by Adam Roberts
It was a relief beyond words to shut the door on that freezing environment.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ said the Dr, pulling towels from the central console and passing them around. ‘I do believe we’ve done what we came to do . . . averted catastrophe once again.’
PROLOGUE
Time.
Have you ever really thought about it? Neither had I, until I met the Dr.
What is time? Whither time? Whence? Thither or hence? Who knows? And whom? And why does Whom know?
What?
Hold up: go back a mo. Start again.
Let us define time. Time is the difference between a hot cup of coffee and a cold cup of coffee. It is the difference between a cold beer on a hot day, and a warm beer on a hot day. It turns young to old, and via the mystery of parturition it turns old into young. It’s what makes yesterday different to today: it’s the difference, in other words, between yester and to. Since to is the opposite of fro, it follows that yester and fro are the same thing. Yesterfro. What am I talking about?
Time will tell.
Time began at the beginning. This is why, strictly speaking, we should call it the beganning.
Time is a dimension.
But (and pay close attention, for this bit is really really important) - even though it is a dimension, Time is not space. This is because one day in time you will die. That’s coming closer and closer, I’m sorry to say. You can’t avoid it by moving around in space. You can’t take three steps to the left and watch your death slide past you, shaking its fist in impotent rage like a bobsleigh-man who’s lost control of the steering. It doesn’t work like that. Time is a two-dimensional, not a three-dimensional, thing. You can move along it from before to after, and if you’re clever enough you can move from after to before. But you can’t go sideways in time.
On the other hand, you can go sideways in space. I’ll prove it
There!
What do we deduce from this? That spacetime, the theory advanced by Albert Einstein, is erroneously mistaken. You see, time is a different sort of thing from space. This is a really important point in the story I’m about to tell. I’d like you to bear it in mind, if you can.
Who am I?
My name is Prose Tailor. I tailor prose, I cut it to shape, fit it together. This prose you’re reading now is my work. I was a companion of the Dr. The Dr - that’s right. Him. I was there when he uncovered the essential mystery at the heart of the cosmos, the answer to the big question. I saw with my own eyes the solution.
You are about to read my story.
It is the duty of the Time Gentlemen to protect the grammar of time.
You didn’t realise that time has a grammar? Ah, you deluded and ignorant fool. To master time, you need to understand the difference between a time noun and a time verb, a time subject and a time object. You need to understand tense and mood without getting tense or moody. Time is things happening in a particular order, according to a particular system of rules. Start breaking those rules and soon the whole fabric of time would unravel. The morrow would not longer follow the day; the day would not longer follow the yester. The yes. I mean yesterday. With the result that yesterday might come after tomorrow, and everybody would get very confused. The processes of life would break down; thought itself would become meandering and untenable.
‘Time is story ,’ the Dr said to me once. ‘It’s a narrative. If the narrative gets all tangled up, then the story becomes impossible to follow. That’s why the Time Gentlemen are so important. Because we preserve the proper line of the story.’
Here is a story. A child is born on Earth of the twenty-third century. And who is this child?
It’s me, of course.
I grew to adulthood in You-’K?, a small country that is part of the continent of You-Rapper !, itself merely a component of the World Wide Federation of Hip Humanity, our glorious global government. After school I went to the Prose College where I learned to shape, snip and tailor prose. After my graduation I worked as a prose tailor, out of a little shop in the Reefer Barn (the main mall for all You-Rapper’s Reefer needs). It was tough work. Few people in You-’K? have any use for prose. Of course, state regulation requires every citizen to possess a dozen personalised lyrics by the age of majority, and Rap Tailors do good business. But I never had the knack for rap. I was rap-knack-less. My parents were ashamed to see me follow the ignominious path of the Prose Tailor, writing little pieces of legalese, or perhaps the liner notes for other people’s albums. I barely earned a living: money was always tight, and I never had enough for the little luxuries that make existence bearable. Worst of all I never had enough cash to be able to travel . . . to voyage to far countries, as I dreamed of doing! To visit the home of our Global religion, the great nation of You-Say!, the holy land, where the power of sayin’ was first mooted - where it was first determined that every ordinary person, no matter how inarticulate, ugly or stoopid, could have their say. But I would never be able to see that exotic land nor travel to the Progrok paradise of Rush?Yeah!, nor the teetering, foul-mouthed antipodian continent of ‘Oz’ - Ausbourneia.
My life was trapped in narrow grooves. Waking, working, eating, sleeping.
And then one day I answered an advertisement for assistant-stroke-companion to a Time Gentleman, and everything about my life changed.
My life, up until that moment, had been empty. I shuffled to work and shuffled home alone at the end of the day. My days were without colour; my life was as hopeless as a soap-on-a-rope that has lost its soap and is only rope thereby becoming hopeless as soap in the shower. You can’t wash yourself in rope, after all. I was ropey.
As you can see from this, I’ve never been a very good prose tailor.
Until I joined the Dr and his apprentice, Linnaeus Trout. The three of us together had a series of extraordinary adventures. And ultimately I was with him when he discovered the secret at the heart of time; and fate - in the shape of a malign ET and his Dr-killing weapon - forced us apart.
This is my story.
Chapter Seven
THE DR RE-UN-DEGENERATES
But although I was anxious that the Dr was injured, perhaps fatally, in fact things took a much stranger path. Not to put too fine a point on it: I was privileged to witness one of the Dr’s ‘re-new-generative episodes’. You see, unlike most other life-forms the Time Gentlemen do not die. At least, they don’t die in the normal course of things. Instead their bodies ‘re-un-degenerate’. One ‘incarnation’, or ‘iteration’, or ‘actor playing’ the Dr passes away, and an entirely new one takes its place. I know! It’s almost too incredible. It’s almost beyond belief. But there you go.
I watched as the Dr fell to the floor, although not so carelessly as he was likely actually to injure himself. He lay there, and his face went all - fuzzy. I can’t think of a better way of describing it. For a moment it looked as though he possessed two faces, but then his features settled into a new configuration. His hair took on the lifeless, shaggy appearance of a bad wig, and then it too seemed to disappear revealing a short crew cut. The Dr had changed into a tall, bony man with a large nose.
He sat up. ‘Ey-oop,’ he declared.
‘Doctor . . ..?’ I hazarded.
‘’Appen Taylor! Ey-oop Linn!’ he said, clambering to his feet. ‘Oo I say!’
‘Doctor! You’re alright!’
He nodded, smiled, and then a look of concern crossed his face. He burped, noisily. ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ he said. ‘I do apologise.’ Again he belched. A sour smell of eggnog became palpable in the air of the TARDY. ‘You have to understand,’ said the Dr, embarrassed, ‘that the process of re-un-degeneration carries with it some—’ He burped again.
‘Some?
‘Some difficulties. My body has changed, you see.’
‘Doctor what’s happened?’ I cried. ‘I was sure you’d died !’
‘No, no. Almost impossible to kill me. Instead of regular death, my body re-un-degenerates. What this means is tha
t all the cells that make up my body change. Anything imprinted with my DNA becomes part of a different body.’
‘But your DNA . . . it’s not human . . .’ I said, trying to grasp the enormity of what I had witnessed.
‘Of course not,’ said the Dr. ‘It’s Time Gentlemen DNA. But it’s there, in every cell, and during the process of re-new-generation it undergoes a sort of shimmy, or cataleptic shudder, and it marks out a new form for the body. But, you see, not everything in my body contains my DNA. That’s just as true of me as it is of you.’
‘Really? You mean there are cells in my body that don’t even contain my DNA?’ asked Linn.
‘Of course,’ said the Dr, his skin acquiring a rather green tinge. ‘For instance, your gut flora. Now, you need your gut flora to digest your food. It’s a thoroughly necessary thing. But the bacteria out of which one’s gut flora are composed carry their own, independent DNA. They are fine-tuned to existing in the set up of their host’s body, and when that body radically changes they ... don’t like it. Stomach-upsets, diarrhoea and nausea are the least of the symptoms.’
‘What was the business with the “ey oop” and the “ ’appen” when you came round from your trance?’ I asked.
‘A momentary grammatical aberration,’ said the Dr, looking distinctly queasy. If you’ll excuse me, I must rush to the toilet.’ He hauled himself to his feet and ran from the control room, making a series of repeated bluuerCA’H! noises as he went.
‘There,’ said the Dr, looking pale. ‘I think that’s got that sorted out. Better out than in, I suppose. I do apologise for that. It’s the cerum aerobic bacteria in the lower gut that . . . mostly . . . oh no.’ He put his hand to his mouth and his cheeks ballooned out like a jazz trumpeter’s. ‘Excuse meeeurrkh,’ he blurted.
He rushed from the control room.
Once again Linn and I sat in the control room, looking pointedly in other directions than one another’s faces. From time to time we made eye contact and smiled, weakly, at one another. ‘Well,’ I said, at one point. ‘This is all very interesting, isn’t it.’ And she replied, ‘yes, it is.’ I asked, ‘have you seen him do this before, then?’ and she replied, ‘no, actually, not,’ and I said, ‘ah!’ We sat in silence for a while. All the time, however, we were accompanied by a cacophonous soundtrack of what sounded like a pig trying to give birth to a much larger, and much more noisily unhappy, pig in the next room.
Eventually the noises died away and the Dr emerged, even paler than before but wearing a brave smile.
‘Again I apologise,’ he said. ‘It is an unfortunate side-effect of the DNA mutation, the broad-spectrum change of cellular germ plasm impacts very sharply upon the gut flora, with concomitant isolation of the Lactobacillus plantarum and an anti-Candida emetic that involves certain projectile gut-spasm implications,’ said the Dr, in a sober voice. ‘Also I was puking like a dog.’
‘We heard,’ said Linn.
‘Anyway, anyway, anyway,’ said the Dr, trying to rally the situation by smacking his hands together and rubbing the palms up against one another. ‘It’s all behind me now. At least it will be, as soon as my lower bowel catches up with the more immediate negative reaction of the stomach and intestinal changes. But we don’t want to worry about that now. We need to get on.’
Chapter Three
THE TIME GENTLEMEN’S CONVENANCE
We stepped through into the meeting chamber. It was a splendidly appointed and decorated chamber; every surface was either gilded, silvered or bronzed: except for the floor which was decorated with verdigris, or ‘verdigreased’ as the phrase goes. On tiered platforms arranged in a horseshoe shape about the central podium as many as a hundred Time Gentlemen were sitting on their official benches. When I say ‘as many as a hundred’ I mean ‘as few as a hundred’, which is to say, a hundred. There was a distinctly pompous and official air.
‘Right, you two,’ the Dr said to us. ‘Best behaviour, alright? This is an official Time Gentlemen’s Convenance. It’s not a place for mucking-about-in. Not,’ he corrected himself, glancing about himself nervously as if conscious that the grammatical exactitude expected of all Time Gentlemen applied most particularly in this space, ‘not an environment in which mucking can be allowed about.’ He looked at the floor and tried one more time. ‘Not about in of which, there can, now, be allowed, any mucking. ’
‘We understand,’ said Linn.
‘Convenance?’ I queried.
‘What?’
‘You sure that’s a word?’
‘Of course I am.’
The Dr bowed to the Time Chairgentleman, seated at apex of the many curving rows of seats, behind the sumptuous Time Table of Garlicfree. We both followed suit. Then we made our way to the side of the chamber and slid onto one of the benches.
‘You’re quite sure?’ I pressed. ‘I mean . . . convenance. It doesn’t have the . . .’
‘It is a meeting convened by the Time Gentlemen. Therefore it is a Time Gentlemen’s Convenance.’
‘It’s just that I’ve never,’ I said, a little nervously. ‘I mean, in all my years as a tailor of prose, I can say that—’
‘Shhhpshh!’ hushed the Dr crossly. ‘Tsschh! Czsch!’
The Chair had got to his feet. Which is to say, the Time Gentleman chairing the meeting, who had been sitting in a chair, was now standing. The chair itself remained standing throughout the whole proceedings. ‘Time Gentlemen and honoured guests!’ he commenced.
‘It is with enormous, Gentlemen’s, relish that I welcome the Doctor to our proceedings.’
‘Too kind,’ murmured the Dr, bowing his head to the gathering.
‘As many of you know,’ said the Chair. ‘The Doctor has been engaged on a certain secret mission - the nature of which I cannot, in the present company, disclose. This mission is of the utmost importance. It is, in other words, more than most important. There is an ut involved too.’ A murmur went through the room. ‘Suffice to say,’ boomed the Chair. ‘That his mission has been more than a standard Time Gentlemen mission - more than going about painting-in the missing apostrophes from shop-signs, and more than correcting complete strangers on their failure to use the subjunctive mode.’
‘If I were,’ murmured the entire room. ‘If I were . . .’
‘No. Our intelligence informs us that a TGV has been purchased by a mysterious and malefactoral figure in Le Bar Sexy in sector Parsec-“C” out by the Giffin Head Nebula.’
‘A TGV!’ whispered the assembled Time Gentlemen.
‘I need not tell you how serious this matter is,’ said the Chair. ‘The one thing that can destroy the life of a Time Gentleman . . . and it could be used again and again, perhaps to wipe out the entire race of the Time Gentlemen.’
‘Blime-crikey!’ said the Dr.
‘Our intelligence reports,’ said the Chair, ‘that . . . and I ask you all to prepare for a shock . . . but that the gun is now in the possession of . . . Stavros.’
The whole room fell silent with shock.
‘I’m afraid so,’ said the Chair, sombrely. ‘I hardly need to tell you how serious a development this is. If Stavros is able to arm his evil cyborg army with TGVs, then the whole future of Time Gentlemanliness is in danger. We could all be wiped out!’
‘What can we do!’
‘For now,’ said the Chair, ‘continue with your various missions. We have breaches of time-grammar that need clearing up in every sector of the Galaxy. Meanwhile the Council of Time Gentlemen will ponder our options. We may be compelled to take the most drastic course of action of all - going back in time to before Stavros was able to create his monstrosities, and eliminating them before they are even created!’
There was only one item of ‘any other business’, relating to the washrooms. After that the meeting was adjourned.
Chapter Six
THE SLUTTYTEENS
The TARDY rematerialised on the patch of green lawn just outside the Houses of Parliament in London, England, Europe, the World, Solar
System. The date was 1960. It was a bright sunny day.
‘So what’s the problem here?’ Linn was asking as we stepped from the TARDY. Red Routemaster double-decker buses rolled past. Beefeaters walked arm-in-arm with soldiers in busbies. Everybody was wearing miniskirts, driving mini-cars, and laughing with mini-hahas.
‘It’s like a history lesson!’ I exclaimed.
‘Lesson in ahistory,’ Linn said darkly. ‘More like.’
I smiled at this, and even forced out a chuckle, but then I gave up. ‘No, I don’t get that at all.’
‘Never mind.’
‘Come along,’ said the Dr. ‘We’ve a job to do. The government here has been infiltrated,’ the Dr said. ‘An alien race called the Sluttyteens. They look on the outside like obese teenagers. But that’s just a prosthetic skin-suit. Underneath that skin, gleaming as it is with the oil of sebum, are pure Slutties, from the planet Slut.’ The Dr shook his head. ‘Very nasty types. No class or style at all.’
‘They shouldn’t be here?’
‘Indeed not. That’s a clear violation of the law of temporal enclitic participles, right there. They shouldn’t be on this planet at all. They should just go back to the planet Slut, and grow up. If we were to do nothing they’d use their hidden positions to pass a series of laws liberalising sexual behaviour, turning nineteen-sixties Britain into a louche and swinging place with no respect of any kind for order, grammar, sequentiality or anything at all. They must be stopped!’
‘How?’
‘Should be easy enough. I’ll slip into the main chamber of Parliament, whilst a governmental debate is going on. I’ll walk up to the Minister for Swinging Affairs, and yank off her skin-suit - in full view of everybody. Once they’re exposed, it’ll be a simple matter to chase them back to their homeworld.’
‘Shall we come with you?’ I asked.