The Thing Itself (36 page)

‘I’m dreadfully sorry,’ said Attar, and his handsome face looked fully distraught. ‘I’m afraid I can hear the drone.’ Adonais put shis head to one side. There
was
a buzzing noise.

‘I’ve miscalculated the timings shockingly,’ said Attar.

‘The building’s a long way from us,’ Adonais replied. But si couldn’t keep the anxiety from shis voice. Si reached out, carefully, and brushed his semi-permeable arm with shis hand. ‘I’m sure we’ll be—’

Events cut shim off. The military drone hurtled low over their heads, and shot towards the building, pulling its horrible noise after it like a comet’s tail. A hundred or so flechettes dropped from its belly, the line of them unzipping in the air and threading away towards the target on spurts of smoke like tentacles. Adonais couldn’t stop staring. Instants later an office block, a cliff-face of fragile twentieth-century window panes, sublimed into a puff-cloud of glass-dust and shards. The sound came a moment later, a deadened thwunk noise, like a gigantic bowling ball dropped on to a hard surface, and then a skin-crawling hissing sound, as antique glass misted into the air.

It was probably half a kilometre away, but the cloud of glass particles was billowing along the road towards them, so Adonis called to Attar to run, and together they sprinted up, round the corner, and finally in at a public library, pushing past the small knot of people who had come out on to the main building’s steps to see what all the noise was.

It was exciting, in fact. Adonais was laughing with the exhilaration of it all; and Attar was grinning like a kid. Soon enough the librarian asked Attar to leave. Adonais apologised on shis society’s part, but Attar took it in good grace. ‘If it’s a municipal regulation, then that’s that. She has to uphold the regulations after all.’

‘Nonetheless,’ said Adonais, looking stern.

Outside, a frost of broken glass was layered over the snow-cleared tarmac, and people were crunching over it, or just standing and gawking. Drones buzzed past, all going in the direction of the ruined building; and Adonais counted three larger land vehicles zumming past. The pavements hadn’t been cleared of snow, and here the glass had left a pitted landscape of myriad indentations like an inverted star map.

Much further away, a series of deep, resonant clangs, like the tolling of a Millennium-Dome-sized bell, shuddered through the air. Then: distant crackling sounds that, inappropriately, made Adonais think of popcorn. ‘The main attack,’ said Attar.

‘Would you like to come back to my apartment?’ Adonais asked and, as soon as si did, blushed. ‘It’s not an invitation I extend to many, male or female,’ si added. ‘I value my privacy. I like an ordered life. And I am not usually so … forward, I promise you … but—’ Si stopped. ‘You doubtless have somewhere to go.’

‘No. I believe there
are
hostels south of the river that will let rooms to my kind. But I haven’t made reservations. Not yet.’

‘Then come!’ Si felt a wash of excitement and pleasure, and when Attar smiled, the lower half of his face whiter (because the pavement was sort of showing through) and the upper half darker (where the road behind was half visible) it made shim laugh.

They walked back to the flat. ‘It’s nothing personal,’ si told him. ‘Hotels and such. It’s not you. It’s the people who hate you.’ Was hate too thoughtless a word? Upsetting? Si modified: ‘Who have taken against you, for ideological reasons. They just don’t want any trouble.’

‘It’s perfectly understandable,’ he replied. ‘I do understand.’

‘At twenty sixty-nine you’re right at the outside limit. Surely you can’t
have
any Ghosts, up then.’

‘Well, there are plenty of returnees. But you’re right, that’s not the same. We don’t really have future people, the way you do. I mean, some people go back from, say, December to February, if there’s something particular they need to go back for. So the beginning of the year has some Ghosts. But again, not the same as you. We’re certainly not overrun by strangers as you guys are.’

Adonais boggled at travelling from December to February. ‘Why would somebody go so short a time?’

‘Bereavement is one reason,’ he said, looking serious. Adonais wondered if loss of that kind was the reason Attar had abandoned his own time.

‘And do they …’ Si tried to think of a diplomatic way of phrasing this. ‘Do any better? With the fading? I mean, just going back a few months, rather than thirty full years?’

He shook his head. ‘How far back you travel has no impact on that. It’s travelling at all. Once you’re decoupled from the original temporal embedding, quantum decay starts to fade you. I’ve heard of cases where people went back literally seconds, and it still happens. They’re not
as
faded, of course. But once Ghosting has begun, it can’t be reversed.’

‘Quantum,’ said Adonais. ‘It’s one of those veil-of-unknowing words, isn’t it? Except to experts I suppose.’

‘It’s not obscure,’ said Attar. ‘Just the fact of a person going back in time, well, it alters the timeline. At a quantum level. And then every time there’s a decision point, different yous split off, and the core you is diluted. The theory used to be that there are
trillions
of such decision points every millisecond, one for every atomic interaction.’ He snorted a laugh. ‘If that were true, I’d disappear at once in a puff of existential evaporation! Luckily for me, it’s a much slower process. Quantum decision points tend to clump together, in ways the scientists don’t entirely understand. But it’s the physical barrier at my time – it’s why twenty sixty-nine is a limit point. They sent probes further up-time, but they all just vanished. There’s some hazy data brought back, I believe, but nothing very useful. Ten years up-time is a storm of decision points, and it erodes them away to nothing. Since anyone travelling forward would have to pass
through
those ten years, it stops all travel. Perhaps these sixty-two years – I mean, from the original Seventeen, up to my time – are an anomaly. They’ve been, somehow, swept relatively clean of decision points. After my time the points are so thick no time traveller can survive. I don’t know, though.’

They were at Adonais’s building, and si let him through the main door. Together they rode the lift up to shis floor. ‘I read somewhere,’ si said, ‘that they think it’s an
artefact
of the Seventeen. Of what happened back then.’

‘Yes, I’ve heard that. Something to do with the resonances, or the harmonics, of time itself. There may be clear areas up at 2350 too, for the same reason. But no one has been able to get back to us from then and we can’t reach that far. So it’s all speculation.’

‘I suppose if a time were perfectly purged of decision points,’ Adonais pondered, ‘a person could time travel there without becoming a Ghost?’

‘I suppose so,’ laughed Attar. ‘But then there’d be no human free will, so it would be a time of automata. I’m not sure I’d
want
to go there.’

The lift doors opened, and Adonais opened shis front door with a finger-click. ‘I’ll tell you something else,’ Attar said, stepping inside. ‘I know people, back in my time, who had put themselves in long-term stasis tanks. They’ll wake up in the twenty-fourth century, and then their curiosity will be satiated.’

‘Excellent,’ said Adonais. ‘So: take a seat.’ Part of shim wanted to grab Attar right away, and kiss him. But si restrained shis impulsiveness. The time traveller took his backpack off, and sat down, and the pattern of the sofa was mistily visible right through him.

Then: the impossible.

The truth was si was falling in love. Si couldn’t help it. It really wasn’t how si normally acted – giddy, like a kid, heart pounding like a James Brown drum fill. But having him in the apartment simply applied the pressure of a peculiar sort of grace to shis soul, first for one day and night, then for another. That first evening, Adonais checked online and discovered a specialist supplier that dealt in Ghost meats. The thought that such a market existed had never so much as occurred to shim before – most travellers carried their own supplies with them, of course. Still, it was good that somebody had been enterprising enough to cater to it. A contact in the future sent sheep, pigs and cows back in time, machines strapped to their bodies. The supplier butchered them and sold them on, or hoped to do so before the meat became too faded. Adonais placed an order for one eye-wateringly expensive sirloin. The cost was not an issue; shis heart was reckless with the flush of new love, and si didn’t care. The supplier required proof that si was cooking
for
a Ghost. Apparently anti-Ghost terrorist groups were in the habit of making spurious orders in order to attack the delivery drone. Adonais got Attar to stand in front of the camera to prove their bona fides. Then the order went through, and within an hour a drone had delivered a bag containing a Ghost steak.

It was fresh enough to be susceptible to heat; and Adonais cooked it, guided by online recipes, and making a best guess as to the timings – meat half Ghostly had to be cooked for twice as long, three-quarters Ghostly four times, and so on. In a separate pan si cooked a regular steak for shimself, and served the two together. Since Attar only had the meat, si didn’t serve shimself any vegetables. He drank water from a large bottle from his backpack, and devoured the Ghost steak hungrily.

Afterwards they sat together in companionly intimacy, and watched the news. It was all about the attacks of the day, of course; the ways they had been predicted by the time travellers, and the trivial ways in which they differed from prophecy. Experts talked the issue back and forth. The main thrust of what the Ghosts said had certainly been proved true. The misdirection by
malicious
Ghosts could be discounted; or by Ghosts who thought they had a duty to add uncertainty back into the picture. But who could fathom the motivation of these people, anyway? When you considered what they sacrificed: why would any level-headed, normal person
want
to travel in time?

‘You can ask, you know,’ Attar said.

‘I didn’t want to seem impolite,’ said Adonais. ‘But I’ll admit, I’m curious.’

‘I thought about it for a long time. In the end it was the approach of the cut-off that decided me. It was when I realised that, if I didn’t do it, I would never do it. When I realised how much the prospect of
never doing it
horrified me.’

‘You came out of curiosity?’

‘I read about the attacks, the last days of the war and especially today and tomorrow. Lots of people died. But returnees said that as
they
remembered it, many more people died. They impressed me. They’d made a difference.’

‘But at what cost to their own lives!’

He shrugged. ‘Nothing valuable is cost free. Maybe if I hadn’t come, you’d have been killed when that building was blown up! That’s worth something, isn’t it?’

Si put shis hand, very gently, on top of his. Waited for him to kiss shim, and when that didn’t happen, kissed him shimself. Shis heart thrummed. Couldn’t remember when si had felt quite so excited, quite so turned on. Applying only the slightest pressure gave back the sensation of being on the verge of breaking through the surface tension that held him in. The thought of that repelled shim – shis face literally sinking into his, a ghastly thought. Yet it was that very horror, held at bay by shis careful self-control (that very quality si had spent a lifetime honing) that gave such force and spice to shis desire for him. Desire always takes fire from the proximity of revulsion, after all. Si had to hold back, and the holding back, the voluntary restraint, was the biggest turn-on of all.

He responded, touching shim delicately and finely, and that excited shim all the more.

They moved from the sofa to the bed, and made love in an agonisingly delicate, tender way. Adonais’s climax was of a deeper and more satisfying kind than si had known for many years. Afterwards they lay together in the twilight. The city outside serenaded them with the rattle of distant gunfire, with ambulance and police drones buzzing frantically back and forth, with army ground effect vehicles swooshing down the long streets.

Si couldn’t deny it any more. Si was in love.

They talked in low tones. ‘It is wonderful, walking around the past. The city isn’t
like
this, where I come from.’

‘You’ve done your research.’

‘Of course. But it’s no substitute for actually going there.’

‘I’m sorry the natives aren’t friendlier.’

‘
You’re
a native,’ he pointed out, ‘and you’re being pretty welcoming.’

Shis blush was hidden in the darkness. ‘I don’t make a habit of doing this kind of thing,’ si assured him.

‘As for the others,’ he said. ‘Well, some people are courteous and helpful. They appreciate that I have come to help them. You know the stats, I’m sure. With each quantum wave of travellers, the rate of preventable death drops by between ten and twelve per cent. It’s because of us, because of me and people like me, this war has the lowest casualty rate of any major war.’

Si pressed shimself against him, gently. ‘I am grateful. You saved my life. I won’t waste that gift.’

‘Some other people are hostile, it’s true,’ Attar went on, in more meditative tones. ‘I suppose they think we ruined something pristine. Released the last evil demon from Pandora’s sack. And a small sub-set of
those
people are violent, it’s true. I know the stories of kidnapping, even murder. And the low levels of successful prosecution of people accused of killing Ghosts. But that’s not most of you. Most of you are indifferent. I’ve been here two days, and I’d say that’s far and away the most common reaction I’ve met with. People are bored with meeting time travellers. I guess, when the first ones arrived, people were probably pretty ramped. But then more came, and more, and every new wave was superposed over the ones who were already here, so that it had always
been
that way. So now, the time travellers are here and have always been here, and without that sense of novelty people are naturally unimpressed.’