Morning Child and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF Page B

shapes and color-patterns from one horizon to the other. It was impossible to watch it for long. It hurt the eyes and filled us with an oily, inexplicable panic that we were never able to verbalize. We looked away, filled with the musty surgings of vague fear.
    We didn’t know then that we were watching the first practical application of a process that’d long been suppressed by both the Combine and the Commonwealth, a process based on the starship dimensional “drive” (which isn’t a “drive” at all, but the word’s passed into the common press) that enabled a high-cycling discontinuity projector to throw time out of phase within a limited area, so that a spot here here would be a couple of minutes ahead or behind a spot a few inches away, in continuity sequence. That explanation would give a psychophysicist fits, since “time” is really nothing at all like the way we “experience” it, so the process “really” doesn’t do what I’ve said it does—doing something really abstruse instead—but that’s close enough to what it does on a practical level, ‘cause even if the time distortion is an “illusionary effect”—like the sun seeming to rise and set—they still used it to kill people. So it threw time out of phase, and kept doing it, switching the dislocation at random: so that in any given square foot of land there might be four or five discrepancies in time sequence that kept interchanging. Like, here might be one minute “ahead” of the base “now,” and then a second later (language breaks down hopelessly under this stuff; you need the math) here would be two minutes behind the now, then five minutes behind, then three ahead, and so on. And all the adjacent zones in that square foot are going through the same switching process at the same time (goddamn this language!). The Combine’s machinery tore itself to pieces. So did the people: some died of suffocation because of a five-minute discrepancy between an inhaled breath and oxygen received by the lungs, some drowned in their own blood.
    It took about ten minutes, at least as far as we were concerned as unaffected observers. I had a psychophysicist tell me once that “it” had both continued to “happen” forever and had never “happened” at all, and that neither statement canceled out the validity of the other, that each statement in fact was both “applicable” and “nonapplicable” to the same situation consecutively—and I did not understand. It took ten minutes.
    At the end of that time, the world got very still.
    We looked up. The land had stopped churning. A tiny star appeared amongst the rubble in the middle distance, small as a pinhead but incredibly bright and clear. It seemed to suck the night into it like a vortex, as if it were a pinprick through the worldstuff into a more intense reality, as if it were gathering a great breath for a shout.
    We buried our heads in our arms as one, instinctively.
    There was a very bright light, a light that we could feel through the tops of our heads, a light that left dazzling after-images even through closed and shrouded lids. The mountain leaped under us, bounced us into the air again and again, battered us into near unconsciousness. We never even heard the roar.
    After a while, things got quiet again, except for a continuous low rumbling. When we looked up, there were thick, sluggish tongues of molten magma oozing up in vast flows across the veldt, punctuated here and there by spectacular shower-fountains of vomited sparks.
    Our scattershield had taken the brunt of the blast, borne it just long enough to save our lives, and then overloaded and burnt itself to scrap; one of the first times that’s ever happened.
    Nobody said anything. We didn’t look at each other. We just lay there.
    The chrono said an hour went by, but nobody was aware of it.
    Finally, a couple of us got up, in silence, and started to stumble aimlessly back and forth. One by one, the rest crawled to their