The Eternal War Read online

  Lincoln heard movement and closed his eyes. A moment later he felt a gentle nudge, the grain sack beneath him shifting, and the warm breath of someone leaning over his face.

  ‘He still asleep?’

  ‘Dead to the world, I think.’

  A chuckle. ‘Jahulla, it’s hard to imagine this drunk being the President of America, isn’t it?’

  ‘He’s still got a while to sort himself out, so he has.’

  ‘Information: the American civil war begins in April 1861.’

  ‘Well, there you go … he’s got exactly thirty years to sort himself out. Loads of time.’

  A pause. ‘What do you think, Bob? Reckon we’ve patched up history?’

  ‘The target person is alive. History data files show that he will embark on a career as a lawyer in the next few years. Then go into politics.’

  ‘Lawyer? Shadd-yah! You’re joking!’

  ‘Negative. Not joking.’

  A pause.

  ‘Hmmm … I could imagine him as a lawyer. He’s got the temperament. Argumentative, so he is. Anyway …’ He heard a footstep. ‘Come on, Sal, let’s go and explore New Orleans while we got the chance. He’ll be fine. We should leave before he wakes up. With a bit of luck he won’t even remember us.’

  Movement again. Lincoln heard the swish and rustle of cotton skirts. Then the receding sound of footfalls down the wooden planks of the dockside. He opened his eyes once more and watched the three dark shapes: one a giant of a man, another a slender young man and the third a young woman. His mind was still foggy from the whisky he’d been drinking earlier in the afternoon, foggy … but still able to function. In the last couple of minutes he’d heard enough to make a feebler-minded person than him question their very sanity.

  … 1912 … time travel …?

  As a boy Lincoln had once discussed such an absurd idea with a friend – what if a man could speed up the turning of a clock? Or slow it? Or stop it? Or … even wind it back the wrong way? What if a man could walk in days past? Meet great men from history and talk to them. An absurd idea. A fanciful notion for their imaginative young minds. Yet … here it seemed to be, the very idea he and his childhood friend had playfully considered while resting in the branches of a sycamore tree.

  Is this possible?

  Perhaps in some far-off future time – 1912, for example – it could be possible. The ingenuity of man seemed to know no bounds. Every year it seemed a new device was being invented, new knowledge of how God’s earth functioned uncovered. Who knows what science men would be wielding like magic in the year 1912?

  He eased himself into a sitting position. His head pounded as if some small gold prospector was at work in there with a rock hammer.

  And what was it the much deeper voice had said? That he would be a lawyer? And one day … did the girl actually say it? Did she actually say the word president?

  He felt a shudder of excitement course through him, blowing away the cobwebs of his hangover.

  President?

  If that was true, really true, if those three strangers did actually come from a time beyond his own and could know such things, know his destiny … then they would know how it would be possible that a poor fellow like him would one day lead this country as its president.

  His skittering mind reached out further. Perhaps there was an even greater goal, a greater destiny for him than a life of politics. He realized it would be a far greater thing to be the only man from 1831 to visit the future, to actually see with his own eyes all the wonderful devices on air, sea and land that man’s ingenuity could create. He imagined the cities of this time full of towers of glistening crystal that prodded the very heavens.

  I would truly like to see this future …

  CHAPTER 12

  2001, New York

  Maddy sat with her feet up on the computer desk, her trainers resting on a stack of pizza boxes. She watched the monitor in front of her, a looping display of tragedy unfolding in painful endless repetition.

  The flickering, shaking camcorder footage of a passenger plane swooping low across the skyscrapers of Manhattan … and in those precious heartbeats of time before it finally crashes into the side of the north tower … a hope? Even though you know what happens, isn’t there always that fleeting moment of hope, a possibility that it might actually miss this time? That it just flies between them? That Julian and nearly three thousand other people might return home that day and tell their families of the near miss that terrified them all for a few moments?

  But the loop of footage never changes.

  She watched it in slow motion. It ended, as it always did, with an orange fireball, a quickly growing pillar of black smoke and a million sheets of paper raining down like confetti, like snow to the streets of Manhattan.

  Maddy remembered that day as if it was yesterday. She’d been nine. She’d been at school. An ashen-faced teacher’s assistant had burst into their classroom and blurted out the news. The television set in the corner had been switched on and there it was, the smouldering north tower. She remembered her teacher sobbing, and other girls in her class following suit.

  Or maybe there was a chance that this world with its subtly altered reality – no President Lincoln – was going to be different enough for the American Airlines Flight 11 to take off and arrive at its destination, and no one was going to die tomorrow. It had only been one tiny ripple of change so far … but, not for the first time, she wondered how nice it would be to preserve an alternate world changed just enough to spare Julian, and three thousand others, their lives.

  ‘Maddy?’

  She looked up at Becks, standing beside her. ‘Uh? Hey, Becks.’

  ‘I have finished.’

  Maddy had given her the task of checking on the growth tubes in the back. There were six foetuses hanging in that awful murky, smelly growth solution, being fed a mix of nutrients that kept them in stasis. None of them would grow any larger until they activated the growth mode and cut the mix with steroids. As long as they had power feeding the tubes, the foetuses – future Bobs and Becks – took care of themselves. Although, occasionally, the filters needed to be pulled out, cleared of gunk and put back in. A quite horrible job. Even worse, Maddy mused, than pulling rotting hair and skin and whatever else was in there from a blocked plughole. Even worse, if it was possible, than emptying their chemical toilet.

  ‘All of the growth tubes are performing optimally,’ she said drily. ‘All the in-vitro clone candidates are fine.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Do you wish me to make you some coffee?’

  Maddy could still smell that gunk on Becks’s hands. ‘Uhh … no, that’s OK.’ She picked up a remote control and switched one of the monitors to show a cable channel. The Simpsons was on. She recognized it as an old episode she’d seen too many times over the years. But, of course, here in 2001, for every kid just coming in from school and watching it now, it was a brand-new episode.

  And one of those kids … is – was – me.

  She had to be out there, right now: a nine-year-old Madelaine Carter, sitting in the kitchen having an after-school bowl of Nugget Crunch, most probably watching the very same episode. And Mom, sitting at the kitchen table beside her, asking her about her day and Maddy grunting answers back.

  What she’d give to just grab her coat, her wallet, walk out of the arch and get the first flight from JFK to Boston. What she’d give to walk up the front yard, on to the porch and ring the doorbell. To say, ‘Hi, Mom,’ when she opened the front door. ‘I’m your little girl all grown up. How’s tricks?’

  Most of all, what she’d give to step in past her mom, cross the hall into the kitchen, hunker down in front of that little girl, with her frizzy hair tied in a ponytail, her hands dirty, her jeans scuffed from playing soccer with the boys.

  ‘Hey there, Maddy, wanna know who I am?’

  Becks sat down beside her. Silent, studying her face intently, before she cocked her head curiously. ‘Maddy Carter. Why are you
crying?’

  ‘Uh?’ She shook her head, her mind once again back in the archway, her eyes once more on the screen watching Homer trashing Ned Flanders’s lawnmower.

  ‘Dirt,’ she mumbled. ‘Dirt in my eye.’ She rubbed them dry under her glasses. ‘Becks?’

  ‘Yes, Maddy?’

  ‘You recall our last conversation with Foster?’

  ‘When we went to Central Park?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  That’s where she could find him same time, same day. For him, a moment that passed once; for her, looping back in their forty-eight-hour bubble, it could be a repeated encounter out there in the park, beside the duck pond.

  ‘I recall your conversation with Foster.’

  ‘You remember we asked you when you could unlock that data … the decoded message in the Grail.’

  ‘Yes, Maddy, I remember that.’

  ‘You replied –’

  ‘The data would be unlocked when it is the end.’

  ‘Yes … “the end”. What did you mean by that?’

  Becks cocked her head on one side. ‘It is the only answer the protocol permits me to offer.’

  ‘But what do you think it means? What is it referring to? The end of what?’

  Becks shrugged. ‘I have no data on that.’

  ‘The end of … me? You? The agency? The world?’

  The support unit’s grey eyes locked on hers. ‘I repeat, I have no data to interpret that message.’

  ‘Is there no way we could dig that hard drive out of your head and access that locked part of the drive? Scan it somehow? Siphon the data?’

  Becks studied her coolly.

  ‘No offence meant, Becks … but hacking open your skull and digging out your brain seems like the only way we’re going to find out what “the end” actually means.’

  ‘Tampering with my on-board computer would trigger the self-destruct mechanism. There is no viable way to bypass this protocol. The information will be revealed to you when certain conditions are met.’

  ‘But you don’t even know what those conditions are!’

  ‘I will know when it happens,’ she replied calmly. ‘Then you will know the contents of the message.’

  Maddy shook her head with frustration. ‘Argghh … you’re so annoying!’

  ‘I apologize.’

  She sighed. ‘Go and make yourself useful. Make some toast or something.’

  ‘Yes, Maddy.’ Becks turned obediently and headed towards their kitchen area. ‘And wash your hands first!’

  Maddy settled back into her chair and watched the world outside through her bank of monitors – the subtly changed world that now no longer recognized the name Abraham Lincoln.

  Secrets and freakin’ lies.

  She resumed her little daydream of going home, seeing Mom, seeing herself and kissing all this insane nonsense goodbye.

  CHAPTER 13

  1831, New Orleans

  The Jenkins & Proctor warehouse was quiet. Around them casks of wine and canvas sacks of cornmeal were piled high. Outside through the wooden slat walls they could hear voices of several dozen men, the bray of a pony, the smack of heavy oatmeal bags being dropped on the docks, the far-off hoot of a steamboat. The life of the day indulging in one last surge of activity before the sky lost its sun.

  Sal sat on a pile of sacks, exhausted from hours on her feet, but exhilarated by the world she’d witnessed.

  ‘Information: three minutes until the twenty-four-hour window is due to open.’

  Liam got to his feet and checked over the top of a stack of cargo to make sure, once again, that they were alone in the storehouse. ‘I do hope our friend Mr Lincoln has sobered up.’

  They’d checked back where they’d left him earlier this morning. He was gone. Not that that was surprising. The docks were a busy place from dawn and more than likely he’d crawled away holding a sore head for somewhere quieter to nurse his hangover.

  ‘Ah well,’ said Liam, ‘we’ll soon know if all’s better when we get back.’

  ‘Maybe he isn’t so important to history after all,’ said Sal. ‘I mean it was only a little change we saw, wasn’t it? Maybe that’s all that’s going to happen.’

  Bob retrieved data. ‘Historical accounts from the unaltered historical database indicate his strong leadership and the announcement of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 were critical to the North winning the war.’

  ‘The whuh?’

  Bob turned his gaze to Sal. ‘The Emancipation Proclamation was an executive order by President Lincoln that all slaves were to be given their liberty. It was an order enacted in the third year of the war and applied only to some of the –’

  ‘Shadd-yah!’ said Sal. ‘Third year of the war?’

  ‘Affirmative.’

  ‘But are you saying for the first three years the North had slaves too?’

  ‘Affirmative. There were slaves in the Union States.’

  ‘But … I thought that war was all about slavery? Started because of slavery!’ said Sal. ‘The North – the blue soldiers – were fighting to end it, and the South – the grey ones – wanted to keep it.’

  ‘There are a number of listed reasons for the war. Slavery was considered a secondary or contributory issue at the beginning of the war, but became a primary issue towards the end.’

  Liam sat down on a bag next to Sal. ‘I’ve been reading up on the civil war. I remember this … some historians said this Proclamation was a tactical decision to weaken the South. It was designed to cause unrest. But, more important than that, the British government was sort of thinking of coming to help the Confederate South …’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because they saw the North, the Union, as a growing threat. They were becoming too rich, too powerful. Becoming too big for their boots. Threatening British dominance. So the British government thought it might be better if America was divided, so they wanted to help the Southern states, the Confederates, split off and form their very own nation. That’s right, isn’t it, Bob?’

  Bob shrugged. ‘I have some conflicting data files on this. Historians disagree.’

  ‘But here was the problem, Sal … the British people were against the idea of slavery. So it wasn’t going to be easy for the government to convince their people to go along with helping the South. And this fella, President Lincoln, was a smart chap. He realized if this war’s headlining issue was all about slavery, if the British people could see more clearly that one side, the North side, was totally against it … then there was no way they’d let their government support the slave-masters in the South.’

  He shrugged. ‘It was the right thing … what’s the word … the moral thing to do, to free all the slaves,’ said Liam. ‘But, the way I see it, it was also very clever, like a chess move. To make sure the Confederates didn’t have Britain come into the war on their side.’

  Sal shook her head. ‘I thought it was much simpler than that. Right versus wrong.’

  Liam hunched his shoulders. ‘Wars are never about right and wrong. Always seems to be they end up being about power … money … something both sides want for themselves.’

  ‘Information: I am detecting the density probe.’

  Liam got up from the sacks of cornmeal wearily. They’d been walking through the early hours of the morning and most of the day and his legs ached. He turned and offered Sal a hand. ‘Ma’am?’

  She was struggling with the layers of linen and cotton petticoats and the tightly laced bodice to get to her feet.

  ‘Whuh?’ she said, looking at his hand, utterly bemused. ‘What do you want?’

  He sighed, grasped one of her gloved hands and yanked her up on to her feet. ‘Jayyyz, don’t gentlemen offer ladies a polite hand any more in your time?’

  She shook her head. ‘Uhhh, no, not really. I’d probably run if a stranger reached out for me like that.’

  ‘One minute left until extraction,’ said Bob.

  Liam suddenly snapped his fingers. �
�We’re probably going to have to come back here again, once we’re sure history’s been corrected.’

  Sal looked at him. ‘Really? Why?’

  ‘Liam is correct,’ said Bob. ‘The distillery wagon represents altered history –’

  ‘And we’ll need to trace it back and find just who caused them horses to bolt.’ Liam looked at Bob. ‘We should’ve followed it up last night, straight after saving Lincoln.’ Liam cursed, frustrated with himself for having been so dense. ‘Why didn’t you suggest that, Bob?’

  ‘It was not a stated mission priority.’

  Liam cursed again. ‘We’ll need to come back once more and trace back the way that wagon came. See where it came from, find out what spooked them horses.’ He fumed in silence for a moment. ‘Jay-zus, that was stupid of me.’

  They waited for the window, listening to the bustling activity outside. Bob counted down the last ten seconds and then with a puff of air that sent Sal’s bonnet fluttering the shimmering orb of displaced time hovered darkly in front of them. Sal took a final look around the storage shed, savouring one last time the smells of woodsmoke, leather and horse manure.

  ‘I enjoyed my trip,’ she said, a little wistfully. ‘I wish …’ she started to say, but didn’t finish. She didn’t need to – Liam knew exactly what she was going to say.

  I wish we could stay.

  He nodded just to let her know he felt the same. ‘Best get going,’ he said finally.

  ‘Goodbye, 1831,’ she uttered, then reluctantly stepped through.

  Liam looked up at Bob. ‘Well, better get back home, then.’

  Bob nodded. ‘Correct.’

  They stepped into the displacement window one after the other.

  2001, New York

  A moment later Liam emerged from the milky void into the archway to see the three girls standing beside the computer desk, awaiting his arrival.

  ‘Hey-ho!’ he chirped as he strode towards them. ‘World saved … yet again!’

  Bob emerged from the portal behind him with a heavy grunt as his feet found the firm concrete.

  ‘Stand clear!’ said Maddy as she turned round to the desk to instruct computer-Bob to close the portal.