Neal Asher - The Engineer Reconditioned

“Marten!” she shouted, and I assumed she was calling to some child. “Marten! Wait, I’ll come down to you!”

She was calling to me — I could not deny this. Was that my name then? I’d heard it recently hadn’t I? I waited for her, one part of me wanting to shout a warning to her, the other part of me avid for her presence. Some distance up the beach she found a path down to me and then came jogging along the beach to me. Her black hair was cropped short around a face as sharp-featured and white as my own. Her clothing had the look of an acceleration suit. She was not of this century. I held up my hand when she was twenty paces from me.

“Stay there. You are not safe,” I said, both glad and disappointed when she slowed to a walk. She was puzzled and angry.

“None of us are safe. What happened? Did you use it?”

I could not fathom her question.

“Don’t come any closer. If you come closer I might kill you.”

“Hallack said you had it under control now,” she told me, and continued walking towards me.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“Bellan, you know that… oh my god!”

She turned at the last moment, perhaps suddenly realising her danger, at least that is what I thought then. Her turning to flee set me moving. Suddenly I was just a hunting animal. I brought her face down in the sand and closed my hand on the back of her neck.

“The beast, Marten! It’s not you! Try to remember!”

These cryptic words were curtailed by her screams. She was definitely from a later century — stronger and more complex, her force was a rich and varied thing. She took a long time to start coming apart, but I was sure I was done when I finally got off her and stepped back, for her flesh was slewing from a collapsing skeleton. However, she managed to crawl for a couple of yards making liquid gasps before she finally deliquesced. I couldn’t figure her words as I walked on, and when I finally returned to the sphere its muttering was louder and I found it difficult to remember.

There was a time, I know, when there was no communication. I stood on that black surface below the iron sky and shifted and travelled. I fed often. I know this. Could it be that I am deluding myself? Perhaps I am not human. Perhaps humanity is a superficial sheen I have acquired throughout my feedings? Why then this attachment to the twenty-eighth century? This one question convinces me that I am human and perhaps only lost that humanity for a little while.

Seventeen shifts passed. The manoeuvres came sooner and sooner so that it seemed my feet only had to touch the black surface and I would be slammed on my back for periods of ten to the full fifty hours. Every Earth-shift I came through exhausted and hungry and I killed and fed. On the seventeenth shift the sphere nearly lost me. For a time I was hurtling alone through limbo before it picked me up again and dragged me on. After this shift I felt the hunger but possessed the will not to feed. Upon the sphere again I saw that my belongings were gone. The tor had been ripped away and lost during the same manoeuvres that had nearly lost me my place. Of a sudden I remembered the woman, shapes I had seen in the greyness, people calling to me and trying to tell me something. Returning to me with almost the force of faith was that I was a prisoner and that once the opposite had applied. It was in the dunes of a desert in an age when craft like uprooted buildings tumbled through the sky that I re-encountered the truth.

“Marten, here at last.”

I turned and saw a man and a woman seated side by side on the dune-face nearby. He wore the robes of a Turag and his eyes were piercing green. I knew him, and in that moment of knowing him I remembered an all too brief conversation. She… she wore something like an acceleration suit and dark cropped hair framing a familiar thin face. Seventeen shifts ago I had killed her: Bellan. I looked to the man.

“You spoke of Cowl,” I said.

He gestured me closer. It seemed he was not afraid of me now. I moved closer trying to plumb that familiarity of his features. He gestured to the sand at his feet. Before sitting I glanced at Bellan. She smiled at me and I felt a hand grasp my insides and squeeze. I needed no explanations of what had happened. I have been travelling randomly in time long enough. In her existence she had yet to have that fatal encounter.

“As we speak you will remember,” she said.

He said, “Without the tor there it does not have so close a link outside and will not have as much control over you.”

“What… what are you talking about?”

“First another little story. We told each other such, quite often,” he said.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“You know my name.”

“It is Hallack, but that means I only know your name.” I glanced at the woman. I dared not say that I already knew hers.

“I am Bellan,” she told me. I could not meet her eyes when she smiled again. Hallack said, “You will remember… now, I shall continue where I left off. It has only been moments for me… Cowl’s organic time machine, or complex time machine, took him way back to the Nodus at such a rate that he managed to overshoot it and thus remain partially inaccessible to his enemies, i.e. the rest of humanity. Back there he took the young beast he had fashioned; a creature for which time was like the air to a bird, a creature that hunted in time, a creature that fished in time for prey. How to describe this monster?” He looked to Bellan and she took up his narrative.

“Originally it was a distinct and describable creature, but it grew into something vast: landscapes of beast, a whole alternate occupied, Mandlebrotian endless feeding mouths and tendrils. On its back grow scales like holly leaves of glassy metal that curl when they fall away into perilous bracelets. Who put these bracelets on can travel in time, usually directly into the creature’s mouths. Cowl sent these items uptime to collect samplings of future humanity to see if his efforts were succeeding. These items were called tors; complex organic time machines in themselves; scales from the back of the torbeast.” I visualised this description and knew that I had indeed seen this creature somewhere, somewhen. I thought of the tor that had lain on the surface of the sphere.

“Why do you tell me this?” I said, gazing at each of them. “What connection do I have with this Cowl, or with this torbeast?”

He replied, “How do you kill a creature that travels in and manipulates time by instinct? You cannot. Cowl is gone. He sits in an alternate from which he cannot travel, forever gnawing on his own rage. The beast was a danger to us all so we laid our plans and we sacrificed a million lives to imprison it.”

“You still have not told me.”

“For fifty hours out of every fifty-two you are trapped on the surface of its prison. At one time you were its warder, until it drew one of its own scales to the surface, and until it began to speak to you,” said Bellan.

“I would be free of it,” I said, quickly.

“It is why we are here,” said Hallack.

“We’ve been following you for a long time. The beast feeds through you,” she nodded at my sudden guilty expression. “Meagre fare for it, but enough to empower its leaps through time and keep it ahead of us, and enough, should you feed it enough, for it eventually to break from its prison.” How could I tell her the true source of the sick guilt I felt?

Hallack pulled a cloth package from behind himself and unwrapped it. He revealed a tor.

“You must place this upon your arm. It is all we have. Our own machines are too slow and too crude. It is ironic that only with what it used to entrap you may you escape.” The sphere was below me; poised on the edge of the real. I could hear a muttering. Perhaps I fooled myself. Perhaps it was really a distant snarling. He rolled the tor down the dune-face to me.