A Tale of Time City (4 page)

I dreamed I dwelt in marble halls! Vivian thought. Perhaps I’ve fallen asleep on the train and this is all a dream I’m having. Though this was a comforting thought, she doubted it.
Nobody
could have slept on that noisy train.

They tiptoed down a narrow marble stair which led to what was obviously a grand entrance hall. This was much better lit. Vivian could see big glass doors in the distance, and a curving row of silver booths like the one she had come through. There must have been a hundred of them—with another hundred of them curving round the opposite wall, although her view of those was partly blocked by a gigantic marble stairway. This was a true marvel. The stone steps were moving. The three of them had to hide under it while a lady guard walked slowly across the open space with her hand on some sort of gun at her belt, and Vivian could hear the moving steps softly rumbling above them. She wondered how on earth it worked.

The guard walked out of sight behind a large circular installation in the centre of the hall. Jonathan and Sam led Vivian on a dash the other way, into the back of the building, where there were more corridors and, at last, a small back door. Sam stopped and fitted another card into a slot, and that door opened to let them out.

They went suddenly from ultra-modern to very old. Outside,
they were in a narrow lane of crooked little stone houses. There was a round blue light fixed to one of the houses in the distance, which showed that the lane was cobbled, with a gutter down the middle. The air was fresh and cool. It made Vivian feel rather heady and giddy.

Sam and Jonathan plunged down towards the dark end of the lane. The cobbles dug into the underside of Vivian’s feet as she trotted after them. There was a thick old archway there, black as night underneath, and after that they came into a blue-lit courtyard, where they went scuttling towards a building like a church.

“No, it’s always left unlocked,” Jonathan whispered to Sam, as he bounded up the steps to the church-place, with his pigtail flying. “And I left both doors to the Annuate unfastened just in case.” Sure enough, the mighty door clicked and swung smoothly to let them in.

Quite a small church! Vivian thought in surprise. But it doesn’t
smell
like a church!

It smelt warmer and more dusty than a church. It was harder to see than any place she had been in so far, because the blue street lighting came in through high-up coloured windows. Bars of misty blue-green light showed up leather-covered seats not quite like pews, and a splotch of dark violet light rested on a throne-thing at one end with some kind of glittering canopy above it. A slant of orange-blue on a wall gave Vivian a glimpse of one of the most beautiful paintings she had ever seen.

“That’s Faber John’s Seat,” Jonathan whispered, pointing to the throne as he led the way down an aisle. “This is the Chronologue, where the Time Council meets.”

“We unlocked a door and listened to them,” Sam said.

“That’s how we heard about the crisis and the plans to intercept you—I mean the real V.S.,” Jonathan explained.

They moved to the right and Vivian found herself facing a shining thing misted with more violet light, that seemed to crown the end of a row of seats. It was like a winged sun and it seemed to be studded with jewels.

“The Sempiternal Ensign,” Jonathan whispered. “Solid gold. That’s the Kohinoor diamond in the left wing and the Star of Africa’s in the right.” He gave the thing a fond pat as they passed it.

This was too much for Vivian. I
must
be dreaming! she decided. I
know
both those diamonds are somewhere else.

“Given to Time City by the Icelandic Emperor in Seventy-two Century,” Jonathan added as he undid a small heavy door. But Vivian felt too dreamlike to attend. She went dreamily down a long dark passage, through a door that creaked horribly and out into a place like a stately home, where they hurried up what seemed endless dark wooden stairs. This dream keeps getting things wrong! Vivian thought, as her legs began to ache. There ought to be a lift or a moving stair at least! She did not start thinking properly until she found herself sitting in another peculiar chair in a large room where all the furniture seemed to be empty frames, like a playground full of climbing frames. Jonathan put a light on and leant against the door. “Phew!” he said. “Safe so far. Now we have to think hard.”

“I can’t think,” said Sam. “I’m hungry. She is too. She told me.”

“My automat’s on the blink again,” Jonathan said. “What do you want if I can get it to work?”

“Forty-two Century butter-pie,” Sam said, as if it was obvious.

Jonathan went to a thing on the wall facing Vivian which she supposed must be a musical instrument. It had keys like a piano and pipes like a church-organ and it was decorated all over with gilt twiddles and garlands, which were a little worn and peeling, as if the instrument had seen better days. Jonathan pounded at the white keys. When nothing happened, he banged at the organ-pipes. The thing began to chuff and grunt and to shake a little, at which Jonathan kicked it fiercely lower down. Finally, he took up what seemed to be an ordinary school ruler and pried at a long flap under the pipes.

“Well, it’s done the butter-pies,” he said, peering inside. “But the Twenty Century function seems to have broken. There’s no pizza and no bubble-gum. Do you mind food from other centuries?” he asked Vivian rather anxiously.

Vivian had never heard of pizza, though she thought it sounded Italian and not like the English food she was used to at all. She was past being surprised at anything by this time. “I could eat a
dinosaur
!” she said frankly.

“You almost have to,” Jonathan said, carrying an armful of little white flowerpots over to the empty frame beside Vivian’s chair. He dumped them into the air above it, and they stayed there, standing on nothing. “Butter-pie,” Jonathan said, handing a pot with a stick poking out of it to Sam. “Otherwise it’s done you algae soup, malty soy, two carob cornpones and fish noodles.”

Sam pulled the stick out of his pot with a yellow nubbly ice cream on the end of it. “Yumm
ee
!” he cried and bit into it like an ogre.

“Er—which is which?” Vivian asked, looking at the strange marks on the other pots. “I can’t read these words.”

“Sorry,” Jonathan said. “Those are Universal Symbols from Thirty-nine Century.” He sorted out the pots for her and took a butter-pie for himself. The pots, Vivian found, were sort of stuck to the air. She had to give a little pull to get them loose. She discovered that you peeled back the lid, and if you needed a spoon or a fork, the lid shrivelled itself into a spoon or fork shape. Algae soup was not at all pleasant, like salty pond water. But malty soy was nice if you dipped the cornpone in it. The fish noodles were—

“I’d rather eat Dad’s fishing bait,” Vivian said, putting that pot quickly down.

“I’ll get you a butter-pie,” Jonathan said.

“And another one for me,” Sam put in.

The church-organ received another banging, two more kicks and a punch in the delivery-flap and Vivian and Sam received a pot with a stick each. Jonathan threw the empty pots into a frame beside the organ, where they vanished.

“Now we
must
talk,” he said, while Vivian dubiously lifted the nubbly lump out of its pot. “We’ve all broken the law and we daren’t be caught. It would have been all right if V.S. was really V.S. but she isn’t, so we’ve got to think how to hide her.”

Vivian was getting very tired of being called V.S. She would have objected if she had not at that moment bitten into the butter-pie. Wonderful tastes filled her mouth, everything buttery and creamy she had ever tasted, with just a hint of toffee, and twenty other even better tastes she had never met before, all of it icy cold. It was so
marvellous that she simply said quietly, “You owe me an explanation. What were you trying to do?”

“Save Time City of course,” Sam said juicily out of the middle of his butter-pie. “We listened to the Chronologue. That’s how we knew where you’d be.”

“There’s a passage between the Chronologue and here,” Jonathan explained. “But it’s been chained up ever since my father was elected Sempitern and I got curious about it. So Sam shorted it out for me and—anyway, we found it led to the Chronologue and, if we opened the door a crack, we could hear what they were all talking about. They were debating the crisis—”

“Only I couldn’t understand a word,” Sam said, as if this was rather clever of him. “It wasn’t like the stories.”

“It wasn’t!” Jonathan said feelingly. “It was all about polarities and chronons and critical cycles, but I understood the part about Time City being nearly worn out. It’s used one bit of space and time too often, you see, and they were trying to find a way to move it to another bit. The City’s held in place by things called polarities, which are put out into history like anchors, but no one except Faber John ever understood how it was done. I heard Dr. Leonov admit that. So that was where V.S. comes in.”

“Who
is
she?” said Vivian.

“The Time Lady,” said Sam. “She’s on the rampage.”

“Yes, but we had to work that out,” said Jonathan, “by putting the talk in the Chronologue together with what the stories say. Chronologue was being very scientific, talking about someone coming up through the First Unstable Era in a wave of temporons
and chronons, causing wars and changes everywhere. But I guessed it had to be the Time Lady. The story says that Faber John and his wife quarrelled about the way to rule Time City, and she tricked him into going down under the City and falling asleep there. They say he’s still there, and as long as he sleeps, the City is safe. But if it’s in danger he’ll wake up and come to our rescue. We’re going by the stories. We know you—the Time Lady hates Faber John and the City, because he saw how she’d tricked him at the last minute and threw her out into history. We think she’s trying to get back and destroy the City now it’s nearly worn out.”

“That’s the bit I didn’t understand,” Sam said. He was cross-legged on the floor, licking the stick of his butter-pie.

“It
is
a bit puzzling,” Jonathan said. Vivian could see he was very pleased with himself for working it out. “Chronologue seemed to be sure that the Time Lady would be quite reasonable when they found her and explained about the crisis. I think the quarrel she had with Faber John must have been political in some way.”

He looked questioningly at Vivian. Vivian caught the flicker of his flickering eyes and began to wonder if Jonathan did believe she was just a normal person from the Twentieth Century after all. But at that moment she bit through into the middle of the butter-pie. And it was hot. Runny, syrupy hot.

“It’s
goluptuous
when you get to the warm part, isn’t it?” Sam said, watching her with keen attention. “You want to let it trickle into the cold.”

Vivian did so and found Sam’s advice was excellent. The two parts mixed were even better than the cold part alone. It sent her
rather dreamy again. When Sam grinned at her, a wide cheeky grin with two big teeth in the middle of it, she found herself thinking that Sam was not so bad after all. But she did her best to keep to the subject.

“I still don’t understand what made you think the Time Lady was
me
,” she said.

Jonathan started to say something. Then he changed his mind and said something else. “Because of the name, you see. Faber John’s wife was called Vivian. Everyone knows that. And Faber really means Smith. So when I heard Chronologue say that you—she was on that evacuee train, I worked out that she must be posing as a girl called Vivian Smith.”

“And we said V.S. when we talked about her so that nobody would guess our plan,” Sam put in. “We started planning two days ago after they met the train and couldn’t find her.”

“Two days ago!” Vivian exclaimed. “But I was there
today
, and so were you!”

“Yes, but you can get to any time you want through a time–lock,” Jonathan said, waving that puzzle away in his most lordly manner. “My father went there and Sam’s father, and so did the Head Librarian and the High Scientist, but they all came back saying she’d slipped through them somehow. That was when I thought we had a chance of getting you—her ourselves. Only you’re the wrong Vivian Smith for some reason—and I
still
can’t understand it! Sam, we’ve got to think what to do with her.”

“Send her to the Stone Age,” said Sam. “You wouldn’t mind that, would you?” he asked Vivian.

“Mind? I’d go crazy!” said Vivian. “There are spiders in caves. Why can’t you send me home?”

“I told you why we can’t,” Jonathan said. “Besides, it’s an Unstable Era and it’s even more unsettled than usual at the moment. Suppose we put you back and that mucked up the whole of history. They’d find out at once! Think of something, Sam!”

There was a long silence. Sam sat on the floor with his face in his fists. Jonathan leant against the wall, chewing the end of his pigtail. Vivian licked the last of her butter-pie off its stick and, for a while, could think of very little else except that she wished she could have another one. But I
will
get home! she told herself, sleepily twiddling the stick in her fingers. I
will
, whatever he says!

“I know!” Sam said at last. “Pretend she’s our cousin!”

Jonathan leapt away from the wall. “That’s
it
!” he shouted. “That’s clever, Sam!”

“I
am
clever,” said Sam. “You work out the details.”

“And that’s easy,” said Jonathan. “Listen, V.S., you are Vivian Sarah Lee. Your father is Sam’s uncle and mine. Have you got that?” He danced round the room, pointing at Vivian until she nodded. “Good. You’ve been away from Time City since you were six, because your parents are Observers on station in Twenty Century. That’s all true. Got it? But they’ve sent you home because the era’s getting more unsettled and there’s a War on. This is brilliant!” he said to Sam. “It will explain why she doesn’t know anything. And my mother’s bound to have her to live here, because Lee House is shut up—and we can even go on calling her V.S.!”