Patches of gray sandpaper skin blotched her body and faded. “A voyage of discovery!” she said enthusiastically. “Well, in that case I’ll help. I fancy taking a look at your vessels. I’ll follow them at depth for a while so you don’t have to fear the sea. If anything untoward happens to your ship while I’m in the vicinity you should be relatively safe.”
“Thank you. Thank you, Tarragon. What can I do in return?”
“Learning motivates us Sharks. An edifying experience is reward enough. And although I’m cruising distant waters right now, it shouldn’t take me too long to swim to you…”
I frowned.
“All the seas are connected. Actually all the oceans in every world are one ocean. The sea finds its own level across the worlds; you can reach anywhere if you swim far enough. As long as the water is to our taste, what matters it what sea we breathe?” She continued, “I wish I could see the ocean from the outside-an immense orb of water hanging in vacuum, so my school tells me. That’s one Shift I can’t make.”
I thought about this for a while. The same sea that is surging into Capharnaum harbor laps on the beach at Awndyn, backs up the sparkling Mica River at high tide-brackishly flows into Epsilon market, glistens in Vista Marchan two thousand years ago, and is swept the next minute by Tarragon’s fins in the deep abyss. The land changes, but the ocean is a still pool, a pool like a sphere, hanging in the universe.
I decided that Tarragon was making fun of me so I giggled and she gave me a contemptuous look. “It’s true. You don’t think angler fish and manta rays originated in your world?”
I shrugged, not knowing the animals to which she referred.
The Shark sighed. “Jant, call yourself a scholar? No real student would mess with their mind the way you do. Why destroy yourself? Do you want to be found lying dead, a stiff corpse with a needle in its arm? What’s cool about that? I get here through study and you get here through pleasure. I can smell it on you. Pleasure is actually bad where I come from.”
“And what is good where you come from?”
“Little bits of fish.”
“I’m sorry, Tarragon. I Shifted by accident. I’m only here because the ocean unnerves me and I OD’d.”
“There are other methods to achieve enough disconnection to Shift.” She smiled triangularly. “By pain, or the way us Sharks do it-by thought. Promise you won’t do drugs again and I’ll teach you! You may eventually be able to Shift at will, just as I can-but probably not as well, because air-breathers aren’t very intelligent. For example you would never be able to Shift as far as my world. The degree of dislocation would certainly kill you. You must be near death to get this far.”
“Shift at will? How?”
“You can will yourself to wake up from a nightmare, right? This is no different. Your body’s not here; you’re a tourist, a projection same as me. If you must travel to Epsilon, do it by meditation-you need a relaxed state of mind to project yourself. Of course, it’s easier to leave the Shift than it is to arrive so you can either meditate or force yourself back home. All I do is wake from my trance and I return to my sea.”
It never occurred to me that I could find a different way to Shift. I had thought traveling to Epsilon city was a side effect of scolopendium, and that I could only wake when the drug wore off. “I don’t think I can.”
“Oh yes. You can travel along what, let’s face it, is a well-trodden path. It just takes patience-and concentration. I’ll show you!”
She leaned over the car’s low door, grabbed my belt and shirt front, and pulled me into the car. Her strength was incredible. I sprawled onto the passenger seat, into the footwell. My long legs waved in the air as I thrashed about trying to find purchase to jump out.
Tarragon held me down effortlessly with one little hand on my chest. She pressed a pedal to the floor, released a lever. The car lunged forward with such power I was thrown back against the seat. “Let me out! Let me out! Help!” I struggled. “Tarragon, you bitch!”
“I’ll teach you a lesson, Shark-style!” Her pert breasts heaved with laughter. She blew a wordless human scream on the car’s larynx horn.
It moved faster than a racehorse, rushed at my flight speed along the ground. Tarragon talked loudly as she steered: “Let me tell you the safe method to Shift-you should lie still and empty your mind, relax and think your way here. It might take a few years to perfect but you immortals have time to practice. Try now-think your way back to the Fourlands.”
I refused. I wouldn’t risk returning to a drugged sleep. My consciousness must be kicked out to the Shift for a reason; perhaps to stop it being damaged by the scolopendium I keep pumping into myself. What if I returned to a body lying in a coma? I’d be rejected from the Circle, could age and die without regaining awareness.
Tarragon saw me shudder and exclaimed, “You can do it! Let me show you!” She spun the wheel, swung the car around and accelerated down the Coeliac Trunk Road, into the Tine’s Quarter.
The sky was dark, and lights on either side of the Aureate’s road gave a golden glow; a chill mist made a diffuse halo around them. Skin-worshiping Tine worked by the roadside. Their arms were flayed to the elbows. Tattoos covered their skin and the shells on their backs were painted with spirals. Their muscular blue haunches were cut with lettering like graffiti in old tree trunks. They had the broken noses of heavyweight boxers and the thick arms of fishermen. They carried other bits of victims’ bodies too that I couldn’t identify.
An immense spoked wheel four meters in diameter turned un-hurriedly and a needle rose and fell. Tine fed skin backed with yellow fat under the needle; it hung over the edge of the sewing machine’s serrated gold platform. “Is that Tine skin?” I asked.
“Oh, they’re just embroidering it. They’ll put it back on later.”
They snarled as we passed.
“Don’t look,” said Tarragon. “It gets worse from here on.” But she knew I would look, because curiosity motivates not only Sharks but me as well.
Shattered glass ground under our wheels. I turned my head with a disconnected feeling. We passed burned-out vehicles at the roadside, smashed and overturned. Blackened Tine bodies lay between them, marking their experiments with engines. Long lines of automobiles had impacted so hard that they were all joined together. Metal crumpled back on itself. Tine assembled around them, carrying hoses, wielding axes. Water sprayed above them; in a flashing yellow light the drops seemed to fall slowly. Nightmare slow motion as water and blood pooled onto the road. Curtains of bloodied skin hung out of broken windows. One muscle tissue axle throbbed in pain.
We passed a gorgeous woman that the Tine had welded into her car. Her body was set into the seat as smoothly as a jewel in a bevel. Only the front could be seen; her face and neck, breasts and belly. Wreaths of gold tubes ran out of the seat into the sides of her body, completely obscuring her ribs and the sides of her slender thighs. Her hands had vanished; bulges at the ends of her arms were seamlessly attached to the steering wheel. Her long hair became a stylized immovable gold curve sweeping back to form the headrest. Her feet merged with the floor; its solid gold seemed to lap up her slender legs. She was part of the car.
“If the Tine catch us, that’s what they’ll do,” said Tarragon. “Make this car grow through us. Would you like to be a passenger forever?”
“Let me go!”
“Think yourself home.”
Something terrible is happening down there. Something vast in the heart of the Aureate is pumping viscous liquid around the drains and dykes bridged with connective tissue. “Let me go!” I shouted. “I want out!”
“Think yourself home, I’m not stopping you.”
“But I don’t know how!”
“If I call out that you’re a gymnast, Rhydanne, you’d be spending the rest of your life as a car. Well, your guts will. The rest of you will make a good roadsighn. Look, there’s one.”
The roadsighn whispered, “i trespassed in the aureate, look at me, save yourselve
s, go home, save yourself, tarragon, where are you going, tarragon?”
His legs twined together were planted in the verge, and a membrane road sign grew from between his outstretched arms. In the mist he was just a spindly écorché silhouette murmuring, “oh Tarragon, what have you brought us?”
As we passed I saw his sticky dark pink color, stripped to pus and muscle, his face locked in a wide risus sardonicus leer; “Tarragon, who is that? where are you going?”
“We’re going deeper,” she said to me. “The Spleen is on your right. On your left you will see-”
“Am I a sacrifice? Let me out!”
Gold buildings loomed smooth and rounded, lobed against each other like internal organs. They were horribly organic, studded with empty ulcerous portals-foramina and fistulae. The Ribs were flying buttresses with nowhere to land. We skirted the Labyrinths of the Ileum and in the distance the Cult of the Oedemic Prepuce had erected a tall gold wrinkled spire with an onion dome. We drove down a rubber subway that stretched and sagged. We emerged from beneath dripping red stalactites through a puckered textured sphincter onto the shore of-
A lake. Against the black sky I could just make out its dark red liquid and hear the lapping as rare ripples ran over its stinking surface. Gold ducts of varying bores, hollow femurs and arrays of tubules sucked liquid from it and ran underground. Glomeruli like fleshy cups fountained in occasional bursts so the automobile wheels sank in ground made spongy by gastric juices. On the far side, spotlights picked out and roved over the highly polished gold shell of the Western Kidney. I tried all the time to wish myself back to the Fourlands.
“Tine are a most religious and honest people…” said Tarragon. Tine crowded the shore. It must be a feast day because hundreds had gathered. Most were Duodenal Sect; their intestines had been pulled out of a hemmed hole in their stomachs and wrapped around their waists, and I could see waves of peristalsis going around them. One was a Novice of the Flectere Doctrine, who snap all their joints to bend the opposite way. His bare feet lifted in front of him because his knees were bent backward like a bird’s. His pale blue palms were on the backs of his hands, his fingers curled outward. “You have to admire their devotion.”
A gold paddleboat that ran on striated muscle fibers and catechism ferried between the Islets of Langerhans in the distance. “We’re going deeper,” said Tarragon. “Soon we’ll reach the Heart and Lungs, and we’ll drive the length of the backbone processional. The Heart! I want to show you the Heart of the Aureate.”
“No!”
“Then think yourself home!”
“I can’t!”
“Or the brain, deep beneath the Transgressor’s Forest. In the brain there’s a temple where any creature drawn on the wall comes to life. Don’t draw stick men, they have enough of those. It’s sickening to see them, limping toward you dragging their misshapen limbs and squeaking.”
I couldn’t feel the pull. It would be at least an hour before my overdose wore off and woke me. I tried to be calm, pictured my cabin on the Stormy Petrel and imagined myself back there.
“That’s a good boy!” Tarragon exclaimed. “I know you can do it!”
She gave me a Shark’s grin but I didn’t give it back. We drove along the lakeside and I screamed when I realized what was pinging out from under our wheels and rattling off the chassis: a gravel beach of kidney stones.
Tarragon called to a whole congregation of Tine kneeling on the shore, “Hey, see my passenger? He runs marathons! He can sprint as fast as a car!”
The Tine paused and stared. They gestured to each other, howled and ran directly at us. “Hurry!” I yelled. “Hurry up!”
Tarragon stopped the car. “Will yourself home.”
Through rising panic I forced myself to stay calm and yearned, forced, demanded myself back to my body. Tarragon tapped a finger on her forehead and repeated the dictum, “Shift by meditation. Not sensation!”
The Tine were almost upon us.
The dark shore twitched in and out of focus, then a wave of distortion rolled through it. Tarragon’s face and the gold vehicle belched into disturbing shapes. They dissolved to gray. To black.
My stomach creased with fear; I closed my eyes. And when I opened them again, slowly and stickily, I was back in my cabin, lying on the floor.
CHAPTER SIX
I woke with the green taste of bile in my mouth, curled up so tightly I ached. Shit, I almost got eviscerated. I clenched my fists. Tarragon almost had me killed.
I rolled onto my back and contemplated the too-close ceiling. A gentle sighing must be the wind on the mainsail, and that constant slap and hiss will be the prow cutting small waves. There were no other sounds, so it was probably nighttime. These deductions left me feeling rather proud but I sensed that the cabin had become a little bit narrower. It had changed shape-it was also longer. There was not enough room to open even the tips of my wings. What the fuck was going on?
I lit a candle and held it up. The walls were painted blue, not black, the portholes were square with white borders. It was a different cabin. Could I have Shifted back to the wrong place? Panicking, I ran my fingernails between the planks, brushed my hand along the shelves: nothing. Where were my wraps? Where were all my fucking wraps? I saw my rucksack, seized it and rummaged through it. The fat envelope containing scolopendium had gone. “Damn you, Ata!” I shouted. “Damn you, damn you, damn you!”
There was a knock on the cabin door. “Go away!” I yelled.
I rubbed the hem of my coat and felt nine hard paper squares still sewn in. Thank god, they had missed some!
Cold air gusted into the cabin as a stocky figure pushed the door open with his shoulder. I saw Serein’s silhouette, a round head with spiky hair. Behind him, dull blue inky dawn clouds packed the vast sky. He sat in the doorway, legs out onto the half deck, huddling in his greatcoat. “Comet,” he said. “You weren’t well.”
“Is that understatement a new type of sarcasm you’re experimenting with?”
“For god’s sake, Comet. You look like you’ve been dragged through a battlefield backward. Mind you, I’ve been seasick. The sailors started laying bets on the number of times I would puke over the taffrail. Mist told me you don’t get seasick. She explained about scolopendium.”
“I see.” I took a swig of water from my leather bottle. “I suspect that I am on the Melowne?”
The Swordsman nodded. “We rowed you across from Petrel. You were out cold.”
“What! A rowing boat? So close to the waves? What if it had capsized?” Drowning while unconscious was too awful to contemplate.
“Ata said you could have this berth because you filled the other one up with drugs. Drugs aren’t an answer, Jant. What are you doing that for when you’re an Eszai?”
“What happened to my wraps and the envelope?” I said threateningly.
“We threw them overboard.”
“Shit.”
The Swordsman sounded both disgusted and surprised that an Eszai would knowingly use cat. “How much did you take?”
“As much as I could.” I wriggled out of the constrictive cabin and pulled myself up, water bottle in hand. I scraped a match, lit one of the cigarettes I had stolen from Cinna and sipped at it. I blew the smoke out of my nose and coughed. I was never going to be any bloody good at smoking. It doesn’t agree with Rhydanne as they are accustomed to thin air. I only do it rarely, when I’m under extreme duress, because if I ever got hooked it would destroy my ability to fly.
Wrenn joined me at the rail, standing upwind of the smoke. “Are you all right? Apart from being dark and moody, I mean.”
I said, “I loathe this bloody floating coffin of a boat.”
“It’s a ship.”
“She’s a ship. Apparently it’s female. I hope all her masts don’t break off when they fuck in the shallows.”
The Swordsman fell quiet, looking at the midnight-blue water. The waves swept up into points, lapping and sidestepping. Their ridges looked like cirques
of the Darkling Mountains. Apart from a sailor manning the wheel and a watchman at the prow, all was quiet. Only knavish sailors, rakish swordsmen and drug-addled Rhydanne are about at this hour.
“The Stormy Petrel’s close by,” he said, pointing forward at two faint lights, one red, one white, which rose and fell gently. The dawn clouds were gradually becoming paler, but the Petrel’s sails and hull were blurred, a drifting perse-gray shape. The ships creaked continually, and when they weren’t creaking they groaned and flapped and sighed. They were like animals talking to each other.
“Hm. I’m surprised Lightning and Mist can bear being on the same boat.”
“Can you see who’s at the helm?”
I glanced at him. “Rhydanne can’t see in the dark, Wrenn; that’s just a story. In fact I have crap night vision. Rhydanne eyes reflect to cut out snow glare so I don’t get blinded. It’s not much of an advantage at sea level…”
“Really?”
“Yeah. While I’m putting to rest myths about Rhydanne, you should know that they don’t turn into lynxes on their birthdays. They can’t survive being frozen solid and thawed out again. And they’re not cannibals, whatever Carniss may say.” I lit another cigarette with the stub of the first. “As for the bit about shitting in little pebbles like goats do, I reserve comment.”
“I didn’t mean to be nosy. I’m sorry.”
“You should be. I stay smooth-skinned, mind. It would take me weeks to grow as much stubble as you.”
Wrenn rubbed his chin. I turned back to the cabin thinking that I needed more time to recover. From behind me Wrenn said, “What’s it like up there? In Darkling, I mean. Is it true Rhydanne don’t talk to each other at all?”
Much as I wanted a few hours alone, that made me smile. I said slowly, “Oh, they say all they need to. But that’s not much compared with flatlanders, for sure. Even Scree village was only built by accident-it started out as a cairn. There was a tradition that every traveler puts a stone on the pile when he goes past. So it grew, very gradually, into a pueblo with rooms and an inn. Rhydanne come to the village every winter, when any person can occupy any room. They all get snowed in and drink themselves legless. In summer, they leave the rooms empty. The conditions make Rhydanne very self-reliant; they can’t act in large groups. When an avalanche destroyed my shieling I couldn’t find anyone to help me…The cornices were hanging waiting for the slightest shock. Eilean was crushed by the barrage and the whole valley changed shape.”
No Present Like Time Page 9