“Thank you?” Ruthven tried. It didn’t sound like she meant it as a compliment.
“So,” said Fenella. “Why would Cress deliberately show herself in an episode that she knew would never go to air, and no one had even found yet in our century?”
“Because,” said Ruthven, who had actually been thinking about this quite hard since last night’s party. “Time is a bastard, and paradoxes don’t exist.”4
This was true. Since time travel was invented, there had not been a single recorded paradox. There were many theories for this: time healing all rifts as she went, time forking into alternate realities too efficiently for humans to notice, and Time Is God, All Things Are Meant To Be.
But it was the Time is a Bastard theory that was largely accepted by most practical time travellers. How else could you explain the number of coincidences and accidents that regularly occurred to prevent the changing of history?
Video, sound recordings and other ephemeral data could (often, not always) be brought through to the present day; objects, living creatures and people could not, unless their purpose in the timeline was irrelevant or complete. Some success had been achieved through the rescuing of endangered wildlife from forest fires,5 works of art from cathedrals on the verge of obliteration, and film canisters which had been dumped by the TV network and somehow not reclaimed by fans in their own timeline.
Never guaranteed success, though. Never enough to be certain that yes, this was the Rule of Time, and if you followed that rule you would get predictable, replicable results.
The lack of rules around time travel was something that Ruthven, for one, often found rather unsettling.
Monterey and Lovelace had, for example, devoted at least six hops to trying to save the Library of Alexandria, and had only managed to recover one slightly dented book bucket and one very surprised librarian who died of a heart attack after three hours exposure to the twenty-fourth century.6 The final conclusion of their report was that a) someone else must have saved it already b) maybe it was never destroyed in the first place, or if it was destroyed, definitely not in 48 BCE7 or c) clearly the burned fragments of parchments and pottery still had a part to play in the timeline.
It was now the official policy that travellers wishing to save precious relics and works of art from history should do so using chronocles and other data recording devices, rather than wasting everyone’s time and energy lugging vases from century to century.8
Did this mean no one had free will? This was a controversial topic amongst those who knew about the existence of time travel. Most arguments usually resulted in a reluctant agreement that most people in the known history of the world felt like they had free will, most of the time. So it shouldn’t be keeping anyone up and staring at the ceiling with existential dread at 3AM. Those who knew how time travel worked, meanwhile, had at least as much free will as anyone working for a difficult boss.
When Ruthven said: “Time is a bastard, and paradoxes don’t exist,” what he meant was: Cressida could not have appeared in any episode of Cramberleigh that she or anyone who might recognise her might have watched before she was lost in time. Which ruled out every episode available for viewing at Chronos College up until seven years ago.
There was no point in Cressida trying to get caught on camera in, for example, 1C: Governess In the Attic (1965) because Monterey and Lovelace had rescued it eight years ago to great fanfare, on their first postgraduate mission. Ruthven remembered it well: he and Oxford were first year students at the time, and had sneaked into Monterey’s Governess in the Attic Restoration Party for a glorious twelve minutes before being spotted and unceremoniously thrown out.
Everyone at Chronos College had seen 1C: Governess in the Attic multiple times, including the remixes, memes, and the digital stills that Monterey had printed on a particularly tight-fitting pair of trousers. If Cressida’s face appeared in that episode, she and her fellow graduates would have spotted it long before she and Boswell left on that fateful mission to 912.
As long as no one at Chronos College had ever seen it, the possibility of Cressida’s face being caught on film and recovered centuries later was still that: a theoretical possibility.
It had always been that way, before she made the decision to do it (assuming she indeed did it deliberately). Her face was on that frame of film long before she was born. There had never been a timeline in which Cressida was not caught on camera in 1964, in the Unaired Pilot of Cramberleigh.9
Ruthven was impressed by Cressida’s strategy. She had obviously taken the very first chance she could to arrange her own appearance on the iconic TV show — and she must have known that if her plan didn’t work, she would have more than half a year before she could try again, with episode 1F: “Where Butlers Fear To Tread.”
No production company in the 1960s was likely to allow the same sound engineer to keep accidentally getting caught on camera during a live recording session. If her pilot episode gambit didn’t work, Cressida would have to go further. She’d have to become an actress, or at least an extra.
She’d have to accept or reject work with obsessive precision, refusing to be involved with any episode of a TV show that she herself had ever watched in the twenty-fourth century. This, given her interest in vintage TV (a common satellite hobby of Cramberleigh fans) would be trickier than you might imagine.
Ruthven was about to fire up his media wiki forums and search engines to do a deep dive into obscure British TV performers (non-speaking roles) of the late 1960s whose headshot was lost to the twenty-fourth century, before realising he was an idiot.
Cressida didn’t need to keep trying, because her first attempt worked. Against all the odds, Oxford had found the episode.
They now knew where she was, and that meant they could go and get her. Seven years too late, perhaps — but for Cressida it might only have been a matter of days. Weeks. Months. Years. There was no way of knowing.
So as long as they could retrieve her efficiently enough not to get the whole year walled off as an Event, Cressida would not have to hang around to see what 1965 had to offer her in the way of a brand-new acting career.
“Don’t worry,” Ruthven told Fenella with more confidence than he could usually muster. “We’ll find her, and bring her home.”
“I’m sorry,” said Fenella. “We? I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but you and I are not time travellers.”
“Speak for yourself,” said Ruthven, feeling oddly buoyed at the thought of getting to see 1964 for himself. “All I need is a cat.”
1 In Season 7 of Cramberleigh, the third Lady Wildegreen died of the Spanish flu. No explanation was given as to why third time was the charm as far dead wives leading to mad science experiments, but everyone had agreed the show was looking a bit stale until this surprising turn of events began to unspool. Barbara Hill, the actress who played Lady Sophia (wife no. 3) famously said that the reason she never married because she didn’t want to risk inspiring a real-life Invasion of the Triffids. She lived to be 97, so the issue never came up.
2 Actress Joan Buckingham was famous for playing archetypes such as ‘the tall, plain spinster who’s a demon in the sack once she takes her glasses off’ in British sex comedies of the 1960s and 70s, including one famous role as a leopard print bikini-clad Jungle Queen in Here We Go Round The Jungle Again (1967) and another as Nurse Birdie in Dirty Laughs at St Al’s (1974). The fact that she concurrently played the tartarish, judgemental Lady Phyllida Cradoc (a character at least 20 years older than herself) on a long-running historical television show was a constant surprise to fans. Joan came and went from Cramberleigh, but despite her success in other creative fields (she was also an award-winning ballroom dancer) she always returned to her iconic role with gusto, even in the show’s waning years during the 80’s. Joan Buckingham went on to win the Best Actress Oscar in 1999 for her gripping, nuanced performance as a homicidal grandmother with a brain tumour in the popular bleak comedy Mrs Hollywood Is Watching You. Two years after that, at the age of 72, she raised 50,000 pounds for Comic Relief by sitting in a bathtub full of creme patissiere. What a legend.
3 Ruthven didn’t need to make an effort to collect friends thanks to Oxford, who towed people in his wake like the Pied Piper. When Oxford wasn’t around, Ruthven pretty much forgot people existed, hiding out in the Media Archives like some kind of brooding bat creature with a collection of antique remote controls. If his life ever depended on him being charming and likeable, he was screwed.
4 “Time is a bastard, and paradoxes don’t exist” is a direct quote from a lecture regularly given to first year students by Professor Boswell, entitled Let’s Just Debunk All Your Stupid Paradox Theories At Once, Shall We?
5 Rescuing endangered wildlife was the primary focus of travel missions co-ordinated by Banksia College, which had the net effect of making most of their alumni insufferable at parties. It’s hard to compete in a “What cool stuff have you done lately” conversation when the other person has “saved the koala from extinction, actually” in their back pocket.
6 Monterey and Lovelace had better luck with saving the complete works of Sappho (a little too effective, as they realised when they came across a specific poem discussing how strange it was that her first drafts kept disappearing), the autobiography of Agrippina Minor (actually a collection of recipes, a few of her mother’s letters and a highly annotated version of her shit list, on which the names of relatives and senators were listed in the order she wanted them to die horribly), and most of the Mona Lisa, which otherwise would have been lost to the twenty-second century event known colloquially as the Louvresplosion.
7 It was a surprise to no one that the attempts of Monterey and Lovelace led directly to 48 BCE becoming an Event, ensuring that the mission could never be officially completed. Not long afterwards, the entire lifetime of Cleopatra VII likewise became an Event, making it doubly unlikely that the Library of Alexandria incident would ever be resolved to anyone’s satisfaction.
8 Data recording itself was not a foolproof system. Recorded media had only a 66.6% chance of making it through to the twenty-fourth century intact, and that was without counting the various incidents that often occurred between the recording of said media and the return journey home. Not every traveller took the hint, especially in the early days of time exploration. 431 BCE became an Event thanks to Boswell and Cressida’s over-enthusiastic attempts to record the first live performance of Euripides’ Medea from three different angles.
9 This of course is based on the assumption it actually was Cressida on the screen and not, for example, an ancestor who happened to have exactly the same facial structure, a possibility that was more believable to Cramberleigh fans than to any other human people on the planet. This was a popular trope recurring frequently in later seasons, almost as often as “this character now has a completely different face, due to an emergency recast,” something that happens in real life with far less frequency.
Twelve
Boswell and Lovelace
Lovelace knew where Boswell would be. He might be a cranky old tabby, but he was also a creature of habit.
The Museum of Lost Things was a love letter to Chronos College’s history of mildly unethical looting from the past.
When the Founders first commissioned the three colleges of time travel, they based the campus design on antique universities past. With Chronos College, they were so awash with nostalgia that they got halfway through building a replica chapel before remembering that public religion had fallen massively out of fashion in the mid twenty-third century.
