His mum looked well. She’d spent the last two weeks in the room next to his. He’d requisitioned some of Marie Antoinette’s bedroom furniture from the Antiquarians. It was good to think of her sleeping in a bed made for a queen.
Once Josh had convinced her that the house came with his new job and that she would never have to go back to the flat or her sister’s, her recovery seemed to accelerate — especially after he showed her the garden.
Each morning he would bring her breakfast in bed and find her staring out of the window, planning what she was going to plant and where.
As soon as Dr Crooke had declared her well enough to get out of bed and resume ‘light duties’, she’d put her plans into action — like a woman possessed.
‘Madam, unhand me!’ cried the colonel as his mother tried to wrestle something from under his arm.
Josh couldn’t help but smile. He’d seen the man fight against the most formidable enemies, go toe-to-toe with Nazi soldiers and Irish bomb-makers, but he’d never seen him look as scared as he did now. His mother was a force to be reckoned with once she got an idea in her head, and the poor man was about to lose any hope of retaining his old bachelor lifestyle.
In his mother’s eyes, the house was a tip, an anathema of all things tidy and organised. Josh knew that there was a system to the colonel’s storage, but to an outsider it bore all the hallmarks of a kleptomaniac or a compulsive hoarder.
‘Now, now, Mr Westinghouse, we both know that these old papers are a playground for mice and beetles. Won’t do to have them cluttering up the house now, will it?’ his mother said as if talking to a small child.
She wrenched one edition out from his grip, and it tore slightly as it went.
‘Look at this one. It’s from 1834 - what an earth could you possibly want with something that old?’
The colonel looked pleadingly at Josh for some kind of support, they obviously couldn’t tell her the truth, but Josh could see that the old man was having trouble coming up with another reasonable alternative.
‘He used to work for the papers, Mum,’ intervened Josh, much to the colonel’s relief. ‘They’re like a hobby for Mr Westinghouse. They sell for quite a lot, especially the old ones.’
Josh had gone with a two-pronged approach: giving the colonel a profession in which she would have no real interest, and the vaguest hint that the thing she was trying to throw away might have some value.
‘Well they can’t stay up here. It’s unhygienic,’ she replied, ‘and there taking up so much space.’ She went back out into the hall and disappeared through the basement door.
The colonel slumped into one of the chairs, which were apparently leather, something Josh had not known until his mother had tidied the study the day before.
‘This isn’t going to work,’ the colonel sighed.
Josh nodded. He knew it was unlikely the two of them were going to get along. They were too set in their ways to change, and they had mutually incompatible lifestyles.
‘Give her a minute, she’s up to something.’
The colonel smiled. ‘While I have you to myself, I’ve been meaning to speak to you about taking a sabbatical.’
‘Do we get holidays? I never checked the small print on the job description.’
The colonel laughed.
‘Kind of a holiday — one with no end date. The Order has a policy of allowing old dogs like me to go off-road at the end of their service. Some call it the “long walk”. I get to study some of the more remoter parts of time and add to the corpus, while they get rid of an old interfering fart to make way for new blood — it’s all part of the cycle.’ He pointed at the tattoo on Josh’s arm.
‘Ah. Cool. Where were you thinking of going?’ Josh asked, hoping that it meant he wouldn’t need to move his mother out after all.
‘More a case of “when” actually. I was thinking more like a sojourn around the Mesolithic. I have always wanted to see the Holocene spring.’
Josh remembered the view from the cave and the smell of Caitlin in the furs beside him. He could relate to the old man’s desire to go somewhere uncomplicated, untainted, and just chill out.
‘How long for?’
‘No idea — until I get bored or something else takes my fancy. Don’t worry, you can always come visit. I’ve been told you’re a bit of an expert yourself in that era.’
They could both hear his mother crashing around downstairs. ‘Do you think they would let Mum and me stay here for a while?’
‘Of course, this is your home now. There are going to be a lot of changes in your life. The Order has been waiting for you for a thousand of years. The Determinists will want to disprove your existence; others will see you as some kind of Messiah. Whatever happens next, you must always remember you have a place here, somewhere where you can be yourself, not what they want you to be.
‘Are you sure you don’t want to hang around and remind me?’
The colonel thought for a moment, as if weighing up the offer, then shook his head. ‘No, I’m afraid you have outgrown me. I would just be holding you back. You have to find your own way.’
Josh’s mother reappeared with a large crate and began to transfer newspapers from the shelves into it. ‘There’s plenty of room downstairs for your archive,’ she smiled. ‘I take it you wish them kept in chronological order?’
‘Yes, thank you, Mrs Jones,’ the colonel replied.
‘So when are you going?’ Josh asked.
‘Soon, but first I have some things to attend to,’ he said, watching Josh’s mother carefully out of the corner of one eye. ‘The council is still in something of a mess after your inquisition and the founder wants me to assist him with some of the more dissident members. Bring them into line, as it were — bloody politics, I hate it.’
The colonel spent the new few weeks coming and going from the house, appearing at random hours of the night with large, old trunks and packing various mementoes carefully inside them. Josh helped him sometimes, and they would talk about the adventures that had been connected to each of them.
It was a time for reflection — as the colonel called it. The accumulated mementoes of more than ten lifetimes had to be sorted, categorised and stored by a team of Antiquarians. Josh’s mother was soon organising that, and more than one mentioned to Josh how useful it would be to have her look at the Great Library, but he reminded them she was still a sick woman, even if her MS seemed to be in total remission.
Josh had begun to see another side to the colonel, and considered asking about the woman and the child he’d seen in his timeline, but there was never a right time and the colonel seemed distracted by too many other things. The Council had returned to some semblance of normality, but the colonel still seemed concerned with something that he wouldn’t discuss.
The day came too soon when the curiosities room was cleared, and the last of his personal belongings were being wheeled out by a team of Antiquarians disguised as removal men, a typical cover for them apparently. He and the colonel sat in the kitchen while Josh’s mother was out weeding in the garden.
‘You’re not going to the Mesolithic, really, are you?’ Josh asked.
The colonel scratched his beard. ‘I might do.’
‘Caitlin reckons you’re going after the fates. Did you ever find out who made the Greek computer?’
‘Who made it, yes, but not who gave them the design. I do have a new lead to follow, and, no, I can’t take you with me.’
Josh smiled. ‘She said you’d say that.’
The colonel stood up and put his cup in the sink, and the cat jumped up on to the worktop to scavenge any last dregs of tea.
‘Do you remember the day I broke in?’ Josh asked.
‘You mean the day I left the door open?’ the colonel corrected him, stroking the cat.
‘Do you ever wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t?’
The colonel laughed. ‘There were many times when you didn’t.’
Josh looked a little s
tunned. ‘You mean —’
The colonel silenced him with a raised finger. Looking at him with deep, kind eyes he sighed. ‘Sometimes fate needs a helping hand.’
He took out the small gear wheel he had removed from the analog computer on the ship.
‘I’ll miss you, Joshua Jones. Take care of the cat.’
Then, with a wink, he disappeared.
70
Paradox
The Copernicans spent the next two months investigating every corner of Josh’s life. There wasn’t a secret moment left that hadn’t been documented in triplicate and stored on the punched cards that their strange little typewriters produced. A senior investigator called Xavier Lusive had spent an entire week trying to prove that Josh was some kind of spy or infiltrator from the Fatalists, which was the first time he’d heard a member of the Order talk about them without laughing — he’d gone away empty handed. There was no proof and no amount of interrogation by his seers made any difference.
Josh had met every senior member of the High Council — including the haughty Madame Bullmedrin of the Antiquarians, Paelor Batrass of the Scriptorians and the larger than life character of Master Aqueous of the Draconians. Each of them had taken great pains to explain how they were privileged to make his acquaintance and that they would be truly grateful if he would join their guild — he accepted their offers of dinner and thoroughly enjoyed the extravagant banquets they threw in his honour, but never committed to any of them. He was finding it hard not to enjoy his new celebrity status.
Caitlin and Sim had stayed beside him throughout all of the investigations. Cat was always ready to bring him back down to earth whenever he began to believe his own hype and Sim was on standby when she had one of her moods and stormed off.
They spent many nights in The Flask, talking about their adventures and especially the look on Dalton’s face when Kelly had revealed the truth about Josh in the court. No one had seen or heard from the Eckharts since that day — the rumour was that they’d gone back to their family castle back in the Eleventh and that Dalton was at some kind of special seer rehab in Bedlam.
Josh didn’t care — he was having far too much fun. As he sat watching Sim re-enacting the court scene for the others, pulling ridiculous faces for their great amusement, he wondered what his life would have been like if he had never broken into the colonel’s house that day. There’d been a part of him that wanted to go into his timeline and look at the paths not travelled, but Caitlin had told him that only led to depression, or madness in some extreme cases. She reminded him of the cries they’d heard in Bedlam — the sound of people grieving for lives that they never had.
He thought about his old friends — Shags, Benny, Dennis, and Lilz — they would be totally freaked out if they could see him now. There was a rule about leaving your old life behind and that had made him sad for a while. He knew that they’d all be happy for him — they’d always been able to see the potential in him even when he couldn’t.
He spent a lot of time thinking about Gossy, of the life he’d never got to live. The children that never were — it had been a hard choice; if he went back and changed it once more, he wasn’t sure what he would have done differently. Caitlin had explained to him how they’d gone back and altered his timeline, that Gossy had originally died in the car crash when they were twelve.
Josh had no memory of that version of events — one of the drawbacks of editing your own life apparently — but she’d told him how much Lenin had used it against him, like a debt that could never be repaid. He’d given Gossy another ten years, not that much in the scheme of things, but the defect in his heart would always have taken him in the end, and he knew that Gossy had at least lived those years to the full.
As for Lenin, he had totally vanished after the fight in the school. The Ghost Squad fragmented into two rival gangs that went back to hustling cars and other small-time stuff. It seemed that without the ambition of their leader there was no real desire to hit the big time. Josh decided not to go looking for him. As far as he was concerned, Lenin may as well be dead. Whatever had bound the two of them together disappeared when Lenin had shot his mother — that chapter of his life was finally over.
Now Josh had a new gang, one that he had chosen to be part of. He had spent his entire life fighting against a system that didn’t seem to want to include him. He’d been deemed a misfit, a rebel; he was just trying to understand what his role was in this life, and now finally he had some idea of what it might be. Finally he had part of an answer to the one question that had haunted his life — although he had little more than the slimmest of leads. He wasn’t sure how it was going to play out yet, but he knew in his heart that this was the beginning and maybe with the help of the Grand Seer, he would finally be able to find out who his father was.
71
Art of War
[Boju, Chu. Date: 9.494]
The battle was over a mile away, at the bottom of the valley that folded into the hills around them. It was a beautiful spot and would have been an idyllic place for a picnic if it hadn’t been for the carnage that played out across the fields below them.
The war was between two rival kingdoms Wu and Chu, the latter had taken heavy casualties, mainly due to the clever strategies of the Wu Commander in Chief — Sun Tzu the most celebrated Chinese general of the sixth century BC. Caitlin was in her element, taking great pleasure in pointing out every detail of the Wu battle plan while drinking wine and picking at the food he’d laid out.
Josh had spent the last two weeks planning this day. He wanted it to be more than perfect. Sim had helped with the venue — Josh had remembered his very first conversation with Caitlin about The Art of War and how she’d been studying it at university before he’d crashed into her life. Sim had found him the relevant co-ordinates and helped plan out the meal. He was fast becoming one of Josh’s favourite people. He’d never had a brother, but Sim had all the qualities he imagined one should have.
As he sat next to Caitlin in the long grass, he searched for the right words to say how beautiful she looked. Her auburn hair was radiant, and her smooth, perfect skin glowed in the sunlight. He watched her lips move, not hearing a word she said, as she commentated on every manoeuvre of the two armies below. She was always so passionate about everything she did; he loved the way she cared so deeply about everything. There’d been so many boring days during the months that followed his investiture, so many questions, so many tests. She had stayed by him throughout every single one, always the first to greet him when he was released, always the last to leave him when he went to bed — leaving that awkward silence where he couldn’t find the right way to ask her to stay.
She was the only thing that got him through that incessant and relentless inquisition.
When he’d finally proven to them that he had no idea how to jump into the future they’d lost interest in him. It had been something of a disappointment to many of the upper echelons of the Order. The invitations to dinner dried up and died out as various rumours developed about his lack of success. Even Dalton finally reappeared from obscurity to disseminate spurious nonsense about Josh being a false prophet. But no one really took him seriously, and life finally returned to a kind of normal.
So Josh had decided to thank her, to do something special to show her how much he appreciated her.
How much he loved her.
It was an unspoken thing between them, but he was hoping she felt the same. He’d never really had a long-term girlfriend; there’d never been enough time to develop that kind of relationship. Not with a sick mother and a drug dealer busting his ass — or so he told himself. If he were being really honest, he’d never really put himself out there. Most of the girls he’d been with were nothing more than simple one-night stands with no complications. Josh didn’t really want to believe he needed anyone else, it was far easier to keep it simple, but it was also lonely, and no matter how he tried to convince himself he was better off alone, he could imagine his life wit
hout her in it.
He touched the wooden box that he’d kept hidden, knowing that she would ask what it was the moment she saw it. This was his surprise.
Caitlin turned back towards him and picked one of the spring rolls from the bowl and ate it whole.
‘These are delicious,’ she said with a mouth full of beansprouts.
‘Best Chinese take-out ever,’ he joked.
She smiled at him with her eyes, and he lost himself in the moment.
‘What’s this all in aid of anyway? Not that I’m not really grateful — I have always been meaning to visit the Battle of Boju. Just doesn’t seem your kind of thing?’
Josh took out the slim wooden box and handed it to her. ‘I wanted to say thank you.’
Caitlin took the box and turned it over to read the Chinese inscriptions along the sides.
‘If you know both yourself and your enemy, you can win numerous battles without jeopardy.’ Her eyes widened as she translated aloud.
‘Art of War, chapter fourteen,’ smiled Josh, watching her take out the bamboo book.
‘The lost chapter!’ gasped Caitlin. She held it like it was made of crystal, carefully laying the entire book of jointed bamboo slats out on the picnic blanket.
‘How did you know?’ she asked, without taking her eyes off of the wooden treasure.
‘You told me back in the library — don’t you remember?’
‘Yes, but I didn’t think you were paying attention to what I was saying,’ she answered with a smile.
Josh grinned. ‘I heard every word.’
‘Thank you! This is amazing. Where did you get it?’
‘I had some help. It wasn’t easy.’
She rolled it back up and placed it back in the box.
‘You don’t do anything by halves, do you,’ she murmured, moving a little closer.
‘Neither do you. Remember when we were back in the cave?’
The Infinity Engines Books 1-3 Page 35
