‘You all know Viscount Trevalkin, of high standing as a Liege Lord, adviser to the Circulus Fidus, and a prime architect of Fire Watch, begging my Lord Corcorigan’s pardon.’

  Tom inclined his head, conceding the right to argue.

  ‘He is also a member of the Grey Shadows High Command—’

  ‘What?’ Tom half-stood, hand going to his hip; but his poignard was not there.

  ‘—whose alliance with the former LudusVitae in no way indicates that social revolution is our primary goal.’

  Trevalkin’s smile was cold.

  Grey Shadows?

  Slowly, Tom sat back down. Grax and Doria had pushed themselves back from the table but not risen.

  ‘You want revolution? Equality for all?’

  Trevalkin shook his head. ‘It won’t happen in my lifetime. I’ll enjoy my privileges while I can, thank you.’

  The Grey Shadows were an ultra-secretive organization that remained a mystery to Tom. Elva had been raised to their cause, by common-born parents willing to sacrifice their daughters to achieve the Grey Shadows’ goals ... which had not been to keep people like Trevalkin in power. (Elva had not been in contact with the organization since the war ... as far as Tom knew.)

  ‘The thing is,’ said Feltima, ‘our objective has always been to guard Nulapeiron from its enemies.’

  Tom leaned back in his chair.

  But the Blight and the Anomaly are the first external enemies the world has faced.

  These people were representatives of hidden networks of power which had evolved over centuries: networks which had taken on lives of their own, and would cooperate only when threatened, in order to achieve goals unknown to the world at large.

  Grax broke the tension, hoisting a daistral jug and a beaker from a tray.

  ‘Does anyone else feel thirsty?’

  Some twenty minutes later, they were deep into discussions of communications routes. Over the table hung a web of glowing holographs, arcs and nodes brightening as indicated whenever someone made a point. Analyses appeared and disappeared in briefly blossoming subsidiary tesseracts: a morass of confusing and conflicting details.

  Doria was amending Feltima’s model of compromised Fire Watch cutouts - trying to work out which realms’ Fire Watch contacts could be trusted, and which ones had already been subsumed by the Anomaly -when something shifted and clicked in Tom’s mind. In an instant, some internal barrier fell down inside him, and he knew that everything he was doing was wrong: not just this meeting ... everything.

  Tom pushed himself back from the conference table.

  Maintain solidarity.

  It is a primary rule of negotiation in teams: never betray a difference of attitude within the group, for it denotes a weakness, a fault line which an experienced opponent will crack open.

  Elva. I need you here with me.

  Not just as a former Grey Shadows operative, but as a tactician in her own right, Elva would laugh at the notion of negotiations without defined objectives.

  I thought I was protecting you.

  Tom had failed. Elva was in Realm Strelsthorm (the former Demesne d’Ovraison) and he was in this place; and they were likely to die apart, never seeing each other again before their universe ended.

  I’m a fool.

  ‘—Lord? You don’t agree?’

  ‘Sorry, Feltima, I... It doesn’t matter.’

  Tom rose to his feet, feeling dizzy.

  This is the moment.

  Everything was spinning away from him, from everyone, in a world which might fall to the Anomaly in days. Win or lose. None of this talk was helping. Right now. This has to change. Tom took a deep breath and looked around the table, locked eyes with each person in turn, including Doria and Grax. Including Trevalkin.

  Do it.

  ‘This is not working,’ he said.

  ‘What do you mean, Corcorigan?’

  ‘Misdirection and obfuscation and unfocused goals and crossed purposes. None of it helps. This is an alliance of confusion.’

  Feltima rocked back in her seat.

  Someone gestured the holodisplays out of existence.

  ‘Everyone here,’ Tom said, ‘knows the mechanics of phase transitions. It’s like heating a block of ice: it shifts into the liquid state just like’ - snapping his thumb - ‘that. Given a critical mass of people Absorbed into the Anomaly, the effects will cascade through the world in a matter of days, maybe hours. Does anybody disagree?’

  The others sat as though punched in the stomach.

  None of them, not even Trevalkin, had a reply. They had been acting as though they were planning a long campaign; but time had already run out.

  ‘That being the case,’ Tom continued, ‘I am assuming command of this alliance. Right now.’

  There were widened eyes, audible intakes of breath.

  ‘You will need to discuss this. I’m going to leave the chamber for ten minutes, so I suggest you decide quickly.’

  Tom’s cape swirled as he turned away, and strode from the chamber with his heart beating hard, a paradoxical cold heat flooding through his body, experiencing the joy and fear of risking everything for a cause which he knew, finally and for sure, was right.

  For Elva.

  He stopped outside in a long chill corridor whose transparent panels looked out into the deep: into black waters where strange luminous predators swam.

  For everyone.

  Ten minutes later, Tom re-entered the conference chamber. He was half-expecting Chaos and shouting. Instead, the atmosphere was silent, but charged with adrenaline. Fear and anger pulsed in the air.

  ‘We can’t say yes or no,’ said Trevalkin.

  ‘Then I suggest you—’

  ‘Because it’s not our choice. There is someone else’ - Trevalkin’s features were unreadable - ‘you have to see. Alone.’

  ‘No.’ Doria was standing. ‘My Lord Corcorigan travels nowhere without—’

  ‘It’s all right.’ Tom looked at Trevalkin. ‘This time, we trust each other, or nothing can save us.’

  Trevalkin stared back, then nodded.

  ‘Fate help us all,’ he said.

  ~ * ~

  27

  NULAPEIRON AD 3426

  Tom travelled almost alone, in a slugtrain which slid surprisingly fast through utilitarian tunnels fashioned beneath the ocean floor. For a while, Tom stood at the rear carriage’s end panel, looking out at the slime trail which glistened then faded.

  He returned to his side-facing bench seat, and sat down opposite a blue-robed man whose white hair had been teased into short spikes. Tom looked up. Droplets of moisture beaded the carriage ceiling.

  ‘Just condensation, my son.’ The man was a priest. ‘We’re safe from the ocean overhead, Fate willing.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Tom.

  The small priest pulled out a holobreviary, and bent forward, muttering prayers.

  As the train entered a series of switchbacks, Tom clutched his armrest. The priest continued his orison without pause, swaying in his seat. Then the train straightened out, and Tom became aware that the air was warmer than it had been, almost stifling.

  He leaned back and closed his eyes.

  As the carriage rocked, Tom slipped into a dream.

  It is a long, concave-walled laboratory furnished in black and dark grey where strange shapes swirl: peripheral, subliminal... Not quite there.

  The chamber is - and yet is not - one that Tom knows: located deep in the interior of Axolon Array. It is a lab where the best researchers Tom could recruit work hard to decipher time’s true nature. Yet this place is subtly different, distorted ... Just how, Tom cannot tell.

  He stands on the solid jet floor, and the air is sharp in his lungs. At the same time he is disembodied, incorporeal. Tom cannot move; yet he feels calm and liberated.

  In the chamber’s centre, blue lightning dances. It tears the air apart but the electric dance of energy does not stop. One moment, it sounds like a tsunami crashing upon a shattered shore; the next, the sound is a gentle shush of white noise and distant breakers.

  It is cold. It is hot.

  Sweat springs out upon Tom’s skin. Or perhaps he is not here at—

  Sapphire lightning.

  At the centre of the chamber, a floating figure screams. The trapped Pilot? But that was on the hellworld known as—

  No.

  The figure is Tom Corcorigan.

  Not me.

  The floating man waves his arms in supplication - his two arms - and then the blue fire grows brighter and the world lurches - splits - this Tom waves his one arm - yelling out his agony to anyone there - but the Tom who observes is frozen by the knowledge that this suffering is self-inflicted. This Tom had two arms, but severed one.

  A trial of pain.

  By which he will regain Elva and defeat the—

  No.

  None of it makes sense.

  His eyelids half-opened, to the bright swaying carriage and the nodding priest who muttered, ‘Auguries like the tide,’ amid the overpowering warmth.

  Sleep welcomed him back.

  As Tom Corcorigan watches, the split occurs.

  Time without time, attoseconds or aeons, the duration of an electron jump or a red giant’s birth and death ... He suffers, the Tom who is trapped, for an unknown time, until a brilliant nova-burst, electric blue, whose flash obscures the laboratory.

  When it has passed, a figure lies at the foot of the wall, and groans. Slowly, as a disembodied Tom watches, the bruised Tom Corcorigan pulls himself to his feet.

  ‘I guess it worked.’

  The Tom who observes aches to speak: Are you addressing me?

  ‘I guess it did.’

  The voice comes from behind - no! - then another Tom Corcorigan faces the one who looked in pain. They wear identical cloaks, each with a whitemetal poignard tagged at the hip.

  ‘The one nearer the drop-exit—’

  ‘—gets Elva. That’ll be me. And you—’

  ‘—will see another universe.’

  ‘Destiny go with you, my brother.’

  ‘Destiny.’

  The two Tom Corcorigans leave by different exits, each heading towards his own Fate, tricking the Destiny which thought just one path could occur.

  Is that what I must do? the Tom who observes can only wonder. Do I harness the trick of parallel time?

  A scraping sound brings all his senses whirling round to bear on one spot: a shadowed alcove behind a buttress.

  ‘I wonder why,’ says the third Tom Corcorigan (not counting the one who observes), ‘everyone assumes a bilateral symmetry. Even me.’

  The smile which twists his face is lupine: a predator with prey in sight.

  What? There’s always another alternative?

  The new Tom, too, gathers his cloak around himself, checks his weapons, walks from the lab chamber, is gone.

  And the dreamer who observes ...

  ... finally woke up.

  What have I just seen?

  In an empty carriage.

  Bulky, blue-skinned figures were waiting at the landing platform. They were fighting Kobolds, kin to the greystone warriors, likewise melding flesh and living stone so deeply that a simple boundary could no longer be drawn. Oil-slick light slid across their hardened craggy forms as they snapped to attention.

  ‘Where’s the ... ?’ Tom hitched his cloak tighter against the chill which swept across the platform, and looked back at the slugtrain. ‘There was an old priest aboard with me. Where is he now?’

  The officer appeared to speak into his clenched stone fist. Then: ‘There was no-one else aboard. The train has made no stops since picking you up.’

  ‘I don’t—’ Tom shook his head. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  Strange eyes regarded him. Tom remembered the myth: that Kobolds could submerge themselves inside solid rock, move through it as if through viscous water.

  ‘Welcome to Surturheim, Lord Corcorigan.’

  Beneath Tom, the platform glowed orange, started to melt. He began to sink.

  ‘Where am I—?’

  ‘To see the Lady.’

  The Kobolds made a strange gesture of respect, fists to forehead, then disappeared from sight as Tom sank into glowing ooze.

  Surturheim?

  And continued to descend.

  ~ * ~

  28

  TERRA AD 2166

  <>

  [8]

  The final draft of Deirdre’s dissertation was entitled ‘Sequencing the Memome’, and it owed nothing to UNSA funding or Rand-Miti intervention. Her wit shone clearly, even through the academic language, and Kian chuckled as he read the final chapter, his infopad’s display bright enough to read beneath the morning sun.

  They sat at their usual outdoor table on the Athenaeum Café patio. The Caltech campus stretched away to one side. Deirdre, clutching a tall iced latte, vibrated with anxiety. After the blaze of creative energy in which she had written, a deep uncertainty enveloped her.

  ‘Yes,’ murmured Kian, reading. ‘I like that.’

  Beside their table, the olive tree’s dark leaves rustled in a short-lived breeze, grew still. A bush with downturned violet flowers cast a subtle scent on the hot, clean air.

  ‘You like it?’

  ‘Come off it, Deirdre. It’s marvellous, and you know it.’

  She shrugged, sipped her latte, then gave a tiny smile.

  ‘I thought it was, when I started. But now—’

  ‘Now you’ve only got to sit and wait for job offers to come flooding in.’

  ‘Job offers?’

  ‘Every faculty in the world will want you on board.’ Kian raised his iced tea in salute. ‘And I can’t blame ‘em.’

  He drank a toast, and Deirdre blushed.

  ‘You need to publish it as a popular science book. You have to—’

  A shadow fell across them: a slim man standing in the sunlight.

  ‘You’ve finished the dissertation.’ It was Nikolos Vlessides, who was working on a master’s in plant design. ‘Already.’

  Kian waved him to a vacant chair. ‘And it’s amazing.’

  ‘Amazingly good’ - Nikolos’s variable English could be surprisingly colloquial - ‘or amazingly bad?’

  Deirdre rattled off a curse in rapid Greek.

  ‘My mother,’ said Nikolos, ‘is not inclined like that.’

  Kian shook his head.

  ‘You can be a real moron, Nick. What do you want to drink?’

  ‘A real espresso would be nice.’

  ‘But you’ll make do with what they serve here, right?’

  Kian placed the order using the table’s microphone; less than a minute later, a dog-sized robot came whirring across the patio. Nikolos removed his cup and saucer from its back.

  ‘You know ...’Nikolos gestured at the olive tree. ‘This reminds me of home. Very much.’ He reached across and picked up Deirdre’s infopad. ‘And this looks like one of my plants’ root systems.’ He highlighted the fractal diagram of propaganda channels. ‘How you say ... Apeiron?’

  ‘Boundless.’ Deirdre grinned. ‘Like the poet: “To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower—”‘

  ‘ “Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand”,’ said Kian, ‘ “And Eternity in an hour ...” Or Hamlet: “I could be bounded in a nutshell yet count myself the king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.”‘

  Deirdre took the infopad from Nikolos’s hands. She tapped it, and the text of Auguries of Innocence hung above the table.

  ‘See here? “The Babe that weeps the Rod beneath / Writes Revenge in realms of Death.” In Will Blake’s time, “beneath” must have rhymed with “Death”. Isn’t that great? Makes you wonder what our speech would sound like to a TwenCener. Y’know, to a Victorian gentleman, “civilization” was pronounced in English just like the Français.’

  Kian grinned.

  ‘You are brilliant.’