Overtime Tom Holt

by Overtime (lit)

  'Thanks,' Guy said. 'Now, about this time thing.'

  'Yes?'

  'Don't you think we should -'

  'Hold on a tick,' said Melroth. He looked at his watch and made a few notes on a clipboard. It was a clipboard of burning gold and it had appeared out of nowhere, but it was palpably a clipboard. Suddenly Guy found himself understanding something very fundamental about the nature of Time.

  'Right,' Melroth said, 'fire away.'

  'Time,' Guy said, and he took a deep breath. 'It's a bit of a mess, isn't it?'

  'Well,' said Melroth indistinctly, 'yes, it is. A bit.'

  'Wouldn't it be easier if there was just the one sort of time,' Guy went on, slowly so as to let Melroth take notes, 'the sort that people could understand? You know, hours and minutes and seconds, and things happening one after the other, and then not happening ever again. None of these Archives and editing and all that. No time travel. No timestorms. Just time.' He paused, and added, 'I'm sure it'd make things much easier for your lot, as well as us.'

  A very long silence. Eventually, Melroth scratched his nose. 'Interesting idea,' he said. 'But no. Wouldn't work. Administrative inertia. Unions'd never stand for it. Manifesto commitments. Cost too much to implement. Limited budget resources for new capital projects. Um.'

  'Are you sure?'

  'No call for it. Weight of public opinion against it at this juncture. Tried in the past and found to be impractical. Careful studies carried out by highly qualified specialist research groups have shown. Constitutional reasons why not. Other unspecified reasons.

  'Sure?'

  'Look.' Melroth diminished visibly, and the sleeves of his robe came down even further over his knuckles. 'It's not as if you're the first one to suggest it, right? It's just -'

  'It's just,' Guy said, 'somebody made a cock-up a long time ago and nobody wants to admit it. Right?'

  Melroth nodded.

  'That's fine,' Guy said. 'Nobody minds. Nobody knows. Nobody need ever know. Just ... sort it out, and that'll be that. Do you see what I mean?'

  Melroth looked at him. 'You reckon?' he said.

  'Yes.'

  'Um.'

  Guy squeezed the last drop of determination out of the spongy mess he was keeping his brains in these days. 'You'll never get a better opportunity than this, you know,' he said. 'Think about it.'

  'All right.'

  'I know, that's easy to say, but ...' He stared. 'What did you say?'

  'I said all right,' Melroth replied. 'Satisfied.'

  'Yes,' said Guy, startled. 'That's fine, thank you.'

  'I mean to say,' Melroth continued irritably, 'we do actually listen to what residents, I mean mere mortals, tell us, you know. It doesn't just all go in a great big shoe-box somewhere, or if it does we have to empty it out every month or so and things sometimes fall out and we pick them up and sometimes we read them and ... I mean, there is feedback. Definitely.'

  'That's very reassuring,' Guy said. 'Really.'

  'Good,' said Melroth. 'I think we understand each other.'

  'Absolutely.'

  'Well, then ...' Melroth hesitated. It's very rare these days for an angel to have to do something he's never done before, and he was nervous. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. 'Thank you,' he said.

  'Don't mention it,' Guy replied. 'Any time.'

  Melroth turned and gave him a look. 'Any what?'

  'Time.'

  'Oh,' said Melroth slowly. 'That old thing.'

  A wheelbarrow moving slowly across an infinite, blank landscape.

  Behind it, doing the best he can with limited resources, a one-legged, one-armed, half-headed humanoid.

  In the wheelbarrow, a large rubber sack with brightly coloured designs painted on it. Behind, a small knot of men carrying tea chests.

  The servants of the Central Authority cannot, for fairly obvious reasons, be made redundant. But they can be redeployed, rationalised, reassigned and, in extreme cases, promoted sideways.

  Of the Chastel des Larmes Chaudes staff, about ninety per cent had been seconded to the Parks and Amenities Department, where they were set to work whitewashing the stars and cleaning out black holes after interstellar conferences. They had been the lucky ones.

  'Boss.'

  The Antichrist looked round and noticed Pursuivant under three hundredweight of files and a typewriter.

  'Well?' he said.

  'What exactly are we going to do when we get there?'

  'Shut up.'

  'Yes, boss.'

  Nobody spoke for the next ten minutes or so, during which time Mordaunt dropped the packing-case that contained the fax machine (probably on purpose) and Mountjoy tripped over the flex of the electric fan. Then they saw it, stretched out in front of them like a magnified sky.

  'Oh shit,' said Pursuivant.

  'All right,' snapped the Antichrist furiously, dropping the handles of the wheelbarrow and discovering that it was directly above his big toe, 'you can pack that in from the start. I mean,' he added hopelessly, 'it's not as bad as all that.'

  'It isn't?'

  'No.'

  'Oh.'

  Pope Julian, of course, had had it easy. Since he was by definition an incurable temporal paradox he had simply ceased to exist. Jammy little toad.

  They had been standing there for a while when the caretaker came out. He was carrying three huge tins of blue paint, six moulting brushes, and he was grinning like a cracked wall.

  'Here they are,' he said, 'the boys from the blue stuff.'

  They ignored him. He chuckled unpleasantly, like a blocked drain.

  'There you go,' he said, plonking the equipment down in front of them. 'And watch the bits round the edges. Gone a bit mouldy there, it has. You'll probably need to rub it right down and fill it before you can start.'

  The Antichrist didn't answer. Somewhere on the other side of this lot the rest of his erstwhile subordinates were toddling about in a leisurely fashion, daubing a bit of glitter on a star here, polishing a red dwarf there. If ever he got his hand on that bloody de Nesle ... Well, there'd be trouble.

  The caretaker handed over the keys to the tiny shed which was to be their home for the next ... for a very long time, and pottered away into the vast white distance, sniggering. The Chastel men stood for a while, staring; just as stout Cortez would have gazed on the Pacific if he'd just been told that he was going to have to walk home.

  'Oh well,' the Antichrist said. He took a handkerchief from the top of the wheelbarrow and gripped it in his teeth while he tied knots in the corners of it with his hand. Then he put it on his head. 'The sooner we make a start ...' he said, and his voice seemed to drain away into the immensity in front of him. 'Anyway,' he said.

  Then he and the others began to paint the sky.

  The jury room of the United Global Criminal Court.

  'Whose is the giblets?' called out the foreman of the jury. Eleven hundred and ninety-eight people shook their heads in turn; and then somebody nudged the eleven hundred and ninety-ninth juror, who had been staring out of the window, and who turned, shook himself, and said, 'Sorry, I was miles away.

  'Right,' said the foreman. 'Eat it while it's hot.'

  The culture that had evolved in the jury room over the last eighty years was distinctive, to say the least. Only Mr Troon and Mrs Cartagena were left from the original panel; the rest were second, third or even fourth generation. When Mr Troon died - and he'd been in a coma for six weeks now, the poor old sod - nobody would be left who had heard the original evidence (Mrs Cartagena had, by her own admission, slept through the whole trial), but that was largely irrelevant. Opinion as to the guilt or innocence of the accused was now a matter of clan belief; and ever since the last outbreak of inter-tribal warfare, positions had become utterly entrenched. The politics of it all defied simple explanation; however, basically it came down to the fact that so long as the Macdonalds refused to give up their nine of the original twelve chairs and the Battistas clung on to their right to f
irst choice of the bread rolls, further negotiation was a waste of everybody's time.

  Stephen Ogilvy III (the foremanship had been hereditary in the Ogilvy family for as long as anyone could remember) banged on the table with the handle of his knife, and was rewarded with the usual silence.

  'Right,' he said - as his father had said, and his father before him - 'have we reached a decision yet?'

  Eleven hundred and ninety-nine voices answered him, and so it was time to start eating. At the far end of the table the Court Midwife announced that a new juror had just been enrolled.

  Meanwhile, in their cell in the basement, the Galeazzo brothers lay motionless on their mattresses and reflected bitterly on the fact that, if they'd been found guilty in the first place and awarded the maximum sentence, they'd have done their time and been back on the street seventy-two years ago. But, as Someone had remarked at the outset, when the charge is one of mucking about with the very fabric of time itself, the interests of justice could only be served by ensuring that the lack of punishment really did fit the crime.

  'Well,' said Blondel.

  King Richard grinned at him and brushed confetti out of his hair. 'Got her off your hands at last, then,' he replied.

  Blondel nodded. 'Took some doing,' he said. 'Have you decided yet?'

  'Decided what?'

  'What you're going to do,' Blondel said, looking away.

  'I think so,' the King said. He sat down at one of the tables and watched as the wedding car bumped its way down the one cobbled street of the village. 'I saw an advertisement in the paper for a little pet shop in Poitiers, and I made enquiries. I reckon it's time to settle down and breed rats.' He leaned his head over his top pocket, made a cooing noise, and added, 'Isn't it, George?' A pair of small brown eyes gave him a look in return.

  Blondel shrugged. 'Money in rats, is there?' he said.

  'No,' Richard replied. 'But so what?'

  'True. Anyway,' Blondel added, 'that's over at last. Now I can get out of this bloody collar.' He did so, and smiled.

  'What about you?' asked the King, pouring the last of the champagne into a tumbler. 'Any plans?'

  Blondel shook his head. 'The thing about life ...' he said.

  'Yes?'

  'Is,' Blondel went on after a moment, 'that there's an awful lot of it, and the last thing I want to do is get involved. I mean, why break the habits of a lifetime?'

  Richard sighed. 'I don't really think you can say you were never involved, Jack,' he said. 'You of all people.'

  'Ah,' Blondel replied, 'but that's all over and done with, isn't it? I mean, all that history I mucked about with has been scrubbed. Clean slate. That means I'm a whatsisname, anathema. So long as I'm still around, can things really get back to how they should be? I'm not sure.

  'How come?' Richard said.

  Under the canopy stretched across the village square, under the shade of the twisted old mulberry tree, a small, over-excited child was sick. 'Think about it,' Blondel said, lying back on the table and contemplating his fingernails. 'You were just the victim. I was the one who caused all the trouble. I was the one who went around singing L'Amours Dont ... L'Amours... thingy all the time.'

  'L 'Amours Dont Sui Epris,' said Richard softly.

  'That's the one,' Blondel said. 'Do you know, I've forgotten how it goes now. L'Amours Dont ... Ah well, never mind. I never liked it much anyway.'

  'Didn't you?'

  'No,' Blondel said, frowning. 'That bit in the third verse. Tum tum tumpty ... How does that bit go, can you remember?'

  Richard shook his head. 'Sorry,' he said.

  Blondel grinned. 'The hell with it,' he said, 'it's only a song, that's all. Some day somebody'll write another one, I expect. Anyway, I always reckoned it wasn't a patch on Ma Joie Me... Me... the other one.'

  'Which one was that, Jack?'

  'Can't remember.'

  They sat quietly for a while, Richard remembering, Blondel just staring, while the last few friends and relations wandered away. A wedding guest hurried up, explained that some damn fool of an ecology canvasser had kept him talking for hours with some rigmarole about endangered seabirds, was told that he'd missed the ceremony and the reception, and clumped off in a huff. The sun went down.

  'Anyway,' said Blondel.

  'Anyway,' said Richard. 'Have you paused to consider that, if you put in a claim for overtime, you'd be the richest man in history?'

  'No,' Blondel replied.

  'Good,' Richard said, and fell asleep.

  Blondel lay still for a few minutes more, gazing up at the battlements of the Chateau de Nesle in the far distance. Although he couldn't remember details, he had an idea he'd lived there once, a very long time ago. And, as the thought crossed his mind, he had the feeling he could hear somebody in one of the turrets singing a song which once he might have recognised.

  'L'amours dont sui epris,' it sang, 'Me semont de chanter;

  Sifais con hons sopris Qui ne puet endurer. Et s 'aije tant conquis

  Blondel sighed, and grinned, and stood up. At the foot of the tower, a low door materialised and opened.

  And Blondel strolled through it, hands in pockets, singing.