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He had surrendered himself completely. All doubt, disparity and confusion had ceased.
A new mind had him in full possession.
The spirit that was not Michael Wenton-Weakes surveyed the college which lay before it, to which it had grown accustomed in the last few frustrating, infuriating weeks.
Weeks! Mere microsecond blinks.
Although the spirit--the ghost--that now inhabited Michael Wenton-Weakes' body had known long periods of near oblivion, sometimes even for centuries at a stretch, the time for which it had wandered the earth was such that it seemed only minutes ago that the creatures which had erected these walls had arrived. Most of his personal eternity--not really eternity, but a few billion years could easily seem like it--had been spent wandering across interminable mud, wading through ceaseless seas, watching with stunned horror when the slimy things with legs suddenly had begun to crawl from those rotting seas--and here they were, suddenly walking around as if they owned the place and complaining about the phones.
Deep in a dark and silent part of himself he knew that he was now mad, had been driven mad almost immediately after the accident by the knowledge of what he had done and of the existence he faced, by the memories of his fellows who had died and who for a while had haunted him even as he had haunted the Earth.
He knew that what he now had been driven to would have revolted the self he only infinitesimally remembered, but that it was the only way for him to end the ceaseless nightmare in which each second of billions of years had been worse than the previous one.
He hefted the bag and started to walk.
CHAPTER
29
Deep in the rain forest it was doing what it usually does in rain forests, which was raining: hence the name.
It was a gentle, persistent rain, not the heavy slashing which would come later in the year, in the hot season. It formed a fine dripping mist through which the occasional shaft of sunlight would break, be softened and pass through on its way towards the wet bark of a calvaria tree on which it would settle and glisten. Sometimes it would do this next to a butterfly or a tiny motionless sparkling lizard, and then the effect would be almost unbearable.
Away up in the high canopy of the trees an utterly extraordinary thought would suddenly strike a bird, and it would go flapping wildly through the branches and settle at last in a different and altogether better tree where it would sit and consider things again more calmly until the same thought came along and struck it again, or it was time to eat.
The air was full of scents--the light fragrance of flowers, and the heavy odour of the sodden mulch with which the floor of the forest was carpeted.
Confusions of roots tangled through the mulch, moss grew on them, insects crawled.
In a space in the forest, on an empty patch of wet ground between a circle of craning trees, appeared quietly and without fuss a plain white door. After a few seconds it opened a little way with a slight squeak. A tall thin man looked out, looked around, blinked in surprise, and quietly pulled the door closed again.
A few seconds later the door opened again and Reg looked out.
"It's real," he said, "I promise you. Come out and see for yourself." Walking out into the forest, he turned and beckoned the other two to follow him.
Dirk stepped boldly through, seemed disconcerted for about the length of time it takes to blink twice, and then announced that he saw exactly how it worked, that it was obviously to do with the unreal numbers that lay between minimum quantum distances and defined the fractal contours of the enfolded Universe and he was only astonished at himself for not having thought of it himself.
"Like the catflap," said Richard from the doorway behind him.
"Er, yes, quite so," said Dirk, taking off his spectacles and leaning against a tree wiping them, "you spotted of course that I was lying. A perfectly natural reflex in the circumstances as I think you'll agree. Perfectly natural." He squinted slightly and put his spectacles back on. They began to mist up again almost immediately.
"Astounding," he admitted.
Richard stepped through more hesitantly and stood rocking for a moment with one foot still on the floor in Reg's room and the other on the wet earth of the forest. Then he stepped forward and committed himself fully.
His lungs instantly filled with the heady vapours and his mind with the wonder of the place. He turned and looked at the doorway through which he had walked. It was still a perfectly ordinary door frame with a perfectly ordinary little white door swinging open in it, but it was standing free in the open forest, and through it could clearly he seen the room he had just stepped out of.
He walked wonderingly round the back of the door, testing each foot on the muddy ground, not so much for fear of slipping as for fear that it might simply not be there. From behind it was just a perfectly ordinary open door frame, such as you might fail to find in any perfectly ordinary rain forest. He walked through the door from behind, and looking back again could once more see, as if he had just stepped out of them again, the college rooms of Professor Urban Chronotis of St Cedd's College, Cambridge, which must be thousands of miles away. Thousands? Where were they?
He peered off through the trees and thought he caught a slight shimmer in the distance, between the trees.
"Is that the sea?" he asked.
"You can see it a little more clearly from up here," called Reg, who had walked on a little way up a slippery incline and was now leaning, puffing, against a tree. He pointed.
The other two followed him up, pulling themselves noisily through the branches and causing a lot of cawing and complaining from unseen birds high above.
"The Pacific?" asked Dirk.
"The Indian Ocean," said Reg.
Dirk wiped his glasses again and had another look.
"Ah, yes, of course," he said.
"Not Madagascar?" said Richard. "I've been there--"
"Have you?" said Reg. "One of the most beautiful and astonishing places on Earth, and one that is also full of the most appalling... temptations for me. No."
His voice trembled slightly, and he cleared his throat.
"No," he continued, "Madagascar is--let me see, which direction are we--where's the sun? Yes. That way. Westish. Madagascar is about five hundred miles roughly west of here. The island of Reunion lies roughly in-between."
"Er, what's the place called?" said Dirk suddenly, rapping his knuckles on the tree and frightening a lizard. "Place where that stamp comes from, er--Mauritius."
"Stamp?" said Reg.
"Yes, you must know," said Dirk, "very famous stamp. Can't remember anything about it, but it comes from here. Mauritius. Famous for its very remarkable stamp, all brown and smudged and you could buy Blenheim Palace with it. Or am I thinking of British Guiana?"
"Only you," said Richard, "know what you are thinking of."
"Is it Mauritius?"
"It is," said Reg, "it is Mauritius."
"But you don't collect stamps?"
"No."
"What on earth's that?" said Richard suddenly, but Dirk carried on with his thought to Reg,
"Pity, you could get some nice first-day covers, couldn't you?"
Reg shrugged. "Not really interested," he said.
Richard slithered back down the slope behind them.
"So what's the great attraction here?" said Dirk. "It's not, I have to confess, what I was expecting. Very nice in its way, of course, all this nature, but I'm a city boy myself, I'm afraid." He cleaned his glasses once again and pushed them back up his nose.
He started backwards at what he saw, and heard a strange little chuckle from Reg. Just in front of the door back into Reg's room, the most extraordinary confrontation was taking place.
A large cross bird was looking at Richard and Richard was looking at a large cross bird. Richard was looking at the bird as if it was the most extraordinary thing he had ever seen in his life, and the bird was looking at Richard as if defying him to find its beak even remotely funny.
> Once it had satisfied itself that Richard did not intend to laugh, the bird regarded him instead with a sort of grim irritable tolerance and wondered if he was just going to stand there or actually do something useful and feed it. It padded a couple of steps back and a couple of steps to the side and then just a single step forward again, on great waddling yellow feet. It then looked at him again, impatiently, and squarked an impatient squark.
The bird then bent forward and scraped its great absurd red beak across the ground as if to give Richard the idea that this might be a good area to look for things to give it to eat.
"It eats the nuts of the calvaria tree," called out Reg to Richard.
The big bird looked sharply up at Reg in annoyance, as if to say that it was perfectly clear to any idiot what it ate. It then looked back at Richard once more and stuck its head on one side as if it had suddenly been struck by the thought that perhaps it was an idiot it had to deal with, and that it might need to reconsider its strategy accordingly.
"There are one or two on the ground behind you," called Reg softly.
In a trance of astonishment Richard turned awkwardly and saw one or two large nuts lying on the ground. He bent and picked one up, glancing up at Reg, who gave him a reassuring nod.
Tentatively Richard held the thing out to the bird, which leant forward and pecked it sharply from between his fingers. Then, because Richard's hand was still stretched out, the bird knocked it irritably aside with its beak.
