The Tourist Read online

  Li is pensive. “I’ll be sorry to see you go.”

  “You can’t be here for much longer.”

  “Five more months. Unless something happens.”

  “Haven’t you checked?”

  “I want it to be a surprise.”

  “Knowing doesn’t take away the surprise,” I say. “The records are always incomplete. I don’t know why I get sent back. And all I know about this afternoon’s accident is that it happens on the journey home and that nobody gets hurt.”

  “But isn’t even that too much?”

  “No. For some of them it’s comforting.” I nod down at our clients in their shimmering coats. Some of the braver ones have entered the shops.

  “And you? Do you find it comforting?”

  “I don’t find it anything. The company record makes my job easier. My personal record—it doesn’t tell me anything I couldn’t have guessed.”

  “That’s what’s different about here.” Li looks at the shoppers below. Our clients are outnumbered three or four to one by the natives. “The people here don’t think they know what’s going to happen. Or when.”

  “Does that make them better than us?”

  “It makes them less fatalistic.”

  “I’m not fatalistic. Apart from a few details, I know just as little about my life as any of the people down there.” I’m careful not to say natives in front of Li. She doesn’t like the word.

  She turns back to me. “A few details. You mean like thinking you know when you’re going to die?”

  “I know the year. It’s only a date. And it doesn’t give an age. Travel changes everything.”

  “I don’t know how you live with it.” She looks down at our clients again. “Why do you think they come here?”

  “It’s a shopping mall. They’re a defining feature of the culture.” Once it was temples and cathedrals, then railway stations. In this era it’s shopping malls and airports. Tri-Millennium don’t organise excursions to airports (the natives have security concerns); occasionally a few clients will make the trip by themselves just to watch the planes.

  “But why the 21st? What do they expect to see here?”

  There are lots of reasons. The main one is this period has a fixed link: spend a month here, go back and find a month has passed at home. Our clients are here for a holiday. They’re not roughing it in the fourteenth century or trying to establish if King Arthur actually existed. The early 21st has short travel time, amenities and relative security. Our clients choose it because it doesn’t need much medical preparation, they can understand some of the language and the natives are sophisticated enough not to burn them as witches or worship them as gods. “They’re here to see something they can’t see at home. They’ll feel they’ve done something adventurous and be glad to get back.”

  “It doesn’t seem much.”

  “Not everyone is like you, Li. The 21st is available, so they come here.”

  “But they could go anywhere. They could go to the 1920s.”

  “Have you seen the schedules?” I might not be a tech but, because I’m interested in the early 19th, I’ve studied them. “The 1920s are difficult. If you want to come back you have to sit it out until 1943. That’s a bad time for any kind of travel.”

  “I’d send the Shins to the 1920s.” Li watches a particular group as they block the door to a sportswear store. “There they are. Spoiling my day.” There are five of them: two women and a man in their fifties, and two men in their twenties. They’ve surrounded one of the natives and are looking intently at something in his hands. “You know, I think they’re about to buy some currency.”

  “Shouldn’t you stop them?”

  “I’ve given them the standard warnings. If they choose to get robbed that’s their concern.” Heritage travellers have higher status than Tri-Millennium clients. They’re paid more and are occasionally confident enough to leave the resort unaccompanied or try to talk to a native. (Living History are the most reckless: they’ll use public transport and eat in restaurants.) As we watch, the Shins stand aside to let the native walk away, then gather in a circle. Then they appear to argue. The younger ones start looking around, obviously trying to find the native who sold them whatever rubbish they’ve just bought. He’s gone, of course. One of the women points up at us. “Here they come,” Li sighs, as they make their way to the escalator. “Time for the Heritage smile.”

  The Shins march towards us in single file, one of the older women at the front, the younger men hanging behind. They knock empty chairs aside as they approach. They are unmistakably in a bad mood. Li stands up, beaming as if she hasn’t noticed. “How are you enjoying your excursion?”

  “We’ve been robbed,” the woman at the front says. “Robbed,” the other woman and man repeat from behind her, like a choral accompaniment.

  Li looks concerned. “I’m sorry to hear that. Tell me what happened and I’ll take you to the police.”

  At the mention of the police the Shins hesitate. But it isn’t long before their sense of outrage bubbles over. “We don’t think this is a matter for the police. We think this is a matter for Heritage. We think we should have been warned.”

  Li sounds less sympathetic. “I’m sorry that you think that. Can you tell me what happened?”

  “We changed some currency,” the man says. “We were robbed.”

  “Was this at an approved bureau?” There’s steel in Li’s voice now. “Because you were warned about the dangers of changing currency at unauthorised outlets.”

  “We should have been warned,” the woman insists.

  “You were warned.” Li smiles again, this time coldly. “I told you on the way here that people who approach you offering to change currency are criminals and you should refuse.”

  “It was a good rate,” the man says. “Very good,” the second woman adds, implying the offer had been so good they’d have been fools not to take it.

  “We gave him two Dors,” the woman says. “And this is what he gave us.” She slams what appears to be a small wad of £10 notes onto the table. Li does not touch them. “I think Heritage are responsible.”

  “So, let me make sure I’ve understood you. You were warned not to deal with touts who approach you. You were told they would almost certainly try to trick you. Yet you made a deal with one of them and were tricked. And now you think Heritage is responsible for you making that decision. Is that correct?”

  “We should have been warned,” the woman insists.

  “You were warned. You chose to ignore the warning.”

  “No. We should have been warned.”

  Li pauses. Some of our clients really don’t understand the logic of travel. “Do you mean I should have warned you personally that you were going to be tricked?”

  “It must be on our itinerary.”

  Li pulls a paper from the small pile on her table. Heritage uses paperwork. It’s a period touch, supposed to remind their clients that this isn’t home. It’s slightly anachronistic, given the 21st is beginning to abandon paperwork. They’re moving their information onto servers, which is why so little of it survives the NEE. “No. Remember it would only be on your itinerary if you were to lodge a formal complaint.”

  “Well, we want to lodge a formal complaint.”

  Li tries to look serious. “I see. You want to make a formal complaint that, while engaged in an illegal activity, you were cheated out of two Dors. You understand that I will be obliged to refer this matter to the authorities here. That does mean the local police. I should warn you there are protocols governing what actions they can take against people from our era who take part in illegal activities.” Hardly any clients have read the protocols. Most don’t need to: they’re too cautious to take any chances. The merest hint they might be held in one of this era’s appalling prisons should be enough to stop the Shins making a fuss. “Even if there is no criminal charge, you understand there would be implications on your return? So,” Li concludes brightly, “do you want
to make a formal complaint?”

  “We’ll think about it,” the first woman says. “We’ll write to Heritage when we get back,” the man says. Disgruntled but beaten, they slouch away, not even picking up their small bundle of notes.

  “They won’t write,” Li says once they’re back on the escalators. “And they don’t travel with Heritage again.” She picks up the notes they’ve left behind and counts them. “Two Dors.” She flicks through the notes. They are, for once, actual currencies, rather than strips of newspaper. “Forty pounds, a hundred Bulgarian lev and the rest is Turkish lira. They’ve been cheated, but it’s not actually bad. I’ve had customers hand over twenty Dors and get less.” She puts the notes into her satchel.

  Time passes. I drink a coffee, slowly. It tastes as bad as it did the first time I came here, but I’ve grown used to that. Coffee is probably one of the few things I’ll miss. That, and the park near my flat where I sometimes sit before going to the resort. There’s a particular spot where there’s just enough of an elevation to give a view across part of the city. There are no particular monuments, nothing I would bring any clients to see: just rows of different-sized houses exposed to the sky. On a winter morning I’ll sit on the bench and listen to the bells ring out the call to prayer as the lights in the houses come on. It’s one of my own rituals of reassurance, and helps put me in the right frame of mind for dealing with the clients. The ones who come here in winter can be the most difficult. They come because of the shorter days and rarely leave the resort, which means I spend longer in their company. On those mornings, with a long day ahead of me, I sit on the park bench and wonder about the lives of the people who live in those houses. There are children in them, perhaps, who will live to see the NEE. I don’t know what form it takes here: there might be something in the records at home, but because I didn’t know where I’d be assigned I didn’t check before I left. Perhaps there’s the outline of a cellar somewhere, with some relic of everyday life in a locked box. That view from the park is something I’ll miss. Perhaps, when I get home, I might try to find the place again. I have the co-ordinates. The hill is probably still there.

  Fifteen minutes before the coach is due to leave the clients have all assembled in Coffee Monarch. Some of them have actually bought cups of coffee, which they sip experimentally. The rest watch as I cut a Danish pastry in half. I eat one of the halves, an act closer to a party trick than the absorption of nutrition. I offer the other half to them to try, but they’re too cautious. This is usual. Children are sometimes tempted to try a mouthful, but even they have trouble dealing with food that is simultaneously tasteless and excessively sweet. When I announce it’s time to go back to the coach everyone is relieved. Tri-Millennium’s excursions are brief, at least compared to Heritage—Li’s clients will be here for another half-hour and then they’re taken to a cathedral. I compliment her on the way she handled the Shins, and she reminds me about a farewell party for another Heritage rep at Bar Five. It’s the kind of event we’d both usually avoid. I tell her to send me a reminder. Even this slight delay makes my clients restless. Brief as the stop has been, they’re still impatient for it to end. It’s understandable. The shopping mall quickly gets dull, especially if you’re uncertain about the etiquette of buying and there is nothing you really need. The clothes are odd: it’s hard to get anything in our size, and they have never really been fashionable. There was a brief fad in the 30s (our 30s), but that was limited to one tiny clique in City One West and lasted about two months. So clothes are out, and the tech—communication devices, hilarious computers—has a certain novelty value but won’t work when you get home. The only things our clients usually buy are books and disks of entertainments. The natives are proud of their entertainments: they think cinema is their greatest contribution to culture. It’s like a Stuart courtier telling you the masque is the art form of the future. The 20th’s real contribution is radio drama, the forerunner of all our serious entertainments. Unfortunately, thanks to travel, it’s become acceptable for grown-ups to watch the old movies and serials. It started with students, who used them as a way of prolonging their childhood, and then spread to older people, like our clients, who take them seriously. Watching them doesn’t feel childish because they’re historical artefacts and the language is different (not that you need the language to follow most of them: you only need to recognise a few simple visual conventions). Still, you can only buy so many disks, and after an hour all the clients usually want is to get back to the resort and tell the people who didn’t come that they’re pleased they did it but it was a bit disappointing and they wouldn’t do it again. Today’s clients are typical.

  Plus some of them are looking forward to the accident.

  I settle the bill for the clients who tried the coffee. Some of them stand next to me so they can hear me talk to the barista. They’re often impressed when they hear me speak This English even if I’m not as fluent as Li. “You sounded like one of them,” they’ll say, though the language isn’t difficult and it’s not as far from Modern as they think. Later, on the coach, I’ll explain how this era’s language eventually became the language we speak today. I’ll tell them how Agneta, the barista we met that afternoon, is from one of the countries that disappears in the NEE, which isn’t strictly true—I don’t know where she’s from—but it’s the kind of detail that gives them a thrill. They’ll feel sorry for her because she treated them politely, wasn’t alarmed at their attempts to speak what’s probably her second language and is almost as pale-skinned as we are. How sad, they think, even though she’ll probably die long before the NEE begins. Our clients don’t always have the strongest grasp of history.

  I lead them out of Coffee Monarch. There’s the usual half-jog across the open space of the car park and then I count them back onto the coach, where, with only the driver to hear them, they become voluble, eager to share their experiences. And then one of them asks, “How much can you tell us about the accident?” He’s about sixty, a thin, neat type who’s probably worked in maintenance or low-level industry. There are no visible augs. He reminds me of my father. The older Tri-Millennium clients often remind me of my parents: hard-working, patchily educated, facing new experiences with bewildered decency. If my parents had lived they would have travelled with Tri-Millennium and congratulated themselves on their daring. This one has been quiet until now. I suspect he’s an enthusiast for ancient tech and has only joined this trip because of the accident. I tell him all I know is what’s on the itinerary: somewhere between the attraction and the resort we will collide with another vehicle. “You must know more than that,” he insists, convinced I’m holding something back. Clients often think we’re holding something back. Sometimes, of course, we are.

  I tell him it’s going to be what the report calls a minor accident, which means it won’t involve the native police or the terrifying emergency services. The delay is for the driver of our coach to exchange insurance details with the driver of whatever other vehicle is involved in the accident. I explain what an insurance company is. The client still looks sceptical. Of course, I say, if you wanted details of the crash you’d need to look in the insurance company records, and, in our time, most of those are lost, and, while in this time they still exist—but not yet, because the accident hasn’t yet happened—there would be problems getting them. Private companies don’t make their records publicly available. You’d probably have to fabricate an ID or pretend to be somebody else, which is theoretically possible if you can get the right approval, but unlikely: approval is usually only issued for serious historical or scientific research and the prep can take years. And in the case of a minor accident the only additional information you’d find would be the approximate time and location and an estimated repair cost—assuming there’s even damage that needs repair. It would be a lot of work for information we don’t really need, and, besides, isn’t it better not to know these details? Doesn’t it add a little thrill to an otherwise dull journey home?

  He
accepts all this, without quite believing me. I’m used to that. They think that because this is the past we should know everything. They’re travelling in the open air, in a country of seventy million people, in a vehicle powered by the internal combustion of fossil fuels, and they still haven’t grasped how different this century is, and how little we know about it. Most of the reps couldn’t name the current Prime Minister or guess which party is in charge. Why would we need to? For most of our job a blurred outline of history is enough. If something we hadn’t expected happens we can always consult the Arc when we get home. (The version of the Arc at the resort is heavily edited—agency again.) As we’re driving through a street of small, old-fashioned shops (newspapers, flowers, takeaway food) a car suddenly pulls out in front of us. Our driver brakes, but there’s still a noticeable jolt as we bump gently against it. A small cheer goes up, and the clients gather round the windows with the best view. Our driver gets out to talk to the driver of the car. It all seems amicable. I wonder how this delay is going to take fifteen minutes. Then the other driver’s face hardens: he’s noticed who’s on the coach. It’s an expression I’ve seen before. Natives often look at us and see the money they hope to make. This one starts rubbing the back of his neck and miming sudden pain.

  Some of the clients ask if they can get off of the coach and look around the shops. It’s an unexpected request from Tri-Millennium clients. Presumably they’ve been emboldened by the shopping mall. I give them the usual warnings and open the door: let them have their experience of the varieties of early-21st retail. A few of them get off. They stand in the street, looking at the shop windows. One, the man who asked about the accident, actually goes into a shop and emerges a few seconds later triumphantly holding a newspaper. Meanwhile, the driver who pulled out in front of us has stopped rubbing his neck and is now looking animated. I suspect he’s trying to persuade the driver to back his claim, probably by offering a share of the damages. Our driver has seen this kind of thing before and doesn’t budge. Eventually the other driver caves in and details are exchanged. Our driver signals to the clients, who are now gathered incredulously around a menu in the window of a takeaway. They jog back to the coach, exhilarated, the man waving his newspaper like a trophy. The driver looks up and down the street, climbs back in and we move on again. The rest of the journey is uneventful. We’re soon out on the motorway and, a little while after that, we can see the dome of the Resort getting gradually nearer. Fifteen minutes later we have driven through the short glass-sided tunnel into the coach bay, our coach has pulled up in its allotted space (#24) and the clients disembark. I count them off for the last time as they file past thanking me for the interesting experience. I thank them for coming. It’s only when the last of them has stepped off the coach that I realise there’s a problem.