Shadows of the New Sun: Stories in Honor of Gene Wolfe (10 page)

Somewhere in the distance a brass band struck up the opening chords of the Indiana Jones theme tune. It couldn’t have been more surreal, or more perfect.

It was nowhere near midnight and the bridge was on the other side of the tramlines, less than a minute’s walk. I could see the distinctive tower over the rooftops. I decided to check it out while the puppeteers and artists were plying their trade, so I waited for the old red tramcar to pass, and then joined the crowd moving toward the bridge.

With the sun going down, the tower’s arch had transformed into a Gothic picture frame, and inside it I could see the silhouette of the black castle and skyline on the other side of the river. I had to squint to see any of it clearly. I couldn’t help but smile. A guy was on his knees acting out some sort of passion play with puppets of a cloven- hoofed George W. and a wild-haired Saddam with a unibrow fit to launch a thousand nightmarish ships. Who said political satire had to be cutting edge?

The first thing that caught my eye was the terrible restoration job. They’d obviously tried to purge two hundred years’ worth of soot from parts of the old bridge, and left some of the gold on the statues looking like it had come out of a Christmas cracker. Tourists climbed up onto the wall to have their photographs taken with the various saints and patron saints that lined the bridge. I walked toward the middle and St. Christopher; after all, I was a traveler. I didn’t realize I had been clutching Isla’s medallion until I was standing on the wall, eye-to-eye with the statue. I hung her St. Christopher from the fingertips of the baby Jesus on the saint’s shoulder. I recited a couple of lines from Mácha as a sort of prayer, and clambered back down before anyone could complain about the crazy tourist hanging off their national treasure.

As I turned, I saw a painting that stopped me dead in my tracks. It was of a couple standing outside of a shop window, meeting for the first time. The hope in their eyes was agonizing. I know, because it was the hope in my eyes the paint er had captured. I couldn’t see if the same look of love was in Isla’s eyes because her head was tilted just slightly away as she looked into the window. All I could think was “be brave” as I walked up to the artist. He sat beside his easel, eating a meat pie with his hands.

“This painting, how did you see this?” I asked, pointing an accusing finger at the shop on the Westgate Road.

He looked up at me like I was mad.

I was beginning to think I was.

“I mean, this picture, that very minute, that’s the most important minute of my life; what’s it doing in one of your paintings?”

He continued to look at me, and then a slow smile spread across his lips as he recognized me. “It’s you,” he said.

I nodded.

“Oh, my God, it’s you.” He jumped up, dropping his meat pie and grabbing my hand to pump it. “I’m so pleased to meet you! You have no idea!”

I really didn’t.

I felt like a character in some surreal black-and-white art house movie.

Once was coincidence, but twice, what was that? It certainly wasn’t coincidence.

“I don’t understand what’s happening here.”

“It’s a funny story,” he promised, but I doubted it. “I was away from home, living in this shitty studio apartment, when my girlfriend phoned me to tell me she was pregnant. . . . It was the happiest moment of my life,” he said, still grinning. I have to admit it, his grin was infectious. I wanted to share his happiness. “I just went to the window and took a photograph of the world outside. I wanted to remember that exact moment, all of it, exactly how it happened. I always wondered what was happening down there.”

“It was the happiest moment of my life, too,” I said, thinking about it all over again. Thinking about how it felt to swallow my fear and walk across the street and say: Hi, I’m Steve, I’m hoping you’ll fall in love with me. “I was finally being brave. I saw this woman, and I just knew I had to walk over there and tell her she was going to be the love of my life.”

“That’s wonderful! What happened? Did she fall in love with you? Tell me she fell in love with you! That would be perfect, two happily ever afters entwined in a single painting. I could call it Four Hearts. That’s a great name for a painting. Four Hearts.”

I nodded. “She did.” I didn’t realize I was crying until he asked me what was wrong. “This was supposed to be our honeymoon,” I said. I didn’t say anything else; I let him read between the lines.

There was a moment in which the silence between our heartbeats was deafening, and then the painter understood the implications of the word supposed, and said, “Oh, shit, I’m sorry. I . . . what happened? Can I ask?”

“She saved someone’s life,” I said, “but no one saved hers.”

I really was crying now, not just a single tear. The painter sat me down on the tarpaulin he’d laid out on the ground. I told him what I was doing, my pilgrimage, and about the old couple I’d met in Paris a few days ago. I don’t know how long I sat there. I couldn’t take my eyes off the painting. By the time I stopped looking at it, it was past midnight and the tourists had gone home.

“It seems to me this journey of yours is being steered, my friend. Call it fate, call it chance; you were meant to be here, tonight, because you needed to be here. I want you to have this,” he said, taking the painting off the easel.

“I can’t. . . . Let me give you something for it.”

He shook his head. “You already did, believe me. Just by being there you gave me part of your life and made it such an important part of mine. Let me give it back to you.”

I couldn’t argue with that.

I held the painting like it was the most precious thing in the world as I walked back to my room in the old Dominican monastery, and hung it on the wall.

I lay in my bed looking up at the painting of when I meet Isla Durovich for the first time. Four hearts.

But there were only three of them now.

At three-fifteen the next morning my watch stopped, and I couldn’t get it going again. It was only a small thing, but it felt like the greatest tragedy in the entire world. I cradled it in my hands like a dying child, willing it to tick. It didn’t.

I’d seen a place in the Jewish Quarter called Old Watches. It was a tiny antique place with a watchmaker who looked like a gnome with mad whiskers and madder eyes. I set out at first light. I couldn’t sleep. I needed to get it fixed. I couldn’t bring Isla back, but I could fix this. It’s funny how little things become obsessions. I didn’t care about my train to Vienna, I wasn’t leaving until my moon-landing watch was keeping good time.

The morning air was brisk. There was rain in the air. Locals bustled toward the underground station, Staroměstská. It was too early for the shops; they were all boarded up or shuttered. It felt like I was seeing a secret part of the city, like watching a lover in bed, drowsy and not quite ready to face the world. I couldn’t remember exactly where I’d seen the watch shop, somewhere close to the old Jewish cemetery and the synagogues, so I just wandered around for a while drinking in the architecture of dreams and desires that had fired those imaginations oh so long ago, marveling at just how beautiful the buildings were and wondering—not for the first time— what future generations would think of the modern monstrosities we left as our legacy with the ugly but functional lines.

The shop was open.

There must have been ten thousand watches and parts of watches in the window, all of them at least fifty years old, most a lot older, all of the working parts ticking away to different rhythms. I opened the door. A little bell rang. There was no room inside— there was a one- foot- square space in front of the watchmaker’s counter and the rest of the shop was taken up by mechanisms. He looked up from the timepiece he had been tinkering with and waggled his bushy eyebrows. There were trays, all neatly arranged with bits of this and bits of that that somehow came together to make everything tick.

“What can I do for you, young man?” he asked, in perfect English. I hadn’t been expecting that. I’d been all primed for five minutes of miming to get my point across.

I took my watch off and put it on the counter between us.

“It stopped last night, and I can’t get it going again.”

“Well, let’s have a look at it, shall we?” He studied it, reached into one of the drawers beneath the counter and brought out a little tool to screw the back off of it. He put a jeweler’s monocle in his eye. Using a fine pin he teased the mechanism, tutting like a mechanic about to tell me he could fix my car, but it was going to cost a lot because the gear box was shot, the manifold was blown, the gaskets were knackered, and a whole bunch of other technical terms that made no sense whatsoever to me was wrong with it. “I see what the problem is,” he said.

“What’s wrong?”

“It’s broken.” He grinned at me. “But don’t worry, I can fix it. I assume you want me to fix it?”

“That’s why I’m here,” I said. “How much will it cost?”

“For you? Nothing, Steve,” he said, taking the monocle out.

“You know my name? How?”

“I know all my customers’ names, Steve. It’s just good business.”

“Yeah, right, sure, but how do you know my name?”

“I make it my business to. We’re all cogs, my friend; we’re all gears in the guts of the world. We tick, we tock, our orbits occasionally draw us close to one another, though more often than not they take us away.”

“Have we met before?”

He shook his head. “Now, let’s see about fixing this, shall we? Been losing a lot of time, has it? The spring’s loose. I should probably replace it, but I’m not sure you want me to do that.”

“Why not? I’m sorry, I don’t really understand. If you need to replace the spring to make the watch work again, why wouldn’t I want you to do that?”

“Because of the time that’s stored up inside it. Change the spring and it’s gone forever.”

I shook my head.

“Gone?”

“Yep, gone, vanished, spent, left behind, lived through, no more, a memory.”

“But that’s what happens. Time passes.”

“Oh, you know so much, do you? So how come you didn’t notice your watch was saving time?”

“It wasn’t, it was losing time.”

“Losing, saving, you speak like you don’t understand the difference,” the watchmaker said, sniffing. He screwed the lid back on and pushed the watch into the middle of the counter between us. “It’s all in there, all of that saved time.”

I looked at it.

It wasn’t ticking.

“You didn’t fix it?”

“Did you see me fix it?”

“No.”

“Then I didn’t fix it. I don’t think you want me to fix it. After all, there are two whole days stored in there. That’s a lot of time to throw away. It’s up to you, but I’d think long and hard about it. Two days. What’s happened to you over the last couple of days, and more importantly, are you ready to give it up?”

What had happened to me? I’d met an old couple who’d reminded me of just how incredible it felt when Isla said yes, and I’d met a painter who had captured the single most important moment of my life. In less than forty-eight hours they’d given me back two of my most precious memories of Isla. There was no way in a million years I’d give that up; but it wasn’t as though I’d just forget them either. They were etched on my soul.

“Forty-eight hours,” he said again. He picked up the watch and reset the time, rolling the hands back. “Think about it.”

I took the old moon-landing watch off him. I could feel the gentle tick of the hands moving. I put it on. “Thank you,” I said, and stepped out of the cramped little shop onto the Parisian street. I felt the padlock in my pocket. I wanted to go to the Les Pont des Arts because of Julio Cortázar’s book Rayuela. Isla and I had joked about fastening a padlock to the bridge like lovers do. I knew what was going to happen. I’d throw the key into the river, then walk down to the subway and meet an old couple looking at a photograph of Isla and me, and I’d be as happy and sad as I could remember ever being, both at the same time. Then I’d move on to Prague to scatter another one of her ashes, her St. Christopher.

I looked at the watch Isla’d given me for my birthday. It was losing time. No. It was saving time. There was a difference. It was saving a little bit every hour until it was full. Then it would stop. And when it stopped, I’d go to a little watchmaker’s shop in the Jewish quarter of Prague, and he’d say, “I know all my customers’ names, Steve. It’s just good business.” This time I’d know how he knew my name, because we’d done this dance before.

If he gave me that choice again, fixing it, or using it, I’d keep on using it until I was ready to go on scattering the rest of Isla Durovich’s ashes in Vienna—on a picnic blanket on the green in Bellevue Höhe overlooking the entire city—and Venice—on the Grand Canal—then Rome— taking in the breathtaking view of the Eternal City from Gianicolo Hill—and finally that little lake house in Garda that was just for us, our little dream house.

And when I was ready, I’d go on to the third battered paperback in my bag, but not yet, and I couldn’t go back four years, six months, four days, thirteen hours, and fifteen minutes to the moment I’d had Tom of Finland tattoo “be brave” over my heart, and live it all again, because forty-eight hours was forty-eight hours. The watch couldn’t save any more time. Not in the year I’d had it.

But I didn’t need to go back. As tempting as it was to wish I could save the child myself, or go back to that day we first met and be brave all over again, I couldn’t change things. This was the way it had to be.

All I needed to do was to let him rewind the watch on all of its saved time, and step out of his shop onto the moonlit Parisian streets. There would always be an old couple waiting for me on the platform with their Kodak moments, and a paint er on a bridge tomorrow desperate to share the happiest moment of his life with me.

That was Isla’s last gift to me, seconds saved here and there from our last year together that all added up to time to remember her.

Internationally bestselling author Steven Savile has written for Dr. Who, Torchwood, Primeval, Stargate, Warhammer, Slaine, Fireborn, BattleTech, Pathfinder, and other popular game and comic worlds. His novels have been published in eight languages, including the Italian bestseller L’eridita. He won the International Media Association of Tie-In Writers award for his Primeval novel, Shadow of the Jaguar, published by Titan in 2010, and has been nominated for the British Fantasy Award on multiple occasions. Silver, his debut thriller, reached number two on the Amazon UK e-charts in the summer of 2011. Steven has also worked in computer games, writing the story for the hugely successful Battlefield 3 from DICE/EA. His latest books include Tau Ceti (coauthored with Kevin J. Anderson); Each Ember’s Ghost, an urban fantasy set in his hometown of London; and the novelization of the computer game Risen 2: Dark Waters.