One Day All This Will Be Yours Read online

  There, doesn’t sound so bad that I killed him now, does it?

  I’m not saying I feel good about Rigo, but the thing about rules is, they’re there to be followed, no exceptions. And it’s all in a good cause. Or it was originally all for the very best of causes, but now, I will admit, mission creep has set in. Because I have come to value my solitude, here at the postepochalyptic end of time. I don’t mind visitors, but I make sure they don’t stay long and, simultaneously, never leave. And I make sure nobody can ever come looking for them.

  It’s a calling. Or, if it’s not a calling, then at least it’s a vocation. Or, failing that, you have to have a hobby, don’t you?

  The last one, the one before Rigo, was one of my favourites. Turned up in his goggles and his leather jacket, great big waxed handlebar moustache. His machine was beautiful. I still have it—well, all right, I still have all of them, in the big hangar where I put the surplus time machines, but this one gets pride of place in the collection. Mahogany and teak, polished to a shine, and all the mountings gleaming brass. And steam! Steam and cogwheels and little things that light up or piston up and down or… It was like a toy store in the holidays, when he set all those moving parts going. I had him show me three times, just so I could do it myself after I’d got rid of him. I still set the thing in motion sometimes.

  Hieronymus Blaylock, that was the name. The Honourable Professor Hieronymus Blaylock. Magnificent, a name as fancy as the moustache, as fancy as the machine he pitched up in. Knew his wine, beat me at chess, talked nineteen to the dozen about the spirit of human science. Took me the devil’s own job to work out that he had actually set out from his own estates in Kent in 1911. There was a steampunk convention somewhere in 2008 that had a very near miss, believe you me. And when he saw Miffly! I swear his eyes lit up like it was Victoria’s jubilee. “I say!” he said. “A real living Tyrannosaurus!” Because he understood, do you see, that exotic pets is basically one of the real justifications for having access to time travel. And I had to correct him, and explain that while T. rex is definitely one of the great iconic dinosaurs, for the purposes of eating people it’s severely suboptimal because, frankly, we’re far too small compared to its typical prey animals. Honestly, I’ve tried it; they’re just not interested in us. They’d be picking little human bones out of their teeth for days, and with those tiny arms that’s more trouble than it’s worth.

  Whereas the Allosaurus, on the other hand, is decidedly closer to our scale. Still terrifyingly big, but a damn sight nippier and far more amenable to a human-sized snack. And Hieronymus nodded as he digested this titbit of information, and then Miffly nodded as she digested him, and equilibrium was restored. And there was a mysterious explosion on a country estate in Kent in 1905, but nobody really noticed anything amiss because the owner was a notorious eccentric known for exploding things. Because I’m sentimental, and had rather liked Hieronymus, I exploded him on the exact same day that T. rex was formally named, to commemorate his mistake. But that’s me all over, you see. I offer a bespoke service.

  They all end up here, because this is the end-time. This is all the time there is. This is the trailing edge of what comes later, after the breach in regular transmissions left by the war. A bottleneck, you understand. You want to fling yourself forwards past the badlands of the war, this is where you end up. And I’ll be waiting for you. Nobody gets by me. I have literally all the technology in the world, culled from every moment that anyone ever had a Big Idea, to make sure of exactly that. I am the ultimate surveillance state.

  Before Hieronymus there was that scientist woman, Doctor Amari Amarylis, come from the twenty-first century because she wanted to get a jump on the scientific developments the future held in store. Something that might save her overburdened, climate-beset and politically unstable world. Very philanthropic, was our Doctor Amarylis. I genuinely think that, if I’d said, I’ll send the appropriate secrets back in a plain envelope if you agree to be devoured by Miffly, she’d have said yes and made the ultimate sacrifice. I could have done it, too. It wouldn’t have inconvenienced me at all. She wouldn’t have understood that, though. She’d have been suspicious and asked the pertinent question: Aren’t you worried that would change things for you?

  And I’d have had to tell her. She was smart, and I’m not really a good liar when you turn the spotlight on me. I’d have had to say, No, because there’s literally nothing you can do in your time that will change any epoch that comes after you, most certainly not this one. This is how it’s going to be. And that would have been cruel. That would have implied she couldn’t save the world. Because she couldn’t save the world, not the world she knew. Maybe make her own epoch a little better, but not stop everything coming down. I know. I know more than anyone.

  And in the end there just seemed to be too much social awkwardness in making the offer, so I quietly shot her and buried her out in the fields—Miffly had already been fed, you see. Then I went back in my wartime time machine and hooked her mum up with the heir to a biscuit manufacturer millionaire before she met Doc Amarylis’s dad, because I was feeling creative.

  And before her it was the damn Greeks. You could have knocked me down with a bloody feather, seeing them. Three old guys with big beards turning up half-naked and half in bedsheets, with nothing but a very complicated diagram and something like a supercharged Antikythera mechanism. You’ve heard of that, right? You didn’t know it was meant to be a time machine, right? And I’m not talking ancient aliens here. I mean there was going to be a school of Greek philosophy that would crack time travel back when Christ was still in short trousers. The things you don’t expect, honestly. But there they were, three learned Athenian gentlemen half plastered on bad wine, gabbling away all at the same time. Took me four days of their riotous company to work out where and when they’d actually set off from. And I had a lot of cleaning up to do, after those guys. I don’t mean the actual bodies, because there’s a robot that mucks out Miffly’s den. I had to trash an entire school of philosophical thought, though, starting four centuries before our three boys even began considering the nature of time. When I’d finished with my remedial work, an awful lot of things they taught you in the history books had become collateral damage, up to and including Alexander the Great, Plato and, to the great joy of schoolchildren everywhere, trigonometry. And it didn’t matter, because nothing does any more. Because of the war.

  That was my big idea, at the start. When the dust had settled and I looked around and realised that it was just me. That, despite never wanting it, I’d been left in possession of the field, and the field was human history, for what that was now worth.

  Peace in our time, I thought. We actually had peace, world peace—that thing everyone says they want, and nobody lifts a finger to actually make happen. Peace, blessed peace, had finally descended. And who better to appreciate it but me, the war veteran, who’d spent the majority of his adult life fighting? Who’d lost so much—literally everything, in fact? Who’d come through the War To End All Wars? Peace, and I’d damn well better appreciate it, because there was literally nobody else left to appreciate it for me, and its not exactly a job you can devolve to a robot. Post-war, and I knew then and there that I must never allow such a terrible thing to happen again.

  CHAPTER THREE

  NOBODY KNOWS WHERE they were when the Causality War started.

  It arose out of a regular war; nobody’s going to kick off by using their ultimate sanction, after all. It started small, in fact. Some territorial… or else it was a resource war, or… I’d say I forget, but that’s not entirely fair on me. I lived through it, after all. I was there cheering them on, or possibly shaking my head and tsking between my teeth, when the announcement was made. I signed up and/or was conscripted into the army. What did you do in the Causality War, Daddy? I fought, son. And in retrospect, that is the only thing that I can say with any certainty.

  Some small business between some small combatants, a proxy war because our proxy had
always had it in for their proxy, or vice versa, and at some point we got so invested in backing our proxy, and they theirs, that we were just fighting them and the proxies had become nothing more than ground zero for a war that expanded out across the globe.

  And it eats me up, that I can’t even tell you what it was for. I mean, I guess what it was for was that we knew there was going to have to be a war and they knew there was going to have to be a war, and then some local nonsense sparked off that we and they agreed was a good enough excuse to get it out of our systems. But I don’t know who the proxies were or what it was about each other that they couldn’t live with, and I don’t know why their little war became our Big War that became the Causality War. I can’t know these things. Nobody can. Nobody ever will, any more. There is no archaeologist to excavate some site giving vital insights into the origins of the conflict. No godlike aliens will come down and reconstruct those tumultuous days. It’s gone.

  I don’t know with what weapons World War III will be fought, Al Einstein said, but the war after that will be fought with sticks and stones. Except that turns out to be almost exactly wrong, if the weapons the next war is fought with are time machines. And I have said that to his face, and you’d think of all bloody people that Einstein would understand, might even have some answers. But, after listening to enough of what I had to say, he just ended up crying on the pavement, stuck it out at the patent office and never went on to work out relativity, so I guess I’m on my own as far as the theory side of things goes.

  People have described a lot of things as an ultimate weapon, a doomsday measure, a holiday at the final resort. None of them were, not really. Even nukes are just a better way of killing people that leaves a longer-lasting stain on the carpet. City-devouring intercontinental missiles and orbital railgun strikes: these things are on a straight line of development from slings and thrown rocks. But time machines really are the ultimate sanction. And just like the nukes of an earlier era, by the time the war started, everyone had them, and everyone had signed a lot of important pieces of paper swearing they wouldn’t use them. Because we knew that as soon as anyone actually used a time machine with hostile intent, that would be it.

  And we knew whoever used them first would theoretically have an insuperable advantage.

  Think about it. You’re there in the heat of a war that’s only getting hotter. Hundreds of thousands of people just died in some city you were probably quite fond of. Millions of people are dead on your side. Millions of people are dead on their side. Tens of millions of people who probably didn’t much identify with either side are also dead, because they made the foolish mistake of being within five thousand miles of some manner of strategic objective. And, gathering dust in the shed, you have a fleet of time machines that you have made the very pinkiest swear not to use under any circumstances. What do you do?

  And it’s easy to characterise that fateful decision-maker as desperate or greedy or a fanatic—a monster of some stripe or flavour—but it didn’t have to be like that. It’s not all about going back and killing someone’s parents, take it from me. What if you could send an agent discreetly back to a year before the war started and defuse the tensions that led to the war? What if you could put a word in someone’s ear that meant the two proxies were never at each others’ throats anyway? What if you could make us and them firm friends a century before, heal the divide before it occurred? What if you could nudge history a whole millennium earlier so that the whole ideological basis of the enemy just never came into being, and everyone happily ended up more like you without ever knowing that it might have been different? What if you could go back two thousand years and introduce an egalitarian participatory government without all that tedious round of kings and queens that went on for so long and accomplished so little? Wouldn’t the thanks you’d get from generations of schoolchildren alone make it worth the effort?

  And if you did it now, right now, before your opposite number did it, then there would literally be no comeback. No fallout, no retaliatory launch. You go and change history so that there’s no war, and they can never do it to you. But if you stick by those agreements you signed while they give in to temptation, then it’s your history getting changed and it’syou who can never retaliate or complain, or even know that a moment ago you were in the middle of a war.

  And both you and they are looking at the big red button on your executive desk that says ‘launch time machines,’ and looking at the casualty figures, the appalling cost of the conflict, the generations of ruin you’ve wrought on the world. And you have at your theoretical disposal a Final Word unlike any other in history. Because, unlike nukes, it doesn’t even make a mess. It cleans up not only after itself but before itself as well. It makes the mess never have happened. You’re not only ending the war, you’re literally saving lives. All those people won’t have died after all! Sending in the time squads won’t even be an act of war, it’ll be an act of un-war.

  And so you do it, and maybe you do it a moment before they do, and a moment before is all that’s needed, in time travel. Except that, quite possibly unknown to you, both you and they already went back in time. Not to do anything. Not to change things. In the same way that, in peacetime, you do your level best to seed their country with agents as a purely contingent measure, just in case they’re up to something. The past is another country, and this is one thing they do there that’s exactly the same. Your security agencies had people secretly scattered back through history, and their agencies did too. Just in case anyone got to the point where all those agreements not to use time machines became too onerous. As, of course, they did.

  So you sent your time soldiers back to dismantle the cause of the war, and quite possibly the cause of the enemy, to make your present a more amenable time where everyone wasn’t killing everyone else and where everyone, moreover, thought and acted and believed a lot more like you—for surely that was better than the whole bloody war business. And their agents already back in time reported back to an HQ that no longer existed in a country that wasn’t their own any more, quite possibly (depending on how far you went back) even speaking a different language. And so they turned straight round and went back to either restore the motherland they remembered or to screw you over, depending on the balance between patriotism and vengeance in any individual agent’s mind. And the next day your own time agents checked in at your office and found the wrong faces on the money and the wrong backside on the presidential chair, and that tigers weren’t extinct but elephants were—again, depending on how far anyone went back to change things. And so they went back to make their own defensive or offensive alterations to history. And, for good measure, they mobilised everyone else who had a time machine and gave them marching orders. And some of those mobilised people didn’t even remember the time and place they were working to restore, they just had a hacked chain of command and some rather rose-tinted ideas of how things should be. And maybe your first order of business was to go back and remove the other side’s capability to build, invent or even generally conceive of time machines, but that doesn’t work, because those time machines already in operation in the past don’t just vanish. They get orphaned instead, products of a sequence of events that never happened. And so they go back and try to restore their own timeline, just as you did, and most likely all they have of that timeline is unreliable memory and some wiki articles still stored in the memory of their phones. Or not even that. There’s no hard line between things turning out how they were supposed to be and things turning out how you’d prefer them to have been.

  This is how we fought the Causality War. A war where you never saw soldiers from the other side, not because you were launching high tech projectiles at each other from ridiculous distances, but because you almost never occupied a common frame of reference. The weapons you launched at each other were cascading chains of historical events, and each one simultaneously hit and caused colossal collateral damage, and did no damage at all, because what was left in its w
ake was a happy smiling world with no idea there was a war on.

  Killing Rigo has left me feeling oddly lonely, here at the end of the world. It happens every so often, usually after I’ve removed another threat to the continuum. Most of the time the solitude is a plus on the ledger, but every so often I actually end up liking one of Miffly’s aperitifs. I remember what it was like when there were other people to share a world with, and when your mission is most definitely to be the last man standing, that can be a problem. Thankfully there’s a whole world of company just a step away. One little trip and I can gatecrash any party I choose, take in a show, join an expedition, hobnob with any wits and bon vivants I choose. And be back in time for tea, no matter how long a holiday I just took, because time travel.

  Time travel, frankly, is aces. If it hadn’t been co-opted as the ultimate weapon, just think of how much fun people could have had. I’ve thought about it: people could have had zero fun with it. The problem with time travel is that it’s the ultimate weapon whether you intend to use it that way or not. I do wonder whether the way things turned out after the Causality War was inevitable the moment someone invented the first time machine (and the problem with someone inventing the first time machine is that someone else immediately took a trip to ten years before and invented the first first time machine so they could grab the patent, and so on, and so on).

  Right now, though, I feel in the mood for a show, and it so happens there’s a performance of Two Gentlemen of Verona where Will Kempe is in spectacular form, and so I head off there, standing in the crowd under a light drizzle while the funnyman goes through his rib-tickling paces. Not exactly the piece of Shakespeare you’d think would stick in the memory, but the thing about theatre is that live performance is everything and Kempe is a master of comic timing. Far better than watching Dick Burbage chew the scenery through Hamlet, believe me.