A Tale of Time City (14 page)

“If you do that, the red bits at the top won’t show,” Vivian said. She took another step down the gallery.

“You have a point,” Elio said, still staring at the boots.

It was maddening. He seemed to be stuck in front of them. “What did they make you
for
?” Vivian asked rather desperately. “An experiment?”

“No, for efficiency,” Elio said. “I am stronger and faster than a born-human. I live longer and I need less sleep. My bones do not break so easily.” He turned towards her. Vivian thought he might be moving at last. She sidled a few more steps towards the hall. Elio took a step in the same direction. “And of course my brain is the best part of me,” he said. “I have twice the intelligence of a born-human and five times the memory. Thus I am acutely observant. But—” To Vivian’s exasperation, he turned back to the show case. He frowned. “This does not make up for the finer points of human taste,” he said. “What if I turned the boots completely, around?”

In the passage, Sam and Jonathan were clearly getting impatient. Vivian had a glimpse, of the door shutting hurriedly again and of Jonathan’s pigtail caught dangling over the chain. “But
I
have taste,” she said. “The boots look very nice. Do you eat the same things as born-humans, Mr Elio?”

“I live mostly on liquids,” said Elio, “though I am partial to fruit.”

“And,” said Vivian. “And.” She walked on a few steps. This time Elio came with her. “And—” She racked her brains for more things to ask. “And were you the only one they made, or were there more of you?”

“They made about a hundred,” Elio said, walking slowly beside her. “It was a very costly process and no more could be afforded.”

“Where are all the others?” Vivian asked. Now they were really walking towards the hall, but awfully slowly.

“They were sent out,” said Elio, “to help colonise the stars eventually. This is what we were designed for. I am from Hundred and Five Century, you see, when mankind spreads through the galaxy and mostly departs from Earth. But I was ordered by Time City, as a rarity of history. Time City collects one of every rarity, this being a policy begun by Faber John.”

“You must be awfully lonely,” Vivian said. She was beginning to feel mean, pretending to be so interested in Elio. “Don’t you miss all the other androids?”

“Not at all,” said Elio. “The only time I met another android, I became extremely irritated with the creature. I confess I wished to hit it in the face. It is the one occasion on which I have felt those strong emotions that you born-humans seem to feel all the time.”

“Don’t you feel
any
thing?” Vivian said. By now they were walking briskly and they were nearly at the corner into the hall. “Don’t you even feel happy?”

“No, but neither do I feel sad,” Elio said. “Amusement I do feel, and much contentment. The alarms and fusses of generations of born-humans keep me entertained all the time.”

They turned the corner into the hall, on to sunlight lying in patterns on the patterned marble. Vivian sighed with relief. But she was finding Elio much more interesting than she expected. “How long have you been in Time City?”

“A hundred years come next New Year,” Elio said.

“But you don’t look anything like that old!” Vivian exclaimed.

“I told you—” Elio began. But he was interrupted by Sempitern Walker rushing down the stairs in a long blue robe.

“Elio! For great Chronos’ sake!” Sempitern Walker called out. “Will you stop messing with that museum of yours for a minute! I’ve a session of Privy Chronologue in five minutes and you haven’t given me my notes for it yet!”

“They are all ready in the study, sir,” Elio said, “if you will come with me.” But before he went away with the Sempitern, he said to Vivian, “I told you I was designed for endurance as well as efficiency.” This caused Jonathan’s father to give Vivian a look as if she was the last straw and hurry Elio away. Vivian was left perversely wishing she could have talked to Elio for much longer.

Jonathan and Sam shot round the corner looking hot, tired, and relieved. “Whoo!” said Sam.

“I thought we were going to be stuck in that passage all day!” Jonathan said. “What’s the time?”

“Just before eleven,” said Vivian. “Isn’t that lucky?”

They agreed that it was. “I need a drink,” said Sam. “That warty woman never gave me anything.”

Jonathan took them to the matutinal, where there was a gadget on the wall which gave out cups of fruit juice. Sam drank three. Vivian and Jonathan each had two. They were sucking up the last drops when Jenny hurried in. “I thought you said you’d be in the hall,” she said. “Hurry up. Ramona’s waiting.”

Vivian never had a chance to ask who Ramona was. She turned out to be Sam’s mother. She was paler and wider and sleepier-looking than her sister Jenny. She was carrying two birdcages like the one Sam had left hidden in the time-lock, with interesting-shaped foods floating under them. She smiled at Vivian. “You were
the image of our brother Viv when I saw you last,” Ramona said. “Funny how children change.”

“BURP!” said Sam. It was the natural result of drinking three cups of fruit-juice without pausing to breathe, but it luckily turned everyone’s attention off Vivian and on to Sam.

“What
has
he done to his hair?” said Jenny.

Sam’s hand and everyone’s eyes went to the top of his head, where his hair still stood in a tuft with Vivian’s rubber band round it. “I want to look like my uncle Ranjit,” he said. “It suits me.”

“No, it doesn’t. Take it down,” said Ramona, and added without looking, “And tie up your shoes.”

“Mothers ought to be sent out into history,” said Sam. His own time in history had put him in a very bad mood. He stumped in the rear, muttering crossly to himself, while they crossed Time Close into Aeon Square and took a short cut past the great glass building down some steps to the Avenue of the Four Ages.

Ramona led the way across the Avenue to one of the archways in the wall. “We thought we’d take a boat,” she said.

Sam cheered up at once. He raced ahead, through the archway and down the dizzily long flight of steps to the wharf. When the others got to the steps, he was already sitting in a red thing floating on the river beside the wharf. There was a line of the things, all different colours. Vivian supposed they were boats, but they looked more like cars to her. That put her in mind of a strange fact about Time City. “You don’t have cars here!” she said.

Jonathan was clearly thinking about something else. “We don’t need them,” he said vaguely.

They went down and settled into the comfortable squashy seats
aboard the boat Sam had chosen. “Red’s my favourite colour,” he told Vivian.

The boat spoke, in a rattling voice from under the floor. “Where to, passengers?” it said. It made Vivian jump.

“All day hire. Main locks first,” said Jenny. “And transmogue for us.”

Transmoguing seemed to mean that the roof suddenly vanished, which made Vivian jump again. Cool winds blew in her hair as the boat made a wide half-circle out into the middle of the river and set off, with the faintest of rattling sounds, away from Time City. Vivian soon began to enjoy herself as much as Sam. The day was warm, though nothing like as hot as that day in 1939, and the sky was blue. The flat lands sliding past were green with new crops. There were houses at intervals in the fields—all kinds from thatched cottages to one built mostly of shimmering nothingness—and orchards, orchards, orchards, loaded with white and pink blossom.

“It’s spring here!” Vivian exclaimed.

“Yes, we keep the seasons,” Jenny said. “It must seem strange to you. Wasn’t it autumn when you left Twenty Century?”

Vivian nodded, thinking of the blackberries still staining Sam’s face from the lane by the Tor. She saw a machine in the distance, rushing across a field spraying out a white cloud of something. She turned to Jonathan to say that Time City
did
have cars of a sort, but Jonathan had his head together with Sam’s. Sam, after five minutes of bouncing about shouting how much he was enjoying himself, was busy taking Jonathan’s belt to pieces to put the clock-function right, and seemed to have forgotten he was on a boat at all.

“What’s wrong with it?” asked Jenny.

“A faulty consistor-connection,” Jonathan answered glibly.

It seemed amazing to Vivian that neither of the mothers put the stains round Sam’s mouth together with the fact that Jonathan’s belt was showing the wrong time and realised where they had just been. But they didn’t. Ramona said placidly, and rather proudly, “Sam can mend that easily.”

Meanwhile the boat surged steadily round bend after bend of Time River, missing other boats as if it could see them. They passed, and missed, other boats like their own, small barges, rafts where people were fishing, and a huge pleasure-boat full of tourists, who all waved. After that came a boat huger still, making waves that piled up along both banks. It was a great barge as high as a house and nearly as long as a football pitch, with men in strange hats on top, who waved too.

“There goes meat from Forty-two Century,” said Ramona.

“All that!” said Vivian. “Who pays for it?”

“We all do,” said Jenny. “Time City trades in exchange—only what we trade is knowledge, Vivian. There are records in Perpetuum, Erstwhile, Agelong, and suchlike of most things the human race has ever known or done. Students come to study here. And anything anyone in history wants to know, we can tell them for a fee—provided it’s something from
before
the date they ask, of course.”

“Oh—we stretch a point sometimes, Jenny,” Ramona said. “My department gives weather forecasts, remember?”

Jenny laughed. “Yes, and Ongoing Science quite often gives hints to make sure Science goes the right way. But we do have to be careful about sending history wrong.”

“We can’t have all of it going unstable,” agreed Ramona.

The voyage lasted nearly an hour. Jenny and Ramona pointed out interesting farms or said things like, “You get an even better view of the City from here,” as new domes and towers came into sight at new bends of the river. Vivian saw Endless Hill from all sorts of different angles. It
was
like the Tor. The only difference was that the Gnomon Tower was not at all like a church. It was more like an old, old lighthouse.

About the time Sam finished Jonathan’s belt and Jonathan buckled it back on, Jenny and Ramona turned and pointed the way the boat was going. “We’re nearly down at the Locks now. Can you see the land’s ending?”

About a field away, the green country just stopped. The blue sky came right down to the ground there. “Ooh!” said Vivian. “That looks a bit creepy!”

“No, it’s not,” said Jonathan. “It’s safe. The thing I
hate
about history is the way the ground goes on and on. If I had to live in history, that would send me mad in the first week.”

Vivian thought of the way Jonathan had become so uncomfortable while they were looking for Cousin Marty’s house. This must have been the reason.

“Don’t be silly, Jonathan,” said Jenny. “No one’s going to send
you
out into history!”

Shortly, the boat turned a corner and nuzzled into a side channel of the river. There were high stone walls on either side. The boat drew into a wharf behind a line of others. “You still wish to retain me?” it asked in its rattling voice.

“Yes. I said all day hire,” Jenny said, as they stood up to get off. “I wish they’d make those things a bit more trusting,” she said to Ramona, while they were climbing steps up the side of the wharf.

“It may be faulty,” Ramona suggested. But when they looked back, the boat’s roof was back in place with the word HIRED shining in big letters along the roof. “It was just making sure we hadn’t changed our minds,” Ramona said.

At the top of the steps, they came to a kind of stone platform, right at the very end of the land. There was a long row of silvery booths at the back of the platform, in a line against the sky. Their doors were sliding open and shut as people came through in all sorts of costumes. Some of them looked businesslike, but most of them stopped and stared round excitedly and pointed to the strange dress of the others. After that, they went and showed long golden tickets at a kiosk in the centre of the platform, where they were given maps and a crackling sheet of information and directed to the other side of the platform, where a man stood at a gate checking tickets. The platform rang with excited exclamations and happy laughter, and the few people going the other way, mostly in Time City pyjamas, had to push their way through the slow throng in order to get to the booths.

Jenny and Ramona led the way to the railing by the gate, where they leant and looked down at a huge tourist-boat waiting to take people to the City. Colourful people were going down the long ramp and taking their seats aboard. There was another boat waiting across the river, where there was the same sort of platform and another row of booths. In between, stretching right across the river,
were six really massive time-locks, standing high against the sky above the platforms. As they watched, another big barge came slowly nudging through the third lock along, against the strong brown current of the River Time.

“Where does the river go to?” Vivian asked.

“It runs out through the locks into different rivers at various times,” Jenny said.

The tourist boat across the river was full. It clanged a bell and set out in a swirl of brown water on its journey to the City. Music was playing on board it and people were opening bottles. It looked very festive.

“I’m thirsty,” said Sam. “
Thirsty
!” he added loudly. And when nobody noticed, he went on saying it.

“What happens,” Vivian asked, “if a tourist meets his own grandchildren and hates them and decides not to get married? Wouldn’t that change history?”

“There’s a whole branch of Time Patrol checking to make sure that won’t happen,” said Ramona. “Hush, Sam.”

“But quite a lot of people come here specially to meet their ancestors or their descendants,” Jenny said. “We have conference rooms in Millennium where they can get together.”

“I do think,” Ramona said, “that Viv and Inga should have told Vivian more about Time City. It’s not fair on the child!”