At the mountain’s peak he paused to look back at Sauros again, and considered how arrogant were so many assumptions about that place. Gazing down the rear slope, he observed a swathe of devastation cut through the vegetation by a herd of sauropods, and the ensuing activity which that elicited from the attendant carnosaurs. But that would represent no problem—he now recognized his surroundings and no longer needed the locator. The communicator lay only a hundred metres below him and, by taking the slope in long bounds, he shortly reached it.
Like the wing of a downed aircraft, the granite outcrop speared up from the spread of cycads crowding this west face of the mountain. Arriving there, he pocketed his locator and reached out to press his hand against the grey rock face. Immediately the stone took on a translucence and a vorpal manifold rose to the surface to meet and bind with his hand. In the darkness behind it, a beetle-black non-face turned towards him.
‘The attack was unsuccessful,’ said Cowl.
Palleque nodded. ‘Goron had made preparations of which no one but he was aware.’
‘He used a displacement generator.’
‘I’ve since learnt he had them placed at intervals inside Sauros, when it was first built in New London. I now have their positions mapped.’ Palleque took his palm computer from his belt and pressed its interface patch against the necessary position in the manifold, squirting the information across. As he took it away again, he scanned about himself, suspicion wrinkling his brow.
Cowl bowed his head towards something, then raising it up said, ‘For this to be of any use to me I will need to know a future, Sauros-time shield frequency.’
Palleque grinned. ‘Now here’s the good news. You won’t even need that. When Sauros—’
The energy discharge hit the rock like a thunderclap. Shrieking, Palleque staggered back, his hand pulling free of the manifold, but leaving most of its incinerated skin behind. Down on his knees he groped for his weapon with his free hand, while Cowl looked on.
Stepping out from the surrounding cycads came Goron and four other Heliothane.
‘You treacherous fucking snake!’ spat Goron.
Palleque pulled his weapon free, but another shot slammed into his bicep and spun him round, the weapon bouncing from his grasp.
Goron turned to the fading image of Cowl. ‘By all means, please, come and visit us. If you don’t, we’ll be coming for you.’
From Cowl there issued a hissing snarl. Goron raised his weapon and fired it straight into the manifold. The communicator fused on solid rock, all translucence behind it disappearing. Goron turned to his companions and directed two of them towards Palleque. ‘I don’t want him to die or suffer any unnecessary pain now.’ He glanced at the rock. ‘That will come later.’
She was coming out of it. Her legs felt cold and numb where they lay in the water, but at last she was able to move her arms a little and, driving her elbows into a scree of rock flakes and broken rainbow shell, she was able to drag herself clear of the cold brine and roll over onto her back. Then, still gasping, she gazed up at an anaemic blue sky smeared with washes of white cloud. Her body felt cored with lead, and as feeling returned to her extremities they felt bloated. But that core was diminishing with her every breath. Eventually she managed to heave herself up onto her knees and survey her surroundings.
The rock pool her legs had been soaking in was bright with anemones, odd shellfish, red algal growth and green weed like discarded tissue paper. She shuddered to see that it also was full of movement: trilobites sculled about in its depths like great flattened woodlice. This pool was just one amid many others left by the retreating tide, in a band of rock lying between the slope of the beach she was now kneeling on and the sand flats stretching out beyond to the distant spume of the sea. Nothing else was visible to her yet.
‘How did you do that?’ she managed, when she could get enough spit into her mouth.
I might as easily ask you the same question.
‘No but… you never said…’
Muse is linked deeply into you and it is linking deeper all the time. Perhaps two time-shifts back I became aware that its monitoring systems were connecting up with your… tor. The last time you shifted I saw… felt how you did it, and knew that I could do it too.
Suddenly Polly felt invaded by the presence of Nandru—something she had never felt before while all she could hear was his voice. Even when attending the calls of nature she had not felt his scrutiny, as he seemed to retreat to some place of his own on such occasions, as if only making his presence felt when she required it. But then she decided she was being histrionic. Nandru had just rescued her from having the tor cut away from her—along with a chunk of flesh sufficient for Thote’s purpose — so he had probably saved her life.
‘Thank you,’ she said, at last heaving herself to her feet and getting a wider view of her surroundings.
Polly was now seeing what she would have called desert, or perhaps tundra, for only these landscapes did she associate with such an absence of life. However, the temperature here was that of a balmy spring day, and the air felt neither freeze-dried nor baked dry of moisture. Under these conditions, the landscape — strewn with boulders, drifts of powdered and flaking stone, blackened with falls of volcanic ash and divided by a sparkling river—should technically be burgeoning with life. The only evidence of such was the occasional smear of green to leaven a monochrome vista. Walking woodenly, Polly headed for the river.
There was nothing alive in the sparkling torrent. Stooping down, Polly scooped up water in the container, and drank. The liquid was cold and tasted of soda. She hadn’t drunk anything so sweet in… a long time. She then refilled the container, pocketed it, and headed back for the seashore, wondering when she would die of shellfish poisoning.
With his breath held, and his understanding of the tor’s operation complete, Tack willed it to materialize its pseudo-mantisal. But that failed when a lack of breath forced him to will it back into the real. He folded out of interspace in midair, the straps of each pack grasped firmly in each hand, and plummeted into reedlike growth and lukewarm water. Then, treading over a mat of rhizomes and stirring up black silt, he waded towards an island made of either mud or rock, which he had glimpsed as he fell. An hour later, exhausted, and with hunger engendered by the parasite on his arm eating into his guts, he reached the mudflat abutting a contorted hook of stone. Crawling up across the muddy slope, still dragging his packs behind him, he finally reached the remains of a lava flow and rested gratefully.
Saphothere must already be dead, or rather would be dead some indeterminate time in Tack’s current mainline future. It didn’t help to contemplate that too deeply as, without expending amounts of energy not available to the Heliothane this far back, time travel was not accurate enough to correct such errors—to save Saphothere’s life. Now only the mission remained.
After a moment Tack stood up. Some distance ahead a gigantic tree reared out of the green battle between horsetails and ferns in a wayward promontory of forest hemmed in by the endless sea of sword-shaped emerald reeds. Gazing at this scene, Tack felt disquiet: that tree was not the right shape, the horsetails were tentacles beating at the ferns in seasonal slow motion, and the ferns themselves grew chaotically from their rhizome trunks. This seemed brute growth without complexity, a war rather than an environment, as if balance of coexistence had yet to be found. And the reeds were like dumb spectators to it all.