Where Time Winds Blow, page 1
WHERE TIME WINDS BLOW
Robert Holdstock
www.sfgateway.com
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Contents
Title Page
Gateway Introduction
Contents
Part One: Where the Time Winds Blow
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Part Two: The Phantom of the Valley
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Part Three: Manchanged
Chapter Fourteen
Part Four: Walking on the Shores of Time
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Finding
Website
Also by Robert Holdstock
Dedication
Author Bio
Copyright
PART ONE
Where the Time Winds Blow
CHAPTER ONE
Towards dusk, five days after they had left the city, Lena Tanoway led her small team through the rugged foothills of the Ilmoroq mountains, and out onto the narrow coastal plain that bordered the Paluberion Sea.
It had been an exhausting mission, and Leo Faulcon, the team’s middle-runner, was tired, uncomfortable and very ready indeed to return to base. He could not comprehend the reluctance of the leader to turn for home; her seemingly endless enthusiasm for continuing the exploration was uncharacteristic, and bothered Faulcon, and he could assign blame to no other than the third member of the party, Kris Dojaan.
Kris was young, and had only recently joined the team. He lay back in the deep seat of his touring byke and whistled through his mask; he was saddle-blistered and sore, but the newness and excitement of this routine expedition had been serving as a balm for his various wounds for all of five days. Whilst this unconcerned attitude to physical discomfort disturbed Faulcon he could have coped with Kris Dojaan’s immunity to pain if the youth would not keep making suggestions: why don’t we try this, why not explore there? And Lena, with a finely misplaced, and long overdue, sense of responsibility was quite evidently determined to conduct this mission in a proper way, and for a proper length of time, something that ought to have been unthinkable.
Thus, after more than two days exploring the high hills and lower slopes of the Ilmoroqs, where the terrain was rough and abundant in dangerous life-forms, Leo Faulcon found himself sullenly agreeing to a tour of the ocean’s shore, a last ride before the long journey home.
The coastal plain was a land dominated by giant blackweed, forests of tall, branchless trees that crowded so high towards the deepening red of the sky that their tiny, flowering tops could not be seen. But it was not the plant life that fascinated the travellers so much as the crumbling, calcite towers and arches of the land-corals that huddled between the trunks of this silent forest. Built by skarl, a tiny, winged life-form that had adapted well to these dry, pollen-rich lands, some of the castles were half as tall as the blackweed, their arches and passageways wide enough for a shuttle to pass. It was a crowded, shadowed land, and as Faulcon watched so a flock of skarl rose silently above their castle and streamed towards the distant, brilliant red-sheen of the ocean.
Riding her battered rift-byke along the easiest route, Lena Tanoway led her group in the same direction. Soon, the ground beneath them softened and they entered a landscape of dunes and tangled, grey plants. Megalithic fingers of sand-scoured rock rose high above the riders; in their lengthening shadows whole flocks of skarl fluttered in panic as the noisy machines passed by.
They rode across a ridge-back of harder sand and the wind hit them, brisk and cold. From here they peered down a slope, and across a mile of nearly lifeless shore, to the dusk-lit sea and its gently moving waves. An object gleamed there.
At first glance Faulcon thought it was some gigantic sea beast, stranded on the shoreline of this inland ocean; dead now, its corpse half buried in the darkening sands, it seemed to reach a stiffened limb towards him, scaly skin all-shining in the light of Altuxor. It had crawled there, perhaps, from the unfathomable depths of this dark and dying sea, and had expired in the red heat of the planet’s day. And yet this thing, this rounded beast, was no beast at all, but a machine, an artifact of some other age, cast adrift on more than just the shores of a moon-torn ocean.
The team approached cautiously; during the last few days a time wind must have blown across the sea, and there was always the possibility that the beach would be swept by a breeze, scurrying across the sands to reclaim the wreck and the fragile beings who were exploring it.
Faulcon climbed down from his byke a hundred yards or so from the derelict and walked across the dunes, following Lena Tanoway. It galled him a little to notice how strongly she stepped out across the heavy sand, how sure she was in every movement of her wiry body. Faulcon took no comfort from the fact that she had been on VanderZande’s World—he disliked the new name, Kamelios—a good twelve-month longer than he, and was consequently more experienced than he, and far less cautious than she should have been. He found his feet dragging, his body labouring for breath; he was sure that some rudimentary element of survival within him was desperately trying to slow his pace. It was not fear, then, but survival tactics, and he shrugged as he watched Lena’s shadowy figure vanish behind the machine.
Behind Faulcon young Kris Dojaan stumbled and fell face down in the sand. His swearing was muffled as grit clogged his face piece, and Lena chuckled as she realized what had happened. Faulcon watched until Kris was on his feet again, and he smiled at the youngster, though in the fading light the gesture was probably lost.
“How can you trip on sand?” Kris asked, his voice plaintive, hurt. Sand of all things. Faulcon laughed. A rasping sound, like the evacuation of a vacuum closet, accompanied Kris Dojaan’s over-enthusiastic unclogging of the filter he wore. “Wait for me.”
Faulcon held his ground as the new recruit floundered through the sand and clinging scrub to make up distance. He had lagged behind, perhaps dragging his feet as much with fear as with awe as he stared up at the ruined machine. If Kris was scared, Faulcon thought kindly, he could not be faulted for it. This particular discovery was very big business for a young man’s first few days on this particular planet. (He had brought luck to the team, Faulcon realized!) The thought of the time winds both fascinated and terrified, and the balance between those two emotions varied, as if by some precise mathematical equation, with the distance one moved from the bubble-like security of Steel City, the mobile installation where the non-colonists lived on VanderZande’s World.
Kris caught up with his team mate, grumbling about the necessity of leaving the bykes so far away. Faulcon reminded him that the bykes were filming the whole scene, just in case they all got swept up by a wind. Lena was standing in the deep shadow of the machine now, a tiny figure gleaming in stray light from the sun. Kris grimaced behind his mask, looking strangely insectile as he peered through the wide goggles, and continued to blow sand from the proboscis that was his filter and air-booster. They were ants, then, scurrying in their skin-hugging black suits across the dunes, dwarfed by the scarred hulk of the alien wreck.
It was a land machine of sorts, a fact evident from the enormous wheels and tracks. It had been blown out of time and into the ocean, and had crawled across the floor of the sea for weeks, perhaps, before emerging onto the shore and burying itself in the sand. The metal was pitted and scarred by the corrosive salts in the ocean; fragments of weed were still visible. There had been a storm raging about the Ilmoroq foothills just a day before, and the sand had blo wn across the dead machine and hidden it from the prying eyes of the satellites above the atmosphere; a regular prize, then, a prize for the ground team and not for the luxuriating men in the orbiting stations.
“I have a feeling we’ve done well,” said Kris, palpably excited, his thin body shaking more than his voice as he peered upwards.
“We’ve done very well,” said Faulcon. “And we shall live like kings for a seven-day or more.”
“You’ve brought us luck, young Dojaan,” said Lena as she hoisted herself up the ridges and spars of metal to obtain a view in through one of the windows.
“I guess I have at that.”
In the deepening red dusk they stood before the metal creature and contemplated their discovery. Twelve convex windows, bulging outwards like gleaming silver blisters, gave the thing its animal appearance; sensory apparatus, extending forward like a spider’s legs, gave the machine a sense of panic, as if those spindly protrusions had tried to scrabble through the sand to free it from the clinging sediment. The hull was metallic, plate upon plate of heart-shaped armour: like scales, Faulcon thought, like the skin of a reptile. And here and there he could see hatchways, and incomprehensible painted motifs; and pipes and wires, weed-clogged and bent; and the bristling finery of antennae, broken now, and useless. There were scant signs of wind and sand abrasion, which confirmed their feeling that the machine had crawled from the sea only hours before. Glancing up into the sky, where three of the world’s six moons were already high and bright, they searched for the winking orbital lights. There were none, although they could tell, by the haloes around the moons, that the organic zone was deep here, which would make such lights difficult to see. Faulcon, nonetheless, laughed with triumph. “We’ve beaten them!”
“They’re going to be so mad,” said Lena, echoing Faulcon’s delight. “If I could wear you round my neck, Kris, I’d do just that.” She fingered her charm, a jagged shard of green byrilliac taken from the first piece of time-junk she had ever touched. Faulcon involuntarily touched the leathery object that was his own amulet, mummified animal flesh from the corpse of a time-blown creature he had discovered in a cave in Kriakta Valley.
Kris watched the movement of his colleague’s hand, and behind his goggles he seemed wide-eyed. “I don’t have a charm yet.”
“You’re a charm yourself, boy,” said Faulcon.
“But he needs a necklace,” said Lena more seriously. “Everyone on Kamelios carries a bit of flotsam. Luck is finite, and the amulet extends it.” They looked up again, up the wall of the alien. “A shard from this,” she said. “It’s all that will work. Get up there, Kris, and crack yourself a bit of the pre-historic.”
Pale red light gleamed on hundreds of small windows, high on the flanks of the derelict. Kris Dojaan crawled his way across it, hitting here, hitting there, cursing as the metal failed to yield. “Are you sure this is such a good idea?”
Lena used her sand blaster to clear the ruddy grit from about the wide, salt-caked tracks. Faulcon searched for a doorway into the vehicle that would open: pressing, squeezing, coaxing, pressuring, kicking. Nothing moved.
“What can you see?” he called to Kris, and the youngster slipped a bit and polished up a window, no more than a foot across, and peered through. “Black. All black.”
“Try another!” shouted Lena; she was across at the bykes, relaying a routine description of the discovery back to Steel City; they had registered the wreck some minutes before. Kris Dojaan reluctantly changed his position, high on the scaly roof of the machine. “Some sort of control desk. Ridges on the floor, and a face … that’s me. I’m being reflected in something on the opposite wall.”
“The floor,” Lena pointed out as she approached, and Faulcon chuckled for no reason that he could fathom. Kris sat upright on the top of the vehicle and kicked frantically at a jagged piece of the outer structure. It didn’t give.
Faulcon photographed the hulk from every angle on the ground, then followed Lena Tanoway down the shore to where the sea broke almost soundlessly against the land. A line of tangled weed, and oyster-shaped shards of rock, marked the highest tide-line. Kamelios had six moons, all small and insignificant lumps of rock that skipped and danced above the world to no one’s great concern, although the pink, striated bulk of Merlin, being always partially occluded by silvery Kytara, had an appreciable effect on the seas, causing small but noticeable tides. Tharoo, a pitted and ugly moon, was the largest, and drew on the waters too; but since it rose and fell with the twins, only a single tide was ever seen clearly. Aardwind, Threelight and Magrath were pretty, but fleeting; there were human bases on all the moons.
“This is a good one,” said Lena, drawing Faulcon’s attention away from the indistinct discs that scattered the dusklight. She was turning a palm-sized shard over and over and touching the rippled green and yellow pattern in its matrix. She skipped the stone and Faulcon whistled approval through his proboscis as it made the eight-bounce and plopped out of sight.
Before them the huge red disc of Altuxor moved closer to the horizon; more stars shone through.
“I hate the dusk,” said Faulcon, skipping; he only got five bounces, and kicked around the tide-line looking for a better shard.
“I like it. It reminds me of a time when I was younger, happier, prettier, richer and when sunset meant beach parties on New Triton, and more fun in one night than you can have in a year in Steel City.”
If Faulcon had thought she meant it he might have wept mock tears for her. He noticed that Kris Dojaan had slipped down the alien machine and was walking slowly … the gait and posture of disbelief … towards them. His voice, as he called out to them, testified to his confusion. “What the hell are you doing?”
“He who gets the ten-skip gets the girl,” Faulcon said, and Lena laughed.
“Unless she gets it first herself.” Her dry voice was slightly muffled through the mask, slightly distorted through the transceivers. She skipped another stone, but Faulcon had turned round and was staring at the motionless youngster.
Kris took a step forward, then changed his mind, glancing back at the alien hulk for a moment. Red light reflected brilliantly off his faceted goggles; his eyes seemed filled with fire. “But the machine … it’s alien, it’s ancient, it’s wonderful.”
The word “ancient” sent an unexpected thrill through Faulcon and he found himself frowning, staring at the ruined vehicle and thinking of the whole of time, the immensity of time gone by. But Lena’s cynical laugh—a peculiar rasping until he turned round towards her—broke the flash of the spell, countered that brief return to the way he had once felt about VanderZande’s World.
She was staring up the beach and Faulcon could see that she was slightly irritated. “But this whole world’s alien, Kris. This whole world’s ancient!” She swung round, skipping a shard out across the ocean, into the glare of the red sun. It went so far, the bounces becoming so low, that Faulcon lost the count. Lena wiped her hands on the tight fabric of her suit and watched the sluggish Paluberion Sea.
Kris was shaking his head as he walked back to the machine. Dwarfed by its bulk he leaned forward to rest both hands against the giant tracks. His voice was shrill as he said, “But this was made by intelligent creatures! It’s a sign of the life that once lived here …”
“So’s this ocean,” said Lena calmly, almost inaudibly. Faulcon was walking towards the youngster, picking his way carefully as the shadows lengthened and the red light confused his senses. Lena was chuckling again. “Didn’t you know that, Leo? They carved this ocean out of the crust … they filled it up with sea, then closed it off. We’re skipping stones across the biggest damned swimming pool in the Universe.”
“But the machine …” cried Kris Dojaan.
“Is just a damned machine.”
Faulcon said, “You’ve seen one, Kris, you’ve seen them all.”
“This is the first I’ve ever seen!”
“And in a year you’ll wonder why you ever got excited about it,” said Lena. “Go on, Kris, have fun, feel the thrills, feel the cold shivers. Why not? I did. Leo did. You have the right to that at least, to feel a certain awe … ” she emphasized the word with effort as she flung a shard out towards the sun, “… for something dead. But in a year, mark me and mark me well, you’ll think of this as cold, hard cash. Why the hell not? To whoever built this thing it’s no more than a bicycle. Would you go berserk over a bicycle if you dug one up?”
