Lost in a good book (14 page)

My feet felt strange as the world rippled again and I looked down and saw that I was wearing trainers instead of boots. It was clear now that time was flexing slightly, and I expected my father to appear, but he didn’t. Stiggins flicked back to the beginning of his sentence yet again and said, this time in a voice I could make out clearly:

“That is our name, Miss Next, but how know you?”

“Did you feel anything odd just then?”

“No. Drink the water. You are very pale.”

I had another sip, leaned back and took a deep breath.

“This wall used to be mauve,” I mused as Stiggins looked at me.

“How you know our name, Miss Next?”

“You turned up at my wedding party,” I told him. “You said you had a job for me.”

He stared at me for almost half a minute through his deep-set eyes. His large nose sniffed the air occasionally. Neanderthals thought a great deal about what they said before they said it—if they said anything at all.

“You speak the truth,” he said at last. It was almost impossible to lie to a neanderthal, and I wasn’t going to try. “We are to represent you on this case, Miss Next.”

I sighed. Flanker was taking no chances; I had nothing against neanderthals, but they wouldn’t have been my first choice to defend me, particularly against an attack on one of their own.

“If you have a problem you should tell us,” said Stiggins, eyeing me carefully.

“I have no problem with you representing me.”

“Your face does not match your words. You think we have been placed here to hurt your case. It is our belief too. But as to whether it
will
hurt your case, we shall see. Are you well enough to walk?”

I said I was, and we went and sat down in the interview room. Stiggins opened his case and drew out a buff file. It was a large-print version made out in underlined capitals. He brought out a wooden ruler and placed it across the page to help him read.

“Why you hit Kaylieu, the Skyrail operator?”

“I thought he had a gun.”

“Why would you think that?”

I stared into Mr. Stiggins’s unblinking brown eyes. If I lied he would know. If I told him the truth he might feel it his duty to tell SO-1 that I had been involved in my father’s work. With the world due to end and the trust in my father implicit, it was a sticky moment, to say the least.

“
They
will ask you, Miss Next. Your evasion will not be appreciated.”

“I’ll have to take that chance.”

Stiggins tilted his head to one side and regarded me for a moment.

“They know about your father, Miss Next. We advise you to be careful.”

I didn’t say anything, but to Stiggins I probably spoke volumes. Half the thal language is about body movements. It’s possible to conjugate verbs with facial muscles; dancing is conversation.

We didn’t have a chance to say anything else as the door opened and Flanker and two other agents trooped in.

“You know my name,” he told me. “These are Agents King and Nosmo.”

The two officers stared at me unnervingly.

“This is a preliminary interview,” announced Flanker, who now fixed me with a steely gaze. “There will be time enough for a full inquiry—if we so decide. Anything you say and do can affect the outcome of the hearing. It’s really up to you, Next.”

He wasn’t kidding. SO-1 were not within the law—they
made
the law. If they really meant business I wouldn’t be here at all— I’d be spirited away to SpecOps Grand Central, wherever the hell that was. It was at times like this that I suddenly realized quite why my father had rebelled against SpecOps in the first place.

Flanker placed two tapes into the recorder and idented it with the date, time and all our names. Once done, he asked in a voice made more menacing by its softness: “You know why you are here?”

“For hitting a Skyrail operator?”

“Striking a neanderthal is hardly a crime worthy of SO-1’s valuable time, Miss Next. In fact, technically speaking, it’s not a crime at all.”

“What then?”

“When did you last see your father?”

The other SpecOps agents leaned forward imperceptibly to hear my answer. I wasn’t going to make it easy for them.

“I don’t have a father, Flanker—you know that. He was eradicated by your buddies in the ChronoGuard seventeen years ago.”

“Don’t play me for a fool, Next,” warned Flanker. “This is not something I care to joke about.
Despite
Colonel Next’s non-actualization he continues to be a thorn in our side. Again: When did you last see your father?”

“At my wedding.”

Flanker frowned and looked at his notes.

“You married? When?”

I told him, and he squiggled a note in the margin.

“And what did he say when he turned up at your wedding?”

“Congratulations.”

He stared at me for a few moments, then changed tack.

“This incident with the Skyrail operator,” he began. “You were convinced that he had a
soap
gun hidden about his person. According to a witness you thumped him on the chin, handcuffed and searched him. They said you seemed very surprised when you didn’t find anything.”

I shrugged and remained silent.

“We don’t give a sod about the thal, Next. Your father’s deputizing you is something we could overlook—replacing you out-of-time is something we most definitely will
not.
Is this what happened?”

“Is that the charge? Is that why I’m here?”

“Answer the question.”

“No sir.”

“You’re lying. He brought you back early but your father’s control of the timestream is not that good. Mr. Kaylieu decided
not
to threaten the Skyrail that morning. You were
sideslipped,
Next. Joggled slightly in the timestream. Things happened the same way but not
exactly
in the same order. Not a big one either—barely a Class IX. Sideslips are an occupational hazard in ChronoGuard work.”

“That’s preposterous,” I scoffed. Stiggins would know I was lying, but perhaps I could fool Flanker.

“I don’t think you understand, Miss Next. This is more important than just you or your father. Two days ago we lost all communications beyond the 12th December. We know there is industrial action, but even the freelancers we’ve sent upstream haven’t reported back. We think it’s
the Big One.
If your father was willing to risk using you, we reckon he thinks so too. Despite our animosity for your father, he knows his business—if he didn’t we’d have had him years from now.
What’s going on?
”

“I just thought he had a gun,” I repeated.

Flanker stared at me silently for a few moments.

“Let’s start again, Miss Next. You search a neanderthal for a fake gun he carries the following day, you apologize to him using his name, and the arresting officer at the Skyrail station tells me she saw you resetting your watch. A bit
out of time,
were you?”

“What do you mean, ‘for a fake gun he carries the following day’?”

Flanker answered without the merest trace of emotion. “Kaylieu was shot dead this morning. I think you should talk and talk fast. I’ve enough to loop you for twenty years. Fancy that?”

I glared back at him, at a loss to know what to do or say. “Looping” was a slang term for Closed Loop Temporal Field Containment. They popped the criminal in an eight-minute repetitive time loop for five, ten, twenty years. Usually it was a Laundromat, doctor’s waiting room or bus stop, and your presence often caused time to slow down for others near the loop. Your body aged but never needed sustenance. It was cruel and unnatural—yet cheap and required no bars, guards or food.

I opened my mouth and shut it again, gaping like a fish.

“Or you can tell us about your father and walk out a free woman.”

I felt a prickly sweat break out on my forehead. I stared at Flanker and he stared at me, until, mercifully, Stiggins came to my rescue.

“Miss Next was working for us at SO-13 that morning, Commander,” he said in a low monotone. “Kaylieu had been implicated in neanderthal sedition. It was a secret operation. Thank you, Miss Next, but we will have to tell SO-1 the truth.”

Flanker shot an angry glance at the neanderthal, who stared back at him impassively.

“Why the hell didn’t you tell me this, Stiggins?”

“You never asked.”

All Flanker had on me now was a slow watch. He lowered his voice to a growl.

“I’ll see you looped behind the Crunch if your father is up to no good and you didn’t tell us.”

He paused for a moment and jabbed a finger in the direction of Stiggins.

“If you’ve been bearing false witness I’ll have you too. You’re running the thal end of SO-13 for one reason and one reason only—window dressing.”

“How you managed to become the dominant species we will never know,” Stiggins said at last. “So full of hate, anger and vanity.”

“It’s our evolutionary edge, Stiggins. Change and adapt to a hostile environment. We did, you didn’t. QED.”

“Darwin won’t mask your sins, Flanker,” replied Stiggins. “
You
made our environment hostile. You will fall too. But you won’t fall because of a more dominant life form. You will fall over
yourselves.
”

“Garbage, Stiggins. You lot had your chance and blew it.”

“We have right to health, freedom and pursuit of happiness, too.”

“Legally speaking you don’t,” replied Flanker evenly. “Those rights belong only to
humans.
If you want equality, speak to Goliath. They sequenced you. They
own
you. If you get lucky, perhaps you can be
at risk.
Beg and we might make you
endangered.
”

Flanker shut my file with a snap, grabbed his hat, removed both interview tapes and was gone without another word.

As soon as the door closed I breathed a sigh of relief. My heart was going like a trip-hammer but I still had my liberty.

“I’m sorry about Mr. Kaylieu.”

Stiggins shrugged.

“He was not happy, Miss Next. He did not ask to come back.”

“You
lied
for me,” I added in a disbelieving tone. “I thought neanderthals couldn’t lie.”

He stared at me for a moment or two.

“It’s not that we can’t,” he said at last. “We just have no reason to. We helped because you are a good person. You have sapien aggression, but you have compassion, too. If you need help again, we will be there.”

Stiggins’s normally placid and unmoving face curled up into a grimace that showed two rows of widely gapped teeth. I was fearful for a moment until I realized that what I was witnessing was a neanderthal
smile.

“Miss Next—”

“Yes?”

“Our friends call us Stig.”

“Mine call me Thursday.”

He put out a large hand and I shook it gratefully.

“You’re a good man, Stig.”

“Yes,” he replied slowly, “we were sequenced that way.”

He gathered up his notes and left the room.

I left the SpecOps building ten minutes later and looked for Landen in the café opposite. He wasn’t there, so I ordered a coffee and waited twenty minutes. He didn’t turn up, so I left a message with the café owner and drove home, musing that with death-by-coincidence, the world ending in a fortnight, charges in a court for I didn’t know what and a lost play by Shakespeare, things couldn’t get much stranger. But I was wrong. I was
very
wrong.

9.
The More Things Stay the Same

Minor changes to soft furnishings are the first indications of a sideslip. Curtains, cushion covers and lampshades are all good litmus indicators for a slight diversion in the timestream—the same way as canaries are used down the mines or goldfishes to predict earthquakes. Carpet and wallpaper patterns and changes in paint hues can also be used, but this requires a more practiced eye. If you are within the sideslip then you will notice nothing, but if your pelmets change color for no good reason, your curtains switch from festoon to swish or your antimacassars have a new pattern on them, I should be worried; and if you’re the only one who notices, then worry some more. A great deal more . . .

BENDIX SCINTILLA
,
Timestream Navigation for CG Cadets Module IV

L
ANDEN
’
S ABSENCE
made me feel unsettled. All sorts of reasons as to why he wasn’t waiting for me ran through my head as I pushed open the gate and walked up to our front door. He could have lost track of time, gone to pick up his running leg from the menders or dropped in to see his mum. But I was fooling myself. Landen said he would be there and he wasn’t. And that wasn’t like him. Not at all.

I stopped abruptly halfway up the garden path. For some reason Landen had taken the opportunity to change all the curtains. I walked on more slowly, a feeling of unease rising within me. I stopped at the front door. The footscraper had gone. But it hadn’t been taken recently—the hole had been concreted over long ago. There were other changes, too. A tub of withered
Tickia orologica
had appeared in the porch next to a rusty pogo stick and a broken bicycle. The dustbins were all plastic rather than steel, and a copy of Landen’s least favorite paper,
The Mole,
was resting in the newspaper holder. I felt a hot flush rise in my cheeks as I fumbled in vain to find my door key—not that it would have mattered if I
had
found it, because the lock I used that morning had been painted over years ago.

I must have been making a fair amount of noise, because all of a sudden the door opened to reveal an elderly version of Landen complete with paunch, bifocals and a shiny bald pate.

“Yes?” he inquired in a slow Parke-Laine sort of baritone.

Filbert Snood’s time aggregation sprang instantly—and unpleasantly—to mind.

“Oh my God. Landen?
Is that you?
”

The elderly man seemed almost as stunned as I was.