CHAPTER SEVEN

 

 

THIS WILL TEACH me to go gallivanting off on holiday when there’s work to do. I should have tracked down a damn nuke and sent it ahead to the utopians gift-wrapped, with a label saying Don’t open till Founder’s Day. Except that would likely still leave enough bits of their time machine fleet to cause me problems later, or indeed before. I need to make them never-have-been instead, and that’s going to be difficult when my bride-to-be has tracked me down to my lonely old farm and is lurking about on the grounds.

I am going to have to commit pre-uxoricide. It won’t be the worst thing I’ve done. In fact, when you think about it, most of the people I murder haven’t really done anything to me at all, save been incautious in venturing the wrong way across the fourth dimension. When I get hold of the future Mrs Me and feed her to Miffly or run over her with a combine harvester, it will be personal. There will actually be a real and immediate motive. Any court in the land would, if not absolve me of the crime, then at least convict me without needing to take some sort of course in advanced chrono-physics. She’s a trespasser and she’s come to ruin my life by somehow making me happy enough that I settle down with her and found a gloriously twee society of facile wankers like Weldon and Smantha. And if that’s not a good enough reason to seek someone’s death, then I don’t know what is.

I start off trying to do things the old-fashioned way and have Miffly track her down. I get myself up in proper huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ clothes—tweed plus-fours and jacket and flat cap—and I get myself a proper huntin’ and shootin’ shotgun, one with a decent laser sight and homing AI drone bullets, because if you’re going to do a thing, do it properly. I swear, these bullets are so smart that if my intention was to hunt grouse then, the moment after I fired them, the shells would go borrow my time machine, track down the closest common ancestor of all grouse and explode it. Which wouldn’t actually exterminate grouse because of the woefully disjointed state of time, but they’re only bullets, cut them some slack.

And anyway, it’s all for nothing because I don’t so much as catch sight of her. And Miffly’s no damn help. Miffly’s been got at, frankly. She might be several tons of ravaging therapod dinosaur, but the old girl is also just a big softy; feed her and rub her tummy and she’s yours forever. And my security cameras catch several instances of the future Mrs Me turning up while I’m asleep, dodging all my tripwires and alarms, and making a fuss of Miffly. So much for the savage vigilance of my faithful reptilian hound, unfortunately. So much for the old fashioned way—and if hunting someone down with a dinosaur isn’t old fashioned I don’t know what is.

I go to the robotics lab and programme a fleet of drones to find her instead. About a hundred of them, from hand-sized to thumbnail-sized, each of them based on tech from a different epoch, a separate shard of time. There are little helicopters and clockwork birds of brass and gems, steel beetle simulacra and even a thing like a floating jellyfish made of plastic bags. I programme them and wind them up and send them all out to go hunting. And I sit at home with a handful of guns and the keys to my fastest tractor, ready to go after my darling wife-to-be with some large calibre ammo the moment my robot servants track her down.

This also fails. The future Mrs Me is being very coy. In fact, soon enough I find some of my robots hanging about the farmhouse like lazy employees, watching me for her, because apparently she’s a bit of a wiz with the old robots herself and has reprogrammed them. I make sure I give her a really good view of my best unamused face before shutting them off. I’m of a mind to send them back to the factory with a strongly worded complaint, but I think in most cases those factories—and the societies from which they arose—don’t actually exist any more (or have now never existed). Ergo the warranties are probably void.

What I’m getting from this is that the future Mrs Me is a bit nervous of meeting her beloved. I should be hurt, but admittedly I haven’t exactly been hiding my homicidal intent, and so a few nerves on her part are perfectly understandable. It’s a big moment, when you meet the man who’s going to be the love of your life, and having him determined to murder you is only adding to the pressure. I feel a bit sorry for her, to be honest. I mean, I’m not really the Bluebeard type, but I appreciate that first impressions are probably casting me in that light.

Not sorry enough that I’m not going to kill her, though. It’s the whole future of the future at stake, after all. No hard feelings, eh?

But I appreciate the poor innocent is a bit tentative about meeting me, and she’s not just going to turn up on the doorstep wearing a big white dress and veil and lugging around the Bishop of Bath and Wells with a marriage licence. I need to try a different tack.

So I find myself a nice glade. I’ve got some good woodland on the estate. I go hunting in it sometimes, and at other times I just wander and enjoy the facsimile of nature that I’ve induced to grow here, the ecosystems I’ve transplanted and species I’ve saved or re-engineered.

I find a nice big grove: bluebells, oaks, squirrels, all very picturesque. I lug a table out there—it’s a big table, and I’m being very open about it, and doubtless she sees me doing it. I set it up with a couple of chairs. I go sit there, not even clutching my shotgun. Not even accompanied by a high-tech death robot or pack of slavering dimetrodons. Just me, peaceful as you like.

And she stays away, but I sense I’ve got her interest. The next day I turn up with a chess set, just in case she’s in a gaming frame of mind. After that, I try a last generation console with a couple of VR headsets, because frankly I never really liked chess that much. After that it’s a mint-in-box set of Ticket to Ride, the rare Hutchinson Games edition from where Europe split into a thousand different states and the board is an insane mass of intertwining branch lines. She doesn’t fancy that either.

On the eighth day I turn up with a bottle of the good wine and a couple of goblets that I nicked from Henry VIII and sit there like we’re about to play guess-which-is-the-poisoned-one, and perhaps this relatively candid approach is what leads to her emerging from the trees.

She is still wearing the white-and-silvery clothes of the Utopians, which are probably self-cleaning and self-renewing. Her dark hair is cut short. Her face is sharp-chinned—elfin, one might say. If I had a type, then doubtless she’d be exactly my type. As it is, I’m going to kill her so that I can obliterate the entire civilization that produced her, so types don’t really come into it. But now I’ve actually got her here, there’s no reason to be rude. I gesture at the other chair and she approaches cautiously, eyes fixed on me.

I give her my best smile, because we’re in endgame territory now. Tomorrow, after digging the grave, I can get back to business as usual. Honestly, the last few days since I discovered her presence have been really quite stressful.

“I didn’t catch your name, when they showed me the statues,” I say blithely. “I think it was just Mr and Mrs Founder or something.”

She sits and takes the goblet when I slide it over, but she doesn’t drink—and, given how lethally poisonous the contents are, this shows an annoying level of awareness in her.

I think for one horrible moment she’s going to say “Eve,” because that utopia of hers really is so very twee, but in fact she’s called Zoe, and I can’t really find any deep literary resonance in that.

“I understand this must be a bit frightening for you,” I say in what even I realise, after the fact, is a colossally patronising tone. “You must have seen those statues every day. And now I’m here in the flesh.”

I check her face for adulation, awe and/or romantic inclinations, and don’t really find any of the above. Her expression suggests that, in the flesh, I’m not really a match for the sculpture. And admittedly they did idealise my physique a bit, in the memorial, but that’s no excuse for being impolite.

Still, “There you are,” she says at last. “In the flesh.” She toys with her goblet, very careful to not get even a drop of liquid on her skin. She has a pleasant, light voice, but there’s a definite edge to it.

“Look,” I tell her, feeling the sudden need to at least be honest with her before I kill her, “I appreciate this has probably been quite a shock. I’m not the man they set you up for. I am not husband material. I am not for redemption. I don’t have a mad former wife in the attic who will conveniently resolve our narrative differences before shuffling out of the story. I am genuinely mad, bad and dangerous to know, and in at least three versions of events that’s something Lord Byron ends up saying about me. So I’m genuinely sorry that things aren’t working out the way you expected. I’m sure you had all sorts of idealistic dreams about how this day would go, and I appreciate that, what with hunting you across the moors with gun and dinosaur, things haven’t turned out as you expected.”

“Oh, you think?” she says, and apparently somewhere amongst the gems of that utopia is a fine vein of sardonyx.

You know, like ‘sardonic.’ Because she was being…

Look, I am a time warrior and occasional murderer first and foremost. I leave the poetry to Byron.

“It’s a nice set-up you’ve got here,” she tells me. “You’ve got it rigged so anyone travelling from the past ends up on your doorstep. Very clever.”

“Thank you.” It’s nice to be appreciated, even by your victims. Maybe especially by your victims.

“And then you kill them.”

“I do, yes.”

“Huh.” She doesn’t actually sound that impressed, which is irksome.

“It’s more complicated than that. I have to work out where they’ve travelled from, so I can eliminate their ability to travel. Otherwise I’d be knee-deep in people coming to see where their friends had got to. I’m not running a holiday resort here, you know.”

She nods philosophically. “I suppose.”

“Look –” And I’m going to kill her, so why I feel the need to justify myself, I don’t know. “It’s actually quite complicated. I mean, I am basically the only thing standing between the end of all time as we know it.” And I realise after I say it that it doesn’t actually make grammatical sense, and she smirks, which is infuriating. “I was in the war!” I tell her. “You don’t know what it’s like. You young people with your utopias, never having to work for anything. Some of us had to fight for everything we had. Actually, scratch that, some of us had to fight for everything, everything there ever was.”

“Sure,” she says. “How’s that working out for you?”

“Well –” I start, all full of righteous anger, and then have to admit, “Actually everything there ever was kind of ended up completely ruined because of all the fighting we did for it, so not so well, to be frank. But for that very reason I am damn well going to stop it happening again, and that means we can’t be Mr and Mrs Founder, unfortunately. And I’m sure you’re a very nice girl and everything, but I really need to murder you now. Look, can you just drink the wine? It’ll be very quick and painless and save me a great deal of bother.”

“Oh, well if you put it like that…” she says, with more of that sardony.

She looks a bit depressed by all these developments, or at least weary. What with me hunting her, and her sleeping rough, she probably hasn’t had a great deal of rest in the last few days. And she’ll have grown up dreaming of this meeting with me, the grand union of perfect soulmates. And now she’s met me and it’s not what she was led to believe and it’s the story of arranged marriages the world over. And she can’t even go back to her parents and beg them to call it off, because if they call it off then their parents (and so on back through the generations) won’t get to exist.

So it’s understandable if she’s a bit miffed by the whole business, but think about how I feel.

She’s not making any attempt to swig the wine. Maybe I should have done the one of the cups is poisoned, oh, no, which can it be? routine, but I’m also feeling a bit frayed and in no mood for showmanship. And last time I tried that trick, I found myself in urgent need of an antidote because I can never remember whether I’ve switched the goblets or not.

“So…” I say. Because there are awkward social situations and then there’s sitting with your intended spouse who is aware you’re trying to murder her and, simultaneously, prevent her from ever having been born. And I need to go check on the sheep in the top field, so if she could just…

“So,” she says, standing up and kicking the chair back. I blink at her, and then the three hyaenodons come out of the trees behind her, monsters as big as ponies, drooling rabies all over my nice clean glade. They are the most malign animals I ever saw. Their eyes don’t actually glow red like the pits of Hades but they might as well, and if I were to look close enough I reckon even their fleas have eyepatches and carry flick-knives.

Zoe takes a step back and the beasts pad to either side of her, their hungry gaze fixed on me.

I run away.

They give chase.

Today is not working out how I expected, so Zoe and I have that much in common anyway.

The killer robots I had waiting to go annihilate her meet the prehistoric monsters she got hold of to devour me in a kind of cross-time mutually-assured destruction, and I don’t slow down until I’m behind the walls of the farmhouse.

Sitting at my kitchen table, I scratch my head. What, precisely, was that about? I mean, she’s here to perpetuate her society by way of hooking up with me. Now I will freely admit I am not exactly a prize catch when contrasted with the whole run of historical manliness, but right now I’m literally the only game in town. And she very much needs me alive. As such, the prenuptial present of some rabid carnivores is perplexing, to say the least. I feel a great need to quiz her about it, as I sense I’ve missed out on some nuance of the situation that might prove rather important. But it’s also very much the case that my best opportunity to sit down and chat has passed.

After some further hunting not only fails to locate her but also leads to my narrowly avoiding some deadfalls, tripwires and explosive devices she’s set for me, I hit upon the idea of leaving radios about the place, just simple two-way things, so that while I hunt her and she tries to dummy me into traps, we can at least have a dialogue. I would like to understand what’s going on before I kill her—or, I’m forced to concede, before she kills me.

A few more days of cat and mouse go by, with the role of cat being passed back and forth. I nearly get her with a remote-control pterodactyl with a bomb strapped to its head. She comes close with a swarm of disassembling nanobots. We keep each other on our respective toes.

Eventually, the radio I carry with me crackles into life. I’ve endured long enough, and harried her hard enough, that she wants to talk about it.

“Why don’t you just die?” is her opening gambit, and I appreciate her frankness. “You must have lived long enough.”

“I don’t know,” I confess. I’m staked out in a hide, sniper rifle in hands, watching a copse of trees that I reckon she’s probably lurking in. “I’ve been back and forth so much, you lose track. I haven’t aged in a while. I think I broke my biological clock.”

“Boo hoo for you,” she says unsympathetically. “You know you can’t live forever, right? I mean, back where I come from, you’re not around. Just that dumb statue.”

“All the more reason for me to get rid of the place,” I say philosophically. “Speaking of which, why all the hostility, if you please? I mean, you need me. Correct me if I’m wrong, but me remaining alive has got to be the cornerstone of your game plan, right?”

“I’m correcting you,” she tells me. “You’re wrong. Also, that’s a horrible mixed metaphor.” And then the heat-seeking missile crests the horizon and I’m up and running, activating my countermeasures so it ploughs off into the ground half a mile away and ruins my cabbages, damn her. And then I see the stampede of aurochs coming over the hill, because she’s been a bit more belt-and-braces this time. So, in short, there’s quite a lot of running for the next hour or so, and we don’t get to continue the conversation until I’m back at the farmhouse. Miffly’s mooching about outside, already fed, so I know Zoe’s been about. In fact, I find she’s raided the larder and taken the last of the good cheese. And as the timeline that cheese came from has been edited out of existence, that really was the last.

“What,” I demand of the radio, “did I ever do to you? I mean, except repeatedly try and kill you, but you make it sound like it’s personal.”

“You make it sound like you’re such a catch,” she tells me.

“That is very hurtful.” I sigh. “Let me guess, there’s some futuristic hunk back home you had your eye on, and now you’re forced to get together with scruffy farmer me.”

“No,” she says. “There is no ‘hunk,’ thank you very much. It’s just… you make it sound as though I want to kickstart that place.”

“Well, yes,” I agree. “You do. That’s what you’re here for.”

“You think so?”

“I do think so, yes.”

“Well, they thought so as well,” she agrees. “I mean, they all spotted it from when I was about twelve, that I was the spit of the woman they had the statue of. They’d been wondering where that woman came from, and then there I was, and they knew that all they needed to do was make the introductions and hey, presto, they’d make their creation myth a reality, right?” And while she’s speaking I’m programming my hunter-killer drones to home in on her location.

“All my damn life after that, it was founder this and founder that, such an honour here, so lucky-lucky there. And nobody ever asked if I wanted any part of it.”

“Yes, yes,” I say impatiently. “Born in a perfect utopia, everyone fawning on you, chosen one, poor you with your first world problems.”

“I don’t know if you’ve ever lived in a utopia,” she tells me, “but it is tedious as anything. Everyone is so damn nice all the time. Because if you’re not nice, you don’t belong. You get repurposed.”

I prick up my ears. “Oh?”

“They scrub your brain until it’s squeaky clean and then you’re nice like everyone else. I was the only one they couldn’t do it to, because they were worried about interfering with the causality of how they came about. I was the one person who knew that their utopia was rubbish. And the one person they needed to make it happen.”

I have her coordinates now. “That’s nice. So what happens now?”

“That depends. Have you drunk your tea yet?”

I look at the cup. With all this talk and telemetry, it’s gone cold. I decide that making a fresh brew is probably the wise move, rather than bunging this one in the microwave.

The drones are on their way, but I have a feeling she’ll be able to bring them down or even send them back. She’s a resourceful little monster.

“Look,” she says over the radio, “it’s nothing personal, but I’m going to have to kill you. Because I have seen the future, and it’s twee. And I hate them and I’m not going to be their fairy godmother, and the only way I can be absolutely sure they won’t be is with you dead.”

I mull that over. In the distance the sound of my drones being detonated prematurely is like a little Fourth of July.

“I can respect that,” I tell her.

Things just got interesting.