Time and Time Again (44 page)

‘I heard the Master use that name,’ Katie conceded. ‘It’s a bourgeois name. The place has a number now.’

‘I was brought there by the Companions of Chronos.’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘I’ve told you, we read your letter.’

‘Well, then you know something about the terrible events of my own century,’ Stanton said. ‘You know that I killed the Kaiser to prevent the most terrible war in history. A war that marked the beginning of a terrible century. A century in which humanity learned to murder on an industrial scale. Whole populations died in the 1930s and 1940s, the Jews, the Gypsies, the Poles, the Ukrainians, all slaughtered. All slaughtered by Russian Soviet Communism.’

Now she really did smile. A broad wide smile that stretched fully across her face. And yet still a smile with not a single gram of joy in it.

The smile of a corpse.

‘I know,’ she repeated. ‘I read your letter. I know about your “terrible” war, your “Great” War, which began with the killing of an archduke at Sarajevo … Tell me, Hugh Stanton, how long did it last? This war that so corrupted and cursed the century into which you were born?’

‘Eleven years,’ Stanton replied. ‘1914 to 1925. The Great War lasted eleven years.’

‘Oh,
eleven years
,’ Katie replied with bitter sarcasm. ‘And tell me, Captain Stanton, how long did the
Second
World War last?’

Stanton was confused.

There had been no Second World War in the century from which Hugh Stanton had come.

The century which McCluskey had sought to correct.

In Stanton and McCluskey’s century there had been only one world war. The Great War.

‘One was enough,’ Stanton asserted. ‘More than a decade of deadlocked butchery. A butchery that ruined all the great nations of Europe utterly. Britain, France, Germany, Austria, Russia.’

‘But not America,’ Katie sneered. ‘They didn’t fight in this
terrible
war, did they? This war which you call Great?’

‘No, they kept out of it. That was why it went on so long. Woodrow Wilson would have brought them in but he was shot on the steps of Congress by Isolationists. So the war dragged on in deadlock until in the end both Germany and Russia had Communist revolutions. Germany’s under Luxemburg; Russia’s under Stalin. You know what happened then from the letter I wrote. Stalin was stronger. He betrayed Luxemburg. He had her and Liebknecht murdered in the streets. The Russians spread their ‘revolution’ west, through the Ukraine and Poland, through Germany and into France and on to Spain. By 1930 only Britain remained free, holding out under Winston Churchill. Isolated, alone, with the Russians on the Channel. The rest of Europe and all of Asia was enslaved under Stalin’s paranoid genocidal regime … a regime which murdered millions and millions of people, right up until 1951 when the Americans produced their bomb and destroyed Stalin’s Soviet Empire in a single day. All those decades of misery for half the globe stemmed from the terrible Great War. The war I stopped.’

‘Yes, you stopped it all right,’ Katie agreed. ‘Because of you, in my century there was no war in 1914. Germany was
not
destroyed. So Rosa Luxemburg didn’t have her revolution in 1925 in a nation exhausted by a great war; instead she had her revolution in 1916. As a reaction to the brutal police state
you
brought about by killing the Kaiser. Her revolution didn’t begin in a nation blighted by poverty and starvation and war exhaustion, like in your century. It began in the richest, most developed country on earth with the biggest army and the most advanced technology. In my century, the Russians weren’t the top Communists, the Germans were. The German USSR that Luxemburg established in 1916 was a global colossus. So when the vermin Strasser had her killed and made himself German Soviet dictator, he was the most powerful man in the world. A red kaiser. The revolution spread to Russia and was unstoppable.
Then
Strasser began his war and along with his Russian servant Stalin he took over all of Europe,
including
Britain. There was no “Churchill”, whoever the fuck
he
was, to “stand alone”. Britain wasn’t fit to fight anyone; it and its Empire had been fatally weakened and divided by the Civil War over Ireland. Strasser’s “revolution” spread to China, India, South America. Soon only America remained outside German Soviet control. But they didn’t save the world. Because when the atomic bomb was finally developed, it was Germany not America that had it. Berlin ordered a nuclear strike. I was one of the soldiers that occupied the rubble of New York. The globe was conquered! You think
you
lived in a shit century? With your
one
war, a bit of genocide and a half-arsed little nuclear strike. And after that nothing to worry about but something called
global fucking warming
, whatever that is. Try living in a century where the
entire planet
is ruled by a fourth-generation Communist lunatic. Where the
entire planet
is one vast network of prison camps. Where love is treason and they make you drown your own babies and every person in the world is an ant, a drone, a robot. Beaten, murdered. Dying in the mines, starving in the fields. Or doing mass synchronized dances in the Red Squares of Berlin, London, Moscow and Washington. Thousands prancing about with red ribbons in their hands while the Party fossils stand on their platforms and gloat. A world where there is no freedom. No individuality. No joy of any kind.
That’s
the world you bequeathed us, when you shot the Kaiser and sparked a revolution. You stupid bastard. You stupid
stupid
bastard. Your century was paradise! Why didn’t you leave well alone?’

She burst into tears.

Stanton was completely taken aback. In the short time he’d known Katie he’d come to presume that her heart and soul were constructed out of the same stuff as her body. He’d never imagined she could cry.

He tried in vain to justify what he’d done. To explain why the Companions of Chronos of his world had tasked him to do what he had done.

‘Katie, you read my history. The Russian USSR killed tens of millions before it was beaten.’

‘But they
were
beaten! In the end they were stopped. How could you have thrown away a century where the killing
actually stopped
and what’s more had been stopped for
seventy years
?’

Stanton could not meet her eye. The dawning realization that his whole mission, the mission which had begun with the murder of his own family, had actually resulted in the enslavement of the whole world was too much to bear.

IT TOOK KATIE
another week to fully recover, during which time she and Stanton agreed an uneasy truce and formed an equally uneasy alliance. Sitting together in their suite at the Kempinski, they made a plan.

Clearly the century in which they were both now living was heading for utter disaster. Katie had failed to stop Stanton killing the Kaiser and so history was developing as it had done in her century, hurtling towards a global totalitarian misery without end.

If nothing else was changed, the whole dreadful sequence of events that would lead to four generations of psychopathic dictators ruling the earth would play out exactly as before.

Both Stanton and Katie could see that it was imperative for them to try to influence the shape of this third loop in time using their unique knowledge of the previous two. They had to try to find a way to prevent things from taking the course that they had in the second loop, and perhaps beginning a history which was preferable to even the one in the first loop, the one Stanton had been born into. And which he had helped throw away.

This last thought was still a very sore and sensitive subject for Katie. She still could not begin to understand how the Chronations of Stanton’s time could have imagined that a century in which global totalitarianism had been defeated could ever be improved on.

‘I suppose we wanted a century in which it had never existed at all,’ Stanton tried to explain, ‘and also, after that we wanted a world where the applications of human ingenuity didn’t develop on such crass and environmentally disastrous lines.’

But the more he heard about the world from which Katie had come, the more he understood how utterly and criminally deluded McCluskey and her crew of smug geriatrics had been. How deluded
he
had been. People made history and people screwed it up, that was what McCluskey had always maintained, and she sure had been right about that. Incredibly, she had ended up proving her own thesis.
She
screwed up.

If only Newton hadn’t been so damn clever.

But all that was in several pasts now. There was only one present, the here and now, and they had to make a plan.

Sitting up together late at night, Katie ravenously devouring every delicacy she could find to be delivered to their suite, they decided what they must do.

They would kill Rosa Luxemburg.

At first Katie had wanted to kill Strasser. He, after all, had been the one to hijack and corrupt Luxemburg’s revolution. He had fathered the hellish dynasty that spawned generations of homicidal demi-gods to lord it over a global population of synchronized puppets.

But Stanton disagreed.

‘Strasser was a thug,’ he argued. ‘He stole something noble, even beautiful, and debased it. Anybody could do what Strasser did, and if we take him out of the equation somebody else will take his place. Stalin or one of the other members of Strasser’s Central Committee.’

Katie had by this time explained her history in detail and Stanton recognized many of the names included in it from his own century: Goebbels, Röhm, Zinoviev. Others he had never heard of: Beria, Kamenev, Hess. Adolf Hitler.

‘Anyone can destroy something,’ Stanton went on, ‘but to
create
it takes talent and I’d suggest that to make a successful revolution takes genius. Luxemburg is a uniquely talented individual, a political visionary and a truly great communicator. I know, I’ve met her. She’s more special than any of the dull bullies who followed her. And without her there’d have been nothing for them
to
follow. We need to remove the shovel, not the shit.’

Stanton didn’t like the idea. In fact, the plan he was advocating pained him deeply. He knew Luxemburg. She was a good woman. A kind woman … and Bernadette loved her. But he also could see that taking her out of the German equation was his best shot at putting right the wrong he’d done. At preventing the German revolution from happening and hence preventing its disastrous corruption followed by its world domination.

‘So we kill Luxemburg,’ Katie said, tearing at steak and sausage with her fingers.

‘Yes.’

‘And then I’ll kill Strasser.’

‘That’s your choice. Right now he’s only twenty-two years old.’

‘I don’t care if he’s only twenty-two months, twenty-two days. I’ll tear him to pieces with my bare hands and eat his heart while it’s still beating. Then I’ll kill the rest of his committee,’ she said, ‘even the ones who are only children now. Then I’ll find the parents of the ones that haven’t yet even been born and I’ll kill them too. And I’ll kill them horribly. In revenge for the crimes that will now never be committed.’

Katie drank deep at water from the jug. She took no alcohol, explaining that remaining in control while others did not had proved useful to her in the past.

‘And maybe,’ she went on, wiping her mouth with her sinewy, ink-blackened arm and looking hard at Stanton, ‘maybe I’ll kill you as well because the truth is that all of this,
all
of this, is your fault.’

Stanton stared back, meeting the challenge of her eyes. He hadn’t asked for any of this. And he’d lost his children too.

‘Maybe you’re right, Katie,’ he said quietly. ‘Although I think you’ll find I’m not so easy to kill. What I and the people of my time set in motion was disastrous, that’s pretty clear. But I stayed with the mission when I saw how it had gone wrong. I could have walked away but I didn’t. I found you and I saved you. And because of that we have a chance to pool our knowledge and try again. There’s a phrase from my century,
third time lucky
. Do you know it?’

‘There was no luck in my time, Hugh Stanton. The word and the very
idea
were banned. The Great Navigator directed all things for the peace and harmony of all. Luck is a bourgeois notion.’

‘Well, we’re directing things now. And we’re going to get it right this time. And for that reason, before we begin our plan we have to go back to Constantinople one more time. To the cellar from which we were both born.’

‘Why?’

‘Because we’re going to make a better century and, when we’ve done it, we want it to be left that way. So we must place your warning next to mine.’

TRAVELLING WITH KATIE
was complex. The Chronations of her time had not had the resources or the technological sophistication to supply her with papers or currencies. In fact, there had been very few early-twentieth-century documents left for them to forge. All evidence of the petit bourgeois past had been destroyed in successive ‘cultural’ revolutions and purges. Great buildings, museums, pictures and books. Virtually nothing remained of the time before the Dynasty of Great Navigators had taken the helm.

It had been as much as the Chronations of Katie’s world had been able to do to smuggle her to the ghost town once known as Istanbul and place her in the cellar in the dockland area at the appointed time. Katie had arrived in 1914 with not much more than a couple of guns and a few bits of gold which had been supplied by a senior Party dentist. The only aids the Master of the State Research and Education Facility had been able to give her were a compass, a map of Europe, a piece of paper with the location and time of the assassination of the Kaiser and a suit of rough male clothing and boots. She had lived by her wits as she made her way across Turkey and the Balkans, stealing and killing to get whatever she needed.

‘I’ve been on the run for most of my adult life,’ she explained. ‘That’s why they chose me. But if you want my opinion anybody could survive in this world. The fields and woods are full of food, the peasants are trusting and the border guards shout out a warning before they shoot, which is very foolish of them since it allows me to shoot them first.’