The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2012 Edition

by Fowler, Karen Joy

  She smiled, and I knew we were back on safe ground. I knew also that the subject of Owen Andrews was closed between us, that whatever fleeting thrill she had gained from hacking into Home Office files she wanted no further part in what I was doing. Doubtless she had her reasons. I had no wish to know what these were, just as she had no real wish to know what had interested me in Owen Andrews in the first place. I walked home the long way round, skirting the boundary of Greenwich Park, which was kept locked after sundown and was sometimes closed to the public for months at a time. The captive trees made me think of Shooter’s Hill, an outpost of an imaginary realm shrouded in a rough twilight. I wondered what Andrews was doing right at that moment, and the strangeness of it all made my heart turn over. One thing I had noticed and not mentioned to Dora while glancing through his papers was that several of the documents gave contradictory information about his birth date. Neither was it simply a matter of a couple of days. His birth certificate had him a whole fifteen years younger than his ID card. His medical records showed him as ten years older. I guessed that bureaucratic errors like this must happen constantly. But still, it seemed unnervingly peculiar.

  When I got home I read the article Dora had copied from Purple Cloud. It was an essay about how the previous government had made use of what the writer called ‘time-bridge technology’ to try and alter the course of the war in the Middle East. It had the smack of conspiracy theory and sensationalism I associated with the kind of magazine that specialises in UFOs and the so-called paranormal and I found myself not believing a word of it. According to the article Owen Andrews was significant as the pioneer of something called the Silver Wind, a mechanical time-stabiliser that certain military scientists had subverted to their own purposes. Apparently Andrews also had connections with the German firm of Lange und Soehne, who had made watches for everyone from Adolf Hitler to Albert Einstein, as well as being pioneers in the field of atomic engineering.

  I knew I would have to go and see him. It was not just about the clock any more, and after reading the flimsy article in Purple Cloud my doubts about the feasibility of time travel were stronger than ever. It was the very fact of Owen Andrews now that fascinated me. The fact that he was a non-person, and yet seemed somehow immune to political reality. The fact that he seemed to have three different birthdays. The fact that he lived in a place where no one but the outlawed and the desperate could reasonably survive. I felt as if I had stepped on the edge of something and felt it move, as if I had been coming down the street and tripped over a loose paving stone, only to discover that it was in fact a secret hatchway into an underground city.

  It sounds insane to say it, but I had never really questioned the world I lived in. I remembered the hung parliaments, the power shortages, the forced deportations of the millions of blacks and Asians from the city ghettos to the vast factory ships built to transport them to the so-called ‘home-states’ of Nigeria, Botswana and the near-uninhabitable wastelands of the exhausted Niger delta. I remembered the fire on board the Anubis, mostly because a teacher of ours, Kwella Cousens, was one of the three thousand deportees who died in the blaze. She taught Business French for a time at the college where I was studying but lost her work permit during the tax revisions and so was forced to take a place on one of the transports. I remembered these things, as generations before me might have remembered the moon landings or the Kennedy assassination, as news flashes and photographic images. They happened when I was in my late teens, busy with college work and desperate to lose my virginity.

  The truth was, I remembered them as things that had happened to other people. The new employment laws affected mostly black people and immigrants. If you were white and had a UK ID card you could mostly go on with your life as if nothing had changed. I had seen what happened to people who made a fuss: the small number of students from my college who joined the demonstrations and the dock pickets, the pamphleteers who for a time had littered the streets of the major cities with their samizdat scandal sheets had all spent nights in jail and some of them had had their grants suspended. One young man who chained himself to the railings of Buckingham Palace even had his national insurance number revoked. They bundled him off to Niger with the blacks. I remember thinking what a fool he was, to get mixed up in something that didn’t concern him.

  Up until now the biggest decision I had ever made about my life was the decision to ask Miranda to marry me. As I got into bed that night I realised I was on the verge of making another decision of that same magnitude and perhaps greater, a decision that could change my life in ways I would not know about until it was too late to recant: I was about to start asking questions about things I had previously discounted as none of my business.

  I lay in bed, listening to the steady ticking of Owen Andrews’s clock on my bedside table and the distant phut-phutting of the wind-powered generators across the river on the Isle of Dogs. As I drifted off to sleep it seemed to me that the clock and the generators had somehow combined forces to form a great silver wheel, its shafts and spokes catching the moonlight, casting its radiance in a hundred different directions.

  The bus was ancient, its wheel arches pitted with rust. It was full of soldiers. Their rambunctious, raucous presence made me nervous, although I realised this was illogical, that there was nothing unusual or sinister in their behaviour, and that the presence of forces personnel was entirely to be expected. Shooter’s Hill was a restricted zone. Civilians could enter, and the shops and small businesses that had serviced the area prior to its closure were allowed to keep running as usual, at least partly for the benefit of the new influx of military. But after sundown any movement into and out of the village was strictly prohibited. There was a military checkpoint, and it was said that the woods behind the old hospital were alive with snipers, that the turf battles between the military and the carjack gangs that used Oxleas Woods as a hideout had taken on the dimensions of guerrilla warfare.

  Officially the place was a shooting range and assault course, like Dartmoor and Romney Marsh, but everyone knew there was more to it than that. There were rumours that the rundown hospital buildings had been turned over to one of the specialist divisions as a testing laboratory for biological weapons. I had always thought the idea was far-fetched, just gossip really, but as the bus pulled up Maze Hill and into the forest I began to wonder. Passing into the forest felt strange, almost like crossing the border into another country. The starkly open expanse of Blackheath Common gave way abruptly to massed ranks of oak and ash and beech, the trees growing so closely together that it was as if we had entered a tunnel. The lowest branches scraped the roof of the bus, linking their gnarled green fingers above our heads. Rough tarmac and dirt tracks branched off from the road at regular intervals, and between the trees I could make out the rectangular masses of houses and apartment blocks. I wondered who would choose to live out here. I knew that much of the housing in the vicinity of the hospital had been demolished by order of the government.

  Aside from one burnt-out car at the side of the road I saw no overt signs of violence but in spite of this I found the atmosphere oppressive. The forest seemed unending, and its green stillness unnerved me; I felt as if something was lying in wait, just out of sight.

  We passed through a set of traffic lights, then came to a standstill beside the two fluted granite columns that marked the entrance to the hospital. The main building was mostly hidden behind a high stone wall topped with metal spikes and coils of barbed wire. Armed sentries stood on guard beside a swing barrier. The soldiers on the bus all rose to their feet, jostling each other impatiently as they crowded towards the front. Once outside they formed a straggling line, waiting to be admitted. I saw one of them rummaging in his knapsack, presumably for his entrance pass or some other necessary document.

  I pressed my face to the window, watching the soldiers go through their ID check. As the bus pulled away I caught a glimpse of narrow windows and blotchy grey walls. Now that the soldiers were gone the bus was almos
t empty. Towards the rear sat two men in business suits and a stout, middle-aged woman with a wicker basket on her knees. The basket contained three live chickens. On the seat across from me sat a teenaged girl. Her pale face and wispy fair hair reminded me a little of Miranda. She glanced past me at the soldiers in the road.

  “That’s the loony bin,” she said to me suddenly. “They guard it to stop the loonies getting out. Some of them have killed people.”

  I stared at her in silence for a moment, unsure of what I should say. When I looked back towards the road the hospital and the soldiers were already some distance behind us. I had vague memories of the place from my childhood, when Oxleas Woods had been unrestricted and carjackings less prevalent. The hospital was derelict then, a forgotten eyesore. We used to pretend it was haunted, or believed perhaps that it really was, I was no longer sure. In either case, the gates had always been kept firmly secured against intruders, and the high wall that ringed the perimeter meant that the grounds were impenetrable, even to the most resourceful and daring among our company. Its gloomy edifice had always been a source of vague dread to me. It was not ghosts I feared so much as the building itself. I hated its barred windows, the frowning facade that always made me think of dungeons and prisons. I could never escape the idea that terrible things had happened there.

  I was amazed and strangely gratified to find that the intervening years had done little if anything to moderate my dislike of the place.

  “Do you know what the soldiers are doing there?” I said to the girl. I had taken her for about thirteen, but now that I looked at her closely I saw she was older than that, eighteen or nineteen perhaps. It was just that her thinness and her sullen, rather vacant stare made her look much younger. She did not really resemble Miranda, other than in the colour of her hair. The girl pressed her lips tightly together and shook her head vehemently from side to side. She seemed startled, even frightened that I had spoken to her, even though she had spoken to me first. It crossed my mind that she might be retarded.

  “I’ve been inside,” she said. She glanced at me from beneath her colourless lashes, as if checking to see that I was still listening. I felt certain that she was lying. I turned away from her and back towards the window. We were coming into the village. Shooter’s Hill had never been much of a place, and the encroachment of the forest made it seem even less significant. I saw a general store and a post office, a church and beside that a recreation hall or perhaps a school house. One side of the dusty main road was flanked by houses, a mixture of small flint cottages and slightly larger Victorian terraces. On the other side of the street the forest began, stretching in an unbroken swathe as far as the Carshalton Reservoir and beyond that the Sussex Weald.

  The bus ground to a halt beside the Bull Inn. As I rose to my feet the fair-haired girl scampered past me, darting along the pavement and then disappearing down an alleyway between two of the houses. The bus coughed once and then lurched forward, bearing the chicken woman and the suited businessmen on towards the dockyard at Woolwich. The silence closed itself around me, so complete it seemed material, green in colour and with the texture of house dust. I looked back the way I had come. Somewhere to the north of me lay the boulevards and tramlines and bomb sites of central London. I hesitated for a moment in front of the pub then headed off down the road. On my left was the water tower, a renovated Victorian structure that I guessed would serve all the houses in the village and probably the hospital too. It soared above the rooftops, its brick-built crenellations weathered to the colour of clay. Owen Andrews’s house was on Dover Road, one of a terrace of eight Victorian villas and directly in the shadow of the water tower. The houses were shielded from the road by a thin line of trees. Fifty years ago and as a main route into London the road would have been seething with traffic. The universal tax on private vehicles had changed everything and so had the closure of the woodlands. Dover Road was now a forest byway frequented mainly by logging trucks and army vehicles. Weeds spilled through the cracks in its tarmac. For the first time since setting out that morning I wondered properly what on earth I was doing there.

  Andrews’s house was approached by a short pathway, a couple of paving slabs laid end to end across a yellowed patch of pockmarked turf. I stepped quickly up to the door and pressed the bell. I heard it ring in the hallway beyond. I stood there waiting for what seemed an age. I had no doubt there were unseen watchers, and whether this would have repercussions was something I would only discover later. I bent down and peered in through the letterbox. I caught a glimpse of cream walls and wooden floorboards and then the door was opened, so suddenly I almost went flying.

  “Can I help you?” said Owen Andrews. “Are you lost?”

  “No,” I said, staring down at him. “At least I don’t think so. It was you that I came to see.”

  “You’d better come in then,” said Andrews. “I don’t get many visitors these days.” He retreated inside, moving with a slow rolling gait that was almost a waddle. He seemed unsurprised to see me. I followed him into the house. Things were happening so fast they had begun to feel slightly unreal.

  He took me through to a room at the back. The room was steeped in books, so many of them that the ochre-coloured wallpaper that lined the room showed though only in oddly-spaced random patches. Glazed double doors overlooked a narrow strip of garden. A set of library steps on castors stood close to one wall. Andrews heaved himself up on to a battered chaise longue, which from the multitude of books and papers stacked at one end I guessed was his accustomed reading chair.

  “Sit down,” he said, waving at the chair opposite, an upright wing chair upholstered in faded green velvet. “Tell me why you’re here.”

  I lowered myself into the chair. “I’m sorry to turn up uninvited like this,” I said. “But I bought a clock of yours recently and I wanted to ask you about it. I wanted to talk to you as soon as possible. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “A clock of mine? How fascinating. Which one?”

  He leaned forward in his seat, clearly interested. He was classically dwarfish, with foreshortened limbs and a head that seemed too big for his body, but his torso was powerful and upright and he carried himself with such dignity that it is true to say that within this first five minutes of meeting him I had already forgotten his diminutive stature. His force of personality was tangible. I thought he was probably the most extraordinary man I had ever met. I described the clock to him, telling him also how I had come by it.

  “I know the one,” he said at once. “The case was made from old bell metal.”

  He grabbed a sheet of paper from the pile at his feet and began to draw on it, sketching in rapid strokes with a blue Bic biro. He gazed at his work appraisingly, tapping the blunt end of the pen against his teeth then handed me the paper. His drawing captured the likeness of my clock in every detail.

  “That’s it,” I said. “That’s amazing.”

  Andrews smiled. “I find them hard to let go of,” he said. “It’s a weakness of mine. But you didn’t come all the way out here to ask me about an old clock. A simple telephone call would have dealt with that. Why don’t you tell me what you came for really?”

  I could feel myself beginning to blush. The man’s forthrightness startled me, and now that I was about to put it into words the thing I had come to ask seemed ridiculous, dangerous even. But I had come too far to turn back. And the fact was that I trusted him. I believed that Owen Andrews would tell me the truth, no matter how difficult or unpleasant that truth might be.

  “My wife died,” I said at last. “Her name was Miranda. She was killed in a car accident. Her father drove his car off a cliff into the sea and drowned them both.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” said Andrews. “That’s a terrible story.” His eyes were clouded with concern, and I was surprised to see that he really was sorry, not just interested as most people were when they first discovered what had happened to Miranda. I didn’t blame them for being interested. The story was shoc
king and dramatic, a breakdown in normality that had never become entirely real to me, even after the wreck was salvaged and the bodies recovered. Who would not be interested? It is all but impossible for one man to climb inside another man’s sorrow. But I could see from his face that Owen Andrews was at least trying. I guessed he was more practised than most in enduring heartache.

  “I read about you,” I said. “About the work you did for the army. I read about the Silver Wind.”

  His dark eyes flashed, his expression changing so suddenly it was almost as if my words had thrown a switch inside him.

  “You’re asking me to bring back your wife? That is what you’re saying?”

  I nodded and looked down at the ground. I felt smaller than an insect.

  “Do you have any background in physics?” he said.

  “Not in the least.”

  “Well, if you did you would know that what you are talking about is impossible. For one thing, the time sciences are in their infancy. We have about as much control over the time stream as a Neanderthal over a steam train. But mainly it is just not possible. A layman such as yourself tends to think of time as a single thread, an unbroken continuum linking all past events together like the beads on a necklace. We are discovering that time isn’t like that. It’s an amorphous mass, a rag bag if you like, a rag bag of history. The time stasis might grant you access to what you think of as the past, but it wouldn’t be the past that you remember. You wouldn’t be the same and neither would she. There’s a good chance you wouldn’t even recognise each other, and even if you did it’s unlikely that you would have any sense of a shared history together. It would be like that feeling you get when you meet someone at a party and can’t remember their name. You know you know them from somewhere, but you can’t for the life of you think where from. It would be an alternative scenario, not a straight rewind. And Miranda would still probably end up dying in that car crash. We’ve found that the pivotal events in history still recur, even if the cause and effect are subtly different. It’s as if the basic template, the temporal pattern if you like, is ingrained somehow. It’s hard to eradicate.”