Overtime (15 page)

The Archives are where events are stored which shouldn't have happened but did. It is impossible to be exact, but recent estimates suggest that they now occupy a much larger area of SpaceTime than the Orthodox or Correct course of history, and the number of reported leaks of excluded matter from the Archives into the Topside (as the Orthodoxy is called in theochronological jargon) increases alarmingly each year. To a certain extent this is due to the irresponsible and highly illegal exploitation of the mineral resources of the Archives by pirate chemical companies - most areas of Archive time predate the commercial use of fossil fuels, and so there are enormous untapped reserves of oil, coal and natural gas down there, but of course it is incredibly hazardous to bring it back - and the Time Wardens have recently been awarded Draconian powers to prevent the traffic. Unfortunately, their efforts so far have been less than successful, and the conclusion of their latest report - ‘Whether it is possible to eradicate this menace, time alone can tell' - has been widely criticised as extremely unhelpful.

 

‘You're having me on,' the man said.

‘I didn't think you'd like it,' Blondel replied. ‘Why were your crew singing that song?'

‘Which song?'

‘L'Amours Dont Sui Epris,'
Blondel said.

‘Is that what it's called?' the man said. ‘Because it's a good song, I suppose; everybody knows the words and when you've got a ship full of men all on the point of complete and utter panic, I always find the best thing to do is sing something, terribly loudly. Look, does it matter?'

‘You haven't,' Blondel persevered, ‘seen Richard the Lion-Heart anywhere, by any chance?'

‘Who?'

‘Never mind,' Blondel said. ‘It was only a thought. Look, I mustn't keep you. Thanks for everything.' He stood up and climbed out of the boat.

‘Look ...'

‘Cheers, then!' Blondel waved, and started to walk.

‘Come back!' the man yelled. ‘Look, how do we get out of here?'

Blondel turned round and looked at him sadly. ‘You don't,' he said. ‘You never happened. Ciao.'

He walked on for a while, thinking deeply. It was logical, after all, that by stepping out into a timeslip as he had done, he would be swept into the Archives; presumably Guy was down here too somewhere, although quite possibly not in the same Archive. For all he knew, the poor chap was swanning around somewhere in the Trojan War, shooting the hats off Greek heroes. Blondel groaned; the last thing he needed was somebody else to look for. How, Blondel now asked himself, am I going to get out of here?

For a while he gave that some serious thought, but nothing brilliant occurred to him, and he decided not to let it worry him. At least he knew where he was, and he always found that that was the main thing. Once you'd got that sussed, in his experience, everything else fell into place somehow or another. He remembered the time he'd accidentally come up on the wrong side of the Day of Judgement. That had been a bit hairy, for a while, but he'd got away without any difficulty in the end, with the aid of a sheepskin rug and a great deal of charm. Whatever else he was, Blondel wasn't a worrier.

Far away in the distance he saw a light, and he started to walk towards it. As he approached it, the non-existent waves under his feet became clammy and smelt unpleasantly of chemicals. Strange.

He walked on, squelching now, and quite soon came to another notice. Whoever set up this Archive had been pretty conscientious about keeping people informed.

 

EXTREME DANGER

 

it said, and a little bit further down, in tiny little letters:

 

MEN AT WORK

 

Well indeed. Blondel stopped and scratched his head. Logic told him that it was highly unlikely that anyone could be bothered to do anything in an Archive; once you were here you were here, and either you found a way out or you got used to it. Anything in the way of industrial activity was counter-intuitive, to say the least. However, in the circumstances EXTREME DANGER probably wasn't to be taken at face value. When you have just been edited out of history and thus caused to cease to have existed, it's hard to think of anything that could actually make things worse.

About a hundred yards further on, he came to another notice. This one said:

 

HARD HAT AREA: NO ADMITTANCE

 

Blondel grinned; then he took off his belt and wrapped it round his right hand. When people didn't want you to go in somewhere, it usually meant there was something worth taking a look at.

He stepped forward, stopped suddenly, and rubbed his nose. He'd bumped into an invisible brick wall. More promising still.

Very cautiously, he felt his way along the wall until his sense of touch suggested that he'd come to a gateway; then he crouched down and waited. About a quarter of an hour later, a door opened and a man in a boiler-suit and a yellow hard hat came out and started to light a cigarette. Whatever it was they did in there, they weren't allowed to smoke while they were doing it.

Something dropped into place in Blondel's mind. He edged forward, tapped the smoker gently on the shoulder, and punched him.

Fortunately, the man's clothes fitted Blondel pretty well. He carefully stubbed out the cigarette, opened the door and walked in.

Inside, things were very different. There was light, for one thing; lots of it, coming from a battery of big white arc-lamps on a scaffolding tower, which loomed over a collection of huts and big machines. There was also a tall flame, rather like the flare from an oil well, rising up from a hole in what one could probably call the ground, although Flaubert would have found a more apt word for it. An illicit drilling station, of the sort that was causing all those headaches in the Time Warden's department. How very convenient.

There were a lot of men in boiler-suits and yellow hats scurrying about, and Blondel found no difficulty in blending in. He found a clipboard and wandered around for a while pretending to be bored. After the first half-hour, he didn't have to pretend very hard.

It was the tannoy that put the idea into his head; and once it was there it made quite a nuisance of itself. Left to himself, Blondel would have bided his time, slipped aboard the bus or whatever it was that took the workers back Topside when their shift was over, and gone on his way singing. As it was, the Idea insisted that he locate the site office, find the man with the microphone who worked the tannoy, stun him with the fire extinguisher and start singing
L'Amours Dont Sui Epris
into the PA system. And, under normal circumstances, he'd probably have found a way of getting away with it. He'd been in worse scrapes than this before now and still been back home in time for
Cagney and Lacey.

As it was, something happened which he hadn't bargained for.

Someone began to sing the second verse.

 

‘Thank you,' Guy said.

‘Milk?'

Guy nodded. La Beale Isoud picked up a little bone-china jug and fiddled about with it.

‘Sugar?'

‘Thanks, yes. Look ...'

‘How many?'

‘I'm sorry?'

‘How many lumps? One? Two?'

Guy wrenched his mind back to where it should be. ‘Two,' he said, ‘thanks. Look, I hate to be a nuisance, but...'

Isoud looked at him, and he realised that she was going to offer him something to eat. If he refused the biscuits she would offer him cake. Best not to fight it, said his discretion, just get it over with.

‘Would you like a biscuit?' said La Beale Isoud. Guy nodded, and was issued with a rather hard ginger-nut. That seemed to be that.

‘The weather,' La Beale Isoud said, ‘continues to improve.'

‘Good,' said Guy. He noticed that he was sitting in a low, straight-backed chair and wondered how the hell he'd got there. Instinct, probably.

‘Are you interested in gardens, Mr Goodlet?' enquired La Beale Isoud. Guy shook his head. ‘A pity,' La Beale Isoud went on. ‘We have rather a nice show of chrysanthemums this year.'

‘What's happening?' Guy asked.

‘We're having tea,' Isoud replied. ‘Please do not make any sudden movements.'

‘Oh, quite,' Guy said quickly, ‘certainly not. My mother likes chrysanthemums,' he added. It was a lie, of course, but with luck she wouldn't notice.

‘Another biscuit?'

‘Yes, thank you.' Guy leaned slowly forward, picked up a ginger-nut and put it on his knee with the other one. He hadn't eaten anything for a very long time, he remembered. He fiddled with his teacup.

‘I don't know how long my brother is likely to be,' said La Beale Isoud. ‘He's terribly unpunctual, I'm afraid. Still, he's usually back around this time, if you'd care to wait a little longer.'

‘If you don't mind,' Guy said. ‘How did I get here?'

‘I don't know,' said La Beale Isoud politely. ‘I thought you might be able to tell me that.'

‘Ah.' Guy stirred his tea for a moment and then raised the cup to his lips, without actually going so far as to drink anything. ‘I fell over,' he said.

‘Did you really, Mr Goodlet? How intriguing.'

‘In a tunnel,' Guy went on. ‘I was running away from a lot of voices which kept trying to ask me things about income tax, and I must have tripped over my feet and fallen over. And the next thing I knew, I was here. Something seemed to pick me up and ...'

‘I see,' Isoud said. ‘In that case, the fax must have brought you. What a curious coincidence, don't you think?'

‘Er,' said Guy. He looked up over his teacup and smiled. La Beale Isoud pursed her lips, as if trying to reach a decision, and then smiled back.

‘Would you care to see some photographs?' she said.

 

Drink generally made Iachimo rather maudlin. Usually that was no bad thing; he was, Giovanni had long since realised, one of Nature's accountants, and anything which let his long-repressed emotions out of their cage and let them walk around and stretch their legs was to be encouraged, in moderation, so long as he didn't actually start to sing.

‘I mean,' Iachimo said, ‘we shouldn't just have left him like that. Really nice bloke, he was. Do anything for you. Lovely voice. Generous.'

‘Gullible,' Giovanni said. ‘Very, very gullible.'

‘The most gullible bloke,' Iachimo agreed, ‘you could ever hope to meet. Could have sold him anything. Anything.' He sighed. ‘And now it's too late. Poor Blondel.' He reached for his drink and drank it.

‘Never mind,' Giovanni said firmly. ‘We've got to think of the future. I'm sure that's what he'd have wanted.'

Iachimo looked up unsteadily. ‘You think so?'

‘Absolutely,' Giovanni said. ‘Blondel,' he went on, fixing his brother with a businesslike look, ‘was an artist ...'

‘Can you say that again?'

‘An artist,' Giovanni repeated, ‘and what do artists really want? They want—'

‘Twenty-five per cent guaranteed return on capital,' said Marco. He was the dozy one, and they had had to teach him little set phrases, of which
twenty-five per cent guaranteed return on capital
was the longest by some way.

‘No,' Giovanni said, ‘that's where artists are different from you and me. Artists don't care about things like that, or at least,' Giovanni added, thinking of Andrew Lloyd Webber, ‘most artists don't. What they care about is posterity, the opinion of future generations, their place in the gallery of fame.'

‘Go on!'

‘They do,' Giovanni said, ‘and Blondel was an artist to his fingertips. Absolutely zilch use as a businessman, but give him a rebec and a mass audience, and there was nobody to touch him.'

‘Too right,' Iachimo said. ‘Bloody genius, that's what he was.'

‘Exactly,' Giovanni replied, ‘a genius, which is why we have a duty to continue marketing his material just exactly the way we did while he was alive. In fact,' he added, thinking of Blondel's lapsed five per cent share of royalties, ‘even more so. With a genius, you see, the real appreciation comes after they die.'

‘Really?'

‘You bet.' Giovanni rubbed his hands together involuntarily. ‘It's only when they die that you can be absolutely sure there isn't going to be any more. When you get to that point, you're in a controlled supply marketing environment, and if you've been clever enough to get sole distribution rights—'

‘Have we got sole distribution rights?'

‘Yes, Iachimo, we have indeed.' Giovanni grinned. ‘Go and get another jug of this stuff, will you, Marco? I think a modest celebration is in order.'

The Beaumont Street Partnership had long ago sorted out the problem of management role coordination. Giovanni did the thinking, Iachimo kept the books, Marco went to the bar. Usually, too, Marco paid.

‘What it boils down to,' Giovanni said, when his cup was once more full, ‘is that the only thing better than a sucker, from an investment management point of view, is a dead sucker. Cheers.'

‘Pity he's dead, though,' said Iachimo with a sigh. ‘Wrote some lovely songs, he did.'

‘He did indeed,' Giovanni replied. ‘And there's no reason why he shouldn't write plenty more.'

‘But he's ...'

‘I know, Marco,' Giovanni said patiently. ‘But he wasn't dead this morning, was he? All we have to do is go back to when he wasn't dead, get him to hum something, and there we go. No reason why we can't go on indefinitely. And no royalties, either.'