The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [655]
“Oh!” said the man, and then he shrugged and said, “I was wondering, since we were told this was the only open day for six months, just who the previous group filing out of the door was—and why were they looking at us in that extremely inquisitive manner?”
“Why, that was you good people, of course! In order not to keep you from your busy schedules, this meeting actually takes no time at all. The moment you arrived was precisely the time you left, only out the other entrance so you wouldn’t meet yourselves.”
As soon as he said it, a twitter of understanding and wonderment went through the small group. I’d experienced the ChronoGuard in the past, so these sorts of cheap parlor tricks didn’t impress me, but for many of the people present, to whom time was immutable, it was something new and exciting. Scintilla had been doing this show for many years and knew how to get an audience’s attention.
“Time is odd,” said Bendix, “very odd. It’s odder than almost anything you can think of. What you consider the usual march of time—effect rather quaintly following cause and so forth—is actually a useful illusion, impressed upon you by rules of physics so very benign that we consider them devised by Something Awfully Friendly indeed; if it weren’t for time, everything would happen at the same instant and existence would become tiresomely frenetic and be over very quickly. But before we get into all that, let’s have a show of hands to see who is actually considering a career in time?”
Quite a few hands went up, but Friday’s was not among them. I noticed Scintilla staring in our direction as he asked, and he seemed put out by Friday’s intransigence.
“Yes, miss, you have a question?”
He pointed to a young girl sitting in the back row with her expensive-looking parents.
“How did you know I was going to ask a question?”
“That was your question, wasn’t it?”
“Um…yes.”
“Because you’ve already asked it.”
“I haven’t.”
“Actually, you have. Everything that makes up what you call the present is in reality the long distant past. The actual present is in what you regard as the far-distant future. All of this happened a long time ago and is recorded in the Standard History Eventline, so we know what will happen and can see when things happen that weren’t meant to. You and I and everything in this room are actually ancient history—but if that seems a bit depressing, let me assure you that these really are the good old days. Yes, madam?”
A woman just next to us hadn’t put up her hand, of course, but was clearly thinking of it.
“So how is it possible to move through time?”
“The force that pushes the fabric of time along is the past at-tempting to catch up with the future in order to reach an equilibrium. Think of it as a wave—and where the past starts to break over the future in front of it, that’s the present. At that moment of temporal instability is a vortex—a tube, in surfing parlance—that runs perpendicular to the arrow of time but leads to everything that has ever happened or ever will happen. Of course, that’s greatly simplified, but with skill, training, a really good uniform and a bit of aptitude, you’ll learn to ride the tube as it ripples through the fabric of space-time. Yes, sir?”
A young lad in the front row was the next to ask a question.
“How can you surf a time wave that is squillions of years in the future?”
“Because it isn’t. It’s everywhere, all at once. Time is like a river, with the source, body and mouth all existing at the same time.”
Friday turned to me and said in a very unsubtle whisper, “Is this going to take long?”
“Keep quiet and pay attention.”
He looked heavenward, sighed audibly and slouched deeper in his chair.
Scintilla carried on, “The time industry is an equal-opportunity employer, has its own union of Federated Timeworkers and a pay structure with overtime payments and bonuses. The working week is forty hours, but each hour is only fifty-two minutes long. Time-related holidays are a perk of the ser