One Day All This Will Be Yours Page 10

  And now it’s time to raid the piggy bank. Zoe and I are going back to the war for a souvenir.

  I remember when it all went to hell, during the war. A mad scramble to do unto them before they did unto us. Not the constant back and forth of the time machines—which by then, it was clear, wasn’t solving anything—but the ultimate of ultimates, that it was utterly crucial we deploy first. Except it was a war in time, and so terms like ‘before’ and ‘first’ didn’t hold the absolute meaning people usually ascribed to them. And it all went off at once. And you’ve seen how that turned out for poor old history, greatest of all civilian casualties.

  I don’t know how many Causality Bombs there were. I suspect even one would have been too many and there were certainly more than one. And for every bomb there was a team tasked with deploying it, detonating it on a precise fault-line of history so that some key part of their game plan or culture or hierarchy would just get atomised, the whole spacetime proximity just blasted into four-dimensional powder. Imagine them, all those squads of determined soldiers, all of the time-orphans, products of sequences of events, places, parents, times now hopelessly overwritten in the shifting chaos of the war. Picture them in their vastly cumbersome suits of protective gear that would not under any circumstances protect them. They’re there, crouching around the ludicrous complexity of their particular bomb, however it might look. They all looked different: brass and clockwork, crystal, lead, moving parts, funnels, wires. None of them looked entirely physical. They hurt the eyes. I remember.

  And they set off the bombs. I remember. Crouching, encumbered, each alone in that great swaddling suit. Detonating the present, burning the past. Because it was a war that had no justification any more and there was no other way of ending it except to end everything else and hope the war got caught in the blast.

  I remember.

  And we were there—or they were there, if it turns out it wasn’t me at all—at the bomb, just as all the other teams were there with their bombs. Except that someone, one of our and/or their team, had a quirk of conscience. Just a moment when they thought, We shouldn’t do this, though. Just a brief second of second thoughts. But it was a time war, and a brief second is all it takes to fall out of step with the rest of the conflict. So that, when it all went kaboom, this one bomb wasn’t ready and didn’t go off. And didn’t matter, as it turned out, because there were enough bombs being detonated in that same second to wipe out history several times over. But that bomb, that one bomb, didn’t go bang. And that bomb, and its hesitating team, and its moment of conscience, ended up stuck in a shard fifty-eight seconds long, and it’s still out there. The last Causality Bomb in causality. And Zoe and I are going to go get it, and we’ll take it to Smantha and Weldon’s perfect paradise. Perhaps we’ll gift-wrap it for them.

  We’ll detonate it and turn their entire postepochalyptic utopia into a wasteland of nothing, and then we’ll go build a new farm on the new broken edge of history, whenever that turns out to be, and settle down to murder time travellers and troll historical figures again. Everyone should have a retirement plan.

  We synchronise our time machines. It’s like synchronising watches, only considerably more complicated. Our in-and-out window is less than a minute, after all. Precision beyond the dreams of the Swiss is the watchword.

  We depart.

  We arrive. The journey is instantaneous. It’s time travel. The travel part doesn’t take any time. Obviously some sort of dramatic falling-through-space-into-a-swirly-vortex sort of thing would be narratively preferable, but it is what it is.

  And then we’re raising the hatches, clumsy in our layers of protection, lumbering out into the moments before history exploded. It’s a warehouse, I think. There’s a terrible glare coming in from somewhere that isn’t really any regular direction. It’s not the ghastly light of the detonated Causality Bombs, because when they went off they took light with them along with everything else. Even light is a slave to cause and effect, and once you cut those strings the puppet falls on the floor and ceases to be particularly entertaining. But it’s something like that. Not the explosion, but the presplosion. It’s the light of the Armageddon about to happen. When you blow up time, you see the mushroom cloud before the bomb goes off. I mean, that’s only common sense, right?

  And up ahead, barely visible in the eye-watering light, we see five figures. The bomb squad, sexless, featureless in the same heavy gear we’re wearing, kneeling in a circle. And I remember.

  I don’t remember.

  I don’t know if I remember.

  I’ve been here multiple times before, after all, and my actual recollection of the late moments of the war is like confetti. Five figures, and am I one of them? How would that even work, that I’m here revisiting the scene of my maybe epiphany, if I never actually left? Maybe I leave later, on the fifty-eighth second. But the other thing about everyone else setting off their space-time-shredding ultimate weapons is that it plays hob with your memory for a few days before and after the event. And as the event encompasses all of time, well…

  So maybe one of them’s me, and maybe I already left. And maybe I was the one who had the crisis of conscience and didn’t detonate this, the last of the Causality Bombs. Or maybe it was someone else. I kind of hope the latter is the case because otherwise I am about to trample all over my former scruples.

  We shamble forwards, feeling the seconds dropping behind us like lead weights. I can see our armour ablating away under the sheer corrosive pressure of burning time, the blast wave that moves backwards through history, the firework that blows up your pets in the house before you even light the blue touch paper.

  We get to those five frozen figures. From a direction known only to the fourth dimension, the end of all things is rolling towards us.

  There’s no bomb.

  No bomb.

  There’s no bomb.

  I mean, we spend some vital seconds looking for it, but there’s no bomb.

  How can there be no bomb? It’s an ultimate weapon; it’s not like it’ll have rolled under the couch or it’s in someone’s other pair of jeans.

  There’s even a little round clear spot on the ground, the nothing that these five doomed sods are gathered around. But we’re too late. Somebody already came and took it.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  WE GO BACK to the farm, understandably dispirited. Disquieted, even, and given the whole reason for settling down on the farm was for a bit of quiet, that is entirely unsatisfactory. But if you stash an ultimate weapon somewhere and then you go back for it and someone’s already nicked off with it, then that is a reasonable basis for a bit of disquiet.

  Back at the farm, something’s different.

  It’s hard to pinpoint. Everything is where we left it. Miffly bounds up wanting a scratch and maybe an errant time traveller to nibble on. The corn’s just ripening, ready for me to take the tarpaulin off a harvester and go chug through the fields feeling like a proper son of the soil. Or else just leave it to the robots. Whatever. Except when I get out of my time machine and set my feet on the good dark earth, it feels… fragile. It feels as though there’s a great hollow cavern below, and I can distantly hear the echo of every footfall. As if it could all collapse any moment.

  Zoe doesn’t quite get the same sense of it, but then I’ve been here longer. I’ve just generally been around the spacetime block longer. You develop senses.

  “Well, I suppose we’d better…” I don’t really know what we’d better, given how things have turned out. We need a new plan, anyway. Maybe if the Utopians are going to come here and bug us, we can go to their perfect world and graffiti their nice white walls, scratch all their silver trim, teach their beautiful, flawless children bad words. I mean, if in doubt, just generally screw up the world for everyone else, right? That’s been the motto of human decision-making since Ug first hit Throg in the head with a rock, and it always seems to have gotten us through. Except for the whole Causality War and breaking everything there eve
r was into a million billion pieces, of course.

  Smantha and Weldon are waiting for us outside the farmhouse. I wonder for a moment if we should pretend we had it away to our heart’s content off in the past and stashed our kid, their sainted ancestor, in some random piece of history. A reed basket or a handbag or a left luggage locker or something. Then they can go hunting all space and time for the entirely fictitious mite and we can have a bit of peace and quiet.

  But there’s an odd look to the pair of them. They’re not doing the strained-smiles and eager-beaver how’s-the-family nonsense they usually resort to. They’re actually looking a bit serious and I think I like them even less.

  “We know where you were, by the way,” Weldon starts. “Looking for the bomb.”

  “I don’t know anything about any bomb,” I say brightly. “How about you, darling? Did you happen to see a bomb?”

  “I did not, love. No bombs at all,” Zoe replies, likewise. And that is, of course, a sore point because a lack of bomb is precisely our problem, but tweaking these two’s sanctimonious noses takes the edge off a little.

  Smantha and Weldon exchange a little look. And, though I didn’t like them when they were being jolly and earnest, and I didn’t like them when they weren’t, I like that little look even less.

  The penny drops a moment after. Zoe goes tense right at the same time, making the equivalent connection. I remember when we went out to the beach on the edge of eternity, looking out-into-across-through that desert of shattered time. They’d been there, Smantha and Weldon, and for once they hadn’t wanted to come over and badger us. Sneaking, almost. Like they’d been caught looking for something.

  “You took the bomb,” I say hollowly. “The last Causality Bomb. The only one to survive the war. You got in ahead of us and took it.” Raiding that little fifty-eight second span of time, treading mere moments ahead of us so that we walked all unknowing in their footsteps, taking the bomb and stealing away just a breath before we were there to steal the same thing.

  “We did, yes,” Smantha says. “And just as well we did. We know exactly what you’d have done with it.”

  I favour them with a sour look. “Well, bully for you, you found us out,” I say.

  “But there’ll be a next time,” Zoe backs me up. “We’ll find something else. And even if we don’t, we don’t lead to you anymore. We’re quite happy without kids, thank you very much. And I appreciate that you, as the kids of the kids of the kids we’re not going to have, are a bit aggrieved by that, but screw you, frankly.”

  “Even though you yourself are a product of that union you’re so determined not to have,” Smantha challenges her bitterly.

  “Meh, I’m outside the timestream now. Doesn’t affect me if I never get born. You too, for that matter. Why not just accept it and find somewhere nice, and forget Utopia?”

  “Because it’s Utopia!” Weldon actually shouts. “It’s the best place! That’s what it means.”

  “Nope,” I say rather smugly. “It literally means ‘no-place.’ So you could just say we’re trying to help it reach its proper potential by making sure it never happens.”

  “And just because it’s Utopia for you doesn’t mean it was to me,” Zoe points out. “Or what about all those people who aren’t around in that Utopia? Because it wouldn’t have been for them either.”

  “We’re not giving you the option any more,” Weldon states flatly.

  “You want my genetic material, you come here and take it,” I tell him, ready for a bout of fisticuffs.

  “We did consider it,” he agrees. “But it just seemed too… messy. And not the way it was supposed to go, so who knows whether that would even give rise to us. You fought in the Causality War. You know that you can change a timeline as easily as that”—a snap of his fingers—“but it’s basically impossible to ever go back to the original. You just get more and more different outcomes.” And he’s right, of course. “And that’s why we took the bomb.”

  I’m still nodding about the lecture on causality that I almost miss that last bit. “Wait, that’s why the what now?”

  “You took the bomb to stop us using it,” Zoe corrects him nervously.

  “Actually,” and now it’s Smantha’s turn to be smug, “we were looking for it long before you had the idea to get it.”

  “Impossible. How could you even know where it was?” And I’m getting tired of just standing out in front of the farmhouse like it’s nigh noon, and so we all end up in the kitchen. With the kettle on and some little probably-not-poisoned crumpets out because I take my duties as host seriously even in these circumstances.

  “We knew,” Smantha says, once I’ve poured the tea, “because you knew. And you’re our ancestor. And, on your deathbed, after the long and happy life with Zoe you’re so determined not to have, you told us in case we ever needed it.”

  “And we needed it,” Weldon adds.

  “So we went and got it,” Smantha adds. I’d like to say ‘finishes,’ but there’s patently more to come, and true to form, Weldon continues, “and then we planted it and set it.”

  “You what?” I ask politely, mouth half-full of crumpet.

  “We set the bomb,” Weldon spells out.

  “When?”

  “Now.” And he doesn’t mean now-this-instant-now, of course. He means that Now is what the bomb is set to explode. This Now, the one I live in. The trailing edge of tranquil time I found at the edge of the devastation the war left. The near end of the rest of time, that’s gone rolling peacefully away into the future from this point.

  They’re going to blow it all up. They’re going to destroy the farm, the house, the fields, the robots, all my hard work. Turn it into a glittering desert of pulverised time. Like it had never been.

  “But… why?” I croak, half a crumpet cooling on my plate.

  “Because if they break the chain of causality so that their Now is the near edge of the rest of history, it doesn’t matter what we do,” Zoe says flatly. “We don’t need to get together. It’s a Causality Bomb. And they need to murder Causality to stay living. They’ve given up on us.”

  I leap up. “Where is it?”

  “We’re not going to tell you, of course,” Weldon says implacably. “And we really should be going. Thanks for the tea.”

  I am outraged. I am outmanoeuvred. I am betrayed. I give Weldon and Smantha an agonised stare and cry out, “But I thought you were twee!”

  They look at me, perfect eyes in perfect, perfect faces. “You have no idea,” they say, “what we have done to protect our tweeness. You cannot imagine the sacrifices we have made, the elements of society we have expunged, the differences we have ruthlessly exterminated, so that we can live cosy, untroubled lives in our perfect world. And when we go back, we’ll erase the memories from our minds so that we don’t have to know either, and we can go about our pleasant, banal existence utterly untroubled by the mountain of bones we’ve built it all on.” And all of this with only a modicum of feeling or expression, but then Smantha’s face twists and she adds, “And all you had to do, to avoid this, was just settle down and have kids. Was that really so terrible? I swear, Weldon, ancestors these days just don’t appreciate how hard we had it in the future.”

  For his part, Weldon ostentatiously checks a watch he has no real need to wear.

  And then they’re out and strolling towards their own time machine and gone.

  “We need to find the bomb,” Zoe says, but I know it doesn’t matter. They won’t have put it in the barn or the undercellar or wired it to the ignition of the Soviet Speedster. They’re not dime novel villains. It’s a Causality Bomb. The effective blast radius is the entire universe, all of space for that moment of time. And more than that, I know it goes off. That’s why I’ve been feeling this sense of fragility to everything. It’s the aftershock of the explosion, receding back in time. We’re already living in a broken shard of time.

  Which doesn’t mean we won’t get obliterated when the boom goes u
p.

  We run. I don’t know if running helps, but it seems wrong to just saunter. I spend one vital second hugging Miffly goodbye because there’s no way I can save her. We get in our time machines and exchange hurried coordinates. Rendezvous at the court of the Medicis in 1613 and take it from there. It’s a decent length shard and there’s some good Italian food.

  And we won’t take this lying down. We’ll fight them every step of the way. And they’ll hunt us, for sure. They’ll track us through all the fragments of time and try to exterminate us, just as I did with the other survivors of the war. They’ll set the same alarms I did, and jump on any intrusion to their perfect world. They’ll make their own bottleneck and murder the crap out of any time traveller who gets that far, but most of all they will actively hunt us across infinity. Because we’re two vengeful bastards with time machines, and we can still disrupt their precious Utopia. And we will. I swear that we will undo them. They’ll wish they’d never been born.

  But that’s for tomorrow. Right now we have a more pressing problem.

  WE GET OUT. The bomb goes off. The rest is history.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Adrian Tchaikovsky was born in Woodhall Spa, Lincolnshire, before heading off to Reading to study psychology and zoology. He subsequently ended up in law and has worked as a legal executive in both Reading and Leeds, where he now lives. Married, he is a keen live role-player and has trained in stage-fighting and historical combat. He maintains an interest in history and the biological sciences, especially entomology.

  Adrian is the author of the acclaimed 10-book Shadows of the Apt series starting with Empire in Black and Gold published by Tor UK. His other works for Tor UK include standalone novels Guns of the Dawn and Children of Time and the new series Echoes of the Fall starting with The Tiger and the Wolf. Other major works include short story collection Feast and Famine for Newcon Press and novellas The Bloody Deluge (in Journal of the Plague Year) and Even in the Cannon’s Mouth (in Monstrous Little Voices) for Abaddon. He has also written numerous short stories. In 2016 he won the Arthur C Clarke Award, and he has been shortlisted for the David Gemmell Legend Award and the British Fantasy Award.