The sound of a loud bronze gong reverberated through the house.
“Damn it,” said Cressida. “Okay. The house is about to fill up with Anachronauts. Don’t lose your heads.”
1 A Scandal To Remember (1970) is a farce comedy in which a hapless British Prime Minister (Ronnie Connor) is haunted by the sexy ghosts of Cleopatra (Fleur Shropshire), Lucretia Borgia (Valerie Windsor) and Marie Antoinette (Sheila Troughton) who all gleefully interfere with his humorous attempts to settle down with a nice respectable bride. He ends up married to Doris, also played by Fleur Shropshire: a secretary with an uncanny resemblance to a certain dead Pharaoh.
2 Scattered: a term also known as time-blinded, or chronologically discombobulated. Can result in memory loss, identity crisis and a little light swooning. If your travel partner is afflicted, all you can do is return them to the twenty-fourth century, fill in a Lost Memory form on their behalf, and hope for the best.
Twenty-Six
The Anachronauts
What about the Anachronauts? How do they fit into the popular Time is a Bastard theory of the single, unbreakable, ‘everything that happened was always happening and was always meant to happen, just accept it or so help me Time will screw with you until you get it right’ timeline?
The Anachronauts make things awkward. We don’t know nearly enough about them to be certain of anything, thanks to the Global Official Secrets Act, and the corruption of university administration bodies. They know how to cover up scandals.
Here’s what we do know: there were three colleges established in the twenty-fourth century more than a decade ago, for the purpose of studying, practicing and formalising the procedures for time travel. The funding was 100% private, provided by nine individuals known as the Founders.
Only those connected to one of the three colleges, or in a select number of high positions in the world government, even know that time travel technology exists.
One of the three colleges went… well, evil. They went to the bad. Descended into villainous monologues and dastardly deeds. How else to explain it?
We know that their leaders are named Zephyr, Abydos and Professor Shelley.
We know that one of their early mission statements was to ‘save’ key historical people who died untimely deaths.
We know that the Anachronauts have caused irreparable damage to Time, including (at least) twenty separate Events, walling huge portions of history off to legit travellers forever. We suspect that the majority of these activities were deliberate acts of sabotage, rather than accidental (as with the Events caused by the reckless behaviour of Chronos College travellers).
We know that large numbers of the Anachronauts were captured and exposed during the Medici Raid, though we don’t know what punishment (if any) they received.
(One of those captured Anachronauts was my sibling, so I’d QUITE like to know more.)
We know there are still plenty of Anachronauts out there, and that their movement continues to grow.
We haven’t heard much from them for a while. That means they’re probably up to something so diabolical that we won’t see it coming until it’s too late.
Zadie Kincaid, Getting More And More Worried About Time Travel, Actually — self published pamphlet, exclusively distributed to trusted friends and allies on campus
Twenty-Seven
Skulking in the Scullery
Monterey was not panicking. Why would he panic? He had Lovelace back. They’d found Cressida, after all these years — or she had found them. They were about to be overrun by Anachronauts.
No reason to make a flap. Right?
Cressida dragged them out of the smoking room and down to the ground floor via a set of back stairs that existed because houses run by servants liked to make sure everyone had their own staircases.1 The whole gang were currently squashed into a room called a scullery, which contained large boxy sinks and a wild assortment of clean pots and kettles, showing no sign of having been recently used.
Despite the surfeit of kettles, there was no evidence that tea was on the cards. Distressing, but one had to endure.
The plan was for Monterey, Oxford, Lovelace, Cressida and Fenella to move discreetly through a house full of dangerous time saboteurs in order to step into yet another cupboard which may or may not lead them directly to 912 CE. Monterey was not loving this plan. He’d had enough of surprise cupboards.
At least Fenella and Oxford were asking the stupid questions so Monterey could pretend to be aloof and above it all.2
“Why are the Anachronauts coming here today?” asked Fenella.
“1899 is one of their favourite years to use for meetings and social functions,” said Cressida, sounding annoyed with herself. “I should have known better than to bring you all here, but Fenthorp is such a useful conjunction.”
“What’s a conjunction?” Oxford asked.
“Will you be upset if I use words like ‘magic door’?”
“Let’s leave magic out of it,” sighed Lovelace. “We’re not kittens.”
“Okay,” said Cressida. “We’re currently inside an Event. Once years are sealed off by Events, they start going very odd. Separated from the proper timeline, they can… get a bit wild. Paradoxy. After a while, they drift from the path of all known Time Mechanics.” She gestured at her bustle as if this should explain the fabric. “Spend enough time in here, you can even find ways to encourage some of those anachronisms. Usually that just adds more chaos. It’s handy, though, in a jam.”
“So, the Anachronauts hang out in these years having committee meetings?” Oxford demanded, his voice getting a bit too loud.
“Committee meetings, cocktail parties, you name it. Event Space is their territory. That’s why they damaged the timeline in the first place. I’m not sure if they’re delighted or frustrated that they can indulge all of their anachronistic impulses without making a dent in Basic Time. Basic Time is the term they use for everything that isn’t Event Space, by the way.”
“Patronising,” Oxford noted.
“That’s how they roll,” said Cressida.
“I still don’t understand how we’re inside an Event,” Fenella frowned. “And how we crawled from 1963 to 1899 through a secret passage in a cupboard.”
“It’s called a time aisle,” said Cressida.
Monterey was finally unable to hold back from joining in. “I know that phrase. Wasn’t it in a Cramberleigh episode?”
