The Woman Who Died a Lot (Thursday Next 7)

“I know,” said Miles. “The planet’s lucky to have her. Cheerio!”

He started the engine, and we waved as he drove off.

“So, Mum,” said Friday, “the timepark?”

“The timepark.”

27.

Wednesday: Kemble Timepark

The C-90-F Reverse Fluxgate time engines, despite being shown to not work, still maintained a residual capacity to bend space-time and exhibit time-dilation phenomena. Physicists had argued long and hard over the apparent contradictions, and concluded that time travel might exist in an entangled intermediate state of working and not working, with no apparent contradiction. In that respect time is very like a tiresome soap star: wayward, petulant and unpredictable.

Norman Scrunge, Time Industry Historian

Kemble was situated about twelve miles to the northwest of Swindon. The 720-acre site had been home to the Main Temporal Transport Device ever since the service was inaugurated in 1932 and had seen six different engines built on its land. The last ones built here had been the C-90-Fs, which had been used for only three years until decommissioning. Since then they had remained empty and abandoned. The engines were silent, and the massive seven-story containment domes dominated the surroundings. The interior of the base was designated a no-go zone, but trespassing wasn’t a problem. The hazardous nature of the timepark was well known, even to idiots with mischief on their minds.

“So,” I said as soon as we had made our way back on to the A419 and were heading north, “why am I missing the Wingco’s pizza evening to take a trip to visit the Kemble Timepark?”

“Here,” Friday said, handing me a folder. “Shazza and I have been doing some research. We set up a bulletin board for anyone else who was now Destiny Aware to make contact. Do you know how many people have done so?”

“First things first: How are you getting along with Shazza?”

Friday thought for a moment. “Not brilliantly, but we’re working on it. Trying to prekindle a spark that will make us inseparable soul mates in two decades’ time is proving a bit tricky. I think she’s a whiny foul-mouth with a victim mentality, while she thinks I’m an arrogant middle-class ponce with an attitude so patronizing she would throttle me if it weren’t illegal. We tried sex to see if that would cement the relationship, but it didn’t help: She told me she’d ‘had better,’ and I told her that yelling out the titles of Tom Hanks movies was . . . well, distracting.”

“So not going too well?”

“No. And with less than forty-eight hours before I’m arrested, it’s not likely to improve.”

“That might not happen. Besides, people have different needs at eighteen than at forty. And if those needs diverge, it can cause serious conflict. Probably accounts for breakups. Your father and I didn’t hook up properly until ten years after first going out. If we’d stayed together, we might not have survived. As it is, we’re still very—”

“Mum, I’m going to stop you before you start getting all smushy about Dad.”

“All right,” I said with a smile, “have it your own way. Do you want me to tell you how much I love you all, too?”

“Definitely not. Look at the folder.”

“Okay. What were you saying?”

“I said that Shazza and I had set up a bulletin board for anyone else who had received a career summary from the Union of Federated Timeworkers. Do you know how many people have gotten in contact?”

“A thousand?” I suggested.

“One,” replied Friday, “and he only missed the meeting because his car had a flat—he lived over in Bedwyn, on the other side of the Savernake.”

“That’s unusual,” I said. “The ChronoGuard must have employed several thousand from around here alone. What does it mean?”

“It means that only those timeworkers who were living in the Wessex area have received Letters of Destiny—more specifically, only those in the Swindon branch of the timeworkers union. But this is what’s strange: It’s a shitty thing to do. If I were my future self, I wouldn’t send myself a Letter of Destiny. So then I got to thinking that maybe there was another reason I did it.”

I looked at the folder he had given me. There were copies of all the letters. Two each per ex–potential worker—one of how it might have turned out and one of how it will. There were copies of the envelopes, too, and several maps, clippings and news reports about the disbanding of the ChronoGuard—it was big news when it happened two years before.

“What’s on your mind?”

“Let me explain the scenario. You’re head of the ChronoGuard and entering your seventy-sixth year, one year from retirement. You can gaze happily back upon a long career maintaining the Standard History Eventline. You’ve defended its manipulation by the unscrupulous and altered it to protect the citizens from mischief, asteroid collision and innumerable other menaces. You are happy that you have done what you could to keep the world safe, knowing that when you hand over the ropes to next chief, the department is in good shape.”

“Okay, I can see that.”

“Good. So this is what happens: Everything, but everything you’ve worked for is to be undone. Time travel is suddenly not possible, and due to the demands of a failure in the Retro-Deficit Engineering principle, all the time engines have to be switched off. It wouldn’t be so bad if it were going to happen in 2062, the time of your retirement—but it’s not. The switch-off will be retrospective from 2002. This is a worry, because the most dangerous event of all, the one that made your career, is slated for February of 2041.”