New Novel
Chapter 8: Nothing Here Agreed

Chapter 8: Nothing Here Agreed

Leon did not run.

Running required a direction, and he did not have one, and the last time a bored man had made a fast decision about this machine he had ended up in mud.

So he stood still for ninety seconds and did the only thing he was actually equipped to do, which was to look at things in an order.

Threats first. Nothing was moving within the twenty metres he could see. The roar had come from the east and had not been repeated. He was in a hollow between the buttress roots of an enormous conifer, which meant he had cover on two sides and a sightline on the third, and if something arrived from the fourth he would find out about it in the way animals usually do.

Position second. He had no idea.

Resources third.

He had what he was wearing, which was more than it looked. The travel clothing had been specified out of Elias’s notes rather than by Leon, and it carried a knife, a fire striker, a sealed sixty-millilitre water tube, and several pockets whose contents Leon had packed on instruction and had not yet had a reason to inventory.

Leon drank twenty millilitres of the sixty and put the tube away.

Then he looked at his hands, and made himself keep looking, because they were his hands and they were also four centimetres too far from him.

The body was going to kill him if he did not learn it fast.

He worked out how tall he was by standing against the trunk, cutting a mark with the knife, and measuring the mark with the cube’s edge. Eleven centimetres, seventeen times, and a remainder.

One hundred and ninety-six.

He had been one hundred and eighty-two his entire adult life.

Strength had arrived well ahead of coordination. When he pushed off the root his legs delivered considerably more than he had asked for, and he crossed the hollow in two strides instead of three and put a shoulder into a hanging vine that his old body would have ducked comfortably.

The equipment had been delivered. Nobody had included the manual.

So he stopped trying to walk and started measuring instead, which was at least something he had a method for. He held one arm out and touched a mark on the trunk, and missed it by three centimetres, and did it again until he stopped missing. He stood on one leg with his eyes shut and counted, and the number he got was roughly twice the number his old body would have managed.

Standing still, he was already better than he had ever been.

Whether any of that survived contact with a hurry was a separate question, and not one he could answer inside a hollow.

His pulse came down faster than it had any business coming down. His recovery between efforts was wrong in a direction he liked. Twenty-three point four percent oxygen, he thought, and a cardiopulmonary system rebuilt for it, and a man who had been out of breath climbing a small mountain last April.

Then he looked up, properly, and the ninety seconds of discipline came apart.

There were three canopies.

The bottom one was ferns and cycads at chest height, dense enough to hide anything under two metres. Above that, a middle layer of broad-leaved trees he could not name, twenty to thirty metres. And above all of it, so far up that the light arriving through it had already been used twice, an upper canopy of conifers whose trunks went past him without narrowing.

The light on the forest floor was green and had no direction. He looked for the sun and could not find it, and that alone told him more about the canopy than anything else did.

There was no grass.

He noticed it the way you notice a missing tooth — not immediately, and then not being able to stop. The ground between the ferns was leaf litter, moss, bare mud and root. No sward. No lawn. Nothing that grew in a continuous low mat.

Leon crouched and put his hand flat on the ground and thought about what that meant, and did not like the answer.

Grasses are recent. If a forest floor has none, the forest is old.

He knew what the obvious conclusion was, and he had been warned about it in writing.

Elias’s notes were in the archive module, in a hollow somewhere he had not yet found, but Leon had read that particular page eleven times and did not need the paper.

DO NOT TREAT FAUNA AS EVIDENCE OF DATE.

Written by a man who had built the machine, run it, and not come back. Written before Leon had a reason to care. Underlined once, which for Elias was restraint.

So Leon put Cretaceous down where he could see it, and did not pick it up.

He asked the cube instead.

"Date."

ERA LAYER: THE SYNCHRONOZOIC ERA.

"Calendar date."

ERA LAYER: THE SYNCHRONOZOIC ERA.

"Local year."

LOCAL DAY: 1.

"That is not an answer, it is an accounting convention."

The cube declined to argue.

He walked a slow circuit of forty metres, keeping the big conifer behind him, and did what he had done in a vineyard in 2024, which was to look at the plants and let them tell him about the place.

Cycads, which had been common before flowering plants existed. Tree ferns. Conifers with the wrong bark and the right shape. Horsetails at the edge of the wet ground, at a height that made him stop walking, because horsetails on Earth had stopped being tree-sized a very long time before anything wrote anything down.

And then, forty metres north, in a break where light came down, a stand of broad-leaved flowering shrubs.

They had proper flowers. Small, white, five-petalled, insect-pollinated, with the kind of leaf architecture that belonged to a much later world than the horsetails did.

They were growing four metres from a cycad.

Leon stood between the two of them for a while with his hand on the cube.

On Earth, in any single era, these plants belonged to different Chapters. Not different pages. Different Chapters, tens of millions of years apart, in a book that only ran one way.

Here they were sharing a light gap.

Do not treat fauna as evidence of date, Elias had written, and Leon finally understood that the man had not been warning him against a mistake in identification.

He had been warning him that the question was wrong.

Something moved in the ferns behind him — small, fast, low, gone before he turned.

Leon put his back against the conifer, took out the knife he had no ability to use, and made himself say it out loud, because saying it out loud made it a fact he had to work with rather than a feeling he could postpone.

"This is not the past."