A Tale of Time City

by Diana Wynne Jones

  “You can count on Elio for that,” Petula said. “If you have any trouble with anything, put your hand across that blue square by the bed and one of us will come and sort you out.”

  When Petula had gone, Vivian took possession of the room by straightening out the paper goblet, which had become rather battered by then, and planting it on an empty-frame table by the wall. Then she lay on the bed, which was a flowered blanket draped over nothing, and listened to strange chiming music out of a thing called “the Deck” which floated beside the bed. It was almost as good as listening to the wireless. She thought she had better start thinking how to get the bees out of Jonathan’s bonnet and make him help her get back to stay with Cousin Marty. In some strange way, she knew that those two time-ghosts she had seen would do that, if she could think how. But she did not want to think of that ghost of herself walking beside the ghost of Jonathan for hundreds of years before either of them were born. She went to sleep instead.

  She woke because someone had come quietly in and laid out clothes for her. The sound of the door sliding shut made her sit up with a jerk. Now she found that she did want to think about the two time-ghosts. I wonder what we were—I mean what we will be doing, she thought, with a great deal of interest. I can use them somehow. She almost had an idea how.

  “Are you there, V.S.?” Jonathan’s voice said out of the Deck.

  “No. I’m asleep,” said Vivian. And the almost-idea was gone.

  “Then wake up. Dinner’s in half an hour,” said Jonathan’s voice. “It’ll be official, with guests, I warn you. It always is. Shall I come and get you?”

  “Is it? Then perhaps you’d better,” Vivian said.

  This news made her very nervous. She managed to fumble her way into the silky white suit laid out for her. Its trousers were so baggy they were almost like a skirt, and she put both feet down the same leg twice before she got it right. When she stood up and put her arms into the baggy sleeves, the suit fastened itself down her back like magic and began to glow slightly. Blue flowers appeared, floating gently in spirals round her arms and legs. Vivian touched them, and they were as unreal as time-ghosts. This was unnerving enough, but the most unnerving thing was the looseness, of the suit itself, if, like Vivian, you were used to the tight clothes and underclothes of 1939. She felt as if she had no clothes on at all, and that made her more nervous than ever.

  When Jonathan arrived, all in white, with his hair newly plaited, he did not help her to feel any better. “It’ll be quite boring,” he warned her on the way down the polished stairs. “The guests are Dr. Wilander—he’s my tutor—and Librarian Enkian. They hate one another. There’s a story that Wilander once threw a whole set of Shakespeare folios at Enkian. He’s strong as an ox, so it could be true. They had another quarrel today and my father invited them to soothe them down.”

  “I hope they’ll all be too busy hating and soothing to notice me,” Vivian said.

  “Bound to be,” said Jonathan.

  But they were not. Jonathan’s parents were waiting in the dining room, which was a round vaulted room that put Vivian instantly in mind of a tube station, and the two guests were standing with them beside a pretend fire flickering in a real fireplace. Though all four were in solemn black, Vivian found it hard not to think of them as sheltering from an air-raid. It gave her an instant feeling of danger. That feeling grew worse when Jenny looked up and said, “Here she is,” and Vivian realised they had all been talking about her.

  Mr. Enkian, who had a yellow triangular face and a way of sneering even when he talked about ordinary things, looked at Vivian and said, “What a pale little creature!”

  Vivian’s face at once contradicted him by growing red and hot. She felt like something the cat had brought in. Except I don’t think there are any cats here! she thought, rather desperately.

  “Six years in smoke-polluted history isn’t good for anyone,” Jenny said, in her most worried-soothing way, as she led the way to the table.

  Sempitern Walker shot her an anguished look over his shoulder. “She managed to grow though,” he said. He sounded as if he bore Vivian a grudge for it.

  As for Dr. Wilander, he simply stared at Vivian. He was huge. He had a huge hanging face like a bear’s. Vivian took one look at him and found her eyes being met by shrewd little grey eyes gazing hard at her out of the bear’s face. They terrified her. She knew she was being stared at and summed up by one of the cleverest people she had ever met. She was too frightened to move until Jonathan took hold of her shoulder and shoved her into a carved and polished empty-frame chair. Then it was a relief just to look at the table and find that it was not invisible, but made of some white stuff with patterns of white on it to imitate a tablecloth.

  Dr. Wilander sat down opposite her and the empty chair creaked. He spoke to her. His voice was a dull grunting, like a bear in a distant thicket. “So you’re the youngest Lee, eh? Vivian Lee?”

  “Yes,” Vivian said, wishing she did not need to lie.

  “Sent home because of the Second World War, eh?” grunted Dr. Wilander.

  “Yes,” Vivian agreed—with relief, because now she was back at least to lying by telling the truth.

  “By which we understand,” said Mr. Enkian, “that the notorious instability of Twenty Century must have escalated to a degree to cause concern to your parents. We hope you can give an account of it.”

  Help! thought Vivian. She looked desperately at Jonathan, but she could tell he was going to be no help. He was looking cool and well-behaved, the picture of a boy trying not to be noticed.

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Enkian,” grunted Dr. Wilander. “You can’t expect an eleven-year-old child to judge degrees of instability.”

  “I do expect it from the child of two trained Observers,” Mr. Enkian snapped. “She can answer questions at least.”

  Jonathan’s father interrupted, realising that his guests were starting to quarrel. “We all know the source of the trouble,” he said, “and though extirpation is still a possibility, what most concerns us now is how the resulting temporonic unrest might be contained in a century of such low prognostic yield…”

  He went on talking. Four ladies came in and set out a multitude of large and small dishes in front of everyone, and Sempitern Walker talked all the time they were doing it. It was very boring. Perhaps it was his job to be boring, Vivian thought, in which case he was very good at his job. He stared at the rounded end of the room as if something there worried him terribly and spoke in a droning voice of escalation waves and socio-temporal curves and paradigms of agon-types and cultural manipulation of ideology and behavioural parameters and the Lee Abdullah index, until a sort of heaviness fell on everyone.

  Vivian tried to listen. She was sure that the more she knew about Time City, the easier it would be to get home. But she understood most of it rather less than she had understood Jonathan explaining how his belt worked. She did dimly grasp that her own century seemed to be in an uproar and that when Sempitern Walker talked about “the source of the trouble” he might have meant the Time Lady. And she gathered that learned people in Time City kept watch on the rest of history and tried to push it into behaving the way Time City wanted.

  I think that’s rather a cheek! she thought.

  The ladies finally gave everyone water and wine in matching tumblers made of thousands of jewel-like bits of glass. Then they left and everyone began to eat. Vivian’s sense of danger returned. She knew she would make awful mistakes and everyone would realise she was not Cousin Vivian. She watched Jonathan and Jenny carefully and did what they did. And it was quite easy. The main difference in Time City manners was that you were allowed to pick up most of the food in your fingers and dip it into little bowls of bright-tasting sauce. The white surface of the table made any drips vanish like magic. Vivian was so relieved to find she could manage after all that she barely felt nervous when Mr. Enkian and Dr. Wilander began asking her questions.

  “How do you feel to be back in civilisa
tion?” Mr. Enkian said. “It must be quite a change after a Twenty Century slum.”

  “We don’t live in a slum!” Vivian said indignantly. “We live in Lewisham! It’s respectable. A lot of people have cars there.”

  “Have you seen any slums?” grunted Dr. Wilander, looking up from his dishes. The ladies had given him twice as many without being asked. He probably needed them, Vivian thought, considering the size of him.

  “Not really,” she said. “Mum won’t let me go down to Peckham Rye. It’s very rough there. Policemen walk in pairs.”

  “But your parents go there, of course,” asserted Mr Enkian.

  “No they don’t,” said Vivian. “Nobody goes to slums if they can help it. But Mum goes through on a bus sometimes on her way to the West End.”

  “And your father?” growled Dr. Wilander.

  “I don’t know,” Vivian said sadly. “I haven’t seen him for ages. As soon as there was the threat of war, the Ministry moved him to a secret Government Establishment and it’s so hush-hush that he hardly gets home for weekends now. Mum says at least that means he won’t be called up into the army to get killed.”

  “I call that a shrewd move on Lee’s part,” Mr. Enkian said. “It’s not an Observer’s job to get himself killed.”

  Sempitern Walker leaned forward with a look of puzzled agony. “I thought your parents had settled in a quarter called Islington?”

  This gave Vivian a jolt. Her mind seemed to have played a strange trick on her. It had allowed her to tell one lie, saying she was Vivian Lee, but otherwise it had settled for lying by telling the absolute truth about everything else. She had to think quickly. “Yes, but we moved,” she said. “Mum wasn’t happy with my school there.” That made another lie. And she hoped hard that nobody would ask her about Islington because she had never been there in her life.

  “Tell us about your school,” said Jenny.

  Vivian heaved a sigh of relief and began to talk. She talked about school, clothes, buses, and the underground and how you sheltered there from bombs if you had no shelter of your own. She described the air-raid shelter that made a hump in the middle of her own back lawn. Meanwhile, she dipped dry little dumplings and long crisp leaves into sauce and ate them as if she had been doing it all her life. She sipped wine—it tasted to her as if it had gone off—and went on to films, where she was a true expert. Mickey Mouse, Snow White, Shirley Temple, and Bing Crosby took her through the time when the ladies brought more dishes, and she ate what was in those almost without noticing. Then she went on to jazz. But a grunted question from Dr. Wilander brought her back to the War. She told them about coupons, and the dark curtains she helped Mum make for blackout, and how there were tank traps on the roads and an anti-aircraft emplacement up on the common. She described big silver barrage balloons over London. She told them Mr. Chamberlain was so good he was no good and she imitated an air-raid siren. It was such fun to be the centre of attention like this that she even offered to sing them Hang out your washing on the Siegfried Line. But they asked about gas attacks instead.

  Vivian explained that this was the real threat. Then she went on to the way the Government was sending all the children out of London. She began describing the hot, noisy train, and very nearly went on to say that she was being sent to Cousin Marty herself, but she stopped herself in time. “They all had labels,” she said. “Just like luggage.”

  “This is a bit puzzling, my love,” Jenny said. She looked at Dr. Wilander. “When were the evacuations in World War Two? Twenty Century’s not my study.”

  “Always some months after war was declared,” Dr. Wilander grunted. “That varies a bit, since it’s an Unstable Era, but it’s usually declared midway through 1939.” His shrewd little eyes swivelled to Vivian. “When was this war declared?”

  Vivian felt very uneasy, because it looked as if someone had noticed something wrong in what she had been saying, but she answered with the truth. “Last Christmas in 1938, of course.”

  She was amazed at the consternation this produced. Everyone stared at her and at one another. Jonathan, who had not said one word up to then, or even looked at her, now gazed at her in obvious horror. Jenny looked quite as horrified. “It’s moved right back!” she said. “Ranjit, it’s gone critical! I think all the Observers should be recalled right away!”

  “Our information seems to be wholly out of date,” Mr. Enkian said disgustedly. “What is Time Patrol thinking of?”

  “I’ll find out,” Sempitern Walker said, and he pressed a stud on his belt.

  Dr. Wilander, popping crisp pancakes into his mouth by twos, said, “Not really so surprising. Three days ago there was a strong source of chronons in September 1939, and we know it’s causing chaos. It’s just surprising that the outbreak of war rolled backtime so fast. But—” his big jaw champed and his little eyes once more rolled round to Vivian “—that Government of yours is pretty inefficient, don’t you agree? Only just getting the kids out now.”

  “It’s been phoney war up to now,” Vivian said apologetically.

  “Still no excuse,” grunted Dr. Wilander.

  Pale Elio slipped into the room. Sempitern Walker whispered to him and sent him out again.

  “At this rate,” pronounced Mr. Enkian, “that century is going to be splitting the atom in the twenties, with all that follows.”

  “They’ve got to do it at some point, you fool,” Dr. Wilander growled. “Life in the next Fixed Era depends on it.”

  “Not if they learn to do it during the war,” Mr. Enkian snapped, “with a wave of chaos rolling uptime at them. There won’t be the next Fixed Era then. The only bit of earth left will be Time City, and that’s decaying fast!”

  “Nonsense!” snarled Dr. Wilander.

  “Gentlemen,” said Sempitern Walker, loudly and boringly. “We are all agreed that there is a crisis both for Time City and for history, and we are all agreed that we will prevent it if we can. We will not sacrifice the art of the Seventies nor deprive the Hundreds of their expansion to the stars…”

  He went on talking. Heaviness descended again. The ladies came to take away the second course and give everyone frothy little mountains of sweet stuff. Vivian had just dug a spoon into hers—it smelt as good as butter-pie—when the door crashed aside to let a wide sandy-haired man pounce into the room. Vivian jumped and dropped her spoon.

  “What’s this about an update on the moveback?” he said. He looked like Sam. He was so like Sam in fact that, while Vivian was bending under the table to get her spoon, she could not help taking a look at the man’s feet to see if his shoelaces were trailing. But he was wearing smooth shiny boots.

  Everyone talked at once then. When Vivian sat up again, she found the sandy-haired man standing over her as if he meant to arrest her.

  “Vivian, you remember Abdul Donegal—Sam’s father—don’t you?” Jenny said. “He’s Chief of Time Patrol now. Tell him what you told us.”

  Everything? Vivian wondered wildly. “You mean about war breaking out last Christmas?”

  Mr. Donegal pulled at his lip and stared at her as if she was a suspect. “You’re telling me Twenty Century’s gone critical then,” he said. “When did you leave it?”

  “Last n—yesterday about four o’clock, I think,” Vivian said.

  Sam’s father pulled at his lip again and frowned. “And my next batch of Observer reports isn’t due till tomorrow,” he said, “Lucky you came. That means the start of that war’s moved back ten months in two days. Bad. I’ll get everyone on to Amber Emergency right away and we’ll do what we can to stop it sliding back any further.” He gave Vivian a smile with two teeth in it just like Sam’s and banged her on the shoulder. “Drop in and see us soon,” he said. Then he seemed to be going.

  “Er—Abdul,” said Sempitern Walker.

  “Look here, Donegal!” Mr. Enkian called out. His pointed yellow face was red and angry. “What do you mean by letting this moveback escape notice? If it hadn’t been for this child, none of
us would have known. Isn’t that a little slack?”

  Mr. Donegal whirled round and stared at him. “Slack?” he said. “Listen, Enkian, I’m handling an emergency in one of the most unstable centuries in history. I’ve just come from a flood of reports from the eighties threatening World War Three two centuries early. I’ve Patrollers out all over the era. What more can I do? It’s been a week since the Lees’ last report—maybe sending young Vivian was the best they could do—but I’ll send a man to check now, if you’ll let me get back to my job.”

  “All the same—” Mr. Enkian began.

  “Abdul, won’t you sit down and have some of this sweet?” Jenny interrupted quickly.

  Mr. Donegal’s eyes went to the frothy mounds rather in the way Sam looked at a butter-pie. Then he glanced at Mr. Enkian most unlovingly and rubbed at the stomach that sat roundly above his studded belt. “I’d better not, Jenny. My weight’s up again. Besides, I’ve got to get back and contact the Lees, not to speak of having another try at catching that little lady.” And before anyone could say anything else, he went out of the room with the same crash and pounce with which he had come.

  “Do you think he has a chance of catching her?” Mr. Enkian said.

  Dr. Wilander grunted into his sweet. “Change the subject,” he growled. “Little pitchers.”

  Mr. Enkian looked at Vivian and Jonathan and then at Jenny.

  “Dears, if you’ve finished your sweet you can run along,” Jenny said. “It’s quite late and Jonathan looks tired.”

  Vivian saw that they were being got rid of so that the grown–ups could talk about the Time Lady. Sempitern Walker made that quite clear by leaning back in his chair and fixing them with an agonised stare as they went out. “None of what we said is to go beyond this room,” he said. “I put you both on your honour.”