FATHER OF THE FUTURE

  by

  Darren Dash

  “The future is not a gift — it is an achievement.”

  Albert Einstein

  ONE

  2510 BC. Egypt.

  The capstone of Pharaoh Menkaure’s pyramid was being carefully edged into place by the gods. Several hundred locals were gathered at a safe distance around the base of the monument, watching with mild interest. Most had brought food and drink, and slaves were busy tending to their masters’ needs, including sheltering them with large leaves from the burn-your-soul-black sun.

  While the adults rested, spoilt, bored children mocked the lesser mortals, beat and abused them as they pleased. Every so often an unlucky slave would be chased too close to the invisible shield of god’s breath which was temporarily separating the under-construction pyramid from the mortals, and would frizzle into non-existence, usually to a chorus of cheers and hearty claps from the cruel, entitled youths.

  Slightly further back from their parents and peers, many naked teenagers had congregated and were fornicating wildly, impervious to the exhausting heat. Their elders looked on fondly and enviously, remembering the days when they too had been passionate enough to shrug off the blows of the mighty sun and rut like cats themselves. A few offered the odd word of advice or encouragement, but in truth the teenagers needed little directing.

  Pyramids were old news, and this latest addition was far more modest than either Khufu or Khafre’s pyramid, both of which stood proudly nearby and would forever overshadow this lesser relative. Still, those pyramids had been built decades earlier, and most of the crowd were witnessing the work of the gods for the first time. Some were overwhelmed and threw themselves to the ground every so often, shrieking to the gods for favour or mercy, weeping zealously. The more level-headed Egyptians looked upon the wailers with unconcealed disdain. They considered themselves the equals of the gods, and one god should never lose one’s composure in the face of another.

  As the capstone clicked into place and the gods pulled back to study their handiwork, a handful of priests jumped up and began chanting. They’d made a habit of this over the years. After all, they had to do something to justify their position as exalted public functionaries. There were people who still believed that the priests were on intimate terms with the gods, that they had some say in the building of the pyramids, that they were acting in conjunction with the higher deities. The priests did everything they could to foster those beliefs, and if that meant dancing around ludicrously at capping time, so be it. Only a foolish locust-eater would let dignity get in the way of prospective tithes.

  The young Pharaoh Shepseskaf pushed his pretty aunt from his lap and gazed up at the finished pyramid, casting a calculating eye over it, mimicking the gods as best he could. This was his father’s pyramid, and he was pleased that it was such a minor construction when compared with the other two in the complex. Shepseskaf was planning to build a monster of a pyramid that would tower over even Khufu’s. His father had mocked him for having a small manhood, patted his back with fake sympathy and snidely said that size didn’t matter. His teasing had shamed the boy deeply, but revenge would be his. When their paths crossed in the next world, Shepseskaf would point proudly to his gargantuan pyramid, clear his throat as if embarrassed when switching his gaze to Menkaure’s pitiful monument, and delight in telling the old man not to worry, that size wasn’t all that important, eh?

  Shepseskaf glowed and grew hard as he imagined the look on his crestfallen father’s face as his son gloated over him for all eternity. His pretty aunt caught the familiar glint in his eye, and the rise of his minor member, and sighed inwardly. What a bore and an annoyance he was, always choosing the hottest moment of the day to flare briefly into life and thrust himself into her when all she wanted was to stretch out in the shade and dream. Still, if it secured her passage into the next world, that was all that mattered. Forcing a smile, taking his tiny growth between a couple of her fingers, she leant back and thought of the heavenly rewards which all her earthly suffering was bound to merit.

  Up in the sky the gods were checking their calculations for the umpteenth time, making sure everything was just right. They knew it would be. There had been no computer errors for more than three centuries of Present Time. Father was beyond mistakes. All the same, they had to do something to feel relevant. It was either check the figures and play at being technicians or count the grains of sand in the desert and admit to being paltry, useless pawns.

  “I hate Egypt,” Chert said, looking down at the desert from one of the sky ship’s many windows. “Nothing but dust, pyramids, and arrogant priests showing us their buttocks.”

  “It’s not so bad,” Cassique replied. “I like the place. Lots of time to get one’s thoughts in order.”

  “Dos that!” Chert cursed. “If there’s one thing I hate more than anything else, it’s dossing thinking.”

  “Language, Chert,” Cassique tutted. “You know Father disapproves when we curse without good reason.”

  “Aw, I’m just letting off steam,” Chert muttered. “We’ve been here too long. What is it now, a hundred and fifty years?”

  “For the Egyptians, yes,” Cassique said. “For us, a little under two months Personal Time. But in Present Time, only about ninety hours.”

  “Ninety hours!” Chert exclaimed as if it was an age. “Think of all we’ll have missed. Ninety hours that we could have spent in the sex spas or the realities. Dos it, Cassique, this job isn’t worth the sacrifice of so much quality time. I’m going to quit after this assignment. I’ve got a million better things to be doing. There are thousands of Fixers. I wouldn’t be missed, would I? Father doesn’t really need us anyway. The robots could do it all if we left them to it. We’re only sent along on these missions to keep the human ego alive and kicking. Dossing Egypt, for Father’s sake!”

  Cassique said nothing. Chert often got like this towards the end of an especially long job. Ze’d settle down again after a few days in the sex spas. Ze was always the most eager in the team at the start of a mission, but the most bored by the end. Cassique was different, steadier. He lacked Chert’s emotional swings. There were few highs and lows in Cassique’s life, just nice, middling plateaus. If one was to judge by Chert’s prematurely greying hair, Cassique believed he was better off that way.

  Outside, beneath the sky ship’s stomach, the priests finished their dance, and the crowd broke out into half-hearted applause, partly to thank the gods for the pyramid, partly to please the priests just in case they were actually working hand in hand with the sky lords, but mostly to curry favour with the young, under-endowed pharaoh. They needn’t have bothered on his account — he was oblivious to everything at the moment, except for his lively, cunning aunt (who he wasn’t going to take into the pyramid and the afterlife with him, no matter how sweet she was, though, shrewdly, he had no intention of telling her that while he was alive) and his dreams of revenge in the next world, where the measurement of one’s flesh was nothing and the size of one’s pyramid was all.

  Its job done, the sky ship shimmered for a moment, then blinked out of sight. The Egyptians hesitated, worried that the invisible wall of god’s breath might linger still. They tossed a few slaves its way and, when the screaming servants didn’t fry, their owners were soon rushing forward to examine the new gift from the heavens.

  One man held back. He was one of the cleverest men in Egypt, which meant one of the cleverest in the entire world. He was certain that this was not the work of mythical gods. He was sure that the figures in the sky ship were all too human, and that although their power was far greater than his people’s, they were not creatures of magic, but were in fact just as rooted in the real world as he was. He had no idea where the builders hailed from, or from where their powers stemmed, but he was determined that one day he, or another like him, would find out.

  He began to write. Few Egyptians possessed this skill and most who did used it for the simplest imaginable recording purposes. Not this would-be rebel. He used his tools to express his innermost feelings, to question the means and motives of the gods. He’d been studying them since they appeared, and interviewed everyone he could find who either remembered them from their previous visits when they’d built the two larger pyramids, or whose parents and grandparents had passed on accounts of those times.

  He’d watched closely as they operated beyond the laws of either Pharaohs or priests, noting it all down. He described the aligning of the capstone, the wall of destruction around the base, commonly known as god’s breath, which kept the people back while the sky masters were at work. He noted the time it had taken to assemble the pyramid — nine days, less than half the time they’d spent on either of the bigger pyramids. He wondered how many more pyramids would be built across his land, and whether a pattern existed, linking them in some unknowable way to one another. He pondered the implications that this building project might have for Egypt and the future of his people. Were they being led towards greatness or a hideous tragedy?

  As he wrote, the air to his left began pulsing gently. He was too wrapped up in his words to notice. A form became apparent, a human, though vastly different in colour and height to the Egyptians, a blend of what they would have identified as male and female genders, and clothed in synthetic material that would take the human race millennia to develop.

  The shape fully materialised, took a step forward, raised a small laser weapon, and slit the Egyptian’s throat neatly, fr
om left to right.

  As the man’s body slumped, the stranger reached down and gathered up the intricate writings. Ze examined them a moment, then shook hir head wearily. “As if I hadn’t had enough of dossing Egypt,” Chert swore. “I’m no sooner back home than I have to return because one dossing genius had to go and take notes. Dossing Egyptians! Next time I’ll make Cassique come and do the dirty work, regardless of what Father dictates. I’m quitting. I mean it this time. Dossing time travel. A virus on it!”

  Chert pressed a button and blinked out of sight once again, taking the writings with hir. In the distance the remaining Egyptians were celebrating wildly, praising the gods (and priests) and sacrificing a few slaves in their honour. As the day developed and the temperature cooled, they grew rowdier and more inventive, and come night they were embroiled in what a Roman a couple of thousand years later would undoubtedly have classified a full-scale orgy.

  AD 1804. Atlantic Ocean.

  The captain was furious with his crew. He knew seafaring men were the most superstitious in the world, and he accepted the fact that tempers would fray on the long, testing voyage to the Americas, but it had been non-stop moaning the last couple of hundred nautical miles. He was sick of the lot of them. Next time out he’d be hiring mutes only.

  They’d come through a fierce, sudden tempest this morning. It had blown up out of nowhere and tested them severely — there were moments, when the ship had been tilting wildly, where he’d feared the worst and said a few quick prayers to the Maker he expected to shortly meet. But once they’d battled through and the waters had calmed around them, he’d put the experience behind him, as he always did in such circumstances, and tried to enjoy the literal calm after the storm.

  Not his crew. They were still whining about it, claiming this voyage was cursed and they should turn around and sail back home. As if their safe passage could be guaranteed in that direction instead of proceeding straight ahead! A pox on them all. The storm had shaken him, but his mithering crew had ruined his day entirely.

  He came up on deck after checking some provisions. The sky was a beaming blue sail above them, and a fresh wind lifted the light flaps of hair around his ears, throwing them back so he looked like a beagle. He took a deep breath of the salty air and grinned. This was a hard job, and some days you felt like hanging every grumbling son of a rabid bitch in sight, but a deck in the middle of a calm ocean was still the greatest place on the face of the planet to be. He wouldn’t swap his captaincy for anything, certainly not for a desk job in a grimy, congested city. All things considered, he had to count himself among the luckiest people on Earth.

  Then, in the midst of his sanguine bout of self-reflection, a large metallic object appeared directly overhead, blocking out the sun. The men aboard all fell silent, staring upwards with numb horror. First the storm, now… what?

  The captain shook his head faintly, realised to his surprise that he was crying, then looked around and noticed the ship was lifting out of the water, rising like a balloon to meet the larger vessel – could it be some sort of vessel of the air? – in the sky.

  Everything went dark for a moment, then it was light again, only now it was an artificial light, a type that the captain was entirely unfamiliar with. They were in a giant holding bay, hovering above the floor, supported by nothing visible. Water was dripping from the hull of the ship, making soft splashing noises as it spattered across the floor, but otherwise it was silent as a village on a Sunday morning. The captain was the only one of the crew to have moved yet. He walked slowly around in shaky circles, trying to get his bearings, praying that his head would clear and the nightmare end.

  A man floated down, seemingly from out of nowhere. He was dressed in loose orange clothes, a fabric which gleamed like none the captain had seen in all his years of travel. The man had a board in his hand, some inhuman kind of glowing board. He was studying it as if it were a book or a map. The captain instinctively leant forward for a better view. The man noticed his interest, smiled, and raised the board for him to study. It was a strange, shifting thing, lit magically from within, with what looked to be a glass front, covered with dozens of green, flickering letters, numbers, and symbols. The captain could make no sense of it.

  The strange man with the board spoke, and the captain understood him when he did, even though he was Spanish, while the other man hailed from a world without countries, even though their births were separated by more than a thousand years, and even though they spoke entirely different languages.

  “It’s called a tablet,” Cassique told him, totally unaware that hidden implants in his throat were translating his words flawlessly, and also giving him a hint of a Spanish accent, making it even easier for the captain to understand him. “Most of the people in my time use holographic versions, projected from implants in their hands and fingers, but I’m old-school and prefer a physical device, especially when it comes to personal interactions such as this one. Future technology itself is frightening enough for people of your time, but when you start throwing holograms into the mix…” He shivered jovially.

  The captain shook his head – although he could understand the words, he could make little sense of them – then asked reverently, “Is this Heaven?” After a short pause, before Cassique could reply, he added, more anxiously, “Or Hell?”

  Cassique smiled comfortingly as the implants just behind his ears (again, he knew nothing of their existence) translated the captain’s queries for him, tweaking them to sound more like Cassique’s neutral global accent — everyone in his own time sounded the same, no matter where on the planet they lived. “Neither Heaven nor Hell,” he said. “You haven’t died, but sadly you should have. Your vessel was scheduled to flounder in that storm this morning and sink, all hands lost. Since you somehow survived, I’m here to share the good news that you’re merely on your way to a new home, instead of an afterlife. I’m sorry we had to take you like this, and that you won’t get a chance to bid a proper farewell to your loved ones, but it’s better than drowning, right? Anyway, enough of that. I don’t want to fill your head with too much too soon. Come, I’ll take you through to your new quarters. You’ll enjoy them, I believe. There’s lots to drink. Follow me.”

  Cassique set off, taking a footpath which had extended to the ship from a wall of the bay while they were talking. After a few seconds the befuddled captain followed, his feet operating automatically. The crew shuffled along after him, silently, like dead men marching to the gates of Heaven on Judgment Day, which, despite Cassique’s assurance to the contrary, most of them believed was in fact the case.

  AD 1938. England.

  A storm-faced Winston had had enough. That damn buffoon Chamberlain, bending over backwards to accommodate that jumped-up, scraggly little German’s every demand. And the rest of the fools in parliament and the press, proclaiming what a great job he was doing, clapping his back, cheering him as he stepped down off a plane to make a speech congratulating his own wisdom and political nous. Hah! They’d see. When the German planes were peppering the sky above Britain, and brave British troops were being bombed in their beds before they had a chance to arm, the whole world would see who was right and who had a couple of mashed carrots for brains.

  Not that Winston cared. Not any longer. He’d seen too much of this world to be bothered. As he lit a cigar, he leaned back and remembered the good old days, being part of the last ever British cavalry charge at Omdurman, tricking those ignorant Boers after they’d captured him, winning his seat in cabinet. Of course, the good memories always led to the inexorable bad — the failure at Gallipoli, his resignation, the hatred directed towards him when he tried to break up the strike of ’26, watching Chamberlain leading the country to the brink of its most humiliating thrashing ever.

  Well, let the damned Nazis thrash away! He was through with this land and its pacifist pisspots. Let them jump off the cliff edge with charming Neville. Let them give Herr Hitler all the room and time he needed to cruelly crush the life out of everything Great that the Britons had worked so long to build. To Hell with them all. He was getting out of it.