The Trouble With Time (20 page)

“Wine would be better. It’s been one of those days.”

“Australian Chardonnay or Australian Chardonnay?”

“Let me see, I think . . . Australian Chardonnay would be nice.” He sat on the sofa and picked up her Kindle while she fetched the bottle and glasses. “Shakespeare.
Measure for Measure
. An interesting choice.”

“Yes. It’s a play you can read in many ways. Even the ‘good’ characters behave appallingly.
Especially
the good characters, come to think of it. What was wrong with your day?” She sat at the far end of the sofa, and passed him a glass, looking at it rather than him. Talking was okay, she was able to sound quite natural, but meeting his eyes was another matter.

“I don’t expect you to have any sympathy with my problems, given that they’re the repercussions of lifting you from your own time. I’ve been getting flak about it. The violation of your human rights, the enormous expense of relocating you, the possible unwanted ramifications, but mainly,” and here he smiled wryly, “the fact that I got it completely wrong.”

Floss nervously smoothed the cushion next to her. “I know you’d put it right if you could,” she lied with as much conviction as she could muster, curious to hear his response.

“I hope you know that if there’s anything at all I can do to make you happy in your new life, you have only to ask.” His voice went lower as he held out his glass. “To . . . the future.”

Floss, who had feared he was about to say, “To . . . us,” raised her glass to clink his, fingers trembling. It would seem strange if she kept looking down, so she compelled herself to meet his gaze. Her cheeks felt hot. Quinn swallowed a mouthful of wine, looking deeply and intimately into her eyes. His were warm, shrewd, and coming to some conclusion, a conclusion that made him smile. Floss read his mind.

Oh God, he thinks I’m embarrassed because I’ve fallen in love with him
.

She felt her blush deepening.

“He got a bit ratty,” said Ryker.
Ratty
was understating it.

Floss grinned. “Oh dear. Was it bad?”

Ryker was not going to admit to finding Quinn intimidating at times. He could handle him. “Nah. He had a bit of a rant, that’s all, threw his teddy out of the pram. Who else is going to keep it working for him? He can’t afford to do a flounce, he’d lose too much face when he came back, so he just had a go at me.”

“And he doesn’t suspect?”

“I don’t think so. But I’ll leave it a bit longer next time, just in case.” Eight months seemed reasonable. Not too long, but not so quick that Quinn started to suspect he was taking the mickey.

Floss was excited, Ryker could tell. Her cheeks were pink, her eyes bright, and she was clutching a folder full of stuff to give her mother, evidence so her mum wouldn’t start thinking after she’d gone that her visit had all been a strange dream. She’d shown him what was inside. Printed-out photos of herself, her flat, and bits of London her mum would recognize, showing the changes of thirty-five years. The temporary phone Quinn had given her was in there, a solar powered toy pod, and a holo cube with images of London – tourist tat, but they probably didn’t have them back in 2015. A silk scarf, with its receipt, in a blue and gold Harrods bag. A Royal Opera House programme from an opera Quinn had taken her to on her birthday the week before, and a silver bookmark which Floss had chosen for the 2050 hallmark. She hadn’t shown him the letter she’d written to her mum explaining everything, but he’d caught a glimpse before she moved it below the rest, and it covered two pages and had lots of kisses at the end.

“Here, take this.” He held out a twenty-pound note. “No one could fake that. Well, they could, but it’d be hard.”

“Oh thanks, that’s great. I wanted to put some money in, but didn’t know where you get it from. No one seems to use it, even for small things.”

“Yup, you’ve got to be down and out or off the grid to have a use for cash. Ready?” She nodded. He thought of something. “Some people get motion sickness.”

“Yes, I did when Quinn brought me here. I bought patches. I don’t want to alarm Mum by turning up and being sick as a dog on her doorstep.”

“Okay. Thursday, 23rd July, 2015, 8 pm, 15 Highbury Street, N5 1UP, exterior?”

“Yes. What happens if we materialize and someone’s standing right there and we land in the middle of them?”

“We won’t. It’s got compensatory fuzzy logic. It won’t land us in the middle of a wall or ten feet up in the air, either. Hold my hand.”

Floss gripped his left hand, eyes wide. Ryker grinned at her and pressed the two buttons simultaneously. Blackness, silence, a whirling sensation; then light again, the golden light of a summer evening shining on Victorian stucco to their left, and a park with big trees on their right. Floss let go of him and her face broke into a huge smile.

“Awesome!”

Ryker smiled and looked around to conceal it. The old-fashioned words she came out with amused him. “Nice here. Should have brought Curtis. Which one’s your mum’s?”

“This one, right here.”

He followed her under a spindly iron arch with a hoop (designed he guessed to hold some sort of light – probably not for a Victorian version of basketball) and up three steps to an imposing door with a fanlight. Floss pressed a bell. “It’s me.” The door latch released and they went upstairs.

Floss’s mother looked quite like Floss, only older. She was slim and elegant, with nicely-done hair and makeup. Floss hugged her for a long time.

“What was that for?” she said when Floss released her, smiling at Ryker and giving his clothes an almost imperceptible once-over. “Lovely to see you. I like your new outfit. Have you eaten?”

“Yes. This is Ryker. My mum.”

“I’m Emma,” said her mother. “Do come in.”

Once they were all sitting down, drinks in hand, in a classy living room with high ceilings and two big windows looking over the park, Floss explained to her mother what they were doing there. Ryker had to hand it to Emma; she was cool. She listened carefully, asked sensible questions and took very little convincing. She looked through the folder and examined the TiTrav on his wrist with interest.

“Ryker brought me to see you just in case I can’t find a way to get back from 2050. I’ll do my best, but if I don’t, I’m going to go to university again, requalify, and start all over. I’ll be fine, so you mustn’t worry if I don’t manage to get back.”

Emma nodded. She seemed to be taking this very calmly. Perhaps her and Floss weren’t that close . . . Suddenly to Ryker’s alarm her face began to quiver, then it crumpled and her eyes flooded with tears. She turned away shaking and sobbing. Floss put an arm round her.

“It’s all right,” Floss said.

“I’m sorry . . .” she gasped through her sobs, “It’s just the thought that I’ll know if you don’t come home in the next week or so, I’ll never see you again . . .”

Ryker got up, mumbled something and left the room. He found the bathroom along the corridor and had a pee, washed his hands and face with great thoroughness and hung around for ten minutes gazing out of the window to give them a bit of space. When he returned, they were falling about laughing as Emma filmed Floss with her camera. Floss was pulling faces and her mum was trying to get her to stop messing about. The camera swung in his direction. Ryker’s native caution made him unhappy about being recorded on film in a time that wasn’t his, digital evidence of timecrime that might still be around decades later. Even just Floss being filmed incriminated him. But he couldn’t ask Emma to delete it.

When they got back to his place, Floss went a bit quiet. Fretting about her mum, he reckoned. Then she told him the idea she’d had.

Ryker thought it over. No reason why it shouldn’t work, in theory. He could fit a receiver into the TiTrav, no problem. Of course, he’d lose a source of income – but then on the plus side, he wouldn’t have to deal with Quinn again. Floss would end up the new owner of the TiTrav. She had as much right to it as Quinn or Pete. He wondered if she’d use it. Difficult to resist . . .

“How are you going to get time alone in Quinn’s flat?”

“I don’t know. How difficult d’you think it would be to break in?”

“For starters there’ll be CCTV in the lobby, recording everyone in and out.”

“That wouldn’t matter, though. I’d be gone before they looked at it. Anyway, he can hardly report the theft, can he? I thought maybe I could jemmy the door. It’s a penthouse, people don’t come up there unless they’re visiting Quinn, so no one would pass by and see the damage.”

Ryker laughed. “Do that a lot, do you, jemmy doors? And it’ll be a smart lock. Ritzy apartments always have them, they come with the robotics. You break in, it’ll send a message straight away to Quinn’s phone and the nearest cop shop. So will the burglar alarm. And Quinn’ll be able to watch a video of you in his flat from his phone.”

“Ah.” She paused, eyeing him sideways, and he could see what was coming next. “You’re really good at robotics, aren’t you? I don’t suppose . . .”

He gave her a look. “I could get in there okay. That’s not the point though, is it? You’ll be safe in the past afterwards. I’ll still be here when Quinn finds out he’s been robbed.”

“Couldn’t you hack into the building’s CCTV and delete the film? Actually, it would be really good if you came with me because I want to get into Quinn’s computer, and you could do that, couldn’t you? You could wear a disguise, if you’re worried about being recognized. We both could. We could pretend we’re going to a fancy dress party. I could be Princess Leia and you could be Darth Vader, so you’d have a mask on and no one would recognize you.”

Ryker gazed at her, speechless. He didn’t know where to start with this – she couldn’t be serious. She was very bright, he’d seen that for himself before he knew what she did for a living, but this reminded him she was only young, not much older than Saffy. Her suggestion sounded more like it belonged in a heist movie than reality. Ryker liked a quiet life, and that didn’t mean a quiet life in jail. He liked things the way they were.

Finally he said, “So your plan to not be noticed is us dressing up as Princess Leia and Darth Vader?”

“It doesn’t matter if they
notice
us, as long as they don’t
recognize
us – you. But if you wiped the recording it wouldn’t matter. Quinn can’t use IEMA tracking for personal stuff, can he?”

“Don’t think so, not without leaving a trace.” Floss looked eager at this, and Ryker felt things had gone far enough. It was high time to disillusion her. He said firmly, “Look, it’s not that I can’t do this; I don’t want to. I could hack into the flat’s systems and from there to the building’s. I could reset the surveillance so there’d just be a repeated section from the day before that if you’re lucky they might not notice. If we were careful, Quinn wouldn’t know he’d been robbed till he looked for his TiTrav and it’s not there. But if anything went wrong, anyone saw me and Quinn did get to hear about it, I’m screwed, and it’s not as if I’m getting anything out of this, either. As far as I’m concerned, it’s too big a risk for nothing. Why d’you want to get into Quinn’s computer anyway?”

“To read his journal. To find out what the disaster is that’s going to happen to humanity.”

“Why?”

“I’m curious. After all, they thought I caused it. I want to know why they thought that. Maybe I can do something to stop it.”

“You don’t even know he keeps a journal.”

“Yes I do. He told me when we went to the opera.
The unexamined life is not worth living
, he said. Socrates.”

Ryker shook his head, unconvinced.

Floss said, “We could use the TiTrav to come back here after to drop you off. Then I’ll use it go home. If you like, I could bring it back to you in the future, in a few months’ time when any fuss has died down. Then you could take me home and hang on to it. I don’t need a time machine –” he sensed her making some private reservation here. Was she planning to win the lottery first? “– so I could do that the same day, and you’d know I’d be there on a date and time we agreed.”

This would mean he’d get the TiTrav in due course. He had to admit, that was quite a big incentive. Quinn would think she’d stolen it so wouldn’t come after him, and he could make enough money to sort Saffy out the way Pete had been going to, save her from scratching a living in that dead end job. He trusted Floss; she struck him as honest. If she said she’d bring the TiTrav back to him, she would. The balance wavered, and tipped in her favour.

But it was still a mad scheme.

Thursday, 5
^th
May 2050

Floss hadn’t really thought Ryker would come with her. The moment she realized he was agreeing her heart began to pound with excitement and trepidation, because with his expertise her plan was much more likely to succeed and she’d be going home. It was nice of him; of course, he stood to gain a TiTrav, but all the risk was his. The worst she could be accused of was breaking and entering, and that only if they caught her. With luck, she wouldn’t be hanging around long enough to be prosecuted for timecrime.

They walked together up the City Road shortly after nine am. Floss had a backpack containing her 2015 clothes and the cobwebby evening dress she could not bring herself to abandon. Ryker had turned down her idea of wearing a Darth Vader helmet; instead he’d put on a sort of hoodie under his jacket, pulled up the hood and kept his head down. Luckily it was a grey cloudy day threatening rain. He stayed a few paces behind her as if they just happened to be walking in the same direction. Floss’s breathing was rapid, and her stomach lurched every time she thought of what they were about to do. She felt she could not bear the disappointment if the TiTrav was not there and she had to stay in 2050 after all.

Near the entrance to Quinn’s building they slowed to a dawdle, watching as planned, until they saw a woman heading for the main entrance. Ryker closed the gap between them.

“Keep behind me,” Floss muttered. Few people are prepared to shut a door in another person’s face, unless that person looks disreputable. Floss knew she looked respectable; she wasn’t sure that Ryker did. She accelerated towards the door, gave a friendly smile to the woman and followed her inside. Ryker sidled in at her heels.