by E. M. Brown
She ran up the stairs, marvelling at her renewed athleticism, and crossed her bedroom to the fat yellow pig sitting on her bookshelf. She raided its belly for a few pound coins and some small change, grabbed her anorak from the hall, then stopped suddenly.
She sat on the settle beside the telephone table and leafed through her mother’s address book until she came to Annabelle’s entry.
There was the address, written out neatly in her mother’s tiny hand-writing.
Annabelle and Edward: 22 Marlborough Street, Camberwell.
She found her father’s dog-eared A–Z of London, located Marlborough Street, and plotted her route. She tucked the booklet into her pocket, remembered to take the spare key, and slammed the front door behind her.
It’s July 1988, she reminded herself as she almost skipped along the pavement to the bus stop. The ogre is still in Downing Street, but will soon be deposed by her own party: the invasion of Iraq is yet to come, along with all that that would bring. Donald Trump was not yet President of the USA; and the rise of the far-right in the UK, the appalling civil war in Nigeria and much else… All those horrors lay in store. Or perhaps not.
She took the bus to Camberwell and sat on the top deck, right at the front, and watched the passing world.
She wondered if, in this timeline, she would meet her first love, Terri Rivera-Sanchez, later this year; would she fall hopelessly in love and for three months be blissfully happy, until Terri told her she’d met someone else? Ella had been devastated, almost suicidal; if it did happen this time, she thought, she’d handle it better. She’d understand that it was inevitable and that, despite the superficial physical attraction, they were mentally incompatible: she was only eighteen, for pity’s sake!
She thought of Kit Marquez, and wondered what her old lover was doing now: she would be eighteen too, starting student life at Princeton. The world had yet to hear from the feminist firebrand she would become.
And the Kit Marquez Ella had left behind in 2030?
More than anything, Ella had wanted to see Kit one last time, to explain what was happening, and apologise. But that was impossible, of course: Mackendrick had made that plain. No one could be informed of what was happening there, deep beneath the Cairngorms.
In Kit’s future, Ella Shaw would suddenly disappear, mysteriously, without a trace… She eased her conscience with the knowledge that Kit was strong: she would survive.
But that had hardly made her leaving any easier.
The bus stopped at Camberwell High Street, and Ella jumped off at the next stop, hurried along the street and turned the corner into Marlborough Street. She stopped outside number 22 and stared at the navy blue front door.
At some point in the very near future, tonight or tomorrow, she would meet Annabelle.
The thought constricted her throat, tightened her chest.
Her dead sister, dead for almost fifty subjective years.
Annabelle, back from the dead, now twenty-eight…
But, first, she had something important to tell Ed Richie.
She hurried up the front path, lifted the knocker and pounded three times. So what if she interrupted Ed’s writing? She thought he’d understand.
No one answered. She knocked again, harder this time.
She saw the outline of a figure through the pebbled glass, and the door opened.
She took a breath. Ed Richie… the man she had pursued, in the future, until she had found him here, in the past…
He was slim and dark, with a piratical five o’clock shadow and dark eyes – and he was intimidatingly tall as he smiled down at her.
“Oh, Ella…” He raised a finger to his lips. “Annabelle’s in bed. She was sick in the night. Come in. Coffee?”
Ella swayed. “Annabelle’s at home?” she said stupidly.
“Too ill to go to work, but she’ll be fine. Must’ve been something she ate. Come on, don’t stand out there all day.”
In a daze she followed him along the hall, past a small, book-crammed study, to the long kitchen at the back of the house.
Ed fixed coffee in a percolator at the cooker and Ella sat at the scrubbed kitchen table.
“I’m not interrupting…?”
“No, not at all. I was just rewriting something, but it’s not urgent.”
She stared at Ed Richie, this man who had found himself pitched back in time, inhabiting ever-younger versions of himself. He must have thought, at one point, that hewas losing his sanity. And now here he was, living in a new timeline in 1988 with the woman he loved, a twenty-eight-year-old man with the memories of someone almost sixty.
He exuded a strange sense of calm, as he moved around the kitchen, a wise bearing altogether at odds with his youth. The only other person she had met who had possessed this ineffable centredness had been a Zen master. In her youth, Ed Richie had overawed her with his intelligence and intensity; and now she felt herself in awe of everything this man had experienced.
She looked across the room at the Welsh dresser, and what she saw there made her catch her breath. She stood, crossed to the dresser as if in a trance, and picked up the framed photograph.
Annabelle and Ed, embracing. Annabelle staring out of the picture, laughing, ecstatically happy – looking a little older than when Ella had last seen her. She backed to the table, still clutching the photograph, and sat down heavily.
Ed turned from the cooker and stared at her. “Ella? What…?”
She looked up through her tears and appealed to him. “I want to see her, Ed.”
He looked bemused. “Of course. But…”
She shook her head, laughed through her tears. “Oh, Christ, Ed, I’m sorry. I’m so bloody happy!”
He smiled uncertainly, as if she had gone mad.
She said, “Ed, sit down.”
He nodded, poured two cups of coffee, and carried them to the table. He sat down before her. “Ella?”
She reached out, her tears still flowing, and clutched his hand.
“Oh, you poor, poor man… What you must have gone through.”
He was suddenly very still. He turned his head slightly sideways, staring at her askance. “What do you mean?”
She cuffed her tears, sniffed, and smiled at him. She nodded, took a breath, and said, “I know what happened to you, Ed. I know everything. More even than you know. And I’ve come to explain…”
His eyes widened. “Ella…?” he said again, an appeal in his voice.
“You see, like Emmi Takala in Crete in 2008, I’ve been sent back to tell you what happened.”
He opened his mouth to speak, but no words came. He slipped further down in his chair, staring at her, and then found his voice, “For so long, Ella, I thought I was going mad. I… I’m not, am I?”
“No, you’re not.” Ella reached out and took his hand, and began, “In July 2025, Ed, you disappear…”
“EVERY DAY,” RICHIE said a little later as he sat, clutching her hand, “every day I’ve wondered if it might be the last. I’ve learned to live from day to day… to live every day as if it would be my very last.”
She said, “You’re safe, Ed. You’re safe in this time. Nothing, and no one, can take that away from you.”
He sat very still, staring down at their linked hands.
“I’ve lived in great fear,” he murmured, “and, at the same time, in great joy.”He looked up and smiled. “Come on,” he said, “I’ll take you to Annabelle.”
He led her from the kitchen and up the narrow staircase, then paused outside a bedroom door and gestured. “I’ll just see if she’s awake.”
He opened the door and slipped inside, and Ella felt her throat constrict.
She took a step forward, pushed the door open with her fingertips, and stared across the bedroom.
In the half-light she saw the figure in the bed, and watched Ed kneel and take Annabelle’s hand, and kiss her fingers.
She thought she had never seen anything so beautiful in her life, and when Ed looked up
and nodded, and Annabelle lifted her head from the pillow, smiled and said, “El, what a lovely surprise. Come here…” Ella stepped into the room, crossed to the bed, and took Annabelle in her arms.
EPILOGUE
From Ed Richie’s Journal, 24th August, 1988
I’M TAKING ANNABELLE and Ella to the Clarke Award ceremony this evening. Diggers’ A Trove… is nominated, and I think the novel might receive the first of many accolades. We’re meeting Diggers and Caroline for a Chinese afterwards, and intuition tells me that my friend just might be announcing his engagement.
I bought Annabelle a new dress yesterday, especially for the occasion, a short, jet black, off-the-shoulder affair, and she looks stunning in it.
Oh, and the latest in Ella’s complicated love life… Following her mysterious trip to the States last week, she announced on Monday that she has a new lover: a young woman called Kit Marquez.
She told me, yesterday, that she’d known Kit in her previous life.
E. M. BROWN
E. M. Brown has previously published bestselling novels under the name Eric Brown. An award-winning name in science fiction for over thirty years, in that time he has won the BSFA award twice for his short fiction, while his novel Helix was a bestseller, and Helix Wars was short-listed for the Philip K. Dick award. He’s divided his SF output between action-adventure novels including Helix, the Bengal Station trilogy and Binary System, and more character-based work such as The Kings of Eternity, Starship Seasons and The Serene Invasion. Buying Time, under the name E. M. Brown, falls into the latter category and explores the life and times of Ed Richie, reluctant time-traveller…
Paris was supposed to save Hallie. Now… well, let’s just say Paris has other ideas.
There’s a strange woman called The Chronometrist who will not leave her alone. Garbled warnings from bizarre creatures keep her up at night. And there’s a time portal in the keg room of the bar where she works.
Soon, Hallie is tumbling through the turbulent past and future Paris, making friends, changing the world—and falling in love.
But with every trip, Hallie loses a little of herself, and every infinitesimal change she makes ripples through time, until the future she’s trying to save suddenly looks nothing like what she hoped for…
“A high-flying novel of love and peril—sheer page-turning entertainment that hooked me with its wit from the first sentence.”
Helen Marshall, World Fantasy Award-winning author of Gifts for the One Who Comes After
“A glittering novel of time travel that you’ll want to devour like a mille-feuille in one single bite. I loved it.”
Lavie Tidhar, World Fantasy Award-winning author of A Man Lies Dreaming and Central Station
www.solarisbooks.com
1999, on the threshold of a new millennium, the novelist Daniel Langham lives a reclusive life on an idyllic Greek island, hiding away from humanity and the events of the past. All that changes, however, when he meets artist Caroline Platt and finds himself falling in love. But what is his secret, and what are the horrors that haunt him?
1935. Writers Jonathon Langham and Edward Vaughan are summoned from London by their editor friend Jasper Carnegie to help investigate strange goings on in Hopton Wood. What they discover there - no less than a strange creature from another world - will change their lives forever. What they become, and their link to the novelist of the future, is the subject of Eric Brown's most ambitious novel to date. Almost ten years in the writing, The Kings of Eternity is a novel of vast scope and depth, full of the staple tropes of the genre and yet imbued with humanity and characters you'll come to love.
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After surviving a catastrophic starship blow-out, Delia Kemp finds herself stranded on the inhospitable, ice-bound world of Valinda, populated by the Skelt, a race of hostile aliens who will stop at nothing to obtain Delia’s scientific knowledge.
Escaping from the Skelt – assisted by a friendly chimpanzee-like alien and a giant spider-crab – she travels south through a phantasmagorical landscape as the long winter comes to an end and the short, blistering summer approaches.
Ever hunted, she and her companions make a death-defying dash across the planet’s fiery equator to meet up with fellow survivors from the starship, and a final journey to the valley of Mahkanda – where salvation just might be awaiting.
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