A Blink of the Screen (19 page)

HmmMMmmMMmmMMmmMMmmMMmm.

Cluck.

We also know that the person calling himself Elrond X, an itinerant, entered the area around 2 a.m. When located subsequently, he said: ‘Yeah, well, maybe sometimes I used to take a chicken but there’s no law against it. Anyway, I stopped because it was getting very heavy, I mean, it was the way they were acting. The way they looked at you. Their beady eyes. But times are tough and I thought, okay, why not …

‘There’s no chickens there, man. Someone’s been through it, there’s no chickens!’

When asked about the Assemblage, he said: ‘There was only this pile of junk in the middle of the bushes. It was just twigs and wire and junk. And eggs, only you never touch the eggs, we know that, some of those eggs give you a shock, like electricity. ’Cos you never asked me before, that’s why. Yeah, I kicked it over. Because there was this chicken inside it, okay, but when I went up close there was this flash and, like, a clap of thunder and it went all wavy and disappeared. I ain’t taking that from no chicken.’

Thus far we have been unable to reassemble the Assemblage (Photos A thru G). There is considerable doubt as to its function, and we have dismissed Mr X’s view that it was ‘a real funky microwave oven’. It appeared simply to have been a collection of roadside debris and twigs, held together with cassette tape.
¹
It may have had some religious significance. From drawings furnished by Mr X, there
appeared
to have been space inside for one chicken at a time.

Document C contains an analysis of the three eggs found in the debris. As you will see, one of them seems normal but infertile, the second has been powering a flashlight bulb for two days, and a report on the third is contingent on our finding either it or Dr Paperbuck, who was last seen trying to cut into it with a saw.

For the sake of completeness, please note Document B, which is an offprint of Paperbuck and Macklin’s
Western Science Journal
paper: ‘Exaggerated Evolutionary Pressures on Small Isolated Groups Under Stress’.

All that we can be certain of is that there are no chickens in the area where chickens have been for the last seventeen years.

However, there are now forty-seven chickens on the opposite verge.

Why they crossed is of course one of the fundamental riddles of popular philosophy.

That is not, however, the problem.

We don’t know how.

But it’s not such a great verge over there, and they’re all clustered together and some of the hens are laying.

We’re just going to have to wait and see how they get back.

Cluck?

A
UTHOR’S
N
OTE:
In 1973, a lorry overturned at a freeway interchange in Hollywood. It was one of the busiest in the United States and, therefore, the world. Some chickens escaped and bred. They survived – are surviving – very well, even in the hazardous atmosphere of the roadside. But this story is about another Hollywood. And other chickens.

¹
The Best of Queen

THE SECRET BOOK OF THE DEAD

N
OW
W
E
A
RE
S
ICK
,
ED
.
N
EIL
G
AIMAN AND
S
TEPHEN
J
ONES
,
D
REAM
H
AVEN
B
OOKS
,
M
INNEAPOLIS, 1991

Given the title of the anthology in which this was to appear, I tried to write this as though I were thirteen years old, with that earnest brand of serious amateurishness. This is possibly not a long way from how I write at the best of times …

They don’t teach you the facts of death,

Your Mum and Dad. They give you pets.

We had a dog which went astray.

Got laminated to the motorway.

I cried. We had to post him to the vet’s.

You have to work it out yourself,

This dying thing. Death’s always due.

A goldfish swimming on a stall,

Two weeks later: cotton wool,

And sent to meet its Maker down the loo.

The bottom of our garden’s like a morg-you

My Dad said. I don’t know why.

Our tortoise, being in the know

Buried himself three years ago.

This is where the puppies come to die.

Puss has gone to be a better cat

My Dad said. It wasn’t fair.

I think my father’s going bats

Jesus didn’t come for cats

I went and looked. Most of it’s still there.

They don’t teach you the facts of death,

Your Mum and Dad. It’s really sad.

Pets, I’ve found, aren’t built to last;

One Christmas present, next Christmas past.

We go on buying them. We must be mad.

They die of flu and die of bus,

Die of hardpad, die of scabies,

Foreign ones can die of rabies,

But usually they die of us.

ONCE AND FUTURE

C
AMELOT
,
ED
.
J
ANE
Y
OLEN
,
P
HILOMEL
B
OOKS
,
N
EW
Y
ORK, 1995

There’s a lot more of this deep on a hard drive somewhere. It may yet become a novel, but it started as a short story in
Camelot,
edited by Jane Yolen, in 1995. I’d wanted to write it for nearly ten years. I really ought to dig out those old discs
¹
again …

… when matins were done the congregation filed out to the yard. They were confronted by a marble block into which had been thrust a beautiful sword. The block was four feet square, and the sword passed through a steel anvil which had been struck in the stone, and which projected a foot from it. The anvil had been inscribed with letters of gold:

W
HOSO
P
ULLETH
O
UTE THIS
S
WERD

O
F THIS
S
TONE AND
A
NVYLD

IS
R
IGHTWYS
K
YNGE

B
ORNE OF ALL
B
RYTAYGNE
.

from
Le Morte d’Arthur
by Sir Thomas Malory

The copper wire. It was the copper wire that gave me the trouble.

It’s all down to copper wire. The old alchemists used to search for gold. If only they’d known what a man and a girl can do with copper wire …

And a tide mill. And a couple of hefty bars of soft iron.

And here I am now, with this ridiculous staff in one hand and the switch under my foot, waiting.

I wish they wouldn’t call me Merlin. It’s Mervin. There was a Merlin, I’ve found out. A mad old guy who lived in Wales and died years ago. But there were legends about him, and they’re being welded on to me now. I reckon that happens all the time. Half the famous heroes of history are really lots of local guys all rolled into one by the ballad singers. Remember Robin Hood? Technically I suppose I can’t, because none of the rascals who went under that name will be born for several centuries yet, if he even is due to exist in this universe, so using the word remember is probably the wrong, you know, grammar. Can you remember something that hasn’t happened yet? I can. Nearly everything I can remember hasn’t happened yet, but that’s how it goes in the time-travel business. Gone today and here tomorrow …

Oh, here comes another one of them. A strapping lad. Legs like four beer kegs stacked in pairs, shoulders like an ox. Brain like an ox, too, I shouldn’t wonder. Hand like a bunch of bananas, gripping the sword …

Oh, no, my lad. You’re not the one. Grit your teeth all you like. You’re not the one.

There he goes. His arm’ll be aching for days.

You know, I suppose I’d better tell you about this place.

About this time.

Whenever it is …

I had special training for time-travelling. The big problem, the big problem, is finding out when you are. Basically, when you step out of a time-machine you can’t rely on seeing a little sign that says, ‘Welcome to
AD
500, Gateway to the Dark Ages, pop. 10 million and falling’. Sometimes you can’t even rely on finding anyone in a day’s march who knows what year it is, or what king is on the throne, or what a king is. So you learn to look at things like church architecture, the way the fields are farmed, the shape of the ploughshares, that sort of thing.

Yeah, I know, you’ve seen films where there’s this dinky little alpha-numeric display that tells you exactly where you are …

Forget it. It’s all dead reckoning in this game. Real primitive stuff. You start out by checking the constellations with a little gadget, because they tell me all the stars are moving around all the time and you can get a very rough idea of when you are just by looking through the thing and reading off along the calibrations. If you can’t even recognize the constellations, the best thing to do is run and hide, because something forty feet tall and covered with scales is probably hunting you already.

Plus they give you a guide to various burned-out supernovas and Stofler’s
Craters of the Moon by Estimated Creation Date
. With any luck you can pinpoint yourself fifty years either way. Then it’s just a matter of checking planetary positions for the fine tuning. Try to imagine sea navigation around the time of, oh, Columbus. A bit hit-or-miss, yeah? Well, time navigation is just about at the same level.

Everyone said I must be one great wizard to spend so much time studying the sky.

That’s because I was trying to find out when I was.

Because the sky tells me I’m around
AD
500. So why is the architecture Norman and the armour fifteenth-century?

Hold on … here comes another one …

Well, not your actual Einstein, but it could be … oh, no, look at that grip, look at that rage … no. He’s not the one. Not him.

Sorry about that.

So … right … where was I? Memory like a sieve these days.

Yeah, the architecture. And everyone speaking a sort of Middle English, which was okay as it turned out because I can get by in that, having accidentally grounded in 1479 once. That was where I met John Gutenberg, father of modern printing. Tall man, bushy whiskers. Still owes me tuppence.

Anyway. Back to this trip. It was obvious from the start that things weren’t quite right. This time they were supposed to be sending me to observe the crowning of Charlemagne in
AD
800, and here I was in the wrong country and, according to the sky, about three centuries too soon. That’s the kind of thing that happens, like I said; it’s going to be at least fifty years before we get it right. Fifty-three years, actually, because I met this man in a bar in 1875 who’s from a hundred years in our future, and he told me. I told them at Base we might as well save a lot of effort by just, you know, bribing one of the future guys for the plans of the next model. They said if we violated the laws of Cause-and-Effect like that there’s a good chance the whole universe would suddenly catastrophically collapse into this tiny bubble .005 Ångstroms across, but I say it’s got to be worth a try.

Anyway, the copper wire gave me a load of trouble.

That’s not to say I’m an incompetent. I’m just an average guy in
every
respect except that I’m the one in ten thousand who can time-travel and still end up with all his marbles. It just gives me a slight headache. And I’m good at languages and I’m a very good observer, and you’d better believe I’ve observed some strange things. The Charlemagne coronation was going to be a vacation. It was my second visit, paid for by a bunch of historians in some university somewhere. I was going to check a few things that the guys who commissioned the first trip had raised after reading my report. I had it all worked out where I was going to stand so I wouldn’t see myself. I could probably have talked my way out of it even if I had met myself, at that. One thing you learn in this trade is the gift of the gab.