Time and Time Again

45

THE WOMAN’S WOUNDS had been nothing like as life-threatening as Stanton’s own had been. He had been shot in the stomach; she had been shot in the arm and the upper chest, towards the shoulder, missing the heart and the lungs. Nonetheless, blood infection is equally serious whatever the size of wound that causes it, and Stanton’s new roommate’s arm was horribly swollen. He could only hope that it hadn’t taken too deep a hold and would respond to antibiotics. The idea of performing an amputation in a hotel room was pretty daunting, even one which had such a newfangled convenience as an en-suite bathroom.

To his relief, the woman responded to treatment, and once Stanton had cleaned her wounds and begun a course of antibiotics, she very quickly started to show signs of recovery. By the end of the first night her fever had begun to subside and her sleep was less disturbed.

He bathed her, attended to her bodily needs and fed her as best he could, spooning tiny amounts of thin soup into her mouth when her consciousness seemed closest to the surface. He wondered about trying to set up some kind of intravenous drip of sugar solution. He felt he had the skills to jerry-rig one but decided against it as it would have looked very strange to the maids and waiting staff who visited the room. Hotels don’t like people dying on their premises and Stanton did not want to alert the management to how serious his ‘sister’s’ condition had been when he brought her in.

He tended her for four whole days before she regained her consciousness and her strength began to return. In that time he could only speculate on the character and nature of this other version of himself and on the cosmic strangeness of their mutual situation.

And it was cosmically strange.

The chain of events that Isaac Newton had set in motion two (and three) centuries earlier had resulted in this incredible junction of beings from two separate worlds meeting in a third. In a hotel room.

As he sat watching her in the long hours of the night, measuring her pulse and listening to her breathing, Stanton had a constant sensation of being out of body. As if all the various versions of himself he now knew to have existed were somehow separate to him. His first life, which had ended with the spearmint kiss of a stranger in a cellar in Istanbul. His second, which was a mystery to him except for the knowledge that he had lived it in the century into which the woman sleeping near him had been born. And born long after he must have died. And now this third life, which began when his scarred and tattooed patient had first made her imprint in the dust on the cellar floor in Constantinople, and so rebooted the loop, thus sending Stanton and the whole world back around it once again.

And who was she? What terrible things had been done to her? And why? What world had these other Chronations been seeking to fix?

Having washed and cleaned her each day, he knew her scars by now as well as she must have known them herself. Better, in fact, particularly the crazed white spaghetti of healed lacerations that covered her back and buttocks and the backs of her legs.

These were marks of a cruel and terrifying abuse. She had suffered under a thick lash. A cat o’ nine tails. Thin canes and heavy batons. She’d been stabbed with a stiletto dagger, slashed with knives and bitten by men and animals. She’d been shot and she had been burned. Stanton felt naked fury welling up inside him to see evidence of such abuse.

How had she even survived it?

The same way that she was currently surviving her near fatal encounter with septicaemia. Because she was clearly the toughest individual he had ever encountered, male or female. Not as strong as him, certainly, but immeasurably tougher.

Nonetheless, even a superwoman should have been dead with the kind of punishment and cruelty this woman had sustained. Clearly whoever had tormented her had also prevented her from dying. It seemed to Stanton that they had been trying to break her, and had refused to allow her release until they had done so. They had tortured her and beaten her but each time they had stitched her wounds and set her broken bones, the obvious conclusion being that they had done this in order that she would get well enough for them to attack her again.

Who did that? Who cared so much about controlling another person, bending them to their will? Subduing the spirit of a single individual?

He stared at the sleeping woman.

She didn’t look so tough now.

Asleep on her pillow, her face framed by the white nightcap, the snowy sheets against her chin, her breath gentle and even. What dreams were diverting her subconscious, he wondered.

She had a fine face. Sharp and angular but noble. The nose had been broken and was bent, but not disfiguringly so. Stanton found himself wondering if she might even be beautiful.

He would know when he could see her eyes. He’d seen them once but only for a moment and then wild with fire and from a faraway place. He didn’t know what colour they were.

Speculating on the colour of her eyes brought his thoughts almost inevitably to Bernadette. Those green and sparkling Irish eyes. Smiling eyes as the old song had it. Not smiling, though, the last time they’d met his. Then they’d been wet with anger and pain. Would he ever see them smile again?

He felt his own eyes closing. He was tired; he had tended the woman for days, getting very little sleep. His head nodded in his chair.

Almost asleep now. His breathing falling into a rhythm with that of his strange and mysterious charge. His comrade. In many ways a sort of sister.

But as he drifted he sensed the movement.

Of course he’d known he should have manacled her, secured her to the bed. But somehow he hadn’t been able to bring himself to. Her wrists and ankles showed the marks of having been bound so many times, sore, permanently bruised and scarred. He just couldn’t add to that. And she’d seemed so peaceful.

She wasn’t peaceful any more.

His eyes snapped open to be confronted by a vision of death. An avenging angel, clad in voluminous white, descending on him like a snow eagle swooping down on a rabbit.

He saw her eyes now as she fell towards him, burning embers in a face of ice.

There had been a fountain pen and paper by her bed, with which Stanton had been keeping a diary of her symptoms. The pen was in her fist now. An inky dagger. She must have been aware of it for a while. Lying in bed, feigning unconsciousness, awaiting her chance.

There is always a weapon available if you care to find it.

That’s what his SAS fight instructor had told him. Clearly she’d been taught the same lesson.

The pen was descending fast, its nib closing on his right eye, the ball of which it would pop before travelling on into his brain.

Stanton turned his head in time. The nib tore into the top of his earlobe and crumpled against his skull. The trajectory of her dive completed, the woman crashed down on top of him, her whole body against his, toe to toe, head to head, together in the easy chair.

This was Stanton’s chance, an opportunity to use his greater weight. He rolled her, and even in this moment of extremis he was clear-headed enough to try not to land her on her injured arm. He wanted her well enough so that he could persuade her to stop trying to kill him.

The two of them rolled out of the chair, tipping it over on top of them as they hit the carpet. This time Stanton was on top, an advantage which he put to immediate use by pinning her.

‘Stop this!’ he spat in English, the language she had used to him. ‘I’m your friend. I saved you.’

‘You shot me!’ she snarled. It was the first time he’d heard her speak since the moment in the hospital when she’d imagined in her delirium that he was trying to rape her. Did she sound Scottish?

‘You shot me!’ Stanton heard himself protesting.

‘Because you were about to kill the fucking Kaiser, you fuck!’

‘Because of Chronos,’ he grunted, struggling to keep her pinned. ‘I’m a Companion of Chronos. I know what you are. I know about Chronos. I’m from Chronos too.’

To Stanton’s astonishment she actually smiled, stopped struggling and smiled.

Except it wasn’t a smile of pleasure or fun, it was bitter and cold, really more of a sneer.

‘I know. Asshole,’ she said. ‘I know you’re from Chronos.’

‘You know?’

Stanton was so astonished he momentarily relaxed his grip. Fortunately she didn’t detect the half second of weakness, or if she did she decided not to exploit it.

‘How do you know?’ he asked.

‘We read your letter.’

It was the last thing he’d expected. In fact, with all the distraction of discovering that he was not the only visitor from the future and of then establishing contact with his counterpart, he’d forgotten all about his letter. It had only ever been the longest of long shots that it would survive. A desperate throw of the dice, a nod towards history.

‘My God,’ he said. ‘It was still there?’

‘Yes, it was there. We found it on the night we entered the cellar. On the night I journeyed back in time.’

Now it was her body that relaxed. She no longer seemed predisposed to fight.

‘So … can we talk?’ Stanton asked. ‘If I release you from this pin-down will you go back to bed, let me check you haven’t done yourself any harm trying to kill me and let me order some tea so we can talk?’

She thought for a moment, then nodded.

Warily he released her and got to his feet. Reaching down he offered her a hand. He could see the thought process in her mind. This was a woman who clearly viewed every moment and every gesture with maximum suspicion. But she was still weak and her violent strike at him had tired her.

She took his hand and he drew her to her feet. She sat down on the bed but didn’t get in.

‘So, talk,’ she said.

There was so much to discuss. Stanton decided to start with the most recent astonishing revelation.

‘You actually read my letter? It was still there? After a hundred and eleven years?’

‘Yes, it was still there. In the time that I come from Istanbul had been a dead town for nearly a century.’

‘Dead?’

‘It was cleared in the great starvations of the 1930s. All the cities of Eastern Europe and Asia Minor were. Prague, Warsaw, Budapest, Sarajevo, Zagreb, Istanbul. The Party couldn’t feed them so instead they drove the people out into the country to make war on the peasants for what could be found. They died of starvation in their tens of millions, which of course was what was intended. Those that survived tried to fight back and the Party responded using chemical warfare. They poisoned everything south of the Danube. When the Master and I entered Newton’s cellar, no one had been near the place in eighty years. The cellar was still locked.’

Stanton’s mind was reeling. Chemical warfare? Mass starvation? Cities dead for decades? What sort of world had this woman come from?

He tried to focus his questions. Start with the most immediate. Like in all good fieldwork, deal with the most pressing issue first.

‘Why did you try to kill me just then?’ he asked. ‘Surely you can see I’ve tried to help you?’

‘It’s my mission to kill you,’ she replied.

‘Yes, but you failed. Your mission was to kill me before I killed the Kaiser. Why bother now?’

She looked at him and suddenly the fire reignited in her eyes.

‘Because you ruined my fucking century, you stupid fucking cunt!’

She lifted her nightdress, all the way to above her breasts revealing the length of her tortured body. ‘You did this to me. You did it to millions and millions of people. Billions. You killed my children!!’

And suddenly the rage was on her again. As she dropped the nightdress hem he saw her abdominals tense into rigid corrugated iron. One foot was moving backwards, preparing to anchor a second spring at him.

‘Stop!’ he said. ‘Don’t do it! I’ll win and you know it. Maybe not on your day but this isn’t your day. You’re weak. You’ve been bedridden for a month and lost whatever weight you had. You can’t beat me, so stop. You’re just not well enough to fight me yet.’

She paused and looked at him hard.

‘You’re right. I’m not well yet,’ she conceded. ‘But soon I will be.’

She sat back on the bed and Stanton went into the vestibule where the internal telephone was situated. He ordered some tea and coffee and food.

‘What’s your name?’ he asked when he returned.

‘They call me Katie.’

‘Short for Katherine?’

‘No. K-T. Short for KT503b678.’

‘I’m Hugh Stanton.’

‘I know your name.’

‘From my letter?’

‘No. I’ve known it since I was six years old. All young pioneers learn it. You’re in the history books.’

That certainly took him aback.

‘Really?’

‘Of course you are. We all learn of the unbalanced bourgeois British zealot who unwittingly lit the spark of revolution by trying to frame honest Socialists. How you were sheltered by the Irish whore Burdette, but that you betrayed her and ran like a coward, leaving her to the Fascist Monarchist police.’

Stanton swallowed hard.

‘Well,’ he said, trying not to think of Bernadette or what might have happened to her after the police realized she’d let him go. ‘You know now that I’m not a zealot and I’m not unbalanced. I am just like you. I was brought to Cambridge in 2024. I presume you were brought to Cambridge too?’

‘I heard the Master use that name,’ Katie conceded. ‘It’s a bourgeois name. The place has a number now.’

‘I was brought there by the Companions of Chronos.’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘I’ve told you, we read your letter.’

‘Well, then you know something about the terrible events of my own century,’ Stanton said. ‘You know that I killed the Kaiser to prevent the most terrible war in history. A war that marked the beginning of a terrible century. A century in which humanity learned to murder on an industrial scale. Whole populations died in the 1930s and 1940s, the Jews, the Gypsies, the Poles, the Ukrainians, all slaughtered. All slaughtered by Russian Soviet Communism.’

Now she really did smile. A broad wide smile that stretched fully across her face. And yet still a smile with not a single gram of joy in it.

The smile of a corpse.

‘I know,’ she repeated. ‘I read your letter. I know about your “terrible” war, your “Great” War, which began with the killing of an archduke at Sarajevo … Tell me, Hugh Stanton, how long did it last? This war that so corrupted and cursed the century into which you were born?’

‘Eleven years,’ Stanton replied. ‘1914 to 1925. The Great War lasted eleven years.’

‘Oh, eleven years,’ Katie replied with bitter sarcasm. ‘And tell me, Captain Stanton, how long did the Second World War last?’

Stanton was confused.

There had been no Second World War in the century from which Hugh Stanton had come.

The century which McCluskey had sought to correct.

In Stanton and McCluskey’s century there had been only one world war. The Great War.

‘One was enough,’ Stanton asserted. ‘More than a decade of deadlocked butchery. A butchery that ruined all the great nations of Europe utterly. Britain, France, Germany, Austria, Russia.’

‘But not America,’ Katie sneered. ‘They didn’t fight in this terrible war, did they? This war which you call Great?’

‘No, they kept out of it. That was why it went on so long. Woodrow Wilson would have brought them in but he was shot on the steps of Congress by Isolationists. So the war dragged on in deadlock until in the end both Germany and Russia had Communist revolutions. Germany’s under Luxemburg; Russia’s under Stalin. You know what happened then from the letter I wrote. Stalin was stronger. He betrayed Luxemburg. He had her and Liebknecht murdered in the streets. The Russians spread their ‘revolution’ west, through the Ukraine and Poland, through Germany and into France and on to Spain. By 1930 only Britain remained free, holding out under Winston Churchill. Isolated, alone, with the Russians on the Channel. The rest of Europe and all of Asia was enslaved under Stalin’s paranoid genocidal regime … a regime which murdered millions and millions of people, right up until 1951 when the Americans produced their bomb and destroyed Stalin’s Soviet Empire in a single day. All those decades of misery for half the globe stemmed from the terrible Great War. The war I stopped.’

‘Yes, you stopped it all right,’ Katie agreed. ‘Because of you, in my century there was no war in 1914. Germany was not destroyed. So Rosa Luxemburg didn’t have her revolution in 1925 in a nation exhausted by a great war; instead she had her revolution in 1916. As a reaction to the brutal police state you brought about by killing the Kaiser. Her revolution didn’t begin in a nation blighted by poverty and starvation and war exhaustion, like in your century. It began in the richest, most developed country on earth with the biggest army and the most advanced technology. In my century, the Russians weren’t the top Communists, the Germans were. The German USSR that Luxemburg established in 1916 was a global colossus. So when the vermin Strasser had her killed and made himself German Soviet dictator, he was the most powerful man in the world. A red kaiser. The revolution spread to Russia and was unstoppable. Then Strasser began his war and along with his Russian servant Stalin he took over all of Europe, including Britain. There was no “Churchill”, whoever the fuck he was, to “stand alone”. Britain wasn’t fit to fight anyone; it and its Empire had been fatally weakened and divided by the Civil War over Ireland. Strasser’s “revolution” spread to China, India, South America. Soon only America remained outside German Soviet control. But they didn’t save the world. Because when the atomic bomb was finally developed, it was Germany not America that had it. Berlin ordered a nuclear strike. I was one of the soldiers that occupied the rubble of New York. The globe was conquered! You think you lived in a shit century? With your one war, a bit of genocide and a half-arsed little nuclear strike. And after that nothing to worry about but something called global fucking warming, whatever that is. Try living in a century where the entire planet is ruled by a fourth-generation Communist lunatic. Where the entire planet is one vast network of prison camps. Where love is treason and they make you drown your own babies and every person in the world is an ant, a drone, a robot. Beaten, murdered. Dying in the mines, starving in the fields. Or doing mass synchronized dances in the Red Squares of Berlin, London, Moscow and Washington. Thousands prancing about with red ribbons in their hands while the Party fossils stand on their platforms and gloat. A world where there is no freedom. No individuality. No joy of any kind. That’s the world you bequeathed us, when you shot the Kaiser and sparked a revolution. You stupid bastard. You stupid stupid bastard. Your century was paradise! Why didn’t you leave well alone?’

She burst into tears.

Stanton was completely taken aback. In the short time he’d known Katie he’d come to presume that her heart and soul were constructed out of the same stuff as her body. He’d never imagined she could cry.

He tried in vain to justify what he’d done. To explain why the Companions of Chronos of his world had tasked him to do what he had done.

‘Katie, you read my history. The Russian USSR killed tens of millions before it was beaten.’

‘But they were beaten! In the end they were stopped. How could you have thrown away a century where the killing actually stopped and what’s more had been stopped for seventy years?’

Stanton could not meet her eye. The dawning realization that his whole mission, the mission which had begun with the murder of his own family, had actually resulted in the enslavement of the whole world was too much to bear.