The Mammoth Book of Time Travel SF

by Mike Ashley

  My love for Estyll – my deepest secret – was thrust away from me by forces I could not resist.

  Until the day my father died I did not have much conception of what his work involved, except to know that he was one of the most powerful and influential men in the Neuropean Union. This was because he controlled the power stations which tapped energy from the temporal stresses of the flux field. On the day I inherited his position I assumed this meant he was fabulously wealthy, but I was soon relieved of this misapprehension. The power stations were state controlled and the so-called fortune comprised a large number of debentures in the enterprise. In real terms these could not be cashed, thus explaining many of the extreme decisions taken by my uncle. Death duties were considerable, and in fact I was in debt because of them for many years afterwards.

  The work was entirely foreign to me and I was psychologically and academically unready for it, but because the family was now my responsibility, I applied myself as best I could. For a long time, shaken and confused by the abrupt change in our fortunes, I could do nothing but cope.

  My adolescent adventures in Flux Channel Park became memories as elusive as dreams. It was as if I had become another person.

  (But I had lived with the image of Estyll for so long that nothing could make me forget her. The flame of romanticism that had lighted my youth faded away, but it was never entirely extinguished. In time I lost my obsessive love for Estyll, but I could never forget her wan beauty, her tireless waiting.)

  By the time I was twenty-two I was in command of myself. I had mastered my father’s job. Although the position was hereditary, as most employment was hereditary, I discharged my duties well and conscientiously. The electricity generated by the flux field provided roughly nine-tenths of all the energy consumed in the Neuropean Union, and much of my time was spent in dealing with the multitude of political demands for it. I travelled widely, to every state in Federal Neurop, and further abroad.

  Of the family: my mother was settling into her long years of widowhood and the social esteem that naturally followed. Both my sisters were married. Of course I too married in the end, succumbing to the social pressures that every man of standing has to endure. When I was twenty-one I was introduced to Dorynne, a cousin of Salleen’s husband, and within a few months we were wed. Dorynne, an intelligent and attractive young woman, proved to be a good wife, and I loved her. When I was twenty-five, she bore our first child: a girl. I needed an heir, for that was the custom of my country, but we rejoiced at her birth. We named her . . . well, we named her Therese, after my sister, but Dorynne had wanted to call her Estyll, a girl’s name then very popular, and I had to argue against her. I never explained why.

  Two years later my son Carl was born, and my position in society was secure.

  xi

  The years passed, and the glow of adolescent longing for Estyll dimmed still further. Because I was happy with my growing family, and fulfilled by the demands of my work, those strange experiences in Flux Channel Park seemed to be a minor aberration from a life that was solid, conventional and unadventurous. I was no longer romantic in outlook. I saw those noble sentiments as the product of immaturity and inexperience. Such was the change in me that Dorynne sometimes complained I was unimaginative.

  But if the romance of Estyll faded with time, a certain residual curiosity about her did not. I wanted to know: what had become of her? Who was she? Was she as beautiful as I remembered her?

  Setting out these questions has lent them an urgency they did not possess. They were the questions of idle moments, or when something happened to remind me of her. Sometimes, for instance, my work took me along the Flux Channel, and then I would think briefly of her. For a time a young woman worked in my office, and she had the same name. As I grew older, a year or more would sometimes pass without a thought of Estyll.

  I should probably have gone for the rest of my life with these questions unanswered if it had not been for an event of major world importance. When the news of it became known it seemed for a time to be the most exciting event of the century, as in some ways it was. The starship that had been launched a hundred years before was returning.

  This news affected every aspect of my work. At once I was involved in strategic and political planning at the highest level.

  What it meant was this: the starship could only return to Earth by the same means as it had left. The Flux Channel would have to be reconverted, if only temporarily, to its original use. The houses in its vicinity would have to be evacuated, the power stations would have to be disconnected, and the Park and its time bridges would have to be destroyed.

  For me, the disconnection of the power stations – with the inevitable result of depriving the Neuropean Union of most of its electricity – created immense problems. Permission had to be sought from other countries to generate electricity from fossil deposits for the months the flux stations were inoperable, and permission of that sort could only be obtained after intricate political negotiation and bargaining. We had less than a year in which to achieve this.

  But the coming destruction of the Park struck a deeper note in me, as it did in many people. The Park was a much loved playground, familiar to everyone, and, for many people, ineradicably linked with memories of childhood. For me, it was strongly associated with the idealism of my youth and with a girl I had loved for a time. If the Park and its bridges were closed, I knew that my questions about Estyll would never be answered.

  I had leapt into a future where the Park was still a playground, where the houses beyond the trees were still occupied. Through all my life I had thought of that future as an imaginary or ideal world, one unattainable except by a dangerous leap from a bridge. But that future was no longer imaginary. I was now forty-two years old. It was thirty-two years since I, as a ten-year-old boy, had leapt thirty-two years into the future.

  Today and Tomorrow co-existed once more in Flux Channel Park.

  If I did not act in the next few weeks, before the Park was closed, I should never see Estyll again. The memory of her flared into flame again, and I felt a deep sense of frustration. I was much too busy to go in search of a boyhood dream.

  I delegated. I relieved two subordinates from work in which they would have been better employed, and told them what I wanted them to discover on my behalf. They were to locate a young woman or girl who lived, possibly alone, possibly not, in one of the houses that bordered the Park.

  The estate consisted of some two hundred houses. In time, my subordinates gave me a list of over a hundred and fifty possible names, and I scanned it anxiously. There were twenty-seven women living on the estate who were called Estyll. It was a popular name.

  I returned one employee to his proper work, but retained the other, a woman named Robyn. I took her partially into my confidence. I said that the girl was a distant relative and that I was anxious to locate her, but for family reasons I had to be discreet. I believed she was frequently to be found in the Park. Within a few days, Robyn confirmed that there was one such girl. She and her mother lived together in one of the houses. The mother was confined to the house by the conventions of mourning (her husband had died within the last two years), and the daughter, Estyll, spent almost every day alone in the Park. Robyn said she was unable to discover why she went there.

  The date had been fixed when Flux Channel Park would be closed to the public, and it was some eight and a half months ahead. I knew that I would soon be signing the order that would authorize the closure. One day between now and then, if for no other reason, Estyll’s patient waiting would have to end.

  I took Robyn further into my confidence. I instructed her to go to the Park and, by repeated use of the Tomorrow Bridge, go into the future. All she was to report back to me was the date on which Estyll’s vigil ended. Whether Robyn wondered at the glimpses of my obsession she was seeing, I cannot say, but she went without demur and did my work for me. When she returned, she had the date: it was just over six weeks away.

  That
interview with Robyn was fraught with undertones that neither side understood. I did not want to know too much, because with the return of my interest in Estyll had come something of that sense of romantic mystery. Robyn, for her part, clearly had seen something that intrigued her. I found it all most unsettling.

  I rewarded Robyn with a handsome cash bonus and returned her to her duties. I marked the date in my private diary, then gave my full attention to the demands of my proper work.

  xii

  As the date approached I knew I could not be at the Park. On that day there was to be an energy conference in Geneva and there was no possibility of my missing it. I made a futile attempt to change the date, but who was I against fifty heads of state? Once more I was tempted to let the great preoccupation of my youth stay forever unresolved, but again I succumbed to it. I could not miss this one last chance.

  I made my travel arrangements to Geneva with care and instructed my secretarial staff to reserve me a compartment on the one overnight train which would get me there in time.

  It meant that I should have to visit the Park on the day before the vigil was to end, but by using the Tomorrow Bridge I could still be there to see it.

  At last the day came. I had no one to answer to but myself. Shortly after midday I left my office and had my driver take me to the Park. I left him and the carriage in the yard beyond the gate, and with one glance towards the estate of houses I went into the Park.

  I had not been in the Park itself since my last visit just before my father died. Knowing that one’s childhood haunts often seem greatly changed when revisited years later I had been expecting to find the place smaller, less grand than I remembered it. But as I walked slowly down the gently sloping sward towards the tollbooths, it seemed that the magnificent trees, and the herbaceous borders, the fountains, the pathways, and all the various kinds of landscaping in the Park gardens were just as I recalled them.

  But the smells! In my adolescent longing I had not responded to those. The sweet bark, the sweeping leaves, the clustered flowers. A man with a mowing machine clattered past, throwing up a moist green smell, and the shorn grass humped in the mower’s hood like a sleeping furry animal. I watched the man as he reached the edge of the lawn he was cutting, turned the machine, then bent low over it to start it up the incline for his return. I had never pushed a mower, and as if this last day in the Park had restored my childhood I felt an urge to dash across to him and ask him if I might try my hand.

  I smiled to myself as I walked on: I was a well-known public figure, and in my drape suit and tall silk hat I should certainly have cut a comic sight.

  Then there were the sounds. I heard, as if for the first time (and yet also with a faint and distracting nostalgia), the metallic click of the turnstile ratchets, the sound of the breeze in the pines that surrounded the Park, and the almost continuous soprano of children’s voices. Somewhere, a band was playing marches.

  I saw a family at picnic beneath one of the weeping willows. The servants stood to one side, and the paterfamilias was carving a huge joint of cold beef. I watched them surreptitiously for a moment. It might have been my own family, a generation before; people’s delights did not change.

  So taken was I by all this that I had nearly reached the toll-booths before I remembered Estyll. Another private smile: my younger self would not have been able to understand this lapse. I was feeling more relaxed, welcoming the tranquil surroundings of the Park and remembering the past, but I had grown out of the obsessive associations the place had once had for me.

  I had come to the Park to see Estyll, though, so I went on past the tollbooths until I was on the path that ran beside the Channel. I walked a short way, looking ahead. Soon I saw her, and she was sitting on the bench, staring towards the Tomorrow Bridge.

  It was as if a quarter of a century had been obliterated. All the calm and restful mood went from me as if it had never existed, to be replaced by a ferment of emotions that was the more shocking for being so unexpected.

  I came to a halt, turned away, thinking that if I looked at her any more she would surely notice me.

  The adolescent, the immature, the romantic child . . . I was still all of these, and the sight of Estyll awakened them as if from a short nap. I felt large and clumsy and ridiculous in my overformal clothes, as if I were a child wearing a grandparent’s wedding outfit. Her composure, her youthful beauty, the vital force of her vigil . . . they were enough to renew all those inadequacies I had felt as a teenager.

  But at the same time there was a second image of her, one which lay above the other like an elusive ghost. I was seeing her as an adult sees a child.

  She was so much younger than I remembered her! She was smaller. She was pretty, yes . . . but I had seen prettier women. She was dignified, but it was a precocious poise, as if she had been trained in it by a socially conscious parent. And she was young, so very young! My own daughter, Therese, would be the same age now, perhaps slightly older.

  Thus torn, thus acutely conscious of my divided way of seeing her, I stood in confusion and distraction on the pathway, while the families and couples walked gaily past.

  I backed away from her at last, unable to look at her any more. She was wearing clothes I remembered too well from the past: a narrow white skirt tight around her legs, a shiny black belt, and a dark-blue blouse embroidered with flowers across the bodice.

  (I remembered – I remembered so much, too much. I wished she had not been there.)

  She frightened me because of the power she had, the power to awaken and arouse my emotions. I did not know what it was. Everyone has adolescent passions, but how many people have the chance to revisit those passions in maturity?

  It elated me, but also made me deeply melancholic. Inside I was dancing with love and joy, but she terrified me. She was so innocently, glowingly young, and I was now so old.

  xiii

  I decided to leave the Park at once . . . but changed my mind an instant later. I went towards her, then turned yet again and walked away.

  I was thinking of Dorynne, but trying to put her out of my mind. I was thinking of Estyll, obsessed again.

  I walked until I was out of sight of her, then took off my hat and wiped my brow. It was a warm day but I knew that the perspiration was not caused by the weather. I needed to calm myself, wanted somewhere to sit down and think about it . . . but the Park was for pleasure, and when I went towards the open air restaurant to buy a glass of beer, the sight of all the heedless merriment was intrusive and unwelcome.

  I stood on the uncut grass, watching the man with the mower, trying to control myself. I had come to the Park to satisfy an old curiosity, not to fall again into the traps of childhood infatuation. It was unthinkable that I should let a young girl of sixteen distract me from my stable life. It had been a mistake, a stupid mistake, to return to the Park.

  But inevitably there was a deeper sense of destiny beneath my attempts to be sensible. I knew, without being able to say why, that Estyll was waiting there at her bench for me, and that we were destined at last to meet.

  Her vigil was due to end tomorrow and that was just a short distance away. It lay on the far side of the Tomorrow Bridge.

  xiv

  I tried to pay at the tollbooth but the attendant recognized me at once. He released the ratchet of the turnstile with such a sharp jab of his foot that I thought he might break his ankle. I nodded to him and passed through into the covered way.

  I walked across briskly, trying to think no more about what I was doing or why. The flux field prickled about my body.

  I emerged into bright sunlight. The day I had left was warm and sunny, but here in the next day it was several degrees hotter. I felt stiff and overdressed in my formal clothes, not at all in keeping with the reawakened, desperate hope that was in my breast. Still trying to deny that hope I retreated into my daytime demeanour, opening the front of my coat and thrusting my thumbs into the slit-pockets of my waistcoat, as I sometimes did when addressing su
bordinates.

  I walked along the path beside the Channel, looking across for a sight of Estyll on the other side.

  Someone tugged at my arm from behind and I turned in surprise.

  There was a young man standing there. He was nearly as tall as me but his jacket was too tight across his shoulders and his trousers were a fraction too short, revealing that he was still growing up. He had an obsessive look to him but when he spoke it was obvious he was from a good family.

  “Sir, may I trouble you with a question?” he said, and at once I realized who he was.

  The shock of recognition was profound. Had I not been so preoccupied with Estyll I am sure meeting him would have made me speechless. It was so many years since my time jumping that I had forgotten the jolting sense of recognition and sympathy.

  I controlled myself with great difficulty. Trying not to reveal my knowledge of him, I said, “What do you wish to know?”

  “Would you tell me the date, sir?” I started to smile, and glanced away from him for a moment, to straighten my face. His earnest eyes, his protuberant ears, his pallid face and quiffed-up hair!

  “Do you mean today’s date, or do you mean the year?”

  “Well . . . both actually, sir.”

  I gave him the answer at once, although as soon as I had spoken I realized I had given him today’s date, whereas I had stepped forward one day beyond that. No matter, though: what he, I, was interested in was the year.

  He thanked me politely and made to step away. Then he paused, looked at me with a guileless stare (which I remembered had been an attempt to take the measure of this forbidding-looking stranger in a frock coat), and said, “Sir, do you happen to live in these parts?”