The Time Traveler's Almanac (118 page)

*   *   *

There had indeed been a war. Did we win? The question has no meaning. It was a cold war. Nobody was actually fighting, because that would have been boorish and uneconomic. Instead, competing commercial and ideological interests – one of them ours – were spinning the wheels frantically behind the scenes to find a way to beat the others without ever having to fight.

You heard about all sorts, from those who remembered those lost, last years. There were gene bombs and attack memes. There were viral ideas gone feral, adverse mental programming on a vast scale. You didn’t know what to believe, they said, and even when you did, you didn’t trust your own faith because someone might have slipped it into your drink. It was a strange war. It killed ideas but left people standing. Every day our society was written and rewritten.

Small wonder that they had started looking at taking the war into time. Surely the ultimate piece of passive aggression was to pre-empt the bad guys before they even knew what they were going to do.

It didn’t work out.

*   *   *

We hit the cooling night of Babylon after the rains had come and gone, creeping out from the cracks of the world into the shadows of the temples. The air was still, scented with fragrant smoke, with distant decay. Around us the darkened city was quiet, but there would surely be locals abroad who would not want to see this ragged band of refugees struggling through their streets. Getting to the safe house would be risky. If we had arrived at the beginning of the fragment, when everything had reset to its earliest surviving moment, then we could know exactly where all the inhabitants would be, and follow a pre-determined path that would get us under cover, unseen, before dawn. This fragment was months into its cycle, though, and the mere presence of other refugees would have exercised a cumulative effect on the routines of the city, despite their best efforts to stay below the radar. We would have to rely on stealth and misdirection.

Marcus and Ellie and I would take turns to lead away anyone who looked like they would take issue with a group of foreigners skulking through their streets, and still we expected to be seen by a fair assortment of beggars, prostitutes and drunken artisans. We could only hope we wouldn’t cause any problems for the incumbents. We would be waiting just a month before we skipped off for the Eocene, whilst they were fixing to stay here for the duration and would have to ride out any ripples that we had made.

We made it in the end, just as dawn was clawing at the eastern sky. There were almost no locals about that night, and those we saw were only glimpsed distantly and were as keen to avoid us as we were to dodge them. At the time I thought that we’d been lucky.

The safe house here was a tomb, or at least a tomb in waiting. The intended resident would be alive and well throughout the fragment’s term, still clinging grimly to life when time called a fractured halt to this slice of Babylon. In the meantime his forward planning and the vanity of his wanting a grand monument to his posterity gave us a roof over our heads.

“Who’s here, anyway?” I asked Marcus as we hurried and skulked in turn through the moon-shrouded streets.

“Maria, Leon, Sun, maybe another thirty all told,” he told me. “Going to be real crowded. We won’t be making any friends. Everyone on their best behaviour.”

“It’s not like it’s our fault—” I objected, but he cut me off.

“Doesn’t matter. Going to be standing room only for a month, and that’s not their fault, either. If Comoy could only step up the work—”

It was my turn to butt in. “Doctor Comoy is doing all he can to fix this.”

We were practically in sight of the tomb and Marcus gave out a long sigh, and only through that did he show just how tired he was. “John, it’s been almost forty years we’ve lived like this. I was a kid, when it all went to crap. You weren’t born. Comoy’s had all the time in the world to put the fucking egg back together again.”

“He’s not given up hope.”

“That’s what he says. Come on.”

Marcus and I had our charges, Scarrow and Nguyen and the rest, and we got them huddled down in a small street within sight of the tomb, while Ellie went to make contact with the incumbents. By that time everyone was exhausted, the children dead on their feet, backs bowed under their loaded lives, all they had of where we’d all come from, mementos of a past and future that no longer existed.

“We can’t keep doing this,” Marcus said. I made an urgent expression towards the others, who were all within earshot, but he shrugged. “I don’t care,” he went on. “It’s too hard. We can’t just keep running.”

“We can if we want to live.” The old party line. “It won’t be forever.”

His laughter was forced out of him like bile from a wound. “Forever? The end of time won’t be forever? Oh, you fucking naïf.”

Then Ellie was on her way back – too soon and too fast. Marcus and I exchanged glances. We were already on our feet by the time she reached us.

“They’re gone,” she told us.

“Is this the right fragment—?” I started and:

“The locals—?” from Marcus, but she was shaking her head to both of us.

“They were here. They’re gone. Not the locals.”

“No,” I heard myself say, but Ellie was already continuing.

“There are burn-marks all over, spent shell casings. Someone put up a fight. This fragment is compromised.”

“No,” I said again, and I was aware of a gathering murmur of despair and fear from everyone around us, but Marcus hissed for quiet.

Somewhere across the city the enemy was abroad. Small wonder we’d seen so few locals. There would be a genocide underway even as we crouched there. This small, jagged fragment of space and time was being cleansed and sterilized. We had lost Babylon. One more piece of history was no longer safe for human habitation.

“We need to move,” Ellie said.

“We need somewhere to move to,” Marcus pointed out sourly.

“Give me a chance. There must be somewhere we can reach from here. John, you too. I’ll take upstream, you take down.”

We did the math, over an hour, calculating our way out of fallen Babylon. At any moment the enemy could have found us, and we would all have died. I had glimpsed the enemy once before, during an escape that was far too tight and diminished the surviving population of human history by another twenty souls. They were sufficiently advanced that there was no resisting them. Hiding was all we had.

They were things left over from the war that had stopped the wheels of history, ended the world and robbed us not only of all we had but of all that was to come. The only thing we knew was that they were hunting us down, we refugees from the war, one rough-edged piece of time after another. Vermin. That’s what we were to them: vermin to be exterminated.

I searched and searched. I found a dozen mapped fragments within reach, not one of them to anywhere with dry land, and some without even a breathable atmosphere. So much of our own past is denied to us, a planet hostile to the meek who would one day inherit it.

“One,” I said at last. Marcus checked my results: the middle of a Carboniferous ice age, a frozen forest where a spark would set off a firestorm.

“No,” he said, and Ellie chimed, “I’ve found another.” She was always faster than me.

“Then why didn’t you—?”

“I was hoping you’d do better,” she said sadly. “We can get to Warsaw.”

“No,” I breathed, aware of all the eyes on us: the desperate, the lost, the eternally displaced. “There must be something else.”

I was seriously going to argue for the ice, for the giant bugs, for the dizzying high oxygen atmosphere of the Carboniferous. He was right, though. The difference between that time – near inimitable to human life – and the Warsaw ghetto was slight, but we might have a chance. There would be a way out, if only we could find it.

*   *   *

They broke time, in that war. Because we can never go back there, we’ll never know who was responsible: whether it was everyone incrementally twisting at the fabric of time, or whether the continuum just fractured the moment the first time engine went online. Or perhaps, as Marcus says, it was just the concept of mutually-assured destruction taken to its logically illogical extreme. A pre-emptive strike against time itself to stop it falling into the hands of the enemy. Perhaps they meant to do it.

The cracks coursed through history like a mouse running down a clock. Some small number of us – and by ‘us’ I mean the seven billion human beings who were alive to see those final days of sanity – were snatched out of time before it broke, preserved by brilliant men like Doctor Comoy. We are, theoretically, the lucky ones. At least we still exist.

Doc Comoy and his team are still mapping the expanding debris cloud that is time itself. When we find a fragment we can reach, we catalogue it, plot it, inventory it. The science is not academic. We are looking for sanctuary, temporary shelters from the storm. For the first few decades it was us against the end of the world, blazing our trails through the monsters of prehistory and the depredations of our own ancestors to find places that would be safe to hide in, even for a little while. Then we discovered that one other thing had survived the annihilation: the enemy, whoever and whatever they were. As we scurried from fragment to fragment, eking out our miserable existence in the spaces between, they were hunting us. Even this tenuous life was more than they were prepared to allow us.

*   *   *

Warsaw 1943, and it is an insult to that city’s name that only this shard of it remains: its darkest hour, the last three months of the ghetto. Jewish and Polish resistance fighters, desperate and poorly armed, clashing with Nazi troops and collaborator police; a thousand plans of getting out, so few of which came to anything; an implacable enemy; the doom of utter annihilation hanging in the air. The only advantage to that terrible place was that we fit right in. No point in trying to hide, because every hidden part of that city was already crammed with the fearful.

“We can’t stay here long.” We’d got everyone into a shelter, the cellar of a collapsed house. There were a dozen families already there, pushed together, on top of one another. Starved, dirty faces stared at us, seeing our bizarre clothes, our mix of ethnicities, the fact that we were all far too well fed. They would all be dead, I knew. They were already dead. The Nazis would storm the ghetto as this fragment of time began to fail. Every one of these people had been preserved by that malevolent cripple, history, solely to suffer, to hope and fear, dread and die, over and over again.

“We need a proper sanctuary,” Ellie said. “There’s nothing I can see where we’d be safe hiding up. Someone has to make it to Comoy and get him to find us somewhere. We don’t have enough data here.”

“Can we even get someone to Comoy?” Marcus asked her.

“I have a path,” she confirmed. It was nineteen fragments long, skipping from time-piece to time-piece, in and out of history like a rat in the skirting, scant minutes to cross between the shards. We could never have got the children through it, probably not most of the adults. But then staying in Warsaw for any length of time was no better.

Time would be of the essence.

“I’ll do it.” And it was my creeping shame that courage did not motivate me. I could not face the end in Warsaw another time. I had seen it too often. The broken fragments of history have sharp edges.

Marcus nodded bluntly, and I looked over Ellie’s obstacle course. It was mostly out of recorded time, a worm-trail through monster-haunted spaces that man had no place travelling in.

My finger tracked to a projected five late Devonian minutes and I raised my eyebrow.

“Hold your breath,” said Ellie, and kissed me lightly on the cheek.

*   *   *

I walked the tops of glaciers when they ruled the world, huddling and hurrying in my too-thin clothes. I lurched from them into a desert that spanned the horizons, that could have been anywhere, save that in this time it was near everywhere. The sun tried to kill me; elsewhere it was pelycosaurs at my heels with their razor teeth. For one minute I walked the streets of Pompeii where the ash had yet to fall. The eruption would never come to this fragment, and yet its work had already been done. The locals were gone, removed entirely, not a living thing remaining. The enemy had been there. We had lost another crumb of our past.

I held my breath and ran through the uncertain Devonian, crushing liverworts beneath my feet, a pelting figure from a lost future dashing through the ferns and towering hands of fungus.

Ellie had plotted my escape well. She always did have the best head for it. Me? The only things I was really good at were running and hiding.

*   *   *

We had retained a lot of the Permian, snapped-off pieces of it scattered like stones across the broken substrate of time. Some of those fragments were years long, even centuries. They were harsh, dry times, the age before the dinosaurs, populated by starving monsters; each shard a memento of a time when all life on earth was sliding inexorably towards an extinction that would claim very nearly everything that lived. The world would know only one greater disaster, and that was ours. It was fitting that Doctor Comoy had made his home there, cycling between a dozen bestial, inhospitable fragments and taking his laboratory with him. Nobody else was permitted to set up in residence along the course of his peregrinations in case they got in his way. He was not a man fond of company, or of the human race much. He was its only hope, though, so it had no choice but to be fond of him.

Permian One was his migratory home, where he and his staff and guards were trying to start the clocks again. It was the hope of every lost, scattered, desperate soul who crept in and out of the fragments and scurried from era to era.
Doc Comoy will fix it.

I believed. I thought I believed. I had lived all my life to that mantra. We will remake the world again, glue the fragments back into a whole. Somehow the misanthropic genius would save us all, give the universe CPR, turn back time.

I hadn’t been to Permian One in six years of personal time. My faith had sat at the back of my mind, comforting in its presence, never needing to be unsheathed. When I had talked with Marcus, the doubter, I had taken Comoy’s side, always. Of course he would succeed in fixing it all. What other alternative was there, that was worth the consideration?