The Woman Who Died a Lot

3. Monday: SpecOps

I took the lift to the first floor and trod along the familiar corridors. The SO-27 staff had taken other jobs or retired when the Literary Detective unit was disbanded. Victor Analogy had gone one further and was currently embracing his newfound eternity from a sunny corner of Wanborough Cemetery. I’d lost contact with most. Herr Bight had returned to Germany, where he came out in a spectacular fashion as a fantasy author, much to the shock of his classically educated parents. The Forty brothers ran an antiquarian bookshop in Hay-on-Wye, but Jim Finisterre was still local—he was the head of the prestigious Really Ancient Texts department at the locally Sponsored Swindon All-You-Can-Eat-at-Fatso’s Drink Not Included Library. Even Bowden Cable, my onetime partner and closest work colleague, had found that running Acme Carpets suited his health better. The worst that could happen was laying an Axminster over someone’s budgie or handing out a refund.

Room 101, I discovered, was sparsely furnished. There was a small desk at which sat a receptionist, and against the wall was a row of hard chairs. On a coffee table were much-thumbed copies of the SpecOps Gazette, and on the wall were posters suggesting various help groups that overstressed SpecOps officers could attend. One was for an Odd Squad support group for those diagnosed with “dimensional fatigue,” and another for SpecOps accountants offered assistance to those who had become dangerously overstimulated by calculating tax exemptions for year-averaged pension deductibles.

I gave my name to the receptionist, and she asked me to take a seat. I said I’d stand, since I could maintain at least a pretense of good health if no one saw me try to get up, but after she said, “Are you sure?” and I’d walked round the office twice, I opted to sit on the windowsill, which was higher and afforded an easier transit to my feet. You learn to adapt.

Once comfortably perched, I looked around, having been in the office a number of times. This had once been the reception for the ChronoGuard, the division that had policed time travel, defending the Standard History Eventline from the rapacious plundering of the temporally mischievous.

Unlike most of the other SpecOps divisions, the ChronoGuard had not been disbanded because of budgetary difficulties. They had been shut down when it was found that the Retro-Deficit Engineering principle couldn’t be applied to time-travel technology. The deficit concept was simple: Use a technology now in the almost-certain knowledge that it will be invented in the future. Nanotechnology works this way, as do the Gravitube, thermos flasks, tachyon data streaming, and the wheel. The reason the concept as applied to Time Travel had once worked but now didn’t was simple: A courageous Time Traveler by the name of “Flipper” O’Malley had upstreamed his way to where time eventually ended and discovered that during that unthinkably vast swath of time no one had actually gotten around to inventing time travel. So with the technology now unsupported by the Retro-Deficit Engineering principle, there was nothing for it but to spool down the C-90 fluxgates and decommission the time engines.

This was a serious blow for the three thousand timeworkers who suddenly found that the glittering career they should have had was no longer going to happen. It was bad news for the human race, too, whose potential extinction by asteroid HR-6984 in thirty-seven years’ time had once been averted by an ingenious flexing of the eventline, an act that lowered the potential Armageddon to a manageable 1.8 percent and not the alarming 34 percent it was at present. Flipper O’Malley had chosen a bad time to declare time travel impossible. And if all that makes no sense, then welcome to the time industry.

“Wasn’t the wallpaper from the seventies just now?” I asked as the room wobbled for a moment and suddenly became a more modern pastel shade.

“It was a backflash,” said the receptionist, “the residual effect of the offices once being ChronoGuard. There’ll be another in a few moments. They usually come in pairs.”

There was another ripple, and her modern dress was replaced by one from the fifties.

“Always in pairs,” she said without looking up. She was about twenty, doing her nails a garish blue and eating a packet of M&M’s. Up until a few moments ago, she’d had bleached hair. She looked better in the more reserved style of the fifties, but, interestingly, she seemed utterly indifferent to the sudden change, so I ventured a theory.

“You would have been ChronoGuard, wouldn’t you?”

She gazed up at me with large, intelligent eyes. The grammatical inference of my question showed I understood the complexities of the service.

“I would have had a successful career in the timestream,” she replied with a sad smile, “but the way things stand at the moment, I marry a guy named Biff I don’t much like, have two unremarkable kids and then get hit by a car in 2041, aged fifty-five.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said, musing on the misguided wisdom that allowed ex–potential employees to have both their original and new lives summarized in a paragraph or two. It was dubbed the “Letter of Destiny” and was apparently part of the Union of Federated Timeworkers severance package. The unions were powerful but had achingly slow bureaucracy. Despite the time engines’ being shut down over two years ago, the Letters of Destiny were only just falling through people’s mailboxes. To many they came as a complete surprise and met with mixed feelings. Yes, it was good to know you might have been a hero at ChronoGuard, and yes, it was good to know that you make it to fifty-one without losing your mind or your hair, but no, perhaps you could do without knowing that your wife/husband is going to sleep with your best friend and enjoy it more, and no, it’s not healthy to know that you’re going to have an arm torn off by a gorilla in six hours and there’s nothing you can do about it.

“You would have known my son,” I said. “Friday Next.”

“Ooh,” she said, eyes opening a bit wider at the mention of his name, “I’d have left my husband for him. We’d have spent a sweaty weekend consummating our affair in his Late Pleistocene weekend retreat.”

This was news to me, and I wasn’t happy knowing that my son might once—in an alternative future—be sleeping with another man’s wife. There was the ethical question of second homes, too.

“I never knew he would’ve had a holiday home in the Late Pleistocene.”

“One interglacial back so with good weather, nothing too bitey and only twelve thousand years ago, so easy access for Friday afternoons—the time engines would have gotten really clogged as soon as work ended.”

“If you must have a second home, best have it someplace where it doesn’t inflate house prices,” I mused. “Have you met him in this timeline?”

“No. I only got my Letter of Destiny last week.”

“Are you okay about it?” I asked, as my son Friday had also been summarized recently and was being a bit more reticent as to how it turned out for him.

“I’m fine about it,” she said cheerily. “Before, I suspected I might not amount to anything, and now I know I won’t, so at least it takes away the wearisome burden of delusive hope.”

“Very . . . philosophical of you.”

She thought for a moment.

“Will you tell Friday that Shazza says, ‘It would have been seriously good’?”

My son and father would both have been in the ChronoGuard if the engines hadn’t been switched off, so the seemingly pointless discussions on the might-have-been were not exactly relevant but certainly of interest.

I told her I’d pass on her message, and she gave a half smile before returning to her nails and bag of M&M’s.

The door to Dr. Chumley’s office opened, and a short, heavyset man walked out. He had prominent brow ridges, dark eyes, and a broad nose. He wore a well-tailored suit woven from three different colors of baling twine, and his head was topped by a shock of unruly hair that had violently resisted all attempts to be combed. When he moved, he had the side-to-side gait of a sailor, and the smell of woodsmoke and hot mud moved with him. This was not at all unusual. He was a resequenced neanderthal named Stiggins and soon to be, I assumed, divisional head of SO-13, the department that policed all unextincted creatures. Not just the legal ones like mammoths, dodos, saber-toothed tigers and himself but also all the ones that were illegal— Diatrymas, to list an example never far from the news, and a host of chimeras—creatures that had sprung not from the random machinations of evolution but from garden-shed laboratories of meddling hobby geneticists who should have known better.

“Hello, Stig.”

He gave a snorty grunt of pleasure, and we hugged and smelled each other—once in the armpit, once in the hair, as was the neanderthal custom.

“ Co-op generic shampoo,” he said with a grimace, the ’thal version of a smile, “but stored in a Pantene container.”

“I like the shape of the bottle.”

“Us, too. Bacon and eggs for breakfast with arabica coffee, pushy-down, not bubble-bubble. Toast with jam. Raspberry. You travel Skyrail, sit next to someone too much Bodmin aftershave, and I smell much-much painkiller, Dizuperadol patches, two per cheek.” He took another deep breath. “But no oofy-oofy with husband. Not for weeks. Not like you. Problems?”

“I’m still a bit mashed,” I replied with a smile, well used to neanderthal ways, which were dazzlingly direct and unencumbered by the complex peculiarities of human etiquette, “but thanks for the concern.”

“Oofy-oofy very important.”

“I’ll second that,” I said with a sigh. “I’d like to but have no desire to. How are Felicity and the boys?”

“We are all well, thank you. Mrs. Stiggins is ripe at present, and the boys passed their flint-plus with distinction.”

“You must send them our congratulations.”

“We shall. And your own childer, Thursday?”

“They’re well, mostly. Friday still doesn’t have a purpose since his future was erased, and Tuesday is going to be the keynote speaker at the annual Mad Inventors Convention on Thursday. Jenny keeps herself to herself most of the time. When do you restart SO-13?”

“We start now. But work no different to past thirteen years. Just legal and paid—end to beetle soup, leaky roof, and sixteenmile walk to work. Afford bus.” And he gave another grunty laugh. “But why?” he added.

“Why what?”

“Why SpecOps back? Something change?”

“I don’t know,” I confessed, “I’m seeing Braxton later. I’ll ask him.”

“Detective Next?” said the receptionist, having finally decided to answer the plaintively wailing intercom, “Dr. Chumley will see you now.”

I wished Stig good day and walked past the receptionist, who had reverted to her bleached hair and modern dress. I took a deep breath, knocked on the door and—when I heard a muffled “enter!”—walked in.