Feast and Famine

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  We were pygmies racing through the depths of the African jungle

  We were Victorian clerks stopping traffic in the Strand

  We were Maoris paddling our war canoes as fast as our arms could bear us.

  Sometimes he was ahead, sometimes it was I.

  *

  Meanwhile the consistency of the timeline was getting quite moth-eaten with all the changes we were making. Whole eras were no longer preceded by their logical precursors, nor did they have continuity with whatever came after them. It didn’t matter. Why should we care that our meddling had shattered history? The lives and loves of our million million ancestors were shot through with fractures and came apart in our hands, and nobody had the inclination to do anything about it. We were the masters of time, after all. It was ours to take apart if we chose to, and we did.

  We did so for the highest and most pressing aim of any advanced society: mass entertainment. After the serious historians gave up, anyone who went back via the reverse quantum punch was wired to record. Groups of bored dilettantes were sent into the past, complaining to one another about their nails and their relationships while Rome burned or the Black Death ravaged the countryside. Celebrity entertainers played hilarious practical jokes on Gilgamesh and Richard Coeur de Lion. Chefs cooked pizza for Genghis Khan. There was a competition where the lucky winner got to debag the historical figure of their choice. I understand that both Hitler and Saint Paul were growing quite tired of it.

  But for me it was the sport, the greatest of games: time-racing. A course of Gaps cast across history, some sending you forward, some back, with just one that would lead you once more to 2144 and the finish line. There was no challenge like it, nothing at all to match the surprise, the uncertainty, the sheer thrill of getting your third century Silesian tribesman through the Gap just ahead of your rival.

  *

  I met up with Gaston after. He was a good sport about it, and in truth I had only been a fraction of a second ahead at the end. Still, in time-racing, that’s all that matters, and he had ended up in the dark ages, and I had ended up in the Eternal Year, the winner.

  “How did we do?” I asked him.

  He shrugged. “Apparently we’ve lost most of the Palaeolithic. Something to do with nobody learning how to make fire. Just means it’ll be colder next time we’re through there.”

  So, another few thousand years of human history knocked out of the stack, and yet the bricks above and below would remain in place, impossibly, until we trampled through again. I took a moment to consider the loss to scholarship.

  But only a moment. After all, the next race would be soon and I had to get training.

  * * *

  When I get the chance, I like writing something with a bit of humour in it, even if I’m the only one who finds it funny. The idea of something catastrophic happening to time is something I’ve played with before – the identical idea is explored, entirely without the humour and indeed with a lot of nastiness added, in my story “The Mouse Ran Down” which as I write is due to be reprinted in the Vandermeers’ The Time Travellers’ Almanac. This, though, is the lighter treatment of the concept, which doesn’t make it any less grim. This is also a good example of one of the great gifts of the short fiction format: the ability to have an absolutely loathsome narrator, purely because you don’t have to live with him very long.

  The God-Shark

  So it was in those times that the people came together to choose a leader.

  For we are divided and lost, they said.

  For we are hungry and thirsty.

  For our lives are those of toil and misery.

  For the beasts prey upon us at their leisure.

  And the people of the next valley do not share our beliefs, chiefly our belief that they should not come to our valley and take our stuff.

  And each man's hand is turned against his brother, and each of us is alone in the world.

  And, yea, our lives are brutish and short, not to mention nasty, but of these it is the short that most concerneth us.

  Not to mention the God-Shark.

  And in our various extremities we need a leader who will unite us against these threats and let us lead lives that are secure and safe from predation and want, and that are notably longer than those we currently lead.

  So the people of that time called out for leaders, and so stepped up one or another who had a calling or a wish for power, and each one told the people how he would protect them and improve their lives, and each was found wanting in turn.

  And so engrossed were the people in their selection of a leader that none noticed a vast shadow being cast upon them until it was too late.

  And they looked up and beheld the God-Shark.

  And the God-Shark spake unto them, saying: Choose Me as your leader and I shall protect you from all harms.

  And the people were sore dismayed, and demurred, saying: But You are cruel and merciless, and have consumed many of our kin, and though we now may hide from You, and cower in the dark places when You approach, if You were amongst us at all times as our leader, You would be able to devour at will, and there would be no defending from You.

  And the God-Shark considered their complaints, and argued so: And yet think of the advantages, for I am mighty, and the beasts fear Me and would not prey upon you while I was your leader, and the people of the next valley would come not near you for terror, and, yea, would perhaps give you tribute for fear that I might sate My everlasting hunger upon them in your name.

  And the people considered this, and replied: Whilst You make many strong points we do not feel this outweighs being consumed.

  The God-Shark appeared suitably chastened by this logic, and was heard to say: This is what follows from having a reputation. Know this: if you choose me as your leader, to reign over you for evermore, I shall go to the slopes of Mount Nod that towers over us all and inscribe there in letters eight feet wide and nine feet deep my lasting pledge that I shall do you no wrong, nor consume any of you, no, not even the least, save by a majority vote.

  And the people fell into serious discussion about the pros and cons of being ruled over by an immortal and ever-hungry God-Shark, and many were those who championed either side, citing on the one hand the proven strength of the God-Shark as it might be deployed against their neighbours, and on the other hand that same strength as it might be deployed upon the God-Shark's own subjects.

  But in the end those who spoke out for the God-Shark and his pledge prevailed and not least amongst the reasons was that the people in the next valley were sore due for a comeuppance.

  And so it was that the people accepted the God-Shark as their leader.

  *

  And the God-Shark was as good as Its word and grave upon the slopes of Mount Nod Its pledge.

  And in all the subsequent years of Its reign the God-Shark held by that pledge, or mostly. And when in Its more forgetful moments It did happen to devour some of the people without first seeking a majority vote, the people directed Its attention to the wording of the pledge and It was suitably chastened and made reparation.

  And there followed a time of prosperity and security for all, save for the people in the next valley, and save for those who fell foul of majority vote for any reason. And always the God-Shark was bound by Its graven pledge, at least after being referred to it a second time.

  And now many centuries, and centuries of centuries, have passed, and the God-Shark reigns still over us as It has done since those days when the people first gathered to choose themselves a leader.

  And Mount Nod, which once towered over all the land, is now a worn stump of rock.

  And each successive year the words of the God-Shark's pledge, that had been written there in letters eight feet wide and nine feet deep, have grown harder and harder to make out, until the scholars of the God-Shark's words try with charcoal rubbings and use of angled lamps to make out just what the God-Shark did or did not pledge.

  And there will come a time in the
near future when the God-Shark's words are entirely illegible beyond any recovery.

  And delegations to the God-Shark requesting that It re-grave its pledge onto some other medium have reported that It grows unaccountably deaf when such matters are raised.

  And some of them have been devoured.

  And these days nobody is as keen to complain about that sort of thing as we were in earlier ages when the words of the God-Shark's pledge were easier to make out.

  And we sit here by the rock that was once Mount Nod and wonder if our ancestors made the correct choice back in those days.

  And we await the God-Shark.

  * * *

  An idea that came to me almost word for word complete, and which I’ve trotted out at readings before, to make up the time. What can be said about a semi-comic fable of just a thousand words? Only that it’s not about gods or religions at all, but about a far more human evil.

  The Sun of the Morning

  Prince-Minor Mornen Corneles had heard plenty of stories about the slaves the Empire took: luckless wretches seized by the score, crammed into cages, the cages put onto wagons and the wagons hauled off by lurching beasts of burden or the noisy, frightening metal engines that the Wasps had brought with them.

  At least they get to ride.

  It was part of his general luck, he considered, that here he was, slave of the Empire, and they were making him push his own wagon.

  There were four of them sweating and straining to keep the thing moving over the uneven ground. The Commonweal of Mornen’s Dragonfly-kinden was not well-supplied with roads and this track had been worn by livestock finding the path of least resistance: neither goats nor aphids cared overmuch about even ground. The traces at the back of the wagon had been designed for two fair-sized beasts pushing in tandem, but the Wasps had botch-lashed it all to one diminutive draft-beetle half Mornen’s size, apparently all they could get. The uncomplaining creature had its hind legs clamped against the wagon’s rear as it pushed with all its might with the other four, moving the vehicle in reeling jolts over the path. Before Mornen had joined this select fraternity of unpaid servants of the Empire the three other slaves must have had a vile time of it holding the wagon steady, and even now it was a constant unbalancing effort to keep the four-wheeled wooden box moving. From inside, the single piece of human cargo gave out occasional tirades of blistering abuse directed at their mutual captors, the panting slaves and the Commonweal’s standards of civic engineering.

  The slavers themselves had an easier time of it, practically strolling along at the wagon’s grinding pace, joking with one another, passing wineskins back and forth and occasionally lashing out at a slack wagon-handler with club or whip. Mornen himself had felt the lash more than once as he stumbled or made to stop for breath. No mild aesthete nobleman was Mornen Corneles, but this constant wrenching physical work was wearing him down, for all the wagon seemed to make such dragging progress. Knowing that the stoic little beetle at the back was doing the grand share of the work only made it worse.

  Three days of this now, and Mornen knew that he did not have so much to give any more. If he was going to make his move then it must be soon or both the strength and the will would have been sweated from him. He had no illusions about the slavers’ reaction to a slave who could no longer push.

  They had tied him to the wagon, but it was only rope and the knots were shoddy. He would have thought that professional slaving men would have been better at knots than a sailor, but it seemed that their mechanical aptitude had spoiled them. His fellow sufferers were manacled to iron rings set in the wagon’s side, but the Wasps had not expected a fourth prize and had been forced to improvise. They were lazy too, leaving their charges in the same bonds overnight. What was casual cruelty to them had given Mornen all the time he needed to tug and worry at his bindings until he was sure he could shuck his hands free in a moment.

  If they had been passing through woodland then he might just have slipped off, trusting to his feet and an outdoorsman’s tricks to escape pursuit, but the wagon’s track was along good farming land that undulated gently down towards what had been the Commonweal’s south-east border, before the Empire’s invasion set about the task of redrawing the maps. As it was, the slavers would be more than equal to the task of bringing down a lone runner: their hands would flash the golden fire of their stinging Art, and that would be that. No, what Mornen needed was the sky. His own Art would conjure wings from his back, and then he would take his chances, betting his swift and darting flight against both the stings and the wings of his enemies.

  They had bound him in more ways than one, however. Fly-shackles, they called them: a harness of leather about his back that drew his shoulders in just enough to stop him moving them easily. It blocked his Art, banished his wings and left him as earthbound as the others. It also made pushing the wagon that much harder, stopped him sleeping for more than an hour at a stretch, and could cripple him for life if he were left like this for too long.

  But the slavers were slack. There was precious little in them of the discipline of the imperial army. Mornen had heard that, of all the fierce and murderous invaders, it was their Slave Corps that owned to the worst atrocities and vices. Certainly these men seemed little better than bandits, for all they wore the hated black and gold. Mornen knew all about bandits: he knew that men of greed and self-interest lived for the moment, for the near future at best. They neither planned nor took proper care.

  So it was that he was close to making his exit from his captors. The Fly-shackles were an old set, and many a prisoner must have done his best to be free of them. They were scuffed, scarred and, at one armpit, slightly torn. Mornen’s Art was good for more than taking wing: his claws were delicate curved razors like the mandibles of the dragonflies themselves, and they slid into and out of his thumbs at a thought. Each night, between his fitful bouts of uneasy sleep, he twisted his arms about until his joints screamed so that he could gouge away at that tear. He widened it and widened it, working in tight silence, hunched in on himself so as not to warn his captors. If his strength held out just a little longer he would be free and then he would chance their stings. Better a burning death than any more life like this.

  I seem to be spending my life running from one prison to another.

  *

  His mind skipped back more than two tendays. He remembered the long walk.

  He had heard that phrase used of prisoners walking to their executions. Execution, in fact, had been exactly what he had expected after the Mercers had taken him. His bad luck, which had been painting his life in bleak colours for some time, had excelled itself over the last few years. His father, the first Prince Mornen, had died suddenly and, even as young Mornen Corneles was trying to pick up the pieces, the Empire’s invasion had come, rolling over little provinces and towns and crushing them beneath the wheels of its war machine. Mornen had tried to muster a defence but his neighbours wanted nothing to do with him, and so they, and he, fell each on their own. The black and gold flag waved over all their palaces and castles now.

  Mornen had been trying to arrange some manner of evacuation in the face of the advancing imperial line when the Mercers had found him. The Monarch’s own hero-soldiers, the defenders of the Commonweal, had taken one look at the chaos and arrested Mornen Corneles because he was impersonating a nobleman. The people of Mornen’s province had been left for the Wasp-kinden.

  They had told him he was being brought before the Monarch, an impossibly distant and hallowed figure that he only half believed in. As it turned out, Mornen was not so important as all that, and he had languished for a day at the pleasure of Prince-Major Lowre Cean who had apparently now been given the thankless job of trying to organise a defence against the imperial invasion. Why it was thought the man should have time to administrate criminal justice as well had baffled Mornen, but then pretending to nobility was treason, and perhaps a simple magistrate and headsman were unequal to the magnitude of the task.

&n
bsp; After a day in the stocks, suffering the foul looks of prince and peasant alike, he had been told that his time had come, that justice would be served on him. By then it had almost come as a relief.

  They had not bound his hands but let him walk free into the vaulted hall of Prince Lowre’s castle, a bright-armoured Mercer on either side suggesting an honour guard that he had hardly earned. The hall ahead had been crowded with nobles and their retainers, and Mornen had been more shocked than he would have thought to see so many of them dishevelled, battered and scarred. The Empire’s steady push into Commonweal lands had been inexorable and savage, obliterating what Commonwealer forces had been thrown together against it.

  Lowre Cean himself had sat enthroned at the far end of the hall, a lean old Dragonfly-kinden, the rich gold of his skin gone pale and his hair white. A flock of petitioners, scribes and subordinates before him had given the impression of hunters before some noble old beast at bay.

  Mornen had stopped, but one of the Mercers had put a hand to his back and pushed him forward. Just as he entered the room, just as all eyes had turned upon him, something had been thrust into his hands: a standard displaying a familiar flag – a crimson sun on a white field, the badge that Mornen’s father had devised when he made the leap from bandit chieftain to would-be prince. Cut loose by the Mercers, stepping uncertainly down the length of the hall, Mornen had felt every snarl, every scowl. Snippets of barbed comment had dogged his heels all the way to the throne.

  “...some jumped up brigand’s son...”

  “...usurper and traitor... have his head...”

  “...should have left him for the Empire...”

  “...My lady, you should not stare at the creature so...”

  At the last, Mornen had stood before the throne and the functionaries and parasites had evaporated, leaving him pinned by the grey steel gaze of Lowre Cean.