One Day All This Will Be Yours Page 5

  I look at that face. It’s a good likeness. The sculptor, or the robot the sculptor programmed, or however it worked, had access to an image of me, and in that image I was waving and smiling and I got the girl and wasn’t living under the shadow of the Causality War. I had changed my mind, found hope for the future, and then actually built a future. And now I’ve seen the future I built, and it’s come on really well. It’s just fabulous, and everyone’s beautiful and happy and perfect and so’s everything else. I mean, I know the point of a utopia is that it’s the best of all possible places, but this was the best utopia. If there was a utopia contest I’d put money down on it winning.

  And I built that. Apparently.

  “How does it feel?” Smantha asks me, and I confess I’m a bit overwhelmed.

  “I need to get back to the farm, really,” I manage, and they look disappointed, and I’m very quick to assure them they’ve not in any way failed as hosts but it’s all been a bit much. And, let’s face it, I do actually have to get back to the farm and carry on, or else this whole utopia thing is putting the cart before the horse. They are the result of my settling down with a nice girl, and it all goes a bit tits up if I just stay here playing the grand old man.

  And they understand that. Of course they do. They are, after all, perfect people from a perfect world where footling social awkwardness has been hunted to extinction.

  I wave them off before I step into my time machine, trying to work out how much older I looked, as a statue, compared to the face I see while shaving. How long before I get swept off my feet?

  I go back home and look out over the farm. Nothing’s changed, but it all seems different. There’s a future hanging over it that wasn’t there before. Miffly comes bounding over and I scratch her under the chin absently.

  That was an adventure, I tell myself.

  What food, what company, what music! So perfect, such utopia, wow.

  I look out at the sunset, my faithful therapod at my side, and I make the only appropriate resolution.

  I am not doing it.

  I am not having any of it.

  I will not become that smiling chump, and there will be nobody to make a statue of me. Oh, it’s all utopias today, but tomorrow it’ll be the Second Causality War, and I am not being responsible for bringing that about.

  And they were just too happy. They were just too perfect. They were too goddamn twee.

  I am going to make sure they’re never even born, the jolly happy bastards. I’d say they will rue the day they ever showed up here, but that won’t even be an issue. Because unlike those troublesome venturers from the shattered past, I don’t even have to do anything to make sure Weldon and Smantha and their friends aren’t even born. I just need to make sure that I, their great-great-and-however-many-greats-grandfather, don’t hook up with whoever the hell that was and, boom, problem solved. It’s the grandfather paradox in reverse, in fact, where I just swear never to have kids once someone shows me the future family photo. All I have to do is just carry on as I have been, and they never happen. Every day I just get on with my solitary existence I’m murdering their entire civilization.

  And that feels good, in a way that all that glitzy partying and smiling didn’t. That, frankly, is a utopia I can get behind.

  CHAPTER SIX

  I AM SUFFICIENTLY heartened by this revelation that I decide I’m due a proper holiday. It’s not often one finds one can save the world by sheer indolence. Usually, when I take a break from the farm to go enjoy myself, there’s this scratchy layer of guilt that the work isn’t getting done. I don’t mean the farm work, because the robots basically have that covered. I mean the real work, the stopping-another-Causality-War work of pouncing on errant time travellers as and when they finally end up in the end times. Except now I’m stopping the war specifically by kicking back and relaxing. I am doing my sworn and solemn duty just catching some rays by the pool.

  So, itinerary for a traditional getaway:

  First, you’ve got to travel somewhere. Even I, possessed of the technological means to go anywhere instantaneously, feel that it’s not a proper holiday without some serious time spent crossing the miles getting from A to B, preferably with some utterly unavoidable waiting around.

  You need to see some sights, some serious monuments.

  A good meal somewhere, too. You’ll have noted by now that I am something of both a gourmet and a gourmand.

  A night out on the tiles, razzling it up with some party animals.

  And a bit of solitude, somewhere you can relax and read a good book.

  Of course, I’m going to cheat a bit. I’m not going to try and find a single perfect destination. Time and space is my smorgasbord, after all.

  I kick off my spring break by falling in with Odysseus just as he’s about to leave the smoking ruins of Troy. I mean, if you’re looking for a pointlessly complicated journey with lots of waiting around, you honestly can’t beat an angry Greek man spending far too long trying to get across one of the smallest seas in the world. And obviously it’s not really that Odysseus, because Homer wasn’t exactly into biographical accuracy, but he’s still a fun guy and so, let’s go on a cruise, why not? Oddy and the gang are decent company, the amphoras are overflowing with admittedly watered wine, and they know some impressively filthy drinking songs about nereids.

  And, yes, I do change things a bit, and if this shard gets as far as Homer picking up the story for his greatest hits then you might be surprised at some of the new verses. The bit where Odysseus and his crew get into a furious argument at a taverna over how to split the bill should prompt some particularly nuanced use of simile.

  After that I do a whirlwind tour of the Sphinxes.

  There’s one definite advantage to time being shattered irrevocably into a thousand million pieces. Given how long the edifice lasts, you can have as many Sphinxes in as many old Gizas as you like, and it’s proved a remarkably tempting prospect to a great many historically significant vandals in various iterations of this timeline or that. So I go see the original, where it’s just a big old person-head on the big old lion-body, although admittedly a rather wonky and boss-eyed one so I can see why nobody complained much when they changed it. And then there’s a whole host of Pharaohs who got their own face on it, although given the limitations of their sculptural stylisation they all kind of look the same: arched eyebrows, lean cheeks, tubular beards—even the women. There’s that one shard where Napoleon went on an epic bender and ordered it reshaped into his image. There’s another where it’s one of the grandchildren of Genghis Khan because a bunch of agents from one time faction or another thought that a successful Mongol conquest of Europe and North Africa would achieve… well, I forget what it was we or they were trying to achieve. I forget if it was even we or they. Seemed like a good idea at the time, is as far as my memory supplies. And the problem with time travel, and what we considered to be the infinite resilience of the continuum, was that you get used to just acting on whatever seems like a good idea at the time, until you break time and there aren’t enough good ideas in the world to put it back together again. Humpty Dumpty eat your heart out.

  And yes, there’s a Sphinx out there with my face. I am not proud. It was an infantile thing, to spend eight years pretending to be Osiris by way of high-tech trickery in order to get them to build it that way. I have regrets. I don’t go and see that one.

  I’m peckish by then, so I review the restaurants within easy reach, which means all of them that still exist in some shard or other, across the whole of human history.

  I go for starters with Caligula, not because I like Caligula, but because when a petulant and homicidal man-god demands the best deep-fried dormice in the Empire, he damn well gets them. Also, I get to sit next to Claudius, who tends to keep his mouth shut and not tread on the punchlines of my jokes. For a main course I fancy some really good rare steak. In my day, which is now irreparably lost since the entire run up to and duration of the Causality War got completely ob
literated by that war’s end, we were all vegetarian. By then it was a necessity, to save the planet. I honestly think someone invented the time machine just so they could go grab a burger from the 1980s when the urge took them. Anyway, turns out saving the planet by eating soy was a bit of a non-starter given how we destroyed the entirety of history, but it was a good idea at the time. At any rate, I do feel I can go get a really good steak without feeling guilty about it.

  I end up in the Palaeolithic. It’s not exactly a restaurant, per se. More a camp fire. And mein host is, admittedly, called something like Og and he only takes barter, so I have to scare up a sled-full of hides before I arrive. Still, the steak… You haven’t lived until you’ve had a good bloody haunch of mammoth. The whole process of being scared off a cliff onto sharp rocks gives it a real gamey flavour you don’t get anywhere else. And it doesn’t matter that Og isn’t much of a conversationalist, what with language not really being a thing yet, because everyone’s too busy chewing.

  And for dessert I end up in a TGI Fridays in Reading town centre in the mid-1990s because they do an ice cream cocktail that I’m particularly partial to, and I defy you to judge me.

  On to the party, and for that it’s Paris in 1832, when the revolutionaries are manning the barricades in perhaps the most doomed of all the Parisian uprisings, more so even than the poor bloody Commune. A pack of students and lefties and idealists with muskets who know the rest of the city hasn’t risen to join them, but are bloody well not backing down even though the army pitched up that afternoon. And that night, before the end, they throw a truly epic party, the student rave to end all student raves. They drink, they make love, they swear everlasting loyalty to each other. When I was there the first time, I was sad, seeing all that youth about to pour itself in blood all over the ground. Now, I can be philosophical. Everyone dies, after all; every good time ends. Time itself ended. They are doomed, but in their doomed moment they live forever, and at least they had a good time for one night. Sometimes that’s all that counts. And this time round I teach them the rousing songs from the relevant musical and we bellow it out at the army camped out there, and at the uncaring populace of Paris. And they actually do Hear The People Sing and next morning the entire city’s up in arms and I’ve screwed over history again. And it doesn’t matter. Because this is just one bit of it, and it changes nothing else. I still feel good about it, though.

  I’m whistling the tunes across the next two hundred million years, because after that it’s a bit of a wind-down in Permian Park.

  This is a long shard of pre-ecological collapse, somewhere coastal. I take a good book. There’s a shard I know where Agatha Christie’s just settling down to write a new one, and it’s my habit to pitch up like the man from Porlock and talk inanely at her just before she does, meaning the book she ends up turning out is different each time and so I have an infinite supply of enjoyably trashy murder mysteries. And sometimes I push the envelope a bit with the conversational topics of my Porlockery, which is why this particular country house drama involves an Indian Army colonel with a giant battle-mech (although it does turn out to be just a red herring).

  All good things must come to an end, though, and eventually I’ve finished my book, lying out in that high-quality sunshine you only get when the Earth’s about to fry in a poisonous paroxysm of climate change. Time to get back to the ranch. Miffly will be getting anxious and will probably have eaten most of the sheep by now. (Shopping list item: go rustle some more sheep on the way home.)

  And so I trudge back to the time machine and set it as far forward as it goes, or at least as far forward as it used to go, before Weldon and Smantha showed me there was actually a further forward. But not for long, and I chuckle indulgently to myself, even though the precise wording doesn’t really make any sense in context. What I can’t do, really, is go back to the future of my future and see if they’re still there, because that all gets a bit Schrödinger’s Cat, and the act of going looking for them might perpetuate their existence or something. I mean, I’m just a multidimensional time warrior, don’t ask me to explain the math.

  When I get back, someone’s fed Miffly.

  That’s the most obvious thing. I just stand there, staring at the trough, which is full of chewed-over Parasaurolophus bones. And she’s only supposed to have the stegosaur, but, like any pampered pet, she vastly prefers to eat dinosaurs that won’t even evolve for tens of millions of years after her species becomes extinct. And someone knows that, and has been indulging her.

  And the door of the farmhouse is off the latch. And given the latch is a very high-tech piece of chicanery indeed, that’s also worrying.

  Someone’s been through my things. They’ve been relatively subtle about it, but I’ve fallen into a lot of fussy habits over the indeterminate time I’ve lived here, and I can see my papers have been moved. I can see my diary has been read. Which will have been a real disappointment, because there’s only one entry and it reads, Today I have decided to start a diary.

  I am frozen, right there in the house. I panic. What’s gone wrong? I set the alarms and everything; if any time traveller from anywhere whatsoever turned up on my patch, I would have cancelled the holiday and hotfooted it over straight away. I would have arrived in the nick of time to sort them out, because that’s how time travel works. And there was nothing. Nobody has tripped the wires. The integrity of the space-time continuum remains unviolated.

  And yet someone’s been here.

  Someone’s still here, maybe.

  Either that or someone’s circumvented my alarms and can just come and go as they please, and I’d prefer not to believe that because it would invalidate my entire self-made existence here. I am the warden, the gatekeeper, the guardian of history. Nobody gets by me.

  I tool up with all the detection technology I can lay my hands on and go out hunting, roaming the range with Miffly pacing alongside the Soviet Speedster, looking for… anything, really. And it’s Miffly who does the finding, in the end, because allosaurs have a really good sense of smell, and because I forgot to put batteries in most of the detectors. Miffly finds the campsite first—just the cold ashes of a fire, but someone was bivouacked out in the fields, where they had a view of the farmhouse. Cautious, apparently; didn’t know I was out on vacation. And then Miffly finds the time machine.

  I know the model. I mean, not to puff myself up too much, but I am history’s premier expert on the subject. There’s no spotter’s guide needed for this one, though. It’s the same type as Weldon and Smantha used when they came visiting.

  For a moment I just assume that’s it. I’ve been out-teched, and they can evade all my alarms. Then I take a good look at the machine and it’s honestly not much of an improvement on my own wartime model. I guess blissful utopias don’t give you much of an incentive to fix what isn’t broken. And if there’s one damn thing my alarms are good for, it’s picking up war-epoch arrivals. That was, after all, my primary concern when I was setting up here. So, what…?

  There is, I realise, only one logical possibility.

  They came back at the same instant I did. They were there in that never-to-be utopia that I’m trying so indolently to make un-happen. When I got into my wartime special, they hopped into this next-year’s-model. We came back simultaneously. It’s the only way it could have worked without tripping the alarms.

  When I was planning my itinerary, they were watching the house. Perhaps they were clutching an autograph book, desperate for the Founder to do them some words of encouragement and a humorous doodle.

  It’s already started. This is why I have to ensure they never happen. Even when I hunt down and kill my new fan, it causes a chain of contradictions. History, meaning the actual continuous chain of causality stretching forwards from my end-times ranch into the future, gets put under strain. And, left to their own devices, those utopian bastards would eventually take one trip too many, have one too many time-travelling descendants, start a new war, invent a fresh batch of Causa
lity Bombs, shatter the future just like we shattered the past.

  Did I mention the Causality Bombs? For when regular time travel just can’t mess up continuity enough.

  I need to track down my visitor and dispose of them as efficiently as possible before things get out of hand and my farm becomes a tourist destination for every gawper and sightseer from the future.

  There follows a few days of me getting all the surveillance kit out of the attic and trying to remember which bit connects to what and how to rewire six centuries’ worth of different models of plug. At the end of it all I have some drones and some cameras and a load of other kit to try and spot the intruder, who is remaining surprisingly coy given the whole cultural obsession with boisterous enthusiasm I marked on my one and only visit to their misbegotten time period. Then I go hunting again, searching my entire domain for any trace of them. Their time machine is still here, after all—now surrounded with tripwires and traps and some angry sabre-tooth tigers for good measure. And if it’s still here, so is my visitor.

  And of course they get into the farmhouse again while I’m out. I get back to find they’ve been sitting on my chair, eating my porridge, though thankfully not sleeping in my bed.

  They disabled almost all the sensors and traps and shenanigans I set up. And then left a load of crumbs and a half-eaten baguette on the kitchen table. From that I know that they know that I know, and are very pointedly letting me know that they know I know they know I know. Or… possibly I’m rabbit-holing too deep, but there’s definitely some multi-stranded structure of shared knowing going on between us.

  And they’ve missed a drone. They were so careful to switch off every camera, so that those crumbs were the sole taunting message to me, but I got slipshod when putting one of the drones together, and didn’t link it to the network properly. It’s been sitting there, taking pictures and not sending them to my central data store, meaning (as it’s a cheap, crappy little thing) that it has just the one most recent shot in its memory when I find it. A grainy, rather retro piece of image recording, but good enough for my purposes.