Far Horizons: Tales of Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Horror. Issue #18 September 2015 | Page 36

“I… I am not sure what I am doing here. There
was a light and then I woke on your floor.”

“You are not an army,” he pointed out.
“No,” Grace grinned, “I’m a journalist.”

“What’s your name?” she asked tilting her chin
up at him.
“Arthur, High King of Britain.”
Her jaw dropped. She stared at him with obvious disbelief. For a moment, he thought she was going
to pick up her weapon and use it on him. He took a
step back, but instead, she sank into the corner of a
couch upholstered in garish geometric patterns.
“The once and future king,” she whispered,
“will come when the world needs him the most and
save mankind.” She looked up at him. “Well mate, we
never needed you more than we do now.”

“Jur-na-list..?”
“Yeah, I write. I talk to people and then write
up articles for the newspapers and magazines. I freelance.”
He gave her a blank look and she waved her
hand. “It doesn’t matter, but I have contacts that can
help us do what we have to do.”
“Contacts?” so many words he didn’t understand the context of. Then something more disturbing
occurred to him. “Us? But you’re a woman.”
“So you noticed,” she said drily. “Look, you’re
lost in the present…”

***
The prophesy was the strangest thing Arthur
had ever heard. He sat back on Grace’s couch, his legs
crossed at his ankles while she spoke. It did seem as
if the world needed help, but even with his army he
doubted his ability to live up to such a charge.

“Future.”
“Does it matter?”
“It is my future.”

“You don’t need an army,” she reassured him,
“You have me.”
That didn’t reassure him. What he really needed, was Merlin. “What year did you say it is?”
“I didn’t, but it’s 2002.”

“Whatever. You’re lost and you need help.
And you need someone who actually believes that you
are who you say you are without wanting to lock you
away as a nutter.”
He didn’t understand the word, but the connotation was clear enough. “You know where to start?”

Arthur gaped. He’d come over fifteen hundred
years into a world he knew nothing about, and he was
supposed to save the world? The gods seemed to be
asking an awful lot of him, king or not.

“I have some ideas. Several countries in this
time have arms that could destroy the world with the
press of a button. One in particular seems hell bent on
blowing us up and his country with us.”

He got to his feet and started pacing across the
lounge room floor. Even after Grace had explained
that her machines were called a television, video,
DVD player and stereo, they disquieted him. Numbers
and lights flashing looked demonic, but they seemed
appropriate in this future world to which he’d come.

Now that, Arthur understood. “They have
swords larger than in my time?”
Grace laughed. “You could say that. Men have
been striving for bigger and better ways to kill each
other since the dawn of time.”

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