by Adam Roberts
But this peculiar disrelation between inside and outside was not the only strange feature of the TARDY.
One feature of the machine was that it possessed a capability to disguise itself automatically. Unfortunately this ‘Disguise Mutation Chip’ functioned perfectly. This was a terrible shame. It would have been much better had it broken down, or malfunctioned in some way. But we had no such luck.
You see, the Dr’s TARDY took the shape of a police phone box. That was its disguise, which enabled it to blend in on any world. All Time Gentlemen were given TARDIES, and all of them were configured with some sort of police-based disguise chip, because every civilisation in the galaxy has a police force. But I have to say, if I’d been the Dr, taking charge of my TARDY for the first time, I would have flipped open the panel in the central control module and I would have smashed the Disguise Mutation Chip with the heel of my fancy boot. Or with a hammer. Or the head of my nearest assistant. Anything to hand.
Do you ask why? I’ll tell you why.
The Disguise Mutation Chip automatically changed the outward appearance of the TARDY to blend in with its environment. Imagine a different TARDY, one operated by a notional Time Gentleman, and programmed to look like a police car. It might land in London in the 1960s as a panda car; and in London in the 2960s as a Police All Nodes Driving AcceleraTron. Blending-in, you see.
All well and good - if your TARDY is configured to look like a police car. Or a police station. But the Dr’s TARDY took the shape of a police phone box. It was a nightmare.
Oh, if we landed in the London of the late 1950s then things were fine. We would materialise ourselves on the corner of a foggy street looking exactly like a tall blue cubicle with POLICE at the top. Well and dandy. But let’s say we were happened to materialise in London in - let’s say, for the sake of argument - 2010. Nobody used phone boxes in that time-period any more, of course; mobile phone technology had rendered them obsolete. To blend in, the TARDY’s software would automatically give us the appearance of a small Nokia seven-three-fourteen, the one with the blue screen and caller ident, the size of a small pack of cards.
Have you ever tried to clamber out of a small mobile phone? Of course you haven’t. That’s a stupid question. Well, I have: and let me tell you: even with the flip-back top it is very far from being easy.
Once the Dr landed the TARDY on a planet in the Nibbler Nebula, a place where the local inhabitants had not advanced beyond the equivalent of our stone age. Their rudimentary police force communicated amongst itself by yelling. Accordingly our Disguise Mutation Chip manifested us as a six-foot shouty man. We had to climb out through his mouth - awkward. And messy too. I came out first, squeezing myself up the gullet and past the big rubbery tongue and slobbery lips: I fell six feet to the stony soil, bruising my shoulder. I picked myself up and did my best to wipe the saliva from my face and body, as Linn followed, and finally the Dr himself. After a great deal of effort, and a good deal of saying yuk and euw we were all outside, and about to leave, when the Dr cursed. ‘I have forgotten my Moronic Screwdriver! Left it inside the TARDY!’
Linn and I both stared at one another. For several minutes nothing happened, except for the moaning of a vast and distant wind dragging itself across the horizon-spanning stony desert.
‘Well,’ I prompted. ‘Do you want to pop back inside and get it?’
The Dr looked at the TARDY. Its Disguise Mutation Chip had given it the look of a man not unlike a young Brian Blessed. The door was still open. The Dr looked at me. ‘You don’t fancy just, er, popping back inside for me, do you?’
‘Not I,’ I said.
‘Well,’ said the Dr, putting his hand on the TARDY’S chin and snapping it upwards to shut the door. ‘I don’t suppose we’ll need it.’
And so we went off without the Moronic Screwdriver. It was alright in the end, because we didn’t need it; but you take my point. It’s not convenient.
On another occasion we landed in eighteenth-century England, and the TARDY took the form of a large semaphore flag: oak pole and a red-triangular pennant. On the distant World of Racrd it took the form of a carrier pigeon. On more than one occasion (I repeat, for the record: on more than one occasion) we landed in cultures so technologically sophisticated that police communication was affected by microscopic nano-technological prostheses. On these occasions the Dr would open the TARDY door from the inside just fine; but the attempt to step through, or even to put one’s little finger through, proved perfectly impossible.
‘Righty-tighty,’ the Dr would say, on these occasions. ‘Well, I didn’t really want to visit this world and this timeframe anyway.’ And he’d fiddle with the control knobs and away we’d go.
There were whole swathes of space and time we never visited.
Chapter One
THE INTERVIEW
The Dr (the advertisement said) happened to be in my area and was recruiting. I went through his usual channels, and was given a time for my interview.
This took place in a spaceship, a marvellous device. It was called the TARDY, because its temporal engines slip it out of synch with Standard Time, disengaging itself, becoming in a sense cosmically delayed. It flips back along the temporal dimension (if the destination is in the future, then the TARDY loops right the way round the whole of spacetime, over the top and back in. It takes less time than you might think).
I stepped through the door. The Dr and a young woman were sitting behind a table. It was one of those tables with fold-out metal tubing for legs.
The Dr was dressed in a strange collection of velvet jacket, moleskin trousers, black winklepinker boots, a waistcoat, a silk tie with the design of a rectangular blue grid upon it. He had a big woolly scarf, and was wearing a leather overjacket. He looked a power of odd, to be honest. The young lady was dressed more soberly. And attractively.
‘Hello,’ said the Dr, peering at his notes and not looking at me. ‘Please take a seat.’ There was a rather rickety-looking chair sitting in the middle of the room: four aluminium poles, a small square of red plastic upholstery and a scuffed oval-shaped seat. I sat on this gingerly.
The woman smiled at me, which I took to be an encouraging sign. The Dr, however, seemed to be spending an awfully long time going through my résumé.
‘Right,’ he said, eventually. Finally he looked up and met my eye. ‘I am the Dr and this is Linnaeus Trout. Named for the great Linnaeus, who did such sterling work establishing categories, rules and restrictive definitions.’
This meant nothing to me. ‘Right,’ I said, a little nervously.
‘Hello,’ she said.
‘Good afternoon,’ I said.
‘So—Mr—Tailor, is it?’
‘That’s right. Prose Tailor.’
‘I wasn’t sure,’ the Dr said, ‘if that was your name, or your job description?’
‘It’s both,’ I explained. ‘On my world it is our jobs that give us our names.’
‘I see. So if, let us say, your work were syringing out the build-up of wax from the ears of cataleptic pigs, then your name would be—?’
‘Please forgive the Doctor his levity,’ said the woman, speaking in a well-modulated and pleasant voice. ‘Why don’t we start the interview with you telling us why you want the job?’
‘I don’t know really,’ I said, rubbing my right knee with my right hand. ‘I suppose I’m ready for a change. A career change. I’ve been a Prose Tailor now for seven years, and I’ve got the feeling I’m going nowhere. I’m ready for the change and the, um, exciting challenges of a new position.’
I paused. I don’t mind admitting I was nervous. I’ve never handled job interviews very well. I rubbed my right knee with my right hand again. Then I rubbed my left knee with my left hand for a bit. Then (I’m not sure why, except that I was terribly nervous) I rubbed both my knees with both my hands simultaneously. This produced a slightly squeaky noise, and for some reason I rubbed both my knees again, replicating the squeaky noise and satisfying myself that it h
ad not been some random noise that happened to coincide with my knee-rubbing activity. I looked up. The two people behind the desk were looking at me askance. Or if not exactly quite askance, then at least in a way that was far from being fully skance. This, naturally, made me more nervous.
I folded my arms. But then I thought that folded arms might give me a standoffish look, so I unfolded them again. I found myself wishing that I had a desk, like my interviewers, upon which to rest my arms in a casual and easygoing manner. I held my arms, elbows bent, a little away from my sides. But that was no good.
‘Mr Tailor,’ said the Dr, leaning forward a little. ‘This is a job that will involve a great deal of travelling through space and time. Tell me: what experience of time travel will you bring to the position?’
I decided then that the best thing to do was let my arms hang straight down by my sides. But no sooner had I let them droop than it occurred to me that this might look rather monkey-like. I didn’t want them to think me too simian. Why should they give the job to a simian? So I picked my arms up and lay them in my lap. This was better, except that it meant that my hands were resting in the declivity of my crotch. As soon as I had made this move I regretted it. I didn’t want them to think, after all, that I was some kind of pervert, fondling myself in the crotch-area right in the middle of an interview. If they wouldn’t want to give the job to a simian, how much less would they want to give it to a crotch-fondler? So, and trying to be as discreet as I could, I turned both of my hands over, so that instead of resting palms down on my groin they were resting palms upward on my thighs. This went well, except that somehow the very tip of my right thumb got itself snagged under a fold of cloth in my trousers, such that as I moved it away the thumb drew up a sort of mini-tent of fabric from the material loosely folded in at my crotch. When I finished this little manoeuvre with my hands this upraised pyramid of cloth remained standing. I glanced down. This could not be making a good impression. It looked, in fact, as if I were markedly and inappropriately aroused by the mere fact of being interviewed for a job. Drastic action was required. With sudden and explosive action I coughed, shifted in my seat, and slapped my right hand down to my privates to smooth away this upward-poking fold of trouser cloth. Then, to try and cover the operation, I swung my right leg up and over my left.
That, I told myself, was one smooth manoeuvre.
My two interviewers were staring at me. The woman had her mouth slightly open.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘What was the question again?’
‘I was asking you,’ the Dr repeated, in a wary voice, ‘what experience of time travel you would bring to the position.’
‘Ah. Well, just the usual, I suppose. The standard?’
‘The standard experience?’
‘Yes, you know. One hour per hour, travelling through time, that sort of thing.’
‘Travelling forward?’
‘Yes.’
‘Your résumé,’ the Dr pointed out, placing his forefinger on the relevant bit, ‘suggests that you have experience of travelling backwards in time as well.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Well, in a manner of speaking.’
‘A manner of speaking?’
‘Yes. It was last year. A haircut.’
‘Haircut?’
‘It made me three or four years younger. Everybody said so. At least three years and possibly four.’
‘It made you three or four years younger,’ Linn asked, ‘or it made you look three or four years younger?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘One of those two.’
‘Mr Tailor,’ said the Dr, sharply. ‘Do you understand what the job particulars involve?’
‘I think so, yes.’
‘It is more than simply travelling. We have a series of very important missions to accomplish, repairing and indeed correcting the very nature of spacetime.’
‘I understand.’
‘There is sometimes danger. Are you prepared for danger?’
‘Danger is my middle name.’
The Dr frowned, and picked up a pen. ‘You really should have put that down,’ he said, making the correction.
‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s not literally my middle name. That’s just a way of saying that, yes, I’m prepared for danger.’
The Dr, frowning in a more pronounced fashion, scribbled out what he had just written.
‘Mr Tailor,’ put in Linn. ‘Let me tell you what it was about your application that interested us. You are a prose tailor?’
‘I am.’
‘You tailor prose?’
‘Yes.’
‘Clearly you are familiar with punctuation. Grammar. Correct syntax. That’s very important.’
‘Well,’ I said. ‘Yes I am.’
‘Allow me to explain,’ said the Dr. ‘This is more than a matter of prose. You see time, history, the life of the cosmos - it has a grammar. There are rules. When actual existence violates those rules, somebody needs to step in and do something. Somebody needs to go around correcting the solecisms and ambiguities that creep in. Because, if nobody did that . . .’ He trailed off.
‘What?’
‘It would be too ghastly to contemplate,’ he said, firmly. ‘Wouldn’t it, Linn?’
‘Much too ghastly,’ she agreed.
‘I see,’ I said in an obviously I’ve no idea what you’re talking about tone of voice.
‘You need to think of history as a kind of sentence,’ said the Dr. ‘Take your own history: the history of the Planet of the Asexual Slug-men. Now, in the third quarter of the—’
‘Earth,’ said Linn.
‘What?’
‘We decided to go to Earth instead,’ said Linn. ‘Don’t you remember?’
‘We’re on Earth?’ the Dr asked. ‘And not the Planet of the Asexual Slug-men?’
‘That’s right,’ Linn said.
The Dr looked me up and down. There was a pause. ‘You sure?’ he said.
‘Earth is my planet,’ I said, a little nervously.
‘Well if you say so, if you, yes. Start again. Take your own history, Mr Tailor: the history of the Planet Earth, apparently. Take a figure like Leonardo da Vinci. It’s pretty obvious, I think, that da Vinci was born too early in your planet’s history. Do you see? He started having all these ideas that were well before their time. You see, Earth’s history was building up to Leonardo.’
‘He was born ahead of his time,’ I said.
‘Yes. You could say that.’
‘And it’s wrong for people to be ahead of their time?’
‘Not morally wrong,’ the Dr clarified. ‘Grammatically wrong. Those are two different usages of the word wrong, you understand. Take that sentence, the one I spoke a moment ago: Earth’s history was building up to Leonardo. If Leonardo occurs too early in that sentence it makes nonsense of it:
Earth’s Leonardo history was building up to.
That’s a very unsatisfying sentence. You see that, don’t you?’
‘In fact,’ Linn put in, ‘the situation is even more pronounced than that. You see, the sentence of Time is structured according to the logic of sequential time. Time is one thing after another, isn’t it? That’s what chronology means. Because of that, Leonardo’s too-early appearance actually disrupts everything that follows. It warps the sentence into something more like this:
Earth’s Leonardo buildtoing up history was.
And that’s an even more unsatisfying sentence.’
‘So,’ I said, realization dawning, ‘your job is—’
‘To buzz about the cosmos, making the necessary corrections. Affirming the grammar of Time. Adding an apostrophe here, changing a who to a whom there, as it were. Changing history in little ways to keep the overall story - the cosmic history - flowing properly on according to the rules.’
‘So you’re going to sort out Leonardo, are you?’
‘Going to? I did him last year. In the original timeline he was Aviator King of a United Europe from fourteen-ninety-one to sixteen-
sixty-six.’
‘That’s an awfully long time to be king,’ I observed.
‘Yes. He discovered an anti-aging potion. He called it Gniga. That’s “aging” backwards. Because it was anti-aging. Do you see?’
‘So you put an end to that possible time sentence?’ I said.
‘We corrected it, yes.’
‘How?’
‘We photocopied all his notebooks backwards and then snaffled the originals. Puzzled him no end, I don’t mind telling you. Took him years to figure them out. Anyway, that’s off the point. The point is that we need somebody who understands grammar - who understands the rules - to assist us in our work. I am a fully qualified Time Gentleman. Linn, here, is my apprentice; after seven years she will be eligible to take the Time Gentleman exams. Are you ready to join our exciting and dynamic team?’
‘I think so,’ I said.
‘You think so?’ prompted Linn. ‘Or you know so?’
‘I know so.’
‘You think you know so?’ asked the Dr. ‘Or you know you know so?’
‘I know I know so!’ I said, assertively. ‘And, just to be clear, I know I know I know so, and I know I know I know I know so.’
‘Good. Well Mr Tailor,’ the Dr was shuffling his papers, ‘that’s all the questions we wanted to ask you, I think. Do you have any questions you want to ask us?’
‘Well,’ I said. ‘I was wondering about overtime?’
The Dr looked at Linn, and Linn looked at the Dr. Then, for reasons mysterious to me, they both started laughing. ‘Very good, Mr Tailor!’ the Dr said. ‘Very witty. We like you. Welcome aboard.’