The Engineer ReConditioned Part 24

ABOUT "THE TOR-BEAST'S PRISON"

Now onto the additions to this collection. The Tor-beast's Prison was first published in Graeme Hurry's excellent Kimota (issue 13, 2000), is an off-shoot of Cowl, but not the novel, the novella that came before it. I guess I have always liked time travel ever since hiding behind the settee when Dr Who was running away from those mobile dustbins. In a story-telling context, I love the self-referencing logic of it all and how very often the story arc can be tied into a loop. And now, proving that truth is sometimes stranger than fiction: I wrote Cowl (the novella) with its tors and its tor beast, before any publisher called Tor had even impinged on my consciousness. Strange how I am now being published in America by Tor and in Britain by Macmillan's Tor UK imprint. A bit loopy really.

THE TOR-BEAST'S PRISON

I was in a park, it was spring and the birds were singing. The Earth was beneath my feet as was the black sphere; poised at the edge of the real. In two hours there would be another s.h.i.+ft and then for the ensuing fifty hours and forty-three minutes I would be confined to that black surface below its metallic sky. I had two hours in which to feed myself, two hours of sunlight and human contact, two hours to acquire some luxuries. The money in my pocket would be of no use here unless I could get to a coin dealer. The last s.h.i.+ft had put me down at the inception of the second Roman invasion of Britain, and I had taken the coins from the pouch of a legionary who had crawled into a briar patch to die, out of sight of the Iceni warrior who had split his gut. The head of the Emperor Claudius was impressed on them.

A jogger came sweating and wheezing past me with a Walkman plugged into his ears. From his dress, and from that single electrical device, I guessed this time to be the late twentieth or early twenty-first century. This man was no use to me, for people did not often go jogging with money in their pockets. I scanned around and spotted a smartly-dressed man sitting on a park bench with a briefcase beside him. He was opening a sandwich box. I sauntered over and sat beside him.

"Morning," I said.

He looked askance at me and I wondered if it was morning. I checked my surroundings. The jogger was fast disappearing and the only other people in view were a couple of teenagers near the park gates. Quickly then. I chopped him hard across the windpipe and felt cartilage give under the edge of my hand. Choking and clutching at his throat the man tried to rise. I knelt on the bench next to him and snapped his neck. As he s.h.i.+vered and convulsed into stillness I picked up his sandwich box and ate the contents. When I'd finished them, and the packet of crisps and apple, I searched him. His clothing yielded a fat wallet, cigarettes and a lighter, a pen knife, some change, and key ring from which depended a pencil torch. I lit a cigarette, following the same impulse that had made me eat the sandwiches - a hope that the other hunger would be staved off. The items I placed in the briefcase with the paperwork, pens, and scientific calculator, and then hurried from the park with it.

I try to remember when it started, but there is a haziness to my memory and a deal of inconsistency. I think I was born in the twenty-eighth century, but how is it I know things about later centuries? How is it I also know things BC that have never been written in history books? The frightening thought is that I have been to these times, experienced these things, and have been s.h.i.+fting for so long that I've simply forgotten. I would ask the sphere, but our communication is not a verbal thing.

As I reached the shops, my watch, a complicated affair that has more functions than seem feasible, displayed the hour and ten minutes remaining to me. There I purchased a sleeping bag and a camp stove, dried food and coffee, whisky and bottled water, and other items to sustain me. I acquired some warm clothing - hiking gear and a body warmer - a rucksack which I packed full of anything of conceivable use. The nylon climbing rope I packed in last was for a very particular purpose. The only weapons available for purchase were a crossbow and a large sheath knife. I spent until the wallet was empty then, heavily burdened, headed back for the park. Whilst walking I smoked more cigarettes as the craving in me grew. By then it was getting dark and I realised how wrong I had been with my greeting to the man who still lay dead on the park bench. The teenagers were waiting for me inside the entrance to the park. Call it fate.

It had to be further into the twenty-first century than I had at first thought. Any earlier and the boy would not have been armed as he was. This was Britain and projectile weapons had been banned for some time. In America any self-respecting mugger would have come at me with an automatic pistol. Here, at this time, muggers had taken to using juiced-up tasers; devices that threw out a wire-connected dart and zapped the recipient. I felt the sharp pain as it entered my chest and the flash threw everything into the negative for me. I didn't go over. The jolt merely burnt away any vestige of my remaining self-control. I dropped the pack and the other items, and took two swift paces forwards. AD humans; so weak and slow. I swatted him on the side of his head and he fell. The one to my right was only just opening his mouth to yell a warning when I caught him by the throat, my thumb on his windpipe. Pressing with my thumb and opening myself, I became a well down which the energy field generated by complex molecular chains flowed. I drank of what is the very structure of time; the field of life which encompa.s.ses where we may travel, and delimits it. The consequence of this was a disintegration of molecular bonds. The boy became a steaming slurry held up by rapidly dissolving skin and clothing. I released what remained of him and shook slime from my hand before turning to his companion. Soon finished, I took up my acquisitions and headed for my arrival point, feeling fuller and more potent than I had a few minutes before, and less human.

"Have you fed well then, Marten?"

The voice that issued out of the night possessed a jarring familiarity. I turned and saw someone standing off to my right. He was unidentifiable in the darkness.

"Is that my name?" I asked.

"It is," said the figure.

"Then what is your name?"

"Call me Hallack, if it suits you, or not. But listen first. You only have a few minutes left here and there are things you should remember," he said.

"I feel there are many things I should remember," I replied.

The man squatted down in the darkness. I moved to go towards him but he held up his hand.

"No closer to me, Marten. I would hold onto the force of my life."

"What do you have to tell me then?"

"A brief story: In the year two hundred," he gestured about himself with his hand, "the twenty-eighth century to these people, a creature was born that resembled humankind only in a rough approximation of form. It was called Cowl and it was brilliant, insane, and horrifyingly dangerous. It built an organic time machine that took it to the Nodus - the beginning of things - and there it tried to destroy the human race, or rather supplant it with a race of copies of itself. In the process it shoved itself off mainline time and we survived."

"Is that all?" I asked contemptuously, but the surge of feeling this brief story had elicited was strong indeed.

"That is all for the moment," said the man. "Your time to depart is upon you, and I don't want to be here when it comes."

I glanced at my watch; about a minute remained. When I looked up I felt that tugging at the inner core of me which I identified with travel in time. The mysterious man was gone. I moved away from him to my point of entry to this Earth. When the time on my watch reached precisely two hours, the Earth s.h.i.+fted away from me.

My new boots possessed a grip. I wouldn't have slipped over unless during an inters.p.a.ce s.h.i.+ft. Anyway, no footwear knowable would have kept me upright in such a situation. The sphere would not let me go and its attraction slammed me flat every time. If only it had done the same for my belongings.

The sphere's surface is matt and without indentation or hole. I had acquired many items of comfort during Earthward s.h.i.+fts only to lose them in inters.p.a.ce during some unknowable violent manoeuvre. Often I was pinned to the surface like a man crucified, only to see food and water, blankets and stoves go hurtling into grey s.p.a.ce. I tried suction pads, epoxy glues, welding. But the sphere goes frictionless on these occasions. Nothing remained bar myself and, of course, the tor. I knew the name, but not what it was.

I didn't know how many s.h.i.+fts ago it appeared. Long enough for the human forearm that had appeared with it, ripped off at the elbow, to rot away, and for the bones to be flung away during a s.h.i.+ft. Its appearance was that of a large coiled holly leaf fas.h.i.+oned of gla.s.s and bright metal and seemed a perilous thing for someone to wear on their arm. It stuck to the surface of the sphere like a burr picked up on the fur of a huge animal. I didn't know why. This time I decided to use it as an anchor point for my belongings.

After securing my belongings to the tor with the nylon climbing rope, I spread out the sleeping bag and set up the stove. It seems too prosaic to mention that I enjoyed my first cup of tea in ... an age. I felt low of course. The huge potency and euphoria I had felt at draining the two boys was gone as it always went as soon as my feet touched the black surface. I felt guilty as well and tried to buck myself with the only consolation I had, that is, should I kill a direct ancestor to myself in this manner I'll shove myself off the main line and straight down the probability slope. This would confine me to the past of a line where I was never born and where time travel would be impossible. I would end up at some point in an alternate history and the sphere would be unable to draw me back ... I think.

Twelve hours. The manoeuvres were coming earlier and earlier. Luckily I was on my back with the sleeping bag underneath me when the cold wind hit. I felt it only momentarily before I was seemingly encased in invisible steel. For a second I felt victorious as I had managed to clasp the neck of the whisky bottle at the last moment. Unfortunately the rest of the bottle was out of the field and it smashed as I was slammed back. I couldn't see the rest of my acquisitions. As I lay there all I could see was the grey sky swirling in mind-numbing patterns and the occasional flicker of a black shape. One of those black shapes became distinct as a human form before being swept away. This was the first time I had seen this and it opened a world of speculation. Was I being pursued? If so, why? And: do my pursuers know who I am? As the sphere s.h.i.+fted I felt its rage and its jealous protectiveness of me. I also heard the whispering murmur that is the nearest it comes to speech and, understanding none of it, was affected at a visceral level by it.

The manoeuvres lasted a further twelve hours. After that time I was delighted to discover my rucksack still secured to the tor. The stove was gone, all but one of the water bottles burst, and the crossbow smashed, but I had enough left to bring some comfort to my remaining hours before the next Earthward s.h.i.+ft. On the b.u.t.ton, twenty-six hours later, that occurred.

I stood on the black surface and waited while the grey faded to cloud-scudded blue and that black surface softened under me and became the wet sand of a beach. The gentle slap of waves encroached on my hearing and the call of a gull complemented my loneliness. Behind me were mud cliffs gradually being eroded by the sea. The presence of fossil belemnites and ammonites in the nearby rocks informed me that I had not gone too far back. When I walked to the head of the beach and inspected the flotsam and jetsam, a spherical c.o.ke can with its hologram surface providing the illusion of a fish swimming inside, showed me I must be somewhere and when in the late twenty-first century. I began to walk along the beach, feeling no inclination to go anywhere for supplies and definitely disinclined to encounter any people. The hunger was growing in me with alarming rapidity even then. I did not think I would be able to control it in even the limited fas.h.i.+on I had before. I had gone only a matter of paces when the woman called to me from the cliff top.

"Marten!" she shouted, and I a.s.sumed she was calling to some child. "Marten! Wait, I'll come down to you!"

She was calling to me - I could not deny this. Was that my name then? I'd heard it recently hadn't I? I waited for her, one part of me wanting to shout a warning to her, the other part of me avid for her presence. Some distance up the beach she found a path down to me and then came jogging along the beach to me. Her black hair was cropped short around a face as sharp-featured and white as my own. Her clothing had the look of an acceleration suit. She was not of this century. I held up my hand when she was twenty paces from me.

"Stay there. You are not safe," I said, both glad and disappointed when she slowed to a walk. She was puzzled and angry.

"None of us are safe. What happened? Did you use it?"

I could not fathom her question.

"Don't come any closer. If you come closer I might kill you."

"Hallack said you had it under control now," she told me, and continued walking towards me.

"Who are you?" I asked.

"Bellan, you know that ... oh my G.o.d!"

She turned at the last moment, perhaps suddenly realising her danger, at least that is what I thought then. Her turning to flee set me moving. Suddenly I was just a hunting animal. I brought her face down in the sand and closed my hand on the back of her neck.

"The beast, Marten! It's not you! Try to remember!"

These cryptic words were curtailed by her screams. She was definitely from a later century - stronger and more complex, her force was a rich and varied thing. She took a long time to start coming apart, but I was sure I was done when I finally got off her and stepped back, for her flesh was slewing from a collapsing skeleton. However, she managed to crawl for a couple of yards making liquid gasps before she finally deliquesced. I couldn't figure her words as I walked on, and when I finally returned to the sphere its muttering was louder and I found it difficult to remember.

There was a time, I know, when there was no communication. I stood on that black surface below the iron sky and s.h.i.+fted and travelled. I fed often. I know this. Could it be that I am deluding myself? Perhaps I am not human. Perhaps humanity is a superficial sheen I have acquired throughout my feedings? Why then this attachment to the twenty-eighth century? This one question convinces me that I am human and perhaps only lost that humanity for a little while.

Seventeen s.h.i.+fts pa.s.sed. The manoeuvres came sooner and sooner so that it seemed my feet only had to touch the black surface and I would be slammed on my back for periods of ten to the full fifty hours. Every Earth-s.h.i.+ft I came through exhausted and hungry and I killed and fed. On the seventeenth s.h.i.+ft the sphere nearly lost me. For a time I was hurtling alone through limbo before it picked me up again and dragged me on. After this s.h.i.+ft I felt the hunger but possessed the will not to feed. Upon the sphere again I saw that my belongings were gone. The tor had been ripped away and lost during the same manoeuvres that had nearly lost me my place. Of a sudden I remembered the woman, shapes I had seen in the greyness, people calling to me and trying to tell me something. Returning to me with almost the force of faith was that I was a prisoner and that once the opposite had applied. It was in the dunes of a desert in an age when craft like uprooted buildings tumbled through the sky that I re-encountered the truth.

"Marten, here at last."

I turned and saw a man and a woman seated side by side on the dune-face nearby. He wore the robes of a Turag and his eyes were piercing green. I knew him, and in that moment of knowing him I remembered an all too brief conversation. She ... she wore something like an acceleration suit and dark cropped hair framing a familiar thin face. Seventeen s.h.i.+fts ago I had killed her: Bellan. I looked to the man.

"You spoke of Cowl," I said.

He gestured me closer. It seemed he was not afraid of me now. I moved closer trying to plumb that familiarity of his features. He gestured to the sand at his feet. Before sitting I glanced at Bellan. She smiled at me and I felt a hand grasp my insides and squeeze. I needed no explanations of what had happened. I have been travelling randomly in time long enough. In her existence she had yet to have that fatal encounter.

"As we speak you will remember," she said.

He said, "Without the tor there it does not have so close a link outside and will not have as much control over you."

"What ... what are you talking about?"

"First another little story. We told each other such, quite often," he said.

"Who are you?" I asked.

"You know my name."

"It is Hallack, but that means I only know your name." I glanced at the woman. I dared not say that I already knew hers.

"I am Bellan," she told me. I could not meet her eyes when she smiled again.

Hallack said, "You will remember ... now, I shall continue where I left off. It has only been moments for me ... Cowl's organic time machine, or complex time machine, took him way back to the Nodus at such a rate that he managed to overshoot it and thus remain partially inaccessible to his enemies, i.e. the rest of humanity. Back there he took the young beast he had fas.h.i.+oned; a creature for which time was like the air to a bird, a creature that hunted in time, a creature that fished in time for prey. How to describe this monster?" He looked to Bellan and she took up his narrative.

"Originally it was a distinct and describable creature, but it grew into something vast: landscapes of beast, a whole alternate occupied, Mandlebrotian endless feeding mouths and tendrils. On its back grow scales like holly leaves of gla.s.sy metal that curl when they fall away into perilous bracelets. Who put these bracelets on can travel in time, usually directly into the creature's mouths. Cowl sent these items uptime to collect samplings of future humanity to see if his efforts were succeeding. These items were called tors; complex organic time machines in themselves; scales from the back of the torbeast."

I visualised this description and knew that I had indeed seen this creature somewhere, somewhen. I thought of the tor that had lain on the surface of the sphere.

"Why do you tell me this?" I said, gazing at each of them. "What connection do I have with this Cowl, or with this torbeast?"

He replied, "How do you kill a creature that travels in and manipulates time by instinct? You cannot. Cowl is gone. He sits in an alternate from which he cannot travel, forever gnawing on his own rage. The beast was a danger to us all so we laid our plans and we sacrificed a million lives to imprison it."

"You still have not told me."

"For fifty hours out of every fifty-two you are trapped on the surface of its prison. At one time you were its warder, until it drew one of its own scales to the surface, and until it began to speak to you," said Bellan.

"I would be free of it," I said, quickly.

"It is why we are here," said Hallack.

"We've been following you for a long time. The beast feeds through you," she nodded at my sudden guilty expression. "Meagre fare for it, but enough to empower its leaps through time and keep it ahead of us, and enough, should you feed it enough, for it eventually to break from its prison."

How could I tell her the true source of the sick guilt I felt?

Hallack pulled a cloth package from behind himself and unwrapped it. He revealed a tor.

"You must place this upon your arm. It is all we have. Our own machines are too slow and too crude. It is ironic that only with what it used to entrap you may you escape."

The sphere was below me; poised on the edge of the real. I could hear a muttering. Perhaps I fooled myself. Perhaps it was really a distant snarling. He rolled the tor down the dune-face to me.

"Put it on and s.h.i.+ft to another time. Escape it, Marten," said Hallack.

It was thorned gla.s.s and silver; a perilous thing to slip onto my forearm. I took it up. It was heavy and it cut my hands. The pain seemed distant. I gazed up at Hallack and Bellan. They were backing away up the dune face. Behind them flowing irises were opening in the air as they returned to their machines. I slid the tor over my right forearm. Skin peeled and flesh parted like earth before the plough. I groaned at the sudden increase in pain as blood jetted from slitted arteries. The pain was intense, but it seemed to promise something else. Very quickly the blood ceased to flow. I studied the thing. It was bonding to my flesh, and the bones beneath, just as I knew it would. Then the tor, parasitic form that it was, cleaned my blood for me, scrubbed my mind, made me a more wholesome beast on which it could feed. And memory returned like falling wall.

Oh Hallack my brother. Dear friend Bellan. Below me the muttering from the sphere became a raging scream. I s.h.i.+fted as it s.h.i.+fted Earthward and tried to s.n.a.t.c.h me up. Suddenly I was falling into the grey abyss, through a tunnel of bones. Someone fell past me screaming my name, then the sphere was falling upon me. I s.h.i.+fted sideways and saw the Earth as through a distorting lens; its continents on fire. I felt something groping for me, unable to find me, but well able to find the tor. I s.h.i.+fted again and hurled myself for the world. All my will was concentrated on this act. All its will was exerted to hold me back. Something had to give and what gave was my arm. I felt it snap and tear, and I felt the tendon rip away from somewhere inside my shoulder. There was no pain at first. I felt and heard its muttering and raging as it receded from me, lost me, and I lay my head upon a flat rock while my arm stump bled into the matted gra.s.s all around.

"Marten!"

Hallack, my brother. I regained a delirious consciousness, watched him shooting some sort of weapon into the air to scare-off a hunting smilodon. He bound my arm and talked all the while. He said how we must move quickly to find Bellan, before her field loci went beyond the detection of his own.

"The late twenty-first," I managed and he stared at me in a puzzled way. "That's where she is."

"How do you know, Marten?" he asked.

"Because that's where I killed her."

Perhaps we can get there ... in time.

ABOUT "TIGER TIGER"

Honest, I didn't know of the Alfred Bester one of the same name until long after I'd written this (which is surprising with the amount of SF I've read), but then probably Mr Bester was not the first to snitch those two words as a t.i.tle, and I certainly won't be the last. In this story the tigers came first, then the t.i.tle, and it being an 'Owner' story it seemed almost inevitable that I had to put in that line from the poem at the start. The Owner is like the Old Testament G.o.d, who is, I suppose, everyone's expression of the ultimate power fantasy. And that's his appeal. No matter how liberal or well-meaning any of us is, we want that power, though many of us would never admit that.

TIGER TIGER.

'What immortal hand or eye Could frame thy fearful symmetry?'

A tiger had taken the orphan Jeleel Welder down by the Wishpool. Her blood speckled the Rhode's dark green leaves and they found her soul, on its unbreakable silver chain, depending from its roots. Sapher found tracks near the pool and told their story to the villagers.

"It took her here while she washed Baum's s.h.i.+rts. She fought it here and it dragged her to here and this blood is where it bit her. It is arterial blood and there is much of it. She probably died before it took her deep into the Rhode and ate her," he said.