Neal Asher - Cowl

‘Come over here.’

Tack pushed himself away from the side of the mantisal, drifting over to catch hold of a strut, then hauled himself down to a standing position next to Traveller. Saphothere withdrew his left hand from one of the two spheres.

‘Place your hand in there,’ he instructed.

Tack rested his palm against the surface, which felt glassy until he pushed into it, then it gave way and enclosed his hand in cold jelly. Immediately there came a prickling stinging as of numerous needles penetrating his flesh. A chill spread up his arm, across his back, then leapt up via his neck and into his skull. The mantisal suddenly appeared even more transparent than normally, and the tunnel itself changed. Now they were hanging in the flaw of a gem, in which they held their position against a waterfall of light. And beyond this, interspace was again visible—infinite grey underlined by the black roiling of that strange sea.

‘What’s it doing?’

‘Connecting… and feeding as well.’

‘Feeding?’ Tack repeated woodenly.

‘Mantisals draw energy from sources we provide for them within interspace, but that is not enough for a material creature. They separate out carbon from our exhaled breath and, in this manner’—Saphothere nodded towards Tack’s hand—‘directly absorb other essential chemicals.’ Now, do you feel the connection?’

After trying to dismiss from his mind the fact that he was somehow being eaten, Tack did sense something. The mantisal was tired and wanted to rest. It felt confined by the distortion of interspace around it, and was aware of that distortion in a way that—through it—Tack instinctively tried to grasp, but it defeated him. The flow of light now began to diminish, and the mantisal began sliding to the edge of the flaw.

‘Don’t let it stop. You must keep pushing it.’

Tack tried to put the construct under pressure, but just did not know how. Mentally pulling back in confusion, he found the alien mind sticking with him, sinking into him, becoming one of his parts. Now its weariness was his, its need to rest becoming his own. Then he knew, and from that part of himself which enabled him to persevere through a particularly tough fight-training session, he now found the will to drive the mantisal on. It began to slowly draw back to the centre of the flaw and the flow of light began to increase.

‘Your other hand,’ urged Saphothere, now seeming just a skeleton cloaked in shadow beside him—like an X-ray image. Tack watched Traveller withdraw his hand only so far that his fingertips still remained inside the eye, then inserted his own hand into its place. Upon doing this, he felt some strange species of feedback from the piece of tor embedded in the wrist of that hand, and saw it brighten under its enclosing bangle, glowing like a solid gold coin. From it, he felt resistance, as if from some infinite ribbon of elastic stretched into the far past. Only while feeling this did he realize that, in his head, time now equated to a distance, and that other elements of the mantisal’s perception were becoming comprehensible to him. He remembered undertaking a simple perceptual test that involved viewing a line drawing of a cube and switching it about in his head, so that what he perceived as the rear surface became the front and vice versa. Doing the same with what he was seeing now, he brought the tunnel back into existence for himself, while maintaining an awareness of how the mantisal perceived it… and much else.

As the compressed ages fled by, he realized that the flaw itself was rising from Earth’s gravity well, which in its turn was a trench cloven around—and within—the trench of the sun. And that they were falling towards the sun, for their destination did not lie on Earth. Reality now patterned around him in absolute surfaces twisted in impossible directions, spheres and lines of force, empty light and solid blackness, all multiplied to infinity down an endless slope. Glancing at Saphothere, who had now moved away from him, he saw just a man-shaped hole cut into midnight—but the traveller was also a sphere and a tube, both finite and infinite. Tack groped for understanding, something starting to tear in his head.

‘Start pulling yourself out now, else you’ll never return.’

Saphothere was beside him again: skeletal, terrifying, fingertips back in the eye.

Tack pulled away and absolute surfaces slid back into place to form the walls of the tunnel, shapes curving away into nothingness, and soon he once again perceived his surroundings in simple three dimensions.

‘Now, take out your right hand.’

‘But… I can do this…’

‘You have done enough for now. You’ve been standing here for two hours and for fifty million years.’

Tack withdrew one hand and Saphothere instantly thrust his own into place. Taking out his other hand, Tack looked at his watch and confirmed that two hours had indeed passed. Pushing himself back through the cavity of the mantisal, he felt weariness descending on him like a collapsing wall.

‘But one light year?’ he said, as he moved to his accustomed position in the mantisal.

‘Time and distance, Tack. Distance and time. You now know the answer: to fly the mantisal you had to build the blueprint of the logic in your mind.’

It was true. Inside himself Tack felt he had gained an utterly new slant on… everything. He thought about the tunnel and said, ‘It compresses the continuum and multiplies, by orders of magnitude, the distance the mantisal can normally travel. And, like the tunnel, the more energy the mantisal uses the shorter its journey. In how short a time, for us, could it traverse this tunnel?’

‘Less than an hour, its personal distance contracted to a few hundred kilometres,’ Saphothere replied. ‘But it would kill itself and its rider in the process.’

Tack nodded, too weary to ask anything further. Folding his arms and bowing his head, he closed his eyes and fell into a dream world, where Klein bottles endlessly filled themselves and hollow people built tesseract houses.

Being interface technician, Silleck commanded the respect of many and the distrust and horror of some. As she strode along the moving walkway towards the lift that would take her up into the control room of Sauros, she spotted other Heliothane surreptitiously noting her shaven head and the scars on her scalp from the penetration of vorpal nodes. But she was used to such attention and ignored it as she thought about the coming shift of the city. Goron had summoned her early because she was his most trusted interface technician, so that meant she would have an hour or more to scan through various vorpal sensors scattered throughout time and across alternates. It was perhaps the best part of her job—such voyeurism.

Reaching the lift shaft, she stepped on the platform and as it took her up she ran her hand over her scalp. Her head ached slightly, as it always did nowadays, for there was never enough time for the damage done by the penetrating glass fibres from the nodes to heal completely. Stepping off the platform, she noted that Goron had not yet returned from the abutment chamber. She nodded to Palleque—who always seemed to be here—then headed to the interface wall, seeing that already one of the other technicians was linked up.

The man stood with his head and shoulders enclosed in the vorpal sphere, which was also packed with translucent and transparent mechanisms. Through this distortion, nightmare hints were visible of his open skull and of glassy pipes and rods interfacing directly with raw exposed brain. From the back of this sphere, like a secondary spine, a mass of ribbed glass ducts followed the curve of his back down, before entering a light-flecked pedestal and then down into the floor. From this spine, vorpal struts spread out like the wing bones of a skate, to connect it to various mechanisms in the surrounding walls, ceiling, floor and adjacent connectware, so that the man seemed to hover at the centre of some strange mandala—the human flaw in an alien hyaline perfection.