One Day All This Will Be Yours Read online

  And it’s a good show. It’s just as I remember it, which in itself is reassuring because it’s literally the same performance and any changes would indicate some active time agent I’ve somehow overlooked. And yet I’m never one hundred per cent comfortable, watching the players strut and fret their hour upon the stage. My eyes keep drifting across the mob of groundlings, across the posh crowd in their expensive seats. I’m looking for familiar faces, whether I want to or not. Just instinct, really. There’s nobody left of the old crowd, but that doesn’t stop me hunting them out.

  The time before last when I came to this show, I spotted one of the final few, and took the appropriate sanctions—meaning, I went out to the car park and trashed their time machine so when they tried to make their timely departure from the stage, there was no exit for them to take. And then the scene ended, and so did they.

  And that end is coming up. It’s the most frustrating thing about this particular show: the curtain comes down before Kempe’s finished, and I have to be gone before it does or it’s my curtain call too. I hear the last joke, but never the punchline. And Kempe’s a master improviser, too, so it’s not as though I can just grab the Collected Works and see how it turned out.

  But at least there are no old friends in the audience any more. Or old foes.

  Friends, foes: after enough back and forth in the war, I realised the difference was less than academic. There must have been a moment of revelation, but if so, it’s been erased with everything else. A moment when I met someone wearing the wrong hat for the period, using a model of mobile phone that probably hadn’t been in circulation back in the court of Prester John. A moment when we looked at each other and gave half-hearted code words and countersigns that nobody else could know because they were the product of a chain of events that didn’t exist any more. A moment when I realised the distinction of us and them had been abraded away because everybody’s motherland had gone through so many visions and revisions that we were all chronological bastards.

  For me, that was the breaking point in the war. To understand that the conflict now consisted solely of soldiers doing a duty owed to a non-existent nation—or faction, or corporation. Doing what they thought they were supposed to do, what they vaguely remembered was their mission, what they’d reinterpreted as the right thing. And the problem is, with time travel, there is no right thing. There is a multiplicity of wrong things, and you can shove your hand in the box and see which one you draw out. All those stories and films where someone has a time machine and they’re going back to restore their own timeline? That’s like a blindfolded archer who’s been spun around a thousand times loosing an arrow and hitting the exact bull’s eye on a target someone removed the day before. You screwed it when you stood on the butterfly effect, and just stamping on more random insects isn’t ever going to bring back the precise chain of events that leads to the world you came from.

  And yet we were all trying. Hundreds of dedicated time warriors leaping about like fleas on the back of history, trying to win the war. And sometimes I met people who also understood that the war could only be lost, but they still wanted it to be lost their way. Every alliance between us failed, because whatever goal state you have in mind for the world, no matter how carefully you describe it, cannot be the one that others envisage. Language just isn’t precise and all-encompassing enough. So we all kept meddling, changing things, changing them back—though not back exactly, just to something closer to the way we thought we remembered it.

  We kept yanking time about until it broke.

  Kempe’s close to finishing up—closer than he will ever realise, because the curtain that will cut him short is the end of his little fragment of world-enough-and-time. And, speaking of time, I have to make my exit right ahead of him, or be obliterated when the tape runs out.

  There’s another bit of Kempe I found, from another performance. I could catch the end of that show, but it’s not the same show and he’s not as funny. So instead, I go home.

  When I get there, there’s some dorky-ass robot bumbling about on the old homestead, much to Miffly’s consternation. I’m not in the mood for the Turing test, so I take the thing apart, work out where it came from, rig it up as a bomb and then send it back. Job done. Bish bash bosh.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ANOTHER PERFECT DAY at the end of the world.

  The same perfect day, you might say. Sufficient unto the day are the events thereof, and this is the day and these are the events. Me and the Soviet Speedster pottering about, master of all I survey. The robots planting and tending and harvesting my fields, and all at once because seasons are so last year, you know. And by ‘last year’ I mean, back when we had years. Remember them? Ah, linear time, so retro!

  And so I motor my tractor along the dirt track between the turnips and the olive grove, both promising bumper crops. Miffly lopes along behind with her tongue out, soppy old thing. And when the sun sets, it’s the same last sunset, the one the world saves just for me. This is my utopia. This is my reward, for good and faithful service in the Causality War, and nobody is going to take it from me. They can’t. Nothing anyone does can change this perfect final moment of the world. Which is also the first moment of the rest of time, but it’s the only moment that matters. By setting up shop here where the regular passage of time recommences, and denying access to the future to all comers, I am saving the unseen future from interference. I am time’s gatekeeper, and without me the future would become the same ruin as the past.

  Picture history as a tower of bricks, as a child might build. Each block is absolutely dependant on the one below in order to maintain its current position. That’s causality (if, at any rate, you’re picturing infinite bricks). The key thing is, in that model, it is very important what order the bricks go in. This brick is only a blue square because of the shape and colour of the brick below; that block is only red because, in the brick it sits on, someone shot a Tsar or two.

  And we’d been pulling bricks out and shoving new bricks in, one after the other, and the tower had teetered and tottered but not fallen over, and we told ourselves that was because silly little time warriors like us couldn’t possibly have an effect on something as big as causality.

  It’s a lot like when we screwed the climate, to be honest. You never think you’re going to affect something as big as that. I mean, I’m just burning a little coal here, right? The planet’s very big, this piece of coal or cup of oil or forest of trees, it can’t be important in the grand scheme of things. A weird blind spot for a species all too happy to consider itself the centre of the universe in every other way. And look, history was a tough old bird. We kept going back and changing things, intentionally or accidentally. We ran all over her and fought our war, murdering each others’ grandparents, applying last-minute CPR to the Archduke of Austro-Hungary, accidentally trekking invasive species into the wrong millennium so that Wordsworth wrote A host of crawling trilobites instead of that daffodil nonsense. We pushed causality to breaking point—meaning the universe’s basic ability to have one thing sensibly follow another.

  And we broke it.

  We made too many changes—think of that tower, only none of the bricks are quite in place, all sticking out one side or another. And we’re using ever less subtlety as we whip them out and shove them back in. Until someone goes at it with all their might and they push the tower over. It’s a good metaphor, actually. Imagine that insanely tall stack of blocks just cascading across a polished nursery floor of infinite dimensions, the whole of history scattering into bits, everything out of order.

  And if I stood in that crowd and shot Will Kempe dead—everyone’s a critic when it’s stand-up comedy night, after all—then I could go to another piece of time and catch one of his later shows, because the chain of causality is well and truly broken. You can’t change history any more, not past the jagged trailing edge of any given piece. I call it the Causality War because causality was its biggest casualty. We were the time warriors, and we k
illed time.

  Time was busy for a while after that. And you’ll understand that I mean both ‘after’ and ‘a while’ based on my personal experience of events, because otherwise things can get tricky when you’re trying to spin a narrative. It wasn’t just the time warriors, but whole populations of time refugees shuffling from shard to shard, trying to find somewhere to settle down. You’d go to Ancient Athens or the court of Kublai Khan or Cahokia, and there would be embarrassed-looking groups of people wearing the wrong clothes and utterly failing to fit in. It was like the world’s saddest renaissance faire played out across the whole of history. And you’d find people wrecking the place, in my experience, either because they were trying to take over some shard, or just incidentally through being there. And still fighting the war.

  Nobody remembered what the war was about, but we all remembered that there was a war, and anyone you met who wasn’t a time-native was de facto on the other side. And it was by observing that—seeing two groups obliterate Byzantium with high-tech weapons, seeing time agents igniting proxy wars between Medici heirs, salting the earth in the Permian to stop anyone else finding refuge there… It was seeing how everyone was still carrying on that made up my mind as to what I myself would have to do.

  I’d already come to the conclusion that ‘us’ and ‘them’ weren’t meaningful distinctions any more, like I said (and, again, ‘already’ and ‘any more’ are my personal anchors and your own time travel mileage may vary) because all those time agent shenanigans meant the original combatants, allegiances and causes célèbres had been obliterated, written and rewritten until there was nothing but a hopelessly illegible inkblot. And even if I met a fellow agent who seemed to jibe with me, no guarantee they’d be the same when I rendezvoused with them later and/or earlier (let me tell you, it’s frankly embarrassing to clap your fellow time warrior on the shoulder only to find that, from their perspective, it’s before the pair of you ever met, and then they’re trying to stick a gun up your nose and… take it from me, it’s a real faux pas; the social anxiety alone was enough to justify burning it all down).

  But really, it was just that, once I’d taken a step back from the whole sabre-rattling jingoism of the war, I could see it wasn’t going away and it wasn’t getting any better. You’d think people would quietly dismantle all that nonsense after the actual nations and parties and religions they were so keen about no longer existed, or had been unrecognisably mutated by altered chains of events, or were just lying about in pieces on the floor. I mean, if you were so very devoted to some rose-tinted golden age, and you had a time machine, why not just go and live in it and stop trying to convert the rest of poor, broken history to fit? And the answer to that—yes, you at the back, speak up boy!—is that, travel as you might through the vasty deeps of time, you never do find that golden age, that promised land. And it’s easier for you to claim that they got there first with their wicked time machines and erased the moment when everything was good and right and proper, rather than admit that there never was that much gold in all human history.

  A bunch of people with time machines were still fighting the war, and a bunch of other people were just… cluttering up history, panhandling for dollars in every spare epoch, setting up camps on the doorsteps of time, splitting into factions, schisming into warring clans, waving the flags of states that didn’t exist yet, or any more, or ever would. And I sat back, having discovered in myself that I was really done with the whole grim business, and saw it all sparking off again, in every jagged-edged piece of history, over and over and forever and the universe never having a moment’s peace.

  Only I could end the Causality War. I couldn’t save history, but perhaps I could save something. One perfect moment. Peace in our end times.

  And so I hunted them down, all of them.

  I mean, that makes me sound considerably more badass than in fact I was. Remember they were all fighting amongst themselves, and most of the time it was just a matter of manoeuvring them so that they discovered each other, this agent ending up at the precise Ottoman coffee shop that agent frequents. That marauding band of revisionists stumbling onto this camp of temporal refugees. By the end, there were only a few of them left, hunting each other through the Leningrad ruins or the Warsaw ghetto or the incendiary jungles of the Carboniferous—and you can’t even imagine what happens when you bring napalm to somewhere with that level of atmospheric oxygen! In the end, I took up my sniper rifle and my particle sword, my griefing knife and my large piece of wood with a nail in it, and I finished the last exhausted survivors off. I won the Causality War on the very sound technicality that I was the only one left standing at the end of it. I then declared peace and went on to a well-deserved retirement here at the end of all things. There’s only one onerous task left, really, and that’s to ensure that nobody is ever in a position to set it all off again.

  And they do try. There’s always someone, some budding genius in one shard of time or other, who finds a way out. They build a time machine from circuits and steel, from brass and glass, from sticks and stones or the flight of birds or pure mathematics, and they travel. And, sooner or later, they come here. Because here’s where you go, when you travel forwards in time to see how far you can go. You come to the last day, this last perfect day before the rest of time happens. And I will be waiting.

  I have a few quiet weeks on the farm after that. I mean, there’s the eighteenth-century French natural philosopher who cogito ergo chrononautums his way into my kitchen and drinks quite a lot of my wine while I build the guillotine outside. And there’s the Neanderthal who turns up looking rather confused after banging the rocks together really hard one day. But other than that, it’s business as usual. I run the farm. I go partying with Jackie Onassis, Lord Byron and Nero. I pick up an even older model of tractor from 1930s Ukraine and spend a few days cleaning off the rust.

  I don’t fight in the Causality War, and every day you don’t fight in the Causality War is a good day, and every good day is the same perfect day, and that’s basically my eternal win condition.

  Then the alarm goes off again and I get into the Speedster and putter off to see who’s come calling this time. Privately I’m hoping that it’ll be something discrete and easily removed from the timeline. Because that last one took a lot of remedial work and now there aren’t and never were any Neanderthals, which feels like a bit of an overreaction. But it’s like painting, and sometimes you keep trying to get something perfect and it ends up a great big smeary mess. No going back. Which, honestly, should have been the motto for the whole Causality War.

  When I get in sight of their time machine, I have a bit of a nasty turn. It’s a layered globe model that looks to share a fair amount of technological DNA with mine. Which means it comes from a time and place not unlike my own, with the usual caveat that the time and place I come from don’t actually exist anymore and never did. For a moment I’m braced for the shot, for the blade, for the unknown piece of advanced military hardware that’s going to end my prolonged and comfortable life here. Did I miss a time warrior? Am I not the sole survivor of the war?

  But then a woman’s voice is calling out, “Hallo!” across the fields, and I see her and a male companion just standing there in the open, waving at me. They do not look like time warriors. You get to know the look: desperation stains the soul if you stew in it long enough. You can tell someone who literally has nowhere in all of time and space they call home, orphaned from all of causation, and these two aren’t it. They’re far too comfortable and cheery. I recognise people with a solid When behind them, the products of a logical sequence of consecutive events. Lucky, corn-fed, privileged bastards.

  They are a good-looking pair, regular features like beauty pageant contestants or TV anchors, wearing white-and-silver matching outfits. Jumpsuits, with puffy moon boots and gloves, like they’ve come to give me the wisdom of the ancients. Except I’ve met the ancients and they were just as dumbass as everyone else, and just piling a bunch of enorm
ous stones on top of one another shouldn’t be anyone’s idea of an achievement. Sort out your healthcare plan and welfare state first, Pharaoh.

  I am, by this time, an old hand at estimating the origin point of time travellers. It’s my self-appointed career, after all; you expect to develop some on-the-job skills. These clowns must be from somewhen recent, some rare splinter from during the war, perhaps, where someone finagled events so that the war itself hadn’t happened, or maybe some time just before things kicked into high gear. Some lost remnant of a replacement timeline I or one of my peers brought about, when things were actually better for a bit. And somewhere out there that shard of time exists, with these happy, smiling people and their time machines. And I smile happily back at the pair of them, tilting my broad-brimmed hat back over my sun-reddened forehead and chewing at my straw, every bit the welcoming yokel. Time to play host, to enjoy some human company, to brush the dust off the big saucepans. Time to engage these two naifs in conversation so that I can find out precisely where and when they set off on this doomed voyage from.

  And then I’ll go back to their happy little hand’s breadth of time and stamp it into the dirt so that not one of those happy, handsome people ever get to step into the timestream again. And, looking at them, I know it won’t just be the case of murdering Professor Braniac Boffo the maverick chrononavigator who’s sent his sole two protégés to do the impossible. Something institutional has crapped out this perfect pair onto my wheatfields. I’m going to have to obliterate quite a lot of their sunny little society in order to prevent them further desecrating history’s cooling corpse. And that’s a shame, but somebody’s got to do it.