Timescape (13 page)

Peterson frowned. "But what's it like? I mean, what does the world seem like if you can change it round?"

Markham said lightly, "Nobody knows. Nobody's ever tried it before."

"There were no tachyon transmitters until now."

"And no reason to try to reach the past, either."

"Let me get this straight. How's Renfrew going to avoid creating a paradox? If he gives them a lot of information, they'll solve the problem and there'll be no reason for him to send the message."

"That's the trick. Avoid the paradox, or you'll get a stuck switch. So Renfrew will send a piece of the vital information enough to get research started, but not enough to solve the problem utterly."

"But what'll it be like for us? The world will change round us?"

Markham chewed at his lower lip. "I think so. We'll be in a different state. The problem will be reduced, the oceans not so badly off."

"But what is this state? I mean, us sitting here? We know the oceans are in trouble."

"Do we? How do we know this isn't the result of the experiment we're about to do? That is, if Renfrew hadn't existed and thought of this idea, maybe we'd be worse off. The problem with causal loops is that our notion of time doesn't accept them. But think of that stuck switch again."

Peterson shook his head as though to clear it. "It's hard to think about."

"Like tying time in knots," Markham conceded. "What I've given you is an interpretation of the mathematics. We know tachyons are real; what we don't know is what they imply."

Peterson looked around at the Whim, now mostly deserted. "Strange, to think of this as being an outcome of what we haven't done yet. All looped together, like a hooked rug." He blinked, thinking of the past, when he had eaten here. "That coal stove–how long have they had that?"

"Years, I suppose. Seems like a sort of trademark. Keeps the place warm in winter, and it's cheaper than gas or electricity. Besides, they can cook at any time of day, not just the power hours. And it gives the customers something to watch while they're waiting for their orders."

"Yes, coal's the long-term fuel for old England,"

Peterson murmured, apparently more to himself than Markham. "Bulky though."

"When were you a student here?"

"In the '70s. I haven't been back very often."

"Have things changed much?"

Peterson smiled reminiscently. "I dare say my rooms haven't changed much. Picturesque view of the river and all my clothes get moldy from the damp ..." He shook off his mood. "I'll have to be getting back to London soon."

They elbowed through the students to the door and out into the street.

The June sunshine was dazzling after the pub's dark interior. They stood for a moment, blinking, on the narrow sidewalk. Pedestrians stepped off into the street to walk past them and cyclists swerved around the pedestrians with a trilling of bells. They turned left and strolled back towards King's Parade. On the corner opposite the church, they paused to look in the windows of Bowes & Bowes bookstore.

"Do you mind if I go in for a minute?" Peterson asked. "There's something I want to look for."

"Sure. I'll come in too. I'm a bookstore freak; never pass one by."

Bowes & Bowes was almost as crowded as the Whim had been earlier, but the voices here were subdued. They edged cautiously between the knots of students in black gowns and pyramids of books on display.

Peterson pointed out one on a less conspicuous table towards the back of the store. "Have you seen this?" he asked, picking up a copy and handing it to Markham.

"Holdren's book? No, I haven't read it yet, though I talked to him about it. Is it good?" Markham looked at the title, stamped in red on a black cover. The Geography of Calamity: Geopolitics of Human Dieback by John Holdren. In the bottom right corner was a small reproduction of a medieval engraving of a grinning skeleton with a scythe. He thumbed through it, paused, began to read. "Look at this," he said, holding the book out to Peterson. Peterson ran his eyes over the chart and nodded.

Attributable Deaths (estimated)

1984-96 Java 8,750,000

1986 Malawi 2,300,000

1987 Philippines 1,600,000

1987-present Congo 3,700,000

1989-present India 68,000,000

1990-present Colombia, Ecuador, Honduras 1,600,000

1991-present Dominican Republic 750,000

1991-present Egypt, Pakistan 3,800,000

1993-present General Southeast Asia 113,500,000

Markham whistled softly. "Is it accurate?"

"Oh, yes. Underestimated, if anything."

Peterson moved towards the back of the store. A girl was perched on a high stool adding a column of figures into an auto-accountant. Her fair hair hung forward, hiding her face. Peterson studied her covertly while leafing through some of the books in front of him. Nice legs. Fashionably dressed in some frilly peasant style he disliked. A blue Liberty scarf artfully arranged at her neck. Slim now, but not for many more years, probably.

She looked about nineteen. As though aware of his gaze, she looked up straight at him. He continued to stare at her. Yes, nineteen and very pretty and very aware of it, too. She slid from her stool and, clutching papers defensively to her chest, came over to him.

"May I help you?"

"I don't know," he said with a slight smile. "Maybe. I'll let you know if you can."

She took this as a flirtatious overture and responded with a routine which probably, he reflected, was a knock-out with the local boys. She turned away from him and looked back over her shoulder, saying huskily,

"Let me know then." She gave him a long look from under her lashes, then grinned cheekily and flaunted her ways towards the front of the store. He was amused. At first, he had really thought that she intended her coquettish routine seriously, which would have been ludicrous if she hadn't been so pretty. Her grin showed that she was playacting. Peterson felt suddenly in very good spirits and almost immediately noticed the book he had been looking for.

He picked it up and went to look for Markham. The girl was with two others, her back to him. Her companions were laughing and staring. They obviously told her he was watching them, because she turned to look at him. She really was exceptionally pretty. He made a sudden decision.

Markham was browsing through the science fiction selection.

"I have a couple of errands," Peterson said. "Why don't you go on ahead and tell Renfrew I'll be there in half an hour?"

"Okay, fine," Markham said. Peterson watched him as he strode out the door, moving athletically, and disappeared into the alley behind the building known as Schools.

Peterson looked for the girl again. She was serving someone else, a student. He watched as she went through another routine, leaning forward more than was necessary, to write a receipt, quite enough to enable the student to look down the front of her blouse. Then she straightened up and looked quite offhand as she gave him his book in a white paper bag. The student went out, with a disconcerted look on his face. Peterson caught her eye and lifted the book in his hand. She slammed the cash register shut and came over to him.

"Yes?" she asked. "Have you made up your mind?"

"I think so. I'll take this book. And maybe you could help me with something else. You live in Cambridge, do you?"

"Yes. You don't?"

"No, I'm from London. I'm on the Council." He despised himself immediately. Like shooting a rabbit with a cannon. No artistry at all.

Anyway, he had all her attention now, so he might as well take advantage of it. "I wondered if you could recommend any good restaurants around here to me?"

"Well, there's the Blue Boar. And there's a French one in Grantchester that's supposed to be good, Le Marquis. And a new Italian one, Il Pavone."

"Have you eaten at any of them?"

"Well, no ..." She blushed slightly and he knew she regretted appearing at a disadvantage. He was well aware that she had named the three most expensive restaurants. His own favorite had not been mentioned; it was less showy and less expensive, but the food was excellent.

"If you could choose, which one would you go to?"

"Oh, Le Marquis. It looks a lovely place."

"The next time I'm up from London, if you're not doing anything, I would count it as a great favor if you would have dinner there with me."

He smiled intimately at her. "It gets pretty dull, traveling alone, eating alone."

"Really?" she gasped. "Oh, I mean ..." She struggled furiously to repress her triumphant excitement. "Yes, I'd like that very much."

"Fine. If I could have your telephone number ..."

She hesitated and Peterson guessed she had no telephone. "Or if you'd rather, I can simply stop by this shop early on."

"Oh yes, that would be best," she said, seizing on this graceful out.

"I'll look forward to it."

They walked forward to the front desk, where he paid for his book.

When he left Bowes & Bowes, he turned the corner towards Market Square. Through the side windows of the bookstore he could see her in consultation with her two friends. Well, that was easy, he thought. Good God, I don't even know her name.

He crossed the square and walked through Pefy Cury with its bustling throng of shoppers, coming out opposite Christ's. Through its open gate the green lawn in its quad was visible and behind that, the vivid colors of a herbaceous border against the gray wall of the Master's Lodge. In the gateway he porter sat reading a paper. A knot of students stood studying some lists on the bulletin board. Peterson kept on going and turned into Hobson's Alley. He finally found the place he was looking for: Foster and Jagg, coal merchants.

John Renfrew spent Saturday morning putting up new shelving on the long wall in their kitchen. Marjorie had been after him for months to do it.

Her bland asides about where the planes of wood should go "when you get around to it" had slowly accreted into a pressing weight, an agreed duty, unavoidable. The markets were open only a few days each week–"to avoid fluctuations in supply" was the common explanation, rendered on the nightly news–and with the power cuts, refrigerating was impossible.

Marjorie had turned to putting up vegetables and was amassing a throng of thick-lipped jars. They waited in cardboard boxes for the promised shelving.

Renfrew assembled his tools systematically with as much care as he took in the laboratory. Their house was old and leaned slightly, as though blown by an unfelt wind. Renfrew found that his plumb line, nailed to the wainscotting, weaved a full three inches out from the scuffed molding. The floor sagged with an easy fatigue, like a well-used mattress. He stepped back from the tilting walls, squinted, and saw that the lines of his home were askew. You put down the money on a place, he reflected, and you get a maze of jambs and beams and cornices, all pushed slightly out of true by history. A bit of settling in that corner, a diagonal misaimed there. He had a sudden memory of when he had been a boy, looking up from a stone floor at his father, who squinted at the plaster ceiling as if to judge whether the roof would fall.

As he studied the problem his own children caromed through the house.

Their feet thumped on the margins of polished wood that framed the thin rugs. They reached the front door and ricocheted outside in a game of tag.

He realized that to them he probably had that same earnest wrenched look of his father, face skewed in concentration.

He arrayed his tools and began to work. The piles of lumber on the back porch gradually dwindled as he cut them into a suitable lattice. To fit the thin planks at the roof he had to make oblique cuts with a rip saw. The wood splintered under his lunging thrusts, but kept to line. Johnny appeared, tired of tag with his older sister. Renfrew set him to work fetching tools as they were needed. Through the window a tinny radio announced that Argentina had joined the nuclear club.

"What's a nuclear club, Daddy?" Johnny asked, eyes big.

"People who can drop bombs."

Johnny fingered a wood file, frowning at the fine lines that rubbed his thumb. "Can I join?"

Renfrew paused, licked his lips, peered into a sky of carbon blue. "Only fools get to join," he said, and set back to work.

The radio detailed a Brazilian rejection of preferential trade agreements, which would have established a Greater American Zone with the US. There were reports that the Americans had tied the favor of cheaper imports to their aid on the southern Atlantic bloom problem.

"A bloom, Daddy? How can the ocean do like a flower?"

Renfrew said gruffly, "A different kind of bloom." He hoisted boards under his arm and took them inside.

He was sanding down the ripped edges when Marjorie came in from the garden for inspection. She had mercifully taken the battery-operated radio into the garden with her. "Why's it jut out at the base?" she asked by way of greeting. She put the radio on the kitchen table. It seemed to go with her everywhere these days, Renfrew noted, as though she could not bear to be alone with a bit of quiet. "The shelves are straight. It's the walls that are tilted."

"They look odd. Are you sure ... ?"

"Have a go." He handed her his carpenter's level. She put it gingerly on a rough-cut board. The bubble bobbed precisely into the place between the two defining lines. "See? Dead level."

"Well, I suppose," Marjorie reluctantly conceded.

"Worry not, your jars aren't going to topple off."

He put several jars on a shelf. This ritual act completed the job. The boxy frame stood out, functional pine against aged oak paneling. Johnny stroked the sheets of wood tentatively, as though awed that he had had a hand in making this wood lattice.

"Think I'll be off to the lab for a bit," Renfrew said, collecting his rip saw and chisels.

"Steady on, there's more fathering needs doingg. You're to take Johnny on the mercury hunt."

"Oh hell, I forgot. Look, I'd thought–"

"You'd put in an afternoon tinkering," Marjorie finished for him with mild reproof. "'Fraid not."

"Well look, I'll just go round to pick up some notes, then, on Markham's work."