The End of All Songs BY MICHAEL MOORCOCK Book Three of the Dancers at the End of Time trilogy
Dregs
1899
1. In Which Jherek Carnelian and Mrs. Amelia Underwood Commune, to some Degree, with Nature
Mrs. Amelia Underwood, with the flat of her left hand, stroked thick auburn hair back over her ear and, with her right hand, arranged her tattered skirts about her ankles. The gesture was almost petulant; the glint in her grey eye was possibly wolfish. There was, if nothing else, something over-controlled in the manner in which she perched primly upon her block of virgin limestone and watched Jherek Carnelian as he crouched, elbows and knees pressed in the sand of a Palaeozoic beach, and sweated in the heat of the huge Silurian (or possibly Devonian) sun.
Perhaps for the thousandth time he was trying to strike two of his power-rings together to make a spark to light the heap of half-dried ferns he had, in a mood of ebullience long since dissipated, arranged several hours before.
"But you told me," he murmured, "that you could not bear to consider There! Was that a spark? Or just a glint?"
"A glint," she said, "I think."
"We must not despair, Mrs. Underwood." His optimism was uncharacteristically strained. Again he struck ring against ring.
Around him were scattered the worn and broken fragments of fronds which he had earlier tried to rub together at her suggestion. As power-ring clacked on power-ring, Mrs. Underwood winced. In the silence of this Silurian (if it was Silurian) afternoon the sound had an effect upon her nerves she would not previously have credited; she had never seen herself as one of those over-sensitive women who populated the novels of Marie Corelli. She had always considered herself robust, singularly healthy. She sighed. Doubtless the boredom contributed something to her state of mind.
Jherek echoed her sigh. "There's probably a knack to it," he admitted. "Where are the trilobites?" He stared absently around him at the ground.
"Most of them have crawled back into the sea, I think," she told him coldly. "There are two brachiopods on your coat." She pointed.
"Aha!" Almost affectionately he plucked the molluscoidea from the dirty black cloth of his frock-coat. Doubtfully, he peered into the shells.
Mrs. Underwood licked her lips. "Give them to me," she commanded. She produced a hat-pin.
His head bowed, Pilate confronting the Pharisees, he complied.
"After all," she told him as she poised the pin, "we are only missing garlic and butter and we should have a meal fit for a French gourmet." The utterance seemed to depress her. She hesitated.
"Mrs. Underwood?"
"Should we say grace, I wonder?" She frowned. "It might help. I think it's the colour"
"Too beautiful," he said eagerly. "I follow you. Who could destroy such loveliness?"
"That greenish, purplish hue pleases you?"
"Not you?"
"Not in food, Mr. Carnelian."
"Then in what?"
"Oh" Vaguely. "In no, not even in a picture. It brings to mind the excesses of the Pre-Raphaelites. A morbid colour."
"Ah."
"It might explain your affinities" She abandoned the subject. "If I could conquer"
"A yellow one?" He tried to tempt her with a soft-shelled creature he had just discovered in his back pocket.
yourselves in this position."
"Then you verify the Morphail Theory," Jherek said, trudging beside the time-traveller. "Time resists paradox, adjusting accordingly refusing, you might say, to admit a foreign body to a period to which it is not indigenous?"
"If a paradox is likely to occur. Yes. I suspect that it is all to do with consciousness, and with our group understanding of what constitutes Past, Present and Future. That is, Time, as such, does not exist"
Mrs. Underwood uttered a soft exclamation as the stranger's craft came in sight. It consisted of an open frame of tubular lengths of brass and ebony. There was ivory here and there, as well as a touch or two of silver, copper coils set into the top of the frame, immediately above a heavily sprung leather saddle of the sort normally seen on bicycles. Before this was a small board of instruments and a brass semi-circle where a lever might normally fit. Much of the rest of the machine was of nickel and crystal and it showed signs of wear, was much battered, dented and cracked in places. Behind the saddle was strapped a large chest and it was to this that the stranger made at once, undoing the brass buckles and pushing back the lid. The first object he drew out of the trunk was a double-barrelled shot-gun which he leaned against the saddle; next he removed a bale of muslin and a solar topee, and finally, using both hands, he hauled up a large wickerwork basket and dumped it in the sand at their feet.