First Among Sequels Read online

  “No reason. Where’s Friday?”

  “In his room. I made him have a shower, so he’s in a bit of a snot.”

  “Plock.”

  “A clean snot is better than a dirty snot I suppose. And Jenny?”

  “Watching TV.”

  I called out, “Hey, Jenny!” but there was no answer.

  “Plock.”

  “She’s upstairs in her room.”

  I looked at the hall clock. We still had a half hour until we had to go to the ChronoGuard’s career-advisory presentation.

  “PLOCK!”

  “Yes, yes, hello, Pickwick—how’s this?”

  I showed her the finished blue-and-white sweater, and before she could even think of complaining, I had slipped it over her featherless body. Landen and I stared at her this way and that, trying to figure out if it was for the better or the worse.

  “It makes her look like something out of the Cornish Blue pottery catalog,” said Landen at last.

  “Or a very large licorice allsort,” I added.

  Pickwick glared at us sullenly, then realized she was a good deal warmer and hopped off the kitchen table and trotted down the corridor to try to look in the mirror, which was unfortunately just too high, so she spent the next half hour jumping up and down trying to catch a glimpse of herself.

  “Hi, Mum,” said Friday, looking vaguely presentable as he walked down the stairs.

  “Hello, Sweetpea,” I said, passing him the CD Polly had given me. “I got this for you. It’s an early release of Hosing the Dolly. Check out the guitar riff on the second track.”

  “Cool,” replied Friday, visibly impressed in a “nothing impresses me” sort of way. “How did you get hold of it?”

  “Oh, you know,” I said offhandedly. “I have friends in the recording industry. I wasn’t always just a boring mum, you know.”

  “Polly gave it to you, didn’t she?”

  I sighed. “Yes. Ready to go?”

  Landen joined us, and he and I moved toward the door. Friday stood where he was.

  “Do I have to?”

  “You promised. And there isn’t another ChronoGuard career-advisory meeting in Swindon for another six months.”

  “I don’t want to work in the time industry.”

  “Listen,” I said, my voice rising as I finally lost patience, “get your lazy butt out the door—okay?”

  He knew better than to argue with angry-determined Mum. Landen knocked on the partition wall, and a minute later our neighbor Mrs. Berko-Boyler was on the doorstep wearing a pink quilted dressing gown, her hair in curlers.

  “Good evening, Mrs. Berko-Boyler,” I said.

  “Is it?” she said with a snarl. “Is it really?”

  “We’ll be about an hour,” explained Landen, who was more skilled at dealing with our volatile yet oddly helpful neighbor.

  “Do you know the last time Mr. Berko-Boyler took me out anywhere?” she asked, scowling at all three of us.

  “I’ve no idea.”

  “Saturday.”

  “Well, that’s not that long ago—”

  “Saturday, October the sixth, 1983,” she said with a contemptuous sniff, and shuffled past us into the living room. “Nineteen years ago. Makes me sick, I tell you. Hello, Tuesday,” she said in a kindlier tone. “Where’s your sister?”

  We walked down to the tram stop in silence. Friday’s lack of interest in the ChronoGuard was a matter not only of annoyance but surprise. The Standard History Eventline had him joining the industry three years ago on their Junior Time Scout program, something that he had failed to do despite our efforts and those of the ChronoGuard, which was as concerned as we were. But we couldn’t force him either—time was the glue of the cosmos and had to be eased apart—push destiny too hard and it had an annoying habit of pushing back. He had to join the ChronoGuard, but it had to be his decision. Every way you looked at it, time was out of joint.

  14.

  The ChronoGuard

  SpecOps-12 is the ChronoGuard, the governmental department dealing with Temporal Stability. Its job is to maintain the integrity of the Standard History Eventline (SHE) and police the time stream against any unauthorized changes or usage. Its most brilliant work is never noticed, as changes in the past always seem to have been that way. Planet-destroying cataclysms generally happen twice a week but are carefully rerouted by skilled ChronoGuard operatives. The citizenry never notices a thing—which is just as well, really.

  T he ChronoGuard had its regional offices in the old SpecOps building where I had worked at SO-27, the Literary Detectives. It was a large, no-nonsense Germanic design that had certainly seen better days. Landen and I walked into what had once been the main debriefing room, Friday shuffling in behind us, hands thrust deeply in his pockets and head nodding to the beat of his Walkman. Of course, this being the ChronoGuard, they already had a list of attendees from the forms we’d filled out at the end of the evening, which seemed to work quite well until a couple with a spotty kid in front of us found they weren’t on the list.

  “Oh, dear,” said the woman at the registration desk in an apologetic tone. “But it seems that you don’t stay until the end of the presentation, so we’ve been unable to include you in the registration process. You’re going to have to come to the next careers presentation in six months’ time.”

  The father of the group scratched his head for a moment, stopped to say something, thought better of it and then departed, arguing with his wife.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Parke-Laine-Next and their son, Friday,” I said to the woman, who blinked for a few seconds, looked at Friday, gave a shy smile and then started to chatter and gush in a most unseemly manner.

  “Mr. Next—Friday—how do you do? I’ve wanted to meet you again for the first time. May I shake you by the hand and congratulate you on—”

  She stopped, realized she was being a bit previous and making a fool of herself, so coughed in an embarrassed manner before smoothing her skirt absently and sitting down again.

  “Sorry. Welcome to the presentation. Here are your badges and your information pack. If you would like to go in, Captain Scintilla will join you soon.”

  We dutifully took our seats, and Friday slouched in a very obvious don’t-give-a-monkey’s manner until I told him to sit up straight, which he didn’t like but sat up nonetheless.

  “What are we doing here?” he asked in a bored voice. “And why the time industry? What about plumbing or something?”

  “Because your grandfather was a time operative.”

  “Yeah,” he grunted, “and look what happened to him.”

  Landen and I exchanged glances. Friday was right. Ending up not having existed wasn’t a terrific end to a promising career.

  “Well!” said a youthful-looking man in the pale blue uniform of the ChronoGuard who up until now had been helping escort the previous group out of the room. “My name is Captain Bendix Scintilla, and I am head of ChronoGuard Recruitment. I’d like to welcome all of you to this ChronoGuard careers presentation and hope that this short talk might go some way toward explaining what it is that we done. Did. Do. Anyhow, my aims are twofold: secondly, to try to demonstrate to the young people here that a career in the time industry is a very exciting prospect indeed and, firstly, to lift the lid on the Temporal Trade and explode a few common myths and misunderstandings. As I’m about to say, did say or would say, my name is Bendix Scintilla, and I was died on March sixteenth, 3291. I’m twenty-three years old in my own personal time, seven hundred and twenty-six in my elapsed work time, and you meet me twenty-seven percent through my life.”

  He smiled, unaware that he was making very little sense. I was used to it, but by the manner in which the rest of the audience members were scratching their heads and looking at one another, they weren’t. Bendix picked up a solid bar of yellow plastic that was about three feet long, two inches wide and domed at either end.

  “Does anyone know what this is?” he asked. There was silence, so he passed
it to the nearest family and told them to pass it on. “Anyone who can guess wins a prize.”

  The first family shrugged and passed it to us. Friday gave it the most cursory of glances, and I passed it on.

  “Yes, sir?” asked Bendix, pointing to a man in the front row who was with his painfully thin wife and a pair of geeky-looking twins.

  “Me?” said the man in a confused voice.

  “Yes. I understand you have a question? Sorry, I should have explained. To save time I thought I’d ask you before you actually raised your hand.”

  “Oh!” said the man, and then he shrugged and said, “I was wondering, since we were told this was the only open day for six months, just who the previous group filing out of the door was—and why were they looking at us in that extremely inquisitive manner?”

  “Why, that was you good people, of course! In order not to keep you from your busy schedules, this meeting actually takes no time at all. The moment you arrived was precisely the time you left, only out the other entrance so you wouldn’t meet yourselves.”

  As soon as he said it, a twitter of understanding and wonderment went through the small group. I’d experienced the ChronoGuard in the past, so these sorts of cheap parlor tricks didn’t impress me, but for many of the people present, to whom time was immutable, it was something new and exciting. Scintilla had been doing this show for many years and knew how to get an audience’s attention.

  “Time is odd,” said Bendix, “very odd. It’s odder than almost anything you can think of. What you consider the usual march of time—effect rather quaintly following cause and so forth—is actually a useful illusion, impressed upon you by rules of physics so very benign that we consider them devised by Something Awfully Friendly indeed; if it weren’t for time, everything would happen at the same instant and existence would become tiresomely frenetic and be over very quickly. But before we get into all that, let’s have a show of hands to see who is actually considering a career in time?”

  Quite a few hands went up, but Friday’s was not among them. I noticed Scintilla staring in our direction as he asked, and he seemed put out by Friday’s intransigence.

  “Yes, miss, you have a question?”

  He pointed to a young girl sitting in the back row with her expensive-looking parents.

  “How did you know I was going to ask a question?”

  “That was your question, wasn’t it?”

  “Um…yes.”

  “Because you’ve already asked it.”

  “I haven’t.”

  “Actually, you have. Everything that makes up what you call the present is in reality the long distant past. The actual present is in what you regard as the far-distant future. All of this happened a long time ago and is recorded in the Standard History Eventline, so we know what will happen and can see when things happen that weren’t meant to. You and I and everything in this room are actually ancient history—but if that seems a bit depressing, let me assure you that these really are the good old days. Yes, madam?”

  A woman just next to us hadn’t put up her hand, of course, but was clearly thinking of it.

  “So how is it possible to move through time?”

  “The force that pushes the fabric of time along is the past attempting to catch up with the future in order to reach an equilibrium. Think of it as a wave—and where the past starts to break over the future in front of it, that’s the present. At that moment of temporal instability is a vortex—a tube, in surfing parlance—that runs perpendicular to the arrow of time but leads to everything that has ever happened or ever will happen. Of course, that’s greatly simplified, but with skill, training, a really good uniform and a bit of aptitude, you’ll learn to ride the tube as it ripples through the fabric of space-time. Yes, sir?”

  A young lad in the front row was the next to ask a question.

  “How can you surf a time wave that is squillions of years in the future?”

  “Because it isn’t. It’s everywhere, all at once. Time is like a river, with the source, body and mouth all existing at the same time.”

  Friday turned to me and said in a very unsubtle whisper, “Is this going to take long?”

  “Keep quiet and pay attention.”

  He looked heavenward, sighed audibly and slouched deeper in his chair.

  Scintilla carried on, “The time industry is an equal-opportunity employer, has its own union of Federated Timeworkers and a pay structure with overtime payments and bonuses. The working week is forty hours, but each hour is only fifty-two minutes long. Time-related holidays are a perk of the service and can be undertaken after the first ten years’ employment. And also, to make it really attractive, we will give each new recruit a Walkman and vouchers to buy ten CDs of your—”

  He stopped talking, because Friday had put up his hand. We noticed that the other members of the ChronoGuard were staring in dumb wonderment at Friday. The reason wasn’t altogether clear until it suddenly struck me: Scintilla hadn’t known that Friday was going to ask a question.

  “You…have a question?”

  “I do. The question is, ‘Tell me the question I’m going to ask.’”

  Scintilla gave a nervous laugh and looked around the audience in an uncomfortable manner. Eventually he hazarded a guess:

  “You…want to know where the toilet is?”

  “No. I wanted to know if everything we do is preordained.”

  Scintilla gave out another shrill, nervous laugh. Friday was a natural, and they all knew it. The thing was, I think Friday did, too—but didn’t care.

  “A good point and, as you just demonstrated, not at all. Your question was what we call a ‘free radical,’ an anomalous event that exists independent of the Standard History Eventline, or SHE. Generally, SHE is the one that must be obeyed, but time also has an annoying propensity for random flexibility. Like rivers, time starts and finishes in generally the same place. Certain events—like gorges and rapids—tend to stay the same. However, on the flat temporal plain, the timestream can meander quite considerably, and when it moves toward danger, it’s up to us to change something in the event-past to swing the timestream back on course. It’s like navigation on the open seas, really, only the ship stays still and you navigate the storm.”

  He smiled again. “But I’m getting ahead of myself. Apocalypse avoidance is only one area of our expertise. Patches of bad time that open spontaneously need to be stitched closed, ChronoTheft is very big in the seventh millennium, and the total eradication of the Dark Ages by a timephoon is requiring a considerable amount of effort to repair, and—”

  He stopped talking, because Friday had inexplicably raised his hand once again.

  “Why don’t you tell us about the downside?” asked Friday in a sullen voice from beneath a curtain of hair. “About time aggregations and leaks in the gravity suits that leave cadets a molecule thick?”

  “That’s why we’re here,” explained Scintilla, attempting to make light of the situation, “to clear up any small matters of misrepresentation that you might have heard. I won’t try to convince you that accidents haven’t happened, but like all industries we take health and safety very seriously.”

  “Son,” I said, laying a hand on his arm, “hear what he has to say first.”

  Friday turned and parted his long hair so I could see his eyes. They were intelligent, bright—and scared.

  “Mum, you told me about the accidents—about Dad’s eradication and Filbert Snood. Why do you want me to work for an industry that seems to leave its workers dead, nonexistent or old before their time?”

  He got up and made for the exit, and we followed him as Scintilla attempted to carry on his talk, although firmly rattled. But as we tried to leave, a ChronoGuard operative stood in our way.

  “I think you should stay and listen to the presentation,” he said, addressing Friday, who told him to get stuffed. The Chrono took exception to this and made a grab for him, but I was quicker and caught the guard’s wrist, pulled him around an
d had him on the floor with his arm behind his back.

  “Muumm!” whined Friday, more embarrassed than outraged. “Do you have to? People are watching!”

  “Sorry,” I said, letting go of the guard. Scintilla had excused himself from his talk and came over to see what was going on.

  “If we want to leave, we leave,” growled Landen.

  “Of course!” agreed Scintilla, motioning with a flick of his head for the Chrono to move off. “You can go whenever you want.” He looked at me; he knew how important it was to get Friday inducted, and knew I knew it, too.

  “But before you go,” he said, “Friday, I want you to know that we would be very happy to have you join the time industry. No minimum academic qualifications, no entrance exam. It’s an unconditional offer—the first we’ve ever made.”

  “And what makes you think I’d be any good at it?”

  “You can ask questions that aren’t already lodged in the SHE. Do you think just anyone can do that?”

  He shrugged. “I’m not interested.”

  “I’m just asking for you to stay and hear what we have to say.”

  “I’m…not…interested,” replied Friday more forcefully.

  “Listen,” said Scintilla, after looking around furtively and lowering his voice, “this is a bit unofficial, but I’ve had a word with Wayne Skunk, and he’s agreed to let you play a guitar riff on the second track of Hosing the Dolly.”

  “It’s too late,” said Friday, “it’s already been recorded.”

  Bendix stared at him. “Yes—and by you.”

  “I never did anything of the sort!”

  “No, but you might. And since that possibility exists, you did. Whether you actually do is up to you, but either way you can have that one on us. It’s your solo in any case. Your name is already in the liner notes.”

  Friday looked at Scintilla, then at me. I knew how much he loved Strontium Goat, and Scintilla knew, too. He had Friday’s complete service record, after all. But Friday wasn’t interested. He didn’t like being pushed, cajoled, bullied or bribed. I couldn’t blame him—I hated it, too, and he was my son, after all.