The Abyss Beyond Dreams

  ‘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 throu
gh 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.

  She lay down on top of the mattress and withdrew her ex-sight. It wasn’t that she couldn’t help at a practical level; there were a dozen housekeeping jobs that needed doing every day while they were camped. In truth, she simply didn’t want to spend any time outside where she couldn’t ignore the mound of corpses. In here, confined by the bright walls of the tent fabric, she could shut out the horror. Pretend her little bubble of existence was somewhere else entirely.

  ‘You were right,’ her whisper told the memory of Jymoar. ‘This desert can drive you mad.’

  Her u-shadow produced a list of books she’d loaded in her storage lacunas from Skylady’s memory. She picked one called The Hobbit, and started reading.

  *

  It was past midnight when the noise woke Kysandra. The same as the previous evening – a pronounced clang, metal scraping raw against metal. Then silence.

  She was sitting upright, heart pounding, sending out her ex-sight to probe the night beyond the tent.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Fergus said. He was sitting close to the tent, rifle cradled across his lap. ‘Nothing here.’

  ‘Humm,’ Nigel said. He was lying on his mattress next to her. A module close by had a purple light winking steadily. It was sending out a stream of raw data.

  Just like last night.

  ‘Was that another quantum event?’ she asked as the nonsense tables slipped across her exovision.

  ‘Yes. The same as yesterday. Except it’s not precisely a daily event. The last one was twenty-seven hours and twenty-nine minutes ago.’

  ‘Is there something inside the exopod pile, some piece of machinery that’s still working?’

  ‘I’m not ruling anything out, but if it’s there, it was amazingly inert during the day for us not to detect anything at all.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Hey, it’s okay. This place freaks me out, too.’

  ‘When are we leaving?’

  ‘Tomorrow. Promise, okay? Fergus and I will finish off during the day, then we’ll pack up and start the trek back. We’ll be back at Blair Farm in three or four weeks.’

  Kysandra exhaled loudly. ‘Thank you.’

  *

  Most of Croixtown turned out to greet them as they rode back into the village. Sitting up in her saddle, her clothes filthy, sand itching everywhere, a sunhat flopping down over her eyes, Kysandra couldn’t help but grin at the sight of them. Men, women and children gathering around, gazing up, half in awe, half in fear.

  The mayor stood in front of them, flanked by several tough-looking men. She saw Jymoar hurrying through the crowd behind him, smiling in relief and delight. She grinned at him, gave a small wave.

  ‘We are happy to see you again, señor,’ the mayor said to Nigel. He looked awkward. Apprehension was leaking through his shell. ‘Nobody has ventured into the Desert of Bone in living memory.’

  ‘It is not a place you want to go,’ Nigel replied solemnly. ‘I will never return there.’

  ‘Is it true? Are there mountains of bones at the centre?’

  ‘There are bodies there,’ Nigel said loudly. The villagers let out a collective gasp. ‘A great many bodies. Thousands, probably.’ He gifted them the image of the mummified face, forever arrested with its mouth open, teeth amalgamated with the lips. ‘They are incredibly old, killed thousands of years ago. We don’t know by what.’

  ‘Were they eaten?’

  ‘No. The bodies were all intact. There are no Fallers in the Desert of Bone, no nests.’

  A few people applauded. Everyone was smiling openly now, and began to press forward, eager for details – mainly about the monster. ‘We did hear strange sounds at night,’ Nigel said gravely, ‘but we never saw anything.’

  Kysandra shook her head at his consummate showmanship. He would say nothing that was an outright lie, yet by the time he was finished, no one from Croixtown would ever travel into the desert, and the word would spread among the other ranchero villages skirting the savannah, reinforcing the legend. The exopods would remain inviolate for another century. Or, ‘Long enough for me to sort this mess out,’ as Nigel said on the trek back. She thought that pure bravado. But . . .

  She climbed down from her horse wearily and handed the reins to Russell before slipping though the crowd. Jymoar was standing in the same place as she’d seen him, his face anxious, yet optimism burnt hot behind his shell.

  ‘Told you I’d make it back,’ she said with a taunting grin.

  He took an uncertain step forward. ‘You did. I never doubted you, señorita. Not you.’

  She leaned forward quickly and gave him a small kiss. And he was the one who blushed. ‘I’m a mess,’ she said ruefully.

  ‘Never!’

  Kysandra laughed, and gestured down at herself. The brown suede riding skirt was creased with mud and water stains. Her long boots were coated in sand, inside and out. White blouse had turned grey, made worse by the unpleasant sweat stains. ‘Stop being gallant. I haven’t washed since we left, and that was weeks ago.’

  ‘You’ve been through a desert,’ he said. ‘And you still look amazing.’

  ‘Come on.’ She started walking towards the Gothora. When she took her floppy hat off, her hair barely moved, it had so much dirt caked in.

  Arriving at the gangplank, she was inexplicably glad to see the old steamship. It resembled a stability she hadn’t known she missed, a stolid representative of her world and the way she had lived before Nigel.

  ‘So what was it like?’ Jymoar asked.

  ‘Bad. Remind me to believe you next time.’

  ‘Next—’ He gave her an appalled look, which made her smirk. For all he’d travelled a lot more than her on boats up and down the Mozal, he was the naive one.

  Kysandra walked round the wheelhouse where she was hidden from the shore and the rapt crowd gathered around Nigel – who was still playing them. She cast a mild fuzz and started to undo the buttons on her blouse.

  ‘Uh!’ Jymoar grunted. He gave an anxious look round, but he was the only one who could see her.

  She kicked the boots off and slipped her skir
t down. ‘I need this very badly.’ She plonked her hat down on his head in a quick playful motion. ‘You going to join me?’ she asked as she slithered quickly out of her grimy underwear, then jumped straight into the river.

  The water was cold and delicious. There had been times, back in the desert, when she’d doubted it ever existed, that water was just some figment of her sun-punished brain. She stayed under for a long moment, feeling the dirt start to flake off. Her hair began to move again, long strands sloughing about languidly in the current. She kicked hard and broke surface. Just in time to see a naked Jymoar leaping off the gunnel.

  He swam over to her as she luxuriated in the clean flow of water. ‘What did you find out there?’ he asked timidly.

  ‘Death. Death and suffering on a scale that really could drive you mad. But, strangely, in the end, it helped me.’

  His open features produced a sorrowful frown. ‘How?’

  ‘I grew up a bit out there. I think. I know now that I’m not going to live a normal life, Jymoar. And I think what I saw, what I discovered about this world, made me come to terms with that. I know not to waste this life I have. I know so many things are petty and stupid, and that you should grab happiness when you can, for you never know what this universe is going to throw at you. I want to celebrate those moments of happiness. I need to be happy after the desert.’ She put her arms on top of his shoulders and twined her fingers through the thick dark hair at the back of his head. Looking unflinchingly into his eyes as she let a lot of her shell drop. Waiting . . .

  Jymoar pulled her to him and kissed her. They sank below the surface, then bobbed up together, spluttering and laughing in delight.

  *

  From Croixtown, it took them just two and a half weeks to reach Blair Farm. Kysandra was disappointed at how fast the Gothora made the trip back to Portlynn, but with the relentless current pushing them along as well as the ship’s steam engine labouring away, they made it downstream in five days. Nigel had sold their animals to one of the rancheros in Croixtown (at a loss), which left the forward cargo hold empty. They altered its bamboo frame and canvas so it was more like a tent, where she and Jymoar spent most of the trip locked together in sweaty carnal bliss.