Overtime Tom Holt

by Overtime (lit)

  'Don't get me wrong,' Guy went on, 'but, well, in a sense...'

  He realised that he hadn't the faintest idea what he was going to say next, and was just about to change the subject and point out a perfectly ordinary tree on the other side of the green when Isoud turned to him and said 'Oh, Guy!'

  There you go, monosyllables again. I think all the bride's lines in the wedding service are made up of monosyllables. Follows.

  'Yes, well,' he said, 'like I was saying, we really ought to consider -'

  'Kiss me, Guy.'

  'Sorry?'

  'I said,' said Isoud, with just a touch of residual personality showing through, 'kiss me.'

  Guy wanted to say, Hold on a minute there, I think you've got hold of the wrong end of the stick, because what I was going to say was that now that we've found out how flexible and adjustable time is, perhaps we won't have to get married after all, and since neither of us is desperately keen on the idea ... But since he'd been taught not to speak with his mouth full, he didn't.

  'Hello, you two,' Blondel said, grinning at them over a mobile barricade of white froth. 'Thought so.'

  Isoud detached herself, leaving Guy realising what a rock must feel like when there are limpets about. She blushed prettily, said something about having a look at the white elephant stall, and skipped away, for all the world, Guy reckoned, like a radiantly happy electromagnet.

  'Have an ice cream,' Blondel was saying. 'So Isoud showed you the family photograph album, did she?'

  'Gug,' Guy replied.

  Blondel shrugged his shoulders. 'Took me a long time to find you,' he went on. 'Well, to be honest, I wasn't looking all that hard, what with searching for the King and everything. Still, better late than never, I suppose.'

  'Hold on a minute,' Guy said. There was ice cream all over his nose, but he didn't care. 'You mean you ... you chose me specially? I thought it was just a coincidence or something.'

  'Hardly,' Blondel replied. 'I don't want to sound rude, but if I'd had a free and unrestricted choice of assistants, I think I'd probably have chosen someone who's a rather better shot. Not that you've done badly,' he added. 'Just the reverse. But you see what I mean.'

  'Yes, I see,' Guy lied. 'You mean, Isoud and me, it's been sort of, fated ...'

  'If you like,' Blondel replied. 'That is, we knew the ending, all we had to do was reconstruct the plot a bit. Your ice cream's melting all down your sleeve, by the way.'

  'How long has it been -' Guy winced; the word was so bloody fey, '- fated, then?'

  'Ever since we got the photographs back from the developer,' Blondel replied. 'That's one of the weird things about living in a timewarp. You get the photos back centuries before they're taken and sent off, rather than the other way round, which I believe is the usual way. So we knew it was going to be you Isoud would fall for, it was just a case of finding you. And while you were handy, of course, you might as well make yourself useful in the quest.

  'I see.'

  'Honestly,' Blondel continued, chuckling quietly, 'you should have seen Isoud's face when she first saw the picture. Talk about horrified disbelief! Still, I think she's just about come round to the idea.'

  'Thank you very much.'

  'Don't mention it.'

  'Yes,' Guy said, 'that's all very well, but it still doesn't explain why you dragged me out of my century -'

  'You were just about to be killed,' Blondel interrupted. 'Remember?'

  'Was I?'

  'Didn't I mention it? Oh yes, you wouldn't have stood a chance if I hadn't ... well, there we are. Couldn't have you getting killed before the wedding, it would have messed things up terribly. Not,' he added, 'that anyone wants you to get killed after the wedding, needless to say.'

  Guy frowned. 'Not even Isoud?' he said. 'I still don't think she's likely to have changed her mind that much. She doesn't have a terribly high opinion of me, I reckon.'

  'And that,' Blondel replied, 'is a prerequisite of a successful marriage, as far as I can tell.'

  Guy thought about it for a moment, considering all the examples in his experience of happily married couples. Yes, he definitely had something there.

  'Even so,' he persisted, 'if it was fated, why did you have to go to all the trouble finding me? Wouldn't I have just turned up anyway?'

  'Probably,' Blondel replied, 'but it might have taken ages, and I've always been particularly keen to get the wedding over and done with. Partly,' he said, grinning, 'because I have this rooted aversion to mashed potato, but mostly because, in the wedding photograph you haven't seen, the man giving the bride away at the wedding is Richard Coeur de Lion.'

  Guy choked on his ice cream. Blondel patted him on the back.

  'So you see,' he went on, 'I've been quite shamelessly fiddling about with your destiny for my own purposes, just like you were going to say yourself. Hope you don't mind. Anyway, you'll understand what I'm getting at when I say that I'm not a believer in long engagements. Ah, here she is.'

  Isoud was walking back, holding a lampshade, a sink tidy and a colander. It's started already, Guy said to himself. A door marked No Entry would go down very well at this juncture.

  'Come on,' Blondel said, 'let's go and have a look round the sideshows. I think we can all afford an afternoon off, in the circumstances. No, Guy, I'd stay clear of the rifle range if I were you, there's a man in a cap just over there and I don't think he'd be too ...'

  'Blondel? What's the matter?'

  Blondel was staring, so hard that his eyes were almost circular. His mouth had fallen open and his face was wet with sweat.

  'What is it?' Guy said.

  'Look,' Blondel croaked, and pointed.

  Guy followed the line of his finger, and saw one of those rubber inflatable castles designed for children to bounce up and down on. It was doing good business, as far as Guy could tell, and the proprietor was throwing two little cherubs off it for trying to puncture the inflatable bit with a penknife. 'So?' he said.

  'Look,' Blondel repeated. 'Are you blind or something?'

  Guy looked; and noticed that there was a pattern of little teardrops painted all down the side. And he began to wonder.

  Blondel had broken into a run. The proprietor, seeing him coming, let go of the two little cherubs and stared at him. A policeman on duty in the beer tent came out, wiping his mouth. Guy looked across at Isoud, and ran after him.

  'Here,' said the proprietor, 'you can't go on it, it's just for the kids. Here ...'

  Blondel was standing in front of the moulded rubber gate. The musical attachment stopped in the middle of the tune it had been playing and then started to play something else. Guy recognised the tune at once. He'd heard it a lot lately.

  Blondel waited for a moment, counting the bars for the start of the vocals. Then he sang:

  'L 'amours dont sui epris

  Me semont de chanter;

  Sifais con hons sopris

  Qui ne puet endurer...'

  The policeman stopped dead in his tracks and let his hands fall to his sides. Everything was quiet, except for Blondel's voice, soaring away into the clouds and ranging outwards in every direction, until it seemed to fill the entire world.

  'A li sont mipenser

  Et seront a touz dis;

  Ja nes en quier oster...'

  Guy felt like a diver who has miscalculated and can no longer hold his breath and is still a long way from the surface. The air seemed to tighten unbearably round him, crushing him until he could feel his ribs and the sides of his skull being driven inwards. And then, from somewhere a long way down inside the inflatable rubber castle, a voice sang:

  'Remembrance dou vis

  Qu 'il a vermoil et clair

  A mon cuer a ce mis

  Que ne l'en puis oster...'

  The voice sounded like an air-raid siren with bronchial trouble. It was the most beautiful sound that Blondel, or Guy, or Isoud, or even the Galeazzo brothers (who had been on the point of interesting the vicar in their exclusive range of ta
x-free clerical pension schemes when the music started) had ever heard in their entire lives.

  The voice fell silent, and Blondel sang again. He sang like the first green shoot of spring, the first snowdrop, the first drop of rain in a dry season. He sang:

  'Plus bele ne vit nuls

  Ne cors ne de vis;

  Nature ne mist plus

  De beaute en nulpris

  Por li maintaindrai l'us

  D'Eneas et Paris,

  Tristan et Pyramus

  Qui ameraientjadis,'

  and it seemed like the whole world, the entire human race, eight centuries of it suddenly realising their mistake and being glad that things were right now, joined in and sang:

  'Orseraisesamis

  Orpri Deu de la sus.

  Qu 'a lor fin soie pris.'

  Giovanni blinked and reached for his handkerchief. He was crying for pure joy. He was thinking of the royalties.

  Talking of royalties; the castle suddenly deflated and fell to the ground, and out of nowhere stepped a man. A tall man, dazzled by light he hadn't seen for eight hundred years, a man stooping and stiff, nursing his pet rat. A man who had been wronged, and who was going to set things right.

  'Blondel, my dear chap,' he said, 'this really is most awfully decent of you, you really shouldn't have bothered, you know, I was getting on splendidly, digging tunnels and so forth. But ...' He stopped, and breathed in the pure, wild air, and soaked up the light until he seemed to glow with it. 'Thank you, my dear fellow,' he said.

  'Your Majesty,' Blondel replied. He was kneeling. There were tears streaming down his face, just like the teardrops painted on the side of the rubber castle. 'Your Majesty,' he repeated. 'It was nothing.'

  The King reached out a stiff hand and raised him up. The light didn't seem to be troubling him now; indeed, he looked like a man who would never be troubled by anything ever again.

  'Right,' he said. 'Now, then.'

  Timestorms are, of course, much rarer these days than they used to be in five hundred years' time, thanks to the tireless efforts of the Time Wardens, and as the threat they will pose receded, humanity will forget the almost indescribable chaos they will cause and will have neglected to be about to take even the most elementary precautions, such as having their names and dates of birth tattooed indelibly on their foreheads.

  In a timestorm, events which in the usual course of things will have happened or will happen consecutively suddenly happen concurrently. In other words, people are born, live long and purposeful lives, select a pension scheme which will grow with them, marry, spend small fortunes on carpets, have children, age gracefully and die all at the same time. Trees are simultaneously acorns, oaks and HB pencils. All the days of the week take place at once. Endowment policies mature on payment of the first premium, and vintage wines suddenly fall drastically in price. Such concepts as relativity, the laws of thermodynamics and early closing cease to have any meaning. Giving up smoking becomes easy but pointless.

  One kind of timestorm has effects that are so devastating as to be almost without exception terminal; and it was with some relief that the Caernarvon Commission was able to report that none of the reported instances of such a catastrophe having taken place could be factually substantiated.

  Once someone has become caught up in one, he can never get out again; and nobody undergoes the phenomenon without incurring material ruin, irreversible psychological damage and a free digital stereo alarm clock radio.

  'Where are we?' Guy shouted.

  He didn't want to, but it seemed that his role in life, over the last however-long-it-was-now, was to ask that sort of question; as if some sort of unseen Narrator needed him to establish the mise en scène.

  'I don't know,' Giovanni yelled back. 'Do you honestly think it matters?'

  Well, no, Guy conceded, probably not. Not particularly likely that anything matters, or will ever do so again. I mean, this is it, isn't it?

  A tiny voice in the back of his mind agreed that yes, it probably was.

  Time and space are, of course, connected at a fundamental level. To give a basic example: because of tectonic shift, the various land masses are no longer where they used to be, and the people who invested in valuable building plots on the strip of land joining England and France have long since given up trying to get hold of the representatives of Beaumont Street Realty who sold them to them, and died.

  In other words, where you are depends to a great extent on when you are. However, when you are in the middle of a timestorm so massive in scale that eight centuries of history are being rolled back like the duvet on the bed of Causality, the whole thing becomes academic, and the only really important question to consider is whether or not it's ever going to stop.

  'What was that?' Guy screamed dutifully.

  '1789,' Giovanni replied, emerging from under a log. 'Didn't you see its markings?'

  The huge shadow that had momentarily blotted out the sun receded into the distance, became a small, vividly bright spot on the sun's disc, and exploded like a firework. About fifteen seconds later there was a soft, distant plop.

  'Pity,' Giovanni said. 'We did good business in 1789. The French Revolution, you know.'

  'Ah,' Guy replied. He listened, and noticed the absence of a sound. It had been going on for some time, getting louder and louder and worrying him very much. If it was worth trying to find something inside his own experience which came within long rifle shot of resembling it, he would suggest that it sounded like enormous reels of film ticking through the gate of a projector backwards.

  He lifted his head and looked around. Something very strange had happened to the surface of the earth.

  It had happened quite quickly. One moment, there had been King Richard and Blondel and, in the background, the sagging rubber castle and a crowd of bemused villagers. The next moment; well, moments had been pretty plentiful after that. The trick had been not to be hit by them as they ricocheted off each other and sang screaming through the air. As for the landscape, it had sort of faded away. It was as if (and the librarian of Guy's meagre archive of imagery started to giggle hysterically when the request came through for this one) the world was a huge watercolour painting which had just been put under the cold tap. First it had run, and then it had been washed away.

  'Giovanni,' Guy asked quietly, 'are you still there?'

  'Depends,' Giovanni replied. 'It's all down to criteria really, isn't it?'

  'You what?'

  By way of illustration, Giovanni stuck his fingers into Guy's eyes.

  'Look,' Guy said, 'just stop clowning about and answer me. Are you there or ...

  'You didn't feel that, then?'

  'What?'

  'Or this?'

  'What?'

  'Or,' Giovanni said, grunting with the effort, 'this?'

  'Look,' Guy said, 'will you stop it and ...

  Giovanni put the knife down. 'Part of me's here,' he said. 'Part of you, too. The rest ...

  They both ducked. There were three large bangs as the main factors leading to the Industrial Revolution were torn up by the roots and flung into the air, or at least flung. Snippets of speech floated down and settled round them, still gibbering faintly. Fortunately for Guy's sanity, they weren't in languages he knew.

  'Stuff it,' he said, 'would it make it any easier if I didn't want to know what was happening?'

  Giovanni shrugged. 'No,' he said. 'What's happening is that the historical part of you, and me, has been vaporised. All that's left is what ...' Giovanni considered for a moment, during which time a splinter of the American War of Independence floated down like a sycamore seed and lodged in his hair. 'What you're really made up of, I suppose,' he concluded lamely. 'In your case, inquisitiveness, fear and a certain amount of angry disbelief. In my case a strong will to self-preservation coloured by a strong dash of financial acumen. Have you any idea,' he added, 'what this lot's doing to the exchange rate?'

  'But...'

  'Exactly,' Giovanni replie
d smugly. 'The first time I met you, I put you down as a but-and-three-dots sort of person. Me, I'm more of a therefore.'

  But Guy wasn't listening. He was looking up at what he stubbornly persisted in thinking of as the sky. The greatest motion picture of all time was about to start.

  It started far off in the future, and it employed a range of split-screen techniques beyond the wildest dreams of any mortal director. There were billions of them, tiny little images, each showing a tiny segment of an overall image which, taken together, Guy supposed was The World. And each individual film crew was using that rather arty style whereby the camera is supposed to be looking through the hero's eyes. To make it that bit more baffling (although Guy knew several people, most of whom wore scruffy old tweed jackets and smoked pipes, who'd undoubtedly have approved) the whole thing was being shown backwards.

  He looked round for Giovanni, but he'd gone. In the darkness, Guy could make out a tiny figure walking across the blurred and naked foreground, not looking at the sky. He had a torch in one hand and a tray round his neck. He was, Guy realised with grudging admiration, selling popcorn.

  The film show moved with considerable pace; and although the voices were all so faint that he couldn't hear any of them, he found that he was able to follow what was going on. This was the Sixth World War; then the foundation of the United States of Oceania and the Eurasian People's Republic; the 2120 World Cup; the Macclesfield Missiles Crisis; the restoration of the Jacobites; the Fifth, Fourth and Third World Wars; the Berlin wall; the Second World War

  'Hey,' Guy shouted, 'that's me ...' Then the screen he'd been looking at suddenly went blank, and he suddenly didn't want to watch any more.

  The film show went on, however, gaining momentum as one spool grew bigger than the other, so that the discovery of America and the reconquest of Spain seemed to merge into one another, and the Apaches merged seamlessly with the Moors. The Moors became Turks under the walls of Constantinople, then Mongols streaming across the steppes of Russia, and then Saracens laying seige to Antioch ...