No Present Like Time

by Steph Swainston

  Tarragon said, “Yes. They wouldn’t eat humans, not worth the energy. They live in the deep ocean; when they slough their skins they scratch themselves on the continent’s roots shelving up from the abyss.”

  “Well, I want a sea krait.”

  “You want to save them! Are you sure?”

  “Only if they agree to the deal. The stinguish told me their ocean dried up, and you said they needed a safe haven. Kraits can come to live in the Fourlands’ sea on the condition that they obey me.”

  I braced myself as we rushed onto the wide bridge. Our wheels hummed as they sped over the irregular surface. I could see the striations where individual Insects had added their masticated wood pulp. The bridge’s stringy supports of hardened spit whooshed by on both sides. Looking between them I saw the savanna drop below us as we labored up to the apex.

  We crested the summit buffeted by Vista’s breeze that blows across worlds, and for one glorious moment I could see the whole of the sprawling market.

  Then it had gone; we were in the world of Vista. The wind howled through the top of the bridge. Below us, it blew the top layer of flaking sand across the wasteland as fine crystal dust, drifting onto high dunes against the base of the sea wall.

  Many white tracks converged on Vista Marchan city; from up here they resembled the rays of a star. Its cluster of pale blocky towers appeared suspended in mirages and pooled in bent light across the entire wasteland.

  I had not seen any place like this before. We descended past the towers that I realized were higher than the Throne Room spire. I was overawed and shaking as we rolled to a halt on top of Vista’s great sea wall. On either side of us were empty, sand-choked dockyards and piers with long, dry barnacled ladders that stopped short of the ground.

  I looked out over the salt flats, to see Epsilon as a translucent illusion, a lush plain and thriving market lying at forty-five degrees through the white wasteland.

  Tarragon said, “Aren’t Insects fascinating creatures? That’s the Vista desert. It used to be the ocean floor.” Her car’s wheels pulled the grit into tracks as we drove along the top of the immense wall. The salt-bleached streets were devoid of movement. The only living things in Vista were myself and Tarragon; her fin annoyingly brushed my thigh as she operated the controls. Paper Insect cells meshed between and hung like gray lace around the worn concrete buildings.

  “I’m sorry to bring you so far,” she added. “Your trip home will cause you substantial distress.”

  Rust stains ran down the dock wall from flaking iron rings bolted into the top. Sea-level markers and fading numerals were stenciled in a script twice my height. We stopped and stared out at the vanished ocean. The white sky and sand stretched away as far as I could see: two parallel planes meeting at the horizon. Occasional patches discolored the dunes’ glaring surface, chemicals and oil seeping up from below. A stagecoach that must have belonged to a recent tourist lay derelict and half-full of sand. The tops of its spoked wheels showed through the surface of a hard-packed ridge.

  Behind us was the city, faceless towers and blanched walls abraded with centuries of windblown sand. Spiral steps emerged like spinal columns from their broken shells. Rusted girders jutted out of the fortieth floors-metal thinned to perforated wafers. There was no sound but the breeze skipping salt crystals over the dry ocean floor and concrete promenade. It was completely outside my experience. I said, “It’s not beautiful. It’s…”

  “A desert, Jant. Lots of sand.”

  “Tarragon,” I said impatiently. “Capharnaum is burning!”

  She tutted but moved quickly, taking a gold pocket watch from a box that was part of the car’s fascia. She clicked its glass case open and I saw that it wasn’t a watch at all. Inside was a gold mechanism and a wire gauze that securely held down a fat black fly, twice the size of a bluebottle. It buzzed energetically, sounding as if it was trying to drill through its gold cage. Tarragon said, “It’s amazing what you can purchase from the Tine in Epsilon market if you have enough meat.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s a Time Fly. They have a way of avoiding being squashed or eaten. They can jump a split second back in time, up to the point at which they emerged from the pupa. This Time Fly hatched in Vista Marchan and has been imprisoned here ever since. I’m taking you back there; we will turn back time until the tide comes in. Wind it for me, will you?”

  I turned the contraption’s little gold key, just like a watch, and the gauze began to put pressure on the trapped insect. It felt threatened and tried its method of escape, but because the mechanism snared it, it carried its threat along. It took us, too, and it went fast. Really fast.

  For a few minutes, nothing changed. I twisted around and looked behind at the town. The buildings could be a little less gray, less dilapidated.

  There was a blurring at street level around the car, as if I could see colored air swirling. Tarragon said, “They’re city people, in their everyday lives or fighting Insects, moving back in time too fast to see.”

  She patted my arm and pointed to the horizon. Prodigious steel ships began to rise from the areas of oily discolored sands. Sand dusted away from them, revealing masts and wheelhouses then unearthed long hulls lying on their sides. The sand’s surface darkened to pale gray and began to glisten. Then shallow blue pools appeared in the lowest linear sand ripples, where I had not noticed hollows before. The long pools swelled and coalesced, turning the summits of the sand ripples into islands and building up around the dunes. Water ran together around them, darker blue as it deepened.

  The ripples were all covered, the sea level climbed, the dunes were dispersed islands. Just a few islands left; then the sea covered the final dune. The ocean kept rising, closer to the bottom rungs of the ladders, bearing upright the drab metal ships.

  Color poured into the sky. From monochrome it became pale, then bright blue. The automobile’s highly polished gold chassis reflected it. The Time Fly in the watch whined with effort. It was now a young imago, its wings crumpled and damp, as it had been when someone imprisoned it. Its six thin legs scraped against the watch’s shiny inside surface.

  Suddenly the Insect bridge vanished. Fresh paper, it disappeared in jerky stages from the foot of the arch to its zenith. Waves hit the harbor wall and climbed its sea-level gauge, higher and higher. The steel ships disappeared instantly; instead the ocean spat out white boats that bobbed at anchor. The rings in the dock wall were glossy; Vista Marchan’s towers were complete and spotless, glass walls reflecting the sun. The buzzing in the watch stopped abruptly, and everything was clear and still. It was a beautiful day. Men and women in orange tabards and yellow helmets went about their business at the docks, blissfully unaware of the annihilation that will happen when the Insects’ bridge crashes through.

  Tarragon showed me the watch; it was empty. She said, “In a factory in Vista, the Time Fly’s just been hatched.”

  An almighty wave reared from the middle of the ocean and cascaded into harbor, diminishing every second, until it lapped at the wall as a gentle ripple. A vast green-and-blue-striped snake’s head and upper body erupted from the ocean, spattering us with spray and blotting out the sun. Its head was four times bigger than a caravel, the solid muscle trunk of its monstrous body as thick as one of the towers behind me.

  The glossy snake lowered its flat, pointed head onto the promenade. The harbor workers seemed annoyed but were too polite to say anything. Tarragon and I climbed out of her car. “God-who-left-us,” I gasped.

  “No, it’s just a snake.”

  “Shit…How many are there?”

  “Sh!” Tarragon chided. “Their population numbers less than a thousand.”

  The sea krait’s bulk stretched into the distance. It meandered in colossal hundred-meter curves like the Moren River. A ship steered away from its side, panicking and belching smoke. Around half a kilometer from shore, the krait dipped underwater and the same distance farther away a striped conical island trailed back and f
orth in the frothing sea-the flattened tip of its tail.

  We stood in front of the snake’s slightly domed yellow eye. Its vertical slit pupil was the height and width of my body. Its head was covered in bright scales the size of a table top. Black skin showed between them, looking like stitching around the square scales on its closed lips. A deeply forked black tongue darted out of the tip of its snout and flickered around us. It didn’t touch me but I sensed the motion of the air a centimeter away from my face and I felt its moistness. The snake darted its tongue back into the hole in its top lip, which was big enough for me to have crawled through.

  Tarragon said, “Jant, may I introduce you to the king of the sea kraits?” She addressed the beast: “Your Heinouss, this is a messenger from the Emperor of the Fourlands who could soon be your Emperor too, if you agree to his terms…Jant, talk to him; he can hear you with his tongue.”

  The snake turned its enormous head on one side like a keeling carrack, and rubbed its closed mouth on the promenade. With the grating of a thousand millstones, it scraped great grooves into the cement and uprooted the iron mooring posts on either side. Its eye moved back and forth, appraising me.

  I declared, “Tarragon will show you the direction to the Fourlands’ ocean. You and your people can live there if you promise me three things. First, destroy the ship called Pavonine afloat in the center of the harbor, that Tarragon will show you. Second, after that don’t damage any other vessels or harm any people. Live in the depths and stay away from the shoreline, so you’ll be less likely to cause accidents. Third, our world is threatened by the Insects too; that makes us allies and in the future I might call on you for help again, via Tarragon.”

  All the time, the krait’s pennant-tongue flicked in and out of its long colubrine smile, picking up vibrations in the air. It was tasting my words. It twisted its head looking for Tarragon and slithered dangerously close to crushing her car before she ran around in front of its eye. It hissed, and I felt its hot, fishy, miasmic breath blow from the arched hole in its lip.

  “What is it saying?” I asked.

  Tarragon said, “He wants to know if your sea is of sufficient size. I don’t think the Fourlands’ ocean is roomy enough to hold every one of the sea kraits. I will tell him that there’s only space to allow a few of them through. That way at least some will escape the disaster and their species will survive.”

  The snake’s glistening body writhed along its whole visible length. Tarragon gave me an encouraging look. “The King accepts. He is convinced of your honesty; he says he can taste it.”

  “How do I know whether to trust a sea snake?”

  Tarragon laughed. “You have a Shark’s word that you can.”

  The meanders of the krait’s kilometer-long body drew tighter and closer together as it pulled its head back and smoothly submerged under the water. I stared at it, openmouthed.

  “You will see him once more,” said the Shark. “Goodbye, Jant. I have to act as their guide and we have rather a long way to swim in this delicious water. Still, we’ve plenty of time.” Her red dress turned gray, and stippled to continuous sharkskin all over her body. She walked to the very edge of the massive wall, hooked her bare toes over and raised her shagreen hands above her head.

  “Don’t leave me here!” I cried. I was not only in a completely unknown, alien world, but somewhere in its past.

  She turned a shark’s cold eye on me. “Have you not been practicing? You should be able to will your way back by now! I advised you to study and I expected you to learn. Well, this is an excellent opportunity to try.” She leaned forward, gave a little jump, and fell through the air in a perfect dive. She splashed into the crystal-clear water and did not rise again.

  I might have to stay here forever, I thought in panic. I might have to live here. Berating myself, I examined the stinking abandoned car but it was already beginning to rot. I kicked it. The dock workers had left when we were talking to the King krait, and I was alone. I sat down and for about an hour, though I had no way of measuring time, I tried to copy the feeling of my return Shifts. I imagined the pull-a plausible path to the Fourlands-growing stronger, solidifying. I grasped it, and dragged myself through.

  I lay somewhere that smelled of feathers. Darkness surrounded me. I felt nothing. My body was paralyzed; I couldn’t move. “Because you’re dead,” a heavy voice pronounced in my ear. I screamed with no sound. This is the wrong world; I’ve no body to return to. I struggled and thrashed and forced myself awake.

  I came to lying on the worn carpet in Ata’s cabin, by the linenfold paneled walls and brocade bench on which Rayne sat in front of the stern windows. “Well done,” she enthused. “You saved us!” The windows behind her were completely black. “Shame i’ killed you, though.” She smiled and her mouth widened on both sides. She smiled and smiled and smiled. I’m still not home. I’m still not awake!

  I squeezed my eyes shut and fought desperately. I then saw a lowering landscape with ruined bridges, fortresses, windmills all benighted backlit with raging fire, vast buildings with stone stairways running in every direction. I did not set down there. Someone’s fingers were on my face, probing like worms in my mouth; they forced my jaw open and rammed down my throat. I simultaneously woke up and vomited helplessly.

  I opened my eyelids to two slivers of glazed-green iris but lay otherwise inert. Rayne’s pair of bloodstained pumps and Lightning’s thick-soled buckled boots stood in front of my face. God, I hate it when I wake up lying in the recovery position.

  “He’s no’ responding,” said Rayne. I felt her thumb my eyelid.

  “I am,” I said, but it came out as a breath.

  Lightning’s voice sounded very weak. “Well, bloody make him respond.”

  Rayne made a sound like a shrug and slapped my face. “His pupils are so thin they’re like threads. Can you feel t’ Circle working t’ hold him?”

  “Yes, damn him.”

  Rayne slapped my face again and I gasped and spat.

  Lightning said, “Ah, Jant. Everyone fights to survive but you wipe yourself out! You couldn’t poison Gio but you do a bloody good job of poisoning yourself! We need you to fly above and drop missiles on the trebuchet team. I know you prefer to be comatose under heavy bombardment; are you hoping to be revived by the cold water when we sink?”

  I rolled into a kneeling position and blinked at him. He half-lay on a chair, still shaking with pain. Instead of his longbow he held a smaller bow with pulleys that could be kept drawn effortlessly.

  Rayne said, “Lightning, don’ make him feel bad or you’ll give him an excuse t’ take another dose.”

  “The gamin wretch! I’ll-”

  I whispered, “You’re wrong. You told me to stop the riot and that’s exactly what I am doing.”

  A ripple jolted Petrel hard against the harbor wall, throwing Rayne off balance. The snakes have arrived. I swallowed dryly, then I stumbled to my feet and out of the cabin. Rayne hurried and Lightning struggled after me, up the ladder to the poop deck where I gazed from the rail. The quayside was littered with bodies; its pavement was cracked and the walls of houses demolished where Pavonine’s shot had struck. Our figurehead and forecastle had been smashed into a mass of splintered wood. I took it all in with one glance, not knowing if I had really woken. The sky was dark-was this Fourlands or still Shift?

  Looking down to the lower level through an open hatch I saw Wrenn sitting on a rope coil, drinking a canteen of water voraciously. Rayne’s assistant was sewing the gash that was open to the bone in his arm. The sight brought me back to earth. He knew that Eszai can take wounds-although not wounds as serious as that. He must have badly misunderstood what I told him about the Circle.

  The Pavonine continued her bombardment. Cinna spun the wheel, keeping the ship’s stern toward us, rudder at full lock. Tirrick commanded the sweating pirates scurrying inside the treadwheels to ratchet the catapult back. They stacked its sling with slimy rocks from the ship’s own ballast.

 
; The Pavonine jolted. An unnatural ripple circled her. The water on either side of her hull began to churn and bubble; waves lapped in every direction. Behind her, between her and the beacon island, a long black ridge surfaced. It was domed like a whale’s back but it rose higher and higher out of the water, passing the height of the Pavonine’s rail. It was the King krait’s top lip.

  Lightning and Rayne stared, stunned. The men on the Pavonine ran about in confused terror as the ridge continued to rise. Two curved sharp fangs emerged parallel with the waves. Longer than pikes they projected from the black arch on the far left and right. The sea krait’s jaw showed its green and blue stripes and the water seething as it emerged glowed with phosphorescence.

  A hundred meters away from the top lip, in the water between us and the Pavonine, the slick lower lip crested up. Men by the catapult shrieked and pointed; on the main deck they ran from one side to the other, unable to fathom what the arches on either side of them could be. The krait’s open mouth ascended, its teeth curved toward the Pavonine. The ridged black skin of its upper palate faced us, twice the size of the mainsail and glistening like tar. Water sluiced off its smooth bony head.

  The smoke-filled sky resonated with the pirates’ screams as far as the town. I had the impression that the whole sea bed was ascending. Water thundered out of both sides of the krait’s open mouth; in the rocketing froth between its upper and lower jaws the Pavonine danced and spun like an eggshell in boiling brine. The cocked catapult went off, hurling shot vertically into the air.

  I heard Cinna screeching. The snake’s lance-long teeth reached the height of Pavonine’s foremast, curving above the ship and caging it in. Pavonine canted over so far the crow’s nest on its mainmast slapped the water, now on the port side, now the starboard, throwing off men. The krait’s bottom jaw obscured the ship. Its yellow eye emerged, surrounded with wet black skin, waves battering against it.