A Tale of Time City (2 page)

Diana Wynne Jones knows how to tell a story. That sounds so simple: “knows how to tell a story.” Maybe it is simple, but it is rare—very rare. Like the gift of music, storytelling is a great gift, and a mysterious one. When you find a writer who has that gift, remember their name. If they told one good story,  their other stories may be as good if not better. This is certainly true of Diana Wynne Jones.  I think she could have written a story about grass growing, or what sheep think when they’re lying around chewing, or what it’s like to be a rock, and that story would be just like what the blurbs on book covers say:
Riveting! Gut-wrenching action! A page-turner! You can’t put it down!

But fantasy stories are a special kind, and they take a special gift. First of all, of course, fantasy takes imagination, but to make a daydream into a story takes a kind of intelligent truthfulness that is, again, quite rare.

A fantasy story doesn’t stick to “the facts” (whatever they are) because not sticking to fact is what makes it a fantasy, okay? So what do I mean by saying it takes truthfulness? Well, in the first place, it has to stick to the “facts” that it makes up. Fantasy invents a world—and then it has to live in that world. It makes up the rules of its world, but it can’t change them. When a writer changes the rules of a fantasy in the middle of it, the story begins to fall apart right there. Things stop making sense. The readers don’t know where they are anymore. It all gets boring and frustrating, exactly the way a game gets boring and frustrating when the players cheat by changing the rules.

Diana Wynne Jones invents brilliant rules for her brilliant invented worlds full of realistic impossible marvels—and she never, ever cheats on them.

And there’s another kind of truthfulness every storyteller needs, which is moral honesty. It seems that, because the writer gets to make up the rules, all the rules in a fantasy can be different from the rules in our world. And many of them, maybe most of them, can. For instance, our world has a rule, which scientists can explain: people with arms can’t have wings. In a fantasy, however, angels can and do fly around all over the place. The Either-Arms-or-Wings rule doesn’t apply to our imagination. But there are some rules that seem to apply in both the Real and the Imaginary worlds. These are the rules or laws of human nature, and right, and wrong.

A selfish twit is a selfish twit in London, Delhi, Cincinnati, Wonderland, Oz, or Hobbiton. Kindness is kindness, cruelty is cruelty, on our ordinary earth and across the misty boundaries of Elfland. These things do not change.

Some fantasy stories try to change the moral rules. They try to make us believe that one kind of person is by nature ugly, mean, inferior (and has crooked yellow teeth), while another kind of person is nice and brave and righteous (and has perfect white teeth). The bad-teeth ones are the Bad Guys. They lose the War Between Good and Evil. The other ones are the Good Guys and they win it, usually by killing all the bad ones in the cruelest and bloodiest imaginable way.

Diana Wynne Jones doesn’t try to fool us or cheat us with that kind of babyish wish-fulfillment. There are villains in Time City, indeed there are—but you can’t tell them by their teeth. In fact,
they’re quite nice, good-looking people. And there are plenty of good guys, but the good guys are very mixed up about what’s the right thing to do and how and when to do it. They do stupid things and make endless mistakes. In other words, the people in her story act like real people. In her most fantastic imaginations, this author follows the great laws of reality. She is a completely honest and truthful fantasy writer. You can trust her all the way.

Now, enjoy the story!

Ursula K. Le Guin

P.S. I forgot to say how funny this book is.

T
he train journey was horrible. There was a heatwave that September in 1939, and the railway authorities had fastened all the windows shut so that none of the children packed on to the train could fall out. There were several hundred of them and nearly all of them screamed when they saw a cow. They were all being sent away from London from the bombing and most of them had no idea where milk came from. Each child carried a square brown gas mask box. All of them had a label with their name and address on it, and the littlest ones (who cried and wet themselves rather often) had the label tied round their necks with string.

Vivian, being one of the bigger ones, had her label tied to the string bag Mum had found to take the things that refused to fit into her suitcase. That meant that Vivian did not dare let go of the string bag. When your surname is Smith, you need to make very sure everyone knows just which Smith you are. Vivian had carefully written Cousin Marty’s name and address on the back of the label, to show that she was not just being sent into the country, like most
of the children, to be taken in by anyone who would have her. Cousin Marty, after a long delay, had promised to meet the train and have Vivian to stay with her until the danger of bombs was over. But Vivian had never met Cousin Marty and she was terrified that they would somehow miss each other. So she hung on to the string bag until its handles were wet with sweat and the plaited pattern was stamped in red on her hands.

Half of the children never stayed still for a moment. Sometimes the carriage where Vivian was filled with small boys in grey shorts, whose skinny legs were in thick grey socks and whose heads, each in a grey school cap, seemed too big for their bare, skinny necks. Sometimes a mob of little girls in dresses too long for them crowded in from the corridor. All of them screamed. There were always about three labels saying
Smith
on each fresh crowd. Vivian sat where she was and worried that Cousin Marty would meet the wrong Smith, or meet the wrong train, or that she herself would mistake someone else for Cousin Marty, or get adopted by someone who thought she had nowhere to go. She was afraid she would get out at the wrong station, or find out that the train had taken her to Scotland instead of the West of England. Or she would get out but Cousin Marty would not be there.

Mum had packed some sandwiches in the string bag, but none of the other evacuees seemed to have any food. Vivian did not quite like to eat when she was the only one, and there were too many children for her to share with. Nor did she dare take off her school coat and hat for fear they got lost. The floor of the train was soon littered with lost coats and caps—and some labels—and there was even a lost, squashed gas mask. So Vivian sat and sweltered and
worried. By the time the train chuffed its crowded hot fighting screaming crying laughing way into the station at last, it was early evening and Vivian had thought of every single thing that could possibly go wrong except the one that actually did.

The name of the station was painted out to confuse the enemy, but porters undid the doors, letting in gusts of cool air and shouting in deep country voices. “All get out here! The train stops here!”

The screaming stopped. All the children were stunned to find they had arrived in a real new place. Hesitantly at first, then crowding one another’s heels, they scrambled down.

Vivian was among the last to get off. Her suitcase stuck in the strings of the luggage rack and she had to climb on the seat to get it down. With her gas mask giving her square, jumbling bangs and her hands full of suitcase and string bag, she went down on to the platform with a flump, shivering in the cool air. It was all strange. She could see yellow fields beyond the station buildings. The wind smelt of cow dung and chaff.

There was a long muddled crowd of adults up at the other end of the platform. The porters and some people with official arm bands were trying to line the children up in front of them and get them shared out to foster homes. Vivian heard shouts of “Mrs. Miller, you can take two. One for you, Mr. Parker. Oh, you’re brother and sister, are you? Mr. Parker, can you take two?”

I’d better not get mixed up in that, Vivian thought. That was one worry she could avoid. She hung back in the middle of the platform, hoping Cousin Marty would realise. But none of the waiting crowd looked at her. “I’m not having all the dirty ones!” someone was saying, and this seemed to be taking everyone’s attention.
“Give me two clean and I’ll take two dirty to make four. Otherwise I’m leaving.”

Vivian began to suspect that her worry about her Cousin Marty not being there was going to be the right one. She pressed her mouth against her teeth in order not to cry—or not to cry
yet
.

A hand reached round Vivian and spread out the label on the string bag. “
Ah
!” said someone. “Vivian Smith!”

Vivian whirled round. She found herself facing a lordly-looking dark boy in glasses. He was taller than she was and old enough to wear long trousers, which meant he must be at least a year older than she was. He smiled at her, which made his eyes under his glasses fold in a funny way along the eyelids. “Vivian Smith,” he said, “you may not realise this, but I am your long-lost cousin.”

Well, Vivian thought, I suppose Marty
is
a boy’s name. “Are you sure?” she said. “Cousin Marty?”

“No, my name’s Jonathan Walker,” said the boy. “Jonathan
Lee
Walker.”

The way he put in that
Lee
made it clear he was very proud of it for some reason. But Vivian knew there was something peculiar about this boy, something not as it should be that she could not pin down, and she was far too worried to wonder about his name. “It’s a mistake!” she said frantically. “I was supposed to meet Cousin Marty!”

“Cousin Marty’s waiting, outside,” Jonathan Lee Walker said soothingly. “Let me take your bag.” He put out his hand. Vivian snatched the string bag out of his way and he picked up her suitcase from the platform instead and marched away with it across the station.

Vivian hurried after him, with her gas mask banging at her back, to rescue her suitcase. He strode straight to the Waiting Room and opened the door. “Where are you going?” Vivian panted.

“Short cut, my dear V.S.,” he said, holding the door open with a soothing smile.

“Give me my suitcase!” Vivian said, grabbing for it. Now she was sure he was a robber. But as soon as she was through the door, Jonathan Lee Walker went galloping noisily across the bare boards of the little room towards the blank back wall.

“Bring us back, Sam!” he shouted, so that the room rang. Vivian decided he was mad, and grabbed for her suitcase again. And suddenly everything turned silvery.

“Where is this?” Vivian said. They were crowding one another in a narrow silvery space like a very smooth telephone booth. Vivian turned desperately to get out again and knocked a piece of what seemed to be the telephone off the wall. Jonathan whirled round like lightning and slammed the piece back. Vivian felt her gas mask dig into him and hoped it hurt. There was nothing but a bare silvery wall behind her.

In front of Jonathan, the smooth silvery surface slid away sideways. A small boy with longish nearly red hair looked anxiously in at them. When he saw Vivian, his face relaxed into a fierce grin with two large teeth in it. “You got her!” he said, and he took what may have been an earphone out of his left ear. It was not much bigger than a pea, but it had a silvery wire connecting it to the side of the silver booth, so Vivian supposed it
was
an earphone. “This works,” he said, coiling the wire into one rather plump hand. “I heard you easily.”

“And I got her, Sam!” Jonathan answered jubilantly, stepping
out of the silver booth. “I recognised her and I got her, right from under their noses!”

“Great!” said the small boy. He said to Vivian, “And now we’re going to torture you until you tell us what we want to know!”

Vivian stood in the booth, clutching her string bag, staring at him with a mixture of dislike and amazement. Sam was the sort of small boy Mum called “rough”—the kind with a loud voice and heavy shoes whose shoelaces were always undone. Her eyes went to his shoes—such shoes!—puffy white footgear with red dots. Sure enough, one of the red and white ties of those shoes was trailing on the marble floor. Above that, Sam seemed to be wearing pyjamas. That was the only way Vivian could describe his baggy all-over suit with its one red stripe from his right shoulder to his left ankle. The red clashed with his hair, to Vivian’s mind, and she had never seen a boy so much in need of a haircut.

“I told you, Sam,” Jonathan said, dumping Vivian’s suitcase on a low table Vivian could dimly see behind Sam, “that it’s no good thinking of torture. She probably knows enough to torture us instead. We’re going to try gentle persuasion. Do please come out of the booth, V.S., and take a seat while I get out of this disguise.”

Vivian took another look at the blank, shiny back wall of the booth. Since there seemed no way out that way, she went forward. Sam backed away from her looking just a mite scared, and that made her feel better, until the door of the booth slid shut behind her with a quiet hushing sound and cut out most of the light in the room beyond. It seemed to be night out there, which was probably what had given her the idea that Sam was running around in pyjamas.
What dim light there was came from some kind of streetlights shining through a peculiar-shaped window, but there was enough of it for Vivian to see she was in some kind of ultra-modern office. There was a vast half-circle of desk at the far end, surrounded by things that reminded Vivian of a telephone-exchange. But the odd thing was that the desk, instead of being of steel or chromium as she would have expected a modern desk to be, was made of beautifully carved wood that looked very old and gave off silky reflections in the low bluish light. Vivian looked at it doubtfully as she sat in an odd-shaped chair near the booth. And she nearly leaped straight up again when the chair moved around her, settling into the same shape that she was.

But Jonathan started tearing off his clothes then, right in front of her. Vivian sat stiffly in the form-fitting chair wondering if she was mad, or if Jonathan was, or if she ought to look away, or what. He flung off his grey flannel jacket first. Then he undid his striped tie and threw that down. Then—Vivian’s face turned half away sideways—he climbed out of his long grey flannel trousers. But it was all right. Underneath, Jonathan was wearing the same kind of suit as Sam, except that his had dark-coloured diamonds down the legs and sleeves.