A Tale of Time City (18 page)

“A bit,” said Vivian. “Four more were full of electricity, but they were insulated with policemen, so that the town could learn philosophy for at least a year.”

“Four more old women and an unspecified number of police,” Dr. Wilander remarked. “The blacksmith makes at least fifteen. I hope he paid the police for wrapping themselves round the electrical old ladies. It sounds painful. Or are you implying that the police were electrocuted, thus supplying the townsfolk with a valuable moral lesson?”

“I don’t know,” Vivian said hopelessly.

“But just what,” asked Dr. Wilander, “do you think your multitudes of old women were really doing?”

“I’ve no idea,” Vivian confessed.

“People don’t usually write nonsense,” Dr. Wilander remarked, still placidly puffing at his pipe. “Pass the paper to Jonathan. Perhaps he can tell us what all these people were up to.”

Jonathan took the paper out of Vivian’s hand. He looked at it and stuffed another lump of pigtail into his mouth. Tears trickled from under the flicker of his eye-function.

“Jonathan considers it to be a tragedy,” Dr. Wilander growled sadly. “The police were killed by high voltage crones. Here. I’ll read it.” He plucked the paper out of Jonathan’s shaking fist and read, “The great Faber John made four containers or caskets and hid each of them in one of the Four Ages of the World.” He turned to Vivian. “
Faber
does indeed mean
Smith
and the Symbol is the same, but your old ladies came about because you took no notice of the double age-Symbol, which always means
time
, or
an Age of the World
if it’s female. To continue.” He read, “The casket made of iron, he concealed in the Age of Iron. The second, which was of silver, he hid in the Silver Age, and the third which was pure gold, in the Age of Gold. The fourth container was of lead and hidden in the same manner. He filled these four caskets with the greater part of his power and appointed to each one a special guardian. In this way he ensured that Time City would endure throughout a whole Platonic Year… There,” he said to Vivian. “That makes perfect sense to me—
and
supplies Jonathan with another of the legends he likes so much.”

Jonathan unstuffed his mouth and asked seriously, “Do you think what it says is true?”

“The writer thought so,” Dr. Wilander grunted. “He or she believed it enough to put the paper in the time-safe up here many thousands of years ago. The containers of power it talks about are, of course, what we nowadays call polarities.”

“And what’s a Platonic Year?” Jonathan asked.

“The time it takes for the stars to work their way back to the pattern from which they started,” said Dr. Wilander. “This is sometimes calculated to be two hundred and fifty-eight centuries, which, if Vivian would look at that chart for a moment, instead of letting her eyes slide off it, she will find to be almost exactly the length of human history. Vivian, you will learn that chart for me by tomorrow. And, since that paper is too valuable to take away, you will take this copy instead and make me a proper translation of all of it, also by tomorrow. Jonathan will do me a detailed essay on the Icelandic Empire.”

Vivian left the warm wood-smelling room feeling as wet and chewed as the end of Jonathan’s pigtail.

“I think he’s a monster!” she said as they started down the thousand stairs.

T
hey walked back across Aeon Square. “Would you call Twenty Century part of the Age of Iron?” Jonathan asked thoughtfully.

“Certainly not!” Vivian said indignantly. “We use aluminium and plastic and chromium. The Iron Age was when they lived in huts!”

“I was only—” Jonathan began. But he was interrupted by the skirling of bagpipes from the centre of the square. There was a lot of surging and pointing among the crowd of tourists gathered there around Faber John’s Stone. They had glimpses of the ghost capering among them. “The student doing that is going to get caught if he’s not careful,” Jonathan said. “It must take quite a big projector.”

“You mean a hollow gramophone is a kind of film?” Vivian asked with new interest. Films she knew all about.

“Hologram. Yes,” said Jonathan. “You use laser beams to make an image you can see all round. About the time of the Mind Wars people get really good at it. I bet that student comes from then.”

“What are laser beams?” Vivian asked.

“A special kind of beam,” Jonathan said in his most lordly manner. Vivian suspected that this was because he had very little more idea than she had.

The ghost had vanished by the time they got to the centre of the square. They skirted the crowd and went towards Time Close. Sam was waiting for them under the archway. “Are we going to go after the boy who stole the polarity?” he demanded.

“When I’ve decided the best way to go about it,” Jonathan said, using his lordly manner again. This told Vivian that Jonathan had no more idea how to go after the boy than he had about laser beams. “I told you we don’t want to get stranded in history,” he said. “You know that egg didn’t work properly after we time-travelled with it.”

“I’ll come and eat butter-pies in your room while you think,” Sam offered.

“No you won’t,” Jonathan said. “I’ve got to do an essay for Wilander.”

Sam turned his widest two-toothed smile towards Vivian. “Then I’ll come to your room and show you how your automat works,” he said.

“Not now—anyway I know how it works,” Vivian said. She felt suddenly overwhelmed with work. “I’ve a chart and Universal Symbols and a translation—I shall be up all
night
, I think!”

“Round-eyed blister and slit-eyed swot!” Sam said. “I hate school days. Everyone goes boring!” He went stumping disgustedly away, flapping two sets of shoelaces on the cobbles.

“Now he’ll do something to get back at us,” Jonathan said. “He usually does.”

Vivian did not much care. She was far more frightened of Dr. Wilander making fun of her again. She hurried to her room and tried to force her unwilling brain to work. It would not. She spent an hour staring at the chart and the Symbols and the only thing she learnt was that a pen-function was not like a real pen in the most important way there was. You could not chew it. She was forced to get up and try to remember what Petula had shown her you did to work the neat little automat on her wall. Sam would have found it deeply disappointing. It did not do butter-pies. It gave Vivian two seaweed chews and a cherry brandysnap-twist, all of which were thoroughly nourishing and good for the teeth, and did nothing for Vivian’s over-taxed brain at all.

“Oh bother!” she said. She turned on some music that called itself Antarctic Bedlam-style, fixed her teeth grimly in a seaweed chew and tried again.

By dinner time she had translated the part of the valuable paper that Dr. Wilander had read out—which was cheating really, because she remembered what it said. Then she had to stop and change into the crisp white pyjamas Petula had laid out for her. They gave her ghostly red roses in her hair and on one shoulder. Vivian turned on the mirror and admired them before she went down to see who tonight’s guests were.

Mr. Enkian was one of them. The others were all high-ups from Continuum or Perpetuum who had been offended by the student’s joke. After one look at their faces, Vivian knew that Sempitern
Walker was going to have to be very boring indeed. And she was right. Mr Enkian started as soon as they were sitting at the table.

“Sempitern, I will not have our traditional ceremonies mocked, particularly in this time of crisis, when everyone should be standing solidly behind Time City. They poked fun not only at me—and yourself of course—but also at Faber John’s Stone. And, as if this was not enough, Doomsday Book fell in a puddle!”

Sempitern Walker fixed his eyes anxiously on a far corner and talked drearily for five minutes about “youthful high spirits” and “not condone it in the least but should endeavour to take a lenient quasi-parental line.”

Mr. Enkian waited for him to stop and said, “I shall put forward a motion in Chronologue. My colleagues here will vote for it. In future we shall ban all students from Sixty-seven Century or any other era with disruptive technology.”

Which meant that Sempitern Walker had to fix his gaze on another corner and drone on again about “a balanced mix of students from all feasible eras.” Vivian watched him while he talked and willed him to jump up from the table and run about shouting the way he had that morning. It would be so much more interesting. And she was sure it would shut Mr. Enkian up in seconds.

“We don’t take students from Unstable Eras,” Mr. Enkian snapped. “If we already ban everyone from Fifty-eight to Sixty-five Centuries, we can quite easily extend the ban to cover Fifty-six Century as well. That’s where the culprit came from—I’m positive of that.”

“But if we did that,” Sempitern Walker said, crumbling the food
in his dish and looking as if he had toothache, “we’d run the risk of attempting to exclude some student whom history states to have studied here. This would initiate instability in that era.”

“Please,” Vivian asked, while Mr. Enkian was opening his mouth to reply. “Please,
why
don’t you have people from Unstable Eras?” As soon as she said it, she realised how very brave Jonathan had been to interrupt the talk the night before. Mr. Enkian glared at her. Sempitern Walker turned his toothache look on her. Vivian felt her face going hot.

But Sempitern Walker seemed to think her question was perfectly reasonable. “We don’t let them in for a number of reasons,” he said. “The most important one is that we need the Unstable Eras to stay just as they are in order to keep the Fixed Eras steady. We can’t have a man from, say Sixty Century knowing he could come to Time City and find out about his future. We rely on his era—the Third Unstable Era—to have the wars and make the inventions which lead to the Icelandic Empire in the next Fixed Era. If this man from Sixty Century knew this, either he might sit back and not do anything, thinking the future was fixed anyway; or—which is probably worse—he might get annoyed and do something quite different. And the trouble with Unstable Eras is that quite small things can change the course of history in them. Is that clear?”

Vivian nodded, trying to look as clever as the real Cousin Vivian. From the way Mr. Enkian was glowering, she suspected that Sempitern Walker was quite glad she had interrupted. “And what happens when an Unstable Era goes critical?” she asked, before Mr. Enkian could say anything.

Sempitern Walker’s toothache look subsided to the usual look of mere anguish. “That,” he said, “happens when enough changes happen to the history of that era to change the Fixed Eras before and after them—as in Twenty Century at the moment. The change rolls forward first, as you might expect. We’re now having trouble in Twenty-three Century, because several inventions which ought to have been made then have been made already in 1940. But the instability is beginning to roll backwards too. Time Patrol are having to work very hard to make sure the Roman Empire—”

Mr. Enkian sprang to his feet with his pointed yellow face twisted. “Oh, this is
too
much!” he shouted.

“Now
really
, Mr. Enkian!” Jenny said, sounding crosser than Vivian had ever heard her.

“No,” said Mr. Enkian. “I meant. That.” He pointed to the rounded end wall of the room. “Excrescence,” he said. He was so angry that he was having trouble in speaking.

Everyone’s head switched that way. The students’ time-ghost was there. Jonathan swallowed what he was eating and crammed his pigtail into his mouth. Vivian slammed both hands across her face so that no one should see her laughing. It was such cheek of the students! The tall crazy-looking man with his high floppy hat was standing against the half-circle of wall, obviously projected there like a film, leering at them like a slightly anxious Court Jester. Vivian felt she knew his long lunatic face quite well by now.

“Go away,” Mr. Enkian said, still pointing.

The Court Jester’s answer was to spread its hands out towards him pleadingly. Its leer became a mad grin.

Jonathan’s parents exchanged looks. Sempitern Walker cleared his throat and stood up. “That will do now,” he said. “Turn your apparatus off, please.”

The Court Jester’s grin faded. It looked almost as agonised as the Sempitern. Its mouth opened as if it were about to speak.

“I said, remove this vision, please, at once,” said Sempitern Walker. “Or you will find yourself up before Chronologue for contempt.”

The ghost’s mouth closed. It looked resigned. It bowed its head to the Sempitern and backed away through the wall, leaving everyone with a faint after-image, like sun-dazzle, of its strange lanky shape.

“Quite a realistic holo,” someone said.

“At least this time they left out those awful bagpipes!” said somebody else. And everyone began talking about the false ghost, or soothing Mr. Enkian, who seemed to think the thing was a personal insult to himself. Vivian said nothing for the rest of the meal. Now she had had a clear and detailed look at the apparition, she knew why she thought she knew its face. It was the same face, under the same floppy hat, that she had seen coming through one of the time-locks up the River Time, ignoring the panic-stricken rush of the other time-ghosts running the other way. She was trying to think where she had seen it before that.

“I don’t think that
was
a hollow phone,” she said to Jonathan afterwards.

“Yes, but Fifty-six Century holography is wildly realistic,” he answered, and went off to write his essay.

“
Or
a hollow giraffe either!” Vivian muttered as she crawled back to her own tasks. The translation came out as nonsense twice. At this point Vivian’s brain gave out and began arguing at her. There was no
point
in flogging it like this, it told her. She was going home to Mum before long, and the best thing she could do was to think of ways of getting there. Not at the moment! her brain added hastily. One more thought would kill it. But it was her duty to sit there at least feeling restfully homesick, instead of going on to learn that awful chart.