Terminal World (16 page)

‘What will happen to them?’ he asked, meaning the woman.

‘Most likely end up as slaves.’

‘This is barbaric.’

‘Welcome to the real world, Cutter. You want to stand up and make a point, you’re more’n welcome. Just give me time to get away first.’

‘You mean, what’s done is done, we just stand by and accept it?’

‘Skullboys are everywhere, Cutter. They own the Outzone. You piss off one lot of ’em, word soon gets around. Fine if you don’t plan on coming back too often. Me, I’ve got a living to make.’

The procession was ending, the last few wagons and riders roaring and rattling into the night, the whooping cries gradually fading. But he could still see the woman and child in the cage. She seemed to be looking almost directly at him, as if she had seen something in the darkness. He flinched, telling himself it was no more than coincidence, and then the woman turned slowly away to face the direction of travel, drawing the child closer to her side. As the woman presented her back to him, he made out a large scar or birthmark on the back of her skull, reaching almost all the way from the crown to the nape.

He wanted desperately to act, but he knew it was senseless; that Meroka was right. How ludicrous he must seem to her now, he thought: fresh from the city, stung with bruising indignation at the inhumanity he had only now begun to take notice of. But it had been out there all along, not just for years or decades but for millennia. A grinding toll of cruelty and injustice, going on, ceaselessly, for every waking moment of his life.

‘I know it’s hard,’ Meroka said eventually, when the clamour of the Skullboy caravan had all but faded, ‘but you get used to it. It’s get used to it or go insane. I already made my choice.’

‘I can’t blame you for that.’ They had stood up from the ground and put their guns away.

‘It’s not that I don’t care. But there are lots of them and not many of us.’ Long silences stretched between each sentence, Meroka assembling the words with obvious effort. ‘If everyone in Spearpoint got together, made an army ... came down here, maybe that would make a difference. And that’s likely, right? Swarm’ll forgive us before that happens.’

‘What’s Swarm?’

‘Just one more thing you don’t need to worry about, Cutter.’

It was the horses, not the lightening sky, that eventually roused him to alertness. They were whinnying, and in the still-present darkness he could hear Meroka cursing and muttering as she tried to quieten the animals. He divested himself of the blanket and stood up, shivering slightly, for the air had cooled and he had been tolerably warm under the covering. He felt light-headed, as if he had rushed to his feet too quickly. The horses were still upset about something. He looked in the direction of the road, but there was no sign of anyone else coming along it, and certainly no audible indication of another Skullboy caravan.

Still unsteady on his feet, the light-headedness persisting, he made his way to the commotion. Meroka was a shape in the dark, one hand on the muzzle of each horse, trying to settle them. Their eyes and teeth flashed white and wild and terrified. Their ears were flattened back.

‘Something’s got ’em riled, Cutter.’ She was out of breath with the effort of restraining the animals, which were still thrashing and kicking against her grip.

‘That much I surmised.’ He took hold of his own horse and laid a hand on the sweat-sheened column of its neck. He could feel its pulse, like an overwound clock. ‘Did you see or hear anything?’

‘Been as quiet as a crypt all night. Then they start this shit.’

At the back of his mind the truth was already forming, although he was reluctant to give it room. ‘How do you feel, Meroka?’

‘Like I’ve been up all night, and the day before.’

‘I mean, apart from that.’

She turned to look at him, her face little more than a featureless oval. ‘Why you asking?’

‘Because I’m not feeling well myself. Either that food I ate was bad, or else ...’ He halted, still holding the horse, and used his other hand to tug up his sleeve, exposing enough of his forearm to read his watches. The dials and hands glowed feeble blue-green. It was hard to read them, with the agitated horse jerking its head up and down. He concentrated until he could be certain. The watches were beginning to show different times, the minute hands no longer winding around in perfect lockstep. The cumulative difference between the fastest and slowest watch was already a quarter of an hour.

‘Something wrong?’

‘I checked the synchronisation before I slept. The watches were all keeping good time. Now they’re drifting.’

‘So what’re you saying?’

It was hard to come out with the words. He almost felt that by voicing his suspicion he was in danger of concretising it into reality. ‘My symptoms match those of zone sickness. My watches are telling me something’s happening. And our horses aren’t happy. Animals sense these things sooner than people or machines.’

‘Could just be a squall.’

‘Yes. It could just be a squall.’ But he thought about Fray’s suspicion that there was something big coming down the line.

More than a squall, for certain.

‘I think we’re in trouble,’ he said. ‘I need to gauge the change-vector and issue us both a dose of antizonals.’

But even as he spoke, some fight seemed to go out of the horses. They stopped kicking the ground and yanking their heads, their eyes narrowing and their ears pricking forwards. They snorted and snuffled, letting the humans know that while they were in no way placated, whatever had stirred them up appeared to have passed, for now.

Quillon still felt light-headed and unsteady, but even that was beginning to ease. He released his horse, letting it wander off, then adjusted his watches back into synchronisation, as near as he could judge it. He would monitor them carefully from now on.

‘You were saying?’

‘Maybe it was a squall after all.’

‘Squalls happen. I feel all right. What about you?’

‘Whatever it was seems to be passing.’

‘The boundary must have wandered over us for a few moments, before snapping back.’

Again Quillon listened into the night, but still there was nothing to be heard. ‘I don’t think I’m going to be able to get much more sleep, though. I feel wide awake.’

‘Got a long wait until your ride arrives.’

‘I’ll be fine. Perhaps you’re the one who ought to be getting some rest. I can look after the horses.’

‘You insist,’ she said, after several moments’ reflection. ‘But don’t go dozing off on me.’

‘No plans to doze off, I assure you.’

Satisfied that the horses were as settled as they were going to get, Meroka lay down under a blanket. Quillon watched her dark form, observing the regularity of her breathing until he was certain she was asleep. Meroka also had a taxing day ahead of her. She had to take both horses back alone, riding one and guiding the other, through the pass and back to the base of Spearpoint.

He found a hummock in the ground that made a passable seat and lowered himself onto it, the wheels of his mind spinning with dizzy alertness. The horses snuffled and snorted, but were otherwise docile. They had enviably short memories, animals. He examined his watches, the luminous dots on the dials and hands forming a series of circular constellations. The hands were all moving in lockstep again now. Watches were carefully engineered (and later selected by the purchaser) so that they would respond to zone changes in subtly different ways, rather than all of them slowing or speeding up in unison. But it still took attention to read the signs accurately, and care to ensure that the watches were wound and functioning properly. In Neon Heights, the majority of citizens had become lax in the business of watch-reading, secure in the knowledge that the ever-present Boundary Commission would alert them to a zone shift as soon as it happened. Most of them only wore watches as fashion accessories, barely remembering how to interpret the signs. The same applied to the other districts, in varying measure. But out here watches were all one had. There was no Boundary Commission, and Quillon would be entirely reliant on his own judgement as to when to administer antizonal medicine, and of what type and dosage.

But when the shift came again, the watches barely had time to respond. What had been light-headedness before was now a vicious, vicelike pressure mounting behind his eyeballs. The suddenness of the pain, the intensity of it, made him gasp. He stood up, more out of a flight reflex than any conscious volition, clutching the sides of his head. The pain increased, until it felt as if a sharp wedge were being driven down through his skull, splitting his brain between the hemispheres. Vomit rose in his throat. He staggered directionlessly, the landscape seeming to tilt madly into the sky. He pivoted around, fighting the urge to vomit, and saw the horses lying still on the ground like piles of black sacks, as if they had been shot. They were either dead or unconscious; he couldn’t tell and he sensed it wouldn’t make much difference either way if he didn’t keep himself from slipping under. Already there was a dreamlike quality to his actions, a feeling that his mind was isolating itself from the real world, slamming down protective barriers.

He found Meroka. Something was very wrong with her. She was palsying under the blanket, her body convulsing. Her zone tolerance was not as robust as his own. He was disorientated and in pain, but if Meroka did not receive the right medication quickly, she would not survive very long. Yet to administer the wrong kind of antizonal would be worse than not treating her at all. He knelt down and touched her, hoping the pressure of his hand would calm her or at least bring her to consciousness, but she kept shaking. He found her mouth and his hand came away wet with blood and spittle.

This was not a squall. The squall had just been a wave breaking on a shoreline. This was an inundation: another zone completely swamping the one they had been inside. And so far it wasn’t passing; it wasn’t snapping back to its earlier configuration.

He bent over and retched. The pain was still inside his head, the dizziness and sense of detachment, but the nausea eased slightly. He forced himself to look down, to survey his watches. It could only have been a minute or so since the episode had begun - not enough time for the hands to have diverged to any useful extent. But the second hands were still ticking around. None of the watches had stopped. If one or more of them had, then it might -
might -
be an indication that the shift was to a lower-state zone, where even the simple clockwork of a watch was too complex and finicky to function. Since the watches were all still ticking, he could only draw the opposite conclusion. The shift was in the other direction, to a higher-state zone, where the clockwork operated too well, too freely. Tolerances had slackened; gears and cams were now whirring faster than they were supposed to.

He reached for his medical bag, snapped it open with trembling fingers. His vision was beginning to tunnel, his hand-to-eye coordination degrading. Like a drunk trying to untie shoelaces he fumbled open the rack that contained the direction-specific antizonals, the rubber-topped vials and the waiting hypodermics. They swam in and out of focus. He checked his watches again; all still running. The minute hands beginning to pull apart, the second hands ticking at visibly different rates. He took one of the syringes and plunged it into a vial. Drew out a measure of thick, resinous fluid.

Every instinct told him to treat himself first. He was the physician, Meroka the patient. Still he went to Meroka, leaning down on her to quell her movements, drawing back the blanket to expose an arm, finding bare skin under her sleeve, locating a vein, pushing the thick needle in, depressing the plunger. All the while seeing the hypodermic in his hand, like a glittering glass toy held at an absurd distance, Meroka’s body stretching halfway to the horizon.

The drug worked quickly. Her convulsions became less violent, less frequent. He knelt back and staggered to his feet, hoping he had done the right thing. Too soon to tell: even the wrong antizonal could have an initially calming effect, lulling the physician into thinking he had made the right decision. He looked at the watches again, relieved to see that they were still telling him the same story.

He injected himself with the other syringe, and then returned both to their slots in the medical mag. If they could not be sterilised, he would at least make sure that Meroka was only injected using one syringe, and he the other.

He began to feel an improvement almost immediately. His vision started to clear, the headache fading. There would still be grogginess for some while, a sluggish quality to his thoughts and actions, but if he had made the right choice, the antizonal would gradually free him from the immediately obvious symptoms of zone sickness. Until either the ambient conditions changed again - for better or worse - or the drug had time to wear off, which it would.

The horses were still lying on the ground, inert as shadows. Perhaps they were dead after all - he could see no sign that they were still breathing. But the prognosis was better for Meroka. She had stopped convulsing and was now lying on her side, almost as if she had been watching him inject his own dose.

As he walked over, she moved a hand across her face. The sky had begun to lighten in the east and now he could make out her open eyes, the blood daubed around her mouth.

‘I’m a mess,’ Meroka said, slurring almost to the point of incomprehension.

‘You bit your tongue.’

‘What happened?’

‘The squall came back.’ He knelt beside her. ‘Worse this time. It got you so fast you didn’t even have time to wake up before you went into palsy. I think the horses might not have made it. I took a risk and decided the shift was in the upward direction. Fortunately, it appears I was right. I injected both of us with what I hoped was the right form of antizonal.’