‘So is Monday morning and Saturday evening.’
‘Now I am eating a piece of chicken. Monday morning I overslept, and Saturday evening — heaven knows what I’ll be doing.’
‘You are still doing those things. Unless something changes so that last Monday you do not oversleep and now you are somewhere else. If, for example, you decide not to come back...’
‘But I did.’
‘Yes. You did. But will you?’
‘You’re really annoying, you know.’
‘No. I’m not. Existence is. It’s not my fault.’
Angela poured herself a glass of the not very good red wine she had ordered after her gin and sipped thoughtfully. It was curious talking to this girl. She had, after all, had to keep it to herself for nearly thirty years. Now she was explaining in simple language, the simplest language, to a young girl who listened with great seriousness to what she was saying. The only person in the world she could talk to, because she knew at least that it worked.
‘Now, let me make everything clear. I am a sort of mathematician, and I got myself into a situation where I had to do many years’ work in a couple of days. The only way of doing that was to step out of time, so to speak. So I came here. I arrived in 1936.’
Rosie seemed to cope with that very well.
‘And now you’re stuck, and want to go home again.’
‘Sort of. I need to make a few modifications before I do. I wanted to discover something fundamental about reality. My boss wanted — or wants — to make lots of money, in ways which I think are dangerous. I have to stop him.’
‘Is it really dangerous?’
‘Yes. It is the most dangerous thing anyone has ever invented. Nuclear bombs can destroy the present. This can destroy the past and the future as well. Which, if you see my point, I think is a bad idea.’
Rosie chewed a piece of chicken. ‘Is it really true that in the future we all have lots of money, and no one works because machines do everything, and everyone is happy? I saw that on the television.’
‘Never underestimate the ability of humanity to mess things up. There are thirty-five billion people in the world, and most live lives which I consider miserable and pointless. Or I used to think that. Now I’m not so sure. Everything is run by a small elite of specially selected experts. Much of the planet is uninhabitable. All animals except us and things we eat have been sent into extinction. Democracy has been abolished as inefficient, everyone is automatically tracked every second of their lives, and dreams have been replaced by advertising. Most people are happy, though. The drugs in their food make certain of that, except for the few people who refuse to take them. They’re really miserable. We call them renegades and lock them up occasionally.’
‘For not being happy?’
‘A crime against Society. They occasionally go on marches shouting slogans like “Glad to be grumpy”. They get locked up or have their brains wiped.’
‘That’s not what we’ve been promised,’ Rosie protested. ‘What were you?’
‘I was one of the elite.’
‘You should be ashamed of yourself, then.’
‘I am increasingly so. It didn’t occur to me that it was anything other than natural at the time, and there was not much I could have done about it in any case. One person cannot change the world. Except, of course, that now I can.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Once my tests are done and I am confident it will work, I think I can alter a few things. Then I can safely go back and take my knowledge with me. Immensely complicated; it’ll take at least another decade.’
‘Won’t you be a bit old by then?’
Angela looked puzzled. ‘I’m good for another eighty years at least,’ she said stiffly, ‘once I take another shot of treatment. I’m only ninety-three.’
‘My grandmother’s ninety-three. You don’t look like her.’
‘I should hope not.’
‘What about Anterwold?’
‘Oh, that’s just to calibrate the machinery.’
‘So what happens to it?’
‘In due course, I will shut it down. I’ll need the machine and there can’t be two universes existing simultaneously for ever.’
‘What about all my friends? Jay, and Pamarchon, and Aliena? What about Lady Catherine and Henary?’
‘They’ll just be as they were before. In a latent state.’
‘They’ll vanish? Be eradicated?’
‘Anterwold only exists inside the confines of the machinery, you know. It’s not real, and it had better not become real, either.’
‘It seems rather nicer than where you come from.’
‘You have seen just a small part of it. I have no idea what it is really like. Not that it matters. There is no chance of it achieving permanence.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because... Because I say so.’
Rosie studied her suspiciously. ‘That’s what my mum says when she doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Are you sure you know what you’re doing?’
‘It is a little complicated at the moment. I couldn’t shut it down because you were in it. That locked it into a sort of fake permanence.’
‘Good,’ Rosie said.
‘It wasn’t good, and it was all your fault.’
‘You didn’t put up a sign saying No Entry. What did you think would happen if someone saw a forest in Professor Lytten’s cellar?’
‘I certainly didn’t think anyone would sneak around someone else’s house, look through their possessions, then go and join a party they hadn’t been invited to. It was very nosy of you.’
‘You were careless and now you are proposing to snuff out my friends. I don’t have many.’
‘Please don’t start to be self-pitying. It’s unbecoming. You must have friends here.’
Rosie shook her head. ‘Not really.’
‘I’m clever, but not that clever. If people in Anterwold think you are wonderful, then it must be because you are. Which means that there is no reason why you shouldn’t be pursued as ardently here as Pamarchon was pursuing you there.’
‘He was running away from me. I was pursuing him.’
‘A minor detail.’
‘Listen. Does this place exist or not?’
Angela sighed. ‘That is a meaningless question. As I say, it depends on your viewpoint.’
‘You said you couldn’t switch it off because I was in it.’
‘True.’
‘I’m here now.’
‘True.’
‘When you went into the cellar an hour ago, did you manage to switch it off then?’
Angela looked a bit shifty. ‘No,’ she admitted.
‘Aha!’ Rosie said in triumph.
Angela put down her glass. ‘You’re annoying me.’
‘You don’t know what is going on.’
‘I am going to take you home, settle down to a night’s thinking and find out. In the morning I will go back to Henry’s house and have another go. I’m meant to be going to help him with something anyway.’
Once I had taken Rosie back home — and she walked through the door like one of Dante’s sinners heading for punishment — I felt free to get to work. Firstly, of course, I needed all the information I could possibly gather together. I had ideas, my intuition was working just fine; it was the context, the overall framework that was lacking.
I could guess, but I didn’t like doing that for long; it always made me feel a little unbalanced. But all I could do practically at the moment was go back to the machinery and run some tests to get the basic information I needed. Then settle down, figure out what was wrong and work out a way to pull the plug. It was fortunate that I had promised to help Henry out the next day with his translation. What was that about? I did very much hope that he wasn’t frittering away his time on nonsense when he had a fantasy to dream about.
The trouble was, I knew already what was going on. My instincts were good enough for that. There was still a foreign body in Anterwold that had originated here. It had to be that; there could be no other access to it, and no other reason why it was locked into existence. Only the cat and Rosie had been in there, and both had come back, so by a process of elimination there could be only one, bizarre, explanation.