Clockwork Phoenix 3: new tales of beauty and strangeness

by Mike Allen

  “Why go to such effort to create a Master, a possible rival, a possible enemy? Answer: You had to. Not another Master. The same Master. You had to make me a Time Master or else you would never come to exist. And, then, once I’m you, I’m stuck. I’ll have to play the same crooked tricks on my younger version when it’s my turn, or else I’ll get edited out into the mist myself. Everything justified. Every step rationalized away. Because whatever you have to do to survive is OK, isn’t it? Necessity excuses everything, you think, right?

  “Except—” I said slowly, “Except that it doesn’t. The one piece of the machine you need to make all the rest of it work is my cooperation. You’ve got to assume that I’d do anything, no matter how rotten, just to stay alive; because you are just the version of me who did just that.

  “But what if I throw a monkey wrench into the whole works? What if I just stand here and take it? Maybe I deserve to die. I killed a lot of innocent people in my day. I’m sure it won’t hurt me any more than it hurt them, and probably a damn sight less, judging from the size of the blast that does me in. Better than I deserve, maybe.

  “And it will all be for the same reason, won’t it? Killing someone before he commits the crime.

  “But I’ll die happier than those poor flatliners I killed for you. At least I’ll know why I’m dying. And I’ll know I’ll be taking you to hell with me.”

  And I just stood there.

  The blur of voices echoed from the helmet of the Master of Eternity: “Nobly spoken! Nobly spoken but sadly mistaken. You are not so important as that. Not to me, nor, I think, to anyone. I am not you, I am not your son. You are nothing to me. But I! I am everything to you!”

  “You’re lying,” I said tiredly. “Who are you? This is just a trick to get me to pick up those damn cards. Show me your face.”

  He opened the faceplate with a slow gesture.

  And there was nothing behind it. Nothing solid.

  I saw a horrible blur of half-formed faces, multiple overlays of translucent features, crowned with a weightless, shifting mass of floating hair. The only thing clearly visible was the skull beneath, half-glimpsed through the misty vibrations of face crawling over it. Perhaps the skull-bones had a smaller range of motions, a less uncertain future, than the rest.

  I stepped half-backwards in disgust and shock. Something in the narrow angle of the jawline seemed familiar. “Iapetus?”

  From the mist came many voices. I could see the muscles of the tongue and throat writhing snakelike through translucent layers of throat, the knobby ridges of the neck-vertebrae looking like a black tree-trunk behind. “So you call me. Fitting, is it not? Father of Epimetheus and Prometheus, past and future! A titan!”

  “Who are you?”

  “I am the Inventor. The Crystal-Smith. The man who synthesized the first destiny crystal out of the subatomic substance of folded time. The first time traveler. No matter whether you wish it or not, once you are a Master of Time, you must go back to sustain my existence, lest no Time Master at all ever will have had existed. I am the First. Upon me, all depends. Perhaps, yes, I created the universe. Certainly my probes into the ultimate dawn of time had sufficient energy to trigger the Big Bang. But you—you are one candidate of many. Many! Your death causes, for me, inconvenience, no more. Does it seem so noble now, waiting passively to die? No? Then pick up the cards! Pick up your destiny! Become a Master of Eternity! It must still be a possibility, or else you would not still see me!”

  For some reason, at that point, I glanced over at d’Artagnan.

  There he stood, still looking calm and amused and aloof, watching us with a remote disinterest, like a scientist observing an experiment in whose outcome he has no particular stake.

  Why so calm? I thought this guy was the brain-slave of the Master, or else another version of the Master himself; an earlier version, I supposed, because, as blurred and as uncertain as the smoking skull in front of me was, there weren’t any future versions coming.

  Was he looking at his own future dissolving? Or was he…

  Or was he not related at all?

  Seeing my eyes on him, he nodded politely, and opened his hand, the same hand which, earlier, I had seen blur in a timeshift.

  He held up a destiny card in his fingers.

  It twinkled like black ice when he turned it over and over in his fingers, toying with it, making sure I saw it. It was entirely black, with no images at all in its depths.

  Then, with a smile, he tossed the card so it tinkled to the floor to one side of the pile the Master of Time had thrown.

  There they lay. On the one hand, was a pile of flashing white cards, glittering like diamonds, with all the kingdoms of all the ages shimmering in their frozen hearts. On the other hand, lay a single, blank, black card.

  I looked up at the Master. There was nothing but a trickle of mist hovering in the blind sockets of his eyes. His hair was floating weightlessly. He was already in the mist, already falling through the endless end, cut off from gravity, cut off from reality, more dead than a ghost.

  His voices: “I do not hear a response!”

  Many other candidates, huhn? I didn’t see anyone here but me. So I spoke up: “If I were a nice guy, I’d wish you to go to hell. That’d be warmer than where you’re going.”

  Even to the last moment, he did not seem to admit or recognize that what was happening to him was irrevocable. He kept shouting at me, and there was dozens of other voices saying slightly different versions of the same sentences, all at once, a garbled mess. No doubt he was replaying the scene several times, trying different words, hoping one would reach me. “It matters not! I have always relied on the weakness of mankind to do my work for me! They will always want to elude the burden of reality! I promise them action without reaction, motion without consequences! Everything done can be undone again! And…as soon as I am whole again…I will go back…not recruit you…this time…different…Destroy you!…I will never die…I can never die…Destroy you all! My power is endless…I…”

  And so on like that for a moment, about how great he was and stuff. And whatever his last words were supposed to be, they trailed off into a pathetic whisper of garbled noise as his lower jaw dissolved. Then his helmet was filled only with mists and shadows. Then, nothing.

  Empty armor clattered to the floor, full of hollow noises and echoes. Then it wasn’t there and never had been.

  While he had been talking, I had stooped over and picked up the Final Destiny card. Maybe that was the turning point. Maybe once it was in my hand, the percent chance that I would change my mind and become a Master of Time after all wound down to around zero.

  I said to d’Artagnan, “That was Iapetus. He made me a Paradox Proctor. He’s the guy who hired me, back when. Am I going to fade away too, now that he never did that?”

  “No.” D’Artagnan smiled. “Much more likely that you’ll get shot. That bullet manifests itself in a minute or two, and you know your smartgun’s shields can’t deflect it, and you know the bullet’s hunter-seeker program will chase you however you try to dodge. Better use the Final card.”

  “You’re one of the anti-Master group?”

  “Of course.” He reached up and pried the false skull-box off his neck. It was just the back half of a box, held against his neck with a traction field, or maybe just epoxy. When he tossed it aside it clattered, hollow, with a noise like cheap plastic.

  “And he’s not the real Inventor, is he?”

  “There is no Inventor. Time travel cannot be invented—how could it be? Illogical things cannot be discovered by the orderly process of science. He’s just one of many who went back in time and gave a set of destiny crystals to his younger self, who would then go back and give them to himself again, in turn. We suspect that he was no more ‘first’ than any of the others. He was just a little more ruthless about tracking down and eliminating the competition. But there was never a first inventor. Time travel, by its very nature, can have no cause. It is spontaneously creat
ed in the flux of nothingness surrounding the core timeline, and, if men do not seek to exploit it, it vanishes just as spontaneously.”

  “But—isn’t there some way, any way at all, to put time travel to a good use?” This was the question that I had wanted to ask them before, but hadn’t thought to ask. “Like—what if everyone had it? If we made everyone into Time Masters, they could…”

  “You are assuming they all would not immediately go to war? That they would have some sort of government or civilized process for handling differences of opinion?”

  “Sure.”

  “But such a government could exist if and only if they all abided by an agreement not to interfere with each other’s pasts, correct?”

  “I guess.”

  “And that would require that they could not change even their own pasts in any particular which might ever affect another person, correct? Since every event affects every other, the range of this prohibition would have to include all external events, no matter how small or private. And to enforce this agreement, they might have to resort to an amnesia block (not unlike the one we gave you the night you visited us in our headquarters). This block would make all memories of alternate timelines seem like daydreams, but all memories of the future seem like forethought, good judgment, or prophecy. Correct?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Everyone would be a Master of Eternity, infinitely powerful, but at the cost that they can never know, never reveal it, not even to themselves; because they all agreed to forget. Can you think of any other fair way of doing it?”

  “Not offhand.”

  “But, my dear boy—what else do you think the core timeline is?”

  That was good enough for me. I looked at the black card, tossing aside my smartgun as I did so, glad to be rid of the weight.

  Deeply, deeply, I stared past the surface, and my imagination went blank for a moment…

  2.

  This time, she slapped my face. And maybe I leaned a little into the blow. After all, I did deserve it.

  I saw her slender shadow against the glass of the door after she slammed it.

  She packed quite a wallop. I rubbed my jaw ruefully, knowing I’d never see her again. There was no way to turn back time and undo what I’d done, no way to unsay what I’d said.

  I looked up. I heard her heels clashing against the floorboards, receding.

  On the other hand—why had she hesitated just outside? And why was I so quick to say “never”? It’s not like anyone knows what tomorrow brings. We can’t change the past, but we sure as hell can try to change the future.

  I ran toward the door, calling out.

  Maybe I could catch up with her before she reached the elevators.

  30.

  In the other ending, the one I’d rather not dwell on, I had no breath to scream when I saw the world dissolve into mist, the golden towers falling. For I had stooped, not toward the one black card, but toward the many shining ones. They seemed so bright, and I thought I’d always have time to change my mind later.

  I hope this warning reaches you in time.

  An End

  TO SEEK HER FORTUNE

  Nicole Kornher-Stace

  I.

  In the land of black salt and white honey, the Lady Explorer bartered a polar bear’s pelt, a hand-cranked dynamo, her second-best derringer, and three bolts of peach silk for her death.

  “You stole the map that brought you here,” said the witch who was waiting at the shoreline when the Lady Explorer had hacked her way out of the trees. At first the witch had said nothing, sitting on her heels, skinning iridescent fish into an ebbing tide. She didn’t watch, though the Lady Explorer did, as the sea bore each raft of scales, like chips of ice and fire in the setting sun, away to sea. To all appearances the witch expected the Lady Explorer to recoil in horror when the guts followed. The grunt brought on by her failure to flinch could have signified anything from approval to cramp.

  When the witch spoke, however, the Lady Explorer glanced up from the water, startled. “I beg your pardon,” she gasped, hand to mouth in her best well-I-never pose, while behind it her mind worked into a lather.

  “It’s not surprising. Seeing as the crew you fly with stole that ship as well.”

  The Lady Explorer froze. A sudden terror seized her in its teeth and shook. If the witch knew that, then what else could she see? That she’d been nothing but a stupid factory girl, upswept on the wave of a rebellion and rejoicing even through her fear? That she’d had to pay her way to the factory-workers-turned-airship-crew with the only currency she had? And what she’d had to do to in the end to earn their respect?

  She remembered the tools in her hands, her skirt in her hands, the gun in her hands, and was ashamed.

  The boy peering out from behind the Lady Explorer’s hip looked up at her, one hand fisted in the sailcloth of her slapdash trousers, gauging the tension radiating off her. One good startle from fleeing back into the jungle, or perhaps into the sea.

  The Lady Explorer gathered herself. Well, I did not come here to gawk at the sights like a schoolgirl at a cathedral. I came here for answers. Before it’s too late.

  She said, “I assure you, I did nothing of the—”

  “That contraption up there tells me different.”

  Bewildered, the Lady Explorer looked over her shoulder to follow the witch’s gaze up and up to where the airship perched with its improbable delicacy on the lip of the caldera. As the Lady Explorer watched, it roused and settled, preening like a nesting hen the size of a four-story brownstone with bat wings and rose windows for eyes. She blinked and looked again and it was still.

  Water. She needed water. And she’d eaten nothing but the hardtack pilfered from that scuttled pirate outrider for the best part of a week. Nor slept: the last scraps of dried meat and fruit she’d squirreled in the boy’s bunk, then sat the door daylong, nightlong, rifle in her lap. The crew would mutiny, and soon, she guessed, but hadn’t chanced her yet. If she had to cut off her arm and roast it over the combustion engine, the boy at least would eat.

  She steeled herself. Her chignon had exploded in the heat; sodden squid-arms of it slapped her face, her eyes. Irritably she shoved it back, drew herself up, set her shoulders and her jaw to hide her apprehension. She’d not come this far to be toy for some rootwitch, regardless what she knew.

  She affected the disdainful drawl the foreman used to use, days when she’d beg early leave from the factory with a migraine from the eyestrain of the close work, or a roiling in her guts while her womb built a person even as her hands built a ship. “Is that so? I see you two are great friends already. What else does it—”

  “It remembers the place where it was born,” the witch interrupted, her voice gone dreamy like a child’s half-asleep, like some seer’s in some cave. The Lady Explorer snapped to attention, for she had heard that tone of voice before. “It smelled of grease and sweat and metal there. Men and women hunched at benches, piecing up its bones, its skin. It came awake like a whale rising from the dark depths of the sea. When they set its heart in place, the joy leapt up in it, flew out of it like lightning: the discharge of it killed three men. Just fried them where they stood, like a basketful of eels. The smell—” She chuckled. “You should see your face. It remembers the taste of you, as well. Blood and bone.”

  Before the Lady Explorer could react, the witch seized her bad hand, held it up so that the empty finger of her glove fell slack.

  Instantly the sense memory flooded her, despite the intervening years: a stab of panic as her hand caught in the struts, a snag, a drawing-in. The other workers’ shouts. A sharp wet crunch.

  She jerked her arm away.

  “It says it never meant to hurt you.”

  She still felt that finger sometimes, or its ghost. Hoisting the boy to her shoulders. Hacking through brush. Burying her people. Unburying other ones. Sighting down the rifle’s length. It still knocked her aim just out of true, if she permitted it, which she did no
t. Only by pulling well more than her weight on the crew’s endless expeditions would she maintain their fragile tolerance of her own infrequent ones, and she’d be damned before she showed those bastards any weakness.

  “If you know all that, then you know why I’m here. I didn’t come to fence with witches.”

  “Did you not?” Her face cracked along its fault lines into a quiet smile. “A pity.”

  As the barter was brought down from the airship and the Lady Explorer disappeared inside the witch’s little house, the boy drew cities in the white sand with a stick, shell-fragments for carriages and leaf-spines for streets. By now he was good at waiting. It took much longer to make a city than to have a card revealed to you, even if it was a fortune-telling card, as his mama had explained; an answering card. A card that tells you secrets. He couldn’t count high enough yet to know how many secrets his mama must’ve been told by now. A great many, he was sure. He imagined her as a Mama-shaped penny-candy jar, each secret a bright sweet bauble nestled behind the cold glass of her skin.

  He picked the biggest shell-carriage up and marked it with a charcoal from his pocket: one messy-haired smiling face that was his mama, one smaller smiling face that was himself. Turning, he tossed the shell into the sea and watched as it skipped four times and sank. He knew from his mama’s stories that there were cities down there too.

  When the Lady Explorer emerged from the little house she looked paler, greyer, older; lighter and heavier at once. But her arms were still strong when she picked him up and swung him. “It’s time to go,” she said, and he rode her shoulders back into the treeline. When the jungle shut its curtains at their backs the sun went out like a lamp, so that when he closed his eyes against his mama’s hair, the wet sweet smell of rot was all he knew.