The River of No Return

it in bold, black letters. Nick puzzled over that, then looked up into the man’s face. “You again? Lord grant me a different dream!”
    “Good morning.”
    “I suppose it is still the future.”
    “I am afraid so.”
    Ten minutes later, Nick had stormed about, rattled and banged upon the frustratingly locked door, stared mesmerized out of the window at the horseless traffic in the street fifteen (fifteen!) stories beneath him and at the unrecognizable sprawl that was, apparently, London, the river nearly devoid of boats and laced across with bridges. He was, he guessed from the position of a shockingly white St. Paul’s and a few—a very few—steeples, somewhere in Southwark, of all the godforsaken places.
    “Is the Abbey gone?”
    “Westminster Abbey still stands. You can’t see it for the new buildings.”
    Nick turned from the window. “I’m in London, though. London of the future.”
    “Yes.”
    “Why? Why am I here?”
    “I am glad to finally hear a rational question from you. You are in London because this is the Guild’s European hospital. You will stay here until your concussion is healed. But then, you must leave. Forever.” He looked at Nick a little warily.
    “So when I am healed you will put me on a ship and send me off? Wherever the winds take me? An exile?”
    “Oh, no.” The old man smiled. “The Guild will choose your new country for you, and prepare you in every way to live in it. The Guild will care for you. First you will spend a year at one of our compounds, getting ready to enter modern life. Most people remember their year in the compound as one of the happiest they have known.”
    Nick wondered if that was the light of fanaticism behind the old man’s eyes. “And then?”
    “At the end of the year you will move to your new home. The Guild will provide you with wealth, property, whatever you need to start life anew. The rest is up to you. You can take a job if you like. Many of us end up working for the Guild. Like me.” He straightened his shoulders. “I am a greeter.”
    Nick leaned back against the window ledge and looked the man up and down. His mysteriously declarative shirt had short, cuffless sleeves. His hairy forearms were on show, like a laborer’s. GAP. Was that some sort of code? Or was he branded, like a criminal?
    “It’s a shock, isn’t it,” the old man said gently. “This city, my clothes, everything. I assure you, you’d think I was exactly as funny-looking if you saw me in the clothes I wore in my old life.”
    “Who were you?”
    “I am—was . . .” He hesitated. “I still have trouble keeping my tenses straight, and it has been so many years since I jumped. I was a Frank. A butcher by trade. I jumped from Aachen in 810 and landed in 1965. An unusually long leap.” There was a note of pride in his voice. “I was sent to London and I have never returned to Austrasia. Or even to what is now known as Germany. It is forbidden.”
    “And you abide by these rules?”
    “Yes. You will, too.”
    Nick thought he would keep his own counsel on that. “How did you know who I am?”
    “We keep a log of people who vanish, and of people who appear.”
    “Surely people get lost every day.” Nick turned and looked down again at the teeming city. His eyes followed a tiny person as he—she! The person was wearing trousers, but Nick saw now that it was a woman—strode to a street corner. She stepped with confidence into the path of an enormously tall, perfectly rectangular red carriage that was bearing down on her without any visible means of locomotion. Nick gasped, but somehow the ghastly machine came to a stop mere inches from her. She seemed not to notice it at all, but sauntered boyishly on her way and disappeared behind the blank glass wall of another building. Nick turned slowly to face the white room and the little man who was his only anchor in this strange dreamworld. “Please tell me that I am dreaming, or dead. And this is either heaven or hell.”
    “No.” The butcher shook his head. “I will not tell you that, for it isn’t true. This is the same world you left, only it is a little bit older, and a little bit grayer.”
    Nick looked at the rectangles on the ceiling emanating light. They were miraculous, but they were neither beautiful nor comforting. Was he in hell? “That dragoon was about to skewer me.”
    “You could see you were about to die, and so you jumped. It is the most common prompt. I jumped right before a