Reflecting on their previous conversations, Tack said, ‘I’d have thought the danger would increase the further back we went.’
His expression showing his customary irritation, Traveller glanced across at him. ‘Which shows just how little you understand. As I said before: kill your father before your conception and you’ll end up right down the slope, where it would take the full energy output of the sun tap for a whole day to propel you back onto the main line. But to achieve the same screw-up here, you’d need heavy weapons—and as far back as, say, the Jurassic, nothing less than a tactical nuke.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘No, of course not.’ Traveller said nothing more for a while then, relenting, added, ‘Errors like that do not accumulate through time. There’s an effect called temporal inertia. By travelling back in time and killing your father, you push yourself down the slope because of the paradox you’ve created. Kill your direct ancestor a hundred million years in the past, and you’ll still be born.’
‘But doesn’t that mean… predestination… some controlling intelligence?’
‘Only in the way that a tree is predestined to grow towards the sun, and only in the way that some god might have made that tree. Evolutionary forces are macroscale as well as microscale.’
‘But—’
‘Enough. Just think about what I’ve already told you. It is doubtful you’ll be able to understand it all anyway. You still think linear.’ Just then the deinotherium let out a roar and was suddenly charging towards them, kicking up a cloud of dust.
‘It is probably in must,’ said Traveller. ‘Pick up your pace.’
Tack did so readily, glancing back the way they had come as he broke into a trot. ‘Perhaps that’s pissed it off,’ he commented.
Traveller looked back, too, and his expression changed. The mantisal had returned, hovering just where they had previously abandoned it. Tack now did a double-take—it clearly wasn’t their mantisal, since it contained four individuals who were even now scrambling out of it.
‘Umbrathane,’ Traveller hissed. ‘Run!’
The order was reinforced through Tack’s programming, so without conscious volition he found himself obeying. As he ran he drew his seeker gun, and he wondered if he had received some subliminal instruction to do that as well. A triple flash to his side: Traveller was firing with that weapon of his, then sprinting past Tack to turn and fire again. Suddenly the grass to their right was burning and the air full of smoke. Again the deinotherium roared, and now they could feel the thunder of its progress.
‘Shed the pack!’
Still running, Tack obeyed, regretting the loss of the equipment it contained. But regret was dispelled when Traveller came sprinting past him with the same pack slung from one shoulder, as if its weight was of no consequence. Tack glanced back and saw the four newcomers heading directly towards them. Then the elephantine mass of the enraged animal thundered in between, drawing a veil of dust between them and their pursuers.
‘Move faster!’
From somewhere inside himself, Tack found his last few ergs of energy and accelerated. But no matter how fast he ran, or dodged from side to side, Traveller was in front of him, behind him, to the side, crouching and firing, then up again and sprinting away. Traveller was fast, more so than any human Tack knew of, and the man made Tack feel slow and clumsy, which he had never felt before.
Behind them, the deinotherium’s aggressive roaring changed to a panicked trumpeting, and Tack glimpsed back to see it turning aside, smoke boiling off its hindquarters, as black-clad figures moved quickly past it. Suddenly a tree exploded to Tack’s left, and it was only then that he realized they had finally reached the forest. Loud detonations and flashes continued to move off to his left—the direction Traveller had veered in as they entered the trees. Tack just kept running as hard as he could. In fact he could not stop, and knew that if Traveller did not cancel his last instruction soon, he, Tack, would die of a ruptured heart.
Stop.
The order at last came through Tack’s comlink as he was running, in the agony of lactic overload, down a black tunnel of trees. He immediately sprawled forwards on the ground, his muscles locking with cramps and his lungs feeling torn as he gasped for breath. Distantly he could still hear the trumpeting animal.
Hold your position and, excepting myself, kill anyone who comes to you.
It was some minutes before Tack could even pull himself to his knees. His seeker gun was clasped tightly in a hand as white as tooth enamel, and it took him a severe effort of will to unclench his fingers and drop the weapon. For a while he tried to massage the agonizing cramps from his legs, then taking up his gun again he dragged himself to cover amongst dense ferns beneath a fallen forest giant, partially supported off the ground by its own massive side branches. There he lay still and listened to the deinotherium’s cries of outrage fading away.
After a hiatus, the birds started singing. He found nothing in their song to comfort him as he lay with his jaw still clenched rigid, while he tried to rub the agonizing knots from his legs. Slowly the pain was dispersing, but it would be some minutes before he would be able to get about on them again. As yet no suspicious sound or sign of movement.
Then the birdsong suddenly stopped again, and the most glorious face Tack had ever seen gazed down at him—before a hand like a nest of steel bars grasped the back of his collar and hauled him out of hiding.
The watcher, mind and body in glass, had tracked the course of the tor over brief centuries from this particular vorpal sensor, finally turning it out from interspace to track her progress in the real world. Upon seeing the girl thrashing her way through the woods and talking to herself, it was not difficult to surmise that this was one torbearer who would not survive long. But the omniscient voyeurism was almost addictive, and there had been something odd about those insane monologues… After a brief exchange with the girl, the wagon driver, presumably the Amazing Berthold advertised, jumped nimbly down to the ground and swept off his hat. And the watcher decided to listen in.
‘Dancing before the King at Court, or standing at the bows of some ship travelling to far Lyonesse,’ the man said, perhaps in response to an earlier question from the girl, which the watcher did not feel inclined to track back to.
The man went on, ‘Perhaps standing at a window of the Bloody Tower, awaiting the harsh fate bestowed upon the beautiful and innocent. Maybe far away on—’
‘You are as interminable as a three-onion fart, Berthold,’ said the older man on the wagon, before replacing in his mouth the stick he had been gnawing.
The girl was studying both men intently, obviously starving because of the parasitic drain of her tor, perhaps fascinated by their smallpox-scarred faces, which were inadequately covered by the neatly trimmed beards they wore.
‘But, Mellor, it is my interminable rhetoric that puts the groats and pennies into my pouch and the pheasant pie into your mouth.’
Mellor removed his stick. ‘No, I would venture to suggest it is the juggling and pratfalls which do that and your athletic servicing of either lord or lady.’
Berthold frowned, then returned his attention to the girl. ‘You have the face of an angel, my lady. Tell me, whence do you come, and whither do you go?’