The Abyss Beyond Dreams (61 page)

‘Never. Not in the outside universe, anyway. In the Void – who knows?’

That was when the sound began – a distant clattering and banging. It made Kysandra jump. The desert had been devoid of sound since the moment they started trekking across it. Sound was
alien here. Shocking.

They all stopped what they were doing, staring round, trying to pinpoint the noise. Kysandra realized it was coming from the exopods, and well up the hill if she was any judge. The clattering
went on for a few moments more, then stopped.

‘What caused that?’ Madeline asked anxiously. ‘It’s the monster, isn’t it?’

‘No monster,’ Nigel said. ‘I’d say an exopod shifted about. It certainly sounded like that.’

‘Has another one landed?’ Kysandra asked. She studied the top of the hill, her infra-red scan trying to find an exopod that was a different temperature to all the others. They all
remained stubbornly identical.

‘No such thing as coincidence,’ Nigel said. ‘Whatever instigated the quantum fluctuation knocked the exopods about.’

‘The monster,’ Madeline said in dread. ‘It’s coming for us.’

‘Now listen, all of you,’ Nigel said forcefully. ‘There is no monster. These corpses, everything we’ve seen here, it’s all three thousand years old. Whatever
happened, happened back then. Today, here, now, you are perfectly safe.’

Whatever the sound was, it didn’t come again. They carried on putting the tents up. Kysandra kept using her ex-sense and infrared vision to scan around, making sure nothing was creeping
out of the darkness. Just in case.

Once the tent was up, she went inside and took her robes off, slipping into the baggy white shirt. Nigel came in and unwrapped his turban, but left the rest of his sand-encrusted robe on.

‘What now?’ she asked, sitting on the mattress, hugging her knees.

‘We wait until daylight. Even with all the senses I’m enriched with – nice irony, that – I do need to have a clear field of vision to assess things properly.’

‘And when it’s light?’

‘Fergus and I will start a decent, detailed investigation of the exopods. There are well over a million of them piled up out there, stuffed full of solid state components. Sheer
probability is that some processors and memory blocks can be salvaged, especially those that haven’t been crushed. And I saw a lot of array tablets jumbled up with the bodies. There have to
be some files somewhere I can retrieve and download into my storage lacuna.’

She managed a weak smile. ‘I’m so scared,’ she confessed, on the verge of tears again. ‘Something killed that woman. All of her.’

‘That’s the bigger puzzle,’ he said. ‘Why so many? Nobody has over a million clones. It’s insanity. Whatever happened to her, it wasn’t as simple as a
monster.’

‘Is it going to get us?’ she asked, hating how pathetic she sounded.

‘No.’ And he actually grinned, squatting down beside her. ‘I really meant it when I said we’re perfectly safe. This is probably the time to tell you. You see, the people
on Querencia found out something else about the Void. Something utterly amazing.’

‘What?’

‘There’s a kind of time travel possible in here.’

It was no good; her mind had gone blank, unable to process what she’d just heard him say. ‘Time travel?’

‘Yes. You know, when you travel into the past.’

‘You can time travel in the Void?’

‘Yes. If you know how, and if your mind is strong enough. I tried it once, the day I landed. I can just do it; it takes a hellish amount of concentration, and I could only manage to
perceive a couple of hours. But I went back in time. My first couple of encounters with Ma’s boys at the Hevlin Hotel didn’t go too well. But the third time, I knew what didn’t
work, like trying to reason with them, so I just started straight in with domination. And . . . here we are. So you see, if anything does start to go catastrophically wrong, we travel back in time
and avoid the danger.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘No, you’re just saying that to try and make me feel safe. Nice try, though.’

‘Listen, outside in the real universe, time is a one-way flow. We learned how to manipulate that flow in a wormhole, slow it down so we can take a relative jump forward if we want, but it
is impossible to go back. Always. But here, the Void is different. Remember I told you it is made up of many layers?’

‘Yes.’

‘This layer, where we exist, is only one of them. The Heart, where you say your soul lives on in glory after death, that’s another. But there are two more layers that are critical
here: the memory layer and the creation layer. The memory layer stores everything: you, your thoughts, your body’s atomic structure. And the creation layer, well, that can take a version of
you from any moment of your life and physically manifest it.’

‘I can go into the past?’ she asked incredulously. ‘You mean I can go back and stop Dad from going on that sweep?’ Tears began to prick her eyes.

Nigel sighed. ‘I can only manage to go a few hours, I’m sorry. There was one person we knew of who could travel back decades, but he lived on Querencia a thousand years
ago.’

‘I see.’ She dropped her head so he couldn’t see the misery that was written there.

‘The point is, if you produce a – I don’t know what to call it – a short circuit between the memory layer and the creation layer, you basically reset this whole section
of the Void to the moment you’ve chosen. But here’s the important thing: anyone who does that remembers the future they just left. No one else does. You quite literally become the
centre of the universe.’

‘Riiight.’

‘Stand up.’ Nigel stood and beckoned to her.

She thought about ignoring him, but this was Nigel . . . She stood up, and he took her hands in his.

‘I don’t know if I can take you with me, but—’

Kysandra perceived him gifting her a complex vision and let it stream into her mind. It was Nigel’s mental perception, but so finely focused she could hardly distinguish anything. He was
perceiving the tent with the two of them in it, but pushing further,
into
everything. Pushing hard. And there behind the phantasm shapes and shadows that were her eldritch world lay a
second image, identical to the first. Nigel’s sense probed at that, and another more distant image was revealed. Another, and another. They began to sink through them, and she saw herself
shift back down to her knees where she’d been a few moments ago.

Somewhere in the real world she heard a gasp escape from her own lips. Then the images were racing past. Played out in reverse was their whole conversation. Nigel left the tent. Then she was
alone sitting on the mattress having a good old wallow in misery. Then earlier still; she was taking off the shirt. The robe rose up from its puddle on the floor into her hand. And the perception
froze. Her mind
twisted
through the image until she was looking out through her own eyes. The real world came rushing back in and she dropped the robe to the floor. Hot air licked over her
skin. Kysandra yelped in shock.

‘Told you so,’ Nigel said.

He was standing at the far end of the tent. He’d
materialized
there.

Kysandra screamed. Then stopped, her hand flew to her mouth and she stared at him in astonishment. She gave a feverish little giggle. ‘Crudding Uracus!’

‘Are you all right?’ Fergus ’pathed from outside.

‘We’re doing just fine,’ Nigel ’pathed back.

‘It’s real,’ she grunted. Then gave a start. She was standing there in front of him in sweaty underwear – and nothing else. One arm hurriedly slapped across her bra, and
her teekay yanked her baggy shirt from the duffel bag.

‘Pardon me,’ Nigel said in amusement and turned his back.

She slipped into her shirt.

‘So now do you believe me when I say we’re not in any danger?’

‘Yes!’ she exclaimed. ‘Oh, crudding yes, do I ever!’ This was more fantastic than finding out he was from another universe, that he had a spaceship, that she could learn
all the knowledge of the Commonwealth. More fantastic than anything.

‘So . . .’ She grasped at words. ‘So, like, that piece of time we just lived through, stopped? And we came back here?’

‘Yes, and only you and I know those five minutes ever happened. Everyone on Bienvenido who died in those five minutes is alive and about to die again. Every baby that was born is about to
come into the world again. Every drunk falling over – bang, ouch. Everyone who got kissed . . . is going to get kissed again.’

‘But they don’t know.’

‘They don’t know because it hasn’t happened for them. It never did.’

‘Nigel?’

‘Yes.’

‘Please, don’t ever go back to before you met me. Don’t let me live that life. Please.’

‘I won’t.’

‘Thank you,’ she said.

‘But if you ever become strong enough to go back to rescue your father, then you go right ahead.’

‘Uh huh.’ She was already trying to use her ex-sight the way he had. It was unbelievably difficult. She could barely perceive an instant ago.

‘So, do you understand that we’re not in any immediate danger out here?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’ She smiled, actually meaning it.

Nigel sat down on his mattress. ‘There’s another reason I told you about that ability.’

‘Yes?’

‘The creation layer. I think it’s glitching somehow. I think that’s what’s happened here. Somehow, for some reason, it recreated the exopod and the woman time and time
again. Only on this occasion, it doesn’t reset everything else.’

‘Why?’

‘I have no idea. But it’s the only logical explanation. Her body has the same ankle damage every time; that tells me she was constantly recreated from one specific moment.’

‘So the Void must still be doing that?’

‘I’m not sure. All the bodies we’ve seen have been here for the same length of time. That’s a paradox – or it would be in the universe outside. There’s
something very strange happening here. And that’s what I’m going to try to understand. Anything which can affect and alter the structure of the Void is tremendously
important.’

*

In theory, Nigel declared next morning, the exopods at the top of the pile should be the newest. Their systems would be in better shape than their squashed and smashed cousins
at the bottom. They might be able to get some useful data from them.

So Fergus started off at first light. He clambered slowly up the pile, gingerly testing every foothold to make sure it could take his weight, that the whole mound wouldn’t suddenly shift
and an avalanche of pods come tumbling down on top of him.

Kysandra couldn’t bear to watch. She winced at each move. Constantly scanned the surrounding exopods with her ex-sight for any signs of instability. Sent ’path after ’path
telling him to be careful.

‘Go away,’ Nigel told her eventually. ‘You’re distracting him, and more importantly, me. Leave him alone and go find me some intact array tablets.’

She and Madeline started walking a circuit of the exopod hill. The embankment of the woman’s mummified bodies was the same all the way round, as was her tight-packed sprawl over the
cluttered caseloads of emergency survival hardware.

‘There might not be a monster here,’ Madeline said, ‘but this place is cursed. The women that died here, their souls screamed and screamed their bitterness and fear as they
were cast into Uracus. That anguish will linger here even after her last corpses have turned to dust.’

Kysandra gave her a sullen glance, but couldn’t disagree.

Nothing responded to the pings sent by Kysandra’s u-shadow – not that she’d expected any replies. As they made their way round the hill, she let her ex-sight flow over the
technological wreckage, searching for array tablets. Unopened cases were her best chance, Nigel had decided. She located several buried amid the debris, and she and Madeline had to grit their teeth
and walk over mummies that were pulverized beneath their boots. Once they pulled the cases out, the arrays they contained didn’t seem any different to those exposed to the desert, their
electronics no more active than the sand, but she put them in her bag and carried on.

She almost missed it. One more axe amid the jumble of survival supplies and the horror of merged bodies. Nothing unusual there. But this axe blade had slammed through one of the skulls. Kysandra
focused her perception. She wasn’t wrong. The mummification process had welded the axe in place.

Now she’d seen one, she started to look for more. Quite a few mummies had similarly damaged skulls, some with the axe still in, some without. Other mummies had loops of filament wrapped
round their necks. Strangled.

It took them nearly fifty minutes to complete a circuit. When they got back, Fergus was at the top of the hill, studying the exopods there.

‘Nothing different,’ he ’pathed. ‘The decay is identical. They’ve all been here the same amount of time. But they must have landed one after the other.’

‘Paradox,’ Nigel sent back, indecently cheerful.

‘She was killing herself,’ Kysandra told him as she handed over the bag full of arrays. ‘She was an axe murderer, among other methods.’

‘This place,’ Nigel said. ‘There’s too much death here. It’s haunted.’

‘I don’t think her soul stayed behind, not any of them.’

‘Not that kind of haunting, not a Void-engineered one. This is purely human. She left her imprint on the sand and in the exopods. How could she not? There were so many of her. Spiritually,
this reeks of her.’

‘Madeline said something similar.’

‘Did she now? Maybe there’s hope for her yet.’

‘Do you need me for anything?’ Kysandra asked. ‘I thought I might go back to the tent.’

‘Sure,’ he said gently. ‘Have a rest. I don’t think there’s actually much more we can do here. We’ll gather some memory processors from exopods and see what
we can do with them when we get back to the
Skylady
.’

Inside the tent, Kysandra stripped off her robes, trying to contain the sand that fell out of them. By now, there wasn’t a square centimetre of the tent that wasn’t contaminated with
sand. It was even in her sleeping bag, despite her best efforts to shake it out.