Chapter 4

The following morning they awoke under a sky compacted by bruised and swollen cloud that admitted no visions of Hell. It looked like any ordinary day on Earth, allowing Izzie to focus on breakfast and packing as if on a camping trip, but with periodic collapses into mental tumult as reality took stabs at her. She suddenly thought of sanitary pads. She would be needful in a day or so. What would she use? Grass? Good grief. Could she ask Bel if he had spare linen or would that be too traumatic an insight into womanly needs for a 19th century male?

She welcomed the distraction when Bel asked, “Have you given mind to our purpose today?”

“You mean stay here or go walkabout?”

While he was processing ‘walkabout’ she nodded at the arch, an evanescent ghost at the edge of vision. “Someone must have put it here, so we could wait around and see if they return. But then that’s maybe not such a good idea — you’d know why if you saw Pacific Rim. Plus, it’s a funny thing, but there’s something fishy going on in it. Every now and then I catch a glimpse of — I don’t know . . . something. People maybe.”

He had stopped packing to watch her. “My sister Emmeline is apt to see ghosts, and strange doings in church during service, and she describes such fleeting visions as these. She believes that we live in a haunted world; that the past is ever with us.”

Izzie gave him a smile and fingered back a lock of hair. “She sounds cool.”

The smile had been sweet, even shy, and Bel was struck by her quietness this morning. He pointed to the north. “I propose we visit that hill yonder.”

“Why it?”

“It draws on me.”

“I suppose it’ll give us a view at any rate. Imagine if we just sat here and there was an interstellar commuter station over there.”

That remark had a nice light touch, Izzie thought. It really sounds like I’m facing up to things. Did he buy it? She dreaded being seen as high-maintenance; she was going to pull her weight or else. But if Bel believed she had her shit together he might be tempted to discuss the facts of their predicament: they were marooned on an alien world with rapists and killers. She shot to her feet and took a post-breakfast walk into the trees.

Watching Izzie move about as he packed, Bel was struck by how her brashness, workmen’s clothes and masculine stride failed to repress the charm of her big-eyed sidelong glances and how she brushed back her hair sometimes when she looked at him in a way that disordered his feelings.

They set off with a sense of adventure and because they were out in the open felt safe to continue walking when the molten twilight fell. An absence of conversation continued a trend. The previous day after the introductory exchanges there’d been little talk. Izzie had lectured on history. Bel had lectured on fishing. Mostly a companionship of solitudes had prevailed. It seemed that now they had some diurnal regularity each needed to go inward to draw a new habitat map of their lives.

But then the raising of the bushfire gloom when the eclipse ended uplifted Izzie to an airy optimism and she wanted to talk. She darted a sidelong glance at Bel — then blushed as she convicted her glance of a shyness she suspected would have looked coy had he seen. He made her nervous. He was too gentlemanly; their dealings made her feel like a dork. Also there was something withheld about him that commended caution. She’d known a guy once who was laidback most of the time, but who sometimes erupted from some pent-up melodrama you didn’t know about. She wondered if Bel too held coiled a whiplike fury within.

Basically she just couldn’t read him. He didn’t obey the rules she knew. His assumption of male authority, for instance, and his propriety. Also his indifference to martial cool. In movies soldiers progressed with rifles toughly held ready, but Bel’s musket was propped on his shoulder pointed skyward. Mostly he held the stock near his ribcage but sometimes slid the musket lower and advanced his hand from his body so the gun acquired a slovenly recumbence and bobbed behind him.

Suddenly Bel turned his head and caught Izzie watching him. She jerked her face away with such force a lock of hair stung an eye. Now he was watching her. She resented this because she couldn’t meet his eyes. With stilted casualness she swivelled her gaze across him as if scanning the landscape and he happened to be in the way. With a spurt of alarm she realised that he too wanted to talk — but, she suspected, with a view to probing like a dentist into the cavity of their predicament and their prospects of . . . what? Not dying horribly?

“Bel,” she said quickly, “tell me about yourself. You know, like, your life before the war.”

He nodded and after a moment began speaking of his family. Izzie felt a Jane Austen familiarity in his descriptions of travelling in buggies and reading by lanternlight, but there were moments, such as when he mentioned drawing water from a well, or crinoline worn by his “Ma”, when she felt a frisson, the awe of learning that a fantasy you’ve read was actually real. It wasn’t the plot of a Regency miniseries; it was Bel’s life. People with familiar features doing familiar things like saying “Um” or scratching their nose or looking both ways before crossing the street, all the while dressed like mannequins in a museum.

It wasn’t entirely incidental that indulging a ruthless curiosity for his past saved Izzie from confronting her present.

“Did you want to spend your life as a shopkeeper?”

He gave her a sidelong grin. Curls poked adventurously out from under his cap. “In truth, I was Pa’s despair in the practice of commerce. While Alex preyed on customers with acquisitive solicitude I preyed on our stock of books. Learning is the coin of my greed. I had such a care for books that we could sell as new volumes I’d studied for weeks. In the end I guess Pa accepted that I’d never grow a commercial empire for he arranged a clerkship for me with Mr. Bidleman. It was to start in the fall of ‘sixty-one. The war defeated this scheme.”

“Did he ask your thoughts on the matter?”

Bel looked surprised. “No.”

“Did you like the scheme?”

“I was glad that Pa had contrived a profession suited to my tastes and not unworthy of our family.”

This sounded stilted even for him.

Bel cleared his throat. “But then the war came and I decided to enlist.”

“And Emmeline, what did she do?”

“She stayed at home with Ma.”

“Waiting for a husband?” Izzie wondered if a pre-feminist mind would catch the irony.

“Emmeline is . . . different. She is less disposed to practical matters even than I. But she is a helpful soul and well-liked by all. I guess she is destined for an old maid.”

There was evidently a story here and Izzie pondered how to open it. But then Bel said, “May I ask what you studied at college?”

“I graduated with a worthless Bachelor of Arts.” Izzie never liked talking about herself. She often had dreams in which she was naked in public. But now a venturesome sense of freedom unwrapped her.

“My parents are achievers: Dad’s a lawyer and Mum runs a business. So of course I had to go to uni. Trouble is, it didn’t teach me what to do with my life. So I asked for a gap year, and they agreed on the condition I lived at home so they could keep an eye on me.

“The year expired six months ago. I’ve since diligently applied for jobs that are, as you say, ‘suited to my tastes’, none of which I want. So I inevitably get rejected early in the selection process. My parents are pissed off at me, I’m pissed off at them as well as pissed off at my boyfriend, who for his part is perfectly fine with everything — which just increases my general pissed-off-ness.”

This unveiling led to one of the stunned silences that were already a feature of their relationship. Casting about for a less revealing topic, Izzie grew aware of herself crossing a veldt with all outlooks noosed by an unearthly close horizon, and a flailing panic shook her.

“I wonder what today will bring,” she said — then wished she hadn’t as her eyes began to prick.

He shrugged. “I believe there are more surprises in store.”

Oh great. A silence fell but for the swish of their shoes and trousers through the grass. Izzie occupied herself wondering why she had such trouble dealing with Bel. The fact that he spoke like a book was part of the problem for it made everything he said sound ripe with meaning. She also felt pressured by his lack of pressure. He actually looked at her as she spoke and allowed her all the time she needed to say what she had to say without her feeling he was poised to interject with any catch of breath. He actually seemed to think about what she said. This gave a spurious significance to her most smartass remarks and served as a dingy mirror to show her how much shit she uttered. If conversation was all they’d done on those long evenings before TV and the internet saved everyone from personal exposure, Izzie wouldn’t have lasted five minutes in the Tuttle household.

Bel was preoccupied. He was hardly aware of Izzie for minutes on end. She was a puzzle to him, but he felt that she had a good heart and was content to spend time getting to know her. After all, they might spend their whole lives here — but this was a thought that laid waste a desolation in him, leaving in ruins his hope and courage. He imagined the grief of his family and was torn by regret.

However Bel held a fortress that defeated such thoughts before they carried his will. Ever since one terrible morning by Antietam Creek when half the regiment had fallen Bel had assumed he would never return home. One day his family would grieve for him. Certainly he’d hoped that he might survive and this hope had tugged hardest when battle was imminent or during the bittersweet minutes spent reading or writing letters. But he had spent the weeks between letters and months between battles in a willed absorption in the living moment. And today this absorption was easy, for he was preoccupied by a sensation.

The course they followed had magnetised Bel’s purpose since the previous evening and he’d attributed it to the hill tugging at his soldierly regard for the high ground. But once embarked on the enterprise a slinking unease had closed in. He felt they were being watched. He gave a wide verge to any wood, crest or gully that could harbour predators, but even in the open he felt a mental presence like electricity in the air. Sometimes it was strong enough to raise the hairs on the back of his neck.

Izzie saw a figure in the distance. Humanoid and approaching. She heard a break in Bel’s pace as he saw it too.

“Uh-oh,” she said. “Call me antisocial, but deploy your weapon.”

They halted at a distance from the stranger and Bel lowered the musket off his shoulder with conspicuous casualness to stand it on the ground. The figure maintained a brisk advance. It resolved into a neatly dressed man in his forties, tall with short red hair crowning a high forehead.

“At least it’s not Conan the Barbarian.”

He advanced as though under orders, his forehead butting the air with each stride, and Bel formed a notion this would not be a good man to impede. He was unsettled by the unblemished regularity of the stranger’s features. Izzie thought that he had the acrylic good looks of a soap opera extra. He wore a dark green suit and white collarless shirt.

The man stopped outside viral transmission range and jerked out a nod. “Jarrad Halcrow.” He didn’t offer his hand.

They introduced themselves. Bel omitted his rank and unit.

“Do you know what brought us here?” Halcrow’s voice was brisk.

“No,” said Izzie. “Do you?”

He ignored this. “Have you seen anyone else?”

Resenting how Halcrow had already taken control, Izzie gave him a rundown of their encounters then quickly asked if he’d met anyone before he could fire another question.

“A different set but as weird a mix.”

Halcrow seemed disinclined to elaborate, but Izzie sensed that a need to vent stress and a competitive impulse to beat their stories would prod him to continue. He did.

“I saw a Kamikaze pilot first, then a guy in a business suit from early this century. There were also these females, one from India, I don’t know when but way back, and another who looked like a Maoist. Then, last and best, a Greek hoplite from, like, the fifth century BC.”

“Did you interact with any?”

“None appeared to have anything to offer and a couple looked crazy, one violently so.” He studied Bel, paying attention to the musket. “When are you from?”

“1863.”

“2024. And you?”

“2063.”

Izzie heard a supercilious tone to this declaration as if they’d told him their IQs and he was trumping their best effort by 39 points. But perhaps it was only that she was irritated by his overbearing promontory of a brow. His blue eyes were so pale she could read nothing in them.

“You’re from the Civil War, yes?”

Bel nodded. He thought that if he tried to speak, the words would jam in his throat. Something about the man oppressed him.

“Your side lost in the end,” Halcrow said.

As with Izzie’s claim of a more positive outcome to the war, the news meant nothing to Bel.

Izzie said, “Do you mean the United States has disunited?”

“It’s on the way to being five states in an uncertain alliance.”

“The fallout of an outdated Constitution.” Izzie had decided on a surprise attack at a weak point. The fact that he’d brought it up suggested the fate of the US was a sensitive issue.

Halcrow gave her a sharp look. “Rather blame the Dissolution.” He paused as if having delivered a smart return volley.

The only riposte Izzie could think of was to let him know he wasn’t the only one with a collapse of some kind up his sleeve. “We had Covid.”

“That was nothing to what followed,” he trumped her. “A global meltdown. Here in the US . . .” A spasm wrenched his mouth. “In the US, state legislatures wrested authority from the Federal government. It was the California border security that caused me to be here.”

“What happened?”

Halcrow had retreated a pace, taking his forehead with him. Izzie realised he was disconcerted by her resistance. In a moment of uncanny clarity, as if she weren’t confined to her head, she actually felt Halcrow decide to batter her with information to assert the authority he believed he was owed due to his extra history.

“Do you know what a pask is?”

“A pask?”

“Sometimes called a passkey.” Seeing recognition light her face, he snuffed it. “It’s not what you think. ‘Pask’ is an acronym: Personal All-access Security Key. It’s a microchip implant that links to remote computation and telecoms software. Think of a phone and workstation that’s also a universal ID which monitors body function using vascular nanoware.”

“Oh, we have those already,” Izzie said airily.

“But pasks have a utility and convenience your time could hardly imagine. For instance, they don’t require manual devices for command and search functionality. They emit full lightware.”

Halcrow paused. Izzie refused to give him the satisfaction of asking about ‘lightware’.

He resumed in a flat voice. “They aren’t convenient just for the wearer. Pasks monitor speech, actions and brain activity for divergent tendencies and enable the wearer to be remotely disabled. Wearing one is mandated.”

Another pause. Izzie suppressed any reaction.

“To understand what happened, you also need to know about autonomous vehicles.”

“Self-driven cars? They’ve been around for years.”

He took a steadying breath. “They’re universal now. The state border controls are robot monitors that run checks on passing vehicles and their occupants’ pasks. If an alarm is raised the robom assumes control of the vehicle — pask-jacking, it’s called — and directs it to a secure facility for investigation.

“I got pask-jacked crossing into California. The robom detected Facelift in my system — I mean, hell, I needed a boost: I had a stacked meeting at Ex-Nucleus — and I was taken to someplace out in the desert. Now here’s the thing: I’d shot grade two, which is legal in California, but the robom supposedly read grade one off my pask, and that incurs a mandatory five-year incarceration.

“Well, I insisted it was a mistake, they insisted roboms are infallible, and in the midst of this as things were heating up, I remembered Ex-Nucleus can tap into any network, its syphons are cosmic. I was excess payload on its trajectory so I was being jettisoned. That’s when I went ballistic.” He shrugged. “High-security facilities aren’t great for blow-outs. The next thing I know is I’m here.”

“What’s Ex-Nucleus?” Izzie asked.

Halcrow looked offended that his tragedy had been dismissed so lightly. But, having perhaps taken a lesson from his desert tantrum, he contented himself with a measuring look at Izzie before elevating his tone.

“Ex-Nucleus is a scientific revolution. It’s based on ex-psyence.”

“Ex-science?” Izzie tried.

“Ex-psyence.” He spelled it out.

“Sounds contrived.”

“I invented the term.”

“Oh. Well, I’m sure it sounds great in your time.”

“It’s gone global. I came up with it while writing a puff-piece for a media-hyper and now it’s everywhere.”

“Good for you,” Izzie said with heavy irony.

“Yeah, but Ex-Nucleus has monopolised my term. Its very name references it. By rights I should’ve made the rich list out of that, but the media-hyper held copyright on my article and had sold it for a pismire’s fart. Then my lawyer explained how I had a case, and that’s what I intended to hit them with.”

“So, what’s ex-psyence?” Izzie could tell he yearned to explain. His face was impassive but for lingering disgruntlement, but his brow was descending on her again.

“It’s forty years ahead of your time.”

If Halcrow had thought that would impress her he would have been disillusioned by her snort. He consolidated behind rehearsed PR. “The word is a portmanteau. Ex is Greek for ‘out of’. E stands for energy, X for mystery. Psy recalls Psyche which is Greek for ‘principle of life’ and in modern usage denotes the mind. Psyence suggests a new science.”

Jeez, Izzie thought, talk about a proud dad extolling the humdrum talents of a boorish son. “All right, but what is it?”

“We have company,” Bel said.

They turned to follow his gaze.

Halcrow’s unfathomable explanations had left Bel agitated and sleepy. He felt like one of the Cayuga tribe who had once inhabited his home in New York state confronting the first Europeans. He felt humiliated by his musket. He understood nothing of what Halcrow had said and was crushed by the weight of the two centuries that divided them. He realised with a kind of grief that his world of 1863 was further removed from Halcrow’s 2063 than from 1663’s primaeval forest. Bel could relate to the first two men he’d encountered, the hunter and the warrior, but not to Halcrow.

Turning away to the expanses around them, he had seen three figures approaching.

All looked Chinese. Two were warriors in body armour; one wearing a helmet topped by a red plume and the other bareheaded with his hair in a topknot. Both wore swords and one carried a bow. A third man was unarmed and wore a bright yellow robe.

“That’s the two I saw the other day,” Izzie said. “Reinforced.”

Halcrow looked over his shoulder. “We’re closer to the forest than they are to us. If we run, they’ll never catch us.”

Bel saw him edge rearward. Izzie looked uncertain but stood her ground. A lingering self-disgust for his cowering these past days ignited like gas to a spark and a wild joy of battle took fire in Bel. “By thunder, I am not running.” He lowered the musket from his shoulder and cocked it.

“Does that thing work?” Halcrow said.

“Stay!” Bel roared and threw up the gun to firing position.

The Chinese stopped. The warriors looked at each other and conferred with their companion. Then all three bowed towards Bel and withdrew.

“Wow,” Izzie said.

Bel lowered the hammer. His blood roared like heat in a flue.

Halcrow studied him thoughtfully.

“I bags you on my side,” Izzie said.

Bel threw the musket erect on his shoulder. “We are bound for yonder hill,” he told Halcrow and set off marching.

Halcrow opened his mouth, then closed it.

“I’m with him,” Izzie told him.

“I guess I can tag along for a spell,” he answered.

Damn, thought Bel.

After proceeding awhile in silence Izzie said to Halcrow, “So what is ex-psyence?”

Halcrow sighed and seemed unwilling to answer. Izzie thought he was sulking.

Halcrow must have realised his silence was revealing. “The ultimate rejection of physicalism and cartesian duality.”

Izzie suspected that Halcrow enjoyed the ensuing silence. He’d managed to answer without giving anything away. Realising he wouldn’t elaborate unless she badgered him — and no way was she giving him that satisfaction — Izzie tried another tack.

“What do you think of that crazy moon up there?” She nodded at the overcast.

“I don't think it’s a moon. It seems that what we have here is a pair of planets of similar size that are tidally locked. Have you seen how it always holds the same position? It means this world always shows the same face to it. Like Earth’s moon.”

Izzie noticed a low cloud in the distance and felt a chill as she realised it was approaching fast in a windless sky. “Is that birds?”

Halcrow followed her gaze. “They must be migrating.”

“Well, it looks like they’re migrating at us.” Izzie felt a growing unease. Looking around, she saw that the nearest trees were a remote and meagre scattering. The flock was monstrous; even miles away it eclipsed a quarter of the sky. It flickered with conflicts of light and shadow caused by fleeting clusterings and diffusions. It rushed up with predatory directness, its body swirling and wrapping itself with cloaks of massed small bodies. The air vibrated to a modulant howl lacerated by a shrill fluting. Izzie’s cheeks were wet and her hands wrung each other before her breast.

The flock to Bel resembled a garment blown aloft, its billowing folds tumbling over each other in endless envelopments. But then as it neared he saw extrusions descend like fluid pointillistic limbs to level out low above the landscape and race across it in undulant bounds before detaching from the flock to banner skyward and be reabsorbed.

Izzie noticed that Halcrow’s assurance was gone. Face working, he stumbled backward. Bel stood calmly, watching the flock, musket at the ready.

Churning and roaring, filling the sky, the flock reared over them; a sunlit and shadowed tumult of furiously working bodies that occult currents shaped into storm front envelopments, or drew swirling in to gouge out caves in the flock that in moments were engulfed by yet more masses of attuned frenetic forms. Its shadow engulfed them, turbulent with the thunderous hurl and beat of millions of wings.

Izzie saw Bel raise his gun and take aim. His answer to a chimaera. She wanted to scream.

Bel felt liberated. In battle he’d been a component of the regiment; a tool of camaraderie, orders and fear of dishonour. Now in this confrontation he was uplifted by a sense of personal responsibility for the girl in his care, and so discovered a singular completeness in himself.

He recalled the antelope herd undone by a shot. These were just fowl. He cocked and raised the musket, wondering where to aim, then saw another limb descend and bend toward him in a furlong-spanning reach of thousands of birds. So many species mingled that the discordances disordered his reason. The limb became a serpent that approached undulant over the ground until its head reared up above him, curling over to plunge. He took aim at a hawk in the forefront and fired. The serpent leapt into the air as if burnt and swerved away.

Swirling, howling, protean, the flock passed by.

In its wake Bel expected to see a landscape shredded and denuded as by a swarm of locusts, but when the sun emerged from behind the flock, the veldt and the woods were whole.

A seething filled Izzie as if the flock had seeded itself in her. She heard retching and saw Halcrow wipe his mouth.

“It couldn’t abide the rifle,” Bel said.

“You think you scared that thing off with a fucking musket?” A terrible expression contorted Halcrow’s face.

Izzie needed to say something to show she was in control, but had to scrape words out through a constricted sandpaper throat. “How did your gun frighten them?”

“I encountered a herd of antelope two days ago that was similarly possessed. I fired a shot and it retreated.”

“You’re crazy!” A stressed vein raised a ridge across Halcrow’s brow. “They wouldn’t have even heard the shot in that racket. Millions of birds fleeing a musket? Mad.”

“Maybe it was the concussion of the discharge, or the directed ardour of my defiance.”

“You speak of them as an ‘it’,” Izzie said, “and say they’re ‘possessed’. I don’t know. They were weird, sure, but just birds.” She thrust down a feeling that resonated with his.

As the flock lowered out of view Bel looked at her, prolonging his gaze until her eyes met his. His expression was grave. “There was something hidden in the flock as in the herd. I didn’t conceive it on first meeting, but now my feeling is sure.”

“Bullshit,” said Halcrow. “A migration changes course because you flourish some antediluvian tool one step removed from a club? Take a reality shot.”

Izzie dismissed Halcrow’s disgusted headshaking as histrionic. She said to Bel, “I’m amazed you kept your composure. It totally threw me.”

Bel embraced her in his gaze. His eyes were gentle. “We have a phrase for being in battle: ‘seeing the elephant’. No matter how many pictures of elephants you’ve seen, meeting one changes you an amount. You couldn’t have known how big it is, how alive, nor how indifferent. I’ve seen the elephant five times.” He shouldered his musket and resumed march.

Izzie felt Halcrow watching her and sensed a collusive impulse. He wanted them to ally as two moderns against a primitive. She set off after Bel. Halcrow followed. After a while she heard the pace of his footfalls quicken and he came alongside.

“You asked about ex-psyence.”

Ah, a peace offering. She returned a noncommittal grunt.

“Ex-psyence admits reality into the world.”

“We are like to pass through a forest,” Bel said at a volume that caused his companions to dismiss each other and look at him. “And I feel we are being watched.”

Bel had been studying the terrain with a soldier’s eye, wary of ambuscade, and the forest ahead felt sinister. Something was there. The sense of being watched had grown from a vague feeling unconnected with his senses to a creeping certainty.

“I don’t feel anything,” Halcrow said.

Izzie thought he was annoyed at having his lecture interrupted. She said, “How far are we from the hill?”

“An hour maybe.”

That sounded a lot to Izzie. It made her aware of how much her legs ached. “Perhaps it was this forest we were drawn to rather than the hill.”

They halted to study it. Bel was repelled by the forest. He had never before felt this antagonism for anything. Yet it wasn’t gloomy in appearance. The trees were separated sufficiently that grass grew among them and the canopy was elevated and airy. But he did not want to go in there.

He looked at Izzie. She returned a smile but he felt unease rising to her surface like a lithe long shadow in a pool. In a moment of clarity he knew her thought: that weariness drew her to the forest and the hope of rest, but she couldn’t repress an instinctive fear of it.

She said, “Shall we check out the forest or just go on?”

Bel couldn’t leave the forest in their rear. Whatever it held must be confronted.

“So what do you want to do?” Halcrow looked impatient, but evidently not enough that he was prepared to proceed alone.

“Izzie?” Bel looked at her.

Halcrow emitted a theatrical sigh.

Izzie swallowed. “Let’s check it out.”

Bel nodded, lowered his musket and advanced.