Here Comes the Sun

by Tom Holt

  Anything’s got to be better than that.

  Wrong.

  So wrong, in fact, that after the first of the disastrous multiple pile-ups on the Futurebound carriageway of the T7 there was a full inter-departmental inquiry. Needless to say, it never actually published any findings; but it leaked like a six-month-old torch battery, and the unauthorised disclosures made alarming reading.

  For a start, because the route was now so straight, everyone was travelling far too fast. Apart from the drastically increased risk of collisions, this meant that travellers were getting from one end of the universe to the other in at least half the time, often less; with the result that at the other end (where they have this really amazing set of traffic lights) the size and mass of the tailback was threatening to destabilise the equilibrium of eternity, quite apart from there only being three operational toilets in the cafe in the last lay-by. Unless something was done, there was going to be trouble.

  So, very reluctantly, the Administration decided that there was nothing for it but to send the whole lot of them back the way they’d come . . .

  The idea wasn’t intrinsically bad. Instead of everyone trying to squash through the exit gates at once, there would be a filter system; any travellers who couldn’t get through would be sent back round in a gigantic loop down the Pastbound carriageway to the start, and then they’d return back up the Futurebound side and have another shot at getting through the gates. It was a sort of holding-pattern, with presents circling in the system until they got clearance to leave.

  What with the panic of getting the Pastbound carriageways built before the fabric of space and time got seriously bent, nobody had the leisure to think the project through; with the result that the awful consequences of having the same traveller driving along the same route two or three times at the same time - in two or three different instalments, if you like - weren’t appreciated until it was too late. Reports of travellers on their second circuit driving too fast on the outside lane and running into the back of themselves still on their first circuit came as a complete and horribly unwelcome surprise. The difficulties over the insurance claims alone were enough to put a permanent kink in causality.

  Each attempted solution led to further and worse problems. The idea of a speed limit was one of the least inspired; the sort of travellers who obeyed the speed limit were the sort who were already causing havoc by dawdling along on the inside - still faffing about in the Reformation when they should have been the other side of Napoleon, for example - while the tearaway element who were causing the problems simply ignored it. Putting sleeping policemen across the carriageway at notorious temporal blackspots did no good at all, particularly when the policemen started waking up.

  Meanwhile, what with everyone driving round the system two, three or even four times more than originally intended, the carriageways themselves began to crack up. The tarmac simply couldn’t stand it. Extensive frost damage along the entire length of the Ice Age didn’t exactly help, and it wasn’t long before, at any one time, up to a third of the entire system was coned off for repair, causing the worst problems yet. Discontented travellers began making their own unofficial exits off the expressway back on to the old, disused network of lanes and byways, with the result that they got to the Exit long before anybody else, themselves included. As a panic measure, the Administration introduced a number of diversions to get the traffic moving again, which meant that any number of crucial moments in history turned out not to have happened at all. The Trojan War, the reign of King Arthur, the golden age of English cricket all suddenly ceased ever to have existed, with side-effects that defied calculation.

  One rather sad knock-on effect of all this was that Staff foresaw the whole ghastly mess just as he cut through the ceremonial ribbon. It would perhaps have been some consolation for him to know that the problem had already been solved, if it wasn’t for the fact that the solution was destined to be held up in a contraflow on the T93 on the outskirts of Agincourt, finally arriving too late to be of any relevance, and being swept back into the stream of traffic.

  The only person who derived any benefit at all from the whole fiasco was the Flying Dutchman; who sold his ship, bought a set of spanners and a small yellow van, and is now doing a roaring trade as a breakdown service.

  Staff closed the door and threw his raincoat over the back of a chair. It had been a long day.

  Senior members of the Administration are expected to live close to the central office complex. Unless they’re extremely lucky (like Ganger, for example, who was able to wangle a long lease of a houseboat moored on the left bank of the Styx) this means a tiny little flat in one of the five labyrinthine complexes that were built on the site of the old dockyards. For your premium of a billion kreuzers and your fifty thousand kreuzers a year ground rent and service charge, you get windows that don’t open, lifts that don’t work and condensation you could swim in. There are no roof-gardens or window-boxes, but if you have a horticultural streak there’s always the mould on the curtains.

  On the doormat there were three envelopes. Staff picked them up, poured himself a stiff shot of distilled water, and sat down in the one chair that space permitted in his living-room.

  The first letter was junk mail from the United Perpetual Bank, offering him a discount on eternal life insurance and a credit card supposedly accepted by five million religions cosmos-wide. For an extra sixty thousand kreuzers a month, the United Perpetual people would be delighted to allow him to participate in their Special Select Reserve pension fund, which was guaranteed tax free owing to its registered office being situated in the Eye of the Beholder. If his application form was received within seven days, they’d even give him a free radio alarm clock.

  The second letter was from the compilers of a publication called Truly Important People of Yesterday, and he was warmly invited to complete the enclosed personal biographical questionnaire in order that his biography could be included in the next edition, along with 190 million other truly important people who the publishers reckoned were good for the two thousand kreuzers they were charging per copy. He binned that one, too.

  The third one he had saved until last, because it looked important. For a start, the address was hand-written, and his name was spelt right. He slipped his finger under the flap and pulled, and a moment later Ganger jumped out, landed heavily on all fours on the carpet and sat up, massaging his neck.

  ‘Before you say anything,’ he said, ‘no, I don’t think I’m getting paranoid about making sure we aren’t seen together. Maybe I’m a touch overcautious, but there’s no point in taking silly risks.’

  Staff frowned. Entrusting oneself to the local postal system, which had the tendency to send all letters to a distant galaxy on principle, seemed to him to be the silliest risk going.

  ‘Now you’re here,’ he said, ‘can we get on with it? Only I’ve got a lot of ironing to catch up on, and . . .’

  Ganger stared at him incredulously. ‘Ironing?’

  Staff flushed. ‘Yes,’ he snapped, ‘ironing. And there’s the kitchen floor to wash.’

  From where he was sitting, Ganger could see the kitchen, and it struck him that it was so small that you could clean it very quickly just by spilling your drink. He confined himself to raising an eyebrow.

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I’ll cut away to the main frame, shall I? It’s vitally important to the entire future of the cosmos that we go for a pizza.’

  Staff blinked. ‘I see,’ he said. ‘Vitally important.’

  ‘Vitally.’

  ‘Who’s paying?’

  ‘I am.’

  A smile like - well, in the circumstances, not like the sun emerging from behind a cloud; like something equally life-enhancing but without the overtones - flicked across Staff ’s face and earthed itself in his collar.

  ‘Done with you,’ he said.

  SIXTEEN

  ‘Look,’ said Bjorn, stopping suddenly and placing a shovelsized arm on his guide’s sleeve, ‘where i
s this?’ There was a faint crackle and Bjorn hastily removed his hand. It was tingling painfully.

  The guide pointed down the tunnel. ‘Look,’ he replied.

  For the record, the guide was a small, hunched entity entirely wrapped up in what looked like an oversized monk’s habit. In fact the costume was so voluminous that Bjorn had to take his own word for it that there was anyone in there at all.

  ‘Where?’ he said.

  ‘There,’ the guide replied. ‘My name’s Tzzx, by the way.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Tzzx.’

  ‘I thought that’s what you said.’

  Bjorn’s eye followed the line of the pointing sleeve and lit upon a sign nailed to the wall. By the dim ambient light - it gave Bjorn a really nasty shock when he realised that it was coming from inside Tzzx’s cowl - he could just about read what it said.

  It said:PICCADILLY CIRCUS

  It also said:TIMES SQUARE

  andPLACE DE LA CONCORDE

  and something else in cyrillic lettering, and something else in Chinese, neither of which Bjorn could read. To make matters worse, it said them all at the same time.

  ‘Um,’ Bjorn said. Tzzx chuckled, and a few blue sparks floated out from under his robe.

  ‘I know,’ he replied, and Bjorn noticed that he didn’t so much speak as crackle. ‘Confusing, isn’t it? And now we’d better be getting on, or we won’t miss the train.’

  ‘Do we want to miss the train?’ Bjorn enquired.

  ‘Well,’ Tzzx replied, ‘since it’ll be coming down this tunnel at approximately fifty-five miles an hour, I think it’d be sensible.’

  Tzzx scuttled away up the tunnel, moving amazingly quickly, and Bjorn followed him. For someone who was completely swathed in ill-fitting brown sackcloth and had no perceptible legs, Tzzx had a fair turn of speed; and the way he managed to avoid treading on his own hem was little short of miraculous.

  ‘We’re in the subway,’ Tzzx was saying. ‘I thought it’d be quicker than walking.’

  ‘We are walking,’ Bjorn pointed out. ‘Running, even.’

  ‘Yes,’ replied Tzzx, and Bjorn noticed that the gap between them was widening, even though he had broken into a jog, ‘but we’re walking in the subway. Makes a difference, you see.’

  ‘Does it?’

  ‘Naturally. Ah, here we are.’

  The ceiling lifted and the walls became wider apart. On the left-hand side, Bjorn could see a platform, about two feet higher than the floor of the tunnel. It looked remarkably like a platform in a station on the Paris Metro.

  ‘If you like,’ Tzzx called out, ‘we can take a train the rest of the way.’

  Bjorn clambered up on to the platform and sat down beside the cowled figure on a bench. It took him several minutes to catch his breath.

  ‘I bet you don’t know how the subway works,’ Tzzx said.

  ‘You like betting on certainties, I can tell.’

  Tzzx laughed again. Funny sound, Bjorn thought; like the noise you get when you accidentally put something metal in a microwave and switch on.

  ‘The subway,’ Tzzx said, ‘is an urban short-haul passenger transport network, designed to take the load off congested surface routes in peak time.’

  ‘Really,’ Bjorn replied. ‘You amaze me.’

  A fat green spark floated out from under the cowl, drifted in the air for a few seconds, and vanished. ‘All right,’ said Tzzx, ‘if you don’t want to know . . .’

  ‘Sorry,’ Bjorn said. ‘But I knew all that bit already. I’ve been on subways hundreds of times. But not this one.’

  ‘There’s only one,’ Tzzx replied. ‘Ah, here’s the train.’

  Sure enough, a tube train pulled into the station and opened its doors. Bjorn frowned. It was unmistakably a tube train. In fact, that was what was getting to him: it was the most quintessential tube train he’d ever seen.

  ‘Come on,’ Tzzx said. They climbed in and sat down. The compartment was empty, apart from a half-empty carton of pasteurised milk, which got up in a marked manner and moved right down to the other end.

  ‘Milk doesn’t like me,’ sighed Tzzx. ‘It thinks I turn it sour.’

  ‘How do you mean, there’s only one?’ Bjorn said. As he spoke, he realised what his subconscious had been driving at. The compartment they were sitting in was every underground railway carriage he’d ever been in: in New York, Paris, Moscow, London, anywhere. All at the same time.

  ‘Exactly that,’ Tzzx replied. ‘There is only one network. They just call it different things in different places.’

  ‘Um.’

  The train rattled away out of the station and into a dark tunnel. Bjorn surreptitiously fingered his penknife in his trouser pocket and tried to locate the two-handed claymore attachment by touch.

  ‘It’s a whole different dimension down here,’ Tzzx went on. ‘It really amazes me how few people notice. You’d have thought it’d have been obvious.’

  ‘Should it?’ No, that was the little plastic magnifying glass you couldn’t actually see through. That’s the scissors which will just about cut sellotape three times out of seven. And - ouch - that’s the nail file.

  ‘Think about it,’ Tzzx replied. ‘Name me a subway station.’

  Bjorn considered. ‘Oxford Circus.’

  The cowl nodded. ‘A classic example,’ Tzzx said, shooing away a small steel bolt which had unscrewed itself from somewhere and was now buzzing round his head like a lovesick moth. ‘Has it ever occurred to you that by the time you’ve gone down the escalator and trudged along all those miles of corridor to get on to the right platform for the Central Line, you’ve really walked a damn sight further than the actual distance between Oxford Circus and Bond Street. And it still takes three minutes to get from Oxford Circus station to Bond Street station in the train once you get on it. True or false?’

  Bjorn thought hard. ‘Um,’ he said.

  ‘It’s because of the dimensional shift, you see,’ Tzzx explained. ‘In this dimension, all the destinations are exactly the same distance from each other, and you travel—’ He hesitated, crackled like a car radio under a power cable, and continued: ‘Well, it’s like at right angles to sideways, I guess. Or, more accurately, at an angle of 450 degrees to the vertical.’

  Bjorn relaxed. When you are trapped in a strange dimension with a weird shapeless stranger in a cowl who gibbers to you about mathematics, there’s nothing like finding a ten-inch length of copper piping filled with lead at the bottom of your knapsack. Bjorn wasn’t a hundred per cent certain where it had come from, but he was very glad it was there. He wrapped a hand round it gratefully.

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Suppose you’re right, how come you don’t get on the train at Les Invalides and find the next stop’s Tottenham Court Road?’

  Under the cowl, a blue light glowed smugly. ‘Easy,’ said Tzzx. ‘Nothing ever exists in just one dimension. When you get on the train, usually you’re also in the dimension of Time, and a whole lot of other ones which we needn’t bother with right now. They restrain you from getting outside the matrix. It’s like a sort of seat-belt or something. ’

  In the sorting-office of his mind, Bjorn picked out the word in Tzzx’s last statement that had triggered off the alarm system in his pineal gland. It was ‘usually’.

  ‘Right now, though,’ Tzzx went on, ‘we’re sort of free-floating outside all the regular dimensions. If you’re interested, the three we’re in are Metro, Fear and Bureaucracy. And if you hit me with that copper pipe, it’ll be the worse for you.’

  Bjorn tightened his knuckles around the pipe. There are times when it’s appropriate to believe what you’re told, and times when you hit people.

  ‘You sure Dop sent you?’ he asked.

  ‘Ah.’ Tzzx threw back his cowl and - this is a very approximate and inaccurate description of a profoundly complex operation - rolled up his sleeves. There was nothing to be seen but a fountain of blue and red sparks. ‘I was having you on there, I’m afraid.’
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  Bjorn nodded, raised the pipe above his head and lashed out at the centre of the cloud of sparks with all his strength. There was a loud bang; then it started to rain molten copper.

  ‘I was telling the truth about trying to hit me, though,’ said a voice in the centre of Bjorn’s brain. Then there was nothing except the rush of a few million particles being dragged apart and sucked away into an infinite vacuum.

  Of the many results of this, the least significant was that an old lady living in a converted railway carriage somewhere in Nebraska received an electricity bill for eight million, three hundred thousand and thirty-six dollars, fifteen cents; which puzzled her. As she explained to her nephew, it wasn’t the size of the bill so much as the fact that she’d only just paid the last one.

  The forecourt of the offices of the Department of Time is about the only place in the entire Administration complex where you can ever have a hope of parking, and even then, you have to know the ropes.

  What you do is this. Before you leave to go there, you phone Gerald, the doorman, and ask him to preserve a place for you. It’s vitally important that you get the verb right. If in doubt, spell it for him; because if he just reserves you a place, then by the time you get to park, your vehicle will long since have fallen apart under the normal pressures of entropy. Preserving is different; it involves using the Department’s special relationship with time to backdate your reservation a couple of centuries or so. One final word of advice; it’s well worth slipping Gerald a minimum of fifteen kreuzers once you’ve parked, unless you want to come back from your meeting to find that your vehicle has been valet-parked a couple of centuries away, probably in a stable and boxed in by ox-carts.

  ‘Thanks, Gerald,’ Ganger therefore said, and there was a clink of money changing hands. ‘And do you think you could get us a taxi?’

  ‘No sweat, boss,’ Gerald replied, and winked. ‘When were you wanting it for?’

  (Please note Gerald’s extremely careful choice of verb tense; it doesn’t do to be grammatically imprecise around Gerald. The senior executive officer who once told him ‘Call me any time you’re ready’ was forced to retire early with critical tinnitus, because Gerald is ready pretty well all of the time, and has been most of his life . . .)