So it goes.
Soon after that, the alarms go off. For a moment I assume it’s some of her compatriots come to check up on her, but instead it’s three men in black suits and ties and sunglasses, turning up with a big machine of chrome and steel and glass and circuits, their armpits bulky with ill-concealed holsters. Some sort of agency. Knowing their type, I’m all for giving them a taste of their own medicine and waterboarding a few confessions out of them, but Zoe has a better idea.
We hide all the robots and the dinosaurs and the rest of it, and when the Men In Black walk up to the farmhouse it’s just the pair of us with no visible technology more sophisticated than the Soviet Speedster. We’ve even got ourselves up like American Gothic, pitchforks and puritan hats, and we make sure we talk with broad New England accents and act as though we’ve never seen anything so astoundingly futuristic as their mobile phones.
We act dumb. They ask us all manner of questions about how we got here, and we explain that we and the entire farm got vanished away from the good old U-S-of-A back in nineteen seventy-one by this great big flying saucer-looking thing, or maybe it was an angel or something, and we’ve been here ever since. What year is it? we demand of them. Who’s the president? Ronald who? And the more we act the wide-eyed yokels, the more creeped-out they get, and they’re Watching The Skies because the Truth Is Out There and Zoe and I are killing ourselves laughing and fighting like mad to keep a straight face every time they look at us.
And we listen in on their murmured conversations and their telephone calls until we know exactly what agency they represent, where their HQ is, what president they don’t report to for reasons of plausible deniability and just how easy it would be to make their whole super-secret nobody-ever-heard-of-us organisation disappear without a trace. And then we sneak off and sabotage their time machine so it takes them back before the beginning of the universe. After that, we go in our own rather better time machine and fix a couple of elections and one funding debate, and their secret agency vanishes in a puff of congressional oversight, and that’s one more threat to the fabric of reality dealt with.
Zoe and I kick back and relax that evening, on the couch, in front of the fire. I put the TV on. I’ve a specially curated selection of box sets, because one thing that spins like a weathervane when you change causality is entertainment, and if you have a deft hand you can collect all the really good versions of things, like the final series of Lost where all the loose ends actually got tied up, or that peculiarly tangled timeline where William Shakespeare, Helen Mirren and Orson Welles got together to make a Transformers movie.
“So that’s what you do,” Zoe says, after we’ve taken in a couple of shows.
“I preserve the future,” I agree piously. “I lived through the Causality War, after all. I was there when they went from conventional apocalyptic weapons to time machines, and I was there when they went from time machines to the Causality Bombs. And never again. The rest of time must remain inviolate for all time. I can’t allow anyone to start gadding about through the epochs. Not even your people. Especially not your people.”
She nods slowly. “That’s very virtuous of you.”
“I thought so.”
“It’s not true, though.”
I go still, waiting to see how problematic this conversation is going to be. “Oh?”
“I mean, I suppose that is also what you’re doing,” she allows graciously, and she is eyeing me sidelong just the same way I’m eyeing her. There’s a definite space between us on the couch, and any moment we might both be leaping up to take cover behind it, the truce in pieces on the floor. Which would mean we both end up hiding from each other on the same side of the couch, which might be strategically awkward, but one thing at a time.
“I’m really not sure what you mean,” I say, unconvincing even to my own ears.
“You’re not really trying to save the future,” she says. “You’ve set up here, on the first piece of historical real estate to survive what the war did, at the start of the rest of history. You’ve turned it into your own perfect eternal day on the shores of forever. You’ve made sure nobody can travel past you. Like you keep saying, they all end up here. And you kill them, all of them. Just like you did your best with me.” And she waves away my protests: she’s not accusing me. Or she is accusing me, technically, but not actually faulting me. “But it’s not because you want to preserve time. It’s because you’re a misanthropic bastard who just really enjoys being the last surviving human being. You’ve gone to live like a hermit on a desert island, only the desert island’s the whole of the rest of history, and you can’t abide sharing it with anyone.”
I stare at the blank screen for a bit. “And?”
“Your turn to talk now.”
“I was in the war,” I say.
“You keep saying.”
“I was a soldier. That means doing what you’re told. Very keen on that, in the army. And because it was a war across time, and because every time anyone from either side went back in time to change things, everything else changed too, the people telling me what to do kept changing. Who they were, what they represented, most especially what their orders were. I’d go do a hatchet job on history to bring something about, and then my new chain of command would be telling me to go do the precise opposite, to restore the way things were, only of course they didn’t realise that was what they were asking me to do. Because they had no memory of the way things had been originally. And eventually neither did I, because I’d seen so many versions of my own present day that I couldn’t remember how it had been. And each time there was someone telling me that it was vitally important for the future of the nation, or the war, or the world, that I go back in time and make this change or that. And I wanted to tell them that it couldn’t be that important, because we’d already done it, and undone it, and done it differently, and a thousand variations in between. Me and my fellow time soldiers and all our opposite numbers, over and over.
“And we died, we time soldiers. We killed each other and got eaten by dinosaurs and our time machines imploded and… just death, really. And though there were fewer and fewer of us, we were meddling more and more, and eventually I ended up in a staff meeting where seventy-five per cent of the people were actually me, from various points in my career. The longer I stayed in service, the more of the whole mess I was personally ending up responsible for. It was insane, just insane. And, of course, somewhere in there I worked out that the only person I could possibly trust or obey or listen to was me. Every other human being was just like a shape made of fog, gone the moment you turn away. Because when you’re travelling through time you’re the only constant. It’s not even stepping on a butterfly. Go into the past and breathe a mouthful of air, intercept a handful of photons, you’ve changed the world in ways you can’t possibly predict.”
I have literally never had the chance to get this off my chest before. I didn’t even realise catharsis was something I needed.
“And so… Well, then they started with the bombs, of course. I became a time bombardier, or some of me did. Because high command—all the high commands, for a given value of both height and command, given they kept changing—worked out that time was mutable, and just started detonating points in history, trying to make firebreaks so that earlier changes couldn’t affect later eras. And that led to a chain reaction that turned a century either side of my birth into sand and the rest of history leading up to that point into disconnected chunks of various durations. And almost nobody survived. Except quite a lot of people survived, escaping ground zero in a variety of time engines and skulking about bits of history, some of them still fighting the war, some of them hunting each other. Some of them just trying to stay alive.
“And I made sure that none of them did. I got rid of them. Because by then I knew I couldn’t share a continuum with even one other time-travel-capable human being. Not one. Because I needed things to stop changing. I needed the merry-go-round to stop. Stability, Zoe.
And give a mouse a time machine and he’ll screw over history over and over and you won’t know what year it is or who’s president. And so I made my rule. No time machines. Not on my watch. And my watch is going on forever.”
She nods, giving me the side-eye. “You’re a misanthropic bastard,” she summarises.
“Yes. I mean, I’m trying to plead mitigating circumstances here, but that is what it boils down to. I’m bad at sharing things, up to and including existence.”
Another pause, and then she says, “Well, I’m flattered, then. That this truce is lasting.”
And I have a think about that, and about Hitler getting chased about a muddy field by Miffly, and about playing the slack-jawed yokel for the Men In Black, and come to the remarkable revelation that I didn’t actually mind having someone to share the fun with.
We watch the really good cut of the Princess Bride next, the one that’s even better than the one you got to see, and then we say our farewells, me for my bedroom and she for her den in the undercellar that apparently my farmhouse has. “Goodnight,” we say, and then we both come in with, “I’ll most likely kill you in the morning,” and we laugh, because it’s probably true. And yet, when the morning comes, we don’t.
I FEEL THAT, as history’s most experienced living time traveller, I should explain to her some great deep secret of the trade. She is, after all, both new to this and an absolute natural hand at it (although, with time travel, you can go from new to an accomplished master in the blink of someone else’s subjective eye).
I feel that I should take her under my wing and make her my apprentice, have her shuffle about in my footsteps as I drone on about equations and consequences and the dire responsibility of preserving the timeline. Except that ship has sailed, caught fire, sunk and then been eaten by a megalodon. Instead, the secret of secrets that bubbles up from within me is, “Time travel is really fun.”
“One more reason to keep it for yourself, eh?”
“Well, yes. Because, believe me, the more people who are doing it, the less fun it gets. But if there’s just one of you… Or two, even. In fact, I’ve been thinking, and there are some things that we might do together. If you’re up for it.”
Zoe gives me the arched eyebrow. “Sounds kinky to me.”
“It is,” I agree, “a very particular kink.”
We go back to the early Bronze Age and see who can pull the best fake miracles on Old Testament prophet types, resulting in a veritable plague of boggle-eyed loons deserting their flocks to preach new and unlikely commandments to increasingly impatient Levantine tribes. We drop in on the Cretaceous and race dinosaurs against each other, winner eats the loser. We steal fistfuls of mutagens from some pre-war bioweapons program and then go back five hundred million years to mess with early life, see who can make the Cambrian explosion go with the biggest bang. I end up making a pink newt-looking thing twelve feet long with a back covered with ostrich-feathers and eyes on eight foot stalks. We christen it Herpaderpus and decide it’s the winner.
We pick some wars and put on generals’ hats. I win Borodino against Zoe’s Napoleon after mounting all the Russians on dire wolves. She obliterates my plucky British at Rourke’s Drift by giving the Zulus a couple of tanks. We fight the Battle of Zhizhi to a standstill after both claimants to the Chinese throne inherit a squad of US Marines, some woolly rhinos and a fleet of hovercraft. After that, with bloodlust more than slaked, we compete to see who can successfully introduce twenty-first century reality TV concepts to the classical world, which Zoe wins with I’m A Caligula, Get Me Out Of Here.
I mean, I could have done these things on my own, you understand. I have always been perfectly capable of amusing myself.
(And it wasn’t as though, when there were any of my peers from the Causality War still around, they’d have been up for this kind of hijinks. They took the business of ruining history for everyone very seriously. And why? No dogma, no nation, no cultural identity and no ideology survived the war intact. Within the first weeks of history being written and rewritten, there was literally nothing to fight for. And yet they kept on fighting, because to stop would be to admit we should never have started. History was brought down by a colossal investment in the sunk cost fallacy.)
But Zoe gets it. Zoe understands the essential meaninglessness of history now it’s lying in pieces on the floor. It might have been your Aunt’s priceless vase a moment ago, but now it’s been elbowed off the side-table, it’s just bits. And nobody cares what you do with bits.
All those lives, you say? Are you going to go to bat once more for all that grandeur, the spectacle, the knowledge, the great sweeping breadth of human achievement? It’s on the floor now. King’s horses, king’s men, right? And if we go to some piece of it or other and fundamentally mess up the sequence of events, get a million people killed, exterminate some species, obliterate a continent in an orbital railgun barrage… It doesn’t actually matter any more. It doesn’t change anything. It’s just one fragment of vase on the floor of time.
And I’m waiting for her to get cold feet, I guess. I’m waiting for her to look upon my works, ye mighty, and say, hold on, maybe this is all a bit cruel, a bit selfish. But she doesn’t She’s game for anything, is Zoe. And with her, it’s twice as much fun to trample the broken vase. Who’d have ever thought I’d find a soulmate in the end times? Not me, obviously, what with my trying my damnedest to eliminate the rest of the human race.
ONE MORNING AFTER we’re back, the alarm goes off again. We had a heavy night, having gone on a colossal bender across half of time and space, so I’m uncharacteristically slow to get out of bed. Zoe has a more robust constitution, and by the time I slope over, she’s already located the latest batch of errant time travellers.
It’s not the usual. I recognise the voices even as I shamble over. It’s Smantha and Weldon.
I go cold. Surely she hasn’t…? But it seems all too likely, in the cold and hungover light of morning. After all, it’s her entire civilization at stake. Why shouldn’t she play along with a selfish old bastard like me?
They’re in a copse off by the top field and I creep over, hiding myself behind a tree to eavesdrop, because sometimes all the high-tech surveillance gear in the world isn’t immediate enough for you.
“What are you doing, Zoe?” Smantha is demanding of her. “You’re supposed to have settled down, already.”
“We’re getting worried, back home,” Weldon adds. “Look, I’ve brought some graphs.”
He has, as well. He’s always looked exactly like the sort of tedious wanker who’d bring out graphs, and now he’s doing it. All the fancy holographic projection his perfect Utopia can muster can’t make this sort of nonsense engaging, but he obviously feels he’s God’s own gift to every middle management meeting. “The probability curve is declining alarmingly,” he announces, as though everyone is supposed to leap up and cry, “Oh, no!”
“We’re honestly not sure what you’ve been doing, Zoe,” Smantha says. “But can you just get on and start having children like you’re supposed to. You know, like you actually did in our past. I’m sure it’s hard living in these primitive surroundings with him, but just pull your weight for once, will you?”
“I have a flowchart, too,” Weldon adds helpfully.
“I understand,” Zoe says, a bit hastily because he doubtless really does have a flowchart and he’s not afraid to use it. “You’re concerned.”
“We are a bit worried that things don’t seem to actually be moving towards the correct sequence of events, yes,” confirms Weldon. I wait for him to pull out a motivational poster, but even he isn’t that much of a monster.
“So if you could, you know, just get it done,” Smantha puts in. “I mean, once the next generation’s secure, you can come back. We’ll take it from there.”
“Uh-huh,” Zoe says, and I lean in to hear just how she’s going to put the knife in. And it’s a shame. I really have had fun, these last few weeks. But I suppose it’s back to murde
ring each other again, and while that has its own appeal, it just won’t be the same.
And then she says, “Go to hell, though.”
“Excuse me, what?” Weldon looks put out, as though ending up in hell is a node he missed off the flowchart.
“Screw the lot of you,” Zoe says. “I’m not doing it.”
There’s a pause, in which I assume the two Utopians exchange perfect glances.
“But… we need you to,” Weldon says.
“You have to,” Smantha says, more forcefully.
“Otherwise none of it happens. Otherwise there’s no us, any of us. Your parents, everyone you knew, our entire civilization, Zoe. I mean, how selfish can you be?”
“Precisely this selfish,” Zoe tells them. “Because nobody ever asked me, and because every one of you has been telling me how I have to sacrifice myself for the greater good so you can go on having your lovely comfortable lives, and you know what? I don’t, actually.” I can picture her smiling, I really can. “So you just get going, the pair of you. Go back home while there’s still a home and while there’s still a you. And if you show your faces round here again, I’ll set Miffly on you.”
And I feel my heart grow three sizes, because she’s a bitter sociopath, but she’s my bitter sociopath.
That night, we’re sitting together watching that weird Casablanca sequel starring Rick Astley that turned out so unexpectedly well, and I decide it’s time I grew a pair and made the appropriate gesture.
“I heard what you said, earlier,” I confirm, and she nods, watching me warily.
“Only,” I go on, “if you wanted… I should make clear I don’t actually want this, but… if you wanted, then I’d do it, for you. Only for you.” I take a deep breath. It’s a hard thing to commit to. “But if you wanted, I’d be willing to settle down and have a utopia.”
One Day All This Will Be Yours Page 8
