Terminal World

by Alastair Reynolds

  ‘The boundary must have wandered over us for a few moments, before snapping back.’

  Again Quillon listened into the night, but still there was nothing to be heard. ‘I don’t think I’m going to be able to get much more sleep, though. I feel wide awake.’

  ‘Got a long wait until your ride arrives.’

  ‘I’ll be fine. Perhaps you’re the one who ought to be getting some rest. I can look after the horses.’

  ‘You insist,’ she said, after several moments’ reflection. ‘But don’t go dozing off on me.’

  ‘No plans to doze off, I assure you.’

  Satisfied that the horses were as settled as they were going to get, Meroka lay down under a blanket. Quillon watched her dark form, observing the regularity of her breathing until he was certain she was asleep. Meroka also had a taxing day ahead of her. She had to take both horses back alone, riding one and guiding the other, through the pass and back to the base of Spearpoint.

  He found a hummock in the ground that made a passable seat and lowered himself onto it, the wheels of his mind spinning with dizzy alertness. The horses snuffled and snorted, but were otherwise docile. They had enviably short memories, animals. He examined his watches, the luminous dots on the dials and hands forming a series of circular constellations. The hands were all moving in lockstep again now. Watches were carefully engineered (and later selected by the purchaser) so that they would respond to zone changes in subtly different ways, rather than all of them slowing or speeding up in unison. But it still took attention to read the signs accurately, and care to ensure that the watches were wound and functioning properly. In Neon Heights, the majority of citizens had become lax in the business of watch-reading, secure in the knowledge that the ever-present Boundary Commission would alert them to a zone shift as soon as it happened. Most of them only wore watches as fashion accessories, barely remembering how to interpret the signs. The same applied to the other districts, in varying measure. But out here watches were all one had. There was no Boundary Commission, and Quillon would be entirely reliant on his own judgement as to when to administer antizonal medicine, and of what type and dosage.

  But when the shift came again, the watches barely had time to respond. What had been light-headedness before was now a vicious, vicelike pressure mounting behind his eyeballs. The suddenness of the pain, the intensity of it, made him gasp. He stood up, more out of a flight reflex than any conscious volition, clutching the sides of his head. The pain increased, until it felt as if a sharp wedge were being driven down through his skull, splitting his brain between the hemispheres. Vomit rose in his throat. He staggered directionlessly, the landscape seeming to tilt madly into the sky. He pivoted around, fighting the urge to vomit, and saw the horses lying still on the ground like piles of black sacks, as if they had been shot. They were either dead or unconscious; he couldn’t tell and he sensed it wouldn’t make much difference either way if he didn’t keep himself from slipping under. Already there was a dreamlike quality to his actions, a feeling that his mind was isolating itself from the real world, slamming down protective barriers.

  He found Meroka. Something was very wrong with her. She was palsying under the blanket, her body convulsing. Her zone tolerance was not as robust as his own. He was disorientated and in pain, but if Meroka did not receive the right medication quickly, she would not survive very long. Yet to administer the wrong kind of antizonal would be worse than not treating her at all. He knelt down and touched her, hoping the pressure of his hand would calm her or at least bring her to consciousness, but she kept shaking. He found her mouth and his hand came away wet with blood and spittle.

  This was not a squall. The squall had just been a wave breaking on a shoreline. This was an inundation: another zone completely swamping the one they had been inside. And so far it wasn’t passing; it wasn’t snapping back to its earlier configuration.

  He bent over and retched. The pain was still inside his head, the dizziness and sense of detachment, but the nausea eased slightly. He forced himself to look down, to survey his watches. It could only have been a minute or so since the episode had begun - not enough time for the hands to have diverged to any useful extent. But the second hands were still ticking around. None of the watches had stopped. If one or more of them had, then it might - might - be an indication that the shift was to a lower-state zone, where even the simple clockwork of a watch was too complex and finicky to function. Since the watches were all still ticking, he could only draw the opposite conclusion. The shift was in the other direction, to a higher-state zone, where the clockwork operated too well, too freely. Tolerances had slackened; gears and cams were now whirring faster than they were supposed to.

  He reached for his medical bag, snapped it open with trembling fingers. His vision was beginning to tunnel, his hand-to-eye coordination degrading. Like a drunk trying to untie shoelaces he fumbled open the rack that contained the direction-specific antizonals, the rubber-topped vials and the waiting hypodermics. They swam in and out of focus. He checked his watches again; all still running. The minute hands beginning to pull apart, the second hands ticking at visibly different rates. He took one of the syringes and plunged it into a vial. Drew out a measure of thick, resinous fluid.

  Every instinct told him to treat himself first. He was the physician, Meroka the patient. Still he went to Meroka, leaning down on her to quell her movements, drawing back the blanket to expose an arm, finding bare skin under her sleeve, locating a vein, pushing the thick needle in, depressing the plunger. All the while seeing the hypodermic in his hand, like a glittering glass toy held at an absurd distance, Meroka’s body stretching halfway to the horizon.

  The drug worked quickly. Her convulsions became less violent, less frequent. He knelt back and staggered to his feet, hoping he had done the right thing. Too soon to tell: even the wrong antizonal could have an initially calming effect, lulling the physician into thinking he had made the right decision. He looked at the watches again, relieved to see that they were still telling him the same story.

  He injected himself with the other syringe, and then returned both to their slots in the medical mag. If they could not be sterilised, he would at least make sure that Meroka was only injected using one syringe, and he the other.

  He began to feel an improvement almost immediately. His vision started to clear, the headache fading. There would still be grogginess for some while, a sluggish quality to his thoughts and actions, but if he had made the right choice, the antizonal would gradually free him from the immediately obvious symptoms of zone sickness. Until either the ambient conditions changed again - for better or worse - or the drug had time to wear off, which it would.

  The horses were still lying on the ground, inert as shadows. Perhaps they were dead after all - he could see no sign that they were still breathing. But the prognosis was better for Meroka. She had stopped convulsing and was now lying on her side, almost as if she had been watching him inject his own dose.

  As he walked over, she moved a hand across her face. The sky had begun to lighten in the east and now he could make out her open eyes, the blood daubed around her mouth.

  ‘I’m a mess,’ Meroka said, slurring almost to the point of incomprehension.

  ‘You bit your tongue.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘The squall came back.’ He knelt beside her. ‘Worse this time. It got you so fast you didn’t even have time to wake up before you went into palsy. I think the horses might not have made it. I took a risk and decided the shift was in the upward direction. Fortunately, it appears I was right. I injected both of us with what I hoped was the right form of antizonal.’

  ‘I feel like shit.’

  ‘You may not believe it, but that’s probably a good sign. Can you sit up?’

  Meroka did as he suggested, letting out only a single groan of discomfort. ‘Something hurts in my chest.’

  ‘You might have done some damage when you were convulsing - fractured a rib, perhaps,
or torn a muscle. I didn’t get to you fast enough.’

  ‘Guess you had problems of your own.’ She pinched her fingers into the corners of her eyes, digging out grit. ‘You did good, Cutter. Made the right judgement.’

  ‘I hope so. In daylight, I’ll give you a proper examination, see if I can work out what you’ve done. In the meantime, it’s best if we stay here and monitor our progress. If I’ve overshot, I’ll need to administer a corrective dose.’ He tapped at the row of watches on his still-exposed wrist. ‘We’ll know soon enough.’

  Meroka got to her feet. ‘That’s not going to work.’

  ‘We weren’t planning on going anywhere until your friends arrive to take me. I don’t see that anything has changed, barring the zone shift. Are you worried that they won’t be able to get here now?’

  ‘They’ve got drugs. Maybe not as good as your city stuff, but it won’t stop ’em getting through.’

  ‘What, then?’

  ‘You say we’ve shifted up?’

  ‘Most likely, yes. If we hadn’t, you and I would probably be starting to feel even worse now.’

  ‘How far up?’

  ‘I don’t know - I couldn’t make that kind of measurement, not in the time I had. That’s why I may have overshot. Or undershot, for that matter. But the severity of the symptoms ... that would suggest to me that this isn’t a small shift.’

  ‘Not the same as just going from Neon Heights to Circuit City, then?’

  ‘More severe than that, I suspect.’

  ‘Severe enough that vorgs might be able to survive here, when they couldn’t before?’

  ‘I can’t say. I haven’t had a wealth of experience with vorgs.’ He paused, the remark hanging in the air like a neon-lit challenge. ‘Should we be moving on?’

  ‘Need to look at the horses.’

  Quillon placed a restraining hand on his patient. ‘You need to stay where you are, until we know I got that dosage right.’

  Meroka brushed him aside and stood up, more steadily than he would have imagined possible. He watched her stalk off in the direction of the fallen animals, taking the occasional lurch or stumble, but somehow managing not to fall down. Either she had gained a sudden, medically unlikely tolerance for the zone transition, or she was as tough as saddle leather. Quillon couldn’t draw any measure of superiority from the fact that he felt clear-headed and in full control of his faculties. Tolerance was a genetic gift, not something you acquired through diligence and determination.

  She stopped at the fallen horses, knelt down and touched the neck of Quillon’s animal, under the hard, round swell of its cheek. She waited silently and then moved to the other one.

  ‘Both dead.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I can’t say I’m surprised, though.’

  Meroka stood up. ‘None of that medicine of yours would’ve made a difference?’

  ‘Human-specific antizonals don’t even work on monkeys, Meroka. Do you think you can make it back on foot?’

  ‘Who said anything about going back?’

  ‘That was the arrangement. You hand me over to these people who are supposed to show up. You return to Spearpoint.’

  ‘Things’re different now.’ She left the horses and started up the slope towards the higher ground, talking back to Quillon all the while. ‘Can’t stay here, not now. Not if the vorgs are on their way.’

  ‘What about the people? They’ll be expecting to find us here now.’

  ‘They’ll figure we had to shift things around. If they’re coming from that way,’ she gesticulated in the vague direction of the main path, ‘then they’re going to be in one motherfucking hurry to get away from the old boundary. There are other routes they can take, avoiding this place.’

  ‘Then we’ll never meet them.’

  ‘Didn’t say that. Just that we gotta be flexible now. There’s another meeting point, ten, twelve leagues further on. Done some business there already. That’s where they’ll head, ’less the zone shifts again.’

  ‘And if they’re not there?’

  ‘Then we need to find some new friends, someone else who can give you a ride to Fortune’s Landing.’ Meroka paused - he’d had the sense that she was going to say something else. ‘Hey, Cutter. Maybe you ought to see this.’

  ‘See what?’

  ‘Just get up here.’

  He followed the rise to where Meroka was standing, exactly where he had stood earlier that night, looking back at Spearpoint. It was still there, still illuminated against the purple- and orange-streaked dawn sky, a light-studded dagger pushed up through the skin of the world, twinkling in the cold distance, too near to make him feel as if they had travelled any significant distance, too far away to offer the promise of sanctuary.

  ‘At least the shift doesn’t seem to have affected it,’ Quillon said.

  ‘Keep watching.’

  He did, and then he saw what she meant. Because even in the few seconds that had passed since his arrival at her side, he had seen a patch of illumination go out, a swathe of lights - a whole precinct or district - turn suddenly dark. The lights did not return; there was a ribbon of blackness cutting across Spearpoint that had previously been illuminated. And as he kept watching, another ribbon appeared below that one - the lights flickering on and off this time, as if some ancient, overstrained generator had just cut out and then restarted, before losing the battle against the darkness. It didn’t end there, either. In seemingly disconnected parts of Spearpoint, squares and rectangles of darkness appeared - not just in Neon Heights but in the upper levels, taking out parts of Circuit City and even the angel spaces. The squares and rectangles pushed out fingers and filaments of blackness, joining disconnected areas, squeezing the visible light into narrow, harried motes and margins, as if the visible lights were people being herded into stifling pens by armies of dark enforcers. The motes and margins dwindled to nothing, and the pace of the shutdown appeared to be quickening, across all of Spearpoint. No part of the city was spared, irrespective of the prevalent technology. Only those low-lying gas- and fire-lit quarters did not seem to be strongly affected, but their contribution to Spearpoint’s brilliance was so limited and feeble that it was as if the darkness had already taken them. As the brighter lights died, electric, neon and plasma-banks guttering out, so the faint, ruddy glow of the lanterns and fires of Steamville and Horsetown shone unchallenged for the first time, a sombre orange-tinged radiance that only reached a small distance up Spearpoint’s rising flanks. The rest of the vast structure, save for a few motes and margins that had not yet been entirely eclipsed, was pitifully dark.

  Then he saw the angels. They had been in flight before, circling the high elevations, tiny moving dots reflecting pastel light from their glowing wings. Now they were falling, tumbling down on the buffeting thermals, wings flickering and fading into darkness.

  ‘Looks like you got out at the right time,’ Meroka said.

  For a moment he couldn’t answer her, stunned into silence by the callous offhandedness of her remark. In Quillon’s lifetime there had been squalls and shifts that had occasionally interfered with part of the city, but nothing remotely on the scale of the blackout he was now witnessing. This was a storm to rival anything that had happened in recent generations, perhaps even centuries. Nor was it some vicious but temporary spasm, the Mire lashing out with petulant fury before returning to normality. The lights would have begun to come on again by now if that were the case, but the darkness only grew more sullen with each minute that passed. A few spots of illumination remained, dotted here and there at different altitudes, but they looked likely to be choked out and swallowed at any moment.

  ‘You think I care about myself now?’ he asked. He stilled his tongue, waiting for her to say something, something he could spit back in her face. ‘That’s a city, Meroka. Thirty million people. Right now most of them are either going to be dealing with the onset of crippling zone sickness - what we just went through, only without drugs - or they’re coming to the realisatio
n that they’ve just lost every life-support system they’ve ever known. Or both.’ He paused. ‘Air. Water. Medicine. It’s all over, until the zones snap back. If they snap back.’ He spoke with a fierce resolution, barely recognising his own voice. ‘They’re either hurting or they’re going to hurt, really badly. All of them, except for the very few that anyone’s going to be able to help. The Boundary Commission was right: something big was coming. But they couldn’t have imagined anything on this scale. This is the end of everything.’

  ‘They’ll fix things, Cutter. The lights’ll come back on.’

  ‘Meroka, listen to me. I spoke to Fray about this. The authorities knew something awful was going to happen. They were waiting, getting ready for it to hit. Not some local reorganisation of boundary lines, but something big, something catastrophic. That’s why there was a drug shortage. They’ve been stockpiling antizonals, knowing this was coming at us.’

  ‘So it’ll be all right. They’re in control.’

  ‘Look,’ he said, forcing her to stare back at the darkening spire. ‘It’s getting worse. There are fewer lights than even a minute ago. The parts that held out until now are failing. Does it look to you as if there’s anyone in control? Does it look to you as if that’s a city about to pick itself up and carry on?’

  ‘It’s only been a few minutes.’

  She was right and he knew it - it was too soon to make rash assumptions - but in his heart he felt an icy conviction that things were not going to improve quickly.

  ‘Even if they stockpiled drugs, there won’t be enough to go around. They’ll be lucky if they can get enough medicine to the people supposed to be in charge, let alone to the citizens.’

  ‘It’s not our problem right now,’ Meroka said. ‘Doesn’t mean I don’t care, all right? Doesn’t mean I haven’t got a heart. But the zone change has happened here as well, only we don’t have a city around us to hide in.’

  ‘We’ve got the drugs,’ Quillon said.

  She inhaled deeply. ‘Ain’t nothing we can do for the city now. Take us two, three days to get back without the horses anyway, and what use are we going to be then? That dinky little bag of medicines won’t stretch far, will it?’