Time and Time Again

46

IT TOOK KATIE another week to fully recover, during which time she and Stanton agreed an uneasy truce and formed an equally uneasy alliance. Sitting together in their suite at the Kempinski, they made a plan.

Clearly the century in which they were both now living was heading for utter disaster. Katie had failed to stop Stanton killing the Kaiser and so history was developing as it had done in her century, hurtling towards a global totalitarian misery without end.

If nothing else was changed, the whole dreadful sequence of events that would lead to four generations of psychopathic dictators ruling the earth would play out exactly as before.

Both Stanton and Katie could see that it was imperative for them to try to influence the shape of this third loop in time using their unique knowledge of the previous two. They had to try to find a way to prevent things from taking the course that they had in the second loop, and perhaps beginning a history which was preferable to even the one in the first loop, the one Stanton had been born into. And which he had helped throw away.

This last thought was still a very sore and sensitive subject for Katie. She still could not begin to understand how the Chronations of Stanton’s time could have imagined that a century in which global totalitarianism had been defeated could ever be improved on.

‘I suppose we wanted a century in which it had never existed at all,’ Stanton tried to explain, ‘and also, after that we wanted a world where the applications of human ingenuity didn’t develop on such crass and environmentally disastrous lines.’

But the more he heard about the world from which Katie had come, the more he understood how utterly and criminally deluded McCluskey and her crew of smug geriatrics had been. How deluded he had been. People made history and people screwed it up, that was what McCluskey had always maintained, and she sure had been right about that. Incredibly, she had ended up proving her own thesis. She screwed up.

If only Newton hadn’t been so damn clever.

But all that was in several pasts now. There was only one present, the here and now, and they had to make a plan.

Sitting up together late at night, Katie ravenously devouring every delicacy she could find to be delivered to their suite, they decided what they must do.

They would kill Rosa Luxemburg.

At first Katie had wanted to kill Strasser. He, after all, had been the one to hijack and corrupt Luxemburg’s revolution. He had fathered the hellish dynasty that spawned generations of homicidal demi-gods to lord it over a global population of synchronized puppets.

But Stanton disagreed.

‘Strasser was a thug,’ he argued. ‘He stole something noble, even beautiful, and debased it. Anybody could do what Strasser did, and if we take him out of the equation somebody else will take his place. Stalin or one of the other members of Strasser’s Central Committee.’

Katie had by this time explained her history in detail and Stanton recognized many of the names included in it from his own century: Goebbels, Röhm, Zinoviev. Others he had never heard of: Beria, Kamenev, Hess. Adolf Hitler.

‘Anyone can destroy something,’ Stanton went on, ‘but to create it takes talent and I’d suggest that to make a successful revolution takes genius. Luxemburg is a uniquely talented individual, a political visionary and a truly great communicator. I know, I’ve met her. She’s more special than any of the dull bullies who followed her. And without her there’d have been nothing for them to follow. We need to remove the shovel, not the shit.’

Stanton didn’t like the idea. In fact, the plan he was advocating pained him deeply. He knew Luxemburg. She was a good woman. A kind woman … and Bernadette loved her. But he also could see that taking her out of the German equation was his best shot at putting right the wrong he’d done. At preventing the German revolution from happening and hence preventing its disastrous corruption followed by its world domination.

‘So we kill Luxemburg,’ Katie said, tearing at steak and sausage with her fingers.

‘Yes.’

‘And then I’ll kill Strasser.’

‘That’s your choice. Right now he’s only twenty-two years old.’

‘I don’t care if he’s only twenty-two months, twenty-two days. I’ll tear him to pieces with my bare hands and eat his heart while it’s still beating. Then I’ll kill the rest of his committee,’ she said, ‘even the ones who are only children now. Then I’ll find the parents of the ones that haven’t yet even been born and I’ll kill them too. And I’ll kill them horribly. In revenge for the crimes that will now never be committed.’

Katie drank deep at water from the jug. She took no alcohol, explaining that remaining in control while others did not had proved useful to her in the past.

‘And maybe,’ she went on, wiping her mouth with her sinewy, ink-blackened arm and looking hard at Stanton, ‘maybe I’ll kill you as well because the truth is that all of this, all of this, is your fault.’

Stanton stared back, meeting the challenge of her eyes. He hadn’t asked for any of this. And he’d lost his children too.

‘Maybe you’re right, Katie,’ he said quietly. ‘Although I think you’ll find I’m not so easy to kill. What I and the people of my time set in motion was disastrous, that’s pretty clear. But I stayed with the mission when I saw how it had gone wrong. I could have walked away but I didn’t. I found you and I saved you. And because of that we have a chance to pool our knowledge and try again. There’s a phrase from my century, third time lucky. Do you know it?’

‘There was no luck in my time, Hugh Stanton. The word and the very idea were banned. The Great Navigator directed all things for the peace and harmony of all. Luck is a bourgeois notion.’

‘Well, we’re directing things now. And we’re going to get it right this time. And for that reason, before we begin our plan we have to go back to Constantinople one more time. To the cellar from which we were both born.’

‘Why?’

‘Because we’re going to make a better century and, when we’ve done it, we want it to be left that way. So we must place your warning next to mine.’