‘Is that what happened to Laura?’

‘Yes. As soon as Shuttle Fourteen entered the Forest, it got entangled in the loop. There’s a place in the memory layer, a subsection where she repeats that whole experience every twenty-seven hours and forty-two minutes. It creates her, and makes her and the science team relive the same section of their expedition every time. Sonofabitch, they started over every twenty-seven hours and forty-two minutes for the last three thousand years. That’s . . . just . . . damn!’

Kysandra frowned, trying not to be too overwhelmed by the horror of it. ‘But why are all the exopods and bodies in the Desert of Bone all the same age? She should be landing on Bienvenido every time she leaves the Forest.’

‘Paradox. You can’t actually travel back in time, so the Void outside the Forest’s distortion tries to normalize the event. As near as I can figure it, every time Laura’s mission loops, it does so in the Void’s memory of three thousand years ago that the Forest has screwed up. It’s like a shared solipsism for her, except the person she’s sharing it with is herself. And each time one of her dies inside that distorted memory segment, the creation layer manifests what happened as a piece of Bienvenido’s history.’

‘So it does happen?’ Kysandra asked. ‘It is real?’

‘To her, yes; but not to us. She doesn’t exist in this time, in our segment of the Void’s reality; what happens to her – to each one of her – is supposed to have occurred in the past. So when her life ends and the loop throws her latest corpse out here, it’s instantly transformed to a chunk of a past that never existed. That’s how the Void outside the loop attempts to balance the books and make the present correct, to neutralize the paradox.’ He grinned savagely. ‘It’s like the old Creationists claiming God laid down the dinosaur fossils a few thousand years ago. Crud, how they’d love this!’

‘Uracus! But she still lives through it?’

‘Yes. Somewhere, in some aspect of the memory layer, Laura, Ayanna, Ibu, Rojas and Joey, all of them have been through the same event over a million times now.’

Kysandra closed her eyes, recalling the hill of exopods and their horrifying crust of mummified bodies. ‘So right now, in this screwed-up section of the memory layer, there’s a Laura trying to escape the exopod landing point, to make it across the desert on a cart?’

‘That, or she’s waiting at the bottom of the exopod hill ready to kill the next Laura that comes floating down out of the sky; we saw she’s done that enough times. Then again, given the height of the hill now, I imagine a majority of her will either die or be badly maimed when their exopod lands on top and goes tumbling down the side. Either way – every time – she dies, and her personal segment of the loop ends.’

‘You have to stop it. You have to set her free.’

Nigel took a sip of the brandy. His gaze never left the Forest. ‘I know.’

8

Even though Kysandra considered herself so much more sophisticated and experienced nowadays, she was still excited to be visiting Varlan again. The rush and bustle of the city, its smells and psychic effervescence, was something poor old Adeone could never match. The size, too, was impressive; even the Shanties were larger here. Looking at it with new knowledge and understanding, she saw that size gave it power, economic and political. By design, it was the hub of the continent’s rail and river trade routes. Ports, train stations, factories, banks, the headquarters of the Marines and the Meor, the seat of the National Council, seat of the civil service – it had them all. Varlan was a true capital.

‘You can’t change Bienvenido without changing Varlan first,’ Kysandra announced. She was standing on the balcony in the Rasheeda Hotel suite, staring out across the lush green expanse of Bromwell Park. On the other side of the grass and trees, buildings and streets smothered the folds of the land in brick and stone. Rooftops stretched away to the riverbank, hard angular waves of blue slate and red clay. A forest of tall industrial chimney stacks populated the north-east of the city, looking like the pillars of some gigantic folly roof that a mad captain had never quite got round to building. They pumped out thick fountains of smoke that cast a palpable shade across that whole district.

‘That’s my girl,’ Nigel said from the lounge.

It wasn’t really a revelation. She’d always known. But it had taken this vista for her truly to comprehend the concept. ‘There’s so much inertia here,’ she murmured.

‘Start small, and keep pushing.’

Kysandra grinned and went back into the lounge, where it was slightly cooler. ‘I thought you were going to say it only takes one pebble to start an avalanche.’

He cocked an eyebrow at her. ‘Now who knows it all?’

She sat down on a chaise longue, stretching out her arms theatrically. ‘What difference would it make, giving the world true democracy? People will still have to pay taxes to fund the regiments, because the Fallers will never stop. They can’t. It’s what they are.’

‘I have to get back into space. That’s the first stage. Once Skylady is up there, I might be able to do something about the Forest.’

‘But you can’t get into space.’ She stopped, suddenly alarmed. ‘Unless you go back to before you landed here.’

‘If I could do that, I would, because then everything would change, even your destiny. But I can’t go that far back in time. There must be something missing, some part of Edeard’s technique I haven’t grasped. Or my mind simply isn’t strong enough. Then again, it could just be more difficult in this part of the Void.’

‘Because of what the Forest is doing to the memory layer?’

He shrugged. ‘It’s my best guess. It’s also my biggest hope, because that would make the Forest very important.’

‘Important how?’

‘It’s damaging the Void – something no one else has ever done.’

‘Does that help us?’

‘Oh, yes! We’re missing a lot of Laura Brandt’s data on the quantum distortion. If I can analyse the effect properly, my allies the Raiel may be able to use it. They have resources far greater than the Fallers.’

‘The Raiel can get us out?’

Nigel held up his hands. ‘We’re talking infinitesimal chances here. But then again, when infinitesimal is all you’ve got to grasp at . . .’

‘Then let’s do it. How can we get the Skylady back into space?’

‘I’ve been thinking about it. Regrav is the problem. It glitched on me the whole time, and since I got down it’s been dead. But ingrav worked. It still does. Not well; it can’t generate a full gee of thrust, which is what I need to lift. But it’s still operational. If I could just get Skylady to a decent altitude, the old girl might be able to accelerate to escape velocity.’

‘So you need something to boost Skylady to start with.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Can you get a Skylord to help?’

‘I don’t see how.’

‘Tell them you can help the Forest.’

‘Even if they understood the concept, you forget they’re the Faller variant that’s perfectly adapted to the Void. They’re not going to help change a damn thing.’

‘Oh.’ She pursed her lips in annoyance. ‘Yeah. Uracus!’

‘I was thinking along the lines of something crude enough that the Void won’t glitch it.’

‘What?’

His grin was malicious. ‘Project Orion. Now that would be something.’

‘What’s Project Orion?’

‘Something utterly beautiful, and completely crazy. It involves a lot of atom bombs. But, don’t worry, I’m not actually going to use it. There are a few more rational options open to us. We’ll run some experiments and see what’s the most effective.

‘How long will that take?’ It came out more childlike and petulant than she wanted.

‘I don’t know, because I haven’t decided which propulsion systems to test, yet. I need—’