I watch his expression, waiting to see if the news will evoke some drastic emotion, but after a moment he simply removes the glasses from his nose and slips them back into his breast pocket. He takes a seat and pours himself a cup of tea.
“So what did they say?”
Doctor Quickly slides his teacup toward himself and rests his fingertips on the saucer. “What I feared it would.”
“Are they threatening Mym?”
“Quite certainly.”
“What are their ransom demands?”
“Unfortunately, they are not asking for a ransom. Mym was their objective and it seems they intend to make use of her. They are asking me for something else that I’m quite reluctant to give.”
“What?” Carson asks, leaning forward onto his elbows. “They want chronometers or something?”
I’m equally curious, though daunted by Doctor Quickly’s statement. He leans back in his chair and sighs. “They want me to show them the way to the Alpha.”
Tucket has his head cocked to one side, considering the statement. Carson and I are both clearly in the dark, so I’m about to ask the obvious follow up question, but Doctor Quickly continues without being prompted.
“The Alpha Prime is believed to be the core of the central timestreams. It’s the time before there was time travel. Some believe that if one were to travel back in time far enough, they could find an entirely unadulterated timestream, one in which time travel hasn’t ever existed. The beginning, if you will.”
“What would be the advantage to that?” I ask.
“That’s a good question,” Doctor Quickly replies. “One would wonder at the motivation for finding it. I certainly question what The Eternals want the information for.
“In the past, I’ve had plenty of contact from various parties, wanting access to my original timestream. ASCOTT has requested the information numerous times for different reasons. Many less reputable persons have sought me out as well. You met some of those on your chronothon adventure. The people who wish to use that knowledge are rarely motivated by the best of intentions. Even if they were, I wouldn’t give it to them.”
“There’s no one you trust?” Carson asks.
“There are a few people I trust. But it doesn’t make a difference. You can’t give what you don’t have. I could certainly give them my original timestream if I was out of my senses for some reason. If I was tortured or under duress, or just somehow decided to give the information up on my own. But it wouldn’t help them. My original timestream still wouldn’t give them the Alpha.”
“There is no true Alpha?” Tucket suggests.
Doctor Quickly shakes his head. “The Alpha exists, but I’m not from there, because I’m not the original Harold Quickly.”
I size up the man before me. In a way I’ve always known there were more than one of him. I’ve met him at various times in his life and had to figure out which era of his life I belonged in. At least a few versions of him had died before Mym and I found the way to save him. I knew that he was a variation of himself, the same way I am now. But I hadn’t imagined that this Doctor Quickly I saved wasn’t the “real” Doctor Quickly to begin with either.
“So you weren’t the one who originally discovered time travel?” I ask.
“I most certainly did,” Doctor Quickly replies. “It was my life’s work. The problem was, I wasn’t the only one.” He spreads his hands out on the table. “Let me see if I can explain.” He takes a sip of his tea and then continues.
“You see, we Quicklys aren’t fools. When the original version of me—let’s call him Quickly Alpha for our purposes—when he first jumped though time, it was an accident. It was amazing, but it was unexpected.
“He was ill prepared, but he wasn’t an idiot. He knew what had happened. As a scientist he knew the potential repercussions of tampering with time. He was familiar with all the grandfather paradoxes and theories floating around about what might happen if you changed your own timeline. He may have been an accidental time traveler, but he was determined not to make more mistakes and further complicate the issue. It was a dangerous situation and he was doing his best not to interfere with his own timeline, thinking that it led to his continued existence. Unfortunately, there was an alternative problem he didn’t fully consider. By not changing the timeline, he created a new dilemma.
“You see, he had been operating on the assumption that time was linear. He didn’t yet have the evidence to prove that he was in fact now in a parallel timestream—not the one he originally left. His original timestream—the Alpha— was still in existence, but devoid of one scientist. He had now added himself to a different timestream—Timestream Beta. And by not stopping the events that sent him back in time in the first place, the events were doomed to repeat themselves.
“In the worst scenario, Quickly Beta would have landed in the exact spot Alpha landed and been killed instantly by fusing into himself. Fortunately, Quickly Alpha did tamper with the timeline of events unintentionally, changing the events just enough that Quickly Beta went back in time, likewise found himself in a parallel timestream, and set about repeating the entire process over again. Left unchecked, there could have begun an infinite repetition of timestreams from that one event.”
“Ah,” I say. “That’s why in my timestream, the November Prime, you went missing as well. I always wondered how that could be if you weren’t originally from there.”
“Yes, unfortunately it did take us a couple of false starts to finally stop the cycle of repetition. We ended up with quite a few despite our best efforts. Some ended themselves, because of the fusion issues, but fortunately, after each repetition, those of us who survived all came to the same conclusion about needing to fix the problem. Even though the timestreams were multiplying, the potential solutions were too. Quickly Alpha figured out how to transfer streams and showed up in each one of the other times to try to stop the repetition. If it didn’t work, he’d take the Harry Quickly from that stream with him to try to solve the next one.
“With more of us on the task, we ultimately were able to stop some of the alternate Harrys from ever traveling in time.” He points to Carson and me in turn. “The timestream you two ended up in during your first adventure, the Lima stream, was one in which we successfully stopped a repetition.”
“So if you created a bunch of versions of yourself by accident, how did you figure out which one of you was the first?” Carson asks.
“For one, he was the first one to show up in another stream. It changed his timestream frequency somewhat, the signature of the gravitite particles inside him, and we could use that to differentiate each other. That’s what inspired us to develop the temporal spectrometer. Once we had that, we could analyze various timestream signatures and locate the original prime. Unfortunately, we realized that if we could figure out how to do that, someone else could too. Something had to be done.”
“There wouldn’t be any way to undo that,” Tucket says. “All those streams. The fractal was created, and you can’t undo time.”
“You’re correct,” Doctor Quickly replies. “Pandora’s box was open, and we knew it would only be a matter of time before someone came looking for the core stream. Some future generation of time traveler would track us down. Once we realized that, we knew what we needed to do with Quickly Alpha.”
“You killed him?” Tucket gasps.
Doctor Quickly considers Tucket briefly and smiles. “No. Nothing quite so drastic as that. But we sent him home. He agreed to go back to the Alpha and never time travel again. Many of us took that approach. It was the safest and most responsible action we could take in order to protect the universe.”
“But you didn’t do it,” Carson counters. “You didn’t take your own advice.”
“He couldn’t,” I reply, beginning to see the bigger picture. “Someone had to take the fall. Someone had to be the face of Doctor Quickly in the time travel community, because time travel was already out. The effects were already happenin
g, to people like us.”
Doctor Quickly sips his tea again and sets the cup gently back in the saucer. “My colleagues set the ball in motion. In my absence, accidents like the one that sent you back in time were repercussions of my discovery and they would ultimately lead to the existence of the rest of the time travel world. ASCOTT, The Academy of Temporal Sciences, and all the varied branches of the central primes stemmed from those few events. And eventually someone was going to follow them back, looking for me. Someone had to be here to respond and to keep the secret safe.”
“So the Alpha Quickly stayed in his timestream?” Carson asks. “He didn’t feel shortchanged by this whole deal? I feel like it would be hard to discover time travel and then not get to use it.”
“He did actually use it a few more times,” Doctor Quickly says. “But there was an unexpected result that convinced him that staying home was in everyone’s best interest.”
“Something bad happened when he left again?” Tucket inquires.
“Depends on your perspective. It was an unfortunate turn of events that ended up being the most important change to my life.”
“Mym,” I say, reading the expression on his face. “You ended up with Mym.”
“Did she tell you the story?” Doctor Quickly asks.
“No. Just bits. She told me a little about her mother’s decision.”
“Time travel causes otherwise unheard of scenarios and forces us to make difficult choices. Sometimes they are made for us. One of the reasons time travelers tend to stay away from their own lives is that mistakes don’t just affect them, but also the people they love. In Mym’s case, it turned out that we ended up with two of us and only one of her mother. A situation that was in no one’s best interest to duplicate further.”
Carson leans in and rests his elbows on the table again. “Does the other Mym—the one with the normal life—does she know there’s a version of her out there who travels through time?”
“I’m not sure what she knows of this reality. Her mother wanted to shield her from much of it. Knowing my daughter, she will likely put it together anyway, but Mym and I—my Mym—we’ve agreed to steer clear. It’s just been the two of us, but we do all right.”
Doctor Quickly wraps his hands a little tighter around his teacup. “We just need to get her back.”
“When they took her, I saw them use a temporal spectrometer on her,” I say. “They said she was more useful to them than I would be. What does that mean?”
Doctor Quickly frowns. “They’ve read her timestream signature so they can use that to trace her origins. Mym’s is the only time traveler other than the original me whose origins are in the Alpha. They plan to use her to find it.”
“So they already have what they want,” I reply. “What do they want you to do?”
“I don’t know. It could be that they know where they are going, but don’t know how to get there. They’ve given me a date to meet them.” He turns the device around so I can see it. The series of numbers is written out in Roman numerals.
The numerals register in my mind and I reach for my messenger bag, extracting Jay’s leather-bound journal. “I’ve seen that date.” I flip through pages until I arrive at the series of Roman numerals I’d been perplexed about. I flip the book around and slide it across the table to Doctor Quickly. “Any idea about these other dates? It’s some sort of set.”
Doctor Quickly runs a finger along the page, tracing the circled numbers. He pauses on the 2165 numeral for our current year, then moves down to the last one.
“You have any idea what those numbers signify?” I ask.
Doctor Quickly is quiet for a moment, still studying the sequence, but when he raises his eyes, his face is serious. “I can’t speak to all of these numbers. Most aren’t significant to me, except this one.” He turns the journal around and taps on the numeral I had converted to read 3525.
“That’s the end of the world.”
13
“We are the beneficiaries of the past. We owe a debt of gratitude to previous generations. As a time traveler I’ve been able to thank some of my heroes in person, but I feel it is just as important to recognize the courageous people in our own eras. By showing enough gratitude now, we save future time travelers a trip.”-Journal of Dr. Harold Quickly, 1941
The Neverwhere
I’m learning to fade.
Residing in Zurvan’s memories has taken stealth, but the more I work at it, the easier it has become. Zurvan spends much of his time in meditation, seated with arms lying comfortably in his lap, visiting his memories.
During times when Zurvan has his mind back in the Neverwhere and he is up and moving around, I keep still and hidden. I’ve discovered nooks in his memories—blank spots and foggy areas—places he hasn’t spent enough time in to remember them with any clarity. These are places I don’t remember either, so even when he wanders off, the hiding places stay foggy and indistinct.
So that’s what I do now. I skulk, and I watch.
I listen.
Sometimes I hear whispers in the fog. Occasionally I think I recognize the voices. One of them sounds like Jay. The girl from the fiery church is there too. I can sometimes hear her crying.
There are other voices in the fog. Strangers. Lost souls lingering at the edges of Zurvan’s mind. Never seen, never able to show themselves. Just whispers. The last remnants of their former selves. They make for eerie company.
My sojourn into the spaceship was my first experience with Zurvan’s past, but it was nearly my last. Zurvan had been staring into the colorful void inside the spaceship for so long, I had almost forgotten he could do anything else. Then, finally, he stood up to go back outside. I barely had time to retreat ahead of him without being seen. I escaped however, keeping my distance and staying hidden once again behind the fallen ruins near the rim of the crater. I had thought myself safe there until Zurvan opened up a portal and promptly disappeared.
I don’t know where Zurvan went, some other memory perhaps, or possibly back to my apartment to search for me again. Wherever he disappeared to, he was no longer in the memory of a future Saint Petersburg. Unfortunately, that meant I wasn’t either.
It was this moment that taught me another unique feature about the Neverwhere and how it functions. When Zurvan vanished, the scene around me changed. It stayed the same location, but reverted back to the version of Saint Petersburg I remember from my life. 2009.
It seems I’m perfectly capable of residing in the memories of my own life for as long as I want, and I can co-exist in a memory of someone else’s without having been there in real life, but when the holder of the memory leaves, I can’t linger.
It turns out that Zurvan’s spaceship crash memory is located a mere half a block west from the point on Fourth Street where I saw the girl disappear inside the ruined church. The same location that in my time is a Tijuana Flats Mexican Restaurant. Despite being centuries apart in time, geographically they are the same place.
When Zurvan vanished from the scene, I once again found myself very near the bank that supplanted my old oak tree, and only a stone’s throw away from the restaurant. It was a clue, but also a very serious problem. If Zurvan returned to this location, expecting to find the ship and his ruined view of the world, and it turned out my memory had supplanted it instead, he’d know immediately that I was there. The scenery would give me away faster than any security system or alarm. My own memories could betray me.
The first time it happened, I ran, purely on instinct, distancing myself from the scene, but I only made it a block or so before realizing the error in my thinking. I couldn’t run away. Not if I wanted to find my way back into his memories. I wanted to see the end of his story, and that meant staying hidden.
The solution was in the fog.
The hazy spaces between memories are neither here nor there. It is the gap of memory rendered into a physical location. For once in my life I was happy to find chinks and holes in scenes I thought I remembe
red. I needed to stay near the site of the restaurant/spaceship, but didn’t want my presence known. I just needed a patch of the nothingness to lay low in.
The first time Zurvan came back to the location on Fourth Street from one of his excursions, I was lying in a bank of fog trying desperately to think of anything except 2009. It worked. Zurvan returned and restored his own memory of the location, one with the spaceship and the two helpful future humans he’d made friends with. I was back inside his memory and free to spy on him.
Over the course of the next few occurrences, I was careful to note the locations where Zurvan’s foggy spaces lined up with those in 2009. That way, even should he decide to vanish without warning, my hiding place remained safe and thoroughly invisible.
That’s not to say I’m not getting out at all. To the contrary, despite my determination to remain in the temporal shadows, I very much want to see what happened to Zurvan’s murderous self in the real world.
Zurvan is an asshole. That didn’t take long to sort out. I had assumed it, based on his treatment of me, but in those first few memories of the future, I saw it just as clearly. It’s not just me. Or Datrica for that matter. While the woman may have had some of her demise coming to her—based on her generally poor manners and questionable decision making—I still feel a bit bad for her. She was arrogant and tyrannical in her leadership style, but she was still more or less an innocent. All of these people are.
In the memories Zurvan relives now, the old man and the thick-set woman who nursed Zurvan back to life have become his servants, bustling about, doing his bidding when required, and following him around like puppies. Zurvan isn’t cruel to them, but it’s clear he doesn’t find them worth much of his time. At least at first.
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