by Tom Holt
I told you (Mr Huos said) about the brass ring. What I didn’t tell you was that it started acting funny.
No, belay that. I’m getting ahead of myself. There I was in the Caucasus, with nothing except the shirt on my back and one hundred thousand bucks in cash. Naturally, the first thing I did was invest heavily in real estate.
I was lucky right from the start. I bought this forest. I was still living in the hotel at the time, but I could see this forest from my bedroom window and I just knew I had to have it. So I went to see the owners. They were a timber consortium that was just on the point of going bust; cash in hand suited them very well, especially hard currency. We rushed though the formalities. They made themselves scarce – came over here, actually; settled down, did quite nicely for themselves, even bought a football team – and I had my forest, which was all I—
Quite. You may well ask. Really, there wasn’t a logical reason I could put my finger on, then or now. I just wanted it. Actually, I had this crazy notion there might have been truffles growing in it. Anyway, a week after I’d completed the deal, one of the megabig Russian oil companies came looking for me. Apparently they’d struck oil nearby, and they desperately needed my land for a pipeline. I turned my one hundred thousand into ten million, thanked them very much and looked round for something else to put my money into.
I won’t bore you with the details. Everything I touched came good. I bought swamps, deserts, deserted villages contaminated by nuclear disasters, and within hours there’d be some nutcase desperate to quintuple my money for me if only I’d sell out to them. It was all so easy – so natural, if you follow me, like this was what was meant to happen – I really couldn’t understand why everybody else on the planet wasn’t doing exactly the same thing. Anyway, at the time life seemed pretty good. Straightforward. Or so I thought.
That was when the brass ring started playing up.
I used to carry it round with me in a little box. Don’t ask me why. It seemed the right thing to do. From time to time I’d take it out and look at it. Yes, I know what you’re thinking, but it wasn’t like that at all. I wasn’t continually putting it on, and when I did I didn’t vanish or anything like that. Rather, it was as though just by looking at it, I thought I might remember some stuff from my previous life. It’s like when you know there’s an answer to some problem that’s driving you nuts and it’s staring you in the face but you can’t quite see it. I was absolutely sure that daft brass ring meant something, and if I studied it hard enough, the penny would eventually drop and then I’d know.
But it didn’t work out like that, and then the ring started changing. Yes, literally changing. One day it’d be a ring, next day it’d be a nail file or a ten-millimetre carriage bolt or a pair of nail scissors or a bit off an intake valve. I only knew it was really my brass ring because it was in the box. It started to bother me, so instead of carrying it round all the time, I hired a safe deposit box in a bank in Tashkent and left it there.
Almost straight away, everything started going down the pan. I bought more swamps and deserts and nuclear disaster sites, but nobody wanted to buy them off me. Deals I’d made earlier started unravelling horribly. The tax people came after me with a vengeance. I managed to piss off some rather heavy people sort of in and around the government – they thought I was political, which I obviously wasn’t, but try getting them to believe that. All in all, I was in a bit of a mess. I did a basic stock take of my assets, liabilities and life generally, and realised that I was exactly, to the kopek, back where I’d started from. I’d lost the four hundred million or so I’d made, but I still had a hundred thousand US, in cash, in my safe deposit box. That was all that was left. The nasty men had made it pretty clear they wanted me to go away somewhere, so that’s what I did, taking the cash and my brass ring with me. I wandered around for a bit, then hit on the UK as a fairly nice place to be. I came here, got off the plane at Heathrow, took a taxi to Slough and bought a disused sewage farm. Why? Because the derelict warehouse and the burned-out factory site were too much money, of course.
Next day some fixers from a supermarket chain came knocking at my hotel room door and offered me five million for my sewage farm. So that was all right. I was back in business.
After that, I took a couple of weeks off and did some thinking. Didn’t take me long to figure out that my luck depended on having the brass ring on my person at all times. Well, fine, I thought. It’s not exactly a hardship. But that was easy enough to say. The fact was, lugging the bloody thing about the place was beginning to prey on my mind really badly. I put up with it for as long as I could, and then I just couldn’t hack it any longer. I chucked the ring and the box in a pond in a field out in the middle of nowhere, turned round and kept walking. About an hour later I got struck by lightning.
I remember waking up, and I was on a hillside. I looked round, expecting to see Russian Orthodox monks zooming towards me in a golf buggy, but not this time, apparently. I was feeling like shit, though there were no bones broken or anything. I got up and walked around for a bit, till I came to this farmyard. There didn’t seem to be anybody about and I was dead on my feet, so I crawled inside the first outbuilding I came to and fell asleep.
You aren’t going to like the next bit, but never mind. While I was asleep, the brass ring appeared to me in a dream. It told me we couldn’t go on like this; I was using it up at a rate of knots, and if I carried on like that it’d have to kill me and find someone else. I didn’t like the sound of that one bit, so I asked it what it wanted me to do. Easy, it replied. Buy this farm, get planning permission, build a load of houses on it, sell them and make a nice profit. All right, I said, I’ll give it a go, and then what? At which, the ring gave me a very funny look and said, no, I didn’t understand. I was to go on doing that indefinitely, or at least until the ring told me to stop. And then I woke up.
You don’t argue with something like that. Well, maybe you would, but you’ve had a rather more conventional upbringing than me. I ran back to the pond and splashed about in the mud till I found the box. Then I walked to the nearest town, discovered who owned the farm and offered him ten times what it was worth. Planning permission was a breeze, and we started building. Then things started to get weird.
Basically, it was like this. We built the houses, and we sold them, and the day after we’d sold the last one, the whole lot vanished. Gone without a trace. I remember walking up the lane to where the housing estate ought to have been, and there was nothing there: just green grass and hedgerows and birds singing and rabbits scampering about at the side of the road, and not a house or a JCB or a big pile of bricks to be seen anywhere. Meanwhile, according to the Land Registry and the council and everybody else who presumably ought to know, I still owned the land and I had full planning consent to build as many houses on it as I could contrive to squeeze in. The only thing that hadn’t vanished, in fact, was the money. So, naturally, I started all over again. I built another housing estate and sold the houses, and sure enough, twenty-four hours after completion on the final sale, I was right back where I’d started. Grass, birds, rabbits, deeds, planning and a tidy sum put aside in the bank for a rainy day.
And that (Mr Huos said) is basically what I’ve been doing ever since. I’ve lost count of how many times. Must be twenty, at least. Which means I’ve built and sold hundreds of houses and bungalows and maisonettes and studio apartments, all on the same scrubby little bit of land, and I can’t face looking at my bank statements any more because the thought of all that money makes me feel sick. But I daren’t even think of stopping, because every time I do, I get this dream where the ring reminds me of what’ll happen to me if I don’t cooperate; and maybe it’s bluffing and maybe it isn’t, but I really don’t want to find out which. And that’s not all it’s made me do. A while back it pointed out to me that I could save a bundle on my wage bill if I hired my legal staff simultaneously rather than consecutively, and I didn’t dare argue; I just did as I was told. I haven’t got a
clue how, but I had about sixteen qualified lawyers working for me and I was only paying four lots of wages, and there’s only four offices in that part of the building.
“So the land you sold me…”
Mr Huos nodded. “The same land,” he said. “Sometimes, just for a change, I sell it to another developer instead of building on it myself. Makes no odds. As soon as the other guy’s built and sold his development, it goes straight back to green fields and gambolling wildlife. But nobody’s ever complained,” Mr Huos added, and his voice was as taut as a guitar string. “That’s the bit that gets to me. You know Jimmy Bouzek, Greystoke Properties? Sold him the land about nine months ago, got it back about six weeks later, and I bump into Jimmy all the time and he’s never said a word about our deal. Or Frank Panizo; he bought the land off me just before Christmas, and apparently he’s been going around telling everybody what a good deal he made and what a right sucker I was to let him have it so cheap. Satisfied customers, in other words. Which was why,” he added sadly, “I sold it to you, because I had no reason to suppose it wouldn’t be perfectly all right.”
Jack Tedesci looked at him for a long time, then took a deep breath. “Let me get this straight,” he said. “You’ve been selling the same bit of land over and over again, and all the houses vanish, and nobody minds?”
Mr Huos didn’t reply, and Jack Tedesci, usually about as sensitive as a policeman’s boot, realised it would probably be best not to press him on the issue. He was a simple man at heart, single-minded, tenacious, not without a considerable degree of basic predator’s cunning, but he believed that the world was made up of straight lines, numbers, causes and effects. Now he was in the excruciatingly uncomfortable position of believing two things simultaneously: one, that Mr Huos was as crazy as three ferrets in a blender; two, that at least some of what he’d just been told was probably true. Faced with something like that, the only course of action he could envisage was to get out of there as quickly as possible, forget everything he’d heard, and get his accountants busy on finding a way of writing off the stupendous sum of money he’d just lost against tax.
“Anyway,” Mr Huos was saying, “that’s what’s going on, more or less. For some reason everything seems to have chosen this particular moment to come unstuck. Bloody nuisance,” he added with a death’s-head grin. “I’ve just had to fire all my in-house lawyers, for one thing. Apparently, they’re sort of leaking into one another, and that’s more aggravation than I can handle, so I thought the simplest thing’d be to get rid of the lot of them. Hopefully all this’ll blow over and I can hire them again. I wouldn’t want to leave them stranded – they’re a good bunch of people, by and large. More worrying is that the land seems to have vanished completely. Well,” he added, “you know that already don’t you? Anyhow, that’s about it.” He grinned again, then added, “You did ask.”
“Yes,” Jack said. “I did, didn’t I?”
Mr Huos stood back and unbolted the lavatory door. “One thing,” he said. “Would you mind very much keeping all this to yourself ? Only…”
Jack laughed, a harsh, rasping noise, like a man just saved from drowning coughing up water. “No worries on that score,” he said. “If I tried to tell anyone what you just told me…” He shook his head so hard he nearly sprained something. “Safe with me,” he said firmly. “Just stay away from me, all right? I never want to see or hear from you ever again, got that?”
Mr Huos walked him back to Reception. “I’m sorry,” he said, but Jack just turned his back and lunged out into the street. Mr Huos sighed and went back to his office, where he called the bank and arranged for Jack’s money to be sent back to him. The least he could do, but not nearly enough.
Come on, Stan, he said fervently to himself. Where are you when I need you?
Mr Gogerty looked at his watch. It was blank. Where there used to be three dials, there was now only a flat sheet of brush-finished stainless steel. Oh, he thought.
The train didn’t seem to be going particularly fast, but it was definitely moving. He looked out of the window, but all he could see was his reflection against a black background. This, he thought, and someone burned down the Carpenter Library. The only possible conclusion: enemy action.
If there’s enemy action, it stands to reason there must be an enemy. Mr Gogerty slipped his mind into calm mode and considered what he knew about his presumed assailant. Not very much; but from what little he had, he might be able to build up a profile.
Competent, you had to give him that. Burning down the Carpenter couldn’t have been easy. Because of the very nature of what was stored there, the building was protected by the highest level of security known to the trade. Admittedly, the biggest concern had always been spontaneous combustion rather than arson, but the defences against the one should have protected it against the other, unless the arsonist was cunning, resourceful, imaginative and very, very good indeed at doing the business. As for this other thing: creating a biosignature-specific temporal portal, just so Stanley Gogerty could be induced to board a train to seven years in the future, wasn’t just impressive, it was showing off. Look how clever I am, his opponent was telling him; you don’t want to mess with someone like me. It was also a remarkably humane way of getting rid of him, he couldn’t help thinking. There were far worse things, and they were much cheaper and easier to use. If Mr Gogerty had been called upon to take someone out, he’d have gone for something like a consequence mine, probability well, Better Mousetrap or McKinley bomb – tried and tested, devastatingly effective, practically impossible to detect or counter and (since British law didn’t recognise the existence of the profession) perfectly legal, even though the effect on the victim was either fatal or worse. Temporal phase engineering was much harder to do, substantially more expensive, considerably less reliable and totally forbidden under the trade’s own ferociously enforced by-laws; it was also, to someone of Mr Gogerty’s abilities, relatively easy to get out of, eventually. His enemy, therefore, was someone who wanted him out of the way for a certain length of time (no pun intended) but who meant him no lasting harm, and who probably wanted to impress on him that he wasn’t playing the blind school. Burning down the Carpenter, on the other hand, implied a rather scary degree of ruthlessness. This time, his unknown enemy was telling him, nobody needs to get hurt. Next time…
Mr Gogerty was mildly impressed; he knew quite a lot about his enemy, after all. That in itself was significant. In the small, claustrophobic village of the profession, such a profile narrowed the list of suspects down considerably, and obviously his enemy knew that. It was almost as though Stan was deliberately being offered a set of clues to an identity – a signature, in fact, albeit a squiggly, illegible doctors-and-solicitors signature that either you recognised or you didn’t. It’s somebody I know, Mr Gogerty’s intuition yelled in his inner ear, somebody I know quite well. Definitely somebody who knows me, or else how…?
He frowned. Leaving the blindingly obvious till last was a fault of his, one that he regretted. The temporal portal had been laid by somebody who could accurately predict his movements. Now that was scary. He’d only taken the Tube because he couldn’t get a taxi. Refine search parameters. It was pretty unusual that he hadn’t been able to get a taxi, since his summoning technology was extremely sophisticated. He reviewed it. Rated Grade 6, it was guaranteed to bring him a taxi in Stoke Newington at 3 a.m. within twenty-five seconds of issuing the summons. A dampening field, therefore. His enemy had neutralised the summons in order to make him take a Tube, before cutting an access portal through time so he’d walk into an Underground station that wouldn’t be built for another seven years. Leaving aside the quite remarkable achievement this represented, it begged the question of how Mr Enemy had known which future Tube stop to access; the answer to which was that he’d known the direction Stanley Gogerty intended to travel in. Given the ad hoc nature of the decision, whoever it was must have exceptionally accurate, up-to-the-minute information about his plans and intenti
ons. In other words, a tracking device. A bug.
Where there’s a bug there’s a bugger. At some point in the fairly recent past someone had got close enough to plant a tracking device on him, someone with a strong incentive for hindering his current mission. That really narrowed it down while, at the same time, throwing it wide open. Someone who’d come within arm’s reach of him. Someone who, presumably, really didn’t like Mr Huos. Someone with a Grade 9 or higher trade rating.
Um.
Meanwhile, he decided, it would probably be a good idea to stop the train and get off. He got up and walked along the carriage, looking for the red emergency-stop button. There wasn’t one. That, he had to concede, made things awkward. A Tube train in motion in an underground tunnel isn’t the easiest thing in the world to disembark from. He could smash a window and crawl/jump/fall out, but only if he didn’t mind the high probability of being killed or horribly mangled. He tried the connecting door into the next carriage, with a view to getting to the driver’s cab. It was locked, and not just with a physical mechanism. When he touched it, it was as though he’d loaded up on LSD and stuck his hand in a bacon slicer. He took a moment to recover, then tried prodding the handle very gently with a pencil, which promptly turned into a green mamba and tried to crawl up his sleeve. He dropped it quickly and retreated to the other end of the compartment. Someone had put a Grade 6 jamming protocol on the door. Laying it on with a trowel, he couldn’t help thinking.
His respect for his unidentified enemy ratcheted up a notch or two. Eventually, the train would arrive somewhere (because a stable temporal stasis field, though theoretically possible, would be inconceivably expensive to produce) and he’d be able to get off and find his way back to his own proper time and place. Until then, he was forced to concede, he was stuck. Mr Enemy – it hurt him to admit it, but he had no choice – was better at this sort of thing than he was. Grade 6 jamming protocols. He shuddered and issued a mental apology to his client. Sorry, Mr Huos, but you’re on your own. Stanley Gogerty is off the case. He sighed, opened his briefcase, took out the forensics report for the Mendoza Consortium inquiry and began to read.
