Doctor Who_ Cat's Cradle_ Times Crucible - Marc Platt [61]
"Ace," he'd say with his impish smile. "I can't let you out of my sight for one minute." And then he'd dab the tears from her cheeks with his paisley scarf. It had to be the scarf, because the matching hanky was probably tying together two errant bits of the ever-expanding, entropic universe.
Who was she trying to kid? Nothing stays the same. It all disintegrates in the end. Never trust rumours. Even knots come undone and hankies get frayed. Yet something was going on, so she was going with it. Nowhere else to go. The mechanism was carrying her up even further into the nightmare tower with only a wayward silver moggie for very doubtful company.
16: The Big Wind-up
The cat sprang on to a passing girder and vanished into the gloom. Ace was left on her own.
The ledge ferried her on a diagonal wheel, juddering upwards through the Watch Tower's iron skeleton, as if each inch it moved might be the last. The other springs and chains were slack. Time's momentum had run down. The clacking wheels and pendulums had frozen at the shock of the phantom's appearance.
The terrified hiss of the Processes rose from below her, but Ace did not look back. She pulled at strands of filament on her grubby clothes. They called her the Future. At least they thought she knew where the Future was. So the Future always faced the front. The Past could look after itself.
The ledge groaned to a halt a metre from another high walkway. It began to teeter backwards in a series of tiny jolts. Ace threw herself across the widening gap. Under her the hungry abyss opened out. Then her arms hugged at a girder and her feet hit the floor. Behind her, the ledge clattered down the curve of the wheel like a broken toy.
The walkway was slung high inside the Tower fretwork. There was no sign of the cat. The metal plate floors and gantries were pocked with the Processes' footsteps, some dry encrusted, some glistening fresh. The passage followed a slow spiral, downwards and outwards like a giant spring around which the Tower had grown.
At one point it emerged, high on the outside of the Tower. Ace ventured cautiously out into the open and stared across the City around and beneath her. The world she had been condemned to was arrayed in a nightmare symmetry that clamped around her head like a thought-vice. Miehrrvre of the brain.
She squinted, but couldn't focus. The perspective was a nightmare. A crushed, grey kaleidoscope of buildings rising around the sides of the basin. Tilting in, dwarfing the mountainous Tower that loomed like an iron canker at the City's heart.
The City spread to the straight bank of the mercury stream that flowed from under the Tower. And on the far side, the buildings started again. The same City repeated. The next phase, past or future, with the same buildings. In the high distance, Ace saw the Phazels. Tiny figures moving on the face of the City. Slaves searching for the Processes' stolen Future.
She ran along the circling balcony, watching the City until she saw another mercury stream. And beyond it, past or future, another phase of the City rose up. There were no Phazels to be seen here, but a column of smoke was rising from between the jumbled buildings.
There was no wind, so the smoke rose in a thin uninterrupted strand up into the stars, feeding the opaque splash of the great nebula.
The stars blinked and flickered like sky-circuitry, fiercer and richer in coloured luminosity at this height. And then the nebula churned as if blown by a gust of solar wind, and Ace glimpsed through the sky beyond the stars to where another City curved like a dim canopy overhead.
It was like circling forever inside a goldfish bowl.
If she stared hard at a point, it came into sharper focus, zooming into close detail. In the heart of the City was a wide area like the face of a clock. Its surface was uneven and soft as if it had been melted, but the patterns