by Tom Holt
The Timekeeper nodded. ‘I wath thorty-thicth onthe,’ she said savagely, ‘and now look at me. And having thethe thodding thingth on my teeth doethn’t help.’
‘It must be awful,’ agreed Lamorak. ‘Why don’t you take them off and the hell with it?’
‘Becauthe,’ the Timekeeper replied sadly, ‘when I wath thorty-thicth I had really thraight even teeth and no thillingth. Which meanth I’ve got to wear thucking bratheth and bruth three timeth a day, otherwithe it’ll cauthe a temporal paradocth. It’th a real bummer.’ She paused for a moment, as something jammed in her mind. ‘Hold on,’ she said. ‘How can you have met Thimon two hundred and thithty yearth ago? You’d be dead by now.’
It was Lamorak’s turn to sigh.
‘Let me explain,’ he said.
Not far away, a real kangaroo - one without golden hooves or a horn in the middle of its forehead - was bounding happily along, its mind occupied with the one great mystery which obsesses the consciousness of the species; to the extent that it has stopped them dead in their evolutionary tracks and prevented them from developing into the hyper-intelligent super-lifeforms they would otherwise have become.
Namely; how come, no matter how careful you are about what you put in your pockets, in the end you always find two paperclips, a fluff-covered boiled sweet and a small, worthless copper coin at the bottom of them?
It had just come to the conclusion that the Devil creeps up and puts them there while you’re asleep, when a terrifying apparition shot up out of a hollow in the rocks, waved its arms and grinned fearfully The kangaroo stopped dead in mid-hop, landed awkwardly, and twisted its ankle. The force of the landing jerked a shirt button and a scrap of peppermint wrapper out of its pouch, and the wind bore them away.
The monster advanced, slowly and with infinite menace. Behind it, a man with a camera and another with a big tape-recorder put their heads up above the escarpment. The monster was talking, apparently to itself.
‘These spectacular creatures,’ it was saying, ‘the world’s largest true marsupials, hounded by mankind to the verge of extinction in some parts of the Outback...’
The kangaroo cowered back on to its hind paws and raised its forepaws feebly; whether to make a show of aggression or to hide behind them was far from clear. The monster continued to advance.
‘And now,’ it was saying. ‘I’m going to try and get in close to the kangaroo, and if we’re really lucky we might for the first time ever be able to show you ...’
The kangaroo tried to move; but completely without success. It fought the urge to grin feebly and wave into the camera with every fibre of its being. It failed.
‘The largest species - Barry, can you zoom in on the little bugger’s head please - the largest species of kangaroo, the Red, can leap twenty-five feet at a single bound and clear objects six feet high,’ said the monster. ‘I’m going to see if I can get close enough for you to see in detail ...’
The spell broke. With a shrill bark of terror, the kangaroo launched itself into the air, twisted frantically round and bounded away, pursued by strange and distinctly unfriendly cries from the monster. Only after half an hour’s high-speed bounding did it stop, crouch down and drag breath into its heaving lungs.
And then stiffen in cold despair; for just behind its shoulder it could hear the sound of human breathing, and that terrible voice, saying:
‘And if we’re extremely quiet, we might just be able - Kieron, if you scare the bugger this time I’ll make you swallow your polariser - we might just be able to get a glimpse of its ...’
A single massive jump might just reach the edge of that rock over there, but why bother? There was clearly no point.
With a soft, despairing cough, the kangaroo turned, faced the camera and waggled its forepaws, hating itself almost to death.
‘Let’th get thith thtraight, thall we?’ said the Timekeeper, after a long, long pause. ‘You’re really ecthpecting me to believe that you’re a pair of Arthurian knighth on a quetht to find an apron?’
‘Yes.’
‘Fine.’ A sharper than usual pair of eyes would have seen her suspended disbelief bobbing for a moment above her head before drifting away on the breeze. ‘And that’th what you need the tied-up horthe for?’
‘The horthe?’
‘Horthe, yeth.’
‘Oh I see, the horse.’ Lamorak scratched his head. He was hot, tired, confused, overdosed to the eyebrows with tinned peaches and dying of toothache. He didn’t really want to do any more explaining just at the moment. ‘It’s not a horse,’ he said, ‘not as such.’
Just then the unicorn woke up, struggled ineffectually in its bonds, and embarked on a stream of invective.
‘Hey,’ said the Timekeeper, ‘the horthe jutht thaid thomething.’
‘Yes, only it isn’t a—’
‘Listen, you bastards,’ screamed the unicorn. ‘Tell that flamin’ sheila that if she calls me a bloody horse just one more time, then so help me—’
Pertelope, showing more intelligence than anyone would have given him credit for, grabbed a sugar-lump and slapped it into the unicorn’s mouth. The tirade broke off abruptly, and was replaced by a crunching sound.
‘If it’th not a horthe,’ whispered the Timekeeper, ‘then what ith it?’
Lamorak sighed. ‘It’s a unicorn,’ he said. ‘Satisfied?’
‘Oh.’
‘And now, we’ve got to get on with what we were doing, and I’m sure your colleagues are getting very hungry up there in orbit, so ...’
‘What do you need a unicorn for?’
It took Lamorak just over six seconds to count to ten slowly under his breath. ‘If you must know,’ he said, ‘we want it as bait to catch a maiden of unspotted virtue.’
The Timekeeper looked at him. ‘You’th got that the wrong way round, you know.’
Lamorak prised his lips apart into a smile. ‘Have we? Oh damn. That is a nuisance, isn’t it, Per? Oh well, it’s back to the drawing board for us, then. Thanks for the tip, anyway. And now we really must be getting along.’
‘And bethideth,’ continued the Timekeeper, ‘you thaid you were questhting for an apron, not a maiden of unthpotted ...’
‘It’s her apron,’ said Sir Pertelope.
‘Ith it?’
‘Yes.’
After the unicorns came the convicts.
There were two waves of them. The second wave arrived with the First Fleet in 1788, seven hundred years after the first wave.
The aborigines, whose permission nobody bothered to ask, had a phrase for it. One damned thing after another, they said.
The first man in the first wave to set eyes on Australia had been the overseer. His first reaction was to shudder slightly. Then he jumped down from the observation platform and told the drummer to stop marking time.
‘Right,’ he shouted, ‘everybody out.’
Nobody moved. Two thousand dragon-headed prows bobbed silently up and down in the still waters of Botany Bay.
The overseer blinked. ‘Did you lot hear what I said?’ he yelled. ‘Everybody off the ships, now.’
‘We’re not going.’
The voice came from behind an oar in the third row back. It was backed up by a mumbled chorus of That’s Rights and You Tell Hims. The overseer started to perspire.
‘What did you just say?’ he demanded. The faint blur of grey smoke behind the oar coruscated in the sunlight. If it had had shoulders, it might well have been shrugging them.
‘I said we’re not bloody going,’ it replied evenly. ‘We can see into the future. It sucks. We stay here.’
In the back of the overseer’s mind, a little voice nervously started asking around to see if anyone had any ideas about what should be done next. The overseer’s hands were more positive. They reached for the big knotted whip hanging from his belt.
‘We’ll soon see about that,’ he said, and he aimed a ferocious blow at the cloud of smoke.
‘Idiot.’
Wit
h aggravating slowness, the wisps of smoke coalesced into a cloud once more. There was an expectant silence.
‘There’s no way you can force us to get off the ship, you know,’ went on the voice, calmly. ‘So you might as well accept the situation, turn this thing round and head for home. Yes?’
‘No,’ said the overseer.
He was sweating heavily now.
He hadn’t wanted to come in the first place. When he’d joined the company, all those years ago, he’d seen his future career developing in an entirely different direction. After five years or so loading sides of bacon on to the ships and sailing them from Copenhagen to Dover, he reckoned, he’d have proved himself the sort of man they could use in marketing. There would follow an orderly progression, from sales representative to assistant sales manager, then regional sales manager, then sales director, and so on until he was given overall responsibility for the whole Danish operation in Albion. And here he was, ten years later, trying to cajole a boatful of deported supernatural entities into colonising New South Cambria. Something, somewhere, had gone wrong.
‘Please?’ he said.
There was a swirling of mists and fogs the length of the ship that left him feeling dizzy. He could feel the roof of his mouth getting dry.
Two thousand longships; each one crammed to overflowing with minor divinities. There were river-gods, wood-nymphs, fire-spirits, elves, wills o’ the wisp, pixies, chthonic deities, earth-mothers, thunder-demons, even a few metaphysical abstractions huddled wretchedly at the back and insisting on soft lavatory paper. As part of the dismantling of the magical culture of Albion, her entire population of supernatural bit-players had been rounded up and sent to Van Demon’s Land.
The overseer dug his fingernails into the palms of his hands and took a deep breath. ‘Come along now, people,’ he wheedled, ‘you’ll like it once you get there, promise.’
‘Nuts.’
‘But there’s rivers,’ whined the overseer. ‘Majestic, awe-inspiring torrents, crashing over dizzying water-falls, winding lugubriously through ancestral forests. There’s deserts. There’s rock formations any redquartzed troll’d give his right arm to live in. There’s bush fires that make Hell look like a camping stove. What in God’s name are you complaining about? It’s a bloody spook’s paradise out there.’
‘There are also,’ said the spokeswraith, ‘spiders.’
There was a soft thunk as the overseer’s jaw dropped on to the studded collar round his neck. ‘What was that?’ he gasped.
‘And snakes.’
‘And mosquitoes.’
‘And,’ added the spokeswraith meaningfully, ‘it’s not as if it’s exactly got vacant possession, you know. The whole place is absolutely crawling with ...’
With a massive effort, the overseer hoisted his jaw back into place. ‘Yes?’
‘You know,’ replied the smoke-cloud diffidently. ‘Things. It’s really creepy out there, you know?’
‘They go around singing all the time,’ ventured a voice from the last bench but one. ‘It’s enough to give you the willies.’
‘Bloody unsocial hours, too,’ added a scratching, grinding sound from somewhere near the middle of the ship. ‘Dream-time-and-a-half, that sort of thing.’
‘Let’s get this straight,’ said the overseer, with an ever so slightly unbalanced lilt in his voice. ‘All you ghouls and ghosts and things that go bump in the night are refusing to get off the ship because you think the place is haunted?’
‘Yes.’
‘Be reasonable,’ added the scratching sound - a fever-wraith from the Plumstead Marshes - ‘they’re natives, they’re used to living here, we’re not. They’d have us for breakfast. If you turn us off the ship, it’d be mass murder. Exorcism. Whatever.’
The overseer lowered his head, stuck his hands in his pockets - where, inevitably, he found a small piece of string, a half-eaten apple and two small bronze coins of purely nominal value - and thought about it for a while; then he retired into the helmsman’s cabin and banged his head against the ship’s wheel for a while. Oddly enough, it helped, because when he emerged he knew exactly what he was going to do.
And it worked. It was, of course, bitterly unfair on the indigenous paranormals; and it has to go down as one of the biggest stains on the superhuman rights record of the English nation. Now, however, it’s far too late to do anything about it, because within five years of the arrival of the deported spirits from Albion, the native deities had been completely wiped out, leaving the entire continent empty to receive the newcomers. In due course, they settled in, adapted themselves to their new environment and evolved an entirely original lifestyle of their own which bore no resemblance whatsoever to the culture they had left behind them, and which survived for seven hundred years before being completely destroyed by the coming of the First Fleet.
Which, so the aborigines say, served the buggers bloody well right.
‘Tho what did they actually do to the native thpiritth?’ the Timekeeper demanded. Lamorak winced. He hated this part of the story. It was, he had always felt, enough to make one ashamed of being Albionese.
‘They methylated them,’ he replied quietly. ‘Well, it’s been really nice meeting you,’ he said, ‘and I look forward very much to having met you before, but unless we make a start immediately we’re going to be very, very late. Ciao.’ He picked up his rucksack, slung it on his back and advanced purposefully towards the unicorn.
‘That’th horrible,’ said the Timekeeper, and shuddered. ‘But it thtill doethn’t ecthplain about the apron and the unicorn.’
‘Very true,’ replied Lamorak over his shoulder. ‘Right then, Per, you grab hold of the rope while I push.’
‘The apron,’ said Pertelope, ‘was a talisman belonging to one of the deported spirits. It has magical powers of its own. We managed to track it down, through newspaper reports of unexplained happenings which could only have been caused by the apron, and it turns out to be owned by a maiden of unspotted virtue living in Sydney. Hence the unicorn.’
‘I thee,’ murmured the Timekeeper. ‘At leatht I think I thee. What thort of unecthplained happeningth?’
Lamorak smiled unpleasantly. ‘It’s kind of hard to explain,’ he said.
The Timekeeper was not amused. ‘Try me,’ she said.
‘Football results,’ said Pertelope. ‘The apron plays merry hell with the results of Australian Rules football matches. All we had to do once we knew that was to plot all the results on a big graph and wait until a significant mutation in the sine curve became apparent.’
‘And?’
‘Paramatta Under-Twelves 22, Sydney 0,’ Lamorak growled. ‘Which was as good as putting up a big neon sign saying OVER HERE.’ He paused and scowled. ‘I can explain the mathematics of it in very great detail if you want me to,’ he added.
‘No thankth,’ said the Timekeeper, and Lamorak noticed that her eyes looked as if someone had accidentally slapped three coats of weatherproof varnish over them. ‘Actually,’ she went on, ‘it’th time I wath getting along, tho ...’
‘Of course. We quite understand. Right, Per, when I say heave ... Per? What the hell are you staring at?’
Pertelope was standing bolt upright, his face contorted into an expression of terminal sheepishness. He swallowed once or twice, raised his left arm and waggled his fingers.
‘Smile, Lammo,’ he hissed out of the side of his mouth. ‘I think we’re on television.’
Faster than the speed of light is very fast. And, it goes without saying, dark.
‘Ouch.’
‘Sorry.’
‘That was my foot.’
‘Yes, all right, I said I’m sorry.’
‘Well, mind where you’re going next time.’
Sleek, streamlined, virtually frictionless and as devoid of light as six feet up a drainpipe, the mighty starcruiser pounced like a giant cat across the vastness of space. Far below - so far that distance became just another deceptive illusion - the earth spun on
its languorous axis, while Time found itself dragged inexorably up the down escalator.
‘For crying out loud, George, watch what you’re doing with that bloody kettle.’
‘Sorry.’
‘You’d have thought the dozy cow would’ve been back by now. I’m starving.’
‘So are the rest of us, Simon. The difference is, we don’t make such a great big performance out of it.’
‘Oh yes? And who asked for your opinion, Priscilla?’
‘I’m not Priscilla, I’m Annabel.’
‘And I’m Priscilla. You just put your teacup down on my head.’
‘God, sorry, Priscilla.’
‘I’m not Priscilla, I’m George.’
Aboard the starship Timekeeper, there are three levels of Time: earth time; relative time; and the time they’d all been cooped up on this small, cramped and above all dark spaceship. The third variety had the weirdest properties of all. It seemed to last for ever.
‘Look, this is hopeless. I’m going out for a pizza. Anybody else fancy coming?’
‘Listen, George ...’
‘Trevor. I’m George.’
‘Listen, Trevor, you just can’t do that. This is a scientific experiment, right? We’re playing sillybuggers with the fabric of causality as it is; I mean, God only knows what damage we’re doing just by being here. If you suddenly touch down in the middle of the twentieth century and start stuffing yourself with a deep-pan quattro stagione, there’s no limit to what could happen. So just sit down and shut up, okay?’
There was complete silence.
‘I said okay, Trevor?’
‘I’m not Trevor, I’m Nick.’
‘Where’s Trevor, then?’
‘How the hell am I supposed to know that, Louise? There’s no light in here.’
‘Actually, I’m not Louise, I’m Angela. Who the hell is Louise, anyway?’