‘So, where are we going?’ he asked her.
‘Well, you can take me for a drink and then we’ll hit a Crasis bar I know. Sound all right?’
‘Sounds fine. Shall we take a trap?’ he said, pointing a little way up the street to a two-wheeled open vehicle waiting by the kerb. A ysner-mistretl pair were harnessed between the traces, the ysner craning its long neck down to peck at a feed bag in the gutter, the small, smartly uniformed mistretl on its back looking around alertly and tapping its thumbs together.
‘Good idea,’ she said. They walked up to the trap and climbed aboard. ‘The Collyrium Lounge,’ the woman said to the mistretl as they sat in the rear of the small vehicle. It saluted and pulled a whip out from its fancy jerkin. The ysner made a sighing noise.
The trap shook suddenly. A great deep burst of noise came from the street behind them. They all looked round. The pondrosaur was rearing up, bellowing; its mahout nearly fell off its neck. His mace tumbled from his grasp and bounced on the street. Two of the kliestrithrals jumped up and leapt into the crowd, snarling and dragging their handlers with them. The two Sintricates who’d been arguing with the mahout rose quickly into the air out of the way; people in float harnesses took avoiding action through the confusion of searchlight beams and anti-aircraft fire. Flin and Genar-Hofoen watched people scatter in all directions as the pondrosaur leapt forward with surprising agility and started charging down the street towards them. The mahout clung desperately to the beast’s ears, screeching at it to stop. The stabilised black and silver cupola on the animal’s back seemed to float along above it until the animal’s increasing speed forced it to oscillate from side to side. At Genar-Hofoen’s side, Flin seemed frozen.
Genar-Hofoen glanced round at the mistretl. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘let’s get going.’ The little mistretl blinked quickly, still staring up the street. Another bellow echoed off the surrounded buildings. Genar-Hofoen looked back again.
The charging pondrosaur reached up with one fore-limb and ripped its eye-cups off to reveal huge, faceted blue eyes like chunks of ancient ice. With its other limb it gripped the mahout by one shoulder and wrenched him off its neck; he wriggled and flailed but it brushed him to one side and onto the pavement; he landed running, fell and rolled. The pondrosaur itself thundered on down the street; people threw themselves out of its way. Somebody in a bubblesphere didn’t move fast enough; the giant transparent ball was kicked to the side, smashing into a hot food-stall; flames leapt from the wreckage.
‘Shit,’ Genar-Hofoen said as the giant bore down upon them. He turned to the mistretl driver again. He could see the face of the ysner, turned back to look up the street behind too, its big face expressing only mild surprise. ‘Move!’ he shouted.
The mistretl nodded. ‘Goo’ i’ea,’ it chirped. It reached behind to slip a knot on the rear of the ysner and jabbed its bootheels into the animal’s lower neck. The startled ysner took off, leaving the trap behind; the vehicle tipped forward as the ysner-mistretl pair disappeared down the rapidly clearing street. Genar-Hofoen and Flin were thrown forward in a tangle of harnesses. He heard her shout, ‘Fuck!’ then go oof as they hit the street.
Something hit him hard on the head. He blacked out for a moment then came to looking up at a huge face, a monstrous face, gazing down at him with huge prismed blue eyes. Then he saw the woman’s face. The face of Dajeil Gelian. She had blood on her top lip. She looked groggily at him and then turned to gaze up at the huge animal face looking down at them. There was a sort of buzzing sensation from somewhere; Genar-Hofoen felt his legs go numb. The woman collapsed over his legs. He felt sick. Lines of red dots crossing the sky floated behind his eyelids when they closed. When he forced his eyes open again, she was there again. Somebody looking like Dajeil Gelian who wasn’t her. Except it wasn’t Flin either. She was dressed differently, she was taller and her expression was… not the same. And anyway, Flin was still draped unconscious over his legs.
He really didn’t understand what was going on. He shook his head. This hurt.
The girl who wasn’t Dajeil or Flin stooped quickly, looked into his eyes, whirled the cloak off her shoulders and onto the street beside him in one movement, then rolled him over onto it, heaving Flin’s immobile body out of the way as she did so. He tried waving his arms around but it didn’t do much good.
The cloak went rigid underneath him and floated into the air, wrapping round him. He cried out and tried to fight against its enclosing black folds, but the buzzing came again and his vision faded even before the cloak finished wrapping itself round him.
8. Killing Time
I
The usual way to explain it was by analogy; this was how the idea was introduced to you as a child. Imagine you were travelling through space and you came to this planet which was very big and almost perfectly smooth and on which there lived creatures who were composed of one layer of atoms; in effect, two-dimensional. These creatures would be born, live and die like us and they might well possess genuine intelligence. They would, initially, have no idea or grasp of the third dimension, but they would be able to live perfectly well in their two dimensions. To them, a line would be like a wall across their world (or, from the end, it would look like a point). An unbroken circle would be like a locked room.
Perhaps, if they were able to build machines which allowed them to journey at great speed along the surface of their planet – which to them would be their universe – they would go right round the planet and come back to where they had started from. More likely, they would be able to work this out from theory. Either way, they would realise that their universe was both closed, and curved, and that there was, in fact, a third dimension, even if they had no practical access to it. Being familiar with the idea of circles, they would probably christen the shape of their universe a ‘hypercircle’ rather than inventing a new word. The three-dimensional people would, of course, call it a sphere.
The situation was similar for people living in three dimensions. At some point in any civilisation starting to become advanced it was realised that if you set off into space in what appeared to be a perfectly straight line, eventually you would arrive back at where you started, because your three-dimensional universe was really a four-dimensional shape; being familiar with the idea of spheres, people tended to christen this shape a hypersphere.
Usually around the same point in a society’s development it was understood that – unlike the planet where the two-dimensional creatures lived – space was not simply curved into a hypersphere, it was also expanding; gradually increasing in size like a soap-bubble on the end of a straw which somebody was blowing into. To a four-dimensional being looking from far enough away, the three-dimensional galaxies would look like tiny designs imprinted onto the surface of that expanding bubble, each of them, generally, heading away from all the others because of the hypersphere’s general expansion, but – like the shifting whorls and loops of colour visible on the skin of a soap bubble – able to slide and move around on that surface.
Of course, the four-dimensional hypersphere had no equivalent of the straw, blowing air in from outside. The hypersphere was expanding all by itself, like a four-dimensional explosion, with the implication that, once, it had been simply a point; a tiny seed which had indeed exploded. That detonation had created – or at least had produced – matter and energy, time and the physical laws themselves. Later – cooling, coalescing and changing over immense amounts of time and expansion – it had given rise to the cool, ordered, three-dimensional universe which people could see around them.
Eventually in the progress of a technologically advanced society, occasionally after some sort of limited access to hyperspace, more usually after theoretical work, it was realised that the soap bubble was not alone. The expanding universe lay inside a larger one, which in turn was entirely enclosed by a bubble of space-time with a still greater diameter. The same applied within the universe you happened to find yourself on/in; there were smaller, younger universes inside it, nested within like layers of paper round a much-wrapped spherical present.
In the very centre of all the concentric, inflating universes lay the place they had each originated from, where every now and again a cosmic fireball blinked into existence, detonating once more to produce another universe, its successive outpourings of creation like the explosions of some vast combustion engine, and the universes its pulsing exhaust.