Tempus Fugitive Read Online Free PDF

time there, when he had been hiding out there as Kelon – a sorceress.  This incarnation, as a woman, he had explained away as a ruse to prevent Tamar from finding him, as she had good reason to want to do, since he was responsible for her slavery as a Djinn.  But, since then, they had reason to wonder about this – there was definitely something camp about him.
    The file was now just empty space; it felt strange to be standing on a surface that, to all intents and purposes, was not there.  Even Tamar could not claim to be used to this sort of thing. 
    ‘So,’ said Stiles, ‘this is the middle of nowhere, is it?  I like it, I might build a holiday home here.  A real get away from it all.’
    ‘That’s an entirely feasible plan,’ Tamar told him.  ‘Maybe we’ll come back to it, but for now, we have to – EXIT FILE,’ she finished loudly.
    A gap appeared in the nothing (if you can imagine that) but they all saw it quite clearly.  As they approached it, a door slammed in the gap. It bore the legend, “FIRE ESCAPE DOOR”, and it had the proper bar to push and everything. It was painted red.
    Tamar pushed the bar; beyond the door was a wall of fire.
    ‘Firewall,’ said Denny laconically, and somewhat pointlessly.  ‘It’s not real fire I guess, but then again, we’re only data ourselves, I don’t know if we should risk it.’
    ‘We won’t have to,’ said Tamar.  She was busy with a piece of chalk. On the “wall” she had drawn a crude facsimile of a fire extinguisher.
    Chalk is not, perhaps, the most obvious of supplies to bring on an adventure, but it all depends on where you are going, in this case, it was invaluable.
    ‘Software,’ she said, as the fire extinguisher became solid in her hands.
    Denny nodded and grinned.  ‘You think of everything.’
    * * *
    Once the “fire” was out, they walked through the door into a long corridor with doors all along it; each door was labelled much as the file list had read except they were all deleted files.  At the end of the corridor was a door marked “MAINFRAME”.  They went through it, into another corridor lined with doors.   
    ‘Mainframe,’ gasped Tamar in awe.
    ‘It’s huge,’ said Denny complainingly and not at all in awe at all.
    It was indeed vast; the corridor in front of them stretched on into infinity and possibly further. The human brain is not designed to register this, which might explain why Stiles said, ‘It’s not as impressive as I thought it would be, somehow,’
    He had a point in a way.  If you disregarded the immense size and complexity of the place, with its labyrinth of corridors and its multi-layered dimensional effects, which some Maori painters have tried to represent with their dream paths, which, of course is, what Stiles did – his brain just short circuited what it could not handle – then the place had a flat utilitarian look about it, like the world’s biggest tax office.  
    ‘We won’t find it any easier to get into those files from here, not without the passwords,’ said Denny, discouragingly.
    ‘Oh God, you’re such an old woman sometimes,’ said Tamar.  ‘Do you have any idea where we are?  It’s amazing. We’re actually in mainframe. All the universe is controlled from here, no mortal, or anything else has ever been here before.’
    ‘Except Askphrit,’ said Denny.
    This comment brought Tamar back down to earth.  ‘Right, right, except Askphrit – the bastard.  We have to find the historical files.’
    ‘Shouldn’t be too hard, just look at the doors,’ said Stiles pragmatically.
    ‘But it’s so big,’ said Denny again.
    It took them fourteen hours of searching to find the right file.  It had taken them nine hours to even find the department of Earth.
     The door, when they finally found it, was not even locked. They opened it, and a guard appeared out of nowhere.  ‘Password?’ it demanded.  (I say “it”, because gender and even species was indeterminate