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believe much the same thing, but — rather than seeing this as a tragedy of apocalyptic dimensions — embrace the idea with dreamy enthusiasm. They see a merciful end to responsibility, guilt and anxiety, striving and failing: a descent into inanimacy, the leaching of our souls into a great cosmic spiritual blancmange, while our bodies hang around, going through the motions.

    For me, though, knowing the future — or believing that I did — never made me feel like a sleepwalker, a zombie in a senseless, amoral trance. It made me feel I was in control of my life. One person held sway across the decades, tying the disparate threads together, making sense of it all. How could that unity make me less than human? Everything I did grew out of who I was: who I had been, and who I would be.

    I only started feeling like a soulless automaton when I tore it all apart with lies.

    * * * *

    After school, few people pay much attention to history, past or future — let alone that grey zone between the two which used to be known as ‘current affairs’. Journalists continue to collect information and scatter it across time, but there’s no doubt that they now do a very different job than they did in pre-Hazzard days, when the live broadcast, the latest dispatch, had a real, if fleeting, significance. The profession hasn’t died out completely; it’s as if a kind of equilibrium has been reached between apathy and curiosity, and if we had any less news flowing from the future, there ‘would be’ a greater effort made to gather it and send it back. How valid such arguments can be — with their implications of dynamism, of hypothetical alternative worlds cancelled out by their own inconsistencies — I don’t know, but the balance is undeniable. We learn precisely enough to keep us from wanting to know any more.

    On 8 July, 2079, when Chinese troops moved into Kashmir to ‘stabilise the region’ — by wiping out the supply lines to the separatists within their own borders — I hardly gave it a second thought. I knew the UN would sort out the whole mess with remarkable dexterity; historians had praised the Secretary-General’s diplomatic resolution of the crisis for decades, and, in a rare move for the conservative Academy, she’d been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize three years in advance of the efforts which would earn it. My memory of the details was sketchy, so I called up The Global Yearbook. The troops would be out by 3 August; casualties would be few. Duly comforted, I got on with my life.

    I heard the first rumours from Pria, who’d taken to sampling the countless underground communications nets. Gossip and slander for computer freaks; a harmless enough pastime, but I’d always been amused by the participants’ conceit that they were ‘plugged in’ to the global village, that they had their fingers on the pulse of the planet. Who needed to be wired to the moment, when the past and the future could be examined at leisure? Who needed the latest unsubstantiated static, when a sober, considered version of events which had stood the test of time could be had just as soon — or sooner?

    So when Pria told me solemnly that a full-scale war had broken out in Kashmir, and that people were being slaughtered in the thousands, I said, ‘Sure. And Maura got the Nobel Prize for genocide.’

    He shrugged. ‘You ever heard of a man called Henry Kissinger?’

    I had to admit that I hadn’t.

    * * * *

    I mentioned the story to Lisa, disparagingly, confident that she’d laugh along with me. She rolled over to face me and said, ‘He’s right.’

    I didn’t know whether to take the bait; she had a strange sense of humour, she might have been teasing. Finally, I said, ‘He can’t be. I’ve checked. All the histories agree—’

    She looked genuinely surprised before her expression turned to pity; she’d never thought much of me, but I don’t think she’d ever believed I was quite so naive.

    ‘The victors have