar sensation of a reprogramming link going in. He tried to object, but instead simply shut down. Everything started to grey out and the last thing he felt was Saphothere catching him as he fell.
RAIN LIKE A VERTICAL sea hammered upon her and, slipping in the mud, Polly went down on her face. Her nostrils filled with the stench of decaying vegetation and in the darkness she could hear things hooting and screeching.
‘Yes, I know—not a good place to be,’ she said, then wished she hadn’t spoken when the
animal noises fell silent.
Pushing herself upright, she looked around at the darkness and at huge trees looming behind curtains of rain.
‘You’ve got nothing to say?’ she asked him nervously, terrified she might now be genuinely alone.
Oh, always something to say. But at present I’m trying to use one of Muse’s military logistics programs to calculate your acceleration back through time.
‘You’ll be able to predict what era I’ll arrive in next?’ Polly subvocalized, sure she could hear baleful movements out there.
Well, I have some dates to work with … within vague limits. Thus far it would seem your acceleration is exponential, though what the exponent is it’s difficult to ascertain. All I do know is that if the increase continues at its present rate … a few jumps more and you’ll be going back millions of years at a time.
‘You’re not serious?’
Oh yeah, but, as I said, the parameters are vague. If you follow the curve I’m now trying to plot, you’ll end up off the graph—achieving a jump that is infinite. But then I might only be viewing part of that curve and who’s to say you’ll be following a curve anyway? Thing is, you are now learning to control the shifts, and Christ knows what other factors might come into play. The next one might easily be one year or one million years.
‘Oh, screw this,’ Polly said out loud and reached down inside herself to grasp hold of that webwork and bend it to her will. This time there was no transition over that previous black sea and she was immediately into that Euclidian space she could manipulate, if only in a small way. She gave it a few seconds only, then pulled herself out, dropping down on her back into soft leaf litter in a raucous daylit forest. She gasped in a lungful of cold morning air.
