“Coffee first...” she said simply, sitting opposite him with her own cup and sipping carefully at it as he almost flinched away from the intensity of her gaze. “Coffee first... then we talk.”
He nodded slowly, no hint of disagreement in his eyes or body language as he stretched against the back of the chair and winced at the aches and pains in his neck and shoulders that he’d inevitably developed from such a precarious sleeping position. His head still throbbed dully but it was tolerable for all that and the wound over his temple appeared at least to have stopped bleeding.
He ignored the danger of burning his mouth, downing a large gulp of the black liquid and feeling its heat surge down into his throat and stomach, instantly warming his insides as the caffeine set about the by-no-means insubstantial task of clearing his sleep-addled mind. The whole time, neither of them could break the other’s gaze, and it suddenly occurred to Brandis that the young woman he was now staring at across that kitchen table was a noticeably different person to the Briony Morris he’d known for so many years.
“I never really looked at the book,” she began slowly, glancing down at the novel in front of her as if it might bite her. “The inscription inside the front cover… it’s in French, so I can’t read it, but I can see the signature underneath.” She paused a moment, as if the ramifications of that were only now sinking in.
“Roughly translated, it says: ‘most gracious thanks for your assistance and continued friendship’ … I helped him and Wilbour with a lot of initial planning in bringing out the first American edition… that’s one of set of five volumes that were first out of the printers in New York – June 1862.”
“And… and that’s signed by Victor Hugo…?”
“Yes… yes, it is…” Brandis nodded, not even able to understand himself why he felt embarrassed over the dedication. He noticed then she was looking at him very differently – that although she was trying to be subtle about it, her eyes followed his every move, and the fact that she had flinched visibly when he moved back to stretch was a telling reaction.
“You don’t need to be scared of me…” he began softly.
“Why do you think I’m scared?”
“Because you almost jumped out of your skin when I moved,” he answered sadly, a thin, mirthless smile of understanding crossing his features. “I’m not a predator to be wary of; I’m the same person I was yesterday.”
“Yes, but the ‘same person’ you were yesterday turns out to be someone we never knew existed,” Briony countered, her words tinted faintly with anger and betrayal. “We thought you were someone we could trust: a man of God.”
“Being a ‘Man of God’ alone never guaranteed any level of trustworthiness in my extensive experience,” Brandis observed with grim irony.
“I’m not a fool – you know what I meant,” she snapped sharply in return, surprising him with the depth behind the words.
‘Yes… yes, I did,” he conceded with a sigh, then added: “But you can still trust me…”
“You lied to me… to all of us…”
“I never lied to you,” he denied calmly, knowing full well where the conversation was going but allowing himself to be taken there anyway. “I knew that things were going to happen, but I never lied.”
“You knew my father will die this weekend in North Africa and you’ve said nothing,” she snarled, refusing to allow the tears to come this time. “You knew my mother was going to die – to be violently murdered – and you said nothing…!”
“Yes,” he said simply, lowering his gaze in shame and staring at the table. In the end, for all he might argue about the reasons behind his own actions, there was really nothing more he could say in that moment of accusation.
“I’ve been reading and watching those motion pictures on your ‘laptop’ thing all night,” Briony revealed, bitterness dripping from her words. “The ‘me’ eight years from now seems to have forgiven you for what you’ve done.”
“That may come with time,” he shrugged, meeting her gaze once more, “but it’s not much help right here and now, is it?”
“No,” she said simply, her shoulders sagging as her remaining energy drained from her and she found she had no strength left to maintain her rage.
“What else did you find out?” He asked softly, thinking he finally saw an opportunity to take gentle control of the situation once more. “What did you learn about this man you’ve never really known?”
“Things I’m not sure I believe,” she replied after a long, thoughtful pause. “Things I wouldn’t believe if it wasn’t for so many pictures that must be real.
“Oh, with the right equipment they could be faked,” he replied with a wry smile, “but in this case they’re all quite genuine. That’s only a few of my entire collection of photos – there’s no room on the computer for all of them so I keep a separate hard drive for most of them.” That she could have no idea what a hard drive was didn’t really seem important to either of them.
“You’ve been here for a long time…”
“That, my dear, is the understatement of the millennium… possibly several…!” He said, almost managing a laugh over that remark. “You read my journal entries…?” She nodded silently. “Then you have a good idea of how long…” he added, noting her assent.
“Why…?”
“Ahh, well that’s a bit more complicated,” he conceded, his smile fading at that question. “I could say simply that I came back to help some friends, but that would only be part of the story and if we’re being completely honest now, then I think you deserve to hear everything.”
“Yes, I think I do.”
“Well, let’s start with who I am then,” he shrugged, as if the whole thing was quite matter-of-fact. “I had another name once, one that I carried with me for the first seventy or so years of my life, but that was so long ago that it really hasn’t much bearing on the person I am now. You know me as James Brandis, although throughout the rest of the world I’ve travelled as ‘Phillip’ these last two years since The Invasion. I generally alternate between one of three or four Christian names, rotating through them every forty or fifty years or so, but the surname has remained constant now for most of my life – it makes things easier when dealing with issues of property and ownership when a ‘clear’ line of inheritance can be established.”
“You change names and pretend to be the son of the previous first name?” She asked, understanding the general gist of what he was saying.
“Saw it in a movie once about a guy who was immortal – saved me a lot of grief over the years, I can tell you.” He stifled a smirk and resisted the urge to mutter ‘There can be only one!’ softly under his breath as he remembered the film in question.
“…And…and you are too… I mean…?” She asked haltingly, not sure how to phrase the next question without seeming foolish.
“Immortal…?” He smiled faintly. “Yes… yes, I am. Anyone who travels through time won’t age while removed from their original era, moving forward or back.”
“And you’re from the future?”
“Originally, yes, although I’ve been ‘back a bit’ in between.” He paused for a moment, not sure how much Briony had already read on the laptop or whether the reality behind it all had truly sunk in. “Giving myself a nominal age would be meaningless but I have walked this earth for a combined total of almost twenty-one hundred years.”
“Why…?”
“The guts of it all…? Where I come from – early in the Twenty-First Century – the Second World War is long finished. Britain was never invaded, the Nazis were shattered, and the Allies were victorious after six long, terrible years of war. At least, that’s how things were until a group of Neo-Nazis from my time stole a time machine and used it to come back and tell Hitler what he bloody did wrong. Now we have Britain conquered along with the rest of Europe and the history of the world so completely buggered that it’s hard to tell which way is up anymore.”
“You were sent back to
stop them?” Briony asked hopefully, making a leap of logic.
“Not me,” Brandis answered quickly, shaking his head. “I was sent back to ‘keep an eye on things’ as it were. To mostly be a passive observer and make sure that history was generally getting on with things the way it should. It was reasoned that if one set of villains could get hold of time travel technology, there was an outside chance someone else with nefarious intentions might as well, so it was decided I act as a kind of ‘caretaker’. There was no way I could be everywhere at once or watch over every single little thing that happened, but at the very least – if I kept moving around between the developing civilisations – I could keep a finger on the pulse of how the world was coming along and – hopefully – detect any unexpected changes and do something about them before they got out of hand.” He grimaced. “As far as actually stopping these time-travelling Nazis, that job went to a group called Hindsight. Their task was to intercept the ‘bad guys’ in this particular scenario and set the world back to right again.”
“But England’s still occupied – they’ve failed?”
“It’s a work in progress…” Brandis answered with a wry smile. “I could spend hours on the background of that, but it’s not really relevant at this point. The upshot is that their job isn’t finished yet and with Britain down for the count, their mission is going to take a lot longer than expected.” He grimaced. “That’s another reason I was sent back – another one of my missions was to prepare the way for them, mostly by way of accumulating significant wealth for them to use upon arrival…” Brandis gave a faint snort of derision “…seeing as I ‘was in the neighbourhood’ anyway…”
He took another sip at his coffee, allowing himself the time to enjoy it as Briony waited patiently for him to continue. She was finally beginning to relax more around him now: the more he spoke the more she realised that despite him having no real accent any more – none of the ‘mixed’ European one he’d always used in any case – he was still the same man behind the voice, and she could hear the same inflections and patterns of speech in his words that she recognised, having known him all of her life.
“I’ve done many things over the last two millennia – many things I’ve been proud of and just as many I’d rather forget – but through all that there’s been one goal to which I’ve always worked toward – preparing the world for Hindsight’s arrival.”
But…” Briony began slowly, thinking through what he’d said as her own quite reasonable logic started sifting through some of the difficult concepts “…but, if you’ve come back from the future too, why not just stop them yourself… or go and kill Hitler instead and remove the whole problem?”
“Right there, you’ve just hit on one of the most common themes ever written about in time travel stories,” he grinned broadly. “Is seems simple on the face of it, right? Go and kill Hitler – world saved – job done…” he shook his head faintly “…unfortunately, trying anything like that might well get you into more trouble that its worth. Someone could travel back in time to kill Hitler but then, if Hitler never rose to power, why was that same person from the future ever sent back to kill him in the first place? So that doesn’t happen, Hitler does rise to power, and the guy is sent back to shoot him again…” he took a short breath “…so then he doesn’t rise to power, there’s no need to go back to kill him, and he does rise to power again…”
“It’s like a loop?” She asked with a puzzled expression, trying to comprehend.
“It becomes a loop, yes – although it usually goes by the fancy title of ‘paradox’. That was one of the major theories about the dangers of meddling with the past that scientists and science-fiction writers alike considered for many years.” He gave another sly grin and a bit of a wink. “Some of us, of course, know what really happens…
“What if, rather than creating a paradox, you create an entirely new history… a divergent course that has nothing to do with the original one? Sure – go back and kill Hitler – knock yourself out! – but who’s to say a new dictator won’t arise to take his place: one that’s far more clever and dangerous. Or, like these buggers from my world have actually done, just go back and tell the crazy bastard what he’s doing wrong instead … and give him lots of really cool technology to play with into the bargain so the German Army’s completely invincible.”
“If that’s what’s going on right now, what’s happened to the future you knew and lived in?”
“No idea,” he answered honestly. “I’ve never found out whether it’s gone completely or perhaps still exists in another reality that we no longer have access to.” Brandis shrugged. “In all honesty, after two thousand bloody years I’ve barely much memory left of what it was really like.”
“Then why do it at all? Why carry on for this long fighting for a world you can’t even remember?”
“Well, I might have forgotten what it was like but I’ve never forgotten what it stood for.” He said with slow certainty after a long time considering his answer. “That might sound corny, but it’s true for all that. The Nazis murdered six million Jews and others in their death camps throughout the course of a six year war – a number that might well number into tens of millions if they’re victorious. The world I left wasn’t perfect by any standard but it was starting to get its shit together by the beginning of the Twenty-First Century and I don’t even want to think about what will happen to that future if the Nazis are allowed to win.”
“…And then there’s people I actually care about to consider…” he added after a pause, again momentarily unable to meet her gaze. “There are people on that Hindsight team who are relying on me… people who – whether they knew it or not – have been waiting for my help for two thousand years.” She noticed his hands were shaking slightly now as he squeezed each one in the other in turn, repeating the process almost obsessively as his knuckles cracked faintly. “I’ve seen death and destruction beyond imagining… lost friends in spite of my best efforts and – in some cases – because of my mistakes… and if I just give up… if I don’t stay the course and see it through to the very end… then I’ve betrayed all of them, haven’t I?”
There was another short but very pregnant pause and as Briony correctly recognised that last question was rhetoric, and also that it was much more an attempt to reinforce the man’s own fears than any real query or statement.
“Then there’s you of course,” he added finally. “What records we had of real history before it was changed never mentioned you or your mother’s fate in what we’ve all come to call Realtime, but I know that every time we’ve gone through this since, nothing I’ve done has made any difference in the long run.”
“‘Every time”…?”
“We were talking about paradoxes, right… loops…?” She nodded faintly, hair rising at the back of her neck in anticipation of the unknown as he continued. “Well, this isn’t the first time we’ve sat here talking about this and much as I hope otherwise, it may not be the last time either. I’ll explain…” he added in a rush, seeing the questions rise in her expression. “If you read some of my journals then you probably also saw a lot of added notes at the bottom of many of the entries… additions that were typed in different colours with notations like ‘second’ or ‘third’ at the end…?” Another nod… “Each entry in a different colour relates to another time that I’ve ‘gone ‘round’ doing this. Right now I’m presiding over the eighth ‘incarnation’ that we’re aware of.”
“That ‘we’re’ aware of?”
“I’m using the ‘Royal We’, meaning myself many times over in this case, and I say its only eight times that we know of because I suspect there may have been any number of times prior to the ones on record that we’re not aware of, simply because I didn’t survive long enough to pass the records on to the ‘next’ Brandis in the line.” He almost laughed then. “It’s almost been like a bloody great relay race, with the information recorded on that sodding laptop as the baton. That’s the only thing t
hat’s been constant throughout it all, handed on from one to the next, each of ‘us’ adding to the records in turn as we see fit… leaving notes and suggestions for the next in line as to whether something we tried to change worked out for the better or took a turn for the worse.
“We’ve taken to not meddling too much with things now – particularly in the earlier centuries where the flow on effects can build up like a bloody tidal wave by the time it gets to the present. There have been some really nasty side-effects of that kind of screwing about with history, and like I said: I can’t confirm it, but my gut feeling is there have been many other times we don’t have records or a memory of simply because something I’ve messed with – or messed up – has ended up getting me killed prematurely.” He glanced down at his coffee cup, swirling the remaining liquid around as a distraction.
“That’s one of the reasons I wasn’t able to intervene in the death of your mother. If you read the notes already written for this month, you’ll find at least four of the earlier entries detail attempts to save your mother from harm.”
“I – I read some of them…” she began, voice breaking as tears rose again at the thought of what had been written in those diaries.
“Either I didn’t make it on time because the car broke down… or I did stop Leonski and the pub caught fire by accident instead… or I managed to get you both out of Tocumwal altogether for that week and she was hit by a truck while crossing the road somewhere else…” There were tears at the corners of his eyes now also. “I don’t remember any of these things – I didn’t live through them – but I feel them somehow all the same… we all have!”
“‘We’…?”
Winds of Change (Empires Lost Book 2) Page 51