Granger’s former sergeant and partner looked up, then stood up and stared out through the glass.
Garstone indicated Creedy’s tank. ‘That one still retains his senses,’ he said. ‘He’s only been submerged a week or so. I’ll go downstairs and fetch you some chalk and a slate.’
‘Stay where you are,’ Granger said. He walked over to Maske-lyne’s desk, snatched up some papers, then reached for the pen. But he stopped. Something was bothering him. He glanced back at Creedy’s tank and noticed three identical pens lying on the floor in there. Granger stepped back and studied the floor in front of the desk, where a slender gap betrayed the presence of a trapdoor. He grunted, then stepped to one side of the trapdoor before removing the pen. The trapdoor fell away, slamming against the inside of a shaft. From the darkness below came the smell of brine.
Granger started to write his message on a sheet of paper.
‘Please,’ Garstone said. ‘Those are my master’s private papers, his work, his experiments. He’ll kill me if they are spoiled.’ He came over to the desk, opened one of the drawers and took out a slate, which he handed to Granger.
Granger threw the slate aside and continued to scribble over Maskelyne’s documents. Then he strolled over to the Mare Lux tank and held up his message to Creedy.
WHERE IS THE GIRL?
The brown seawater made Creedy seem huge and distorted. His eye lens dilated. He picked up a stub of chalk and a slate from the floor of the tank and wrote his reply.
FUCK YOU.
Granger scrawled another message on the back of the paper.
TELL ME, OR YOU DIE.
Creedy gave him an ugly grin. He wiped his slate clear and wrote:
COME GET ME.
Granger returned to the desk, where he gathered up all of Maskelyne’s documents. He scrunched them up and piled them around the base of the tank, as Creedy looked on from his watery prison. Granger walked back to the desk and flipped it over. Maskelyne’s glass device fell to the floor and shattered. A wire extending from the underside of the desk disappeared into a hole in the floor.
‘What are you doing?’ Garstone protested.
Granger ignored him. He hunted around the workbenches, searching through the tools, until he found a flat-headed screwdriver. He used this to disassemble the writing desk. In a short while he had a decent-sized pile of wood, which he piled around the documents at the base of Creedy’s tank. Then he took out his knife and flint, and lit the paper. Flames blossomed.
Creedy thumped his fist against the inside of the glass. Garstone yelled at Granger to stop.
Granger held up his message again.
WHERE IS THE GIRL?
Creedy erased his slate and frantically scribbled a new message.
PUT OUT FIRE.
The flames had begun to take hold of the wood now, and were licking the walls of the tank, staining the glass black. Smoke began to fill the laboratory.
Creedy banged his slate against the tank.
PUT OUT FIRE.
Granger held his own sign higher.
WHERE IS THE GIRL?
Creedy scrubbed his slate clear again and wrote:
LOOKING FOR TROVE. WHISPRING VAL. M. REGIS.
The fabled treasure-hunting site. Dredgers had been scouring the Whispering Valley since its rediscovery three years ago. The valley held the ruins of an Unmer castle, destroyed and abandoned long before the rising seas had claimed it. The sheer number of weapons salvaged from the surrounding area led many captains to believe a great battle had taken place there.
Granger wrote another message.
HOW LONG?
But Garstone interjected. ‘Ten days,’ the servant said. ‘He won’t be back for months.’
Granger turned around and walked away from the tank. He left the fire burning.
‘I won’t let you do this,’ Lucille said.
Maskelyne didn’t look up from his work. He had snuffed the lights and opened the windows in order to examine the Pole Star through an unusually heavy refraction telescope. The device had been fitted with a lead plate over its larger lens, and yet, oddly, this did not obstruct his view. The Unmer archivist spectacles lay to one side. He had been too afraid to put them on again. ‘Do what?’ he muttered.
Her voice was low and cold in the darkness. ‘You know exactly what I mean.’
Maskelyne peered through the telescope. Removing the lead plate caused the stars to blink out of existence. Only by replacing the plate could he observe the heavens. He assumed there must be some disguised hole or slit in the metal. Or the lead itself must somehow be acting as an optical element, which meant that it could not be lead. ‘I had always intended for her conceive a child,’ he said. ‘Her talents ought to be passed on.’
‘But not like this,’ Lucille said.
‘This ship has unmanned the crew—’ he began.
‘What does that have to do with anything?’
‘The men are terrified,’ Maskelyne said. ‘Terrified of ghosts. Terrified of the dark. Terrified of their own shadows. Ianthe’s punishment is necessary to strengthen the command hierarchy aboard this vessel. I’ll go further, if I have to. If we are going to make it back home, I require my men to be more afraid of me than they are of the dead.’
‘Half of them will refuse to do what you ask.’
Maskelyne set down the telescope and turned to face her. He could hardly make her out in the gloom. ‘You’ve spoken to them?’ he asked. ‘Or was your conversation just with Mellor?’
She was silent for a long moment. ‘You never used to be so cruel, Ethan. What happened to you?’
He turned back to his experiments. ‘Any man who refuses to carry out my orders will be thrown overboard.’
After a moment he heard the door shut softly behind him.
Maskelyne found himself gazing down at the Unmer spectacles, the other experiments abandoned. He had put this off too long. He picked up the lenses and examined them carefully, trying to see how the whisper-thin optical elements interacted, but he might as well have been staring into an insolvable labyrinth. He wrote in his journal:
The spectacles show an interpretation of the past. Does the device simply record perceptions, or did the Unmer discover a way to make a link between minds located elsewhere in Space/Time? The Haurstaf command this talent, at least spatially. Is it possible that these spectacles are able to achieve the same feat, both spatially and temporally? Can I explain this in spatial and temporal terms?
He thought for a moment, then added:
What if space was simply a measure of variance, where variance is the product of both the distance and the difference between any two things?
If the distance between two particles is zero, the space between them must also be zero. Without space, attraction and repulsion forces cease to be.
If the difference between two particles is zero, they are fundamentally identical. In such a case, the space between them must also be zero, regardless of the distance that separates them. Effecting a change in one particle would therefore affect its twin, even if that twin was a thousand miles distant.
It might explain how certain Unmer artefacts worked across vast distances. The jealous knife, the seeing knife and even the trio of small pyramids Maskelyne had dredged up at the start of this voyage. He put pen to paper again.
Time = A measure of the difference between one thing and itself.
For Time to exist in Space, there must be some sort of change – some movement, spin, or oscillation. But if Space is simply an ever-shifting sea of variance, then Time must be relative. The Unmer’s ability to manipulate Space might conceivably be the very thing that allows them to manipulate Time.
This made sense in te
rms of Brutalist magic, since various Unmer devices appeared to quicken or slow the speed of time. Food decayed rapidly in the presence of amplifiers. The Unmer themselves lived for hundreds of years. But even if their sorcerous devices could alter the flow of Time, or observe the past, they could not change the past. However, if – as he began to suspect – the spectacles actually exchanged the wearer’s perceptions with those of a long-dead sorcerer, then that sorcerer would be able to peer out of the present owner’s eyes, which implied that the past could be changed. And that was a paradox.
Maskelyne paced the cabin. He raised the spectacles to his face but then lowered them again. He stopped and sat down on the bed and gazed at the lenses for a long time, cursing his own fear. Then he took a deep breath and put them on again.
Dragonfires raged across the icebreaker’s deck. Bodies lay everywhere. The Unmer Brutalist knelt among the flames, his flesh now scorched and blistered. He raised his fists as four great armoured serpents swept down from the skies. Conquillas rode the largest beast, his void bow now gripped in his gauntleted hands. He pulled back the bowstring and let an arrow fly.
Maskelyne turned the little wheel on the side of the frame, and the scene flickered backwards in time.
He was standing on the deck of the same ship. The electrical receiving tower loomed over him, its great torus shining in the midday sun. The black paint covering the iron deck and wheel-house was old, revealing rust in places, but the vessel itself had not yet been damaged. There were as yet no energy weapons situated behind the bulwarks.
They were coming into a harbour full of Unmer warships. Maskelyne could hear the droning of the ironclad’s engines, the rush of the sea against the hull and the pounding of metalworkers’ hammers from the shore. The orange flames of welders’ torches flickered on a score of docked vessels, while other – more sorcerous – lights danced here and there on ship and shore. They were refitting the fleet. After a moment, he recognized the city behind the water’s edge. It was Losoto, but not as it existed now. The sea was blue, as yet untainted, and perhaps thirty yards lower than current levels. Tiers of fine white buildings covered a steep hill above the harbour, the streets curling around the rocky headland where Hu’s City Palace now stood. The great winged shapes of dragons looped through the skies above, held in thrall by their Unmer masters.
The Unmer were preparing to meet the Haurstaf fleet at Awl, which meant Argusto Conquillas had already betrayed his kin. His lover, Queen Aria, would now break the Haurstaf’s pledge of neutrality and bring her Guild to war against those who had enslaved the East. And yet Maskelyne suspected Conquillas hadn’t given a damn about mankind. The legendary hunter loved nothing but himself and his precious dragons.
Maskelyne turned the wheel again, moving further back in time. The spectacles crackled as days and nights fluttered across his vision.
He found himself walking through an oak forest, most likely the Great Anean Forest to the north of Losoto. Emperor Hu had built his Summer Palace on a lake among these hills. The trail meandered down a slope towards a wooden shack with a stone chimney stack, from which Maskelyne could see smoke rising.
When he reached the porch, the door opened, and an old Unmer woman came out. She was wearing simple peasant clothes. She looked up at him and smiled. And then she hugged him fiercely.
‘It’s so good to see you,’ she said in Unmer. ‘Your father is down by the river, fishing, always fishing. Don’t you dare go and join him until you’ve eaten something.’
She ushered him inside. The interior was simple, but tidy: a few stools around a table, a bed with a colourful woollen blanket, a kettle sitting on a iron wood stove. A collection of small glazed animals stood on a shelf under the window. The old woman opened a cupboard over the sink and took out two cups.
Maskelyne turned the wheel again, forwards this time. The image of the shack blurred into pulsing shadows and lights. He heard a sound like gunfire, followed by a gravelly roar. He turned the wheel all the way forwards, to the present.
Blinding white light assailed his eyes. The noise rose to an intolerable screech. Maskelyne cried out and tore the lenses from his face again.
Gods in Hell.
It was as if some universal force or barrier prevented the dead sorcerer from viewing the present through Maskelyne’s eyes. Maskelyne could look back, but the sorcerer could not look forward beyond his own time. The cosmos would not allow a paradox. The spectacles were of little use to anyone but a historian.
Evidently Ianthe had never turned the wheel all the way forwards. Maskelyne thought about giving them back to her. She’d soon learn not to tamper with Unmer artefacts.
Later, perhaps later. He looked down at his notes, and added:
If Space is the distance and the difference between two objects, what happens in places when Space is zero?
Maskelyne rummaged through the box on the workbench until he found a matched pair of magnets. He pulled them apart, then pushed the north poles towards each other, until he felt them repelling each other. Then he turned one magnet around and noted the attraction between unlike poles. It seemed to him that the material in one pole was identical to the other. He picked up his pen again.
Can Space be stretched and compressed? Are the forces of attraction and repulsion witnessed between poles merely the tendency for such stressed spaces to reach an equilibrium determined by the mean variance of the surrounding universe? As the variance between two points is reduced, the energy required to further compress Space increases exponentially, until that space is compressed to zero. The energy contained in such minutiae must be considerable indeed. Is there a horizon where forces of attraction and repulsion no longer apply?
Could our universe have once been a single invariant point, perhaps one of many such points, containing vast amounts of Space in ultra-compressed form? What if the expansion and contraction of Space continues? Do tiny knots of super-compressed Space still remain in the heart of everything? Such knots must contain identical particles, trapped together and yet unable to repel each other until variance is introduced. Opposing particles would gather at the horizon (or horizons – if space is truly waveform), and yet be unable to come any closer. Furthermore, if compressed Space has no physical quantity, then each of these knots would act like a vacuum pump, drawing a constant flow of uncompressed Space (created by variant particles) into itself. What if we called this force gravity?
Maskelyne set down his pen again and gazed out of the window. The old ship creaked and groaned around him, rocked by the sea. He thought of the ocean currents, and it seemed to him that Space might flow in a similar fashion. It was all degrees of variance. He lifted one of the magnets and let it drop. It hit the workbench with a thud.
One wonders if it is possible for enough knots of super-compressed Space to gather together and thus provide an overwhelmingly powerful force of attraction? Such an object would become progressively larger as it sucked more and more of the cosmos into itself – stabilizing only when it reached a point of true invariance.
Is it possible to release the energy within these knots – within the heart of matter itself? The sudden expansion of Space must surely be absorbed by the particles around it, radiating outwards over time until equilibrium is achieved once more. If this assumption is correct, then these radiation waves created by the birth of the universe itself must still be detectable. Indeed, the universe must continue to expand wherever knots of super-compressed Space are split apart. To an observer at any point of expansion, it would seem that that point was itself the heart of the cosmos. Ultimately, variance might only exist between a few massive knots of ultra-compressed Space. Space will thin as the universe dies. But as long as a trace of variance remains between the last dark leviathans, then a breath of Space remains. Like massive ships sailing a vaporous and ever-diminishing sea, it is not inconceivable to imagine a collision bet
ween them. Were such a collision to occur, these ships might break apart, spilling their holds and thus creating a new sea through which the remaining vessels might continue to sail.
Maskelyne set down his pen and rubbed his temples. He was making too many assumptions, sailing down too many channels without stopping to look around him. How did any of this account for the electrical fluids used by the Unmer? Were they merely the propagation of variance? And what about the expansion of heated gas? Did adding energy to a system expand Space only when there was Space to expand? He lacked any mechanism aboard this vessel with which to test his theories. Such sorcery belonged only to the Unmer.
He gazed out of the window at the setting sun, marvelling at the ferocity of its fires, which now turned the sky and sea to blood. It was just one of countless stars in a cosmos he could not understand. The universe was so vast and unknowable, so far beyond imagination. Had the Unmer even fully understood what they were doing?
Lucille didn’t come to bed that night. Maskelyne lay in his bed and could not sleep. Whenever he closed his eyes he saw Unmer warships in a harbour that no longer existed. The old wooden ship pitched and growled, as gales whipped rags of spume from the Mare Lux and flung them against the cabin windows. It was growing cold.
At some point he must have slept, because he woke in the dark before dawn, gasping and terrified, certain that someone had placed the Unmer spectacles over his eyes. He could not shake the feeling that someone had been watching him.
Had he been dreaming?
He recalled something . . .
Adrift in the vacuum, spheres of starlight expanding into dead vacuum. He had dreamed of an explosion in the darkness, a great fuming bubble of energy, its edges uncertain. It grew larger than imagination. He realized that the particles of light were separating as they flew apart, leaving waves of energy in their wake, leaving variance. There could be no space between them because it had not yet been created. Space and Time existed only in the great froth of energy they left behind. The shortest distance between different particles was a wave. Space itself was merely the potential between any two points. He saw the universe as ripples of energy expanding across a pond and bouncing back, but the pond did not really exist, only the ripples.