Cowl

by Neal Asher

  Tack turned to Polly, who shrugged, then reached out a finger to touch the device now attached to the Roman’s neck. With a sigh Tacitus closed his eyes and slumped unconscious.

  ‘What did he mean by “carapace”?’ Tack asked.

  Polly pointed at his surgical boot. ‘It supports both internally and externally while accelerated repair takes place, but it can only be used for minor injuries. Tacitus could have one placed on his chest, but only if he was prepared to move around very slowly and I do not think that was his intention.’

  ‘So Cowl has Aconite,’ said Tack.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What do we do?’

  ‘We have to get her back. We need her.’

  Tack absorbed the thought. They did not know how the mechanisms of the house operated and so could not survive here. But he did not think they stood much chance up against more Umbrathane and the last thing he wanted to do was face Cowl again.

  ‘We have to get her out of there,’ Polly affirmed, staring at him.

  Tack swallowed dryly. ‘OK,’ he said.

  THE MANTISAL CLIPPED WAVETOPS, the vapour of its ablation giving it the appearance of hot glassware just cast out of the furnace. It rolled across the sea’s surface and broke apart, the three Heliothane ejecting as if thrown from a car wreck, but controlling their descent at the last and each entering the sea in a perfectly orchestrated flat dive. Pieces of the mantisal skittered across the water and settled, floating, on the surface, as the final glowing ember extinguished in them. One of the three Heliothane resurfaced, cast a package out before him and watched as it unfolded into an inflatable raft. By the time it was fully expanded, the other two had surfaced and all three scrambled aboard.

  ‘Nothing yet,’ said Meelan, collapsing on her back and spitting out sea water as she studied her detector.

  Saphothere started up the small engine mounted inside the back of the inflatable and got them moving. Coptic folded up a scope on the hand-held missile launcher he clutched, and watched the skies.

  As soon as the raft was moving, Saphothere asked, ‘Where are we?’

  ‘About ten kilometres from the citadel itself and about an hour from the Nodus,’ Meelan replied.

  ‘Look,’ said Saphothere, nodding ahead. The three of them gazed at the torbeast distortion wavering in the sky like a heat haze. Below it they could just about discern the spiky peaks of the citadel. Saphothere went on, ‘We probably won’t get any missiles heading this way. No doubt the attack on Sauros is in progress, and I’d guess Cowl won’t spare attention to such minor matters as a tor falling through his trap and going into the sea. Probably thinks another torbearer just drowned—if he noticed at all. Then, when we get closure at Sauros, Cowl will be in a world of shit—no short-jumping inside his citadel and no way to dodge the bullets.’

  ‘Shame we can’t send some missiles from here,’ opined Coptic.

  ‘They would be detected,’ Saphothere replied, ‘especially if they were likely to be in any way effective.’

  ‘Like atomics, you mean,’ said Meelan acidly.

  ‘Yeah, like atomics. Cowl probably detected those two I handed to Tack when he was within a kilometre of his destination—and no doubt had a double displacement fixed on them all the time.’

  ‘Poor idiot,’ said Meelan. ‘At least Tack would have died believing that his assassination attempt was to prevent Cowl destroying human history.’

  ‘In a roundabout way he was, actually,’ said Saphothere. ‘And, anyway, many Heliothane have died believing the same—so he was not unique.’

  ‘Umbrathane believe that’s Cowl’s intention, too, and they die just the same.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Saphothere.

  ‘Saphothere,’ Coptic interrupted, ‘we’ve got company.’

  The three of them turned their attention to the sky and the object becoming visible there: distant still, but growing closer.

  ‘Another reason for him not sending a missile against us,’ Meelan observed.

  ‘That’s it, then,’ said Saphothere. ‘Let’s go and kill the bastard before he can do anything about it.’

  ‘Sounds reasonable to me,’ said Meelan.

  THE SKY WAS GROWING dark and the effect was something like silt boiling up from the bottom of a deep pool. Wave after wave threw dark bands of shadow across the landscape. Polly looked up, feeling her mouth grow dry. This simply did not happen here—after a downpour like last night’s, the sky usually remained clear for many weeks, and Polly had yet to witness any true extremity of weather. But this had an immensity: the bands of cloud spreading out from that central boiling point seemed almost solid. And that there was no sound as yet made it all the more threatening.

  ‘What now?’ asked Tack, as he too stepped outside Aconite’s house.

  ‘The Nodus,’ said Polly. ‘We knew it was close.’

  Makes a kind of insane sense for it to arrive now. Makes you wonder if the Heliothane haven’t unified everything yet. Perhaps there’s still much they don’t know.

  ‘Does this mean Cowl has failed—or is he about to succeed?’ Tack asked. Polly turned and stared at him. ‘Succeed at what?’

  Still gazing at the sky, Tack said, ‘At shoving human history down the probability slope and creating his own time-line at the top of the slope.’

  ‘You still believe that?’ Tack returned his attention to her, as she went on. ‘That’s just the great Heliothane lie told to justify continuing their extermination of Umbrathane. Admittedly their attempts to get to Cowl are in themselves justified because of the many Heliothane lives he has taken. But that doesn’t make it any less of a lie.’

  ‘What?’

  He looked confused, and Polly realized she was pulling another bulwark of belief from underneath him, but it had to be done.

  ‘Cowl is working to prevent the omission paradox,’ she explained.

  ‘And I thought I was confused,’ said Tack, rediscovering the sense of humour for which Saphothere had once beaten him.

  Polly went on, ‘Cowl escaped Heliothane persecution, and he gave the Umbrathane an escape route too. The energy he carried in the big jump took him back before the Nodus and do you know what he found?’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘He found life without DNA. He found life that bore no relation to anything he knew, with minimal probability that it would develop into the life we know in the few centuries he had before the Nodus arrived.’

  ‘And that means?’

  ‘You have to be as utterly arrogant as Cowl to believe that you are the source of such a critical omission paradox.’

  ‘You said that before and I still don’t get it.’

  ‘Cowl believes he is the source of the Nodus—that if he doesn’t start DNA-BASED life in this ocean, there will be no life as we know it later. That by omission he will destroy the time-line and become a unique, unreferenced being, perpetually trapped in his own alternate.’

  ‘So he’s a good guy?’

  ‘If a good guy is also one who’s regard for any life but his own is nil—and who would, given the opportunity, wipe out the entire Heliothane Dominion.’

  ‘But surely he could do that by doing what the Heliothane claimed he was doing?’

  ‘No. He only has geothermal taps here. The energy levels he would need require a sun tap at the very least. That’s just another Heliothane lie.’

  ‘So what the fuck is going on?’

  ‘That,’ said Polly, pointing at the sky.

  Gathering in a wheel above them, thick black clouds turned and rolled, expressing spokes of lightning. A low, growling storm was reaching them now. And behind these strange cloud formations a shape was resolving.

  ‘A ship?’ Tack wondered.

  ‘Maybe. Or some living being in itself. Or even a seed pod.’

  A flattened sphere now filled a quarter of the sky, the lower edge of it lost beyond the horizon. Segmented like an orange, it was translucent, and higher cloud layers showed through it as through a disto
rting lens. Other clouds broke over it, like the waves of a sea splashing over a boulder. As they watched, it tilted and came fully into view. In consonance with the tilting, the ground began to vibrate. Then came immense flashes of lightning, cracks in the heavens revealing another reality, and the gunshot crashing of thunder.

  ‘What’s happening?’ Tack yelled.

  ‘Seeding,’ said Polly, leaning close. ‘As the Heliothane knew, because their first interstellar probe sent back evidence of it elsewhere after Cowl had gone. I don’t know how Aconite found out, which is why we have to get to her—she must have some access to the future that is her own.’

  ‘But why didn’t she tell him?’

  ‘Because as long as he struggled to solve his omission paradox, he would not turn his full fury on the Heliothane. She has spent her life blunting the edge of Cowl’s rage.’

  Nandru took that moment to add, I’m so glad you explained all that, Polly. There was me thinking it was all a bit complicated.

  ‘Nandru,’ said Polly out loud, glancing apologetically at Tack. ‘It gets even simpler now. As we move into the Nodus, the chances of the Heliothane reaching Cowl increase dramatically. And when that happens we’ll need to be on the other side of the planet, at least, if we want to survive. We need Aconite and we need her as soon as possible.’

  I can help you, but it means I must leave you, and I won’t be able to come back this time, as I must be both the program and the memory.

  ‘What the fuck are you on about?’

  Don’t be so unfriendly.

  ‘I’m sorry, but things just got a lot more urgent.’

  Well, goodbye, Polly.

  ‘Wait! What are you—?’

  Polly felt him go, just as he did when he transferred his awareness to Wasp.

  ‘What the hell?’ said Polly, then shook her head in irritation. Reaching up, she brushed her fingers through her hair then brought her hand down for inspection. There were gritty white crystals on her palm. She blinked and looked up. It was snowing, only this was no snow that she recognized.

  ‘We have to get to Aconite—she’s the only one who can help. She has to have a way out of here.’

  Just then there came a loud clattering and droning from inside the house, and they whirled round as something shot out of the door to loom over them.

  ‘And hello!’ bellowed Nandru-Wasp.

  THE TENSION IN THE New London Abutment Control Centre was palpable. Maxell watched the screens and wondered just how much longer she could wait in the hope of totally completing this herculean task. So much had been invested and so much would be lost, whether they succeed or failed, so justification of the latter was not something she wanted to contemplate. Then the tension notched up a level.

  ‘We have closure!’ shouted an interface technician.

  Maxell was frozen for half a second. They had time—they still had time.

  ‘Do you have a mass reading?’ she asked.

  ‘Not yet … still calculating … I’m putting it up on a subscreen,’ the technician replied.

  Maxell felt her mouth go dry as she saw the figure. The subscreen opened in a band across the bottom of the screen and filled with digits. Abruptly it contracted, the number being rounded off and displayed with an exponent, because it was simply too big to fit on the screen.

  ‘That cannot be taken out of existence,’ moaned Carloon.

  ‘Nevertheless,’ said Maxell, ‘we will try.’ To the interface tech she said, ‘Send the signal.’

  ‘Sent,’ replied the tech.

  Now it was a matter of waiting. The tachyon signal would arrive at the moment of transmission, but the transit of the microwave beam was nominally six minutes. They were now utterly committed and history would judge them—if any history there was to be.

  ‘How long before the beast reaches our abutments?’ she asked.

  Carloon replied, ‘It was looking like about ten minutes, but now it’s accelerating.’

  ‘How the hell can it know?’ an interface technician asked.

  Carloon now brought the most distant sensor back into phase, displaying the far section of the wormhole empty of torbeast. This brought them no comfort—the end of it with the most mouths was coming at them like an accelerating juggernaut.

  ‘Any of you know how to pray?’ Maxell asked. Then to the negatives she said, ‘Well, now might be a good time to learn.’

  21

  Cowl:

  I am the pinnacle of the Darwinian evolution of the human species, even though my superiority has been achieved by genetic manipulation. I was made to survive in an extrapolation of the most hostile of human environments, by the most ruthless means. As such I am all that Umbra and Heliothane dogma would have humans come to be. But when a being is measured by its ability to survive ruthless selection processes, isn’t its superiority equated with its ability to destroy and murder? Doesn’t such a measure discount all creativity, and so much else? The ability to survive and to dominate is not all. I am a dead end, but I am also human, and know that what was made to be is not enough. I am what I am.

  HE HAD NEVER DONE this to her before and foolishly she had believed he never would. Aconite was appalled at the ruthless power of her brother’s mind. His linking tendrils were fully developed and he knew how to use them to best effect. Her own had been stunted and virtually unusable since birth, so she’d had an autosurgeon remove them and cover the evidence with cosmetic surgery. With anguine deadliness his tendrils speared through her eardrum and into her skull, dividing and ever dividing down into synaptic plugs, connecting to the various portions of her brain. Cowl had never mind-fucked her before, but now he was.

  Immediately she was dropped into the world of memory—but with her brother present as a hostile spectre. He stood behind her as she looked with some amazement at the ersatz assassin, and wondered why Tack was still alive and if she should allow him to continue to be. A jump, and Cowl listened to his explanation, her brother knowing that she already knew the truth: Tack had been sent here to reveal a weakness in the defences of Sauros, which was the jaws of a trap. But Cowl wanted the root of it:

  The four stood on a viewing balcony overlooking the Tertiary park, where six-metre tall paraceratheriums were browsing. Though these creatures possessed skin like that of elephants and a llama-like appearance, they were, like all the prehistoric fauna of the New London parks, distinct animals in themselves. Watching them tearing down palm fronds to get at the ripening dates, Aconite felt that, of all Heliothane projects, this was the most worthy, and even to be able to recover Earth’s genetic heritage was a gift indeed. It was a shame that, on the whole, time travel was used for more bellicose purposes.

  ‘How did you manage to get here?’ asked Engineer Goron.

  Aconite held up her arm to display the enclosing tor. ‘My brother has yet to completely hard-wire the programming. I simply inverted it, and I will return it to normal to take me back.’

  Maxell turned to Goron. ‘Goron, don’t make the mistake of seeing Aconite forever in her brother’s shadow. Her abilities are at least equal to his, even if her intentions are not.’

  Cowl hissed at this, his breath liquid against Aconite’s cheek.

  ‘Did you think I couldn’t plumb your technology? Did you really believe I was the poisonous failure our mother named me?’ asked Aconite.

  The tendrils tightened in her head, shooting agony around her skull and down her spine. She knew he wanted her to resist, but she let him have it all:

  ‘So what is it you have to say?’ asked Goron, eyeing Aconite with suspicion.

  ‘My brother is not trying to destroy you by altering the time-line-in doing that he might well destroy himself. He has discovered he is the cause of the Nodus. Human history begins with a circular paradox. He has found no DNA-based life before that point, so it can only be caused by him. Now he applies all his energies to stop himself causing the omission paradox that could destroy the entire time-line, and thus his own ancestry.’


  The laughter came from the fourth member of this group.

  ‘Such arrogance,’ said Palleque, shaking his head.

  Maxell gave him a look. ‘Something of which we are all guilty. Please continue, Aconite.’

  After a moment of puzzlement Aconite went on, ‘My brother is not the greatest danger to you, not in himself.’

  ‘The torbeast,’ said Palleque. He wasn’t laughing now.

  Aconite nodded, ‘Already it is immense and reaches uptime to feed. Cowl cannot entirely prevent it doing this, and already the anomalies it is creating are forcing its uptime substance further down the slope generated from the Nodus.’

  ‘Then that will be the end of the problem,’ said Palleque.

  Aconite stared at him. ‘No. My brother needs the torbeast to drop active tors, so he can sample the future and thus find out how to avoid the omission paradox—to find out if his experiments with the protoseas are having any effect—so he feeds energy to it from his geothermal taps to sustain its position on the slope.’

  ‘It also serves another purpose for him,’ said Palleque through gritting teeth.

  Aconite turned to stare at him. ‘Then you know that, while it serves his purposes, it also feeds.’

  Grimacing, Palleque turned away from her.

  ‘I do not yet see how his pet is the greater problem,’ said Goron.

  ‘As it feeds, it grows,’ said Aconite. ‘Its structure is more complex than anything else that has ever lived. It can grow organic time machines on itself … do I need to draw you a diagram?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Goron.

  ‘What does she mean?’ asked Palleque, turning back.

  Maxell offered an explanation. ‘It generates its own vorpal field, and once it reaches sufficient mass that field will be strong enough to enable the beast to shift itself anywhere on the probability slope.’

  ‘And to feed,’ Aconite added.

  ‘And what precisely are we talking about here?’ Palleque asked.

  ‘An eater of worlds—all life, every shift-generated time-line, nothing but torbeast left.’