‘You’re right, though,’ Liam said after a while.
‘About what bit?’
‘That we’re different people now. You, me and Maddy. I’ve seen things, done things, that I think have changed me.’
‘Like what?’
‘Well … I killed a man, so I did.’
‘Really?’
He nodded. ‘The fight for Nottingham. Killed a soldier with me sword. He looked at me … was staring at me as I did it to him. Like … I don’t know, Sal, it was like he wanted me to know him, in his final moment, like he wanted me to make sure I remembered him forever.’ Liam shook his head. ‘And it worked. I see him every night … in my dreams. That same fella. The same face.’
‘Do you ever dream of the moment when Foster recruited you?’
Liam closed his eyes. Not recently. Since Nottingham it had been this man over and over, haunting his sleep. ‘I used to.’
‘I do,’ she said. ‘Almost every night. I remember every little detail. I see it all every night like a holo-movie.’
She’d told him once about how she’d been recruited. ‘The fire?’
Sal nodded. ‘Every morning I wake up and want to cry … because it’s like I’ve just left my parents … my mathaji, baba all over again.’
‘I can barely remember my parents,’ he said. He tried to remember them and struggled to conjure their smiles, their frowns in his mind. Only one memory successfully gave him their faces, a fleeting recollection of holding in his hands a badly faded photograph of them in an old tin frame. He shook his head. How could that be the only decent enough memory he’d managed to hang on to?
‘But there’s this thing, Liam, this odd thing …’
He gave up fishing for another mental image of Ma and Da. They were gone. People from someone else’s life now. ‘What? What odd thing?’
‘My memory of Foster saving me from that burning tower. There’s this moment, when the building finally begins to collapse. It’s horrible.’ She shook her head and winced at that sensation of the floor collapsing beneath her feet, of falling … and the fire beneath waiting for her to drop into it as if she was falling into Hell itself.
‘I’m falling, Liam … but beneath me, spinning beneath me, there’s this soft toy. A teddy bear. A blue teddy bear. It belonged to one of my neighbours, Mrs Chaudhry’s little boy. I used to babysit him.’
He shrugged. ‘What’s so odd about that?’
‘Because I’ve seen it, Liam. The same bear — the exact same bear — in that antique shop near us.’
CHAPTER 71. 2001, New Wellington
On the other side of the fire, Lincoln grimaced, confused, frustrated. ‘How can a world be so very different from the absence of one man?’ muttered Lincoln. ‘It seems a highly illogical notion. A man such as myself, even.’ He scratched at his dark beard. ‘I had hopes of making some mark, but to cause an entire new world to come into being … from my not being there? I still struggle to make sense of this.’
‘Since all time — past, present and future — exists at the same time, it is logical to say the future has already happened,’ said Bob. His eyes warily scanned the night around them as he spoke. ‘Therefore all events are predetermined to happen a certain way. Every event, every human is a part of that sequence of events.’ He looked at Lincoln.
‘The predetermined sequence — you would call this “history” — can tolerate the absence or alteration of minor events. Your influence on the outcome of the American Civil War was a significant event.’
‘Surely it is important that you tell me more about the life ahead of me, then? For me to make all the correct decisions in my life in which I end up as this wartime president of the north?’
‘Negative. You do not need to know. The events of history, the circumstances of your life and what is in your own nature will conspire to direct you correctly.’
‘But there must surely come many moments in my life ahead where my destiny might hang on the fate of —’ Lincoln shook his head, trying to think of an example — ‘of the simple toss of a coin, or even the distracting smile of a pretty woman.’
‘If the course of your life was dependent on such marginal variables, you would be a minor sequential event, and your absence would not have caused this time wave.’ Bob cocked his head as he fished for an appropriate saying from his database. ‘Destiny has a plan for you.’
Lincoln gazed at the flames as if in their flickering momentary shapes hidden answers lay waiting to be discovered. ‘In other words … you are saying I must trust my instinct?’
‘All that you will be already exists in you,’ said Bob. ‘The human mind is a store of data … memories. The memories plus the behavioural template you inherit genetically define you.’
Lincoln nodded. He thought he understood the gist of that. He’d once had a conversation very similar to this with his father. A simple, uneducated man, but wise beyond the grime on his farmer’s hands.
We are all that we see and what our forefathers have seen.
And in the last few days he had seen some very questionable things, those creatures for instance. Creatures capable of intelligent thoughts and speech — reading and writing for God’s sake! — treated like possessions. Like objects, things to be dispensed with or recycled when broken. To know a creature has human-like intelligence and yet still treat it like a yard dog — worse, to treat it like cattle?
He nodded. ‘I believe you may have a point there, Bob. My father once —’
‘Just a moment.’ Bob cocked his head and started blinking.
Lincoln scowled at him. ‘What the devil is the matter with you?’
Liam had stopped talking with Sal. Both looked across the campfire at Bob.
‘Bob? Are you —?’
‘Affirmative, Liam. I am detecting tachyon particles.’
‘At last!’ said Sal. ‘What’s Maddy saying to you?’
Bob’s head remained cocked, like a dog listening for his master’s whistle. ‘Just a moment … I am compiling the message.’
Lincoln looked at the three of them, one to the other, as if they were all mad. ‘Are you saying he is hearing Miss Carter’s voice?’
Liam shrugged. ‘In a manner of speaking.’
Presently Bob nodded, straightened up and looked at Liam. ‘We have a rendezvous data-stamp.’
‘Where?’ asked Sal.
‘More to the point, when,’ added Liam.
‘Seventy-one hours, fifty-nine minutes, three seconds.’
‘Three days to you and me,’ said Liam to Lincoln.
‘Location is thirty-one miles due west of our present location. A location known as New Chelmsford.’
‘Thirty-one miles!’ Sal looked at Liam. ‘Jahulla! That’s … that’s quite a trek for us. Isn’t it?’
Liam thumbed his chin as he looked out across the night. The direction in which they needed to go was going to take them away from the north — south road they’d been walking along. Across countryside, away from roads clogged with refugees. Away from New York.
Quite deliberately. She’s found us somewhere safe to head towards.
‘It’s a walk, so it is … but it’s not so hard. We’ll make an early start tomorrow.’
CHAPTER 72. 2001, New York
Wainwright sipped his coffee and smacked his lips approvingly. ‘And this is called “instant” coffee?’