Xeelee: Endurance (44 page)

Well, he had succeeded, and he must not let Huro stir ancient doubts in his soul. ‘You Philosophers exploit the time strata selfishly—’

‘While you have burned up your own life to save others. Yes, yes. You aren’t the first, you know; your heroism isn’t even original.’ Huro peered into Celi’s eyes, his mouth. ‘You might have found your Blight treatment up there, Celi, but you sacrificed your own health in the process. I’d give you a year. Two at the most.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘No, I don’t suppose it does to you, does it?’ Huro’s expression softened, just a little. ‘My offer still stands.’

‘What offer?’

‘To come with me, down below. You may only have a year, but spin it out! Some of us are planning to go on, you know.’

‘Go where?’

‘
Down into the red.
Nobody knows how deep we can go, how much we can stretch time before it snaps like an overextended sinew. Some of us dream of pushing on into the future, all the way to the next Formidable Caress. And if we can do that, who knows what’s possible? Come with me, Celi. You’ve given up almost all of your life. Surely you owe yourself that much.’

But Celi heard a sound from a neighbouring room. It was a soft gurgle, the cry of a waking baby. ‘I have all I need here,’ he said.

HuroEldon snorted. ‘Well, we won’t meet again. The time streams will see to that.’ The Philosopher walked out of the house.

And Celi, broken and old, went to comfort his infant son.

THE TIME PIT

AD
c
.4.5 BILLION YEARS

The Mechanist balloons, fast and grey, drifted over the ruins of Old Foro. Belo couldn’t even see the crude bombs they dropped until they came streaking down out of the blueshifted air to splash fire. But the Mechanists’ advance was driving Belo and the last of his troopers towards the Shelf’s edge, where the river Foo, running with blood, plunged into the abyss.

And all across the battlefield, Creationist soldiers were dying. Belo could see their Effigies rising up like smoke, spectral distortions of the human form that twisted and spun away.

All this for the sake of an idea, Belo thought. No, not an idea – the truth. He must cling to that, even as the blueshifted fire from the sky blossomed around him.

‘Captain?’

Tira, his most trusted lieutenant, was shaking his shoulder. In his exhaustion he had drifted into abstraction, as he so often did. He was after all trained as a Natural Philosopher, and his senior officers had never let him forget that intellectuals, with their long perspective, didn’t necessarily make for good soldiers. But if not for intellectuals like him, there would have been no war anyhow.

‘I’m sorry, Tira. It’s just that you have to admire them.’

‘Sir?’ Her small face, smeared with blood and dirt, was creased with concern.

‘The Mechs. We think of them as stupid, you know, backward. After all, the reason we fight is because they cling to their absurd, primitive idea that the world is a product of natural forces, acting blindly, in the absence of mind. But now they have come up with
this.
’

For a soldier of Old Earth, gaining the high ground was
everything
. If you were higher than your enemy you had the benefit of accelerated time; you could think faster, prepare your strategy and aim your weapons, while your opponents tumbled, slow-moving, trapped in glutinous, red-shifted slow time.

So, in this campaign, the Creationists of Puul had taken the Attic, the long-abandoned community on the cliff face above the town of Foro itself, where once rich Forons had kept time-accelerated slaves. The campaign had gone well, and Belo had started to believe that the Forons and their hated Mechanist notions might soon be purged from the world.

But then the Forons had produced their hot-air balloons, which wafted even higher than the Attic, and the Creationists’ advantage was lost.

‘A stunning idea,’ Belo said. ‘So simple! Nothing but bags of hot air. But look at that formation. You’ve got to give them credit.’ Belo had a flask of gin in his coat pocket, meant to comfort battlefield wounded. Perhaps he should crack it now, and spend his last moments watching the wondrous spectacle of fighting soldiers and flying machines working in tandem to snuff out his life.

But Tira was almost screaming in his face. ‘Sir! We have to get out of here. Dane has found a way.’

‘Dane?’

Stumbling towards them through the rubble came a trooper, blood-soaked, a small, squat man. Dane’s bayonet had been snapped in two, and he was dragging one leg: both weapon and man damaged, Belo thought bleakly. Grimacing with pain, Dane showed Belo what he had found: a shaft in the ground, no wider than Belo’s own shoulders, covered by a heavy stone slab. ‘I think it’s a well,’ he said.

‘Or a larder,’ Tira said. A place where you could store meat, preserved in the slower time of depth.

‘No,’ Belo said grimly. ‘See the lock on this hatch, broken now? This is a time pit. A place you would throw down thieves and murderers and forget about them.’

‘So where does it come out?’

‘Who knows? But
where
scarcely matters. It just needs to be deep enough, deep into slow time. A neat way to dispose of your criminals – to hurl them one-way into the future!’

Tira peered into the time pit, her face twisted with fear. ‘It’s this or nothing,’ she said.

Belo said, ‘Do you love your Effigy so much, Tira? Shall we not stand and fight?’

Dane said, ‘Dying like this won’t do any good.’ His accent was coarse; he had been a farm worker before the war. He was wheezing, exhausted. ‘I say we live to fight another day.’

‘Even if that day is far in the future?’

‘Even so,’ Dane said.

Fire-bombs bloomed ever closer. Looking around, Belo saw that the three of them were alone, beyond help.

Belo grinned. ‘Another day.’

‘Another day,’ they mumbled.

Belo lifted his legs into the shaft, raised himself over a tunnel of darkness, and fell into time.

‘I’ll have your boots.’

Belo was reluctant to wake. Even half-asleep he remembered the endless fall down the tight, filthy shaft, as if he was being swallowed into some terrible stomach. And now here was this ugly voice, dragging him back into the world.

‘I said, I’ll have your boots. I know you can hear me, soldier boy.’

Reluctantly he opened his eyes. He was dazzled by a glaring blue sky, by stars that wheeled above his head. And a face loomed over him, a man’s face, broad, dead-eyed, roughly shaven, surrounded by a mass of dirty black hair.

Belo tried to speak. His throat was bone dry. ‘What’s your name?’

‘I am Teeg. And you’re in my world now.’

‘Really?’ Belo had no idea where he was, and he wondered where Dane and Tira were – if they were still alive. All that would have to wait. First he had to deal with this grubby buffoon. ‘You want my boots?’

The face cracked in a grin, showing blackened teeth. ‘That’s right, soldier boy.’

‘Try taking them.’

The grin disappeared. Then Teeg’s face twisted, and he roared and raised two huge scarred hands. Belo aimed a kick at where he guessed the man’s crotch would be, but his legs felt feeble, heavy, as if the muscles had drained of energy. Besides, this Teeg was so massively built, a hulk of muscle and bone dressed in filthy rags, that the kick only enraged him. Teeg got his hands around Belo’s throat, and pressed him back into the dirt. Belo flailed and struggled, but he was like a child battling an adult.

He had been conscious here only a few heartbeats, yet already he had given his life away. Quite a miscalculation, he thought, weakening.

‘Get off him!’ A squat mass came hurtling from Belo’s left side and slammed into Teeg.

Belo, the pressure on his throat gone, coughed for breath. He struggled upright, clinging to consciousness. He was sitting on a dirt plain. Beside him a cliff face rose up into the blue. He was close to a ragged cave, perhaps the chute down which he had tumbled. People huddled a few paces away. Four women, five kids – no men. Scrawny, filthy, dressed in rags, they stared at him fearfully.

He couldn’t see an end to this scrubby plain. Perhaps it was another Shelf – or perhaps he had fallen all the way into the Lowland itself, he thought with a stab of despair.

And beyond the people he glimpsed something moving over the ground – not on it,
over
it, at about waist height, almost like a Mechanist balloon. It was a rough sphere of some silvery metal that gleamed in the blueshifted light of the sky. Was it a machine? But it was like no machine he had ever seen, no pump or elevator or cannon. And what could possibly support such a mass of metal in the air? He longed to see more, but details were blurred by heat haze—

‘Soldier boy.’

Teeg’s ugly voice snapped him back to the here and now.

Teeg had hold of Dane, by an arm locked around his throat. It was obviously Dane who had knocked Teeg away and saved Belo’s life. Dane wasn’t struggling. His injured leg was twisted back at an impossible angle. But his eyes were locked on his commanding officer, and he made no sound.

‘Let him go,’ Belo said.

Teeg looked mock-puzzled. ‘How did you put it? . . . Try taking him.’

Belo tried to stand. The world greyed.

‘No.’ It was Tira. She was sitting on the ground, the remnants of her blood-stained uniform in disarray. ‘Don’t fight him,’ she said. ‘Not now. He’s too strong.
Not yet
.’

Belo knew she was right. But still Teeg was squeezing the life out of Dane. ‘Let him go,’ he said again. ‘We didn’t come here to do you harm.’

‘I don’t care why you came here,’ Teeg said. ‘I told you. You’re in my world now. And you will do what I say. You know why? Because of the Weapon.’ He held Dane at arm’s length, with one mighty fist locked on his collar, as if he was holding up a doll. Dane bit his lip, and his leg trailed beneath him, but still he made no sound.

And then Teeg grabbed Dane by neck and belt, and hurled him bodily at the floating machine.

A window clicked opened in the side of the machine. Fire, purple and bright, snaked into Dane’s belly and simply blew him apart, into fragments of flesh and bone amid a mist of blood – all this before the body could hit the ground. Then the window closed, like an eyelid shutting, and the machine continued its serene patrol around the huddling people.

Teeg grinned, cocksure in his ragged robes. He stood over Tira, who was still sprawled on the ground. ‘Now, where were we before soldier boy woke up?’

Despite everything he had seen, Belo stepped forward again. ‘Touch her and I will kill you, I swear.’

Tira said grimly, ‘I already made the same promise.’

Even in this moment of power Teeg looked from one to the other, and something in their determined stare seemed to put him off. ‘You’ll keep. But you,’ he said, stabbing a finger at Belo. ‘Your boots.’

Belo sat down and began to work at his laces.

Teeg walked over to the group of huddled women. ‘You.’ The woman he had selected cowered from him, but he grabbed her by the shoulder, threw her to the ground, and began to fumble at her rags. She lay passively; the children watched empty-eyed.

‘You’re right to give him a victory,’ Tira whispered. ‘There’s nothing to be done as long as he controls that machine. We must play for time. Wait for an opportunity . . .’ She was staring at a charred fragment of Dane’s corpse, and her composure cracked. ‘Oh, Belo, what horror have we fallen into?’

He said grimly, ‘We are soldiers. We have been trained to survive. We will survive this, together.’

‘But how long has this monster kept these women as his slaves? Can you see the faces of the children?
They look like him.
’

‘It won’t happen to you.’

‘Oh, you can be sure of that,’ said Tira, her voice full of hate.

Life in Teeg’s nasty little kingdom turned out to be simple.

They lived outdoors, on the arid plain. For the first couple of days they stayed close to the cliff where the time chute had decanted, huddling at night in caves or under rocky overhangs.

But then they were led away by Teeg and the enigmatic hovering machine, the ‘Weapon’. So, by default, Belo was exploring the Lowland, the greatest mystery of all to Shelf Philosophers of all persuasions. If it hadn’t been so brutally hard it would almost have been interesting.

They slept out in the open. They ate berries they gathered from the sparse bushes, or they chewed on strips of dried meat – Belo wasn’t sure yet where the meat came from. Their clothes were rags, replaced if they came across a handy corpse, like poor Dane’s. But it appeared Teeg always got the best pick, like Belo’s own boots.

And, while they walked, they carried fragments of Dane’s corpse with them. The women of Teeg’s grim harem seemed used to this. Even the blank-eyed children stumbled along with grisly butchered remnants. Belo had no clear idea why they did this.

Indeed, Belo’s own continued existence puzzled him. It was obvious what Teeg wanted of Tira – but why keep Belo alive? Another man could only be competition, a threat; why tolerate him taking another breath?

And towering over all these personal issues was the deeper mystery of the Weapon: where it had come from, how and why it had been made – and what its true purpose was, for Belo was beginning to suspect that it had nothing to do with Teeg and his petty lording. Belo couldn’t even see how Teeg communicated with it; he never spoke to it directly, never touched it. Sometimes, Belo thought, it was almost as if Teeg was following the Weapon, rather than the other way around. Belo longed to examine the Weapon, but he dared not approach it, not until he understood more.

Belo tried to talk to Teeg as they walked. In his military service he had learned that any knowledge could be a lever. But he had to bury his resentment as Teeg marched along in his own spindling-leather boots, while Belo’s feet bled on the rough ground.

‘You are a victim of the time pit,’ Belo essayed.

‘As are you,’ Teeg snapped, as if Belo had tried to insult him.

‘We are soldiers. We fled a lost battlefield.’

Teeg listened, his massive face closed up. For all his brutish behaviour, Belo sensed that this man was no fool. But Belo’s talk of his war clearly meant nothing to Teeg.

Belo tried again. ‘You were cast in the pit by your enemies. Perhaps it was unjust—’

‘Unjust? More than that. I was born in the Attic, over Foro.’

‘I know it.’

‘I was a bastard, sired by some red-tinged Foron who raped a servant, my mother. Nobody accepted me, neither the Forons nor their slaves. In the end they stuck me down the pit and stranded me in the future. But not before I got to my father.’ Teeg grinned, remembering; Belo could see that this moment of patricide had been the peak of his life.

‘Teeg, the Forons are my enemies. But they no longer keep time-accelerated servants.’

Teeg twisted his face. ‘How long?’

‘I’m not sure.’ It was history to Belo. ‘Many generations.’

Teeg shrugged. ‘Then that’s how long I’ve been down here, isn’t it?’

And here was the cruel reality of the time pit. Even if you survived, to be cast down here was to be sent into the future, to live out a futile life adrift from family, friends, cut off even from the context of your crime.

It was this that distressed Tira more than anything. After all, she and Belo were not criminals; had devoted their very lives to a cause.

Foro had long been a centre of the traditional ‘Mechanistic’ philosophy, an argument that the world was a product of blind natural processes, while the community of Puul, further along the Shelf, had become a haven for heretics, ‘Creationists’, who clung to the idea that everything about the world had been shaped by mind – perhaps human mind. The sharp intellectual content of these ideas had burned away the last of the old animist religions to have emerged after the last Formidable Caress, among the tribes that huddled in the ruins of a fallen civilisation. But these contrasting world systems, sharpened by incompatibility, had become a banner of identity, as such theologies often would, and hostility had deepened.