‘Do you see the sun tap?’ Saphothere asked.

Sun tap? The man had repeatedly referred to that, but Tack had never wondered what it might mean. Silhouetted against the face of the orb he noticed a rectilinear shape, minuscule in proportion, but then, to the sun, so was planet Earth.

‘How?’ Tack was at a loss.

‘It sits in the chromosphere, using more than half of the energy it generates to power the antigravity engines that hold it in place. Entering the same AG fields, the sun’s radiation accelerates and is focused into a microwave beam with which you could fry Earth in half a second.’ He nodded towards the distortion above the dish. ‘A fraction of that beam hits splitting stations, before reaching here, and is diverted to conversion stations spread throughout the solar system, which in turn provide the energy for our civilization.’

‘Conversion stations?’ Tack asked.

‘One such station, over Mars, converts microwave energy into the full spectrum of light—from infrared to ultraviolet—which serves as our replacement for the sun mirrors destroyed by the Umbrathane. It is the reason that planet is now no longer entirely red.’

Tack considered that. ‘You said just a fraction?’

‘Most of that beam hitting the dish here, is used to power the wormhole—the time tunnel. You have to understand that we originally built the tap specifically for that purpose, and that the greening of Mars became just a side benefit. Tap and wormhole are inextricably linked and neither, once created, can be turned off. There is, in fact, no physical means of turning off the sun tap as the antigravity fields that sustain its position also focus the beam—as I mentioned—but if you did, the wormhole would collapse catastrophically and Sauros would be obliterated by the feedback. Also, if the wormhole was independently collapsed, the energy surge would vaporize New London. The project was therefore a total commitment.’

They now became weightless inside the mantisal as it dropped past the outer rim of New London, and soon Tack observed that, just like a coin, the city had two sides. When the construct swung in towards the other side, Tack felt his stomach flip and bit down on a sudden nausea. Now he felt the pull of gravity from the second side as they descended towards a building on the very edge of a city, which sprawled across the entire underside of the disc. This structure was shaped like the rear half of a luxury liner, but standing on end so its stern was pointing into space. Except this would have been a liner that made Titanic look like a lifeboat. The mantisal now curved in towards the ‘deck’ side of the building, where other structures protruded at right angles. Tack saw that, like a silver foam, thousands of mantisals were already attached to these protrusions. Eventually they came in amidst them and descended onto a platform resembling a weird melding of a giant oyster shell and a helipad.

Withdrawing his hands from the mantisal’s eyes, Saphothere said, ‘You remember the mask in your pack? You’ll need it to get to the entrance, as it’s vacuum up here.’ He gestured to an oval door at the juncture of the landing platform with the main building. ‘You’ll have to run, though.’

Tack opened his pack and took out the mask. When Saphothere had originally explained its function to him, Tack had hoped he would never have to use it. It looked organic, like the sliced-off face of a huge green cricket, its interior glistening wet. As he pressed it against his face, its soft interior flowed around his features, moulding itself to him. For a moment he was blind, then a vision screen switched on, with complementary displays arrayed along the bottom. Breathing involved only slightly more effort than usual. Apparently the mask stored pure oxygen—after sucking it in from its surroundings—and, when being worn, released it.

‘Come on now,’ urged Saphothere, his own mask in place as he leapt out. Tack followed him, running for the door. Initially his skin felt frozen, then suddenly it was burning. He saw vapour rising off his clothes and dissipating. Saphothere, trotting along beside him, seemed completely at ease in this environment. As they reached the oval door, Tack glanced back to see the mantisal floating over to one side of the landing pad, where others of its kind were gathered. Grabbing the protruding handle, Saphothere pulled the door open and led the way into an oblate airlock chamber. As soon as he closed that door, air began blasting in, and after a moment they could remove their masks.

‘Now what?’ Tack asked.

Saphothere proceeded through the next door into a chaos of sound and colour. Tack could hardly take it all in: a vast chamber containing dwellings in all shapes and sizes suspended in gleaming orthogonal scaffolds; gardens and parks, some of them even running vertically; walkways ribboning through the air; transports of every kind hurtling all about the place; and Heliothane everywhere, thousands upon thousands of them. Glancing at Saphothere he saw the man was operating his palm computer.

‘You are too slow and too weak, so would get killed in here’ — he gestured to the surrounding mayhem—‘within minutes, probably by accident. This is not for you yet.’ So saying, Saphothere operated some other control on his computer. Tack felt the all-too-familiar sensation of a reprogramming link going in. He tried to object, but instead simply shut down. Everything started to grey out and the last thing he felt was Saphothere catching him as he fell.

Rain like a vertical sea hammered upon her and, slipping in the mud, Polly went down on her face. Her nostrils filled with the stench of decaying vegetation and in the darkness she could hear things hooting and screeching.

‘Yes, I know—not a good place to be,’ she said, then wished she hadn’t spoken when the animal noises fell silent.

Pushing herself upright, she looked around at the darkness and at huge trees looming behind curtains of rain.

‘You’ve got nothing to say?’ she asked him nervously, terrified she might now be genuinely alone.

Oh, always something to say. But at present I’m trying to use one of Muse’s military logistics programs to calculate your acceleration back through time.

‘You’ll be able to predict what era I’ll arrive in next?’ Polly subvocalized, sure she could hear baleful movements out there.

Well, I have some dates to work with… within vague limits. Thus far it would seem your acceleration is exponential, though what the exponent is it’s difficult to ascertain. All I do know is that if the increase continues at its present rate… a few jumps more and you’ll be going back millions of years at a time.

‘You’re not serious?’

Oh yeah, but, as I said, the parameters are vague. If you follow the curve I’m now trying to plot, you’ll end up off the graph—achieving a jump that is infinite. But then I might only be viewing part of that curve and who’s to say you’ll be following a curve anyway? Thing is, you are now learning to control the shifts, and Christ knows what other factors might come into play. The next one might easily be one year or one million years.

‘Oh, screw this,’ Polly said out loud and reached down inside herself to grasp hold of that webwork and bend it to her will. This time there was no transition over that previous black sea and she was immediately into that Euclidian space she could manipulate, if only in a small way. She gave it a few seconds only, then pulled herself out, dropping down on her back into soft leaf litter in a raucous daylit forest. She gasped in a lungful of cold morning air.

Of course, every time you do that, you just screw up my calculations further.

Polly did not know whether to laugh or cry.

Cheng-yi dragged himself out from under the mounded dead and looked around in disbelief. The attacking unit of the People’s Army had bayoneted the survivors and the wounded ponies, then looted the bodies. All that now remained of the largest robber band in Miyi county was butchered corpses strewn along the valley. That none of their attackers had dragged Cheng-yi out and searched him he put down to his being covered in blood and the plenitude of loot elsewhere. Climbing unsteadily to his feet, Cheng visually checked himself from head to foot. None of the blood appeared to be his own, which was miraculous considering he had been riding beside Lao when the machine gun opened up, and there was not much left of him that was identifiable. Cheng gave a little dance and shook his fists at the sky, then he looked round again, completely at a loss.