by Tom Holt
‘Um.’
‘Yes,’ snapped the Dream-Master, ‘um. Bloody silly idea, wasn’t it? And you know what happened to the bright spark who suggested it?’
Feeling like the poor fool who’s lent her watch to the conjuror, Jane shook her head. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Do tell me.’
A grin like a septic dawn spread over the Dream-Master’s face. ‘He got posted,’ he said.
‘Posted?’
The Dream-Master picked up the Fragile stamp, pressed it on an ink-pad and brought it down on the desk-top so hard that it snapped in two.
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Posted.’
Jane considered this for a moment. ‘Wasn’t that rather difficult?’ she enquired.
‘Nah,’ replied the Dream-Master. ‘Once we’d got his head through the flap, the rest just sort of followed.’
FIFTEEN
‘Sod,’ said Bjorn. He twisted uncomfortably round, and tried to see what had grabbed hold of his leg. The part of him that still occasionally harboured optimism hoped that it would turn out to be a smiling blonde air hostess.
It was, in fact, a man-trap. Close, but no cigar.
A fairly humane man-trap, it has to be said. The jaws weren’t lined with inch-long steel spikes; in fact, they were padded with foam rubber and covered with chamois leather. There was also a notice, probably insisted upon by the Administration’s hyper-paranoid legal advisers, engraved in tiny letters on the trap’s upper mandible. It read:CAUTION: THIS TRAP MAY BE DANGEROUS TO ELDERLY OR DISABLED PERSONS. MEMBERS OF THE PUBLIC ARE ADVISED THAT THEY GET CAUGHT IN IT ENTIRELY AT THEIR OWN RISK.
Bjorn grunted and tried prising the jaws apart with what was left of his axe. There was, of course, a man-trap-opening attachment on his Zambian Army Knife, but he’d broken that a day or so ago trying to cut into a pat of hot butter.
Overhead, the beams of many searchlights were producing a complex and geometrically satisfying display which, combined with the blaring of sirens and the thundering noise of many speakers playing back tapes of barking Rottweilers, added up to one of the most original son et lumière performances in cosmic history.You had to be there, of course.
Bjorn was, and wished he wasn’t. The axe handle, seasoned hickory, groaned accusingly and splintered without shifting the jaws of the trap at all. The torches waving about in the distance wouldn’t be in the distance for very much longer. What to do?
‘Gotcha!’
A light shined straight into Bjorn’s eyes, and he automatically shied away from it, raising his hands to shield his eyes. He had enough problems as it was, he felt, without having great big blobs of yellow custard cluttering up his retina for the next five minutes.
‘All right, chummy,’ said a voice from behind the light source. ‘Throw down the gun. Easy, now.’
Bjorn sighed. It was going to be one of those nights, he could tell.
‘How?’ he said. ‘I haven’t got one.’
The torch-beam didn’t blink exactly; but there was a sort of sympathetic modulation in the flow of photons as its owner registered surprise.
‘But you’re a dangerous intruder,’ he said.
‘Yeah,’ Bjorn replied sourly. ‘Looks like it, doesn’t it?’
The torch came closer. ‘So what are you armed with, then?’ the trooper enquired curiously. ‘Bombs? Gas grenades? Flamethrower?’
‘No.’
The torch-beam wavered again. ‘Don’t believe you,’ said the voice behind it. ‘Come on, you’ve got to be armed with something. Nobody breaks into a high-security compound without something.’
Bjorn considered. ‘I’ve got a bust penknife, a broken axe-handle and a pair of socks,’ he said. ‘Now, could you see your way to getting this fucking thing off my leg before it stops my circulation completely, please?’
The trooper hosed Bjorn down with the torch from head to foot, shrugged, and came closer. When he was within arm’s length, Bjorn reached out, pulled his feet out from under him, and knocked him silly with the rim of his own steel helmet. Then he grabbed the man’s rifle, and used its barrel to force apart the jaws of the trap. It wasn’t easy even then; by the time he’d finished, he was holding the only rifle in the cosmos capable of shooting directly behind the person firing it. Essential equipment for self-defence in the corporate jungle.
Pausing only to stuff the socks in the recumbent trooper’s mouth and steal his packed lunch, Bjorn jumped to his feet, winced, and ran off into the darkness. Behind him, very close now, he could hear the blood-curdling baying of quadrophonic Dolby hounds, with the occasional crackle.
Something materialised in front of his face and he ran straight into it. If the way he rebounded like a tennis ball and sat down with sparks coming out of his ears was anything to go by, it was quite possibly an electric fence. He forced himself to stop vibrating, picked a handful of spent volts out of his eyebrows and blinked four times. This was heavy stuff. Whatever it was they’d got in that shed, they didn’t want anybody else to know about it. Which was odd, considering that it was hoisted up into the sky every morning where everybody on earth could see it.
‘Psst.’
Bjorn lifted his head, spat out an amp and peered into the darkness.
‘Over here.’
‘Why?’ Bjorn enquired.
The darkness hesitated. ‘Look,’ it hissed, ‘do you want to be rescued or not?’
‘Depends,’ Bjorn replied. ‘Who are you?’
‘Dop sent me.’
‘Oh.’ Suddenly, a great light dawned in Bjorn’s mind; figuratively speaking, of course. Otherwise, light would have seeped out through his ears and given the troopers something to shoot at. ‘Oh, right. Coming.’
‘This way,’ hissed the voice. From the way it expressed itself exclusively in whispers and hisses, it was either the tutelary spirit of a cracked gas-main or a chatty snake. But if it was a friend of Dop’s, that didn’t really matter much.
Dop was the sort of bloke you could really trust.
From where Jane was sitting, wearing the great halo of noise and vibration like a hair-dryer, it looked like a giant millipede in dayglo socks. The more you looked at it, the less you actually made out. Everything just seemed to melt into a continuum of twinkling red and white light.
She switched on the intercom. ‘It’s very pretty,’ she said. ‘What is it?’
The pilot’s laugh bounced around inside her headphones. ‘It’s the main stretch of the Renaissance bypass, between junctions 16 and 17,’ he replied. ‘Want to take a closer look?’
‘Okay,’ Jane replied, and the helicopter slowly lost height. As they closed in, the continuum became marginally less continuous. It looked less like a fibre-optic cable with indigestion and more like the pattern of millions of tiny dots of light, each close behind the other, each moving so slowly that you had to stare quite hard to perceive any motion at all.
‘Fine,’ Jane said. ‘It’s a traffic jam.’
‘Almost,’ the pilot replied, ‘but not quite. Going in closer.’
Lower still, and the millions of tiny dots broke up into vague but distinct shapes, like a newspaper photograph under an extremely powerful magnifying glass. They reminded Jane of something - cars, to be precise, and lorries and motorcycles and vans - but it was only a similarity. They were palpably vehicles, but there the resemblance ended.
‘What are those things?’ Jane asked.
‘Lives,’ the pilot replied. ‘No, that’s not strictly true. If we’re going to be all technical and correct, they’re presents.’
‘Presents?’
‘That’s right. And before you ask where’s the wrapping paper and cards, I mean presents as opposed to pasts and futures. Okay?’
Jane frowned. ‘I don’t think I . . .’
‘Well you wouldn’t, would you?’ the pilot replied. ‘I mean, you’re down there somewhere. Part of you is, anyway.’
‘Um.’
So low now that each individual thing was plainly distinguishable from the mass, eve
n if it didn’t look at all like anything Jane had ever seen before. Try and imagine one of those old Heinkel bubble-cars that’s suddenly come to life, and you may be able to creep into the corner of the same frame of reference.
‘See the sign up ahead?’ said the pilot. ‘There’s a clue for you.’
Jane peered forward. Despite the pitch darkness above her, she could see reasonably well at ground level, thanks to the lights of the things. There was indeed a sign; very much like a road-sign.
‘I can’t quite . . .’
And then she could. It was an awkward moment. It read:DEPARTMENT OF TIME T49 CREATION-DOOMSDAY EXPRESSWAY; RENAISSANCE BY-PASS NOW OPEN ANOTHER CENTURY COMPLETED: AHEAD OF SCHEDULE BY ELEY TIMESTONE PLC
At Jane’s request, the helicopter climbed higher, until the continuum reappeared and the individual lights merged once more with the general flow.
‘That’s one of the good bits,’ the pilot was saying. ‘It’s the bit they show in the reports. Further on, where the whole bloody thing’s falling to pieces, it’s not so pretty.’
‘Um.’
‘It’s supposed,’ the pilot continued, ‘to be, like, continuous. Time, like an ever-rolling stream, and so forth. That’s the theory.’
Jane swallowed hard, and tried to fool herself into believing that the heaving in her stomach was something to do with the way the helicopter was rocking about in the thermals. ‘I see,’ she lied.
‘Doesn’t work like that, of course,’ the pilot went on remorselessly. ‘I mean, it’s becoming a joke. If it’s not a whole carriageway coned off because they’re repairing the membrane of the space-time continuum, then it’s resurfacing; which means contraflows, of course.’
‘Contraflows,’ Jane repeated.
‘Bloody horrible things,’ the pilot said, nodding. ‘Just up there, between junctions 19 and 20, they’ve rerouted all five lanes of the Pastbound carriageway on to the hard shoulder of the Futurebound, and they expect it to work.’ The pilot took one hand off the joystick, felt in his pocket, and found a stick of chewing gum. ‘No wonder you get hold-ups,’ he said.
‘Hold-ups,’ Jane said. ‘In Time.’
‘It can be a real bummer,’ the pilot agreed. ‘Not to mention the confusion. I mean, there you are, quietly edging your way through the first few decades of the sixteenth century, and you look over your shoulder and see all these blokes in bomber jackets and flared jeans and Status Quo T-shirts zipping along past you on the inside. I’m not at all surprised some of them freak out and try and cut across the lanes.’ A red light flicked on just below the fuel gauge and started to flash alarmingly. The pilot put his fingers in his mouth, and then reached out and put a blob of chewing gum over it. ‘I haven’t the foggiest what that light’s for,’ he commented. ‘In the manual it just says “Emergency”.’
Jane opened her eyes - somehow or other they had come to be shut - and nerved herself to look down. It was like . . . Hell; there was no point her trying to fool herself with similes. Now that she actually knew what it was, there didn’t really seem much to be gained from trying to compare it with something it wasn’t.
‘But the hold-ups,’ she repeated doggedly. ‘In Time.’
The pilot chuckled. ‘I bet you thought Time always travelled at the same speed,’ he said. ‘Well, now you know.’
Jane felt her jaw sag, as if someone had cunningly managed to whip all the bone out of it without her feeling a thing. ‘It doesn’t?’ she said.
‘Course not,’ the pilot replied. ‘I mean, it’s supposed to, sure; that’s what the speed limits are for. But does anybody take any notice? Do they hell as like. And they call that progress!’
Jane tried thinking about that one, but her brain wouldn’t bite on it. ‘Do you mean it used to be different before?’ she hazarded.
‘No,’ the pilot said. ‘They call it progress. That’s the word they use for it. Or sometimes they call it innovation, or the relentless force of socio-political development. What they mean by that is, some flash bugger in a soupedup cafe racer doing a ton down the outside lane. It doesn’t half screw things up when that happens, I can tell you.’
‘Er.’
‘That’s if he’s on the Pastbound carriageway,’ the pilot added conversationally, ‘because then he’s going from the future into the past. If he’s on the other side of the road, of course, he’s a rabid reactionary trying to turn the clock back. Either way, if he gets done he loses his licence automatically, and a bloody good thing too.’
The calm, unflappable part of Jane’s mind sorted out the words necessary for her to ask the pilot to confirm that it was possible for people to travel from the future into the past. The rest of her mind switched off the lights, locked up and went for a coffee. She closed her eyes, but it didn’t seem to help.
‘Can we get this straight?’ Jane asked. ‘There’s people going from the past to the future, yes. I can handle that, I think. But people going from the future to the . . .’
The pilot turned his head and gave her a funny look. ‘Yes?’ he said.
‘I’m sorry,’ Jane replied, feeling rather as if she had a wet sock in her mouth. ‘Is that possible?’
‘It’s more than possible,’ the pilot said. ‘It’s absolutely essential. Can you imagine the mess you’d have up the top end if they didn’t?’
Jane said nothing. The wet sock had become the last sock of all, the one you find wedged in a crevice in the back of the drum of the washing-machine three days after you did the actual wash. The pilot seemed to sense the difficulty she was having, for he changed his tone of voice down a gear and spoke a little more slowly.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘you’re a mortal, right, you’ve got all that blood stuff sloshing about inside you. Think what would happen if all the blood only went in one direction. You’d get a sodding great build-up in your feet, and the rest of you would . . . Well, anyway, think of it like that, if you can. Presents circulate in the same way. If they didn’t, the past would go to sleep. You’d have pins and needles right up your racial collective subconscious. See what I mean?’
‘You mean,’ Jane replied, with extreme caution, ‘that people keep going round and round in circles? For ever and ever?’
The pilot scratched his nose with the heel of his hand. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I suppose you could put it like that. It’s more your classic river analogy, really, but I didn’t want to explain it that way because it’s such an awful cliche. You’ve got your river, right?’
‘Which river?’
‘Oh, any river. Rain falls in the mountains, it collects and runs across the plain in a river to the sea, the sea evaporates and falls as rain on the mountains. Now do you see?’
‘No.’
‘Fair enough.’ The pilot’s voice seemed very far away, somehow; or perhaps it was very long ago rather than very far away. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘I gather that you’re going to help us sort it all out. I bloody well hope so,’ he added. ‘It needs it.’
It’s impossible to explain the operation of Time simply, especially if you’re trying to fly a helicopter as well. Attempting to understand the way it works purely from a verbal description is like learning to play Mah Jong without a Mah Jong set. It can’t be done.
Instead, look back down the carriageway to a point where the two streams of light eventually merge into one, then zoom in close and stare. This is Time, coming into operation . . .
. . . On a day when it’s really slashing down, with the mud bubbling up around the ankles of the extremely self-conscious party of worthies in sodden grey suits and yellow plastic hard hats, standing around a length of damp pink ribbon stretched half-heartedly across the shining tarmac.
‘. . . Gives me very great pleasure,’ Staff is saying, as the rain drips off the peak of his hat on to his tie, ‘to declare this astro-temporal expressway well and truly open.’
He reaches for the pair of scissors on the velvet cushion; and as his fingers make contact, he’s making a very quick assessment of the wh
ole idea, and thinking: Yes, but . . .
He’s thinking: Okay, the old system worked, but that’s not to say it’s going to go on working, what with the vast increase in Time use expected in the next five million years. It’s got to make sense to do it this way. Join it at the Big Bang, and then straight through to the other end without having to stop for anything. Absolutely no risk of anybody getting lost in the Industrial Revolution, or taking the wrong turning at the Fall of Constantinople.
And so he cuts the tape. And in that fraction of a second between the two blades of the scissors meeting, and the severed ends of the tape falling away, he thinks: Well, we all make mistakes.
Because, before they built the expressway, it worked. It shouldn’t have, of course. It should have been absolute chaos.
Instead of a straight line joining the two ends of the universe, there was a maze of single carriageways and winding little lanes, creeping on its tortuous way from one crucial event to the next, completely haphazard, uncoordinated and unplanned; rather like history itself. The traveller had to get off the ferry, thread his way through the back alleys of prehistory to get on to the Neolithic ring-road, pootle round that to the big roundabout on the outskirts of the Bronze Age, take the second turning on the left (otherwise he’d find himself evolving back into an ape) for the long drag across a thousand years of flat, boring timeways with no chance of overtaking until he got on to the downhill straight into the Roman Empire. Then he’d be faced with the sheer hell of cutting across the city traffic (you know what the traffic’s like in Rome these days; well, it’s actually improved out of all recognition) before taking the last exit for the gearbox-numbing journey through the Middle Ages - uphill all the way, stuck behind a succession of slow-moving ecclesiastical Long Vehicles - only to find himself confronted with the brain-twisting complexity of the sixteenth-century flyover network . . .