Here Comes the Sun (23 page)

‘Um.'

‘It's supposed,' the pilot continued, ‘to be, like, continuous. Time, like an ever-rolling stream, and so forth. That's the theory.'

Jane swallowed hard, and tried to fool herself into believing that the heaving in her stomach was something to do with the way the helicopter was rocking about in the thermals. ‘I see,' she lied.

‘Doesn't work like that, of course,' the pilot went on remorselessly. ‘I mean, it's becoming a joke. If it's not a whole carriageway coned off because they're repairing the membrane of the space-time continuum, then it's resurfacing; which means contraflows, of course.'

‘Contraflows,' Jane repeated.

‘Bloody horrible things,' the pilot said, nodding. ‘Just up there, between junctions 19 and 20, they've rerouted
all five lanes of the Pastbound carriageway on to the hard shoulder of the Futurebound, and they expect it to work.' The pilot took one hand off the joystick, felt in his pocket, and found a stick of chewing gum. ‘No wonder you get hold-ups,' he said.

‘Hold-ups,' Jane said. ‘In Time.'

‘It can be a real bummer,' the pilot agreed. ‘Not to mention the confusion. I mean, there you are, quietly edging your way through the first few decades of the sixteenth century, and you look over your shoulder and see all these blokes in bomber jackets and flared jeans and Status Quo T-shirts zipping along past you on the inside. I'm not at all surprised some of them freak out and try and cut across the lanes.' A red light flicked on just below the fuel gauge and started to flash alarmingly. The pilot put his fingers in his mouth, and then reached out and put a blob of chewing gum over it. ‘I haven't the foggiest what that light's for,' he commented. ‘In the manual it just says “Emergency”.'

Jane opened her eyes - somehow or other they had come to be shut - and nerved herself to look down. It was like . . . Hell; there was no point her trying to fool herself with similes. Now that she actually knew what it was, there didn't really seem much to be gained from trying to compare it with something it wasn't.

‘But the hold-ups,' she repeated doggedly. ‘In
Time
.'

The pilot chuckled. ‘I bet you thought Time always travelled at the same speed,' he said. ‘Well, now you know.'

Jane felt her jaw sag, as if someone had cunningly managed to whip all the bone out of it without her feeling a thing. ‘It doesn't?' she said.

‘Course not,' the pilot replied. ‘I mean, it's supposed to, sure; that's what the speed limits are for. But does anybody take any notice? Do they hell as like. And they call that progress!'

Jane tried thinking about that one, but her brain wouldn't bite on it. ‘Do you mean it used to be different before?' she hazarded.

‘No,' the pilot said. ‘They call it progress. That's the word they use for it. Or sometimes they call it innovation, or the relentless force of socio-political development. What they mean by that is, some flash bugger in a soupedup cafe racer doing a ton down the outside lane. It doesn't half screw things up when that happens, I can tell you.'

‘Er.'

‘That's if he's on the Pastbound carriageway,' the pilot added conversationally, ‘because then he's going from the future into the past. If he's on the other side of the road, of course, he's a rabid reactionary trying to turn the clock back. Either way, if he gets done he loses his licence automatically, and a bloody good thing too.'

The calm, unflappable part of Jane's mind sorted out the words necessary for her to ask the pilot to confirm that it was possible for people to travel from the future into the past. The rest of her mind switched off the lights, locked up and went for a coffee. She closed her eyes, but it didn't seem to help.

‘Can we get this straight?' Jane asked. ‘There's people going from the past to the future, yes. I can handle that, I think. But people going from the future to the . . .'

The pilot turned his head and gave her a funny look. ‘Yes?' he said.

‘I'm sorry,' Jane replied, feeling rather as if she had a wet sock in her mouth. ‘Is that possible?'

‘It's more than possible,' the pilot said. ‘It's absolutely essential. Can you imagine the mess you'd have up the top end if they didn't?'

Jane said nothing. The wet sock had become the last sock of all, the one you find wedged in a crevice in the back of the drum of the washing-machine three days after
you did the actual wash. The pilot seemed to sense the difficulty she was having, for he changed his tone of voice down a gear and spoke a little more slowly.

‘Look,' he said, ‘you're a mortal, right, you've got all that blood stuff sloshing about inside you. Think what would happen if all the blood only went in one direction. You'd get a sodding great build-up in your feet, and the rest of you would . . . Well, anyway, think of it like that, if you can. Presents circulate in the same way. If they didn't, the past would go to sleep. You'd have pins and needles right up your racial collective subconscious. See what I mean?'

‘You mean,' Jane replied, with extreme caution, ‘that people keep going round and round in circles? For ever and ever?'

The pilot scratched his nose with the heel of his hand. ‘Well,' he said, ‘I suppose you could put it like that. It's more your classic river analogy, really, but I didn't want to explain it that way because it's such an awful cliche. You've got your river, right?'

‘Which river?'

‘Oh, any river. Rain falls in the mountains, it collects and runs across the plain in a river to the sea, the sea evaporates and falls as rain on the mountains. Now do you see?'

‘No.'

‘Fair enough.' The pilot's voice seemed very far away, somehow; or perhaps it was very long ago rather than very far away. ‘Anyway,' he said, ‘I gather that you're going to help us sort it all out. I bloody well hope so,' he added. ‘It needs it.'

 

It's impossible to explain the operation of Time simply, especially if you're trying to fly a helicopter as well. Attempting to understand the way it works purely from
a verbal description is like learning to play Mah Jong without a Mah Jong set. It can't be done.

Instead, look back down the carriageway to a point where the two streams of light eventually merge into one, then zoom in close and stare. This is Time, coming into operation . . .

 

. . . On a day when it's really slashing down, with the mud bubbling up around the ankles of the extremely self-conscious party of worthies in sodden grey suits and yellow plastic hard hats, standing around a length of damp pink ribbon stretched half-heartedly across the shining tarmac.

‘. . . Gives me very great pleasure,' Staff is saying, as the rain drips off the peak of his hat on to his tie, ‘to declare this astro-temporal expressway well and truly open.'

He reaches for the pair of scissors on the velvet cushion; and as his fingers make contact, he's making a very quick assessment of the whole idea, and thinking: Yes, but . . .

He's thinking: Okay, the old system worked, but that's not to say it's going to go on working, what with the vast increase in Time use expected in the next five million years. It's got to make sense to do it this way. Join it at the Big Bang, and then straight through to the other end without having to stop for anything. Absolutely no risk of anybody getting lost in the Industrial Revolution, or taking the wrong turning at the Fall of Constantinople.

And so he cuts the tape. And in that fraction of a second between the two blades of the scissors meeting, and the severed ends of the tape falling away, he thinks: Well, we all make mistakes.

Because, before they built the expressway, it worked. It shouldn't have, of course. It should have been absolute
chaos
.

Instead of a straight line joining the two ends of the universe, there was a maze of single carriageways and winding little lanes, creeping on its tortuous way from one crucial event to the next, completely haphazard, uncoordinated and unplanned; rather like history itself. The traveller had to get off the ferry, thread his way through the back alleys of prehistory to get on to the Neolithic ring-road, pootle round that to the big roundabout on the outskirts of the Bronze Age, take the second turning on the left (otherwise he'd find himself evolving back into an ape) for the long drag across a thousand years of flat, boring timeways with no chance of overtaking until he got on to the downhill straight into the Roman Empire. Then he'd be faced with the sheer hell of cutting across the city traffic (you know what the traffic's like in Rome these days; well, it's actually improved out of all recognition) before taking the last exit for the gearbox-numbing journey through the Middle Ages - uphill all the way, stuck behind a succession of slow-moving ecclesiastical Long Vehicles - only to find himself confronted with the brain-twisting complexity of the sixteenth-century flyover network . . .

Anything's got to be better than that.

Wrong.

So wrong, in fact, that after the first of the disastrous multiple pile-ups on the Futurebound carriageway of the T7 there was a full inter-departmental inquiry. Needless to say, it never actually published any findings; but it leaked like a six-month-old torch battery, and the unauthorised disclosures made alarming reading.

For a start, because the route was now so straight, everyone was travelling far too fast. Apart from the drastically increased risk of collisions, this meant that travellers were getting from one end of the universe to the other in at least half the time, often less; with the result that at
the other end (where they have this really
amazing
set of traffic lights) the size and mass of the tailback was threatening to destabilise the equilibrium of eternity, quite apart from there only being three operational toilets in the cafe in the last lay-by. Unless something was done, there was going to be trouble.

So, very reluctantly, the Administration decided that there was nothing for it but to send the whole lot of them back the way they'd come . . .

The idea wasn't intrinsically bad. Instead of everyone trying to squash through the exit gates at once, there would be a filter system; any travellers who couldn't get through would be sent back round in a gigantic loop down the Pastbound carriageway to the start, and then they'd return back up the Futurebound side and have another shot at getting through the gates. It was a sort of holding-pattern, with presents circling in the system until they got clearance to leave.

What with the panic of getting the Pastbound carriageways built before the fabric of space and time got seriously bent, nobody had the leisure to think the project through; with the result that the awful consequences of having the same traveller driving along the same route two or three times
at the same time
- in two or three different instalments, if you like - weren't appreciated until it was too late. Reports of travellers on their second circuit driving too fast on the outside lane and running into the back of themselves still on their first circuit came as a complete and horribly unwelcome surprise. The difficulties over the insurance claims alone were enough to put a permanent kink in causality.

Each attempted solution led to further and worse problems. The idea of a speed limit was one of the least inspired; the sort of travellers who obeyed the speed limit were the sort who were already causing havoc by dawdling
along on the inside - still faffing about in the Reformation when they should have been the other side of Napoleon, for example - while the tearaway element who were causing the problems simply ignored it. Putting sleeping policemen across the carriageway at notorious temporal blackspots did no good at all, particularly when the policemen started waking up.

Meanwhile, what with everyone driving round the system two, three or even four times more than originally intended, the carriageways themselves began to crack up. The tarmac simply couldn't stand it. Extensive frost damage along the entire length of the Ice Age didn't exactly help, and it wasn't long before, at any one time, up to a third of the entire system was coned off for repair, causing the worst problems yet. Discontented travellers began making their own unofficial exits off the expressway back on to the old, disused network of lanes and byways, with the result that they got to the Exit long before anybody else, themselves included. As a panic measure, the Administration introduced a number of diversions to get the traffic moving again, which meant that any number of crucial moments in history turned out not to have happened at all. The Trojan War, the reign of King Arthur, the golden age of English cricket all suddenly ceased ever to have existed, with side-effects that defied calculation.

One rather sad knock-on effect of all this was that Staff foresaw the whole ghastly mess just as he cut through the ceremonial ribbon. It would perhaps have been some consolation for him to know that the problem had already been solved, if it wasn't for the fact that the solution was destined to be held up in a contraflow on the T93 on the outskirts of Agincourt, finally arriving too late to be of any relevance, and being swept back into the stream of traffic.

The only person who derived any benefit at all from
the whole fiasco was the Flying Dutchman; who sold his ship, bought a set of spanners and a small yellow van, and is now doing a roaring trade as a breakdown service.

 

Staff closed the door and threw his raincoat over the back of a chair. It had been a long day.

Senior members of the Administration are expected to live close to the central office complex. Unless they're extremely lucky (like Ganger, for example, who was able to wangle a long lease of a houseboat moored on the left bank of the Styx) this means a tiny little flat in one of the five labyrinthine complexes that were built on the site of the old dockyards. For your premium of a billion kreuzers and your fifty thousand kreuzers a year ground rent and service charge, you get windows that don't open, lifts that don't work and condensation you could swim in. There are no roof-gardens or window-boxes, but if you have a horticultural streak there's always the mould on the curtains.