Celi stood in the doorway of the home he had built with Qaia. He looked round at the walls of mud and plaster, the furniture they had made and bought, the carving with their names over the door. For him, all of it was a lifetime old, yet as fresh as a morning. And there was no place for him, he knew.
He felt an odd stab of nostalgia for his mountaintop refuge, the hut he had built, the cages for the mice. But even if he could climb back up there it would already all be gone, weathered away by accelerated time. The core of his life had been hollowed out; he felt as if he had been away only a moment, that he had been aged in a heartbeat.
Qaia walked into the room, humming, a towel around her hair. For a moment she did not see him, and he watched her, his breath catching in his throat. It hurt him to see what the Blight had done to her: the crimson stain had spread up from her neck across her once-pretty face. Yet he was relieved that he had, after all, returned in time to save her.
Then she saw him. She recognised him immediately, and her blue eyes widened. It was unbearable to have her look at what he had become, with his white hair, his stooped back.
He longed to hold her, but time stood between them like stone. Only a year had passed for her, while more than forty had worn away for him.
‘You said you would be gone a few days,’ she said. ‘Some “few days”.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Qaia, the baby—’
‘You have a son, Celi. A son. Four months old.’
He tried to take that in. His leathery old heart beat faster. He held up his precious vial. ‘Take this. It is—’
‘I know what it is. Your mother guessed what you must be doing. So did Dela. Oh, you fool! What use is saving me if I had to lose you in the process?’
He pressed the vial into her hand. ‘Take it to Dela,’ he whispered. ‘She will know what to do. Hurry now. It’s what all this has been about, after all.’
She bit her lip, and ran out of the door.
And HuroEldon walked in, his robe sweeping. ‘Well, well. Somebody told me they saw you come staggering back down out of the blue.’
Celi straightened. ‘Philosopher.’
Huro leaned closer. ‘You smell like a spindling’s breath. And what is this you’re wearing, mouse fur? I take it you found your cure. I knew you would do it,’ Huro said grudgingly. ‘But I never thought you would reduce yourself to this in the process. And you ran out on your patients, despite the vows you doctors take.’
‘I came back—’
‘But what use are you now, like this?’ He inspected Celi, as if he were a curious specimen. ‘Your wife can’t love you again, you know. We humans don’t seem to have evolved to handle such differential shifts in time. That’s another point that convinces me this is a made world, by the way, that we are designed for a different environment . . .’ He idly picked up Celi’s notebook, and paused at the very first observational note Celi had made so long ago, about the effects of differential weathering rates at altitude. ‘An acute bit of geology. I told you, you would have made a good Philosopher. But you’ve thrown your life away.’
Celi had no reply. Huro was articulating doubts that had plagued him during his vigil on the mountain – in all those years alone, how could he not have had doubts? As he had worked through his monumental combinatorial challenge with his vials of infected blood and trial remedies, slaughtering generation after generation of white mice, his intellectual curiosity, even his basic impulse to save his wife, had worn away, leaving nothing but a grim determination to keep on to the end. He had even stopped counting the years as they had piled up. Of course he had been lonely, up there on his plateau, looking out over uncounted layers of time! But what choice had there been?
Well, he had succeeded, and he must not let Huro stir ancient doubts in his soul. ‘You Philosophers exploit the time strata selfishly—’
‘While you have burned up your own life to save others. Yes, yes. You aren’t the first, you know; your heroism isn’t even original.’ Huro peered into Celi’s eyes, his mouth. ‘You might have found your Blight treatment up there, Celi, but you sacrificed your own health in the process. I’d give you a year. Two at the most.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘No, I don’t suppose it does to you, does it?’ Huro’s expression softened, just a little. ‘My offer still stands.’
‘What offer?’
‘To come with me, down below. You may only have a year, but spin it out! Some of us are planning to go on, you know.’
‘Go where?’
‘Down into the red. Nobody knows how deep we can go, how much we can stretch time before it snaps like an overextended sinew. Some of us dream of pushing on into the future, all the way to the next Formidable Caress. And if we can do that, who knows what’s possible? Come with me, Celi. You’ve given up almost all of your life. Surely you owe yourself that much.’
But Celi heard a sound from a neighbouring room. It was a soft gurgle, the cry of a waking baby. ‘I have all I need here,’ he said.
HuroEldon snorted. ‘Well, we won’t meet again. The time streams will see to that.’ The Philosopher walked out of the house.
And Celi, broken and old, went to comfort his infant son.
The Time Pit
AD c.4.5 BILLION YEARS
The Mechanist balloons, fast and grey, drifted over the ruins of Old Foro. Belo couldn’t even see the crude bombs they dropped until they came streaking down out of the blueshifted air to splash fire. But the Mechanists’ advance was driving Belo and the last of his troopers towards the Shelf’s edge, where the river Foo, running with blood, plunged into the abyss.
And all across the battlefield, Creationist soldiers were dying. Belo could see their Effigies rising up like smoke, spectral distortions of the human form that twisted and spun away.
All this for the sake of an idea, Belo thought. No, not an idea – the truth. He must cling to that, even as the blueshifted fire from the sky blossomed around him.
‘Captain?’
Tira, his most trusted lieutenant, was shaking his shoulder. In his exhaustion he had drifted into abstraction, as he so often did. He was after all trained as a Natural Philosopher, and his senior officers had never let him forget that intellectuals, with their long perspective, didn’t necessarily make for good soldiers. But if not for intellectuals like him, there would have been no war anyhow.
‘I’m sorry, Tira. It’s just that you have to admire them.’
‘Sir?’ Her small face, smeared with blood and dirt, was creased with concern.
‘The Mechs. We think of them as stupid, you know, backward. After all, the reason we fight is because they cling to their absurd, primitive idea that the world is a product of natural forces, acting blindly, in the absence of mind. But now they have come up with this.’
For a soldier of Old Earth, gaining the high ground was everything. If you were higher than your enemy you had the benefit of accelerated time; you could think faster, prepare your strategy and aim your weapons, while your opponents tumbled, slow-moving, trapped in glutinous, red-shifted slow time.
So, in this campaign, the Creationists of Puul had taken the Attic, the long-abandoned community on the cliff face above the town of Foro itself, where once rich Forons had kept time-accelerated slaves. The campaign had gone well, and Belo had started to believe that the Forons and their hated Mechanist notions might soon be purged from the world.
But then the Forons had produced their hot-air balloons, which wafted even higher than the Attic, and the Creationists’ advantage was lost.