The Kings came first. They built the timeships, sowed the legends, and died. Even if you’re an adventurer through time, a history lesson is a history lesson, and damnably boring.
“I’m not teaching you to navigate until you learn this,” Perry says. It’s Perry’s time machine, so up to a point, his word is law.
The point is, even if you’re a time traveller, you still have a linear subjective experience. That was the first lesson. Bradley got that.
“Linear subjective experience again,” she says, head on the desk. There’s a whole room in the bowels of the time machine that’s set up like a schoolroom out of the olden days or something. Perry likes to drag her in here when he feels schoolmarmish.
The thing is, time travelling is pretty dull. You just multiply all the places in space you can visit by all the points in time. The past and the future don’t have any mystique when they’re just more tourist destinations. After the novelty wears off, the only thing that’s interesting is the time travel itself, not the places. So she asked to learn.
“Trace the pedigree of a time machine through it’s subjective lifetime, identify the model that came before, do it again, go back until you find the first one, voila. The Kings.” Bradley stretches her legs out. The chair and the desk are slightly too small for her, as if this was a real schoolroom.
Perry reaches into the small wicker basket on the teacher’s desk, takes out a wrapped sweet, and tosses it in her direction. Bradley wavers between thinking that they’re bribery to learn, and a darker suspicion that Perry comes from so far in the future, such a different culture, that he’s trying to train her like an animal. She snatches the sweet out of the air.
She only ever ate one of them. They taste a little of mint, and a little like cough medicine, and mostly like sugar. She hoards the rest, counting through them like a miser, swinging rapidly between wonder at how much she’s learned, pleasure that Perry is teaching her, and bitter resentment.
She holds this new one in her fist, lodged tight against her hot palm.
“Timeships,” Perry says in his schoolmarm voice. “Why?”
That was a lesson, too. Perry thinks that Bradley doesn’t listen. She wouldn’t if she had a choice, something else to do with her brain.
“Two ways for an organism to cope with it’s environment,” she says, cheek flexing against the wood of the desk as she talks, stray hair scraping between her skin and the polished surface. Time for a haircut. “Hardwired world model, or hardwired ability to form one.”
It’s not like she was expecting another sweet for that much, but Perry just rolls his eyes. “More,” he says, as if he can’t join the dots himself, as if he’s not just bullying Bradley.
“Timeships are tools.” It’s one of Perry’s favourite soundbites when he’s lecturing. “Time travellers use timeships to reconstruct the universe’s linear experience. The Kings formed a world model after birth, like a human.”
“More,” Perry says impatiently. Perry has said, repeatedly, that Bradley would be a good student if she’d take it seriously. He’s not the first.
“Different world model,” Bradley says. That should be enough. Perry’s smarter than she is, and he knows that Bradley knows all this, so there’s no reason why Bradley should have to recite it like a textbook.
Perry says, “Bradley,” patience strained. Bradley rolls her eyes.
“Kings learned how the world worked after birth, like a human,” she clarifies. “You never get rid of your initial assumptions, just build on them. Most people don’t have to cope with time travel when they’re really small, so they have trouble with it later. The Kings grew up with it, so they viewed the world different.” She lifts her head, puts her hand together in front of her face like a viewfinder, tilts it to illustrate.
“And?” Perry says.
“And timeships are tools.” She knows it’s going to get her another prod, so she adds, “Damage to the universal linear experience is a subjective perception; it’s only damage if you try to make events correspond to an objective linear experience. Timeships are tools to reconstruct the universal linear experience. Kings didn’t use them as transport with causality paradox side effects; the effects were the point.”
“You do listen,” Perry says, pleased, and throws another sweet at her.
One day, Bradley wakes up and Perry has packed and gone. It’s a couple of years in, so Bradley waits, and when she’s sure Perry means it, she knows enough to start off on her own. If time travel was dull with Perry in charge, doing it on her own is worse. The machine is big, and feels very empty.
She’d always wondered what Perry dragged her along for. She’d always thought that companionship was a cop-out answer.
There’s a jungle planet, and later a far-future Earth; she picks people out to tag along. She tries the Perry thing, being the wise and experienced mentor, but she sucks at it.
Sometimes she has just one companion, sometimes two or three. A couple of times she feels the need to collect a crowd, surround herself with people.
She sees some really cool stuff, and even appreciates some of it. She tries getting along with people, she tries benevolent meddling, she throws tantrums and abandons companions on strange worlds in strange times. All in all, she was a lot better at being alone than the people thing, even if company is nice in the abstract.
She has sex with this one guy, several times, then has a pregnancy scare and strands him alone in his planet’s past without telling him. She turns out not to be, but she can’t make herself go back for him. She thinks she might be going into another no-companion phase.
None of this would happen if Perry was around.
Perry looked at her sometimes, like he was thinking of sex.
“Imagine the future,” Perry had said when Bradley called him on it. “Imagine a future where genetic engineering is everywhere. Imagine what the people there could be.”
“Okay, fine,” Bradley had said. “I asked if you’re checking me out.”
“Imagine that there are new kinds of bodies,” Perry said. “Bodies that aren’t what you’d think of as male or female or even intersex.”
“Oh,” Bradley said, or something brilliant like that.
“Yes, women are attractive to me,” Perry said. “But do you really want to know what’s under my clothes?”
“No,” Bradley said, with, “thank you,” as an afterthought.
Bradley could have lived with a “yes”, could have coped with “I want your body” or “no” or “ew” or whatever, but no, Perry had to freak her out. Perry was kind of a bastard like that. Bradley fiercely resents missing him.
Some nights she uses handfuls of wrapped sweets like a crinkly cellophane rosary, counting them out. Sleep doesn’t come easy.
Time travellers have a kind of loose community, and like any community, they’ve got stories, the time-travel version of the Mary Celeste and whatever. The story about the last of the Kings goes round regular as clockwork.
“There’s always a last one,” Bradley says dismissively to another time-tourist, the guy trying to chat her up in broken English. “It’s an archetype.” She only realises after she’s said it that it’s a Perryism, that it was Perry’s answer when she asked what happened to the Kings.
“They died.”
Other people, people who don’t live in a time machine with you, become places to visit, too. “Time machine,” she’d argued.
“They’re gone, Bradley,” Perry said. “They’re nowhere and nowhen. They died.”
“All of them?” Bradley said sceptically.
“All of them.”
“Every last one?”
“Oh, there’s always a last one.” The archetype bit was Bradley; Perry hadn’t said that. “Don’t mix facts up with fairy tales. Last ones die too; they just do it last.”
They have stories, because news doesn’t travel well when everyone’s got a time machine, although she sometimes hears gossip about herself and people she hasn’t met yet, and what people think they’re doing together when she has met them. She thinks it’s mostly wrong. She even hears about Perry sometimes, although she can’t tell if it’s Perry-before-Bradley or Perry-after-Bradley.
She leaves a solitary phase and for a short but fevered while, she desperately wants to be around people. Ordinary people are too hard to get on with, too dazzled by the time-travel thing. She sleeps her way through half the other time travellers she knows, then wakes up one day and realises that she’s being as much of a slut as the gossips thought she would be. She sneaks out of the time machine she’s in and has a bit of a panic until she remembers where she left hers.
Wouldn’t have happened with Perry in charge.
Bradley spends a while wondering if Perry left her the machine because Perry secretly fit into this life as badly as Bradley does, if maybe Bradley should find a companion and walk out of the machine with a suitcase one day while the companion sleeps.
If she ever finds Perry again, they need to talk.
The machine breaks down on some planet or other. Might be hers, sometime after she was born on it, she’s not sure. There’s a technical manual, huge actual printed books, dozens. She always meant to learn enough about the machine to fix it; now she’s obliged to. Her linear experience is in parallel lockstep with the universe, and it’s awful. She’s parked the machine’s entrance behind the door of a remote, abandoned farmhouse, but she’s there for long enough for the outside world to notice her, so she has to keep up the appearance of normality, shop for food, wave hello to the neighbours when they drive their four-wheel-drive whatevers past the house she picked.
She reads the books in order, not knowing enough to know what she needs to read. Spends months checking things that don’t need to be checked, because she doesn’t know enough to tell whether she should check them. She finds the problem, fixes it in a single rainy afternoon and leaves.
Determined not to be stranded again, she reads the rest of the books, goes over every inch of the time machine, cleans and recalibrates and restores to factory settings. By the end, she knows enough to know that it’s running better.
She thinks that Perry probably took better care of it than she has. Wouldn’t have happened if Perry was on board. She’s briefly annoyed with Perry for leaving her without the technical knowledge to fix the machine, but forgives him after six months or so. She’d have hated him for making her read all that.
Bradley grew up with the notion of an absolute past and an absolute future. This place looks weird enough to her that she automatically pegs it as the future. She has no idea how it fits into any calendar, and doesn’t much care.
She’s in a solitary phase, but a glance into a bar stirs something. She might be warming to the idea of a new companion. It’s been a while.
Time is a subjective linear experience; the future is just the things that haven’t happened to you yet. She’s starting to think she was wrong about warming up to people, and then she sees him, and the future unreels in her mind’s eye with startling clarity.
She’ll walk over to the possibly-boy, whose name might or might not yet be Perry; she’ll bring him on board the time machine, he’ll be a companion. She’ll make him learn stupid shit about the Kings, and probably the technical library too; throw sweets at him to reward good behaviour, talk in Perryisms until not-yet-Perry does too. One day, Bradley will wake up before Perry and walk out of the time machine with a suitcase, and not-Perry will wait a while, then take the machine and go.
One day, Perry sidles up to her and asks if she wants to have sex. Bradley thinks about it.
“I come from the past,” Bradley says. “Horrible historical societies. All that repression manifested as twisted sexual perversions, you know.”
Not-quite-Perry opens and closes his mouth, and they don’t have sex.
One day, she walks out of the time machine with a small suitcase of clothes, and wanders down a road in the sunshine. If she doesn’t do it today, she won’t; and if she doesn’t leave Perry, he won’t meet her — if she doesn’t meet Perry, Perry won’t leave her; if Perry doesn’t leave her, she won’t meet Perry. She’s used to this crap, and it’s still making her head hurt. She’s not ready for this, she doesn’t know how she’ll survive without a time machine.
Round the next corner, she runs into Perry, real Perry, Perry-who-left, clutching a suitcase of his own like a shield.
“Goddamn,” Bradley says emphatically. “Look, were you hitting on me or what?”
Perry just grins crookedly and holds out a wrapped sweet.