No Present Like Time (28 page)

Tern said, “Why did you steal my money? Can I have it back, please, or have you mainlined it all?”

I ignored this transparent attempt to change the subject. I kept pleading: “Remember when I proposed, how I brought you the filigree spider? We could go down to the Hall and dance without music, the way we did back in ’ninety-five. Come on! Wear your brooch—it can be our seventh honeymoon.”

“Ten minutes and you’ll simply collapse.”

“Come to bed then.”

“That’s not the point! Shira, you’re never here yourself!”

“I’m the Messenger! The point of my existence is to bugger off and bring back news! It’s my job!”

Tern drew the curtain across our room. I lay and watched the details of its velvet folds; they looked like letters of the alphabet.

She wiped her eyes and said quietly, “All your holidays are spent in Scree. Fighting Insects nearly burned you out—so off you go to the mountains. Do you have any women there? Even when you’re here, you’re unconscious! I knew your cycle would come around again. You can’t stay off cat—you can’t stand to be sober for more than five years. You’re not thinking about us; you are thinking about that
fucking
drug.”

Tern knew how to hurt me. She had observed it well over the last century and her infidelity had pushed me into addiction before. If she was not adulterous I would not be a junkie. “I took cat because I’m scared of the ships,” I said. “Everybody knows that but Ata still forced me to sail. Besides, I would rather not use cat at all than bother you with it. It’s under control.”

“That’s not always apparent.”

Well, it wasn’t always true.

Tern kept going. “Oh, for god’s sake! If I upset you, you suddenly start to notice—but you don’t think how your actions affect anyone else! I should never have married a Rhydanne.”

“Where did
that
come from?” I blinked.

“I don’t mean your appearance! Some things you just can’t grasp, no matter how hard you try. It doesn’t occur to you to think of anybody else, like you’re still living alone in a hovel in the mountains. When you’re away on errands do you ever think of me?”

“Yes. Yes, all the time! That whole Rhydanne thing is just bullshit. Don’t lay it on me as well now.”

“The pact—”

“Sod the pact! It’s all right in theory but neither of us can actually stand it!” In a lull between the waves of chemical pleasure I sprang to my feet and stalked around the room. I ran my hands down the embossed spines of the books on the shelves. I ended up leaning on the stone mantelpiece looking at outdated invitations to dances. Our marriage rings were smoke rings and they soon dispersed. “I’m still Eszai,” I said.

“Shira…” said she, and then fell quiet as she remembered what my name meant.

I kicked a neat hole in the bottom of the wardrobe door, then sat down cross-legged on the bearskin rug. “Yes! See how important fidelity is to Rhydanne. If you’re going to make all these unfair comparisons! I’m mostly Awian anyway!”

Tern said nothing; she had not seen me this angry for years. I stared at the ceiling, the only part of the room that didn’t spin. I understood affairs; Tern wanted the same intensity of feeling now that she had when she was young. We might have young bodies, but we have had so much experience that we can’t be young again. Tern should face it: she’s one hundred and twenty-one. She would be dead by now if it wasn’t for me, the ungrateful bitch.

“Do you drop your underwear on Tornado’s floor as well?”

“At least I don’t vomit on the floor!”

“Where do you think I’ve been? Tris and back! This is the first rest I’ve had in months; I’m serving the whole Fourlands, not just Wrought! You can’t see farther than your own nose! Having been through all that—
ocean
—don’t I deserve some affection from my wife? Well, I can speak a patois that Tornado will understand. I will challenge him to a duel.”

Tern laughed. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

“I’ll throw down the gauntlet and fight him. When I have a clear year to recover from being hospitalized. Of course he’ll rip my wings off but it’s worth it to get through to him.”

“You mad bastard,” Tern said, with something of her original admiration.

“Yes, I am. And remember, none of the mortals were. Not Sutler Laysan—”

“I didn’t—”

“Or Aster—”

“That—”

“Or Sacret Aver—”

“No!”

It was the fact that her latest affair was with an Eszai, not a mortal, that angered me so much. I would outlive the mortals and my talent reassured me; I knew that Tern would always come back. Now for the first time she had a choice. “Are you going to divorce me and marry the Strongman?”

“Jant, don’t ask such questions…I’m going now. I’ll come back when you’ve straightened out. When you can return the money you stole.”

“Money has nothing to do with this!”

“It does. Oh, it does indeed.” Her pure, sparkling voice instantly froze. She picked up the most expensive beaker from the still, turned it over and put it down thoughtfully. “I can’t keep up repayments on Wrought’s debts. I can’t afford to rebuild the foundries. With no workers in the colliery or armories, my manor is sunk.”

But I knew all that; I had always tried to help Tern. I was suddenly uncertain how to answer because I had been listening more to her voice than her words. “What are you saying?”

“Wrought will have to be leased. I considered selling but I don’t want to lose my title, so I have managed to find a tenant. A coal-quarrying, canal-building nouveau-riche Hacilith businessman. I have no idea what Lightning will think of that. But who cares? Micawater itself is not in a position to help us financially anymore.”

“But that’s terrible! How will we live?”

“Soberly. The rent will pay my creditors—thankfully credit rates for immortals are good—but there will be little left over, and I will have to live
here.
The man from Hacilith and his family will help me reconstruct the manor house. Until my fortune improves, he’ll reside there and also take the revenue from the armories. He’s keen to work with Eszai.”

“I bet he is. I’m sorry. I do love you, Tern.”

Tern came and placed manicured hands around my cheeks. “You look awful,” she observed, and laughed red-wine fumes into my face. She lightly kissed my cheek and I smelled her powdered skin; the scent went straight to my groin. I swept one wing across my body to hide an erection that swelled so large I thought it was trying to climb into my belly button. I might get some sex tonight, after all. “What would you say to a quick fuck?”

“Don’t push your luck, quick fuck.” And she left, bound for Tawny’s rooms.

I yelled after her, “Don’t ever come back! You’re not that important to me anyway!” I picked my needle off the floor and threw it at the dressing table. “Cat makes me feel better than you ever did!”

I
felt as if I had a hole in the middle of my chest, and everything I am and everything I had been was draining through it until there was nothing left. I was hollowed out, utterly emptied. No smile or kindly deed I will ever perform will be rooted in myself; it will be carried out from duty rather than love. The world’s conflicts carry on, oblivious, elsewhere and unreal; from now on there was no way to connect with them. I was animated only by that sick sense of duty, because all the love had been washed away.

I retrieved my needle and staggered up the steps to the four-poster bed with a feeling of desolation and a strange desire to get down and walk on all fours like a dog.

I drew the curtains; the dark brocade bed became a ship spinning on a whirlpool’s rim. Its sails would not fill. Cold fish push up under my feet, fall flapping from beneath the bolsters of this bed and everywhere I’ll ever sleep. In the tiny vial eels seethe and bite. I wanted to sink out of the world. I tapped up a vein running over my biceps and slid the needle in deep with a practiced hand. Then I huddled against the ivy-covered headboard, sighed, and bubbles rose around me. Scolopendium pulsed through me, so good, to my toes and fingertips. A solid blow hit my heart and I squeezed a fistful of shirt tightly. I can ride the rush. But there’s nothing to hold on to on this ride, because the ride’s yourself. I gasped ice water into my lungs and then was nothing. It kicked me heavily out of my body and into the Shift.

I
nto Epsilon, the place you find when you take a wrong turning and decide to keep going. There is no easy way in.

I walked down the street. It’s a one-way street; from the other end it looks like a mirror. Litter blew past, in the opposite direction to the breeze. Some of the Constant Shoppers were already arranging their wares, buying from each other with a muted morning energy. Tine made their stalls of smooth, living bone. They shaped a grainy bone gel with their hands and it set in sculptural sweeps. They exhibited framed emotigraphs, pictures faint with age or new and piquant, that recorded the subject’s emotion and emanated it for the viewer to experience. A wedding picture radiated every feeling from rapture to secret jealousy. A picture of an autumn forest evoked nibbling nostalgia: lighting up a stolen cigarette, smell of leaf litter and first-night stand sweat.

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.

L
ost 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.