Paint Your Dragon

by Tom Holt

  Kurt swallowed. Spooky no longer worried him. He felt comfortable around spooky. Weird was as familiar to him as a pair of well-worn slippers. But this was strange.

  ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘I just did.’

  ‘Only,’ the voice bleated on. ‘I told my husband the play’d be over by ten and I’d be home in time to make him a late tea. And that was hours ago, and he gets all upset if his meals aren’t when he expects them.’

  Gradually, while Kurt was trying to get his larynx working again, the other fifteen joined in, a symphony of bleats and whines forming a baroque fugue around the same main theme.

  ‘I ...’ Kurt had raised his hand for silence, and obtained it instantly. Thirty-two eyes were gazing at him. He could feel the blood rushing to his cheeks. It was horrible.

  ‘I ...’

  Thirty-two ears, hanging on his every word. Jesus, he told himself, now the suckers are all goddamn British.

  He turned, grabbed David by the arm and dragged him forward. ‘My assistant will explain,’ he said, and ran for it.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  ‘The job,’ Chubby explained, ‘is basically very simple.’

  It was, the dragon wanted to point out, perishing cold. The air was full of high-velocity snow which he could feel even through his scales. There was nothing to be seen in any direction except flat white. Chubby and the dragon stood alone in an albino wilderness, like the last two balls on a white snooker table.

  ‘That’s not to say,’ Chubby went on, ‘that it’s easy. Easy and simple don’t necessarily mean the same thing. What I want you to do is simple, as opposed to complicated, but very, very difficult. With me so far?’

  The dragon couldn’t speak because his teeth were chattering like a school party in a theatre, so he nodded instead.

  ‘All you have to do,’ Chubby continued, ‘is fly, any direction you like, as fast as you possibly can. Direction doesn’t matter ’cos we’re at the North Pole. Speed, however, is of the essence.’

  The dragon frowned. ‘Don’t you mean time?’ he queried. Chubby grinned.

  ‘That,’ he said, ‘is either a naive remark or a very poor joke. Now then, here’s your parcel, don’t drop it. When I want you to stop, this little buzzer thing on your collar will bleep. Wonder of micro-electronics, that, cost me a fortune.’ He paused, recited a check-list under his breath, and took five steps back. ‘When you’re ready,’ he said.

  The dragon shrugged. ‘Now?’

  ‘Now.’

  Theory: travel faster than light around the Earth and you can move forwards in Time.

  A likely story. Like all great hypotheses, the theory of relativity relies on the basic assumption that nobody will ever be able to do the experiment which will prove it wrong; and anything that can’t be disproved must be true. Garnish with fresh mathematics, heat and serve.

  But supposing it’s true, and feasible. Think, not of the fame, the glory and the Nobel prize, but of the commercial possibilities.

  Correct; there are none. That’s why it’s a safe hypothesis. Nobody will ever try the experiment because there’s nothing in it for the institutional investors. That’s why there’s a whole lot of scientific theories about the nature of the space/time continuum, and rather fewer about the medium-term acceleration of racehorses. It’d be different, of course, if you could then send a messenger from the future back to the present, notebook crammed with stock exchange results, football scores, winning lottery numbers and the like; but that’s impossible, according to the theory. Guess why.

  The truth is that it’s possible - simple, even (see above) to travel back through Time, in roughly the same way as you can travel forwards. It involves flying round the world, yes; but at a rather different tempo.

  To go forwards, you have to fly faster than light. To go backwards, you have to fly slower than history. The maths goes like this:

  T-d=h

  P=n+h

  —where T is Time, d is disinformation, h is history, P stands for the Past, and n is the now, or present.

  For anybody who missed the first sixteen lessons, here’s a very simplistic summary.

  The past is made up of the present plus an awareness of there having been a time before the present; the awareness is called history. The speed at which history travels is equal to the speed of Time, less the time it takes to record it. The recording of history is slowed down by disinformation; official secrets, the reluctance of participants to tell the story because of the repercussions on themselves, and so on. The quantum of d varies from nation to nation, culture to culture; in Britain, there’s a thirty-year rule which means that nobody can look at important official documents for thirty years, whereas in the USA the freedom-of-information statutes say that you can see them straight away, except for the really important ones, which nobody ever gets to see at all. In some regimes, history gets rewritten every time there’s a change of government personnel. The constant d is therefore not a constant at all; accordingly history moves at a different speed depending on where you are, and in some places it’s at a complete standstill or moving backwards.

  Fly round the world, therefore, and you’re constantly crossing into different history zones. As you soar over the continents, the retrospective march of Time, from present to past, is taking place at all sorts of different speeds. Instead of being a tidal wave, crashing relentlessly down onto the reef of the present, the advance of history is a confused mess of recollection particles, swarming about in no sort of order. And there are always particles that move so slowly in comparison with the others that they’re getting left further and further behind; relatively speaking, going the wrong way.

  Reverse history and you reverse Time.

  In practical terms, then; if as you fly round the world you follow a carefully plotted course through the anomalies of the different history zones, you can get so far behind that you’ll be travelling backwards in time. As a further refinement, if you have moles and undercover agents at work in universities, public records offices and national computer archives all over the world, busily hiding, destroying, obscuring, obfuscating, rewriting, stuffing files down the backs of radiators and generally sabotaging the manufacture of history, you can control the production of anomalies and artificially create a navigable course from a given point in the future back to a given point in the past. Or, as the classic equation so elegantly puts it:

  I = fd2

  - where I stands for the Time-traveller’s itinerary, d is disinformation as above, and f stands for a statistically acceptable incidence of clerical and administrative fuckups.

  While we’re on the subject of Time, it’s universally acknowledged to be a great healer. By rights, therefore, it should be available free of charge through the National Health Service. But it isn’t, of course. If you want chronotherapy, you have to go private.

  ‘It’ll cost you, mind,’ the doctor muttered in a low voice.

  ‘Very, very expensive. Not to mention illegal. If they catch me doing this, I’ll be lucky if I can get a job casting out evil spirits in New Guinea.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ Bianca replied. ‘I’ve got to get well and get out of here as soon as possible. It’s urgent. It’s a matter of ...’ She was going to say life and death, but that could mean anything; like, for example that she’d managed to get seats for the Shrunken Heads concert at the NEC and didn’t want to waste them. ‘The future of the human race,’ she said, ‘is hanging in the balance here. It’s essential—’

  ‘Hey,’ the doctor interrupted, ‘you mean you got tickets for the Heads gig? You wouldn’t consider selling them, would you?’

  Having your right arm in plaster means you can only hit doctors with your left; unless you’re a natural southpaw, this can be a nuisance. ‘Shut up,’ Bianca snapped. ‘Look. Sixteen people, one of them quite possibly a close friend, have died. Most likely, that’s only the beginning. The only person who can stop it is me. So name your frigging price and let’s get on with it.’

  ‘My
price? You mean for the tickets? Well—’

  ‘For the operation,’ Bianca hissed.

  Chronotherapy, also known as Injury Time; a new breakthrough in medical science, brought to you by the pharmaceuticals wing of Chubby Stevenson (Time) Inc.

  What nearly all medicine boils down to is: leave the human body alone and comfortable, and in Time it’ll sort itself out. But if you haven’t got Time, this is a non-starter. So; either you die, or bits fall off you, or you buy more Time.

  It’s an entirely private and personal envelope of additional Time shoe-horned into an ordinary day - one second in real time, but up to three months as far as the user is concerned, during which bones knit, scars heal, muscles rebuild and so on. Since it’s a very small-scale temporal field, it only takes a tiny drop of the raw stuff-less than one microlitre, street value currently £100,000. Double that for the shoe-horn, installation costs, credulity suspension jigs and tooling, the doctor’s and Chubby’s profit. Fortunately, the sensational manner in which she’d received her injuries (Sultry Brunette In Bomb Horror) had sent her market values rocketing, and she’d arranged a few sales of old bits of junk she’d had cluttering her studio which more than covered the cost.

  Later, Bianca was to remember it as the most boring second of her life.

  Mike arrived, dishevelled and out of breath, to find he was already there.

  This worried him. True, his aggravating vagueness and extremely flexible attitude to punctuality had frequently led people to suggest that one of these days he’d be late for his own funeral. On the other hand, he’d always assumed that they’d have the common courtesy to wait for him. Apparently not so.

  ‘We therefore commit his body to the earth,’ said the priest, ‘dust to dust, ashes to ...’

  ‘Hey!’ he shouted. Nobody heard him. He watched with incredulous fury as they started to fill in the grave. It was like watching a waiter take away your meal before you’d had a chance to unfold your table napkin, let alone start eating. One thing did, however, suggest at least a degree of normality. Nobody had told him anything and he hadn’t got a clue what was going on. That made him feel more comfortable. He could cope now.

  ‘Good turnout,’ said a voice to his immediate right. ‘You must feel proud.’

  The voice was coming from a large, florid Victorian weeping angel. She’d seen better days; acid rain, vandalism and the trainee assistant gardener (who sharpened his billhook on her marble ankle) had all taken their toll, leaving her looking like something found in a sink-trap. Mike recoiled slightly.

  ‘Be like that,’ the angel said, apparently not offended. ‘Let’s face it, you’re no oil painting yourself; although, that said, in a bad light you’d pass for a second-rate Jackson Pollock.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  The statue sighed. ‘Sorry,’ it said, ‘I forgot, you’re new. Find a puddle or something, take a look at yourself. Or rather,’ she added quickly, ‘don’t. Probably best if you remember yourself the way you used to be.’

  Mike sat down on a tombstone. As he did so, he studied the process. As far as he could tell, he was solid and real; he could feel the stone against his trousered leg, and when he tried to pass his arm through an ornate granite cross, it wouldn’t go. He tried again, only harder; when he banged his wrist on the stone it hurt, and a little smear of blood showed in the graze. In one sense, reassuring; in another, disconcerting.

  ‘Neat trick, isn’t it?’ said the angel, who had been watching. ‘Feels just like the real thing, but isn’t. All a matter of timing, you see.’

  ‘Timing?’

  ‘That’s right.’ The statue yawned. ‘God,’ she said, ‘why’s it always me who’s got to do this? I don’t get paid for explaining to new recruits, I just do it because I’m here. And,’ she added, ‘because I feel sorry for you, bless your poor disoriented souls. And because I’ve got absolutely nothing else to do. Still, I really do think it’s time they did something official, it’s a scandal if you ask me. I mean, there’s all those preparing-for-retirement courses you can go on, so the shock of not having to work won’t send you to an early grave; but the biggest and most radical change of your entire existence, you’re supposed to be able to fend for yourself, puzzle it out from first principles. Cheapskate, I call it.’

  Mike took a deep breath - presumably it was a deep breath and not just some virtual reality programmer’s placebo. ‘If you’d explain,’ he said, ‘I personally would be very grateful.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ said the angel, ‘you’re welcome. Look, forget what I said about timing for the moment, it always confuses people. Think of a radio, right?’

  Mike thought of a radio.

  ‘Now then,’ the statue continued, ‘there’s hundreds, maybe thousands of different radio signals blamming about simultaneously, but the radio only picks them up one at a time. That’s because it’s tuned in to one specific frequency.’ The angel paused. ‘Nobody told me this, by the way,’ she added. ‘I had to work it out for myself. It’s true, though, ’cos I had it confirmed by Official Channels when I asked them. They’re very good about answering enquiries, so long as you don’t forget the stamped addressed envelope.’

  ‘Please go on,’ Mike said. ‘Like radio waves, you said.’

  ‘Sure.’ The angel thought for a moment, remembering where she’d got to. ‘Well, just as there’s lots of different radio frequencies, there’s lots of different chronological continuums. Continua. Timescales. That’s a better word, although I shouldn’t use it because it’s got a separate technical meaning. Strictly speaking, timescale is the residue left after hard time’s been boiled down in a copper kettle.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Forget I said that. Different timescales. Now, in the timescale which human mortal life is tuned in to, a second lasts—’ She stopped. ‘Sorry, got in a bit of a tangle there. Should have done the weights-and-measures spiel before I started. Let’s put all that on one side for the time being and stick to Terrestrial Orthodox. As far as you’re concerned, a second lasts one second, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Wrong. A second only lasts a second in your own specific timescale, HMS - that’s Human Mortal Standard. That’s what you were tuned in to when you were alive. Now you’re dead, you’re tuned in to HDS, Human Deceased Standard. One second HMS is equivalent to 0.8342 seconds HDS; or 0.0062 seconds SIS, Supernatural Immortal Standard; or 0.000147, SITS, Soul In Torment Standard; or—’

  ‘All right,’ Mike said, ‘got that. How does that mean I don’t exist but I can’t walk through tombstones?’

  Being a statue, the angel couldn’t shrug, but by extra-subtle voice modulation it did the vocal equivalent. ‘Don’t exist is a bit of an overstatement,’ she said, ‘and it’s a very complex bit of maths, which I’m still not sure I completely follow. The analogy is, though, think of the radio signals. They’re all there, but you can only listen to one at a time. Now, turning back to timescales, think of yourself as the radio signal.’

  ‘Fine. Here am I going bleep bleep. Who’s being the radio?’

  Another, broader verbal shrug. ‘This is a difficult concept to put across,’ she said. ‘Basically, the world is the radio, your fellow sentient beings are - no pun intended, promise - the cat’s whiskers. Do you see what I’m getting at? You exist, you’re here, no question about that. The tombstone there is inanimate - either that, or it’s very, very shy, because we’ve been standing next to each other since 1897 and it’s never said a word - and so it couldn’t notice you even if it wanted to. Doesn’t matter a damn what a tombstone thinks. But living creatures are different; they’re all tuned in to their own timescale, and so they just don’t see anybody who’s in a timescale faster than their own. Dead people move too quick; you know, the magic lantern effect. Marvellous system when you come to think of it, bloody efficient way to store billions of people on a relatively small planet.’

  There was a substantial pause while Mike let it all sink in. ‘I see,’ he said.
‘So do I still have to eat and sleep and so on? Do I still have to go to work and earn money, or is everything free, or don’t I need anything? Can I have things even if I don’t need them?’

  ‘The question doesn’t arise,’ the angel replied. ‘Life expectancy of a dead human’s no more than three days, four days maximum. At the end of that time, either you find an empty property in Mortality you can slip into, or else - phut.’

  ‘Phut?’

  ‘Phut. That’s yet another gross simplification,’ the angel went on apologetically, ‘but so what, I’m pretty shaky on the theory from now on. What actually happens, I think, is that you start to speed up to such an extent that Time just zips by in a meaningless blur and before you know it, you’ve reached the End of the Universe, entropy time, the big nothing; like you’ve fast-forwarded and there you are at the end of the tape. What happens after that is beyond me. Maybe they wind it back, maybe they take it back to the library and get out another one. Let’s put it this way, you’ll know the answer to that particular part of the story long before I will, so if you can, be sure to send me a postcard. I say that to all the new arrivals,’ the angel added, ‘and I’ve never had anything from any of them. But maybe they just forgot.’

  ‘Four days?’

  ‘Four days tops.’

  Mike felt ill. The gravestone was still there under his backside, the breeze was still a little on the chilly side, but he felt as if he was already hurtling past, like a child on a combination merry-go-round and Ferris wheel. ‘You said something about an empty property,’ he remembered. ‘What’s that all about?’

  ‘Thought you’d ask,’ replied the angel. ‘They always do.

  Just occasionally, you can slip back in. Sounds nice, but isn’t.’

  ‘No?’