• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Steinmann paused. ‘You can’t be from the future. We Nazis are united by our heritage, and our destiny is in the stars! In the future, people such as you — the weak, the decadent, the liberal — have all been eradicated. Future history has already been written by men such as Hartung. Tomorrow belongs to us, not you. If you were really from the future, Miss Summerfield, you would be a Nazi.’

Roz Forrester threw another piece of bacon fat into the midst of the flock of pigeons swarming across the grass near her bench. She had needed a break and a cigarette.

The birds circled round the stringy rind, waiting their turn for a meal. As the pigeon with the rind in its beak bit into it, it tossed its head from side to side, carelessly hurling little scraps into the air, which other birds eagerly pounded on as they landed. The pigeons maintained a strict pecking order.

Odd how that phrase had lasted in human language to her time, centuries after the last bird had become extinct. Every wild animal and plant species had disappeared from the Earth by the thirtieth century, except for humanity and the rat.

Here, a thousand years earlier, the ecosystem was virtually intact. This Earth teemed with life: there was moss between the paving stones, flowers sprang up in the rubble of the bombsites, little brown birds nested in the trees.

There was a sense of certainty here, too, a sense of order. This was a time when everyone knew their place, from the King right down to the smallest pigeon. Other people might find that restrictive, but Roz could see the attraction of such a rigid system. There was order, and a sense of discipline. There was crime here, but it was so small-scale: a protection racket here, a burglary there. The criminals and the police force had a gentlemen’s agreement that they didn’t carry guns. There didn’t seem to be a drugs problem. There weren’t any rogue combat robots or gangs of evil mutants roaming the streets. She had to remind herself that this was the Undertown, the place that no right-thinking human would ever go. The chattering classes in her time kept asking: why not sterilize the whole area and start again from scratch? Half a dozen photon charges would do the trick. This past London was like a parallel world where the city was still beautiful, still proud of itself.

There were no monsters here. Nothing deformed with a horned snout would lumber round the next corner and ask her the time in haltering English. No slimy, green-skinned blob would menace her for spare change. In the thirtieth century, down in the Undertown, there was an alien beggar in every doorway, an alien crime lord behind every door. They were all immigrants, of course, they had come to Earth to take a human’s job, or just to claim ILC allowance. Although there had been a number of incursions later on in this century, the first official, lasting, contact with an alien race wouldn’t be made for one hundred and fifty years. Everyone here was purely human, with two eyes, one nose and one mouth, all in the correct place, and so it would remain for another century.

The Age of Legend was fast approaching, the time when her people overthrew their masters and went on to become examples of hope and justice for the entire world. A thousand years from now, South Africa was still there: a rock of stability in a chaotic world. Her family were still part of the ruling elite, their genetic material almost unchanged from the Xhosa in this century. The Forrester clan stood out in a world in which humanity had become racially homogenized. While other people’s ancestors succumbed to cosmetic gene surgery, and the rest of the thirtieth century had been swept by the craze for body-beppling, she was pure.

The pigeons had finished feeding, and the whole flock were standing still, looking at her with their strange sideways glances. She threw her last piece of rind at them, stood and went back to work. It was beginning to rain.

‘Have you seen the UFO?