A Tale of Time City

“You almost have to,” Jonathan said, carrying an armful of little white flowerpots over to the empty frame beside Vivian’s chair. He dumped them into the air above it, and they stayed there, standing on nothing. “Butter-pie,” Jonathan said, handing a pot with a stick poking out of it to Sam. “Otherwise it’s done you algae soup, malty soy, two carob cornpones and fish noodles.”

Sam pulled the stick out of his pot with a yellow nubbly ice cream on the end of it. “Yummee!” he cried and bit into it like an ogre.

“Er – which is which?” Vivian asked, looking at the strange marks on the other pots. “I can’t read these words.”

“Sorry,” Jonathan said. “Those are Universal Symbols from Thirty-nine Century.” He sorted out the pots for her and took a butter-pie for himself. The pots, Vivian found, were sort of stuck to the air. She had to give a little pull to get them loose. She discovered that you peeled back the lid, and if you needed a spoon or a fork, the lid shrivelled itself into a spoon or fork shape. Algae soup was not at all pleasant, like salty pond water. But malty soy was nice if you dipped the cornpone in it. The fish noodles were—

“I’d rather eat Dad’s fishing bait,” Vivian said, putting that pot quickly down.

“I’ll get you a butter-pie,” Jonathan said.

“And another one for me,” Sam put in.

The church-organ received another banging, two more kicks and a punch in the delivery-flap and Vivian and Sam received a pot with a stick each. Jonathan threw the empty pots into a frame beside the organ, where they vanished.

“Now we must talk,” he said, while Vivian dubiously lifted the nubbly lump out of its pot. “We’ve all broken the law and we daren’t be caught. It would have been all right if V.S. was really V.S. but she isn’t, so we’ve got to think how to hide her.”

Vivian was getting very tired of being called V.S. She would have objected if she had not at that moment bitten into the butter-pie. Wonderful tastes filled her mouth, everything buttery and creamy she had ever tasted, with just a hint of toffee, and twenty other even better tastes she had never met before, all of it icy cold. It was so marvellous that she simply said quietly, “You owe me an explanation. What were you trying to do?”

“Save Time City of course,” Sam said juicily out of the middle of his butter-pie. “We listened to the Chronologue. That’s how we knew where you’d be.”

“There’s a passage between the Chronologue and here,” Jonathan explained. “But it’s been chained up ever since my father was elected Sempitern and I got curious about it. So Sam shorted it out for me and – anyway, we found it led to the Chronologue and, if we opened the door a crack, we could hear what they were all talking about. They were debating the crisis—”

“Only I couldn’t understand a word,” Sam said, as if this was rather clever of him. “It wasn’t like the stories.”

“It wasn’t!” Jonathan said feelingly. “It was all about polarities and chronons and critical cycles, but I understood the part about Time City being nearly worn out. It’s used one bit of space and time too often, you see, and they were trying to find a way to move it to another bit. The City’s held in place by things called polarities, which are put out into history like anchors, but no one except Faber John ever understood how it was done. I heard Dr Leonov admit that. So that was where V.S. comes in.”

“Who is she?” said Vivian.

“The Time Lady,” said Sam. “She’s on the rampage.”

“Yes, but we had to work that out,” said Jonathan, “by putting the talk in the Chronologue together with what the stories say. Chronologue was being very scientific, talking about someone coming up through the First Unstable Era in a wave of temporons and chronons, causing wars and changes everywhere. But I guessed it had to be the Time Lady. The story says that Faber John and his wife quarrelled about the way to rule Time City, and she tricked him into going down under the city and falling asleep there. They say he’s still there, and as long as he sleeps, the City is safe. But if it’s in danger he’ll wake up and come to our rescue. We’re going by the stories. We know you—the Time Lady hates Faber John and the City, because he saw how she’d tricked him at the last minute and threw her out into history. We think she’s trying to get back and destroy the City now it’s nearly worn out.”

“That’s the bit I didn’t understand,” Sam said. He was cross-legged on the floor, licking the stick of his butter-pie.

“It is a bit puzzling,” Jonathan said. Vivian could see he was very pleased with himself for working it out. “Chronologue seemed to be sure that the Time Lady would be quite reasonable when they found her and explained about the crisis. I think the quarrel she had with Faber John must have been political in some way.”

He looked questioningly at Vivian. Vivian caught the flicker of his flickering eyes and began to wonder if Jonathan did believe she was just a normal person from the Twentieth Century after all. But at that moment she bit through into the middle of the butter-pie. And it was hot. Runny, syrupy hot.

“It’s goluptuous when you get to the warm part, isn’t it?” Sam said, watching her with keen attention. “You want to let it trickle into the cold.”

Vivian did so and found Sam’s advice was excellent. The two parts mixed were even better than the cold part alone. It sent her rather dreamy again. When Sam grinned at her, a wide cheeky grin with two big teeth in the middle of it, she found herself thinking that Sam was not so bad after all. But she did her best to keep to the subject.

“I still don’t understand what made you think the Time Lady was me,” she said.

Jonathan started to say something. Then he changed his mind and said something else. “Because of the name, you see. Faber John’s wife was called Vivian. Everyone knows that. And Faber really means Smith. So when I heard Chronologue say that you—she was on that evacuee train, I worked out that she must be posing as a girl called Vivian Smith.”

“And we said V.S. when we talked about her so that nobody would guess our plan,” Sam put in. “We started planning two days ago after they met the train and couldn’t find her.”

“Two days ago!” Vivian exclaimed. “But I was there today, and so were you!”

“Yes, but you can get to any time you want through a time-lock,” Jonathan said, waving that puzzle away in his most lordly manner. “My father went there and Sam’s father, and so did the Head Librarian and the High Scientist, but they all came back saying she’d slipped through them somehow. That was when I thought we had a chance of getting you—her ourselves. Only you’re the wrong Vivian Smith for some reason – and I still can’t understand it! Sam, we’ve got to think what to do with her.”

“Send her to the Stone Age,” said Sam. “You wouldn’t mind that, would you?” he asked Vivian.

“Mind? I’d go crazy!” said Vivian. “There are spiders in caves. Why can’t you send me home?”

“I told you why we can’t,” Jonathan said. “Besides, it’s an Unstable Era and it’s even more unsettled than usual at the moment. Suppose we put you back and that mucked up the whole of history. They’d find out at once! Think of something, Sam!”

There was a long silence. Sam sat on the floor with his face in his fists. Jonathan leant against the wall, chewing the end of his pigtail. Vivian licked the last of her butter-pie off its stick and, for a while, could think of very little else except that she wished she could have another one. But I will get home! she told herself, sleepily twiddling the stick in her fingers. I will, whatever he says!

“I know!” Sam said at last. “Pretend she’s our cousin!”

Jonathan leapt away from the wall. “That’s it!” he shouted. “That’s clever, Sam!”

“I am clever,” said Sam. “You work out the details.”

“And that’s easy,” said Jonathan. “Listen, V.S., you are Vivian Sarah Lee. Your father is Sam’s uncle and mine. Have you got that?” He danced round the room, pointing at Vivian until she nodded. “Good. You’ve been away from Time City since you were six, because your parents are Observers on station in Twenty Century. That’s all true. Got it? But they’ve sent you home because the era’s getting more unsettled and there’s a war on. This is brilliant!” he said to Sam. “It will explain why she doesn’t know anything. And my mother’s bound to have her to live here, because Lee House is shut up – and we can even go on calling her V.S.!”

Sam rose from the floor and breathed heavily into Vivian’s face. “She doesn’t look like a Lee,” he said critically. “Her eyes are wrong and her hair curls.”

“A lot of Lees don’t have the eyefold,” Jonathan said. “I don’t think Cousin Vivian does. Her cheekbones are the right shape.”

“Will you both stop staring and criticising!” Vivian said. “There’s nothing wrong with my face. The lady in the woolshop says I look almost like Shirley Temple.”

“Who’s he?” said Sam, and Jonathan said, “Who are you, V.S.?”

“What?” said Vivian.

“She’s almost asleep,” Sam said, leaning even closer to Vivian’s face.

He was right. The long and worrying day, followed by the peculiar events of the last hour, were suddenly too much for Vivian. Or maybe it was the butter-pie. There began to be gaps in what she noticed. She heard Jonathan saying airily, “Oh, we can hide her in one of the archaic rooms. She’ll be more at home there.” At this, Vivian noticed that Jonathan seemed to have bounced back from his scare in the ultra-modern office and become once more the lordly, confident boy who met her at the station. This made her feel uneasy, but before she could work out why, they were telling her to get up and come along.

She almost forgot the precious string bag. She turned round for it and yelped. She found she had been sitting on nothing in a yellow framework, just like the flowerpots from the church-organ. She tried to reach through it for the bag. But the nothing stopped her hand and she had to grope underneath it before she could take hold of the string handles.

Next thing she noticed, they were going along a corridor. Then Jonathan was sliding a door aside and saying to Sam, “Mind you take those keys back now. And don’t get caught doing it.”

“I know what I’m doing,” Sam retorted, and trotted off down the hallway with the trailing tie of his puffy shoe flapping on the carpets.

After that Vivian noticed she was in bed, a rather hard, scratchy bed, with blue street light coming in from somewhere. What a lot of Vivians! she thought sleepily. And then: I’ll have another butter-pie before I go home tomorrow.

And after that, Vivian noticed that it was daytime again and woke up. She turned over under a heavy, scratchy coverlet embroidered with lines of thin brown people and smelling of dust, and knew at once where she was. She was in Time City, in the middle of a horrendous mistake. Oddly enough, although this was quite frightening, Vivian found it rather exciting too. She had always wanted to have an adventure, the way people did in films. And here she was having one. She knew it was no dream. She sat up.

No wonder the bed felt hard. It was made of stone. It had four huge stone pillars like totem poles that held up an embroidered canopy overhead. Beyond in the room, strong sunlight slanted on to Egyptian-type carvings on the stone walls. Vivian knew it was quite late on in the morning. She got out of the bed on to rush mats, where she was surprised to find that she had put on her night clothes before she had gone to sleep. Her suitcase was open on the stone floor and her clothes were scattered all over the room.

I wonder where the toilet is, and I do hope it’s not invisible! she thought. A stone archway in the wall led to a tiled place. Vivian went through and found, to her relief, that the toilet and washbasin in there looked much like the ones she was used to, even though they were made of stone. But there were no taps, and she could not find out how the toilet flushed.

“But at least I could see them,” she said to herself, as she hunted for her scattered clothes.