A Theatre of Timesmiths

by Garry Kilworth

Genres: Horror; Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure

Synopsis

Trapped behind walls of towering ice, First City was a prison from which no one ever escaped. The Trysts ruled with an iron fist: violent death was a common sight on the streets. Morag MacKenzie was a mind-prostitute who gave erotic thought stimulation, without giving her body. Those who yearned for other escapes visited the Timesmiths, within those hands time could be moulded like clay as they spun dream-visions. But morag has her own dreams, of a world outside the ice walls, a world of space and freedom, and she is determined to find it.

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 185

Sample

It was a city of freezing mists, emerging each morning like a grey, ridged beast through layers of swamp fog. Haifa thousand years old, it was completely surrounded by a wall of white-veined ice in the shape of a cone. No one knew exactly how thick the ice was at its base but it was at least a kilometre: the length of the longest escape tunnel ever attempted. The blowhole, at the top, was approximately half a kilometre in diameter but this distance varied according to the temperature of the gases exhaled by the city.

First City itself had been built in the shape of a hexagon, of four-storey, grey blockhouses with a tall, green tower at the very centre. Its streets were narrow and frequently white with a heavy frost or awash with meltwater. Covering the area of the city was a high roof: a transparent canopy strengthened with great stargirders to protect it against fallbergs. The inhabitants of First City world were generally of a morose and truculent disposition, and many of those whose spirit had not been broken by a life of privation, disease and depression spent their waking hours planning escape from the whirlpool of ice that was their prison.

Morag MacKenzie was one such person.

Morag MacKenzie watched the priest slide the body into the tomb: a hole cut in the wall of ice that surrounded the city. This was her world, inside the cone of frozen water, and like many others, she hated it. She hated it because it was a prison from which none escaped. She hated it because it was a grey, dismal place where people barely managed to exist. She hated it because she had a restless, curious spirit and the lifestyle the city imposed upon that spirit was claustrophobic, crushing and promised a bleak future.

She looked away from the corpse of her former employer. Ilona Ingle had never been a friend but she had meant security while she had been the madam of a thriving whorehouse. Now, Morag and three other prostitutes were without shelter. It was almost impossible to survive in First City unless you had a roof over your head.

They were spitting on the corpse as a mark of respect now, the globules freezing into white blisters as they struck. It was colder than death near the ice. Around her the walls creaked and groaned relentlessly as the priest droned out his orisons—it was almost as if the ice were providing musical accompaniment to a dirge. She looked upwards, at the blowhole some three kilometres overhead. There was a grey-blue sky above. She longed to be the first to go beyond the lip of the cone, and return.

A great gush of meltwater fell from the misty heights of the interior of the cone. It thundered on to the canopy that covered the city, ran down the gutters in the stargirders, and finally fountained out near the mourners, to disappear down the boreholes that followed the perimeter of the city.

Morag, though tall, was a slim woman and she felt the cold. A lock of her dark hair had escaped the hood of her toga and was frozen hard against her forehead. She did not move it in case skin came away. It was best to leave it until she could thaw out.

Someone sighed near her.

“So beautiful,” they said, softly.

Now what did that mean? Death was beautiful? Surely not I Ion as corpse? The madam had never had any pretence to beauty. Perhaps the sermon or the prayers? No, they were dull and boring. The whole situation possibly? Morag looked around her again, ignoring the priest’s interminable chanting. It was possible that some people might even find the ice beautiful, with its white-lightning veins and wet, shiny surface. The grey blockhouses of the city too, if one had the kind of mind that appreciated symmetry, though she personally could not see them without also seeing the despair and misery that they housed. People without hope. People who dragged themselves out of one day and into the next, knowing that change was not possible: there would always be the cold, the intermittent hunger, the drab existence, the possibility of a premature death. There was always Raxonberg, Chief of Trysts, to keep them inside the city, no matter how many ingenious escapes were dreamed up, with balloons, and scaling equipment and tunnels through the walls. There would always be the unreliability of the central computer that controlled their lives.

What would she do now? She was not fond of any of the other prostitutes, so there was no point in staying together. She looked over her shoulder and saw the black man on the edge of the crowd of mourners. Him? He had approached her earlier, offering accommodation, but had not yet explained why. She would find out. There was nothing to lose now except … except her pride. She did not want charity and neither did she want to prostitute her body. It was her mind she worked with, not her loins. She decided to ignore him for the time being. If he was genuinely interested he would follow her.

Morag turned, walking quickly away from the dozen mourners. The priest was busy scattering ice chips on the body and he looked up, frowning slightly. Then he bent his head to his task again. It was a matter of indifference to her that he felt slighted. She had paid her respects and that was all that mattered. Now she had to take care of herself.

There was a scream from the ice above: a berg was beginning to part from the main body of the cone. It had her attention momentarily, that wrenching, grating cry from her prison. Looking up, a glitter of tinsel caught her eye, as a tiny sliver of frozen water drifted obliquely through the beam of a perimeter light: a falling star.

Around and above her the huge, humped ice leaned over threateningly, ridged and rippled where the meltwater flowed down its smooth walls. Darkness courted its upper, cavernous interior, where frozen mists moved as ghosts in the changing currents of air. There were gods up there, among the fine, freezing rains and twisting winds. Powerful gods, that tore hanging bergs the size of towers from the walls and let them fall to shatter into spires which in turn flew javelin-like from the girders, sometimes to bury themselves point-first into the body-ice; or perhaps bouncing stars that cannoned across the canopy to explode into white dust on impact, to cast sparkling clouds of powdered ice through the perimeter arc lights.

It was over two hundred metres back to the edge of the city. She strode quickly beneath the giant heater screen which had been raised to allow the funeral procession to pass beneath. Electromechanical devices were prone to erratic behaviour. Six months ago a screen had lowered behind a group who had been inspecting the wall and had fried them. Walking quickly, she reached the narrow streets of the city. The standard eight-storey apartment blocks in their neat grey rows formed dark avenues for her approach. There were not many people about. A few children, playing road games or loitering at the entrances to alleys. Most of the population were huddled in myopic rooms behind the small, mean windows with their thick lenses. The soup palaces would open at 5 o’clock. Morag had to walk the streets for thirty minutes to keep warm. Or, rather, to stop from freezing. She was aware of the dark man, close behind her.

She turned to confront him. He was dressed in the grey toga of a civil servant. She read the name again, the symbols tattooed on his cheekbones just below each eye: Ben Blakely.

“You still following me?” she said. “What is it you want?”

He looked up into her face, his gaze fixed upon her own tattoos. He seemed hesitant and unsure. As if he were unused to dealing with prostitutes.

“I’m sorry … I saw you leave for the funeral and I thought… .”

“I’m not working any more,” she snapped. There was a pathetic look about him and she was aware that her tone was not helping him. It was difficult not to feel sorry for him.

Gently, he said, “That’s not what I want.”

When she did not reply, he asked, “Can’t we talk? My apartment is only two blocks away. I may be able to help you.”

“Help me what?”

“You need a room. You’ve already spent two nights in the open. How long do you think you can last?”

“You’ve been following me for two days?”

She had intended to sound angry but her annoyance was diluted by her surprise. The first time she had noticed him was that morning.

“Does that bother you?”

“It depends… .” She made a quick decision, “I’ll come but I don’t need any money. She—” Morag nodded towards the city limits— “she left me plenty to be going on with.”

“Only food discs though.”

Morag fingered the plastic discs inside the mittens. She knew them all to be coloured red.

“Look, I don’t mean you any harm.” He lifted his hands and then let them drop, a gesture which showed he understood the futility of her situation. “Food’s not your problem at the moment. Accommodation is. I can help you—and I don’t want anything for it. Not for myself. Come and hear what I’ve got to say, at least.”

Morag glanced around her, at the huddled people in the doorways and alleys, some with their togas pulled up over their heads, exposing their legs to the cold. On the steps of an apartment block about ten metres away sat a woman in a threadbare toga. It was impossible to tell if she was young or old, but her face had the pallor of the grey crumbling stone on which she sat, rigid as the brickwork itself, staring vacantly. The building façade framed her small tight figure, as if the two of them had been fashioned at the same time and their ancient lines had fallen into a similar pattern of decay, the mortar holding brick and stone, flesh and bone, together only by the tiny ice crystals that glistened from the cracks and crevices of wall and skin. They were one: woman and wall, their destinies the same—to sit exposed to the erosive elements, to crumble, grain by grain, to dust. This too, was Morag’s destiny, if she cared to think too hard about it. A week in the open would put the same hue to her skin, give her that same dull, stonelike expression, produce those ash-white hands that gripped the edge of the toga with the inflexibility of griffon claws. Morag was glad she was too far away to see the woman’s eyes, which would be as glazed and blank as the windows of her background framework.

What should she do about this black man’s offer? She was suddenly angry because she had little choice in the matter. Not if she intended to spend a warm night.

“All right, I’ll come. But I want to know under what conditions. No more hedging.”

He smiled then. A warm, friendly smile. “Fine, I’ll tell you when we get out of the cold air.”

The apartment was reached by way of slick, gloomy stairways, flanked by ill-lit passages. It was a top floor room and she tried not to show that she was impressed. Once inside, the man took off his mittens, opened his outer toga and then turned to help her with hers. She shook her head. He nodded, replacing his own mittens.

She said, “I’m not warm yet.”

She looked around the room. It was sparsely furnished, with togas and blankets covering the floor. There was a single seat. A stool. Not a bad little apartment. Comfortable at least. It was all she was used to.

The man moved to the dim light of the window.

“Don’t you want to know more about me,” he asked, “before I explain why I want to talk to you?”

“Is there any reason why I should?”

He shrugged without turning round. “I don’t know. Perhaps I might be a Messiah. The one who will lead our people to the sun. It seems to be the one topic of conversation these days… .”

“If he, or she, ever comes … well, he won’t look like you. Hell be tall and straight… .”

“… and golden. Yes, yes.” He gave a sigh. “Look at that ugly prison out there… .”

Morag crossed to the window and looked out through a space in the frostfern patterns on the pane. Below her the sharp angles of the streets and buildings formed a cubist pattern varied only by shades of dark and light grey, with some patches of white where the frost rested. The one streak of colour was the green obsidian tower in the centre, which rose like a lance to threaten the canopy above it. At the tip of the tower was a cupola in which it was said—and few doubted—the central brain, the Primary, was housed. The mighty semi-organic computer that controlled their tight little world of misery, making it a place just barely possible to exist within, was their housegod with which a love-hate relationship was maintained. Even now ambivalent feelings welled within her breast, as she studied the mottled exterior of its impenetrable keep.

The rest of the city was uniform in its general appearance, the flat-roofed buildings interconnected by walkways and forming almost a single unit, a banyan-like beast that grew from and into itself to make one tight structure, without beginning or end: a Klein-bottle in blocked stone. Here and there was evidence of neglect and decay where chunks of granite had detached themselves from buildings and lay in the narrow streets: pieces of sill, a cornerstone from a roof, one or two shattered cornices. There was an attempt at ornamentation: stone griffons loured down upon the streets and alleys, or stared malevolently into each other’s eyes across three metres of space. Their implacable expressions had often been responsible for their destruction, when some resident with a facing window could no longer stand the frozen gaze and had taken a pole to a carving, decapitating it.

There were also some attempts at mosaic, around doorways and windows, but the lack of different varieties of stone had produced a poor patchwork of grey.

In her more fanciful moments Morag could view the city as a many-headed, multi-shouldered mutant giant, whose arms and legs grew out and into its disparate parts with grotesque oneness: a giant that seemed to be eating itself yet at the same time growing new limbs and heads; a giant that was caught in a desperate struggle with itself, was locked in a tense knot of muscles of equal strength so that it remained unmoving yet straining in every fibre for possession over itself. It was a living thing, this city, that remained in a state of high pressure, pushing, pulling, straining, heaving, in an equation that never altered.

“That’s our Messiah, out there, if we can get to its heart and head,” said Ben Blakely, startling Morag back into awareness.

“What? Where … what are you talking about?”

“That… .” He pointed. “The tower.”

“The green tower?”

He nodded. “Not so much the tower, but the thing inside it. If I could get to the Primary … if we could reach that damned hybrid we could find a way out of this place. I hate that thing … yet we can’t exist without it, can we?”

Underneath the city was a wormery of tunnels, ducts, channels and drains. Filling these voids were jungles of silver pipes, black cables, wires, tubes: the city’s life support system, that spread outwards from the torso of the Primary like the roots of a giant tree. This underworld pulsed and hummed, gurgled and gasped, crackled, hissed and spat: restless, ever-working, playing catch-me-can with light and darkness. Along this fibre rippled bright data to a secondary computer; through that tube ran the chemical agent feeding the brain of the central computer itself; down these pipes, all twisting, turning, interlocking, and fanning out, travelled the threads of electricity that burned in the heater screens. Beneath the mesh of the Primary’s multiform limbs and extremities, a geothermal borehole dropped to the core of the planet, where the contained heat of a captive star was sapped of its energy and transformed into a hundred different varieties of dancing electrons before transmission. Morag knew of this magic unterwelt and of its importance in her life but it had less significance for her than the men and women that controlled it through the central brain.

“Why should I want to know who the five are?” she said in response to a question from Ben Blakely. She stared out at the weak, roofcorner lamps on the opposite building and noticed how the mortar around them had spidery plants clinging to it which gave the lamps green ruffs.

“I should have thought everyone wanted to know the answer to that question. If we knew one of the five people that maintained the Primary … well, then we’d have the key to power. Perhaps to freedom… .”

Morag looked round into his face, which had suddenly taken on a look of concentration that seemed to age him in the grey light.

She said, “You want me to find one of the five, take the key to the green tower and let you in, so that you can melt the ice cone, allowing us all to enter the outworld?” She smiled sarcastically. ‘That it?”

Ben frowned. “Of course not.” He pulled his hood back from his head in frustration and she could see that his hair was as dark as his skin, except for one small streak of white at his temple. She fixed her gaze on this hoary lock, knowing she could intimidate him without words. She was skilled at inflating the male ego and consequently she was also expert at deflating it. She saw his hand touch the spot, almost involuntarily. Then she felt ashamed of herself because this man … well, he seemed to arouse a feeling of tenderness in her for some reason. He was not like the clients she had to face occasionally, he was more … more like her father. He had had that same appealing, sad look which had raised protective emotions in her breast as a small child. Somehow, then, she had known her father was destined for a premature death. He was the kind of man that had his fate stamped on his features and wore it in his demeanour. A snout of ice had crushed both parents when a heater screen failed one night. Although she had been an adopted child her love for her father had been as strong as that of any blood-related infant. Not that Ben Blakely would necessarily die young: he just had the same sort of attractive love-need in his aspect.

“What are you looking at?” he said.

“Nothing. You have an interesting face, that’s all. Look, how am I supposed to help you? What do you want from me?”

“I need … we have to find a way, an entrance to the tower. Listen … I know one of the five. I know his name. I know his face. I’ve tried following him but somehow I always lose him. He’s gifted at slipping away into nowhere—and I have to walk some way behind him, otherwise he might realise and that would be the end of it—or me. I know which food hall he visits. You could… .”

Morag did not hear the words that followed. She had had a sudden realisation and it formed in her mind like cold clay. Surely not? He was on his own … they usually travelled in twos and threes. That’s how you learned to recognise them on the streets. Two or three young people with intent looks on their faces and murder in their hearts. You learned to sense that air of unease about them. Perhaps it was in the body odour or the look in their eyes? They carried their intent around with them like a badge of office, in the way they walked and moved: quick, jerky actions, but deliberate, full of self-conscious gestures. The adrenalin, the fear-bloodlust sweat, gave their movements tha. . .