She grins. “You’d do that for me?”
The words are out, now. I’m committed. “If you wanted.”
“Well I don’t,” she reassures me. “But that’s sweet of you. It’s nice to know.”
CHAPTER TEN
WHAT HAPPENS NEXT is that they turn their attention to me. I’m off ploughing the top field for the next crop of sprouts when Weldon turns up. He’s made an effort: he’s riding a twenty-third-century hover tractor and he’s got dungarees on, and even a straw hat of the kind I favour, except he wears it really badly. He looks like he’s on his way to the dullest ever costume party.
“Howdy, neighbour!” he hails me, full of fake cheer. “Looks like a… bumper crop of… something, this year.”
“Sprouts,” I tell him.
Coming from a utopia, of course, he has no idea what sprouts are.
“Listen, I wanted to have a manly talk with you, man to man, as men,” he explains heartily. “Only, it looks like there’s one… field on your farm that you haven’t… ploughed, so to speak, if you see what I mean.” Having vomited up the laboured innuendo, he makes a grotesque show of waggling his eyebrows.
“Weldon,” I tell him reasonably, “get in the sea.”
“No, but listen,” he says desperately. “There’s a lot riding on this, and it’s not as if we’re asking much. You might even enjoy it. It’s not so much to ask.”
“She doesn’t want to. And I don’t want to. We’re getting along platonically just exactly fine.” Meaning we spent all afternoon throwing things at Plato and it was hilarious. “So you can just go back to your perfect future and cease to exist, if you please.”
“No, look,” Weldon insists. “You have no idea what’s at stake. This is so much bigger than you.”
I stop the Soviet Speedster and lean on the steering wheel, looking at him. “I understand exactly what’s at stake. I am the time travel veteran. I’ve seen whole chains of human historical events come and go as we fought over time. And then I saw the bombs fall and everything there ever was get splintered into pieces forever. And your lot, your precious perfect art deco society? It’s not all that, mate. It’s not the topless towers of Ilium. I won’t miss it, when it’s gone. When it never was. Because that’s the point with things that get erased from the future: you don’t miss them, by definition. Now off you trot. Go make a pie-chart or something.”
But he doesn’t get in the temporal sea and nor does Smantha. Over the next week at the farm, we’re constantly running into the pair of them. They keep trying to pretend that it’s all chance meetings and Oh, what were the odds of running into you two here? which, given this is where we live and we are literally the only people in the entirety of the world at this point in time, wears a bit thin fairly quickly. And they keep doing this whole false-jolly routine of asking how we’re getting on and is there any big news we want to share, all of that. And you can see the strain at the corners of their smiles, but that doesn’t make it any less annoying. I think I’ve finally found a situation where someone else’s discomfort isn’t actually funny.
SO ZOE AND I go for another holiday to get away from it, a gadabout around the rough terrain of history, tweaking famous noses and playing God for the people in the cheap seats. Except now we can’t get away from them. We lose ourselves in the crowds at the Coliseum, and who should be on the bench behind us talking in loud voices about what a lovely couple we make but Weldon and Smantha. We descend into the fleshpots of nineteenth-century Paris and in the very tawdry brothel we settle on, the pair of them are already ensconced and booking us a private room with the bawd. On the deserted section of Devonian beach we choose for a stroll, someone’s set out a romantic table for two with some wine and oysters. Or, if not actually oysters, some kind of primeval mollusc.
It takes all the fun out of it. What was previously just a carefree spree of mayhem and chaos carved through the corpse of history now feels like a holiday with your prurient maiden aunt. Except in this case Auntie is desperate for us to get it on, and it’s really, really off-putting. Everywhere we go, every time period, every version of the timeframe, there they are: making encouraging faces, playing inexpert mood music, coining laborious double entendres (or, as they get steadily more desperate, single entendres).
Zoe and I seriously discuss actually doing it to get them off our backs—by which I mean murdering Weldon and Smantha. Except their goddamn hangdog expressions, the passive-aggressive accusing looks we keep getting from them, it’s all a bit too much. You can kill us, those looks seem to say, but just save our world! and it’s no fun. It must have been this way for Roman Emperors and barbarian warlords when confronted with actual saintly martyrs. I mean, when they’re begging you to tie them up and throw them on a fire, the whole business rather loses its fun factor.
We even try to fake them out by going back to the farmhouse and making a big fuss about getting our jollies on as noisily as possible in the hope they’ll be satisfied and leave us alone. We go at it hammer and tongs in a variety of locations and positions, using, of course, every contraceptive method known to man because we really don’t want to be engendering any little utopias. Except Weldon and Smantha are on the case and they’re not to be put off by anything quite so theatrical. They keep turning up with pregnancy tests and Weldon’s damnable graphs, and it’s obvious that a little physical intimacy won’t put them off. By that time they’re so intrusive that there are frequently two or three sets of Weldons and Smanthas hanging around the farm at any one time, and it’s frankly intolerable.
One evening, Zoe pops the pertinent question. We’ve closed the curtains and barred the doors against them, but it doesn’t help. By then we’re almost supernaturally aware of Weldons and Smanthas. We know they’re there, noses pressed to the glass like urchins at a pie shoppe window. And she asks. “How long, exactly? I mean, we absolutely have not given rise to their future. Shouldn’t they have popped out of existence by now?”
“Well that’s the tricky thing about time and causality,” I admit. And then I have to make the much more painful admission that, “It’s all in Weldon’s bloody graphs, really. There’s a waveform of probability that leads to them. When it’s zero, that’s when there will never have been a Weldon and a Smantha and all the bloody lot of it. If I killed you, or you killed me, that would do it. But as we’re both still about, the probability is obviously sufficiently this side of zero that their future is still clinging on.” I sigh. “And, depressingly enough, even if it went, the whole of the past is lousy with Weldons and Smanthas now. Even if their originating timeframe didn’t happen, they’d still be around because when you travel in time you sever yourself from causality. My own past is a blank slate; I’m the product of a whole snarl of timelines that all never happened.”
“So we’ll never be rid of them, even after the universe accepts that we’re not going to play mum and dad to their society?” Zoe demands in exasperation.
“Well, my plan was, once that actually happened and the supply of new Weldons and Smanthas definitively dried up, we could hunt them for sport,” I suggested. “No point now, because we’d just keep getting more, but when they’re actually an endangered species, we could wipe them out. In fact we’d have to, because we—”
“Can’t have time travellers running about ruining the place,” Zoe agrees. “But I’d rather the universe got its act together and accepted we aren’t going to do the dirty. Because they are getting right on my tits.”
“Let’s go on another trip,” I suggest.
“Is it worth it? They’re always there. I can’t just kick back and relax when they’re looking over my shoulder all the time.”
“I’ve thought of somewhere they shouldn’t be. And it’s somewhere I was thinking of showing you. Somewhere special.”
She looks at me narrowly, because one of things when you have the whole of time and space to visit is that nowhere is really special. There’s so much wonder that it’s all a bit samey, after a while. Exce
pt there is somewhere.
I never go there. Or then. I don’t make the journey, as a rule. It’s not actually a happy place. It has a personal resonance for me that’s somewhat downbeat. But it’s beautiful, in a terrible way, and Zoe should see it.
I take her to the edge of the war.
We broke time, like I said. In the last throes of the war every remaining faction simultaneously developed an ultimate ultimate weapon, after discovering that mere time machines reshaping history wasn’t ultimate enough. Everyone had the Causality Bomb and, just as with time machines, everyone agreed not to use them. And then they used them, because that’s what you always do with the ultimate weapons that you swear you’ll never, ever use. You get your retaliation in first. Sooner or later, you pre-emptively deploy your deterrent just in case the other side aren’t deterred by it.
And time got cut into chunks, as you’ve seen, but around the period of the actual war itself—that century or two that would have contained all the moments and days of my actual personal history—that was ground zero. That took the brunt of the blast.
“What,” Zoe asks, “am I looking at?”
Normally you can’t see into time, because photons don’t work like that, and nor do human brains. You have to do something pretty damn stupid and spectacular to reduce the actual structure of time to something you can sit there and look at.
I’ve brought a picnic and a tartan blanket and a couple of deck chairs, and we’re sitting on the shores of time, where the big chunks of moments get progressively smaller until it’s like sand. Until it’s just dust. Until, if you pick your vantage point very carefully, you can pop open a cold one and look into forever, where fractions of a murdered second shimmer like a heat haze on the horizon. Where the receding last moments of the war stretch out like glittering rainbow sand into an infinite perspective, and here and there a chunk of time like a beached iceberg standing proud of the rest. It’s an eye-twisting, brain-bending sight. It’s beauty like a black hole is beautiful. It’s staring the impossible in the face, the wreck of things that shouldn’t even be made manifest in the first place, let alone be destroyed.
In short, I’ve taken Zoe back home, though she won’t be meeting the family. I don’t even remember the family. They were an early casualty of the war, unwritten from time along with everything else while I was off playing soldier.
We sit there sombrely and sip our beers. It is not a fun place. We won’t be playing any pranks or holding dumb contests here. It’s not a place for jokes.
“Damn,” she says after a while, and I nod agreement.
You can see my house from here, I want to tell her. But you can’t and it’s not true and there never was a house and it’s all just powdered time crunching underfoot; fragments of chronology too small to ever visit. Everything I ever was, everything that led to me, all the times of my lives.
And I’m not saying this is why I’m the bastard I am. I own to my bastardy. But at the same time, this is what makes me a literal temporal bastard, as well as orphan. Nothing more illegitimate than a man whose grandfather got killed before meeting his grandmother, and at this remove I can’t even remember if it was me who did it.
At least, though, this frozen moment of funereal solitude should give us some respite from bloody Weldon and Smantha.
Except…
“Isn’t that…?” Zoe says, peering into the non-distance.
“What?”
“There, near that big chunk of… Wednesday. Something’s moving.”
I squint, shading my eyes from the glare of fourth-dimensional devastation. Out there across the scintillating desert, out by one of the bigger pieces of beached time, something’s moving. Two somethings. Two dreadfully familiar somethings.
They were, I think, trying to be subtle for once, but they stop when they realise we’ve spotted them. Weldon and Smantha, the scourge of the space-time continuum.
I think they’re going to saunter over, then. I’m fully braced for a hearty hail-fellow-well-met-fancy-meeting-you-here from them, followed by the usual nudge-nudge-wink-wink-how-are-you-two-lovebirds nonsense they usually come up with. Mercifully, though, they just look furtive and skedaddle, receding into the vanishing point of history as quickly as their toes can take them. But they were here, and that’s enough to ruin the moment.
In the aftermath of that I give a great sigh.
“I think we’re going to have to do something drastic,” I say, and Zoe nods philosophically.
“I don’t think we can just wait for them to never have existed,” she agrees.
It’s not something I ever thought I’d countenance. It’s basically the antithesis of every vow I ever made, in fact. But right now, we are going to have to cross some lines if we ever want to enjoy some peace and quiet without the temporal neighbours dropping round.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“HOW HARD WILL it be,” Zoe asks, “to start from scratch?”
We’re both on the Speedster, taking one last turn around the farm, Miffly mooching alongside. Zoe’s behind me, sidesaddle, one leg up to her chin as we jolt along, a hand on my shoulder for stability. It’s amazing how used to her I am. Honestly, we were trying to kill each other not very long ago at all, and now I can’t imagine eternity without her.
And we’ll probably get bored of one another sooner or later, and then it’ll be her or me again, sure enough. But I can’t find even the seeds of that in me, and I hope it’s the same for her. And if I do end up killing her, I know I’ll regret it sooner or later and those regrets will last forever. So perhaps we can just agree to spend an eon or two apart and then get back together. Perhaps, after all, we’ll just be civilized about it and won’t actually need to kill each other at all.
Perhaps this final act of barbarism will teach us to be good from hereon in.
“If any of this survives, we can just plunder it for what we want to keep,” I say. I don’t know if it will, though. What I’m planning isn’t an exact science.
We go out to a hilltop where the whole farm is spread out below us. I can see my house from here, the one I built with my own hands. Also a buttload of robots, but I was at least involved in the process. I can see the wheatfields and the turnips and the cabbages and the golden glory of the sunflowers. The sheep like little clouds on the hillside across the way. And it’s never going to be the same, not any more. It won’t be home. Just another piece on the floor, if it survives at all.
Because the constant intrusions of Smantha and Weldon have got too much for me. I’m countenancing the unthinkable. And it will be profoundly inconvenient, to have to rebuild elsewhere and elsewhen. But I did it before, and this time there will be two of us. Many hands make light work, and that’s even truer when you’ve raided the past for as many robots as you need.
“All right, then,” Zoe says. “How do we go about this?”
With difficulty, is the answer to that. With a lot of careful prep. With a sense of finality. This isn’t something you can just do. The only reason our destination still exists is that it’s very secret and very hard to reach and extremely inhospitable to any kind of life that requires a regular space-time frame of reference, which is to say all life. Including Zoe and me, so we have to take precautions and get some very special protective clothing.
It’s not easy to invent kit that will protect you from the dreadful effects of collapsing time, but it was something of a priority right towards the end of the war. And as a rule all that kit turned out not to be quite effective enough, and it was obliterated into non-existence along with all the time-space volumes that contained it when the boom went up and causality went boom. But I’d snuck some out, by then. I’d taken some of that gear and hidden it in 1192 Byzantium, in a place and time that now exists as a loop of four hours ninety-seven minutes out there in the rubble of history. And then, when the dust had cleared and I’d made myself my new home, I took it and stuck it in the farmhouse’s attic with all the other junk I thought I’d never need again.
<
br /> We lay it out on the kitchen table. Chronic baffles, tachyon screeds, vortex dampeners, boson filtration tubes. All that cumbersome nonsense people were loading themselves up with at the end. And none of it would protect you from the blast of a Causality Bomb, in the same way as a hazmat suit wouldn’t let you walk slowly away from a nuclear explosion like an action hero in one of those movies. Although, if you were an action hero in a movie, you’d have the hood of the hazmat suit off so the audience could see your chiselled features, and so it would be even less use than that.
We load up with the gear. I saved enough stuff for about three people. I have no idea who the other two people were that I was intending to kit out. Probably they got erased from time so thoroughly that even my memories of them got wiped. That gives me a disquieting moment of self-reflection. Had there been someone, back then? When I had the idea of building the farm out on the edge of forever, was it really just for me?
And the grim answer, the one I always give to myself when these thoughts occur to me: it doesn’t matter. I can’t remember, and if it’s gone from my memory, then it’s gone from the universe. The only thing that matters is the here and now. Literally.
“Happy with what we’re doing?” I ask, after we’ve got the gear on and are waddling off towards our time machines.
“Fifty-eight seconds!” So muffled by her helmet I can barely hear her. We’re on the same page, though. That’s how long we’ll have. That’s how long our target shard of time lasts. In and out in under a minute, the perfect heist.
Because it’s out there. One shard of time I saw once and marked with an X on my secret causality map. My secret. The big one. Fifty-eight seconds of war that survived the blast intact. And maybe it’s fifty-eight seconds of my own actual past, but I can’t remember, and so that’s that. It’s there, is all. And I’ve lived with the knowledge of it for… well, for an indeterminate amount of time, things being how they are. And I know I should have destroyed it. It’s far too dangerous to leave lying about. But every time I tried to, a little voice in my head said, You might need it. You never know. And you know what? That little voice was right.
One Day All This Will Be Yours Page 9
