A Tale of Time City (8 page)

The bar looked as if it would just about reach. Unsteadily, with her paper goblet in one hand and the bar in the other, Vivian leaned across the steamy wet space and prodded the bar at the cave. And as soon as the end of it reached the sheet of pouring water, it
refused to go any further. Vivian shoved, as if the bar was a spear, and the railing bounced back again so hard that she almost overbalanced into the black gap where the river rose. Sam and Jonathan both caught hold of her by her shirt.

“Why? What’s stopping it?” Vivian demanded.

Jonathan took the bar out of her fist and put it back in the railing. “It’s some kind of forcefield, but nobody can discover what kind,” he said. “Ongoing Scientists have tried to find out for centuries. And it can’t be there for nothing, can it? It does look as if that really is Faber John, doesn’t it?”

“It does rather,” Vivian agreed. She was surprised at how sober and awed this made her feel. She took a last amazed look at the giant’s back under the constantly pouring water and followed the boys slowly round another corner. There was another long flight of stairs there, and then a way out, where a man checked them off on a screen.

Then they were blinking about at a wonderful view of the City. “There,” said Jonathan. “Don’t you think this place is worth saving?”

The mysterious stone giant had upset Vivian. “Yes, but what’s that got to do with me?” she said snappily. “I don’t want London to be bombed either.”

“I’ll have my next butter-pie now,” said Sam.

Jonathan pressed a belt stud and flashed the clock-face quickly to his wrist and away. “Later,” he said. “I must show V.S. Millennium now. That’s it, at the other end of the Avenue of the Four Ages. You mustn’t miss seeing it. It’s got all the greatest pictures in history in it.”

He pointed. Millennium was vast, glittering with rows of windows and twisted glass spires and a gigantic blue glass dome. Vivian quailed. “Oh, no more buildings, please!” she said. “My mind’s got indigestion!”

“Then perhaps we ought just to go quietly back to the Annuate,” Jonathan suggested, with great sympathy.

Vivian almost believed the sympathy for a second, until she saw Sam looking up at Jonathan with his mouth slightly open as if he had that moment caught on to something. “Great idea!” he said, much too heartily. “I don’t need a butter-pie really.”

That last touch overdid it, to Vivian’s mind. She knew they were up to something. What is Jonathan planning
now
? she wondered, as she followed Sam’s flapping shoelace down a cobbled alley. Another unreal adventure?

J
onathan checked his clock-face several times on the way back through the City. Sam never mentioned butter-pies once. Back they trotted, across Aeon Square, through the archway and up Time Close, and Vivian followed, quite certain that they were up to something. Her legs were aching as she went up the steps to the glass doors of the Annuate.

I want some peace, she thought. I want to read a film magazine and listen to the wireless. But I don’t think there’s such a thing as a wireless in this place!

The hall of the Annuate was empty and quiet. Jonathan turned to Vivian with his most lordly, casual air. “There are some more once-ghosts I can show you if you like,” he said. “Here in this very Palace.”

This
is what we’ve come back here for! Vivian thought. “Then you’d better show me,” she said. “Now you’ve dragged me all this way for them.”

“Along here then,” Jonathan said, and strode off, pigtail bouncing,
the opposite way to the way he had taken her that morning. Sam went after him at a rolling trot. It’s the way we came last night, Vivian thought, walking behind across the coloured marble patterns of the floor. They went round a corner and, sure enough, Vivian remembered the long space with showcases against both walls. It had reminded her of a museum. Now she saw that it was indeed a sort of museum. And since she was rather sick of Jonathan hurrying her about, she purposely loitered, looking at the things in the cases. Each exhibit had a card written in neat, easy-to-read writing.
Seventy-three Century American Golf Club
, said the first.
Forty-five Century Indian Wedding Chalice
, said another. But some of the exhibits were decidedly odd, like the
Hundred and Five Century Gas Iron
and the
Thirty-three Century Icelandic Decorators’ Paint
, while in the next showcase—Vivian found herself looking at her own luggage, labelled in the same neat writing:
Twenty Century Refugee Equipment (Cases open to show Clothing and Protective Mask)
.

They
were
open too. Her suitcase was artfully propped ajar, with that wretched liberty bodice arranged to show on top, and her gas mask was half out of its box. And there was her precious string bag spread open to show sandwich paper, magazine, gloves, and socks. Vivian stared at them in outrage. “The
cheek
!” she said. She was also rather scared, for how was she to get at her things when she went home? But it was worse than that somehow. It was as if someone had taken away the person she really was, so that she was forced to turn into somebody else. “But I won’t!” Vivian said angrily. “I’m
me
!”

Sam and Jonathan came anxiously galloping back. Sam tugged at her arm. “You’ve got to come
now
!”

Vivian was too dismayed to care. She pointed to the showcase. “Look! Look at that! All my things.”

“Yes. Good old Elio’s been busy as usual,” Jonathan said. “Androids are like that. But the ghosts are due to walk any second now. Do come and look at them. Please!”

Vivian looked from him to Sam. Sam was staring at her anxiously. Jonathan was so urgent that he had gone white. He
is
highly strung! Vivian thought. She knew Mum would call Jonathan that. But it was plain to her that it meant a lot to both Jonathan and Sam that she should see these ghosts. “Oh, very well then,” she said, and let Sam pull her down to the far end of the museum.

There was a dark old door there. It was the one Vivian remembered as creaking horribly the night before, but, to her surprise, it was as locked as a door could be. A big shiny chain, made of transparent stuff with wires embedded in it, was fastened across it from one metal box fixed to the door-frame by the hinges, to another fixed to the door-frame by the handle. Cables led from both boxes into the floor. It looked as if anyone trying to open that door would get some kind of nasty shock.

Sam reached out a chubby hand, somewhat coloured with butter-pie and mud from Faber John’s cave, and deftly slid the metal box across from the door-frame on to the door just beneath the big iron handle. The cable stayed where it was, but the door still looked locked to anyone who did not look too closely. “I shorted it,” Sam said proudly. “The first day of half term.”

“And I asked him to,” Jonathan said, checking his clock again. “It was my idea. When I was little, everyone had heard of these ghosts. They’d walked here every day for hundreds of years. So when my father was elected Sempitern six years ago, I wanted to see them. But my mother went and looked at them first, and when she had, she screamed and had the door chained up. I’ve been wanting to see them ever since, but I had to wait until Sam turned out to be a genius with energy-functions.” Sam beamed proudly. Jonathan checked his clock again. “About now,” he said.

He turned the handle and the door creaked slowly open. Beyond it was the dark stone passage which Vivian remembered walking up last night from the church-place called the Chronologue. The open door let in enough light to show that the passage was quite empty.

“Wait,” said Jonathan, in a gasp, as if he was holding his breath.

Almost as he spoke, there were suddenly two people walking down the passage towards them. At first, they were hard to see in the dark. All Vivian could tell was that they were wearing modern Time City pyjamas and walking in the way people do when they are very excited about something. Then she saw that the taller one had dark diamonds down the sides of its suit. There was a flicker over its eyes and its hair was in a pigtail that trailed over one shoulder. The shorter one was a girl with light brown curly hair.

“Jiminy Cricket!” said Vivian. “It’s
me
! And
you
!”

It was the oddest and most upsetting sight, to see herself as a ghost, looking almost but not quite like somebody else, with her face back-to-front from the face she knew in a mirror, breathlessly
chattering without a sound to a boy she had only met the night before. It was worse still when the two ghosts swept unseeingly up to her. Vivian felt a jolt of sheer panic, such as she had never felt in her life before. They vanished almost where she was standing.

She stood wobbling for a moment and her eyes felt queer and misty. Then her legs folded up and she sat with a bump on the marble floor. “
Hundreds of years
, did you say?” she asked croakily.

Jonathan held out a hand to haul her up. “My legs did that too when I first saw them,” he said. “Sam ran away.”

“Only six metres!” Sam protested. “I came back when they’d gone.”

“I don’t wonder your mum screamed and had that passage locked!” Vivian said as she struggled to her feet. She hung on to the door until she felt steady. “She must have known it was you, even if you
were
only six!”

“She won’t talk about it,” said Jonathan. He was looking lordly and jubilant now. “
Now
do you see how I recognised you, V.S.? That was us last night. I wore that suit and I took you that way on purpose.”

Vivian still felt wobbly, but there was nothing wrong with her brain. “It was
not
last night!” she said. “Apart from the fact that I never said one word to you until we got to your room, I was not in those clothes. I was wearing this same skirt I have on now last night. That ghost had Time City clothes.”

This made no difference to Jonathan at all. “Then it’s some time soon,” he said airily. “And what we were doing is important. It
has
to be, or we wouldn’t have made once-ghosts. So what do you think we were doing, V.S.?”

He was back to being the Interrogator again. Bless me! Vivian thought. He
still
thinks I’m the Time Lady! He just decided to make me admit it in a different way after he got that fright with those guards. Talk about bees in your bonnet! “If you call me V.S. once again,” she said, “I shall scream—I warn you!”

Sam patted her arm. “You need a butter-pie,” he said kindly.

Oddly enough, this nearly did make Vivian scream. She gave a strange squawking laugh. “I’m going barmy!” she cried out. “Why can’t I get back to the war and have some peace for once? Everything’s mad here! None of this is
true
!”

Her voice was getting louder and louder. They stared at her. Vivian opened her mouth to laugh at how foolish they looked and decided that she would scream instead. She had her head back to give a really loud, satisfying scream, when she heard footsteps turning the corner into the museum. She shut her mouth. Sam had the chain back in the right place in a flash. They all hurried over to a museum-case labelled
Forty-three Century Chinese Home Computer
and stared at it intently until the person arrived.

It was a friendly brown-faced lady called Petula who was looking for Vivian. “Madam Sempitern told me to look out for you, dear,” she said. “Would you like to come and see if everything in your room is the way you like it?”

“I’ll come and show her,” Jonathan said at once.

But Petula said, “No, go away, Jonathan dear. You don’t own her.” She took Vivian away upstairs, leaving Sam and Jonathan looking like people who have been brought up short in mid-adventure.

A while later, Vivian was peacefully and happily installed in a
small friendly room. Though none of the things in it were much like things she knew, Petula had shown her how everything worked—for instance, if you wanted a mirror, you put your foot on a stud in the floor and a piece of wall reflected your face suddenly—and told her what everything was called. She had shown Vivian how to work the shower and where the switch was for music. Finally, she pressed a stud that made a wall unfold into a cupboard. Inside was a row of pyjama suits mysteriously hanging on nothing and all miraculously Vivian’s size.

“You can count on Elio for that,” Petula said. “If you have any trouble with anything, put your hand across that blue square by the bed and one of us will come and sort you out.”

When Petula had gone, Vivian took possession of the room by straightening out the paper goblet, which had become rather battered by then, and planting it on an empty-frame table by the wall. Then she lay on the bed, which was a flowered blanket draped over nothing, and listened to strange chiming music out of a thing called “the Deck” which floated beside the bed. It was almost as good as listening to the wireless. She thought she had better start thinking how to get the bees out of Jonathan’s bonnet and make him help her get back to stay with Cousin Marty. In some strange way, she knew that those two time-ghosts she had seen would do that, if she could think how. But she did not want to think of that ghost of herself walking beside the ghost of Jonathan for hundreds of years before either of them were born. She went to sleep instead.

She woke because someone had come quietly in and laid out clothes for her. The sound of the door sliding shut made her sit up
with a jerk. Now she found that she
did
want to think about the two time-ghosts. I wonder what we were—I mean what we
will
be
doing, she thought, with a great deal of interest. I can use them somehow. She almost had an idea how.

“Are you there, V.S.?” Jonathan’s voice said out of the Deck.

“No. I’m asleep,” said Vivian. And the almost-idea was gone.

“Then wake up. Dinner’s in half an hour,” said Jonathan’s voice. “It’ll be official, with guests, I warn you. It always is. Shall I come and get you?”

“Is it? Then perhaps you’d better,” Vivian said.

This news made her very nervous. She managed to fumble her way into the silky white suit laid out for her. Its trousers were so baggy they were almost like a skirt, and she put both feet down the same leg twice before she got it right. When she stood up and put her arms into the baggy sleeves, the suit fastened itself down her back like magic and began to glow slightly. Blue flowers appeared, floating gently in spirals round her arms and legs. Vivian touched them, and they were as unreal as time-ghosts. This was unnerving enough, but the most unnerving thing was the looseness, of the suit itself, if, like Vivian, you were used to the tight clothes and underclothes of 1939. She felt as if she had no clothes on at all, and that made her more nervous than ever.