Time and Time Again

47

TRAVELLING WITH KATIE was complex. The Chronations of her time had not had the resources or the technological sophistication to supply her with papers or currencies. In fact, there had been very few early-twentieth-century documents left for them to forge. All evidence of the petit bourgeois past had been destroyed in successive ‘cultural’ revolutions and purges. Great buildings, museums, pictures and books. Virtually nothing remained of the time before the Dynasty of Great Navigators had taken the helm.

It had been as much as the Chronations of Katie’s world had been able to do to smuggle her to the ghost town once known as Istanbul and place her in the cellar in the dockland area at the appointed time. Katie had arrived in 1914 with not much more than a couple of guns and a few bits of gold which had been supplied by a senior Party dentist. The only aids the Master of the State Research and Education Facility had been able to give her were a compass, a map of Europe, a piece of paper with the location and time of the assassination of the Kaiser and a suit of rough male clothing and boots. She had lived by her wits as she made her way across Turkey and the Balkans, stealing and killing to get whatever she needed.

‘I’ve been on the run for most of my adult life,’ she explained. ‘That’s why they chose me. But if you want my opinion anybody could survive in this world. The fields and woods are full of food, the peasants are trusting and the border guards shout out a warning before they shoot, which is very foolish of them since it allows me to shoot them first.’

Stanton and Katie travelled by train across Europe. Katie maintained her guise as a man wearing a suit of clothes that Stanton bought her. She refused point blank to wear the women’s clothing of the time, maintaining not unreasonably that it was ridiculous and would severely restrict her fighting ability.

Due to her lack of papers they were not able to cross borders by train but instead got out at the last stop before each one and hiked out into the country to find a suitable point to cross. By such a manner the two Chronations crossed Europe north to south and returned once more to the city where both their adventures had begun.

Once more Stanton took rooms at the Pera Palace Hotel and that evening in the dark of night, for the final time, he made his way to the house that Isaac Newton had bought when first the business of Chronos began.

‘I wanted to ask you,’ he said to Katie as they reconnoitred the street, ‘was it really necessary to kill the doctor and the nurse when you came out of the cellar?’

‘The woman in the room in the corridor heard my footsteps,’ Katie answered. ‘My boots were too heavy, and steel shod.’

‘Didn’t you think to come in rubber soles?’

Katie stopped in the darkened street and turned to Stanton.

‘Those boots were donated by a soldier who probably paid with his life for losing them. Without them I would have come to this time either barefoot or at best in canvas moccasins. You have no comprehension of the utter poverty of the world you created, Hugh Stanton.’

Stanton kept silent after that. Together they broke into the hospital building using Stanton’s skeleton keys and crept down into the cellar.

It was just as Stanton had left it, with the two sets of footprints and the chair and the table on which lay the letter to the future that Stanton had left.

‘Your history,’ Katie said. ‘The one I found.’

‘No,’ Stanton corrected. ‘The one you found was left at the beginning of the century in which you were born, the century I created which disappeared the moment you entered the past and rebooted history all over again. This letter was left in the new version of the twentieth century, the one that you are creating. The one in which you’ll die. That letter is the same letter as the one you found down to its last molecule but it exists in a different version of time.’

‘Well, let us hope there’s only ever one version of mine,’ she said.

Katie approached the table and put a second envelope beside Stanton’s. The history of her own twentieth century. A catalogue of utter misery, written out during the long hours they had spent travelling on the train.

Two different versions of the future lying side by side. Both terrible but one vastly more terrible than the other.

‘So, it’s done,’ she said. ‘Now if another traveller passes this way at least there’s a chance they’ll know all that we know.’

‘But if we succeed in our mission,’ Stanton replied, ‘if we’re able to prevent the German revolution, perhaps there won’t be another traveller.’

‘Perhaps,’ Katie said.

Stanton turned his torch beam from the table where Katie was standing to the shadowy arches where the ancient dusty bottles were laid down.

There were the footprints he had left, halfway between Katie’s and the arches. Stanton played his torchlight into the darkness of the vault.

A thought occurred to him.

One which made his soul shiver with dread.

He stepped towards the darkness.

‘Where are you going?’ Katie asked.

‘Towards the past,’ he said. ‘Your footsteps are ahead of mine. I came here to change history and I did. A century passed and then you came for the same reason, but time had slipped a little and the sentry box had moved. Just like Sengupta said, As each loop of space and time progresses, space and time are gained.’

‘Sentry box?’ Katie asked. ‘Sengupta? What are you talking about?’

Stanton didn’t reply. He was under the first arch now.

He turned his torch to the floor. Were there marks? He thought perhaps there were but the dust was so thick he couldn’t be sure. He shone his light once more on the bottles, sooty black upon their shelves.

‘Perhaps I wasn’t the first,’ he said. ‘After all, why should I have been?’

And then he saw it.

Wedged in among the rows of bottles.

An envelope.

He reached out and took it from its place.

Then he walked a little further into the catacomb. McCluskey had said it stretched back away under the street and the next house along.

After a few more steps Stanton found another envelope.

Then another.

And another.

Five, six.

Nine, ten.

‘What are you doing?’ He heard Katie’s voice behind him. ‘If we’ve done what we came to do we need to clear out.’

Stanton returned to where she was standing. He was carrying the brittle, yellowing papers in his hands. He had twelve, perhaps there were more; the cellar went further back and deeper than he had gone.

‘It’s what I feared,’ he said quietly. ‘I wasn’t the first. There have been many.’

He put the bundle of papers down on the table beside his and Katie’s own.

They sat together on the floor and by the light of their torches began to read.

The stories of a dozen centuries. A dozen twentieth centuries.

The same hundred and eleven years repeated over and over again beginning each time in 1914. Sometimes the authors came back to save or to kill the Archduke. Others to save or kill the Kaiser. Others came with their sights set on some different figure altogether, monsters in the making, too young as yet to have committed the crimes they were destined to commit if left to live. But each time the result had been the same. A nightmare catalogue of human brutality and human misery. War and genocide. Bigotry and fear.

Some versions, like Stanton’s own century, had resulted in some kind of human progress, although never it seemed enough to persuade the Chronations of those times to leave well alone. Others, like Katie’s, were simply unmitigated nightmares descending ever further into a hellish darkness, the type of which only humanity is capable of inventing.

Sitting together in the beams of their torchlight, Stanton and Katie read of dictators and secret policemen. Of terrible science and murderous disease. They read of Communism corrupted over and over again. And also of something called Fascism, of which neither of them had heard but which had sometimes gained the upper hand, although the result was just the same.

The name Hitler came up in four separate histories.

Stanton didn’t know him at all; the Austrian fanatic had played no part in his century, but Katie knew him as one of Strasser’s henchmen.

In other centuries, however, it seemed this terrible man had been able to make himself the boss, a monster the equal of Stalin and Strasser. Harnessing Germany’s might to conquer half the world and murder half the people in it. Two previous Chronations had come back specifically to kill him while he was still a penniless dosser, painting his watercolours in Vienna.

Hours passed. Time was moving on. Soon the hospital above them would be up and bustling. Stanton laid the papers back on the table all together.

‘I think perhaps we’re the first Chronations to meet,’ he said. ‘Those who came before us simply rebooted the previous one’s creation and the loop went round again. You were supposed to kill me but instead we met.’

Katie nodded, still staring moist-eyed at the papers she’d been reading.

‘So many other women forced to kill their babies,’ she whispered.

‘This can’t go on,’ Stanton said firmly. ‘The twentieth century can’t spin in time for ever, a howl of pain ringing across the universe into eternity. Same century following same century, a planet and a race lost in loop, destined to suffer alternative versions of the same nightmare for ever.’

‘No,’ Katie said quietly, tears glistening on her cheeks now. ‘It can’t go on.’

‘So, after we’ve killed Rosa Luxemburg,’ Stanton went on, ‘and done what best we can to give this new century a chance, we have to go to Cambridge.’

‘Yes,’ Katie said, ‘and destroy Newton’s box. There can be no more Chronations. I must be the last.’