“Now let’s have the further adventures of the blacksmith and the madly multiplying old ladies,” he said.
“Before you do,” Vivian said—saying it, she felt the same jolt of fear she had felt as she touched the Guardian’s nearly solid arm, but she made herself go on—“before I read it, please could you tell me about the Unstable Eras? How you tell which they are, I mean. And all about them.” There, it was out. Vivian was shaking and Jonathan was staring at what he was writing, disowning her. But she knew it was important.
“Trying to put off the evil hour, are you?” Dr. Wilander grunted. But he puffed placidly at his pipe and considered what to say. “Having just come from one yourself, I suppose you would be puzzled,” he remarked. “You can’t tell they’re Unstable at all when you’re living in them. You can only tell from outside, here in Time City. And it isn’t only that nobody in an Unstable Era knows what’s going to happen in their future—nobody knows. It can differ from day to day.” He laid his pipe on his desk and clasped his fat hairy hands round one of his huge knees. “But let’s not take the era you came from. That’s a terrible muddle, particularly just now. Let’s take the one closer to hand. Let’s look at Time City.”
“Time City!” Vivian exclaimed.
Jonathan was so astonished that he gave up disowning Vivian and swung his chair round to join in. “But Time City isn’t Unstable!” he said.
“One point proved,” grunted Dr. Wilander. “You don’t know it is because you’re living in it. Of course it’s Unstable, boy! If you could get right outside time as well as history, you’d find the City had a past and future as changeable as Twenty Century. What do you think is the real reason we have records of every single year of history and almost none of the City itself? Because those records wouldn’t stay accurate, of course. And do you know what’s going to happen in the City tomorrow? No. And nor do I.”
“But we do know!” Jonathan protested. “We know the weather and what ceremonies are due—”
“Ceremonies!” Dr. Wilander snarled. “They were probably invented to make people feel they knew what would happen tomorrow. That’s all the use I’ve ever seen in them. Or maybe they had a meaning once. Oh, I grant you that Time City is the most uneventful and stable seeming of Unstable Eras, but that’s all it is. We might hope for a bit of a crisis perhaps when it comes to an end—and since it’s almost worked round to its own beginning again now, that won’t be long—but my guess is that it’ll just peter out in some ceremony or other. With that fool Enkian complaining somebody put him too low down the order. Gah!”
“Did you say it’s come round to its own beginning?” Vivian asked.
“I did. Pass me that chart,” said Dr. Wilander. And when Vivian had handed the chart to him, he showed her what he meant, running his big square-ended finger round the horseshoe from the left where it was marked Stone Ages, and up to the right, where it said Depopulation of Earth. “The City has lasted the whole length of history, until now,” he said. His big finger stopped in the blank space between the beginning and the end of history. “Here. It’s moving into the gap at this moment, where it almost certainly began. When it gets to the middle of this gap,” his finger tapped the very top of the chart, “it will probably break up. People are trying to think of ways to prevent that, of course. The trouble is, we don’t know what will happen. Maybe nothing will. Or maybe it will go critical like this Twenty Century you came from.”
Jonathan shot Vivian a scared look. “Oh,” she said. This was not exactly what she had meant to find out, but it was worth knowing all the same. “If it goes critical, does it take the whole of history with it?”
“That’s one of the many things we don’t know,” said Dr. Wilander. “There’s no point in looking scared, girl. There’s nothing you can do. And that’s enough of that. Translation now. Skip the first bit—you’ll have remembered that—and read out the rest.”
Vivian sighed, because the first bit was the only part that made sense, and began, “The first Time Patrol Officer—”
“Guardian,” said Dr. Wilander. “It makes a change from old ladies, I suppose. Guardian is the word.”
“Guardian,” Vivian read obediently, “in the Iron Age is upon a hill and he is a long man with an antic (is that right?) weather and boring shirts—”
“Antic nature and drab clothing,” said Dr. Wilander.
“Which suits him in the first place,” said Vivian. It suddenly dawned on her that she was reading a description of the very Guardian they had met this morning. She wished she could have made more sense of it. Perhaps, if it was nonsense enough, Dr. Wilander might tear the paper out of her hands and read it himself. But that was not to be.
“No, no!” said Dr. Wilander. “As befits the Guardian of an early Age. Go on.”
Vivian was forced to go on, in fits and starts, with corrections every other word from Dr. Wilander, and try to make sense of it as she went. Jonathan was not even pretending to do the work Dr. Wilander had set him. She could see his eyes wide behind their flicker, looking at her past his pigtail, waiting for the next word. And to her relief, he was having the sense to write it down on a spare sheet of writing-stuff as she stumbled on. He read it out to her afterwards as they went slowly down the stairs, with Time City appearing slanted this way and that around them and once almost over their heads.
“This is it,” he said. “‘And the second Guardian is in a sea that is dry and is all in silver which befits an Age where men create and kill in marvellous ways’ (I wonder why). ‘The third Guardian is young and strong and in every way a man of the Golden Age. He is clothed all in green, for he lives in a forest that covers a town that was once great. And the fourth Guardian goes secretly, lest any should guess where the Casket of Lead lies, for that is the most precious Casket of all.’ Oh, for Time’s sake, V.S.! You are a fool! Why didn’t you say what this was about?”
Vivian fixed her eyes on the glitter of Millennium, lying sideways down a green horizon. “I couldn’t make head nor tail of it,” she said. “I’d no idea it was telling how to find the Caskets.”
“It is, but it’s not telling enough,” Jonathan said discontentedly. “Knowing the Iron Casket was on a hill doesn’t mean much unless you know anyway. And there are about ten seas that have been dry at one time or another. As for towns that were once great, I can think of forty straight off, starting with Troy and ending with Minneapolis. Still, if I give Leon Hardy this, he might make something of it.”
“Why? What have you gone and told him?” Vivian said.
“Nothing really. I was very cunning,” Jonathan said. “But he offered me anything I wanted in return for telling about the Guardian dancing through the ceremony, so I asked him to look in records for legends about the Caskets. Students can look in all sorts of sections of Perpetuum without anyone wondering what they’re doing, and I thought he just might come up with where and when the polarities are hidden.”
Vivian felt very dismayed. Leon Hardy might be nice enough really, but he was quite old, old enough not to bother about things that seemed important to people her age and Jonathan’s. “I hope you told him not to tell anyone.”
“He understands that,” Jonathan said airily, plunging down another flight of stairs, which brought the dome of The Years wheeling right way up. The twin domes of Science now blocked the view of Millennium. “And I got him to concentrate on the Ninth Unstable Era anyway, because he’s from near then himself and knows a lot about it to start with. You see, I had a really good idea this morning in Duration. I think we ought to go and warn the Guardian of the last Casket first, so that he can be ready long before the thief gets there, and perhaps get him to help us find the other two. But we need to find out where he is before we can do that. You can see that, can’t you?”
It did make sense, Vivian agreed. But she still felt uneasy. She had to remind herself that their two time-ghosts in the passage showed that she and Jonathan were certainly going to do something like this, and quite safely
and happily, it seemed. Then she reminded herself that Jonathan had managed to snatch her off the station in 1939 very cleverly, without being found out. This was such a comforting thought that Vivian quite forgot that the whole kidnapping had been a mistake anyway.
She came into the Annuate Palace with Jonathan to find that there was going to be another ceremony. The hall was littered with golden hats and jewelled shoes. Feet were hammering and voices shouting somewhere overhead. Jonathan took one look and quietly disappeared. Vivian never even noticed him go, because a crowd of people came rushing downstairs just then, with Sempitern Walker leading the rush.
“Not that golden hat!” Sempitern Walker roared. “I need the Amporic Mitre, you fool! And where the Devil has someone put the Amporian Cope?”
He turned and sped along the hall towards the matutinal, with everyone else pelting after him. Elio ran after the crowd, waving a frail golden vest-like thing. Jenny came mincing down the stairs last of all. She was obviously part of the ceremony too, because she was half-dressed for it in a blue and lilac gown that held her knees together and flared out at her feet, and she was looking more than usually worried.
“Oh, Vivian!” she said. “Be kind and helpful and find him the Amporic Mitre. It must be somewhere! I have to get dressed too. This is one of the really big ceremonies and we really daren’t be late.”
“What does it look like?” Vivian asked.
“Like a sort of golden drainpipe,” Jenny said over her shoulder as she minced back up the stairs.
Vivian threw herself into the search with a will. It was much more fun than worrying about the Caskets and their Guardians, and it gave her a wonderful opportunity to hunt about in parts of the Palace where she had not yet been. Every so often, as she hunted, the crowd of people rushed past, with Petula in front waving something furry and Elio behind waving the golden vest. Sometimes they were close behind the Sempitern. Sometimes the Sempitern was pelting about on his own, roaring for the Mitre, or the Esemplastic Staff or the ermine buskins. Each time he appeared, a giggle rose into Vivian’s throat and she had to dodge through the nearest door to laugh.
That was how she found the Amporic Mitre in the end. The last room she dodged into turned out to be a bathroom. At least, Vivian gathered it was a bathroom from the wet prints of the Sempitern’s feet on the cork floor, but she had never, in her part of the Twentieth Century, come across anything like the huge glass bath that stood half-way to the ceiling, full of green water bubbling like a cauldron. Her eye caught something like a golden drainpipe on the other side of the glass bath, and she thought at first that it was just a golden drainpipe. Luckily, she was so amazed by the bath that she walked all round it. And there was the hat, lying on the damp floor.
Vivian picked it up and joined in the chase, waving the hat and shouting to Sempitern Walker that she had found it. But he just scudded on in front and took no notice at all. After they had all raced up to the attics and then down once more, and seemed about to set off to the attics again, Vivian had the giggles so badly that she had no breath left at all. So she did the obvious thing and waited in the hall until they all came tearing down again.
Sempitern Walker appeared first, speeding downstairs towards her, with one ermine buskin flapping off his leg and the other in his hand. “Where is that Amporic Mitre?” he roared.
Vivian took a deep breath to stop herself laughing. “Here!” she shrieked, and held on to the rest of the breath to keep the giggle down. But it did no good. As she jammed the hat into the Sempitern’s free hand, the laugh came out. She more or less hooted in his face. Then she had to bend over with tears running down her cheeks. “Oh, oh, oh!” she said. “You are so funny!”
Sempitern Walker stood completely still and gave her his most anguished look ever. While he stood there, staring, Petula raced down the stairs and handed him the Esemplastic Staff. Elio burst through the other people straggling downstairs after her and flung the golden vest-thing round his shoulders.
“The Amporic Cope, sir,” he said. He was the only one not out of breath.
Sempitern Walker turned his anguished stare on Elio. Then he gave the rest of the stragglers a deeply hurt look all round and stalked off to his study with his buskin flapping. Everyone soberly followed him, carrying their pieces of regalia. Vivian was left feeling exactly the same as when she had said the wrong thing to the Guardian that morning.
“You shouldn’t have laughed, miss,” Elio explained seriously before he followed the others. “Not to his face, that is. The Sempitern, like all born-humans, needs excitement and his work is very boring. I usually take care to mislay at least one garment before every ceremony.”
Vivian felt more like crying than laughing. “Will he forgive me?”
“I do not know,” said Elio. “No one has dared to laugh at him before.”
Vivian went and sat in the matutinal, feeling ashamed, until the Palace went quiet. Then she went into the hall. Just as she expected, Jonathan was coming carelessly downstairs, looking as if it was the merest accident that he had happened to reappear the moment the fuss was over.
“Let’s go and see the ceremony,” Vivian said to him. She felt she owed it to Sempitern Walker.
“Do you want to?” Jonathan said, much surprised. “It’ll be horribly boring.” But he obligingly went with her to Aeon Square, where they packed in among rows of tourists near the glass arcade. They were in time to watch a smart squad of Time Patrollers march out of the Patrol Building and take up a position near Faber John’s Stone. People in red robes, and white, and blue filed out of other buildings and archways and stood in position too. Then came processions. Vivian saw Jenny, now wrapped in a wide mauve cloak, among a whole lot of people all walking with small steps because of the tight robe underneath. She saw Mr Enkian marching importantly at the head of a line of blue-robed Librarians. There was a group of students in dusty green gowns. Everybody seemed to be taking part. Even Dr. Wilander was there, bulking in a shabby purple robe. Vivian saw why he spent so much of his time sitting in SELDOM END. He walked with quite a limp.
She watched Jonathan’s father pace slowly past, stately and golden, with the tall pipe-shaped hat towering on his head. “What is this ceremony about?” she asked.
“No idea,” said Jonathan.
“Then you should know,” said a severe man next to them. He was an obvious tourist in respectable blue and yellow check drapes. He folded his Information Sheet over and held it in front of Jonathan. “It’s the first of the Four Ceremonies of the Founding of the City. It’s very old—it goes right back to the beginning and it’s said to mark the first moments when Time City was separated from history. You should be proud to witness it, my boy. We’ve come specially to see it.” He took back the Information Sheet and said anxiously, “And it says the forecast rain will hold off until the ceremony’s over. I hope it’s right.”
So the City really had arrived back to the time when it was founded, Vivian thought. She felt unexpectedly anxious. Another procession was winding its way in from Secular Square. This one seemed to be of ordinary people, all dressed in sober pale pyjamas, each with a chain of some kind hung round his or her neck. The sun twinkled on the chains and flashed on the buckles and shiny boots of the Time Patrollers. Jonathan’s father flared gold in the midst of all the bright coloured robes. There seemed no sign of the rain the tourist had talked about, but it was coming, hanging over the ceremony, just like the end of things seemed to be hanging over Time City. What will happen to all these people, Vivian thought, if Time City just collapses?
Jonathan must have been thinking the same thing. “I don’t want all this to go!” he said.
“It won’t. We’re going to do something about it,” Vivian said. “The Guardian called us in.”
But the ceremony did go on rather. Sam found them and stood for five minutes with them, watching, after which he yawned loudly and went away. Vivian felt it would be a bit rude to go away too, after what the tourist had said. So she kept
herself amused by pressing the studs of her belt. Time function—they had already been watching for more than an hour—pen-function, weather report—rain due in two minutes—low-weight-function—at which the severe tourist gave her a very reproving look—and finally credit-function. Her palm lit up: 00.00. Vivian stared at it. She pressed the stud again and yet again to bring the numbers back. It still said 00.00.
“Jonathan! What’s wrong? This said one hundred yesterday morning, and I haven’t spent anything yet!”
“Ask Elio. It must have a fault,” Jonathan said. “And just look over there!”
Vivian looked where Jonathan nodded; All the important people had formed themselves into a new procession, with Mr. Enkian stalking proudly at its head. Dr. Leonov, the High Scientist, was walking behind Mr. Enkian beside the huge purple bulk of Dr. Wilander. And the poor crazy Iron Guardian had joined the procession too. His floppy hat was bobbing and his face was very serious and he was imitating Mr. Enkian’s important walk exactly. Probably he thought that was the right way to walk. Dr. Leonov glanced at him once, doubtfully, and then seemed to decide he was a time-ghost or another student joke. Dr. Wilander must have decided the same, because he took no notice of the Guardian at all and simply limped grimly on with his eyes fixed on Mr. Enkian’s strutting back. Quite a number of people had seen. A wave of amused murmuring swept down that side of the square. But Mr. Enkian was far too wrapped up in his own importance to notice.
Then the rain came down in white sheets. Vivian was glad of the excuse to go. The severe tourist and his wife raised a small blue and yellow tent above their heads and stayed to watch, but Vivian and Jonathan ran for Time Close, with umbrellas of all possible shapes and sizes going up round them. Elio had been watching the ceremony too. They met him under the archway, while they were pushing through the crowd of damp people sheltering there. By this time, rain was battering on the cobbles of Time Close and gargling in every groove of the buildings. The three of them dashed for the Annuate Palace together.