by John Crowley
“That had worked out very well, of course—his choices often did. The pioneer column had penetrated into the heart of the bundas, the flag was flying over a settlement they called Fort Salisbury, and the whole of Matabeleland was in the process of being added to the Empire. Up at Groote Schuur they were kicking around possible names for the new country: Rhodia, perhaps, or Rhodesland, even Cecilia. It was that night that they settled on Rhodesia.”
The President pro tem felt a moment’s shame. There had been, when it came down to it, no doubt in his mind that what they had done had been the right thing to do: and in any case it had all happened a long time ago, more than a century ago in fact. It was not what was done, or that it had been done, only the moment of its doing, that was hard to relate: it was the picture in his mind, of an old man (though he was only forty-eight, he looked far older) sitting in the lamplight reading The Boy’s Own Paper, as absorbed and as innocent in his absorption as a boy himself; and the vulnerable shine on his balding crown; and the tender and indifferent night: it was all that which raised a lump in the throat of the President pro tem and caused him to pause, and roll the tip of his cigar in the ashtray, and clear his throat before continuing.
“And so,” he said, “we baited our hook. Rhodes’s British South Africa Company was expanding, in the wake of the Fort Salisbury success. He was on the lookout for young men of the right sort. We presented him with one: good-looking lad, public school, cricketer; just twenty-three years old. He was the bait. The mole. The Judas.”
And the bait had been taken, of course. The arrangement’s having been keyed so nicely to the man’s nature, a nature able to be studied from the vantage point of several decades on, it could hardly have failed. That the trick seemed so fragile, even foolish, something itself out of The Boy’s Own Paper or a story by Henley, only increased the likelihood of its striking just the right note here: the coloured fanatic, Rhodes leaving his hotel after luncheon to return to Parliament, the thug stepping out of the black noon shadows with a knife just as Rhodes mounts his carriage steps—then the young man, handily by with a stout walking-stick (a gift of his father upon his departure for Africa)—the knife deflected, the would-be assassin slinking off, the great man’s gratitude. You must have some reward. Not a bit, sir, anyone would have done the same; just lucky I was nearby. Come to dinner at any rate—my house on the hill—anyone can direct you. Allow me to introduce myself; my name is…
No need, sir, everyone knows Cecil Rhodes.
And your name is…
The clean hand put frankly forward, the tanned, open, boyish face smiling. My name is Denys Winterset.
“So then you see,” the President pro tem said, “the road was open. The road up to Groote Schuur. The road that branches, in effect, to lead here: to us here now speaking of it.”
“And how many times since then,” the Magus said, “has the world branched? How many times has it been bent double, and broken? A thousand times, ten thousand? Each time growing smaller, having to be packed into lesser space, curling into itself like a snail’s shell; growing ever weaker as the changes multiply, and more liable to failure of its fabric: how many times?”
The President pro tem answered nothing.
“You understand, then,” the Magus said to him, “what you will be asked: to find the crossroads that leads this way and to turn the world from it.”
“Yes.”
“And how will you reply?”
The President pro tem had no better answer for this question, and he gave none. He had begun to feel at once heavy as lead and disembodied. He arose from his armchair, with some effort, and crossed the worn Turkey carpet to the tall window.
“You must leave my house now,” the Magus said, rising from his chair. “There is much for me to do this night, if this world is to pass out of existence.”
“Where shall I go?”
“They will find you. I think in not too long a time.” Without looking back he left the room.
The President pro tem pushed aside the heavy drape the draconic had drawn. Where shall I go? He looked out the window into the square outside, deserted at this late and rainy hour. It was an irregular square, the intersection of three streets, filled with rain-wet cobbles as though with shiny eggs. It was old; it had been the view out these windows for two centuries at the least; there was nothing about it to suggest that it had not been the intersection of three streets for a good many more centuries than that.
And yet it had not been there at all only a few decades earlier, when the President pro tem had last walked the city outside the Orient Aid Society. Then the city had been London; it was no more. These three streets, these cobbles, had not been there in 1983; nor in 1893 either. Yet there they were, somewhere early in the twenty-first century; there they had been, too, for time out of mind, familiar no doubt to any dweller in this part of town, familiar for that matter to the President pro tem who looked out at them. In each of two lamplit cafés on two corners of the square, a man in a soft cap held a glass and looked out into the night, unsurprised, at home.
Someone had broken the rules: there simply was no other explanation.
There had been, of course, no way for anyone, not Deng Fa-shen, not Davenant, not the President pro tem himself, to guess what the President pro tem might come upon on this, the first expedition the Otherhood was making into the future: not only did the future not exist (Deng Fa-shen was quite clear about that), but, as Davenant reminded him, the Otherhood itself, supposing the continued existence of the Otherhood, would no doubt go busily on changing things in the past far and near—shifting the ground therefore of the future the President pro tem was headed for. Deng Fa-shen was satisfied that that future, the ultimate future, sum of all intermediate revisions, was the only one that could be plumbed, if any could; and that was the only one the Otherhood would want to glimpse: to learn how they would do, or would come to have done; to find out, as George V whispered on his deathbed, “How is the Empire.”
(“Only that isn’t what he said,” Davenant was fond of telling. “That’s what he was, understandably, reported to have said, and what the Queen and the nurses convinced themselves they heard. But he was a bit dazed there at the end, poor good old man. What he said was not ‘How is the Empire,’ but ‘What’s at the Empire,’ a popular cinema. I happened,” he always added gravely, “to have been with him.”)
The first question had been how far “forward” the Otherhood should press; those members who thought the whole scheme insane, as Platt did, voted for next Wednesday, and bring back the Derby winners please. Deng Fa-shen was not certain the thrust could be entirely calculated: the imaginary futures of imaginary pasts were not, he thought, likely to be under the control of even the most penetrating orthogonal engineering. Sometime in the first decades of the next century was at length agreed upon, a time just beyond the voyager’s own mortal span—for the house rule seemed, no one could say quite why, to apply in both directions—and for as brief a stay as was consistent with learning what was up.
The second question—who was to be the voyager—the President pro tem had answered by fiat, assuming an executive privilege he just at that moment claimed to exist, and cutting off further debate. (Why exactly did he insist? I’m not certain why, except that it was not out of a sense of adventure, or of fun or curiosity: whatever of those qualities he may once have had had been much worn away in his rise to the Presidency pro tem of the Otherhood. A sense of duty may have been part of it. It may have been to forestall the others, out of a funny sort of premonition. Duty, and premonition: of what, though? Of what?)
“It’ll be quite different from any of our imaginings, you know,” Davenant said, who for some reason had not vigorously contested the President’s decision. “The future of all possible pasts. I envy you, I do. I should rather like to see it for myself.”
Quite different from any of our imaginings: very well. The President pro tem had braced himself for strangeness. What he had not expected was famili
arity. Familiarity—cozy as an old shoe—was certainly different from his imaginings.
And yet what was it he was familiar with? He had stepped out of his club in London and found himself to be, not in the empty corridors of the Orient Aid Society that he knew well, but in private quarters of some kind that he had never seen before. It reminded him, piercingly, of a place he did know, but what place he could not have said: some don’s rich but musty rooms, some wealthy and learned bachelor’s digs. How had it come to be?
And how had it come to be lit by gas?
One of the pleasant side effects (most of the members thought it pleasant) of the Otherhood’s endless efforts in the world had been a general retardation in the rate of material progress: so much of that progress had been, on the one hand, the product of the disastrous wars that it was the Otherhood’s chief study to prevent, and on the other hand, American. The British Empire moved more slowly, a great beast without predators, and naturally conservative; it clung to proven techniques and could impose them on the rest of the world by its weight. The telephone, the motor car, the flying boat, the wireless, all were slow to take root in the Empire that the Otherhood shaped. And yet surely, the President pro tem thought, electricity was in general use in London in 1893, before which date no member could alter the course of things. And gas lamps lit this place.
Pondering this, the President pro tem had entered the somber and apparently little-used dining room and seen the draconic standing in the little butler’s pantry: silent as a statue (asleep, the President pro tem would later deduce, with lidless eyes only seeming to be open); a polishing cloth in his claw, and the silver before him; his heavy jaws ajar, and his weight balanced on the thick stub of tail. He wore a baize apron and black sleeve garters to protect his clothes.
Quite different from our imaginings: and yet no conceivable amount of tinkering with the twentieth century, just beyond which the President pro tem theoretically stood, could have brought forth this butler, in wing collar and green apron, the soft gaslight ashine on his bald brown head.
So someone had broken the rules. Someone had dared to regress beyond 1893 and meddle in the farther past. That was not, in itself, impossible; Caspar Last had done it on his first and only excursion. It had only been thought impossible for the Otherhood to do it, because it would have taken them “back” before the Otherhood’s putative existence, and therefore before the Otherhood could have wrested the techniques of such travel from Last’s jealous grip, a power they acquired by already having it—that was what the President pro tem had firmly believed.
But it was not, apparently, so. Somewhen in that stretch of years that fell between his entrance into the telephone box of the club and his exit from it into this familiar and impossible world, someone—many someones, or someone many times—had gone “back” far before Rhodes’s death: had gone back far enough to initiate this house, this city, these races who were not men.
A million years? It couldn’t have been less. It didn’t seem possible it could be less.
And who, then? Deng Fa-shen, the delicate, brilliant Chinaman, who had thoughts and purposes he kept to himself; the only one of them who might have been able to overcome the theoretical limits? Or Platt, who was never satisfied with what was possible within what he called “the damned parameters”?
Or Davenant. Davenant, who was forever quoting Khayyám: Ah, Love, couldst thou and I with Him conspire To take this sorry scheme of things entire; Would we not smash it into pieces, then Remold it nearer to the heart’s desire…
“There is,” said the Magus behind him, “one other you have not thought of.”
The President pro tem let fall the drape and turned from the window. The Magus stood in the doorway, a great ledger in his arms. His eyes did not meet the President protem’s, and yet seemed to regard him anyway, like the blind eyes of a statue.
One other…Yes, the President pro tem saw, there was one other who might have done this. One other, not so good at the work perhaps as others, as Davenant for example, but who nonetheless would have been, or would come to have been, in a position to take such steps. The President pro tem would not have credited himself with the skill, or the nerve, or the dreadnought power. But how else to account for the familiarity, the bottomless suitability to him of this world he had never before seen?
“Between the time of your people’s decision to plumb our world,” said the Magus, “and the time of your standing here within it, you must yourself have brought it into being. I see no likelier explanation.”
The President pro tem stood still with wonder at the efforts he was apparently to prove capable of making. A million years at least: a million years. How had he known where to begin? Where had he found, would he find, the time?
“Shall I ring,” the Magus said, “or will you let yourself out?”
Deng Fa-shen had always said it, and anyone who traveled in them knew it to be so: the imaginary futures and imaginary pasts of orthogony are imaginary only in the sense that imaginary numbers (which they very much resemble) are imaginary. To a man walking within one, it alone is real, no matter how strange; it is all the others, standing at angles to it, which exist only in imagination. Nightlong the President pro tem walked the city, with a measured and unhurried step, but with a constant tremor winding round his rib cage, waiting for what would become of him, and observing the world he had made.
Of course it could not continue to exist. It should not ever have come into existence in the first place; his own sin (if it had been his) had summoned it out of nonbeing, and his repentance must expunge it. The Magus who had taken his confession (which the President pro tem had been unable to withhold from him) had drawn that conclusion: it must be put out, like a light. And yet how deeply the President pro tem wanted it to last forever; how deeply he believed it ought to last forever.
The numinous and inhuman angels, about whom nothing could be said, beings with no ascertainable business among the lesser races and yet beings without whom, the President pro tem was sure, this world could not go on functioning. They lived (endless?) lives unimaginable to men, and perhaps to Magi, too, who yet sought continually for knowledge of them: Magi, highest of the hominids, gentle and wise yet inflexible of purpose, living in simplicity and solitude (were there females? Where? Doing what?) and yet from their shabby studies influencing, perhaps directing, the lives of mere men. The men, such as himself, clever and busy, with their inventions and their politics and their affairs. The lesser hominids, strong, sweet-natured, comic, like placid trolls. The draconics.
It was not simply a world inhabited by intelligent races of different kinds: it was a harder thing to grasp than that. The lives of the races constituted different universes of meaning, different constructions of reality; it was as though four or five different novels, novels of different kinds by different and differently limited writers, were to become interpenetrated and conflated: inside a gigantic Russian thing a stark and violent policier, and inside that something Dickensian, full of plot, humors, and eccentricity. Such an interlacing of mutually exclusive universes might be comical, like a sketch in Punch; it might be tragic, too. And it might be neither: it might simply be what is, the given against which all airy imaginings must finally be measured: reality.
Near dawn the President pro tem stood leaning on a parapet of worked stone that overlooked a streetcar roundabout. A car had just ended its journey there, and the conductor and the motorman descended, squat hominids in greatcoats and peaked caps. With their long strong arms they began to swing the car around for its return journey. The President pro tem gazed down at this commonplace sight; his nose seemed to know the smell of that car’s interior, his bottom to know the feel of its polished seats. But he knew also that yesterday there had not been streetcars in this city. Today they had been here for decades.
No, it was no good, the President pro tem knew: the fabric of this world he had made—if it had been he—was fatally weakened with irreality. It was a botched job: as though he
were that god of the Gnostics who made the material world, a minor god unversed in putting time together with space. He had not worked well. And how could he have supposed it would be otherwise? What had got into him, that he had dared?
“No,” said the angel who stood beside him. “You should not think that it was you.”
“If not me,” said the President pro tem, “then who?”
“Come,” said the angel. She (I shall say “she”) slipped a small cool hand within his hand. “Let’s go over the tracks, and into the trees beyond that gate.”
A hard and painful stone had formed in the throat of the President pro tem. The angel beside him led him like a daughter, like the daughter of old blind Oedipus. Within the precincts of the park—which apparently had its entrance or its entrances where the angels needed them to be—he was led down an avenue of yew and dim towers of poplar toward the piled and sounding waters of a fountain. They sat together on the fountain’s marble lip.
“The Magus told me,” the President pro tem began, “that you can feel the alterations that we make, back then. Is that true?”
“It’s like the snap of a whip infinitely long,” the angel said. “The whole length of time snapped and laid out differently: not only the length of time backward to the time of the change, but the length of the future forward. We felt ourselves come into being, oldest of the Old Races (though the last your changes brought into existence); we saw in that moment the aeons of our past, and we guessed our future, too.”
The President pro tem took out his pocket-handkerchief and pressed it to his face. He must weep, yet no tears came.
“We love this world—this only world—just as you do,” she said. “We love it, and we cannot bear to feel it sicken and fail. Better that it not have been than that it die.”