Dancers at the End of Time (41 page)

It was then that Lord Jagged lifted his sensitive head and paused, like a fox catching wind of its hunters. He raised a hand, and Jherek and Mrs. Underwood hesitated, watching as the others ran up the steps.

"A remarkable —" Bishop Castle vanished. The Iron Orchid began to laugh and then she, too, vanished. My Lady Charlotina took a step backward, and vanished. And then the Duke of Queens, his expression amused and expectant, vanished.

Donna Isobella sat down on the steps and screamed.

They could hear Donna Isobella's screams from several streets away as Lord Jagged led them hurriedly into a maze of little cobbled alleys. "We'll be next, if we're not lucky," he said. "Morphail Effect bound to manifest itself. My own fault — absolutely my own fault. Quickly…"

"Where are we going, Jagged?"

"Time machine. The one you originally came in. Repaired. Ready to go. But the fluctuations caused by recent comings and goings could have produced serious consequences. Brannart knew what he was talking about. Hurry!"

"I am not sure," said Mrs. Underwood, "that I wish to accompany either of you. You have caused me considerable pain, you know, not to mention…"

"Mrs. Underwood," said Lord Jagged of Canaria softly, "you have no choice. The alternative is dreadful, I assure you."

Convinced by his tone, she said nothing further for the moment.

They came to an alley full of bleak, festering buildings close to the river. At the far end of the alley, a few men were beginning to move boxes onto a cart. They could see the glint of the dirty Thames water.

"I feel faint," complained Mrs. Underwood. "I cannot keep us this pace, Mr. Jackson. I have had no sleep to speak of in two nights."

"We are there," he said. He took a key from his pocket and inserted it into the lock of a door of mouldering oak. The door creaked as he pushed it inward. Lord Jagged closed the door, reached up to take an oil lamp from a hook. He struck a match and lit the lamp.

As the light grew brighter, Jherek saw that they stood in quite a large room. The floor was stone and the whole place smelled of mildew. He saw rats running swiftly along the beams in the roof.

Jagged had crossed to a great pile of rags and debris and began to pull them to the ground. He had lost some of his composure in his haste.

"What 
is
 your part in this, Mr. Jackson?" said Mrs. Underwood, averting her eyes from the rats. "I am right, am I not, in believing that you have to an extent manipulated the destinies of myself and Mr.

Carnelian?"

"Subtly, I hope, madam," said Jagged, still tugging at the heap. "For so abstract a thing, Time keeps a severe eye upon our activities. I had to be careful. It is why I adopted two main disguises in this world.

I have travelled in Time a great deal, as you have probably guessed. Both to the past — and the future, such as it exists at all in my world. I knew about the 'End of Time' before ever Yusharisp brought the news to our planet. I also discovered that there are certain people who are, by virtue of a particular arrangement of genes, not so prone to the Morphail Effect as are others. I conceived a means of averting disaster for some of us…"

"Disaster, Jagged?"

"The end of all of us, dear Jherek. I could not bear to think that, having achieved such balance, we should perish. We had learned, you see, how to live. And it was for nothing. Such an irony was unbearable to me, the lover of ironies. I spent many, many years in this century — the furthest back I could go in my own machine — running complicated checks, taking a variety of people into the future, seeing how, as it were, they 'took' when returned to their own time. None did. I regret their fate. Only Mrs. Underwood stayed, apparently virtually immune to the Morphail Effect!"

"So you, sir, were my abductor!" she cried.

"I am afraid so. There!" He pulled the last of the coverings free, revealing the spherical time machine which Brannart Morphail had loaned to Jherek on his first trip to the Dawn Age.

"I am hoping," he continued, "that some of us will survive the End of Time. And you can help me.

This time machine can be controlled. It will take you back to our own age, Jherek, where we can continue with our experiments. At least," he added, "it should. The instability of the megaflow at present is worrying. But we must hope. We must hope. Now, the two of you, enter the machine. There are breathing masks for both."

"Mr. Jackson," said Mrs. Underwood. "I will not be bullied any further." She folded her arms across her bosom. "Neither will I allow myself to be mesmerized by your quasi-scientific lecturings!"

"I think he is right, Mrs. Underwood," said Jherek hesitantly. "And the reason I came to find you was because you 
are
 prone to the Morphail Effect. At least in a time machine we stand a chance of going to an age of our choice."

"Remember how Jherek escaped hanging," said Lord Jagged. He had by now opened the circular outer door of the time machine. "That was the Morphail Effect. It would have been a paradox if he had died in that particular way in this age. I knew it. That was why I lent myself to what appeared to you, Mrs. Underwood, to be his destruction. There is proof of my good-will. He is not dead."

Reluctantly, she began to move with Jherek towards the time machine. "I shall be able to return?"

she asked.

"Almost certainly. But I am hoping that you will not wish to when you have heard me out."

"You will accompany us?"

"My own machine is not a quarter of a mile from here. I must use it, for I cannot afford to abandon it. It is a very sophisticated model. It does not even register on Brannart's instruments. As soon as you are on your way, I will go to it and follow you. I promise you, Mrs. Underwood, that I am not deceiving you. I will reveal all I know upon our return to the 'End of Time.' "

"Very well."

"You will not find the interior of the machine pleasant," Jherek told her as he helped her into the airlock. "You must hold your breath for a moment." They crouched together in the cylinder. He handed her a breathing mask. "Fit this over your head, like so…"

He smiled as he heard her muffled complaints.

"Fear not, Mrs. Underwood. Our great adventure is almost ended. Soon we shall be back in our own dear villa, with roses climbing round the door, with our pipes and our slippers and our water closets!

King Darby and Queen Joan in Camelot!" The rest of his effusion was muffled, even to his own ears, by the necessity of putting on his mask as the airlock began to fill with milky fluid. Jherek wished that there had been rubber suits of the kind normally used in the machine, for the stuff felt unpleasant and was soaking rapidly through their clothes. There was a look of outraged disgust, in fact, in Mrs. Underwood's eyes.

The machine filled rapidly and they drifted into the main chamber. Here certain instruments were already flashing green and red alternately, swimming about his head. They floated, unable to control their movements, in the thick liquid. As his body turned slowly, he saw that Mrs. Underwood had shut her eyes. Blue and yellow lights began to flash. The liquid became increasingly cloudy.

Figures, which he could not read, began to register on the display panels. A white light throbbed and he knew that the machine was on the very brink of beginning its journey into the future. He relaxed.

Happiness filled him. Soon he would be home.

The white light burned his eyes. He became dizzy. Pain began to nag at his nerves and he stopped himself from screaming, for fear that she would hear him and be troubled.

The liquid grew dark until it was the colour of blood. His senses fled him.

He woke up knowing that the journey must be over. He tried to turn himself round so that he could see if Mrs. Underwood were awake. He could feel her body resting against his leg.

But then, surprisingly, the process began again. The green lights gave way to red, to blue and to yellow. The white light shrieked. The pain increased, the liquid became dark again.

And again he fainted.

He woke up. This time he stared directly into Mrs. Underwood's pale, unconscious face. He tried to reach out to take her hand and, as if this action were enough to begin it, the process started again. The green and red alternating lights, the blue and yellow lights, the blinding whiteness, the pain, the loss of his awareness. He woke up. The machine was shuddering. From somewhere there came a grating whine.

This time he screamed, in spite of himself, and he thought that Mrs. Underwood was also screaming. The white light throbbed. Suddenly it was totally black. Then a green light flickered. It went out. A red light flickered and went out. Blue and yellow lights flashed.

And then Jherek Carnelian knew that Lord Jagged's fears had been realized. There had been too many attempts at once to manipulate Time — and Time was refusing further manipulation. They were adrift. They were shifting back and forth at random on the timeflow. They were as much victims of the Morphail Effect as if they had never entered the time machine. Time was taking its vengeance on those who had sought to conquer it.

Jherek's one consolation, as he fainted again, was that at least he and Mrs. Underwood were together.

"Mr. Carnelian! Please, Mr. Carnelian, try to wake up!"

"I am awake," he groaned, but he did not open his eyes. His skin felt pleasantly warm. There was a delicious smell in his nostrils. There was silence.

"Then open your eyes, please, Mr. Carnelian," she demanded. "I need your advice."

He obeyed her. He blinked. "What an extraordinarily deep blue," he said of the sky. "So we are back, after all. I became a trifle pessimistic, I must admit, when the machine seemed to be malfunctioning.

How did we get out?"

"I pulled you out, and it was as well I did." She made a gesture. He looked and saw that the time machine was in even worse condition than when he had landed in the 19th century. Mrs. Underwood was brushing sand from her tattered dress of maroon velvet. "That awful stuff," she said. "Even when it dries it makes everything stiff."

He sat up, smiling. "It will be the work of a moment to supply you with fresh clothes. I still have most of my power rings. I wonder who made this. It is ravishing!"

The scenery stretched for miles, all waving fern-like plants of a variety of sizes, from the small ones carpeting the ground to very large ones as big as poplars; and not far from the beach on which they lay was a lazy sea stretching to the horizon. In the far distance behind them was a line of low, gentle hills.

"It is a remarkable reproduction," she agreed. "Rather better in detail than most of those made by your people."

"You know the original?"

"I studied such things once. My father was of the modern school. He did not reject Darwin out of hand."

"Darwin loved him?" Jherek's thoughts had returned to his favourite subject.

"Darwin was a scientist, Mr. Carnelian," she said impatiently.

"And he made a world like this?"

"No, no. It isn't anything really to do with him. A figure of speech."

"What is a 'figure of speech?' "

"I will explain that later. My point was that this landscape resembles the world at a very early age of its geological development. It is tropical and typical ferns and plants are in evidence. It is probably the Ordovician period of the Paleozoic, possibly the Silurian. If this were a perfect reproduction those seas you observe would team with edible life. There would be clams and so on, but no large beasts.

Everything possible to sustain life, and nothing very much to threaten it!"

"I can't imagine who could have made it," said Jherek. "Unless it was Lady Voiceless. She built a series of early worlds a while ago — the Egyptian was her best."

"Such a world as this would have flourished millions of years before Egypt," said Mrs. Underwood, becoming lyrical. "Millions of years before Man — before the dinosaurs, even. Ah, it is paradise! You see, there are no signs at all of animal life as we know it."

"There hasn't actually been any animal life, as such for a good while," said Jherek. "Only that which we make for ourselves."

"You aren't following me very closely, Mr. Carnelian."

"I am sorry. I will try. I want my moral education to begin as soon as possible. There are all sorts of things you can teach me."

"I regard 
that
," she said, "as my duty. I could not justify being here otherwise." She smiled to herself. "After all, I come from a long line of missionaries."

"A new dress?" he said.

"If you please."

He touched a power ring; the emerald.

Nothing happened.

He touched the diamond and then the amethyst. And nothing at all happened. He was puzzled. "I have never known my power rings to fail me," he said.

Mrs. Underwood cleared her throat. "It is becoming increasingly hot. Suppose we stroll into the shade of those ferns?"

He agreed. As they walked, he tried his power rings again, shaking his head in surprise.

"Strange. Perhaps when the time machine began to go awry…"

"It went wrong, the time machine?"

"Yes. Plainly shifting back and forth in time at random. I had completely despaired of returning here."

"Here?"

"Oh, dear," he said.

"So," she said, seating herself upon a reddish-coloured rock and staring around her at the mile upon mile of Silurian ferns, "we could have travelled backwards, could we, Mr. Carnelian?"

"I would say that we could have, yes."

"So much for your friend Lord Jagged's assurances," she said.

"Yes." He sucked his lower lip. "But he was afraid we had left things too late, if you recall."

"He was correct." Again she cleared her throat.

Jherek cleared his. "If this is the age you think it is, am I to gather there are no people to be found here at all."

"Not one. Not a primate."

"We are at the beginning of Time?"