Something strange is happening to our species. We’re beginning to experience pauses in the flow of time, periods in which everything but our thinking mind appears to stand still. Each pause is five times longer than the last, and the gap between one pause and the next is halving. In the near future, these “nots” will be longer than the time between them, longer than man has existed, longer than the universe itself.
But musicologist William Shall has a plan. Even if we can’t survive the nots, we can leave a little humanity to those who come after us.
“I scrambled over again. Her voice became a wild, unbroken ululation. Her legs skewed at the mud. One time, heaving her up with an arm under her ribs, she gave a sudden cry and stiffened, and then immediately hauled me down so that we rolled clattering through the broken ice. I heard a fizzling noise. Red embers plunged all around me in the glassy field.
“Cicely came scrabbling across the ruts to drag us the rest of the way in. ‘You felt it? You felt it?’ he kept shouting at me, and in truth I couldn’t tell whether I’d felt it at all. It’s obvious, with hindsight, that I did not. Obvious because I’m writing this now, and Lani and everyone else from Église Penchée is dead. But in that moment it seemed plausible to me that I, too, had been trapped in my mind for eleven hours in those frozen ruts, and that only the fireworks had actually revived me and wrenched me back to the world of moving time.”
66,000 words : 220 pages
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EXCERPT
Dreams of Luisa, which therefore means I myself slept, which in turn strongly suspects that not only were the researchers lying about the drugs but they slipped something into my water bottle to knock me out. It must be the water bottle, since I could eat or drink nothing else last night.
I am thick and ponderous this morning, a head swollen and pillowed in wadding thick as llama wool. My eyes won’t focus, keep sliding off toward the right, and my hearing is muffled and hollow. The world clangs like the inside of a copper boiler. I spent much of the morning trying to argue for a truck which the staff now assures me is impossible without authorization from the Government. Señor Pizarro is no help at all. Eventually a plane could be brought to the strip but it will not arrive until early tomorrow. It seems I am being instructed to wait this out to the end.
I’m not an innocent man. I’m just a man who has been toughened by life, like most of us. I cannot count my partners and loves anymore. Forty maybe. How giddy I must have been as a young man, how buck-like. I have long ceased to think back on them. I’m young enough for a second wife, but the death of one with the blood of a child between her legs is all the tragedy I need to scribe on the sepulcher of my heart. The University will offer me at least ten more years. Fifteen maybe. I don’t watch the girls. I don’t even know what they are. I certainly didn’t expect another Luisa.
I can see her, moving in the candlelight, the slow swaying of a flame on naked skin. I always see her when I close my eyes. But if I keep them closed the flame laps at her flesh and her body twists and distorts and her eyes become fixed and hard and inhuman. She transitions, by degrees, into a form monstrous and pagan beneath which I lie prone and helpless in the misery of my ecstasy. I wish I were less of a coward and knew how to follow her into the cracks of the earth.
This report is all wrong, and tells nothing of consequence.
Today, today. Our survivors were kicked to their knees and we watched them struggle to rise and be kicked back down again. All the men chose violence, in the throes of their madness, and were one by one strapped to the metal bedframes just as I’d originally expected. By noon I could take it no longer and stomped out into the hills. I didn’t think I was headed anywhere, but my subconscious drove me to the inevitable confrontation back at the peak of the trail. I was almost at the barrier before I realized I had traced Luisa’s steps all the way up to the invisible monster squatting on the side of the mountain.
She walked to one side of me. My unborn child, which I generally now think of as a girl just old enough to understand me when I talk like an adult, walked on the other. I do not know her name. Daddy, she asked me, what’s the biggest thing I can see with my naked eye? Luisa laughed, and I chuckled as I walked, and the track was not so steep nor so monotonous. Luisa and I stepped up the chain for her, little by little, leading her through a mental mountain range all her own. There are big buildings and bridges and dams, we told her, ticking off their names. But if you want to see really big things you have to look to the sky. The moon’s large. Jupiter’s larger. See that sun flogging down on our backs? No, don’t look at it directly for more than an instant, you’ll make your eyes flare. But other stars are bigger still. Red supergiants are big enough to swallow the Earth if they were in the same place as our own sun. You know one of them already, it’s easy to spot. I pointed to the Orion in my imagination, though it’s not quite the right time of year to see it. Betelgeuse, red and clear on its shoulder. Others are bigger still, but harder to see. You watch the dust of the stars without even knowing how big they might be. And then there’s the Andromeda Galaxy, Luisa said, which is visible to the naked eye on a clear night.
So we distracted ourselves to the barrier, and it was only at this point I realized that I had left my watch behind. I tried to gauge the angle of the sun over the hills to the west but I couldn’t form a sensible approximation. There was an event due this afternoon at 16:35. That looked like a four o’clock sun, a four thirty sun. I tapped a few angry rhythms on the barrier and set off up the track anyway.
I walked for a while without really registering what I passed. The track was a winding line through the rocks. To one side there was an empty building and I ducked my head in. A whole life, abandoned here. Luisa’s flashlight was standing on its lens on the table. The shadows slanted ever further across the slope. Somewhere far above me a llama brayed mindlessly at the valley. I felt chilled and disconsolate and worthlessly alone.
When I came back down to the barrier Señor Pizarro was leaning on it looking at me. You could have called, I told him, and he shrugged. He did call. Didn’t I hear his voice? I grimaced and wondered just when the ghosts had dissipated from my side. Why I think of Luisa now, and not the wife that wrenched at my heart for so many years. It all fades into a long silence. Each day is another corner passed. Señor Pizarro glanced at his watch. Twenty past the hour, if I wanted to head back up the trail. I shook my head. Did I find what I wanted up there?
I found nothing, Christian, I said, and slapped the flashlight in his palm. I walked ahead of him all the way back.
66,000 words : 220 pages
eBook
Amazon search code: B0CSLZR1KF
Buy at Amazon US : $6.99 (free on Kindle unlimited)
Buy at Amazon UK : £5.99 (free on Kindle unlimited)
Paperback
Amazon search code: B0CSDY494B
Buy at Amazon US : $11.99
Buy at Amazon UK : £10.99
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