“Where were you going, in your very careful fashion, when that deer got in your way?” I wanted to know.
“Home,” he said. He was being annoying again, probably to pay me back for the ironic remark about his very careful fashion.
“Where had you been, then?” I asked. “Collecting dinosaurs?”
“Much further back than that,” he told me. “Collecting alternatives to DNA, from the era when there was a chemical contest to determine the fundamentals of Earthly life. You can imagine how many individual moments I had to pass through in a five-billion-year journey. They were all supposed to be vacant of solid material—until you changed history.”
“Me!” At first I was outraged, but then I caught on to what he meant. I’d been supposed to hit the deer. The deer shouldn’t have jumped sideways. But he was still wrong. It hadn’t been me who’s changed history—his history—but the deer. I remembered the way it had looked at me before it left the scene of the accident…if it really had been an accident.
The time traveler had implied that history couldn’t be changed, but what he’d actually said was that he and his kind couldn’t change it, and it seemed to me that his remarks about the practicality of time travel might imply that he actually meant “wouldn’t” rather than “couldn’t”. For them, perhaps, there really might be only one time-track, one history of Earthly life…but they weren’t arrogant enough to think that they would be the end of the Phoenix’s story, or the very last word in intelligent design, and they weren’t stupid enough to think that everything they couldn’t do was necessarily impossible or impractical.
“Your friends might not be able to come and pick you up,” I said. “If that bloody animal wiped out the history of the next billion years, your entire world might have been blanked out of existence.”
“They’re already here,” he countered, smugly, pointing to the driving mirror.
When I’d pulled into the lay-by it had only been big enough to accommodate one car, but now there was an empty space behind us, in which another vehicle was forming. It didn’t have its headlights on, but its shadowy form was uncannily similar to a Volkswagen Polo.
The thing that got out of the driving seat, however, didn’t look anything like me. It was wearing a plastic bag, but it looked vaguely reminiscent of a shaggy crocodile walking on its hind legs, although it bore about as much resemblance to a twenty-first-century croc as a twenty-first-century croc does to a lichen-encrusted warthog.
The time-traveler turned towards me, and stuck out his hand. “I’m truly sorry about the gun,” he said. “I didn’t know you as well then as I do now. You’ve been you for an entire lifetime, so you’re probably used to that awful chaos and confusion of motive and desire, fantasy and perception, but it was all extremely strange and disturbing to me.”
He opened the door as he was speaking. The car’s internal light came on. I saw that the cuts and bruises had almost healed, and that his features were almost exactly like those I see in a mirror when I shave—except, of course, that they were the wrong way round. I’m not the most symmetrical person in the world, alas.
Automatically, I took the hand in my own and shook it.
“You couldn’t give me a few tips, I suppose,” I said. “Tactics for avoiding the worst effects of the world’s impending end—that sort of thing.”
“Study Stone Age survival techniques and move to Antarctica,” he said. “That’s if you want to drag it out. Otherwise, don’t wait too long before buying that antique revolver and blowing your brains out.”
“I really would like to come with you,” I said. “I might not like your world, but.…”
“No can do, Jim,” he said. “Very sorry. Thanks for the lift. Just turn around and go back the way we came. You’ll be home in no time at all.” Then he shut the door, and walked back to the other car with the shaggy crocodile in the plastic bag. They seemed to be arguing about something as they went, but they certainly weren’t doing it in English.
The time-traveler got into the other Volkswagen’s passenger seat. The vehicle moved off a minute or so later, swerving past me and continuing along the road in the direction of the unknown.
For a couple of minutes I thought about following it, but I knew that time travel couldn’t possibly be as simple as that, and that I’d probably get lost in limbo. Doomed or not, the familiar world seemed the more attractive option. I put the car into gear, did another three-point turn, and headed back the way I’d come.
I had a lot to think about, and whatever the time traveler had said about “no time at all” I’d had a very long day. I was so used to the fake road being empty that I wasn’t really paying attention. I didn’t notice the road become real again, and I didn’t see the deer until it was far too late.
It wasn’t a big deer—a roe deer, I think, and not fully grown at that. I braked hard, but I knew it wouldn’t be hard enough, because the damn thing just stood stock still until I hit it. In the last split second before the impact, I stopped wondering whether it might be the same deer as before, realizing that it had to be exactly the same deer. This time, though, it wasn’t going to leap aside. This time, the time traveler’s history would be conserved.
The luckless deer slammed into the windscreen, and the windscreen broke. A deer—even one that’s hardly more than a fawn—can really make a mess of your face when it’s traveling along with the shards of a windscreen at God-only-knows-how-many miles per hour, but it didn’t knock me unconscious. To tell the truth, I think most of the blood must have been the deer’s, not mine. I was able to bring the car to a halt, unbuckle my seat belt and step out on to the road.
“The bastard,” I said. “I wonder whether he and his mate fixed things so that it never bloody happened, or whether the dent in history was just snapping back into shape.” I was glad, though, that I still remembered every moment of what had happened, even if it hadn’t happened any longer. Neither he nor history had been able to take that away from me.
I couldn’t be absolutely sure, of course. How could I begin to guess what the temporal AA, or the natural resilience of the time-stream, might be able to achieve?
I stuck the deer in the boot, although rumor has it that collecting road kill still counts as poaching in the eyes of the law. I got a friend in the business to butcher it for me, and split the legs and rump with him. Unfortunately, every time I eat a bit I remember the way the damn thing looked at me that first time, immediately after it had caused the time machine to crash. I don’t know for sure, but it still seems to me that the deer had known what it was doing. Perhaps, in some parallel universe, it still does—but in ours, it seems, intelligent designers seem to be content to work in less ambitious and more mysterious ways.
CHAPTER THREE
TAKING THINGS SERIOUSLY
In most of the places that Steve had hung out in the course of his life, a story like Jim’s would have got a round of deeply ironic but sincerely admiring applause, assuming that the audience could have tolerated its enormous length—which was unlikely, given the shortage of modern attention spans. Even respectful applause, however, was evidently not de rigueur at AlAbAn meetings. When Jim finished he was greeted with a polite murmur of approval and an assortment of sage nods.
Steve hadn’t been planning to tell his story anyway, even if there had been time left for a second one, but he realized immediately that he was going to have to remember a great deal more, and organize it far more comprehensively, before he could even begin to think about taking the floor in Amelia Rockham’s front room. Even if Jim’s performance wasn’t typical, it had certainly set a standard. Steve wasn’t the kind of person to obsess about the possibility