Future Indefinite (Round Three of The Great Game)

by Dave Duncan

  She took the train to Waterloo and crossed London by bus, breaking her journey to visit Thomas Cook and Son and inquire about passage to East Africa. At Liverpool Street, she caught the 4:15 for Norwich with seconds to spare. The travel information would wait; she divided her time between a selection of newspapers and just staring out the window. England had not changed in two months, not as much as she had. Spanish flu was raging again, although in a less deadly form. It had almost killed the American president.

  On another world, it had killed Zath.

  By evening, she was sitting in a rattling, wheezing taxicab, bound for her cottage. The driver himself belonged in a museum. He looked too old to know much about trains, let alone motorcars, and when he tried to make conversation, his lack of teeth combined with his scrambled Norfolk accent to defeat her completely. Worse than Thargian. She gathered only that this was the first sunshine in weeks, and it had been the worst April since Noah.

  The shops were all shut, but she could eat sardines tonight and face the real world tomorrow. London had seemed even more of a madhouse than she remembered it. Not London. And not Norfolk. If she shut herself up in her hermitage with her memories, she would be talking to the gulls inside a week. No, it must be Africa. What she would do there she could not imagine, but she'd find something. She would look when she arrived.

  One thing she would not look for was romance. Three men in less than three years! She was Lucretia Borgia. She was Typhoid Mary. One heart can only break so often before it forgets how to heal. She would let no more men enter her life, not ever again.

  Methuselah stopped at the end of her muddy little drive, perhaps not trusting his chariot to extricate itself if he went in. She overtipped him, and he sprayed her as he gushed his thanks, touching his cap. His rattletrap ground its gears and roared away, one wheel wobbling precariously.

  She trudged up the driveway, unburdened by luggage but still feeling the aftereffects of her cramps. Miss Pimm had promised no intruders—and there were the tire marks from Miss Pimm's motorcar, still showing in the mud outside the door. The garden ... oh, dear, the garden! Tomorrow the garden. Home was where your heart was? Not in her case, because she had left her heart in Thargvale. But the little place was a welcome sight. After all those weeks of sleeping in tents, it would feel like the Ritz. It did seem quite homely, with the smoke drifting from the chimney....

  A broken heart could still leap into its owner's throat. Alice did not need to be an Embu or Meru tracker to know that those tread marks were recent, or that an untended fire did not burn for two months.

  Three empty paint tins lay by the doorstep. There was a muddy footprint on the step itself. Panic! No, steady ... Think this out.... There's nowhere to run to anyway. Concentrate! Miss Pimm herself? Getting it ready for its owner's return? Nobody except Miss Pimm knew of this place, but even Miss Pimm could not have known she was coming, not today, not to have a fire ready. It was a man's footprint.

  Faint strains of music ... That was why he hadn't heard the taxi. He was playing one of her records, Galli-Curci singing “Un bel di vedremo.” Even as she listened, the soprano dwindled to a mournful baritone and then soared triumphantly again as he wound up the gramophone.

  Paralyzed, Alice could only stare at the door. D'Arcy, the horrible mistake and the prison camp fantasy? Or Terry? But Terry's ship had gone down in the Channel, not off some desert island. Edward? Julian and Domini had vouched for the body and watched it burn....

  Magic? Mana? He had given all his mana away to the Five. Prof Rawlinson had said: It should be easy enough to alter the appearance of some other corpse....

  He had said: You'd have thought that one of them would have had the common decency...

  Alice threw open the door.

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  FUTURE INDEFINITE: POSTSCRIPT TO THE 2009 EDITION

  © 2009, Dave Duncan

  Wow! That was a snappy ending.

  As I said in my preface to Past Imperative, I recently read over this series prior to its reissue by E-Reads and Lightning Source. Of course I know the story in detail—an author almost knows a book by heart when it finally goes to press. It held no real surprises for me, but after a dozen years, I could see it with new eyes. And yes, that ending took my breath away, even though I knew it was coming.

  I refer to the final page, of course. The climax of the story and the death of Zath go well. The rule of fictional conflict is that the little good guy must outsmart the big, bad bully. The converse does not work. The story of Goliath and David (where the stone bounces off the helmet of brass and the uppity brat gets that iron-headed spear through his bowels) would not have raised a cheer even back home in Gath, let alone made it into the Bible. So Zath, and I hope the reader, get hoodwinked by Exeter, just as Sauron is hoodwinked by Frodo.

  But ending when Alice opens the door, does seem incomplete, and I even got letters asking me who was in there. To which I answered, “Exeter; who else could it be?” Who else would be finishing her painting for her?

  Why didn't I spell that out at the time and describe the final clinch? Mainly because both Alice and Edward are very undemonstrative people, and they deserve privacy for that passionate, tearful reunion. However I wrote it, the scene would have been obtrusive, with both of them acting out of character. In a movie it would have been shown without dialogue, just soaring violins.

  But there was another reason. Edward let his friends die for his cause. As Julian pointed out a few pages earlier, he would never have done that had he not known that he must die also. He was ready to die. He had been beaten up and laid on the anvil; he was waiting for the smash of the hammer. Then the despicable Tion rescued him, murdering the innocent Dosh in the process. Edward would have been furious! The man waiting in that cottage would have been jubilant at his victory over Zath, yes, but he would also have been carrying a huge load of rage and guilt. An emotional turmoil like that cannot be wrapped up and disposed of in just a few lines. The conflict would have to be talked out over several pages, blunting the drama.

  So Alice opened the door and you can work out the rest for yourself. A true Edwardian gentleman would then produce a large, clean, white, well-ironed, linen handkerchief and offer it to his companion so she might dry her eyes.

  —Dave Duncan

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