Chapter 9 Hazel #3
The church wanted to be old, but the pointing between the bricks was too fresh and ruined the illusion, a real North London suburbia job.
There was a table in a corner, fresh tapers on one side and burning stubs on the other.
She put fifty pence in the box and took two candles, one for each of her dead parents.
No, she didn’t want to think like that: one for Mum, one for Dad.
She wondered if she believed in God—right there, in his house—but she prayed anyway.
Limited range of movement but it depends how hard you work; weakened motion of the vocal cords, weakened weak—
There’s a rustle, as if all the world’s paperwork is shuffling, and a chronological tide pulls her, scruff-first, threatening to drag her away.
The dreamscape’s womblike light floods her eyes, but she can’t let the current take her.
She has to mend Tree, fix Robin’s hand, give the Tinys enough longevity to keep Station C going.
This cannot be the last expedition. But the riptide is strong, and she’s paralysed in its flow, unable to escape—
A hand touches her shoulder, and she looks into Robin’s lenses. She’s fallen to her knees and her throat hurts. Has she been shouting?
The altar-lamps flutter. Unsteadily, she gets to her feet, wishing she too could pray and access that religious comfort blanket which banishes loneliness, promises salvation, speaks for the conscience, and quells the panic that comes from staring down the barrel of impermanence.
Robin touches her thigh, lens wipers tented upwards with worry, as the inundation of memory seeps away, to return another tide.
‘It’s OK, I’m OK,’ she lies, patting its hand.
It’s the closest the Tiny has got to her since she hurt it.
Dozens of other Tinys watch her from their cells and the altar, and Robin squeezes her hand.
‘Really, I’m fine. It’s just time to get back to work, that’s all.
’ As she walks to the elevator, the Tinys’ tails twitch, out of sync, like each one is trying to shout its own idea loudest in the hive mind.
She needs a private moment to check the Eikos Muthos and figure out what fresh weirdness is happening.
She’s only read half the story of time travel and whatever this is, it’s part of the other half.
And so the ocean shall rise and cover the blanched land, and Station C will become an island in the smog-brown waters.
On a planet thus unstable and devoid of redemption, the Wrinkle-Fingered Generations will be born, infected with anxiety and the lunacy of isolation, and shall become unafraid of breaking the world further.
In this dark crucible, their ideas shall manifest all the lost wilderness, and they will come to believe that only by traversing the fourth dimension shall these earthly woes be undone.
They shall create the Arch, though they will know not what it is until, by bootstrap chance, the first Backward Traveller shall emerge from the mirror door, eyes wide and limbs akimbo, naked as the day they will have been born.
Hazel keeps her head down as the elevator ascends.
Breathe in to four. I’m still here. Hold for two.
So am I. Out for— The voices in her head entwine and she realises where she’s heard Echo before.
It’s her voice talking Hazel through the calming breathing patterns.
The back of her neck squeezes and she shakes her head vehemently. Don’t open that box.
When she reaches the Treehouse, Hazel pulls out the Eikos Muthos and flicks through it, leaning into the hammock to hide her activities from any watching Tinys.
And the broad-minded scientists shall become the Traveller’s Keepers and wrap their nudity in a blanket and ask them, ‘Traveller, who are you? Where are you from? Why are you here?’ And to each the Traveller shall answer, ‘I know not.’ Until, by coincidence, one of the Keepers will explain the use of mirrors and the Traveller’s words shall fail them and their eyes will glaze with visions of another time.
Upon which, the Traveller shall say, ‘Are we not drawn onward ere divided?’ And the Keeper’s mouth will fill with a thing she has been told before by a time that comes after, and reply, ‘We few live on mirror rims.’ So together, Keeper and Traveller shall undertake the first recitation of the Traveller’s Cipher.
Then the past will come for the Traveller, and time will catch them, and they shall be blown away.
For many moons no other Traveller shall arrive.
When he does, his mind shall be likewise washed clean of memories, until a spark shall ignite them and he shall say: ‘It is later than we think, and the hour’s growing thin.
Yet there is still width enough to traverse between the minute hand and midnight, for I have been sent with a Deed. ’
Is that what the tug on the back of Hazel’s neck is?
Like a stray kitten being caught by its mother, is time somehow catching up with her?
And what does it mean to be ‘blown away’—to be transported elsewhere or be snuffed out?
Either way, time mustn’t catch her yet, she has too much left to do.
But she can’t stop the past from coming for her.
All she can do is work as fast as possible.
She slams the book shut, stuffing it back in her pocket.
Fuelled by adrenaline, she returns to the broken circuit, feverishly rewiring, soldering, stripping, rebuilding, while her memories threaten to break.
Grief suits you; breathe in; weak weakened weak— Whether or not he has anything to do with that mysterious corpse in the third dome, CHARL1E will know what’s happening, but she doesn’t have the oxygen to return to the Hab Dome, the biosuit’s comm is blocked inside Tree, and there’s no way the Tinys would act as messengers.
She’s tried getting Shiny and Teaspoon to bring her the Lucid Dreaming book, but they just shake their lenses and point at the broken circuit she’s fixing.
She doesn’t get any favours from them until her work’s done.
Then again, maybe the circuit itself will let her get a message out to CHARL1E—it is designed to receive and transmit radio messages.
Yet the Keepers will not be able track their actions and shall stumble lost through the past and future.
For thirteen years, their harvests will fail, and under starvation they shall dwindle yet again, becoming slender-wristed and gaunt-cheeked.
During this time, they shall work night and day, until they unlock the post-quantum realms of computing.
In that half-real place they shall construct a machine named CHARL1E.
And he shall be an ungainly thing, whose nodes shall weave around the timeline; observing, measuring, and calculating.
But the broad-minded scientists shall be afeared of their new creation, who shall be so little known and so all-knowing.
Thus, they will curtail CHARL1E’s powers, so that while he can see and speak of the timeline, he shall not be allowed to access the Arch or tinker with its workings.
This job the Keepers alone shall fulfil, guarding their knowledge from hands that might otherwise do it wrong.
In such ways shall the Keepers preserve the Travellers’ safety, while they are delivered time and again into the waiting hands of their Caretakers.
Without Keepers or Caretaker, Hazel is lost. She distracts herself with memorised fragments of the Eikos Muthos, working until her eyes scratch. She’s so nearly there. But she gives herself a soldering burn through inattention and at her cry Robin emerges from a nearby cell to dress the wound.
‘Does this mean you’ve forgiven me?’ Hazel asks.
Robin shakes its head persistently, but drags her to the hammock and tucks her in.
It’s not until its wheel-squeaks have faded that she realises even though the Tiny hasn’t forgiven her, it might still care about her.
The phantom colours of darkness press on her eyes, becoming a doctor’s coffee cup, the morgue assistant’s clipboard, two candles burning for twenty-five pence each. Weak weak—
She snaps on the light and opens the Eikos Muthos.
If she falls asleep, she might get caught by time, and wake up elsewhere or maybe not at all.
She flips through the book’s missing sections, stroking a finger down each rag-end indicating torn out pages.
One here, one there, what looks like about twenty pages in the third section, and a handful right at the end.
That’s how she finds that someone has turned the endpaper into a pocket, and Hazel is revisited by a meddling-in-the-medicine-cabinet frisson as she pulls out, not the missing sections, but about ten pages written in Lilith’s hand.
Someone’s spilt amber liquid over them, and the words have blurred together, so she can only make out the title and a few snippets:
THE LAST ACTS OF THE KEEPERS brOAD-MINDED SCIENTISTS …
Huxley doesn’t know I’m writing this … of course I love my brother, but it’s hard to like him when he takes his experiments so far …
when we die, someone must take over who can remain here indefinitely and operate the Arch …
Huxley’s denial … in secret, CHARL1E and I …