Time of Breath

by Paul Mannering

  “Not after last time,” I frowned.

  “Regular tea. A blend of some rather stale Oolong and a sprinkle of Ashma.”

  “Thank you.”

  “There would have been more Ashma, but it was mouldy.”

  “You had me at regular tea.”

  Drakeforth handed me the cup; the tea was hot and refreshing. I drank it and tried not to think about watering persimmons. “Do you think Goat has a toilet?” I asked.

  Goat’s bathroom had seen less water than most Pathian plumbing. He had emerged fully dressed by the time I returned and we let Drakeforth do the talking as we occupied ourselves with not looking at each other.

  “I have been going through your charts and…notes,” Drake­forth said. He lifted a pile of screwed-up scraps of paper on to the table. “The good news is that you have been to many places that may have been the site of The Tree, but actually aren’t. At least, they weren’t when you went there.”

  “Tree?” Goat asked, and gnawed on a strip of goat jerky.

  Drakeforth peeled a crumpled egg of paper. “There is a theory that The Tree has quantum properties. This makes actually finding the drumming thing almost impossible.”

  “What quantum properties?” I asked.

  “Like any decent sub-atomic particle, we can either know where the Tree is or how fast it is travelling.”

  “Oh, that quantum property,” I said. “Are you sure that is why no one has ever found it? Don’t things have to be, well, sub-atomic to have quantum properties?”

  “Of course,” Drakeforth said. “What no one considers is that if you bring enough sub-atomic particles together they can make up quite a large piece of reality.”

  “All of it, I should think,” I said.

  “Precisely. The trick is bringing all that quantum potential with you. Living Oak manages that up to a scale of one tree.”

  Drakeforth rarely spoke with such passion about anything he wasn’t angry about. I finished my tea and sniffed a piece of goat jerky before putting it back on the plate.

  “How do we find The Tree, if we can only know where it has been?” I asked.

  “Or how fast it is travelling,” Drakeforth replied.

  “Either way, it makes finding it impossible.”

  “There is a way.” Drakeforth collected Goat’s bark manuscript and unrolled it across the breakfast table. “You are tuned into the channels of interconnected empathic energy.”

  “Okay.”

  “So we use you to confirm The Tree’s current position and its momen­tum.”

  “Have you considered that maybe The Tree doesn’t want to be found?”

  “That will be the second question we can ask it,” Drakeforth said.

  “The first being…?”

  “The whereabouts of Professor Bombilate, of course.”

  I almost asked who Professor Bombilate was, and then I remembered and felt guilty about the lapse.

  “Of course. We should get started then.”

  “Goat!” Drakeforth barked. Goat flailed wildly and fell back off his stool.

  “Raise the mainsail, weigh the anchor, bilge the pumps! We have places to go and trees to see!”

  “Tree!” Goat yelled from the floor, a fist pumping the air in triumph before he rolled to his feet. Goat leapt into the rigging and then slid down a rope to the cabin deck. We watched as he threw himself around the flying ship. Tugging on goat-hide straps, turning wooden pegs and pulling on levers. The ship continued to meander through the air at the same sedate pace.

  “Well…” I said after a few minutes of watching a distant sand dune keeping its distance. “This is exciting.”

  “Do you feel anything?” Drakeforth asked.

  “Too much, too often,” I replied. “It’s exhausting.”

  “Specifically, are you feeling any empathic energy flows in a particular direction, either converging on or coming from the tree that Goat is obsessed with finding?”

  I took a deep breath. On the exhale, my breath misted as if I was somewhere cold. It also sparkled as if I was in a blizzard of glitter.

  “Pudding?” Drakeforth’s voice came from a great distance. I blinked, my eyelids crashing down with the weight and gravity of neutron stars.

  “Yes…” I whispered down a tunnel of swirling light. The warm glow of empathic energy sparked in a living network that pulsed with an infinity of synchronised heartbeats.

  “It’s kinda cool,” I murmured. My words sparkled, sending glowing snowflakes of energy spinning into each other, where they burst into shards.

  “Follow the energy to its source,” Drakeforth said.

  Empathic energy funnelled into a whirlpool that stretched to infinity. I let my consciousness tip forward and I plunged into the vortex. As everything accelerated, the blur of my velocity knitted the sparks together with faint lines that I told myself were light.

  A constellation took shape as I plummeted down the seemingly endless tunnel. Like people who see the face of Arthur in their burnt toast, I comprehended the shapes by making them familiar. “I wondered where you got to.”

  The woman with dark hair smiled at me in that mysterious way that no one really can.

  “You’re everywhere,” I said. “You show up and interfere, or stop me doing something, and then you disappear again. I have no idea if you are trying to ruin my life or save it. Your only redeeming quality is that you don’t have Drakeforth’s sarcasm.”

  The woman raised a pale, glowing finger to her cold, sparkling lips and silently shushed me as I crashed through her face. Her image shattered into stars, and the stars broke.

  In a place of moving light, refracted, reflected, imprismed, and scattered, I found The Tree.

  “No wonder no one has ever found you,” I said to The Tree. “You probably don’t exist.”

  Energy coursed in lines from all directions. It flowed up the trunk to spread among the endless branches and leaves, spilling out into everything in countless streams.

  “Not the source, a conduit,” I said. “Energy is neither created nor destroyed, just endlessly cycling.”

  I could have stayed there forever. I may have already. Rising from the stream of consciousness only required me to open my eyes.

  “What did you find?” Drakeforth asked.

  “You don’t know?”

  “Pudding, I’m not Pathian-trading with you. There is too much at stake.”

  “Arthur doesn’t know something?” I was amused but unsurpr­ised.

  “Arthur knows all. So humour us by telling me what you found.”

  “The Tree. It’s not what you think. There is no plant growing in some hidden desert oasis. The Tree is everywhere. Connected to everything.”

  “Now you understand,” Drakeforth said.

  “Yes, though I don’t think you do.”

  “I find it better not to,” Drakeforth replied.

  I cleared my mind with a sigh. “You could have told me that before!” I punched Drakeforth in the arm.

  “I find it is better to learn things at your own pace,” Drakeforth said. “That way, you can make your own mistakes.”

  “And learn from them,” I replied.

  “Mostly it stops you blaming anyone else.”

  “How does this help Goat? Or us, for that matter?”

  “You found the answer when you went, wherever it was you disappeared to.”

  I frowned, “Uhm, no I’m quite sure I said I didn’t find The Tree.”

  “You found it. You just don’t know where it is going,” Drake­forth said.

  “Because we can either know where it is, or where it is going?”

  “We know where it is going,” Drakeforth replied.

  I thought for a moment. “Everywhere…?”

  Chapter 20

 
“Would it help if we rowed?” I asked after several dull hours of gentle drifting across the endless sand of the Pathian desert.

  “It might,” Drakeforth replied from under his hat. He had retired to his hammock while Goat steered the airship towards the horizon.

  My internal dialogue went round in circles. Where are we going? Oh, but if we know that, we won’t know how fast we are travelling. I could see how fast we were travelling. I could shimmy down a rope, run a few laps around the shadow of the airship, and casually climb back up before it had travelled more than two ship-lengths across the burning sand.

  With Drakeforth hiding under his hat, I was left to stare out at the drifting dunes. The worst part of being on such a slow boat was how it left me with no one to interrogate except myself.

  All right, Pudding. We’re going to get to the bottom of this.

  Yes, I mentally nodded. We’re already scraping the bottom of the barrel, so why not make a go of it?

  Well there’s no need for that kind of attitude.

  Are you sure?

  Winning an argument with my inner voice was unlikely. It felt easier to take action instead of talking about it.

  “Goat!” I shouted.

  “See!?” he bellowed from the helm with such intensity, we may as well have been in the grips of a terrible typhoon and not drifting through the calm air as sedately as lint.

  “You don’t know where we are going!” According to Berkeley Upsqueak, if you are going to subvert a question by making it a statement, then speak with confidence and volume.

  “What?!” Goat reacted as I had hoped.

  “You have no clue where we are!” I enunciated each yelled syllable.

  “I don’t?”

  I took a deep breath. Berkeley had also said that if you find your­self going through homophones, then keep going.

  “No idea!”

  I waited for the weight of my words to have the desired effect. It took a moment, and then the ship groaned as the air had intensified. I grabbed the rail and hung on. Overhead, the tight mass of inflated goat intestines squeaked indignantly under the strain of the rising wind.

  The tones and shades of the sky changed so rapidly it felt like one of those interior design paint books had been riffled through at close range. The swelling clouds went from Snow Cake to Crusty Frypan,and my skin tingled with the building static charge of impending lightning.

  There is no way this is going to work, I warned myself.

  “Shutup,” I replied aloud.

  Everything went from mildly off-putting to extremely weird in what might have been a few seconds. I sighed and closed my eyes.

  Cats arranged themselves like self-cleaning gargoyles along the convoluted ledges and edges of the Pathian Museum of History. The building itself was a low hill of stone blocks and pillars that gave the impression it had been built by a legion of blind stone masons, each of whom had no idea that anyone else was working on the project.

  Goat’s ship appeared in the shadow of this eye-twisting edifice with a sound similar to a cat coughing up a fur ball.

  Space and time, and all the possibilities between, hurriedly got their story straight and the sky returned to normal. Except for the floating mass of inflated goat intestines with the haphazard wooden cabin swinging underneath.

  “We’ve arrived?” Drakeforth asked, joining me on the deck.

  “Yeah,” I nodded. “It wasn’t that difficult, once I realised we can’t possibly know where The Tree is, or where it is going at the same time.”

  “Which means the chances of it actually being here are as remote as Nin’s hot-chip caravan in Yambake, Malakam,” Drakeforth replied.

  “Is that remote?”

  “Stupidly remote.” Drakeforth adjusted his hat. “Come, Pudd­ing, we have a library to explore and possibly rob.”

  Chapter 21

  With Goat’s help, we dismounted and trod the warm sands towards the museum. I followed Drakeforth on to a narrow flight of stairs that went up at an angle as if it were climbing a hill. The stairs switchbacked across the front of the building and we covered more ground than necessary in reaching the grand entrance.

  To my complete lack of surprise, the massive doors were made of stone. Drakeforth pulled a rope handle protruding from the centre of one. The metre-thick slab of rock swung outwards with the silent ease of a whale doing a headstand.

  We walked into an interior that had a pleasant chill to it, as if the only cold air in the country had been safely stored here.

  I inhaled the special smell of museums: the slightly dusty, oddly chemical, musty scent of old things gathered in one place. It smelled like curiosity and the thrill of discovery.

  My pace quickened, along with my pulse, as we entered the museum gift shop. Arrayed on shelves and racks were souvenirs and T-shirts with catchy slogans. Everything about the place felt as tacky as a mile of spilled honey. She was here already, sitting cross-legged on the counter top, chin in her hands watching us come in. Her impossibly dark hair stirred gently, like eggs in a soufflé mix.

  Drakeforth moved left with the certainty of a bloodhound suffer­ing a sinus infection, and collided with a postcard stand.

  “Where is everyone?” I whispered.

  “I’m here, you’re here,” Drakeforth replied.

  “And everyone else?” I chose to ignore his wilful ignorance of my hallucination, who was now lying on her back on the counter, one leg crossed over the other knee, wiggling her toes to the beat of some unheard music.

  “Minding their own business, I expect,” Drakeforth said.

  “Do we pay an entry fee?” I asked.

  Drakeforth stepped around a display of icecube-sized stone blocks, labelled as genuine pyramid stone. “In Pathia, this place is the equivalent of a bank. Getting in is free; getting out, however, may cost you everything.”

  We passed through an archway of perfectly stacked stone blocks, flanked by a pair of murrai. After my experience with the Godden Corporation’s answer to humanity, these animated stone statues made me nervous.

  “Do you think these are real?” I whispered.

  “No, they’re an illusion; it’s all done with mirrors and clever use of light.”

  “I mean: are they actual murrais?”

  Drakeforth gave them a moment of his attention, reaching out and tapping one on its chiselled features. “Yes.”

  “They remind me of those RABITs the Godden Corp was making.”

  “Similar idea, though these are artisanal pieces. Carved from local stone by masters of the art.”

  “I thought the Pathians didn’t use empathic energy?”

  “They don’t, at least not anymore. They did use it, centuries ago. When the pyramids were built and the murrai were empath­ically powered. Then attitudes changed, the murrai fell out of favour and became museum pieces.”

  “What about the ones we saw carrying litters?”

  “It’s not like they break down, some people still use them. It’s just harder to make a living when you are competing for work against a stone man who doesn’t need payment or bathroom breaks.”

  “I didn’t read any of that in the guidebook.”

  “Tourism is also an illusion, Pudding.”

  “Wait…” the thought that had been itching at the back of my mind for a while intensified. “Godden and his fellow deplorables discovered Double-e flux a century ago. How can that be, if the Pathians were using it hundreds of years ago?”

  Drakeforth rolled his neck as if my insistence on finding out things caused him pain.

  “There is a school of philosophy that suggests if you can’t see something, it doesn’t exist. This makes as much sense as most philosophy, in that it’s good for a laugh, but really is best not given too much attention when it comes to practical applications like manufacturing products fo
r the visually impaired. There is also a raft of other disciplines that explore the cycle of the rise and fall of civilisations, the acquirement and loss of technology and, oddly enough, the constant of tea.”

  My nodding along stopped. “The constant of tea?”

  “Every civilisation throughout recorded history, and probably before, has had a form of tea. It has the same social structures and is always prepared using the same basic ingredients of hot water and dried leaves of a local plant. Tea is the one constant found in all countries, cultures, and civilisations. People have gone centuries without cottoning on to the idea of the wheel, or the prepaid gift card, but every single one of those tribes, regardless of size or complexity, has understood tea.”

  “Which relates to my original question how, exactly?”

  “It’s called tangential speech, Pudding. I thought you studied language structure at university.”

  I shrugged, my mind flashing to a joke the linguistics lecturer told about a man who fell asleep while sunbathing naked.

  “Empathic energy was known to, and utilised by, the ancient Pathians. They stopped using it centuries ago and since then, like most countries separated from others by an ocean, Pathia remained happily isolated and doing its own thing. Exactly why Pathians stopped using empathic energy has always been the subject of conjecture. Now, I suspect it was because they realised what it actually is,” Drakeforth continued.

  “They figured out that empathic energy is the life energy of actual people?” I asked.

  “Enough to make the decision to stop using it for anything,” Drakeforth replied. “The knowledge appears to have fallen out of use for centuries, then rediscovered by three college students with questionable morals.”

  “How can the murrai keep functioning? They should need refuelling, or something.”

  “No one is certain. They just keep working.”

  “Energy cannot be created or destroyed, just transformed. So the murrai are self-contained batteries of double-e flux of some kind? Surely, someone has taken one apart and seen how they tick?”

  “That’s the thing.” Drakeforth waggled his eyebrows in a mysterious way. “It has been done, there’s nothing inside a murrai except more murrai. Stone, all the way through. Regular desert rock. There is no reason they should be moving at all.”