A cloud of dust was moving along the desert road. More police cars were coming, reinforcements. A knife twisted in Ali’s heart. This gesture of friendship astonished him, but it would lead nowhere. In five or ten minutes, the protesters would all be rounded up and carried away.
A young man outside the fence met Ali’s gaze. “Hey! My name’s Ben.”
“I’m Ali.”
Ben looked around frantically. “What’s your number?”
“What?”
“We’ll write to you. Give us your number. They have to deliver the letters if we include the ID number.”
“Behind you!” Ali shouted, but the warning was too late. One policeman had him in a headlock, and another was helping wrestle him to the ground.
Ali felt Daniel stagger. The crowd on his own side was trying to fend off a wave of guards with batons and shields.
Ali dropped to his feet. “They want our ID numbers,” he told Daniel. Daniel looked around at the melee. “Got anything to write on?”
Ali checked his back pocket. The small notebook and pen it was his habit to carry were still there. He rested the notebook on Daniel’s back, and wrote “Ali 3739 Daniel 5420.” Who else? He quickly added Fahim and a few others.
He scrabbled on the ground for a stone, then wrapped the paper around it. Daniel lifted him up again.
The police were battling with the protesters, grabbing them by the hair, dragging them across the dirt. Ali couldn’t see anyone who didn’t have more pressing things to worry about than receiving his message. He lowered his arm, despondent.
Then he spotted someone standing by the bus. He couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. He, or she, raised a hand in greeting. Ali waved back, then let the stone fly. It fell short, but the distant figure ran forward and retrieved it from the sand.
Daniel collapsed beneath him, and the guards moved in with batons and tear gas. Ali covered his eyes with his forearm, weeping, alive again with hope.
THE MOUSE RAN DOWN
Adrian Tchaikovsky
Adrian Tchaikovsky is a British fantasy author with eight novels out currently in his Shadows of the Apt series from Tor UK, and about a dozen short stories in various anthologies. “The Mouse Ran Down” was first published in Carnage: After the End 2 in 2012.
Will Kempe was just starting his comic turn when Ellie pushed her way through the crowd to prod me in the shoulder.
“It’s time,” she hissed. “We’ve got to go.”
I missed Kempe’s standard opener, the joke about lawyers, and the whooping roar of the groundlings around us obliterated Ellie’s next words.
“Give me five minutes, come on,” I slipped into the next lull. “I never get to hear this. I’m all packed.”
Ellie prodded me again. “Move, John.” She was got up as an apprentice, a young lad with the first growth of moustache feathering his lip and out on the prowl in his master’s cast-off doublet. A man’s clothes made it easier to move about London in the Year of Our Lord 1598. Small wonder Shakespeare had cross-dressing on the brain.
“They’ve got the Complete Works back at Permian One.” Ellie’s finger jabbed even harder. “Besides, you could have gone to see it yesterday.”
“It’s Will Kempe. He does a different skit each night. No-one wrote it down.” But I was letting myself be dragged off, as Ellie drove a path through the crowd, leading with her elbows.
I never did get to hear that routine of Kempe’s. You could keep the rest of the play, the stuff Shakespeare wrote, but Kempe was a comedian’s comedian, and I was always having to move just as he got into his flow, hearing the joke but never the punchline.
But we were running out of time, approaching the jagged end of history. Ellie was right: we had to get out.
There was a warehouse near the river that was the subject of a furious inheritance lawsuit. It was piled high with crates and boxes, imperishable goods brought in from the Indies and tied up in the courts until one of seven warring brothers would finally prevail over the others in around 1603. That was our home, for the nine months of the years 1597-8 that history had snapped off and preserved. We always arrived in the bitter cold of December, laden with our meagre possessions, hurrying through the snow-scattered streets to our makeshift saunctuary. We left in a September that was just being leached of the heat of summer, just as Will Kempe was making them laugh at the Curtain.
Four times. I had crept into this London four times with Ellie and Marcus, with a handful of families at our heels, living in the untenanted spaces of history by borrowing and theft and subterfuge, and then moving on.
We got back to the warehouse double time, by all the secret ways of that close-pressed, cluttered London, roofs and alleyways and connecting cellars. We were dressed as locals, but we were not supposed to be there, surplus to temporal requirements. It was best to avoid being noticed.
And there were always the hunters. We’d lost four fragments in the past year – my personal year, that was cut loose from all calendars – and nobody knew where would be next. We refugees were running short of safe havens. We were always on the move. It was no life, not for me, and certainly not for the children, the infirm. So few of us had made it out from the fall of history. We did our best to look after everyone.
Marcus had a look like sour milk when we turned up. “Do you know how late you are?”
“Plenty of time,” I told him, but it wasn’t true. Everything around us was starting to look grainy, shot through with streaks and fuzzy spots: noise in the signal, signs that a fragment was coming to its end. Out there, Old London Town was unravelling, breaking apart against the rocks of end time. Nobody would notice except us. The inhabitants, Will Kempe, all the theatregoers, they would disintegrate into nothing and never know it. If we didn’t get out we’d join them, only we’d not be made anew when the fragment began its nine month round again. We’d just be gone.
Patrick Scarrow and his family were ready to move, and Beth Nguyen and her kids, and the Wietzels, and the Morrow girls. We had twenty-one souls in our care, eternal refugees from when they’d destroyed the Now. The kids were complaining, mostly in whispers. It didn’t matter how many times, the life was still too disjointed to be good for them. Worse than just having to move school every year or so: each time they packed their bags they might be headed for the halls of Prester John or Dark Age Siberia or some time before mammals had even evolved.
Speaking of which. “Where’re we headed? You’ve taken a reading?”
Marcus gave me another look. “Just as well someone did. One month of Babylon. We’re overlapping with another troupe but it’s the only safe shard I could plot to. After that it’s a year in the Palaeolothic.”
“Make the most of Babylon then,” Ellie said dryly.
I passed amongst the others, making sure all the kids were keeping close to their folks, and that everyone had shouldered their backs and bags. Everyone had dressed for the occasion: robes and skirts, bare chests for the men, jewellery for the women. Babylon was a soft touch, but if there were other refugees already eking out a living there, we’d be in each others’ way and on each others’ toes every day. A populated fragment has its advantages – plenty of food to steal, plenty of comforts and conveniences if you’re sly about how you take advantage of them. Living space is tough to find, though – there just aren’t many places in any city of any time that will stay overlooked for the duration. The invisible spaces of Babylon in 1700BC would already be staked out and claimed by whoever was taking refuge there.
That this sort of doubling up was becoming more common as fragments were lost to us must have been in all our minds, but nobody said it. Nobody wanted to admit we were losing.
Not even losing the war. A war suggests we could fight back. We had been on the run since the end of time, desperately trying to put back the clock, and our enemies had hunted us through the eras and the ages, taking away our hiding places one by one. One day they would find this old London we were abandoning, and then Will Ke
mpe would be no more, and his humorous monologue would be forever lost to human recollection.
“All right, let’s move!” Marcus called, opening the doors from one ruined dog-end of time to the next, keeping us one step ahead of the enemy. Everyone began to file through, and I cast a backwards glance at the warehouse even as the sight was riven with cracks and discoloured stains. I would be back, I hoped: back for another of 1597’s endless supply of Decembers, and many more after that.
There had indeed been a war. Did we win? The question has no meaning. It was a cold war. Nobody was actually fighting, because that would have been boorish and uneconomic. Instead, competing commercial and ideological interests – one of them ours – were spinning the wheels frantically behind the scenes to find a way to beat the others without ever having to fight.
You heard about all sorts, from those who remembered those lost, last years. There were gene bombs and attack memes. There were viral ideas gone feral, adverse mental programming on a vast scale. You didn’t know what to believe, they said, and even when you did, you didn’t trust your own faith because someone might have slipped it into your drink. It was a strange war. It killed ideas but left people standing. Every day our society was written and rewritten.
Small wonder that they had started looking at taking the war into time. Surely the ultimate piece of passive aggression was to pre-empt the bad guys before they even knew what they were going to do.
It didn’t work out.
We hit the cooling night of Babylon after the rains had come and gone, creeping out from the cracks of the world into the shadows of the temples. The air was still, scented with fragrant smoke, with distant decay. Around us the darkened city was quiet, but there would surely be locals abroad who would not want to see this ragged band of refugees struggling through their streets. Getting to the safe house would be risky. If we had arrived at the beginning of the fragment, when everything had reset to its earliest surviving moment, then we could know exactly where all the inhabitants would be, and follow a pre-determined path that would get us under cover, unseen, before dawn. This fragment was months into its cycle, though, and the mere presence of other refugees would have exercised a cumulative effect on the routines of the city, despite their best efforts to stay below the radar. We would have to rely on stealth and misdirection.
Marcus and Ellie and I would take turns to lead away anyone who looked like they would take issue with a group of foreigners skulking through their streets, and still we expected to be seen by a fair assortment of beggars, prostitutes and drunken artisans. We could only hope we wouldn’t cause any problems for the incumbents. We would be waiting just a month before we skipped off for the Eocene, whilst they were fixing to stay here for the duration and would have to ride out any ripples that we had made.
We made it in the end, just as dawn was clawing at the eastern sky. There were almost no locals about that night, and those we saw were only glimpsed distantly and were as keen to avoid us as we were to dodge them. At the time I thought that we’d been lucky.
The safe house here was a tomb, or at least a tomb in waiting. The intended resident would be alive and well throughout the fragment’s term, still clinging grimly to life when time called a fractured halt to this slice of Babylon. In the meantime his forward planning and the vanity of his wanting a grand monument to his posterity gave us a roof over our heads.
“Who’s here, anyway?” I asked Marcus as we hurried and skulked in turn through the moon-shrouded streets.
“Maria, Leon, Sun, maybe another thirty all told,” he told me. “Going to be real crowded. We won’t be making any friends. Everyone on their best behaviour.”
“It’s not like it’s our fault—” I objected, but he cut me off.
“Doesn’t matter. Going to be standing room only for a month, and that’s not their fault, either. If Comoy could only step up the work—”
It was my turn to butt in. “Doctor Comoy is doing all he can to fix this.”
We were practically in sight of the tomb and Marcus gave out a long sigh, and only through that did he show just how tired he was. “John, it’s been almost forty years we’ve lived like this. I was a kid, when it all went to crap. You weren’t born. Comoy’s had all the time in the world to put the fucking egg back together again.”
“He’s not given up hope.”
“That’s what he says. Come on.”
Marcus and I had our charges, Scarrow and Nguyen and the rest, and we got them huddled down in a small street within sight of the tomb, while Ellie went to make contact with the incumbents. By that time everyone was exhausted, the children dead on their feet, backs bowed under their loaded lives, all they had of where we’d all come from, mementos of a past and future that no longer existed.
“We can’t keep doing this,” Marcus said. I made an urgent expression towards the others, who were all within earshot, but he shrugged. “I don’t care,” he went on. “It’s too hard. We can’t just keep running.”
“We can if we want to live.” The old party line. “It won’t be forever.”
His laughter was forced out of him like bile from a wound. “Forever? The end of time won’t be forever? Oh, you fucking naïf.”
Then Ellie was on her way back – too soon and too fast. Marcus and I exchanged glances. We were already on our feet by the time she reached us.
“They’re gone,” she told us.
“Is this the right fragment—?” I started and:
“The locals—?” from Marcus, but she was shaking her head to both of us.
“They were here. They’re gone. Not the locals.”
“No,” I heard myself say, but Ellie was already continuing.
“There are burn-marks all over, spent shell casings. Someone put up a fight. This fragment is compromised.”
“No,” I said again, and I was aware of a gathering murmur of despair and fear from everyone around us, but Marcus hissed for quiet.
Somewhere across the city the enemy was abroad. Small wonder we’d seen so few locals. There would be a genocide underway even as we crouched there. This small, jagged fragment of space and time was being cleansed and sterilized. We had lost Babylon. One more piece of history was no longer safe for human habitation.
“We need to move,” Ellie said.
“We need somewhere to move to,” Marcus pointed out sourly.
“Give me a chance. There must be somewhere we can reach from here. John, you too. I’ll take upstream, you take down.”
We did the math, over an hour, calculating our way out of fallen Babylon. At any moment the enemy could have found us, and we would all have died. I had glimpsed the enemy once before, during an escape that was far too tight and diminished the surviving population of human history by another twenty souls. They were sufficiently advanced that there was no resisting them. Hiding was all we had.
They were things left over from the war that had stopped the wheels of history, ended the world and robbed us not only of all we had but of all that was to come. The only thing we knew was that they were hunting us down, we refugees from the war, one rough-edged piece of time after another. Vermin. That’s what we were to them: vermin to be exterminated.
I searched and searched. I found a dozen mapped fragments within reach, not one of them to anywhere with dry land, and some without even a breathable atmosphere. So much of our own past is denied to us, a planet hostile to the meek who would one day inherit it.
“One,” I said at last. Marcus checked my results: the middle of a Carboniferous ice age, a frozen forest where a spark would set off a firestorm.
“No,” he said, and Ellie chimed, “I’ve found another.” She was always faster than me.
“Then why didn’t you—?”
“I was hoping you’d do better,” she said sadly. “We can get to Warsaw.”
“No,” I breathed, aware of all the eyes on us: the desperate, the lost, the eternally displaced. “There must be something else.”
I was
seriously going to argue for the ice, for the giant bugs, for the dizzying high oxygen atmosphere of the Carboniferous. He was right, though. The difference between that time – near inimitable to human life – and the Warsaw ghetto was slight, but we might have a chance. There would be a way out, if only we could find it.
They broke time, in that war. Because we can never go back there, we’ll never know who was responsible: whether it was everyone incrementally twisting at the fabric of time, or whether the continuum just fractured the moment the first time engine went online. Or perhaps, as Marcus says, it was just the concept of mutually-assured destruction taken to its logically illogical extreme. A pre-emptive strike against time itself to stop it falling into the hands of the enemy. Perhaps they meant to do it.
The cracks coursed through history like a mouse running down a clock. Some small number of us – and by ‘us’ I mean the seven billion human beings who were alive to see those final days of sanity – were snatched out of time before it broke, preserved by brilliant men like Doctor Comoy. We are, theoretically, the lucky ones. At least we still exist.
Doc Comoy and his team are still mapping the expanding debris cloud that is time itself. When we find a fragment we can reach, we catalogue it, plot it, inventory it. The science is not academic. We are looking for sanctuary, temporary shelters from the storm. For the first few decades it was us against the end of the world, blazing our trails through the monsters of prehistory and the depredations of our own ancestors to find places that would be safe to hide in, even for a little while. Then we discovered that one other thing had survived the annihilation: the enemy, whoever and whatever they were. As we scurried from fragment to fragment, eking out our miserable existence in the spaces between, they were hunting us. Even this tenuous life was more than they were prepared to allow us.
The Time Traveller's Almanac Page 92