by E. J. Swift
Published 2018 by Solaris
an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd,
Riverside House, Osney Mead,
Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK
www.solarisbooks.com
ISBN: 978-1-78618-090-2
Copyright © 2018 EJ Swift
Cover art by Joey Hi-Fi
The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.
This book is a work of fiction. Names. characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
for Dominique Larson and Björn Wärmedal
and for friends in far away places
Montmartre, Paris
THE ANOMALY IS waiting. It has been waiting for a long time, although the anomaly’s sense of time differs from a conventional understanding, given the peculiarities of its nature. It does not know exactly what, or rather who, it is waiting for, but it will recognise them when they come. The anomaly is ready. Its hunger grows.
The anomaly has one desire, and that is to expand. With the right incumbent, it can push its feelers out through the centuries, backwards and forwards, producing new shoots which will emerge into unexpected temporal gardens. Like all of its kind, the anomaly has neither knowledge nor understanding of where, when, or what the consequences of these shoots may be. It wishes only to expand. The chance of discovery by a matching incumbent is approximately one in a hundred thousand, but the anomaly does not know that, either. All it can do is wait.
Every now and then, the anomaly has a squatter. This state of affairs makes it—as far as it can experience emotion—deeply unhappy. It is impossible to evict the squatter, because the squatter has no physical substance. It is impossible to communicate with the squatter, because the anomaly’s intelligence, if it can be called that, is not human. And so the anomaly must endure this hostile presence.
Time passes.
Weeks.
Months.
Years.
And then, at the very edge of the anomaly’s awareness, a disturbance.
Something—someone—is approaching.
Part One
The End of the World
Chapter One
Prague, 2318
THE EXPLOSIONS HAVE stopped, and in their absence a raw quiet unfolds. The bunker feels empty and cold, as if the people it harbours are already dead and have been for some time. Outside, what looks like snow is falling. It is not snow. Figures lurch past the cameras, sudden ghosts, there then gone. Inga breathes out. Breathes mist. In the confinement of the underground space, she listens to her thoughts detonating one by one.
This is the calm before the storm.
This time—this storm—will be the end.
There is a chance to fix this, but it means breaking everything they believe in. All that they’ve worked and sacrificed to preserve.
“The heating’s gone.”
That’s Toshi, the eldest of them.
Inga looks about the bunker, observing her depleted crew. Only a handful of history’s incumbents remain. Some have died during their travels through time, or have taken their own lives. Most have been buried never knowing the truth about their nature—perhaps they are the lucky ones. Others are yet to be born. Might never be born, now. Those too, she envies. What is left of the House of Janus is a world-weary collective, traumatised by experience and the implausibility of what has happened to them. They are addicts, although they had no choice about that. Over the years they have suffered relapses. Most returned to Janus, acknowledging the importance of their mission. Because they are survivors. But what they have survived will be meaningless if this is the end of humanity.
She shivers, hugging herself inside her coat. The war feels as though it has always been here, yet compared to most wars it has been short. A matter of weeks. Wars are rarely about what their perpetrators profess them to be about; Inga has seen enough conflict to know that. This one has seen entire continents reduced to nuclear wastelands. The fact is, it no longer matters how the war started, unless they stop it.
She turns to her analysts.
“What do you have?”
Efe clears her throat. She sounds nervous.
“We’ve worked back from the Marceau address and identified two turning points which should cause minimum disruption to the timeline. The building of the Parisian basilica Sacré-Coeur, and a twentieth century woman called Rachel Clouatre.”
“Show me.”
The analyst waves her hands and a scroll of mathematical code gleams into being: banners dictating action and reaction, probability and consequence. The randomness of the universe reduced to a set of equations. Looking at those digits gives Inga a strange feeling; at once childish and omnipotent. Like a field biologist who may observe but never intervene, she has dedicated most of her life to preserving history. Now she is preparing to do what she swore she would never do.
“This Rachel… she’s an ancestor of our man?”
“She starts the Marceau bloodline.”
“And the Sacré-Coeur—”
“Was where the April address was made. The catalyst.”
“You’re certain about this?”
“We’ve scanned every source.”
It is an unavoidable fact that by addressing the Marceau bloodline at its root, they will be condemning several generations before their instigator is born. Inga supposes that’s the penalty of acting for the greater good. She glances around. The others nod their agreement.
“How do we get there?”
“We’ve identified an incumbent who was a near miss. She passed very close to the dormant anomaly in the north of Paris, but never discovered it.”
One of the lucky ones, thinks Inga. A map of the French capital unfolds, and the four people present in the room form a circumference around it. Efe moves a finger through the projection, pointing to a site on the right bank of the river Seine.
“This one.”
“Do you have a lock?”
“Twentieth, twenty-first century—I’m trying to narrow it further—”
“Don’t try. Do.”
The analyst sits back, defeated.
“Early twenty-first century. Somewhere between the year fifteen and twenty-five. That’s the best I’ve got.”
Inga folds her arms, psyching herself up to face the person she needs. Of course it would be Léon, she thinks. Léon, who is closest to the brink, who of all of them has the fewest travels left before the anomaly claims him for good. She hears him exhale.
“Léon.”
When she looks up, his gaze is locked upon the map.
“Léon, we need you.”
“I can’t.” He speaks softly.
“If there was anyone else… you’re the only one with a European anomaly.”
“I can’t... go back there.”
Efe focuses intently upon her projections. Toshi moves aside, giving Inga and Léon the illusion of privacy.
“I know.” She steels herself. She knows what it means to return to something you had overcome; that you thought you had escaped. “And I know the danger. I know this could be your last travel. It could even be the tipping point, there’s no point pretending otherwise. But we can’t trust the chronometrist to do this alone. Even if we could trust her, she hasn’t got the range. We need someone on the ground to identify the incumbent and steer her to the anomaly. We have to oversee the mission.”
His gaze drops away. They all agreed
on the course of action, but that was before they knew what it would entail.
“How will you get me into Paris?” he says at last.
“We’ll take the hopper.”
“You might not get out again.”
There is no denying this. The European mainland is gone. Paris is ripe with radiation.
“Then you’d better make sure you succeed.” She raises her voice, bringing the others back into the conversation. “Time to get the chronometrist in here, before everyone outside is a goner.”
THEY WATCH ON the cameras as the chronometrist selects her body. Through the white flakes Inga catches glimpses of Prague, a once beautiful city reduced to skeletal buildings and the burned out carcasses of vehicles and people. Civilians lie at odd angles in the street, slowly being covered in ash. Inga doesn’t know who bombed Prague. In some ways she’d rather not. She’s fifty-six, older out of time, thought she’d seen everything there was to see. She was wrong.
As they watch, one of the wounded raises himself from the ground and gets awkwardly to his feet. He begins to shuffle towards the bunker. As he draws closer, Inga can see that half of his face is missing, the white of calcium exposed.
“For fuck’s sake,” says Toshi. “That one’s practically dead.”
“Her idea of a joke, no doubt.”
“Some joke.”
As far as they know, the chronometrist was the first incumbent. When the anomalies began to appear, sometime around the twelfth century, she was a young woman growing up in the Southern Song dynasty in China. Like all of them, she discovered her anomaly by accident. She liked what she found, and the power it bestowed upon her. The chronometrist travelled without restraint, further and further away from her home time, and as she reached a tipping point the anomaly began to hollow her out, like a cockroach wasp taking over its host. She faded, and faded. She exists now only as a consciousness, one whose sanity is dubious at best. Tied to the timestream, she can travel through and pass between any anomaly in the world, but can communicate only by using a body within a few hundred metres of an anomaly. If she remembers her name, she has never revealed it.
The chronometrist’s host enters the tunnel to the underground bunker. Previous members of the House of Janus constructed the bolthole centuries ago. It is the site of an anomaly whose incumbent was killed in the Battle of Vítkov Hill. Out of time. Inga supposes technically there is no difference, but it seems worse, to die out of time, when in a sense you are not really living at all. Occasionally she has the impression of ghosts surrounding her, traces of the doomed incumbent coming and going. They all feel it.
A knock on the metal door. Inga feels the atmosphere in the bunker shift. No one likes dealing with the chronometrist, even under normal circumstances.
“Let her in.”
As he staggers inside, the dying man’s injuries make themselves known. It is impossible to ignore the smell of rotting meat. The man stands, clad in makeshift combat gear, swaying from foot to foot. He is a patchwork of blood, grime, ash and gangrene. Multiple gunshot entries mark his jacket.
His lips move; the chronometrist’s voice comes out in a parched croak.
“Oh—my dear Janusians—how delightful—to see you.”
Toshi fetches a glass of water, but the chronometrist ignores it. Inga pushes a chair towards the man.
“Could you not have let this one die in peace?”
“I’m doing—him—a favour—don’t you think? Taking his mind—away—”
“All right, all right. You know why you’re here.”
The injured man giggles.
“Stop the war, stop the war, stop—the—war…”
“Exactly. Or we’re all dead.”
“Don’t know—if I can die.”
“You’ll find out soon enough, if you don’t help us.” Inga’s words float back to her. This is what it has come to: they must put their trust in the psychopath. She pushes the thought aside. “It’s all up to you and Léon now. We’ve found an incumbent.”
“A new one?” The man’s voice squeaks with the chronometrist’s excitement.
“You will have to engage her. Influence her. But she mustn’t know what’s she’s doing. It’s best she thinks it’s an accident, at least until the mission is completed. We don’t want her getting any ideas. Once it’s done, Léon will induct her into the code of practice. Do you understand?”
The man’s eyes slip away. His fingers poke at one of the entry wounds. Fresh blood begins to ooze through the synthetic material of his jacket. Toshi’s frown deepens.
“Ye-es…”
Inga speaks sharply.
“Then listen carefully. This is what we’re going to do.”
LÉON SAYS NOTHING as he straps himself into the co-pilot’s seat, and Inga does not attempt to instigate conversation. The landscape says it all for them. As they rise into the ash and then break above its veil, the blitzed city reverts into a maze of tessellating shapes until it blurs again, a blackened smear on a blacker land. Léon watches in silence as the earth falls away and she points the aircraft west.
It takes them two hours to reach northern France. Everything below is the same: grey rivers, grey country. Some cities appear almost untouched, but stand still and silent, monumental sculptures carved upon the land. Paris will not be like that. Paris was decimated. She was one of the first cities to fall. On the approach, Inga begins a slow descent. This whole region was underwater once. Perhaps it will be again, with the seas rising. Perhaps that would be better. She wonders what is going through Léon’s head, seeing the ruination of the city. It’s not where he grew up, but the anomalies make themselves the centre of your heart. Once you have answered that call, everything that came before is meaningless.
Inga dreams about Mexico City every night.
“I’ll need your help to navigate,” she says.
“South of the river.”
He directs her. Inga spirals in slow circles and touches down in what must once have been a wide boulevard, busy with department stores and brasseries. Léon’s anomaly is located deep inside the catacombs beneath the city. She lets the hopper’s engine wind down. Léon unstraps and stares out of the windshield.
“That’s the last of our fuel,” he says.
“Yes.”
He doesn’t elaborate, and neither does she. It is what it is.
They step outside. The silence strikes her. No living thing stirs here, no birds or insects, or even the slow creep of plants. A breeze moves black dust about their feet.
“This way.”
Léon leads her through what is left of the streets. There are bodies, inside cars or lying in the road, all covered in that fine black dust. It gets into her nose, her mouth. Her throat thickens. She can’t swallow. She is reminded of Pompeii, the way the lava made sarcophagi for its victims as it cooled.
She had assumed they would have to blast their way into the tunnels, but luck favours them. The glass dome that housed the entrance to the catacombs has collapsed, but when they clear aside the debris they find the stairway down to the tunnels is intact. A mouth in the earth, as if it has been waiting for them, the way the anomalies wait for their incumbents. She hands Léon a torch and follows him below. There are six million dead buried down here, stacked in immaculate constructions of tibia, fibula and skulls. And now another three million above, preserved in dust.
“How far in do we go?” she asks.
“All the way.”
The skulls observe their passage, the grinning masks alive in a way the dead above are not. They have been walking for twenty minutes when Léon stops. Inga sees the problem at once. Part of the tunnel has caved in. She glances overhead. Impossible to tell how stable the ceilings are.
They work together to clear the piles of rocks and dirt. Léon’s movements are precise, methodical. He shows no sign of anxiety or fear, though he must feel both. She sits back on her heels for a moment, watching him.
“How old were you, when you found your anomal
y?”
“Twelve.”
“No child should have to deal with that.”
“I don’t know. Perhaps it’s easier that way. To accept. Your views aren’t so rigid.”
But the damage is worse, she thinks, in the long term.
“You know, when you go through it will feel like none of this could possibly happen.”
“I know.”
“You’ll be centuries away. It would be very easy to immerse yourself in a new life. To forget about us. About the future. I know there will be side effects, but—”
“I won’t forget.”
“We’re counting on you, Léon.”
He looks up, just once.
“I know.”
There is nothing more she can say. They have almost cleared enough space. She helps Léon enlarge the gap until his shoulders can fit inside. He pushes through without hesitation. On the other side, he stops.
“The roof is unstable. There’s no point us both going on.”
“All right.”
“What will you do?”
“I’ll wait. In the hopper. If it works—I don’t know. I suppose all this will vanish.”
“I suppose so.”
They stand for a moment.
“You never know,” she says. “The twenty-first century might suit you. In a quaint kind of way.”
He grins reluctantly. She has a glimpse of the person he could have been, should have been, if it were not for the anomaly.
“It’ll be something,” he says.
“Good luck, Léon.”
“And you.”
He makes his way down the tunnel. Inga follows his progress, trying to imagine how it must feel, this return. What it would be like if it were her anomaly, back in Mexico City, back in—no. Don’t think about it. But she does. It rushes up. The exhilaration and the terror. The desperate urgency to meet the flare, the feeling that this and only this can make you whole. She has tried not to indulge those memories; the grief is too much. At times it is almost unbearable. A terrible jealousy overcomes her at the sight of Léon’s receding figure. She can feel it gripping her, thinks perhaps she should follow him, as though by being close when he travels, she might recapture some of that lost joy—