First Among Sequels

30. Now Is the Winter

My mother answered the door when we knocked, and she seemed vaguely surprised to see us all. Landen and I were there as concerned parents, of course, and Tuesday was there as she was the only one who might be able to understand Mycroft’s work, if that was what was required.

“Is it Sunday lunchtime already?” asked my mother.

“No, Mother. Is Friday here?”

“Friday? Goodness me, no! I haven’t seen him for over-”

“It’s all right, Gran,” came a familiar voice from the living-room door. “There’s no more call for subterfuge.”

“It was Friday-our Friday, the grunty, smelly one, who up until an hour ago was someone we thought wouldn’t know what “subterfuge” meant, let alone be able to pronounce it. He had changed. There seemed to be a much more upright bearing about him. Perhaps it was because he wasn’t dragging his feet when he walked, and he actually looked at us when he spoke. Despite this, he still seemed like a sad-teenager cliché: spots, long unkempt hair, and with clothes so baggy you could dress three people out of the material and still have enough to make some curtains.

“Why don’t you tell us what’s going on?” I asked.

“You wouldn’t understand.”

I fixed him with my best “Son, you are in so much trouble” look. “You’d be amazed what I can understand.”

“Okay,” he said, drawing a deep breath. “You’ve heard that the ChronoGuard is using time-travel technology now in the almost certain knowledge that it’s invented in the future?”

“I get the principle,” I replied somewhat guardedly, as I still had no idea how you could use something that had yet to be invented.

“As weird as it might seem,” explained Friday, “the principle is sound. Many things happen solely because of the curious human foible of a preconceived notion’s altering the outcome. More simply put: If we convince ourselves that something is possible, it becomes so. It’s called the Schrödinger Night Fever principle.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s simple. If you go to see Saturday Night Fever expecting it to be good, it’s a corker. However, if you go expecting it to be a crock of shit, it’s that, too. Thus Saturday Night Fever can exist in two mutually opposing states at the very same time, yet only by the weight of our expectations. From this principle we can deduce that any opposing states can be governed by human expectation-even, as in the case of retro-deficit-engineering, the present use of a future technology.”

“I think I understand that,” said Landen. “Does it work with any John Travolta movie?”

“Only the artistically ambiguous ones,” replied Friday, “such as Pulp Fiction and Face/Off. Battlefield Earth doesn’t work, because it’s a stinker no matter how much you think you’re going to like it, and Get Shorty doesn’t work either, because you’d be hard-pressed not to enjoy it, irrespective of any preconceived notions.”

“It’s a beautiful principle,” I said admiringly. “Yours?”

“Sadly not,” replied Friday with a smile. “Much as I’d like to claim it, the credit belongs to an intellect far superior to mine-Tuesday. Way to go, sis.”

Tuesday squirmed with joy at getting a compliment from her big brother, but still none of it made any real sense.

“So how does this relate to Mycroft and time travel?”

“Simple,” said Friday. “The obscenely complex technologies that the ChronoGuard uses to power up the time engines contravene one essential premise that is at the very core of science: that disorder will always stay the same or increase. More simply stated, you can put a pig in a machine to make a sausage, but you can’t put a sausage in a machine to make a pig. It’s the Second Law of Thermodynamics. One of the most rigid tenets of our understanding of the physical world. You can’t reverse the arrow of time to make something unhappen-whether it be unscrambling eggs or unmaking a historical event.”

“The recipe for unscrambled eggs,” I murmured, suddenly remembering a family dinner we had about the time of the Jane Eyre episode. “He was scribbling it on a napkin, and Polly made him stop. They had an argument-that’s how I remember it.”

“Right,” said Friday. “The recipe was actually an equation that showed how the Second Law of Thermodynamics could be modified to allow a reversibility of time’s arrow. That you could unbake a cake with almost breathless simplicity. The recipe for unscrambled eggs is at the heart of reversing the flow of time-without it, there is no time travel!”

“So,” I said slowly, “the whole of the ChronoGuard’s ability to move around in time rests on their getting hold of this recipe?”

“That’s about the tune of it, Mum.”

“So where is it?” asked Landen. “Logically, it must still exist, or the likelihood of time travel drops to zero. Since your future self just popped up twenty minutes ago to make veiled threats, the possibility remains that it will be discovered sometime before the End of Time-sometime in the next forty-eight hours.”

“Right,” said Friday, “and that’s what I’ve been doing with Polly for the past two weeks-trying to find where Mycroft put it. Once I’ve got the recipe, I can destroy it: The possibility of time travel drops to zero, and it’s good night, Vienna, for the ChronoGuard.”

“Why would you want that?”

“The less you know, Mum, the better.”

“They say you’re a dangerous historical fundamentalist,” I added cautiously. “A terrorist of time.”

“But they would say that, wouldn’t they? The Friday you met-he’s okay. He’s following orders, but he doesn’t know what I know. If he did, he’d be trying to destroy the recipe, the same as me. The Standard History Eventline is bullshit, and all they’re doing is trying to protect their temporal-phony-baloney jobs.”

“How do you know this?”

“I become director-general of the ChronoGuard when I’m thirty-six. In the final year before retirement, at seventy-eight, I’m inducted into the ChronoGuard Star Chamber-the ruling elite. It was there that I discovered something so devastating that if it became public knowledge would shut down the industry in an instant. And the time business is worth six hundred billion a year-minimum.”

“Tell them what it is,” said Polly, who’d been standing at his side. “If anything happens to you, then at least one of us might be able to carry on.”

Friday nodded and took a deep breath. “Has anyone noticed how short attention spans seem to have cast a certain lassitude across the nation?”

“Do I ever,” I replied, rolling my eyes and thinking of the endlessly downward clicking of the Read-O-Meter. “No one’s reading books anymore. They seem to prefer the mind-numbing spectacle of easily digested trash TV and celebrity tittle-tattle.”

“Exactly,” said Friday. “The long view has been eroded. We can’t see beyond six months, if that, and short-termism will spell our end. But the thing is, it needn’t be that way-there’s a reason for it. The time engines don’t just need vast quantities of power-they need to run on time. Not punctuality, but time itself. Even a temporal leap of a few minutes will use up an infinitesimally small amount of the abstract concept. Not the hard clock time but the soft stuff that keeps events firmly embedded in a small cocoon of prolonged event-the Now.”

“Oooh!” murmured Tuesday, who twigged it first. “They’ve been mining the Now!”

“Exactly, sis,” said Friday, sweeping the hair from his eyes. “The Short Now is the direct result of the time industry’s unthinking depredations. If the ChronoGuard continues as it is, within a few years there won’t be any Now at all, and the world will move into a Dark Age of eternal indifference.”

“You mean TV could get worse?” asked Landen.

“Much worse,” replied Friday grimly. “At the rate the Now is being eroded, by this time next year Samaritan Kidney Swap will be considered the height of scholarly erudition. But easily digestible TV is not the cause-it’s the effect. A Short Now will also spell the gradual collapse of forward planning, and mankind will slowly strangulate itself in a downward spiral of uncaring self-interest and short-term instant gratification.”

There was a bleak silence as we took this on board. We could see it all now. Short attention spans, a general malaise, no tolerance, no respect, no rules. Short-termism. No wonder we were seeing Outlander ReadRates go into free fall. The Short Now would hate books; too much thought required for not enough gratification. It brought home the urgency to find the recipe, wherever it was: Without unscrambled eggs, there was no time travel, no more depredation of the Now, and we could look to a brighter future of long-term thought-and more reading. Simple.

“Shouldn’t this be a matter for public debate?” asked Landen.

“What would that achieve, Dad? The ChronoGuard doesn’t have to disprove that the reduction of the Now is caused by humans-they only have to create doubt. They’ll always be Short Now deniers, and the debate will become so long and drawn out that as soon as we realize there is a problem, we won’t care enough to want to do anything about it. This issue is not for debate-the ChronoGuard cannot get hold of that recipe. I’m staking my career on it. And believe me, I would have had an excellent career to stake.”

There was silence after Friday’s speech. We all realized that he was right, of course, but I was also thinking about how proud I was of him and how refreshing it was to hear such eloquence and moral lucidity from such a grubby and disheveled individual who was wearing a WAYNE SKUNK IS THE BALLOCKS T-shirt.

Polly sighed, breaking the silence. “If only Mycroft were alive. we could ask him where he put it.”

And then I understood.

“Aunt,” I said, “come with me. Friday-you, too.”

It was dusk by now, and the last rays of evening light were shining through the dusty windows of Mycroft’s workshop. It seemed somehow shabbier in the twilight.

“All those memories!” breathed Polly, hobbling across the concrete floor with Friday holding her arm. “What a life. Yes indeed, what a life. I’ve not been in here since before he…you know.”

“Don’t be startled,” I told her, “but I’ve seen Mycroft twice in here over the past two days. He came back to tell us something, and until now I had no idea what it was. Polly?”

Her eyes had filled with tears as she stared into the dim emptiness of the workshop. I followed her gaze, and as my eyes became accustomed to the light, I could see him, too. Mycroft’s opacity was low, and the color seemed to have drained from his body. He was barely there at all.

“Hello, Poll,” he said with a smile, his voice a low rumble. “You’re looking positively radiant!”

“Oh, Crofty!” she murmured. “You’re such a fibber-I’m a doddering wreck ready for the scrap heap. But one that has missed you so much!”

“Mycroft,” I said in a respectful whisper, “I don’t want to keep you from your wife, but time is short. I know why you came back.”

“You mean it wasn’t Farquitt or the chairs?”

“No. It was about the recipe for unscrambled eggs.”

“We need to know,” added Polly, “where you left it.”

“Is that all?” laughed Mycroft. “Why, goodness-I put in my jacket pocket!”

He was beginning to fade, and his voice sounded hollow and empty. His post-life time was almost up.

“And after that?”

He faded some more. I was worried that if I blinked, he’d go completely.

“Which jacket, my darling?” asked Polly.

“The one you gave me for Christmas,” came an ethereal whisper, “the blue one…with the large checks.”

“Crofty?”

But he had vanished. Friday and I rushed to support Polly, who had gone a bit wobbly at the knees.

“Damn!” said Friday. “When does he next come back?”

“He doesn’t,” I said. “That was it.”

“Then we’re no closer to knowing where it is,” said Friday. “I’ve been through all his clothes-there isn’t one with blue checks in his closet.”

“There’s a reason for that,” said Polly, her eyes glistening with tears. “He left it on the Hesperus. I scolded him at the time, but now I see why he did it.”

“Mum? Does this make any sense to you?”

“Yes,” I said with a smile. “It’s somewhere the ChronoGuard can’t get to it. Back in 1985, before he used the Prose Portal to send Polly into ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,’ he tested it on himself. The jacket is right where he left it-in the teeth of an Atlantic gale inside Henry Longfellow’s poem ‘The Wreck of the Hesperus.’”

“Inside the BookWorld?”

“Right,” I replied, “and nothing-repeat, nothing-would compel me to return there. In two days the ChronoGuard will be gone, and the slow repair of the Now can begin. You did good, Sweetpea.”

“Thanks, Mum,” he said, “but please-don’t call me Sweetpea.”