In Trinity Hall, in particular, the sudden failure of all lights would
have brought both parties to a sudden halt. But the lights stayed on.
So 61 pensioners and 139 boys and girls between thirteen and nineteen
died in Trinity Hall. Exacty two hundred.
And that grisly piece of the
disaster more than anything else, Miranda told me, was the thing which
was going to make my name stink forever.
I didn't attempt to interrupt as she told me what she knew, which was less
than I'd have expected. The giants didn't really know everything; their
remarkable knowledge which had so impressed me on severai occasions was
merely a small collection of isolated bits of exact information. Miranda,
who knew so much about me, hadn't known of the existence of Dina. Perhaps,
in the world in which the giants played no part, Dina became worse, had
to go into a home, and was not mentioned in any accounts that survived.
Miranda did not, after all, have to do much explaining to show me how
I could become the villain of the Shuteley fire. As she spoke, I oouid
see this for myself. And I felt cold horror at the partial justice of it.
I wasn't really a villain. I had done nothing stupid, immoral or illegal.
And yet . . .
FLAG was to all intents and purposes the only insurance company in
Shuteley. Practically all pressure exerted on traders, farmers, firms,
factories and ordinary householders to make fire less likely was exerted
by FLAG -- by me. I didn't personally inspect anything, of course. But
I was responsible. If there was blame, it was laid at my door.
And there was going to be blame. After such a catastrophe, millions of
people all over the world were going to feel that such a thing couldn't
happen unless someone had been criminally irresponsible.
There were fire prevention officers, too, but not one based in
Shuteley. Anyway, Shuteley didn't have a bad fire record. Advice on fire
prevention and official pressure for better standards usually followed
incidents which showed the need for them.
We were the people most responsible for fire prevention. And we were
slack . . .
FLAG head office was pleased with Shuteley. The directors liked having a
town in their pocket, insurance-wise. As local manager, I was expected
to carry on the good work. Shuteley made more money for the firm than
any other town four times its size, simply because of the volume of
business. And the claims record was highly satisfactory. The office ran
smoothly. But after all, the directors liked Shuteley first and foremost
became it was the one place where the company was supreme. Shuteley made
them feel good. It was unique.
There was no actual directive, but I was well aware that I must not lose
business, must not allow any other insurance company a toehold. This meant
that I wasn't supposed to be too hard to please. It would never do if we
wouldn't insure a property and some other company would; if we insisted
on certain fire safeguards and the other company waived them; if we set
a higher premium than the other company.
So, while our methods in Shuteley were not exactly bent, they had always
been yielding. No doubt some of the town's smarter business men knew
our position and cunningly took advantage of it. We wanted to insure
them, and prestige mattered even more than profit. We could easily be
maneuvered into giving a better deal than anyone else. We could also be
persuaded to be satisfied with lower standards of safety than anyone else.
No, I hadn't been careless, I hadn't been crooked. I had merely been
more easily satisfied than any insurance manager anywhere else would
have been, with full backing from my firm.
But my firm's backing was going to fade away after this, after the
staggering claims that would be made. FLAG would have to pay, in effect,
the cost of the town, plus the insured value of the lives lost. Although
the bill wouldn't kill the firm, it would make it very sick indeed. And
instead of being the blue-eyed boy who kept a whole town in the company's
pocket, I'd be the crass idiot whose incompetent methods were partly or
even wholly responsible for the biggest pay-out ever made by any single
insurance company in the world.
Also the firm's backing would fade away the moment there was a hint of
public concern about the branch's methods.
Naturally the firm had known what I was doing, and approved. But that
was before the Great Fire of Shuteley.
Oh, I could see it all. People like to have someone to blame. And I was
just sufficiently involved to be a perfect choice.
"The most unfair bit," Miranda said quietly, "is the way Trinity Hall
will be blamed on you. A fire officer called Christie inspected it a
year ago and reported . . . "
I groaned. I hadn't exactly forgotten the incident, I had merely failed
to fit it in place. I knew what was coming. "You saw Christie and showed
him your own inspector's report on Trinity Hall. This said that although
the building wasn't up to the highest fire-prevention standards, and
had a big proportion of wood in the structure, and old wood at that,
although the situation left a great deal to be desired, all fire-safety
conditions were fully met -- "
"That's enough," I said. It was more than that: it was too much.
I wanted to hear about other things, no longer that.
"What happened to you?" I asked.
"Greg hit hard," she said, "but not hard enough. I'm small, yet I'm pretty
tough. I came to in the river, choking, and let it carry me almost to
the blockage. Then I swam ashore. I had a suit hidden in some bushes as
a safeguard -- it wasn't entirely a surprise to me, what Greg did."
"What I can't understand," I began, and stopped. I'd been going to say I
couldn't understand why Greg was allowed to sabotage everything that the
others were trying to do, whatever that was, why Miranda and the rest of
the giants had ever thought for a moment it was worth going ahead with
their scheme while Greg was along with them, wrecking every move they
made, and in the end trying to kill Miranda and failing only because in
his vicious anger he preferred to lash out rather than make quite sure
of her.
But that was only one of the things I couldn't understand. The others
rose up and silenced me, tongue-tying me because I couldn't make up my
mind which to press first.
Miranda, not surprisingly, was no longer immaculate. The two minute
pink garments she wore were merely utilitarian, totally dissimilar from
the subtle, carefully designed bikini she had worn that afternoon. It
was probable that she and the giants had worn the briefs under their
suits simply to avoid startling too much the Shuteley people who were
to see them.
She was scratched and bruised, apart from the huge discoloration where
Greg had hit her. And seeing her as she was then reminded me of the
impossible glossiness of all the giants.
"You do come from the future," I said.
"What you call the future," she agreed. "What we know is the present."
"That's a play on words."
"No. Time doesn't happen all at once. The moving finger writes, and
having writ, moves on . . . The date is 2097."
" Your date."
"No.
The
date. At this moment, it's April 17, 2097 -- a Wednesday,
if you care to check. What comes after April 17, 2097, is the future,
completely inaccessible. Before 2097 is the partly accessible past."
Her certainty irritated me. "This is what makes all you people cruel,
inhuman -- the delusion that your own period is the only one that
matters."
She was as certain as the torturers of the Inquisition. "It's
April 17, 2097."
"Then I was born to no real existence? I live out my life in the shadows,
dead from the moment I was born?"
That made her pause for a moment. "The metaphysical problems," she said at
last, "are far beyond me. Perhaps you lived out your life in the second
half of the twentieth century . . . perhaps you're restored to play it
out again at the end of the twenty-first. I can't tell you the truth from
your angle. All I know is that the pointer of time stands at 2097 . . . "
When I tried to argue, she went on: "Val, just think. I was born in 2067,
and I'm here. Time
must
have reached . . . "
So she was thirty. It was surprising, in a way disappointing. She
could have been eighteen or eighty, from what I had known, guessed and
imagined. Thirty seemed an indeterminate age for Miranda. It seemed
an anticlimax.
She went on trying to convince me that time had always reached a definite
point, just as a clock had to register something, even if it had stopped.
The date, the vital date, the only date that had any life or meaning,
was April 17, 2097. Anything before that was the past, anything in front
of it was the future.
Presently she realized she was wasting her time trying to convince me,
and abandoned the attempt.
"It doesn't matter," she sighed, sitting down and leaning back against the
stasis machine. "You want to know, but you don't want to know. You think
you want the truth. All you want, of course, is what you want to hear."
"I do want the truth," I retorted. "What is it? You're a history class? At
a college?"
Her eyes widened. "That's near enough true," she admitted. "I'm the
teacher. The rest are pupils. But we're more than just a class. There
are changes to be made."
"Changes? You're committing suicide, then? Change the past -- your past,
if you insist -- and you change everything."
"No," she said patiently. "Time can't be changed, though bits of it
can. Think of time as a river. It's an old idea, the river of time. But
the analogy can be taken a good deal farther. Time is a river. And
it's April 17, 2097 -- remember that, assume that, as a hypothesis,
even if you're not convinced. Suppose we of 2097 interfere in the past,
what happens?"
"You cease to exist," I said. "You wink out as if you never were."
"No," she said. "Remember the past is a river. Block a river, and what
happens? Except in one case in a million, just what happened here. The
river flows to the sea. Block it, and it takes another course. It still
flows to the sea -- can you even imagine anything else? And except in
the most unusual circumstances, the contour of the land forces the river
to return to its original course rather quickly, and flow on as if it
had never left it. Just think -- the very fact that a river exists means
that gravity is forcing all the surplus water in the area to collect and
flow in a certain direction. Stop the flow, and the water makes a detour,
and then returns to the original direction, the original bed."
What she said made sense, but only in a limited way. Arguing by analogy
proved nothing. She was saying, in effect, that because a river would
act in a certain way, time must act in the same way.
I said so.
She agreed. "It doesn't always happen. A river flows one side of a
hill. Divert it even a few yards at a certain point, and it must flow the
other side of the hill. And then it's possible that it never gets back
to the original course. Well, that
can
happen in time, too, but even
more rarely than it does with a river. Make minor changes in the past,
and your own time is certainly affected . . . but not in a catastrophic
way. The river makes a detour, and returns to its original course."
She paused and then said quietly: "I ought to know, because I've done
it more than once."
"You've done it? Changed the past?"
She stood up and began to walk about. The flames were dying, I saw,
for the firelight flickering on her skin, making it yellow and orange
and red but mainly a deep bronze, was far less bright than it had been
when Jota and I fought.
"About twenty-five years ago it was discovered that it was possible to
alter the past, for a purpose, without making vast, indiscriminate chaos
of time. At this moment, all the force and life of time is in Wednesday,
April 17, 2097. Any time diversion made anywhere has its effect, perhaps
a vast effect on 2097, but in the changed world I still exist, I'm still
a teacher, I still do the same things at the same time.
"The paradoxes of time travel have always fascinated some people, but
I'd never been one of them. I had assumed, as most people did, that if
you somehow managed to change even the tiniest event in the past, the
consequences which must result would multiply, square and cube themselves
with every passing millisecond, producing even in a few years a totally
different world.
"If a girl were delayed ten seconds and consequently never met the
man she would have married, never had the children, grandchildren,
great-grandchildren she would have had, naturally the future must be
quite different. Yet far tinier changes must, I had believed and still
believed, be just as significant."
"What sort of changes have you made?" I demanded. "And how do you know
you've made them?"
She smiled and sat down again. But she was very restless. Something was
bothering her, something that to her was far more important than the
Great Fire of Shuteley -- which, after all, was only history.
"Anyone who moves in time," she said, "remembers everything. You were
in a loop, so you know what happens. You experience and remember the
entire loop -- the previous track, what happened, the return, the change
in events, the consequence."
Jota and I had entered the camp, fought, Jota had been killed and I had
killed. Then we'd been pushed back a few minutes and lived through a
different version of the incident. And we remembered everything.
Miranda went on: "What have we changed? Sorry, Val, I can't tell you. It's
better not -- they're all in
your
future. This is the farthest-back point
where a change has been sanctioned -- "
"So it's sanctioned, is it?" I demanded. "Your parliament or senate or
whatever you've got calmly decides to monkey with -- "
"Wait, please." She laid her hand on my arm. "Cool down. You know nearly
enough now for me to tell you plainly and simply why we're here, what
we intended to do, and how the operation is going."
She was, however, in no hurry to start. And now that it had come to the
point, I felt no urge to hurry her.
We all like a safe, ordered world. Me more than most. The idea of people
watching you, interfering with you, manipulating you makes the flesh
creep. And yet, in this case, this very special case, if the giants
had come to do the obvious thing and did it, if even now they could be
persuaded to do it, I for one would have been delighted they came. Though
afterwards, I wouldn't want any such interference again.