Overtime (33 page)

The voice sounded like an air-raid siren with bronchial trouble. It was the most beautiful sound that Blondel, or Guy, or Isoud, or even the Galeazzo brothers (who had been on the point of interesting the vicar in their exclusive range of tax-free clerical pension schemes when the music started) had ever heard in their entire lives.

The voice fell silent, and Blondel sang again. He sang like the first green shoot of spring, the first snow-drop, the first drop of rain in a dry season. He sang:

and it seemed like the whole world, the entire human race, eight centuries of it suddenly realising their mistake and being glad that things were right now, joined in and sang:

Giovanni blinked and reached for his handkerchief. He was crying for pure joy. He was thinking of the royalties.

Talking of royalties; the castle suddenly deflated and fell to the ground, and out of nowhere stepped a man. A tall man, dazzled by light he hadn't seen for eight hundred years, a man stooping and stiff, nursing his pet rat. A man who had been wronged, and who was going to set things right.

‘Blondel, my dear chap,' he said, ‘this really is most awfully decent of you, you really shouldn't have bothered, you know, I was getting on splendidly, digging tunnels and so forth. But ...' He stopped, and breathed in the pure, wild air, and soaked up the light until he seemed to glow with it. ‘Thank you, my dear fellow,' he said.

‘Your Majesty,' Blondel replied. He was kneeling. There were tears streaming down his face, just like the teardrops painted on the side of the rubber castle. ‘Your Majesty,' he repeated. ‘It was nothing.'

The King reached out a stiff hand and raised him up. The light didn't seem to be troubling him now; indeed, he looked like a man who would never be troubled by anything ever again.

‘Right,' he said. ‘Now, then.'

Timestorms are, of course, much rarer these days than they used to be in five hundred years' time, thanks to the tireless efforts of the Time Wardens, and as the threat they will pose receded, humanity will forget the almost indescribable chaos they will cause and will have neglected to be about to take even the most elementary precautions, such as having their names and dates of birth tattooed indelibly on their foreheads.

In a timestorm, events which in the usual course of things will have happened or will happen consecutively suddenly happen concurrently. In other words, people are born, live long and purposeful lives, select a pension scheme which will grow with them, marry, spend small fortunes on carpets, have children, age gracefully and die all at the same time. Trees are simultaneously acorns, oaks and HB pencils. All the days of the week take place at once. Endowment policies mature on payment of the first premium, and vintage wines suddenly fall drastically in price. Such concepts as relativity, the laws of thermodynamics and early closing cease to have any meaning. Giving up smoking becomes easy but pointless.

One kind of timestorm has effects that are so devastating as to be almost without exception terminal; and it was with some relief that the Caernarvon Commission was able to report that none of the reported instances of such a catastrophe having taken place could be factually substantiated.

Once someone has become caught up in one, he can never get out again; and nobody undergoes the phenomenon without incurring material ruin, irreversible psychological damage and a free digital stereo alarm clock radio.

 

‘Where are we?' Guy shouted.

He didn't want to, but it seemed that his role in life, over the last however-long-it-was-now, was to ask that sort of question; as if some sort of unseen Narrator needed him to establish the mise en scene.

‘I don't know,' Giovanni yelled back. ‘Do you honestly think it matters?'

Well, no, Guy conceded, probably not. Not particularly likely that anything matters, or will ever do so again. I mean, this is it, isn't it?

A tiny voice in the back of his mind agreed that yes, it probably was.

Time and space are, of course, connected at a fundamental level. To give a basic example: because of tectonic shift, the various land masses are no longer where they used to be, and the people who invested in valuable building plots on the strip of land joining England and France have long since given up trying to get hold of the representatives of Beaumont Street Realty who sold them to them, and died.

In other words, where you are depends to a great extent on when you are. However, when you are in the middle of a timestorm so massive in scale that eight centuries of history are being rolled back like the duvet on the bed of Causality, the whole thing becomes academic, and the only really important question to consider is whether or not it's ever going to stop.

‘What was that?' Guy screamed dutifully.

‘1789,' Giovanni replied, emerging from under a log. ‘Didn't you see its markings?'

The huge shadow that had momentarily blotted out the sun receded into the distance, became a small, vividly bright spot on the sun's disc, and exploded like a firework. About fifteen seconds later there was a soft, distant plop.

‘Pity,' Giovanni said. ‘We did good business in 1789. The French Revolution, you know.'

‘Ah,' Guy replied. He listened, and noticed the absence of a sound. It had been going on for some time, getting louder and louder and worrying him very much. If it was worth trying to find something inside his own experience which came within long rifle shot of resembling it, he would suggest that it sounded like enormous reels of film ticking through the gate of a projector backwards.

He lifted his head and looked around. Something very strange had happened to the surface of the earth.

It had happened quite quickly. One moment, there had been King Richard and Blondel and, in the background, the sagging rubber castle and a crowd of bemused villagers. The next moment; well, moments had been pretty plentiful after that. The trick had been not to be hit by them as they ricocheted off each other and sang screaming through the air. As for the landscape, it had sort of faded away. It was as if (and the librarian of Guy's meagre archive of imagery started to giggle hysterically when the request came through for this one) the world was a huge watercolour painting which had just been put under the cold tap. First it had run, and then it had been washed away.

‘Giovanni,' Guy asked quietly, ‘are you still there?'

‘Depends,' Giovanni replied. ‘It's all down to criteria really, isn't it?'

‘You what?'

By way of illustration, Giovanni stuck his fingers into Guy's eyes.

‘Look,' Guy said, ‘just stop clowning about and answer me. Are you there or ...?'

‘You didn't feel that, then?'

‘What?'

‘Or this?'

‘Or,' Giovanni said, grunting with the effort, ‘this?'

‘Look,' Guy said, ‘will you stop it and ...?'

Giovanni put the knife down. ‘Part of me's here,' he said. ‘Part of you, too. The rest . . .'

They both ducked. There were three large bangs as the main factors leading to the Industrial Revolution were torn up by the roots and flung into the air, or at least flung. Snippets of speech floated down and settled round them, still gibbering faintly. Fortunately for Guy's sanity, they weren't in languages he knew.

‘Stuff it,' he said, ‘would it make it any easier if I didn't want to know what was happening?'

Giovanni shrugged. ‘No,' he said. ‘What's happening is that the historical part of you, and me, has been vaporised. All that's left is what ...' Giovanni considered for a moment, during which time a splinter of the American War of Independence floated down like a sycamore seed and lodged in his hair. ‘What you're really made up of, I suppose,' he concluded lamely. ‘In your case, inquisitiveness, fear and a certain amount of angry disbelief. In my case a strong will to self-preservation coloured by a strong dash of financial acumen. Have you any idea,' he added, ‘what this lot's doing to the exchange rate?'

‘But ...'

‘Exactly,' Giovanni replied smugly. ‘The first time I met you, I put you down as a but-and-three-dots sort of person. Me, I'm more of a therefore.'

But Guy wasn't listening. He was looking up at what he stubbornly persisted in thinking of as the sky. The greatest motion picture of all time was about to start.

It started far off in the future, and it employed a range of split-screen techniques beyond the wildest dreams of any mortal director. There were billions of them, tiny little images, each showing a tiny segment of an overall image which, taken together, Guy supposed was The World. And each individual film crew was using that rather arty style whereby the camera is supposed to be looking through the hero's eyes. To make it that bit more baffling (although Guy knew several people, most of whom wore scruffy old tweed jackets and smoked pipes, who'd undoubtedly have approved) the whole thing was being shown backwards.

He looked round for Giovanni, but he'd gone. In the darkness, Guy could make out a tiny figure walking across the blurred and naked foreground, not looking at the sky. He had a torch in one hand and a tray round his neck. He was, Guy realised with grudging admiration, selling popcorn.

The film show moved with considerable pace; and although the voices were all so faint that he couldn't hear any of them, he found that he was able to follow what was going on. This was the Sixth World War; then the foundation of the United States of Oceania and the Eurasian People's Republic; the 2120 World Cup; the Macclesfield Missiles Crisis; the restoration of the Jacobites; the Fifth, Fourth and Third World Wars; the Berlin wall; the Second World War ...

‘Hey,' Guy shouted, ‘that's me ...' Then the screen he'd been looking at suddenly went blank, and he. suddenly didn't want to watch any more.

The film show went on, however, gaining momentum as one spool grew bigger than the other, so that the discovery of America and the reconquest of Spain seemed to merge into one another, and the Apaches merged seemlessly with the Moors. The Moors became Turks under the walls of Constantinople, then Mongols streaming across the steppes of Russia, and then Saracens laying siege to Antioch ...

Then the film stuck, as if a huge hair had got itself jammed in the gate of Time; and, as always seems to happen, the film seems to crackle, and little wisps of smoke ...

 

‘Satisfied?'

‘All right,' said a muffled voice from inside the rubber castle, ‘there's no need to make a bloody great performance about it.'

‘Come out, then.'

The rubber castle stirred uneasily. One of the small children who had been bouncing about on it a few minutes before dropped its ice cream and started to yell.

‘Can't we talk about this like sensible adults?'

‘No.'

‘How about arbitration?'

‘No.'

‘Toss you for it?'

‘No.'

The castle writhed a little, like a dyspeptic python. ‘Best of three?' it said hopefully. ‘Use your own coin?'

‘No.'

‘Look, there really isn't anything personal, it's just . . .'

King Richard raised his sword again and pointed at the ground in front of him. He was smiling, but his smile had about as much to do with joviality and bonhommie as a cap pistol with a Howitzer.

‘You wouldn't,' said the castle, shaking like a crenellated jelly.

‘Watch.'

‘But opening the Archives ... You haven't got the faintest idea ... Thousands of years ... They just won't
fit...'
,

King Richard raised the sword in both hands, whirled it round his head, and brought it down in a flashing circle of light that seemed to cut a section out of the sky. A fraction of a second before it hit the ground, he checked the stroke and wobbled furiously. The castle unhuddled itself.

‘Very funny,' it said, and its voice was on the thin edge of hysteria. ‘Knew you wouldn't have the . . . No!'

The sword rose.

And where the rubber castle had been, there stood a gateway, and behind it, mile upon mile of winding battlements and cloud-topped watchtowers and sun-spearing keeps and mottes and baileys and ...