No Present Like Time (10 page)

At the top two pale pink lungs inflated and deflated of their own accord like bellows. They were joined to the depths of the engine by a windpipe ringed with cartilage. Dark clots lay slickly around it. Nearest me was a blood-smeared glass tank of water; gleaming veins ducted it out to cool the hearts. I saw about twenty red-brown kidneys attached by a network of ligaments to a porous gold pipe that led toward the rear of the car. As I watched, hot yellow liquid spattered out of the pipe onto the forecourt making a steaming puddle; the car relieved itself.

“Ugh.” I shrank back. “God, it’s disgusting!”

“I bought it to help me in my search,” Tarragon said. “I’m looking for a way to save the sea kraits. That’s why I’m here in Epsilon instead of at home studying, basking and eating tuna.”

Sea kraits were the largest animal I had ever heard of, but I had thought they’d all died out centuries earlier in the worst disaster Insects ever caused. “I don’t understand. Why are you bothered about sea snakes? And anyway, aren’t you a bit late? Their ocean dried up a long time ago—and good riddance.”

“Yes, but I have ways to talk to them. Sea kraits are intelligent animals with a sophisticated knowledge all their own. I think it’s a great pity they died out. All their learning was lost, Jant; don’t you care? I saw you free the porcupanda just now.”

“There’s a difference between a porcupanda and a kilometer-long sea snake! The Shift’s better off without foul, slimy sea creatures!”

“So says the Rhydanne. Take care you’re not threatened with extinction yourself. The Tine will want to make sports-coupés out of you. Wait! Don’t run away! Be a nice Rhydanne and look after my car for a minute while I pay.” Tarragon hefted a slab of succulent steak, which was lying on the spare seat. She jumped down from the running board and turned her shark’s waddle into a very sexy walk as she strode into the kiosk.

I leaned on the car’s curved side, staring all around for approaching Tine. If Tarragon was right they would be waving cleavers and bent on my demise. She had called this vehicle a sports car, but I have never seen one play sports, and if you ask me it is quite unsporting, sitting in a car when one is expected to run.

Tarragon reappeared, unwrapping a chunk of the Tine’s red water frozen to a flat wooden stick. She gave it a big lick, then offered it to me.

“No way!”

“Suit yourself. Weird air-breather. You shouldn’t visit Epsilon, Jant; you don’t belong here. It makes me so sad to see you poisoning yourself. I hoped you had given up drugs.”

“Well, I’m having a bit of a relapse.” I explained the island, my fear of the sea and my current predicament on board
Stormy Petrel.

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 yourselves, 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.