CHAPTER EIGHT

 

 

THERE FOLLOWS A fairly eventful week of attempted homicide. Zoe proves remarkably adept at this, which makes me wonder just what nasty little backrooms her utopia harbours. I send prehistoric monsters and she domesticates them. She re-wires my robot assassins, fouls the targeting of my drones, disarms my traps and avoids stepping on my landmines. When I drop a Buick on her camp from low orbit, she gets out just before the impact. And she doesn’t even touch the tempting but lethally poisonous picnic basket I leave out in a tranquil glade for her to find.

And in between trying to exterminate her, I’m having to do quite a bit of dodging myself. There are venomous spiders in my shoes when I get up in the morning and speckled serpents in my bed when I put my head down at night. When I take a tour of the fields, a couple of the agricultural robots do their level best to decapitate me with their threshing attachments. The next day, I feel the Soviet Speedster isn’t running quite right and find that’s because of a bomb wired to the rev counter. The only thing that saves me is that Zoe’s set it to explode once I reach a certain speed which this particular Son of Communism has never really approached. When I stand up after disarming the device, a stray shot from a long-distance rifle puts a hole in my straw hat. Life on the farm is getting really quite bracing.

That night, I take stock. Zoe is out there somewhere, probably engaged in similar strategising. She has, to date, not managed to kill me, but in the minus column of the ledger she remains aggravatingly un-killed in turn. I feel the match between us remains at a solid no-score draw so far, but given that it’s only best of one, that doesn’t help either of us.

And I’ve been murdering errant time travellers for quite a while, not to mention my wartime career of state- or faction-sanctioned mass murder before that—and indeed the genocide of entire timelines every time I swatted an insect I wasn’t supposed to. Zoe, on the other hand, has turned out to be an extremely gifted amateur who’s in serious danger of challenging me for the end-times all-comer murder trophy.

And I am surprised to find that I feel relatively chill about it. Not that I’m exactly cheering her on, but at least the worst that can happen is still better than the way things are going to go if we don’t murder each other. Which is to say, even if I slip up and she gets me, that still means that Smantha and Weldon’s precious Utopia doesn’t happen. My ultimate sacrifice will actually mean something (technically it will mean the absence of something, but that’s still more meaning than anything in the war).

Eventually, though, I admit to myself that I need help. I’ve been the proverbial lone wolf for a long time. I am, after all, the sole survivor of humanity to make it to the end times, the one living veteran of the Causality War. Fixing things with my own hands has been a long-held habit, because when you’re constantly rearranging the sequence of events from the Cretaceous on up, you can never be sure that any other pair of helping hands won’t spontaneously have never existed.

So, I get my time machine, remove the explosive device Zoe has taped to it, and go on a bit of a recruiting drive.

I am, I may as well admit, not a very good person. I am a bad person, in fact. But I feel that the task of preserving the future of time requires a bad person who won’t shrink from doing bad things.

And, if there’s one thing that the various bits and pieces of history have in abundance, it’s bad people, so I draw up a shopping list and go to scoop up some real stinkers. I am putting together a hit squad of the very worst that time has to offer, and Zoe is going to get the nastiest kind of applied history lesson when I get back with the troops.

It’s quite the whirlwind tour of depravity, believe you me, but I reckon one thing I have over Zoe is that I know the shattered map of time better than she does. I know where to go to get my hands dirty. I know, in most cases, multiple versions of some bad, bad people and I can pick the very least pleasant iteration of them, the broken finger of causality where they were the worst they could ever be. That said, I am rushing it a bit, because I really, really can’t wait to get back to the farm with my posse and see the look on my poor intended’s face. So some of my choices are maybe a little suboptimal.

I go and get Edward Teach, or Blackbeard, to you, because he’s big and scary, even though he was maybe a bit better at making people scared of him than actually doing scary things—a lot of being a pirate is in psyching out the opposition—and he turns out to be dead drunk on rum when I talk him into the trip, and he never really sobers up after. I schmooze Elizabeth Bathory by promising her a bathtub of Zoe’s blood and that time travel can keep her young (which may well be true, who knows?). I offer Ashurbanipal of Assyria conquests beyond the dreams of an Iron Age tyrant. I throw Gilles Garnier, so-called Werewolf of Dole, a bone and offer La Quintrala a map to El Dorado for when she gets back. After this I look over my troops and reckon I’m a bit short of actual muscle, given how sodden Blackbeard is. So I change tack and go grab the meanest Richard Cœur de Leon I can lay my hands on because, despite the glowing report history gives of him, he really is a self-centred arrogant bastard, but at the same time he can swing a dirty great sword with the best of them. Inspired by that idea, I also go find Achilles and offer him a threesome with any two Patrocles he fancies if he can just rid me of my little prenuptial problem. And, yes, Achilles qua Homer isn’t exactly historical, but one of my time-war colleagues did their level best to make the Trojan War happen and so I have a few heroic oddballs in my back pocket. After that I go to gay Paris—the city, not the Homeric character—and tell Robespierre about the glitzy Utopia, which all sounds distressingly aristo to him, and so he rounds up a band of sock-hatted revolutionaries and heads into the future with me. And Stalin; I go grab Stalin because who doesn’t want Stalin? That done, we all assemble at the farm, and I stand on a box with Miffly beside me and give them their marching orders. We are going hunting, lads and lasses!

By that time, my drones have located her again, and usually that’s a bad sign because she tends to reveal herself only when she has something planned. Right now I reckon the something I have planned is going to knock the socks off whatever sad menagerie of Pleistocene predators or booby traps she’s thrown together, though, and so off we go to meet her. I am very, very keen to see the look on Zoe’s face when she sees all the work I’ve put into this. I want her to be impressed with the sheer lengths of murderous unpleasantness I’ve gone to for her sake. I mean, you expect a bit of gratitude, when you make this sort of effort.

We draw up, me on the Speedster and my lynch mob riding a variety of horses, motorcycles, giant mutant dogs, robot beetles and whatever else I had in the stable. And there’s Zoe.

She isn’t alone.

I feel a keen stab of disappointment. I thought I’d been so clever! I thought I’d surprise her. I wanted to see her reaction. “For me?” she’d cry, before being hacked to pieces by my pack of murderers.

Only she’s been busy, too. She’s obviously got past all the barriers I placed around her time machine, or else nicked one of the others from my warehouse. She’s plainly taken the time to get familiar with the shattered expanse of history. She’s done exactly what I’ve done. She’s gone to find some help.

I suppose I should be flattered.

I see Gilles de Rais down there, a Bluebeard to counter my Blackbeard. There’s the demented sorcerer Peter Niers, and Duke William of Normandy, already eyeing up that crown Richard Lionheart’s wearing and fancying the look of it. I see Black Agnes Douglas and half the clan of the cannibal Sawney Beans, and you’d be a brave man to sample the breakfast they’ve been cooking up for Zoe’s troops. She’s got Attila the Hun and Vlad the Impaler, apparently engaged in a furious argument over the most pointlessly extravagant way to execute your enemy after they’ve surrendered to you. I count three different Jack the Rippers, plus Ching Shih and a dozen of her eighty thousand pirates. Plus a rather baffled-looking Tomas de Torquemada, because even the Spanish Inquisition didn’t expect this.

She’s got Hitler. She actually went full Godwin and got Hitler. And Stalin. A slightly younger Stalin than my Stalin. She got Hitler and Stalin.

Our armies of utter bastards face off against each other, edging closer and closer. As general, I go take my position on a rise to overlook the battle. After a short while Zoe joins me. We maintain a prudent arm’s length distance between us, but honestly we’re both more focused on what’s about to kick off down below than on cutting each other’s throats right then.

“Stalin and Hitler is cheating,” I say.

“I don’t see why. Achilles is cheating, he never even existed.”

“Says the woman with three Jack the Rippers.”

“Eh.” She shrugs. “You go to get a Jack the Ripper and he turns out to be some effete aristocrat who only really has the guts to butcher helpless women. So you go to a different shard and find another version, and he’s even worse and… before you know it you’re up to your neck in Rippers and they’re all a bit crap, really.”

The fight’s begun, by then. It is…

Strangely hilarious. Because none of them really know how to fight each other. Most of them are actually not as terrifying as their reputation, or else they earned that reputation by dint of armies they don’t currently have access to. Gilles de Rais and Edward Teach are just tugging on each other’s beards and roaring. The Stalins get into a knock-down drag-out wrestling match. Robespierre turns out to faint at the sight of blood when it isn’t blue. Torquemada gets eaten by the Beans, and he was nominally on their side. And that’s a further flaw with our skirmish, because neither of us really did the requisite team-building exercises, and so most of our murderers forget just who’s with them and who’s the enemy. The entire thing breaks down into an every-murderer-for-themselves skirmish in a muddy field.

Oh, there are some highlights. Ching Shih takes on Achilles blade-to-blade and kicks his ahistorical arse. William impales Richard’s heart at the same time as Richard cuts off William’s conk. Zoe and I applaud politely, like we’re at the cricket. We point out particularly deft flourishes to each other. Elizabeth Bathory stabs up Vlad the Impaler, possibly because her idiot husband styled himself on the man and she’s been wanting to do that for ages. The Rippers get into a fight with each other over which of them is the Rippest. Ashurbanipal, without an Empire to back him up, gets his Assyria handed to him by one of the Stalins, who then goes down to Ching Shih, strongly in the running for Most Valued Player right up until she reaches the semis and falls to a mutual fatal stabbing against La Quintrala.

It is perhaps the most entertaining thing I’ve seen since before the war. Zoe and I may between us have invented the best reality TV format known to mankind.

In the end there is only one of them left, and wouldn’t you know it, it’s Hitler. Basically because he’s been hiding in a bunker all this time. He pokes his head up, and I set Miffly on him. Zoe and I have a fine old hoot watching Hitler get chased round and round a field by an allosaur. It’s very therapeutic. And the thing about allosaurs is they can run really quite fast, and the thing about Hitlers is that they can’t, not really, or not for very long.

As Miffly tucks in, I’m still snickering about the whole wretched show of it. So is Zoe.

“We should do this again some time,” I suggest.

“There are always more Hitlers,” she agrees.

There is an awkward pause.

“This isn’t what I thought you’d be like,” she says, eventually, warily, still that distance between us that I’m more than happy with. “The Founder. Grandfather. I mean, aside from the overtones of incest in the whole thing. I thought you were going to be, you know, nice.”

“Well, when I saw you, I assumed you’d be just another Smantha, all that gushing sincerity. I thought you’d be desperate to make sure your own society arose.”

“I thought you’d just be desperate to get your end away, frankly,” she says, with some disgust. “Living out here at the end of time, last man on the desert island of history. The way they teach it where I come from, you’ve got blue balls the size of Mercury before the Bride of the Founder comes along. And of course I didn’t know that was going to be me when I was growing up, but I still thought it was gross. Everyone else thought it was ‘romantic.’”

“Not if you were the last woman on Earth,” I tell her, heartfelt. “And even if I was that desperate, one look at the place you come from would prompt me to a vow of celibacy. Besides, I know plenty of places to go for a good time. The whole of history’s my brothel.”

“Huh. They don’t teach that bit at school,” she admits. “So…” A philosophical pause where she rewrites the textbooks in her head. “I guess we go back to killing each other now?”

“We could do.” I don’t feel terribly keen on it, to be honest. You know how it is, you’ve tried all the positions, gone through all the kinks and quirks to try and keep things fresh. Eventually you just get jaded, though. I could keep trying to kill her for the rest of time, but I’d just be repeating myself.

She rubs at her chin. “We could, you know, take it as read that that’s what we’re doing.” She looks over the field. “Assume, as a baseline, that you’re doing your best to kill me and I’m doing my best to kill you. So we’re cancelling each other out. Only, it’s honestly taking up a lot of my time that I’d be happy to free up for other things.”

“I need to get the harvest in,” I agree. “Or at least nominally oversee the robots. It’s difficult, what with constantly having to spend time trying to kill you. And avoiding being killed. It becomes a bit of a chore, eventually.”

“Truce?”

“Truce,” I agree. “Although obviously with no promises or anything. I am, after all, a very bad person and may turn on you at any moment.”

“Ditto and likewise.”

We relax a bit. Miffly lopes over, panting, and we take turns scratching her under the chin.