A Tale of Time City

by Diana Wynne Jones

  “Hey! Look at that crack today!” Jonathan exclaimed.

  The crack had grown right down from the corner of the slab, through the golden letters FAB and on into the bald part. There it forked into three new cracks, zig-zagging faintly out into the middle of the stone. There was no need for Jonathan to measure it to see that it had grown.

  “Great Time! I hope it doesn’t mean what they say!” he said.

  The two processions had met by then. “Sempitern greets Perpetuum in the name of the Chronologue,” Jonathan’s father intoned from quite near. A few drops of rain came down.

  “Perhaps Faber John’s woken up enough to wriggle his toes,” Vivian suggested, not very seriously. “They’d about reach here from that cave.”

  Sam’s face bunched up and he stamped defiantly on the branching crack. His shoelace burst undone. Jonathan took his arm and dragged him off. “Careful! You could make it worse!”

  “By the power vested in me, through me Perpetuum greets Chronologue and Sempitern,” Mr. Enkian was now intoning. “These my Librarians—”

  His voice was suddenly drowned in a skirling of pipe-music. Vivian looked up to find the ceremony dissolving into confusion. A long-legged man in a tall floppy hat was dancing figures-of-eight round the Sempitern and the old man carrying the axe, playing on a set of bagpipes as he pranced. Just as Vivian looked, he cavorted in among the Annuate Guard, leaping and bounding and throwing out his long legs like a lunatic. The elderly people in red uniforms scattered out of his way, except for one old lady who drew her ceremonial sword and shakily tried to bar the dancer’s way. But the leaping man danced clean through the sword and pranced on, quite unharmed and still skirling away at his bagpipes.

  Vivian realised that the lunatic must be a time-ghost. Oddly enough, nobody in the ceremony seemed to think he was. When he pranced in among the Librarians, the blue-robed people scattered too. “Will you stop that, whoever you are!” Mr. Enkian shouted.

  The man whirled and did a neat high kick towards the cushion with the huge old book on it. Vivian could see that the long leg and the pointed shoe never touched the cushion or the book, but the two Librarians were fooled and tried to snatch the cushion out of the way. The book slid to the ground in a flurry of stiff pages.

  “Doomsday Book!” Mr. Enkian shouted. He and the two Librarians pounced for the book, horrified, and the dancing man sprang capering across their groping backs. Next moment, he was cavorting straight towards Vivian, Sam, and Jonathan.

  “Arrest him!” Sempitern Walker commanded the Guards. They shouted back that the lunatic was only a time-ghost. But most of the shouting was drowned in the deafening sound of the bagpipes. Vivian had an instant’s glimpse of the lunatic’s pale, intense face as she backed out of its way, before the figure whirled round and pranced on to Faber John’s Stone.

  The slab broke into a hundred pieces beneath the madly dancing pointed feet. The pieces broke again, and those pieces broke too, milling away to pale gravel in seconds. By this time, the dancing man had become oddly hard to see and the din from the bagpipes sounded muffled. Then he faded away entirely and there was silence mixed with a growing patter of rain. Faber John’s Stone was whole again, except for the forked crack, and turning black and wet.

  “Confound it!” Mr Enkian said angrily, trying to shield Doomsday Book with a fold of his robe. “We’d better begin again.”

  Jonathan, Sam, and Vivian ran through the rain, leaving the ceremony reorganising itself in the downpour. “That was a funny kind of time-ghost!” Jonathan panted. “I wonder if it was one.”

  Sam had no doubt about it. As soon as they dashed in through the door of Duration, he began shouting, “We’ve seen a new kind of time-ghost! Everyone I’ve seen a new time-ghost!” His voice could be heard booming this all morning. Vivian heard it oftener than she would have liked, because, to her shame, she was put in the same class as Sam. The class she should have been in was, as far as she could tell, learning things that even her teachers in London had never heard of.

  “I’m sure you’ll soon catch up,” the Head Teacher said. “All you Lees are quick. But I can’t move you up until you know Universal Symbols.”

  Sam’s class was learning Universal Symbols. Vivian sat in an empty-frame chair that was rather too small in front of an empty-frame desk a trifle too low and tried to form strange signs on a white square that was not really paper. The rest of the class were using green pencils, but as Vivian was older she was allowed to use the pen-function on her new belt. When you pressed the stud, a green light sprang up between your fingers. It felt like a pen. It wrote in green and it was easy to use. Unfortunately, the stud for it was next to the stud for low-weight-function. Vivian kept pressing the wrong one by mistake and soaring gently out of her empty-frame chair.

  “Be quiet, Sam. Tie up your shoes,” the teacher said every time Vivian caused a disturbance by doing this. He was right, in a way. Every other disturbance was caused by Sam telling people about the time-ghost. But it made Vivian ashamed. By the end of the morning, when the teacher collected their work by pressing a button, whereupon what they had written vanished from the white squares and appeared lined up in the empty-frame of his desk, Vivian was feeling very low.

  Lunch cheered her up. They went to a long room surrounded by automats—like the one in Jonathan’s room which needed kicking, except that these did not need to be kicked so often. The automats allowed each child four things. They seemed to know if you tried to cheat by going to more than one. Even Sam could not get them to give him more than four butter-pies. Then you sat at the long tables to eat the four things.

  Vivian was new, and she was a Lee. This made everyone very interested in her. A crowd gathered round her. By now Vivian was so used to pretending she was Cousin Vivian Lee that she almost forgot that she was not. She told them she had just come from Twenty Century, from World War Two. This caused even more interest and a bigger crowd still. Most of the children had never been in history and they wanted to know how it felt.

  As she answered their questions, Vivian looked round the room and was quite surprised that there were no more children than this in Time City. True, it was a big school. But all the children in it, from tiny ones far smaller than Sam to nearly grown-up ones a head taller than Jonathan, were all fitted into this one long room for lunch. When she asked, they told her that Duration was the only school in the City. More than half the children came in every day by boat or hovercraft from farms in the countryside. This was very strange to Vivian after the crowded schools of London. She told them about those and they were astonished to think that one teacher could teach over thirty children at once.

  “How can he hold thirty sets of brain-rhythms in his head at once?” someone asked. “Now tell about the war. Is it quiet like the Mind Wars or noisy like the New Zealand Takeover?”

  “Do they run up and down the streets fighting?” someone else wanted to know.

  Vivian tried to explain that when two countries fought one another they did not usually do it in the streets unless the army from one country invaded the other. Then she had to explain what invading was.

  “You mean, as if all the tourists came screaming up the River Time to kill people in the City?” a small girl asked, rather upset.

  While Vivian was trying to decide if it was like that, Jonathan pushed through the crowd and said loudly in her ear, “Message for you. It’s on your belt.”

  “Where? How?” said Vivian.

  “Press that stud there,” everyone said helpfully.

  Vivian did so, and green writing appeared on the table in front of her:

  Hakon Wilander’s Compts to V.S. Lee.

  Come for special tuition with J. L. Walker 13:00 sharp.

  Under that was a second message:

  Duration affirms assignment, F.T. Danario, Head Teacher.

  “Is it true?” she asked Jonathan. “Not a joke?” She just could not imagine anyone so large and so learned as Dr. Wilander even remembering she ex
isted, let alone wanting to teach her.

  Jonathan pressed a stud on his belt. Another message appeared beside Vivian’s:

  H. Wilander to J. Walker. Stupid child V. Lee not answering belt. Bring her with you 13.00.

  “He sounds angry,” someone said.

  “He mostly is,” said Jonathan. At which a number of people remarked fervently that they would rather have Bilious Enkian for a tutor. Vivian gathered from what they said that everyone went to a special tutor as soon as they were ten years old. Dr. Wilander was considered one of the worst. “Yes, but we’ve got to go or we really will get eaten,” Jonathan said.

  They left Duration at 12.36 by Vivian’s belt clock. Jonathan was still thinking about the dancing time-ghost. “You know, that was all wrong for a real time-ghost,” he said as they pushed through a glass door at the side of Duration. “They don’t make a sound usually. I bet it was one of the students having a joke.”

  “What—even Faber John’s Stone breaking up like that?” said Vivian.

  “Some centuries can do wonders with holograms,” Jonathan answered. Since Vivian had never heard of holograms, she was none the wiser. “If I see any students I know, I’ll ask,” Jonathan said.

  Outside, as Vivian’s belt had predicted, the rain was over. Sun was sparkling on wet grass between the tall block of Duration and the airy arched building that was Continuum. Since the grass was still damp, the students who had come out to sit in the sun were mostly perched on the various statues that stood about on the grass. The air rumbled with their lazy talk. They all looked alarmingly grown-up to Vivian.

  “I greet you, Jonathan,” called a young man in a black velvet smock, who was sitting on one of the knees of a statue like a large Buddha with a lion’s head.

  The girl in a gauzy robe who was sitting on the statue’s other knee smiled and said, “Hallo, young Jonathan.”

  Jonathan stopped. “Hallo,” he said. “Do either of you know about that time-ghost that interrupted the ceremony this morning?”

  “We wish we did!” they both said together. This attracted the attention of a row of students sitting along a statue of a sleeping man nearby. “So do we!” they all called out. A young man in a little white kilt who was sitting on the statue’s head said, “I’m offering a year’s beer money to that joker if he can come up with tri-dees of the whole caper. I want to see the look on Enkian’s face!”

  “Close up,” said the girl in gauze.

  “No reward is high enough,” said the man in the kilt.

  “Enkian’s raging about, offering to expel the one that did it,” explained the young man in black velvet. “So of course he’s not going to find out.”

  “Which means we’re all dying of frustration,” added the girl in gauze. “You don’t know anything do you, Jonathan?”

  “I’ll reward you too,” said the man in the kilt.

  “Sorry, no,” Jonathan said. “I was hoping you did.”

  He started to walk on, but the young man in the kilt called him back. “Seriously,” he said, laughing. “If you can give me an eye-witness account, I’ll do anything you want in return.”

  Jonathan laughed too. “Later,” he said. “We have to get to Dr. Wilander.” They went on, up some steps and into a long arched corridor. “It was obviously somebody having a joke with a hologram,” he said to Vivian. “This is Continuum, by the way. We have to go right through and into Perpetuum—that’s the main library. Wilander lives in a den right at the top. They say he only comes out to quarrel with Enkian.”

  Perpetuum was huge, and very strangely shaped. The open entry facing them beyond Continuum was made of granite blocks and it had five sides. Of course, Vivian thought, if you imagined an ordinary doorway with a pointed arch at the top, that would have five sides too, but the two sides making the point would be shorter. In this entry, all five sides were the same length and it looked lopsided. Above and beyond it, she could see the same five-sided shape repeated over and over again, in a vast honeycomb, all combined together into a huge half-toppled-looking five-sided building. There were old eroded letters carved along the uppermost side of the portal, picked out faintly in gold: MONUMENTS MORE LASTING THAN BRASS.

  “That means books,” Jonathan said. “Press your low-weight stud. There are thousands of stairs.”

  There were indeed thousands of stairs. Shallow and made of granite, they climbed left, then right, then left again, past more five-sided entries labelled DANTEUM, SHAKESPEAREUM, ORPHEUM and other names that meant nothing to Vivian. At each archway, other flights of steps led off in four different directions. It was like climbing a maze. Jonathan told Vivian that the sharp, electric smell that hung round each five-sided archway was the smell of the millions of book-cubes stored in each section. It seemed that there were not many real books in Perpetuum. But shortly, even with the low-weight-function turned on, they did not have breath for talking and just climbed. By the time they reached an archway called CONFUCIUM, Vivian had realised that Time City was appearing around them at all sorts of strange angles. At CONFUCIUM, she saw the Gnomon tower in the distance sticking out sideways from under her feet and tried not to look. The stairs felt as if they were right way up, even if they were not.

  Finally, at an entry named HERODOTIUM, Time City came the right way up but slanting, quite a long way beneath them. Jonathan turned into HERODOTIUM, to Vivian’s relief. It was rather dark inside and smelt strongly of wood. The five-sided corridor was carved from the same kind of silky wood as Sam’s father’s desk. Vivian glimpsed grass-shapes and people-shapes as Jonathan hurried her along.

  “They say Faber John got the man who carved Solomon’s Temple to do this,” he told her breathlessly. Vivian did not think he was joking. He was too much out of breath. “Turn off your low-weight-function. It’ll need to recharge.”

  At the very end of the corridor a flight of wooden steps led to the last five-sided portal. SELDOM END, Vivian read, as Jonathan knocked on the silky wooden door.

  The door sprang open on light that was warm and orange because of the wood. “You’re nearly a minute late,” growled Dr. Wilander.

  He was sitting at a wooden desk under the window in the sloping roof of the room. All the straight walls were filled with shelves of real books. Thousands of little square things that were probably book-cubes were clamped to the ceiling. Piles of papers and books filled most of the floor. Dr. Wilander was smoking a pipe and wearing a shaggy brown jacket that made him look more like a bear than ever. He looked completely comfortable, like a bear resting in its den after a feast of honey.

  “You sit there,” he grunted at Vivian, pointing his pipe at a small real-wood table. “What do you see in front of you?”

  “Er—” said Vivian, wondering what he wanted her to say. “This looks like a chart. And there’s a list and a piece of paper covered in shiny stuff and a sheet for writing on. And a table underneath of course. Do you want me to say the chair too?”

  Jonathan snorted as he sat at a small table in front of Dr. Wilander’s desk, and stuffed the end of his pigtail into his mouth.

  “That will do,” Dr. Wilander growled. “I intend giving you a crash-course in history and Universal Symbols, my girl. You’re a Lee. Yet your aunt and your teacher tell me you’re completely ignorant. It won’t do. The chart is a map of history from the start of man to the Depopulation of Earth. Learn it. The list is a glossary of Universal Symbols, and the paper is one of the very first pieces of writing in those Symbols. That is why it is covered in energised plastic—it is extremely valuable. Make me a translation of that writing. In short, use your brain for once in your life. I’ll test you on both things when I’ve done with Jonathan.”

  It was clear that everyone thought that the real Vivian Lee was very bright indeed. Vivian had no choice but to sit down and try to be brainy too. She picked up the chart. It was almost circular—horseshoe-shaped really—so that the end on the left marked Stone Age nearly met the end on the right marked Depopulation. Along it were li
nes marked in thousands of years. The parts that were white except for the lines were marked Fixed Era. The parts coloured grey were labelled Unstable Era. Very few other things were marked in the grey parts, but the curved stretches of white were a mass of writing and dates. Vivian’s eyes scudded over them in horror. World War Four… Conquest of Australia… Mind Wars… Icelandic Empire Begins… The Waigongi Atrocity… Primacy of Easter Island Ends… Revolt of Canada… Fuegan Economic Unity… The Sinking of the Holy Fleet… The Demise of Europe… And these were only some of the things in large print! Vivian gave the chart another desperate stare and turned to the valuable paper. It looked easier.

  Meanwhile Dr. Wilander was growling questions at Jonathan and Jonathan was answering after long pauses filled with a faint crunching-noise. The crunching was Jonathan chewing his pigtail, which he did whenever he was stuck. It must end up quite wet! Vivian thought, as she got down to translating. This was nothing like as easy as she had hoped. Universal Symbols did not exactly stand for letters, nor for whole words either. You had to fit the things the Symbols might stand for together, and then try to make sense of them. Vivian’s brain began to complain that it had never worked so hard in its life. Every so often it went on strike and she had to wait for it to start working again, while she watched Dr. Wilander plucking down book-cubes, slapping open real books and growling at Jonathan.

  “Don’t be a fool, boy!” she heard him growl. “You’re like everyone else in Time City. You think the only real history is outside in time. Nobody bothers to keep a record of what goes on in the City, but of course it’s got a history, just like everywhere else.”