THREE SUNS FOR YESTERDAY
By
DF Lewis & Jeff Holland
The thunder rolled around the tops of the towers and the lightning danced crisp glass shards between sky and ground
Turner pulled the durna skin over his head and watched the city through a curtain of drips. In the morning he’d go in and see if any damage had been done. Tough shit if it had, how the hell was he supposed to repair it when all the power was down?
He felt, rather than heard, a movement behind him and before he even had a chance to react Lorni was underneath the skin and snuggling into his armpit.
Ignoring the overpowering stench of the animal’s wet fur Turner swore softly at the beast and tried to get some sleep.
Two of the three suns were visible when Turner awoke and the durna skin steamed in the heat. There was no sign of Lorni but Turner didn’t expect there to be.
No one had quite worked out how the animals did it but certainly it was something to do with telekinesis
They thought where they wanted to be and were there.
If not for that ability Turner doubted that they would have survived. As it was they still died quite spectacularly when their thoughts were inaccurate and they tried to occupy an already occupied space.
Amid the distant hills – where, much earlier, he had sun-breakfasted – he saw large loping shapes. Peculiar how he only ever avoided danger by the skin of his teeth.
He dug into his pack and extracted two breakfast packages, set them for “sun” and laid them out to activate.
While he waited he used storm water puddles to freshen up.
After a hasty meal Turner slung his few possessions into the pack and set off for the city. Every so often Lorni would burst into view, scamper around Turner and disappear again.
As the city approached, Turner heard thunder return. An unusual morning storm created a black backdrop to the grey-brown turrets and beacon-tops from where the oddly sporadic wailing of muezzin broke the silences between the sky’s grumbling peals.
Eventually arriving at the iron studded gate, Lorni, now upon hind-legs, scuttled beside Turner. Once within the city walls, of course, Lorni would not be able to come and go with such freedom.
‘Oi!’ shouted Turner.
‘Oi!, Oi!’ came the high-pitched voice from beyond the gate.
Turner’s own voice was still oily with the remains of his sun-baked breakfast. Indeed, he had rubbed some of it on his nose – but no need for such precautions today in view of the unseasonable darkening of the weather.
The gate suddenly groaned, gaped open – swifter than any hinges could possible allow whatever their lubrication – and a lightning shaft spot-lit the most beautiful woman Turner had ever seen. Not many of her charms were left to the imagination, yet, surely, this was none other than Rachel, the sprite who had been only two knickknacks short of an apple scrumper when he’d last seen her.
So stunned was Turner, he failed to keep reckon upon Lorni whose feral flanks were literally flickering in and out of existence before trying to cross the gate’s threshold.
In the end Lorni’s mind flickered as much as her body and she disappeared.
‘Rachel?’
‘Who else?’
‘But … but … you should be, what? Nine? Ten at the most.’
‘I am ten, Turner; and twenty seven; and forty three. You don’t know, do you?’
‘Rachel, you always were bright but you’re leaving me now.’
‘Time is irrelevant now, Turner. It’s as we always thought.’
‘You’re from the future?’
‘The Council Elders sent me to find you.’
‘Me? Why me? Hang on. I’m not really getting this. What’s been going on?’
‘Mainly it’s due to you, Turner, you and Lorni. When you bought Lorni back after – (she paused) ‘After this job, we found out how the natzin do it and, with a bit of training, found we could do it as well.’
‘What, teleport? That sort of thing?’
‘Exactly. It’s easy to do but not very easy to ensure your arrival point. The natzins can absolutely clear their mind and concentrate on one physical place. They’ve also got an instinct for empty spaces. At first bits of people were landing up all over the place. It was worse than wars. No one does it any more but we can think a “when” instead of a “where” quite successfully.’
‘You mean just think of a time and off you go?’
‘Something like that. Look, we haven’t got long and there’s work to do. I’ve literally been looking for you for ages.’
‘Hold on. Hold on. If you can think yourself through time why don’t you find me earlier on and give us both a break? Better still, why don’t I come back from the future myself?’
‘You can’t, Turner. You die before we find out how to think and I can’t physically find you before now. Don’t you think I’ve tried?’
‘Okay. I’ll buy it. What’s the job?’
‘Two jobs, Turner, not one. Yours is to get power back on to the city. Mine’s to make sure Lorni is with you.’
She could see the puzzlement on his face.
‘When you travel-think you leave trails.’
She moved past Turner and out through the gate. He watched her; the sun’s rays glistening on her own sun-oiled body.
‘And you can stop thinking that, Turner. I’m your partner’s clone, not your partner.’ And she shimmered into where/when.
Turner sighed. Obviously the force field was still intact so he let the durna skin fall where he stood despite the impending storm. Just before he closed the gate Rachel materialised beside a rocky outcrop.
‘Turner, I nearly forgot. The reason for all this is the durna. Someone’s been tampering with their gene pool. They’re becoming intelligent very quickly.’
And she was gone.
Turner tried to imagine the huge, vicious durna with a brain and he shuddered as he slammed the portal shut.
It suddenly dawned on Turner that the small natzin and the mammoth durna were one and the same beast at different evolutionary stages. A thought which could be taken further … except Turner’s mind failed to encompass the implication. Why, for example, did Lorni herself sometimes progress over the ground on all fours like the natzin and, then, later, on hind-legs? Turner did not have time to dwell upon this frightener of the duration dilemma – because, following a gap in memory, he found himself at the top of one of the city’s beacon towers – adjusting a lightning conductor. It had no doubt been a long, painful climb: his legs ached and his chest pumped. The citizens below were forming strange patterns with the haphazard journeys between chores. He soon spotted – even at this height – Rachel and Lorni weaving between the Indian Files of pail-toters and swill-maids, as if creating an invisible fabric upon the loom of chance. But Turner knew who was who. Something told him.
Amid the distant hills where, much earlier, he had sub-breakfasted – he saw large loping shapes. Peculiar how he only ever avoided danger by the skin of his teeth. The feeling was that these shapes smelt Turner’s actual absence – which was unusual since most prey tended to be revealed to predators by tangible body-stench. Turner wondered if these shapes were simply in pursuit of his mental residues rather than of the thing-he-was. He laughed as the rod ratcheted into position upon the beacon-tower – ready for the next storm. The muezzin renewed their wailing, as if such muezzin had merely been plugged back in. Turner laughed again as he began to prepare for his descent.
‘That was quick’ announced Rachel, as he arrived, even before he could blink an eyelid, on the ground. But his next blink revealed that she now appeared to be at the optimum age for bedding. And no sign of Lorni.
‘Where’s Lorni?’
‘It doesn’t matter, John,’ and she moved towards him, an oiled temptress glistening in the pre-storm sunlight. Turner reached for his knife and lunged forward in one smooth movement, all the time trying to screen his mind from outside probes. He aimed the sharp point just below the swell of Rachel’s left breast and plunged lengthways into the dust of the street. The muezzin changed from its religious wailing to a harsh, metallic laughter, which echoed and boomed around the spires and towers.
Turner picked himself up, sheathed his knife and peered around the empty streets. He was used to people playing with his mind but to get it so wrong as to use Rachel sexually against him was pathetic.
He quickly made his way back to the generating room knowing only that the impending storm, was his best chance of restoring power. He cursed his memory loss. Now that was a good touch. He no longer knew if he’d sited all the conductors or only the one he could remember.
By the time he viewed the city from the generators’ observatory one sun had vanished completely while a second played hide and seek behind the black clouds. With the third sun gleaming from a clear sky behind him, the effect of the shadow movements below was almost strobe-like.
With a deafening crash the storm broke. Turner watched with pleasure as strike after strike of lightning hit the myriad conductors around the city whilst the rain ran helplessly off the force shield.
Stepping away from the window Turner watched the gauges mount slowly and inexorably towards the red line.
With one eye on the gauges and the other on the storm Turner anxiously pleaded with any and all Gods to let the storm continue long enough to recharge the city. The gauge, still short of the red line, was moving slower and the rain was easing.
Hoping against hope for a final gigantic strike Turner threw the switches.
The feeling was that these shapes smelt Turner’s actual absence – which was unusual since most prey tended to be revealed to predators by tangible body-stench. Turner wondered if
Nothing happened
Then, slowly, a deep thunderous, vibrating sound crept into his belly. He looked up at the gauges to see them heading for the empty mark, quicker than a meteorite. One last gigantic clap of thunder and the sharp electric smell of strike told Turner he’d succeeded.
The rumble stopped and, street by street, the lights came on.
Turner sighed with relief, punched the co-ordinates into the computer and settled back for the long journey.
On a distant hillside Rachel turned to the huge durna behind her.
‘Look, Lorni, I told you he’d do it.’
The durna watched intently as, like a woman picking up her skirts, the city raised itself onto its airbed and set off slowly for the distant mountains.
The loping shapes curtailed their furtive antics as soon as they had tracked Turner’s tussling mind to its fox-earth. Turner, had, indeed, just been through here … and not even the fluidity of time could cover his mating-call. These beasts could sniff out the most insignificant moment in the most insignificant minute if such a moment in such a minute merely revealed a suspicion of their prey.
They surrounded the city, pretending to be Red Indians stalking a slumbering wagon-train – except, of course, the so-called wagons did shift, even when their wheels were stuck fast in the solid mud of unbudgeable duration. But now the wagons actually floated on air like the constituents of a flowing wedding-gown, one whose gems glinted with thunder-sparks.
Most of the shapes eventually slouched off, but not before leaving one chosen from themselves – a misbred cross between a durna and a natzin – to eavesdrop upon a particular constituent of the city. This constituent was a power-house on metal bogies wherein, supposedly, those who wailed and chanted now sat silently with their fingers in sockets, waiting for the next shock to restir their spiritual concatenations.
‘How can we keep up this vigil?’ asked a feminine voice from within.
Surely, this was no muezzin, since all muezzins were men.
‘Please, let me, Rachel. There are only a few precious moments before the points change … they are sweeter than the sweetest pippins.’
A sucking noise ensued, as the shaggy ear-wigger outside shifted its rump to gain further purchase upon the sounds of this special moment.
Then the shape recognised another shape similar to itself curled like a huge, furry whelk upon the wagon’s porch-step … as if guarding the canoodling couple inside against intruders.
It was Lorni!
And Lorni was a representative of every single creature to which and from which the aeons of evolution derived. Even the surreptitious shape felt itself part of the onward spawning Lorni-cycle – and, thus, if Lorni was ripe for raping, it would be tantamount to the raping of oneself. But, at this point in the ruminations, Lorni stirred as Turner and Rachel left the caravan (for caravan was what Turner and Rachel called it in a moment of unvarnished truth) … and the couple took air by the only river the city boasted, where pylons stretched into the sky yearning for one more short circuit with the next trip-switch sun that was set to rise. Solar flares, indeed, fussed like curlicue glow-worms upon the dark horizon. Stars spurted like expensive fireworks. A romantic sight, it was, but then Lorni dissolved to the pangs of muffled wailing from a muzzled muezzin. Rachel vanished, too … watched by a tearful Turner who now sat astride the shaggy cross-breed that had been simply lying in wait for its own turn with Turner, its horns being bony earth-wires within tantalising air, antlers that teased out atoms of electricity even when there were no storms that could z-track sunbursts.
Eventually, despairing of Rachel coming back through the aeons of time upon Lorni’s broad back, Turner turned the steering of his own natzidurnic steed towards the caravan of Catafalk, the onion seller.
It never ceased to amaze Turner how Lorni could pick her way through the hordes in the market place without ever even annoying anyone, let alone trampling on them. As the thought entered his mind, he remembered Lorni as she was this morning. He leant forward and ruffled the fur between the beast’s ears.
‘I shan’t be sorry to get back to linear time, Lorni, and that’s no mistake. I don’t know whether I’m going or coming back.’
Turner could see from the crowds that the power was on and was able to judge from Lorni’s rolling gait that the city was on the move. Somewhere, in the depths of his memory he was sure that the city would reach the mountains, sure that in the distant past of the future he had left his planet to … to …
He couldn’t remember who was going to win, the harmless thought eaters, the natzin durnas, the Council of Elders or … or something else just on the shadowy edges of his memories.
‘A thousand good pasts to you, Sir Turner.’
He’d either dropped off or the time had jumped again.
‘Catafalk! It really is good to see you. Who are you cheating today?’
Catafalk looked suitably insulted.
‘Good Sir, I cheat no one. I sell only honest onions.’
‘Tell me, Catafalk, does time here ever slip at a convenient place? I mean, why can’t time slip now and take me to the end of this meeting? I really have no wish to put up with your stench, your lies, your onions or your over-priced information.’
‘To move time wrongly would open your future to the thought eaters, Sir. A wrong move at the wrong time and you’d jump forward to being a zombie.’
Catafalk found himself talking to a crowd of curious onlookers with no sign of Turner or the huge beast he called Lorni.
‘Oh, shit!’
He muttered to himself and, surrounded by jeers from the taunting crowd, he crept into his caravan.
Once inside he moved swiftly and surely, uncovering the comm-set and powering up. The lights barely glimmered before Catafalk started thinking.
‘Rachel, he’s still here, about half way through the time but I think he’s losing control. He doesn’t seem to remember what’s shifted or when.’
‘Be careful, Catafalk. He could be bluffing or Lorni may have been gotten at. Does she show any signs of the thought eaters?’
‘I didn’t see any signs but they were only here briefly.’
‘Okay. Watch out for him for us and look after Lorni too. There’s a possibility that the thought eaters may try to insinuate a mate into her life.’
The connection broke and the screen went dark. Catafalk looked around the tip that was his caravan and silently wished he were back in the clean, antiseptic shrine of the Elders’ Council Chamber. Unlike Turner, though, he didn’t wish for the worlds of linear time. He found not knowing when he was coming next quite exhilarating.
He gazed into the mirror and, not quite satisfied with his reflection, dipped his fingers into a pot of evil smelling grease which he daubed across his cheek and throat. Nodding at his reflection he resumed his place outside.
‘Onions. Three perpa a birt. Three perpa a birt.’
He prodded the steaming mass of onions with the curved blade of his knife.
‘Hey, Catafalk. I’ll have two birts if they’re any good.’
‘How can you insult me so, Citizen? Take five birts. They’ll never be this good again.’
‘At three perpas they need to be platinum.’
‘I’ll give them to you for 14’
’10.’
’13.’
’12.’
’13 and my wife goes hungry and my children starve.’
‘You have no wife let alone children, Catafalk. They can’t stand the stench.’
‘Why, thank you, Citizen. May a durna fancy your daughter. 13.’
’13 and the sauce goes free.’
‘Done.’ Catafalk filled the birts and pocketed the money.
‘And two change.’
‘Why, bless you! I clean forgot.’
‘Catafalk, nothing’s clean about you.’
‘A thousand good pasts to you, Sir Turner.’
He’d either dropped off or the time had jumped again.
‘Catalfalk! It really is good to see you. Who are you cheating today?’
Catafalk looked suitably … surprised.
‘You know this is about 10 minutes ago, don’t you, Turner?’
‘Oh, Christ! It’s not, is it?’
‘If the thought eaters had been here you’d have shit out, Turner.’
‘Who are you, Catafalk?’
‘I’m just a poor onion seller, Sir.’
‘I’m not fooled, Catafalk. What’s going on?’
‘You just watch out for Lorni. You don’t want her up the spout, do you?’
‘Catafalk, you just tell Rachel I still need one more storm to reach the mountains. No, don’t say anything. Save the lines for the punters.’
Turner wheeled his animal away and into the crowd. Three shadowy figures emerged from the alley and hungrily sniffed around Catafalk’s caravan.
Turner wondered if
The thought eaters were a rat race apart. Catafalk kept onions merely so that they would turn rotten and attract such scavengers, attract them with a mulchy stench.
The return of Turner the durna. The return of Turner the durna.
The costermonger’s cry was more rhythmic than any “three perpa a birt”.
The loping shapes were only ever avoided by the skin of a rodent’s eye tooth.
And after sniffing around the onion-seller’s caravan, the three loping shadows took direction for their home base. They had checked out that he was earning perpa for his birt and thus the dirt on him regarding his social benefit entitlement. But Catafalk usually avoided discovery in this respect by dodging around those crucial minutes in each day when the welfare laws were tightest upon time-hoppers. Turner was one such loping shape himself intent on nabbing crooks and other loping shapes. Little did he know that he thus tracked himself …
Another shapely shadow followed in the wake of Rachel, sure that this Rachel was Turner’s mate. Two could live cheaper than one. Entitlements for couples were not as great as double a single. Lorni was a snuffler-out of scandals, too, although her huge bulk was often too noticeable to be of any use for camouflage. She yearned for her natzin beginnings, when muezzins were paid to keep quiet, rather than punished for it. Wailing was never very holy at the best of times.
Turner shrugged.
Stars spurted like expensive fireworks.
There was only one pylon that was still working. It sprayed light into the dark expanse of sky, like the most expensive pyrotechnic of all, it wrote letters with the help of comets, stars, moons and wayward time-hoppers:
SIR TURNER IS THE CROSSEST CROSS-BREED OF THEM ALL!
The exclamation mark was a flash of lightning dropping a thunderbolt.
‘Hey!’
He turned to see who was fussing about soft straw.
‘?’ Queried Turner.
‘Yes, O wondrous one, I wish to introduce myself.’
Turner squinted through the scintilla of near-to-dying fireflies and discerned the huge shoulders of a natzin with pippin breasts like mildewy cookers. If this were Rachel, time had not been good to her. Yet the voice was sharp and bright, as if a young woman were in the mouth conducting the passage of words.
‘!’ exclaimed Turner.
‘Your silence speaks volumes,’ said the natzin. ‘I am Lorni and Rachel both, the shape in which each emerged from the primaeval slime of time – lopers Lorni and Rachel both, in the shape each emerged from the primaeval slime of time – both and each…’
The loping shapes curtailed their furtive antics as soon as they had tracked Turner’s fussling mind to its fox-earth. Turner had, indeed, just been through here … and not even the fluidity of time could cover his mating-call.
‘Three herpes per dirt. Three herpes per dirt.’
These beasts could sniff out the most insignificant moment in the most insignificant minute if such a moment in such a minute merely revealed a suspicion of their prey. Catafalk and some rogue muezzin surrounded the city, pretending to be private dicks stalking a slumbering gypsy encampment – except, of course, the so-called wagons did shift, even when their wheels were stuck fast in the solid mud of unbudgeable duration. But now shanty-houses actually floated on air like the constituents of a flowing scarf of stars and thunder sparks.
Most of the shapes eventually slouched off, but not before leaving one chosen from themselves to think itself the universal person.
As the sun faded into three purple bits, Turner sobbed. He burrowed his hands into the shaggy natzin shape upon which he would try to sleep, searching for handholds on romance. The distant grumbles of just one more storm’s thunder sounded amid undercurrents of muezzin complaint. Finally, he set his supper for lightning and pulled the durna skin over his head. If this were Lorni, it was tantamount to eating a thought before having thought it.
“At the end of every day every self is the same self.”
(from THE OPTIMUM HOLOCAUST by Rachel Orchard)
