One Day All This Will Be Yours Page 4

  The man’s name is Weldon. The woman’s is Smantha. “Samantha?” I clarify, but no, apparently it’s ‘Smantha.’ I’ve been invaded by chrononautic hipsters. But they’re engaging enough. They stare at the fields, and the Speedster, and me, and if their eyes were any wider the balls would fall out of their sockets. So damn enthusiastic! You’d think they’d never seen the end of all things before. And they grin and they’re always touching or putting their arms about each other’s waists, and I honestly wonder if they didn’t violate the entire fabric of the continuum just to cop an illicit feel or something. All the way home I listen to their innocent chatter, sat in the trailer of the Soviet Speedster. And then we run into Miffly, who’s jumped the fence again, bad girl. I hadn’t intended them to meet Miffly just yet. In fact, meeting Miffly is generally the last stop in the whirlwind tour of the future I have planned for people. I wait to see just how they take to a ravening allosaur loping alongside the tractor eyeing up its dinner.

  They’re cool with her, basically. They make all the right noises and tell each other how cute she is—and she is, once you get past the teeth and the claws and the terrible breath. By the time I reach the farmhouse, they’re scratching her under the chin just where she likes and have made a friend forever. Or at least until I kill them, after which Miffly will likely sulk a bit and then forget, because there’s a limit to how much sentiment a large therapod can really hang on to. But they get on well with my pet, and I find myself warming to them. I am, I decide, going to have a fine old evening playing host. I’ll get out the good wine, dusty bottles rescued from the collapse of time, from governments and from badly-designed cellars. I’ll cook. I don’t all-out cook often, but the fit has taken me. I am going to push the boat out. And while I’m in the kitchen and they’re enjoying a little mammoth-cheese aperitif at the table, we can chat about just exactly where they came from and where the time machines are parked back at their end.

  WHEN YOU’RE LIVING on your own, you forget how much fun it is to cook for company. I almost forget what I’m doing after I’ve got the wine flowing and the nibbles out and I’m melting butter in the big skillet. I talk them through the details of each dish and ingredient, and they eat up the details greedily. I make my standard joke about everything coming from a sustainable source, that’s really just for my personal amusement—after all, there’s no such thing anymore, not now we broke time. But they get it and they laugh, and I’m really starting to enjoy this hosting lark.

  But business comes first.

  “You must have come quite a way,” I start, as if their time machine had just broken down outside and they came in to use the phone. “Nice place, where you come from, is it?”

  They agree that it is, it really is. Quite the perfect place to live. And I look at their white-and-silver clothes and their faces that are devoid of cancer marks and disease scars and any suggestion of childhood privation, and almost ask why they ever left. Because it’s horrible out there, in history. It always was, even before we shattered it to bits. It’s full of war and plague, starvation, intolerance and misery. But, but, but, I hear you say. But hope, but progress, but the glory of human achievement.

  A candle, I tell you. And the rest of it is the hurricane. I have sat in the palaces of the Minoans before the Bronze Age Collapse. I have dined with the egalitarian philosophers of Harappa in the Indus Valley before the world turned and ground them to dust. I have taught whist to Archimedes shortly before a Roman soldier gutted him. And yes, human achievement is a grand and splendid little candle in the great vast night of causality, but there’s only so often you can watch it be snuffed out before it’s easier to become the snuffer. And so I listen to the two of them fondly tell me how bloody wonderful it is where they come from, and I brown the vegetables. And I poison the dessert wine, because frankly puddings aren’t my strong suit when it comes to haut cuisine and it’ll save everyone a lot of embarrassment if I can murder these two wunderkinden before they find out how lousy my baked Alaska is.

  And there’s something about their manner that’s starting to get on my nerves, which will make the whole murdering-them-and-then-destroying-all-trace-of-their-culture a bit easier. There’s a sort of giggling, nudge-and-wink going on between them as they look at me. A sort of shall-we-tell-him-no-not-yet that’s frankly juvenile. I really need to get the goods from them and then maybe pour an early glass of the good stuff.

  “Maybe I should come visit, if it’s all you say it is,” I suggest airily, and Weldon and Smantha agree that yes, yes I absolutely should. They’d be only too glad to show me.

  I put my finger up to test the wind, naming a couple of likely centuries I reckon they might have come from. It must be some little shard right on the edge of the desert of dead time that’s ground zero for the war. The epoch we were fighting for, which every past battle was intended to change. The time of my life, the time I can’t go back to. Older history gets shredded into progressively larger chunks, so I can get a fortnight in Elizabeth’s London, a sybaritic summer sleeping on Nero’s couch or a solid couple of hundred years running away from dinosaurs. But, as you approach the war, the pieces get smaller, and during the war itself, to visit any one moment would be… just that. Each moment, each instant of the decades that made up my life is a separate grain of sand on that lifeless beach. And beyond it… here, the end times, my domain.

  So Weldon and Smantha have come from somewhere pretty remarkable, I reckon. Some unusually longitudinous shard of time hard up against the war. Amazed I never came across it, but it’s absolutely the sort of thing I have to remove from causality with extreme prejudice. They are some version of the people who turn into the people who start the war, and they already have the weapons to fight it. So, I’m sorry, kids, but I can’t allow you to be. Nothing personal, but I’m going to go shoot a few grandfathers, and yours’ll be among them.

  And so I coax and wheedle and feed them some seriously good homemade chow, and they cast each other little sidelong glances full of mischief, like it’s them playing a trick on me somehow. Like I’m not going to dole out some death-by-dessert, the last course of their last supper. But I grin and smile and raconteur until I’m clearing the plates away and wondering if I’ll just have to kill them before pudding and reverse-engineer the truth from their transport.

  Then I turn round and they’re both grinning at me, absolutely delighted with themselves, and Smantha says, “We’ve got a bit of a confession.”

  I nod, and if my expression is a bit exasperated then my comedy apron and chef’s hat takes away from it.

  “We’re probably not supposed to tell you,” Weldon adds.

  “But it’s just so, so wonderful to meet you,” she finishes for him. They’re holding hands and finishing each other’s sentences. I think I’m going to be sick.

  “They’re not going to believe it, back home,” says he.

  “Not that we should tell them!” says she, with the clear indication that they won’t be able to keep their damn mouths shut and everyone will have heard the whole story within thirty minutes of their return.

  And yet, what story? They went to a nice farm up the time stream and met… me?

  “I mean,” I tell them, “it’s very flattering to my skills as a cook, but I can’t see how anyone’s going to be that interested. Not when you’ve got the whole of time to visit.”

  “Oh, we’ll do time later,” Smantha says dismissively. “We just had to meet you first, though. How could we not? We’ve read so much about you.”

  I have a very, very ill feeling about things. I couldn’t feel iller if I’d drunk the dessert wine myself, frankly.

  “But you really have to come and see,” Weldon says. “Right now! Everyone’ll be so excited.”

  “Just tell me when,” I croak out. “I’ll go dust off the time jalopy. Just tell me, back a hundred years, two hundred, five hundred…?” Desperately clutching at chronological straws.

  “Oh, no,” they say.

  “Not bac
k,” says Weldon.

  “Forwards,” chimes in Smantha.

  “Grandfather,” they finish together.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I MEAN…

  No.

  I mean, absolutely not, under any…

  I am nobody’s grandfather. Because I live at the end of time, on the far side of all that wreck of fractured history that’s all the war left of the past. I live here, on my farm, in an eternal perfect day just where sane causality picks up again, and that’s it. I am the full stop to the sentence that is human history. That’s the point.

  That’s…

  I took all the technology of the Causality War and I made a thing, here. I was its only inheritor, after all, and I had all the manuals and receipts and warranties (not that the latter were worth anything anymore, admittedly).

  Because, being the sole survivor of the war and, by extension, of all of human history, I didn’t know entirely what I wanted to do with my life, save for one particularly strongly held resolution.

  Never again.

  That thing we did, that broke everything in the universe; which left all of history in a scatter of sharp-edged shards so that nothing led to anything—that war, that lunacy, that terrible, terrible time-to-end-all-times—must never come again. And to that end, I would set a trap. I would create a bottleneck here at the near end of the rest of time. I would ensure that anyone travelling into the future from that broken desert of glass would find only one thing: me. They would find me, and my alarms would go off, and I would find them. And then they would die, and I would go back and ensure that nobody else would ever venture onto the seas of time to wash up on my shore.

  And beyond my postepochalyptic ranch, time could just stretch on forever, never to be troubled by any human presence. Never to be broken, maimed, mauled, mutilated or spindled. I was the great gatekeeper, and my watchword was You Shall Not Pass.

  I have eliminated one hundred and eighty-nine wildly different time travellers who have tried to get into the pristine future to ruin it all. Nobody got past me. There is no white-and-silver art deco utopia to produce a Weldon or a Smantha. There is no future. They cannot have come from it.

  And yet they sit here in my kitchen, eating my food and telling me I should come visit. And I have lived a life that’s all about the grandfather paradox, and now I discover it was the wrong grandfather I was worrying about all the time. I am my own paradox.

  I want to murder them and bury them in an unmarked grave and pretend this never happened, but I can’t give in to sentiment. I have to know.

  “I suppose,” I tell them, “you’d better show me.”

  AND IT’S LOVELY. Of course it’s lovely. It’s as bright and gleaming a future as you could possibly want, the bastards.

  I hop in my wartime special and punch in the impossible coordinates. A tomorrow that shouldn’t be—which I suppose makes a difference to my usual fare of a yesterday that’s about to be edited out of existence, but I would far prefer to stick with what I know.

  We materialise in the grandest and most chrome-trimmed parking lot you can imagine, with a big old dome roof and a viewing gallery and at least a dozen of their fancy time machines. Which apparently are upgrades from my own model, because they’re from the future all of a sudden, and therefore better than me.

  I have worked so hard.

  I have sweated and strained and slaved for there not to be a future, and now I stand next to my poor last-year’s-model and look at their wondrous abundance of time machines, and all I can think is, It’s all going to happen again.

  And Weldon and Smantha are beaming and gurning and so happy with their news that they could burst. I wish they would burst. I wish the pair of them would swell up like septic limbs and then pop in a great big shower of infected pus. But no, there they are being pleasant and keen and beautiful, and they tell me what a privilege it is to have me as their guest, and how I can have anything I like, and just wait till everyone finds out who’s coming to dinner.

  I mean.

  I mean I just made them dinner, and already they’re…

  I mean, talk about poor guest etiquette. It’s rude, is what it is. I put a lot of love into that meal. Or if not love, then at least murderous guile, but it was still effort and now they’re telling me they already had plans for the evening.

  Anyway, they dash off hand-in-revoltingly-twee-hand to tell all their friends, and I lean back against my poor battered old time-mobile and try to look as surly as humanly possible, because I don’t want to give them the satisfaction. And soon enough, people start to filter onto the balcony above to gawp down at me. Young, beautiful people. Older people who are still achingly beautiful. Children who look like they’ve been got up in their smartest white-and-silver clothes, hair brushed and faces scrubbed, except they probably look like that every moment of their perfect lives. And they all look a bit like each other, because apparently the utopian future is a bit uncomfortably eugenic. (Which is one more thing the war was probably about, or one iteration of it. What were we fighting the war for? Like Brando in The Wild One, ‘Whadda ya got?’)

  And they stare, and I feel like I’m in a zoo, and when I glower up at them they try to pretend they weren’t staring, without actually stopping staring, and they’re fooling nobody, but I can’t exactly stand there and shout at them because that would be rude, and so we’ve got this stupid social impasse. And I’m still getting stared at.

  And then Weldon and Smantha are back with a whole delegation of beautiful, smiling, wildly enthusiastic people, and they’re all shaking my hand and gabbling about what an honour it is to finally… I get kissed on the cheek and clapped on the shoulder and hugged, and this guy’s crying with joy and that woman is squealing with excitement, and the whole joyous mob of them bustle me through to the next chamber.

  There’s a party going on. Maybe two hundred people in the immediate environs, and every one of them looking absolutely the picture of health and happiness. Their clothes are gold and silver and white and ultraviolet and zany ziggy zaggy patterns, and some of them have glowing tattoos or gems in their foreheads or bejewelled piercings. Each one is more perfect than the last, and there’s music that annoyingly manages to be lively yet also timelessly elegant, and every one of them is having a good time. And they turn to me when I shamble in, yesterday’s man straight off the farm with allosaur dung on his boots, and they are just so goddamn pleased to see me.

  And projected in the air overhead in letters so bright it hurts to look at them is the legend Happy Founder’s Day with too many exclamation marks.

  “What the hell’s Founder’s Day?” I demand of Weldon and Smantha.

  “We just invented it!” they tell me enthusiastically, like they do everything enthusiastically. “Because you’re here!”

  I get the whirlwind tour after that. They skim me out into the country with their skimmer and I see all those perfect farms laid out one after another, zero carbon footprint, one hundred per cent recycled, environmentally compliant. They show me the forests they planted, the ecosystems they’ve engineered. They show me the city of domes and towers and flying cars they live in. There are only about a thousand of them, right now, I understand, but even back in the war I remember various groups researching genetic variation tech because they planned to be the only people left when the dust settled. Population size isn’t the problem it used to be. Of course, my own postwar plan involved a population of one eking out a hermit’s existence in the forever of the end-times, without any posterity at all, so it wasn’t anything I had to worry about.

  By then, I grudgingly admit that I have worked up an appetite, so it’s time for me to enjoy someone else’s cooking.

  The food is, needless to say, perfect. A succession of tiny dishes, each more delicate in flavour than the last, each complimenting its predecessor and whetting the appetite anew for its successor. Like one of those restaurants where you only really go for the delicious starters, only it’s all starters and never the belly-
bloating stodge of the main course. I am almost weeping by the end. I’ve never had anything so good. I could eat it forever, and no doubt the food’s so healthy that I’m practically getting a full-body workout just from chewing it.

  Weldon and Smantha sit to one side of me, and there’s a succession of others: older, younger, men, women. They all hold hands and they all smile at me and each other, and the conversation is carefree and witty. People get up and recite impromptu poetry, and somehow even that isn’t as tedious and awkward as it would normally be.

  And we get to that point in the evening where most hosts, be they ever so gracious, would be making is-that-the-time-you-must-be-wanting-to-get-away noises, and I end up on another balcony with Weldon and Smantha and a few others, looking down into the crystal waters of a pool where a bunch of dolphins are performing some kind of dramatic presentation of their own invention. It is very moving. I am very moved. So, so moving. And Weldon and Smantha are whispering to one another in that conspiratorial way they have, that is too innocently charming to be properly annoying. “Shall we show him?” “Yes, oh, we must! What fun!” Like I’m the deaf old uncle everyone loves to patronise. And so they take me to some equivalent of the town square and show me the statues.

  Actual statues.

  Statues, plural. Dual, in fact, because there are only two.

  They are shown waving—his right hand, her left—and holding hands with each other, and I take this as extreme artistic licence because he is very clearly me.

  I’m depicted wearing something a bit like what they wear, and I look considerably happier than I ever have at any given moment of my real life. Actually, I look happier there than I have in all the moments of my life added together and multiplied by three. And so does she, the other one, the woman.

  She kind of looks like them. Like all of them. And all of them kind of look like me. And that’s because when Weldon and Smantha called me grandfather it wasn’t exactly hyperbole. I mean, not actual grandfather, not just two generations, but it’s me. I am their progenitor. I’m going to meet a nice girl and settle down and have a utopia.