The Ministry of Time, page 28
“But—”
“The world is at war. We are running out of everything, and everyone thinks they’re owed what’s left. But as long as the Ministry exists, as long as the Ministry comes to exist in the shape it does in my era, then we have the technological advantage. That isn’t nothing, having weapons other people don’t, the kinds of soldiers other people don’t. Some other countries get left behind, but that’s how progress works. You really didn’t pay attention to anything that’s ever been said about history, did you?”
I said, “Did you kill Quentin?”
She lifted her thumb to her mouth and bit the edge of the skin. “Technically,” she said, “we both did. Since you are me.”
“I thought the Brigadier did it. Someone with my access credentials shut off the CCTV—”
“You are aware we have the same fingerprints.”
“Oh. Right. But why did you do it?”
“Because last time, Quentin was the mole, and I thought that he was the reason Maggie and Arthur were—were murdered. And he did pass information about the Ministry to the Brigadier and Salese. That was extremely fucking inconvenient. You can’t imagine what Britain looks like in my era. Coming back here was a shock. It’s so decadent. Like stepping into Rome before the barbarians sacked it. I seem to remember the boomers had a real hard-on for food rationing as an ideological exercise when we were your age. Let me assure you that no one enjoys food rationing.”
“You didn’t know the Ministry had Maggie and Arthur killed?”
“No. None of us did. Well. I wonder. Graham is so senior now.”
“Do you think he knows?”
“Hmm. There was a period when things were bad between us. Lasted a few years. Dad was very sick, and Mai was struggling to care for him, and Arthur was having a lot of trouble at school, and our workloads were… Anyway. We were… distant. I assumed he was having an affair.”
“You didn’t ask?”
“We tried to put those years behind us. Besides, when have you ever known Graham to answer a direct question?”
Her voice was strained when she said this, but I remember the way affection luminesced under her skin. I still love him, I thought. Even after everything that happens, at least I still love him. I asked her, “Are you happy?”
Adela considered this. “No.”
“Oh.”
“Not being in the middle of a war makes you happy. Not grieving. Not being so profoundly fucking loathed by your son. Not having to kill people for your salary. Speaking of which—”
“You aren’t going to kill Graham!”
“No, I’m not going to kill him. I love him.”
“I—”
“You hardly know him. It’s going to be two years before you even see him cry.”
“He cries?”
Adela’s mouth quirked at that. She fell into an agitated reverie. I felt her pulling away from the moment as the tide pulls from the shore—I mean I could feel the suck of it as her attention retreated to some inaccessible socket of “elsewhere.” It was horrible. Her “thereness” at work against her, I assume—or two decades of regret, piling up with such force it changed the shape of her thoughts. I wondered how it felt, realizing the version of history she’d lived for years was a lie. Because of the choice she made next, I never got to experience it myself.
“Here,” she said.
I looked down. She was holding a palm-size tablet and a memory card. I attempted to take them with my dominant, recently damaged hand. She shook her head, and I took it with the other.
“Ministry passcodes,” she said. “For this project.”
“Why are you giving me these?”
She dragged her hand through her brittle bottle-blond hair, and the black roots flashed up with a wanton, impossible pride.
“Because I’ve been a company woman all my life and look where it’s got me. The Ministry had Arthur and Maggie killed. No one ever told me. He didn’t tell me. If I’d known—”
I said, “Maggie’s still alive.”
Another origami of emotion creased her face. “Oh, Maggie,” she murmured.
“Can you go back again and save Arthur?”
I thought I might get another You’re a stupid girl, but Adela just looked sad. “Time,” she said, “is a limited resource. Like all of our resources. You only get to experience your life once. And you can travel through time, a little, though it’s like smoking cigarettes: the more you do it, the greater risk you’re at from death by its effects. And yes, you can go back and change the details, a little, but there’s a limit to how often. Every time you dig a new pathway into time, you exhaust a little more of it, and if we go back too often and mine too deeply in the same place, again and again, pulling history from the same coal seam, it will collapse. It will obliterate us, like a black hole. You have to get it right.”
“What—good grief—what is right? In this context? Adela?”
“I should get the surviving expats. I’ll keep them safe. The Defence SWAT team are on their way, with heat scanners and infrared goggles, emergency protocols being what they are, so I can at least stay ahead of them and their tracking techniques. But you need to go to the Ministry, with those passcodes, and you need to end this project. I’m one half of Control—I do still have that authority. If we’re going to get it right, then we’re going to have to ensure I am all of Control, and for that, the project needs to be wiped.”
“If I leave now, Graham will think I betrayed them.”
“I’ll explain. I’ll bring them to you, to the safe house, and we can plan next moves. Just trust me. We’ll get it right this time.”
She smiled suddenly, the first real smile I’d ever seen on her face. I saw myself in her then—her mouth, her cheeks, her eyes.
“He is wonderful, isn’t he?” she said. “I’d forgotten how handsome he was when we first met. And how happy. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen him as happy as I saw him that day in the shooting gallery. I’ve missed him so much. You have no idea.”
“Hands in the air, please,” said a clear, calm voice.
I whirled around. There was no one to be seen. The dense emerald vegetation of the scrubland surrounded the road. He could have been hiding anywhere. His voice carried strangely.
“Easy, little cat,” Graham said, his voice still calm. “You have some explaining to do. Madam, put your hands in the air. We have you in our sights.”
“Plugged thine ears, sir,” I heard Cardingham snarl. “Refused my counsel and now see—these whores do conspire. Thou rolled i’bed with death.”
“Shut up, Thomas.”
“Commander Gore and Lieutenant Cardingham,” said Adela, scanning the scrub. “Rest assured that we mean you no harm.”
“I suppose this depends on your interpretation of harm,” said Graham from his hiding place, quite pleasantly. “Perhaps you don’t intend to kill us. But to survey a man, to rob him of his freedom and use him like a tool—would you not consider this harmful?”
Adela leaned toward me. “If I were you, I would run before the SWAT team gets here,” she whispered. “Things are going to get very crowded, very quickly.”
I look back on this moment, and I do wonder: Should I have done something else? Stayed? Argued? Pleaded? Thrown myself toward the sound of his voice, onto his mercy? Would it have changed anything?
As I ran, a gunshot rang out. The bullet passed close enough that I heard its whistling song. And I thought, that wasn’t Graham. It wasn’t Graham who just tried to shoot me. It can’t have been Graham. Because if it was Graham, he wouldn’t have missed.
X
The people he persistently thinks of as his captors take him along a corridor. He’s learned, through delirious trial and error, that the lumps beneath their brief jackets are guns. It has been a difficult few weeks.
“You were in the Discovery Service, weren’t you?” one of the white-robed attendants had said. “Think of this as a mission of discovery.”
Thus this brave new world is reframed for him as a job he can do well or badly.
At the end of the corridor is a door. Through the door is a room. In the room is the officer who will be his “bridge” to the future.
When he enters, he sees a little ghost shifting her feet on the carpet. Black hair. Brown skin, bright and clean. The marquee sweep of her black lashes. The indescribable color of her mouth. She looks at him. He can’t meet her eyes. He drags his stare off her, his blood thin and acid in his wrists. Do they all see her? Everyone is so still, he can’t tell. Perhaps she manifests for him alone.
There is a man who he thinks must be the officer, and he tries to fix his gaze on that face. But the little ghost steps forward.
“Commander Gore?”
“Yes.”
“I’m your bridge.”
Later (and he will have many days and weeks and months of later) he will see that the resemblance to the Inuit woman is a weak one, fueled by guilt and fancy. Her hair is less lustrous, her skin is paler, her face more feline. Her eyes are a different shape. She is several inches taller and narrower besides. Nevertheless, nevertheless.
God’s ways, as Lieutenant Irving had once observed, are not our ways. His methods can be mysterious. His intentions, however, He carves on the flesh.
God gave me to you, little cat. It is His will that I am yours. In His infinite mercy, He has offered me redemption.
CHAPTER TEN
I ran for as long as I could, and then I stopped. I’d sweated through my clothing and the sweat encased me like cheap plastic. I stank and I was thirsty. I was still in bastard, bastard Greenhithe, and I didn’t have enough battery on my phone to call an Uber.
I had to take a bus, trains, another bus, and eventually the tube to get into the Ministry. The day cracked open around me. I waded through its rancidly vivid yolk, feeling damaged by the sheer color and depth of normal vision. In a spy movie, this would have been done in a montage. Instead, I had to clamber to my narrative conclusion, step by staggering step.
* * *
I took the escalator to Adela’s office. I did not, however, make it all the way there. Simellia was waiting at the top.
“Oh my God. Simellia. Oh God. You have to help me. Arthur—”
“Come on,” she hissed. I jogged obediently after her. I caught sight of myself in the glass of the doors as she pushed through to unfamiliar rooms, tapping in unfamiliar passcodes. I was the color of a recently hatched baby bird, and just as ugly. Panic has never become me.
Finally, Simellia seemed to have found a suitably private room.
“Oh fuck,” I croaked, flopping into a chair. “Simellia. Arthur is dead.”
I started to cry, big messy sobs which had been gathering in the reservoir of my lungs since the day before. I was so busy snotting and heaving that it was a full minute before I wiped my face on my sleeve and realized that Simellia was pointing a gun at me.
“Is that a gun?” I said stupidly.
“Yes.”
“Oh.”
I looked around. We were in a beautiful little room, with soothing cream and mustard furniture and what looked, to my eyes, like reinforced walls, wallpapered exquisitely. There were no windows.
“Where are we?”
“The vestibule.”
“The—?”
“Before the time-door.”
“I thought bridges weren’t allowed near the time-door.”
“We aren’t.”
I blinked gummily. “Oh. Hell. You’re the mole.”
Simellia grimaced. “Yes.”
“Jesus.”
Heat and rage barreled up through my chest, enormous as a sun, shrank to a tennis ball by the time it gained my throat, and came out as another “Oh.” Eventually, I managed a further syllable: “Why?” When she didn’t respond, her forehead gathering and ruching with the effort of not crying herself, I said, “But you must have known what would happen to Arthur?”
“They told me what happens to sub-Saharan Africa.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Two hundred years from now. It’s finished. South America’s mostly gone, except Brazil and its satellites. Half of Britain’s underwater. Europe dropped bombs on any ships in the Mediterranean coming from North Africa. No refugees. They died there or they turned back and died of disease and starvation and the heat. Billions died, billions. Then the backlash, when water started running scarce, against immigrant communities. Salese told me—”
“Did you believe them?”
Simellia smiled sadly. “ ‘Did I believe them?’ ” she echoed. “How hard did you try to be a white girl that you’re asking me whether racism exists?”
“That’s not fair.”
“Isn’t it? Do you know what you become?”
“A Ministry employee. Which you are as well.”
“You’re a murderer.”
“A civil servant.”
“They showed me. What the Ministry did. Does. Will do. In the future. Once I knew, I had to help them. Of course I didn’t want Arthur to die, but if I’d blocked the Ministry in any way, then they’d have known it was me and they’d have detained me and done God knows what to me and found Salese and the Brigadier and—”
She broke off, her lips shaking. She rolled her eyes upward quickly but she could no more have shoveled a waterfall than she could have stopped that tear falling.
“You are pointing a gun at me,” I said carefully. “Why have you brought me here? If it’s to kill Adela by killing me, it won’t work. We’ve changed history, apparently. Or the details, anyway.”
“I’m not shooting you unless you make a break for it. I just need you in my sights.”
She shifted from one foot to the other. She was wearing a bias-cut skirt in muted yellow linen, which fell elegantly around her calves. Its grace was noticeable because it contrasted so dramatically with her uneasiness holding a gun.
“You really think all that stuff about me?” I said at last.
“I believe it could happen.”
Of all the things I felt, weapon in my face, life fraying at its end point, I felt hurt. I gave Simellia a bitter little frown, like I was handing it to her on a plate with a cake fork. She sighed and sniffed enormously.
“I think you think you’re doing the right thing,” she said. “You’ve always been so careful round me. Worried about what you’ll say or how I’ll take it. You really thought you were onto something with Eighteen-forty-seven, didn’t you?”
“I—”
“You let him off the hook again and again. I watched you. He came up through the empire. He believed in it. And you did too. I read your file. The things that happened to your family. That’s why you joined up. Getting behind the biggest bully in the playground.”
“You know what,” I said, “I really held you in high esteem, Simellia.”
“You know what? No you didn’t. You liked me, and you couldn’t work out why, you little freak. You kept wondering when we would start competing. Or when I’d test you. I never wanted to test you.”
“What did you want?”
“To not watch you become a fascist in slow motion.”
During this conversation, I’d been thinking about Ministry training. Specifically, the firearms training and unarmed combat training. Simellia’s training was in psychiatry and psychopathology, not fieldwork. I could see from where I was sitting that she hadn’t taken the safety catch off the gun. So, rather than attempt repartee, I kicked her hard enough in the knee that I heard her patella crack.
“Fuck!”
“Aaa—”
“Give me—”
“Let go—!”
At the end of this ungainly little tussle, I was holding her gun, and mine, and bleeding lightly from the mouth, and Simellia was sitting on the floor cradling her leg.
“You little bitch,” she said, seemingly both amused and enraged. “Are you going to kill me now?”
“No. Ministry’ll do that, probably. Or fire you.”
“Oh, fired from the Ministry. Fate worse than death.”
“God! Will you just—I’m going to put a stop to this, okay?”
“We are on the path to total climate destruction.”
“We can change it. I’m starting to suspect history changes all the time. How do I get to the time-door? I’m asking as the person now holding the guns.”
Simellia dragged herself upright and limped across the floor. She touched a panel in the wall that was seemingly like all the other panels in the wall, and it brightened into a screen. She tapped at a keypad then slid aside.
“The Brigadier’s in there,” she said. “So I’d take the safety catch off, if I were you.”
I managed a sour little chuckle. I put her gun away in my holster and seized her hand. It probably looked like an allegorical picture for friendship for a moment, but then I wrenched her arm up behind her back and put my gun between her shoulder blades. Part two in a triptych: friendship weaponized. Arthur, after all, had died on her watch. That he had also died on mine, I didn’t really want to contemplate.
“Shall we?” I said, and Simellia, who never laughed, laughed.
* * *
In the middle of the room was a metal frame. It was the height and shape of a door. When I first saw it, I deflated. Had I really gone through the past twenty-four hours of horror, pandemonium, and violence to be faced with a low-production cliché?
Then I took in the squat, awful machine on the far side of the frame.
I could try to describe it, but words flex and disperse when I think about it. It had a mouth, I think. Around it, color was not. Around it, shape was not. Threat radiated from its carapace, which itself appeared both constructed and grown. Though I cannot pretend to know how the time-door worked, I could imagine what it would look like when it was switched on. That monstrous machine belched its belly-deep cosmos outward, and the doorframe captured it and channeled it to a particular time and place. The machine fired time as a rifle fires bullets. No wonder, when it was seized, they thought it was a weapon. No wonder every time it was switched on, it had accidentally killed people. That must have been what Quentin actually saw: not a handheld weapon, but the time-door itself, slicing a path through time out of the air and the bodies of those teenagers.
