by Adam Roberts
‘Hello,’ she said.
‘Good afternoon,’ I said.
‘So—Mr—Tailor, is it?’
‘That’s right. Prose Tailor.’
‘I wasn’t sure,’ the Dr said, ‘if that was your name, or your job description?’
‘It’s both,’ I explained. ‘On my world it is our jobs that give us our names.’
‘I see. So if, let us say, your work were syringing out the build-up of wax from the ears of cataleptic pigs, then your name would be—?’
‘Please forgive the Doctor his levity,’ said the woman, speaking in a well-modulated and pleasant voice. ‘Why don’t we start the interview with you telling us why you want the job?’
‘I don’t know really,’ I said, rubbing my right knee with my right hand. ‘I suppose I’m ready for a change. A career change. I’ve been a Prose Tailor now for seven years, and I’ve got the feeling I’m going nowhere. I’m ready for the change and the, um, exciting challenges of a new position.’
I paused. I don’t mind admitting I was nervous. I’ve never handled job interviews very well. I rubbed my right knee with my right hand again. Then I rubbed my left knee with my left hand for a bit. Then (I’m not sure why, except that I was terribly nervous) I rubbed both my knees with both my hands simultaneously. This produced a slightly squeaky noise, and for some reason I rubbed both my knees again, replicating the squeaky noise and satisfying myself that it had not been some random noise that happened to coincide with my knee-rubbing activity. I looked up. The two people behind the desk were looking at me askance. Or if not exactly quite askance, then at least in a way that was far from being fully skance. This, naturally, made me more nervous.
I folded my arms. But then I thought that folded arms might give me a standoffish look, so I unfolded them again. I found myself wishing that I had a desk, like my interviewers, upon which to rest my arms in a casual and easygoing manner. I held my arms, elbows bent, a little away from my sides. But that was no good.
‘Mr Tailor,’ said the Dr, leaning forward a little. ‘This is a job that will involve a great deal of travelling through space and time. Tell me: what experience of time travel will you bring to the position?’
I decided then that the best thing to do was let my arms hang straight down by my sides. But no sooner had I let them droop than it occurred to me that this might look rather monkey-like. I didn’t want them to think me too simian. Why should they give the job to a simian? So I picked my arms up and lay them in my lap. This was better, except that it meant that my hands were resting in the declivity of my crotch. As soon as I had made this move I regretted it. I didn’t want them to think, after all, that I was some kind of pervert, fondling myself in the crotch-area right in the middle of an interview. If they wouldn’t want to give the job to a simian, how much less would they want to give it to a crotch-fondler? So, and trying to be as discreet as I could, I turned both of my hands over, so that instead of resting palms down on my groin they were resting palms upward on my thighs. This went well, except that somehow the very tip of my right thumb got itself snagged under a fold of cloth in my trousers, such that as I moved it away the thumb drew up a sort of mini-tent of fabric from the material loosely folded in at my crotch. When I finished this little manoeuvre with my hands this upraised pyramid of cloth remained standing. I glanced down. This could not be making a good impression. It looked, in fact, as if I were markedly and inappropriately aroused by the mere fact of being interviewed for a job. Drastic action was required. With sudden and explosive action I coughed, shifted in my seat, and slapped my right hand down to my privates to smooth away this upward-poking fold of trouser cloth. Then, to try and cover the operation, I swung my right leg up and over my left.
That, I told myself, was one smooth manoeuvre.
My two interviewers were staring at me. The woman had her mouth slightly open.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘What was the question again?’
‘I was asking you,’ the Dr repeated, in a wary voice, ‘what experience of time travel you would bring to the position.’
‘Ah. Well, just the usual, I suppose. The standard?’
‘The standard experience?’
‘Yes, you know. One hour per hour, travelling through time, that sort of thing.’
‘Travelling forward?’
‘Yes.’
‘Your résumé,’ the Dr pointed out, placing his forefinger on the relevant bit, ‘suggests that you have experience of travelling backwards in time as well.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Well, in a manner of speaking.’
‘A manner of speaking?’
‘Yes. It was last year. A haircut.’
‘Haircut?’
‘It made me three or four years younger. Everybody said so. At least three years and possibly four.’
‘It made you three or four years younger,’ Linn asked, ‘or it made you look three or four years younger?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘One of those two.’
‘Mr Tailor,’ said the Dr, sharply. ‘Do you understand what the job particulars involve?’
‘I think so, yes.’
‘It is more than simply travelling. We have a series of very important missions to accomplish, repairing and indeed correcting the very nature of spacetime.’
‘I understand.’
‘There is sometimes danger. Are you prepared for danger?’
‘Danger is my middle name.’
The Dr frowned, and picked up a pen. ‘You really should have put that down,’ he said, making the correction.
‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s not literally my middle name. That’s just a way of saying that, yes, I’m prepared for danger.’
The Dr, frowning in a more pronounced fashion, scribbled out what he had just written.
‘Mr Tailor,’ put in Linn. ‘Let me tell you what it was about your application that interested us. You are a prose tailor?’
‘I am.’
‘You tailor prose?’
‘Yes.’
‘Clearly you are familiar with punctuation. Grammar. Correct syntax. That’s very important.’
‘Well,’ I said. ‘Yes I am.’
‘Allow me to explain,’ said the Dr. ‘This is more than a matter of prose. You see time, history, the life of the cosmos - it has a grammar. There are rules. When actual existence violates those rules, somebody needs to step in and do something. Somebody needs to go around correcting the solecisms and ambiguities that creep in. Because, if nobody did that . . .’ He trailed off.
‘What?’
‘It would be too ghastly to contemplate,’ he said, firmly. ‘Wouldn’t it, Linn?’
‘Much too ghastly,’ she agreed.
‘I see,’ I said in an obviously I’ve no idea what you’re talking about tone of voice.
‘You need to think of history as a kind of sentence,’ said the Dr. ‘Take your own history: the history of the Planet of the Asexual Slug-men. Now, in the third quarter of the—’
‘Earth,’ said Linn.
‘What?’
‘We decided to go to Earth instead,’ said Linn. ‘Don’t you remember?’
‘We’re on Earth?’ the Dr asked. ‘And not the Planet of the Asexual Slug-men?’
‘That’s right,’ Linn said.
The Dr looked me up and down. There was a pause. ‘You sure?’ he said.
‘Earth is my planet,’ I said, a little nervously.
‘Well if you say so, if you, yes. Start again. Take your own history, Mr Tailor: the history of the Planet Earth, apparently. Take a figure like Leonardo da Vinci. It’s pretty obvious, I think, that da Vinci was born too early in your planet’s history. Do you see? He started having all these ideas that were well before their time. You see, Earth’s history was building up to Leonardo.’
‘He was born ahead of his time,’ I said.
‘Yes. You could say that.’
‘And it’s wrong for people to be ahead of their time?’
‘Not m
orally wrong,’ the Dr clarified. ‘Grammatically wrong. Those are two different usages of the word wrong, you understand. Take that sentence, the one I spoke a moment ago: Earth’s history was building up to Leonardo. If Leonardo occurs too early in that sentence it makes nonsense of it:
Earth’s Leonardo history was building up to.
That’s a very unsatisfying sentence. You see that, don’t you?’
‘In fact,’ Linn put in, ‘the situation is even more pronounced than that. You see, the sentence of Time is structured according to the logic of sequential time. Time is one thing after another, isn’t it? That’s what chronology means. Because of that, Leonardo’s too-early appearance actually disrupts everything that follows. It warps the sentence into something more like this:
Earth’s Leonardo buildtoing up history was.
‘So,’ I said, realization dawning, ‘your job is—’
‘To buzz about the cosmos, making the necessary corrections. Affirming the grammar of Time. Adding an apostrophe here, changing a who to a whom there, as it were. Changing history in little ways to keep the overall story - the cosmic history - flowing properly on according to the rules.’
‘So you’re going to sort out Leonardo, are you?’
‘Going to? I did him last year. In the original timeline he was Aviator King of a United Europe from fourteen-ninety-one to sixteen-sixty-six.’
‘That’s an awfully long time to be king,’ I observed.
‘Yes. He discovered an anti-aging potion. He called it Gniga. That’s “aging” backwards. Because it was anti-aging. Do you see?’
‘So you put an end to that possible time sentence?’ I said.
‘We corrected it, yes.’
‘How?’
‘We photocopied all his notebooks backwards and then snaffled the originals. Puzzled him no end, I don’t mind telling you. Took him years to figure them out. Anyway, that’s off the point. The point is that we need somebody who understands grammar - who understands the rules - to assist us in our work. I am a fully qualified Time Gentleman. Linn, here, is my apprentice; after seven years she will be eligible to take the Time Gentleman exams. Are you ready to join our exciting and dynamic team?’
‘I think so,’ I said.
‘You think so?’ prompted Linn. ‘Or you know so?’
‘I know so.’
‘You think you know so?’ asked the Dr. ‘Or you know you know so?’
‘I know I know so!’ I said, assertively. ‘And, just to be clear, I know I know I know so, and I know I know I know I know so.’
‘Good. Well Mr Tailor,’ the Dr was shuffling his papers, ‘that’s all the questions we wanted to ask you, I think. Do you have any questions you want to ask us?’
‘Well,’ I said. ‘I was wondering about overtime?’
The Dr looked at Linn, and Linn looked at the Dr. Then, for reasons mysterious to me, they both started laughing. ‘Very good, Mr Tailor!’ the Dr said. ‘Very witty. We like you. Welcome aboard.’
‘Witty?’ I asked, nervously.
And so began my adventures with the Dr.
Chapter Four
THE DOOM OF THE ICETANIC
The TARDY rematerialised inside a large white space: bare and spare and perfectly white. ‘We’re here,’ declared the Dr.
‘And where’s here, exactly?’ Linn asked him.
‘Earth. But the real question is when. Let’s pop outside, have a peep.’
He opened the door and we all stepped outside.
The TARDY had taken the form of a large rectangular blue box with the word POLICE written at the top of all four of its faces. ‘Well,’ said the Dr, rubbing his chin in an Antiques Roadshow sort of way. ‘I’d say, looking at the design, we’re talking somewhere around nineteen-ten. Which is pretty good, considering I was aiming at London in the eighteen-eighties. Not too far from the target, now, is it.’
‘We’re thirty years too late!’ I objected.
‘No such thing as late,’ said the Dr, blithely. ‘You know what they say. Wherever you find yourself, there you are. I daresay there’s a kink or temporal solecism for us to work out hereabouts. Put our time-grammatical knowledge to good use.’
‘Caves,’ said Linn, looking around her. ‘It’s extremely cold.’
‘Far as I can tell, these walls,’ I offered, running my ungloved finger along one of them, ‘are ice.’
‘Ice, you say?’ said the Dr coming over to check for himself. ‘You could be right Prosy. Ice, ice, maybe.’
‘So we’re inside an ice-cave somewhere on Earth in nineteen-ten,’ said Linn, matter of factly. ‘Could it be the north pole?’
‘Or the south?’ I suggested.
‘Or the west,’ agreed the Dr. ‘One of those, definitely.’
‘West pole?’ I said. ‘There’s no west pole.’
‘Indeed there is,’ said the Dr. ‘Very cold it is too.’
‘And where is it, then?’
‘Oh, not to worry. I mean, it’s in Wales. But not to worry. I was hoping to show you London in the eighteen-eighties. I need to get hold of this chap from the East End . . . somebody from your time period, Tailor.’
‘From Earth’s twenty-third century?’ I asked. ‘Really?’
‘Indeed. Fellow called Jack. A much misunderstood individual; he was suspected of a number of rather nasty crimes—’
‘You’re not talking about Jack the Ripper?’ asked Linn, in horror.
‘Jack the Rapper,’ corrected the Dr. ‘As I say, he was a Rhyme-tailor from the twenty-third century - from Prosy’s time period in fact.’
‘Please don’t call me Prosy,’ I said in a small voice.
‘The twenty-third century,’ the Dr continued. ‘The time period when Earth was governed by the world state of You-Say! and everybody was encouraged to express themselves through the medium of tuneless shouting. A low point in Earth’s history, I’d say. Anyway my friend Jack got dislodged in time and after a series of bizarre adventures, into which I really don’t have time, right now, to go, he migrated to the East End of London in the eighteen-eighties. He’s there now. He likes it there, although his habit of shouting rhyming couplets at people in street has been misconstrued. He’s out of his place; as naked a temporal solecism as you can imagine.’
‘He gets naked?’
‘No he’s not naked. The solecism is naked. By which I mean, egregious. Obvious. And my job is to sort that out - recover him and return him to his own time. Set the time-line straight again.’
‘Are you going to do this before or after he murders all those prostitutes?’ Linn demanded.
‘Before, obviously. That way I prevent all the suffering he creates. Everybody wins. He’s not a bad sort, either, by all accounts. It’s just that his brain is a bit scrambled by the temporal dislocation. It almost always results in disaster, does temporary dislocation. I should imagine Mr Prose here would welcome the chance of a bit of chinwag with a contemporary, eh?’
‘Frankly,’ I said. ‘I have enough trouble with Rhyme-tailors patronizing me as a poor humble tailor of prose at home, without wanting to meet another one on my travels. Beside. We’re obviously not in east London.’
‘It’s so cold,’ said Linn. ‘Can we just get back inside the TARDY before I freeze to death?’
‘No no,’ the Dr expostulated. ‘Let’s have a little look around, shall we?’ And with that he marched off.
We all trudged up the slope.
‘So is this the north or the south pole?’ Linn asked.
‘I’ve come to a conclusion. This ice is dry - it’s very cold. I believe we’re in an Antarctic cave-system, formed by natural forces. Now, in nineteen-ten the Antarctic continent was completely unexplored. Right now we’re perhaps three thousand miles from the nearest human being.’
‘I say!’ cried a human being, perhaps three metres away from us. ‘Are you chaps English? Or do my ears deceive me?’
He was a young man dressed in a smart, Edwardian-era military uniform: olive-
green heavy fabric and military greatcoat. The outfit was topped-off with a hat. Not a top hat, I should add, in case my use of the phrase topped-off with a hat gives that impression. That would be silly, under the circumstances. It was a fur hat, with ear flaps like two great furry tongues hanging down on each side of his face. Fur, you see, is a better head-insulator than is, er, top. Than whatever top-hats are made of. Anyway this fellow also wore Eskimo-mittens, and snowboots: he was evidently a military officer clearly prepared for the cold.
‘Good afternoon,’ said the Dr, brightly.
‘Afternoon? But it’s the middle of the night!’
‘Really? It’s awfully bright.’
‘Of course it’s bright in here,’ said the man. ‘The corridors are illuminated. With electricity, you know.’ A certain pride was audible in his voice as he said this last thing. ‘There’s a mirror system beaming light down all the . . . but, wait a mo, you haven’t answered my question.’
‘Question?’
‘Are you English?’
‘I am,’ I said. ‘My name is Prose Tailor. And this is Linn.’
‘How do you do?’ asked Linn.
‘And this,’ I concluded, ‘is the Doctor.’
‘Pleased to meet you,’ drawled the fellow. ‘My name is Captain Antenealle.’
‘Antenealle?’ repeated Linn, with the very slightest of disbelieving intonations.
‘It’s a perfectly common Wiltshire surname I assure you,’ said Antenealle, blushing slightly. Or perhaps it was the cold.
‘If I might say so,’ said the Dr, ‘you don’t seem all that surprised to see us all here, in Antarctica.’
‘Were we in Antarctica,’ said Antenealle, ‘I might be. Surprised, I mean.’
‘So we’re not in Antarctica?’ said Linn.
‘We are not.’
‘In which case,’ she pressed, ‘where are we?’
‘Where else but aboard a secret Habakkuk-style British Navy Warship in the middle of the North Atlantic in the winter of nineteen-twelve?’
‘I knew it!’ cried the Dr, eurekaishly.
Both Linn and I looked at him. ‘You knew what?’
‘The North Atlantic. I knew that’s where we were!’
