The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2012 Edition

by Fowler, Karen Joy

  He folded his arms across his chest, as if to indicate that this was his last word on the matter. I felt once again the power of his personality, the force of his intellect, and it was as if we were fighting a duel, his knowledge against my despair. I knew the battle was lost, but I could not deny myself one final, miserable onslaught.

  “But I would see her again? She would be alive?”

  “No. It might be possible to transfer to a version of reality where a version of Miranda is not dead yet. But that is all.”

  “Then that is what I want. I have money.”

  “No you don’t,” said Andrews. “And this has nothing to do with money.” He fell silent, looking down at his hands, the fingers short and neat, pink as a baby’s. I sensed that he was troubled, that such brutal candour was not something he enjoyed.

  “I’m sorry,” I said in the end. “I’ve been very stupid.”

  “Not at all,” said Andrews quickly. “And at least what you asked for is harmless, beautiful even, the kind of wish one might almost be tempted to grant if it were possible. I’ve had far worse propositions, believe me. Fortunately they’ve been equally impossible.”

  “You’re talking about the army? The government?”

  Andrews nodded. “I must warn you that this room might be bugged. I’ve given up bothering about it. They know my views and I have nothing to hide. But I wouldn’t want to cause any unpleasantness for my friends.” He paused, as if giving me the option to leave, but I stayed where I was and waited for him to continue. I realised two things: firstly that my pilgrimage to Shooter’s Hill had always been about Andrews’s story rather than mine, and secondly that I felt properly alive for the first time since Miranda died.

  There was also the fact that Owen Andrews had called me his friend. I took this as a mark of trust and a gracious compliment but strangely it also felt true. For a brief instant something flickered at the back of my mind, a sense that there were some facts missing, like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle, and then the curtain of logic descended and it was gone. I liked Andrews, and felt a kinship with him because of that. That was all.

  “What’s the matter?” Andrews said. His anger seemed vanished, and an amused smile tweaked at the corners of his mouth. I wondered what secrets my face had given away.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Go on.”

  He shifted his position on the chaise longue, sitting upright and hugging his knees. He was wearing green velvet slippers and grey schoolboy socks. The combination was both amusing and moving, and I was reminded of images I had seen in books, paintings by Velasquez and Goya of the court dwarfs of Spain. They had been the playthings of the nobility but in some cases they had actually been the secret power behind the throne. “Do you know about the hospital?” he said.

  “I’ve heard the rumours,” I replied. “What about it?”

  I was surprised to hear him speak of the place, I suppose simply because it was the source of so much ignorant tittle-tattle. I thought of the strange girl I had met on the bus, and my heart sank. If Owen Andrews went spinning off in some similar tale of murderous lunatics it would make me start to doubt everything he had told me.

  I was wrong, of course. The girl had not been completely deluded either, although I did not think of her again until much later.

  “It’s always been a military hospital,” Andrews said. “It was designed and built by Florence Nightingale’s nephew as a centre for the study and treatment of shell shock. It was the first hospital in the country of its kind.”

  “I’ve heard it’s being used to test chemical weapons,” I said. “Is that true?”

  Andrews shook his head, seeming to dismiss the idea out of hand. “You said you read about the Silver Wind,” he said. “What did you read, exactly?”

  I hesitated, unwilling to reveal that the only hard information I had on Andrews’s research had been gleaned from a UFO magazine. “Something about time-bridges,” I said in the end. “The article I read said that the army were trying to change the outcome of the Saudi war by stealing technology from the future. It all sounded rather improbable. I wasn’t sure what to believe.”

  Andrews nodded. “Do you know what a tourbillon regulator is?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “It was invented by Louis Breguet, in the eighteenth century. He became famous for making watches for Napoleon and Marie Antoinette. His grasp of mechanics was extraordinary and at least a century ahead of his time. He discovered a way of making time stand still. Please excuse me, just for one moment. It’s better if I show you.”

  Andrews slid from the chaise longue and shuffled out of the room. A minute later he returned, bringing with him a small wooden box.

  “Here’s one I made earlier,” he said with a smile. He flipped open the lid, and I saw there was a watch inside. Andrews lifted it out, laying the box carefully to one side on the floor. The watch was quite large, a facsimile of a gentleman’s pocket watch from the nineteenth or early twentieth century. I was familiar with such articles, having bought and sold them on several occasions. This one had a silver case. Even to my untutored eye it was a thing of quite exceptional beauty.

  “I studied Breguet’s diaries for many years,” said Andrews. “He died an old man. A lot of people thought he was crazy in his final years, suffering from Alzheimer’s disease or some other form of dementia. It is true that he did lose some clarity of expression at the end, but that may well have been due to the complexity of the ideas he was struggling with. A lot of it is brand new science.” He thumbed a catch, opening the back of the watch. I caught a glimpse of wires and levers, a mass of mechanical circuitry that glimmered as it rotated. Andrews cradled the watch in his left hand, using his right to point to first one of the gleaming internal wheels and then another. I quickly lost track of them all. Fortunately his words were somewhat easier to follow.

  “The tourbillon is like a cage,” he said. “It rotates the whole mechanism about its own axis. Breguet discovered this as a way of preventing gravity from dragging on the mechanism and making the watch run slow. In effect he made the mechanism weightless. The time stasis is simply a more advanced version of this idea. It makes time null and void within the area of its operation. The stasis creates a kind of temporal anteroom. Think of it as the lobby of a large hotel, with doors and lifts and corridors opening off it. Once you get through the entrance and into the lobby you can go anywhere you like within the building. It’s the time stasis that reveals the entrance. Do you see?”

  “Some of it.” I paused. “It’s what the article I read called the time-bridge.”

  “Yes. But I’ve never liked the term ‘time-bridge.’ Once again it’s too linear. The lobby image is better, and useful, too. You know how easy it is to get lost in one of those big hotels. All the corridors look the same after a while.”

  By then I was struggling to make sense of it all. “But what use could this be to the army?” I said. “You’ve already told me that it’s not possible to travel in time in the way people usually imagine it, so where’s the point?”

  “There isn’t any. But the government refuse to believe that. They’ve set up a stasis field around the hospital and they are conducting experiments there, forcing people through into other realities and trying to control the future before it happens. And I’m not just talking about weapons. My guess is that they have glimpsed something up ahead they don’t like, somewhere in one of the alternative futures, and are trying to eradicate that as a possibility. Think about it, what Hitler might have done if he had seen what would happen when he invaded Russia, or if Reagan had changed his mind over North Korea. It’s insane, of course, like trying to do brain surgery with a pickaxe. They have the idea that I could help to refine the mechanism for them, and that is the single reason they leave me alone. They think I’ll come round eventually to their way of thinking. They’ve offered me some marvellous inducements.”

  “But if they can’t succeed where’s the harm in it?”

  “In the
harm they’re doing to people, for a start. They snatch people after curfew and then blame it on the carjackers. They snatch carjackers, too. They send them through the stasis, hoping that with time they’ll be able to control their experiments more closely and through them begin to control the time stasis. As is the case of all dictatorships, they believe that individuals are expendable. Some of the people they send through never come back. Some never seem to leave, but their contact with the stasis seems to alter their substance. They’re incomplete somehow; like underdeveloped photographs their colours are muted. They flicker in and out of existence, like ghosts. I have even begun to think that they are ghosts, or rather that the manifestations people think of as ghosts are not the spirits of the dead at all, but are actually the living products of unsuccessful experiments with a time stasis, conducted from a time-stream lying parallel to ours. Then there are the mutants, those occasional unfortunates that experience the stasis as an allergy, a chemical reaction that forces their physical substance into hideous aberrations. There’s nothing that can be done for them. The soldiers simply release them into the forest. They don’t mind if someone catches a glimpse of one of these poor creatures once in a while because they’re better than any amount of barbed wire and electric fencing for discouraging intruders. I’ve no doubt that this is how the chemical weapons stories started. And if the mutants start causing trouble then the army simply go out and use them as target practice.”

  “But that’s terrible.”

  “There are a lot of terrible things going on these days.” He looked at me hard, as if holding me personally accountable for the transports and for the Saudi wars, for what had happened aboard the Anubis. “No doubt there have been the usual speeches about omelettes and breaking eggs. What none of them seem to realise is the harm they could be doing, not just with these local atrocities but on a wider scale. The stasis is a weak point, a lesion in time that if allowed to consolidate itself could undermine the stability of our own reality. The breach should be closed, at least until we understand its implications. There are people that have an idea of what is happening and want it stopped, but they have a tendency to disappear.”

  “A resistance, you mean?”

  “I don’t talk about that. I do still have some shreds of a private life, and I intend to hang on to them. I suppose it is true, that everyone has his price.”

  A clear image came to me of the woman in the photograph, the smiling girl with the pretty mouth. Andrews folded the watch in his hand, pressing it shut.

  “How long did it take you to make that?” I said.

  “A long time,” Andrews said. He smiled to himself, as if at some private joke. “Can I offer you something to eat?”

  I stayed, and we talked. I told him about Miranda, and he told me about his childhood in Devon, his first encounter with a Breguet watch, at the town museum in Exeter. Some details of his stories seemed disconcertingly familiar, and several times I experienced that same feeling I had had earlier, that there was a wider sense to everything, just out of sight.

  Andrews got up to put a lamp on. It was only then that I realised how late it was.

  “I should be going,” I said. “It’ll be getting dark soon.”

  I had no idea what time the last bus went. In the light of what Andrews had told me the idea of breaking curfew was unthinkable.

  “You’re welcome to stay,” said Andrews. “There’s a spare bed upstairs.”

  “No, thank you,” I said. For some reason the idea of spending the night there unnerved me.

  “Then at least say you’ll come again. It’s been just like the old days, having you here.”

  I laughed to show I knew he was joking, but his face remained serious. Suddenly I was anxious to leave.

  “I will, I’ll come soon,” I said.

  “See that you do. Mind how you go.”

  He waved to me from the doorway. I wondered if he ever got lonely. Dover Road stood silent, a ghost place. With the dusk approaching and to my increasingly anxious mind the place seemed to me like a mock-up, a stage set for some elaborate deception.

  It was growing dusk. The forest loomed before me, its greens leached to lavender by the approaching twilight. In the Bull Inn the lamps were already lit, and further along the road towards the village there were lights showing in the windows of most of the houses. It was not long till curfew, but I reasoned that as long as I could get myself on a bus within the next half hour there would be nothing to worry about. I set off in the direction of the High Street, walking briskly in what I hoped was a businesslike fashion. I had just come in sight of the bus stop when I saw something terrible: a roadblock had been set up outside the post office. There were four soldiers manning it; all of them were armed with rifles. I stopped in my tracks, ducking sideways into an alleyway lined with dustbins. My heart was racing. There was no question of approaching the barrier. Even though I had not breached the curfew and it was still my legal right to pass along the street I knew beyond any doubt that in practice this would count for nothing, that the soldiers would find some pretext to arrest me. What might happen after that was something I did not care to think about.

  The safest move was to go back the way I had come, to return to Owen Andrews’s house and take him up on his offer of spending the night there. I hesitated, knowing this was the logical course of action but still reluctant to take it. I trusted Andrews completely; the place I did not trust at all. As the dusk came steadily onwards, seeming to curl out from beneath the trees like tendrils of smoke, I realised I had a horror of it, that for some reason the thought of spending the night at Shooter’s Hill was almost as impossible for me as the idea of confronting the soldiers at the barricade.

  I felt horribly trapped. I cowered in the alleyway, staring at the trees opposite and knowing I had to make a decision in the next few minutes or risk breaking the curfew. It was then that it came to me there was a third option: I could bypass the checkpoint by cutting through the forest. The idea seemed simple enough. I was actually within sight of the checkpoint, and less than half a mile from the village boundary. I could walk that in less than fifteen minutes. I would not need to go far into the woods, just enough to keep me out of earshot of the soldiers. I should emerge on the Shooter’s Hill Road somewhere between the hospital and Blackheath.

  I ran quickly across the road, hoping that one of the soldiers down by the barrier would not choose that moment to turn his gaze in my direction. I slipped in between the trees, my feet crunching through leaf litter. The slope down from the road was steeper than I had imagined. I tripped against an exposed root and almost fell. In less than a couple of minutes I had completely lost sight of the road.

  I had imagined there would be a pathway, some kind of track to follow but there were none, or at least none that I could find, and in the oncoming darkness it was difficult to see clearly for more than a couple of yards. I kept going, fighting my way through the underbrush in what I hoped was a westerly direction. There were no landmarks to guide me, no sounds other than the scuffling of my feet in the leaves and my own rapid breathing. I stopped moving, straining my ears for the rumble of a logging truck or even for the voices of the soldiers at the barricade but there was nothing. I could not have been more than a mile from the lighted windows of the Bull Inn, yet it was as if I had unwittingly strayed into some other universe. I could smell the trees all around me, the pungent odour of tree bark and rising chlorophyll. I remembered something from my schooldays, that it was during the hours of darkness that plants released their pent up stores of oxygen, and it seemed to me that I could feel their exhalations all around me, the collective green-tinged sigh of a thousand trees. The dark was growing, spreading across the forest floor like marsh gas. From somewhere further off came the echoing melancholy hooting of a night owl.

  I walked for what felt like hours. I could no longer see where I was going, and had no idea of whether I was even vaguely headed in the right direction. I was very afraid, but the state of high
nervous tension that had taken me over when I first realised I was lost had worn itself out, blunting my terror to a dull background hum, a mental white noise that drove me incessantly forward whilst slowing the actions and reactions of my brain. Finally I came to a standstill. The woods seemed to close in around me, shuffling forward to block my escape like some vast black beast that knows its prey is all out of running. I slid to the ground where I stood, the dampness settling at once into my clothes. Until that moment I had not realised how cold it was. I began to shiver. I knew that if I was to spend the night in the open I had to get under cover somehow, but I was too exhausted by my flight through the woods to make any decisions. I closed my eyes, thinking confusedly that this might make the darkness less terrible. When I opened them again some minutes later it was to the sight of a yellowish glow, moving slowly towards me from between the trees. I could hear something also, the soft shushing sound of someone or something doing their best to move quietly across a ground that was ankle-deep in twigs and dry leaves.

  I moved from a sitting to a lying position, stomach down in the dirt, never taking my eyes from the pale light that though still some distance off appeared to be coming closer with every second. I was torn by indecision. I did not wish to fall into the hands of soldiers or carjackers, but on the other hand I was desperate to be out of the forest. At that moment the thought any human company seemed better than none. As the light came closer I was able to discern amidst the surrounding darkness of trees the deeper, blacker bulk of a human figure: somebody carrying a torch, and coming my way.

  In the end the simple need to hear a human voice outweighed my misgivings. I scrambled to my feet, extending my arms towards the figure with the lamp like a blind man trying to feel his way across a crowded room.