‘Pack up the supplies. We’re moving on,’ ordered Coptic.
Looking around, Tack saw Meelan down on the beach gazing out to sea. Gathering their equipment, he followed Coptic down to join her. Both of them, he saw, were well rested now, for their eyes glowed like embers. He did not see how they summoned it, but instantly the mantisal folded out of the air ahead of them, cold mist pouring off it to dissipate above the warm sand. Tack followed the two of them aboard and took up his accustomed position. Again they shifted.
One has to wonder if it matters at all to that thing on your arm whether you arrive at your eventual destination alive or dead. It seems parasitic — so perhaps it will continue feeding on your corpse as it drags it back through time.
Polly’s head was aching abominably, her mouth felt terracotta dry, and her body felt battered. Her hands and face were stung all over, not as a result of time travel but of landing in a patch of nettles. Still gasping on welcome air, she rolled over and sat upright, then wished she had not been so hasty as her vision darkened and a wave of nausea washed through her. After a moment this was supplanted by that familiar gnawing hunger. Glancing down at her hand clenched white around the neck of the food bag, she eased her grip and delved inside it, retrieving a large pork pie, but it was frozen as solid as granite.
You have to wonder if you have an eventual destination, or if there is any purpose at all to your journey. Maybe you’re just a piece of temporal flotsam?
‘Nandru, I don’t suppose you could tell me where to find your OFF button?’
Touchy. I was only trying to make conversation.
After staring at the inedible pie for a moment longer, Polly cursed, returned it to the sack, then sat upright. She was sitting in patch of vegetation at the edge of woodland, and it all looked little different from the countryside of Henry VIII’s time. Getting unsteadily to her feet, she gazed around.
The nettles grew in a band along the edge of forest, separating it from grassy heath scattered with patches of teasel and thistle and dotted with wild flowers. This open heath extended some hundreds of metres to a wall of parsleys, displaying glimpses of reeds and more forest beyond. Nowhere visible was there any sign she recognized as from the hand of man.
‘How far back have we gone now?’ she wondered aloud.
Oh, speaking to me again are you?
‘Yes, I’m speaking to you,’ she snarled.
That’s good, for after a few more of these jumps back through time, I’ll be the only one left you can speak to.
‘What do you mean?’ Polly carefully trod a path through the nettles, as she made her way out into the open.
Well, your time-jumps are getting longer and longer, and remember human history isn’t that long, relatively speaking.
‘Go on,’ Polly snapped, acutely aware of how little history she knew.
OK, like it was once explained to me at schooclass="underline" if you compared the whole sweep of Earth’s history to one day, then human history occupies about the last two minutes of that.
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ Polly suddenly felt very cold.
I’m serious. Earth is four billion years old, and modern humans have only been around for about one thousandth part of that. Dinosaurs, which I’m sure you’ve heard of, existed for about a hundred and sixty million years, yet died out some sixty million years before we appeared.
Even as he said it, Polly recalled with painful clarity the small facts she herself had picked up almost by osmosis while watching films and taking part in interactives. She recited, ‘And before the dinosaurs, hundreds of millions of years of life on land and in sea, and before that only in the sea, then even more time without life at all.’
You’re now getting it. Seems your brain is waking up.
‘Yeah, seems like it.’
Polly trudged towards the reeds where she assumed she would find a river, as that seemed as good a destination as any. Upon reaching the high parsleys, she reached out to brush them aside.
Stop right there.
‘What?’
Those plants are hemlock, so don’t get their juice on your skin—they’re poisonous.
Polly veered around the stand of hemlock and headed for a gap through to the reeds. Soon she found herself alongside a fast-flowing river, its bottom sandy and pebbled, underneath a slow ballet of strands of waterweed. Soon she found a shallow part, the water’s surface broken by a pebbled prominence, where she crossed and began to walk upstream. Eventually she found a fallen log to sit on. Her hunger had become a constant gnawing in her gut, so she took out her tobacco and made a roll-up, in the hope that it might still the pangs. Staring down into the debris caught where the fallen tree’s branches penetrated the river bottom, she froze suddenly and found her hunger the last thing on her mind.
‘I think I know what time we’ve arrived in,’ she whispered.
And how do you…? Oh.
‘You see him, too?’
Trapped, amid debris, with water flowing over it like a transparent skin, lay a rotting human corpse. White bone and grinning teeth showed through where much of his face had slewed away, white fingerbones dotted the river bed, the remaining flesh was washed almost colourless. But the leather helmet, breastplate and one leather sandal remained. Tatters of cloth flowed about his hips. His eye sockets were empty.
Your leaps through time are indeed getting longer.
‘He’s a Roman soldier, isn’t he?’
A legionary, yes, so this time you’ve shot back over a thousand years. The Romans were here from about 100BC until around AD400.
Polly continued puffing silently on her cigarette. When the scale moved her backwards next, who could know when she would end up? How could she make any plans for her own future when she kept regressing further into the past? She stood and continued upstream.
‘I don’t know what to do. What am I supposed to do?’
All you’ve ever done, really: survive.
The era of the andrewsarchus was like balmy spring compared to this period. It seemed as if someone had just opened a furnace door, and Tack did not relish the prospect of stepping from the mantisal when they landed. Coptic, who was currently controlling the bioconstruct, remained where he was, as the mantisal slid on through the air, ten metres above the ground. Meelan began whispering urgently to Coptic and gestured to the structure encaging them. Coptic spat a reply, nodding ahead. Tack assumed this exchange was something to do with how the mantisal’s glassy struts were becoming clouded, as if filling up with smoke, though he had no idea what this might signify.
Gazing downwards, Tack observed dense scrubland broken only by striated rock formations and red earthen tracks. Looking ahead, he saw that this arid landscape extended as far as distant misted mountains crouching above the flat shimmer of heat haze. Immediately below them, creatures resembling a cross between camel and deer went crashing into concealing scrub. Others, like deer with elephantine snouts, spread honking along well-trodden trails. A lone beast like a rhinoceros, but with twin club-shaped horns on its snout, looked up, then stamped its feet, before lowering its head and charging away. Then, slowly becoming visible through the haze, appeared a sight that did not belong in this distant age at all.