which the serjeants had discarded. He found his own and unfastened the top. “We don’t ingest solid food, I’m afraid, but our nutrient soup will sustain you. It contains all the proteins and vitamins required by a normal human digestion system.” He pulled out several silvery sachets and distributed them round the dubious group. “You should supplement the meal with water.”
Cochrane flipped the cap off the sachet’s small valve and sniffed suspiciously. With everyone watching intently, he squeezed a couple of drops of the pale amber liquid onto his finger, and licked at them. “Holy shit! It tastes like seawater. Man, I can’t eat raw plankton, I’m not a whale.”
“Big enough to qualify,” Rana muttered under her breath.
“We have no other source of nourishment available,” Sinon said in mild rebuke.
“It’s fine, thank you,” Stephanie told the big serjeant. She concentrated for a moment, and her sachet solidified into a bar of chocolate. “Don’t pay any attention to Cochrane. We can imagine it to be whatever taste we like.”
“Bad karma’ll get you,” the hippie sniffed. “Yo there, Sinon. You got a glass going spare? I figure I can still remember what a shot of decent bourbon tastes like.”
The serjeant rummaged round in his pack, and found a plastic cup.
“Hey, thanks, man.” Cochrane took it from him, and transformed it into a crystal tumbler. He poured a measure of the nutrient soup out, watching happily as it thinned into his favourite familiar golden liquor. “More like it.”
Stephanie peeled the wrapper from her chocolate, and bit off a corner. It tasted every bit as good as the imported Swiss-ethnic delicacy she remembered from her childhood. But then, in this case the memory is the taste, she told herself wryly. “How much of this nutrient soup have you got left?” she asked.
“We each carry a week’s supply in our pack,” Sinon said. “That period is calculated on the assumption we will be physically active for most of the time. With careful rationing it should last between two and three weeks.”
Stephanie gazed out across the rumpled grey-brown mud which made up the surface of the flying island. Occasional pools of water glinted in the uniform blue-tinted glare that surrounded them. A few scattered ferrangs and kolfrans nosed around the edges of drying mires, nibbling at the fronds of smothered vegetation. Not enough to provide the combined human and serjeant inhabitants with a single meal. “I guess that’s all the time we’ve got then. Even if we had warehouses full of seed grain, three weeks isn’t enough time to produce a crop.”
“It is debatable if the air will sustain us for that long anyway,” Sinon said. “Our estimate for the human and serjeant population on this island is twenty-thousand-plus individuals. We won’t run out of oxygen, but the increase in carbon dioxide caused by that many people breathing will reach a potentially dangerous level in ten days’ time unless that air is recycled. As you can see, no vegetation survives to do this. Hence our determination to explore the potential of our energistic power.”
“We really ought to be helping you,” Stephanie said. “Except I don’t see how we can. None of us have affinity.”
“The time might come when we need your instinct,” Sinon said. “Your collective will brought us here. It is possible that you can find a way back. Part of our problem is that we don’t understand where we are. We have no reference points. If we knew where we were in relation to our own universe, we might be able to fashion a link back to it. But as we played no part in bringing the island here, we don’t know how to begin the search.”
“I don’t think we do either,” Moyo said. “This is just a haven for us, a place where the Liberation isn’t.”
“Interesting,” Sinon said. More serjeants started to listen to the conversation, eager for any clue that might be scattered amid the injured man’s words. “You weren’t aware of this realm before, then?”
“No. Not specifically. Although I suppose we were aware that such a place existed, or could exist. The desire to reach it is endemic among us—the possessors, that is. We want to live where we don’t have any connection to the beyond, and where there’s no night to remind us of empty space.”
“And you believe this is it?”
“It would seem to fill the criteria,” Moyo said. “Not that I can vouch for the lack of night,” he added bitterly.
“Are the other planets here?” Sinon asked. “Norfolk and all the others? Were you aware of them at any time?”
“No. I never heard or felt anything like that when we moved here.”
“Thank you.” Instinct appears to be the governing factor,he said to the others. I don’t believe we can rely on it for answers.
I don’t understand why we can’t simply wish ourselves back,choma said. We have a power equal to theirs; we also have a commensurate desire to return.
The united minds in their mini-consensus decided there were two options. That the possessed had spontaneously created a sealed continuum for themselves. An improbable event. While that would account for several properties of this realm—the failure of their electronic hardware, the cutting off of the beyond—the creation of an entirely new continuum by manipulating existing space-time with energy would be an inordinately complex process. Coming here was achieved by sheer fright, which discounted such a procedure.
More likely, this continuum already existed, secluded among the limitless dimensions of space-time. The beyond was such a place, though with very different parameters. They must have been thrown deep inside the multitude of parallel realms conjunctive within the universe. In such circumstances, home would be no distance at all away from where they were now. At the same time, it was on the other side of infinity.
There was also the failure to open even a microscopic wormhole, despite a formidable concentration of their energistic strength. That did not bode well at all. Before, ten thousand possessed had opened a portal wide enough to embrace a lump of rock twelve kilometres in diameter. Now, twelve thousand serjeants couldn’t generate a fissure wide enough to carry a photon out.
The explanation had to be that energy states were different here. And in eleven days’ time, that simple difference was going to kill them when the clean air ran out.
Stephanie watched Sinon for a couple of minutes, until it became apparent that he wasn’t going to say anything else. She could sense the minds of the serjeants all around her, just. There was none of the emotional surges which betrayed normal human thoughts. Just a small, even, glow of rationality, which occasionally fluttered with a hint of passion, a candle flame burning a speck of dust. She didn’t know if that was indicative of Edenist psyches, or normal serjeant mentality.
The swarthy bitek constructs remained unnervingly motionless as they stood in a loosely circular formation. Every new platoon which arrived immediately discarded their backpacks and joined their fellows in stationary contemplation of their predicament. As far as Stephanie could tell, they were the only humans among them. The newly arrived serjeants had all given the remnants of Ketton a wide berth. Yet she could sense a stir of minds amid the ruined town. As first puzzled why not one of them had ventured out to talk to the serjeants, she’d now assigned a certain resignation to the fact.
“We should go over and talk to the others,” she said. “Having this kind of division is ridiculous in these circumstances. If we’re going to survive, we have to cooperate and work together.”
McPhee sighed, and wriggled his large frame comfortably over the sleeping bag he was lying on. “Oh lass, you only see good in everyone. Open your eyes. Remember what yon bastards did to us, and let them stew.”
“I’d like to open my eyes,” Moyo said harshly. “Stephanie’s right. We should at least make an attempt. Setting up different camps is stupid.”
“I didn’t mean to offend. I’m just pointing out that they’ve made no attempt to talk to us or the serjeants.”
“They’re probably too nervous of the serjeants,” Stephanie said. “It’s only been half a day, after all. I doubt they even know how much trouble we’re in. They’re not as disciplined as the Edenists.”
“They’ll find out eventually,” Rana said. “Let them come to us when they’re ready. They won’t be so dangerous then.”
“They’re not dangerous now. And we’re in a perfect position to make the first move.”
“Whoa there, sister,” Cochrane said. He struggled up into a sitting position, which sent a lot of bourbon slopping out of his tumbler. “Not dangerous? Like funky! What about the Ekelund chick? She put up some mighty
