A Tale of Time City (17 page)

“You mean, as if all the tourists came screaming up the River Time to kill people in the City?” a small girl asked, rather upset.

While Vivian was trying to decide if it
was
like that, Jonathan pushed through the crowd and said loudly in her ear, “Message for you. It’s on your belt.”

“Where? How?” said Vivian.

“Press that stud there,” everyone said helpfully.

Vivian did so, and green writing appeared on the table in front of her:

Under that was a second message:

“Is it true?” she asked Jonathan. “Not a joke?” She just could not imagine anyone so large and so learned as Dr. Wilander even remembering she existed, let alone wanting to teach her.

Jonathan pressed a stud on his belt. Another message appeared beside Vivian’s:

“He sounds angry,” someone said.

“He mostly is,” said Jonathan. At which a number of people remarked fervently that they would rather have Bilious Enkian for a tutor. Vivian gathered from what they said that everyone went to a special tutor as soon as they were ten years old. Dr. Wilander was considered one of the worst. “Yes, but we’ve got to go or we really will get eaten,” Jonathan said.

They left Duration at 12.36 by Vivian’s belt clock. Jonathan was still thinking about the dancing time-ghost. “You know, that was all wrong for a real time-ghost,” he said as they pushed through a glass door at the side of Duration. “They don’t make a sound usually. I bet it was one of the students having a joke.”

“What—even Faber John’s Stone breaking up like that?” said Vivian.

“Some centuries can do wonders with holograms,” Jonathan answered. Since Vivian had never heard of holograms, she was none the wiser. “If I see any students I know, I’ll ask,” Jonathan said.

Outside, as Vivian’s belt had predicted, the rain was over. Sun was sparkling on wet grass between the tall block of Duration and the airy arched building that was Continuum. Since the grass was still damp, the students who had come out to sit in the sun were mostly perched on the various statues that stood about on the grass. The air rumbled with their lazy talk. They all looked alarmingly grown-up to Vivian.

“I greet you, Jonathan,” called a young man in a black velvet smock, who was sitting on one of the knees of a statue like a large Buddha with a lion’s head.

The girl in a gauzy robe who was sitting on the statue’s other knee smiled and said, “Hallo, young Jonathan.”

Jonathan stopped. “Hallo,” he said. “Do either of you know about that time-ghost that interrupted the ceremony this morning?”

“We wish we did!” they both said together. This attracted the attention of a row of students sitting along a statue of a sleeping man nearby. “So do we!” they all called out. A young man in a little white kilt who was sitting on the statue’s head said, “I’m offering a year’s beer money to that joker if he can come up with tri-dees of the whole caper. I want to see the look on Enkian’s face!”

“Close up,” said the girl in gauze.

“No reward is high enough,” said the man in the kilt.

“Enkian’s raging about, offering to expel the one that did it,”
explained the young man in black velvet. “So of course he’s not going to find out.”

“Which means we’re
all
dying of frustration,” added the girl in gauze. “
You
don’t know anything do you, Jonathan?”

“I’ll reward you too,” said the man in the kilt.

“Sorry, no,” Jonathan said. “I was hoping
you
did.”

He started to walk on, but the young man in the kilt called him back. “Seriously,” he said, laughing. “If you can give me an eye-witness account, I’ll do anything you want in return.”

Jonathan laughed too. “Later,” he said. “We have to get to Dr. Wilander.” They went on, up some steps and into a long arched corridor. “It was obviously somebody having a joke with a hologram,” he said to Vivian. “This is Continuum, by the way. We have to go right through and into Perpetuum—that’s the main library. Wilander lives in a den right at the top. They say he only comes out to quarrel with Enkian.”

Perpetuum was huge, and very strangely shaped. The open entry facing them beyond Continuum was made of granite blocks and it had five sides. Of course, Vivian thought, if you imagined an ordinary doorway with a pointed arch at the top, that would have five sides too, but the two sides making the point would be shorter. In this entry, all five sides were the same length and it looked lopsided. Above and beyond it, she could see the same five-sided shape repeated over and over again, in a vast honeycomb, all combined together into a huge half-toppled-looking five-sided building. There were old eroded letters carved along the uppermost side of the portal, picked out faintly in gold: MONUMENTS MORE LASTING THAN BRASS.

“That means books,” Jonathan said. “Press your low-weight stud. There are thousands of stairs.”

There were indeed thousands of stairs. Shallow and made of granite, they climbed left, then right, then left again, past more five-sided entries labelled DANTEUM, SHAKESPEAREUM, ORPHEUM and other names that meant nothing to Vivian. At each archway, other flights of steps led off in four different directions. It was like climbing a maze. Jonathan told Vivian that the sharp, electric smell that hung round each five-sided archway was the smell of the millions of book-cubes stored in each section. It seemed that there were not many real books in Perpetuum. But shortly, even with the low-weight-function turned on, they did not have breath for talking and just climbed. By the time they reached an archway called CONFUCIUM, Vivian had realised that Time City was appearing around them at all sorts of strange angles. At CONFUCIUM, she saw the Gnomon tower in the distance sticking out sideways from under her feet and tried not to look. The stairs felt as if they were right way up, even if they were not.

Finally, at an entry named HERODOTIUM, Time City came the right way up but slanting, quite a long way beneath them. Jonathan turned into HERODOTIUM, to Vivian’s relief. It was rather dark inside and smelt strongly of wood. The five-sided corridor was carved from the same kind of silky wood as Sam’s father’s desk. Vivian glimpsed grass-shapes and people-shapes as Jonathan hurried her along.

“They say Faber John got the man who carved Solomon’s Temple to do this,” he told her breathlessly. Vivian did not think he
was joking. He was too much out of breath. “Turn off your low-weight-function. It’ll need to recharge.”

At the very end of the corridor a flight of wooden steps led to the last five-sided portal. SELDOM END, Vivian read, as Jonathan knocked on the silky wooden door.

The door sprang open on light that was warm and orange because of the wood. “You’re nearly a minute late,” growled Dr. Wilander.

He was sitting at a wooden desk under the window in the sloping roof of the room. All the straight walls were filled with shelves of real books. Thousands of little square things that were probably book-cubes were clamped to the ceiling. Piles of papers and books filled most of the floor. Dr. Wilander was smoking a pipe and wearing a shaggy brown jacket that made him look more like a bear than ever. He looked completely comfortable, like a bear resting in its den after a feast of honey.

“You sit there,” he grunted at Vivian, pointing his pipe at a small real-wood table. “What do you see in front of you?”

“Er—” said Vivian, wondering what he wanted her to say. “This looks like a chart. And there’s a list and a piece of paper covered in shiny stuff and a sheet for writing on. And a table underneath of course. Do you want me to say the chair too?”

Jonathan snorted as he sat at a small table in front of Dr. Wilander’s desk, and stuffed the end of his pigtail into his mouth.

“That will do,” Dr. Wilander growled. “I intend giving you a crash-course in history and Universal Symbols, my girl. You’re a Lee. Yet your aunt and your teacher tell me you’re completely ignorant.
It won’t do. The chart is a map of history from the start of man to the Depopulation of Earth. Learn it. The list is a glossary of Universal Symbols, and the paper is one of the very first pieces of writing in those Symbols. That is why it is covered in energised plastic—it is extremely valuable. Make me a translation of that writing. In short, use your brain for once in your life. I’ll test you on both things when I’ve done with Jonathan.”

It was clear that everyone thought that the real Vivian Lee was very bright indeed. Vivian had no choice but to sit down and try to be brainy too. She picked up the chart. It was almost circular—horseshoe-shaped really—so that the end on the left marked
Stone Age
nearly met the end on the right marked
Depopulation
. Along it were lines marked in thousands of years. The parts that were white except for the lines were marked
Fixed Era
. The parts coloured grey were labelled
Unstable Era
. Very few other things were marked in the grey parts, but the curved stretches of white were a mass of writing and dates. Vivian’s eyes scudded over them in horror. World War Four… Conquest of Australia… Mind Wars… Icelandic Empire Begins… The Waigongi Atrocity… Primacy of Easter Island Ends… Revolt of Canada… Fuegan Economic Unity… The Sinking of the Holy Fleet… The Demise of Europe… And these were only some of the things in large print! Vivian gave the chart another desperate stare and turned to the valuable paper. It looked easier.

Meanwhile Dr. Wilander was growling questions at Jonathan and Jonathan was answering after long pauses filled with a faint crunching-noise. The crunching was Jonathan chewing his pigtail, which he did whenever he was stuck. It must end up quite wet!
Vivian thought, as she got down to translating. This was nothing like as easy as she had hoped. Universal Symbols did not exactly stand for letters, nor for whole words either. You had to fit the things the Symbols
might
stand for together, and then try to make sense of them. Vivian’s brain began to complain that it had never worked so hard in its life. Every so often it went on strike and she had to wait for it to start working again, while she watched Dr. Wilander plucking down book-cubes, slapping open real books and growling at Jonathan.

“Don’t be a fool, boy!” she heard him growl. “You’re like everyone else in Time City. You think the only real history is outside in time. Nobody bothers to keep a record of what goes on in the City, but of course it’s got a history, just like everywhere else.”

Dr. Wilander had obviously said this many times before. Jonathan bit his pigtail in order not to yawn. Vivian went back to her Symbols. When her brain gave out next, Dr. Wilander was grunting, “Time Lady, Time Lady! That’s just what I’m complaining of. All we’ve got in this City is legends like that instead of history. It’s a disgrace. You can hardly find out something that happened a hundred years ago, let alone whether creatures like your Time Lady really existed or not.”

“But
someone
was coming up through Twenty Century making a wave of chaos, weren’t they?” Jonathan said, twisting the damp end of his pigtail. He was so obviously trying to pump Dr. Wilander about the boy on the Tor that Vivian turned off her pen and held the chart in front of her face in order to listen.

“Undoubtedly,” grunted Dr. Wilander. “Keep to the subject. What came out of the Second Unstable Era?”

“A great deal more science,” said Jonathan. “How would a person like that time-travel?”

“How should I know?” Dr. Wilander snarled. “Now put that together with what you know of the Icelandic Empire and see if you can explain its decline.”

“They relied on the science too much,” said Jonathan. “But what would someone be time-travelling through Twenty Century
for
?”

“To get out of a vile era as quickly as possible, I should think,” Dr. Wilander said. “Tell me how they relied on science too much.”

Jonathan’s teeth clamped round the end of his pigtail again. He was getting nowhere with Dr. Wilander. Vivian sighed and turned her pen on. It seemed only a short time later that Dr. Wilander was barking at her, “Well? Have you learnt that chart yet, or haven’t you?”

“I—er—no,” Vivian said.

“And why not?”

“There’s so
much
!” Vivian said piteously. “History was
short
in the Twentieth—I mean, Twenty Century!”

“Because history was incomplete then,” Dr. Wilander growled. “That’s no excuse.”

“And I don’t understand it. Why is it round?” Vivian pleaded.

“As everyone in Time City knows, except you apparently,” said Dr. Wilander, “it is because historical time is circular. The beginning is the end. Time used by Man goes round and round—in a small circle here in the City, in a very large one out in history. Possibly the whole universe does also. What were your parents thinking of, not telling you that at least? So you haven’t learnt any history. Haven’t you done any translating either?”

“I’ve done some,” Vivian admitted.

“Let’s hear it then.” Dr. Wilander leaned back and lit his pipe with a tap of one huge finger on its bowl, as if he expected to be listening for the next hour or so.

Vivian looked miserably at her few lines of crossed out and rewritten green writing. “One large black smith threw four coffins about,” she read.

Jonathan hurriedly stuffed a doubled-up lump of pigtail into, his mouth. “Oh, did he?” Dr. Wilander said placidly. “To show off his strength, I suppose. Carry on.”

“So that they turned into four very old women,” Vivian read. “One went rusty for smoothing clothes. Two went white in moderately cheap jewellery. Three of them turned yellow and got expensive and another four were dense and low in the tables—”

“So now there were ten coffins,” Dr. Wilander said. “Or maybe ten strange elderly ladies. Some of these were doing the laundry while the rest, pranced about in cheap necklaces. I suppose the yellow ones caught jaundice at the sight, while the stupid ones crawled under the furniture in order not to look. Is there any more of this lively narrative?”