A Tale of Time City (16 page)

“No, you stupid android!” Sempitern Walker shouted out of the midst of them. “The other hat! And I said the gold bands, you stupid woman! Find them, can’t you! The ceremony’s due in twenty minutes!” He came bursting, out of the crowd and sped towards Jonathan and Vivian again.

This is marvellous! Vivian thought, as the others all turned themselves hastily round and raced after the Sempitern. Sempitern Walker swung himself nimbly round on the end of the banisters and went flying up the stairs two at a time. “And I have to have the carnelian studs!” he bellowed. “Can’t anyone find anything in this place?”

A giggle began to rise up Vivian’s throat as everyone else went streaming up the stairs after him. “You’re all useless!” she heard him shout. “Gold bands!” They all went running round the railed landing overhead, tripping over mats and getting in one another’s
way. Vivian nearly laughed outright. This is as good as a film! she thought, turning to see what Jonathan thought of it.

Jonathan swung haughtily away. “This happens every time there’s a ceremony,” he said wearily. “Come on. We’d better get breakfast.”

The giggle was sitting right behind Vivian’s teeth, fighting to get out. She swallowed it down. “Do you have ceremonies very often?” she asked, trying to stop her voice shaking.

“About every two days,” Jonathan said dourly.

They had breakfast to the din of running feet, shouting, and one or two metallic crashes, as if someone had thrown a gold chain downstairs. Jonathan pretended not to notice. Vivian understood perfectly that he would be very hurt if she laughed, but the giggle would keep rising up her throat whenever the running feet and the roars came close to the matutinal. This made it hard for her to follow what Jonathan was saying.

“We ought to go after that boy and get the box back,” he said. “If he was doing a hundred years with every time-jump, he’ll be in the middle of a Fixed Era by now and probably sending that crazy too. We should be able to find him if that time-egg works. But I didn’t like the way it nearly didn’t bring us back. We don’t want to get stranded in history.”

The Sempitern’s feet pounded past the matutinal, followed by the feet of everyone else. Vivian struggled with the rising giggle again. “Do you think he might be trying to steal all the polarities?” she asked, trying to think sensibly. “Couldn’t we go to them first and ask the people in those places to keep guard on them? How many of them are there?”

“I don’t know,” Jonathan said, almost groaning. “I don’t know where or when they are. I’m not even sure that it
was
a polarity he stole.”

It was clear that what the Scientist said last night had shaken Jonathan’s faith badly. And he certainly had jumped to that conclusion, Vivian thought. There was no proof. On the other hand—here Sempitern Walker’s feet thumped across the ceiling of the matutinal and she had to swallow the giggle again. “Do cheer up,” she said. “Think of our time-ghosts. You can tell we did—
do
do something.”

“That’s true!” Jonathan said, brightening a little.

Soon after this, the Palace went suddenly quiet. Jonathan pressed the clock-stud on his belt and said that they ought to be going. Vivian got up and followed him, feeling very nervous. Jonathan did not seem to be taking anything to school with him, not even a pen. This made Vivian feel odd and incomplete. She thought she had got used to the naked feeling of wearing Time City pyjamas, but she felt naked all over again without any books or even a pencil box.

The hall and the stairs were littered with silken cloaks, various hats, shoes, and several golden chains. Elio was soberly backing down, the stairs, picking everything up. Vivian could not see his face clearly, but she could have sworn that Elio was smiling.

Sam was definitely smiling when they met him by the fountain in Time Close, his widest smile with two teeth in it. “Your father ran,” he said. “Like a rocket. He picked up his robes and he sprinted. Was it a big fuss?”

“About average,” Jonathan said haughtily. “Get moving. It’s due to rain in ten minutes.”

Vivian looked up at the sky as they came through the archway into Aeon Square. White clouds were billowing up, with grey ones following, but it did not look very much like rain. “Are you sure it’s going to rain?”

“Yes, because we’re getting this year’s weather from Thirty-five-eighty-nine,” said Jonathan. “They never pick a drought year because of the crops. You can get a forecast from your belt.”

“Which stud?” said Vivian.

They went across Aeon Square showing Vivian how her belt worked. The weather-stud lit up a shining green list along her forearm:

“See how efficient Elio is,” Jonathan said. “He’s got you one you can read. Mine’s all in Universal Symbols.”

“How many units credit did he give you?” said Sam. “No—that stud, stupid!”

Vivian put her finger on that stud and the palm of her hand lit up.

she read, rather awed. Two hundred pounds? Surely not!

“Lucky blister!” said Sam. “Two hundred butter-pies!”

“You’ve got a low-weight-function too,” Jonathan said. “And
that one’s the pen-function. What’s your time-function—clock-face or digital?”

Vivian was so fascinated by her belt that she did not notice straight away that the ceremony that had caused all the fuss at the Palace was taking place on the other side of Aeon Square. A line of figures all in red, looking tiny below the huge buildings, was pacing slowly down the square. Jonathan’s father was walking near the head of them, behind someone carrying a silver battle-axe thing, pacing in the most grave, stately, and important way. You wouldn’t believe, to look at him, that he’s spent the last half hour rushing about and yelling! Vivian thought.

“Who are the ones with him?” she asked.

“Annuate Guard,” said Sam.

“A lot of old folk retired from Time Patrol,” Jonathan said. He pointed to the other end of the square. “And the blue lot look to be the Librarians. Hurry up. Everyone’s going into Duration.”

The blue line was pacing towards the red one, robes billowing, tall blue hats on their heads, led by two who seemed to be carrying a gigantic old book open on a cushion. Behind them, where Jonathan was really pointing, much smaller figures were streaming along the end of the square from right and left and going in through the high open door of Duration. The sight made even Sam hurry. But he stopped again at Faber John’s Stone. By this time the two processions of the ceremony were close enough for Vivian to recognise Mr. Enkian under the tall blue hat, just behind the two Librarians with the book, looking very sour and self-important. The two lines were obviously going to meet just beside Faber John’s Stone.

“Hey! Look at that crack today!” Jonathan exclaimed.

The crack had grown right down from the corner of the slab, through the golden letters FAB and on into the bald part. There it forked into three new cracks, zig-zagging faintly out into the middle of the stone. There was no need for Jonathan to measure it to see that it had grown.

“Great Time! I hope it
doesn’t
mean what they say!” he said.

The two processions had met by then. “Sempitern greets Perpetuum in the name of the Chronologue,” Jonathan’s father intoned from quite near. A few drops of rain came down.

“Perhaps Faber John’s woken up enough to wriggle his toes,” Vivian suggested, not very seriously. “They’d about reach here from that cave.”

Sam’s face bunched up and he stamped defiantly on the branching crack. His shoelace burst undone. Jonathan took his arm and dragged him off. “Careful! You could make it worse!”

“By the power vested in me, through me Perpetuum greets Chronologue and Sempitern,” Mr. Enkian was now intoning. “These my Librarians—”

His voice was suddenly drowned in a skirling of pipe-music. Vivian looked up to find the ceremony dissolving into confusion. A long-legged man in a tall floppy hat was dancing figures-of-eight round the Sempitern and the old man carrying the axe, playing on a set of bagpipes as he pranced. Just as Vivian looked, he cavorted in among the Annuate Guard, leaping and bounding and throwing out his long legs like a lunatic. The elderly people in red uniforms scattered out of his way, except for one old lady who drew her
ceremonial sword and shakily tried to bar the dancer’s way. But the leaping man danced clean through the sword and pranced on, quite unharmed and still skirling away at his bagpipes.

Vivian realised that the lunatic must be a time-ghost. Oddly enough, nobody in the ceremony seemed to think he was. When he pranced in among the Librarians, the blue-robed people scattered too. “Will you stop that, whoever you are!” Mr. Enkian shouted.

The man whirled and did a neat high kick towards the cushion with the huge old book on it. Vivian could see that the long leg and the pointed shoe never touched the cushion or the book, but the two Librarians were fooled and tried to snatch the cushion out of the way. The book slid to the ground in a flurry of stiff pages.

“Doomsday Book!” Mr. Enkian shouted. He and the two Librarians pounced for the book, horrified, and the dancing man sprang capering across their groping backs. Next moment, he was cavorting straight towards Vivian, Sam, and Jonathan.

“Arrest him!” Sempitern Walker commanded the Guards. They shouted back that the lunatic was only a time-ghost. But most of the shouting was drowned in the deafening sound of the bagpipes. Vivian had an instant’s glimpse of the lunatic’s pale, intense face as she backed out of its way, before the figure whirled round and pranced on to Faber John’s Stone.

The slab broke into a hundred pieces beneath the madly dancing pointed feet. The pieces broke again, and those pieces broke too, milling away to pale gravel in seconds. By this time, the dancing man had become oddly hard to see and the din from the bagpipes sounded muffled. Then he faded away entirely and there
was silence mixed with a growing patter of rain. Faber John’s Stone was whole again, except for the forked crack, and turning black and wet.

“Confound it!” Mr Enkian said angrily, trying to shield Doomsday Book with a fold of his robe. “We’d better begin again.”

Jonathan, Sam, and Vivian ran through the rain, leaving the ceremony reorganising itself in the downpour. “That was a funny kind of time-ghost!” Jonathan panted. “I wonder if it
was
one.”

Sam had no doubt about it. As soon as they dashed in through the door of Duration, he began shouting, “We’ve seen a new kind of time-ghost! Everyone I’ve seen a new time-ghost!” His voice could be heard booming this all morning. Vivian heard it oftener than she would have liked, because, to her shame, she was put in the same class as Sam. The class she should have been in was, as far as she could tell, learning things that even her teachers in London had never heard of.

“I’m sure you’ll soon catch up,” the Head Teacher said. “All you Lees are quick. But I can’t move you up until you know Universal Symbols.”

Sam’s class was learning Universal Symbols. Vivian sat in an empty-frame chair that was rather too small in front of an empty-frame desk a trifle too low and tried to form strange signs on a white square that was not really paper. The rest of the class were using green pencils, but as Vivian was older she was allowed to use the pen-function on her new belt. When you pressed the stud, a green light sprang up between your fingers. It felt like a pen. It wrote in green and it was easy to use. Unfortunately, the stud for it
was next to the stud for low-weight-function. Vivian kept pressing the wrong one by mistake and soaring gently out of her empty-frame chair.

“Be quiet, Sam. Tie up your shoes,” the teacher said every time Vivian caused a disturbance by doing this. He was right, in a way. Every other disturbance was caused by Sam telling people about the time-ghost. But it made Vivian ashamed. By the end of the morning, when the teacher collected their work by pressing a button, whereupon what they had written vanished from the white squares and appeared lined up in the empty-frame of his desk, Vivian was feeling very low.

Lunch cheered her up. They went to a long room surrounded by automats—like the one in Jonathan’s room which needed kicking, except that these did not need to be kicked so often. The automats allowed each child four things. They seemed to know if you tried to cheat by going to more than one. Even Sam could not get them to give him more than four butter-pies. Then you sat at the long tables to eat the four things.

Vivian was new, and she was a Lee. This made everyone very interested in her. A crowd gathered round her. By now Vivian was so used to pretending she was Cousin Vivian Lee that she almost forgot that she was not. She told them she had just come from Twenty Century, from World War Two. This caused even more interest and a bigger crowd still. Most of the children had never been in history and they wanted to know how it felt.

As she answered their questions, Vivian looked round the room and was quite surprised that there were no more children than this
in Time City. True, it was a big school. But all the children in it, from tiny ones far smaller than Sam to nearly grown-up ones a head taller than Jonathan, were all fitted into this one long room for lunch. When she asked, they told her that Duration was the only school in the City. More than half the children came in every day by boat or hovercraft from farms in the countryside. This was very strange to Vivian after the crowded schools of London. She told them about those and they were astonished to think that one teacher could teach over thirty children at once.

“How
can
he hold thirty sets of brain-rhythms in his head at once?” someone asked. “Now tell about the war. Is it quiet like the Mind Wars or noisy like the New Zealand Takeover?”

“Do they run up and down the streets fighting?” someone else wanted to know.

Vivian tried to explain that when two
countries
fought one another they did not usually do it in the streets unless the army from one country invaded the other. Then she had to explain what invading was.