Cowl

by Neal Asher

  Of course, every time you do that, you just screw up my calculations further.

  Polly did not know whether to laugh or cry.

  CHENG-YI DRAGGED HIMSELF OUT from under the mounded dead and looked around in disbelief. The attacking unit of the People’s Army had bayoneted the survivors and the wounded ponies, then looted the bodies. All that now remained of the largest robber band in Miyi county was butchered corpses strewn along the valley. That none of their attackers had dragged Cheng-yi out and searched him he put down to his being covered in blood and the plenitude of loot elsewhere. Climbing unsteadily to his feet, Cheng visually checked himself from head to foot. None of the blood appeared to be his own, which was miraculous considering he had been riding beside Lao when the machine gun opened up, and there was not much left of him that was identifiable. Cheng gave a little dance and shook his fists at the sky, then he looked round again, completely at a loss.

  What little drug smuggling or gun running they had managed across the Himalayas since Mao’s revolution, would not be available to him alone. And also, since that revolution, pickings had been poor in the Xiang region—most of the thieving already done by Party officials. Cheng was damned if he was going to rejoin China’s current society: thankless toil and the grey and boring clothing did not appeal to him. One option remained: he would head towards the coast, for Kowloon and Hong Kong, and see how his fortunes would fare. Not for one moment, as he exchanged his clothing for the best available remaining on the corpses, and looted them of anything the soldiers had left, did he feel any grief. They hadn’t been a bad lot, but none of them had really appreciated his qualities and, anyway, his emotional spectrum encompassed only terror and lust. The former came into play again when, just as he was ready to set out, the monster came.

  The huge and horrible thing fed on the dead. He saw it bow down over the body of a pony and suck it down with a crunching gulping. The human corpses it took down with less trouble. Crouched behind a rock, Cheng-yi sobbed with terror as he listened to the macabre feasting, then when the sounds ceased, he choked back his sobs and held his breath. Perhaps it was gone now? Perhaps it had never been there …

  Cheng-yi looked up straight into the mouth of hell poised above him and screamed. The mouth turned away and, from the flank behind, one of the monster’s scales fell and thudded in the dust beside the Chinaman. He watched as the scale, at first leaf-like, coiled up into a cylinder as if rapidly drying. Lust was Cheng’s next emotion, and he did not hesitate to grab the thing up and pull it up over his forearm. Then, the monster gone, he wondered what madness it was that had made him see such monstrous visions. But this was not his last.

  11

  Engineer Goron:

  It was some staffer of Maxell’s who had the idea of using cerebral programming on the next torbearer we managed to intercept. Sir Alex seemed the best option as he had been combat trained from birth. Our team had eighteen hours to work on him before his next shift and all seemed to go well: the programming took and there was even time to provide him with physical augmentation and a Pedagogue weapons’ instruction download. Apparently, though he accepted our weapons, he utterly refused to shed his armour. But even with his armour and his weapons and his new abilities, he must have failed. The team, remaining at the location where they had intercepted Sir Alex while they recharged their mantisals via a portable fusion/displacement generator, were attacked by the beast only minutes after his concurrent arrival beyond the Nodus. So we can only suppose that Cowl killed the man, but was angry enough to retaliate directly.

  PEDAGOGUE WAS AN UNSEEN presence directly downloading information into his mind and, with the true brutality of a surgeon, wrenching into shape those structures in his mind that could utilize it. But this, this he didn’t understand:

  The trip was due to take another five hours. Tack knew there were three ramscoop fusion engines, set on outriders protruding from the main cylindrical body of the ship, belching white blades of flame. Mercury resembled a cindered sphere to his left, but with a sprawl of bright-silver installations spread in a maze across its sooty flank and cigar-shaped stations orbiting it. Tack was apparently standing before one of the triangular screens that ringed the bridge sphere—earlier in its life, the only place possible for humans to survive here. Now the ship was lethally radioactive. How such a vessel managed to operate in these conditions Tack was only momentarily bewildered to consider, but then, almost off-handedly, he dowsed the extent and capabilities of Heliothane materials and field technology.

  Ahead, the sun loomed large—like a hole cut through space into some hellish furnace—and against it was silhouetted the tap itself. The thing was stupendous, like some vast tanker crossing an ocean of fire.

  ‘Why … ?’ He didn’t really voice the question—it was just there.

  Would you prefer …

  Instantly Tack found himself submersed in some viscous clear fluid, and in a world of pain. He couldn’t scream as the fluid was in his mouth and lungs and, as he began to struggle, he discerned optic cables snaking away from the back of his head. Looking down, he saw himself flayed, red muscle revealed, tubes and wires connected down the length of him, metal cuffs enclosing his joints, the cowled head of some surgical robot excavating into the side of his chest. Then the horrific vision was gone and he was back on the sun ship, gasping and clutching at his chest, shivering. But the pain faded and the memory of pain swiftly blurred.

  ‘When we have rebuilt you, you will be more sufficient to your task.’

  The disembodied words meant the same in every one of the many different languages now available to him, for Pedagogue was speaking to him in every language that he now knew. He thought of Heliothane weapons, realized he knew how to strip and rebuild a multi-purpose carbine, and how to program molecular catalysers. And these were just the tip of the berg of knowledge expanding in his mind.

  ‘I have questions …’

  ‘And I have answers,’ Pedagogue told him flatly.

  Tack reached out, touched the screen, actually felt its warmth. ‘Cowl must overcome the temporal inertia of four billion years to succeed.’ He tilted his head. ‘I see, one billion.’ Now he knew the Nodus Cowl had travelled a few centuries behind was situated just before the Precambrian explosion—when complex life really began to take hold. ‘That inertia—to overcome it Cowl must do something … cataclysmic. And even if he succeeds he’ll just push himself and his new history down to the bottom of the probability slope.’

  ‘Cataclysmic … Nodus. What maintains the relative position of the alternates on the slope? Why does father killing confine you in the new time-line you have created by that act, down the probability slope, rather than make that line the main one?’

  ‘Cause and effect. The paradox shoves you down the slope.’

  ‘Correct. But that paradox can only come into being because you are contradicting what came before. You are acting counter to temporal momentum. Before the Nodus there is virtually zero momentum and therefore zero to contradict.’

  Tack saw it then. He conceived the image of time as a sheet tossed over a table, against the surface of which already rested a long rod, the uppermost point on the sheet, where it was lifted along the length of the rod, being the main line. The rod was also tilted up from the edge of the table, so that the slope of sheet, down from it on either side, grew longer the further in from the edge of the table you went. The edge of the table was the Nodus itself, and the rod protruding from the edge was held in a hand that could, given sufficient pressure, swing the rod, thus altering the position of the high point in the sheet and the slopes on either side. That hand belonged to Cowl. Tack swallowed dryly, seeing that he had no choice but to believe what he was being told: if someone’s hand is hovering over the detonator switch of an atomic bomb, you do not hesitate to shoot them should you have the opportunity; you do not ask what their intentions are.

  ‘There’s more I need to know.’

  ‘Yes …’

  In his m
ind he now sensed a wave of information, poised just at the edge of perception and ready to break over him. Before him the triangular screens turned black for a second, then came back on to show an entirely different display. He stepped forward, for a moment was submerged in viscous fluid again, and briefly glimpsed his raised arm, skin growing back across it like white slime, the material of his tor grown to the size of his palm. Pain was a brief suf fusion, then he was standing on a walkway beside the glass of an aquarium wall behind which something shifted. A nightmare turned towards him.

  WELL, LOOK AT THE pretty horses now.

  From the start the place had seemed idyllic: warm balmy sunshine, wild plums scattered below the trees fringing the forest—fed upon by small lemurs who maybe preferred the slightly decayed fruit for its intoxicant effect—amid lush green grass scattered with giant daisies and enough dry wood with which to make a fire for the coming night. But before she had a chance to set about gathering some, a herd of miniature horses galloped into view—scattering the lemurs in panic. Polly knelt in the shadow of a tree to eat the plums she had collected while she watched the cute creatures’ antics. Then it had appeared, and now she crouched behind the same tree, the taser in her left hand and the automatic in her right.

  You’re way back now. Bastards like that died out about forty million years back.

  The monster hurtled in on the pastoral scene with a scream like a klaxon. Swinging and clashing its parrot beak, it eviscerated one of the little horses, then took the head off another, and stamped its talon down on a third, while the rest of the herd fled. It began eating the pinioned animal, tearing it in half and tilting back its head to gobble down the quivering hindquarters. In moments it finished the first horse, then it strode across to another, pecking up a decollated head on the way. Before feasting on its third victim, it paused and shat out a spray of white excrement.

  I think it’s getting full now.

  So it appeared, for the monstrous bird, after eating the head and forelegs of the third horse, was pecking at the rest in what now seemed a desultory manner. After a moment it gave up completely, scraped at the ground like a chicken, before letting out that klaxon squawk again and moving away.

  And that was only a small one.

  Polly was aghast, for the horrible creature had stood higher than herself and . its killer beak was the size of a bucket.

  It’s called Gastornis, Nandru explained.

  Seeing the bird was now some hundred metres away, Polly began to move out from under cover.

  Wouldn’t it be better to stay in the trees?

  Ignoring this advice, she glanced all around to make sure there were no other unpleasant surprises in the offing, then ran over to where the bird had been feeding.

  Are you insane?

  Stooping, Polly grabbed a bloody chunk of the last little horse and ran for cover again.

  ‘Waste not want not, as my mother always used to say,’ she sang, running still deeper into the forest.

  Later, with her stomach full of roast horse, she gazed out from her camp and noticed how her fire’s glow reflected on eyes out there. After throwing a bone out towards them, she could hear things squabbling in the darkness over it. But at least they sounded small.

  THE NIGHTMARE BORE THE shape of a man, but a tall, long-limbed man in whom the ranginess of the Heliothane had been taken to its extreme. It had no face—its head was a slightly beaked, utterly featureless ovoid, of the same shiny beetle-black appearance as the majority of its naked body. However, as if this was not strange enough, the black carapace revealed a network of hyaline veins and ribs, so that, when the light caught the network, it looked as if something horribly skeletal stood there.

  ‘A woman used a semi-AI prognostic program to predict the future development of human DNA, and on the basis of that started recombination experiments on her children. In her terms, her first experiment was a failure, though the offspring survived. Cowl was not a failure, so there is much speculation as to what those terms of hers were.’

  Tack flinched as Cowl started to walk towards him, but the dark being was then frozen mid-stride as Pedagogue continued lecturing.

  ‘We don’t know what external pressures were input, because DNA has no purpose in itself other than its own survival and procreation, so intelligence or physical strength are only increased should they have a direct bearing on that. Should the survival of human DNA entail you needing to lose your big brains and filter food out of the soil, you would all become worms. It can only be supposed that her program posited a future where the highest levels of intelligence, ruthlessness, speed and strength were required. Cowl killed his own mother while in her womb, thereafter escaping by internal caesarean much like a chick escaping from the egg with its beak spur.’

  ‘But he became one of the Heliothane,’ Tack stated. The information was now just there, in his mind. He saw how Cowl’s survival had initially depended on the Heliothane, how he had deliberately become a very valuable member of that society. It was not so difficult—ruthlessness and intelligence being much admired. The misjudgement had killed many. One of them a top scientist called Astolere—Saphothere’s sister.

  ‘I see,’ said Tack woodenly.

  And see he did. He saw Callisto, a moon of Jupiter, exploding, with the blast contained in some unseen barrier and the moon just winking out of existence. Four hundred million Heliothane gone in less time than it took to draw breath.

  ‘Cowl, having made his alliance with the Umbrathane, and passing on much of his research, caused a temporal anomaly on Callisto, where his research facility was based, putting a pico-second future version of that moon in exactly the same place as the original. The physical composite of the two moons, forced to exist however briefly in the same place, went in a fusion explosion, the energy generated thereby powering his flight, and that of the Umbrathane fleet, into the past.’

  ‘And I am supposed to kill this … creature?’

  ‘Yes, that is your task.’

  Back aboard the virtual ship, Tack was bathed in incandescence. The screens now revealed a side view of the sun tap. It was a leviathan wood planer shaving the fiery surface of the sun, raft-like at its two extremes but humped in the middle. The view was filtered—it would have incinerated him otherwise. Then, suddenly, he was gazing upon the vast cliff that was just one side of the tap. This close it seemed to extend to infinity in every direction, beyond planetary scale—immensity impossible to encompass. He blinked and drew his attention away from it, studying his closer surroundings. The inside of the ship had become a furnace: plastics were beginning to smoke, coatings were peeling from metal surfaces, spots of red heat were appearing on bare metal, and smoke-hazed air being drawn away through vents. And so the unreal world Pedagogue had created came to an end. When the ship’s fields collapsed, actinic light obliterated everything and Tack began to wake.

  SHE WAS RUNNING OUT of air, and now the force of her will was pushing the scale in some other way. She found herself being dragged sideways back into that dimension of black sea underlining a grey void, but drawing along with her part of the previous place. From the scale itself barely visible lines of light sprang out and turned back in on themselves, all looping at precisely the same distance out from it, so she appeared to rest at the centre of a huge, luminous dandelion clock. Then this spheroid took on a glassy quality, the light draining out of it and its surface splitting and coalescing into veins and ribs, as of water poured onto something greasy. Encaged in this cocoon she fell, gulping at nothing in the darkness, consciousness fading. But still she had some will left and attempted to force her way back into her own reality. Around her the black sea rose up, and gravity grabbed her and slammed her down on a floor of hyaline bones. She gasped in frigid air, grateful for each painful breath. Rolling upright, she found herself still encaged in the sphere, hovering now over frigid ground, a dark grey sky above, strange frozen trees to her right and a snowy plain to her left. Terrified that she would be snatched away from brea
thable air again, she scrabbled for a gap in the cage wall, but even as she found it and fell through, the cage itself began to fold away into that other place.

  ‘What the fuck was that?’ Polly managed, recovering her breath after landing on her back on the unforgiving ground.

  Well, as about the nearest thing to an expert in temporal travel we have here, I have to say I haven’t a clue.

  Polly looked around, then hugged her arms close around her body. ‘I thought it was your expert opinion that it was supposed to be warmer before that last ice age.’

  Sorry, but there were more than one of them. You got a few in the Pleistocene age, but I thought you were beyond them, then some in the Carboniferous … Let’s just hope you’ve not gone that far yet. This is probably just some sort of hiccup: a bad winter, maybe a bad millennium. You’ve been covering millions of years, remember.

  Polly tried not to think too much about that. Absentmindedly she opened her coat and removed from her hip bag a remaining lump of eohippus meat, and methodically devoured it.

  ‘Any idea at all what period this is?’ she asked.

  None whatsoever. The thing that manifested around you might have altered the circumstances, and your previous time-jumps have been too out of kilter for me to easily work out a curve. I would guess you’re getting pretty near to dinosaur country, though.

  Polly grunted an acknowledgement and continued eating as she stared about her. ‘Perhaps I’m just in the Arctic here—you said my position in space seems to be changing as well.’

  I don’t think there was an Arctic, as we know it. I’m not sure, but I think that, in the region of time we should be entering, even the poles weren’t frozen over.