“But why do you need my world,” she asked, “if you already have this one?”
Célestine looked scornful. “This world is ending,” she said. “The seas are poisoned, the vegetation dying off. It’s useless. Soon, only bacteria will remain.” She took a step back and closed one eye, sighting the gun at the bridge of Victoria’s nose. “On your world, we already have Mars—an unspoiled canvas upon which to build—and soon, we will have the Earth as well. With the red planet in our hands, we are halfway there. We just need the final push, and then we’ll found a society that will last an aeon, spreading from world to world through space, and from timeline to timeline on Earth. A society that will outlast the sun itself.”
Victoria tensed. She knew she could move quickly, but could she move quickly enough to dodge a bullet?
“It’ll never happen,” she said, buying time.
Lady Alyssa looked pityingly at her.
“My Leviathans cannot be stopped. I will fly this helicopter right into the heart of London and land it on the lawn of Buckingham Palace. Merovech will surrender to me personally.”
“You’ll be shot down before you get within a mile of the palace.”
“Don’t be so sure.” The Duchess moved sideways and tapped the toe of one of her military boots against the metal box holding all the candles. “Do you know what this is?”
Victoria glanced down. Whatever the box might be, there were power cables plugged into it, and it gave off a faint, almost subliminal hum, easily missed against the racket of the helicopter’s engines.
“I haven’t the faintest idea.”
Célestine smiled triumphantly, and thrust out her chest.
“It’s a field generator. It creates an invisible energy shell around the aircraft. It can stop bullets, even tank shells.”
“Bullshit.”
“No, I assure you, it’s true. It’s even impervious to air and water. If we had the right propulsion system, with that shield in place, we could fly this helicopter under the sea.”
“And your Leviathans have them?”
“Most, yes.” She brought her free hand up to grasp her other wrist, steadying her aim. “But enough of this chatter. You have seen all I wished you to see, and now, I’m afraid, it’s time to say farewell.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THE BONE PIPE
A
CCORDING TO THE
luminous dial of Ack-Ack Macaque’s wristwatch, it was midnight when he first glimpsed the campfire. From where he hung, in the upper branches of a tall conifer, the flames danced invitingly, illuminating the trees and throwing long black shadows through the forest. He sniffed. His limbs were tired, his belly empty. Along with the wood smoke, he could smell something else. Something that smelled like an unwashed human, or perhaps...
Moving as stealthily as possible, he worked his way towards the quivering light, keeping to the high branches. Eventually, he came to the edge of a clearing and there, in the centre, was the fire. A figure crouched beside it, wrapped in old blankets, poking the glowing embers with a long stick. At first glance, it resembled a monk, or an old woman in a shawl, but on closer inspection, he saw that copper hair covered the backs of its hands, and its fingers were thick, leathery sausages. Ack-Ack Macaque wrinkled his nose. He’d been right about the smell. The figure wasn’t an old woman; it wasn’t even human. As he watched, it pulled back the blanket covering its head, revealing the deep brown eyes and greying muzzle of an elderly female orangutan.
“You may as well come down,” the orangutan said. “I know you’re there. I’ve been listening to you crashing around for the last ten minutes.”
She waited patiently as Ack-Ack Macaque lowered himself to the forest floor and edged towards the campfire, one hand resting on his holster.
“Who are you?” he demanded.
The orangutan smacked her lips.
“My name is Apynja. Use it wisely.” She reached into the folds of her blanket and pulled out a battered steel canteen. “I expect you’re thirsty.”
“You escaped from Célestine’s place too?”
“It doesn’t matter where I come from. My journey is of little consequence.” She tossed the flask to Ack-Ack Macaque. “Now, take a drink.”
Suddenly, Ack-Ack Macaque’s tongue felt like an old flannel. He unscrewed the lid of the flask and took an experimental sniff.
“Is this vodka?”
“Vodka, and a few medicinal herbs.” Apynja tapped her stick against one of the stones ringing the fire. “Strong stuff, too. It’ll keep out the cold.”
Ack-Ack Macaque swirled the liquid around in its container.
“What are you doing here, Apynja?”
“Waiting for you.”
“For me?”
“You, or somebody like you. You see, if you’re running from the laboratory, these woods are the closest of any appreciable size. I knew that if I waited here, you were bound to turn up sooner or later. You or somebody like you, at any rate.”
Ack-Ack Macaque took a sip from the canteen. The taste drew his lips back against his teeth. The fumes made his eye water.
“How long have you been here?”
“A short while.”
“What about the cyborgs?’
“They don’t worry me.” Apynja smiled through thick, rubbery lips. “You can hear them coming a mile off.”
Ack-Ack Macaque stepped closer to the warmth of the fire. His arms and legs felt like overcooked spaghetti.
“They were chasing me.”
“I don’t doubt it.” She gave the fire a final prod, and then settled back on her haunches. “Now, why don’t you sit down and join me.” She reached behind her and threw a handful of dry leaves onto the embers. They crinkled and curled as they burned, giving off a sweet, oily smoke.
Ack-Ack Macaque glanced back, into the blackness beneath the trees.
“Listen, lady—”
“I’m no lady. And you can relax; you’re perfectly safe here, as long as you’re with me.”
Ack-Ack Macaque opened his mouth to respond, then wondered why he was arguing. He let his shoulders slump.
“Whatever you say.” He took a draught from the flask, and felt the vodka burning its way down to his belly. He was exhausted; he’d been running and swinging for hours. The internal warmth, combined with the heat from the fire, made him drowsy.
He watched as Apynja produced a dirty yellow pipe that looked as if it had been carved from the shinbone of a largish animal, and filled it from a drawstring pouch she kept tucked into the sleeve of her robe. With delicate fingers, she fished a burning twig from the edge of the fire and used it to light the mixture. After a few puffs, she got it going and gave a sigh of satisfaction.
Ack-Ack Macaque took a deep sniff through his nostrils, breathing in as much of the fragrance as he could catch, trying to identify it. She saw what he was doing, and held the pipe out to him.
“Would you like some?”
“Is it tobacco?”
“Something along those lines.”
“Then hell, yeah. Pass it over.”
The elderly ape paused. “It might be more... potent than you expect.”
“Listen, lady, I’ve only got one cigar left, and I’ve been trying to save it. I’m gasping. The way I feel right now, I’d smoke a used teabag if I had to.”
He accepted the pipe from her hands, and took a long, noisy suck from the business end.
Stars exploded behind his eyes.
“Whoa.”
“Quite.” Apynja smiled. In the firelight, wreathed in blue, sticky-smelling fumes, the hairs on her arms and face seemed to shimmer like molten gold. Ack-Ack Macaque blinked. His head felt deliciously light and airy, like a dusty attic with the skylight open, and he could feel all his aches and pains bubbling away into nothingness, as if he’d just slipped into a hot bath. He pulled back his lips and let the smoke curl out between his teeth.
“That,” he said, his voice like boots treading a gravel path, “is some
seriously
good shit.”
H
E WAS BORN
in captivity, in slavery. For the first years of his life, all he knew was cages. Other monkeys were unknowable smells and shrieks in the darkness beyond the bars, trapped behind bars of their own. The only time he met them in the flesh was when he was put in a ring with one of them, their feet scuffing sawdust, weapons clenched in their paws, human faces howling and chanting around them.
The victors were rewarded with fruit, cigarettes and beer; the losers died, coughing their last breath on the floor of the ring.
His owner, a rake-thin Malaysian, stank of coffee, sweat, and back-alley deals. All the man cared about was money. As long as Ack-Ack Macaque kept winning, his owner stayed happy and the treats kept coming. If he was wounded, there were no treats, just a slap across the head. If he lost... Well, Ack-Ack Macaque didn’t need to lose in order to know his owner would walk away without a second glance. So he made sure he never lost. He channelled all his hurt and rage into the fights, taking on larger and larger opponents; sometimes two or three primates at a time; sometimes dogs or large cats. He had no morality or conscience, and could only dimly sense the suffering and pain he caused. In order to survive, he killed everything they put in front of him and, in the process, earned some scars and lost an eye.
Later, he was sold to a lab. They opened up his head and filled it with plastic. They gave him a voice box capable of human speech, then lengthened his spine and extended his arms and legs. He spent six months in a motion-capture suit learning to walk and talk like a human. New skills and attitudes were loaded onto the processors that filled his skull, and then they dropped him into their virtual reality war game and let him think it was real...
T
HE MOVIE OF
his life went dark.
He felt himself unspool into the obscurity of the void. The remains of the world reeled around him, reduced to fragments of memory, glimpses of other times, other places...
Through the maelstrom, he heard Apynja’s voice.
“Close your eye,” she said, “and tell me what you see.”
“Do what?” He struggled against the darkness, flailing like a drowning monkey.
“Indulge me.”
A
T FIRST, ALL
he perceived was the light of the fire flickering through the skin and blood vessels of his closed eyelid, turning his world a deep rosy pink. Then, out of the colour, a pattern emerged. It was like television static, but every blip and pixel contained an image of the whole. Every scratch and shadow was a world in itself, and all the worlds were connected.
“I see... everything,” he said, his tongue thick like a dead thing in his mouth. “The whole multiverse. All the timelines.”
“And what else?”
He tried to look closer, but the picture seethed, always just out of focus. He got the impression there were forces moving beyond the limits of his perception, mighty struggles being played out just beneath the surface tension of his understanding.
“War,” he said.
Apynja pursed her lips and nodded gravely.
“You are a creature of violence,” she said, “in a world laid waste by violence—lost in an endless ether of chaos and suffering.”
“It’s not my fault.”
Apynja’s laugh filled the skies like the derision of an unkind god. “But of course it is.”
The giddy sensation passed. Ack-Ack Macaque found himself standing on something that felt like sand or ashes. His toes sank into it and he shivered in the wind.
“Where am I?”
He raised his eye to a sky grown dim with the burned-out embers of dying stars, and knew he stood on a lifeless planetoid at the conclusion of all things, at the dusk of the universe.
“At the Eschaton. The place where one story ends and another begins.”
Recoiling from the emptiness, he flailed his arms and legs, lashing the void around him, kicking up dust.
“Let me go!”
“Hush now.” The old orangutan’s voice seemed to come from everywhere at once. “Concentrate.”
“Fuck you.”
Apynja sighed like a tired parent.
“Why must you always make this so difficult?”
And then everything spiralled away, like water down a plughole.
S
OME TIME LATER
—he had no way of guessing exactly how many hours had actually passed—Ack-Ack Macaque realised he was back in the familiar discomfort of his own body. Opening his eye, he looked up through the black, almost leafless branches at the edge of the clearing. He was lying on his back and the clouds seemed to flex and roil above him like the skin on the belly of a dragon.
He sat up, and had to put his palms flat against the forest floor to stop the world from spinning. The trees around him seemed to bend and straighten in time with his breathing.
“What fuckery was that?” The dregs of his dream were fading. On the other side of the fire, Apynja watched him with shining eyes.
“You saw things as they really are. Now, tell me, what do you believe?”
Ack-Ack Macaque’s head throbbed and he groaned. He hated hangovers. “I don’t believe in anything.”
The orangutan looked disappointed.
“How about good versus evil?”
With a hand to his brow, Ack-Ack Macaque snarled. “Good and evil, heaven and hell, humans and monkeys. I’m sick of all of it.”
“Really?” The faintest suggestion of a smile brushed across the elderly ape’s lips.
Ack-Ack Macaque took another pull on the pipe. The smoke seemed to calm him, seemed to stop the world from trying to sway and tilt. “Yeah, I’m sick of being told to choose sides all the time. I’m sick of people messing with my head; people trying to take over or destroy the world; sick of
fucking robots trying to kill me
.”
“Then what are you prepared to do about it?”
“Me?” He gave a snort. “What can I do, except look out for myself?”
“Ah!” Apynja held up a wrinkled finger. “So you
have
chosen a side?”
“Yeah, I guess I have.” He looked into the flames. “My own side. Just me, because I’m sick of all the other bullshit.”