He had his bags packed and a ticket on a steamer booked. He was going to America. He’d tour around for a few months, maybe longer if he was enjoying his time on the road, then find a temperate state – not too hot – where he could settle down and live out the rest of his days quietly and unobtrusively. He’d paint, of course – he’d been doing that for more than twenty years and found it nourishing for the soul – but he also had a hankering to do some farm work. Maybe he’d raise chickens. God knew, he’d dealt with enough headless ones during his time in the House of Commons.

  Winston leaned even further back in his chair, drew deeply on his cigar, and smiled. He’d done his bit for the Empire. Yes, and more. He might not have been the most popular man of his age, and he certainly hadn’t been the most influential, but by damn he’d done his best. While others had followed the herd and played it safe, he’d gone out on a limb every time, always put his mouth where his heart was. He was one of the last true British spirits, bearer of a stubborn, ugly, narrow streak of pride and determination which had made his country the greatest in the world. He could see that changing, could smell the fear and uncertainty which had never before been present in his people, and it sickened him. Chamberlain was the excuse for his absconding, but in all honesty, he would have gone anyway in the end. Too many bleeding hearts in the country. Too many liberals. Too many damn women with votes.

  As Winston brooded, a hand casually tapped his shoulder. He’d thought he was alone in the room, and his heart skipped a beat, but he showed no outward sign of having been surprised. “Yes?” he mumbled, turning slowly, in his own good time. “What is it?”

  “Mr Churchill, the time has come to depart.”

  Winston stared at the speaker. He had never seen this man before. He’d never seen his type of uniform either, even though, Heaven knew, he’d seen just about every uniform there was during his time on Earth. And the man was carrying some kind of electric clipboard, also new to his eyes.

  Winston took a deep drag, blew the smoke out slowly and smiled. “And where, pray tell, am I departing for?”

  “We’re slipping you out of here, Mr Churchill,” Cassique said. “We know about your plans to leave, and we’ve decided to assist you.”

  “Really?” Winston blinked. “In what way?”

  “We’re going to take you far away from here, to a land free of Chamberlains and weak spines and cowards in control of everything. We’re going to take you to a place where you need never be bothered by the common people and their petty problems again, where a man of deep means and motives can be whatever he wishes.”

  “I see.” Despite himself, Winston found his nose wrinkling with pleasure at the thought. “And this place lies further on from America?”

  “Yes, sir,” Cassique said.

  “Not China or Russia, I hope,” Winston growled. “I’ll have no truck with either of those empires.”

  “No, sir,” Cassique responded truthfully. “Not China or Russia.”

  “Hmm.” Winston studied his accoster and decided there was something in the cut of his jib which appealed to him. This fellow, in his opinion, had backbone. “Very well, my good man,” he said, taking the cigar out of his mouth long enough to speak clearly. “Lead me on as you will. I place myself in your care and trust it shall not be misplaced?”

  “I’ll do my best not to disappoint,” Cassique said respectfully, and led Winston off to his new land.

  As soon as the pair had disappeared, Chert beamed into the room with a man the spitting image of the soon-to-be great leader. The man’s name was Rort, but he would henceforth be known as Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill. He’d been waiting an awfully long time for this chance and was delighted with himself. He bumbled around the room, all aflutter, excitedly examining everything. Chert let him have his head for a while, then coughed discreetly.

  “Oh, sorry, I was being overawed by the moment, wasn’t I?” Rort said rather sheepishly, coming to a stop.

  “Quite.” Chert couldn’t understand these Geminis. What was so thrilling about coming back to a time like this, living the rest of your life as someone else, every waking moment spent following the exact path taken by an earlier being? It was beyond hir ken. A nice novelty, perhaps, for a week or a couple of months, but this guy had more than a quarter of a century left before his scheduled death. Having to play a part all that time, submerging yourself so completely in the role, saying and doing only as the Original would have done… Chert knew that Geminis were necessary, and ze admired their dedication to the cause, but ze thought they were crazy for volunteering.

  “You know what you have to do?” Chert asked. “You’ve got your bearings and you’re all set?”

  “Please,” Rort bristled. “I’ve been preparing for this moment for more than twenty years. The cosmetic surgery, the memorisation of every word the great man ever uttered. I have every date, meeting, and action imprinted in my memory. Go on, ask me anything about the next twenty-six years. I’ve got it all off, every last minute of it.”

  “Digital for you,” Chert yawned. “As long as you remember not to veer from the set path. There are a lot of bad times ahead, if I recall my history lessons correctly. You’re ready for those too?”

  “I’ll take all the blows and setbacks in my stride,” Rort said icily. “Just like the bulldog himself would have done.”

  “Sure,” Chert replied with a dark chuckle, “if this version of him hadn’t run off to America to start his own spectacularly unsuccessful chicken franchise. See you, Rort. Good luck with your life.”

  Chert blinked back through the Time Hole and left Rort to his façade.

  The new Winston strode around the room once more, slower this time, more in keeping with his position as a budding elder statesman. Then he eased himself into the chair, still warm from its previous occupant, lit a cigar and let himself relax. Chamberlain. Heh. What a shock he was going to get in the next year!

  AD 1431. France.

  Joan said nothing while the flames licked the length of her body and began eating through to her bones and organs. She stared ahead resolutely, lips sealed, mouth moving slightly only to pray. Women were weeping at her feet. Yes, and men too, she noticed, as the wall of fire split for a moment, affording her the opportunity for one last look at the world.

  Her real name was Klim. She was forty but had been altered to look a couple of decades younger. She wanted to scream wildly and spoil the spell, but her tongue was bound as tightly as her limbs. She had not volunteered for this. She wasn’t a Gemini, no matter what the Fixers who’d brought her here had assumed. The past was of no interest to her, and she hadn’t even heard of Joan of Arc before her trial and sentencing.

  She tried to shout a warning to the world and the future, even though she knew it was hopeless, tried breaking the programme that Father had used to subdue her. She threw all her inner strength at the mental barrier which had been erected between her brain and her body, willing it to crumble, compelling her mouth to speak, to foil Father’s carefully laid plans, to extract some small measure of revenge for this most horrific of punishments.

  It was no good. Father’s power was too great. She was aware of who she really was, and why she was here, but she couldn’t speak of it, no matter how hard she tried. And thus, she died, in the end, for all the world the saint she would one day be proclaimed.

  Meanwhile, fourteen hundred years in the future, a seventeen-year-old girl rose hesitantly to her knees, gazed around in horror, and wondered why all the voices had been silenced, and why they hadn’t warned her of this before they went mute.

  AD 1903. The United States.

  The Wrights were turning the air blue with brotherly insults. Wilbur was calling Orville a wolf cub’s runt, while Orville was insisting that Wilbur was the son of a thousand rotting lepers.

  “Fifty-nine seconds!” Wilbur shouted. “That’s how long I was up there. Fifty-nine lousy bloody seconds. Not even a whole damn minute.”

  “You don’t have to tell me,” Orville retorted angrily. “I was the one who learnt to read the time first, remember? Even though you did have four years of a head start on me.”

  “Oh, we’re going to bring that up again, are we?” Wilbur snarled.

  “Why not?” Orville jeered. “Who better to blame than the man with a record of incompetence as long as… as…”

  “As eight hundred and fifty-two feet?” someone helpfully interjected.

  The brothers stopped arguing long enough to assess the man who had spoken to them. They’d never seen him before, but in the heat of their angered debate they didn’t think to question his being present, or to ask how he had measured the length of the flight without any visible instruments.

  “What?” Orville snapped.

  “Eight hundred and fifty-two feet,” Cassique repeated. “That’s how far you got, in fifty-nine seconds. Your fourth, final and most successful flight of December seventeenth, 1903. A momentous day.”

  “Momentous?” Wilbur laughed hoarsely. “A momentous flop, more like. I was supposed to be up there a quarter of an hour. Instead, what did I manage? Change from a minute! It’s been one lousy cock-up after another. We should have been up in the air before the turn of the century, but things kept going wrong with the earlier models.”

  “Yeah,” Orville concurred. “Plans went missing, pieces got lost, there were fires and floods and all manner of obstacles. We thought for a while we were being sabotaged.”

  “Then we decided it was just plain stupidity,” Wilbur said, shooting his brother a look of hard-earned disgust.

  “Oh, yeah?” Orville returned. “Whose?”

  “Whose do you think?” Wilbur shouted.

  “Listen to me, you mongrel son of a baboon…” Orville roared.

  A chuckling Cassique left the brothers at each other’s throat. They’d calm down eventually. And, while it was true the flight hadn’t been the magnificent success it could have been (Cassique had seen to that), it would still go into the record books and be remembered as one of the most significant days in history. When you took the bigger picture into consideration, that was far more important than a scrap of lost pride and a family squabble.

  Cassique slipped through the Time Hole, submitted a report to Father, then stepped back to the same part of the world later that year and nicked a few more vital parts from one of their follow-up planes. Sometimes, he reflected, you had to be cruel to be correct.

  When William Shakespeare was struggling with “To be or not to be…” Cassique popped up to act as his Muse.

  When Howard Hughes’ incredible mind showed no signs of deterioration, Chert slipped him drugs to knock it off course and ensure he ended his days as the world’s most famous mumbling recluse.

  When Marilyn Monroe succumbed to her first overdose, one of their team was on hand to whisk away the corpse and let a Gemini loose in her place.

  When Hannibal’s elephant slipped and tore him down a slope, a Fixer dashed in with the medical equipment necessary to repair his crushed body.

  From Archimedes to Isaac Newton, Julius Caesar to George Washington, Elvis Presley to Kurt Cobain, a Fixer was present, always watching, always adjusting, making players and events align with the One True History that had been recorded in Father’s memory banks. Sometimes they assisted a great figure in a moment of doubt or setback. Other times they curtailed developments and deliberately held up progress. On occasion they had to take a person out of the picture altogether or insert one of their own to replace a key player who had never materialised.

  There was neither benevolence nor malice in their actions. These were not gods, despite how they were sometimes perceived, playing with humans as if they were pieces on a chessboard. They were merely trained workers doing a vitally important job, setting the past to rights, protecting their own few acres of temporal reality, eliminating the kernels of alternate timelines which were threatening to destroy their entire universe. It hadn’t always been this way, but if they were successful, it soon would be.

  TWO

  AD 2853. Hawkingston.

  Cassique had earned a two-month Present Time holiday and was bored already after just three days. He hadn’t requested a break and didn’t particularly want one, even though he’d endured several hectic years of Personal Time in his job, but Father kept track of these things and had been insistent. He said Cassique would work more efficiently after a couple of months off.

  A lot of Fixers were getting holidays around the same time, to prepare them for the Great Fix due to begin later this year, when the final string of alternative pasts would be aligned. At that point the Time Hole would be collapsed (before it fell in on itself of its own accord), and the present would be fully embraced for the first time in a hundred and seventy-three years. Nobody could be entirely sure what would happen at that point. Although Father assured them that all would be well and that Present Time would proceed without any issues, tensions were running high, especially among the Fixers, who cared way more about it than the general populace, which was why Father felt large sections of his team needed some time away from… well, time.

  Even though Chert was the one who genuinely craved a holiday, and would have surely benefitted the most from one, ze hadn’t qualified for a break. Father said ze hadn’t worked enough Present Time hours, regardless of the fact that ze’d been partnered with Cassique for almost three Personal Time years. Chert had seethed and cursed to hirself when the news came through, but you couldn’t argue with Father, so ze’d had no choice but to accept it and head back on another lengthy assignment.

  It had been almost a decade, Personal Time, since Cassique had had this much free Present Time on his hands. There’d been regular, shorter breaks, of course — the standard twenty-four hours Present Time for every three months of Personal, and an additional eight full Present days every two Personal years. But sixty-one straight days of uninterrupted Present Time… Cassique hardly knew what to do with himself.

  He started with the sex spas, as almost every Fixer did when on leave. He’d heard about a new spa, one which boasted all the latest programmes and technical developments. According to his source it was the most scintillating spa yet, the model for all future establishments. Not many people knew about it, as Father was beta testing the place, but it was open to anyone who got wind of its existence and wished to gain entry.

  “Just don’t post any reviews of it,” Cassique had been warned. “Its patrons enjoy its low profile, and you won’t be appreciated if you flag it up for the masses and draw in the horny hordes.”

  He’d hailed an automated car outside the station, told it the coordinates, sat back and drummed his fingers on his knees in anticipation. He wasn’t as hooked on the sex spas as Chert and many others were, but he did get a buzz from his visits, there was no denying that.

  Cassique spent the short journey trying to enjoy the view out of the car’s windows. The cities of the twenty-ninth century were incredibly clean and aesthetically relaxing after the chaotic, grubby constructions of the past. With the population so carefully controlled by Father, there were no more hive-like suburban sprawls, and skyscrapers were few and far between — those that existed had been built purely for show and were not used for homing thousands of people or as vast office complexes.

  The roads were much wider than those of the past, with nowhere near as much traffic. Gardens and parks were everywhere, each exquisitely maintained by teams of robotic horticulturists, many so small that you’d have needed a magnifying glass or even a microscope to study them, doing the job of crucial but now defunct parts of the ecosystem such as ants and worms. Water fountains were similarly abundant in number, though you didn’t spy so many statues or monuments — Father was of the view that they interfered with the flow of traffic and added little of any real value to the scenery.

  The buildings were mostly fashioned out of polymers which had been designed during the last couple of centuries — Father produced far better polymers than any human inventors of the past ever had. Some were a single, permanent colour, but many changed colour over the course of each day and night. Some even changed shape as the hours slipped by, morphing like the clouds did.

  It was a visual wonderworld, and most Fixers spoke of the relief they felt when driving or strolling through it upon their return from a mission in the muddied past times. Cassique always echoed those opinions, not wanting to seem like the odd one out, but in his heart he preferred the chaos and wild differences of those earlier, simpler civilisations. It made no sense, but in many ways he found past societies more interesting and stimulating than his own, though he was careful never to voice those views, as he knew Father wouldn’t approve. He had been reared, like all the others of his time, to believe that their world was the zenith of humanity’s rise. It was the key reason the Fixers took their job so seriously, as by correcting the crooked past they were ensuring this perfect present would be preserved.

  Perfect. Cassique sought frequently – sometimes desperately – in the present for that perfection, but most days he struggled to see the world of 2853 that way, and he was struggling more and more every time he returned to it.

  Cassique was pleasantly surprised, when he arrived at the sex spa, to find it housed in a nondescript building designed to mimic a British townhouse of the twentieth century, with white walls and large rectangular windows. Most sex spas were located in garish, multi-coloured, shape-shifting buildings, and their function was immediately clear to any passer-by from the huge neon-like signs advertising their services. This one was identifiable only by a small sign on the wall outside, which you’d have missed if walking past on the street.

  THE HOLEY GROUND

  SEXUAL ECCENTRICITIES OUR SPECIALITY

  And, just beneath, in smaller writing, Father’s words of wisdom which were found attached to every such sign the world over, although normally in a much larger and more eye-catching font.