Overtime. Part 8

Blondel raised an eyebrow. 'Not as such,' he said. 'After all, this is the twelfth century we're in now. Well, mostly. I get the electricity for the machines from the twenty-third century. By the time I reach there I'm going to have the most enormous bill. But the plumbing is, well, pretty medieval. Why do you ask?'

Guy thought hard, seeking to find the best possible form of words.

'I don't know about you,' he said at last, 'but I find physical discomfort is a great barrier to concentration, and just now I feel I ought to be concentrating on what you're saying.'

'Ah,' Blondel said, 'I see. Very sensible of you. We all use the channel that runs round the edge of the main hall. That's through the door immediately behind you.'

'Thank you.

An empty bladder, Guy always felt, gives you a whole new perspective on things. Problems which had seemed insurmountable a few minutes before gradually begin to take on a new perspective. When he came back into the study a few minutes later, he was feeling much more able to cope.

'Well,' he said. 'Blondel, eh?'

'Yes indeed.'

'Pleased to, er, meet you.' Guy smiled weakly. 'Actually,' he said, 'I write songs too. That is, I, well, dabble a bit, you know.'

A very brief flicker of pain flashed across Blondel's eyes, and for a moment Guy wondered what he'd said; then he understood. It was the pain of a man who, for nine hundred years, probably more, has had strangers say to him, 'Let me just hum you a few bars, I expect it's the most awful rubbish really,' and has then had to perjure his soul by disagreeing. Guy changed the subject quickly.

'So,' he said, 'how do you do it? The time travelling, I mean. Does it just come naturally, or ..

'Good Lord, no,' Blondel said, smiling. 'Not a bit of it. My agents fixed it for me. You see,' he said, standing up and opening a drawer of his filing cabinet, 'they originally come from the twenty-fifth century.

Guy swallowed. 'Oh yes?'

'They do indeed.' From the drawer, Blondel produced a bottle of port. 'Have some?' he asked. '2740. It's going to be one of the best years on record, so they say. Mind you, it all tastes the same to me.

Guy shook his head. The thought of drinking something that hadn't been grown yet did something unpleasant to his stomach lining.

'In the twenty-fifth century,' Blondel said, 'time travel will be as familiar as, say, air travel is to you. It'll be so commonplace that they'll need to advertise it on posters to persuade people to use it instead of other, more convenient methods. "Let the clock take the strain. We've already got there." That sort of thing. You sure you won't join me?'

Guy, who didn't wish to appear rude, accepted a gla.s.s.

'Now,' Blondel went on, 'orthodox time travel operates on a system called Bluchner's Loop. It's very technical and I really don't understand how it works, but it's something about the law of conservation of reality. The Fourth Law of Thermodynamics,' Blondel frowned, then shrugged. 'Something like that,' he said. 'I read an article about it once in Scientific Oceanian but it was all Greek to me. Anyway, it means that when a person travels in time, then time sort of heals up after him as soon as he's moved on; it means that whatever he does in the past, for example, the present and the future will be exactly the same as if he'd never been there. In other words, I couldn't stop the Napoleonic Wars by going back in time and poisoning Napoleon in his cot. No matter how many times I killed Napoleon in infancy, he'd still be there in 1799 overthrowing the Directorate. All right so far?'

'More or less,' said Guy. 'Very good port, this.'

'Like San Francisco,' Blondel agreed. 'That's orthodox time travel. My agents - the group of people who became my agents - found another way of travelling through time. It wasn't nearly as safe as the orthodox way, but it meant you could take things with you. The orthodox way, you see, only lets you take yourself; which can be awfully embarra.s.sing, so they tell me. It means, for example, you run the risk of turning up at Queen Victoria's wedding with no clothes on. Another?'

'Thanks.'

'There's another bottle after we've finished this,' Blondel said. 'Plenty more where this is coming from. In fact, if you like, we can have the same bottle all over again.'

'No, really,' Guy said, 'a different bottle will do fine.'

'My agents,' Blondel said, 'saw at once that this new form of time travel had all sorts of possibilities. Commercial possibilities, I mean. The trouble was that if they told anybody about it, it'd be suppressed immediately; too dangerous. So they kept it to themselves. They used it for all sorts of clever financial deals, apparently. I've never been much of a money man myself so I don't really understand it all, but it seems they move money about throughout the centuries.'

'Why?'

Blondel shrugged. 'Tax reasons.'

'Ah,' Guy said. That, he felt, would account for it.

'What they used to do,' Blondel said, 'and please excuse me if I get the tenses wrong, was to take money from the future and invest it in the Second Crusade; you know, King Richard's crusade. Well, don't you see?'

'No.'

'Oh. Well, I'm not a hundred per cent sure myself. But it occurs to me that if you start bringing lots of things - you know, gold coins, that sort of thing - back through time and depositing them in another century, then that's going to make the century they end up in rather - what's the word? -unstable. Volatile, even. You run the risk of upsetting the balance of nature, or physics, or whatever. I think that because they made rather a mess of time at about that point, they made the next bit of history go all wrong. It couldn't happen the way it was supposed to happen, because of all these influences from the future upsetting it. On the other hand, it had already happened - because, well, it did - and as a result of it happening, history's what it is today. Or then,' Blondel scratched his ear, and continued. 'Anyway, I think that because of this imbalance or instability or whatever you like to call it, the whole thing sort of blew a fuse. Since the Crusade could neither happen nor not happen, history just washed its hands of the whole thing and left a great big gap. A hole, if you like. And Richard fell into it.'

'My G.o.d.'

'Exactly,' Blondel finished his gla.s.s of port thoughtfully. 'Anyway,' he continued, 'that's beside the point. All I knew at the start was that my agents could take me about in time, so that's what I did. Instead of just going all round the world, I went all round time as well, looking for the King, like I'd promised I would. And that, basically, is what I'm still doing.'

'I see.'

Blondel lit a cigar and offered one to Guy. 'It's all right,' he said, 'we don't yet know how bad they are for you. After a while, I found out how to travel through time on my own, without any help from my agents, and it was about then that I started putting two and two together and wondering if perhaps Richard's disappearance might have been their fault. Once I'd come to that conclusion, of course, I didn't want anything more to do with them - well, you wouldn't, would you? - so I gave them the slip and set off on my own. I set up a sort of base here where I can slip back and keep a change of clothes and so on. A sort of pied a temps. Otherwise, I'm mostly on the move, I have to be,' Blondel added. 'You see, they're looking for me.'

Guy frowned. 'Who?'

'My agents,' Blondel replied. 'You see, they've got a contract. By the terms of it, I have to give two concerts a week for the rest of my life, and they get ninety-five per cent of the profits.'

Guy whistled.

'Not only that,' Blondel went on, grinning, 'but they've invested millions and millions of livres in setting up concerts -gigs, they call them - all through time and now I'm not there to sing at them. No wonder they're worried. It's not their money they're investing.'

Guy grinned too. 'Awkward,' he said.

'Exactly,' said Blondel, tipping a little ash into a saucer. 'But the last thing I want to do is get pinned down by them again. I've got to find the King.'

'Er,' Guy said. 'Has it occurred to you that he might be, well...'

'Might be what?'

'Well,' said Guy, 'that when he disappeared, or fell through time or whatever, that he might not actually be anywhere? I mean ...'

Blondel's face became very cold; then he relaxed.

'Perhaps,' he said. 'But I've got to keep looking. After all, I did give my word. Now then, another bottle.'

Blondel filled both gla.s.ses and they sat in silence for a while.

Guy said, 'So, er, where do your sisters fit in?'

'Sorry?'

'Your sisters,' Guy repeated. 'Mahaud and Ysabel and, er...'

'Oh yes,' Blondel said. 'I forgot, do forgive me. They very sweetly agreed to help out, at least to begin with. But you know what women are like. After a bit, you see, they lost interest, got the urge to settle down, that sort of thing. Mahaud and Ysabel met men they rather liked, got married, settled down. Can't blame them, of course. I find that women have this terrible urge to be normal.'