‘Can’t we go back and save them too?’ asked Josh as a panic-stricken stationmaster ran past them towards the disaster.
‘Not authorised, I’m afraid.’ The colonel tapped where his notebook sat in his jacket. ‘I think we have overstayed our welcome as it is. Time to try out your tachyon.’ He pointed towards Josh’s watch.
Josh pulled back the sleeve of his jacket to see the dials whirring under the glass. He had no idea what they represented, although one pointer had now moved to a different number. He pressed the button on the side, and the Victorian station twisted away.
21
The River
The study was a strange and wonderful collection of seventies memorabilia. Interspersed between the impressive array of books were photos of space launches and collections of Apollo mission badges in neat frames. Hanging from the ceiling on short lengths of fishing line were meticulously painted model aircraft. A half-finished Concorde was resting on the upturned box at the edge of his desk and in an alcove was an ancient-looking turntable with a huge collection of old vinyl records stacked carefully underneath.
The colonel was sitting behind a large desk, struggling with an antiquated typewriter. He’d brought Josh into the study for a debrief on the mission. Apparently, this was all part of ‘normal procedures’.
It was only now they were safe that Josh realised how late the colonel had left it to pull them back from the detonation. He’d actually witnessed the bomb ignite, saw its devastation in slow motion — the colonel had cut it fine, a little too fine, now he thought about it. It was a different experience to a jump. Time had slowed down and then rewound like a movie. He had felt something like it before, in the graveyard with Caitlin and the posh twat.
‘The rollback — a very useful defence mechanism,’ the colonel explained when Josh asked him how they had survived the blast. He was struggling to feed three sheets of paper into the typewriter.
‘It gives one a few minutes’ grace to avert, avoid or rectify a bad situation.’ The paper jammed as he cranked a wheel on the side of the machine. ‘It’s a simple panic button. The Mark IV gives you about two minutes. The official term is “induced temporal retrogradation” — most of us refer to it as a rollback, rewind or even déja vu.’
‘So I hit this and go back two minutes?’ Josh asked, pointing at the topmost of the two brass buttons on the side of the watch.
‘Yes. As I explained before, the other one is set to bring you back to the present, thirty seconds after you left — to ensure you don’t bump into yourself.’ He thumped the typewriter until it released the pages. ‘Damn triplicate forms! What do they take me for? A bloody filing clerk?’ He pulled a paperclip out from between two of the sheets and threw the ruined document in the bin.
Josh pressed the rewind button and the room flickered as he watched last two minutes roll back.
[<<]
‘So, how come I remember our conversation?’
‘Which conversation?’ The colonel went to put the form in the typewriter once more. Josh stayed his hand and pulled out the hidden paperclip from between the sheets.
‘The one about déja vu,’ he said, handing back the paper and throwing the clip in the bin.
‘Ah. We’ve had that chat, have we? You just tried the Mark IV out I suppose. Fair enough, I would’ve done the same. You’re still travelling forward in your own timeline. It’s a little hard to grasp — Eddington would be able to explain it better.’ He took a fountain pen from his pocket and began to draw a series of lines on the back of one of the forms. ‘I always think it’s best to imagine time as a river, flowing ever forward.’
Josh could just about make out that the sketch was of a winding river with dots drifting down it.
‘Now linears — normal people — are in their own personal boats, floating along with the current. Some sink, others misplace their oars, all eventually fall away.’ He scratched little Xs over some of the dots. ‘But members of the Order experience time in an entirely non-linear way. They have their own streams, which can be diverted away from the main flow: the Continuum.’ He wrote the word along the middle of the river, and then drew lines that looped away to join early bends in the stream. ‘Yet we are still travelling along our own timeline, even when we go back, so we remember everything we experience, at least in most cases.’
‘And you can control the direction of this Continuum?’
‘Not exactly,’ he scowled. ‘I may have over simplified the analogy. It’s more like we’re trying to keep it flowing in the right direction.’
‘And that is?’
‘Towards the best possible future of course! Which is a conversation for another day. Now back to the report.’ He turned back to the typewriter.
‘So how would you describe the young Fenian’s moustache?’ the colonel asked.
‘Fake?’
At the end of the day, as he lay back on Mrs B’s sofa, Josh was still coming to terms with this new reality. The fact that he’d spent twenty-four hours in 1866 and come back to the same day he’d finished his community service made him appreciate what the colonel meant by tomorrow being a lifetime away. Josh knew that the future was waiting for him somewhere ahead — down the river — but he could deal with it when he was ready, and that gave him a great feeling of relief.
22
A Better Life
His mum was looking more like her old self when Josh went to visit her the next day. He still hadn’t come to terms with the fact that the present was only one day older — even though he’d spent more than forty-eight hours in the past. The colonel had paid him in used banknotes, some of which Josh had to give back as they weren’t legal tender, or at least not since decimalisation. There was also a ‘bonus’ — a guest room where he could stay whilst they continued his training. The cash came to just over £600, and it was burning a hole in his pocket when he turned up for visiting hours.
‘Hi, Josh,’ his mother said weakly.
He could see how drained she was and it made his heart ache to see how fragile she’d become. He’d bought her a box of her favourite chocolates — Malik had a deal going on them; they were fire-damaged stock from one of the shops on the high street which had suspiciously gone up in smoke the week before.
Her face beamed as she dug through the contents looking for the most precious of them all — the hazelnut cluster. If Josh was lucky, he might be able to get a couple of toffee fudges, but it was always a bit of a gamble.
‘So how have you been keeping? Is Mrs B looking after you?’ she asked before popping a whole cluster into her mouth.
‘Great. She’s a legend,’ Josh replied. ‘I have some good news.’
‘Really, love? Have we won the lottery?’ she asked with a broad smile.
‘No, Mum, better than the lottery. I got a job — pays three hundred quid a day.’
She stopped chewing and looked at him with wide eyes. There were tears forming in the corners.
‘You’re not working for that bad boy are you?’
‘No, Mum. It’s legit.’ Well kind of, he thought. He wasn’t quite sure what to tell his mother that would sound convincing. ‘I’m helping out this antiques dealer. House clearances and stuff.’
She smiled and went back to her quest for another sweet. He wasn’t sure if she believed him.
‘The lady over in bed four told me that her son has a job in the city. Something to do with computers. She says they can earn up to five hundred a day.’
‘You know I’m not good with technology, Mum. This is proper work. Look.’ He took out an envelope full of notes.
‘Put it away. You never know who is watching.’ She waved her hand at the money. ‘I just want the best for you. I know it’s not been easy.’
Here we go, he thought to himself. This was always the prelude to the monologue about how they ‘never had any luck’ and wasn’t it about time they ‘got a break’ or the classic: ‘if only their numbers would come in’ they would be able to ‘buy that house
on the corner of Chamberlain Street’.
As she talked, he collected the growing pile of discarded wrappers off the bed, his mind wandering as he helped himself to another of the chocolates. The fire had melted them into strange shapes, and there was a white bloom on them from the heat. Still, they tasted the same, and his mother wasn’t stopping to inspect them before they went into her mouth.
She always finished with some variation of ‘if only I had never got ill’, and how ‘she should have married Mr Timmins when he’d asked’. Mr Timmins was a parasite who lived a few doors away. He was very welcoming when they moved in, making all the right moves and saying all the right things. Flattering a single mother with a young child wasn’t hard, and he did a good job of pretending to care about them until his mother got ill and then he disappeared without trace.
The memory of ‘Timid Timmins’ did remind him of something else that the colonel had asked about.
‘I’m fine, Mum, honestly, but there is something I have been meaning to ask you . . . Was there anyone in our family that was kind of special?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You know, like, gifted. Did any of our ancestors have special abilities, weird psychic stuff, like seeing ghosts or having visions?’
She thought for a moment, chewing on a rather sticky toffee penny. Josh could see the wheels going around inside her head, one of her fingers twitched as if she were counting something.
‘Well, your Great-aunt Agatha was supposed to be able to talk to animals, and my mum’s uncle George claimed he’d met Napoleon. But he was definitely mad, and Agatha just spent too much time on her own with her cats. Why?’
‘What about on my dad’s side?’
Her expression soured as though the toffee had pulled out a filling.
‘I’ve told you before — there’s nothing to say about your dad. Don’t ask me any more about it. I’m tired.’ With that she closed her eyes and shuffled down on the pillow.
Josh took the hint, adjusted her blankets and put what was left of the chocolates in the bedside cabinet.
‘Try and stay out of trouble,’ she whispered as he left.
23
Second Lesson
[Paris, France. Date: 11.971-02-21]
Josh spent the next two days researching a test mission that the colonel had prepared for him. He knew it was going to be set somewhere during the French Revolution; the clues he’d been given were: a painting of a woman with a swan, an address in Paris and the words liberté, égalité, fraternité — which had meant nothing to him.
To complicate matters further, the colonel had taken him back to a safe house in Paris in 1971. There was no internet, and no computers to work with, just the books in the house’s extensive library.
‘Can’t I at least work in a time with a search engine?’ Josh complained as he leafed through the second volume of Encyclopaedia Britannica.
‘You won’t always have the luxury of Google at your disposal,’ the colonel muttered as he read a French newspaper. ‘A good watchman has to be able to work with what he’s got.’
‘But I’m rubbish with books,’ said Josh, not wanting to admit to his dyslexia.
‘Then think a little harder about how you would approach the issue,’ the colonel answered without looking up. ‘Humanity seems to have done quite well without search engines for the last twelve thousand years.’
Josh looked over his notes. He’d learned some interesting facts about the revolution: how the republic took shape around certain key figures like Robespierre and Danton, and how the masses had gone on a rampage that had destroyed palaces and churches all over France. Many of the most precious artworks had been ‘liberated’ from the aristocracy and taken to the Louvre for the benefit of the masses. This had been his first breakthrough: the address turned out to be the ‘Tuileries Palace’, which was once the home of the French King, Louis XVI, until he was deposed and replaced by the National Convention, who turned it into a court of justice for the rich during the ‘Reign of Terror’. It finally burned down on the twenty-third of May, 1871, exactly a hundred years earlier, which Josh knew couldn’t be a coincidence.
‘So how about we go to the Louvre?’ Josh suggested. He wanted to get out into the fresh air. Two days locked up in the house was beginning to make him a little crazy.
The colonel nodded and smiled. ‘A fine idea,’ he agreed, grabbing a hat and coat from the stand. ‘You’ll learn that institutions such as galleries and museums become very useful in our work.’
That made a lot of sense, Josh thought. They would be full of old artefacts. He kicked himself for not having thought of it before.
The sun was shining on the gardens where the Tuileries Palace had once stood. The Louvre was sitting to the East and behind him was the River Seine. It was a serene place, a cultivated garden that gave no hint of the turmoil and horror it had seen during its history. There was nothing left here for them to work with. He turned to the colonel, who was sunning himself on a nearby bench.
‘Dead end!’ said Josh in frustration.
‘Not quite.’ The colonel pointed to the Louvre building. ‘Let’s go and visit one of my favourite places.’
Josh had read that the Louvre was once a grand palace, the exclusive playground of the rich and powerful. Back in 1971, the iconic glass-pyramid entrance had not yet been built, and the large square was flanked on three sides by the colonnaded facades of the three wings. Above each portico stood a sculpted figure staring blankly down over them. Josh wondered whether the architecture alone would have enough history for them to work with, but as he moved his hand out to touch one of the columns the colonel caught his sleeve.
‘We try not to use stone,’ he whispered as he shook his head. ‘Natural materials tend to be too messy, something to do with their geological origins. Too bloody old.’
Josh shrugged and followed the colonel as he made his way to the ticket queue. The seventies were a bit of a culture shock; the line was full of long-haired hippy types with bad body odour and ridiculous flared trousers, taking photos of everything with clunky wind-on cameras. From their accent he could tell they were Americans. One of them wore an anti-Vietnam T-shirt with the words ‘Make Love, Not War’ on the front and — ‘Weather Underground’ on the back.
‘What’s the weather underground?’ Josh whispered as they shuffled slowly inside the building.
‘Bunch of militant anti-war protestors, formed at Michigan University — started a bombing campaign of government buildings in the US as a way to force them to stop the war. They usually gave enough warning to get the buildings cleared, but they did manage to blow themselves up once in Greenwich Village.’
‘I thought it was all about making love, not war?’
‘Not all of them,’ said the colonel as he showed a piece of paper to the one of the attendants, and she waved them through. ‘The weathermen declared war on the US government over Vietnam and the whole civil rights issue. They were put on the FBI’s ten-most-wanted list in 1970,’ he chuckled.
‘What’s so funny about that?’
‘Weatherman means something else in the Order — one who cannot predict the future accurately — a fool, basically.’
The interior of the Denon wing was even more stunning than its grand facade promised. The vaulted ceilings were painted with images of angels and gods, framed in gold that seemed to float in the air above their heads. Along each side of the long corridor stood Greek and Roman statues on marble plinths.
‘Ah, the blind heroes of antiquity,’ the colonel said in admiration. ‘Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.’
He turned to Josh for some kind of reaction, but Josh had none, he didn’t really get art — especially sculpture. He never really had the time or the opportunity to appreciate it, and didn’t really see the point of it.
‘This way,’ ordered the colonel, opening a service door. Behind it stood a stony-faced guard, who simply nodded and moved aside to let them through.
‘Aren’t we going to the exhibits?’ Josh asked under his breath, looking back towards the guard, who was paying no attention to them whatsoever.
‘Those are for the tourists. Never did see what all the fuss was about — Mona Lisa is nothing more than Da Vinci in a dress. No, the best part of the collection lives below stairs.’
Josh knew about the Mona Lisa. It was probably one of the only paintings he could name if asked.
He followed the colonel down a series of poorly lit stairs until they came to a large metal door that would have looked at home in a bank vault. In front of it stood another, even more surly looking guard with his arms crossed.
‘Tempus fugit, Marfanor,’ recited the colonel, pulling back his sleeve to reveal a tattoo on his forearm. It was a snake eating its own tail. ‘Young man here would like to take a look at your Reign of Terror archives,’ he added in perfect French.
Josh had seen the symbol before, but couldn’t remember exactly where.
The stoic Frenchman’s face cracked into a smile and he replied in English. ‘Rufius. So good to see you.’ He waved the tattoo away. ‘You think I have such a bad memory that I can’t remember that face? Who could forget it? Eh?’ Marfanor winked at Josh as if asking for agreement. ‘Even if it is covered in all that fur.’ He produced an enormous set of keys and turned towards the massive metal door. ‘So La Terreur is it? Not a very safe place to take the boy. I assume he’s on probation?’ he asked, looking Josh up and down. ‘Bit old for that, though, no? Which test?’
‘Ferrara. Leda and the Swan.’
‘Ah.’ There was a nod of approval as the locks on the door clicked. ‘Say hello to Madame Déficit.’
The Louvre was built on the site of a much older castle, and as they entered it became apparent that the vault was the only remaining evidence of its existence. The walls were made of large grey stone blocks from the medieval fortress. It was damp and very cold. Josh could see his breath the moment they walked through the door.
The Infinity Engines Books 1-3 Page 13
