Steph Swainston - No Present Like Time

Tarragon held me down effortlessly with one little hand on my chest. She pressed a pedal to the floor, released a lever. The car lunged forward with such power I was thrown back against the seat. “Let me out! Let me out! Help!” I struggled. “Tarragon, you bitch!”

“I’ll teach you a lesson, Shark-style!” Her pert breasts heaved with laughter. She blew a wordless human scream on the car’s larynx horn.

It moved faster than a racehorse, rushed at my flight speed along the ground. Tarragon talked loudly as she steered: “Let me tell you the safe method to Shift-you should lie still and empty your mind, relax and think your way here. It might take a few years to perfect but you immortals have time to practice. Try now-think your way back to the Fourlands.”

I refused. I wouldn’t risk returning to a drugged sleep. My consciousness must be kicked out to the Shift for a reason; perhaps to stop it being damaged by the scolopendium I keep pumping into myself. What if I returned to a body lying in a coma? I’d be rejected from the Circle, could age and die without regaining awareness.

Tarragon saw me shudder and exclaimed, “You can do it! Let me show you!” She spun the wheel, swung the car around and accelerated down the Coeliac Trunk Road, into the Tine’s Quarter.

The sky was dark, and lights on either side of the Aureate’s road gave a golden glow; a chill mist made a diffuse halo around them. Skin-worshiping Tine worked by the roadside. Their arms were flayed to the elbows. Tattoos covered their skin and the shells on their backs were painted with spirals. Their muscular blue haunches were cut with lettering like graffiti in old tree trunks. They had the broken noses of heavyweight boxers and the thick arms of fishermen. They carried other bits of victims’ bodies too that I couldn’t identify.

An immense spoked wheel four meters in diameter turned un-hurriedly and a needle rose and fell. Tine fed skin backed with yellow fat under the needle; it hung over the edge of the sewing machine’s serrated gold platform. “Is that Tine skin?” I asked.

“Oh, they’re just embroidering it. They’ll put it back on later.”

They snarled as we passed.

“Don’t look,” said Tarragon. “It gets worse from here on.” But she knew I would look, because curiosity motivates not only Sharks but me as well.

Shattered glass ground under our wheels. I turned my head with a disconnected feeling. We passed burned-out vehicles at the roadside, smashed and overturned. Blackened Tine bodies lay between them, marking their experiments with engines. Long lines of automobiles had impacted so hard that they were all joined together. Metal crumpled back on itself. Tine assembled around them, carrying hoses, wielding axes. Water sprayed above them; in a flashing yellow light the drops seemed to fall slowly. Nightmare slow motion as water and blood pooled onto the road. Curtains of bloodied skin hung out of broken windows. One muscle tissue axle throbbed in pain.

We passed a gorgeous woman that the Tine had welded into her car. Her body was set into the seat as smoothly as a jewel in a bevel. Only the front could be seen; her face and neck, breasts and belly. Wreaths of gold tubes ran out of the seat into the sides of her body, completely obscuring her ribs and the sides of her slender thighs. Her hands had vanished; bulges at the ends of her arms were seamlessly attached to the steering wheel. Her long hair became a stylized immovable gold curve sweeping back to form the headrest. Her feet merged with the floor; its solid gold seemed to lap up her slender legs. She was part of the car.

“If the Tine catch us, that’s what they’ll do,” said Tarragon. “Make this car grow through us. Would you like to be a passenger forever?”

“Let me go!”

“Think yourself home.”

Something terrible is happening down there. Something vast in the heart of the Aureate is pumping viscous liquid around the drains and dykes bridged with connective tissue. “Let me go!” I shouted. “I want out!”

“Think yourself home, I’m not stopping you.”

“But I don’t know how!”

“If I call out that you’re a gymnast, Rhydanne, you’d be spending the rest of your life as a car. Well, your guts will. The rest of you will make a good roadsighn. Look, there’s one.”

The roadsighn whispered, “i trespassed in the aureate, look at me, save yourselves, go home, save yourself, tarragon, where are you going, tarragon?”

His legs twined together were planted in the verge, and a membrane road sign grew from between his outstretched arms. In the mist he was just a spindly écorché silhouette murmuring, “oh Tarragon, what have you brought us?”

As we passed I saw his sticky dark pink color, stripped to pus and muscle, his face locked in a wide risus sardonicus leer; “Tarragon, who is that? where are you going?”

“We’re going deeper,” she said to me. “The Spleen is on your right. On your left you will see-”

“Am I a sacrifice? Let me out!”

Gold buildings loomed smooth and rounded, lobed against each other like internal organs. They were horribly organic, studded with empty ulcerous portals-foramina and fistulae. The Ribs were flying buttresses with nowhere to land. We skirted the Labyrinths of the Ileum and in the distance the Cult of the Oedemic Prepuce had erected a tall gold wrinkled spire with an onion dome. We drove down a rubber subway that stretched and sagged. We emerged from beneath dripping red stalactites through a puckered textured sphincter onto the shore of-

A lake. Against the black sky I could just make out its dark red liquid and hear the lapping as rare ripples ran over its stinking surface. Gold ducts of varying bores, hollow femurs and arrays of tubules sucked liquid from it and ran underground. Glomeruli like fleshy cups fountained in occasional bursts so the automobile wheels sank in ground made spongy by gastric juices. On the far side, spotlights picked out and roved over the highly polished gold shell of the Western Kidney. I tried all the time to wish myself back to the Fourlands.

“Tine are a most religious and honest people…” said Tarragon. Tine crowded the shore. It must be a feast day because hundreds had gathered. Most were Duodenal Sect; their intestines had been pulled out of a hemmed hole in their stomachs and wrapped around their waists, and I could see waves of peristalsis going around them. One was a Novice of the Flectere Doctrine, who snap all their joints to bend the opposite way. His bare feet lifted in front of him because his knees were bent backward like a bird’s. His pale blue palms were on the backs of his hands, his fingers curled outward. “You have to admire their devotion.”

A gold paddleboat that ran on striated muscle fibers and catechism ferried between the Islets of Langerhans in the distance. “We’re going deeper,” said Tarragon. “Soon we’ll reach the Heart and Lungs, and we’ll drive the length of the backbone processional. The Heart! I want to show you the Heart of the Aureate.”

“No!”

“Then think yourself home!”

“I can’t!”

“Or the brain, deep beneath the Transgressor’s Forest. In the brain there’s a temple where any creature drawn on the wall comes to life. Don’t draw stick men, they have enough of those. It’s sickening to see them, limping toward you dragging their misshapen limbs and squeaking.”

I couldn’t feel the pull. It would be at least an hour before my overdose wore off and woke me. I tried to be calm, pictured my cabin on the Stormy Petrel and imagined myself back there.

“That’s a good boy!” Tarragon exclaimed. “I know you can do it!”

She gave me a Shark’s grin but I didn’t give it back. We drove along the lakeside and I screamed when I realized what was pinging out from under our wheels and rattling off the chassis: a gravel beach of kidney stones.