The Eternal War Page 4

Liam frowned for a moment, then grinned. ‘The Northern fellas … them people in blue.’

  ‘Right. Yes. Abraham Lincoln was the president of –’ she sighed – ‘them people in blue. Otherwise known as the North, the Union. The point was he kept them together, kept them fighting, led them to victory … but now he’s gone from civil-war history!’

  Sal chewed a fingernail absently. ‘That’s going to mean a big wave, then.’

  ‘Uh-huh … five minutes from now we could be looking out at a world in which the Confederates won.’ She glanced sideways at Liam. ‘Them fellas in grey.’

  Computer-Bob’s dialogue box appeared on screen.

  > Maddy, I have completed a scan of all the civil-war data retrieved and there are no references to Abraham Lincoln in this time period: 1861 to 1865.

  ‘Maybe he died,’ said Sal, ‘you know … before he should’ve?’

  ‘Hmmm … that’s a possibility. OK, then, computer-Bob, look earlier. Go earlier.’ She rubbed her eyes, already irritable and red from her cold, beneath her glasses. ‘We have data on him from our own internal historical database, right?’

  > Of course.

  ‘So when and where was he born?’

  > 12 February 1809. Hardin County, Kentucky.

  ‘Do we have a proper detailed biography? All his movements from childhood right up to becoming president?’

  > Yes, Maddy. I have detailed files.

  She had a pretty foggy high-school memory of Lincoln. They’d studied him and the civil war for a semester. Boring stuff some of the time, but it got interesting when the country started to pull itself apart over slavery and the war began.

  ‘He travelled around a bit if I remember correctly, right, Bob?’

  > Correct. His family moved several times. Then when he was a young adult he left home and –

  She waved her hand at the webcam to stop him. ‘Right, then. All right, OK, this is what we do.’ She pushed her glasses back up her nose. ‘I want you to search every external database from his birthdate onwards. I want you to focus your data-trawling on the places he was supposed to have lived in … Kentucky, wherever else he went. Dig into their newspaper archives, a lot of that old stuff is digitized.’

  ‘Hold on.’ Liam sat back in one of the office chairs, dug his heels into the concrete floor and pulled himself on squeaking castor wheels closer to her. ‘The world out there doesn’t care a jot for Mr Lincoln now. He’s a Mr Nobody, right? We’re now in a timeline where he never became a famous president. So there’d not be detailed biographies an’ the like out there on the man, surely?’

  ‘True.’ Maddy pulled on her lip. ‘But I remember reading he was quite … I dunno … quite driven. He had an uneducated father and lived quite poor, if I recall, in a log cabin, and sort of hated all that. Wanted to better himself. So, all right, something’s happened, things have changed and he never got to be president, but maybe he managed to become a local mayor or something, or a successful businessman? Something that might have left a small mark on the world.’

  She looked up at Bob and Becks in hope of a word of support. But both of them were silently blinking: networking with computer-Bob and helping the system with the data shovelling.

  ‘So,’ she continued, ‘if he became a local bigwig somewhere, maybe he opened some sort of, I dunno … some shopping mall …?’

  ‘Shopping mall?’

  ‘Ahhh … you know what I mean – trading post!’ She shook her head irritably. ‘Or opened some hospital wing, or some charity school for orphaned kiddies … or made some small town Independence Day speech or something. Point is … these places all had their own little two-sheet gazette, their own newspaper. And these days all that kind of stuff is up on the net as scanned data.’

  She turned towards the webcam. ‘You got that, Bob?’

  > Yes, Maddy, we are already searching.

  ‘Do you think we’ll have any more changes?’ asked Liam. ‘The world doesn’t look so different to me. Well, actually, it looks no different to me. Maybe that missing beefburger and the changed painting is all we’re going to get?’

  She shook her head. ‘That can’t be all, Liam. You can’t just remove a guy like Lincoln from history and it amounts to no more than the change of a snack menu. There’ll be more changes …’ She stopped mid-sentence. ‘Just a sec …’ She dug a hand deep into her jeans and fumbled for something. She pulled out a crinkled ball of paper and quickly unfolded it. Liam recognized it as a five-dollar bill.

  ‘Look! He’s still on there!’ she said, turning the note round so that he and Sal could see Lincoln’s face staring out at them with a surly scowl. ‘There’s your answer, Liam,’ she said. ‘There’ll be more ripples … History hasn’t finished fidgeting around to get rid of Lincoln yet.’

  Fidgeting around? Maddy realized how oddly human that sounded. As if time itself was some curmudgeonly old college lecturer who grumpily decided when he was good and ready to sit down to rewrite the history books.

  ‘This means another someone trying to mess things up,’ said Sal, ‘doesn’t it?’

  Liam nodded. ‘Another Kramer?’

  Maddy shrugged. ‘Not necessarily another Kramer.’

  Not long after they’d been recruited, they’d been thrown in the deep end, having to deal with a nut-job from the future who’d thought it a great idea to help the Nazis win the Second World War.

  ‘But if Lincoln’s destiny has been mucked up,’ said Liam, ‘that’s changed history. That means –’

  ‘I know,’ Maddy sniffed. ‘I know. It means another idiot’s fooling around with time travel.’ She puffed her cheeks. ‘All right, so here’s our plan, then … We’ll find him out there somewhere. A driven character like Lincoln’s going to have made his mark one way or another. He may not have ended up being the president, but a guy like that will have made his mark in some other way. We find him, then maybe we’ll find whoever’s just stepped back into the past and changed Lincoln’s destiny.’ She looked at Liam, even managed a laugh, not bad really, given she felt like death warmed up.

  ‘And you can tell whichever time-travelling moron it is who’s done this that they’re in big trouble.’

  CHAPTER 8

  2001, New York

  It took three hours before computer-Bob’s dialogue box blinked on to the screen and Becks and Bob eventually stirred from the motionless trance they’d been in. Liam came and shook Maddy awake.

  She stared up bleary-eyed at Liam, fumbling for her glasses. ‘They done?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Where’s Sal?’

  ‘Viewing. Bob’s with her.’

  Viewing – Maddy knew what he meant. Sal was sitting out in the middle of Times Square watching for the subtle further ripples of a time wave.

  ‘Any more changes?’ she asked, sitting up and swinging her legs wearily over the side.

  ‘Not that me or Sal have noticed.’

  She shuffled over to the computer desk feeling worse than ever, if it was even possible, despite having managed to grab some quilt-time. She squeezed past Becks, still standing like a sentinel, her eyelids flickering and twitching like the wings of a humming-bird.

  She slumped down at the desk just as she heard the echoing hiss of their kettle stirring to life. Liam – bless him – was making Maddy her wake-up brew. Coffee, black, strong and treacle-sweet.

  ‘Hey, Bob, what have you got for me?’

  > Hello, Maddy. We have collated all the data hits for ‘Abraham Lincoln’ dating from 12 February 1809. There are 7,376 data references to the name. Most of these will be in reference to other people of the same name.

  ‘Right. So can you filter it down to occurrences in places where Lincoln was supposed to have lived?’

  > Affirmative. I have done this. There are 109 data entries in relation to the following locations. 1809 – Hardin County, Kentucky. 1816 – Perry County, Indiana. 1830 – Macon County, Illinois. 1831 – Coles County, Illinois. 1831 – New Salem, Sagemon County, Ill
inois. 1831 – New Orleans. 1836 – Springfield, Kentucky. 1846 – Washington DC. 1848 – Springfield, Kentucky. 1860 – Washington DC.

  ‘Right … and some of those hits will be him. Some will be other guys of the same name.’

  > Affirmative. There is one data entry I calculate to be of particular relevance. Do you wish to see it?

  ‘Yeah, put it up.’

  One of the monitors on her right suddenly stopped relaying a real-time feed of Wall Street stock values and instead displayed the sepia-coloured scan of an old newspaper. She saw the paper’s title banner:

  The New Orleans Bee. Wednesday, April 6th, 1831

  ‘So, which bit am I looking at?’

  Liam placed a steaming mug of coffee on the desk and settled in a chair beside her.

  ‘Thanks,’ she wheezed.

  > I will enhance the image.

  The scanned image zoomed in on a short article at the bottom of the page. No more than half a dozen sentences in print that was almost as faint as a watermark. The magnified image was horribly pixellated, like trying to read words cobbled together out of Lego bricks.

  ‘Sheesh, can you do anything with the image?’ Maddy wrinkled her nose as she squinted at it. ‘It’s just pixel garbage.’

  > Just a moment. I shall alias-average the pixels and apply character analysis. There will be a significant margin of error, which I can attempt to contextually interpret for you.

  ‘Just do what you can, Bob,’ she said, holding a tissue to her face and honking noisily again into it. ‘Oh crud, I hate feeling all blocked up an’ rough,’ she muttered.

  The scanned image blurred, softened then hardened again as if a cinema projectionist was messing around with the lens. Then a small highlighted green square appeared in the top left-hand corner of the image, grabbing a portion, analysing it, then moving along and highlighting another portion to the right. Step by step it moved right across the image, stepped down a row and began on the left-hand side once more. On another screen a document opened and words began to appear.

  Liam leaned forward and began to read it aloud.

  ‘Yesterday, in the evening a second fatal collision occurred on Powder Street in as many weeks. A delivery cart belonging to Costen Brothers Distillery was responsible for crushing to death in a most horrendous manner a young dock worker. The ravaged body was identified by a flatboat captain as a crewman he had discharged earlier in the afternoon: Abraham Lincoln of New Salem.’

  There was a little more to the article, an editorial rant about the increasing business of the thoroughfares beside the landing docks and the need for some order to be brought to the chaos of foot and horse traffic sharing the same avenues.

  Liam looked at her. ‘Do you think …?’

  She honked again into a handkerchief, shedding shreds of tissue on to the desk. ‘I fig we definubbly got a winner, Liab,’ she huffed breathlessly, her blocked nose whistling unpleasantly like a flute.

  ‘Bost definubbly.’

  Midday in Times Square. Sal sat on her favourite bench, spattered with a pebble-dash of pigeon droppings and pink globules of discarded gum. Bob sat beside her, taking up the space two other people could easily have used.

  ‘You are different, though … Bob. Different from when you were first birthed.’ She turned to him. ‘Do you feel different in there … in your mind?’ she said, pointing to his bristly head. Maddy had insisted on shaving his head back down to the nut the other day. To be fair, she was right: Bob was beginning to look ridiculous. Coarse and dark, his hair should have been weighed down by its length – instead it seemed to perch on his head like a large spongy muffin. No way he was going to be able to go on missions looking like a seven-foot mushroom.

  Bob was giving her question some thought. ‘I have accumulated large amounts of sensory data. This has altered my operating parameters.’ He looked down at her. ‘These are my … memories.’

  ‘Memories, huh?’ She smiled. ‘Memories. You sound sort of … almost proud of them.’

  He cocked his head. ‘They are my mission log. They are performance data. They are –’

  ‘You,’ she finished for him. ‘They are you. They are what make you you. That’s what my dadda used to say. What makes us who we are is all the things we experience.’ She reached out and patted one of his thick arms affectionately. ‘You’re so much more now, more than you were, you big lump.’

  ‘More than … my operating system?’

  She nodded. ‘Does that make you feel proud? Do you feel different?’ She shrugged. ‘Do you even feel?’

  ‘I have sense receptors in my dermal layer –’

  ‘No, I mean in your heart … I mean emotions. Do you ever feel things? Like “scared”, or “happy”, or “sad”? Things like that?’

  He scanned his memories, sorting through trillions of bytes of data: fleeting images of stormtroopers and giant airships, prison camps and castles, and a million little interactions with Liam O’Connor.

  ‘I have experienced sensations of … attachment.’

  ‘Attachment? Do you mean … affection? What … for Liam?’

  ‘Affirmative. He is my mission operative.’

  ‘What about us, me and Maddy? You like us?’

  His expressionless cold grey eyes burned down at her as he sorted through data to find an answer. ‘I also feel similar sensations for you and Maddy Carter.’

  She hugged his arm. ‘Oh, you big chutiya bakra.’ A thought occurred to her. ‘What about Becks?’

  He frowned. Now there was a challenging question for him to chew over. His eyes blinked as he worked hard for an answer.

  Finally he spoke. ‘She is … a … part of me. And I am a part of her.’

  ‘But do you like her? Do you have sensations of attachment to her? I figure she’s like a sister or something?’

  ‘Sister?’ He considered that for a moment. ‘A sibling?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I will consider the question,’ he said. She suspected that was probably going to keep him occupied for the rest of the day. Sal shook her head and giggled at him, then hunkered down, cradled her chin in her hands and resumed watching the world going by.

  And then it happened,

  Just as she was looking right at it, before her very eyes, the sign above a fast-food restaurant flickered and changed. For a moment she thought she might have been gazing at an LED screen that had finally decided to move on to the next picture in its image list. But it was just a scuffed plastic sign above the glass windows of a fast-food bar. One moment it had said KENTUCKY-STYLE FRIED CHICKEN, the next it simply read FAST FRIED CHICKEN.

  She cursed under her breath, pulled out her mobile phone and dialled Maddy.

  ‘Yeah?’ she answered on the third ring.

  ‘I think I just saw a … No, I’m certain I just saw another time ripple, Maddy. A small one. You want to know what it was?’

  ‘It’s OK, Sal, it’s OK. We think we’ve got it nailed. Abraham Lincoln went and got himself squished by a cart in 1831. You better get yourselves back here, asap. If that’s another change you just spotted, then maybe the big time wave is coming right on its tail.’

  ‘OK.’

  She snapped the phone shut and stuffed it back in her pocket. ‘Back home, Bob.’ She punched his arm. ‘Time for us to get busy again.’

  CHAPTER 9

  2001, New York

  ‘Can I go this time?’

  Maddy looked at Sal. ‘No … that’s not your job.’

  ‘But I always end up in here … I never get to see anything interesting!’

  Maddy shook her head.

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Too dangerous.’ Maddy mentally winced at that. That was a lame reason. The poor girl had been in almost as much danger here in 2001 as she might have been with Liam in the past. And Sal could see that too.

  ‘Come on, Maddy, it’s just as bad here! We’ve had mutants, soldiers … those weird dinosaur things. You’re telling me “here” is safe?’ Sh
e shook her head. ‘That is totally shadd-yah!’

  Liam and the two units were listening to the row as they were getting dressed.

  Maddy closed her eyes tiredly. She didn’t need this. How could she explain to Sal that every trip through a portal could quite possibly strip another year or five off her natural lifespan? That the bombardment of tachyons, the immeasurable forces of chaos space, had a lethal effect on the body: aged it, corrupted it … eventually killed it. How could she explain that to her with Liam just yards away, unaware that soon – far too soon – he was going to be a dying old man?

  But then she and Sal were experiencing a milder form of that contamination themselves, living as they did in the archway’s resetting temporal bubble, weren’t they? It was coming for all of them one day, death.

  Something her cousin Julian had once said: ‘We’re all dead the moment we’re born. Just, some of us get there faster than others.’ Prophetic really since he died not so long after, lost in the rubble of the World Trade Center’s north tower.

  ‘Please!’ said Sal. ‘I want to see some history too!’

  We’re all dead …

  At least this wasn’t a huge jump. A hundred and seventy years. Nothing really in the grand scheme of things, she supposed. The shorter the jump, the less the damage. Their jump to Sunday a while back had probably been little more a dose of poison than the normal Tuesday-night bubble reset. She sighed. Why not? Living here in this archway like mole people wasn’t really the sort of dream life a person would want to last forever, anyway. One trip into history … this trip, a relatively safe trip. Why not?

  ‘All right,’ she sighed.

  Sal yelped and clasped her hands together with excitement.

  They had some clothes in the archway that they used to travel back to their 1906 ‘drop point’ in San Francisco. The ‘drop point’ was a stash of support-unit embryos held in suspended animation in the safety deposit box of a bank that was due to be reduced to rubble and ashes by the infamous and imminent Californian earthquake. With a little customization and by losing the headgear – hat fashion seemed to move along far more quickly than other wear – they could pass as 1830s clothes. Maddy’s corset and skirts might be a size too big for Sal, but nothing that would attract any attention.