What little drug smuggling or gun running they had managed across the Himalayas since Mao’s revolution, would not be available to him alone. And also, since that revolution, pickings had been poor in the Xiang region—most of the thieving already done by Party officials. Cheng was damned if he was going to rejoin China’s current society: thankless toil and the grey and boring clothing did not appeal to him. One option remained: he would head towards the coast, for Kowloon and Hong Kong, and see how his fortunes would fare. Not for one moment, as he exchanged his clothing for the best available remaining on the corpses, and looted them of anything the soldiers had left, did he feel any grief. They hadn’t been a bad lot, but none of them had really appreciated his qualities and, anyway, his emotional spectrum encompassed only terror and lust. The former came into play again when, just as he was ready to set out, the monster came.

The huge and horrible thing fed on the dead. He saw it bow down over the body of a pony and suck it down with a crunching gulping. The human corpses it took down with less trouble. Crouched behind a rock, Cheng-yi sobbed with terror as he listened to the macabre feasting, then when the sounds ceased, he choked back his sobs and held his breath. Perhaps it was gone now? Perhaps it had never been there…

Cheng-yi looked up straight into the mouth of hell poised above him and screamed. The mouth turned away and, from the flank behind, one of the monster’s scales fell and thudded in the dust beside the Chinaman. He watched as the scale, at first leaflike, coiled up into a cylinder as if rapidly drying. Lust was Cheng’s next emotion, and he did not hesitate to grab the thing up and pull it up over his forearm. Then, the monster gone, he wondered what madness it was that had made him see such monstrous visions. But this was not his last.

Engineer Goron:

It was some staffer of Maxell’s who had the idea of using cerebral programming on the next torbearer we managed to intercept. Sir Alex seemed the best option as he had been combat trained from birth. Our team had eighteen hours to work on him before his next shift and all seemed to go well: the programming took and there was even time to provide him with physical augmentation and a Pedagogue weapons’ instruction download. Apparently, though he accepted our weapons, he utterly refused to shed his armour. But even with his armour and his weapons and his new abilities, he must have failed. The team, remaining at the location where they had intercepted Sir Alex while they recharged their mantisals via a portable fusion/displacement generator, were attacked by the beast only minutes after his concurrent arrival beyond the Nodus. So we can only suppose that Cowl killed the man, but was angry enough to retaliate directly.

Pedagogue was an unseen presence directly downloading information into his mind and, with the true brutality of a surgeon, wrenching into shape those structures in his mind that could utilize it. But this, this he didn’t understand:

The trip was due to take another five hours. Tack knew there were three ramscoop fusion engines, set on outriders protruding from the main cylindrical body of the ship, belching white blades of flame. Mercury resembled a cindered sphere to his left, but with a sprawl of bright-silver installations spread in a maze across its sooty flank and cigar-shaped stations orbiting it. Tack was apparently standing before one of the triangular screens that ringed the bridge sphere—earlier in its life, the only place possible for humans to survive here. Now the ship was lethally radioactive. How such a vessel managed to operate in these conditions Tack was only momentarily bewildered to consider, but then, almost off-handedly, he dowsed the extent and capabilities of Heliothane materials and field technology.

Ahead, the sun loomed large—like a hole cut through space into some hellish furnace—and against it was silhouetted the tap itself. The thing was stupendous, like some vast tanker crossing an ocean of fire.

‘Why…?’ He didn’t really voice the question—it was just there.

Would you prefer…

Instantly Tack found himself submersed in some viscous clear fluid, and in a world of pain. He couldn’t scream as the fluid was in his mouth and lungs and, as he began to struggle, he discerned optic cables snaking away from the back of his head. Looking down, he saw himself flayed, red muscle revealed, tubes and wires connected down the length of him, metal cuffs enclosing his joints, the cowled head of some surgical robot excavating into the side of his chest. Then the horrific vision was gone and he was back on the sun ship, gasping and clutching at his chest, shivering. But the pain faded and the memory of pain swiftly blurred.

‘When we have rebuilt you, you will be more sufficient to your task.’

The disembodied words meant the same in every one of the many different languages now available to him, for Pedagogue was speaking to him in every language that he now knew. He thought of Heliothane weapons, realized he knew how to strip and rebuild a multi-purpose carbine, and how to program molecular catalysers. And these were just the tip of the berg of knowledge expanding in his mind.

‘I have questions…’

‘And I have answers,’ Pedagogue told him flatly.

Tack reached out, touched the screen, actually felt its warmth. ‘Cowl must overcome the temporal inertia of four billion years to succeed.’ He tilted his head. ‘I see, one billion.’ Now he knew the Nodus Cowl had travelled a few centuries behind was situated just before the Precambrian explosion—when complex life really began to take hold. ‘That inertia—to overcome it Cowl must do something… cataclysmic. And even if he succeeds he’ll just push himself and his new history down to the bottom of the probability slope.’

‘Cataclysmic… Nodus. What maintains the relative position of the alternates on the slope? Why does father killing confine you in the new time-line you have created by that act, down the probability slope, rather than make that line the main one?’

‘Cause and effect. The paradox shoves you down the slope.’

‘Correct. But that paradox can only come into being because you are contradicting what came before. You are acting counter to temporal momentum. Before the Nodus there is virtually zero momentum and therefore zero to contradict.’

Tack saw it then. He conceived the image of time as a sheet tossed over a table, against the surface of which already rested a long rod, the uppermost point on the sheet, where it was lifted along the length of the rod, being the main line. The rod was also tilted up from the edge of the table, so that the slope of sheet, down from it on either side, grew longer the further in from the edge of the table you went. The edge of the table was the Nodus itself, and the rod protruding from the edge was held in a hand that could, given sufficient pressure, swing the rod, thus altering the position of the high point in the sheet and the slopes on either side. That hand belonged to Cowl. Tack swallowed dryly, seeing that he had no choice but to believe what he was being told: if someone’s hand is hovering over the detonator switch of an atomic bomb, you do not hesitate to shoot them should you have the opportunity; you do not ask what their intentions are.

‘There’s more I need to know.’

‘Yes…’

In his mind he now sensed a wave of information, poised just at the edge of perception and ready to break over him. Before him the triangular screens turned black for a second, then came back on to show an entirely different display. He stepped forward, for a moment was submerged in viscous fluid again, and briefly glimpsed his raised arm, skin growing back across it like white slime, the material of his tor grown to the size of his palm. Pain was a brief suffusion, then he was standing on a walkway beside the glass of an aquarium wall behind which something shifted. A nightmare turned towards him.