White Time Read online

  ‘Now, Shanelle, I’ve got to—’

  ‘Sheneel.’

  ‘Sheneel, I’ve got to stabilize us. It’s up to Rowan in the tap room to move us about, so you’ll hear him and me swapping co-ordinates a bit. Say hello to the young lady, Rowan.’

  ‘Hi, Sheneel.’ A younger, brighter voice than Lon’s was in her head.

  ‘We’ll do the biggest first, Ro. She’s a monster, mate.’

  They floated past two pale, person-sized sacs that pulsed like jellyfish in the darkness. Sheneel looked around for the bigger entity, but there seemed to be nothing more between them and the distant blotched surface of the wall … hang on, did white time have a wall?

  Then she was scrabbling and pedalling on the end of her cable. ‘That’s an entity? That bloody great— How big is it?’

  ‘Whoa, whoa,’ said Rowan. ‘You’re not in danger, Sheneel.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Mind my ears, girl,’ grumbled Lon.

  She squashed her voice down. ‘Lon! Is it alive?’ She was still trying to fight Rowan steering her towards the thing.

  ‘Well, as I said, it’s not alive and it’s not dead, Sheneel. Cool it, girl. It’ll be gone in a sec. Hang in there and watch.’

  Rowan stopped moving her, and she hung still, panting.

  Lon floated on, a shadow against the gradually shrinking circle his chest-light threw. Then he hung still, a small knot of light and shadow applying himself to the entity’s surface. There were growths and stains all over it, encrustations bigger than Lon.

  ‘OK, give it to me, Rowan,’ he said. ‘This bit’s just maths, Sheneel. Just punching numbers into a clack-ulator.’

  ‘You’ve already made that calculator joke today, Sir - Lon, I mean!’ It had nearly happened to her. She had nearly forgotten his name. ‘Am I supposed to tell you stuff like that?’

  ‘It can only help, girl.’

  She waited. Her head was so busy, with the two voices blabbing numbers in one ear, and the music wandering in the other. It was annoying. She wanted to unplug everything and just hear for herself what white time sounded like. She was sure it would be a delicious, restful silence. She put her gloved hand to her helmet, and the two surfaces ran slickly off each other. The pips had been tiny, and had gone deep into her ears; she was stuck with the breathing and the blabbing and the tuneless tinkling.

  And then the wall – the entity – was not there. It vanished without sound or vibration. Only the after-image of Lon’s chest-light on the blotched skin burned out against an entity-free blackness.

  ‘That was it? Lon?’

  ‘Sheneel. That’s what we do.’

  ‘What was it?’

  ‘Thing called a Whalan. If you think of the universe as an ocean, that thing is a deep-sea bottom-crawler. A big prawn, that’s all. A space-cockroach.’

  ‘You’ve seen one before?’

  ‘I’ve heard of ’em. What’s your name again?’

  ‘Sheneel. And you’re Lon.’

  ‘Let’s go back and get those two little fellas.’

  The two jellyfish had become very like people, Sheneel thought. But a moment later they were like branching vein-networks, and then they were like branches, and then branches with leaves, and then like branch-less leaves clumped on the air.

  ‘Oh, these guys,’ said Lon. ‘We get quite a few of them through here, Sheneel. They’re big history buffs.’

  ‘How come they keep changing?’

  ‘They’re similizing. Playing off our brains. Trying to identify themselves to us, showing us a few things we know, things they might be like. It’s automatic; it’s not like they’re communicating with us or anything warm and fuzzy like that. I’ll put a sucker on each one, Rowan; my guess is, these two are travelling together.’ He attached two tiny suction cups to a leaf of each being, and keyed in numbers on a floating pad cabled to his belt. As he keyed, the two beings became stretched-out birds, rather ugly, without wings. ‘Am I right, Romo?’

  ‘My name’s Sheneel.’

  ‘He means me, Sheneel – Rowan.’ The birds vanished. ‘And yes, Lon, they were together.’

  ‘Geez,’ said Sheneel. ‘When’s this music in my ear going to do something? When’s a hummable bit going to happen?’

  ‘Never,’ said Rowan. ‘That’s the point – nothing repetitive. Your brain needs it to keep time going inside your suit.’

  What is the aspect of the tasting that you enjoyed the least?

  The way white time scrambles your brain.

  In the suit-room, Lon drew the voice-pip out of her ear by its cord. She felt the weirdest alarm – would he stop breathing if she didn’t listen? She had to restrain herself from snatching the pip back.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, and pulled out the music-pip herself. ‘It’s really quiet now.’

  She followed Lon’s example and unzipped her cumbersome suit. It didn’t seem to smell so bad now. And it had been well ventilated. Why had the guy before her – the ‘tourist’ before her – got in such a sweat-bath?

  In the elevator Lon sighed enormously and seemed to wake up a little. ‘You doing a walk-through, are you? Well, you’ve seen the best bit. The rest’s pretty technical: testing equipment, filling out bloody stats sheets.’

  ‘You do this every morning?’

  ‘Every couple of days.’ He watched her politely suppress a grimace. ‘Why, what do you think?’

  She tried to think, and shrugged. ‘It’s pretty strange …’

  He was looking at her as if he expected her to say something more. Something clever, maybe. Something insightful, to use one of Sir’s favourite words. She felt a flash of resentment; she wouldn’t’ve had to be insightful on release-party tasting.

  She smiled lamely and didn’t say anything. And he didn’t say anything back. And they rumbled on upwards, and at last came out into the labs, where she could sense other people–suddenly she could hardly wait to see other people.

  Lon seemed to feel the same. ‘Toilets are down that way, canteen’s up the other end. I’ll meet you there, eh.’

  The canteen was thinly sprinkled with technicians, casually dressed. Something smelled yummy – lasagne. The server moved like a snail, pausing to chat with his colleagues, taking so long Sheneel felt like stomping in behind the bain-marie and serving her-bloody-self. Finally she had the food on her tray, and she was all shaky with hunger – she wanted to put her face down and take a big mouthful then and there.

  Lon saw her making ready to sit a couple of tables away from his group. ‘Here, Sheneel.’ Grr. She’d really rather have a rest from him and his weird job, thanks. But she wasn’t rude enough for that; over she went and took the seat next to him.

  Everyone else had little snack-plates with half a cake or a bit of salad on them – except Lon, whose meal-plate was scraped so clean of lasagne you’d’ve thought it just came out of a dishwasher.

  Sheneel didn’t want to talk, just eat. ‘I’m so hungry,’ she apologized through her first mouthful.

  ‘Yeah, it does that,’ said Lon.

  The others were talking incomprehensibly. Lon listened intently, unbuttoning his checked shirt-sleeve. He pulled it up to his elbow and peeled off a patch there, pressed it under a broken foil in a cycle-packet on the table, broke out a fresh patch and took some care choosing a place on his inner forearm to stick it. Sheneel stopped chewing and stared at the circular imprints of previous patches, some livid, some just brownish shadows. Far out. A patch man – a ‘person with a physiological dependency’, that is.

  The shirt-sleeve swooshed down like a closing curtain.

  Lon was watching her. ‘Go on, ask,’ he said softly. Everyone else was still talking.

  She pointed to her full mouth, chewed as long as she could, hoping he’d be distracted by something. He wasn’t. But she wouldn’t ask the obvious question, the one he wanted to answer – she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.

  ‘You take that right out here in the open?’ she said, nodding aro
und at the publicness of the canteen, the bright, unsecretive light.

  He slid the cycle-pack into his shirt pocket. ‘It’s allowed,’ he said. ‘I’m allowed it. Special dispensation,’ he added slowly, as if to a child – a really little kid, not someone nearly finished school, like Sheneel. He tapped the side of his nose stagily. She was filled with equal parts dislike and uncertainty.

  Lon stopped mugging. ‘It’s so I can do the work. Anyone who does this for a while needs to go on patches. You’ve seen it: white time puts the screws on your brain.’

  Then one of the technicians said, ‘Anyway, we’re not going to solve this today. Who’ve we got here, Lon? Someone who’s been swimming in puddles, by the look of it.’

  Sheneel tried to smile politely and take a fairly big mouthful at the same time.

  ‘This is Sheneel. She’s on a walk-through. Don’t worry, you’ll get a chance to drivel in her ear this arvo – don’t have to do it now and bore the pants off us.’

  ‘Hi, Sheneel. I’m Fare McCutcheon. I’m in Analysis.’

  Sheneel reluctantly put her fork down and shook hands. Fare was partly being polite, partly showing off.

  ‘And this is Rowan, whose dulcet tones you would have heard already.’

  A guy who looked way too young to be working here gave her a shy smile. He had a nice face, but his haircut, or lack of, and that greenish knit vest, marked him as a hopeless style-munster. ‘Hi, Sharelle-Shanelle-Sheneel,’ he said.

  ‘Hi, Romo.’

  ‘OK, OK,’ said Lon. ‘That’s enough, you two.’

  ‘How was it, Sheneel?’ said Rowan.

  ‘It was fine. Weird, but fine.’

  ‘Mind-broadening?’

  Lon snorted.

  ‘Mind-crumpling, more like,’ she said.

  ‘You wait till Fare gets ahold of you,’ said Lon. ‘This morning’ll look like a piece a cake.’

  Fare grinned at him, a grin full of in-jokes and layers of meaning. ‘Ah, Lon, admit it. We need each other.’

  ‘Well, you need me.’

  Fare looked stung, gathered himself to strike back, then stopped and cast Sheneel a glance. He checked Lon’s face and relaxed. ‘You. You’re just a big tease, Lon Klegg.’

  Sheneel looked up at Lon. There was a ghost of something there, maybe, in the creases around his eyes. Oh, so he could smile properly, if he wanted to.

  What aspect of the tasting did you enjoy the most?

  The food in the canteen, especially on field mornings!

  When Dalma saw Sheneel in the parkway, she flung out her arms. ‘I’m niched! I’m well and truly niched!’

  ‘Lucky you,’ said Sheneel coldly.

  ‘So how was the lab?’ Dalma dropped her mini-pack on the grass and sat down.

  ‘You don’t wanna know. You’re just being polite. You can’t wait to show me where Lazzaro signed your shirt.’

  Dalma edged her jacket slowly off her shoulder, growling some strip-club music.

  ‘Oh, bugga,’ said Sheneel. ‘He did it. You got it.’

  ‘He did it!’ Dalma exposed a scramble of tag-letters across her shoulder blade. ‘It tickled like anything, but I got it.’ The top half of her body did a little dance. ‘Where’s Joey? He was gunna meet me here— oh, there! Joey! Honestly, we’ve been having the bestest-best time, ’Neel. Haven’t we, Jo?’

  ‘What a place, eh? They work you to the bone! I’m dead!’ Joey fell over flat on the grass.

  ‘Oh, it’s gunna be one great party, Sheneel. Guess who’s going to be the opener!’

  Sheneel played the game for a while, guessed and exclaimed and watched Dalma fizz. Keanu joined them too, and a couple of other release-party tasters, and Liv Morrow.

  ‘But you weren’t even there, Sheneel,’ Liv said suddenly, after a burst of laughter. ‘Where were you again?’

  ‘Ooh, she was in white ti-ime,’ said Joey. ‘Floating around with the universal spookies!’

  Liv laughed with the others. ‘So how was that?’

  Everyone was listening. Sheneel looked around and realized how unusual this was, the group’s faces all being turned to her. And she saw quite clearly that Dalma, Joey and Keanu didn’t expect much from her, were just looking to milk whatever she said for laughs.

  She tried for world-weariness. ‘Thanks a lot, Liv – actually, I was trying to forget where I’d been.’ Which was true enough. And it worked for getting the eyes off her: Dalma squeaked, ‘Well, we don’t want to ever forget where we were today, do we?’ and there followed much cheering and high-fiving.

  But, ‘Why?’ said Liv, under cover of all that. ‘Was it scary, or just boring?’

  Sheneel drew her knees up to her chest. She could smell the sweaty white-time suit in the cloth of her shirt, in the knees of her jeans. She tried for an answer but could only shake her head.

  ‘Or neither?’ joked Liv. ‘Hey, choose your own description.’

  Sheneel kept trying. ‘I just don’t understand,’ she said eventually, ‘how people can go back to some jobs, day after day, year after year …’

  Liv gave her a funny look, smiling but with a raised eyebrow. ‘What, you don’t understand the jobbishness of jobs?’

  ‘Mmph …’ No, that wasn’t what she meant. If a job drove you to patches –

  ‘You don’t get why all jobs can’t be fun?’

  Sheneel shot her a look. ‘Now you’re laughing at me.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Liv apologized. ‘But I’ll tell you – people go back to their jobs day after day because they have to.’

  ‘Have to? Well, there’s having to and having to, isn’t there? I mean—’

  ‘They need the dough and they’re doing something they can do. Don’t you think?’

  But that flying thought was gone. Liv’s needling had thrown her off; Sheneel didn’t know what she’d meant to say. ‘I suppose,’ she said miserably, just to shut Liv up.

  She had a day and a half with the number-crunchers, the brains on sticks. It was deadly dull. They kept telling her how interesting it was, but their jobs all seemed to be about feeding numbers into computers and getting different numbers out, and they never could quite tell her the point of it all. They tried, but they’d spent so long in these jobs that they talked in a kind of code, and couldn’t seem to remember how to translate back to normal speech. She could feel Fare’s intensity when he told her they were doing ‘nothing less than building a composite picture of the face of God’, but the words were a meaningless combination; the purpose was still a mystery to her.

  The third morning she was rotated in with Lon again. He’d had the size 95 suit cleaned. ‘Hey, thanks!’ she said, surprised. He gave her a sober wink.

  It was restful for her brain, just to float about and check out the entities.

  ‘What’s the weirdest one of these you’ve ever found, Lon?’ she asked, her own voice metallic in her ear.

  His breathing became thoughtful, and went on so long she thought his mind must have drifted off her question.

  ‘Lon?’

  ‘Sheneel. Just thinking.’

  ‘That little guy last summer was pretty weird.’ Rowan’s tinned voice barged into her brain.

  ‘Ah, yeah,’ said Lon. ‘Hard to get a fix on. Had to kind of scoop it up in the intake sucker, and then put the other one on him separately. He wasn’t weird though, Ro. Just little.’

  ‘He was weird when you went down the trail and looked at where he came from.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I don’t get to see all that. The weirdest, actually … Sheneel … are the ones most people’d think were the boringest. The humanish ones. That look like they could just wake up and walk out of here and start living along with us. But you know they couldn’t. You know they’d go nuts, or explode, or die of some scratch or some food. The different-ness of things that seem alike – that’s the wonder of the universe. Get us over to that CB-5 next, OK, Rowan?’

  ‘You’re on, Lon.’

  Lon shone his chest-light on the dolphin-sized,
tentacled vertebrate as they approached. This wasn’t the first one Sheneel had seen him deal with.

  ‘At school they always say it’s the opposite way round …’ she said, then fell silent, confused by her brain having sprouted such a thought.

  ‘They do?’ Lon breathed in her head.

  ‘Yeah, they’re always going on about patterns and similarities and the intertext of all things, and how basically you and I are … are CB-5s too.’

  ‘Oh yeah, basically. Basically we’re all gas and water, aren’t we? That’s helpful.’ He reached out and touched the belt of her suit as Rowan positioned her at ninety degrees to him beside the CB-5. Her chest-light snapped on and Lon used it in conjunction with his own to choose two points along the creature’s spine to place his suction cups. The CB-5 flinched a little as he placed them: ‘He’ll have a dream,’ said Lon. He keyed in his ‘clack-ulations’, the CB-5 vanished and the cups again floated at the ends of their leads.

  Lon looked at her in puzzlement.

  ‘I’m Sheneel,’ she said, before he had a chance to ask. She was getting used to the timing of his brain-scrambles. ‘Here for work experience. Your name’s Lon.’

  ‘Ah, yes. Patterns. Sheneel. There’s a reason why you look different from me. There’s a reason why the stripes are different on every zebra.’

  Rowan chuckled in her head. ‘And you sneer when Fare goes on about spiritual dimensions, Lon. I can’t believe I’m hearing this.’

  ‘Believe what you like, button-pusher,’ Lon muttered.

  ‘I heard that.’

  ‘You were meant to. Get us over to that sea cow.’

  ‘That Third-phase Non-porous Intertemporal Vehicle, you mean?’

  ‘Ah, shaddap.’

  ‘So how’s Miss Commonweal?’ Dalma looked out from the release-party group picnicking under ‘their’ tree in the park.

  Sheneel laughed and drew a halo in the air above her own head. ‘Actually, I’m quite getting to like it.’

  ‘Ew, is she now?’

  ‘Actually, I think you’re off your rocker.’

  ‘Warning, warning – transformation to nigel-mode beginning.’