Dancers at the End of Time (42 page)

"For want of a better description, yes." Her lovely fingers drummed rapidly against the rock. She did not seem pleased.

"Oh dear," he said, "we shall never see the Iron Orchid again!"

She brightened a little at this. "We'll have to make the best of it, I suppose, and hope that we are rescued in due course."

"The chances are slight, Mrs. Underwood. Nobody has ever gone this far back. You heard Lord Jagged say that your age was the furthest he could reach into the past."

She straightened her shoulders rather as she had done that time when they stood upon the bank of the river. "We must build a hut, of course — preferably 
two
 huts — and we must test which of the life, such as it is, is edible. We must make a fire and keep it lit. We must see what the time machine will give us that is useable. Not much I would assume."

"You are certain that this is the period…?"

"Mr. Carnelian! Your power rings do not work. We have no other evidence. We must assume that we are marooned in the Silurian."

"The Morphail Effect is supposed to send us into the future," he said, "not the past."

"This is certainly no future we might expect from 1896, Mr. Carnelian."

"No." A thought came to him. "I was discussing the possibility of the cyclic nature of Time with Brannart Morphail and Lord Jagged quite recently. Could we have plunged so far into the future that we are, as it were, at the start again?"

"Such theories cannot mean a great deal to us," she told him "in our present circumstances."

"I agree. But it would explain 
why
 we are in them, Mrs. Underwood."

She plucked a frond from over her head and began to fan herself, deliberately ignoring him.

He drew a deep breath of the rich Silurian (or possibly Ordivician) air. He stretched himself out luxuriously upon the ground. "You yourself described this world as Paradise, Mrs. Underwood. In what better place could two lovers find themselves?"

"Another abstract idea, Mr. Carnelian? You surely do not refer to yourself and myself?"

"Oh, but I do!" he said dreamily. "We could begin the human race all over again! A whole new cycle. This time we shall flourish 
before
 the dinosaurs. This is Paradise and we are Adolf and Eva! Or do I mean Alan and Edna?"

"I think you refer to Adam and Eve, Mr. Carnelian. If you do, then you blaspheme and I wish to hear no more!"

"Blas-what?"

"Pheme."

"Is that also to do with Morality?"

"I suppose it is, yes."

"Could you explain, perhaps, a little further," he asked enticingly.

"You offend against the Deity. It is a profanity to identify yourself with Adam in that way."

"What about Eve?"

"Eve, too."

"I am sorry."

"You weren't to know." She continued to fan herself with the frond. "I suppose we had best start looking for food. Aren't you hungry?"

"I am hungry for your kisses," he said romantically, and he stood up.

"Mr. Carnelian!"

"Well," he said, "we can 'marry' now, can't we? Mr. Underwood said as much."

"We are not divorced. Besides, even if I were divorced from Mr. Underwood, there is no reason to assume that I should wish to give myself in marriage to you. Moreover, Mr. Carnelian, there is nobody in the Silurian Age 
to
 marry us." She seemed to think she had produced the final argument, but he had not really understood her.

"If we were to complete my moral education," he said, "would you marry me then?"

"Perhaps — if everything else was properly settled — which seems unlikely now."

He walked slowly back to the beach again and stared out over the sluggish sea, deep in thought. At his feet a small mollusc began to crawl through the sand. He watched it for a while and then, hearing a movement behind him, turned. She was standing there. She had made herself a hat of sorts from fern-leaves. She looked extremely pretty.

"I am sorry if I upset you, Mr. Carnelian," she said kindly. "You are rather more direct than I have been used to, you see. I know that your manner is not deliberately offensive, that you are, in some ways, more innocent than I. But you have a way of saying the wrong thing — or sometimes the right thing in the wrong way."

He shrugged. "That is why I am so desperate for my moral education to begin. I love you, Mrs.

Amelia Underwood. Perhaps it was Lord Jagged who encouraged me to affect the emotion in the first place, but since then it has taken hold of me. I am its slave. I can console myself, of course, but I cannot stop loving you."

"I am flattered."

"And you have 
said
 that you loved me, but now you try to deny it."

"I am still 
Mrs
. Underwood," she pointed out gently.

The small mollusc began, tentatively, to crawl onto his foot. "And I am still Jherek Carnelian," he replied.

She noticed the mollusc. "Aha! Perhaps this one is edible."

As she reached down to inspect it, he stopped her with his hand on her shoulder. "No," he said.

"Let it go."

She straightened up, smiling gently at him. "We cannot afford to be sentimental, Mr. Carnelian."

His hand remained for an instant on her shoulder. The worn, stiffened velvet was beginning to grow soft again. "We cannot afford not to be, I think."

Her grey eyes were serious; then she laughed. "Oh, very well. Let us wait, then, until we are 
extremely
 hungry." Gaily, with her black buttoned boots kicking at the fine sand of that primordial shore, she began to stride along beside the thick and salty sea.

"All things bright and beautiful," she sang, "all creatures great and small./ All things wise and wonderful:/ The Lord God made them all!"

There was a certain defiance in her manner, a certain spirited challenge to the inevitable, which made Jherek gasp with devotion.

"Self-denial, after all," she called back over her shoulder, "is good for the soul!'

"Ah!" He began to run after her and then slowed before he had caught up. He stared around him at the calm, Silurian world, struck suddenly by the freshness of it all, by the growing understanding that they really were the only two mammals on this whole planet. He looked up at the huge, golden sun and he blinked in its benign glare. He was full of wonder.

A little later, panting, sweating, laughing, he fell in beside her. He noticed that her expression was almost tender as she turned to look at him.

He offered her his arm.

After a second's hesitation, she took it.

They strolled together through the hot, Silurian afternoon.

"Now, Mrs. Underwood," he said contentedly, "what 
is
 'self-denial'?"

"I really do think, Mr. Carnelian, that we should at least 
try
 them raw, don't you?"

Mrs. Amelia Underwood, with the flat of her left hand, stroked thick auburn hair back over her ear and, with her right hand, arranged her tattered skirts about her ankles. The gesture was almost petulant; the glint in her grey eye was possibly wolfish. There was, if nothing else, something over-controlled in the manner in which she perched primly upon her block of virgin limestone and watched Jherek Carnelian as he crouched, elbows and knees pressed in the sand of a Palaeozoic beach, and sweated in the heat of the huge Silurian (or possibly Devonian) sun.

Perhaps for the thousandth time he was trying to strike two of his power-rings together to make a spark to light the heap of half-dried ferns he had, in a mood of ebullience long since dissipated, arranged several hours before.

"But you told me," he murmured, "that you could not bear to consider … There! Was that a spark?

Or just a glint?"

"A glint," she said, "I think."

"We must not despair, Mrs. Underwood." His optimism was uncharacteristically strained. Again he struck ring against ring.

Around him were scattered the worn and broken fragments of fronds which he had earlier tried to rub together at her suggestion. As power-ring clacked on power-ring, Mrs. Underwood winced. In the silence of this Silurian (if it was Silurian) afternoon the sound had an effect upon her nerves she would not previously have credited; she had never seen herself as one of those over-sensitive women who populated the novels of Marie Corelli. She had always considered herself robust, singularly healthy. She sighed. Doubtless the boredom contributed something to her state of mind.

Jherek echoed her sigh. "There's probably a knack to it," he admitted. "Where are the trilobites?"

He stared absently around him at the ground.

"Most of them have crawled back into the sea, I think," she told him coldly. "There are two brachiopods on your coat." She pointed.

"Aha!" Almost affectionately he plucked the molluscoidea from the dirty black cloth of his frock-coat. Doubtfully, he peered into the shells.

Mrs. Underwood licked her lips. "Give them to me," she commanded. She produced a hat-pin.

His head bowed, Pilate confronting the Pharisees, he complied.

"After all," she told him as she poised the pin, "we are only missing garlic and butter and we should have a meal fit for a French gourmet." The utterance seemed to depress her. She hesitated.

"Mrs. Underwood?"

"Should we say grace, I wonder?" She frowned. "It might help. I think it's the colour…"

"Too beautiful," he said eagerly. "I follow you. Who could destroy such loveliness?"

"That greenish, purplish hue pleases you?"

"Not you?"

"Not in 
food
, Mr. Carnelian."

"Then in what?"

"Oh…" Vaguely. "In — no, not even in a picture. It brings to mind the excesses of the Pre-Raphaelites. A morbid colour."

"Ah."

"It might explain your affinities…" She abandoned the subject. "If I could conquer…"

"A yellow one?" He tried to tempt her with a soft-shelled creature he had just discovered in his back pocket. It clung to his finger; there was the sensation of a kiss.

She dropped molluscs and hat-pin, covered her face with her hands and began to weep.

"Mrs. Underwood!" He was at a loss. He stirred the pile of fronds with his foot. "Perhaps if I were to use a ring as a prism and direct the rays of the sun through it we could…"

There came a loud squeak and he wondered at first if one of the creatures were protesting. Another squeak, from behind him. Mrs. Underwood removed her fingers to expose red eyes which now widened in surprise.

"Hi! I say — Hi, there!"

Jherek turned. Tramping through the shallows, apparently oblivious of the water, came a man dressed in a seaman's jersey, a tweed Norfolk jacket, plus-fours, heavy woollen stockings, stout brogues. In one hand he clutched a stick of a peculiarly twisted crystalline nature. Otherwise he appeared to be a contemporary of Mrs. Underwood's. He was smiling. "I say, do you speak English of any kind?"

He was bronzed. He had a full moustache and signs of a newly sprouting beard. He beamed at them. He came to a stop, resting his knuckles on his hips. "Well?"

Mrs. Underwood was confused. "We speak English, sir. Indeed we are — at least I am — English, as you must be."

"Beautiful day, isn't it?" The stranger nodded at the sea. "Nice and calm. Must be the early Devonian, eh? Have you been here long?"

"Long enough, sir."

"We are marooned," Jherek explained. "A malfunction of our time-craft. The paradoxes were too much for it, I suspect."

The stranger nodded gravely. "I've sometimes experienced similar difficulties, though happily without such drastic results. You're from the nineteenth century, I take it."

"Mrs. Underwood is. I hail from the End of Time."

"Aha!" The stranger smiled. "I have just come from there. I was fortunate enough to witness the complete disintegration of the universe — briefly, of course. I, too, am originally from the nineteenth century. This would be one of my regular stops, if I were journeying to the past. The peculiar thing is that I was under the impression I was going forward — beyond, as it were, the End of Time. My instruments indicate as much. Yet here I am." He scratched his sandy hair, adding, in mild disappointment, "I was hoping for some illumination."

"You are on your way, then, to the future?" Mrs. Underwood asked. "To the nineteenth century?"

"It seems that I must be. When did you leave?"

"1896," Mrs. Underwood told him.

"I am from 1894. I was not aware that anyone else had hit upon my discovery during that period…"

"There!" exclaimed Jherek. "Mr. Wells was right!"

"Our machine was from Mr. Carnelian's period," she said. "Originally, I was abducted to the End of Time, under circumstances which remain mysterious. The motives of my abductor continue to be obscure, moreover. I…" She paused apologetically. "This is of no interest to you, of course." She moistened her lips. "You would not, I suppose, have the means of lighting a fire, sir?"

The stranger patted the bulging pockets of his Norfolk jacket. "Somewhere. Some matches. I tend to carry as many necessities as possible about my person. In the event of being stranded … Here we are." He produced a large box of vestas. "I would give you the whole box, but…"