A Tale of Time City (20 page)

She expected that Jonathan would want to rush off early to Dr. Wilander. So she was very surprised not to see him at all during the lunch-break. At twelve thirty-five by her belt clock, there was still no sign of him. Vivian waited a few more minutes and then tore herself away from the eager crowd who wanted to hear more about the war. Very nervously, she set out for Perpetuum on her own.

Jonathan was in the grassy space with the statues outside Continuum. He was leaning against a vast statue of a woman without any arms, talking eagerly to one of the students. It was the young man who had offered beer money for a film of the Guardian interrupting the ceremony. Vivian remembered the short white kilt and the young man’s brawny legs beneath it. The young man had one of those brawny legs comfortably hooked over the great foot of the statue as he talked to Jonathan, and the rest of him was sprawled on the grass. From that position, he saw Vivian before Jonathan did and gave her a friendly wave.

“Oh, is it that late already?” Jonathan said. “Leon, this is my cousin V.S. Meet Leon Hardy, V.S., he’s from One Hundred and Two Century.”

Leon Hardy rose gracefully to his feet. “Pleased to meet you, Vee,” he said and smiled, two rows of white teeth in a brown face. Vivian was rather taken aback by him. He was so like a film star.

“Isn’t One-hundred-and-something an Unstable Era?” she said doubtfully.

“Just after the end of the Ninth,” Leon told her. “The last Fixed Era before the Depopulation—but that’s not for centuries after my time. My time is busy repairing the mess left by the Demise of Europe. It’s a very exciting time, full of new technology, and I came here to learn all the Science I could.”

“We’d better go,” Jonathan said.

“Or Wilander will throw you down all the stairs in Perpetuum,” Leon said, laughing. “I heard he threatened to do that to Enkian once. Right, young Jonathan. Payment for the eye-witness account coming up. Expect to hear from me in a couple of days or so.”

So that’s what they were talking about! Vivian thought. She walked beside Jonathan down the arched corridor of Continuum, wondering why it was that people you could admire perfectly well as film stars were the people you didn’t quite like in real life. “What did he mean about payment?” she asked.

“Tell you later,” said Jonathan.

Vivian looked and saw that Jonathan was walking with his most bouncing and lordly stride. Oh no! she thought. He’s got one of those ideas of his again! I hope he isn’t going to kidnap someone else now!

T
hey ran up most of the many stairs of Perpetuum. It seemed to be one of those days when you are late for everything. Even with the low-weight-functions of their belts to help, Vivian and Jonathan threw themselves into SELDOM END almost five minutes late. Dr. Wilander sat lighting his pipe. All he did was stare at them through the smoke, but neither of them dared move or speak until he grunted, “I see you don’t intend to waste any more time making feeble excuses, at least. Sit down. Vivian, how is your translation?”

“The second part is peculiar,” Vivian admitted.

“Then get on and make sense of it while I tear a few pieces off your cousin,” Dr. Wilander growled.

Vivian did her best, while she listened to the clicking of book-cubes and Jonathan’s teeth crunching hair. It was very peaceful in the odd-shaped wooden-smelling room—too peaceful. As Vivian’s breath came back, she slowly realised that Jonathan was asking almost no questions at all. Those he did ask had nothing to do with Unstable Eras. Vivian had a nagging feeling that something was
wrong. She had no idea why Jonathan had decided not to fish for information about the Four Ages, but she thought she had better try fishing herself—if she dared, that was.

“Er—” she said.

Dr. Wilander turned his great head to look at her. “Yes?”

Faced with those clever little eyes looking at her through the smoke, Vivian lost her nerve. “I don’t know if this Symbol means
comic
or
old
,” she said.

“Try
antic
—that means both,” Dr. Wilander grunted, and turned back to Jonathan.

Vivian sighed and made an attempt to chew her pen-function. Her teeth clacked together on nothing. Come
on
! she told herself. Ask! Be cunning or you’ll never get home to Mum. But it was no good. She was too frightened of Dr. Wilander to say anything, until Dr. Wilander swung his bulk round in her direction.

“Now let’s have the further adventures of the blacksmith and the madly multiplying old ladies,” he said.

“Before you do,” Vivian said—saying it, she felt the same jolt of fear she had felt as she touched the Guardian’s nearly solid arm, but she made herself go on—“before I read it, please could you tell me about the Unstable Eras? How you tell which they are, I mean. And all about them.” There, it was out. Vivian was shaking and Jonathan was staring at what he was writing, disowning her. But she knew it was important.

“Trying to put off the evil hour, are you?” Dr. Wilander grunted. But he puffed placidly at his pipe and considered what to say. “Having just come from one yourself, I suppose you would be puzzled,” he remarked. “You can’t tell they’re Unstable at all when you’re living
in them. You can only tell from outside, here in Time City. And it isn’t only that nobody
in
an Unstable Era knows what’s going to happen in their future—
nobody
knows. It can differ from day to day.” He laid his pipe on his desk and clasped his fat hairy hands round one of his huge knees. “But let’s not take the era you came from. That’s a terrible muddle, particularly just now. Let’s take the one closer to hand. Let’s look at Time City.”

“Time City!” Vivian exclaimed.

Jonathan was so astonished that he gave up disowning Vivian and swung his chair round to join in. “But Time City isn’t Unstable!” he said.

“One point proved,” grunted Dr. Wilander. “You don’t know it is because you’re living in it. Of course it’s Unstable, boy! If you could get right outside time as well as history, you’d find the City had a past and future as changeable as Twenty Century. What do you think is the real reason we have records of every single year of history and almost none of the City itself? Because those records wouldn’t stay accurate, of course. And do
you
know what’s going to happen in the City tomorrow? No. And nor do I.”

“But we
do
know!” Jonathan protested. “We know the weather and what ceremonies are due—”

“Ceremonies!” Dr. Wilander snarled. “They were probably invented to make people
feel
they knew what would happen tomorrow. That’s all the use I’ve ever seen in them. Or maybe they had a meaning once. Oh, I grant you that Time City is the most uneventful and stable
seeming
of Unstable Eras, but that’s all it is. We might hope for a bit of a crisis perhaps when it comes to an end—and
since it’s almost worked round to its own beginning again now, that won’t be long—but my guess is that it’ll just peter out in some ceremony or other. With that fool Enkian complaining somebody put him too low down the order. Gah!”

“Did you say it’s come round to its own beginning?” Vivian asked.

“I did. Pass me that chart,” said Dr. Wilander. And when Vivian had handed the chart to him, he showed her what he meant, running his big square-ended finger round the horseshoe from the left where it was marked
Stone Ages
, and up to the right, where it said
Depopulation of Earth
. “The City has lasted the whole length of history, until now,” he said. His big finger stopped in the blank space between the beginning and the end of history. “Here. It’s moving into the gap at this moment, where it almost certainly began. When it gets to the middle of this gap,” his finger tapped the very top of the chart, “it will probably break up. People are trying to think of ways to prevent that, of course. The trouble is, we don’t know what will happen. Maybe nothing will. Or maybe it will go critical like this Twenty Century you came from.”

Jonathan shot Vivian a scared look. “Oh,” she said. This was not exactly what she had meant to find out, but it was worth knowing all the same. “If it goes critical, does it take the whole of history with it?”

“That’s one of the many things we don’t know,” said Dr. Wilander. “There’s no point in looking scared, girl. There’s nothing you can do. And that’s enough of that. Translation now. Skip the first bit—you’ll have remembered that—and read out the rest.”

Vivian sighed, because the first bit was the only part that made sense, and began, “The first Time Patrol Officer—”

“Guardian,” said Dr. Wilander. “It makes a change from old ladies, I suppose. Guardian is the word.”

“Guardian,” Vivian read obediently, “in the Iron Age is upon a hill and he is a long man with an antic (is that right?) weather and boring shirts—”

“Antic nature and drab clothing,” said Dr. Wilander.

“Which suits him in the first place,” said Vivian. It suddenly dawned on her that she was reading a description of the very Guardian they had met this morning. She wished she could have made more sense of it. Perhaps, if it was nonsense enough, Dr. Wilander might tear the paper out of her hands and read it himself. But that was not to be.

“No,
no
!” said Dr. Wilander. “As befits the Guardian of an early Age. Go on.”

Vivian was forced to go on, in fits and starts, with corrections every other word from Dr. Wilander, and try to make sense of it as she went. Jonathan was not even pretending to do the work Dr. Wilander had set him. She could see his eyes wide behind their flicker, looking at her past his pigtail, waiting for the next word. And to her relief, he was having the sense to write it down on a spare sheet of writing-stuff as she stumbled on. He read it out to her afterwards as they went slowly down the stairs, with Time City appearing slanted this way and that around them and once almost over their heads.

“This is it,” he said. “‘And the second Guardian is in a sea that is
dry and is all in silver which befits an Age where men create and kill in marvellous ways’ (I wonder why). ‘The third Guardian is young and strong and in every way a man of the Golden Age. He is clothed all in green, for he lives in a forest that covers a town that was once great. And the fourth Guardian goes secretly, lest any should guess where the Casket of Lead lies, for that is the most precious Casket of all.’ Oh, for Time’s sake, V.S.! You are a fool! Why didn’t you say what this was about?”

Vivian fixed her eyes on the glitter of Millennium, lying sideways down a green horizon. “I couldn’t make head nor tail of it,” she said. “I’d no idea it was telling how to find the Caskets.”

“It is, but it’s not telling
enough
,” Jonathan said discontentedly. “Knowing the Iron Casket was on a hill doesn’t mean much unless you know anyway. And there are about ten seas that have been dry at one time or another. As for towns that were once great, I can think of forty straight off, starting with Troy and ending with Minneapolis. Still, if I give Leon Hardy this, he might make something of it.”

“Why? What have you gone and told him?” Vivian said.

“Nothing really. I was very cunning,” Jonathan said. “But he offered me anything I wanted in return for telling about the Guardian dancing through the ceremony, so I asked him to look in records for legends about the Caskets. Students can look in all sorts of sections of Perpetuum without anyone wondering what they’re doing, and I thought he just might come up with where and when the polarities are hidden.”

Vivian felt very dismayed. Leon Hardy might be nice enough
really, but he was quite old, old enough not to bother about things that seemed important to people her age and Jonathan’s. “I hope you told him not to tell anyone.”

“He understands that,” Jonathan said airily, plunging down another flight of stairs, which brought the dome of The Years wheeling right way up. The twin domes of Science now blocked the view of Millennium. “And I got him to concentrate on the Ninth Unstable Era anyway, because he’s from near then himself and knows a lot about it to start with. You see, I had a really good idea this morning in Duration. I think we ought to go and warn the Guardian of the last Casket
first
, so that he can be ready long before the thief gets there, and perhaps get him to help us find the other two. But we need to find out where he is before we can do that. You can see that, can’t you?”

It did make sense, Vivian agreed. But she still felt uneasy. She had to remind herself that their two time-ghosts in the passage showed that she and Jonathan were certainly going to do something like this, and quite safely and happily, it seemed. Then she reminded herself that Jonathan had managed to snatch her off the station in 1939 very cleverly, without being found out. This was such a comforting thought that Vivian quite forgot that the whole kidnapping had been a mistake anyway.

She came into the Annuate Palace with Jonathan to find that there was going to be another ceremony. The hall was littered with golden hats and jewelled shoes. Feet were hammering and voices shouting somewhere overhead. Jonathan took one look and quietly disappeared. Vivian never even noticed him go, because a crowd of people came rushing downstairs just then, with Sempitern Walker leading the rush.

“Not
that
golden hat!” Sempitern Walker roared. “I need the Amporic Mitre, you fool! And where the Devil has someone put the Amporian Cope?”

He turned and sped along the hall towards the matutinal, with everyone else pelting after him. Elio ran after the crowd, waving a frail golden vest-like thing. Jenny came mincing down the stairs last of all. She was obviously part of the ceremony too, because she was half-dressed for it in a blue and lilac gown that held her knees together and flared out at her feet, and she was looking more than usually worried.

“Oh, Vivian!” she said. “Be kind and helpful and find him the Amporic Mitre. It must be
somewhere
! I have to get dressed too. This is one of the really big ceremonies and we really daren’t be late.”

“What does it look like?” Vivian asked.