The ice-scull trundled off a little way behind him; he lunged at the girl to force her back, then retreated two steps to the scull; he grasped the remaining oar and threw it away behind him, skittering and whirling across the ice.
The girl grinned at him, throwing away the hand muff with a similar gesture.
‘Ah,’ she said, glancing in the direction of the oar. ‘It’s to be a fair fight, then.’
He jabbed forward and swung the oar. The seven claw blades were needle-tipped and razor sharp; they hissed through the air in front of her face as she jinked back and side-stepped.
‘Well, you still have the advantage of me in terms of names,’ he told her, keeping himself between the girl and the other claw-oar, still sliding away across the ice.
‘As in so much else, Oncaterius,’ she laughed, dodging one way, then the other, as if trying to get past him. He was ready for the bluff, but not the double-bluff; the claw-oar slammed into the ice where the girl would have been as she slipped and skidded past behind him. He twisted, levering himself on the embedded oar to perform a sort of stunted vault and landing kneeling with the oar held out in front of him.
She had not attacked, and she had not attempted to run for the other oar, fifty metres or more away across the ice; instead she’d picked up the ice-scull, brandishing its thin A-frame in front of her now like a shield, and advancing.
‘We have met before, haven’t we?’ Oncaterius said, rising and hefting the claw-oar as he moved forward too.
‘Once or twice,’ she agreed.
‘Thought so,’ he said, thinking furiously, certain he knew this person in some other guise. He cancelled the image he’d taken on, removing any trace of Gadfium from his appearance. There was just a hint of a delay as this took effect, almost as though the alteration had had to be approved, which ought not to be the case.
He watched the girl’s tensed, intense face, framed by the ice-scull, edge closer to him.
He’d had enough of this. He attempted to cut out, back to base-reality, but the command failed. He was stuck here.
Now that was interesting, he thought. He tried thinking the girl unconscious, then imagined that the claw-oar was a gun, but neither worked. He attempted to summon help; that oaf Lunce was supposed to be waiting in the wings... No reply. The Serotin, then: ... again, nothing.
Alone, then, as well as trapped.
‘Problems, Quolier?’ the girl asked, still advancing warily towards him. One of the ice-scull’s rear blades caught the light and glinted, and for the first time Oncaterius realised that the spindly craft might be pressed into use as a weapon as well as a defence, and that he was just a little afraid. So this was how it felt.
He laughed. ‘No, not really,’ he said, then swung furiously at the girl. She fended the blow with the ice-scull; he was already swinging back, but that slice too was parried. He anticipated a counter attack and saw her moving as though to comply; he used his own momentum to whirl round and then brought the claw-oar up and then down where he expected her to move.
The claws ripped through the left arm of her coat, encountering some resistance, then slammed into the ice. He hauled the claws back out as fast as he could and ducked and twisted, but the A-frame of the little ice-craft came whistling through the air and a blade bit into his shoulder.
They separated a few metres, each carried across the ice by their own momentum. She bled from the left arm, tattered fur hanging dripping red onto the ice, her face still set in a strange, eager grin. His own shoulder felt numb and suddenly stiff. There was blood on the ice at his feet.
He advanced again, feinted and swung; the claw locked into the ice-scull’s frame; she twisted it and the oar was almost torn from his grasp. He pulled, skidded on both feet, and suddenly they were face-to-face through the A-frame of the craft, him pulling one way on the locked blades, her hauling in the other direction on the warping frame of the little ice-boat. Their breaths met in a single cloud amongst the carbon tubing.
Oncaterius tugged, feeling his feet start to slip, and planted them further apart. At least the shaft of the claw-oar was between them, preventing her kicking him in the balls. She was sweating. Blood was dripping from the elbow of her left arm. He felt the A-frame and the oar start to tremble as the girl’s strength began to give out. She grunted, her mouth set in a compressed line. He was sweating too and his shoulder hurt abominably, but he could feel her gradually yielding to him.
Her breathing was laboured now; their faces were less than half a metre apart and he felt her breath on his face, smelling of nothing. He wondered - with a sort of furious idleness that allowed his real concentration to focus on the physical struggle —how far down the reality-base the parameters here extended. They were each modelled for muscles, skeleton, cardiovascular system and appearance, but was there some sub-routine running which impersonated their intestinal flora? He really ought to look into these things more closely. Meanwhile, all that mattered was that he was physically stronger than this girl, and the trembling he was feeling through the ice-craft’s A-frame and the claw shaft was increasing as he forced the oar round.
He laughed, conscious of his breath clouding around her, enveloping her face. She frowned, and he knew he had won. He glanced, grinning, round the A-frame as he twisted it slowly round. ‘Use my own scull against me, eh?’
Her eyes flashed. Her head came thudding forward and her forehead smacked into his nose. He heard a crunch and his face went numb. He dropped back and heard a great bell tolling inside him, as though his bones were metal and hollow and just struck. Something whacked into the back of his head, sounding another toll within his reverberating bones.
He lay, spread upon the ice. He tried to draw breath through the warm liquid bubbling up in his mouth and nose.
Then she was on top of him, her knees on either side of his chest, the front blade of the ice-scull cutting into the skin over his Adam’s apple.
‘All right, all right,’ he said, spitting and spluttering through the blood. ‘Tell you what; we’ll call it a draw.’
She didn’t reply. She was staring off to one side.
The ice beneath them trembled. Then - thirty metres or so away - the surface bulged and split; great wall-sized plates of ice tipped over and slammed back, breaking and splitting and spreading out across the water-filmed surface as from the middle of the spreading, creaking breach, in a blast of steam and smoke, a huge animal covered in thick, knotted hair appeared, the size of a house, the sweeping yellow brackets of its tusks as tall as a man, its trunk longer still, thicker than a man’s leg and hoisted to the cold skies, blasting an ear-splitting bellow on a cloud of mist. On its back an ape-like thing screeched and punched the air while a giant black bird screamed and spread its broad wings. An elderly woman - clinging onto the beast behind the gibbering ape-man - glanced nervously under the bird’s wings as the mammoth roared again and trod with surprising delicacy over the ice towards them.
She took a handful of the material at the neck of Oncaterius’ one-piece suit and hauled him to his feet; he was unsteady and almost fell; blood poured from his face and he held both hands to his mouth and nose, trying to staunch the flow. He blinked at the sight of the approaching mammoth.
‘Good grief,’ he said, sniffing. ‘Well, I hope they’re your friends, because I haven’t got a thing in.’ He snorted back some blood, coughing. ‘And the hairy one looks hungry.’
‘Shut up, Quolier.’
‘This is terribly amusing, but I’d make the most of it if I were you.’ He snorted again, throwing his head back. She still held him by the neck of his suit. ‘Fuck,’ he said, ‘did we really have to make pain so realistic here?’ He coughed again.
The mammoth stopped five metres away. The beast’s trunk swung, pendulous and heavy. The ape-thing chuckled, the great bird flapped once. The elderly lady looked down at them. She glanced at Oncaterius and looked rather shocked.
‘Madam Chief Scientist Gadfium, I presume,’ the girl said.
&n
bsp; ‘Yes, hello,’ she said. ‘Are you the asura?’
She nodded. ‘Apparently.’
‘Well then,’ Gadfium said, ‘apparently we’re here to rescue you.’ She looked at Oncaterius again. ‘Isn’t that Consistorian Oncaterius?’
‘Delighted, ma’am,’ Quolier said, bowing. Blood splattered on the ice. He threw his head back once more and sniffed mightily. ‘Actually, I’d been hoping we’d meet again. This is not quite how I’d imagined it, but—’
The girl shook him, quieting him. ‘Shall we go?’ she asked.
2
Gadfium - swung so violently through all three axes of motion that she feared both biting her tongue and losing her breakfast - clung desperately with both hands to the tangled fur on the back of the bellowing, charging mammoth. The ape-man in front of her whooped and screamed and waved both arms wildly in the air, only the grip of his legs on the animal’s thick neck and a generous measure of luck preventing him from being thrown off. The lammergeier flapped overhead, cackling.
The troop of galloping beasts thundered through the streets of the dark city-port of Oubliette, scattering startled people to left and right.
They had exited the tunnels by a series of ramps leading to a huge dark hall full of neatly stacked railway wagons, then crashed through a partition wall of flimsy plastic boarding into an empty warehouse. Sweating and trumpeting, the mammoths had swept down the aisles in a half-dozen hairy streams, their humanoid riders whooping and clamouring.
The warehouse doors had given way; they let out onto a dock-side where black water stretched away under the dark sky of the vast cavern which housed Oubliette and the end of the tunnel which led to the distant sea. The mammoths had wheeled and headed along the dock between warehouses and ships for the city itself, their riders hollering and making faces at a few astonished container-crane operators and sailors.
A broad boulevard led up from the docks to the centre of the quiet city; there were some vehicles on the road but they had all stopped. The Security building was plain and undistinguished and formed one corner of a square. The other mammoths came to a stop outside; the one Gadfium was on thumped on up broad steps, turned at the top, kicked in the tall closed double doors with its rear legs and then turned and shouldered its way through. Gadfium had to duck. The lammergeier clung to the animal’s rump behind her.
There were no obvious guards, just one man at a desk who sat staring straight ahead and did not react when they charged into the reception area, but sat immobile and unblinking.
- What’s wrong with him?
- Our new friend, her own voice said. He’s jamming the Security people’s implants. We should be safe here for a while.
The ape-man hopped off the mammoth and bounced easily on the floor. He scampered for a door, which hissed open in front of him. He disappeared; the door seemed continually to be trying to close, but could not, and so oscillated fractionally back and forth with a series of clicks and hisses.
The lammergeier flew over to the receptionist’s desk and settled there, folding its wings and stamping from foot to foot, making an S of its long, naked neck and staring quizzically up at the face of the unmoving man.
The ape-man reappeared at the hesitating door. He beckoned her. The mammoth settled, kneeling.
Gadfium sighed and clambered down off the mammoth. At least its knotted fur provided ample foot- and hand-holds.
- Get the receptionist’s keys, her other self said.
She did. The ape-man took her hand and led her by corridors and stairs to a door with a complicated mechanical combination lock. The ape-man screamed and leapt up and down, hitting the lock with one fist.
- 6120394003462992, the voice in her said.
- One at a time, please.
- 6...
The room beyond held a woman and a very large man, both of them sitting at a table holding cups and staring straight ahead.
The ape-man pulled her onwards.
The room led to another combination-locked door and then a corridor where her crypt self led her to a distant door; this door had an electronic lock - already winking green for Open - a combination lock and two key-locks.
The girl was inside, sitting on a small bed. She nodded when she saw Gadfium, and took the ape-man’s hand when he ran to her, chuckling happily.
She came up to Gadfium.
‘I am somewhere else as well,’ she said. ‘Come and see.’ And she reached out and gently touched Gadfium’s neck.
- Woa, here we go—
/ And Gadfium was back on the great mammoth but this time in a crypt reality, where the great animal rose like a furry fist through a white glowing ceiling of ice. The little ape-man was seated in front of her again and the lammergeier flapped above.
They burst out onto the frozen surface, where a man with a bloody face lay on the ice, straddled by a slim girl in a fur coat who was holding the blade of an ice-scull to his neck and who had just turned to stare at them.
3
The mist was the world was the data corpus was the Cryptosphere was the history of the world was the future of the world was the guardian of un-done things was the summation of intelligent purpose was chaos was pure thought was the untouched was the utterly corrupted was the end and the beginning was the exiled and the resiled, was the creature and the machine was the life and the inanimate was the evil and the good was the hate and the love was the compassion and the indifference was everything and nothing and nothing and nothing.
He dived within, becoming part of it, surrendering completely to it to accept it into him and dissolve himself within it.
He was a flake within the fall, an insect sucked up into the whirlwind, a bacterium caught within a water droplet forced whirling within the hurricane’s howl. He was a particle of dust from the plain thrown up by the hoof of one horse within the charging line, a grain of sand upon the storm-besieged beach, a fleck of ash from the eruption’s endless detonations, a mote of soot from the continent afire, a molecule within the encroaching dust, an atom from the star’s heart thrown out in its last, majestic, exhaustive blast.
Here was the meaning at the core of meaninglessness and the meaninglessness at the centre of meaning. Here every action, every thought, each nuance of every least important mental event within any creature mattered utterly and fundamentally; here, too, the fates of stars, galaxies, universes and realities were as nothing; less than ephemera, beneath triviality.
He swam through it all as it coursed through him. He saw backwards and forwards throughout time forever, seeing everything that had happened and everything that would happen and knew it was all perfectly true and completely false at once, without contradiction.
Here the chaos sang songs of sweet pure reason and reserve, here the loftiest aims and finest achievements of humans and machines were articulations of psychopathic insanity.
Here the data winds howled, dissociated as plasma, abrading as blown sand. Here the lost souls of a billion lives had poured and shattered and tattered and dissolved and mixed with a trillion extracted, excerpted strings and sequences and cycles of mutated programs, evolved virus and garbled instructions, themselves irretrievably compounded with uncountable irrelevant facts, raw figures and scrambled signals.
He saw, heard, tasted and felt it all, and was submerged within it and borne over it; he carried within him, always there and just collected, the seed of something else, something at once supersessant and insignificant, and foolish, wise and innocent all together.
He stepped ashore from a molten ocean of chaos, walked calmly from the belching volcano mouth, floated comfortably on the supernova’s radiation wave-front to the dust-rich depths, always holding his charge.
... When he got to the garden he recognised it, and wondered if his future self would, but thought probably not. The rotunda was on the side of a small hill, surrounded by tall trees, manicured bushes and rounded, well-kempt lawns. A stream ran through the small valley, and a path led towards the towered house in the dista
nce, through the formal hedge-garden.
He got to the vault and found that he held nothing in his arms after all, that his own naked self had been all there ever was, and knew he had always known that. There would be no other, no remainder or survivor who would walk away again afterwards.
He stood a while at the doorway to the rotunda, drinking in the place where he would lie down to die and something else would rise. It was not his home, not his clan’s territory, not really part of anything or anywhere that he knew except that it was upon Earth, and fashioned by and for his own species, and so was part of his own and his ancestors and his descendants’ aesthetic and intellectual inheritance.
It would, he told himself, have to do.
He wondered again what it was he was supposed to do, what message he was supposed to carry; he had hoped that at some point during all that had passed he might have discovered what the signal he was supposed to act as carrier for actually was, but in this he had been disappointed, if mildly; he had not really expected that to be part of the process. Still, it would have been nice to have known.
He looked around again, knowing that he had lived many lives, and each of them well beyond the term the vast majority of his forbears would have called a natural span, and knowing that he lived on, in a sense, elsewhere, but for all that he still experienced a feeling of regret at leaving the world, however foolish and ultimately trivial it all was, and could not help but let that reluctance detain him, just a few moments longer, to gaze upon the represented face of this small, pleasant garden, and still know that for now, for this moment - which whatever happened in the future always would have happened and always would have contained him - he was alive.