No Present Like Time

by Steph Swainston

  Traders at a pet stall were herding some pygmy house-mammoths, the size of dogs, into an enclosure. An indigo-feathered archaeopteryx on a perch rattled its scaly plumage and twisted its head down to bite at its toes. The strawberries on a nearby fruit stall chatted between themselves of whatever strawberries talk about.

  I walked to the edge of Epsilon city, along the bank of the river that runs mazily in right angles and often uphill. The market clustered around, infesting both banks. It seeped out of the town’s perimeter, down to the estuary and toward the open plain, a lush grassland dotted with tiny isolated hermite mounds.

  Out on the savanna, in the distance the skeletal white city of Vista Marchan tilted in the air, hanging like an enormous moon in daylight. Flocks of birds flew through its insubstantial mirage towers. Single-humped dronedaries grazed the long grass. They wandered, complaining, without even glancing at the ghostly streets around them. An Insect bridge arched up from the green plain, became transparent at its apex, then descended into the center of Vista Marchan. The bridge was so old that cracks showed in its silver-gray patina like weathered teak.

  Vista Marchan is a city that crashed through in the wake of an Insect invasion. The entire world of Vista was undermined by the Insects and collapsed into the Shift, where it is now visible from Epsilon. Its sandy wasteland seemed to emerge from the ground and extended at an incline to high in the sky. The dead towers of its capital city leaned at forty-five degrees through the Epsilon plain, listing so that their tops hung over the Insect bridge. Their basements looked to be embedded in the ground, but actually they neither entered nor overlaid it, and they shimmered slightly in a heat that the savanna did not feel.

  Nothing survived the Insects in Vista Marchan, but since they destroyed the boundary between the worlds so completely, people could walk there now, over their bridge.

  One Insect tunnel bored into Vista’s deep-sea abyss, causing a kilometer-high waterspout in another world, through which the entire ocean drained away. No good came of this apart from the fact that it killed god knows how many millions of Insects, and there is now a peaceful saltwater sea in downtown Somatopolis.

  I wondered if the Insects would eventually reach Tris of their own accord; some time millennia from now the Trisians might truly need Eszai to defend them. I wondered if the Insects burrowing down and piercing through the worlds would in the far future infest them all-the last worlds forming the outer layers of their teeming nest. Were they imperceptibly surrounding the Fourlands on all sides? Were we at the center, near the Insects’ long-overrun world of origin, or were we on the outer reaches, one of the last to fall?

  Tarragon said she wanted to view the ocean’s sphere from the outside. I wanted to strip away the worlds and look at the complex extensions, apertures and twisted continuous shapes of the Insects’ domain.

  Lost in contemplation I wandered through the market’s fresh clothing region and the designer food district, to the edge where the Constant Shoppers’ rickety shacks were dotted around between the stalls. The poorest Shoppers had to walk hours to reach the Squantum Plaza, heart of the market. They are a collection of all species but habitually a breed apart. They are either creatures of Epsilon, or Shift tourists like myself, so overwhelmed by Epsilon’s bazaar they never escape.

  “They buy things all the time,” Tarragon had said. “Compulsively. I mean, that’s their only pastime. They trade morning to night, and then all night in the southern souks. It’s fashionable to spend money. Some of them are terminally addicted, which is as terrible as your habit.”

  “These Constant Shoppers, what do they do when they run out of funds?”

  “They set up their portable stalls on the other side of the Plaza and sell everything they’ve bought. Then, with that money, they start shopping again.”

  I explored toward the river mouth. The market did not end at the waterline; the rows of stalls kept going, unbroken, straight into the estuary and along the sea floor.

  Out here in the periphery Epsilon market extended into the air as well. Tall metal struts supported stalls on platforms thirty meters high. Creatures on top flitted, squawked and chirruped, eager to buy and sell. Marsh gibbons swung hand over hand along ropes strung between the poles; vertebrate spiders with meter-long fangs spun webs across them to catch flying machines.

  Seldom ripples came in on the limp Epsilon sea. The water was as clear as air. At first half-submerged, the market continued down to great depths, where it faded from view in the poor light. Jellyfish hung motionless above it. Things with long, intricate shell legs waded between the stalls and reached down to select bargains. In comparison with the aerial stalls, the underwater market moved slowly and gracefully; columns of kelp swayed like trees. Temblador eels glowing eerie white swam at a sedate pace in shoals through the passageways. Nicors with ivory tusks and whiskery faces flapped along with lazy fins. Saurians snacked on pre-Cambrian sushi, tasty bundles of seaweed and writhing worm junk food. They haggled over jewels-green glass beads on silver rings. Anorkas clustered with geeky excitement around a shell stall and frales-very small whales-cruised picking up crumbs just as dogs, rats and trice do on land.

  There were red octopi with pale undersides and eight shopping baskets. Rays with sinister ripped-off goods under their cloaks avoided the pikemen patrolling the aisles.

  The market surrounded a large, translucent hall that the stinguish had constructed out of solidified water. Their building materials were monumental, colorless pyramids of spring water atop black water slabs from the lightless abyss, and gray speckled blocks from the deep silt where soft carcasses degrade to their elements. Their edifice was decorated with bricks colored bright blue from the brine captured in sea caves, and rare aquamarine from the surface water that flares green when the last ray of the setting sun flashes through it.

  A mirth of female stinguish looked up from the forecourt of their hall, through the surface tension. I waved to them; they turned to each other and giggled, long silver fingers over their lipless mouths in girly gestures.

  Stinguish are a lighthearted people who live in groups called mirths. They communicate by laughter that carries underwater for thousands of kilometers, so any two individuals can chatter to each other through a network of mirths, anywhere in the vast ocean. According to Tarragon, chatter is exactly what they do; their flaky air-head nonsense pervades every cubic meter of the sea. Stinguish mirths migrate fifteen hundred kilometers twice a year, dive two thousand meters down to chasms, or lounge on the beaches in the tidal zone and breathe air. No stinguish was ever solitary. They had even more camaraderie than Plainslanders did. If you kicked a football along the streets of Rachiswater, an Awian would either tell you to keep the noise down, or point at the KEEP OFF THE GRASS signs. If you kicked a football about in the wrong side of Hacilith, someone would knife you and steal it. In Eske, Plainslanders start fifty-a-side matches that last for a week. But stinguish never stopped playing. How they managed to swim vast distances and remain cheerful is one of the great mysteries of nature.

  My boots crunched on the pebbles. I passed a refreshment stall under which crouched a pair of brown, scaly tea dragons. Their innocent yellow eyes tracked me. Tea dragons breathe streams of hot, black tea. They were being used as caddies; I approached carefully because I didn’t want to be sprayed with it. The stall holder was a polyp, a teacup held in each tentacle and its wet skin shining in the sun. “What’s it like being a polyp?” I asked.

  “It’s awful. Bits of me keep budding off and becoming accountants.”

  The polyp sold tea to a flabberghast who bought a whole armful of ghostly doughnuts. I didn’t see the flabberghast in time and accidentally walked straight through his corpulent, overhanging belly.

  “Hey!” he exclaimed. “Look where you’re going, skinny boy!”

  “Sorry, sorry.” I backed down to the water’s edge, my hands raised.

  Immediately a stinguish girl shot out of the wavelets. She grabbed my ankle with fingers as bo
ny as a bird’s feet.

  I shook my leg. “Get off! What are you doing?”

  “Can you spare some change, please?”

  The stinguish was young, with circular silver eyes, not much of a nose at all, and an ample mouth side-to-side of her round smooth head. Her mouth turned up at the corners like a dolphin’s and was full of small pointed teeth. Her thin arms grew down into long, bony claws, her chest was flat and lacking nipples, and her body ended in a broad tail like an eel’s-thick in the middle, edged with a fringe of fin that came to a point. She coughed up some water, shuddered and quailed as she took a lungful of air, as if she didn’t like it at all. Water drained out of the gills that lay shaped over her ribs. The stinguish’s smooth silver skin was extraordinary; every imaginable pastel color shone on her iridescent metallic hide. I could see the herringbone arrangement of muscle in her tail. Her ribs were like ripples in platinum sand; she looked malnourished.

  Oddly, she was alone and she hadn’t laughed once. She was not behaving like a stinguish at all. She waved her tapering tail exhaustedly and pleaded with big lidless eyes. “Please. I need to buy things.”

  I crouched down and peeled her pointed, nailless fingers from around my ankle. “Hello, little urchin,” I said.

  “I’m not an urchin. Urchins are prickly.”

  “No, they’re not all bad-tempered. I was one once.”

  The stinguish shook her head and an expression of confusion appeared in her medallion eyes. “What are you going on about? Can you spare any change, or not?”

  I wondered what a cheerful, giggling, stupid stinguish wanted with money. “Why aren’t you with your mirth?”

  “I don’t have the time for this. I have to go and buy more things. Look at it all,” she said, distraught. She turned her face left and right taking in the vast market. She was desperate to be out there, beach-combing among the stalls.

  “Listen. There’s a stinguish representative in Epsilon’s court. I can introduce you to her if you’re lost. She’s called Far-Distant. I’ll-”

  “I’m not called that anymore. My name is Summer-Sale.”

  “Far-Distant? Is it you? You’ve grown very thin! Don’t you remember me?”

  She bubbled distractedly. “All the things on the stalls look really pretty and exotic when they’re arranged together, but if I buy one and take it away, it’s not the same. It seems to turn into tacky crap. I just want them all. I spent all my money on clothes, slime and jewelry, and now I’ve no money left. Please…I’m missing the music and the lights, and the stall holders talk so friendly.”

  Far-Distant had evidently become a Constant Shopper. “No, my sister. I won’t give you anything. No one you meet in the market will be as friendly as your mirth. I think you should go back to them.”

  The stinguish started wailing. I understood why, because I know the torment of addiction, and the effects of all addictions feel similar. Far-Distant would have to do withdrawal from shopping, and whatever world she must return to will seem very cold and unforgiving. I stroked her head but hundreds of tiny circular transparent scales rubbed off and stuck to my hand. Her mackerel skin shone.

  She tried to shake me by my ankle. “I need money; I’m so unhappy.”

  “There’s much to be happy about. If it had seasons, the ocean would be beautiful at this time of year.”

  She looked for a way to escape me. “I’d rather go hungry than trouble you further…”

  “No! Come back! OK, I’ll give you some cash,” I said soothingly. “You’re just a bit lost. Why not call for your mirth, they’ll help you.”

  “You don’t understand,” she said bitterly. “All stinguish are lost and they always have been. All of us! We don’t belong here. Insects keep destroying our homes.”

  “You mean Epsilon isn’t your home?”

  “No. Up there.” Far-Distant dragged her arm out of the water and pointed vaguely away from the sea, across the open grassland.

  “In the sky?”

  “No, silly. Vista.”

  Vista’s pale wasteland seemed to focus as I stared at it. For all its immense size, it looked weightless, part of the air. “I know that the Insects bored through from Vista to Epsilon so thoroughly that Vista slipped down the path they made.”

  “All the sea fell into the Somatopolis,” said Far-Distant. “And the water carried us through, too. Ha! Not us exactly; our ancestors-it happened a million tides ago. But Insects ate the Somatopolis so we swam on again, and we ended up here. We’re very lucky to survive; the sea kraits and so on all became extinct. Everyone who was too big to fit down the waterspout died, left high and dry. The bad old snakes squirmed around in the ooze, too heavy to support their own weight in the air, and they were crushed. The ones trapped in pools starved when the food ran out. All of us stinguish rejoiced. The kraits used to eat us, but we escaped and they didn’t, ha ha. But that’s why stinguish are very lost. No wonder I feel lonely and have to go shopping to cheer myself up…Now can I have some change?”

  “Well, all right.” I dug in my pocket for coins. “But tell me first; it’s just a myth, isn’t it, that stinguish can chat underwater?”

  “We can! For two thousand kilometers.”

  I shook my head. “I hardly believe it. I’m a messenger and if it was possible to shout that far I’d be redundant. But I’m not worried by those tales; I know water’s thicker than air and probably just muffles the sound.”

  “It’s true!” she said indignantly.

  I shrugged.

  “Look! It’s true! Watch!” She ducked under and gave out her signature laugh. Bubbles rose from her gaping mouth and burst, releasing her wonderful inflective giggles. “Ha ha ha ha!” the bubbles chuckled. “Ha! ha!”

  She listened for a second, then surfaced, blowing out spray. “I called ‘Hi.’ The littoral mirth is passing it on.”

  Stinguish began to swim in from all directions. They all looked the same but different sizes. Naked and grinning they wriggled between the market stalls or glided effortlessly above them. Their tadpolelike tails waved in sinuous ripples, their long arms trailed, heads raised, watching the surface tension. Their swimming reminded me of flying; the grace of both belies the strength it takes. I appreciated their sturdiness, but I didn’t envy them the cold water.

  The first stinguish thrust his hands against the estuary bed and burst upward, in a shower of spray. He gave a smile so wide I thought he would drink the ocean. “Far-Distant! I haven’t seen you for tides and tides.”

  “Way-Farer!” shouted Far-Distant.

  He batted her with his tail. “Have you recovered from your latest spending spree?”

  “I think so,” she said uncertainly.

  “Ho ho! So come back to us! We won’t lose you again, Far-Distant. We’ll surf the warm current over the reefs while fish shoals scatter before us. We’ll echo the sonar laughter rising from the benthic mirth five hundred fathoms down!”

  Her mirth all broke surface at once; a hundred rounded backs rolled on the wave. The sea was silver with their bodies; chuckles and gasps wet the air. They surrounded Far-Distant, guffawing and tittering. Their round heads bobbed up, some leapt from the water and somersaulted back, flicking their gleaming tails. The nearest ones beached themselves on the pebbles, propped up on their spindly arms. They pointed at me in my “Club 18-∞” T-shirt and black wings, and collapsed in helpless belly laughter.

  Far-Distant looked up at me. “It’s my mirth. Mine! They want me back. Thanks for your help; I’ll always remember. Um? Bye!”

  “Wait!” I called. “I want to know about the sea kraits. If they’re extinct, how can Tarragon save them?”

  “Tarragon?” cried Way-Farer. “Where? A shark! A shark!” He submersed and laughed an alarm call through the water.

  “A shark?”

  “Worse-a megalodon! Swim for your lives!”

  Their heads bobbed down and their fleshy tails fluked up. Bubbles trickled between them. They whipped the sea into froth which t
he next wave brought ashore. The tight crowd of stinguish glided toward deep water, vanishing into the gloom. I shouted, “Far-Distant! Come back, you annoying amphibian!” But her mirth had gone, leaving just the occasional giggle swept back on the wind.

  I felt the unusual warm glow of having done something right. I lingered and observed the aquatic commerce in the soaked souk. Far-Distant was an addict, and I managed to help her; maybe there was some hope for me. I couldn’t tell if her cure was temporary, or what strains drove a carefree stinguish to class-A shopping. For me, it was my past, and now Tern’s infidelity was eating me alive. But every Shift I start to die, and that’s the trip. I wished that someone in the Fourlands would save me the way I have saved Far-Distant. I needed someone strong and forthright to barge in and force me to stop.

  The attraction to my body began to drag me back. I concentrated and redoubled the rate at which the vivid marketplace faded to gray. To black.

  TO BLACK. t o b l a c k tob l a c k o b l a c o b l a b l a l a a w a s e was f g e was fu n g e was f u l i n g e was f u l l r i n g e was full y r i n g e was full s y r i n g e was full s y r i n g e was full of blood. the syringe was full of blood.

  Blood was trickling out of the back of the barrel. It had soaked into the sheet and mattress in a patch around my elbow. The syringe looked like a red glass feather growing out of place on my arm. Fuck it. I sat up and wiped at a warm trickle that had been running out of my nose and horizontally across my cheek. I stared at my hand-it was smeared with red.

  Shit, I thought; what time is it? I glanced at the clock-six P.M.! And it’s Thursday! How could I have slept for two days? Oh, by god-Gio’s meeting! I’m late! I pulled myself out of bed, feeling weak and sick, viscid with self-recrimination and resentment. Shira, you stupid bastard; you really can’t leave it alone, you can’t control it. Ninety years in and out of scolopendium; you should have learned by now. I snarled, “You don’t fucking deserve to be an Eszai at all!”