A Tale of Time City

He turned the handle and the door creaked slowly open. Beyond it was the dark stone passage which Vivian remembered walking up last night from the church-place called the Chronologue. The open door let in enough light to show that the passage was quite empty.

“Wait,” said Jonathan, in a gasp, as if he was holding his breath.

Almost as he spoke, there were suddenly two people walking down the passage towards them. At first, they were hard to see in the dark. All Vivian could tell was that they were wearing modern Time City pyjamas and walking in the way people do when they are very excited about something. Then she saw that the taller one had dark diamonds down the sides of its suit. There was a flicker over its eyes and its hair was in a pigtail that trailed over one shoulder. The shorter one was a girl with light brown curly hair.

“Jiminy Cricket!” said Vivian. “It’s me! And you!”

It was the oddest and most upsetting sight, to see herself as a ghost, looking almost but not quite like somebody else, with her face back-to-front from the face she knew in a mirror, breathlessly chattering without a sound to a boy she had only met the night before. It was worse still when the two ghosts swept unseeingly up to her. Vivian felt a jolt of sheer panic, such as she had never felt in her life before. They vanished almost where she was standing.

She stood wobbling for a moment and her eyes felt queer and misty. Then her legs folded up and she sat with a bump on the marble floor. “Hundreds of years, did you say?” she asked croakily.

Jonathan held out a hand to haul her up. “My legs did that too when I first saw them,” he said. “Sam ran away.”

“Only six metres!” Sam protested. “I came back when they’d gone.”

“I don’t wonder your mum screamed and had that passage locked!” Vivian said as she struggled to her feet. She hung on to the door until she felt steady. “She must have known it was you, even if you were only six!”

“She won’t talk about it,” said Jonathan. He was looking lordly and jubilant now. “Now do you see how I recognised you, V.S.? That was us last night. I wore that suit and I took you that way on purpose.”

Vivian still felt wobbly, but there was nothing wrong with her brain. “It was not last night!” she said. “Apart from the fact that I never said one word to you until we got to your room, I was not in those clothes. I was wearing this same skirt I have on now last night. That ghost had Time City clothes.”

This made no difference to Jonathan at all. “Then it’s some time soon,” he said airily. “And what we were doing is important. It has to be, or we wouldn’t have made once-ghosts. So what do you think we were doing, V.S.?”

He was back to being the Interrogator again. Bless me! Vivian thought. He still thinks I’m the Time Lady! He just decided to make me admit it in a different way after he got that fright with those guards. Talk about bees in your bonnet! “If you call me V.S. once again,” she said, “I shall scream – I warn you!”

Sam patted her arm. “You need a butter-pie,” he said kindly.

Oddly enough, this nearly did make Vivian scream. She gave a strange squawking laugh. “I’m going barmy!” she cried out. “Why can’t I get back to the War and have some peace for once? Everything’s mad here! None of this is true!”

Her voice was getting louder and louder. They stared at her. Vivian opened her mouth to laugh at how foolish they looked and decided that she would scream instead. She had her head back to give a really loud, satisfying scream, when she heard footsteps turning the corner into the museum. She shut her mouth. Sam had the chain back in the right place in a flash. They all hurried over to a museum case labelled Forty-three Century Chinese Home Computer and stared at it intently until the person arrived.

It was a friendly brown-faced lady called Petula who was looking for Vivian. “Madam Sempitern told me to look out for you, dear,” she said. “Would you like to come and see if everything in your room is the way you like it?”

“I’ll come and show her,” Jonathan said at once.

But Petula said, “No, go away, Jonathan dear. You don’t own her.” She took Vivian away upstairs, leaving Sam and Jonathan looking like people who have been brought up short in mid-adventure.

A while later, Vivian was peacefully and happily installed in a small friendly room. Though none of the things in it were much like things she knew, Petula had shown her how everything worked – for instance, if you wanted a mirror, you put your foot on a stud in the floor and a piece of wall reflected your face suddenly – and told her what everything was called. She had shown Vivian how to work the shower and where the switch was for music. Finally, she pressed a stud that made a wall unfold into a cupboard. Inside was a row of pyjama suits mysteriously hanging on nothing and all miraculously Vivian’s size.

“You can count on Elio for that,” Petula said. “If you have any trouble with anything, put your hand across that blue square by the bed and one of us will come and sort you out.”

When Petula had gone, Vivian took possession of the room by straightening out the paper goblet, which had become rather battered by then, and planting it on an empty-frame table by the wall. Then she lay on the bed, which was a flowered blanket draped over nothing, and listened to strange chiming music out of a thing called “the Deck” which floated beside the bed. It was almost as good as listening to the wireless. She thought she had better start thinking how to get the bees out of Jonathan’s bonnet and make him help her get back to stay with Cousin Marty. In some strange way, she knew that those two time-ghosts she had seen would do that, if she could think how. But she did not want to think of that ghost of herself walking beside the ghost of Jonathan for hundreds of years before either of them were born. She went to sleep instead.

She woke because someone had come quietly in and laid out clothes for her. The sound of the door sliding shut made her sit up with a jerk. Now she found that she did want to think about the two time-ghosts. I wonder what we were – I mean what we will be doing, she thought, with a great deal of interest. I can use them somehow. She almost had an idea how.

“Are you there, V.S.?” Jonathan’s voice said out of the Deck.

“No. I’m asleep,” said Vivian. And the almost-idea was gone.

“Then wake up. Dinner’s in half an hour,” said Jonathan’s voice. “It’ll be official, with guests, I warn you. It always is. Shall I come and get you?”

“Is it? Then perhaps you’d better,” Vivian said.

This news made her very nervous. She managed to fumble her way into the silky white suit laid out for her. Its trousers were so baggy they were almost like a skirt, and she put both feet down the same leg twice before she got it right. When she stood up and put her arms into the baggy sleeves, the suit fastened itself down her back like magic and began to glow slightly. Blue flowers appeared, floating gently in spirals round her arms and legs. Vivian touched them, and they were as unreal as time-ghosts. This was unnerving enough, but the most unnerving thing was the looseness of the suit itself, if, like Vivian, you were used to the tight clothes and underclothes of 1939. She felt as if she had no clothes on at all, and that made her more nervous than ever.

When Jonathan arrived, all in white, with his hair newly-plaited, he did not help her to feel any better. “It’ll be quite boring,” he warned her on the way down the polished stairs. “The guests are Dr Wilander – he’s my tutor – and Librarian Enkian. They hate one another. There’s a story that Wilander once threw a whole set of Shakespeare folios at Enkian. He’s strong as an ox, so it could be true. They had another quarrel today and my father invited them to soothe them down.”

“I hope they’ll all be too busy hating and soothing to notice me,” Vivian said.

“Bound to be,” said Jonathan.

But they were not. Jonathan’s parents were waiting in the dining room, which was a round vaulted room that put Vivian instantly in mind of a tube station, and the two guests were standing with them beside a pretend fire flickering in a real fireplace. Though all four were in solemn black, Vivian found it hard not to think of them as sheltering from an air raid. It gave her an instant feeling of danger. That feeling grew worse when Jenny looked up and said, “Here she is,” and Vivian realised they had all been talking about her.

Mr Enkian, who had a yellow triangular face and a way of sneering even when he talked about ordinary things, looked at Vivian and said, “What a pale little creature!”

Vivian’s face at once contradicted him by growing red and hot. She felt like something the cat had brought in. Except I don’t think there are any cats here! she thought, rather desperately.

“Six years in smoke-polluted history isn’t good for anyone,” Jenny said, in her most worried-soothing way, as she led the way to the table.

Sempitern Walker shot her an anguished look over his shoulder. “She managed to grow though,” he said. He sounded as if he bore Vivian a grudge for it.

As for Dr Wilander, he simply stared at Vivian. He was huge. He had a huge hanging face like a bear’s. Vivian took one look at him and found her eyes being met by shrewd little grey eyes gazing hard at her out of the bear’s face. They terrified her. She knew she was being stared at and summed up by one of the cleverest people she had ever met. She was too frightened to move until Jonathan took hold of her shoulder and shoved her into a carved and polished empty-frame chair. Then it was a relief just to look at the table and find that it was not invisible, but made of some white stuff with patterns of white on it to imitate a tablecloth.

Dr Wilander sat down opposite her and the empty chair creaked. He spoke to her. His voice was a dull grunting, like a bear in a distant thicket.

“So you’re the youngest Lee, eh? Vivian Lee?”

“Yes,” Vivian said, wishing she did not need to lie.

“Sent home because of the Second World War, eh?” grunted Dr Wilander.

“Yes,” Vivian agreed – with relief, because now she was back at least to lying by telling the truth.

“By which we understand,” said Mr Enkian, “that the notorious instability of Twenty Century must have escalated to a degree to cause concern to your parents. We hope you can give an account of it.”

Help! thought Vivian. She looked desperately at Jonathan, but she could tell he was going to be no help. He was looking cool and well-behaved, the picture of a boy trying not to be noticed.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Enkian,” grunted Dr Wilander. “You can’t expect an eleven-year-old child to judge degrees of instability.”

“I do expect it from the child of two trained Observers,” Mr Enkian snapped. “She can answer questions at least.”

Jonathan’s father interrupted, realising that his guests were starting to quarrel. “We all know the source of the trouble,” he said, “and though extirpation is still a possibility, what most concerns us now is how the resulting temporonic unrest might be contained in a century of such low prognostic yield…”

He went on talking. Four ladies came in and set out a multitude of large and small dishes in front of everyone, and Sempitern Walker talked all the time they were doing it. It was very boring. Perhaps it was his job to be boring, Vivian thought, in which case he was very good at his job. He stared at the rounded end of the room as if something there worried him terribly and spoke in a droning voice of escalation waves and socio-temporal curves and paradigms of agon-types and cultural manipulation of ideology and behavioural parameters and the Lee Abdullah index, until a sort of heaviness fell on everyone.

Vivian tried to listen. She was sure that the more she knew about Time City, the easier it would be to get home. But she understood most of it rather less than she had understood Jonathan explaining how his belt worked. She did dimly grasp that her own century seemed to be in an uproar and that when Sempitern Walker talked about “the source of the trouble” he might have meant the Time Lady. And she gathered that learned people in Time City kept watch on the rest of history and tried to push it into behaving the way Time City wanted.

I think that’s rather a cheek! she thought.