The nightmare darkness receded into memory and it seemed she had been in this forest for an age, with nothing to accompany her but the sounds of birds and the wind in the trees. But now she heard bells tinkling, the murmur of conversation and an occasional burst of laughter. Somewhere nearby there were people, and in Polly’s mind that meant the possibility of food, for she was racked with a hunger that had already compelled her to chew and swallow a handful of acorns before vomiting up the whole bitter mess. Drawing hard on her second hunger-quelling cigarette, she then discarded it and moved on eagerly. Pushing through the bracken below towering trees, she soon lost any sense of where the sound was coming from and began flailing forward in a panic, then stumbled down a slope onto her knees. Before her, like an epiphany in the damp leaf-litter, grew a single yellowish-white toadstool. She reached out for it.
What the hell do you think you are doing?
‘I’m hungry,’ Polly replied, her mouth still full of nauseating bitterness.
Well, that would certainly cure any future hunger. Muse has it listed as Amanita virosa or the Destroying Angel. I thought it was a death cap, but that’s only a small disagreement of memory and acquired memory. Either way the results would eventually be the same.
‘You don’t really know that,’ said Polly, reluctant to deny herself this potential snack.
Muse 184 has a hundred terabytes of reference, remember. I’m living in its damned RAM, so I’m not taking up any space. Do you know what that means?
‘No… no I don’t.’
Put it this way, it knows more than any single human is ever likely to know on any subject you could think of. And being as its purpose is military, it particularly has everything in here you’d want to know about poisons and other causes of death. You want me to detail what will happen to you if you eat that thing?
‘No, I don’t need that.’ Polly stood up and moved off, irritably kicking the toadstool to snowy fragments across the leaf litter as she went.
It’s that damned scale on your arm. By my clock you ate four tins of pilchards and half a loaf of bread only six hours ago on that boat. It must be sucking you dry somehow. They knew it was parasitic… alive in its limited way.
‘Why do you call it a scale?’
Where it came from, my little slot machine. You saw the…creature that killed me? Well that thing on your arm is a scale from its back—if back it had.
‘You said something about all this, but nothing made sense then.’
What’s to tell? We raided a suicide bombers’ school in Kazakhstan, and that creature hit at the same time. Fucking chaos. It chewed four of them down, and shed that thing on your arm in the process. It was just one of many arranged like scales on its surfaces, though whatever the creature is, we never saw enough of it to… just call it a monster, something vast from another place.
‘What other place?’
I haven’t got a clue.
Polly looked around her. There, the bells again… somewhere over that way.
‘What happened then?’ she asked.
One of the Binpots wanted to put it on his arm. Leibnitz put a clip into him before he got a chance, then the monster hit Leibnitz and Smith. I bagged the scale and ran with it—I knew it was important — and Patak and the others covered me. The monster took him when we got back to HQ. Next thing the last of us were in a U-gov facility with the big brains talking temporal anomalies. I was interrogated under VR with drugs I’d never heard of, then was sat out in a compound with the rest as bait for the… monster. Wired up like lab rats, we were. I knew it wanted me, see, from the moment I killed that guy who had been about to put the scale on himself, like you did. It attacked — chaos again. I was able to escape, grabbing the scale and some other tech as I went. The scale tried to get me to put it on, but it left me alone when I wrapped the fucking thing in plastique…
Polly found herself standing at the edge of a rough track. Distantly she could again hear the tinkling of bells, and that muted conversation and laughter.
‘But what is it? What’s it for?’
Christ knows. But I heard enough then to know that somehow time travel was involved, and that the monster it came from hunts through time, taking victims that are somehow irrelevant to the future. You know, if that thing hadn’t attacked when it did, we would have still been around in an area that was subsequently carpet-bombed. I’ve thought about this a lot. I think it was coming to take dead men before they died.
Thinking about that made Polly’s head ache. She turned onto the track and headed towards the human sounds. Shortly a covered wagon rounded a corner, pulled into view by a big white shire horse. The vehicle was hung with the bells she had heard, and painted with the words ‘The Amazing Berthold’ and its woodwork was intricately carved. Polly paused in its path as it approached, the driver and his elderly companion peering at her suspiciously, then she moved to one side of the track. As the wagon drew alongside her, she observed a young dark-haired man holding the reins, his clothes straight out of some historical interactive, and his broad flat hat sporting a couple of pheasant feathers. He pulled on the reins to halt the horse, then reached down to haul up the wooden brake.
At last it was ending, and the world was returning in coloured flashes like a strange species of lightning. Gradually revealed through the mantisal’s glassy spars was a landscape seemingly little different from the one they had recently departed. They rematerialized above grassland a few hundred metres away from the edge of dense forest. Then Tack began to note the subtle but disturbing differences. Here the cloud-dotted sky was a deeper blue, the green of sprouting grass was hazing up through the trampled sea of older stalks, and everywhere were scattered yellow, red and lavender flowers. The distant trees were also tinged with the green and yellow of new growth, and there were birds racketing up into the air. A balmy breeze, carrying with it the smells of hot spring, dispersed the cold from the skeletal cage of the mantisal.
‘Best get to the trees as quickly as we can,’ said Traveller. ‘Out here we’re likely to get stomped.’
Tack saw that the man was tired again and his eyes lifeless. Traveller gestured to a distant elephantine shape coming towards them.
‘Mammoth,’ Tack said.
Traveller snorted. ‘Wrong. They’re ten million years in the future. That thing over there is a deinotherium—a rather larger and more bad-tempered ancestor of the elephant. So let’s move.’
They dropped out of the mantisal and walked away from it. Glancing back, Tack saw the strange thing fold out of existence, leaving a cold mist that swiftly dissipated. Nearby he saw huge skins of excrement covering the ground, some old enough for plants to be pushing up through them, and some new enough to be covered by legions of flies contesting ownership with dung beetles the size of golf balls. Avoiding these, they tramped on towards the trees, keeping a wary eye on the approaching beast.
‘How big is it? I can’t really tell,’ Tack asked.
‘About four metres high at the shoulder. We could bring it down with our weapons, but even this far back in time every drastic action we take creates difficulties for the mantisal.’ Seeing Tack’s puzzled expression Traveller went on, ‘We come from the potential future, and no matter how careful we may be our actions here affect that future.’ He gestured all about them. ‘Our presence here is even now moving this time-line down the probability slope, leaving as the main line all this without our presence. Therefore, in each jump through time we make, the mantisal takes us not only back in time but back up the slope to mainline time. And the more we influence each time we are in, thus affecting our probable future, the more slope it has to carry us back up on the next jump. Luckily, the further back we go, the less we affect our probable future.’