The Time Traveler's Almanac (117 page)

In the weeks that followed, Ali gave himself no time to brood on his fate. Stage Two had English classes, and though Fahim and the others had long outgrown them, Ali joined in. He finally learned the names for the European letters and numbers that he’d seen on weapons and machinery all his life, and the teacher encouraged him to give up translating individual words from Persian, and reshape whole sentences, whole thoughts, into the alien tongue.

Every evening, Ali joined Fahim in the common room to watch the news on TV. There was no doubt that the place they had come to was peaceful and prosperous; when war was mentioned, it was always in some distant land. The rulers here did not govern by force, they were chosen by the people, and even now this competition was in progress. The men who had sent the soldiers to block the bridge were asking the people to choose them again.

When the guard woke Ali at eight in the morning, he didn’t complain, though he’d had only three hours’ sleep. He showered quickly, then went to the compound’s south gate. It no longer seemed strange to him to move from place to place this way: to wait for guards to come and unlock a succession of doors and escort him through the fenced-off maze that separated the compound from the government offices.

James and Reza were waiting in the office. Ali greeted them, his mouth dry. James said, “Reza will read the decision for you. It’s about ten pages, so be patient. Then if you have any questions, let me know.”

Reza read from the papers without meeting Ali’s eyes. Fernandez, the man who’d interviewed Ali, had written that there were discrepancies between things Ali had said at different times, and gaps in his knowledge of the place and time he claimed to have come from. What’s more, an expert in the era of the Scholars had listened to the tape of Ali talking, and declared that his speech was not of that time. “Perhaps this man’s great-grandfather fled Khurosan in the time of the Scholars, and some sketchy information has been passed down the generations. The applicant himself, however, employs a number of words that were not in use until decades later.”

Ali waited for the litany of condemnation to come to an end, but it seemed to go on forever. “I have tried to give the applicant the benefit of the doubt,” Fernandez had written, “but the overwhelming weight of evidence supports the conclusion that he has lied about his origins, his background, and all of his claims.”

Ali sat with his head in his hands.

James said, “Do you understand what this means? You have seven days to lodge an appeal. If you don’t lodge an appeal, you will have to return to your country.”

Reza added, “You should call your lawyer. Have you got money for a phone card?”

Ali nodded. He’d taken a job cleaning the mess, he had thirty points in his account already.

Every time Ali called, his lawyer was busy. Fahim helped Ali fill out the appeal form, and they handed it to James two hours before the deadline. “Lucky Colonel Kurtz is gone,” Fahim told Ali. “Or that form would have sat in the fax tray for at least a week.”

Wild rumors swept the camp: the government was about to change, and everyone would be set free. Ali had seen the government’s rivals giving their blessing to the use of soldiers to block the bridge; he doubted that they’d show the prisoners in the desert much mercy if they won.

When the day of the election came, the government was returned, more powerful than ever.

That night, as they were preparing to sleep, Fahim saw Ali staring at the long white scars that criss-crossed his upper arms and chest. “I use a razor blade,” Fahim admitted. “It makes me feel better. The one power I’ve got left: to choose my own pain.”

“I’ll never do that,” Ali swore.

Fahim gave a hollow laugh. “It’s cheaper than cigarettes.”

Ali closed his eyes and tried to picture freedom, but all he saw was blackness. The past was gone, the future was gone, and the world had shrunk to this prison.

4.

“Ali, wake up, come see!”

Daniel was shaking him. Ali swatted his hands away angrily. The African was one of his closest friends, and there’d been a time when he could still drag Ali along to English classes or the gym, but since the appeal tribunal had rejected him, Ali had no taste for anything. “Let me sleep.”

“There are people. Outside the fence.”

“Escaped?”

“No, no. From the city!”

Ali clambered off the bunk. He splashed water on his face, then followed his friend.

Dozens of prisoners had gathered at the south-west corner of the fence, blocking the view, but Ali could hear people on the outside, shouting and banging drums. Daniel tried to clear a path, but it was impossible. “Get on my shoulders.” He ducked down and motioned to Ali.

Ali laughed. “It’s not that important.”

Daniel raised a hand angrily, as if to slap him. “Get up, you have to see.” He was serious. Ali obeyed.

From his vantage, he could see that the mass of prisoners pressed against the inner fence was mirrored by another crowd struggling to reach the outer one. Police, some on horses, were trying to stop them. Ali peered into the scrum, amazed. Dozens of young people, men and women, were pushing against the cordon of policemen, and every now and then someone was slipping through and running forward. Some distance away across the desert stood a brightly colored bus. The word “freedom” was painted across it, in English, Persian, Arabic, and probably ten or twelve languages that Ali couldn’t read. The people were chanting, “Set them free! Set them free!” One young woman reached the fence and clung to it, shouting defiantly. Four policemen descended on her and tore her away.

A cloud of dust was moving along the desert road. More police cars were coming, reinforcements. A knife twisted in Ali’s heart. This gesture of friendship astonished him, but it would lead nowhere. In five or ten minutes, the protesters would all be rounded up and carried away.

A young man outside the fence met Ali’s gaze. “Hey! My name’s Ben.”

“I’m Ali.”

Ben looked around frantically. “What’s your number?”

“What?”

“We’ll write to you. Give us your number. They have to deliver the letters if we include the ID number.”

“Behind you!” Ali shouted, but the warning was too late. One policeman had him in a headlock, and another was helping wrestle him to the ground.

Ali felt Daniel stagger. The crowd on his own side was trying to fend off a wave of guards with batons and shields.

Ali dropped to his feet. “They want our ID numbers,” he told Daniel. Daniel looked around at the melee. “Got anything to write on?”

Ali checked his back pocket. The small notebook and pen it was his habit to carry were still there. He rested the notebook on Daniel’s back, and wrote “Ali 3739 Daniel 5420.” Who else? He quickly added Fahim and a few others.

He scrabbled on the ground for a stone, then wrapped the paper around it. Daniel lifted him up again.

The police were battling with the protesters, grabbing them by the hair, dragging them across the dirt. Ali couldn’t see anyone who didn’t have more pressing things to worry about than receiving his message. He lowered his arm, despondent.

Then he spotted someone standing by the bus. He couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. He, or she, raised a hand in greeting. Ali waved back, then let the stone fly. It fell short, but the distant figure ran forward and retrieved it from the sand.

Daniel collapsed beneath him, and the guards moved in with batons and tear gas. Ali covered his eyes with his forearm, weeping, alive again with hope.

THE MOUSE RAN DOWN

Adrian Tchaikovsky

Adrian Tchaikovsky is a British fantasy author with eight novels out currently in his Shadows of the Apt series from Tor UK, and about a dozen short stories in various anthologies. “The Mouse Ran Down” was first published in
Carnage: After the End 2
in 2012.

Will Kempe was just starting his comic turn when Ellie pushed her way through the crowd to prod me in the shoulder.

“It’s time,” she hissed. “We’ve got to go.”

I missed Kempe’s standard opener, the joke about lawyers, and the whooping roar of the groundlings around us obliterated Ellie’s next words.

“Give me five minutes, come on,” I slipped into the next lull. “I never get to hear this. I’m all packed.”

Ellie prodded me again. “Move, John.” She was got up as an apprentice, a young lad with the first growth of moustache feathering his lip and out on the prowl in his master’s cast-off doublet. A man’s clothes made it easier to move about London in the Year of Our Lord 1598. Small wonder Shakespeare had cross-dressing on the brain.

“They’ve got the Complete Works back at Permian One.” Ellie’s finger jabbed even harder. “Besides, you could have gone to see it yesterday.”

“It’s Will Kempe. He does a different skit each night. No-one wrote it down.” But I was letting myself be dragged off, as Ellie drove a path through the crowd, leading with her elbows.

I never did get to hear that routine of Kempe’s. You could keep the rest of the play, the stuff Shakespeare wrote, but Kempe was a comedian’s comedian, and I was always having to move just as he got into his flow, hearing the joke but never the punchline.

But we were running out of time, approaching the jagged end of history. Ellie was right: we had to get out.

There was a warehouse near the river that was the subject of a furious inheritance lawsuit. It was piled high with crates and boxes, imperishable goods brought in from the Indies and tied up in the courts until one of seven warring brothers would finally prevail over the others in around 1603. That was our home, for the nine months of the years 1597-8 that history had snapped off and preserved. We always arrived in the bitter cold of December, laden with our meagre possessions, hurrying through the snow-scattered streets to our makeshift saunctuary. We left in a September that was just being leached of the heat of summer, just as Will Kempe was making them laugh at the Curtain.

Four times. I had crept into this London four times with Ellie and Marcus, with a handful of families at our heels, living in the untenanted spaces of history by borrowing and theft and subterfuge, and then moving on.

We got back to the warehouse double time, by all the secret ways of that close-pressed, cluttered London, roofs and alleyways and connecting cellars. We were dressed as locals, but we were not supposed to be there, surplus to temporal requirements. It was best to avoid being noticed.

And there were always the hunters. We’d lost four fragments in the past year – my personal year, that was cut loose from all calendars – and nobody knew where would be next. We refugees were running short of safe havens. We were always on the move. It was no life, not for me, and certainly not for the children, the infirm. So few of us had made it out from the fall of history. We did our best to look after everyone.

Marcus had a look like sour milk when we turned up. “Do you know how late you are?”

“Plenty of time,” I told him, but it wasn’t true. Everything around us was starting to look grainy, shot through with streaks and fuzzy spots: noise in the signal, signs that a fragment was coming to its end. Out there, Old London Town was unravelling, breaking apart against the rocks of end time. Nobody would notice except us. The inhabitants, Will Kempe, all the theatregoers, they would disintegrate into nothing and never know it. If we didn’t get out we’d join them, only we’d not be made anew when the fragment began its nine month round again. We’d just be gone.

Patrick Scarrow and his family were ready to move, and Beth Nguyen and her kids, and the Wietzels, and the Morrow girls. We had twenty-one souls in our care, eternal refugees from when they’d destroyed the Now. The kids were complaining, mostly in whispers. It didn’t matter how many times, the life was still too disjointed to be good for them. Worse than just having to move school every year or so: each time they packed their bags they might be headed for the halls of Prester John or Dark Age Siberia or some time before mammals had even evolved.

Speaking of which. “Where’re we headed? You’ve taken a reading?”

Marcus gave me another look. “Just as well someone did. One month of Babylon. We’re overlapping with another troupe but it’s the only safe shard I could plot to. After that it’s a year in the Palaeolothic.”

“Make the most of Babylon then,” Ellie said dryly.

I passed amongst the others, making sure all the kids were keeping close to their folks, and that everyone had shouldered their backs and bags. Everyone had dressed for the occasion: robes and skirts, bare chests for the men, jewellery for the women. Babylon was a soft touch, but if there were other refugees already eking out a living there, we’d be in each others’ way and on each others’ toes every day. A populated fragment has its advantages – plenty of food to steal, plenty of comforts and conveniences if you’re sly about how you take advantage of them. Living space is tough to find, though – there just aren’t many places in any city of any time that will stay overlooked for the duration. The invisible spaces of Babylon in 1700BC would already be staked out and claimed by whoever was taking refuge there.

That this sort of doubling up was becoming more common as fragments were lost to us must have been in all our minds, but nobody said it. Nobody wanted to admit we were losing.

Not even losing the war. A war suggests we could fight back. We had been on the run since the end of time, desperately trying to put back the clock, and our enemies had hunted us through the eras and the ages, taking away our hiding places one by one. One day they would find this old London we were abandoning, and then Will Kempe would be no more, and his humorous monologue would be forever lost to human recollection.

“All right, let’s move!” Marcus called, opening the doors from one ruined dog-end of time to the next, keeping us one step ahead of the enemy. Everyone began to file through, and I cast a backwards glance at the warehouse even as the sight was riven with cracks and discoloured stains. I would be back, I hoped: back for another of 1597’s endless supply of Decembers, and many more after that.