Context (18 page)

He waited.

ENTANGLEMENT
—the lev-throne spun a full
circle —
IS THE ROOT SYSTEM BENEATH THE COSMOS.

Tom’s leg was not healed yet. But
adrenaline would power the attack, if that became necessary: three lev-steps,
jump into space, knife-hand to the throat as he reached the Seer.

YOU WON’T BELIEVE
—
tricons tinged with ironic blue, as the helm-throne
retreated once more—
UNTIL YOU SEE.

‘See what?’

Sapphire lightning curled and
spat.

The
air pulled apart.

Molecules, growing into great
glowing shapes, rushed past as he fell
into
reality. Deeper, inwards ...until
space-time’s fabric unravelled, and Tom slipped inside the weave.

Twisted spheres of Calabi-Yau
geometry.

Illusion.

The sometimes compactified, sometimes
limitless extra dimensions of realspace: at ultra-magnification, each geometric
point—formerly a tiny, infinitesimal sphere -became a twisted, curlicued
complex knot which Tom perceived with a sense beyond sight. He was becoming
aware of the world’s hidden aspects, the hyperdimensions whose existence human
beings can infer but never truly experience.

And then a vision:

Her features are a little softer;
her hair is long. An old, old ribbon of scar on her left hand which was never
there before.

She is wearing a military uniform
of unknown allegiance.

‘I would like,’ she says, to a
committee of senior officers, ‘to make a full report—’

Twist, plunge.

Elva!

He might have screamed.

Again:

Elva spins round, graser pistol
in hand, just as the chamber door-membrane denatures and falls apart. Uniformed
figures burst in upon her, and she struggles but they are overwhelming her, as
five more enter, reinforcements, holding back to train their weapons upon her
-

No!

— until a one-armed black-clad
figure leaps through an archway, kicks low, hits a second trooper three times before
anyone perceives his presence, takes out a third trooper with a high spinning
kick -

‘Elva. Didn’t you know I’d come back
for you?’

— and laughs, mad and triumphal,
as the others come for him.

And spin.

Twist.

Elva! The new Elva, the one who
lives...

There was a sense of being torn
apart—no, being torn
away ...
from Elva, from everything, and he reached
out yelling but it was too late because the world was rushing past, a great
flood of implacable geometry, her image dwindling, slipping away, as atoms
shrunk to normal size and reality shivered into being all around him ...

The Seer’s chamber.

‘Come back—’

And then he was sprawled face
down on the hard lev-stone, arm outstretched towards the illusion of Elva, the
future-vision—in which his love still lived—vivid in his mind, while the
floating lev-step on which he lay seemed a cold, hard illusion scarcely worthy
of consideration.

His entire body trembled once,
shuddering uncontrollably.

Tears
tracked down the Seer’s cheeks.

Tom, sitting up as the shock
symptoms eased, stared at him.

‘Seer? Why are
you
so ...
?’

Young/old features, bathed in
blue light as lightning continued to crackle and jump around the chamber’s
flanged walls.

YOU THINK LIFE MEANS SO LITTLE,
TO ONE WHO CAN SEE?

Tom shook his head, not
understanding.

‘I don’t—’

GO WELL, MY LORD.

That was when the ceiling fell
in.

It
enveloped him. From among the panels, a glassine section dropped, instantly
forming a block which imprisoned Tom, yet allowed him to breathe.

He raged, but could not move
inside a cocoon which was soft and translucent but absolutely massive. Like an
amber-trapped insect, he was totally without power or control over his
situation, and it stripped him of dignity and purpose, leaving only fear.

Elva!

Trapped, he could just make out
the Seer—

Then Tom stopped, and shivered.
He ceased his struggles.

Outside, something strange was
happening.

A ripple at first, a disturbance
in the air which became substantial, a flickering of
black flames
pushing
reality apart, and everything seemed very odd and distant but Tom knew that
this was not a dream.

Dark Fire ...

And then it began to grow, that
light-sucking conflagration, those flames without heat which seemed the inverse
of every fire Tom had ever seen. To grow, to spin ... to advance towards the
Seer, whose helm-throne hung unmoving at the great chamber’s centre, heavy with
acceptance of his Fate.

Thunderstorm-black, space-black,
the disturbance spun faster, accelerated beyond tornado speed, with flickering
hints of impossible twistings, mind-bending geometric transformations beyond
human comprehension, strange hints of bright scarlet amid black flames whose
appearance denied any understanding of the Chaos-driven processes which had
given them birth.

The very air shivered apart.

Get out of there, Seer!

But there was nothing the Dark
Fire’s poor intended victim could do to save himself.

Spacetime itself became
fractured, and for a moment Tom thought he glimpsed scarlet-clad human figures
within the impossible maelstrom ...then something reached out, enveloping, and
the Seer’s scream pierced even the thick imprisoning smartglass: a voice
finally made real, in the moment of his final agony. And then the blackness
grew absolute, spinning faster but shrinking now ...

Sweet Fate, Seer.

...
dwindling to a point...

You saw it coming.

...
flickered ...

Why didn’t you get out of here?

...
and was gone.

But Tom knew better than anyone
how Fate could envelop the most driven of people, and he pressed his hand
uselessly against the glassine prison, knowing that he would have to wait for
release, and that there was no good he could do for anyone right now.

Outside, the helm-throne floated
intact, but the torn red meat scattered around its interior, glistening wet and
steaming with diminishing heat, was long past bearing any resemblance to
humanity or to life.

~ * ~

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