No Present Like Time

“Let me go!”

“Think yourself home.”

Something terrible is happening down there. Something vast in the heart of the Aureate is pumping viscous liquid around the drains and dykes bridged with connective tissue. “Let me go!” I shouted. “I want out!”

“Think yourself home, I’m not stopping you.”

“But I don’t know how!”

“If I call out that you’re a gymnast, Rhydanne, you’d be spending the rest of your life as a car. Well, your guts will. The rest of you will make a good roadsighn. Look, there’s one.”

The roadsighn whispered, “i trespassed in the aureate, look at me, save yourselves, go home, save yourself, tarragon, where are you going, tarragon?”

His legs twined together were planted in the verge, and a membrane road sign grew from between his outstretched arms. In the mist he was just a spindly ecorche silhouette murmuring, “oh Tarragon, what have you brought us?”

As we passed I saw his sticky dark pink color, stripped to pus and muscle, his face locked in a wide risus sardonicus leer; “Tarragon, who is that? where are you going?”

“We’re going deeper,” she said to me. “The Spleen is on your right. On your left you will see-”

“Am I a sacrifice? Let me out!”

Gold buildings loomed smooth and rounded, lobed against each other like internal organs. They were horribly organic, studded with empty ulcerous portals-foramina and fistulae. The Ribs were flying buttresses with nowhere to land. We skirted the Labyrinths of the Ileum and in the distance the Cult of the Oedemic Prepuce had erected a tall gold wrinkled spire with an onion dome. We drove down a rubber subway that stretched and sagged. We emerged from beneath dripping red stalactites through a puckered textured sphincter onto the shore of-

A lake. Against the black sky I could just make out its dark red liquid and hear the lapping as rare ripples ran over its stinking surface. Gold ducts of varying bores, hollow femurs and arrays of tubules sucked liquid from it and ran underground. Glomeruli like fleshy cups fountained in occasional bursts so the automobile wheels sank in ground made spongy by gastric juices. On the far side, spotlights picked out and roved over the highly polished gold shell of the Western Kidney. I tried all the time to wish myself back to the Fourlands.

“Tine are a most religious and honest people…” said Tarragon. Tine crowded the shore. It must be a feast day because hundreds had gathered. Most were Duodenal Sect; their intestines had been pulled out of a hemmed hole in their stomachs and wrapped around their waists, and I could see waves of peristalsis going around them. One was a Novice of the Flectere Doctrine, who snap all their joints to bend the opposite way. His bare feet lifted in front of him because his knees were bent backward like a bird’s. His pale blue palms were on the backs of his hands, his fingers curled outward. “You have to admire their devotion.”

A gold paddleboat that ran on striated muscle fibers and catechism ferried between the Islets of Langerhans in the distance. “We’re going deeper,” said Tarragon. “Soon we’ll reach the Heart and Lungs, and we’ll drive the length of the backbone processional. The Heart! I want to show you the Heart of the Aureate.”

“No!”

“Then think yourself home!”

“I can’t!”

“Or the brain, deep beneath the Transgressor’s Forest. In the brain there’s a temple where any creature drawn on the wall comes to life. Don’t draw stick men, they have enough of those. It’s sickening to see them, limping toward you dragging their misshapen limbs and squeaking.”

I couldn’t feel the pull. It would be at least an hour before my overdose wore off and woke me. I tried to be calm, pictured my cabin on the Stormy Petrel and imagined myself back there.

“That’s a good boy!” Tarragon exclaimed. “I know you can do it!”

She gave me a Shark’s grin but I didn’t give it back. We drove along the lakeside and I screamed when I realized what was pinging out from under our wheels and rattling off the chassis: a gravel beach of kidney stones.

Tarragon called to a whole congregation of Tine kneeling on the shore, “Hey, see my passenger? He runs marathons! He can sprint as fast as a car!”

The Tine paused and stared. They gestured to each other, howled and ran directly at us. “Hurry!” I yelled. “Hurry up!”

Tarragon stopped the car. “Will yourself home.”

Through rising panic I forced myself to stay calm and yearned, forced, demanded myself back to my body. Tarragon tapped a finger on her forehead and repeated the dictum, “Shift by meditation. Not sensation!”

The Tine were almost upon us.

The dark shore twitched in and out of focus, then a wave of distortion rolled through it. Tarragon’s face and the gold vehicle belched into disturbing shapes. They dissolved to gray. To black.

My stomach creased with fear; I closed my eyes. And when I opened them again, slowly and stickily, I was back in my cabin, lying on the floor.

CHAPTER SIX

I woke with the green taste of bile in my mouth, curled up so tightly I ached. Shit, I almost got eviscerated. I clenched my fists. Tarragon almost had me killed.

I rolled onto my back and contemplated the too-close ceiling. A gentle sighing must be the wind on the mainsail, and that constant slap and hiss will be the prow cutting small waves. There were no other sounds, so it was probably nighttime. These deductions left me feeling rather proud but I sensed that the cabin had become a little bit narrower. It had changed shape-it was also longer. There was not enough room to open even the tips of my wings. What the fuck was going on?

I lit a candle and held it up. The walls were painted blue, not black, the portholes were square with white borders. It was a different cabin. Could I have Shifted back to the wrong place? Panicking, I ran my fingernails between the planks, brushed my hand along the shelves: nothing. Where were my wraps? Where were all my fucking wraps? I saw my rucksack, seized it and rummaged through it. The fat envelope containing scolopendium had gone. “Damn you, Ata!” I shouted. “Damn you, damn you, damn you!”

There was a knock on the cabin door. “Go away!” I yelled.

I rubbed the hem of my coat and felt nine hard paper squares still sewn in. Thank god, they had missed some!

Cold air gusted into the cabin as a stocky figure pushed the door open with his shoulder. I saw Serein’s silhouette, a round head with spiky hair. Behind him, dull blue inky dawn clouds packed the vast sky. He sat in the doorway, legs out onto the half deck, huddling in his greatcoat. “Comet,” he said. “You weren’t well.”

“Is that understatement a new type of sarcasm you’re experimenting with?”

“For god’s sake, Comet. You look like you’ve been dragged through a battlefield backward. Mind you, I’ve been seasick. The sailors started laying bets on the number of times I would puke over the taffrail. Mist told me you don’t get seasick. She explained about scolopendium.”

“I see.” I took a swig of water from my leather bottle. “I suspect that I am on the Melowne?”

The Swordsman nodded. “We rowed you across from Petrel. You were out cold.”

“What! A rowing boat? So close to the waves? What if it had capsized?” Drowning while unconscious was too awful to contemplate.

“Ata said you could have this berth because you filled the other one up with drugs. Drugs aren’t an answer, Jant. What are you doing that for when you’re an Eszai?”

“What happened to my wraps and the envelope?” I said threateningly.

“We threw them overboard.”

“Shit.”

The Swordsman sounded both disgusted and surprised that an Eszai would knowingly use cat. “How much did