Time of Breath Page 3

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  1 You might want to bookmark this bit. It is going to be important in the fifth book in the Drakeforth series.

  Chapter 5

  There is a reason no one writes poetry about the majestic beauty of the inside of commercial aircraft. It is the same reason why there are entire verses dedicated to the vision of birds soaring majestically as the masters of flight and not even a dirty limerick about the inside of those same creatures.

  Much like the interior of your standard bird, the inside of a zippelin is cramped, humid, and if you are simply passing through, quite uncomfortable.

  Habeas also liked to watch the zippelins coming and going. These vast silver cylinders, over a hundred feet long with aerodynamically tapered ends, moved like clouds as the reflected light of the afternoon eferncesun bounced off the paper-thin alloy shell that encased the gas bubble and passenger cabin. He watched as a loaded zippelin rose from its boarding gate mooring. It floated upwards like a soap bubble borne on the warm breath of a child’s delight. With a perfect delicacy, the balloon manoeuvred into position for the flight to distant Pathia. Once the craft was pointed in the right direction, the jet engines rotated into a flight position. A moment later the empathic generators engaged the power and the sleek, silver bullet accelerated towards its destination at a velocity quickly approaching the speed of sound.

  Habeas sighed; in his mind, the zippelin was the perfect comb­ination of faith and technology. Watching these behemoths vanish over the horizon in a blur filled his heart with a righteous joy.

  Going from a stationary position, to within touching distance of the speed of sound in the space of a heartbeat, comes as a surprise to many organs in the human body. The foam of the seats and the soft cuddle of the passenger harnesses held us in a comforting embrace as the air outside blurred.

  We angled up into the air and then levelled off. I swallowed a wave of nausea as the rollercoaster of take-off put my spleen through a rigorous wash cycle.

  With a slow breath, I looked out the window and tried to make sense of the blobs of colour passing underneath us.

  The hazy sprawl of the city gave way to the smears of satellite towns, the blurred lines of highways, the green splat of forests and the smudge of ocean water.

  For all its eye-watering speed, zippelin travel is one of the safest modes of transport. The safety features engineered into the navigation systems and engines of the flying machines were so complex that there were rumoured instances of an Empathic Singularity. In theory, when so many separate empathically empowered circuits were working together they could achieve a kind of awareness. Until recently, I would have rejected the idea with a sinus-clearing snort.

  Experience is a great teacher. Personally, I always prefer it to be backed up by a good lesson plan and a multi-choice exam. Clos­ing my eyes against the kaleidoscope of the landscape far below, I tried to relax and pretend I could sleep through the flight.

  It started as an itch, almost a vibration rising up through the dense pressure foam of the seat. By the time it scaled my spine and brushed my teeth, it was an audible chorus of whispers. Wheeee…!

  “Wee?” I muttered, and opened my eyes.

  “Bathrooms are at the rear of the aircraft,” Drakeforth replied without looking up from his magazine.

  I leaned over the currently empty central seat. “Can you hear someone going, wheee, Drakeforth?”

  “Toilet humour, Pudding?”

  “What? No. I can hear voices. They’re all going, Wheeee!”

  “With an empathic resonance sensitivity like yours, Pudding, I’m surprised you don’t hear more things.”

  “But why wheeee?”

  Drakeforth put down his magazine. He’d been scribbling notes in one of the articles and doodling derisive faces on certain passages he had underlined. “You are in a constructed shell of metal, plastic, and empathically powered technology, hurtling through the atmosphere close to the speed of sound.”

  I nodded. My frown remained fixed.

  “I wouldn’t start worrying until you hear the voices say ‘Oops’.”

  I sat back; Drakeforth’s words made an odd kind of sense. I was picking up on the collective resonance of a legion of tiny empathically powered circuits and components. Collectively they shared a basic awareness of hurtling through the air, so why shouldn’t they be enjoying themselves?

  Since meeting Vole Drakeforth, the man who claimed to be the retired god of the world’s foremost religion, Arthurianism, my life had been interesting. My inner critic piped up to insist that life had been quite interesting enough before Drakeforth dragged me into his lunatic conspiracy theory about the secret origins of double-e flux, the mysterious energy that ran everything. It was tempting to overlook the fact that Drakeforth’s conspiracy theory was correct. The truth still made my skin crawl.

  I hadn’t had a lot of time to come to terms with my sensitivity to empathic resonance that was off the charts. I had always liked charts. They brought order to chaos and represented large volumes of data in clear terms that could often foresee the future better than reading tea leaves.

  Not being dead just made things more complicated.

  I think being dead would have removed a great deal of respons­ibility. Of course I didn’t have enough experience of being dead to say for sure.

  Arthurians tended to scoff at questions about death. To them, there is an acceptable level of probability that we are energy and energy cannot be created or destroyed. Energy can be inconvenienced by being forced into the shape of a bored youth serving burgers in any one of the faceless corporate franchise outlets. However, with perseverance and the passing of puberty, even energy can make something of itself and finally transform into a form far less aggravating.

  I once had a T-shirt with a quote attributed to the Arthurian physicist, Toronomy Snoot, printed on it: “Energy is an Optimist.”

  Once I would have said that attributing any kind of world view to something as elemental as energy was simply an effect of empathic resonance. Now, I wasn’t so sure. Every vibrating particle and wave of double-e flux was once part of a person. A life lived and experience gained. Now, like the individual fibres that make up the yarn that is woven into a pullover, some tiny fragment of those lives had been diverted into empathic energy and was being used to send us hurtling through the air. Wheee! indeed.

  The worst part is that the constant drone of delight made sleeping away the long hours of the flight impossible.

  The inflight service menu sounded delicious. After our food arrived, I concluded the same person who named our seats wrote the menu.

  Sense Media systems on zippelins have limited immersion, something about the unpleasant effect of being fully engaged in a four-dimensional sensory reality when hitting turbulence. The novelty of watching a sensie on a 2D screen wore off quickly.

  In a fit of terminal boredom, I ended up reading a travel guide to Pathia.

  Pathia, the guidebook said (thanks to the audio function and complimentary headphones) is an ancient country, steeped in tradition and a rich cultural history.

  My experience of other countries was limited, though I felt sure a rich cultural heritage meant your grandparents grew up without the benefits of indoor plumbing.

  Accepted by Arthurian scholars to be the area where Arthur him­self first began the religion that bears his name, modern Pathia has no formal religion and is considered one of the most secular countries in the world.

  I looked over towards the aisle, intending to ask Drakeforth if this was true. The pale woman was back in the seat between us and once again, I hadn’t noticed her leave or return.

  She had her knees up against her chin and her feet flat on the edge of the narrow seat. She wiggled her alabaster toes like the sensory papilla of some exotically anaemic sea slug.

  “Who are you?” I asked. She turned her head, a wave of bl
ack silk hair cascading past her face in a way that if I wasn’t seeing it for myself, I would say was computer generated.

  “Seriously,” I added.

  In response, she lifted a single finger to her lips and made a silent, shh gesture. I shivered.

  “Drakeforth?”

  “Vole isn’t here right now. Would you like to leave a message?” he replied from the aisle seat.

  “Do you know this person?” I nodded significantly at the strange woman seated between us.

  “Do any of us really know anyone?” Drakeforth replied. I leaned forward. He had his hat brim pulled down over his eyes.

  “This is important,” I insisted.

  “Importance is all a matter of perspective.” He was talking into his hat.

  “Well, apply some perspective to the person sitting in the seat between us,” I snapped.

  Drakeforth pushed the brim of his hat upwards with one finger. His eyes rolled in my direction and then rolled away again.

  “I think this is my stop,” he announced. Before I could comment, Drakeforth had left his seat and vanished up the narrow aisle towards the bar at the front of the passenger cabin.

  “I could make a career out of apologising for him,” I said. “Maybe write a book. Like a manual or a user guide or something. Do lecture tours and run seminars at tropical resorts.” I let this daydream run for a few more seconds and started thinking that no matter how lucrative the idea, it would involve addressing large groups of strangers. I went back to my book.

  By the time we were asked to stow our tray tables, return our seats to the upright position, and engage our 8-point inertia-dampening harnesses in preparation for landing, the book assured me that I had learned everything there was to know about Pathia.

  Sand. The country was the world’s largest litter box. Cats were an integral part of Pathia’s history and culture, and the country’s borders were defined by water on three sides and a mountain range on the other two.

  All that sand made for a changing landscape, which is why the Pathians had invented geometry and cartography before other primitive technology like the wheel and the humorous greeting card. The guidebook had an entire chapter about early attempts to make maps that would show land ownership. It was two centuries before the concept of scale was invented and maps were no longer required to be actual size.

  Aside from the general dismissal of organised religion, Pathia had given up on the idea of money. Their economy did not operate on a complex system of cheques and balances. Instead, they operated on something called the Knowledge Economy. It sounded impossibly confusing. I gleaned from the guidebook that the basic idea was that it wasn’t the value of the product or service someone provided, but some kind of intangible value of the contribution to the knowledge and betterment of society as a whole that their economic system was based on. Pathia, the book said, is a country where information is more valuable than rare minerals.

  When we landed in the capital city of Semita, I felt ready to pass any kind of immigration pop-quiz they might hit me with at customs.

  Chapter 6

  Filing out of the zippelin, the first thing that hit me was the heat. The second thing that hit me was the heat. Pathia baked under an eternal summer. The worst part of it was the way the heat came up from the ground; it was as hot as the sun shining down, except without the bright light.

  “Hat, glasses,” Drakeforth instructed. I nodded, my eyes screwed shut against the glare as I fumbled for our purchases.

  It made a nice difference, and as long as I didn’t breathe, the heat was merely unbearable.

  “Brrr,” Drakeforth shivered.

  “Yes, we should get inside before we freeze to death.” In the same way that vaccines trick your immune system into fighting a disease with biological props, I felt I was getting the hang of hanging with Drakeforth.

  We made it to the terminal, where the doors seemed to steel themselves before opening. Inside it was cooler, with a great colour scheme and eye-catching modern art installations. The temperature was much lower than outside, too.

  “Try not to let them know that you know,” Drakeforth murmured.

  “Who? What?”

  “Exactly.” Drakeforth nodded.

  If we were going to be tourists, that meant souvenirs. I went to a nearby shop selling T-shirts and flipped through the racks.

  Drakeforth stood back and watched her shop.

  “Pudding, we are at a junction in what, for simplicity’s sake, we will call space and time. You are going to make the first of many choices. The outcome of those choices, of course, will remain unknown to you until it is far too late. You will know about this later because you are going to write it all down, or he will. And if you think that’s breaking the fourth wall, then just you wait till I break the fifth wall.”1

  My credit stick still worked in this part of the world, which was a relief. I held up a T-shirt for Drakeforth to see.

  “My Sister Went to Pathia and All I Got Was This Amazing T-shirt,” I read. “I got it for Ascott. He hates souvenirs.”

  “I’m sure he will not love it,” Drakeforth replied.

  We joined the queue of people seeking formal admission to the country. While we waited to be admitted, I wondered: If we weren’t in Pathia in the official sense, then where the herbivore were we?

  My passport got stamped by an immigration official with long hair in a complex sculpted style that suggested he used wallpaper paste as shampoo and slept on it wet.

  I followed the signs to the baggage claim area and stood in expectant silence among a hundred other people, all of us staring at the luggage conveyor and waiting for the obvious to happen.

  There are people who devote their lives to studying the big mysteries. They are motivated by money, curiosity, boredom, or, in many cases, the overwhelming need to prove that they are right, and everyone who ever doubted them can go do what famous playwright, Colin Oscopy, once invited the East Geshun Observer’s critic to do with her first night review of the production of Colin’s new play, Aubergine Emergent.

  When people converge in groups around airport baggage claims, I am reminded that someone, for some reason, designed the entire baggage retrieval system in a certain way. I’m equally certain, that, like Oscopy, they harboured a deep, irrational hatred against their fellow man.

  After forty minutes, Drakeforth joined me, a steaming take-away cup of tea in his hand. “Having fun?” he asked.

  “Gosh, yes!” I gushed. “I saw all these other people standing around and I thought, that looks like the sort of mind-numbing activity I would really enjoy, and you know what? It’s more wonderfully mind-numbing than I ever imagined it would be.”

  “Your bags are over there.” Drakeforth indicated a trolley so similar to the one I had wrestled with at the beginning of our journey that I wondered, for a moment, if we had ever left our point of departure.

  “Right…” I took a deep breath and let my shoulders drop. “Where have you been for the last forty minutes?”

  Drakeforth raised his take-away cup, “I’ve been sitting over there drinking tea, enjoying a fresh scone and wondering what you were doing standing at the baggage claim.”

  “Pathia is a desert country, isn’t it?”

  “Mostly,” Drakeforth agreed.

  “Lots of loose soil, easy digging?”

  “In places.”

  I looked around. “I wonder if I can buy a shovel here? Or some other tool suitable for digging a shallow grave.”

  “In Pathia, traditionally the dead are not buried, they are pathed.”

  “Passed?” I frowned.

  “No, after they have passed, they are pathed.”

  I reached for my guidebook and thumbed through it until I found the section on burial customs. I read in silence for a few moments.

  “Oh, you have got to
be kidding!”

  “Mind where you step,” Drakeforth said. “And when you see a sign saying, Keep On The Grass, do it.”

  Between the city of Semita and us, a young woman with short hair stood holding a sign. In local pictograms and carefully printed letters, it said: Experienced Pathologist. Reasonable Daily Rates.

  A cat was weaving between her bare ankles in a figure eight pattern that seemed to generate bliss for the small creature and made my toes curl in ticklish empathy.

  Drakeforth went and spoke with her, and then leaned in and whispered something in her ear. They shook hands and she introduced herself as Harenae, and immediately offered to drive our trolley.

  “Be my guest.”

  I didn’t think it was fair to inflict Drakeforth and an airport trolley on her on the same day. However, she guided the trolley across the terminal with a casual ease that made my eyes narrow. The cat groomed itself and watched us leave.

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  1 Breaking the fourth wall is when a character in the story addresses the audience directly. The fifth wall is when you get taken out of the story by realising that someone is reading over your shoulder. Aimee hates it when people do that.

  Chapter 7

  “Archaeology, Pudding. Ever taken a fancy to it?” Drakeforth asked.

  “You mean the study of human history and prehistory through the excavation of sites and the analysis of artefacts and other physical remains?”

  “I was thinking more the marine zoo construction, but sure, let’s go with your version.”

  “It’s never been a passion. On account of all the dirt.”

  “Most of the world is made of dirt.”

  “And yet the oceans get all the credit,” I agreed.

  “Better coverage,” Drakeforth said.

  “You have until we reach the exit to this terminal to make your point, Drakeforth.”

  “Archaeology was invented in Pathia.”